Sophianotloren

Moderation Management (MM) was founded by Audrey Kishline in 1994 as an ‘alternative’ to AA for those who had a ‘drinking problem’ but weren’t interested in complete abstinence.  Kishline believed that there was a difference between ‘problem drinkers’ and ‘true alcoholics’ and that MM could fill a void in substance abuse treatment.  Kishline later decided she was a ‘true alcoholic’ after all and rejoined AA in 2000.  Two weeks later she killed a father and his daughter while “driving a hundred miles an hour in a total blackout” when going to visit her father.

At about 6 p.m., travelers Patricia Clark and her friend Brenda Keller were driving east on I-90 when Kishline suddenly pulled onto the highway from a wooded shoulder, heading in the wrong direction at 60 mph. After forcing a startled Clark to swerve into the farthest left lane to avoid a collision, Kishline veered into the tree-lined median, then reentered eastbound I-90, again in the wrong direction. “It scared us to death,” says Keller, who immediately dialed 911. During the next five minutes, a dozen horrified motorists phoned the police. “She kept running cars off the road,” says Det. Tom Hickman of the Washington State patrol. Richard “Danny” Davis, 38, and his daughter LaShell, 12, weren’t so lucky. Kishline’s one-ton brown pickup truck slammed head-on into their 1982 two-door Dodge. Davis died on impact, his daughter moments later. “We had to cut them out,” says Hickman. When police arrived on the scene, they found Kishline unconscious and unseat-belted, a half-empty bottle of 80-proof vodka beside her in the front seat. Two hours later at a Seattle hospital, tests showed her blood alcohol level to be 0.26, more than three times the state limit.

MM is just a front group for AA, whose purpose is to indoctrinate more people into the 12 Step cults by convincing them they might be ‘true alcoholics’ and to underscore the risks of guessing wrong.  Of course, ‘alcoholism’ is completely fake.  It’s a mischief cult for some (like Kishline) and for others it’s a brainwashing suicide cult (e.g. Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman and millions of others).  Kishline killed herself last month, showing that for some people it can be both.

Kishline founded MM with Jeffrey Schaler, who is curator of a Thomas Szasz web site.  Szasz is an anti-psychiatry psychiatrist who questioned the existence of mental illness and addiction.  He believed that much of these conditions were faked, as if the participants were actors playing parts.  (Szasz died a few years ago.)  Schaler is obviously a smart and skeptical guy, but somehow he was bamboozled by Kishline into joining the board of MM.  He later left, denouncing the organization he helped found, after she became more persistent in her doctrinal distinction between ‘problem drinkers’ and ‘true alcoholics’.  Regarding her crime he wrote: “I support a life sentence in prison for Kishline.  Another option would be to give her the opportunity to commit suicide.”

The other original members of MM’s board were Kishline’s husband Brian and psychologist Fred Rotgers of the Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies.  Rotgers has long promoted ‘harm reduction’ strategies and alternatives to the 12 Step approach.  But he still believes in the existence of the ‘true alcoholic’ and sees MM as a pipeline into AA: “We now see a sizable minority of folks in MM who have moved to an abstinence goal”.

A recent comment on an article about Kishline’s suicide reveals Rotgers’ true sentiments:

 Of course, he is just parroting Big Book propaganda and copying their brainwashing tactics to discredit detractors. Amazingly, anyone who says that addiction isn’t really a disease is called a ‘Holocaust denier’ and ‘science-denier’ and has a ‘large ego’ and is ‘trying to do it your own way’.  These are all well-known 12 Step cult debating tactics.

Also he completely fails to address the reason why Kishline went driving even when she knew she was drunk.  The idea that she wasn’t aware because of her blackout is BB propaganda.  As Bill W said, “There had been no real infidelity, for loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness, kept me out of those scrapes.” (p.3)  This is of course a well known lie.  But Rotgers promotes the idea that once drunk you are no longer responsible for your behavior either because you are unaware or lack judgment.  This is axiomatic in AA.  Of course Kishline had long experience with drunkenness to know that she was dangerous behind the wheel.  And yet she drove anyway.  Why?  Probably because she was trying to get some kind of revenge on her father.  This could be easily corroborated by anyone who knows her family.  It is very typical of most stories of female alcoholism – usually an attempt to get their mother to ‘love’ them, though most heterosexual women outgrow such childishness by their mid 20’s.

This passage from the Big Book is recited at the start of every meeting:

Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.  We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery.  The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed.

The idea that alcohol makes us do things we later regret is a religious belief: idolatry of ‘King Alcohol’.  It is not a scientific belief, despite government scientists’ heroic attempts to make it so.  SAMHSA promotes that belief to children under a pseudoscience guise: “Don’t drink because it will make you do things you’ll later regret.”  NIAAA and NIDA similarly promote pseudoscience nonsense to convince the public that addiction is real, ironically and hypocritically calling their critics ‘science deniers’ even though their own claims about the ‘neuroscience of addiction’ are pure conjecture and speculation.

Like AA, he dismisses his critics as having their ‘head in the sand’ — “Belligerent denial” (BB p. 568) and suffering from ‘large egos’ — “Our actor is self-centered — egocentric.” (BB p. 61)  This causes the resentments that power the cravings.  “And with us, to drink is to die.” (p. 66)  The only solution is a spiritual cure: “We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.”  (p. 68)  Rotgers is promoting AA suicide cult doctrine to disarm his critics, a tactic that has worked for AA for decades.  They say either, “If you criticize AA you are going to die.”  Or, “If you criticize AA you are killing suffering alcoholics.” (Whichever they think will be more effective at silencing you.)  These tactics are the envy of islamist extremists!

Rotgers ascends to new heights of hypocrisy when he validates Bill Wilson’s notions of ‘the best way to help people change’.  Of course, Wilson promoted AA as the only way (“Rarely have we seen a person fail”), while Rotgers scorns others as claiming exactly that.  What makes Wilson so special in Rotgers’ eyes?  Why does Rotgers refer to him reverently as ‘Bill W.’?

The truth is that AA and all its front groups like MM are the true science deniers.  AA is killing millions through its deadly brainwashing propaganda, and Rotgers’ greatest hypocrisy is his own denial of the AA Holocaust he helps perpetrate.

Tom Horvath of SMART and other promoters of ‘alternative treatment options’ are similarly just front men for AA propaganda. The goal is to provide softer introductions to AA’s religious pagan/satanic doctrines which provide a convenient pipeline to the 12 Step drinking club suicide cult of powerlessness.

Read more:

• Warning: Campus Rape Epidemic! – The panic agenda
• AA Has Killed Millions!
• A Thomas McLellan – Acclaimed Higher Power of Addiction Science
• Project ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ – A progress report
• Because Addiction – ‘Addiction’, Overdose and Suicide
• Alcoholism: The Lie Becomes the Truth
• SAMHSA’s New Blood Drive
• The Origin of Sin – We once lived in the Garden
• AA’s Satanic Roots – Have a drink and do what thou wilt
• Lie Like the Wind – How to know if AA is right for you
• How to Drink Like a Normal Man – Just keep it simple
• Powerlessness as Religion – Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny – Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda – How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club – Watch what they do, not what they say
• Does Addiction Take Away Free Will? – We lived in the Garden
• Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
• I Call Blackout – I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction – The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky – 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels – What you actually learn in the rooms
• AA is a Pagan Cult – Putting the ‘pagan’ in propaganda
• The Little Psychopath Could: How the Addiction Myth creates new Drug Addicts

The future belongs to salt-grown potatoes.

Aphids are weird and gross.

Today in duh: pets radically change your brain.

On the cultural life of whales.

Let’s all take a trip inside the 25th annual ice hotel.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Shorter Verbatim Dr. Helen: “As if NYC doesn’t have enough to worry about, a campaign is underway to curb manspreading [assholes who sit in a way that occupies multiple seats on the subway — ed. ]…So, if it’s okay to subway shame men, is it okay to slut-shame women? Slut-shaming is “defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct.” So now men are attacked. Why is one form of sexism okay and the other not?”

So, let’s see. We have an assertion that men have the right to other people’s public space. We then have a non-sequitur expressing misogynist resentment. Yup, it’s hard to get much more conservertarian than that!

Virtually every word of Christopher Caldwell’s evaluation of Obama’s presidency is an embarrassment. Let’s start here:

Health-care reform and gay marriage are often spoken of as the core of Obama’s legacy. That is a mistake. Policies are not always legacies, even if they endure, and there is reason to believe these will not. The more people learn about Obamacare, the less they like it — its popularity is still falling, to a record low of 37 percent in November. Thirty states have voted to ban gay marriage, and almost everywhere it survives by judicial diktat.

You have to love the bait-and-switch within the same paragraph. Whether the ACA will be enduring is based solely on public opinion surveys, although the GOP isn’t in a position to repeal it and the primary threat to it is “judicial diktat” (although he would never call judicial decisions he likes that.) On the other hand, public opinion strongly trending in favor of same-sex marriage is ignored because in some states same-sex marriage is recognized because of judicial opinions. If Caldwell thinks that same-sex marriage won’t be enduring because the courts took the initiative, all I can say is, care to make it interesting?

It gets worse than this:

These are, however, typical Obama achievements. They are triumphs of tactics, not consensus-building. Obamacare involved quid pro quos (the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the “Louisiana Purchase,” etc.) that passed into Capitol Hill lore, accounting and parliamentary tricks to render the bill unfilibusterable, and a pure party-line vote in the Senate. You can call it normal politics, but Medicare did not pass that way. Gay marriage has meant Cultural Revolution–style bullying of dissenters (notoriously, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty and the Mozilla founder Brendan Eich). You can call this normal politics, too, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not pass that way.

Let’s leave aside the outright factual errors (the “Cornhusker Kickback” was not part of the final ACA, what the hell did Obama have to do with Brandon Eich losing his job and what does it have to do with Maoism?) The argument is still a logical and historical disaster. First of all, Caldwell apparently doesn’t know anything about the passage of the Civil Rights Act or Medicare, both of which involved legislative deals. The EEOC was gutted to get Republican support for the Civil Rights Act; congressional leaders abandoned price controls in Medicare to placate the doctor’s lobby. The idea that there’s something new in making deals with legislators is farcical, and giving some additional Medicaid funds to Louisiana is one of the more trivial examples of the genre.

It is true that major reform legislation passing on a straight party-line vote is relatively unusual. But the obvious problem is blaming Barack Obama for the new conditions of American politics. Let’s go back to the Civil Rights Act. From Julian Zelizer’s superb new book The Fierce Urgency of Now, on getting Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen’s support for cloture on the Civil Rights Act:

Dirksen firmly believed that the job as a legislator was to make the compromises necessary to pass bills. Like so many others in this period of insider politics…Johnson and Dirksen knew each other well, liked each other, and believed in working together…

Johnson was hoping to take advantage of Dirksen’s concern for his legacy. Like Johnson, Dirksen measured his worth by the legislation he was able to move through Congress. (116-7)

So, yes, the ACA was passed through different means than the CRA or Medicare. But the key variable was Congress, not the White House. Johnson was dealing with a Republican leadership that was supportive of some parts of Johnson’s agenda ex ante and, more importantly, believed that it was the job of legislators to pass legislation. The current Republican leadership explicitly believes its responsibility is to prevent legislation supported by a Democratic president from passing, and failing that its job is to not give it any patina of bipartisan legitimacy. The only way Obama could have avoided unified Republican opposition is just to not support any significant legislative initiatives. I’m sure this is Caldwell’s preferred outcome — he’s arguing in transparent bad faith here — but it’s absurd to think that historians will be incompetent enough to think that Obama is to blame for Mitch McConnel’s legislative strategies.

Of course, Caldwell uses similar arguments to call Obama racially divisive:

Mitt Romney won three of five white votes in 2012, and exit polls from 2014 show this to be a floor rather than a ceiling. Obama may be remembered the way Republican California governor Pete Wilson was after he backed the anti-immigration Proposition 187 in 1994—as one who benefited personally from ethnic polarization but cost his party and his country dearly by it.

Sure, Romney may have been beaten convincingly by Obama, but Romney won among real voters, and by definition the candidate that was supported by a more heterogeneous coalition is more racially divisive. (Barack Obama getting 2 out of 5 white votes — divisive! Mitt Romney getting fewer than one in ten African-American votes — inclusive!) I’m sure Caldwell’s views will heavily influence historians — if the Dunning School comes back. Otherwise, while it’s of course unclear how historians will evaluate Obama, the evaluation won’t be this.

David Brooks raids a 40 year old science fiction classic --

Maybe you’re familiar with Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s about a sweet and peaceful city with lovely parks and delightful music.

The people in the city are genuinely happy. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a “magnificent” farmers’ market.
...

to explain (oh Lord) why his decades of calculating, loathsome, immoral career decisions weren't really that bad after all:

The rest of us live with the trade-offs. The story reminds us of the inner numbing this creates. The people who stay in Omelas aren’t bad; they just find it easier and easier to live with the misery they depend upon. I’ve found that this story rivets people because it confronts them with all the tragic compromises built into modern life — all the children in the basements — and, at the same time, it elicits some desire to struggle against bland acceptance of it all.

I do with Andrew Rosenthal would keep his diarrhetic mutt the hell outta my back yard.

Also, Mr. Rosenthal, if you want to see this sort of thing done right, here are a few examples

If This Goes On -- 

"Christ, what an imagination I've got!" 

The Day The Icicle Works Closed 

The Hollow Men Who Rule Us

David Cameron could block WhatsApp and Snapchat if he wins the next election, as part of his plans for new surveillance powers announced in the wake of the shootings in Paris. The Prime Minister said today that he would stop the use of methods of communication that cannot be read by the security services even if they have a warrant. But that could include popular chat and social apps that encrypt their data, such as WhatsApp. Apple's iMessage and FaceTime also encrypt their data, and could fall under the ban along with other encrypted chat apps like Telegram. Part of Cameron's speech has been posted on YouTube.

In their Wounderland photo project, Antwerp, Belgium-based art duo Mothmeister create wonderfully bizarre portraits in which figures in frightful and surreal costumes pose with taxidermy animals. They present the project as a reaction against both “selfie culture” and the beauty standards of the mass media. The latest photos can be viewed on their Instagram account. Prints are available on their Etsy store.

photos by Mothmeister

via Bored Panda

Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Television, has announced that Stephen Colbert will begin his duties as host of the Late Show on September 8, 2015, replacing David Letterman when he retires on May 20, 2015 after 22 years of hosting the iconic show. Stephen Colbert was chosen to be David Letterman’s replacement in April 2014, but the start date was unknown at the time.

#NinaTassler announces Late Show w/ @StephenAtHome premiere on September 8, 2015 #TCA15

— CBS Television (@CBS) January 12, 2015

image via Late Show

via The New York Times

Cartoonist James Chapman created the informative comic “How to Answer the Phone in 10 Languages” for Babbel. Chapman also drew versions for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers.

He publishes a new international sound comic every Friday on his website.

image via Babbel

via Pictures by James Chapman

Eclectic Method, the audio-visual remix team who recently created a musical mix of droid scenes from Star Wars, has taken upon themselves to digitally insert subtitles in for R2-D2‘s beep and whistle-filled lines from the last six Star Wars films.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

The NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California and Nissan North America have signed an agreement that will create partnerships in a number of futuristic fields including autonomous vehicles, robotics, and human-machine interfaces. The deal is expected to lead to the development of self-driving cars and planetary rovers.

NASA will benefit from Nissan’s shared expertise in innovative component technologies for autonomous vehicles, shared research to inform development of vehicular transport applications, and access to appropriate prototype systems and provision of test beds for robotic software. Lessons learned from integration, testing, and demonstrations will enable Nissan North America to better plan for development and commercialization of autonomous vehicles and applications.

image via NASA

intricatelystructuredjewel:

katanafatale:

Seattle’s Mario Kart (N64) Championship Finalist and plus model? Why, yes. Yes, I is.

This needs to have more nots, k!

zaynewest:

this tweet is everything

rapmonsters:

rapmonsters:

hobbies: pissing of the beetles fans

hobbies: pissing off the beetles fans

aaaaa42:

just found this comic i drew in 2012

kuwamiko:

i can’t stop laughing

garf-lyf:

The Wolf of Wall Street

lacigreen:

farfromthepacific:

cigarettesandwaffles:

Me if you use those fingers correctly.

omg I almost spit out the water I was drinking 

a million gallons of fun

http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/

thefabulousweirdtrotters:

My Little Cthulhu 

TYWKIWDBI will not be dwelling on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, which is extensively covered elsewhere.  But I thought it worthwhile to excerpt a couple comments, first by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself...

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens. Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery, and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population. ..

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content... Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights...

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least...

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

Similar thoughts were echoed at The Dish (citing other sources):

Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something that very few Americans understand—or approve of...

The last lawsuit to be filed against Charlie Hebdo in 2014 was declared ineligible only because Islam doesn’t qualify for the special legal regime that criminalizes blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism in the Alsace region. And the British Muslims in 1989 wanted authorities to invoke British blaspehemy laws, not the shar’ia, to sanction Salman Rushdie’s novel – but there too Islam did not qualify for protection...

It wasn’t that long ago that entertainers like the Dixie Chicks were being roundly denounced and taken off the air for having the temerity to question our country’s wars.

The counterargument is that this is comparing apples to oranges:

This is a completely false equivalency, and really gets to the heart of the cultural gap at play. To secularists like the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, Mohammed is a man like any other, he is no prophet, he is aggrandized by a religion, and is therefore a legitimate target of satire, just like the the Pope, or Jesus, or even the Dalai Lama if one is so inclined. The Holocaust was systematic genocide based on religion/ethnicity.

I'll close the comments here, because there's so much discussion elsewhere (everywhere), but I'd suggest that those who expect to address the Charlie Hebdo event at cocktail parties or around office water-coolers should ponder the above in order to be prepared for the discussions.

feministsorgnow:

"This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from world affairs, things today might have been different." - Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977)

Me: I would love it if Idris Elba were James Bond.
Dad: ...are you sure?
Me: (ready to get mad) YEAH DAD WHY WOULDN'T I
Dad: Well, it's just... James Bond as a character is misogynistic so would you really want to see him in that role? Treating women badly?
Me: *speechless* I... I don't know. Probably not now that I think about it.
Dad: James Bond is iconic but he is a jerk to women. It's what the franchise is built on.
Me: oh my god
Dad: there are other roles where Idris can wear a suit and is a badass that you won't hate
Me: holy shit
Dad: are you ok
Me: oh my god