If you argue you may be mentally ill?

If you are a free thinker, or argue and don't respect authority you may be, according to the American Psychiatric Association, mentally ill.

You may in fact be suffering from “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.

Oh dear. It would appear that having your own thoughts and views may actually be a sign that you should be drugged by the latest wonder medicine from who knows which company.

These kind of diagnoses worry me, there seems to be so little room for the person who chooses not to confirm to a medically drawn stereotypical model of what a 21st century citizen should be. It is rather like the gulags of Soviet era Russia when to think other than the way you were told to was a sign of mental illness.

Our modern day, western version of the gulag is not some cold prison cell in a remote location, but a chemical concoction that seeks to smooth away all the rough edges of personality and thought until conformance is achieved.

Check the link to read more about DSM IV and this 'disorder'

My trusty cassette tape recorder

Yes I know they're old but I still find my old cassette tape recorder a useful tool. However the supermarkets have stopped selling cassette tapes!

It looks as if Argos will come to my rescue though!

Just sometimes...

Just occasionally the noise and nonsense of life threaten to overwhelm clear thinking.

Generally it's a sign that I have been overdoing it (perhaps it's the same for you).

So having been here before I know the most useful path to take which is to relax, do less, rest and recharge the batteries.

Chill time. (Just for a day or so)

I'm not an ecomist but...

I can't help feeling there is something very screwy going on with the stock markets. They just seem to keep going up in spite of what is going on around us.

During my working day I see many companies and organisations; some are doing well, many are just getting by and far too many are either on the way to closing or now closed.

I see empty shops and business units (some empty for years)across the south of England. I see those shops that are open, having continuous rolling sales with huge discounts.

If I believe what I see, then the economy as a whole is not well. Belts are tight and getting tighter, pay is flat or even down for many and still, new job losses are announced.

So why in this maelstrom of bad news does the stock market keep going up?

Is it because it's the only place banks and trust funds will invest? Has the real value of the FTSE companies really gone up? Is too much money chasing too few stocks.

I see the real economy slipping backwards into what feels like a re-run of the 1970s and yet the stock markets appear to be driven by some other primal force utterly disconnected from the shops, industrial units and factories that I see.

Like an over stretched elastic band, I have a nasty feeling that something somewhere quite soon will go PING! When it happens I'm going to guess that it will be the ordinary everyday people who get hurt and that the bankers and stock brokers will be elsewhere counting their gold and silver.

The bad and the good of humanity-two videos to compare

I had planned to write a blog today about my thoughts and feelings about the world in this very moment but two videos will do this for me.

The first is supposed to be a "joke" way to have people wake up to need to reduce carbon use. It is a nasty piece of work but I'll let you watch it first and then comment on afterwards.



It seems that any means is justified by the end (reduce man made global warming). How can you have respect for the eco-systems of the planet when you have no respect for those who disagree with your views.

It is a very long way indeed from the enlightenment view of Voltaire "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. " Now  if you don't agree with 'their' world view your life has no meaning. This is not a joke video, there really are people who advocate mass deaths to reduce the human population.

Isn't it odd however that  those calling for a reduction in population (the Duke Of Edinburgh amongst them) never actually live or rather die by their own words. One presumes that it should always be 'other people' who should die rather than the self elected, global climate change gurus.

You can see organisations "sorry" page here http://www.1010global.org/uk/2010/10/sorry

But, there is another way.

Watch this video.


I think the second video says most of what I wanted to. (I realised that I had never watched the Chaplin film The Great Dictator, that forms part of the second video. I feel I need to do that soon.)