if you already discount the spirit as being non-existent and have never experienced the mental health system then this video will really not hold anything of interest for you.

i find this young mans approach to dealing with mental illness a very humanistic one and while you may feel the numbers may be fudged to make his point...big deal.are you denying the RAMPANT diagnosis in the industrialized world concerning bi-polar?panic-anxiety? this list is becoming LEGION..everyone seems to be all fucked sideways mentally.
and the answer to all this mental health calamity is?........
medicate baby!!
create a society of utter zombies.

and who doesn't take favorable numbers or statistics to make their argument?
or base a philosophy partially on the words and teachings of another?
ken wilbur practically stole from teilhard de chardin and so what of it...not a big deal.

bi-polar is just failed indoctrination manifesting itself as a polarized polemic of what we have been taught how we are SUPPOSED to be and NOT who we actually are.
there are many ways to deal with this.
some self-medicate,others are medicated and then there are those that choose the path this man chose.

i do not agree with everything this young man put forth but i do agree with the humanistic approach:
know what you want.
to do that you have to know who you are and to do THAT you have to have the courage to look at yourself clearly,openly and honestly (much harder than it sounds).
this is when you realize that maybe...just maybe..you were living your life not according to what YOU wanted but rather what OTHERS wanted for you (mom,dad,grandma,girlfriend..you get the idea).
does this solve everything?
of course not but it is a good place to start and notice not one mention of spirit nor any new age jargon.

now self-medication and prescribed medication to me are just band aids without addressing the real problem and BOTH have long lasting side effects that are not of the positive kind.
i dont need to list those do i?

see what im saying here?
i see you tearing apart somebody elses work but did not see you post any solutions.
i mean look at this one line in your post:
"At the beginning, he posses the question, why can't mainstream psychology and psychiatry heal bi-polar disorder. The answer is because we don't understand exactly what it is, just that it tends to happen."
you wrote that and it didnt give you pause for a second?
they over-diagnose something that they dont know what it really is.
how the fuck can you ever be expected to heal something you dont really know anything about but the REAL question is:why the fuck are you even diagnosing people with something you dont really know anything about?

am i the only one seeing insanity all over that?
thats just fucking crazy.

one of my all time favorite cartoons, along with the old Ferdinand the Bull cartoon...
also reminds me of that one Goofy cartoon where he has the pet grasshopper, Wilbur. is that on the sift?

Super cute klipity-klopety shoes/feet on that little munchkin. Do people really keep lambs as pets? Makes me think of Charlotte and Wilbur.

Great first video, suzanne! You've finally gotten rid of your red P after almost 4 years. Congrats!

>> ^jerryku:
I'm not surprised that so few are Republican (Einstein was a Communist, and many of Oppenheimer's relatives were, too), but I wonder how many today are Libertarian-types, since so many identify as independents?
And how many are pro-democracy? I would argue that science and democracy don't really work together well. For one thing, scientists are very smart, while the majority of the human race is probably embarrassingly foolish in their eyes. So are scientists (elite eggheads) really in favor of having the unwashed masses rule the world? I gotta wonder.
A scientist libertarian party guy makes sense to me though. Free market stuff is like a form of social darwinism. Survival of the fittest. Evolution. Science. Brutal, cold, efficient, and without any silly Bible or Quran to teach hippie whatever egalitarian "love your neighbor" principles that are in there.
A scientist fascist makes sense to me, too.
I guess a scientist Communist (which was VERY popular in the past) actually makes the least amount of sense to me. The only part that makes sense is the tenet of Communism that opposes faith in God. If high #s of scientists are not religious, then I can see the appeal of Communism. But all the other aspects of Communism, which is really based on the idea of majority rule ("The People!"), seems to go against what scientists would favor. Then again, I guess convincing the world that there was no afterlife after a nuclear world-destroying war.. would be the most important thing to do for the time being. Kinda like an Ozzymandias from The Watchmen type thing.




Maybe scientists are elite egg heads, but you know who else were also elite eggheads? Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Thomas Edison, Dr. Salk, Neil Armstrong. It was American eggheads that led the way to map the human genome. Nearly everyone on tonight’s shuttle launch is a science/math geek, and all but two are American. I for one am proud that my country has produced so many eggheads.

Science has done very well under democracy, and amazingly well under American democracy. In our brief history, American scientists (or at least scientists that came to and did their best work while in America [i.e. Nikola Tesla, Alexander Bell, Wernher von Braun]) have given the world the greatest number of advances in science, medicine and technology of the modern era. It makes totally sense; a free society, where ideas and information can be easily exchanged, coupled with a healthy amount of capital from the private sector to fund research is the best environment for scientific advances.

Just because a person is not religious does not mean they would automatically find communism attractive. If everyone that didn’t believe in a god were also a communist, communism would be a lot more successful than it is. I would venture to say that a disbelief in a god is more likely to happen in the above-mentioned free and open societies as opposed to one where everyone are told what to think. Communism (at least as in the form of China, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR) is not a “majority rule” government, but one where a small, self appointed, insular group at the very top controls everything. Majority rule is, however, a tenet of democracy.

There was an excellent article written about this very idea in Harper's by Garret Keizer titled Specific Suggestion: General Strike, quote:

"Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizen-ry that believes it is already dead.

Any strike, whether it happens in a factory, a nation, or a marriage, amounts to a reaffirmation of consent. The strikers remind their overlords—and, equally important, themselves—that the seemingly perpetual machinery of daily life has an off switch as well as an on. Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant karma is not so instant—we ratify it day by day.

The stream of commuters heading into the city, the caravan of tractor-trailers pulling out of the rest stop into the dawn’s early light, speak a deep-throated Yes to the sum total of what’s going on in our collective life. The poet Richard Wilbur writes of the “ripped mouse” that “cries Concordance” in the talons of the owl; we too cry our daily assent in the grip of the prevailing order— except in those notable instances when, like a donkey or a Buddha, we refuse to budge.

The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, César Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood.
Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . .
A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign? "

I'm going to miss Kurt Vonnegut. I'm glad he left some of his alter egos with us. (Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-ll Swain, etc.)

I feel like someone watching Orville and Wilbur Wright circa 1900.
We are on the verge of great and terrible advances in humanity.

This is one of my favorite songs from my favorite Swedish band Opeth. I saw them live several times and they honestly make other musicians look like amateurs.

Opeth is a progressive death metal band from Sweden. Opeth adds several lighter elements to their music, such as acoustic guitar interludes, influences from jazz, 1970s progressive rock, blues and folk elements. Vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt performs both clean singing and death vocals.

Due to their unique blend of melodic and progressive elements, they are said not to conform to any specific metal sub-genre. Opeth have also been influential in the doom metal genre and have attracted a lot of doom metal fans. The name Opeth was taken from the novel Sunbird by author Wilbur Smith, and was originally spelled Opet. In the book, Opet is the name of the location for an ancient empire which translates to "City of the Moon".

- More @ Wikipedia

This is the original movie.

"The Little Shop of Horrors is a 1960 dark comedy film directed by Roger Corman. The film is famous for having been shot in two days. The film tells the story of a nerdy young florist's assistant who cultivates a plant that feeds on human blood and flesh. The film is also noteworthy for featuring a young Jack Nicholson in a small role as Wilbur Force, the dentist's masochistic patient...."