Jon Batson
The Artist.  The Author.

By Lea Yu on June 25, 2010

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has entered into confidential settlements with nearly 200 families who claimed that its antidepressant Paxil caused congenital birth defects.

Most of the claims alleged that babies born to mothers taking Paxil suffered heart defects. Last October, a suit filed on behalf of Lyam Kilker said he was born with three cardiac defects, including a hole between two chambers of his heart that disrupted the aorta.

Kilker’s case is the only one to have gone to trial, and a Philadelphia jury awarded Kilker’s family $2.5 million in compensatory damages. Plaintiffs argued that animal testing revealed potential problems with Paxil, but the company did not follow up with additional tests. A company memo introduced as evidence during the trial also revealed that Glaxo considered covering up any negative test results. “If neg, results can bury,” the 1997 memo said.

In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration warned doctors about a 35,000-person study that found that pregnant women on Paxil were twice as likely to have a child with defects than women taking other antidepressants.

The terms of the settlement will remain confidential. At least 600 Paxil birth defect cases have been filed, and up to 100 cases were settled prior to the settlement announced on Thursday. Paxil generates nearly $3 billion in annual sales

Guest blog by B. K. Eakman

“Increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?” Such is the latest worry according to a recent story by Hilary Stout in the New York Times.

Whoever would have imagined that all the effort by child psychologists and behaviorist educators over the past 40 years to replace the school’s former academic focus with the goal of socialization would now be headed for the ashbin of history — along with the dress codes, good manners and “Yes, Ma’ams” and “Yes, Sirs” they once loudly decried? Maybe all that socializing was too much of a good thing. The same field of incompetents who diagnose questionable brain diseases in every other child, correct learning and behavioral “disorders” with psychotropic drugs, and call for “teamwork” over individual excellence is anxious about “bullying” and “cliques.”

Precisely what they thought they were going to get once children became the authority figures and adults were relegated to stepping, fetching, chauffeuring, and arranging “play dates” (which “usually have to be planned a week or more in advance,” according to the article) is unclear. What they got, of course, was a Lord of the Flies subculture along the lines described in William Golding’s famous, allegorical novel. But today’s subculture doesn’t affect just a small group of stranded British boys, as per the 1954 novel. Instead, this subculture morphed until, by the 1990s, it had permeated American society and much of the rest of the free world. In the United States, the Lord of the Flies mentality has spawned such toxic schools that little “educating” can any longer take place.

Pseudo-educators-turned-social engineers, like John Dewey in the 1920s, were among the first in a long list to dismiss the three R’s as being vastly overrated and to favor child-socialization instead. But the anti-discipline, anti-authoritarian factions began launching a more aggressive campaign under the umbrella of “Mental Hygiene” immediately following World War II. Through speeches, women’s magazines, and teacher-preparation courses, psychologists and psychiatrists started pitching the idea that unless parents wanted to turn out a bunch of little Hitlers and Mussolinis, they had better ease up on the discipline and drop their obsession with right and wrong. Canadian psychologist, Dr. Brock Chisholm, argued in a 1946 speech to the World Federation of Mental Health that right-versus-wrong, and morality itself, were “perversions” that needed to be “redefined” and eventually “eradicated.” He insisted that childrearing methods were “turning out a thousand neurotics for every one that psychiatrist can hope to cure with psycho-therapy.”

Chisholm had plenty of company in the so-called Progressive Movement of new educators. By 1970, one could hardly find a teaching curriculum in any university that wasn’t almost totally immersed in psychology. The left-wing took it all a step further with a political spin toward socialism. In a now-declassified book, Social Psychology and Propaganda, published by the Institute of Social Sciences, (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1985), future educators learned that “socio-psychological knowledge plays a great role … in “tasks that include the perfection of the socialist way of life and combating such antipodes … as individualism.”

Gradually, the suggestion that children learn to question, and even disobey, their parents gained a foothold in professional circles, and was picked up by a public which found the “package” suddenly attractive after the atrocities uncovered at Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, and the Bataan Death March. Parents of that generation were ready to give their offspring a “real childhood” they themselves felt they had been denied during the war years.

The notion that parents and teachers should be the child’s buddy and that youngsters could be “instrumental in their own decision-making” started taking a grotesque turn in the mid-1970s. Still, child “experts” didn’t back off. Instead, they pushed little children to invent their own values, and chastised parents for “pushing their values onto their children.” Today, trends like home schooling are derided as child abuse — because of a supposed lack of socialization opportunities.

Now, to read the New York Times article, it appears that it is too much, not too little, socialization that is cause for angst, while parents busily micromanage their kids’ lives instead of allowing them to just go out and play.

“The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date,” lamented the Times article. “While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention …, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene.”

Why? To head off bullying.

So, what’s different about bullying? Weren’t there bullies in the 1940s? Yes, but the bullying of today is of a type that would have sent shock waves through families of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Today it’s vicious, Lord-of-the-Flies behavior.

What, then, do we have to show for the diktats of child experts?

First, an entire education system based in the abandonment of moral absolutes. Schools grounded in moral relativism are passing along the notion that there are no standards or principles of behavior that cannot be bent or broken, only petty “gotcha”-type rules of political correctness infamy are inviolable. From the moment a child steps on the school bus (parents taking their children to school is discouraged), the student is jockeying for popularity points with peers. Primping and grandstanding dominate the pupil’s entire school day, mushrooming into brutal popularity contests and school violence.

Intransigent peer pressure trumps teacher authority, leading to a lack of respect for school and for learning. It is hard for schools to get, much less keep, good teachers in such a climate. This creates a vicious cycle of continuous parent-teacher-administrator confrontations. Parental interest, patience, and support for schools and their teachers eventually wears thin, sending mixed messages to kids.

The result: School is now mostly a political football for leftist opportunists, and a black hole for taxpayers. Delinquency, cynicism, unemployability, alienation: These are the fruits of child experts’ “socialization” gambit, and it is leading us all unknowing to a different sort of national security crisis that, in the end, will “require” imposition of a police-state.

That will suit the 21st Century breed of socialists in government just fine.

Beverly K. Eakman is a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies as well as editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper (Johnson Space Center). Today, she is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer and columnist, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent book is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).

The question came up at a Writers' Morning Out in Raleigh, a dozen authors and a speaker with a long history of experience and success. Recent technological evolutions have changed how we read and what we read.

Print-on-Demand changed publishing, making the printing of a single copy both possible and cost effective. PDF (Portable Document Format) made digital download possible – for the first time, you could download a page or an entire book and read it on your computer. Kindle and similar readers allowed instant download of magazines, newspapers and books. We have cell phones that text, gadgets that access the net on tiny screens and even a gizmo that will keep Twitter, Facebook and other social media up and running at all times. The iPad adds video to the mix and we are nearly full circle.

Once people read books and newspapers. It was where we got information. But then the radio came along and gave us entertainment with sound. With it came predictions of the demise of the newspaper and of books, because everyone would simply sit around their radio instead of reading. Soon, faster than we thought possible, the radio grew a screen and television was born. With television, again, experts predicted the end of printed paper as a source of information and entertainment.

When the computer and the Internet came about, there was again the prediction that we would see the last of the printed word, that paper was to go the way of the dodo. But paper usage is up by 18% - the printer attached to the computer saw to that.

But the author of today has a special challenge: it is easier than ever before to put your book into print, into digital form and into the marketplace, but who is reading them?

More books were put into print and into the marketplace through print-on-demand self publishing last year than through publishers, or as they are becoming known, “traditional publishers.” Some people actually call these entities “real publishers.” But traditional publishing is in trouble. People are not buying books as much as they once were. Books are being sold through bookstores, more than the Internet, but the Internet still constitutes a large market. Individuals who write are getting more energetic in selling their own books and the sheer glut of material being put out gives the impression of there being a boom.

A best-seller is judged by the books that are ordered by the book stores. Any that are not sold get returned to the distributor after the book has been put on the best-seller list. It is staggeringly possible for a book to be on the best-seller list and sell fewer copies than a new author's print-on-demand poetry collection. The returns would tell the tale.

So what are people reading? It's been said that you cannot sell your book on Twitter or Facebook. The reason is that on Twitter or Facebook people are already reading all they want to read. Any more than 140 characters and they lose interest.

The new fiction is Flash Fiction, even Micro-Fiction. At a reading last Friday, a young man read half-a-dozen stories he called Micro-Flash-Fiction. Each story was a paragraph. It was mildly entertaining, partly because of its novelty.

In Asia, novels are being written to be read on cell phones. What the “Graphic Novel” did for comic books, the new ePub technology is doing for books. On the television show (and movies) Star Trek, in all it's many forms, we saw no paper, no pens, no books. Anything to be viewed was presented on small screens, either stationary or portable, just as today – we read on Kindle or iPad, or Blackberry, Smart phones and the like.

It will change. Change is the watchword of the age. For now, what are people reading? Well, the kids are reading each other as they are texting (or sexting). Students are reading Kindle. Those who can afford it are reading iPad – remember, all the aps must be bought separately. Many of us are reading our computers, the television – even in the car, rather than the radio. A vast number of us are reading Twitter and Facebook updates and nothing else. Why can't you sell a book on Twitter? Because once they read the announcement, they're done reading.

Three days ago the electricity went out. Without missing a beat, I lit a candle, pulled out my acoustic guitar and played until the lights came on. Then, being a victim of my own jaded drives, I put the guitar away and turned to my favorite channel. I could have turned off the lights instead. I still might.

Today you can get Sports Illustrated with a short paragraph and a link to the video about it. Vook.com has a book with videos and claims to be the wave of the future. The leap from Kindle to iPad is a sign that things are changing, the direction is away from static print and toward moving pictures and interactive aps.

I welcome your input and am interested in your comments. I also seek an answer. The question is: as an author, what do I write now?

Jay Leno sent me a photo today. It is a picture of him on a motor cycle and it is signed. I'm going to frame it. It's nice to meet someone who not only reads his mail but responds.

Dear Mr. Leno,

I suppose you could call this a hate letter. Somewhere I heard that you get a lot of those. So I thought, if writing you hate mail is so popular, I'd give it a try.

So, I hate that you left late night TV. For a week or two I hung on to see if anyone – anyone – was going to be funny. They weren't. On the up-side, I got more sleep, as I went to bed at 11:00 instead of waiting up to see you at 11:35.

I hate that you went on the air at 10:00, as it cut into some of my favorite shows – on another network,  but I did switch over to you on the commercials, sometimes losing track of the time and in the process a large part of the story line. Sometimes I just abandoned the show and left it on NBC.

I hate it that you are back on the late night slot, because that means that I can't get that extra sleep any more, or that I have to miss your monologue. I hate it when that happens.

And I hate that you are taking flack from so many for being rich and successful. I mean, isn't that what we all want? Isn't the goal of every single individual to eventually become so successful that we are rich as a result? Believe me, every male worth the label wants your garage. Every female wants a male who has your garage.

I hate that you are taking flack from other talk show hosts for being popular and funny. Isn't that what they are trying to do – and failing miserably? They should study you, maybe they can become popular and funny.

And finally, I hate that someone as broadly popular, a fixture in today's society, the hallmark for having arrived, should endure this crapola. It just goes to show what I have said for so long: America hates heroes. The American press and people have always longed to see every hero brought down. They love a story about someone who should be beloved arrested, divorced, in rehab, in an accident or on trial for murder. There are snakes in the popular press that begin looking for smut the very moment someone comes into the public spotlight.

So now you're back on late night TV at NBC, in beautiful, downtown Burbank. Life is as it should be, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. There will still be grumblings, after all, you are everything that a good American should want to be: rich, successful, popular and (I mean this in the most manly and non-sexual way) attractive. There will always be those who will want to bring down a celebrity, a hero.  I hate that.

Sincerely,

Jon Batson

Government-mandated parity of mental and physical ailments for insurance coverage is a back-door route to nationalized health care. Special interests have been pushing government to implement parity for years and on January 29, the Obama Administration acquiesced. Health plans will henceforth be required to provide (not merely “offer”) mental-health benefits that contain no zingers, such as separate annual deductibles or lesser rates for psychiatrists and social workers.  Instead, according to Andrew Sperling of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), health insurers will be obliged to give the same level of coverage for treatment of emotional angst “as they do for cancer, diabetes and heart disease.”

Mental health has morphed into a cottage industry with scores of advocating organizations and lobbyists — NAMI, the American Psychiatric Association, Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (CHADD), the National Education Association and, of course, pharmaceutical companies. Industry bigwigs have repeatedly insisted that mental-health issues are no different than physical illnesses. The problem is that one cannot verify a mental illness — not with an X-ray, a blood test, a urinalysis or by any other means. Unlike brain injuries, Alzheimer’s and other clear-cut brain impairments due to strokes, high fevers and birth defects, mental illness per se is purely subjective. Perhaps someday researchers will discover issues at the cellular level that definitively cause a certain subset of behaviors, or which exacerbate stress, but at the moment they cannot. So it is no wonder that the various medications and therapies directed at curing, or even alleviating, emotional distress have virtually no track record of success.

In fact, many are suspected of doing harm, as reflected in the increasing number of “black box” warning labels, both on drug packaging and in TV advertisements. Amazingly, the mental health industry has managed to exempt itself from charges of complicity and fraud.  Worse, it has inserted itself into every aspect of our lives and repeated its claims to the point where they are viewed as unassailable — so much so that it actually fuels political-correctness. Unsurprisingly, the Obama Administration has failed to address the problem; seats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a post-9/11 entity aimed at safeguarding Americans against politically motivated intrusiveness, remain unfilled.

Parents fear charges of negligence when they refuse to place toddlers on psychiatric cocktails; the criminal “justice” system recycles thousands of violent criminals back into society at the hands of mental health therapists; hundreds of thousands of citizens are left permanently harmed, thanks to the inevitable side-effects of psychotropic substances that fail to alleviate their symptoms anyway.

Nevertheless, advertisers hawk products that purportedly lessen emotional distress by increasing or blocking serotonin levels. But they never say how much serotonin is too much, how much is not enough, or how much is just right.

It’s enough to make one crazy; indeed, several therapies and drugs are doing just that!  Psychotropic drugs are suspected of being complicit in suicides, hyper-aggressive acts and other bizarre behaviors that have recently rocked the nation.

(More on this later)

Feb 2, 2010

NC is iced in with snow on the ground and freezing rain due later today. I received this from Beverly:

Something else just came up:  Last night I was called by someone high up in the Tea Party movement.  They apparently want to form a real alternative party, complete with platform and litmus test for candidates.  Well, they’d already sent me the substance, but the wording and format was bloody awful, as though it were worded by someone who had no clue as to protocol or political experience.  I told them so, rather bluntly, and they called back commissioning me to whip it into shape!!  At first I said no, but then relented ($$, after all), so now I’m really behind the 8-ball.  I think I hae a magazine and possibly a newspaper that would want to be first to publish it down the road when complete and approved.

I told her to keep a record of everything that happens and we'll write a book.

Then she sent me this:

People are sick of both political parties and shouting at each other, even as they grovel before outrageous government mandates and cower in political correctness, afraid to “offend” and lose status.  Oh, my…  How can we hope to untangle such a mess?  Fortunately, there’s a way out.  Read Beverly Eakman’s new article, just posted, on “Saving Civil Society and a Culture of Merit” at:  http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/family/2846-saving-civil-society-and-a-culture-of-merit .

In a time of political unrest, we elected a savior, who promised change in Washington and then put in members of an old regime. He promised health care and has been trying to force-feed us with a bulky and impossible system. He promised a way out of the financial mess, and gave us more bail-outs, more debt and more fat cats getting fatter. He said he would hear us and turned a deaf ear to out pleas.

The prior leader took us to war almost immediately after a disaster of world-changing proportions. That event has been under a great deal of fire with accusations of being staged to create a situation wherein the president could garner more power. The troubling thing about these accusations is that, instead of being totally outrageous, utterly unbelievable, they are plausible and worthy of our attention. If such an event had been staged, it is an act of criminality unheard of since – no, I don't think there is a 'since.'

Do I believe that a government, which is made up of people, after all, is capable of such evil? Is a government of ambitious men and women – not to discriminate – capable of ambushing a president and blaming it on some poor ne'er-do-well? Are there men capable of pressing a button and blowing up a space shuttle? If the many emails, blogs and even videos on the Internet are correct, there are men capable of evil who would bring down the World Trade towers, would sabotage the Pentagon and would bring down a plane in a field, killing everyone involved?

Before that time, I had never heard the name “Osama Bin Ladin”, had never heard of the Taliban and never thought of Afghanistan. Perhaps I was living in a back yard bomb shelter left over from the 1950s.

Before 2007, I had never heard of Barack Obama. Before November, 2008, his candidacy had “nothing to do with race.” It's not about race, we were told. After all, he's half-white. Think of the white half. He was raised by his grandmother, so his parents technically don't count. Nor, apparently, did his nationality, his religion or his friends. But I'm not going to open up all those cans of worms and go through them again. Suffice to say that after the election, it was all about race. It's all about race, we were told. After all, it's time a black man was president. He was raised by his grandmother, so there really is no white person in his family or in his life. Even his minister is black. Oh! Oops! Scratch that. Let's never mention him again. And no, he's not a Muslim, though he loves them and wants them to be part of America's history from the very start.

Well, as long as America lasts. It was, after all, the last president, GWB, who signed the North American Treaty, eliminating the United States – and the Dollar, in favor of the Amero.

So with out country slipping down the drain fast, I expect an American back-lash. Right on time, the Tea Party came along. There was a march on Washington in 2009. You didn't hear about it because the popular press didn't cover it. Only Fox News and online sites covered it. The actual Tea Party events were hushed up as much as possible. But they gave birth to a movement, the Tea Party Movement.

It's only February and already there is a site selling Tea Party wrist bands with slogans on them and tea-shirts (get it?) and caps promising a “judgment day” in November, 2010. The New Yorker ran an article and there is some speculation online that the party will tear itself apart, split with internal differences. That only happens to well-established groups. CNN even reported that the movement was “threatened by internal rifts.” However, one point that is made is how very little squabbling is going on – less than expected.

The Brown victory in Massachusetts is said to be the first flurry of the party, though Brown ran as a Republican. (We're a republic, remember?) But if there are to be more, the Tea Party Party has to get it's act together. So Beverly was asked to rewrite their platform. With Beverly in there, I just might join, except that I already belong to more social media sites than I can keep updated. Besides, in my 2008 novel, Deadly Research, I suggested that many such sites have membership lists just so the people behind the site, the group being protested against, will have a list of dissenters. I'm sure I'm already on several such lists, but why temp fate?

What's the answer? Read everything, stay sharp, become informed and most of all, vote against the usual party line – our only hope of getting our country back is by voting out the old guard, even under the guise of “Change we can believe in.”

Blogs! They're everywhere! And I am told I have to keep them up! And there is so much more that I have to keep up. But I digress.
I have a blog for Midnight Whistler at http://midnightwhistler.blogspot.com, one for me at http://jonbatson.blogspot.com, three at MySpace.com at "jonbatson," "jonbatson_author" and "jonbatsonmusic."
Earlier this year, I put short stories up, ending with the Powder Monkey of Cape Fear. However, I got very few comments - it was clear no one was reading.
This coming year, I am going to send all the blogs to this site and put up what I want to say here. If no one is reading, at least I am updating only one site.
So that's my New Year's Resolution, to funnel all my many blogs down to one site - here.
If you're reading it, let me know. I'll feel better and who knows, you might feel better too.
Have a Happy Holiday Season and a very sa