One group of humans get to decide, another is supposed to just follow orders, and trust that the other group will make the right decisions. One group gets heavily funded and carried aloft on the shoulders of the Status Quo and heralded everywhere as heroes, the other gets to remain passive, waiting in silenced trust to be served. One group gets to engage in "reputable" dialogue with each other, the other group gets to  "rant" and "rave" and can only be viewed in a very narrow, paternalistic way. All of these ways have a lot of bigoted assumptions within them and end up tooling all the otherwise beautiful human beings involved. 

 I work full time and loose my dignity everyday. Here is a quote from Phoenix Rising in the early 1980's. "If you thought school was bad welcome to work a "prison of measured time"..

My talk at the Process Work Institute school where I study in Portland Oregon, joined by Mouse from Reed College Icarus and Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland. Includes an audio recording of the entire event.

On Thursday, February 21 a committee of Toronto City Council heard from numerous deputants regarding the critical loss of shelter beds and other basic services for homeless persons in the downtown. Council opted to do nothing.

The recent horrifying death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver Airport has provoked an international outcry over the indiscriminate police use of Tasers.

I've become embroiled in a discussion about how psychiatry is being utilized within the prison system as an additional means of punishment under the guise of 'penal reform'. No doubt psychiatry is inherently punitive when it functions in this capacity as partner to the judicial apparatus. But this is to say nothing of those innocents who find themselves incarcerated and punished in psychiatric prisons (euphemistically referred to as 'hospitals') without even having broken any laws. (This actually means the vast majority of psychiatric 'patients'.)