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[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters317.html#Sheilah_B ]
Date: Mon, July 16, 2012 3:05 pm (answered 16 July 2012)
> > Just thought you'd like to know Sheilah B. sent you $0.02 USD. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > Note from Sheilah B.: Just thought you'd like to know, someone read > your painstaking article at > http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-effectiveness.html. I want you to > know it's really well written. If you put into working THE program what > you put into this article, you would never ever have use or drink again. > >
Hello Sheilah,
I don't need to "work the program." I have 11, almost 12 years now, off of
alcohol, tobacco, and all other drugs. So I'm doing just fine without
any cult religion practices in my life.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Mon, July 16, 2012 12:35 am (answered 16 November 2012) I only wish you'd wish yourself as well. I'm awestruck by the animosity you have for A.A. Terry, I have had some hum dingers as resentments but yours is so vicious, I feel compelled to let you know that it's likely to kill you. Are you a drinker? Or has someone you loved died due to alcohol and this is your way of punishing A.A. for not working fast enough to save them? Or was someone you loved been killed by an alcoholic and you wish every alcoholic dead? Is this rant of yours your attempt at mass murder? So far, A.A. is the closest mankind has come to a cure. There are millions of people who's lives have been saved by that program. And it truly does work for those who actually work the steps (and it's like salvation, once saved is NOT always saved...salvation and sobriety has to be maintained) take the advice of those who have had success. If not 100%, one's lives are so drastically improved....they keep coming back. Which I kinda think by evidence of your rant, is something YOU might consider. So spill it please. I'll give you $5.00 if you reveal who pissed on your pop tart. That ought to be enough to get you a 40. I can't say I "got" the program right off the bat. I didn't. But my life improved for the effort. There's no way in hades I would ever EVER be alive today if I hadn't found A.A. I was destined in ALL ways to die on one of my binges either directly from the alcohol or the events that transpired when I was drunk. I was desperate to get sober. I had every reason to. I tried everything. Hypnosis, Counseling, Religion, Prayer oh LORD did I pray**....but I was ignorant of what to pray for or what to pray about. (I kept asking GOD to help me with my drinking problem and all that happened was my drinking got bigger and bigger) Only by taking a suggestion *that wasn't initially directed to me......did I ever get a clue. I have had 12 consecutive years of complete sobriety thanks to stopping my shit, and working THE program. I have had 22 days of drunkenness in the past 24 years.....Thanks to finding A.A. I hope if you meant to kill people with your tirade that you fail miserably, esp. if that tirade was your self justification for continuing to drink....May you never have an even reasonable drinking or drugging event for your crime. May you know such humiliation, you become one of A.A.'s hardest working members.
Hello Sheilah,
Starting at the top,
By the way, having a "resentment" against frauds who foist quackery on sick people is not a bad thing.
No.
No. Because I know that A.A. does not work at all, I sure don't expect A.A. to "work fast enough."
No. Again, A.A. does not work. If I wanted every alcoholic to die, I would tell them to go to A.A.
Again, since sending people to A.A. kills more of them than not sending them, my discouraging people from
going to A.A. could not possibly be mass murder.
By the way, congratulations again. You just made the other list,
the list of accusations of me killing alcoholics
by telling the truth.
No, it doesn't work. The A.A. claim that it has "saved millions" is just another
Big Lie, some completely untrue grandiose bragging
that they have parrotted for so many years that they don't know when it started. Well,
it started with Bill Wilson, here.
A.A. does not even have 2 million members in the entire world, so they cannot possibly have saved millions.
The truth is that most of the A.A. membership is just churn — another 100,000 people are
forced into A.A. meetings for a little while, and then another 100,000 drop out.
And then another 100,000 go in, and then another 100,000 drop out.
There are only a few hundred thousand committed A.A. cult members in the whole world.
Look here for much more about the A.A. churn rate.
We have discussed the "millions" claims of A.A. many times before.
No, it doesn't work. It's just a cult religion hoax.
A.A. won't save you any more than Scientology or the Moonies will.
Please answer this one simple question that no true-believer Stepper
has ever answered honestly:
Out of each 1000 newcomers to A.A., how many will pick up a one-year
sobriety medallion a year later?
Obviously. You did 12 years in the cult, and then relapsed, and now you have 12 years again.
By the way, you are misinterpreting Christianity. They say that salvation is forever, and that all
of the demons of Hell cannot take back one of the saved.
The vast majority of those who have achieved sobriety, like me, did it without the 12-Step cult.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
of the National Institutes of Health reported
Congratulations. You are now among those Steppers who have wished me to relapse and
get drunk on a 40-ouncer.
I have never done that to a Stepper. I never suggest that Steppers go out and get drunk.
But the "spiritual" 12-Step people do that to other people, often. It is even documented
practice in the Big Book:
If somebody won't surrender and submit to an A.A. sponsor and believe Bill's Bull, the A.A. recruiter is supposed to
tell him to go out and do some more research
on the subject.
Now that is vicious.
You wonder who "pissed on my pop tart"? Alcoholics Anonymous did. It has harmed
millions of people, including friends of mine, with lies, misinformation, bad advice, quack medicine and cult religion.
Now we have Freedom of Religion in this country, so you can believe whatever screwy superstitions you wish to.
You can worship Satan as your "Higher Power" if you like.
You can believe that you can contact saints and spirits and demons
through a Ouija board,
like how Bill Wilson did.
But when you push an old cult religion from the nineteen-thirties as a cure
— or "not a cure, but a treatment" — for a deadly disease,
you have crossed an important line. You are practicing medicine without a license, and that is a crime.
And when your patients die, that is felony manslaughter.
Again, there is no evidence that a cult religion saved your life.
What saved your life was getting a grip and quitting drinking.
I believe you when you said that you were desperate to get sober. That is why you quit drinking.
It had nothing to do with joining the 12-Step cult, or praying to God, or "working the Steps", or any of that.
You quit drinking because you wanted to quit drinking, and then you did.
But what happened 12 years ago? Did God stop answering your prayers and let you get drunk?
Why?
Actually, I don't think that either your sobriety or your relapse had anything to do with God.
You probably lost your resolve, and
the Lizard Brain Addiction Monster started yammering that "Just one will be okay."
And you made the mistake of believing it.
Look here for more on that:
The Lizard Brain Addiction Monster
And you most assuredly did not "try everything". That is a common over-used old
A.A. cliché that A.A. members
parrot mindlessly without even thinking about what it means.
Did you try SMART? SOS? Lifering? Women For Sobriety (WFS)?
Rational Recovery and AVRT (Addictive Voice Recognition Therapy)?
The Veteran's Administration program?
The Catholic CALIX or St. Vincent de Paul programs? The Salvation Army program?
Naltrexone?
You did not "try everything."
I notice a common characteristic to all of the things that you say you did try:
passive laziness.
You expected somebody else to do the quitting for you. When you prayed, you expected God to keep
you from drinking. When you went to the hypnotist, you expected the mental mechanic to fix your
behavior for you.
When you went to counseling, you expected the counselor to somehow change your behavior for you.
And then you went to A.A., where you believe that A.A. and its 12 Steps and God will make you quit drinking.
The truth is, there is no substitute for self-control.
I find it very curious that you say that praying to God did not work. But then joining A.A. did.
But the A.A. program is based on praying to God, and waiting for God to save you. Care to explain that
contradiction?
You hint:
"but I was ignorant of what to pray for or what to pray about."
Did you first pray,
"Dear God, please help me. Please help me to quit drinking."?
And that didn't work? Was that too "selfish"? So what prayer did you have to say instead?
Was it Bill Wilson's groveling Third Step Prayer where he cons God by telling God that God will have
a better slave, and God will look like a better slave-master, if He fixes Bill?
Is that grovelling masochistic mess the magic spell that you have to incant?
By the way, can you explain how you rate so highly in the A.A. God's list of priorities? Your A.A. God lets
millions of little brown and black children die of diseases and starvation on the other side of the
world without lifting a finger to help them, but when a white woman in the USA drinks
too much alcohol, God supposedly comes running to save her.
Care to explain why God favors you so much more than black children?
You have zero evidence that you got sober because of A.A. I suggest that you got sober because you
were desperate to get sober.
So why did you relapse for a month 12 years ago? What happened there?
I mean, you "worked the Steps" for 12 years, and then you drank alcohol. So
the A.A. program doesn't work either, does it?
The only thing that works is "Just Don't Drink Any Alcohol."
Now that is a "program" that works.
Sheilah, telling people the truth about alcohol, alcohol addiction, and
Alcoholics Anonymous is not "killing them."
One of the Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous,
Prof. and Dr. George E. Vaillant, found that Alcoholics Anonymous produced a zero-percent
improvement in sobriety, along with the worst death rate of any way of treating alcoholism
that he studied.
He spent nearly 20 years shoving A.A. treatment on sick alcoholics, and trying to prove that
A.A. works, but in the end, the best that he could say for Alcoholics Anonymous was:
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Sat, July 14, 2012 2:49 am (answered 21 July 2012) Hi Terrance, I've just read a very detailed and damning report on the treatment industry from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Among the many things that this report stated was the following:
"Given the prevalence of addiction in society and the extensive evidence regarding how to identify, intervene and treat it, continued failure to do so signals widespread system failure in health care service delivery, financing, professional education and quality assurance. It also raises the question of whether the low levels of care that addiction patients usually do receive constitutes a form of medical malpractice." It's nice to see that the experts are finally catching on to what you've been saying for years! Iamnotastatistic
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters317.html#iamnotastatistic2 ]
Date: Sat, July 14, 2012 3:21 am (answered 21 July 2012) Hi again Terrance, I haven't read the complete report below, just an extract, but the extract shows that over half of the female AA members in the report had experienced harassment or abuse (13th Stepping) and 3.6% had been raped by male AA members. It appears that odds of getting raped in AA are higher than the odds of remaining a member for 10 years. That's horrific! "13th Stepping: Why Alcoholics Anonymous is not always a safe place for women." Cathy Bogart, Carol Pearce. Journal of Addictions Nursing, 2003,Vol. 14, No. 1 , Pages 43-47. Extract available at: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10884600305373 I know that correspondents often suggest ideas for the website (i.e. more work for you) but it would be great to have a section on the website dedicated to incidences of psychological/physical/sexual abuse in AA which includes personal stories, media reports and publications (maybe you've already got this and I haven't found it yet?) It would be very useful to be able to direct professionals to a section like this where they could quickly and clearly see the evidence of the widespread abuse in AA. Just an idea. Thanks for all great work that you do. Iamnotastatistic
Hello again, Iamnotastatistic,
Thank you very much for the reports. Both of them are appalling. And yes, there is no doubt that
the current treatment for alcohol abuse and substance addiction is medical malpractice.
There is a section for stories about psychological/physical/sexual abuse in AA
— the "A.A. Horror Stories" section of the forum:
I don't know if we need an additional, separate, section for just
"psychological/physical/sexual abuse" stories,
since such abuse is a big part of the horror stories.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Tue, July 17, 2012 6:57 pm (answered 21 July 2012) Sorry to spam your inbox. But, you're really about the only person I can tell this stuff to, since nobody else would have any idea what I'm talking about. So, I get bored with Lubuntu. I look into new distros. The Slackware-based distros catch my eye, though Slackware itself intimidates me. I discover Salix OS, which is basically Slackware with more tools. Seems good for an intermediate user. So I install and discover that my wifi doesn't work out of the box. Kind of a major problem for a laptop. I do some research and discover that linux drivers did exist. I also learned that I had to install my kernel source and something called the mac80211 subsystem. So, I plug in an ethernet cord and download everything. I discover that installing the mac80211 subsystem involves recompiling my kernel. Kind of intimidating for somebody who just switched from the Ubuntu family. But I take a stab at it, wait a while, and reboot. Kernel panic. User panic. Reinstall, do some research, and learn that I needed to compile-in the filesystem used by my root partition. So, I try again, selecting all the right options in menuconfig. Wait a while again. Reboot. Mac80211 subsystem successfully installed. Victory! I place the microcode for my wifi in the right place. I try to build the drivers. No matter what, they wouldn't build. Make kept failing with an error. I make a post on the Salix OS forum asking for help. Some nice guy directed me to updated kernels that already had the drivers installed. So I download. Put everything in the right place and run all the included shell scripts. Reboot. Find wi-fi works. Victory! Anyhow, I just needed to vent and brag. Thanks for being a good listener.
Hello again, Meatbag,
Congratulations on your venture into "the Nightmare".
Ah, yes, compiling in additional device driver sources. What a pain. I have never succeeded in doing that,
and I tried several times with several different things.
And I'm an old computer programmer with more years of experience with "sysgen"
than I care to brag about. ("Sysgen" was an old Digital Equipment Corporation program that generated
operating systems for PDP-11 and Vax computers.)
Right now, I have a neat little high-quality autofocus Apple webcam that won't work with
Linux because of no drivers for it. I found and downloaded a package of source code for drivers, but the source code
won't install right because the patch file is trying to fix an empty file. The source code file
that is supposed to get the additional code patched into it is an empty zero-bytes file. How can that be? Easy:
the kernel writers moved the source text to some other file, and left the empty file there so that it wouldn't break
the Makefile and installation scripts.
So there is a mismatch between the driver source code and the kernel version.
So the camera sits here unused.
Yes, it is immensely easier when they put the driver source code into the kernel source code and just compile it in.
Do it right, for once and for all.
I'm glad that you found a version that works for you.
The built-in wifi in my laptop has never worked either. Not ever, not once. I use a USB wifi adapter.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Fri, July 20, 2012 1:17 pm (answered 21 July 2012) Orange, I had to respond to this article someone sent to me. It's not meant to be confrontational, but I had to take exception to some of your statements. My experience in AA has been extremely positive and I have seen many others get well in this program. I hope you read my comments with an open mind and not as a means to argue or debate.
Hello Ed,
Thanks for the letter. I find that when people ask me to be "open-minded", it almost invariably means
that they want me to agree with them.
Your statements are in black, mine in red. Alas, the colors did not come through the email at all. It's all just undifferentiated black text. I'll have to recreate colorized text. I'll do the usual color codes that I always use, where your statements are in black, and mine in blue. Quotes from my previous letter are blue and indented and in a San-Serif font like Lucida.
Thanks,
Actually, it is not an issue of "anonymity". If A.A. really practiced anonymity, there would be no last names in the document (The document was not for public display. We are not anonymous amongst ourselves. That is why you were asked to remove it.)
Thank you for your time. I don't really expect you to change your mind
based on my comments. I only know what I've seen and what I've experienced.
I just believe that AA, in general, is a good thing.
Good luck and best wishes,
Ed
Okay, Ed, now I'll go down the list of your comments:
Sure, the pop culture is more famous, but so what? It always is.
Remember the story of Rollie Hemsley, the famous baseball player
who declared to newspapers that he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous? Bill Wilson hit the roof, and
went on a years-long self-aggrandizement campaign, touring the country and presenting himself
as the leader of Alcoholics Anonymous. By 1944, Bill Wilson was the most famous "anonymous"
person in the USA.
Then Bill made up a fake "tradition" about
"anonymity" so that celebrities could not get more publicity than him:
Look here for the rest of the story:
No way does A.A. have 2 million members. The total worldwide membership is under 2 million, and the vast majority
of them will drop out soon. They are just churn, newcomers coming in and going out of the A.A. revolving door.
And no way are there 2 million sober A.A. members. A.A. most assuredly does not have 2 million sober members
out of 2 million alleged members.
Again, the vast majority of the A.A. members get drunk and drop out. A.A. really
only has a few hundred thousand hard-core committed members, and there is no evidence that they got sober
because of A.A. or the 12 Steps or "the program", or the meetings, or anything else that A.A. does.
I just went over all of that again in a previous letter, just a couple of letters back, so I'll point you to it here:
"There are millions of people who's lives have been saved by that program."
About Clancy and Mike:
You are minimizing what is going on there. The
Clancy I. Cult,
of which
Mike Quinones
was a part (he was Clancy's grand-sponsee), is a militant wing of A.A.
that is taking over A.A. They have sent out missionaries all
over the country, and even to England. They specialize in taking over meetings by invading them
in large numbers and then voting the current leaders out, and installing their own leaders, and changing the
rules so that only they and their sponsees can vote in future elections.
Then they move on and do the same thing to another meeting, and another, and another,
until they have taken over a whole area.
They are like a spreading cancer.
There are far more than only two obnoxious sub-cult leaders in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Clancy Imusland and Mike Quinones are just the most famous ones, especially because
of the blatant sexual exploitation. Also look at:
Let's face it: The strucure of A.A. is perfect for spawning junior cult leaders who answer to no one.
Tradition, slogan, custom, habit... Call it what you will, they don't really practice anonymity. Just secrecy.
Yes, there have been a few letters or memos telling A.A. members to stop doing it, but the membership ignores
such papers just like how they ignore the instructions to not rape the newcomer girls. Look here:
Memos and chiding web pages and confidential documents are all fine and well, but they don't really do anything, do they?
The criminal A.A. members just keep right on doing their thing, and hurting vulnerable people, and
the A.A. leaders do nothing to stop it.
It is good that your area does that. Unfortunately, from the large number of horror stories that I receive,
it is obvious that many other areas do dispense medical advice and tell newcomers not to take their medications.
Look here for some examples of sponsors
telling newcomers not to take their medications.
And mind you, that is an old list that I haven't updated in years.
When I get around to it, I'll have to add all of the new letters.
UPDATE: I got around to it. There is now an entire file of "No Meds" stories, here:
A.A. "No Meds" Stories.
Sorry if you find the truth offensive. And it is not extreme. It's the truth.
I did not say "endorses". What I said is that they tolerate it,
they know about it and allow it, and they do nothing to stop it. Although
Clancy Imusland
and
Mike Quinones
and their branches of A.A. do endorse sexual exploitation, and they and their minions do it a lot.
And the A.A. headquarters does nothing to stop them.
Oh, and there is no evidence that either Mike or Clancy "went back out"
as their spiritual punishment.
That is just wishful thinking. They didn't get their comeuppances.
Mike enjoyed his cult leader position until he died of prostate cancer. Clancy is still doing it.
And the offenders are never punished or kicked out of A.A. Serial rapists can stay in A.A. forever by
chanting,
"The only requirement for membership is a desire to quit drinking."
Of course their real reason for being in A.A. is to get more victims, not to quit drinking,
but nobody ever talks about that.
Furthermore, A.A. is a wonderful environment for criminals and sexual predators
because of the "anonymity". A predator can move from group to group,
using new fake names, and do the same things to new victims, again and again and
again, for many years. And again, the A.A. headquarters will do nothing to stop it.
Also see this recent article on "The FIX":
I thought young people's meetings would be a safe place to clean myself up, but it turns out, not so much. Without knowing it, I was becoming a target.
The young people's meetings I went to all over Los Angeles featured a revolving cast of men that I would call perverts. They weren't the obvious kind of creeps, either, with windowless white vans and long trench coats. They looked like everyone else at the meetings: tattooed and cool and smoking cigarettes.
These men swarmed me, as they did every other newcomer too young and inexperienced to distinguish between the loving hand of AA and the clammy hand of a predator. They welcomed me to the meetings, they gave me over-long hugs, they offered me smokes when I was still too young to buy my own. I felt absolutely enveloped by the program. I had never had so many people pay attention to me in my life.
But what I thought of as harmless flirting — and all flirting is harmless when you're 17 and your curfew is 10 pm — these men rightly interpreted as vulnerability.
There was J, who asked me to his house to "read the Big Book." When I arrived and asked
what we were going to read, he laughed and showed me to his bedroom. ...
There was C, who was 36 and also had double-digit sobriety. He had a daughter a
few years younger than me. It's strange to look back and call it rape — because
I've been assaulted under much less ambiguous circumstances — but that's absolutely what it was.
There is more. Read the article.
Also see this other letter that just came in, that documents the A.A. 13th-Stepping and rape rate:
Sorry, but A.A. has a lot of other reasons to exist.
(And again, there are no "millions helped".)
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Last updated 14 February 2015. |
