Dennis Allard – Page 4 – The Ocean Park Column

February 11, 2011Dennis AllardLeft, Morning ThoughtsLeave a comment

Congratulations Egypt!

Today, there was something new under the sun. Mubarak is out. The people have spoken. Democracy is emerging in an Arab state.

This is going to be interesting. “This is only the beginning”, stated one of the young people leading this revolt.

Can something like a true democracy be built in Egypt? The young in Egypt will see to it. May they succeed. It will not be easy and it will not be perfect.

A beautiful thing about the movements in the Arab world as with the new governments in South America is that they are genuinely coming from the people and are not being determined by US decision makers.

February 8, 2011Dennis AllardLeft, Morning Thoughts1 Comment

Hillary Clinton opposes legalizing drugs but why?

Each day I realize more that I live in a world dominated by power and not by truth. I just heard Hillary Clinton opposes legalizing drugs “because there is too much money in it”. And I read that “Hillary Clinton applauds Mexican government’s war on drugs”.

Can someone please tell me if there is another planet nearby where I can escape to?

Too much money in it? The price of legalized drugs would be higher than the price of those same drugs kept illegal? That is prima facie stupid. I guess if the US pharmaceutical industry takes over, that actually is possible. But cocaine and marijuana are very natural substances and are inexpensive to produce. Legalizing them and permitting legal production and distribution would lower the price, not raise it. And legalized drugs would become a large source of tax revenue of money now going to drug lords. And it would put the illegal drug lords out of business.

No, something else is going on here. As with the insane, and at this point stupid, war in Afghanistan, there must be some other explanation for why the world is kept the way it is. That goes for US policy in Egypt as well. And it has to do with preserving power, holding on to it. It does not have to do with democracy or truth or helping people or doing what is right.

There are rational arguments against legalizing drugs (all of which are incorrect). Some parents here in the drug-consuming Empire think that making drugs illegal will keep drugs away from their children. Those parents should talk to their children because their children will use drugs or not use drugs for reasons having nothing to do with the legality of the drugs. And some people think that legalizing drugs will increase the use of drugs. I have noticed that this latter viewpoint is particularly prevalent among ex drug-addicts who used the hell out of drugs in spite of them being illegal and now, after becoming born again drug-free Christians take it upon themselves to tell others how to behave.

And if drug use does increase, what is worse, a few more drug users or the rampant murder being conducted in Mexico due to the puritans and policy pundits in the US maintaining the status quo? For every murder that no longer occurs, I don’t care if that means ten more drug users who use drugs. Why don’t we instead work on figuring out how to make society a place in which people want to be healthy and happy and not resort to drugs. In the meantime, legalize them all, say I.

My poor Juarez Mexico. My heart feels for you. You will have no help from the drug consuming Empire today or tomorrow or ever. They sit in their high chairs pontificating and expounding their power while your children are murdered by drug lords. While your children are murdered by drug lords.

January 28, 2011Dennis AllardLeft, Morning Thoughts2 Comments

The Arab world is changing, how will the US oligarchy handle it?

Democratic movements are trying to change the power structure and the shape of government in the Arab world.

Will the US do the right thing and support these movements for change or, instead, will the US continue to back the dictatorships as it has in past and continues to do in the present? As in 1953 in Guatemala when the US opposed Arbenz and Iran when the US opposed Mossadeq and supported the Shah’s dictatorship, as in Chile in 1973 when the US opposed Allende and supported the dictator Pinochet, as in Vietnam, as in the 1980s when the US supported the brutal regime in Salvador, as in the past when the US supportedf Suharto in Indonesia against the popular revolution in East Timor and the US support of Marcos or the US support of the Somoza family in Nicaragua?

As illustrated in Oliver Stone’s new film, South of the Border, democratic change is occurring in South America in spite of past US support for dictators. Hugo Chavez, Eban Morales, and many other new leaders are doing the bidding of the people, not of the corporate oligarchy. It’s called socialism or a variant of socialism. And that is a dirty word in the US were democracy equals Capitalism even though Capitalism has nothing to do with democracy per se and, in fact, modern corporations are like little dictatorial fifedoms now backed by the Supreme Court as being citizens where it is one dollar one vote instead of one person one vote.

The tumult in the Arab world is a good thing. The call for change is being made by the educated middle classes not under control of fundamentalists. It will be interesting to watch how the US reacts especially since many calls for change will be by people who are not afraid to be called socialists. Will the US react, as in the past, by supporting the status quo and the dictators in order to protect “our oil” and the interests of our wealthy plutocrats?

January 15, 2011Dennis AllardMorning ThoughtsLeave a comment

Michael Steele and Ted Williams

What do these two recent media stars have in common, here in January of 2011?

Can you spell “boring”?

The good news is that both will very soon disappear from the public mind share never to return.

However, we are stuck with Dr. Phil indefinitely, as far as I can tell.

January 15, 2011Dennis AllardMorning Thoughts2 Comments

How to remember how to spell therefore vs therefor

If you’re like me, you forget if therefore has the letter e at the end.

Yes, it does. But the word therefor without the e also exists. Therefor is an ancient word that simply means “for” or “for that purpose”. Its current use is mostly in legal documents.

So it’s easy to remember that when it means for, it ends in for.

Therefore, when you mean therefore, end it in fore.

January 10, 2011Dennis AllardMental Health, Morning Thoughts7 Comments

Society ignores the mentally ill. Everyone suffers.

As the shooting of Gabriell Giffords in Tuscon shows, a mentally disturbed person who is left to fall between the cracks can end up going totally insane and in some cases harm other people. Futhermore, the afflicted person also suffers from the mental illness since their thinking becomes tortured by obsessions, fears, and delusions. They are left untreated. They suffer. And sometimes society suffers.

In the case of Jared Loughner, his mental illness was evident to many yet that mental illness was given the right to rule his mind and degenerate. An article in the Washington Post, January 9, 2011, by David A. Fahrenthold, Sari Horwitz and Amy Gardner illustrates this point. According to that article, Loughner was attending classes at Tucson’s Pima Community College. School administrators ignored warnings of his fellow students and his teachers that his behavior was threatening. According the article, the administrators were reported to have said, “He hasn’t taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn’t provoked anybody. He hasn’t brought any weapons to class…. We’ll just wait until he takes that next step.”.

But what can a school do? Should school administrators reject a student just because he manifests quirky behavior or some fellow student makes a complaint? To answer that question, we needto realize the the issue is much larger than what happens in schools. Consider the case of the Virginia Tech Massacre in 2007 . Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people, had been diagnosed with mental illness long before enrolling at Virginia Tech. Yet, due to federal privacy laws, Virginia Tech was not informed of Seung-Hui Cho’s diagnosis at the time he enrolled!

On a daily basis, in Los Angeles, police officers do not detain or transport mentally ill people to a hosptial even when they have been reported to be making threats unless they are deemed “a danger to themselves or others or severely disabled”. The bar for arresting disturbed people or for placing them in treatment is very high. Often, after being reported to police, a mentally ill person who was harassing someone will simply be taken to some other part of town and dropped off. Or taken to an emergency room where they will be given some pills then turned loose.

It goes from bad to absurd. Some scientologists have been known to try to convince mentally ill people to not take antipsychotic medicine.

In my opinion, when a mentally ill person has gotten to the the point they are delusional and making threats, there needs to be a fair judicial process, with due process, that requires the afflicted person to take medication, involuntarily if necessary. That may sound harsh. But, in fact, it is more humane than letting the mental illness dominate the life of the afflicted person and people the afflicted person comes in contact with on a daily basis.

December 4, 2010Dennis AllardLeft3 Comments

Paypal, VISA, and Mastercard censor Wikileaks.

I just heard on 1070 KNX News Radio, Los Angeles, that PayPal has cut off Wikileaks. In other words, PayPal no longer allows you to donate to http://wikileaks.ch. (If you cannot get to the main Wikileaks site, try a mirror site listed at www.boingboing.net).

Wikileaks has not been convicted of anything by any court of law. Yet PayPal (and, as of December 6, 2010, both VISA and Mastercard) are preventing people from making payments to Wikileaks. This is the privatization of state censorship, pure and simple.

Ironically, the New York Times has published numerous articles based on facts revealed by Wikeleaks. Yet PayPal and VISA and Mastercard are not censoring the New York Times.

You may agree or disagree with Wikileaks releasing documents that were provided to them by sources. But the question I am asking you to consider is what gives these organizations the right to censor people who use these tools to make payments?

I have canceled my PayPal account. I will find it more difficult to cancel my VISA card, I must admit.

I encourage all people who support freedom of the press to do likewise and cancel their PayPal accounts.

[Begin Editor’s note:

Although I did cancel my PayPal account, I have not and will not cancel my VISA account nor my Amazon account. I simply depend too much on those mechanisms. Hence, I retract my recommendation that others cancel their accounts. Why?

Because…

I wrote my suggestion to cancel PayPal a few minutes after hearing about PayPal’s decision to censor Wikileaks on KNX News radio.

It was not until the next day that VISA and MasterCard did likewise.

I also did not know about Amazon’s decision to cancel hosting of wikileaks.org until later.

That being said, although I did cancel my PayPal account, I simply cannot afford to not use VISA (my one and only credit card) nor cancel Amazon, that provides excellent service and is an integral part of my use of the cloud in my professional life.

In other words, I’m stuck.

We’re all stuck.

We now live in a world where private companies engage in censorship based on extra-judicial directives from government administrators.

In the old days, a court order would have been required, I believe.

Those days are a thing of the past, as is some of our liberties.

End Editor’s note]

If you wish to cancel your PayPal account, login to PayPal, go to “My Account”, and click on “Profile”, then click on “Close account”.

Here is a link explaining howto cancel your PayPal account: how to cancel a PayPal account.

To those who are rightfully concerned that Wikileaks documents may lead to harm, I ask them what harm has come not knowing about the hidden lies and backroom hypocrisy of governments and corporations? How many people needlessly died due to wars based on false information or, worse, information that was false and known to be false by our so-called leaders who lied to us about the facts?

Which is worse?

I respect those who argue that Wikileaks should be careful to not reveal names of people who could be endangered by leaks. According to Daniel Ellsberg, there are no documented cases of people who have been harmed as a result of the release of documents by Wikileaks. Daniel Ellsberg is an American hero who, with the help of others, including the New York Times, released The Pentagon Papers in 1971. As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Paper states:

A 1996 article in the New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance

May Wikileaks continue to serve free society equally well as did the Pentagon Papers.

Were only we, the citizens of the United States and the World, able to be informed of the secret meetings between Dick Cheney and the oil companies or be informed of the plotting between the Bush Administration and the British to lie to the American public about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, or to be informed about back room deals between the Washington oligarchs and the banks to bail out the banks at the expense of the American public. What happened to the “open and transparent government” promised to the U.S. public by President Obama?

Here’s the thing. You cannot censor the Internet. We, the people, won’t allow governments or corporations to censor the Internet. Corporations are not democratic institutions, so the only way to influence them is through government regulation and voting with your dollar. That is why I encourage you to cancel your PayPal account today.

November 2, 2010Dennis AllardLeftLeave a comment

There are no rich, there are no middle class, there are no poor — Rand Paul, 2010 Republican Senator elect in Kentucky, Idiot.

And he probably thinks God is on his side.

America, you are pathetic. Well, OK, Kentucky, you are pathetic.

I will accept comments on this post only if they are by Republicans or Libertarian Fundamentalists who can state what their plan is. (Or by thinking people who can explain what the HELL is going on in this country.)

July 6, 2010Dennis AllardMental Health21 Comments

6. Competent to Stand Trial?

Chapter 6 in a series on mental illness.

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The process of obtaining a conservatorship for my brother has been suspended. The reason, according to William Ortega of the office of the California State Public Guardian, is that my brother is on a hold to determine his competency to stand trial on charges of felony vandalism in a matter unrelated to his original incarceration on a misdemeanor.

While delusional and psychotic, my brother allegedly keyed the car of an old acquaintance and is now facing a second strike felony on those charges. The judge in the case found reason to doubt that Tony is competent to stand trial. So Tony was moved to a hospital where he is required to take anti-psychotic medication while he is “restored to competency to stand trial”. No matter that he committed the act of keying the car while delusional. He just has to be sufficiently stable after taking medication so that he can shuffled back into court and make a decision about his case and be put on trial.

The actual process of “restoring” him can take up to three years of incarceration in the hospital/jail.

In other words, the conservatorship process, which those close to my brother believe to be one last hope for my brother to be required to receive treatment and become stable, is being thwarted by the very criminal justice system that initiated it. The conservatorship process was initiated by the doctors at LA County jail while he was awaiting his hearings. Now that is all to naught. This is bonkers.

Knowing my brother, even after being restored to “competency” he will be in total denial of his mental illness. He will not accept a plea bargain whereby he agrees to a treatment program. He really wants to be normal and not mentally ill so he believes he isn’t and, if the past is any indication, will plead not guilty and prefer to go to prison for a second strike violation. Once in prison, the system will see that he is not stable and will continue to require medication. As before, he will end up in a psychiatric ward of the prison or in a mental hospital/prison, but this time for years as he serves his second strike violation for having been delusional and removing some paint from the side of a car.

This is not to justify vandalism. And, when delusional, my brother can become threatening to both strangers and friends who, ironically, like him and enjoy his company when he is stable. Although he has never harmed anyone, he sometimes makes threats and is a big guy and can be scary. It is his insanity telling him that people are out to get him and his delusions working on his mind, causing him to react in a way that almost makes sense except he is not rational. So the insanity affects everyone. It affects him first and foremost. It affects those he comes in contact with, both friends and strangers. After many years, he continues to relapse. Which is why the disease should be treated by a mandated treatment program. But we have almost no mechanism in U.S. society to require treatment. It falls on the criminal justice system to handle a large percentage of our mentally ill. That is not the kind of society we should accept. Change is needed.

My hope, as reported in https://oceanpark.com/blog/2010/03/mentally-ill-brother-thrown-back-on-the-street/#latest-update , was that his doctors at Los Angeles Twin Towers Correctional Facility would succeed in the effort they started to create a conservatorship. The conservatorship would have been instituted by the State of California and would have provided a mechanism to make legal decisions in Tony’s place about his living situation and his money. He would not have liked it, but it seems to be the only method available to the state other than direct imprisonment to require Tony to take medication and remain stable and functional in society. Now that one hope for progress is being delayed and thwarted by a different court in the bureaucracy while Tony is “brought back to competency to stand trial”.

[Note: Elsewhere see video interview with my brother on September 1, 2009.]

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpt’s of my brother’s writing about his own mental illness .]

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May 4, 2010Dennis AllardLeft, VentsLeave a comment

Social Security Works

Being a computer nerd, I subscribe to Slash Dot News for Nerds.

Once each morning, I receive a digest of discussions on topics that are of interest to, well, to nerds. This mornings headlines included the topic: “How Bad is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill”. The ensuing overkill exchange of comments somehow managed to morph into a discussion of social security and included this tid bit:

You mention Social Security and health care. If I could, I would opt out of Social Security entirely. I’m in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don’t know how to justify that one. Blah blah blah….

Dear young Libertarian Fundamentalist:

You are in your mid-twenties and you have it all figured out.

You think that 200,000,000 workers all making individual investment decisions would result in a retirement system better than social security.

So, you like the crap shoot that the market provides and are OK with a large chunk of those 200,000,000 investors getting screwed every 20 or 30 years?

Social Security is one of the best most successful government programs in U.S. history yet Libertarian Fundamentalists have been complaining about it since I was your age.

My 92 year old mom worked her entire life and saved and the market screwed her. Her social security is the one safety net she has. Her social security makes it less on hard on me to help provide for her, which I do to augment her social security. That is family helping family – the oldest kind of socialism on the planet.

I’ll be curious to see what your opinions are when you are 55. I heard your exact same arguments from the Silicon Valley crowd 30 years ago. I was at Berkeley, they were at Stanford. That’s funny, public vs private. Social Security was supposed to be broke by now. It isn’t. And the only reason it will be is if the illogic of the Libertarian Fundamentalists remain in control and the Goldman Sachs and other (overpaid) investment bankers of the world and the U.S. Oligarchy continues to transfer wealth to themselves as they have so ably done done over the past 30 years.

The facts are that since the mid 1970s, the amount of GDP (income) going to the most wealthy in our society has increased dramatically while the income going to the normal people has stayed flat or nearly flat. Does that mean that the wealthy “earned” all that extra wealth? Should only the most wealthy citizens accrue almost all of the increase in wealth in the country? Is it only the wealthy who “earned” the increase in overall wealth over the past 30 plus years? I think not. I think it is because they are in power and have kept wages low for the normal worker while increasing their own wages and ownership of property and the means of production.

There has been a redistribution of wealth by the private sector. The private sector has redistributed the new wealth of the overall economy upwards and left little of that increase in overall wealth for the hard working middle class. This has made the wealthy even more wealthy and has let the middle class stagnate and in some cases, drop in net income level. This in spite of the fact that most of the work that actually creates the wealth to start out with is done by the middle class and lower classes. This has been going on for over thirty years.

Things have gotten out of whack. Social Security is a system that allows normal working people to be assured that the upper strata of our society cannot take an undo proportion of the wealth and assures that the overall welfare of the society has a level of protection for the elderly. We, as a democratic society, should remove the cap on income level contributing to social security. That alone would more than fix the system and take back a small part of the wealth that the wealthy have accrued to themselves from via the private system of capitalism they have commandeered.

I imagine the Kings and princesses during the days of feudalism believed that they too deserved all their wealth. Marie Antionette, when informed that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat, responded: “Then let them eat cake”. She ended up having her head chopped off during the French Revolution.

This transfer of more wealth to the wealthy is well documented in Les Leopold’s well written and entertaining book:

“The Looting of America, How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity and What We Can Do About It”

Cheers
Dennis Allard