More photos...

I've been walking around as much as I can here on the ranch, trying to take a walk every day that it isn't pouring. I always take the camera, a walking stick (it gets steep in places) and a hat. The hat is for the sun or rain, of which we get both in copious amounts. The walking stick is an affectation, but it also keeps me from losing my balance and falling down on some of the steeper slopes. The camera is for my friends who can't be here, so I can share some of the beauty of this place with them.

Here are some photos from the end of March:

Write to FDA Commissioner - Dr. von Eschenbach

The FDA has too long been in the pocket of the drug companies.

You know it and I know it.

Drugs are approved for uses they never should be, based on completely bogus pseudo-scientific "double blind" studies that are rigged in every way possible. They have the trappings of science, but are not based on the truth, applied the way any rational human would see it.

Here's a recent white paper from CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) on the subject of "Psychiatry, the Pharmaceutical Industry and the FDA -- a destructive alliance endangering the lives of children." Read it and contact the FDA commissioner yourself. Here's his address:

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.,
Acting Commissioner
Food and Drug Administration
5600 Fishers Lane
Rockville, MD 20857-0001
or by email through the FDA website

Not that I think writing this guy is going to accomplish much. Wait until he resigns from the FDA and goes to work for one of the drug companies, as so many other FDA employees do.

Narconon in Canyon Oaks (LA County)

The Narconon of Canyon Oaks facility is sorely needed in LA County. They have 46,600 admissions for drug treatment last year, and of those, 42,000 had had prior emergency room admissions. So there's a high incidence of repeat traffic emergency drug treatment traffic. Of those, 52% reported they had failed to get off Meth, 60% reported they had failed to get off Cocaine, and 79% reported they had failed to get off heroin.

The great things about Narconon (which has now been around for 40 years!) is that it does not replace one drug with another (like methodone "treatments" that basically addict the person to methodone!). Instead, the people are put through a purification program and education in the basics of moral living using "The Way to Happiness", a common sense (and non-religious) guide to morals. Narcononalso teaches drug addicts how to communicate with other people, giving them practical life skills they can use to control themselves and live a moral life thereafter. Narconon's recidivism rate is extremely low. Once drug addicts have gone through the program, the majority of them will not ever go back on drugs again. The Narconon program handles the root causes of drug addiction, not just the symptoms.

I liked this recent Narconon graduate's success story:

"At Narconon, I found that standards of ethics do exist. Not moral platitudes enforced on me by someone else, but basic, commonsense guidelines for honesty and happy living. I apply these basic standards to how I live my life now. It has improved my conditions on a very broad scale. But, especially it has improved my relationship with my parents. I am completely straight and honest with them now, and I feel closer to them than ever before."

It resonates with me because when I was young and foolish (back before there was dirt) I did various street drugs before I wised up, got clean and did the purification program myself. That wild period was very hard on my parents--my mother was numb with shock at some of the things I did while on drugs. It took a while to gain back her trust and get back into communication with her again.

Here's a flyer on Narconon Canyon Oaks. If you know someone with a drug problem, get them to a Narconon before they die. My first wife's younger sister came to visit us in the early 80's for a few days -- we didn't know that she was a heroin addict, although she was an obvious "druggie". A week later she was dead in London of an overdose. So my advice based on personal experience is -- don't put it off.

Kiddie Heart Attacks linked to Ritalin

Here's an article in "The Australian", about the research they've been doing under their Freedom of Information laws, to document the links between heart attacks ( including deaths ) in children using Ritalin and other drugs.

CHILDREN as young as five have suffered strokes, heart attacks, hallucinations and convulsions after taking drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Documents obtained by The Australian reveal that almost 400 serious adverse reactions have been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, some involving children as young as three.

Cases include the sudden death of a seven-year-old, and a five-year-old who suffered a stroke after taking Ritalin. Children also experienced heart palpitations and shortness of breath after taking Dexamphetamine.

Others taking Ritalin or Dexamphetamine - the two most commonly used ADHD drugs - experienced hair loss, muscle spasms, severe abdominal pain, tremors, insomnia, severe weight loss, depression and paranoia.

In other news, the guy who is alleged to have killed his two children earlier this year was (as is usually the case in such horrific murders) on the drug Prozac. According to WCNC.com of Charlotte, North Carlina, their reporters were allowed to view the psych's notes on the case of David Crespi. They reported:

The man accused of stabbing his two daughters to death in January switched medication to treat depression several days before the alleged killings, court documents unsealed Friday revealed.

David Crespi is accused of killing his two daughters in their south Charlotte home Jan. 20.

According to a doctor who evaluated Crespi three days after the crime, Crespi switched from Paxil to Prozac.

And yet the psychs want to screen every child for depression or other mental illnesses such as "math disorder" (can't remember "7x8=56"), "ADD" (can't focus because the kid is hypnotized from watching 8 hours of TV every day, or is vibrating from sugar and caffeine overload) so they can put them on Ritalin.

When you observe for yourself that something doesn't work, and you continue doing it because "that's what is done in such cases" -- that's criminal negligence, not to mention evil.

If there's any justice, there's a special place in Hell reserved for psychiatrists, where they are restrained, shocked, drugged, told what's wrong with them, where they are never listened to, where they are intensely depressed and their "care" is to be drugged and shocked into apathy about it.

Lies in the LA Times about ECT

Yesterday's article in the LA Times called "The Future Holds More than Pills" touted the benefits of Electro Convulsive Therapy, or ECT. While I wasn't exactly "shocked" to see the LA Times following the party line of psychiatry, it still hit me that some people might actually believe that ECT could benefit anyone. So I wrote the following letter to the editor:

Citizens Commission on Human Rights has made a long-standing,
well-publicized offer to any psychiatrist, offering $10,000 to any psych who
would willingly undergo ECT. We've never had any takers on that offer,
despite psychiatry having one of the highest suicide rates of any
profession; suggesting that even severely depressed psychiatrists would
rather kill themselves than undergo ECT.

Fair and balanced reporting would have required more strenuous research into
the claims of the psychiatrists touting ECT. That would reveal what CCHR
has documented for the last 35 years. ECT doesn't work, it is harmful, and
it ought to be outlawed as treatment for the barbaric torture that it is.
Like slavery and rape, it has no place in a civilized society that respects
the rights of innocents.

Jeré Matlock
Broadbent, Oregon

We'll see if it gets published. I tried not to pull any punches.

Canadians Unite!

Here's a site where a petition is being circulated to allow 12-year old Canadian Gabriel Lavigueur back in secondary school. He's been kicked out for refusing to take psychiatric drugs: just more psychiatry at work. There are so many other things that can be wrong in the life of a child -- psychiatrists seem to always reach for the drugs first, and of course hammer their solution home by force instead of checking for the obvious: Is the kid hungry? Tired? Is he being bullied by his classmates? Does he have allergies? Does he have another medical situation?

Late winter on the ranch

Spring is almost here on the ranch and we've just had what will probably be our last snowfall of the year. I've been walking a lot lately, exploring off the main roads. I found a small pond we didn't know existed on one trek. Found some quartz on the top of one of the hills around here, which was odd. Most of the beautiful white quartz seems to wind up in the creek eventually. In this section of Oregon we live on what remains of an ancient sandstone plateau, badly eroded. The creeks cut down deep through the frangible, porous sandstone and find the basalt underneath it all. Quartz is hard and durable -- it lasts while all the sandstone is eroded away under it.

Here are a few photos of the views. The air has been very clean and clear after the storms go through. I tend to walk outside near dusk, so the light is spooky and fun to play with. None of these photos has had anything done to tweak the colors or light. I have only shrunk them down to fit - otherwise they are exactly as they came out of the camera.

Talking Points on Basics of Internet Marketing

Last week I received the honor of being asked to put together some "talking points" on the basics of internet marketing, for a series of seminars to be given in Spain and Holland by Gilleard Marketing. That is the firm belonging to Keith and Deborah Gilleard, long-time marketers. They've been marketing for about 30 some years and have achieved many excellent marketing products over the years. They've left a long string of more successful companies in their wake. They became clients of mine about a year ago, when Deborah asked me to fix the HTML coding and CSS on a busted website design for them.

Here's my take on this intriguing subject: The Basics of Internet Marketing.

That page design is simple and clean -- I'm tempted to put my whole "normal" website, www.wordsinarow.com in that clean and simple format. But I also want something a little more complex to showcase the level of complexity that we can use when making websites.

Any comments would be welcome -- I have no perspective on this. I tell people I was born "without the color gene" and while that's not completely true, it's also not that far from being spot on.

Putting an end to psychiatric crimes -- in Florida

My friends at CCHR Florida now have a website. CCHR is, of course, the Florida bastion of the only psychiatric watchdog group, "Citizens Commission on Human Rights", founded in 1969 by Dr. Thomas Szasz, author of the best selling book "The Myth of Mental Illness", and the Church of Scientology.

The website has some good graphics but needs to be tweaked to work perfectly in FireFox and in various screen resolutions. And they've gotta get rid of that one blinking word, blinking text being the hallmark of a newbie web designer.

Anyone who hasn't seen the CCHR traveling museum of psychiatric horrors should make the effort. You'll never think psychiatrists are well-meaning bumblers like TV's Frasier again. Anyone for an impromptu ice pick lobotomy? Any takers? There was one psychiatrist who would grab people off the street and ... well, go see for yourself.

Psychiatry Debunked

My friends at CCHR have put together a terrific four minute video debunking psychiatry. It contains statements of fact from several psychiatrists about how the entire field is bunk. It's worth a look to see what the psychiatric industry does not want you to know about how they diagnose mental illness. Their elaborate scam involves controlling what goes into the DSM IV, their diagnostic manual, so they can bill the insurance companies for it, without a shred of actual scientific evidence behind them.

TeenScreen - What a Scam!

TeenScreen is one of those things that sounds like a good idea at first. After all, we are all concerned about the rising violence and suicide rates among teens. But when you start actually looking at the plan and its consequences, you soon realize is a nightmare designed to make the situation worse.

The main push behind setting up TeenScreen is coming from the drug company lobby, that want to sell more psych drugs to teenagers, at taxpayer expense.

There is no effective or beneficial mental health treatment coming from the psych community -- all they know how to do is drug, warehouse, and shock. Psychiatric counselling is either ineffective at best or outright harmful at worst. Couple it with the harmful drugs that are administered (now with black box labels on them, thanks to CCHR and other concerned citizens) and you have a recipe for even more Columbine massacres and teen suicides.

Fall

After a long summer and no rain, we're very admiring of fall weather here in coastal Oregon. The last of the maple leaves are falling from the trees, and we're getting frost every night. The light has been magical at twilight.

Google AdWords advice

Here's a question from someone who is afraid of overspending at Google:

Our sponsored link is on page 5 of Google. We signed
up for $.10/click and $33.33/day. What should we do to bring it to page 1?
Please help.

Remember that Google wants to make as much money as possible from your ad. It uses at least three factors to figure out which ads it is going to display.

1. How much per click each ad is willing to pay (the bid amount).
2. How much is the maximum daily budget set for that ad.
3. How often a particular ad is clicked when it IS displayed. If you have a terrible ad that no one clicks even though it is displayed in the #1 position, it won't be displayed there for very long.

So, first, try setting the DAILY budget ridiculously high, like $1000. And monitor it extremley closely for a day or two and make sure it isn't actually costing you more than you can afford to pay (it almost certainly won't).

Second, after you see how that goes for a couple of days, start raising your bid about $.05 every day or two, and monitor the results closely again. You'll hit a point where the ad will show up on the first page of Google's results, even though you aren't paying as much per click as most of the companies on the home page.

If you have a good ad that IS clicked when it is displayed, then you can pay less per click, as long as you are willing to have a higher daily budget, and you will make it onto the first page at Google for less than the other guys are paying per click.

Best,


Jeré Matlock
http://www.wordsinarow.com
Writing | Website Design & Marketing | SEO

Gray Lady in the Red

I read an email summary of the New York Times every day, which they kindly provide by email. It's a masochistic thing to do, I know, but I do it to see just how slanted their coverage really is.

So it was with great relish I saw an article in The Federalist that announced the following:

The Gray Lady is deep in the red, but can anything stop the bleeding? Amid weak advertising revenues, circulation decline and a former Enron advisor pretending to be a columnist, The New York Times Co. announced that it will cut four percent of its total workforce, including 250 jobs for the main operation of the Times itself, the International Herald Tribune and the online Times. New England operations, including The Boston Globe, will lose 160 jobs. This announcement comes on the heels of 200 jobs cut in May. We suspect outsourcing to bloggers and other online news services could be playing a role here. Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and its CEO Janet Robinson called the new round of cuts "a painful process" but a necessary one given the "continued financial challenges and the cloudy economic outlook for the remainder of the year." Further, they promise to manage the cuts "in such a way that we continue to provide our readers...with journalism of the highest quality." Journalism of the highest quality? Now that's news!

It's no surprise that the circulation of the NY Times is in decline. The more they slant their news to the hard left, the more out-of-agreement it is with the general populace of New York. Sure, there are plenty of democrats in New York who want someone like Hillary as senator (although I wouldn't be too surprised to see her ousted in the next election despite her recent efforts to re-mold herself as being more in the mainstream). But there are also plenty of people who are fed up. I think of those who think and vote more conservatively not as Republicans, but as being "normal people"; those who are fed up with "corruption as usual", with the unstated adoption of multi-culturalism/atheism as the only politically correct national religion, and with the persistent trend of local, state and our national government toward anti-religious laws and hateful intolerance of mainstream ideas.

Regular NY Times columnists Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd have been given a pulpit where their anti-American, anti-religious and anti-Republican extremist viewpoints are made to seem legitimate. Without the NY Times supporting them, they'd have to find an actual soapbox in Central Park where they could shout out their vitriol and where people could do the right thing--ignore them and get on with their lives. It doesn't matter if a hundred people send in emails or letters supporting their extremist views (not that they do). It matters that the thousand letters that are sent in protest of their views are scoffed at and dismissed.

If the New York Times wanted to turn itself around financially -- and I don't think it does, I think Sulzberger is one of those suppressive people around whom everything fails because that IS his covert, psychotic agenda, to make everything fail -- it could gain readership by actually reporting news fairly, concisely, and with compassion. Something it was noted for 50 or 75 years ago. Now its voice is catty, shrill, carping and hostile, like some aged burlesque queen who was, once-upon-a-time, Miss New York. The glamour is long gone--now we can see the hostility it was masking. It only ever pretends to be your friend, but it is not and never was.

Its agenda is not your agenda, unless you want the world to be ruled by UN beaureaucrats, unless you want America reduced to the role of cash cow for the third world, and unless you want the US Governement to run every aspect of your life for you. Freedom is not their guidon any more, unless it is "freedom to destroy".

If the institution that is the Gray Lady fails, it will be good for not just New York, but for the country and the world.

More Katrina disaster relief

Here's FEMA's Katrina Donations page. Pick one, empty your paypal account.

Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief

Make a donation, help put volunteer ministers on the ground helping people in Louisiana.

Scientology Volunteer Ministers Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort

Let's Invade Venezuela!

Found a factual article about why gas costs what it does and how much is typically tax. It goes a long way to disprove the common assumption amongst left-leaning young Americans that the war in the Middle East is all about oil. Here's the article: Gas Prices Primer. It's a couple of years old but the data is still valid.

Hmmm. According to this other article in CNN Money about gas prices worldwide, gasoline costs twelve cents! per gallon in Venezuela.

Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to invade a country like Venezuela (government in disarray, no big army and no organized we-all-hate-America-movement there) and just STEAL all their gasoline? Hell, why invade Iraq for crude oil when we could invade Venezuela where they've already refined it into gasoline!

Glorious Summer

Here in southern coastal Oregon, we've had the most wonderful weather so far this summer. It rarely gets much past 80 during the days, and nights it is in the 50's.

During the warm days we've been taking walks up into the hills or down to the creek. Here's a picture of one of the views from the road.

Life is good.

Cute Psychiatric Word Games

My friend Dean Blehert has been busy looking up words.
Here's his candid report on what psychiatric jargon means: Psychiatric jargon explained.

Read it and you'll be able to withstand the onslaught of psycho-babble that will come at you when you try to point out that drugging 8 million American children might not be a good idea, or that treating post partum depression with drugs might be the wrong tack to take.

Psychs love to talk about the effectiveness of a "double-blind peer-reviewed study" -- they fail to point out that it is usually full of holes and BAD SCIENCE to boot.

The scientific method, as Dean eloquently points out, when used correctly, is used to DISPROVE one's theory, not to prove it. Only if it stands up to an effort to DISPROVE it, are you getting close to doing actual science. The drug companies employ psych "researchers" who work it backwards to try to make their studies make the drugs look like they work.

Like I said - pseudoscience at work.

Psychiatry = Pseudoscience

Definition of pseudoscience from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition:

pseudoscience: A theory, methodology, or practice that is considered to be without scientific foundation.

Doesn't that describe the wayward step-child of medicine that votes to determine what is a mental disease (like "Math disorder") and what isn't (homosexuality)? Doesn't that definition of pseudoscience describe the theory of brain chemistry imbalance? The psychs can't give anyone a single scientific test to demonstrate that a "chemical imbalance" actually exists, much less that their drugs fix such an imbalance.

It's an horrific mass of lies and betrayals.

"Pseudo" is from Latin, meaning: False, deceptive, sham.

Now here are some people who have been working for more than 30 years to expose the lies and show psychiatry for what it is, the chief pusher for the profit-driven drug companies:

• CCHR - Citizens Commission on Human Rights
• What is CCHR
• Nancy Cartwright - CCHR volunteer
• CCHR helps defeat Florida Psych Forced Drugging bill
• Psych Assault & CCHR
• CCHR & psychiatric human rights abuses
• Siberia Bill
• CCHR Hollywood
• CCHR - standing up for human rights
• CCHR & Celebrities
• CCHR - volunteer match