The following message, which was sent to me in an email by info@conservativealert.com, is written rather hysterically, replete with exclamation points and all-capital letters as emphases. It also glosses over the distinction between adult gay males and lesbians who have no interest in sex with children, on the one hand, and pedophiles, on the other, which is injust and based on erroneous assumptions. That said, however, it concerns a bill crafted by Democrats now in the Senate which would be one more step toward George Orwell's world of 1984 and a Gestapo-style police force that could arrest anyone, at any time, on the mere suspicion that that individual had committed "thought-crimes." Think that's overblown? Read on . . .

This CONSERVATIVE ALERT is a special message from:



Senate Democrats are Pushing for Vote on the 'Pedophile Protection Act' -- Select Below to tell the Senate to reject the so-called 'Hate Crimes' bill:
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/rm_hatecrimes/?a=2691 ( Read more... )

I don't take them, myself. They're not worth it, and I'll never take them. Here's one more reason why:

I know someone who used to be a good friend, who has been taking very strong antipsychotic medications for some time. They do keep her from having psychotic episodes, which she used to have, very bad ones. But they do something else, too, and that "something else" is sinister as hell.

She used to be a rather staunch conservative. She lives in West Virginia, which is more conservative than otherwise, so this isn't surprising. But last year, a couple of months before the elections, she not only went for Obama, but refused to hear anything good, however true it was, about Republican candidates. Any Republican candidates for anything. Why? Because Dubya "is a traitor to the country." Oh, really? I think she'd also started to pick up on 9-11 "Truther" garbage about that point, as well.

It's her right to vote for anyone she pleases, to have whatever opinions she wants to. But if you ask her for her reasons for this switch in political outlook, she becomes completely coherent and literally cannot explain why she now prefers liberals and the Left over conservatives and the Right.

If you're reading this blog, you've probably already seen the entry I put up earlier today about the latest "hate crimes" bill now in the Senate. I forwarded the original email that came from to her, and prefaced it by stating, quite truthfully, that the style it's written in is somewhat hysterical, and that it glosses over the differences between gay sex between consenting adults and pederasty. I pointed out that this bill, like numerous others before it, is an attempt to criminalize the thought-processes of those accused of certain crimes, and also prevent people from effectively defending themselves and their loved ones from attempted or actual assault by predators, which it does. This would set ugly precedents in law would move us ever-closer to a police state like that of George Orwell's 1984. Her response: "Lies! Lies! Lies!" And a lot of other things that made it clear she was reading into the text of that email as well as my introduction to it things that weren't there, and either ignoring what was there or else believing it to be just great.

She wasn't like that before. Moreover, her ability to compose a coherent email, one minus typos, spelling errors, etc., was once a great deal better than it is now. Intellectually she is going steadily downhill. She's in her 30s now. At this rate, she'll soon begin to exhibit obvious symptoms of early Alzheimer's.

You have to wonder just how good for someone those antipsychotic medications are, and whether there are better ones out there, which wouldn't rob people of their intellectual skills. Even more, you have to wonder why her psychologist hasn't asked the same questions and found something better for her client. I could come up with all sorts of very paranoid answers to those questions, but they would only be speculative. I merely note that maybe that particular class of drugs, like so many others, aren't the world's best things for people to ingest.

Gomez and Morticia Addams. Second favorite: Fester Addams and his girlfriend Dementia.

Have you ever made an honest assessment of the skill-levels and general competency of people? If you have, you'll have noticed that way too many of them don't know how to tie their shoelaces properly. If they've actually mastered that and gone on to tie-tying 101, they've never gotten much farther. I've gotten emails from groups that earnestly insist that there's a global conspiracy of big pharmaceutical companies and their policy-makers who are trying their deadly best to kill off most of us so they can rule the rest. Guess what? If there is such a conspiracy, and they really are trying to do that, the people they're most likely to kill off are the very people who raise, process, and distribute the food they eat, build and maintain the systems that bring running water into their homes, and otherwise produce that which they need for survival. Shooting yourself in the ass isn't a good way to conspire about anything, which means that such conspirators are too stupid to pound rocks, which means that they don't exist. What you do have are a bunch of stupid, venal bastards who will stoop at nothing to line their pockets with your hard-earned wealth -- and, because of the way they go about it, will end up losing all they've taken from you and more in the lawsuits they inspire with their idiot policies.

Furthermore, bureaucracies are absolutely necessary to the running and maintenance of everything from public utilities to vast government programs. Bureaucracies aren't conspiracies. They are far, far worse. They're superorganisms which ultimately develop such a metabolic momentum that in effect they operate themselves, the same way in which Hal 9000 or a too-complex computer platform like, say, Windows Vista will. The bureaucrats end up being along for the ride, and only that, and the ultimate goal of any bureaucracy is to perpetuate its own existence -- which it will attempt to do, even if, especially if, that means killing off its own employees. Think Scientology since the death of L. Ron Hubbard, or even before his death, and you'll see what I mean. The most appalling horrors in the world have been wrought by monster bureaucracies, such as Nazi Germany. The Nazis themselves were as horrifying as they were because essentially they were happily wedded to those bureaucracies, and each one deserves a place in the worst areas of Hell. But without that giant bureaucracy their ability to wreak havoc on the world would have been miniscule, and the history of the 20th century would have been very different than it actually was.

By themselves, as individuals, people aren't very good at doing things. But put them together via a bureaucracy, and they can make the foulest of conspiracies look like a choir of angels, because what a bureaucracy really is, is a step-up transformer for human-caused disasters and human evil, and it will flatten any conspiracy that dares to get in its way the way a 3-trailer semi combo on a 10% downgrade slope will some poor coyote that wanders out into its path. Merciless. Remorseless. Relentless.

Don't waste time worrying about giant global/universal conspiracies. Worry about bureaucracies, instead. Much more realistic and productive.