Scream Rooms Getting Educators in Hot Water

Update 10/28/2015: A girl tossed across the room like a rag-doll, nearly breaking her neck, by a school police officer in Richland County, SC, USA. Incidents like that are often the result of NO GOOD place to place a disobedient student in that circumstance;

CNN Story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/us/south-carolina-school-arrest-videos/index.html

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Take a read at some recent local coverage of this issue here.  Here. And here.

I am really surprised that someone might actually lose a job over the use of the "time-out" rooms at Farm Hill School in Middletown. I see these rooms as necessary and I'm surprised they are not in every school. Even high school kids could use a place to cool off and do their homework in solitary. 

When I was a boy I was wild and uncontrollable, and I have disturbed my share of teaching and learning classroom time for others, in my adventures in public schools. At ten years old I had knocked out a school teacher and had to be placed in a school for students with behavioral problems in another county. It was called the Mark Twain School, in Montgomery County, Maryland, (closed in 2008) and it incorporated all that was known about teaching to bad behaviors. "Quiet" rooms were at the entrance areas to each school, the middle school where I was, and the grade and high schools in that one building. The Quiet Rooms were two rooms near the secretary's desk, off a main hallway paced by a teacher or an assistant principal. Like the Middletown room portrayed on television news, they were barren concrete block plain painted walls, with room enough to pace, with a school desk to sit and do school work. Back in the 1970s I deserved to be yanked out of class and asked to spend some hours in the Quiet Rooms, and the kids in my class especially deserved for me to be yanked out. Separating me from the classroom was about what's' fair to them, not about what was fair to me. The rules were simple in the rooms "chill out." Doors were never locked. Punishment for coming out is more time in.

It is way overboard to chastise an educator for the innovation of the safe and timely use of these rooms. I would trust most well intentioned educators, in choosing what is best for the entire classroom, in so choosing to utilize these necessary rooms for Hellions like me to sit and chill. These rooms actually save taxpayer money and time! When the disruptive influence is away from classroom, normalcy convenes and that's what we pay for and expect to see!

Occupy Movement: Don't Rest Yet!

To: The Hartford Courant

[published December 19, 2011

Dear Editor,

Occupy Movement participants: You may not realize it but through all of those newspaper and television images you are broadcasting hope to millions of your fellow citizens. I wish for a moment that you colorfully imagine the sight of one of you young and passionate people, sitting on your rear-end right smack on the center of the floor of the people of the United States of America's capital building as a pleasant looking Capital security guard brings you a warm drink and a blanket. I am sure this would be the most beautiful display of a free society advancing that you and I and billions of others will ever see in a lifetime. DON'T REST YET! (peace symbol).

Grace on the United States!

James Mason

Connecticut

I Could Not Have Said It Better

“In this modern day, self sufficiency is a delusion of the ego.”

- James G. Mason, JamesGMason.com

Liberals like me have been trying to communicate the following for years. The philosophy of taxation's effect on all of us, rich or poor, is infrequently understood and many false assertions come from this misunderstanding. Warren is actually speaking (video below) about a type of person, with a particular standard of morality. I think these people she is pointing her finger at are those who never properly learned to share in childhood, and so never learned that because we share we all benefit. They then take for granted, for the rest of their lives that the resources they need to succeed will continue to "fall from the sky," and so "Why share?"

They are the exploiters who often get rich by using our resources and our desperation for jobs. Unreasonably they then scream for less government, as they are under a delusion inspired by greed that they had not been hoisted into their comfortable leather seats by taking advantage of our government.  A government through which we collectively chose to provide the resources they have used. Warren is speaking below about an ethic that is harming us all. This corrupt ethic also brings us corporations in America with little loyalty to their communities, the first corporations to out-source our communities to their economic death.

Elizabeth Warren understands liberal philosophy and has an eloquent description to aid in understanding the core of one of our most pressing economic issues. If she runs for president, I'll support her over anyone in current contention for the office.  See video.

Senator, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Copyright Reserved, JamesGMason.com, 2013

Lost Dreams Storage Rentals Inc.

A lot of people in our country think that because something is legal it must be moral. Far from true. Example is a television show called Storage Wars where the stars are tattooed beer bellied scavengers who take advantage of the unexpected losses and failures in the lives of poor people. The motto of the goods grabbers is “Don’t pay your bills we’ll take your stuff!” Most of the storage unit renters, by economic causes beyond their control, have for reasons of food verses storage rental, become rental delinquents. We have all passed the concrete cubicles in our cars, storage prisons surrounded by electrified chain link fences, that to many represent the always losing and ever struggling Poverty Wars.

The whole context of the show is immoral. The stored goods of poor people are auctioned off to strangers. Anyone enjoying this show is either immoral or just too stupid and ignorant to realize when immorality is practiced right under their noses. The winners of these auctions are happy with glee to forage through poor people’s stuff, 99% of which is thrown out, and the show follows every happy moment except those precious moments when poor people's photo albums are thrown in the trash.

If you consider yourself a moral person don’t buy a storage rental compound because you’ll frequently have to make a moral decision whether to sell off the many boxes of someone’s lost dreams, or put it all outside somewhere, like underneath a carport. But if you consider that anything legal you can get away with must be moral, then go ahead and buy one these poor people’s container compounds, you immoral scumbag.

There are a lot of activities that are legal but immoral - here is a short list: It’s immoral and legal to sell cigarettes knowing full well that most of the population of smokers will be killing themselves slowly. It’s a legal offense to all to immorally dodge one’s fair share of taxes. Billing Medicare for something just because the health care providers say it happened and patients won’t check their itemized billing anyway, is immoral. It is immoral to own a bar or lounge miles outside of town with a parking lot that holds the cars of 50 likely drunk drivers. It is legal and immoral to buy a pedigree dog while thousands of perfectly healthy lovable dogs are put to death daily. It is legal and immoral to sit back while your nation begins a clearly unnecessary war that kills thousands. It is legal and immoral to cut back funding for social services based on political hypothesis.

In the minds of the storage unit vultures someone is going to buy this stuff anyway, so why not us! Following the actions of immoral people does not make a follower moral. Whether someone else is going to buy the possessions or not does not make the buyers moral. In this writer’s mind the owners and the buyers of these auctions are all a bunch of scumbags who don’t deserve anyone’s time. Viewers should stop looking at the Storage Wars show before their children see it and deduce that selling off poor people’s things is perfectly moral. If a town or city or state allows these landlords of despair to practice their cold hearted behavior in their districts then they are complicit in this immorality that effects only poor people.

Here’s an idea to be moral and to have some civic pride. If you have a few hundred dollars and feel like helping someone, go to the nearest furniture prison and pay off one or two back rents for people in delinquency. I guarantee that you will be helping poor people and I guarantee you will feel better about having done that than the pride you felt at your graduation.

One solution to the storage unit immorality is for towns and cities to build their own concrete compounds and charge a not-for-profit fee. Rentals can be restricted to local citizens only. These towns should offer complete forgiveness to any renters who have hit rock bottom. One good rule: never throw out or sell somebody’s stuff. Those towns and cities that do this should receive an award for morality above the call of legality.

To Glenn Beck and the Tea Party new comers:

"Government is the coming together of people to do for one another collectively what they could not do as well or at all privately through the market system or philanthropy." - Abraham Lincoln (liberal!)   

“People” coming together as a “collective,” disrespecting our market system and the failures of “philanthropy?” Does that quote sound like something a conservative would say? No of course not. It sounds socialist and practically communist. In the 1860s the fairly new Republican party was comprised mostly of members with Liberal ideals. And the Democratic party members had conservative ideals. A lot of people who study American history know that, but you newbies to politics choose to not find that out, or you are just in denial. Even your leader Glen Beck didn't know that when he chose the Lincoln memorial for your fall rally in 09. There have been party ideology switches this century in the baby boomer generation, such as the conservative democrats flight to change parties after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (the act that effectively ended legal segregation in our nation). Go ahead ask somone! The quotation above is famous in Liberal circles and was said by Abraham Lincoln (See "Lincoln's Hands," his original manuscript). If you folks, who praise President Lincoln, and think he represented your party today, knew this to begin with, you would not have been making fools of yourselves in front of the Lincoln memorial and in the minds of US historians, intellectuals and liberals, 8 out of 10 Phds, 94% of all scientists, and half of our politicians. It is apparent to me that Tea Partyers and conservatives really only like Lincoln because he freed the slaves (something that Liberals had wanted for for decades). And if they praise Lincoln then that provides cover from the media so that the conservative right doesn’t look as if they are racists. And with President Lincoln in their pockets they can attract more African American members, from somewhere. The racism of the right wing is pretty clear because of the right’s hatred for a black president who is doing less damage and more reform, that helps all citizens, than the white conservative president before him had ever done in 8 years. Where was the tea party while the white President Bush was adding more than 3 trillion dollars to our national debt for two wars that were not even necessary? Where was the Tea Party when that white President Bush gave tax cuts to rich people without even making up for it anywhere else in his budgets! President Bush was a tax and spend Republican. So was the white Ronald Reagan who tripled our national debt. Why were the Tea Partiers not carrying posters of the white George Bush as a black African witchdoctor with a bone through his nose at their tax day march? Answer: deep down inside, hidden from political correctness of our society, a black president is an affront to the sensibilities of a true conservative.

By pretending to embrace Lincoln’s party politics you conservatives are warping history. Don’t you care that students learn true facts about our past? Or does that concern mean less to you than boosting your roles by hiding behind a liberal. A liberal Lincoln who clearly used “big government,” to better the United States as whole, when the states had continuously failed to better themselves and bring fairness to their citizens?

Our government representatives have not spent 234 years passing laws willy nilly for the fun of it. Tea Partiers and other conservatives go ahead and study President Lincoln’s record of laws passed. While you are studying Lincoln’s ideals and ask yourselves which federal government laws existing today used to be run just fine without Lincoln’s ideal of what our government really is? Ask yourselves which federal laws can you honestly say were not even needed before they were created, and why were they needed, and do those problems that cause us to write laws, remain today? What were the continuing failures of small governments and individuals that caused our representatives to come together for nationwide solutions? You can also contemplate which specific laws you want to get rid of now that you think that the problems that they had addressed can be handled well at the local level? Look at your past and find evidence that supports your beliefs that the big bad government can’t do anything right. The truth is our Democratic Republic has a centralized government that does a hell of lot more good for its citizens than a pack of conservative governors running around in circles, mostly ending up where their state had started from.

At your convention last year, 80% of the audience when asked if “you have ever been involved in politics before?” raised their hands to answer no. This ignorance is really making you guys look foolish. Tea Partiers and other conservatives should return to school, take civics and United States history. Perhaps you could make a new website called Government as Seen through Tea Party Tainted Glasses.”It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”

-- Abraham Lincoln, chiding the editor of a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper

Sales Reps Invade our Doctor's Offices

Author, 1978. Washington D.C.. "Little did I know at
this time, I would be loathing this organization a
few decades later." 

BigPharma 😡 #dvertising

Ask yourselves, why was it ever necessary for a pharmaceutical medicine company, to hire a salesperson, never mind tens of thousands to visit your MD's office?

Medicine never needs advertising, demand is expressed by patients, and met by the doctor.

The Opioid Crisis Reached Deadly proportions after #BigPharma #Advertising ran amok. NO PHARMA COMPANY ever had to promote medicine. 

WRITE ABOUT THAT, #LIBERAL #Journalists! PLEASE? 10's of 1000s of pharmaceutical sales people are fanning out right now, to every town in the USA. But the mainstream media NOW depends on their dollars to stay-afloat! 

Write the FDA and the FCC: no advertising of controlled substances must be allowed in public media. Like it used to be.

Addendum, 4/2015: Below is a letter I sent to the brand new customer contact form online at Middlesex Hospital's website, in 2010. I addressed it directly to the president and may have been one of the first letters to be received through the new interface. In the following year, at my very next visit to one of the hospital's associated Doctors' offices, I heard an interesting statement from a Nurse when someone else brought up the subject of free samples: "We're no longer allowed to see those pharmaceutical people in here anymore . . "  Later the president would learn more about who I was, on an unrelated healthcare matter and I can honestly state that today he would toss that electronic letter in the trash knowing it was from " . .that James Mason." I'm waiting for the Boat Show of Pharmaceuticals to come to Hartford. :-) 


Denial is strong when we are compelled by accessibility to depend on one hospital. No one will admit to living near a bad hospital, or even a hospital with a problem – that would be cause for community wide fear and distrust. That is why your hospital will never get the full truth from the great majority of your patients.

On Wednesday, December 15th, between of 11:05 a.m. and 11:20 a.m., I witnessed 5 sales representatives exit the building through the lobby of Middlesex Primary Care in Essex while I sat nauseous waiting to be seen. The door kept opening, the freezing air kept blowing in. A sales person seemed to be crossing the threshold every couple of minutes.

I felt like a second priority in that office. I thought that if one of these sales people has been sitting with my doctor for even one minute that might have been mine, then I was being ripped off by big faceless unaccountable corporations at my doctor’s office. Corporations so deep in competition they have to send out armies of young pill pushers with gifts to sit waiting in lobby chairs intended for patients. Is my doctor capable of researching his own drugs? Can he not make the decision to prescribe a medication based on his own qualified opinion? If my doctor’s practice has been tainted by the influence of corporate sales representatives, I should be entitled to know.

This letter represents an opportunity for Middlesex Hospital to live up to its own published policy. From your own web page titled Standards of Business Ethics and Conduct: “It should be remembered that the appearance of a conflict of interest may be just as damaging to the system’s reputation as a real conflict, and the appearance is often difficult for the individuals involved to discern.”

Most importantly I want to trust my doctor. When he gives me a prescription order I want to know he is behind it with his full confidence. I want to trust that he is not giving me a particular drug because its maker supplied him with pens and clipboards and passed him (under the table) tickets to Hawaii. I would also like know that the health care professionals treating me are not a bunch of sell-outs.

Last year by general agreement, arranged by a private standards company, with no consequences, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, not the people’s laws, issued an unenforceable edict that drug companies are no longer supposed to give influential gifts. But little has changed. Some pharmaceutical companies have ignored the new standards. And the rest of these companies have realized that a gift unseen is no gift at all, essentially fooling the public and hospital administrators.

I don’t bitch about something without having an answer to the problem. Here is a solution which can stop the conflict of interest, and the appearance of conflict of interest: Stop all daily sales representative traffic. Hold a monthly conference (like an indoor boat show) where sales representatives can swarm in with all their goodies like parachuters on D-day and have great access to the health care professionals of your hospital. Agree on one rule: for instance gifts to walk away with should be no larger than a football. Hospitals and health care products companies can collaborate to make this monthly event a great day. Convince the drug companies to foot the bill (it would really be in their interest). Lilly can set up a carousel for the children. Roche can hire a band. Glaxo Smith Kline can supply food, and etcetera. A fun day for all with unmatched corporate sales access that the patient does not have to see. Imagine the capitalism, United States corporations winning over clients because they have a better product than the other corporations. That sounds familiar.