Sayonara, Mr. Lawrence Everything in DRAFT has been published... All the old drafts that were on haiatus have been published... my energy to smash the state has diminised, and I've gotten on with living my life in different ways... I'm living in Japan now, and that takes up a lot of my time.







I can't thank people enough for ever caring about justice for the afflicted addicts of mental health care... We are all of us, damned to hell.







-michael.

Some minor cleanup, then Bob Watch goes live.

It's been a while since I've dipped into the "CEE-ESS-ESS" as we like to call it, but overall it will have a much nicer look, with aditional links and alternatives to what you may been getting. Overall, I've removed 90% of the gradient backgrounds so all you Mozilla geeks ;) can browse the site and actually be able to read it.

Stay tuned. It's not just a militia, it's an army.

And now for a bit of explanation for the inquisitive or puzzled.
You'll notice aside the text of the purpose of this board a series of rotating pictures to which I am adding daily. You might wonder what in the world these pictures have to do with anything relating to this website. I had started with a clip of a photograph done by French artist, Christian Boltanski.

That link will take you to a page denoting the GYMNASIUM CHASES portfolio, a portfolio of photographs based on a group photo of the 1931 graduating class of the Gymnasium Chases, a Jewish High School in Vienna.

Just as you would any critic, you will have to take my words as they are written, but if curious, I suggest you look up his work. Boltanski's work focuses on "A History", it does not so much denote the individual, so much as the remnants of such. The Gymnasium Chases photos, some of which have been used before in other installations render the subjects almost muted, ghost like interpretations of their former self. We can not help but think that these photos are a part of history, and not of the present, and yet at the same time they form a sort of monument, a shrine perhaps. In fact Boltanski did several pieces which were simply "Monuments", installations of similar photos lit by unadorned light fixtures. One of my favorite installations, for its purity and depth of feeling is simply called "Les Archives". It is installed in a somewhat small room with metal racks employed along within the room's walls. Every inch of the installation is filled with face after nameless face, sans text. Quoting Art in America, October 1989 "Without text, without sanctimony, and without Holocaust imagery, it yet manages to evoke the worst horror story of modern times."

This is what I am attempting to reproduce with my borrowing of Boltanski's style, I thought it crude and unjust simply to lift his imagery without permission, so I have begun my own series. I have started with victims of the Khmer Rouge, yet I am continuing onwards until a point where the images become saturated with contradictions, another theme in Boltanski's work, one most evident in the piece Reserve-Detective. I'll let you draw your own inferences from that, and explain it more so at a later date.

The purpose behind the images is to convey the need to serve the individuals in a group, to identify them as individuals, not just statistics and numbers.

When we make half-hearted judgments as to if individuals are "dangerous" to a group, and what we should do with them, for whatever questionable reasons we make such judgments, we run the risk not only of hurting those we remove, but those with whom they confer as well, all the while establishing a code of ethics reminiscent of the rule of Pinochet, Saloth Sar, Idi Amin, et al, and yet in a less direct way.

If an environment which has been touted by Dr. Bob as effective for the use and aid of the mentally ill is to live up to such claims, we need to address these types of issues on a constant basis, simply for the health and well being of its participants.

The pictures are haunting, perhaps disturbing, metaphors of the research data that Dr Hsiung uses for his own goals; making anonymous those being used. No longer are they names and illnesses, they are numbers and statistics. They sublime into the text of the medical abstract.

The Postest with the Mostest.
Well, you can't claim that we've been making this all up, can you? This board really stands more as a objective view rather than opinion. Here is the post that denotes our trademark. It's simply a glimpse at a moment in time. Take from it, what you will.

OOOPS!
MY BAD as they like to say in the hipster scene. While I was messing around with the template and fixing some people's links... I had inadvertently deleted this GEM, which while posted much earlier, shows our Dr. Spock, err Dr. Bob's theory of basing his moderation on poorly written science fiction. Thanks again to Soquel for finding the link.

More Insanity from the combine.
Where do the bad machines go? They go back to the factory to be repaired! Sometimes I feel it's like watching Un chien andalou except that it is all very real, and much much more frightening! Thanks to Soquel for this find. If Bob claims to hate blocking, he sure seems to have some sort of Hyde like counter personality who revels in it. Makes the mind reel.
Editor's Note: This is out of context, so I'm not too sure what the whole Jew remark was, I can only imagine from my experience with the poster that it was sarcastic and NOT anti-semetic, but the link is there and you can follow it to futher your curiosity. - Michael

New AdminArama!
Say hello to my little fiend, uhm, I mean friend!
One of my long time friends from the world of Psycho-Babble, Ms. Soquel, will be helping me admin/edit the board when I am too busy writing manifestos on the liberal self image and the need for the power process (little joke there), so yes, she'll be helping me out too.

Also, you'll notice the other writers on this board, the distinguished W, and Nina, two veteran PB members who have been with it with us all through the whole silly sordid mess. I can't run this board without the help of everyone and I want to give everyone the thanks that they deserve.... There may be new Admins as people's time permits. It's not a hierarchy.

Are you serious? Because you can not be!

Ghosts In the Machine
Just a little mindless commentary here, in the wee hours of the AM for me. I've used a lot of discussion boards/message boards these days (we all have, the expats) as you will no doubt become acquainted by us, that name either holding some sort of badge of honor or defamation depending on who you talk to. Well, I've seen a lot of ads, nothing on the Internet is free so you're bound to get a bit of ad-age, I made that word up, so don't call the grammar police please! But BLOGGER I've found has the most unobtrusive ads in any such system... Look, way up there at the top, a simple aesthetic banner ad. The creepy thing is, is how well it reads the contents of this blog and produces ads designed almost exactly in tune with the contents. It's like there are little monkeys behind a switchboard somewhere and they have all been trained to read web blogs and they punch in relevant data. "Ook, they need Celexa! Ook"... Everyone needs a laugh now and again, you'll find we're not all just a bunch of blowhards with a duracell battery on our shoulder (you do remember those ads don't you?) Anyways, do yourself a favour and go pick up Johnny Cash's last album, not only is it amazing, you'll be pleasing the money fiends at the RIAA and honoring a man who has, may I slip the tongue a bit, been one of the most Kick Ass performers ever. God Bless ye, Man in Black... Say hello to Waren for me. Peace.

Who are you funhogs, and why are you trying to attack this board? Doesn't everyone have the right to run their website the way they see fit?
Yes, magic reader, that's a very good question with a very important answer. Truth be told, I'd love to see Psycho Babble, (I loathe the word babble, but, that's not relevant), thrive and flourish with help doled out to those in need with nary a fear in the world that one might slip up and fall within the eyes of the marker of 'dissident'.

I don't have anything against Dr. Hsiung personally, but as someone who has battled mental illness (think Antonin Artaud illness, not Mary Todd Lincoln) for most of his life, I find myself in the unique position of having empathy towards those who may innocently seek help on a website only to be shot down in flames when tripping over their own shoelaces.

Rules and regulations are good, I've never been one to believe in Anarchism, unless you're speaking of Sacco and Vanzetti which is another thing entirely, however rules and regulations need to be fair, and we all know that sometimes some compassion must be employed to deal with those whose own inner emotions are at such a boiling point.

My metaphor for this has always been that you can not invite children into your gingerbread hut lured by Turkish Delight and then shove them in the oven when their actions become fey and wayward.

Many suggestions have been made in the last 3 years, all of them ignored. I lost a good friend on that board, whose death I do not blame upon anyone, but in the most sincere words I can muster, I would hate for anyone now to be expelled from communication simply for their own missteps. There is outright misconduct, and there are trips of the tongue. When we make blanket laws (much like mandatory minimums, which also are now seen as unjust), we run the risk of endangering those who need help the most.

We can not, as a people, as an empathic people say "do not be bad", and expect the masses to collectively shake their heads in understanding. We need clear definitions of good versus bad, not ad hoc rules that smite down upon those who's reputations follow them, nor those who blindly stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time.

I would love to see these matters rectified, but I have tried time and time and again through personal e-mails with Dr. Hsiung to suggest ways of moderation which would at the same time protect those from ad hominem attack yet let those whose speech may be out of character with what may be considered church-language, be free within a moment to thus speak, and not feel the heavy hammer of the law.

I will only leave you with this, with which to ponder:

"The more corrupt the government, the greater the number of laws."
--- Tacitus

Just a little bit of head scratching humor for a Friday afternoon.
Wrap your collective noodles around this.
Okay, so let me see if I can fathom this logic. I am subjected to some sort of insult, slandered, and my Christ like instinct as a bipolar person used to rocky mood disturbances is naturally to walk away to chant sutras. Behind me, I leave my ability to retort, behind me, I leave my slanderer. It certainly is a nice ideal to aspire to, but good luck in achieving this goal of zen like compassion.

In the end, I feel even more helpless about my illness, the victor remains, the victim walks away silent.

Sounds quite reasonable to me.

The intentions of the writer have to be found in the work itself, and not in his life.
-Flannery O'Conner
Okay, where to begin, it was March maybe, sometime in 2001, where I stumbled across "Psycho-Babble." It was busy with activity, people talking about medications, people interacting socially... It still seemed a bit ad hoc, but it was a good place to start, and turned into a great place to talk to other people sitting in the same sinking and sometimes rising boat.

Cut to the future, approximately 95% of the veteran posters have left out of disgust with slipshod, inconsistent, & irresponsible moderation of the board, or have simply got tired of it all and gave up. Veteran users as well as new users alike were cut down seemingly without pause for infractions of a set of rules they could never hope to understand since no rule ever seemed to apply to what they had posted. All things tilted on this invisible axis of civility, that moderator Dr. Bob Hsiung locked somewhere inside his head as if he might one day be hired to head a department who's function was to judge an art object as obscene or not

It's a long story, that will seem much more lucid as we go... I'm shirking work to post this and need to be a good little cog and work my way back into the combine. I'll have a few deputies... (we'll get into that later as well), helping me, more than likely spelling better than me, and helping me fill out the details as far as past to present goes. Who am I, and why should you care? I'm kid_A, I switched over to the name a very little sphinx leaving kid_A behind until the twilight hours of late. Why would you care?

If you care about the health and well-being of people who are afflicted with a mental illness who rely on peer support online you'll find this site of great import. You'll see that you can not bait and switch the mentally ill to further your own goals, and then crush them mercilessly when those goals run adrift upon the rocks.