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My dreams throughout the night left me feeling maybe I’m undergoing major change internally, perhaps done to me by the usual suspect angels and/or other of their confederates. I suppose time will tell how, and if, that goes, and how, and if, it presents in my daily (waking) life.
Moving into bench and bar,
Bonnie Helms and Jack Bridges
One thing that happened during dream time last night was I spent a while on Key Largo, and the upshot of that seemed to be the angels prefer Jack Bridges over Bonnie Helms in the race for the judgeship Tegan Slaton held until he was eliminated in the August primary election. I think I agree with this assessment. I feel Jack is fluid enough to grow into this judgeship, which will be challenging. And I feel he has the steel in his spine the rough family law cases will require of this judgeship. I feel Bonnie is too set in her mediation ways, lacks fluidity, and does not have the steel in her spine this judgeship needs in the rough family law cases this judgeship presides over.
Moving laterally, I nearly peed in my pants laughing over this comment in yesterday’s Citizen’s Voice - www.goodmorningkeywest.com:
“Anyone who owns property in the Keys, and believes the global warming models about floods in the next few years, I’ll buy your property for a dollar. Here’s my prediction, which is just as ‘accurate’ as theirs: It is possible that a giant meteor will strike the Keys and totally destroy all life, including protected species, federal law notwithstanding, in the next 40 years.”
That’s exactly how the dinosaurs came to exit this planet after they had completed their spiritual work here as a sentient species. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, especially, and offshoots thereof, never came anywhere close to reconciling their scriptures and beliefs with the 100-percent fosilized concrete evidence that dinosaurs ruled this planet for a few hundred millions of years before God made Adam and Eve. No sense in thinking that head buried where the sun never shines outlook is going to change.
Ann Massey of Perth, Australia,
author of Salvation Jane, an interesting novel about homeless people down under and evil Australian politicians who hate homeless people, wrote to me on Facebook, re the discrimination in Key West, and other defining poetry post at www.goodmorningkeywest.com:
Ann Massey
The more faithfully you listen to the voice inside, the more clearly you hear what is sounding outside. Only one who listens can speak.
September 28 at 8:43pm · Like
Sloan Bashinsky
Ha! If that were enforced, there would be a whole lot less talking, and perhaps that would lead to a whole lot more listening to the voice inside, but perhaps it would simply lead to mass meltdowns 
I have it on pretty good authority that the Australian aborigines once had, perhaps some still have it, the ability to hear and speak telepathically - among themselves, they didn’t even need to use their mouths to speak. Then, the civilized white people arrived with their know it all religious and social beliefs, and …
September 28 at 9:02pm · Like
Moving into even deeper woo woo doo doo, in 1988, I had the good fortune to spend a few weeks around Dora Kalff, the founder of Sandplay Therapy,
at her home in Zollikon, Switzerland, a few miles up the big lake from Zurich. [Google Dora Kalft to learn more about Dora and Sandplay Therapy.]
One day I asked Dora if she’d ever encountered ETs in her life, or in the sand pictures her clients made in sandtrays? Dorda said she would answer my question in this way:
One of the times her good friend the Dalai Lama came to Zurich to visit Tibetan expatriates who had relocated to Switzerland, he came to her home . He had not come to her home previously. She took him to see her therapy room, in which were two small rectangular sandtrays, one containing wet sand, the other dry sand, and bookshelves filled with miniature objects representing just about anything imaginable from this planet and beyond. She told him that her clients select miniatures from the bookshelves to make sand pictures in one of the sandtrays, while she watches on, and in that way her clients work through issues in their psyches. The Dalai Lama asked, “And what kind of pictures do people make who were not born on this planet?” Dora turned and looked me dead in the eye and said, “The Tibetans know many things they do not say.”
Dora said she did not adopt Tibetan Buddhism as her religion; she said she was an esoteric Christian. She also said that for any real change to occur on this world, the women will have to go first. Probably 95 percent of her students were women. One of them was my 3rd wife. I probably I heard Dora tell her students that half a dozen times, in Zurich and in America, when she came here. Her women students, including my 3rd wife, did not seem to care for being told women will have to go first.
Hell, if women just crossed their legs and went on strike until all wars and all rape of this planet stopped, that would either stop all wars and rape of this planet, or it would terminate humanity.
Either outcome would be fine with me.
I’m fed up with the fools errands the angels give me to run, which have zero chance of making any difference in how humanity behaves. The only beneficiary I see of what the angels give me to do is me, and that’s only if I do it in the way they want me to do it. That may seem far-fetched, but I have good reason to have that outlook.
In March 2006, right after I had found my own version of Walden on Little Torch Key, I was told in my sleep by an unidentified woman, “You are trying very hard and are doing very well. The species did not reach escape velocity. This has happened before. But you can still do it. You will be given experiences designed to increase your pace and give you a chance to reach escape velocity. This can be compared to scientists sending space vehicles close to heavenly bodies, for the vehicles to use the bodies’ gravity to slingshot them onward into space at a greater velocity.”
From that day, I have viewed what the angels design for me to engage on this world as being for me to have a chance to reach escape velocity, whatever that means. I have taken to heart that is the sole, and the soul, reason I do this work, and I do not expect anyone else to benefit from or be changed by what I am given to do. Nor do I feel judged or measured by the angels, because of how other people respond, or not, to what I do, say, write or publish.
Flashback to March 2004. In my sleep, a familiar male voice asked me, “What do you think of the species?” I awoke, said something like, “I wished I had not been asked that question, but since it was asked, I’m going to be dead honest. The species has lost its creativity and is devolving; it is spirtually cloning itself. While some individuals are evolving, the rest of humanity is going backward. If what has been done to me, and still is being done to me, is done to the entire species, it will reduce the species to 50, 000 individuals planet-wide. But why do that? Look at how messed up I still am, after all the help I have been given. Maybe it is better and more compassionate to remove the species from this planet and put it somewhere it has a chance of moving forward.”
As time passed, I reduced the number of human beings who would survive what was being done to me to 5,000 planet-wide, and then to 500. That’s still the number of individuals I calculate would survive what has been done to me.
Besides being excruciating lonely, this totally selfish journey I am on also seems not to have anything to do with trying to help this planet,
which, I say, needs no help. Anytime she wishes, this planet can end what humanity is doing to her, by simply sneezing and launching all land and sea life forms into space. That the planet has not already done that tells me she still is choosing to give human beings chances to grow up and be good stewards of what many of them think they were given by God.
In fact, for their own purposes, ET races genetically engineered Earth human beings and the other life forms on this planet, and even today those ET races are mining and farming human beings and other planetary life forms, and this planet, in ways Earth scientists have no comprehension.
There is nothing Earth human beings can do about that. It is allowed by the angels assigned to steward this planet. What the angels are interested in is evolution of the souls of Earth human beings. How that evolution occurs, or not, depends on how each human being relates to what this world serves up. That’s the whole program, which western Earth religions, especially, have twisted and convoluted beyond any recognition. Religions basically are drugs.
So, you now are maybe thinking I went off my meds? I assure you, if I were taking meds, you would know it. You would wonder what in the hell is wrong with me? You would pray for my soul. You would tell me I need to see a doctor. And you would not for a heartbeat believe my saying meds are making me crazy.
In that regard, if you are able to find it online, I strongly recommend the international classic movie, “Man Facing Southeast”,
which is about a fellow who claimed to be an ET mysteriously showing up in a South American insane asylum, because, he told the psychiatrist assigned to him, that’s where he was going to end up anyway. To say more about my all-time favorite movie would spoil the plot. Yes, it’s in Spanish, with English subtitles. And yes, the later American movie, “K-PAX”, was a weak copycat of “Man Facing Southeast”.
All of which moves me to share email back and forth yesterday and this morning with Jerry Weinstock, M.D., Psychiatry. Jerry also is a life-long ecologist.
Jerry wrote:
Sloan: There is an article (financial page) in the-New Yorker Magazine; well reported (as they are noted for) about a novel approach to Homelessness —-which has been quite effective for everyone concerned. Sept. 22 2014 -issue -if you can’t get it I will send it to you. We most probably can’t do it here -but it is worth some illuminating thought.
Also I don’t have Angels just Dante’s demons—I must do more about protecting Bristol Bay -I guess getting my book finished would help-but is still a long way off.from publishing time.
I have written my fingers to stubs to the EPA—and others concerned.
Assault weapons are the only sure means to stop the maniac mining company-it is important enough for me to participate—there is a limit to our plundering of this once MAGNIFICENT planet….enough is enough—we have had it here too; HTA demolishing the environment with their compatriots-the destructive Cruise monsters.
the best to you—-Jerry
I replied:
Hi Jerry, thanks - I found the New Yorker article using Google, it’s title, author and text are inserted last below.
I read of the Utah solution maybe 3 years ago? The recent homeless forum promoted the same solution, without giving Utah much credit. The problem for Key West going that route is:
(a) the city doesn’t have the land, or the money, to build permanent housing for maybe 400 local chronic homeless people;
(b) the city needs affordable rental housing far more for people who are new to being homeless, “situationally homeless,” a population also mentioned in the New Yorker article, than the city needs housing for chronic homeless people. Such affordable rental housing is needed before situationally homeless people, who cannot pay the high local rents, become chronically homeless. And such housing is needed before people just barely hanging on now, due to high local rents, become situationally homeless, and then become chronically homeless.
That’s what I told the panelists and audience at the recent homeless forum. And putting active addicts into free housing is wasting time and money. Perhaps I was mistaken about that, but my experience and observation is, active addicts will continue to be active addicts until something peculiar happens to cause them to want to become sober. Getting free housing is not the kind of peculiar that tends to get that result.
Giving addicts free housing certainly will get them off the homeless rolls, and perhaps keep them out of jail, the criminal justice and court systems, and the hospital, but it does not stop them from being addicts, as you certainly know from your decades of practicing psychiatry in Key West. You also know that addicts live to maintain their habit - that is the most important thing to them. So, giving addicts free housing is looks good externally, but changes nothing internally.
I suppose housing homeless people for free is a choice each locale has to make, but in Key West, the land and money simply are not there to give active addicts/homeless people free housing. Nor do I see Monroe County has the money for such a venture, but there is land up from Key West, which could be used for such free housing.
Consider, though, that Florida Keys Outreach Coalition will not admit an active addict into its program. The dried-out (somewhere else) addict has to produce clean urine as part of the screening process. And the then recovering addict has to pass random urine tests thereafter to remain in the program.
I have a friend living in Housing Authority rental housing, paying a freakishly low rent. He only gets Social Security disability. He is an active addict, and doesn’t seem inclined to stop using. He would be homeless if he didn’t have that cheap housing. No, he would be dead.
I suppose his good fortune would piss off lots of righteous Key West people, starting with some of our elected city officials. I think he earned his good fortune by being incarcerated for 3 years after refusing to be inducted and fight in Vietnam. He was 18 years old when it was imprisoned. Imagine what all happened to him during those 3 years in prison, for refusing to fight in a demonic war waged by President Lyndon Johnson and the US Military-Industrial Complex. Yeah, I say he earned the right to have that freakishly low rent, even though I wish he would give up his habit, which has to be rooted, at least in part, in that 3 years in prison.
Shucks, Arnaud and Naja Girard told me about a year ago now, that just about everyone they know in Key West uses illegal drugs. I wonder how that will play out down the road, say 10 or 20 years from now? Will it increase the homeless rolls? It certainly might. American wars certainly are increasing addict and homeless rolls.
If Rick Boegtter carries through on his threat to sue County Commission George Neugent for defamation, over George’s remark that Rick went off his meds and filed ethics complaints against George, George’s defense counsel will be able, during discovery, to find out if Rick uses meds prescribed by a physician. George’s legal counsel probably will be able to get all of Rick’s telephone records, and anything else Rick has which might shed light on Rick’s character, which George is accused of defaming. George will be able to call witnesses who might not testify favorably to Rick’s good character, or his mental state. I hope Rick has considered what he might, or will, be in for if he files that lawsuit.
I wonder how the financial numbers on the Utah free housing for homeless people program will look 10-20 years from now? Frankly, I hope I’m not still around to find out, but I think it will take that long to really evaluate that approach.
As for me having angels, and you only having demons, my feelings are mashed. I have heaps of demons to deal with, and while many of them wear various external human and non-human forms, a few live right here inside of me :-).
If the save Bristol Bay camps don’t have indigenous Alaskan shamans on their team, they need to fix that yesterday.
I had a giant discharge just as I was finishing this email; I hope lots of demons now are headed to the Key West sewerage treatment plant :-).
Sloan
Home Free?
BY JAMES SUROWIECKI
In 2005, Utah set out to fix a problem that’s often thought of as unfixable: chronic homelessness. The state had almost two thousand chronically homeless people. Most of them had mental-health or substance-abuse issues, or both. At the time, the standard approach was to try to make homeless people “housing ready”: first, you got people into shelters or halfway houses and put them into treatment; only when they made progress could they get a chance at permanent housing. Utah, though, embraced a different strategy, called Housing First: it started by just giving the homeless homes.
Handing mentally ill substance abusers the keys to a new place may sound like an example of wasteful government spending. But it turned out to be the opposite: over time, Housing First has saved the government money. Homeless people are not cheap to take care of. The cost of shelters, emergency-room visits, ambulances, police, and so on quickly piles up. Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told me of one individual whose care one year cost nearly a million dollars, and said that, with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust. The same is true elsewhere. A Colorado study found that the average homeless person cost the state forty-three thousand dollars a year, while housing that person would cost just seventeen thousand dollars.
Housing First isn’t just cost-effective. It’s more effective, period. The old model assumed that before you could put people into permanent homes you had to deal with their underlying issues—get them to stop drinking, take their medication, and so on. Otherwise, it was thought, they’d end up back on the streets. But it’s ridiculously hard to get people to make such changes while they’re living in a shelter or on the street. “If you move people into permanent supportive housing first, and then give them help, it seems to work better,” Nan Roman, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Homelessness, told me. “It’s intuitive, in a way. People do better when they have stability.” Utah’s first pilot program placed seventeen people in homes scattered around Salt Lake City, and after twenty-two months not one of them was back on the streets. In the years since, the number of Utah’s chronically homeless has fallen by seventy-four per cent.
Of course, the chronically homeless are only a small percentage of the total homeless population. Most homeless people are victims of economic circumstances or of a troubled family environment, and are homeless for shorter stretches of time. The challenge, particularly when it comes to families with children, is insuring that people don’t get trapped in the system. And here, too, the same principles have been used, in an approach called Rapid Rehousing: the approach is to quickly put families into homes of their own, rather than keep them in shelters or transitional housing while they get housing-ready. The economic benefits of keeping people from getting swallowed by the shelter system can be immense: a recent Georgia study found that a person who stayed in an emergency shelter or transitional housing was five times as likely as someone who received rapid rehousing to become homeless again.
It may seem surprising that a solidly conservative state like Utah has embraced an apparently bleeding-heart approach like giving homeless people homes. But in fact Housing First has become the rule in hundreds of cities around the country, in states both red and blue. And while the Obama Administration has put a lot of weight (and money) behind these efforts, the original impetus for them on a national scale came from the Bush Administration’s homelessness czar Philip Mangano. Indeed, the fight against homelessness has genuine bipartisan support. As Pendleton says, “People are willing to pay for this, because they can look at it and see that there are actually solutions. They can say, ‘Ah, it works.’ ” And it saves money.
The recognition that it makes sense to give money away today in order to save money later isn’t confined to homeless policy. It has animated successful social initiatives around the world. For more than a decade, Mexico has been paying parents to keep their children in school, and studies suggest that the program is remarkably cost-effective, once you take into account the economic benefits of creating a more educated and healthy population. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia is a similar program. The traditional justification for such initiatives has been a humanitarian or egalitarian one. But a cost-benefit analysis suggests that, in many cases, such programs are also economically rational.
Our system has a fundamental bias toward dealing with problems only after they happen, rather than spending up front to prevent their happening in the first place. We spend much more on disaster relief than on disaster preparedness. And we spend enormous sums on treating and curing disease and chronic illness, while underinvesting in primary care and prevention. This is obviously costly in human terms. But it’s expensive in dollar terms, too. The success of Housing First points to a new way of thinking about social programs: what looks like a giveaway may actually be a really wise investment.
Jerry wrote:
Sloan: thanks for your well thought out detailed analysis.
I am treating 2 addicts right now—-but they get housing
on stock island —rent from (generous) -another industrialized countries’
social system is paying the rent—-one of them has citizenship
in that empathic country.-(that is responsive) -that person must return
every 3 months for a short time. Treatment is Psychotherapy
which is stabilizing both of them so far. Their life has improved.
Housing in Key West just for just service workers is a major problem…
Yes -the Blue [Arnaud and Naja Girard] paper is correct —one must look hard to ever find someone drug free !!
We all must contend the best we can with our demons-
utilize our ingenuity.. !! have a fine day—Jerry
( the natural world is my safety net-beauty etc.)
( also music —was concert pianist in my teens)
also writing and fishing —Cheers -Jerry
[being at one time a profession athlete helps my interest]
(people in treatment improving— a big boost for me)
another Cheers -Jerry
I replied:
Morning, Jerry - woke up to find this last below in my in box. I used to live, eat and breathe Rodale - organic gardening/farming, which they call regenerative farming. Maybe more later. Sloan
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P.S. to Jerry:
What does it say about a species which relies on drugs (meds) to cope, and even to survive? It says to me the species is lost and unable to fix itself. Maybe it’s time for another big meteor?
Or for something more local?
The angels let me take 2 200 mg ibuprofen when I ache a lot, otherwise I’m a drug-free zone.
Sloan Bashinsky
keysmyhome@hotmail.com
