Psychiatry does NOT Kill: Stupid Internet Videos Kill

Not everyone who hangs out their shingle
on the Internet knows what they are
talking about.

Okay, can you tell I'm angry? I just saw a video entitled "Psychiatry Kills". The premise is that the medicines psychiatrist give are all bad and you should get off them. The trouble is, rather than trust a highly trained physician with years of study and research behind him, you're going to trust a lot of anecdotal "evidence" from a group of people that the video says, quit all their meds "cold-turkey".

EXACTLY WHAT THEIR DOCTORS WARN THEM NOT TO DO!

Here's what happens when you quit a psychotropic medication cold turkey.  First, you start going back into the depressed, panicked, schizophrenic or whatever state you were in that caused the medication to be prescribed in the first place. Second, the change in neurochemistry in the brain caused by the sudden stopping of your meds triggers all sorts of brain neuro-transmitters to either shut down or kick into overdrive giving you the equivalent of a very bad LSD trip.  So every story in this video (and no I'm not going to give you the link to some advice that can kill you, so don't ask), is based on someone doing what their doctor told them not to and in many cases probably because the person saw one of these scary videos about evil Big Pharma and decided some anonymous Internet video cares more about them than the physician you are paying to look out for your health.

Do psychotropic meds sometimes cause side effects?  YES.  You see, you can't peek inside the human skull when the patient is alive to see what's causing his mental problems. That would do more damage than good (remember lobotomies).  Diagnosing psychoses is a very much working in the dark process. We can only diagnose by observing behavior and listening to you tell what is wrong.

If you do a lousy job of telling the doctor what's going on in your head or if you spin the story to make it sound worse or sound not so bad, you will almost certainly get the wrong medication the first time out.  That's how psychiatry works. It's a partnership between patient and physician. He is not a magician. There are no magic words he can say nor magic pills he can give you, especially if he doesn't get good information from you. If you don't tell your physician what is going on, you probably are going to have a bad experience.

The truth is that the chances of the first medication you try working for you are pretty slim. That's because the causes of many mental disorders cause symptoms that look pretty much the same. One pill may work great for one kind of depression and be really bad for another kind of depression.

And yes, not every depression is exactly the same and cannot necessarily be cured by the same treatment.  I know people expect doctors to wave their magic prescription pad and cure their problems, but it's not that easy.

Think of the doctor/patient relationship as a collaborative research partnership.  Here's an example.  My grandmother's physician prescribed a powerful anti-biotic for an infection she had.  Just after she started taking it, she had a terrible panic attack. I was in grad school at the time and so the first thing I did was ask if she was taking any new medications. I'd never heard of an anti-biotic causing panic attacks, so I went down to the pharmacist to ask about side effects (this was pre-Internet).  Sure enough one of the side effects listed was panic attacks.

We called her general practitioner and he prescribed valium for her anxiety. It didn't work and the problem escalated. She was so freaked out, she was afraid to drink water. Fortunately, at school I had access to Medline and looked up some info on panic attack. A doctor in Shreveport had done some work on panic attacks and noted that anti-anxiety meds don't work on severe panic when used alone. He recommended pairing it with an anti-depressant and had shown good results with a combination treatment.  I went down to the doctor's office (his secretary wouldn't let me talk to him). I ambushed him as the office was closing, told him about my grandmother's problem and showed him the research I had found (he was not a psychiatrist, remember).  He said he'd take a look. He called me a couple of hours later and told me I was right. He prescribed an anti-depressant to go with the valium and once we convinced my grandmother to take it, she got better immediately and within two weeks, just like the research said, the panic attacks were totally gone and she was able to quit the meds as she should have.

Treating mental illness is a tricky process. There are no instant cures. If you are lucky and diligent to give the doctor good information, you may get the right treatment the first time, but don't count on it. If you have bad effects from the medicine, tell the doctor and he'll try something else. Trying a lot of different meds doesn't mean you've got a bad doctor. On the contrary it may be a sign that you have a very good doctor.

Here is some advice for those of you with mental illness who are taking or considering taking psychotropic meds like anti-depressants, anti-anxiety or anti-psychotic medications:

1. If you need psychotropic meds see a psychiatrist: If the problem is severe, you may need to see a psychologist too. A psychologist will test you to find out what's wrong. A psychiatrist handles medication.  Either may send you to a counselor for talking therapy if that's appropriate.
2. Trust your physician:  Take the meds as he or she tells you to. Don't fiddle around with the dosages or times you take them. Doing that can cause some side effects or mess up what the drug is supposed to do.
3. Choose a treatment partner:   Your spouse is the best or a parent or adult child who lives with you. That person needs to know what you are taking, why you are taking it and go along on doctor visits to provide a 3rd party report to the psychiatrist as to what your behavior is really like. They WILL see things from outside that you don't see from inside your rattled brain.
4. Trust your partner! Your partner will tell you when you are going off the rails. It's the hardest thing in the world to trust someone to tell you your behavior is erratic. You probably don't want to hear that and you may be so screwed up that you think your partner is out to get you. You need to know that this may happen. It's the illness, not necessarily the meds. It could be both if you have the wrong medication too.  Here's where you have to use cold rational thinking to overcome your feelings. If you are mentally ill, you cannot trust your feeling.
5. Don't self-medicate:  Pot may make you feel "mellow", but it may also have some nasty interactions with the stuff your doctor gave you. Illegal drugs are notoriously irregular in their strength and dosages and pushers are a real hazard to your health. My son wound up 3 days in a coma because he believed pot had no dosage limits and smoked his whole supply wrapped up in papers his helpful dealer had treated with PCP. It nearly killed him.  That's why you don't self-medicate.
6. Call the doctor if there is something wrong or give your partner permission to call on your behalf: When you are having an "episode", you cannot trust yourself to act in your own best interests. People who trust their own judgement when they are mentally ill are the ones who kill themselves or do something monumentally stupid that they wind up in jail or worse. You need someone who will get you to the help you need and you have to keep reminding yourself that you trust that person, no matter what you feel emotionally.
7. Don't switch doctors:   Too many people switch doctors the first time their medicines don't work and then complain because the new doctor gives them the same medication.  Each mental illness diagnosis has a protocol that doctors follow. You give Medicine A first and then Medicine B if that doesn't work and then Medicine C and so on. Change doctors and he's going to start down the same protocol list.  Stick with your doc till the two of you figure it out. If you find a physician that will listen to you when you tell him what's wrong, then stick with that doctor. You've found a jewel.
8. NEVER QUIT COLD TURKEY:  Every damned story in the "Psychiatry Kills" video was of someone who belonged to a group which quit their meds cold turkey and they all had suicidal ideation, homicidal thoughts and really twisted urges. No wonder. THEY QUIT COLD TURKEY. The warnings that come with the medicine say never to quit cold turkey. It can be fatal.
9. Don't believe everything you see on the Internet:  There are some wonderful resources there. Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins and other reputable information sources have a wealth of material about every disease imaginable. If you see some hysterical warning on Facebook, skip it. Search out the information for yourself. Avoid the independent websites. Hook up with social media groups to share stories and learn how other people handled their disease, but be careful of quack cures and hysteria. Your doctor studied all those years because she wanted to help people. Besides, killing your patients is not a very good way to make a living. Dead people don't pay for doctor visits.
10. Remember that you are unique:  No two people are alike and there is no "blood test" or X-ray for mental illness. Even MRIs and CAT scans can diagnose your mental illness on their own. It's a long and complex process.
11. Don't make big decisions when you're not thinking clearly:  If you or a loved one is struggling with mental illness, make it an agreed upon thing that you don't make big decisions when you're having an "episode". Always let your treatment partner be the one to be the final word on whether you are up to it or not. That's hard to do, but it's the best way to regain control of your world. By deciding not to make impulse decisions when you aren't at your best is very wise.

Finally, remember that fear, paranoia, sadness, elevated mood and rage are all components of various mental illnesses.  They come with the territory. Apologize in advance to your loved ones. You may say stupid things that you regret later, but which, at the time, seem like they simply must be said. Build around you a circle of loved ones who know what you are going through and who you trust to be on your side when you are in trouble. You want people who won't let you go to the casino when you're manic, because they know you'll bankrupt yourself if given a chance.  You want doctors who have enough experience with you to piece together a correct diagnosis and who trust you to tell them what's really going on in your head. Not every general practitioner is good with medications for your mental health. If you need medication support, go to a psychiatrist who is expert in treating mental illness and build a partnership with him or her in helping you reach stability.

AND FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE STOP WATCHING CRANK INTERNET VIDEOS.

Tom King
© 2016

Etiquette in the Electronic Age: Time for A Guidebook?

Chris Brogan's blog today "The Anywhen Manifesto"   got me to thinking about etiquette in the electronic age.  We're being constantly pulled one way and another by the demands of the new electronic media.  As fast as the tech people can add features to our cell phones and laptops, televisions and Blackberries, some marketer somewhere finds a way to use that feature to pester and annoy us.  They pile our computer memory with little programs that track how we use the Internet and bombard us with ads their software thinks we want to see.

They even claim it's a service to us, as all the while our computers gradually run slower and slower, forcing us to go out and spend hard cash to buy other software that takes off the software spies that were placed on our computers without permission in the first place. The new electronic communications media piles images, messages and demands for action on us to the point that many of us feel overwhelmed by it all - buried in e-mail, voice mail and Twitters.

The Internet and the new electronic media is, undoubtedly a young and vibrant media.  Like anything young, it hasn't yet learned the value of being polite!  That's to be expected.  The question is, "Should the resultant crudity of the new media be tolerated by our society?"

Years ago, Emily Post wrote a thick book on etiquette that set the tone for social behavior for decades in our society.  Someone codified polite behavior and those who valued polite behavior adopted her guide and set the tone for others who, though they might never have read Miss Emily, were nevertheless impacted by her strategic guide for improving the quality of life in "polite society".


Perhaps it is time to write a 21st century etiquette to guide us in deploying the new media.  Can we use the strengths of the new media to overcome the nasty bits that keep cropping up as new and useful technological tools are developed?

E-mail is wonderfully useful as a tool for time-shifting.  You can put off till later, the reading of your e-mail and handle it when you have time.  Listserves were early and useful on-line communities that developed around this valuable characteristic of e-mail.  Unfortunately, the nasty bit that came with the listserve was spam. Then came spam filters which have helped some, if not perfectly.  Then came MySpace and Facebook and we soon had a kind of e-mail on steroids, but with that came the marketers and things began to be built into these tools that waste our time.

For instance, there is a little social game on Facebook called Farmville.  Lots of my friends and family play it and it's actually a lot of fun.  But the problem is, the marketers are busy with the game maximizing the amount of time you have to spend there to keep up your farm, thereby maximizing how long you look at the advertisements in the sidebars.  The idea is to achieve a delicate balance whereby players stick with the game because they get rewarded with special junk for their electronic farms in exchange for spending hours piddling with the game and looking at ads. They are probably making pots of advertising dollars.

Now these games are everywhere and I feel obligated to play because my loved ones keep sending me stuff, but I'm beginning to realize I can't do it anymore and keep up with my career and personal things I want and need to do. These kinds of games can be very impolite.  They could, I think, still achieve their purpose, though perhaps not as lucratively by incorporating some principles of politeness.

Chris Brogan posted his "Anywhen Manifesto" to address what he calls an "Assault on Anywhen".  Anywhen is Chris' word for that most valuable of characteristics of the new electronic media, the ability to time-shift work or communications to a more convenient time for the user.  This document is a nice start. It provides a strategic framework for pushing back against those who would take by force, the very things about the new communications technology that can potentially improve our lives.

Time-shifting is the big thing we stand to lose.  Do we want to go back to the days when a telephone HAD to be answered.  Twitter and text-messaging, to some extent is doing that to us, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not. Are the creators of the new technology using human weaknesses like the need for acceptance or attention to enslave us to our PDA's.  It's sad, because PDA's, hi-tech cell phones and laptops have the potential to give us power over when we communicate and when we go to our kid's Little League game. Instead, some media purveyors seem intent on tying us down and cutting us off from the world around us.

Perhaps what we need is a 21st century Emily Post for the Internet Age - a guide to how to engage the basic principles of politeness as we deploy new electronic communications technology.  Can we create an electronic "etiquette" that recognizes that human beings have a basic need for privacy, for control of their own time and energies and for boundaries that are recognized and respected by polite people.

Just because a new electronic tool CAN do something, does that mean it should?  This should be explored. It's a great idea for a book.  I do believe I will suggest that to a publisher.

Just One Man's Opinion

Tom King

The Hazards of Going Viral

I was fooling around with Google today and searched the title of a piece I wrote several years ago, then rewrote and released back in May on this blog. It's a spoof on the famous "Who's on First" sketch by Abbott and Costello. I was stunned to pull up nearly 2000 entries. Now I admit I posted the piece on several of my blogs, but not in that many places.

I wrote it as a skit. I posted it in a couple of places about 4 or 5 years ago and then left it to marinate on my hard drive. Back in May I dusted it off, updated a couple of the software references and posted it again.

Turns out there are 5 or 6 videos on Youtube of people doing the piece. One's quite good. The skit is posted word for word on hundreds of joke forums and in not one single instance am I credited as the author.

In the old days I'd have sold the piece to Reader's Digest and made a little money, but now, your work gets spread so fast via the Internet, but by the time I prove it's mine, I'm not sure it would be worth the money. At any rate, I'm at least trying to get folks to add a weblink and copyright everywhere I've found it posted. Maybe it'll do some good.

I'm trying to go back and add copyright notices to all the stuff I've written, but I have few illusions about getting credit when a piece goes viral. I do plan to take credit for it on my resume'. Here's one of the best of the films.



It's kind of flattering that someone stole my work and took it this far. I'm sure, with it being all over the web and posted as anonymous, no one though of it as stealing and I do know that posting something on here leaves it virtually unprotected. I am, however, going to stick my copyright on everything that I post on the web. I can always use the film credits on my resume'.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

by Tom King (c) 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Contact twayneking@gmail.com for permission to reprint

Battling Our Own Balderdash!

WARNING!

Be careful what you believe without evidence. When real things are happening that are disturbing, the nuts come out of the woods. I remember during the Branch Davidian Standoff, a stream of paranoid schizophrenics streamed through our town on the way to Waco, mumbling about government conspiracies. It's happening again.

Our liberties are, in fact, being threatened. Let's remember, however, that the truth is more important than making a point. Some of the stuff that's being posted on some of the conservative discussion groups is really questionable. There are two sources for this kind of stuff:

(1) People who are mentally unbalanced, kooks and conspiracy theorists

(2) Political wolves in sheep's clothing posting wildly inaccurate and paranoid stories while pretending to be conservatives in an effort to make conservatives look mentally unbalanced and like kooks and conspiracy theorists.

If you listen to Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and the leading conservative commentators, they are careful to bring solid evidence before they tell a story. Let's follow their example and be very careful to verify everything we pass on in our community. We need to be 99.9% right all the time, to maintain our credibility since we are paddling upstream against a flood of media and educational system driven "common knowledge" that is slanted, distorted, manipulative and just plain wrong. It doesn't help us counter the mainstream when they lie if we pass along lies ourselves, however well-meaning the helpful soul was who made the story up.

Do some research first before you hit "forward".

Someone wrote once, "Satan, Satan is my name. Confusion is my game!"

Or as someone else wrote, "The devil is in the details." Let's try hard to make sure he's not. If something posted here is balderdash, you should say so. Let's be scrupulous about not letting a lie stand. Let's demonstrate our integrity by refusing to accept lies EVER, even when it's our own side telling them and you'd really love to believe the story because it's sooooooooooooooooooo good!

Tom King
Flint, TX

The Most Dangerous Man in America

A few weeks ago, I would have called the President the most dangerous man in America, but just yesterday, the Senate approved the appointment of a new guy that I think will put this president in the shade.  This guy doesn't worry me because of his charisma, his public leadership of his ability to lead.  It's his invisibility that is most troubling. It's the deceptively innocuous appearance of his job in the administration - Regulatory Czar.

Cass Sunstein, the president's appointment for Regularoty Czar would preside over a wide range of regulatory mechanisms.  This would make him arguably one of the most powerful figures in Obama's Wonderful World of Czars.

For one thing, he'd have regulatory power over the Internet.  About that, he said in his 2001 book, Republic.com, that the Internet may "weaken democracy".  Why?  Because it "allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences".  Sunstein argues that these people cut themselves off from information that conflicts with their own preconceived notions and beliefs.  He even has a term for it - cyberbalkanization.

Sounds bad doesn't it?  Listen, I hang with conservatives a lot on the Internet, but I also read and hear from the other side of the fence as well.  Those people constantly come into our yard and throw poop on porch and run off laughing.  We may get together to share ideas, but there is plenty of give and take in a free market modeled Internet.  Sunstein thinks we ought to be "encouraged" to hear the full range of ideas (like the dozens of books he churns out on every subject known to man.  Sunstein would eliminate all such bunching up of like minds and artificially force us to spend equal time listening to the public debate.

On first blush, it sounds like something that would be a healthy thing, but unfortunately, when you get these intellectual guardians of public opinion going on what sort of things they want to do, they start out by eliminating sources of information that conflict with their own preconceived notions.  In Sunstein's media utopia, the debates would be controlled by regulation so that everyone would get a balanced view and extremist elements would fade away.  It's been described as a sort of, fairness doctrine for the Internet.

Isn't it lovely how these guys just want to make sure we get the "whole argument".  You have to wonder how that works when the first thing they want to do is eliminate the loudest and most effective debaters from the other side.  May God protect us from such politico-nannies.  They firmly believe that if everyone just heard their argument clearly without any effective noise coming from the right, that we would all just fall in line and accept what's best for us - like nationalized health care, gun control, animal rights, cap and trade and militarized civilian "security" forces just for starters. 

Even some of Obama's supporters are getting a little jittery about this guy - especially the guys who make their living blogging! If you put such a regulatory stranglehold on the Internet as it appears that Sunstein advocates, you better not hope we EVER elect another conservative to office.  What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  The same regs that silence conservative bloggers can also be used to silence liberal bloggers.  I think that's a mistake and so do some of my liberal colleagues.

The Wall Street Journal says that Sunstein's obscure job “wields outsize power”. In that job, Sunstein will be a key player in Obama's efforts to regulate financial services, implement global climate change "controls" and in implementing nationalization of American industry and business and the deployment of universal health care. You've heard the expression "The devil is in the details." Well Cass Sunstein is now Obama's guy in charge of the details.

What to do?

It's too late.  He's been approved.  We're stuck with this guy unless we turn a spotlight on him so bright he can't make a trip to the can without an audience.  At the risk of being branded a right wing "wing nut", I think we dog this guy till we can elect a new president.  By the way, I've always found wing nuts to be very handy and versatile fasteners.  If things get loose you can increase the pressure without having to drag out your tool box every time.  Wing nuts are great little gizmos for controlling the level of pressure you need to put on a big old screw!

Oh, well, if the Internet goes away, maybe I'll get more work done of the type my wife approves of.  If I can't blog anymore, maybe I can get in a little more of that manual labor my wife says I'm avoiding.  I've been wondering how long I'll last before I spontaneously combust!  Hey, if the news media suddenly goes 100% unicorns and flowers over the political news, maybe it will relive my blood pressure.

As it is, my long term survival may depend on whether we re-elect the Czar Maker on the next go-round or not....

Just one man's opinion

Tom King

The Decline and Fall and Rise of the Invisible Writer

America is a nation of writers. Though formal literature got off to a slow start, the bulk of early American writing was done by millions of diarists writing alone. When someone died in those days, particularly someone of position or influence, the first things the family did was find his diary. You wanted know what your dearly departed had said about you that might be problematic.

To this day, old diaries represent a major source of historical evidence, despite the subjective nature of the writing. I used to wonder why people stopped keeping diaries. Teenage girls, of course, kept it up. Accumulating a secret stock of damning written ‘evidence’ against all the people who have ever mistreated you, that can be read aloud at a special high school assembly after your tragic death, has always been attractive to teenage girls for some reason.

The average American, however, has left off keeping extensive personal diaries. I wasn’t sure why until the great ice storm of 2004 left our rural community without power for nearly a week. I played the guitar a lot; listened to my Walkman till I ran out of batteries. Finally, in desperation, I dragged out my old journal. I dutifully entered daily handwritten entries up until the television came back on.

Ah, but personal writing is not dead! To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of personal writing has been greatly exaggerated. While the keeping of handwritten journals and private manuscripts may remain in decline, actual private writing may be experiencing something of a comeback. Recently I did a personal inventory to find out what all I had written over the years. I went through my stuff from the 60’s and 70’s in no time. My Sweet Baboo long ago tossed most of it in a fit of cleanliness that extended even to the top shelf of my closet. My extensive early works were gone. Then, I waded into the computer era. My hard drive and pile of backup CD’s yielded 3 full books and 3 unfinished ones, a biography of my son, some 200 poems, short stories, thousands of photographs, humorous, religious and political essays and a dozen web pages.

Then, I hit the Internet. I found 5 blogs, 8 forums I contribute to regularly, three books in progress on webooks.com, an e-book excerpt from my only published book, and two poetry websites with my poetry collections. I also host a poetry class that I plan to turn into an e-book. I’ve published hundreds of web-based articles on subjects ranging from rose bush pruning to treatments for dog diarrhea.

I’m thinking that if I croak, my family is going to have a devil of a time finding the electronic equivalent of my diary. It’s scattered all over the Internet. I suspect that’s pretty common these days. Lots more people write than used to. They just aren’t using paper. The Internet conveys a sense of anonymity that attracts the shy writer. It allows us to be far more courageous than we would be otherwise. Someone who might never stand up in a public meeting and criticize the mayor, will fearlessly take his honor to the woodshed on his weblog.

The invisible writer is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

He’s just not so invisible anymore. He has a poetry web page his kids don’t know about. She writes a political blog with hundreds of followers. His family tree website has photos and stories from five generations. She teaches an on-line class for organic gardeners and is completing a new e-book on growing organic hothouse tomatoes.

The beauty of the Internet for the shy writer is that it frees us from the tyranny of the publishing industry which had built a virtually impenetrable wall about itself to keep out the riff raff. In defiance, millions of would-be writers publish their work daily on the Internet and are finding an audience. Talented people can build an audience one reader at at time. Best of all they don’t have to pass through the soul-destroying process of finding a publisher. You can work on your draft novel on-line with the help of a half dozen friends and nobody sends you a rejection slip. We may not make much money, but we are honing our wordsmithing skills.

Today, invisible writers like Emily Dickson would have had a devoted following on Poetry.com instead of having had to die first and hope someone accidentally discovered her manuscripts. You wonder how many brilliant “invisible” writers we lost because nobody ever opened that box in the closet after they died. Nowadays they’d simply live on in cyberspace.

How cool is that?

© 2009 by Tom King

Who Gave You Permission to Help That Man?

Someone asked me something like that once. We were trying to find rides for seniors and people with disabilities who can't drive so they can get to the doctor, to the grocery store and to church. He was a development director for one of the largest charities in town. What he really wanted to know was whether we had the okay of the local good old boy network BEFORE we started looking into the problem.

"Who gave you permission to start a transportation initiative?" he asked.

The answer: Nobody did!

So, without permission, in 7 years we tripled the funding for rural transportation for seniors. We forced the rural transit provider to drop discriminative practices. We engaged private sector transportation providers to help get folks with disabilities get to and from jobs. We stopped predatory "coyote" drivers from exploiting the families of farm workers in small rural colonia's and helped the women get an affordable ride to town to buy groceries. We did so without raising taxes by so much as a nickel.

For our troubles, I got a nasty letter from the executive director of the local Council of Governments. The director of the state Transit Association called me "anti-transit".

I figure we must have done something right if we upset so many good old boys!

There has been a lot of rhetoric in recent years about an old African proverb. "It takes a village to raise a child."

Somehow, folks of a certain political persuasion have come to believe that Washington, DC is just the village to do that.

I'm not sure on what planet the federal government is considered a village, but it is surely not in this solar system. The proverb is dead on, though. I know from experience. I grew up in such a village.

Back when I was 12, If I had been seen throwing rocks at a street light in Keene, Texas by any one of the town's mothers or grandmothers, word would have reached my Mom before I could have made it home at a dead run. Mom would have met me on the porch, her arms crossed and tapping her foot in a way that boded no good for me.

There is no power on Earth for getting things done effectively and humanely like that of a small community. That's the village those old Africans were talking about. Local communities, united together to fix their own problems - that's what the proverb means. They aren't talking about vast unwieldy social programs.

Virtual Village began as a dream to help people working in small to mid-sized nonprofits in rural and small towns, local neighborhoods and communities. The idea was to help inexperienced, but passionate local leaders successfully network, write grants, create new programs and solve problems in their own communities.

They don't need a mandate from Washington. They don't need the okay of whatever good old boy political network runs things in their state. What they need is help figuring out how to do what needs doing.

We call it "doing good without permission".

You'd be surprised how many government bureaucrats we've aggravated so far.

As we built the website, however, the economy suddenly came crashing down around everyone's ears. Foundations cut their giving for new projects. Some closed entirely. The feds cut the deduction for philanthropic giving, seizing control of dollars that once flowed freely to charities and channeling them through government programs. Our small, local charities need help more than ever.

I was driving through the country yesterday and saw a crude sign in front of a tiny country church advertising a "Soup Kitchen". It wasn't sophisticated. It wasn't politically correct. Yet struggling rural seniors were getting a hot meal. The church started the soup kitchen because Meals on Wheels and food bank programs have been having getting food out into the rural areas and there were a lot of older people out here in the sticks that need a hot meal every day. So neighbors pitched in and are helping their grandmas and grandpas and struggling families that have been laid off, have lost jobs or businesses or who have had the family wage-earner die suddenly. By the time a government program could have been put together, isolated seniors could have been starving. They didn't because their neighbors acted quickly and solved a problem with the resources they have.

They'd like to keep it going permanently, but they don't know how.

The Food Stamp folks have long complained that church food pantries were cutting into their business. A couple of years ago they actually started a marketing campaign to bring people back to the Food Stamp program that were being fed by little church food pantries. Now, the Food Banks that supply those church based pantry programs are suddenly finding it harder and harder to get the food supplies they once did as the federal government tries to centralize all anti-hunger programs under government control.

Small to mid-sized charities also face stiff competition for increasingly limited Foundation grants. Big charities with fat development budgets and marketing resources dominate the competition for what grants and other funding remains out there. Local charities are having to do more, with less money and they're doing it with organizations that don't have the aggressive development resources they need to find funding to keep their doors open.

Virtual-Village is a vitally needed on-line tool that can help the hundreds of thousands of small church and community-based organizations that have sprung up to meet needs in our towns and neighborhoods that were not anticipated up in Washington's central planning.

We're here to help the people who create and run local charities. We're here to show them how to reduce travel costs, to access information they need to do their jobs and to help build collaborative networks using 21st century telecommunications and Internet based tools. These wonderful people solve a myriad of problems that exist in our home towns that nobody in Washington has ever thought of, much less designed a "program" for.

These are tough times.

Please go to this link ( http://virtual-village.org ) and visit the site. Small charities can't afford expensive development officers, much less afford an extensive development and fund-raising program. Yet, Foundations and government funding sources increasingly require more and more networking, interagency cooperation and program coordination before they'll give money to local charities. This is an expensive and time consuming task, something most nonprofits can't afford. Virtual Village can help by bringing the collaborative networking process down onto our own desktops.

You can help the little nonprofits and faith-based ministries survive in this era of crumbling economies. Contribute now. We need your time, your talent and your money. Any one or all three!

We need just $25,000 to finish adding all the new tools the site needs to be fully functioning. A commercial for a used car dealer can cost more than that to make.

Just go to the Virtual Village homepage and click on the 'donate' button. Help us finish building the website and adding the tools our friends will need to survive the coming lean years.

The community you help may be your own!

I've given 6 weeks pay so far. Can you give lunch money? It's easy. Follow the easy to use Paypal "Donate" link on the home page. Just a couple of minutes and you can strike a blow in support of all those little guys out there helping your communities.

• They aren't making government salaries.
• They don't have government health benefits.
• They spend on average less than 8% of their entire budgets on admin costs.
• Many go without pay altogether.
• Millions of volunteers work with them.
• Tens of millions are given a hand up.
• Tens of millions of lives are changed.
• We can help them do even better.

Join us, won't you.

We don't have to ask the government for permission to help the homeless, to shelter a battered wife and her kids, to feed an elderly person or to help someone who's fallen on hard times to get back on his feet.

Why should we have to ask someone in Washington whether the widow next door deserves to have a couple of neighbors mow her grass or paint her porch for her?

Why should our neighbor have to file stacks of humiliating paperwork when all he needs is a couple of bags of groceries and a ride to work for a few weeks till he gets on his feet?

Help Virtual Village help our community do-gooders to, well, to do good!

Thanks for your support,

Tom King

E-Books in Our Schools?

The Texas legislature is debating whether to begin deploying electronic instead of paper textbooks in Texas public schools. Proponents say it saves paper and storage and in the long run will be less expensive. Opponents say, it's a dangerous innovation and if it was good enough for grandma.....

Oh, and what if the lights went out. Then where would you be.

In the dark!

And you can't read a paper textbook in the dark either.

Now I like electronic learning. The great thing about e-books is that you can go so far beyond traditional printed texts as far as the depth of material you can offer. With printed text, the publisher must weigh the cost in paper and ink of every photograph they put into the text. And forget about video or audio materials. With an e-book, however, you can click on a hyperlink and see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. You can listen to Ronald Reagan challenge Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!". You can watch our grandfathers storm the beaches at Normandy, Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. It's so easy to go to the source.

Amerigo Vespucci's map can be scanned and available at the click of a link. Want a copy for the kids to pass around, hit the "print" button. Want to hear FDR's "Day that Will Live in Infamy" speech. Click on a button. The teacher can even plug into a projector and put it up on the screen without having to check out the DuKane projector and buy a $200 filmstrip.

It's absurd to limit our kids to a two page summary chapter on the Civil War, written by a leftist historian and then picked over by a paranoid textbook committee that is devoted to making the text politically correct (never mind about the truth). That's why our country is in the shape it's in these days. You can't read the tepid pablum that passes for textbooks any more - not and remain conscious at any rate! How much better to have e-books that link to the original source material, that show original maps, film of the actual events, photos, artifacts and the original words of the players in history, literature, art, math, science and economics.

How cool would it be if our smart kids could go off exploring on a subject that interests them instead of being tied down to memorizing a few watered down facts and figures and dates? Imagine kids not being bored to death by what they were studying.

An e-book is a whole library on the subject at hand and is not hindered by the cost of paper and ink or the limitations of the written word. An e-book publisher doesn't have to decide whether a picture should be printed in black and white or color, large or small. Bytes and pixels cost the same in black and white or color. The cost of including the vast amount of free written records, historical materials, visual and audio records is negligible when stored on a disk or hard drive or server compared to what it would cost to duplicate even a fraction of that information in a printed volume. An encyclopedia set that my parents took two years to pay for when I was a kid, can be had for less than $20 today at Best Buy on a shiny silver disk!

Now I confess to being an information junky. I read whole encyclopedias cover to cover when I was a kid. Not every kid is like that, but many are. Why don't we give them a challenge too while we're stuffing information into the unwilling and oppositional kids that don't have an interest in learning. With e-books, a kid can go just as far as he or she wants. With e-books, it's not hard to give them the enrichment materials they will devour if they have it.

The great danger of making this promiscuous lot of learning available to our kids is that we might accidentally teach our kids to think for themselves - and you know what trouble that caused back in colonial times. I mean, first Ben Franklin started newspapers, then he regularized the postal system and then there were all those libraries and next thing you know, the tea was in the harbor and the British had a revolution on their hands.

I kinda think it's time for another revolution in this country. But, we're not going to see that happen if we keep spoon feeding our kids with the intellectual pablum being dosed out in today's printed textbooks.

Imagine if our kids could read the words of the founding fathers for themselves instead of a summary of what some progressive socialist textbook writer would like to believe they said. Wouldn't that turn the world upside down as one English King name George lamented.

What's even more cool about e-books is that there's so much material in them that there's no way on God's green earth that any gang of progressives on a textbook committee could possibly read all the stuff in all those e-books! There's bound to be some original thought slip through, especially if they include original video and audio of the actual events and people responsible for all that history, literature, mathematics and science we're asking them to learn. If we give them the opportunity to sit at the feet of some of history's great teachers and hear them in their own words, then there might be hope for this generations of our kids and grand kids yet.

Then, two years from now, instead of buying new textbooks, you just download the update! Quick, clean and no trees have to die and maybe we could use the money for something else like better cafeteria food!

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

.

Virtual-Village.org Goes Live!

Hi folks,

I'm pleased to announce that Virtual-Village.org is live and online as of today.

WHO ARE WE?
We are a community of people with a mission. Our missions are as diverse as the people who live in the neighborhoods, towns, cities and communities that make up our world. Virtual Village brings together information, organizational tools and most importantly, some of the smartest most experienced folks from the nonprofit, faith-based and advocacy fields. If you have a passion to do something good for your community, we invite you to join us here. We'd all love to help you get it going!

What's up so far
It's a Beta Site - the bare bones of the website with basic tools in place. Over the coming months we'll be adding a whole raft of new features like friends tools, chat room, collaborative grant writing tool and an online shop.

In the meantime we need your help.

What Virtual Village will become depends a great deal on you the membership. Don't be afraid to let us know what you think we need, what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. Your active participation will help guide us toward making this the most effective nonprofit networking site ever.

PLEASE GO TO: http://Virtual-Village.org
AND SIGN UP FOR A FREE MEMBERSHIP.

It only take a couple of minutes. You can add more to your on-line resume whenever you want.

Please give us just a few minutes of your time each day to check in, trade ideas, stories and experiences with your fellow laborers in the vineyards. I promise it will be worth your time.

Welcome aboard and thanks for your help.

Tom King

WEBMASTER!!!!!

Well, I'll be a webmaster if we get the project funded. Sounds a little sinister. "I AM THE WEBMASTER!" Actually, if we do it right, it'll be more like the web herder or the web coaxer. A bunch of us nonprofit types have come up with an idea for an on-line social/professional network for people like us in faith and community based organizations so we can get together on our computers to plot and plan how to take over the world.

Ultimately, that's what we'd like to do - in a good way of course. Sadly, though we all want pretty much the same thing, the disagreements over how we get those things can get pretty violent. I heard a talk show host disagree with the idea that we want the same things. He says people on the left want power!!

He's half right. The leaders on the left do want power any way they can get it, anyhow they can hang on to it. The problem is, there are just as many people on the right who only want power too! They all seem to fall to corruption one by one....

I've long believed that the rank and file folks could get along fine if we could just ditch our leaders. We could hold a lottery or something to pick new ones. It should be somebody who doesn't want to be in charge. Somebody smart and talented and stable who isn't crazy or vain enough to want to run for public office.

It's that separate elite group - people who have made themselves our leaders that's the problem. They lust for power and will do anything to get it.

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky. We're going to try and take over the world!"

Like Brain, our leaders set their followers out to do the dirty work. These guys know full well they are using their followers to tear our country apart. They don't care. It's a big old game to these guys. They play the game every day in the halls of power and then they gather for steak and lobster dinners in the Senate restaurants at night to drink and congratulate themselves on having made fools of us all.

My friend the talk show host is wrong. I used to watch the Pinky and the Brain cartoons a lot when my kids were little. Pinky never had a clue, he just went along with Brain wherever he went. Most of us are far too much like Pinky. We mean well, but the Brains of this world feed us with platitudes and rhetoric, convince us to follow them and then reap the rewards of our labor - either by taxing it out of us or through fees or surcharges or any one of a thousand ways our leaders have of living off the sweat of all of our backs - rich, poor, liberal or conservative.

The best way I've ever found to get anything worthwhile done is to get folks together without the politicians and their lackeys and just do it. That's what the new Virtual Village Website is about. I hope once we get it up, that many of you will join us in this nifty experiment in Internet-based collaboration.

The politicians are going to hate it. People banding together to make their communities better without the permission of the powers that be! What a wonderful and terrifying thing that could be.

I'm just sayin'

Tom

Creative Sentencing for Hackers

I've just spent the better (or worser if the truth be known) part of a week trying to rebuild my computer after malware got in and ran amok in the danged thing.

I just don't get it. Where's the fun in writing a program that totally screws up someone's computer? You don't get to see the frustration you cause. You don't profit from the damage you do. You don't even know the people who's lives you hijack while they are going through the incredible hassle of reinstalling Windows and all their programs.

Who would have a reason to do something like that? Here is may personal list of suspects:

1. Terrorists - You want to screw up the American economy, shut down business and personal computers and make it hard for us to get our propaganda about freedom out there, that would be one way to do it.
2. Anti-Virus software companies - If they were to release new viruses regularly, then you'd have to "update" your software and then you'd have to pay them renewal fees every year. Sounds kind of like paying tribute to the Romans doesn't it? Nobody has ever proved that occurs. Also, if it worked, you'd see similar schemes cropping up in other areas. Oh, wait..... I just realized I have anti-spyware software, anti-malware software and a firewall on my computer to protect me from other "threats". That's part of the reason they tell me that my computer takes half an hour to boot up.
3. Juvenile Delinquents - Yes, I know some of them are in their 40's now, but some people never get over being anti-social. Little twerps at their computers spraying graffiti across the Internet just because they can do it and it makes them feel powerful!

A bunch of us on the banjohangout forum came up with some interesting consequences for these guys, in case the government ever gets around to catching them. It's too bad that you can't sue these folks for the full value of wasting your time.

Bailiff: Will the defendent please rise.

Judge: You have been found guilty of willfully creating computer software which deliberately hijacks and ruins computers costing tens of thousands of citizens of this country millions of hours of lost work and recreational time just trying to get rid of this pernicious garbage.You are hereby sentenced to ...............

1. Estimate the time he's wasted, double it for the aggravation, that's the time he spends being made to watch Tina Turner and Michael Bolton videos. - Scarecrow
2. Make them listen to Barbara Streisand 24/7 for the length of their sentence. - Fiddlebuster
3. Since exposure to Vogon poetry is not possible in reality, how about 1 day in solitary for every 1 megabyte of storage found on his hacker machine, with 20 or so different renditions of Rocky Top piped into the cell 24 hours a day, at least 5 of which include a bass solo. - MrNatch3L
4. The worst punishment I can think of is making them listen to clawhammer banjo playing 24-7.. - Stelling Man
5. Since we'd rather not be visited by Vogons for obvious reasons, play recordings of the poetry of the Famed "Worst Poet on Earth", Scottish Bard William McGonagall. "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say. That ninety lives have been taken away. On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember'd for a very long time." About 3 months of that the poor guy would be gnawing off body parts trying to escape...-Tom King
6. Hopefully they are into grundge or heavy metal rock or something. Then, what you do is play Ralph Stanley records and Alan Lomax's field recordings, some Earnest Tubb and some Wagner. By the time they got through the ring cycle....... Can you imagine?
7. I agree that the punishment should fit the crime so my suggested punishment would be to force them to continually eat spam until they were puking out of their eyeballs. -Wheatstraw
8. Polka music. Nothing but polka music. - anonymous
9. Locked up in a cell with nothing but a Sinclair 1000 computer and a broken tape recorder. - scruggsfiend
10. Chain them up in a music school in a practice room with the beginning fiddle, accordion, banjo and bagpipe students. - mandoguy
11. Something creative with chains, syrup, ants and aardvarks. - banjoman

It goes on like that for some time, but you get the idea.

Too bad judges can't do that anymore.

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

The Knights Who Say "Nay"

Given the glut of superhero movies I would like to suggest a way for a real geek to become a superhero. You've got Peter Parker who becomes Spiderman, Clark Kent who becomes Superman, The Fantastic Four, Bruce Wayne who slips into the Batsuit, Darkman, The Daredevil and the Incredible Hulk, just to name a few.

All you need to be a super hero is a superpower and some assorted evil villains.

Let me suggest a super power that is being misused by evil villains the world over. There are thousands of bright misguided folks in cyberspace who are using their considerable intellects to create viruses, adware, hijackers and programs to steal your identity, your money and your time. These brilliant villains destroy peoples lives, their websites and their credit and force us to load down our computers with so much anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-adware and security software that our computers lumber through their tasks like knights in plate armour.

Where are the brilliant hackers who devote themselves to taking the fight back to the bad guys? Where is the cyber equivalent to Spider Man? Where are our cyber knights in armour, protecting the weak and downtrodden and gullible and unprotected? Where are the heros who say "Nay" to the cyber villains that stalk the Internet and cost us all millions in lost revenue, credit theft and lost time.

I once spent $180 to have a computer at work stripped down and reformatted and lost most of the material on the computer in the process because of a "toolbar" one of my staff was tricked into installing. I spent most of two days trying to get rid of it, but it kept reloading itself every time I rebooted. I never could find the buried file that kept reloading the deleted software. I went to the software's home website and found the home address of the software company. I went to visit them next time I was in Austin, Texas. By the timer I got there, the office was empty and looked like someone had taken a bat to the place - evidently someone who had a similar idea to mine. I hope they were there when he found the office.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a Cyber Justice League of America? A bunch of brilliant hackers on the side of the little guy. How about they track down the sites which upload hijack software and shut them down for a change? Crash their servers, hijack their software, steal their credit cards. Why couldn't our government do that? Half the time these sites are based in foreign countries. Let's put together a cyber-Delta Force or Hacker Seal Team and go after the porn sites and bogus companies that download viruses, hijacker programs or otherwise mess up people's computers. Pound the Internet cafes that serve as home base for the Nigerian e-mail scammers. Clobber terrorist sites! Lock up spammers. That would certainly be something worth doing.

Now those guys would be my kind of superheros!!!

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

The Wonderful Wizards of Odd

I remember when personal computers and video games began to become popular. I remember columnists and television and print media pundits issuing alarming predictions about the decline of education, intelligence and western civilization in general. To hear them talk at the time, you'd have expected that the Internet and computers would, by this time, have reduced us all to disembodied brains in jars being pumped full of mindless government propaganda designed to keep us all cooperative and quiet. Turns out, the personal computer and the rise of the Internet has probably done more to promote human creativity, individuality and literacy than any tool yet invented. 

Don't believe me, google something you are interested in - anything at all. I told my kids that once and Micah, the smart alec child, bet me I couldn't find anything about "navel lint". In 5 minutes, I'd found 3 websites dedicated to the subject - complete with pictures of their own navels and embedded lint, contributed by viewers of the site. It's true, like television, you can find tons of garbage. Google recently listed "Paris Hilton" among the most googled words of the week. I'm not really surprised. It only proves we have a huge segment of the population that gets a vicarious thrill from peeking at the lives of shallow spoiled rich kids. It's the soap opera crowd and, sadly, there are always lots of us who want nothing deeper than that for entertainment. 

You can find plenty of pornography and illiteracy and stupidity on the net too - if that's what your hunting for. The good news is that a person with any sort of brains at all can find plenty of really good stuff with which to occupy his or her mind. Not only that, but bright or really determined people can create their own websites, contribute to encyclopedias from their own peculiar areas of expertise and become columnists and pundits in their own right. Ninety year olds can become rock singers and popular video-journalists almost overnight. Bloggers had their own booth at the political conventions last time - right alongside the network journalists. The mainstream media finds itself becoming more and more marginalized as the blogger nation grows. The music industry is losing it's hold on the musical tastes of America as we can download songs we like instead of buying expensive albums that only have maybe one track we want. Virtual unknowns can set up their own websites, build an audience, record, market and sell their music, movies or art entirely outside the mainstream. 

That's refreshing. It lets those that leftists refer to as "the people" enjoy a level of freedom that is unheard of the history of the world. Those who believe that a wealthy or privileged elite should have the power to tell ordinary people how to live, what to believe and how to spend their money are FRANTIC!!! The virtual world of the Internet is expanding rapidly and the fastest growing segment is outside the control of the traditional arbiters of public taste. We increasingly demand substance over style. When CBS canceled Jericho, fans set up a howl. There's even talk of running the show over the Internet at 99 cents a download to subscribers. The fact that we can talk about marketing a television show outside the networks entirely or on any one of 100 cable channels tells you something about how the world is changing. The big networks aren't so big any more. They fight for an increasingly smaller portion of the biggest segment of the audience pie - mostly, it seems, the "reality" television junkies. Meanwhile, the intelligent and individualistic segment of the public is drawn to other places for their entertainment and they are willing to buy what they want instead of wading through drek. I love folk music and weird songs. 

I found a website belonging to Joe Bethancourt, a 60 year old native of Arizona who does a version of "Benson, Arizona", the theme from John Carpenter's odd comedy space opera, "Dark Star". I love that song and right away found a copy on the Internet. Do you know how long I'd have had to look to find that song just 20 years ago? I made a CD that has songs I like to listen to when I'm walking:
1. Benson, Arizona,
2. Hallelujah - 2 versions (Cale & Buckley)
3. Mad World (Jules)
4. Faith of the Heart (Russel Watson)
5. I'm my Own Grandpa (Lonso & Oscar)
6. That's How the Yodel Was Born (Riders in the Sky)
7. Sail Away - Enya
8. As Time Goes By - Sinatra
9. Superman Song - Crash Test Dummies
10. If I Had a Boat - Lyle Lovett)
11. Pass Me By - (Theme from "Father Goose")
12. Grow Old Along With Me - John Lennon
13. Rainbow Connection - Kermit the Frog
14. Waltz Across Texas - Earnest Tubb
15. Waltzing With Bears - ?
16. Over the Rainbow (Izzy K - with ukelele)
17. Don't Fence Me In (Bing & the Andrews Sisters)
18. When I'm 64 - Beatles
19. Gilligan's Island Theme
20 Hobo's Lullaby - Arlo Guthrie
21. I Will - Alison Kraus
22. When I was a Dinosaur - Trout Fishing in America
23. Cover of the Rolling Stone - Dr. Hook
24. Mad Dogs & Englishmen - Noel Coward
25. Ape Man
26. All of Me - Sinatra
27. Sleepytime Cartoon - Trout Fishing in America

Weird selection, huh, and all available on the internet from 11 cents to 50 cents apiece. How cool is that? And I watched a Joe Bethencourt concert of selected songs for an hour for free on You-Tube. How utterly cool is that. I read the news on 10 right wing and 1 leftist blog and cruised a new music site for a folk musician named Josh Woodard who lets you download his music for free - how cool is that? He's pretty good too. I think I'm going to be a fan. As a kid who used to read encyclopedias for fun, all of this is like having a gigantic library at my fingertips. I can download the classics for free - even audio book versions..... Now that's what I call THE PEOPLE'S ENTERTAINMENT. 

You want to find out what entertainment is like when the elite are in charge, just check out North Korean television. If you don't like stories about how heroic Kim Jong Il is, you might just want to reconsider moving to that little worker's paradise. So when they start talking about reining in the Internet or "fairness" rules, WATCH OUT!!! They're going to mess up things sure as shootin'. In the meantime, I'm just tickled that all those wonderful oddballs, kooks and geniuses have a place to display their wares. It's like an informational farmers market and I think it's the healthiest thing to happen to this world in a long time.

Just one man's opinion...
Tom

Here We Go Again

I got a hoax e-mail yesterday about Glade Plug-ins. You can read about it here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_plug_in_air_freshener.htm And here: http://www.scjohnson.com/family/fam_pre_pre_news.asp?art_id=133 There are several versions of this “Alert” out there, some signed and some not. If you check the website of the “attorney” that supposedly signed it, Hunton & Williams are corporate lawyers defending the likes of TxU, Bank of America and Bell South FROM these kinds of lawsuits. Their pro bono work is largely environmental lawsuits. Someone stuck the phony signature on it after reading that a lack of signature was a dead giveaway that it was a phony e-mail (they probably read it on About.com). 

 Use a Glade Plug-in properly and your bathroom will smell just fine and is unlikely to burn down as a result. Of course, if your bathroom plugs are cracked and broken and your wiring inadequate, you could start a fire there, but that’s not the plug-in’s fault. Sounds like some unscrupulous lawyer (probably not Hunton & Williams) setting up the manufacturer for a lawsuit. By tainting potential jurors in advance with this word of mouth attack on Glade, an attorney has a better chance of winning a nice fat lawsuit. Maybe it was done by a rival manufacturer who wants to improve their sales of a similar product by besmirching Glade’s brand name. Whoever it was knew enough about attorneys to make a realistic looking signature for the note. 

 Shame on them. Please understand that by passing this sort of stuff around without checking it, we all contribute to rising costs for the things we buy in the store and the goods and services we use. There are more than one million lawyers in this country – at least one for every 250 of us. At an average salary of $75,000 (and that’s very modest – it’s likely much higher), that means you and I pay out an average of around $3400 per year to support lawyers. This cost is not just in direct fees, it’s hidden in every product we buy, every service we use, every thing we do. How many things do you know of that you cannot do anymore because of the fear of lawsuits. 

Been on a hayride recently? Churches don’t do those anymore because their insurance won’t let them. How about a nice program for seniors at your church? Nope! Can’t do that without licensing and liability insurance out the wazoo – which you often cannot get at any price! Take a group of kids out in your boat? Not without signed waivers and proof that you have liability insurance. Swimming pool in your yard? Not without an ugly high fence and locks and a sign that says no trespassing (as required by your insurance company). Had a fender bender and apologized to the other driver because you made a mistake. Not without worrying for weeks afterward that the other driver was going to show up in court with a neckbrace and take your home from you? Apologized and helped them up when a neighbor slipped and fell on your porch or stumbled over your kid’s tricycle? Not without worrying whether such an apology was an “admission of guilt” and basis for a suit. Offered a homeless person a job for a few days to help him out? Not without wondering if you were being set up for a suit. Better to let those “homeless organizations” with good insurance do that. When’s the last time your kids played baseball on a sandlot? Not without waivers, proof of insurance by the sandlot’s owner and certified umpires and safety equipment. When’s the last time the local band did a concert in the park for free? Not unless someone paid for it, because there was the city’s insurance against lawsuit to consider. Somebody paid for the concert you can bet on it and somewhere a lawyer got some money, however indirectly. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m not happy with what I’m getting for my $3400. AND for every dollar that goes directly to an attorney, at least another goes to his support staff, court fees, filing fees, penalties and losses to companies which they recover by charging you more for goods and services. Got mesothelioma, Parkinsons or Lyme disease? Had a car wreck? Mom in a nursing home? Taken heart medication, pain or diet pills? Got a rash from a bottle of lotion? Looking for a quick pile of money? Who ya’ gonna call? Just watch daytime television for a few minutes. They’ll give you a number you can call. There’s an old folk song that I heard once. I’d like to offer a revision to the last verse. …And when I die and go to heaven, There won’t be no lawyers there. 

Just one man's opinion... 

Tom 

Oh, great! Now I'm junk mail... Send me to 10 people right now!

We get dozens of e-mails in our boxes every day from friends - little cutesy pictures, stories, scary warnings about rat urine on coke cans and phoney virus alerts that say your computer will blow up if you don't delete some system files. The irritating ones demand that you forward them to 10 of your friends in 10 minutes or your bank will collapse, your plants will die and your dog will get mange!

I usually debunk the hoaxes if the person meant well and I know them. But, most people don't appreciate being told they sent you a steaming load of horse poop and they don't forward any more junk mail to you. Which is good in some ways, but tends to dampen your relationship a little too, so I usually don't debunk the harmless ones, preferring to respond only when the e-mail is a dangerous or potentially damaging hoax like the one about deleting system files.

I got an e-mail the other day entitled "Children". Curious I started reading and recognized the text. I had written it back in July last year on this blog. It wasn't entirely original. Part of it was a takeoff on a Bill Cosby routine I'd heard, but the original parts that I'd added were included word for word. You can read the original post at:

http://twayneking.blogspot.com/2005/07/if-god-had-trouble-what-makes-you.html

It's really weird when you become part of folk tradition. I'm sure that others have had the disconcerting experience of being told a joke or story that they have actually made up themselves (I mean somebody has to make jokes and stories up after all). A lot of artists lately have taken umbrage at their working becoming part of folk lore. Many have gotten very protective of their work, hiring lawyers and stuff to "protect" their work. In the process, how many are insuring that their work will fade into obscurity.

For instance, the folks who wrote the "Happy Birthday Song" (or at least their heirs) have sued for royalties from everyone who used their "intellectual property" in films, restaurants and on television. As a result the perfect birthday song, which was well on its way to becoming a part of our culture, is disappearing from use as we search for a replacement whose author won't sue. Waiters in restaurants sing "generic" birthday songs that sound like a bad knockoff of the William Tell Overture or something that somebody in marketing made up after too many lunch martinis.

Sad really. Did anyone actually make enough money off royalties for that song to make it worth giving up the song's place as a cultural icon? Money versus a place in history..... even an uncredited place; that's the choice they really made. Greed is one of the most underappreciated sins in the ten commandments (it's #10 if you need the reference).

I think the nicest thing about heaven is that we will have all the best in music, art and great jokes and nobody will sue you for humming along and will be flattered if you make a copy for yourself. How lovely that will be.

For me, I'm a little flattered that me and Bill Cosby contributed a little bit to the new folk tradition that is represented by the gentler sort of spam - the kind that makes you smile and doesn't cause you harm. It was nice that they ended the post with this little note:


Quick, send this on to ten people
within the next five minutes.
Nothing will happen if you don't,
but if you do, ten people will be laughing

That's sweet!

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

The Devil and the Holistic Encyclopedia

There was a brief controversy over the past couple of days about an article on the Internet-based Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia over an article that accused a prominent Democrat and journalist of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Apparently the article was part of some sort of office practical joke. The folks at Wikipedia didn't catch it and left it up for several months to the horror of the journalist in question. The author of the prank fessed up and lost his job over it. Wikipedia as a result of the incident has come under fire for allowing uncredited postings to be made to the encyclopedia's article database. The Wiki folks have, over the years, built up a carefully crafted community of information junkies who tirelessly scour the world for bits of information about anything and everything. Till now, the Wiki volunteers have policed themselves and there is, of course, some resistance to changing what has been an arguably successful method of collecting up to the minute data. Some of their articles are updated within minutes of a major event, the death of a public figure or the publication of some new bit of history, archeology or pop culture arcania. All in all it's been a successful experiment so far despite the misinformation that's bedeviled the site more often than the Wiki's would like to talk about. The concept has proved itself by creating a massive co-op information library that deserves full marks for innovation.

THAT SAID -- I think Wikipedia has reached the critical mass necessary to make the database useful. It’s time to shove in the control rods now. Articles should have authors listed. Everyone who contributed should be included and their credentials (if they have any). In using Wikipedia, it would be infinitely useful to me to be able to see whether the article was written by an imminent nuclear scientist or a 35 year old devotee of the Warhammer Universe who is currently living in his mother’s garage and drawing disability due to his tragic addiction to Ding-dongs and moon pies. Authors should have to pony up a little information about themselves – establish their bona-fides so to speak. If Wikipedia wants to continue to be viewed as a legitimate source of knowledge, they should be willing to put some practices in place that give researchers some idea of where an article comes from. Certainly, for many controversial articles there would be a long list of authors and contributors, but multiple authors have never limited the usefulness of, say, medical journal articles or scientific papers on physics. It should be simple enough to prohibit anonymous authors from having the right to post an article or revision unless a verified author is willing to put his or her name on the article to cover the same information that the anonymous shy person has put forward. If the information is good, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone to take credit for it if the original author doesn’t want to.

Anonymity is great if you’re debating in a chat room or on a list serve or bulletin board, where the argument is the thing but when you’re writing an encyclopedia which is supposed to be factual in nature, information shouldn’t be included if it is uncredited, unsupported or just plain made up. While Wikipedia may be a holistic and evolutionary process (which is admittedly a pretty cool way to do this sort of thing), part of any natural selection process has to be selecting positive traits and rejecting unhelpful ones, that is if the evolution is going to lead to a successful outcome and not some Darwinian electronic dead end inhabited by unwashed post-adolescent pranksters and left-wing conspiracy theorists.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King