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MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia. Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum. The doctors handling Arap's case...

In the 16th century, London’s mentally ill were often kept at Bethlem Royal Hospital. The conditions inside the hospital were notoriously poor. Patients were often chained to the floor and the noise was so great that Bethlem was more likely to drive a man crazy than to cure him. The conditions were so infamous that the nickname locals gave the hospital—Bedlam—has come to mean any scene of great confusion. Unfortunately five hundred years later, we’re still treating the mentally ill more like prisoners than patients. Fifty years ago, more than 550 thousand people were institutionalized in public mental hospitals. Today,...

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives. ... The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases. Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for...

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday that laws should be strengthened to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech Monday before killing himself, had a history of mental health problems but still was able to buy two guns that he used in the rampage. "If we know that he got mental health services, then there should be some way of preventing somebody like that from buying any kind of weapon," Obama said in an interview on "The Steve Harvey Morning Show," syndicated on radio stations nationwide....

LARGO, Fla. — Steve Stanton professed his love for the city and asked the people of Largo to support his decision to undergo a sex change and allow him to keep his $140,000-a-year job as city manager. To his sorrow, the answer came back no. Almost 500 people packed City Hall on Tuesday night for a special meeting to decide if they would accept someone named Susan instead of Steve as their top official. And while many spoke eloquently in his defense, more called for his ouster. "If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated,"...

WASHINGTON -- GLOBAL WARMING is “unequivocal,” according to the just-released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people — all of us. Yet, apart from insightful comments by former Vice President Al Gore, there has never been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming. Prof. Tim Dyson, of the London School of Economics indicates that a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per-capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be completely cancelled by population growth. It’s time to open a “second front” in the battle against global...

Saint Petersburg -- A judge threatened to jail the head of the state Department of Children & Families if the agency can't explain why it consistently has failed to get mentally ill jail inmates into psychiatric treatment. Under Florida law, jail inmates found incompetent to stand trial must be turned over to the agency and placed into treatment within 15 days. An assistant public defender in Miami, Carlos Martinez, said the average wait time had spiked to more than two months, and his office and public defenders in Broward and Hillsborough counties have filed court motions to force DCF to...

A loose coalition of liars, profiteers, political panderers, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semitics, terrorist sympathizers, cyber thrill seekers, anti-Americans, and the mentally ill is growing and congealing in America. They allege terrorists did not attack the United States on 9/11; President Bush and the “neocons” did it or the Jews did it or both did it. Their fallback theory is the Bush administration extensively knew about the 9/11 plot by terrorists and just let 9/11 happen so they could aggressively pursue a war on terror. For the conspiracy coalition's main claim, they have virtually conjured from the thin blue 9/11 air a...

Schnitt just announced the breaking news. The DNA for JM Karr is NOT a match for Jon Benet evidence.

Here is something I like to do and I wonder if anybody else is on the same page. I'll go into one of those convenience stores, especially a mom-and-pop convenience store, and I'll buy multiple quantities of some stupid dust-covered knick-knack type thing that this store might sell two or three of in a given year. After two or three visits, I'll have this item completely cleaned out of the store. Then the store will inevitably buy a whole bunch of this stuff, thinking that this item is suddenly in demand. But once this happens, I'll never buy another one...

Synchronised swimming not for gays The governing body for aquatic sports and their World Masters Championships insist that synchronised swimming is for females 09-August-2006 Tony Grew A gay synchronised swimming team has been banned from performing at an international meet, as the International Olympic Committee continues to insist that the sport is for females only. The ten men and four women squad from the San Francisco Tsunami Swim Club had been invited to perform a routine at the FINA Masters in Stamford, California this week. Local organisers knew that the male team would not be able to compete organised a...

The American Left as "crisis cult" Clinical psychologist Robert Godwin proposes an interesting framework for understanding the increasingly bizarre behavior of the American Left at his very interesting website One Cosmos. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston LaBarre, he posits that the left has become a “crisis cult” such as are found in societies whose bedrock assumptions break down in the face of the superior strength of foreign cultures impinging on their territory. Probably the most famous of the crisis cults are the cargo cults which developed in Melanesia. The Cargo Cults believe that manufactured western goods (‘cargo’)...

MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. - A former teacher who has already served jail time for having sex with a 13-year-old student was sent to prison for more than six years Friday for violating her probation by sending the boy nude photos of herself. When Pamela Rogers, 29, was released after serving 198 days in jail, she was under orders not to contact the student or his family or use the Internet. But authorities say that even after appearing in court on a charge of violating her probation in April, she continued talking with the boy and sending him text messages and sexually...

Ansaman has been keeping a lil' strip on Kim Jong Il's latest fun shennanigans.... http://www.ansaman.com/kim/kimcomix.html

Today: June 28, 2006 at 3:16:29 PDT Transgender Community Finds Acceptance By LISA LEFF ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A clash between police and patrons of an all-night diner here 40 years ago was once a forgotten footnote in history. For members of the transgender community, though, it was the start of their slow march toward widespread acceptance. Sparked by the riot, San Francisco activists started their own civil rights movement - three years before the more famous clashes at New York City's Stonewall Inn. A dedication this month of a granite anniversary marker at the site of the...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

LESBIANS and single women are receiving IVF and other fertility treatments on the NHS in Scotland despite a nationwide shortage of sperm donors. A Scotland on Sunday investigation has revealed that three health boards are paying up to £3,000 per treatment for lesbians and single women who want babies to have artificial insemination. Four other boards have treated or referred women who paid for the fertility procedures themselves. The revelation has been welcomed by gay rights campaigners but has angered infertility support groups, who fear healthy gay couples are harming the chances of parenthood for heterosexual couples with fertility problems....