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Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry sign

“If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.” Dr. Christoph Hufeland (1762-1836)

Before Reynoldsburg police broke down the door to her home November 19, 2015, Linda Leisure, long-time corruption investigator and whistleblower, thought she had seen it all – including previous police break-ins into her home. But she had no psychiatric history and never before witnessed “forced psychiatry” Ohio-style.   

  Earlier that day, during a verbal argument with a police officer at her home, Leisure cursed him for ignoring her complaints about harassment she was suffering from Columbus police officers Delmar and Steve Knotts, one who lived across the street from her Reynoldsburg home. Within minutes, a woman identified as a “social worker” came to Leisure’s home. Leisure described the woman as “unprofessional” and that she “looked like a bag lady.” A few minutes of discussion through a partially-opened door led the “social worker” to diagnose Leisure with “a mood disorder,” according to police records.

Image of cop beating someone

Last December 2015 while some waited for the holidays to bring them “good cheer” and were consumed with the media hype in regards to Trump, or just waited for the year to end, many African Americans and Civil Rights Activists were more concerned with the outcomes of grand jury indictment decisions and jury trials held in December concerning African Americans who lost their lives in 2014 and 2015 at the “alleged” hands of police officers.
  Twenty-Five year old Freddie C. Gray Jr., was arrested on April 12, 2015 in Baltimore and while being transported by a police van to jail fell into a coma and died April 19, 2015 from “injuries to his spinal cord.”  On December 21, 2015 a hung jury left the Gray family as well as Officer William Porter and the other five officers awaiting trial, in limbo until a retrial this June 2016.

Tall downtown skyscrapers

JPMorgan Chase and Co. is a bank “too big to fail,” and according to the G20 or The Group of Twenty, it is the bank too big to fail.
  The G20 is an international forum of the world’s major governments and central banks, and recently published a report stating if JPMorgan were to get into trouble, the greatest global financial havoc could follow because the bank is interconnected with so many smaller banks and investors.
  As Wall Street sputters into 2016 amidst global market volatility, many in Central Ohio and the rest of the state aren’t aware of how connected JPMorgan is to the local workforce and beyond. Way beyond, as in 200,000 state worker retirees and their beneficiaries.
  JPMorgan is the region’s largest private-employer with more than 20,000 workers, and many are well-paid. JPMorgan is also the custodian of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System’s international fund, which accounts for $21 billion of the pension’s total fund that’s currently at $87 billion.


It has been argued that nonviolent struggles to liberate occupied countries – such as West Papua, Tibet, Palestine, Kanaky and Western Sahara – have failed far more often than they have succeeded but that secessionist struggles (that have sought to separate territory from an existing state in order to establish a new one) conducted by nonviolent means have always failed. See 'Why Civil Resistance Works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict'. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820

Bernie Sanders

Strong encryption in the age of terrorism has quickly become a major part of the debate on how safe we are. Intelligence agencies are saying strong encryption they can’t crack will result in more terrorist attacks. ISIS is encouraging its followers to use encrypt communication, but it hasn’t been proven that ISIS has actually ever utilized encrypted technology to commit an act of terrorism.

Nevertheless, more and more tech giants such as Apple and Google have strong encryption technology in the pipeline that will soon be available to everyone. Because of this, our government and nearly all of our presidential candidates are encouraging these tech companies to create and allow access to secret backdoors within their future encryption technologies.

Jeb Bush said stronger encryption makes it harder to catch “evil doers”. Hillary Clinton went further saying in a recent debate a “Manhattan-like Project” is needed to create encryption that allows for government access to backdoors.

Book cover

Many years ago I dated a man who made lists for virtually everything. He even had the five- and ten-year plans all the business books of the era were touting. I jokingly called him List Man, and thought it was kind of quaint. Now in 2016 he’s well off and I’m not, and I’m beginning to think there was something to all his list making after all!

What we learn from Lists of Note is that people have been making lists for eons. The extremely varied lists show us that human beings have long tried to make sense of and order in the world and their lives. Most psychologists and psychiatrists agree that list making, unless it is compulsive, has a number of positive benefits.  Lists can clarify goals, organize time, tame chaos, and provide a road map for where we need to go. The act of making lists represents hope and possibility, and there is great satisfaction checking items off our lists.

 

The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual. 

In the United States it's not actually difficult to find significant funding with which to research new and innovative -- not to say bizarre and absurd -- pursuits, as long as they form part of an overall project of mass murder.

The United States has hundreds of programs at universities, think tanks, and research institutes that claim to devote their attention to “security” and “defense” studies. Yet in almost all of these programs that receive many millions of dollars in Federal funding, the vast majority of research, advocacy and instruction have nothing to do with climate change, the most serious threat to security of our age.


What if the very worst result of George W. Bush's war lies is that people stop taking seriously the danger of actual nuclear weapons actually falling into the hands of actual lunatics? Arguably the very worst result of Woodrow Wilson's lies about German atrocities in World War I was excessive skepticism about reports of Nazi atrocities leading up to and during World War II. The fact is that nuclear weapons are being recklessly maintained, built, developed, tested, and proliferated. The fact is that governments make mistakes, fail, collapse, and engage in evil actions.

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