"According to a report not yet released, the Council on Science and Public Health of the American Medical Association has recommended that a chronic and widespread affliction of Americans be officially declared a psychiatric disorder. It has been named the Political Attention Deficit Disorder (PADD). It is recommended that the disorder be included in a widely used mental illness manual created and published by the American Psychiatric Association. The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012. The benefit to people of an official classification is coverage by health insurance."

For shame. We are not paying enough for health insurance that we have to dream up outrageous, fraudulent "disorders" as this?

Ah, but who's really behind this, do you think? You don't suppose that Big Pharma is ready to "reveal" their latest wonder drug to revitalize our patriotic fervor and get us down to the voting booth, the first Tuesday of November, do you?

And if that weren't hard enough to swallow, check this out: "Reached by phone, Dr. Aaron Gestaltstein, a Council member and psychiatrist with the Michigan Institute for the Study of Individual and Societal Health, said the AMA proposal will help raise awareness and called it 'the right thing to do if the United States is ever to regain effective government and equitable public policies.' 'Sick Americans deserve compassionate treatment if our country is to survive. PADD is no joke,' he added.

OMIGOD! And here I was hoping the whole thing was a troll!

Let's just take a step back and look at this. What can we do to prevent drugging 80% of our population who have been driven down into apathy by inept leadership and lousy education that leaves them unable to adequately participate in their civil responsibilities. (and by the way, I don't for a minute believe these figures of 80%, and I can't imagine how they dreamed it up!).

Here are things we can do to remedy this:L. Ron Hubbard described in the book The Problems of Work in the 1950's. Just take a walk and look around at the environment until you feel extroverted. He explains why and how this works in the book, but all you have to do is get out and walk, even if you feel exhausted (and especially if that's how you feel).

2. Improve your ability to understand political issues by boosting your functional literacy. Functional literacy is the ability to apply what you read. The Scientology Handbook has a chapter on the technology of study. Very easy to read and learn, and when you use it, Voila, you can understand what you are reading much better.

3. Get out and do something to help someone. I recommend checking out the Volunteer Ministers web site, as that's my favorite web volunteer group, but there are so many groups working hard and doing good. Dedicate a bit of your time to providing some unconditional help.

4. Ignore those who would like you to believe that living is a disease. It is most definitely not. It is part of LIFE to experience emotions.

If I've learned anything in Scientology it's that you CAN improve your life and it's not hard to do. And it certainly doesn't require the latest Big Pharma invention (which we later find out has a 70% failure rate so they had to invent a new one.)

It is NOT illogical to feel apathetic about an unresponsive government that thinks it's perfectly okay to ignore a record low 26% approval rating and continue to act with a total disregard of what the public actually needs and wants.

Wait a minute. The AMA/APA were wrong. It's not 80% of use who have PADD yet. It's only 74%. 26% still approve of the way the government is being administered!

It was about whether men and women can ever really communicate with each other.

There is so much opinion on this subject. Of course down through the ages this has been a hot topic, but it seems that over the past 100 years it has had more personal relevance, because before that most marriages were arranged, and you didn't really expect to find love and romance in your marriage. Rather you were just trying to provide a safe place for the rearing of children and the preservation of the family despite all the possible ways it could be overwhelmed. There was so little effective technology for combating disease that far more children died as infants and children that today (I'm speaking of the West when I say this, because clearly there are many countries today that face the same or worse threats to survival that we in the West did 100 years or more ago).

But what this comes down to, really, is that we have come to expect more in relationships today, but most of us know no more about how to create and preserve relationships and make them thrive than our ancestors did (and they weren't even all that interested!)

So, I read this blog entry on the Scientology religion blog, and I thought what he/she wrote was so true!

The article goes into something anyone can read and learn to use from the Scientology Handbook. It's a principle called the ARC triangle, and the Handbook explains it a lot better than I can.

Have you ever met someone you felt sure you knew before, but you never ran into him or her this lifetime? Do you believe that love, hate or other emotions can span space and time?

39-year-old Doralice Santana of Brazil did. In fact she was so sure, that when she met 85-year-old Joe Myers of Winston-Salem North Carolina last December they got married again.

Quite a leap, considering their completely different backgrounds, professions.

And ages.

Myers, who has long believed in reincarnation, and writes about it on his web site at www.reincarnation2002.com/ is certain he is the reincarnation of Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) and is the author of the book Edward Bellamy Writes Again.

Doralice recalled her marriage to Bellamy, searched for him on the Internet, found Meyers' web site, emailed him and resumed where she'd left off. The story of Joe and Doralice Myers reuniting and remarrying in December was published last month in the Winston-Salem Journal.

But although there may not be too many people who are as certain of their past life recall is as Joe and Doralice, there are sure a lot of people who believe they have lived before and have some feeling, vague or strong, of what must have occurred.

Another take on this is, have you ever met someone you disliked intensely at first site, without ever hearing anything about the person or having any prior acquaintance. But you just knew he or she was a jerk/creep/rogue/whimp....?

There are a lot of people who go to a movie, where the plot centers around a past life relationship, that totally get into the movie and root for the characters to vindicate their foreknowledge. But what do they believe when they leave the theater? Do they actually believe in past lives or is it just, like the Simpsons or South Park, a fanciful construct?

A few years ago Finlandia Vodka build a whole ad campaign on the "in a past life I was a...." theme.

When I told the Meyers/Bellamy story to one of by friends over lunch today she got all excited and told me about the time at least 30 years ago when she and her husband went out to dinner with another couple—a business associate of her husband's. As soon as she saw the man, that was it. And it was the same way for him. The rest of the evening was epiphany for her. It was just the two of them in rapt communication. She was not about to cheat on her husband or he on his wife so nothing ever came of it. But 30 years later that incident is as clear to her as if it happened last week.

On the Scientology web site it says, "Man is an immortal, spiritual being. His experience extends well beyond a single lifetime. His capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized - and those capabilities can be realized."

Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with this idea.

I'm a Scientologist and I have recalled having lived before. I've never been tempted to change everything in my life because of recalling a past life incident like Meyers (who is not a Scientologist but rather a Christian) and Doralice (no faith stated in article) did, but the idea of renewing old friendships, even old loves, isn't that foreign to me.

Maybe if some of our "friends" who are cutting down rain forests, dumping sludge in the seas, polluting the air with the byproducts of their "get-rich-now-cuz-you-onl y-live-once-so-why-worry" irresponsibility could get the idea that they are going to have to come back and live in the mess they are manufacturing today, they might deal with things a bit differently. Maybe some day, before it's too late for all of us, they will.

(Reprinted courtesy of Vartas Diary).

This might sound unbelievable to most people, but in Scientology it is pretty common knowledge that this can occur.

In fact, there is a Scientology assist, described in the Scientology Handbook called an Unconscious Person assist which is pretty magical and incredibly effective.

Congratulations to this man and his wife, but to anyone who doesn't want to wait 19 years, can I recommend looking up this assist online and using it if the need ever arises!