Sequel To 'Man From Earth' Released On Pirate Sites By Its Creators

from the lessons-learned dept

While we cover much here in terms of content creators actually embracing what the internet can do for them rather than fighting what is essentially mere reality, some stories truly do stand out more than others. If you aren't familiar with the story of the film The Man From Earth, you should read up on it because it's plainly fascinating. The sci-fi film was directed by Richard Schenkman on a fairly barebones budget and set for the sort of release that these types of independent films tend to get.
And then somebody put a screener DVD up on The Pirate Bay and the film became known in a way it never would have otherwise.

“Originally, somebody got hold of a promotional screener DVD of ‘Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth’, ripped the file and posted the movie online before we knew what was even happening,” Man from Earth director Richard Schenkman informs TorrentFreak.
“A week or two before the DVD’s ‘street date’, we jumped 11,000% on the IMDb ‘Moviemeter’ and we were shocked.”

Suddenly there was very real public buzz and interest in this small, independent film. No advertising budget for the film had been planned. Marketing was non-existent. And, yet, all of that work was essentially done by an internet that truly appreciated the film for what it was. Still, this was an unauthorized placement of a creative work put up on torrent sites. It would be quite understandable if the producers of the film lashed out at these sites.
Instead, Eric Wilkinson, a producer for the film, reached out to those sites to thank them. Schenkman is on the record stating that filesharing was key to the success of the film as a whole. And, because they were smart, those behind the film decided to try to monetize this fandom.

“Once we realized what was going on, we asked people to make donations to our PayPal page if they saw the movie for free and liked it, because we had all worked for nothing for two years to bring it to the screen, and the only chance we had of surviving financially was to ask people to support us and the project,” Schenkman explains.
“And, happily, many people around the world did donate, although of course only a tiny fraction of the millions and millions of people who downloaded pirated copies.”

Meanwhile, the film went on to win awards and still enjoys a healthy audience on modern platforms such as Netflix. Interestingly, the filmmakers and producers don't appear to be thinking of the piracy experience as some kind of one-off, nor do they see how well it turned out for them as being a function of being initially unknown. Indeed, they plan on making even more use of torrent sites this go around, no longer leaving it to chance that someone else will upload the film and instead choosing to simply do so themselves.

“It was going to get uploaded regardless of what we did or didn’t do, and we figured that as long as this was inevitable, we would do the uploading ourselves and explain why we were doing it,” Schenkman informs TF.
“And, we would once again reach out to the filesharing community and remind them that while movies may be free to watch, they are not free to make, and we need their support.”

The Pirate Bay upload is rife with information and notes on the movie, and even goes so far as to include helpful tips on how the movie can be even more widely shared to generate additional audiences. Schenkman goes on to call this something of an honor system, relying on the general goodness of people to compensate directly the makers of a film they have enjoyed for free. This is of course still counterintuitive, but we've made the argument for years that treating people well, and specifically treating piracy as an untapped market, can be a fantastic avenue for success.
And this isn't the only experiment in treating moviegoers like human beings that the makers of the film are undertaking.

Other partners include MovieSaints.com, where fans can pay to see the movie from January 19 but get a full refund if they don’t enjoy it. It’s also available on Vimeo (see below) but the version seen by pirates is slightly different, and for good reason, Schenkman says.
“This version of the movie includes a greeting from me at the beginning, pointing out that we did indeed upload the movie ourselves, and asking people to visit manfromearth.com and make a donation if they can afford to, and if they enjoyed the film.
“The version we posted is very high-resolution, although we are also sharing some smaller files for those folks who have a slow Internet connection where they live,” he explains.

It's hard to imagine how they could have gotten this any more right than they have. Meanwhile, this undertaking is knocking down all kinds of strawmen that currently guard the MPAA offices. Bravo all around.                                                                                https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180117/10452439022/sequel-to-man-earth-released-pirate-sites-creators.shtml

Exposing Psychiatry As A Fraud from Top to Bottom           ~ hehe BUT  don't  worry A~merry~land~cia ...there's a " pill "... 4 that ...

http://humansarefree.com/2018/01/exposing-psychiatry-as-fraud-from-top.html

“Promoting diabolically false science, psychiatry creates a gateway for defining many separate states of consciousness that don’t exist at all. They’re cheap myths, fairy tales.” — The Underground, Jon Rappoport

Note: This is an expanded version of my recent piece about psychiatry. It contains far more evidence that psychiatry is a highly dangerous fraud.
Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, the deployment of psychiatrists to diagnose a person they oppose on political grounds is a tactic — not science.

In some cases, psychiatrists give favored individuals a soft landing — “Well, he’s suffering from bipolar and he needs help straightening out his life” — while in other cases these shrinks use their diagnoses to discredit and diminish public figures — “his judgment is impaired, pay no attention to what he’s saying, he needs treatment (toxic drugs).”

It’s the old USSR strategy, with a few cultural twists to fit the American landscape.

It’s time to lay out the facts about psychiatry, to show how bankrupt this “science” really is.

Wherever you see organized psychiatry operating, you see it trying to expand its domain and its dominance. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm? Are you kidding?

The first question to ask is: do these mental disorders have any scientific basis? There are now roughly 300 of them. They multiply like fruit flies.

An open secret has been bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

No blood tests, no urine tests, no saliva tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

In a PBS Frontline episode, Does ADHD Exist?, Dr. Russell Barkley, an eminent professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, unintentionally spelled out the fraud.

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY: That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.

Oh, indeed, that does make them invalid. Utterly and completely. All 297 mental disorders. They’re all hoaxes. Because there are no defining tests of any kind to back up the diagnosis.

You can sway and tap dance and bloviate all you like and you won’t escape the noose. We are looking at a science that isn’t a science. That’s called fraud. Rank fraud.

There’s more. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been obliquely referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

If this is medical science, a duck is a rocket ship.

To repeat, Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definitions of Bipolar and ADHD were expanded to include more people.

    Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
    acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
    life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
    brain damage.

    Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis)    include:
    intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
    peripheral circulatory collapse;
    stupor and coma.

    Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar”) include:
    serious impairment of cognitive function;
    fainting;
    restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances self-admitted label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of Ritalin (and other similar amphetamine-like compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So… what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse effects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

• Paranoid delusions
  
• Paranoid psychosis
  
• Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
  
• Activation of psychotic symptoms
  
• Toxic psychosis
  
• Visual hallucinations
  
• Auditory hallucinations
  
• Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
  
• Effects pathological thought processes
  
• Extreme withdrawal
  
• Terrified affect
  
• Started screaming
  
• Aggressiveness
  
• Insomnia
  
• Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
  
• Psychic dependence
  
• High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
  
• Decreased REM sleep
  
• When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
  
• Convulsions
  
• Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

Let’s go deeper. In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”).

Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

Let’s take a little trip back in time and review how one psychiatric drug, Prozac, escaped a bitter fate, by hook and by crook. It’s an instructive case.

Prozac, in fact, endured a rocky road in the press for a while. Stories on it rarely appear now. The major media have backed off. But on February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus’ Wall Street Journal article on the drug carried the headline, “Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense.”

She wrote, “A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac are imposing new problems for the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Co.”

Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece headlined, “Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant Prompt Violence?”

In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin mentions that the Donahue show (Feb. 28, 1991) “put together a group of individuals who had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response confirmed the problem.”

A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes:

“Despite unanimous literature of double-blind studies indicating that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in treating depression in children and adolescents, such medications continue to be in wide use.”

An instructive article, “Protecting Prozac,” by Michael Grinfeld, in the December 1998 California Lawyer, opens several doors. Grinfeld notes that “in the past year nearly a dozen cases involving Prozac have disappeared from the court record.”

He was talking about law suits against the manufacturer, Eli Lilly, and he was saying that those cases had apparently been settled, without trial, in such a quiet and final way, with such strict confidentiality, that it is almost as if they never happened.

Grinfeld details a set of maneuvers involving attorney Paul Smith, who in the early 1990s became the lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the famous Fentress lawsuit against Eli Lilly.

The plaintiffs made the accusation that Prozac had induced a man to commit murder. This was the first action involving Prozac to reach a trial and jury, so it would establish a major precedent for a large number of other pending suits against the manufacturer.

The case: On September 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a former employee of Standard Gravure, in Louisville, Kentucky, walked into the workplace, with an AK-47 and a SIG Sauer pistol, killed eight people, wounded 12 others, and committed suicide.

Family members of the victims subsequently sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, on the grounds that Wesbecker had been pushed over the edge into violence by the drug.

The trial: After what many people thought was a very weak attack on Lilly by plaintiffs’ lawyer Smith, the jury came back in five hours with an easy verdict favoring Lilly and Prozac.

Grinfeld writes, “Lilly’s defense attorneys predicted the verdict would be the death knell for [anti-]Prozac litigation.”

But that wasn’t the end of the Fentress case. “Rumors began to circulate that [the plaintiffs’ attorney] Smith had made several [prior] oral agreements with Lilly concerning the evidence that would be presented [in Fentress], the structure of a postverdict settlement, and the potential resolution of Smith’s other [anti-Prozac] cases.”

In other words, the rumors declared:

This plaintiff’s lawyer, Smith, made a deal with Lilly. He, Smith, would present a weak attack, omitting evidence damaging to Prozac, so that the jury would find Lilly innocent of all charges.

In return, the case would be settled secretly, with Lilly paying out big monies to Smith’s client. In this way, Lilly would avoid the exposure of a public settlement, and through the innocent verdict, would discourage other potential plaintiffs from suing it over Prozac.

The rumors congealed. The judge in the Fentress case, John Potter, asked lawyers on both sides if “money had changed hands.” He wanted to know if the fix was in. The lawyers said no money had been paid, “without acknowledging that an agreement was in place.”

Judge Potter didn’t stop there. In April 1995, Grinfeld notes:

“In court papers, Potter wrote that he was surprised that the plaintiffs’ attorneys [Smith] hadn’t introduced evidence that Lilly had been charged criminally for failing to report deaths from another of its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration. Smith had fought hard [during the Fentress trial] to convince Judge Potter to admit that evidence, and then unaccountably withheld it.”

In Potter’s motion, he alleged that “Lilly [in the Fentress case] sought to buy not just the verdict, but the court’s judgment as well.”

In 1996, the Kentucky Supreme Court issued an opinion: “… there was a serious lack of candor with the trial court [during Fentress] and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process or perhaps even fraud.”

After the Supreme Court remanded the Fentress case back to the state attorney general’s office, the whole matter dribbled away, and then resurfaced in a different form, in another venue. At the time of the California Lawyer article, a new action against Smith was unresolved. Eventually, Eli Lilly escaped punishment.

Based on the rigged Fentress case, Eli Lilly silenced many lawsuits based on Prozac inducing murder and suicide.

Quite a story.

And it all really starts with the institution of psychiatry inventing a whole branch of science that doesn’t exist, thereby defining 300 mental disorders that don’t exist.

Here’s a coda:

This one is big.

The so-called “chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness” is dead.

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid the theory to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:

“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend — never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

Boom.

Dead.

However…urban legend? No. For decades, the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “We’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain; every mental disorder stems from such a chemical imbalance.”

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to cover his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:

“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it… the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”

Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…

…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…

…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct a chemical imbalance?

Here’s what’s happening. The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed. They’re taking heavy flack on many fronts.

The chemical-imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders.

All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience.

So the shrinks have to move into another model, another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.

For example, mental disorders are the result of genes plus “psycho-social factors.” A mish-mash of more unproven science.

“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…” Professional propaganda.

It’s all gibberish, all the way down.

Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

Big Pharma isn’t going to back off. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

And in the wake of Aurora, Colorado, Sandy Hook, the Naval Yard, and other mass shootings, the hype is expanding: “We must have new community mental-health centers all over America.”

More fake diagnosis of mental disorders, more devastating drugs.

You want to fight for a right?

Fight for the right of every adult to refuse medication. Fight for the right of every parent to refuse medication for his/her child.

By Jon Rappoport, Guest author