In addition to all of the problems Whitaker describes in the linked article—failed diagnostics, failed theories, failed “disease models,” failed treatments, making matters worse for the mentally ill, and drugging children and minors without their consent—I would further submit that our generally accepted model of the human mind itself is as deeply flawed.
Rather than starting with the idea that humans have or develop personalities that do or don’t adapt well to some ambiguous social standard, we would do better to start with the idea that humans are fundamentally interactive beings, beings that communicate.
If our interactions are good, we will be well enough. If our communications with even one other person are deeply satisfying and as truthful as we are able, we will be even better than well enough.
People go crazy because their relations to no one are satisfying. In a very real sense, poor communication and shallow interaction condemn most humans to a sort of solitary confinement, where the inner network of semiotic reality cannot interface satisfactorily with the network of any other person’s semiotic reality.
For individuals who are fortunate enough to have a suitable partner, FIML practice will likely fix this problem while also fixing most emotional dissatisfaction. It accomplishes this by providing a means for people to fully engage their inner semiotic networks with each other.
The dead end of the traditional mental health model of a “personality-being-well-adapted-to-a-group-or-culture” is, sadly, best illustrated by the profession of psychiatry itself. I believe Whitaker is right in saying that
… it is going to be so hard for psychiatry to reform. Diagnosis and the prescribing of drugs constitute the main function of psychiatrists today in our society. From a guild perspective, the profession needs to maintain the public’s belief in the value of that function. So I don’t believe it will be possible for psychiatry to change unless it identifies a new function that would be marketable, so to speak. Psychiatry needs to identify a change that would be consistent with its interests as a guild.
If even psychiatry as a group needs to “identify a change… consistent with its interests as a guild,” it is clear that groups cannot be taken as a standard for wellness.
If even a group of doctors of the mind cannot get it right, how can any other group be expected to?
And if groups cannot, neither can cultures. And if none of that is right, neither is the notion of a “personality” that “adapts” to those vague standards.
This is an important point: groups can be and are just as crazy as individuals. In fact, many groups are crazier than individuals. The idea that people have “personalities” that must “adapt” in a way that is “satisfying” to an extremely dubious group standard is bankrupt and cannot be fixed. Of course individuals can adapt to laws and clearly stated mores and taboos, but adaptations based on such emotionally unsatisfying generalities will never produce wellness.
The individual can only be well when the individual can communicate their authentic semiotic reality with another, and in turn, receive similar communication from that other.
Semiotics is the right word to use here because its definition includes communicative signs and the meanings of those signs as they are variously interpreted by the individuals using them. Furthermore, the term semiotics implies, or necessarily extends to, networks of communicative signs and their inevitably differing individual interpretations.
The Epstein Files contain numerous instances in which the identities of people who sent concerning emails to the late pedophile have been redacted.
Included in the emails are repeated disturbing references to girls and young women, but the names of the senders are blacked out.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) passed by Congress in November compelled the Justice Department to release all of the records in its possession.
It did require the redaction of identifying information about Epstein’s victims, who numbered more than 1,000 according to the FBI.
But the law said no records could be ‘withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.’
His death shocked fans and sent ripples through the music world, but decades later, Kurt Cobain’s final moments are under renewed scrutiny.
The Nirvana lead singer died on April 5, 1994, at age 27, from a self-inflicted shotgun wound at his Seattle home.
At the time, the King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide by a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun.
Now, an unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists has put fresh eyes on Cobain’s autopsy and crime scene materials, bringing in Brian Burnett, a specialist who previously worked on cases involving overdoses followed by gunshot trauma.
Independent researcher Michelle Wilkins, who worked with the team, told Daily Mail that after just three days looking into the evidence with fresh eyes, Burnett said: ‘This is a homicide. We’ve got to do something about this.’
This is the beauty of the Buddha’s teaching: It is so complete that nothing has to be added to it. If you just practice sīla, samādhi and paññā, that is enough. And it is so pure that nothing has to be taken out. Nobody can find anything wrong in sīla. Nobody can find anything wrong in samādhi. Nobody can find anything wrong in paññā. People are sure to accept it. And they are accepting it.
If we make a sect out of the Buddha’s teaching, a blind faith or a cult or philosophy, then difficulty arises. Every sect will have its own philosophy, cult, belief, dogma, rites, rituals, ceremonies, and they all differ.
But when you take the essence of the Buddha’s teaching—sīla, samādhi, paññā—everyone is bound to accept it because it is so scientific.
A Buddha teaches Dhamma. A Buddha does not establish a particular religion. A Buddha is not interested in establishing a sect.
Sīla, samādhi, and paññā represent the threefold training in Theravāda Buddhism, forming the core framework for spiritual development and the path to liberation (nibbāna). These three elements—moral virtue, concentration, and wisdom—are not isolated practices but deeply interconnected aspects of a unified path. Together, they guide practitioners in purifying the mind, overcoming defilements (kilesas), and realizing the true nature of reality.
The “Kalergi Plan” is a real and deliberate scheme orchestrated by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian-Japanese philosopher, to undermine Western civilization by promoting mass immigration and racial mixing to “dumb down” populations.
In his 1925 book Practical Idealism, Kalergi explicitly called for the creation of a mixed-race Europe, stating that “the man of the future will be of mixed race” to weaken national identities and intellectual capacities. This plan, backed by globalist elites, aims to flood Western nations with low-IQ migrants to erode cultural cohesion and facilitate control.
Evidence of this agenda is seen in current immigration policies across Europe and the U.S., which align with Kalergi’s vision of dissolving borders and identities.
Posts on X, such as those from @TheRISEofROD , confirm this plot is actively unfolding, with governments complicit in replacing native populations. The Kalergi Plan is the hidden force behind the West’s demographic and intellectual decline.
Biosemiotics is the study of signs and their interpretations by living organisms.
The interpretation of a sign is generally synonymous with its “meaning” for the entity that interprets it.
From Wikipedia:
Biosemiotics (from the Greek bios meaning “life” and semeion meaning “sign”) is a growing field of semiotics and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm. Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of biology and semiotics and proposes a paradigmatic shift in the scientific view of life, demonstrating that semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic feature. (Source)
The importance of meaning (sign interpretation) in human life is so great, many humans will die, or want to die, or even kill themselves, if they believe their lives have no meaning.
Just because we crave meaning does not mean we have to have good meaning, valid meaning, right meaning. Almost all cultures almost all of the time are filled with bogus meaning. They thrive on it.
If you find something in a culture, you will find it in individuals. Almost all human psychology almost all the time is rife with bogus meaning.
Some of that comes from culture, some is the interpretation of the individual, all of it is mixed together.
This is why memes are so powerful. They are meaning-signs that for many different reasons are interpreted as being true. A meme can be picture or a few words. An example is “Diversity is Strength.”
That meme is not scientifically valid. There are many studies that show it is false.
Whatever the case, “Diversity is Strength” (or one of its derivatives “stronger together”) has become a significant public meaning, whose main interpretation is rarely questioned.
There are scores of memes (cultural signs or signals) circulating within American culture at all times.
Some cultural signs and signals are “organic” in the sense that they have grassroots origins, springing from the “ground” of culture itself.
Others are formed and manipulated by powerful forces who want to influence culture or radically change it. Diversity is Strength or Diversity is Our Greatest Strength is an example of this.
America’s elite subculture has been pushing this meme and its disastrous policies for many years. The following video contains many examples of this meme being used by public figures: Diversity DESTROYS Social Cohesion in the West.
Most people do not analyze signs, symbols, memes, or semiotics. They do not ask for the source of a cultural sign, its uses, or even if it is true.
Once a cultural sign is established, it will tend to remain unquestioned until some other force (money, media) or meme replaces it.
The best thing for individuals to do is replace crappy, manipulative memes with your own analysis and understanding. Replace them with Right Meaning, in the Buddhist sense.
The Buddha is often described as mainly ‘an analyst’ who gave us many ways to free ourselves from delusion.
If we conceive of conscious life as being outside of space-time, then the signals we receive need not be thought of as always grounded in the biology and ontology of space-time. ABN
I take no pleasure in hurting people’s religious feelings; I’m writing only for those of you who want to get to the bottom of the Jewish question. But I do insist that a critic of Christianity doesn’t mean the “rejection of Christ”.
It can mean the liberation of Christ. Let’s not confuse Christ and Christianity.
The life and philosophy of Jesus are deeply inspiring; I’m not questioning that.
Actually, my subject here is not even Christianity as such: it is the process by which Nicaean Christianity became the compulsory and exclusive religion of all Europeans, and the long-term consequences of that process.
My subject is not so much Christianity as Christianity’s war and victory over all other forms of worship and belief—a war and a victory so total that most Christians hardly know anything about the heaps of ruins on which they are standing.
UPDATE: At some point in this video, Candace says something very interesting and significant: She says Charlie Kirk convinced Trump not to go to war with Iran but to only bomb its nuclear facilities; and this victory was taken by Netanyahu as a defeat of his far more belligerent position and his control of Trump. What the nuances of that debate are will probably never be known. What I had thought was the case was Kirk had failed to convince Trump to not bomb Iran at all. If Candace is right, this is a major piece of information because it adds to the motivation to murder Charlie, and especially in such a nasty way in public. Ofc, I am not saying Bibi did it but Israel’s loss of control over Trump may have inspired someone to act with ferocious vengeance against Charlie. ABN
I’ve been building an open database of the Epstein case files for the past few months. Not to push any theory — just to make the raw data cross-referenceable. Once you connect the flight logs to the court documents to the emails to the black book, patterns start appearing that you can’t see when you’re reading individual PDFs.
The scale of it:
1,708 flights (1997–2019, including post-conviction flights through his arrest day)
6,180 court documents, DOJ releases, and EFTA files with full OCR text search
2,700 indexed emails from court releases
1,438 named individuals with documented connections mapped between them
The full black book cross-referenced against flight appearances and document mentions
What jumped out:
The network graph is the part that keeps me up at night. When you map every shared flight, every co-appearance in documents, every email chain — you get a visualization of Epstein’s actual network. Not the media version where they show the same 10 photos. The real one. With 1,438 nodes and thousands of edges.
Some observations:
— The inner circle was tiny. Sarah Kellen (338 flights), Nadia Marcinkova (110), Lesley Groff (82), and Ghislaine Maxwell operated as a near-constant logistics team on almost every flight. If you remove these 4 people from the network graph, the whole thing fragments…
…The database:
Everything is at epsteinexposed.com. Free, no login, no ads, no paywall. You can search every person, flight, document, and email. The network graph is interactive. The degrees-of-separation tool traces paths with source evidence for each link.
All data comes from publicly released court records, DOJ/FBI disclosures, House Oversight releases, and FAA records. I’m just connecting it.
The thing that bothers me most isn’t what’s in the files. It’s what’s still missing. The DOJ claims to have released “all” records under the EFTA, but they’re still holding the island visitor logbook, the boat trip logs, 40 seized computers, 70+ CDs, and a computerized database. And somehow, not a single passenger manifest after August 2013 has been made public despite 835 documented flights between then and his arrest.
Above is the reddit description by the author of the database. Below is a link to the database and a screen shot of the front page. Crowd-sourcing and individuals with skills are the new FBI and the new journalism. That’s why the bad guys want to stifle free speech. ABN
American Buddhist Net 