Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a childhood pyschological disorder that could lead to Conduct Disorder and/or Antisocial Personality Disorder later in life.  (wink, wink)

Everytime I read the DSM-IV, I'm totally amazed at how they classify natural human traits for the struggle to be free as diagnosable psychotic neuroses.  For those who don't know what DSM-IV is, it's just similar to a diagnostic manual for your car as applied to diagnosing the horrible affliction known as human behavior.

Home remedies for self-medication in adults used to include smoking tobacco and/or marijuana and imbibing alcoholic beverages. 

Psychiatrists and psychologists don't like self-medication for it cuts down on profits from office visits.  Big Pharma doesn't like self-medication, as it cuts into their profits.  Get ready for Obamacare.  And after we're all diagnosed as psychotics, then they'll come for our guns.

Oppositionally and Defiantly yours,

Uncle Joe's Shack

We have a strange slang word , Uncle Tom, in our language that has come to be a slur to mean according to on-line Merriam-Webster: 

1. : a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)
2. : a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women … Some of them are regular Uncle Toms— Jane Fonda>

That certainly was not Harriet Beecher Stowe's intent, but that is lost on the prevailing attitudes of the heavily indoctrinated minds of today.  Joan Hedrick discusses a little of how it has come about:

Grafted onto the minstrel tradition, the stage versions of Stowe’s novel often portrayed Stowe’s hero as a shuffling, humorous Sambo. 

The Christ-like pacifism that ennobled Stowe’s Tom appeared to many in the increasingly confrontational racial politics of the twentieth century as subservience, or as James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1912, “foolishly good”—behavior that became branded as “like Uncle Tom.”

Stowe’s literary reputation, very high in the nineteenth century, was also declining as modernist critics viewed the work of Stowe and other politically motivated women writers as “melodramatic” and "sentimental.”
 

Such critic's views and the slur that gained acceptance are pure poppycock.  Uncle Tom's overt subservience was simply a survival technique in the face of an unbearable situation.  It's no different than people today swallowing their pride, integrity, and opinions to please their masters and keep their job.

Brandon Raub - American Hero or Ticking Bomb?

The republican Mother is following the developing Brandon Raub story.  Her latest post Brandon Raub:  Crazy Like a Fox? gives us a most profound thought on what young Brandon may or may not realized he was doing when he predicted his detainment.  She says:

But getting back to Brandon and his comments, the one I found most interesting was the one made on August 14, a couple days before his arrest. "The Revolution will come for me. Men will be at my door soon to pick me up to lead it."
 

Adam Kokesh's interview with Brandon blows my mind, for he certainly sounds perfectly sane yet he's still being held after 72 hours on the opinion of someone who Ben Swann describes as a "special judge who is actually just a lawyer and part of what Virginia calls a Civil Commitment Board".

Now this is scary.  I've been looking at many other situations where Americans or permanent residents have been picked up and even convicted on skimpy evidence or coerced confessions.  They need to be tied to the escalating use of swat teams to prosecute the War on Drugs, which is spilling over into arrests of non-violent offenders in other areas such as student loan fraud and food co-ops.  There are so many more out there that I was planning on someday putting something together to better "connect the dots", but until then, here are a few.

 

• Justice for Yassin Aref - Monster or unwitting innocent victim?
• The Lackawanna Six - Many questions abound about how big of a threat they really were.  See also this.
• Robert Perske - Advocate for justice for those with learning disabilities.
• The Agitator - Radley Balko performs exhaustive investigative reporting on civil liberties and the criminal justice system.
• Sultans of Swat - Can they seriously come for you?

 

That's enough to give a glimpse into the serious implications of possible effects behind our government's imposition of the Patriot Act, NDAA, and other excesses into the usurpation of our Constitutionally protected rights.  Of course, without anyone left actively supporting their oath to abiding by that Constitution anymore, you have no rights.

Update (28 Aug 12) - Brandon, who was taken into custody on Aug 16, was ordered release by Circuit Judge W.Allan Sharret on Aug 23.

Brandon discusses his ordeal with John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute.