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Archive for March, 2010

Proposal for DSM-5 to Include Parental Alienation Disorder

March 31st, 2010 No comments

The American Psychiatric Association has published early draft of its proposed changes for DSM-5 (also known as DSM-V), an upcoming version of its mental health manual scheduled for 2013, at its website APA DSM-5 Development. While the draft version does not yet contain a definition of parental alienation syndrome or disorder, the APA has indicated that a group of mental health professionals including William Bernet, Wilfrid von Boch-Galhau, Amy J. L. Baker, and Stephen L. Morrison has submitted a document discussing how to include parental alienation in DSM-5 and ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases, 11th Edition).
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Tennessee House Considering Equal Parenting Bill

March 30th, 2010 10 comments

Tennessee Representative Mike Bell has submitted House Bill 2916 to change the law to provide for 50/50 equal parenting unless there is clear and convincing evidence that one or both parents are unfit to care for the children.
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Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts

March 29th, 2010 46 comments

(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations. That article focuses on problems encountered when psychological evaluations are used in an attempt to deal with a personality disordered abuser in a family law dispute.)



William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.

Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
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Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations

March 29th, 2010 28 comments

(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts. That article focuses on the more general problems encountered in family law disputes involving personality disordered abusers.)

A common opinion of many people suffering harm due to a current or former partner who is a personality disordered abuser is that a psychological evaluation performed for a family law case will describe and label the personality disorder and help protect the victims, including the children and spouse, from the abuser. Disturbingly, this seldom occurs. Instead, what often happens is that the evaluation leads to more conflict and poor outcomes in family law courts that put children and the target parent and their extended family at increased risk of continuing abuse at the hands of the personality disordered abuser and her or his associates.
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Cop Block: Fighting Law Enforcement Abuse

March 25th, 2010 No comments

Updates on February 11, 2016 and September 1, 2016: A complainant has been filing unwarranted DMCA takedown notices against this website and many others, including the Chicago Tribune, to silence reporting of this story. Filing false DMCA takedown notices against “fair use” content can result in significant legal liability such as Diebold Inc. experienced when it was forced to pay out $125,000 damages and fees to an activist group against which they filed a clearly unreasonable DMCA takedown notice. See the end of the article for more details.

Update on July 31, 2017: This article, despite being legally permissible content in the United States, has been censored as the result of one of the two victims of the alleged police abuse described in the article filing a lawsuit against the web hosting company currently used by this website. This suit was filed in Canada because the litigant (hereinafter known as MR. INTERNET CENSOR) is a resident and citizen of Canada. Our web hosting company does not have a data center in Canada, but somehow could be sued because it has done business in Canada even though our understanding is that it did no business with [MR. INTERNET CENSOR].

The company settled because it was much cheaper to do so than to fight the suit out of the US, even though it believed the complaint was without merit and it would win in court. They indicated in Canada, the loser is supposed to pay the legal fees of the winner, but if the loser does not have sufficient financial resources then of course that will not happen in actual practice. The web hosting company believed litigating would run up large costs and even though they believed they would win, they also believed [MR. INTERNET CENSOR] would be unable to pay them damages.

It was exceedingly unfair of [MR. INTERNET CENSOR] to sue them. Web hosting companies are not supposed to micro-manage or censor the legal content of their customers’ websites. These companies function much as common carriers, and they should be treated as such.

Although we understand their business considerations, the decision to settle is imperfect. While it is cheaper for them in the short run, it may invite many more Canadian lawsuits against web hosting providers by those who don’t like something that is legal speech posted online by a customer. This should be of particular concern to the vast majority of web hosting companies and websites that are too small to have international legal departments and millions of dollars to spend on defending against such suits.

We were not notified by the web hosting provider until they settled the suit a week ago. They gave us an option to censor the plaintiff’s name and image or be terminated as a customer. They hoped we would censor and remain a customer.

So for the moment, we have been pushed into censoring content globally because of this Canadian court case despite the content being legal in the US, not being a party in the case, nor having any say or due process. That this can happen does not bode well for free speech on the Internet.

While not exactly the same, it is somewhat like the recent Canadian Supreme Court action against Google in which Canadian courts repeatedly directed Google to censor content despite it not being a party in the legal dispute. Given the alarming slippery slope potential of this, Google is taking action in US courts to block Canadian censorship of the entire Internet worldwide.

Canada ought to be ashamed of its growing role in global Internet censorship, and the rest of the world should be concerned about Canada’s overreach.

If you want the information censored from this article, visit the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Arturo’s Taco beating incident. As a larger publisher with more resources, they have so far been strong enough to withstand [MR. INTERNET CENSOR]’s campaign to eradicate legal website content he doesn’t want others to see.

Update on August 3, 2018: [MR. INTERNET CENSOR], who thinks he would make a great history professor, is continuing his quest to censor the history of his alleged police abuse with new lawsuits against Google and Chicago Tribune. Professor Volokh of the UCLA School of Law writes about the recent idiotic actions of a New Jersey judge ordering Google to censor the photo that is not liked by [MR. INTERNET CENSOR] and the legal reasons for how flawed this order is plus the obvious lack of merit for the litigation.

If this sort of Internet censorship is a concern or interest to you, see the end of this page for more discussion.

We’ve recently added an RSS feed for a new web site called Cop Block to our web page. We’re very supportive of the work of other writers and web sites that report on the corruption and misconduct by police, prosecutors, and courts. Our own writers and their families and friends have seen similar abuses in their communities and are outraged by the lawlessness and abuse perpetrated by governments against their citizens.

One recent story on the site that caught our attention is a police brutality incident in Chicago, Illinois, that we summarize below. Click on the title below to link back to Cop Block’s story.

Chicago police beating victim Matthew Clark
Clark After Beating

‘They’re Cops; They’re Going to Beat You’

The essence of this story is that two friends from the University of Chicago were eating at a restaurant, somehow triggered rage in plainclothes cops over a trivial issue, and then were beaten both by those cops and uniformed officers who showed up to respond to their 911 call.
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Reject US Government Attempt to Ban Nutritional Supplements

March 23rd, 2010 No comments

I was recently alerted to the actions of Senator John McCain who is sponsoring the misleadingly named Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA). This flawed legislation should concern anybody who wants to be able to manage their own healthcare free from unreasonable prohibitions and cost-inflation caused by the United States government. It should also concern anybody alarmed by the out of control healthcare costs in the county. While McCain’s primary intent appears to be to assist the US sports industry from stomping out illegal steroid use, his legislation is irresponsible, destructive, and won’t fix the problem. This article explains why DSSA is flawed and if passed would be harmful yet not solve any real problems. It also explains how you can easily contact your legislators via two web sites to relay your disapproval of DSSA.

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Tire Shopping? Get up to $80 Mail in Rebate for Goodyear Tires

March 18th, 2010 No comments

If you’re like most people, shopping for a new set of tires is something you don’t do often. You want to get safe and long-lasting tires at a good price. But where do you find guidance on choosing a tire? One answer to that question is the Tire Rack web site.

Get up to $80 mail in rebate for a set of Goodyear tires from TireRack.com!
This promotional offer ends April 3rd, 2010.
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The Truth About Governments and Economics

March 17th, 2010 No comments

We received an email from a friend today that explained the way of the world in simple bovine terms.

We would cite the author, but unfortunately we were not provided with the source. If the author ever comes across this, I hope that he or she will leave a comment here and claim authorship of this wise and whimsical “cow philosophy”.

21 Business Models Explained With Cows

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk..
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Trying Out WPtouch Mobile Web Browser Theme

March 15th, 2010 No comments

We’ve noticed that some phone and mobile devices, particularly those with small screens running Windows Mobile Internet Explorer, are really clunky at viewing our site and many others, too. If you’ve got a Windows Mobile device, we’ve noticed that Opera Mobile seems to work a lot better in our experience. We’ve done some brief testing using version 8.65 running on a Sprint Touch on a CDMA 3G network and it works reasonably well for viewing our content.
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Lisa Michalk Takes First Place in Texas 221st Judicial Election

March 9th, 2010 1 comment
Lisa Michalk
Lisa Michalk

Lisa Michalk was the only one of four candidates in the Texas 221st Judicial Election to take the time to respond to our articles on the election and the candidates. As we’ve seen in person how biased, corrupt, and incompetent courts, particularly those in family law cases, ruin people’s lives and abuse children and parents, we believe it is critical that the American public learn about the problems in the courts and struggle to make better choices in judges. While we still don’t know enough about Michalk to endorse her, we’d like to think that her willingness to participate in our discussion over the issues might have earned her a few votes and put her in first place in the primary election.
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