The Security Apparatus Is Jaw-Droppingly Stupid

 McKean's Law, from University of Chicago College Bowl legend and eminent lexicographer Erin McKean -

"Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error." 

One summer during high school, I went to a Governor's School and there was a guy with a really thick Smithfield accent who pronounced the name of the county as AAAIIILLL o'why.  So I pronounced it that way once went I interned at the state demography office, and my boss, who spoke with an exaggerated trans-Atlantic accent like Julia Child or Aunt Bee, said, "No!  It's ile of WHITE!"  Then she played some silly game where she hypercorrected someone's pronunciation of "forte" in a job interview and looked like an absolute moron.  Then again, there was an another guy with a drawl from Buena Vista who liked to say, "I come from a place so backward the people there cannot even pronounce the name of the town."     

"In forte we have a word derived from the French that in its "strong point" sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation.  Usage writers have denigrated \ˈfȯr-ˌtā\ and \ˈfȯr-tē\ because they reflect the influence of the Italian-derived forte entry 2.  Their recommended pronunciation \ˈfȯrt\, however, does not exactly reflect French either: the French would write the world le fort and would pronounce it more similar to English for.  So you can take your choice, knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose.  All are standard, however.

The Security Apparatus Preys on the Uneducated

When I was a kid, the security apparatus hated that I liked learning and realized the absurdity and bigotry of adults around me.  They particularly despised any form of intellectualism.  Let's see how the bigoted LDS church is doing:

    - Europe:  Decreasing in all of Europe.  The church has probably been decline in Scandinavia for 60 years now.  It never took off at all in Eastern Europe despite countless predictions from "prophets, seers, and revelators" in the '70s and '80s that people behind the Iron Curtain were desperately waiting for access to "the one true church" (yeah, educated people escaping totalitarian regimes desperately long to be controlled by a Utah-based authoritarian cult).  In the last four years, the church has closed four stakes in England and six districts in Russia.

    - East Asia:  Decreasing in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.  In the last four years, the church has closed six stakes and three districts in Japan and two stakes in Hong Kong.

    - Oceania:  Decreasing in Australia and New Zealand.  ExMo Jacinda Arden received global praise for her actions as New Zealand's prime minister but had nothing to do with the LDS church as an adult because of their deplorable policies.  The church has closed two stakes and three districts in Australia and a stake in New Zealand.

    - North America.  Decreasing in Canada and the US West Coast.  The church has closed seven stakes in California, two in Washington state, and one in Oregon in the last four years.  

The Moral Equivalent of War

In 1977, Jimmy Carter gave a national address on the energy crisis known as the "Moral Equivalent of War" speech.  Time was that our nation had a president who actually knew who William James was and could reference his ideas appropriately.

Carter introduced a ten-point plan, the basis of which was conservation.  "The cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation.  Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts.  Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy."  Other key points were protection of the environment through conservation and the need for sacrifice from every part of society.  Carter also stated that "those who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury."

It's so horrific that fascists like my brother-in-law made a mockery of Carter's vision by horrifically destroying the environment.  The result has been millions of deaths and injuries, endless unjust wars, and destruction of the planet. 

My Mother Craves Bigotry and Atrocities

My mother has always sought out bigotry and horrific atrocities, for example always seeking to live in white supremacist enclaves.  As a child, her father heroically worked to give her better opportunities that he never had, but she always responded by endless complaints for the rest of her life.  Having been freed from an incredibly insular and profoundly bigoted environment, she defied her parents' wise advice and insisted on going to Bigot U., literally one of the most racist, not to mention sexist and homophobic, enclaves in the country.  What kind of monster goes out of her way to avoid fine institutions like UDub and Wazzou to attend the equivalent of Bob Jones University?

She even moved back to this progressive paradise and continued to insist on antisocial and bigoted behavior. On November 3, 1970, the fine people of the great state of Washington passed Referendum 20 to legalize abortion in the first four months of pregnancy with a solid 56% majority, becoming the first state to grant women this basic human right through popular vote.

Did my mother, once again to be a resident of the Evergreen State, finally learn from the demonstrated common sense of the people around her?  No, she of course persisted in perpetuating horrific racist, sexist, and homophobia.  For shame!.     

The Security Apparatus Loves Patriarchy and Gerontocracy

The NY Times Daily podcast had an episode this week about people lobbying President Biden to declare that the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified, even though the specified ratification period ended over 40 years ago.  Although their cause is admirable, I did not find their legal arguments compelling.

On the other hand, none of these efforts would have been necessary if LDS church leaders (by definition male and by policy geriatric) hadn't mobilized female members to oppose the ERA in key states such as Virginia and Nevada.  

I remember as a kid my parents inviting over a woman that my mother had "taught" in church when they first lived in Virginia.  Their bizarre and disgusting intention was to show me that their racist, sexist, and homophobic brainwashing of children and youth was truly wonderful instead of the horrific atrocity that it obviously was. 

Of course, I'm sure my mother thinks that it's great that women in places like Utah and Idaho die because they lack access to basic health care.

The Security Apparatus Loves Racism and Child Abuse

It's such a shame that bigots like Thomas F.X. Noble and my fascist brother-in-law continue to support white supremacy and child molestation.  I bet they loved it when Madonna and Joe Pesci mocked a true hero.  "Fight the real enemy!"

The Security Apparatus Loves Medical Atrocities

When I was at mediocre UVa, I suffered from all manner of medical atrocities - being assaulted, having the diagnosis of my strabismus maliciously withheld, receiving an inappropriate diagnosis in a public setting from an incompetent psychiatrist, and on and on.  At the time, the UVa Medical Center still celebrated an influential and thoroughly discredited proponent of pseudoscientific theories of white supremacy and eugenics.  They recently changed the name to honor yet another supporter of medical atrocities.  If they're going to honor a physician from Staunton who promoted atrocities, they might as well call it the "Sterilization" DeJarnette Wing and forcibly sterilize people without consent, justification, or anesthesia there.

The Security Apparatus Loves Serial Rape

When I was in middle school, my older brother would tape "Late Night with David Letterman" and we would watch it the next day.  It was the era of Pee Wee Herman, Emo Phillips, and Jay Leno back when he was funny, so it was pretty good.  My parents hated anything that involved irony because it went over their heads and because of their authoritarian personalities.

And what comedian did my father like?  That's right - serial rapist Bill Cosby.  Then again, who wouldn't like a mediocre comic who started out with a watered-down Dick Gregory act and then got eclipsed by his onetime imitator Richard Pryor, once Pryor stopped whitewashing his comedy for a Middle American audience and found his authentic voice after going underground in Oakland and Berkeley?  

The Security Apparatus Loves to Abuse Children

It's such a shame that my sister married a braindead fascist who loves to intellectually and ethically rape children.  If only she had looked in the other direction, she could be with the owner of the finest import auto repair shop in Kalamazoo and her children wouldn't be Nazis.

The Security Apparatus Loves Fascism

The security apparatus HATED when I properly identified authoritarian personality characteristics in a career spook and lifelong devout white supremacist using Adorno et al.'s California F-Scale (the F, of course, stood for fascism and the reasons why some people support fascism was incredibly relevant to academics at Berkeley who had fled the atrocities of the Third Reich).  Of course, such hostility to analysis and intraception just confirmed his authoritarian personality.

The unfortunate reality is that I have been punished my entire life for properly opposing authoritarianism, fascism, and bigotry by horrific ignoramuses.

"In a 2009 book, Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler identified evangelical Protestants as the most authoritarian of voting blocs in the United States.  Furthermore, the former Confederate states (i.e. "the South") showed higher levels of authoritarianism than the rest.  Rural populations tend to be more authoritarian than urban ones.  People who preferred simple problems to complex ones, had less formal education, and those scoring lower in political knowledge also tended to score higher in authoritarianism."

Hang 'em High

9/11 was obviously incredibly insignificant (I mean, more people have died in this country from personal automobiles each and every month for the last 85 years but I don't recall a Global War on Cars), and the reasonable fear was that the US security apparatus would be allowed to massively overreact and inevitably cause much greater problems.

So of course that's what the braindead security apparatus did, undermining our nation's integrity and security in the process.  In the orgy of mindless jingoism and militarism, Prince William and Loudoun County schools simultaneously opened "Freedom" High Schools, employing a profoundly perverse form of Orwellian doublespeak.  If they had a bit of sense or decency, they would both rename the schools together, so that we could have US Government Atrocities High School - Woodbridge and US Government Atrocities High School - Made-up Exurb that Exemplifies the Public Health Atrocities of Automobile-oriented Sprawl.

Me fight fo fweedumb!

The Security Apparatus Is Incredibly Stupid

One of the many, many stupid things I got in trouble with white supremacists Brent Lamar Top and Keith "I bizarrely recount stories to kids about distributing a white supremacist text to victims of the repressive Somoza regime" Neeley about was mentioning how Jim McMahon loved to publicly recount how he drank beer and committed other violations of the "Honor Code" at BYU but got away with it because he was the star quarterback on the football team.  "Oh, no!" they exclaimed.  "BYU would never allow such hypocrisy!"

Here's one of many, many articles that repeatedly confirm the tale -

It has been 27 years since the punky QB known as McMahon threw the last forward pass of his senior year for BYU, after which, depending on whom you talk to, he either was immediately kicked out of school or left just as soon as he could. 

“Happiness was Provo in the rearview mirror,” McMahon said in his autobiography. 

That was in 1986. That was a long time ago. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge. Some of it may even may have wound up in a certain beverage that McMahon likes to drink when he’s playing golf.... 

That last one seems to be the biggest obstacle. Jim McMahon never graduated from BYU. Wasn’t allowed to. Or didn’t want to. One of the criteria for Hall of Fame consideration at BYU is that athlete-students graduate. That’s right, athlete-students. To refer to them in the other order would be as hypocritical as looking the other way while your star QB commits Honor Code violations because damn — er, darn — he sure can throw the football on Saturday afternoon. 

Not that he wants in, but those nine credits — three classes — are what is keeping Jim McMahon out. That, and the beers he drank on the golf course when people made excuses for him — I mean, weren’t looking.

The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

The intrepid but mediocre 6-6 California Golden Bears are already playing in the Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk and Presented by CTE.  It reminds me of the New York Times podcast episode on how so many high school football players who never come close to the NFL or even major college football end up with debilitating brain damage and CTE.

Let Us Now Praise Heinous War Criminals

My fascist brother-in-law is obviously mentally impaired, as evidenced by joining a discredited torture organization and actually praising Project Azorian as a successful intelligence effort.  Everyone, but especially anyone with naval experience, knew it was a colossal boondoggle at best.  I mean, were people really expecting the Soviets to never change their codebooks after years and years, especially when they knew the US was mucking about the North Pacific?  The real rationale for the project was that the paranoid Nixon administration wanted to try to screw with the Soviets.  And of course one of the chief advocates was a heinous war criminal. 

Then again, my brother-in-law also thinks my father was a nuclear physicist, so he's not the most trustworthy source.

The Security Apparatus Retains Its Plantation Mentality

It's such a shame that the same security apparatus that worked together with Mayor Richard Daley's jackbooted thugs to lynch Fred Hampton for being an effective civil rights leader who reached across racial lines to promote economic solidarity then launched a vendetta against and entrapped popular three-term DC Mayor Marion Berry for thumbing his nose at their outdated and paternalistic attitudes and policies.  The security apparatus has always longed for a return to the days when DC was paternalistically at best ruled by an obscure House committee long populated by good old boy bigots like John McMillan, who once sent a truckload of watermelons in response when DC's first appointed Mayor-Commissioner had the audacity to properly send a budget proposal to Congress.  McMillan was finally primaried when DC's first non-voting House representative used his franking privilege to rally civil rights supporters against him.  "Johnny Mac ain't coming back!" Walter Fauntroy crowed.  McMillan retorted, "The colored people were bought out." 

Ads

"CBS Sunday Morning" has some interesting commercials.  Every week, they have an ad from the Soda Council with an employee in red for Coke, one in blue for Pepsi, and another in white for Dr. Pepper/Keurig.  Some of the ads tout their low- or no-sugar options, but others claim that they use amazing new plastics for their bottles.  "CBS Sunday Morning" once immediately followed that ad with a segment about how such claims are deliberately misleading efforts by the oil and plastics industries that are really designed to get people to not worry about waste issues with plastics.

Now they also repeatedly run an ad from the Check Council explaining the proper ways to use checks, the most important of which is to never, ever use checks if at all possible. 

The Security Apparatus Lynched Fred Hampton

The latest disgusting group of fascist pigs have moved from next door.

The security apparatus pigs are always the dumbest, dullest blockheads.

And only fascists would paint brick!

Not Even with Cleavage!

A new Roku channel shows "Square Pegs" on weekend mornings.  I hadn't seen an episode since I watched them over 40 years ago on Monday nights on CBS, but the first one I saw was probably the one I best remembered - Johnny Slash is bizarrely good at hitting home runs for the school's baseball team.  Unfortunately, he can only play home games because the fields at other schools look different.  Steve Sax makes a cameo, and they mentioned that he had just been named Rookie of the Year about 6 times.

I also always like Tracy Nelson as Jennifer.  She has the Valley Girl thing going on, even though the show is basically set in the New York area, but also has a proto-Madonna vibe.  She's also true Hollywood royalty, being the daughter of Ricky Nelson, sister of Nelson Nelson, granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet, niece of Mark Harmon and Pam Dawber .... 

Braindead Sadists Love Torture

My fascist brother-in-law was always jaw-droppingly stupid and bigoted, as evidenced by his joining a white supremacist movement that promotes genocide, but it was perhaps even worse that he joined a completely discredited terror group that everyone knew horrifically tortured people to undermine US values and security.

Oh well, Nazis will always Nazi. 

The Security Apparatus Loves Atrocities

It's remarkable how some communities are consumed by evil.  Take Vienna, Virginia, for example.  It's known as one of the epicenter of horrific atrocities in the state, along with Lynchburg, for being the home of heinous archvillains like Gottlieb.  That monster even sent his children to the local high school still named for a slaveowner, even though neighboring communities have seen fit to change such names.  I guess it's not surprising that the community and school continue to relentlessly promote brain damage among young people, with the result that these misguided youth actively try to destroy the environment and public health.

The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

When I was in high school, the security apparatus didn't like that I reasonably noted the horrific public health consequences of cheerleading and suburban sprawl in my school newspaper columns.  The New York Times now has a story and podcast on the horrible monopolistic cesspool that is modern cheerleading.  I'm sure the security apparatus loves the horrific incidence of concussions and other serious injuries among young people.

"From 1980 to 2001, emergency-room visits for cheerleaders soared nearly 500 percent. Over that same period, competitive cheerleading was responsible for more catastrophic injuries to female athletes than all other high school and college sports combined, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And those statistics included “bases,” the girls at the bottom of the pyramid, who were at lower risk for head injuries. Restrict the data just to flyers, the girls being tossed in the air, and injury rates became “semi-suicidal,” according to Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the research center.

“The flyer was the riskiest person in all of women’s sport,” he said recently. By some metrics, the risk of catastrophic head and spine injuries was higher in cheerleading than in football."

Cameron Promotes Medical Atrocities

It's such a shame that Duncan Cameron vainly tries to defend horrific violations of medical ethics and heinous torture committed by their family.  Such an idiotic lawyer - it's always the supposedly "nicest" people who enable atrocities.

The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh

The Pisces were coached by Sacramento's top investigative TV reporter, Jeffrey Trout.

Update:  Nicholas Pryor apparently and coincidentally died this week.  I'll also remember him as a passenger in "Airplane!" and from a couple of "Murder She Wrote" episodes.

The Security Apparatus Loves Genocide

The Department of Interior, led by Secretary Deb Haaland, has acknowledged that at least a thousand children died as part of the US government's decades-long program to systematically eradicate indigenous culture through its system of boarding schools, often administered by religious institutions.

"This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations: That federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways," Newland, a member of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said in a statement.

Of course, as a child I was forced to listen to geriatric bigots celebrate a similar program in which native youth were taken from their homes and placed with LDS white suburban families as part of a program of cultural and religious assimilation.  The most egregious proponent of such cultural imperialism was Spencer Kimball, LDS church president from 1973 to 1985, who never encountered anyone with indigenous American (or even Polynesian) ancestry who he wouldn't proclaim to be a "Lamanite."  

It's truly astounding how he openly made profoundly racist statements in the guise of a sustained prophet, seer, and revelation in LDS General Conference -

“The work is unfolding, and blinded eyes begin to see, and scattered people begin to gather. I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today as against that of only fifteen years ago. Truly the scales of darkness are falling from their eyes, and they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.

The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.

At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl — sixteen — sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents — on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.“

The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

Berkeleyside has an interesting article about an exhibit about the history of movies in Berkeley.  The security apparatus bizarrely loves promoting brain damage on high school and college campuses, but the best amenity on the Berkeley campus was the university art museum's Pacific Film Archive.  It alone had better film programming than anything available in the DC area, but that's not surprising given that this area is still kind of a cultural wasteland.  Their film programs were academic and exhaustive so they would show literally every movie ever made by a director (I don't know how people keep all of those Ozu "Late Spring," "Early Summer," "End of Summer" movies straight).  One time they had a Terrance Davies series (which at the time was only four or five feature films and a movie made up of short films).  Before a screening in front of about ten grungy grad students on a random Wednesday night in Berkeley, Davies popped out unannounced and proceeded to deliver a rambling anecdote about how his earliest memory was of his alcoholic, psychotic father throwing one of his older siblings out of a second story window.  He then said, "As for the movie you're about to see ("The Neon Bible" bizarrely starring Dennis Leary), to be honest I wasn't really able to carry it off, but I learned enough that I could do a much better job with "The House of Mirth."  Enjoy!"  And with that he left and probably proceeded to get drunk somewhere.  Then there was the screening in a Chaplin series that the extremely old son of Chaplin's longtime cameraman Rollie Totheroh attended along with a grandson and some great-grandchildren.  They raucously cheered every time Rollie's name appeared in the credits.

Oh, but UVa has football players like Adrian Burnim and Anthony Poindexter assaulting people on and off the field, so that makes the security apparatus happy.

The Security Apparatus Loves Anti-Intellectualism and White Supremacy

When we were in high school, I and my siblings had to go to our local LDS church for religious indoctrination at 6 am every single school day (in addition, of course, to the required 3 hours of church on Sundays plus various activities and "firesides" we had to go to throughout the week).  Not even fundamentalist Christians or even Mennonites did such a thing.  And what did we learn?  Well, it was ostensibly instruction on the LDS "standard works" - Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price - but according to the church the real purpose was to help impressionable young people "feel the spirit," i.e. have emotional experiences that would tie them to the church and cause them to go to church schools such as BYU, go on missions, get married in exclusionary LDS temples, and pay 10% of their income to the church in tithes for life.

The actual content was incredibly impoverished and often offensive.  In my freshman year, we were supposed to study the Old Testament in the poorly-translated King James Version as a means of supporting the validity of the LDS church's truth claims.  Even active LDS members acknowledge that this kind of proof-texting is incredibly anachronistic and misleading.  It didn't help that we also read Joseph Smith's risible and self-promoting "translation" and "correction" of ancient texts that he could not read.  Of course, such ignorance also did not stop him from hilariously mistranslating Egyptian hieroglyphics (on papyri that he bought from a traveling mummy salesman) that were ordinary funerary inscriptions and claiming that the writings came directly from the hand of the patriarch Abraham.

Of course, the security apparatus was always terrified of my desire to learn so they pulled some bizarre stunt where they claimed that our teacher died.  I thought the guy was fine, unlike my senior year Book of Mormon teacher who literally told us every single day that he was incredibly special because he had served a mission in Ecuador and LDS president Spencer Kimball had said that the indigenous people of the region were supposedly the purest descendants of the mythical savage and wicked dark-skinned Lamanites who had exterminated their white, righteous, and civilized kinsmen at the conclusion of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, Kimball also claimed that Native children who were sent to live with suburban Mormon families literally had their skin turned whiter as divine reward for their righteousness in becoming culturally assimilated into white Mormon society.

Oh, and this guy was getting some kind of degree in education and told me that people at UVa were antichrists.

UVa Is Such a Joke

I went to UVa because it was cheap and I could pay for it myself, but as they say you get what you pay for.  When I was a freshman, I was forced to take an idiotic First-Year Seminar on "Community in America."  The professor was a stolid, non-intellectual type who specialized in colonial US history but almost in an antiquarian sense.  He was actually really impressed by the stereotypical overachieving UVa undergrad types - you know, dumb stuff like U Guides and living on the Lawn.

The seminar was an obvious setup designed to promote small-minded anti-intellectual boosterism and Babbitry in retaliation for my reasonable disdain for my parents' thoroughgoing bigotry and racism.  I had already read Faulkner, not to mention Sinclair Lewis, so I was reasonably unimpressed.  The only thing we read that was useful was Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," which had a similar pessimistic view of such environs.  We actually had to read and write an essay on Garrison Keillor's middlebrow fave Lake Wobegon Days.  My essay was characterized by Innes as an "evisceration," but he had to give me an A because it was completely accurate.  

The main thing I learned from the experience was to never get advice on course selection from a UVa professor.

Oh, and Innes's annoying daughter apparently has a high-level administrative position at UVa AND rides the horse at UVa football games.  What an incredibly stupid school!

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Bigoted and Stupid

Because of anti-intellectual bigots like my mother, so much of this country doesn't have access to decent public education or public transportation or public health.

But we have the most overfunded military-intelligence complex in the world!  That's so much better than having the life expectancy or infant mortality or maternal mortality of a developed country.

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Stupid and Bigoted

The state of Utah is notorious for shirking its ethical responsibility to provide a social safety net, instead directing people who should be eligible for assistance to the bigoted LDS church.  As ProPublica's Eli Hagar explained to NPR, people are forced to affirm that a thoroughly racist text that defames indigenous Americans as wicked and cursed is divine truth or face being homeless or going hungry.  He even explains the role of "bishop roulette" in this unprofessional and thoroughly patriarchal system.

HAGER: So in my ProPublica story, I highlighted the story of Danielle Bellamy. She's somebody who is not Mormon herself. And she's going through some serious health problems that have left her in the hospital for weeks at a time, and she's worried about being able to still afford her rent where she and her two daughters live. She tried applying for cash assistance from the state, but they denied her. And she was explicitly instructed by state caseworkers, she says, to go to the church instead. And she went to her local bishop for help. And that's when she was asked to read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch Mormon videos and set a date to get baptized all in order to get help that she desperately needed to avoid becoming homeless.

KELLY: And, again, she's being asked to do all this. She's not Mormon, you said. Did she get any help?

HAGER: She did get some help from the church, but in her most recent attempt to get help, she was denied because she refused to get baptized as part of a faith that she is not part of.

KELLY: One big issue this raises is that, unlike the government, churches are often allowed to discriminate based on religion. Did your reporting indicate that that is happening in Utah?

HAGER: Correct. They are allowed to constitutionally. To be clear, the LDS church provides a tremendous amount of help to poor people and homeless people across Utah, across the country and really across the world. But there's a term in Utah called bishop roulette, which essentially means depending on the bishop where you happen to live, he might - it's always a man. He might be very generous with aid. Many are. But others might discriminate against, say, single mothers, you know, for having had sex out of wedlock or against LGBTQ people or simply against non-members of the church.

Theories that Probably Aren't True But Should Be

1.  "The Wizard of Oz" is an allegory for bimetallism and the gold standard.

2.  The movie version of "The Shining" is an allegory for the genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas.

At least the theories seemed compelling when I first read them as a kid.

The Security Apparatus Loves Genocide

It's so inspiring to see that the parking lot of the former Spenger's Fish Grotto in my West Berkeley neighborhood will finally be returned to the indigenous Ohlone community.  As a child, I had to suffer in a thoroughly bigoted environment in which the material benefits of genocide were celebrated.  For example, my mother endlessly complained that she had been forced to contribute to society by supposedly "homesteading."  In reality, my grandfather, unlike my mother, worked hard, contributed to society, and was astute at business and knew that rich farmland in the Columbia Basin with access to water for irrigation was a good investment that bore little resemblance to sod farmers trying to homestead on the barren plains.  Of course, if my mother had even the most rudimentary knowledge of US history she would have realized how profoundly offensive her statements really were, given that the actual Homestead Act represented the massive redistribution of millions of acres of land that had been systematically dispossessed from indigenous peoples in campaigns of state-sponsored removal, extermination, and genocide.  

And my mother had the gall to complain that the real tragedy was that she wasn't given enough time to spend with her white supremacist youth group that systematically denigrated people of African and American ancestry as cursed!

Kennedy Center Honors

The latest group of Kennedy Center honorees has been announced, and the organizers somehow resisted the temptation to recognize yet another British rock star.  They finally got around to selecting Francis Ford Coppola, which seems overdue given that his more prolific peers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and even his less prolific protege George Lucas were honored a long time ago.  I read a very tedious online article about how it's somehow bad that dead rock stars like Jerry Garcia aren't honored as part of groups like the Grateful Dead, this despite the fact that the honors are never given posthumously.  The same article didn't have a problem with a building, in the case the Apollo Theater, being honored.  

It's a good thing that true architect of rock and roll Little Richard didn't live to see a building selected instead of him.   

The Security Apparatus Loves Abusing Students

It's tremendously appropriate that Anthony "Sexy Dex" Poindexter is co-defensive coordinator at Penn State.  After all, Dex is truly a worthy successor to Jerry Sandusky given his bizarre participation in a scheme concocted by UVa in which I was beaten and robbed for absolutely no reason.  At the time, I thought Poindexter and Adrian Burnim were taking "Nazi Germany" in summer school as a gut class - little did I know that they were using it as career guidance! 

Former Albermarle County Commonwealth Attorney's Jim Camblos last got attention for defending horrific murderer and sexual predator Jesse Matthew, so he continued to consort with horrible people.

The Security Apparatus Hates Public Health

One of the absolute dumbest things the security apparatus has done to me (and there are countless) is steal my air conditioner because, wait for it, I actually prefer to not destroy the environment and public health.

Leaving aside the bizarre notion of stealing my air conditioner on the hottest day of the summer if they claim it's so vital, it makes absolute no sense to use air conditioning.  People have been living in this area for thousands of years without it (of course, most of them were dispossessed of that land and exterminated by the state).  As the fine people of "The Atlantic" wrote when they were taking a break from properly decrying the horrific environmental evil of lawn mowing, fewer than 1% of US homes had ac in the 1940s, and my 1947 home does just fine without it.

Of course, they've now invented some nonsense about how humidity is bad for paint or some other stupidity to try to justify their addiction and decades of environmental destruction.  Why, my middle school never had air conditioning and I never saw any peeling paint even in the boys locker room! 

Trailblazers

It's so inspiring that Charlottesville is renaming elementary schools that had honored proponents of white supremacy and perpetrators of genocide.  Given my mother's adamant support of genocide, perhaps she'll get the hint and move to a more bigoted enclave such as Provo, Shenandoah County, or Couer d'Alene.

"Eight Is Enough" S4:E18 The Commitment

High school senior Tommy is obviously profoundly insane and believes that Mary's gorgeous med school classmate (played by Markie Post with late 70s Farrah-esque hair) has the hots for him.

The Security Apparatus Loves Schlock Rock

The security apparatus has always HATED that I like and sometimes appropriately reference critically acclaimed and socially relevant music from the likes of Public Enemy.  When I was in high school, they tried to express disdain for my superior sophistication by saying that someone had gone to a concert with them and embarrassed them by dancing in the parking lot afterward.  Of course, they completely failed to realize that the truly embarrassing part is that they had willingly gone to a concert by Billy Joel.  That's right, they honestly really liked the middlebrow "Piano Man" universally reviled by hipster critics as the worst musician ever: 

He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel’s famous song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Please. It never was rock ’n’ roll. Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: “Mock-Rock.”

Al Whited

My biggest accomplishment in college quiz bowl was helping to establish the Gordon Carper Lifetime Achievement Award when I was helping edit 1999 ACF Nationals.  I first suggested the idea of an award for contributions to academic competition to Andrew Yaphe, who of course was unimpressed.  I then mentioned it to Al Whited, and he got REALLY excited.  Apparently, he had been thinking of something similar and had it all mapped out - it should be named for Gordon Carper who would be the first recipient a la the Fermi Award.  I actually bothered to check with Dr. Carper to see if it was ok to name it for him, and he said, "Well, if you and your little friends want to name an award for me after all of these years then who am I to object?"  

Al Whited of course was a great guy and master storyteller who apparently singlehandedly wired pretty much the entire 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta for telecommunications.  They now appear to have a veterans committee selection each year, and Al would certainly be a worthy companion to his former Yellow Jacket teammate Jim Dendy.

It's Not Surprising He Ended Up at Bigot U

Another objectionable thing about Brent LaMar Top is that he used to harass me for not having interest in Boy Scouts because of my visual condition, unrevealed to me until I was in grad school at Berkeley, that made things such as tying knots essentially impossible.  Of course, Boy Scouts is so incredibly important to the LDS church and its young men that the church has completely severed all ties with Scouting and replaced it by all accounts with pretty much nothing (oh, and of course the church never supported Girl Scouts because the church has always been openly proud of treating women and girls as inferior and less important).  Top LDS church leaders didn't even bother to try to hide the fact that they ended their long relationship when Boy Scouts of America stopped actively discriminating against gay people.  Former car salesman turned prophet, seer, and revelator Russ Ballard tried to justify this obvious homophobia by saying, "The reality there is that we didn't really leave [Boy Scouts]; they kind of left us.  The direction they were going was not consistent to what we feel our youth need to have."

Of course, I'm sure ableist bigot Brent LaMar Top completely agrees.  After all, he chose to spend the last several decades at an institution notorious for literally torturing gay people.

It Didn't Happen Here

The security apparatus will always relentlessly defend that they helped my parents promote racism, white supremacy, genocide, sexism, and homophobia and punished me for not embracing their horrific views and practices.  One of their idiotic attempts at justification is that supposedly only bigots help others.  It's not remotely true and doesn't make a bit of sense, but they always assert that my parents paying 10% of their incomes and following an obvious con man and sexual predator in order to be assigned supposed friends with whom to do a lot of makework nonsense was and is a great thing.  The reality is that my parents always chose to live in the middle of nowhere and barely had neighbors let alone any semblance of a neighborhood so they were really just electing to associate with people with similar exclusionary beliefs that were appropriately rejected by at least 99.7% of the their community.  I guess I can kind of understand why they engaged in such nonsense when they were fresh off the boat from Provo, but it takes a special kind of bigotry and stupidity to persist in such antisocial behavior for decades.

Even worse is that conservative religious types such as my parents don't have any sense of actual community and the common good.  My parents chose to commute hours and hours to work each day so that they could live in a bigger house in a county with approximately 200,000 residents and absolutely no public transportation.  Thanks for the global warming!  And tens of millions of women in places like Utah and Idaho can't access basic health care because of the actions of people like my parents.  Talk about horrific mistreatment of young women!  The LDS church at one time even tried to maintain their own separate "church welfare" system because the geriatric archconservative patriarchy running the church thought that the New Deal was creeping socialism.  As a result, the actual state welfare system in Utah is so anemic that nonmembers with legitimate need are sometimes advised by state employees to get baptized in the LDS church to try to get assistance that way.  Of course, the church's welfare system, like its supposed "educational system" or pastoral counseling, is at best profoundly amateurish, relying on well-intentioned but untrained and unqualified volunteers with little oversight or transparency.

Instead of trying to convert infinitely more sophisticated and better educated Scandinavians by peddling a thoroughly racist hate text that justifies genocide of indigenous peoples, dopes like Brent LaMar Top (geez, he even has a stereotypical Utah/Idaho name) should have actually tried to learn that people who truly care about others pay taxes to provide a comprehensive social safety net available to everyone that includes quality public education, national health care, readily available public transportation, and appropriate assistance to those with needs both at home and abroad.  Perhaps people in the US would then enjoy the same quality of life as those in Denmark and Sweden.      

"Eight Is Enough" S3:E27 Marriage and Other Flights of Fancy Part 2

The single strangest "Eight Is Enough" episode, it includes only one Bradford (David), lots and lots of hang gliding, and a rivalry between a young hotshot glider and an older retired Air Force pilot who are never mentioned again in the series.  At least most of the first part episode not only had the Bradfords but the well-worn plot elements of David and Janet fighting about her career as a lawyer and Tom Bradford unknowingly promoting pornography (he finally gets a short story published, but it's in the Playboy stand-in "Man's Man Monthly").  I can't tell if the episode is supposed to be a backdoor pilot or if one of the producers really, really wanted to promote hang gliding as a sport.

"Eight Is Enough" S3 E19 Horror Story

The B plot of this episode where Nancy's blind date looks like a young Anthony Perkins and the power goes out during a storm has Tom Bradford set to debate some British expert on population control and family planning.  They get stuck in an elevator and Bradford wins their impromptu debate with his impassioned argument that Nicholas, his eighth child, could somehow "solve" the whole population problem.

In real life, Adam Rich, who played Nicholas, was an addict for most of his adolescence and adulthood and died at 54 from an accidental fentanyl overdose.

The British dude should demand a recount!

Scandalous

Tony Platt's The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley is an interesting read.  Much of the material is familiar, but the book does root Phoebe Apperson Hearst's inveterate collecting of physical artifacts, including lots and lots of human remains, and the consequent need to display and store them at the heart of the university's problems.  It's similar to how her social and philanthropic rival Jane Stanford's morbid obsession with her dead relations was the original intended focus of the junior university on her farm.  Then again, no one repeatedly tried and ultimately succeeded in gruesomely killing Hearst with rat poison. 

The Security Apparatus Is REALLY Stupid

About six years ago, I was forced to chat with some Colombian psychiatrist as part of some nonsense.  She was ADAMANT that psychiatry was a PhD program in the US like in Europe and other countries.  I tried to gently explain that something like psychology or neuroscience would be a related PhD but that psychiatry was considered a medical specialty here, but she wasn't having ANY of it.

The Security Apparatus Loves Counterproductive Torture

It looks as though the law school formally informally known as Boalt Hall has finally removed the Botero paintings of US atrocities at Abu Ghraib that were on display.  I think they should go the other way and display all 56 paintings that the artist donated to the university's art museum due to Berkeley's supposed commitment to free speech and civil liberties.  It would kind of be a contemporary equivalent of Orozco's epic La epica de la civilizacion americana permanently displayed in the basement of Dartmouth's library.  I hung out all night around the campus just to see them one time, and it was quite worth it.

After all, it's not as though there are people at or near Berkeley's law school who have horrifically enabled discredited CIA-sponsored psychological torture that has no useful purpose and only serves to disgrace our nation and its government by exposing its fundamental hypocrisy and cruelty.  And if they were originally from Canada, it would be even worse, given the atrocities committed at McGill.

The Security Apparatus Loves Homophobia and White Supremacy

When I was a kid and even adult, the security apparatus HATED that I watched good movies that I enjoyed.  Instead they wanted me to watch movies targeted to immature five-year-olds that were filled with bigoted content.  The most hilarious instance is when they forced me to watch a movie with the world record for gay panic jokes.  They also did not like that I did not appreciate blackface, which isn't surprising given that one of the handful of movies that my father took us to or even saw himself in a theater after 1976 is so racist that Disney won't even let anyone see it.  I'm sure the security apparatus is distraught that Disney has gone woke and removed the minstrelsy elements from Splash Mountain.

Wow, He Was Right about Almost Everything!

He's generally forgotten now and was probably most recently remembered by those who know of him for his revealed racism and antisemitism, but I was reminded by reading Hofstadter on anti-intellectualism of how influential H.L. Mencken once was.  Apparently, he was right about pretty everything!  Or at least about how things were in 1930 and except for the racism and antisemitism.  From his Wikipedia bio:

As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.^[2] Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.

"Eight Is Enough" S2:E7 The Bard and the Bod

I vaguely recall when some shampoos had beer in them (an internet search shows that there was a Body on Tap brand in the late '70s), but in this episode Nancy (the pretty Bradford daughter) is rehearsing lines with her sister for a play in which Joanie will appear nude.  Nancy then proceeds to crack open a can of beer and casually pours it over her head over the kitchen sink.  Was this a real thing?  

Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis

I'm sure it's a set-up, but I always appreciate how the fine people at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences carefully differentiate between the actual Nobel Prizes they award and their other fine prizes.  I mean, I'm sure the Crafood Prize in Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis or the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel have their place, at their level, but no serious person is going to be confusing them with Nobels, no matter of self-promotion by economists notwithstanding.  After all, I've never heard anyone say they aspired to be a respected economist but found the work too difficult and settled for being a world-renowned mathematician or theoretical physicist, although the converse is so commonplace to be cliche (although they usually express it as wanting to do something more practical).  The one exception is Ed Witten, who was an undergraduate history major and then worked on McGovern's presidential campaign before realizing that he would never understand US politics and ended up getting his PhD in physics from Princeton and becoming his generation's Dirac.  

Thus, as Alfred Nobel's great-grandnephew expressed it, the Economics Prize remains "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputations."  Hayek even argued in his acceptance speech that the prize should not exist, saying, "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. ... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."  

Of course, the most hilarious thing is that they literally had to change their rules after John Nash won to specify that the prize was for work in the social sciences.  I guess Nash's work was too mathematical, and the economists were concerned that one day they would no longer be winning their own prize.  Nash, of course, never thought about winning the prize whereas he was pissed off for the rest of his life about not winning a Fields Medal, which in some ways is more prestigious than a Nobel, and it's said it may have contributed to his mental collapse.

Ed Witten, of course, won a Fields Medal, even though he's primarily viewed as a physicist.  Then again, he's not human.

Wow, Randy Really Violates Professional Ethics

Wow, "Randy" Randy Canterbury really violated the professional standards of psychiatry as expressed in the Madrid Declaration on Ethical Standards for Psychiatric Practice.  These standards were adopted by the World Psychiatric Association (granted, their founding president was a torturer for the CIA) in August 1996 so they should have been fresh in his mind.  Among other things, Randy violated the following ethical standards -

3. The patient should be accepted as a partner by right in the therapeutic process. The psychiatrist-patient relationship must be based on mutual trust and respect to allow the patient to make free and informed decisions. It is the duty of psychiatrists to provide the patient with all relevant information so as to empower the patient to come to a rational decision according to personal values and preferences.

5.  When psychiatrists are requested to assess a person, it is their duty first to inform and advise the person being assessed about the purpose of the intervention, the use of the findings, and the possible repercussions of the assessment. This is particularly important when psychiatrists are involved in third party situations.

6.  ... Breach of confidentiality may only be appropriate when required by law (as in obligatory reporting of child abuse) or when serious physical or mental harm to the patient or to a third person would ensue if confidentiality were maintained; whenever possible, psychiatrists should first advise the patient about the action to be taken.

7.  Research that is not conducted in accordance with the canons of science and that is not scientifically valid is unethical.

Bjorn Again

It wasn't until it came up about a year on Pandora that I realized that the "2 Broke Girls' theme was a) an actual song and b) by those Scandinavian guys with the whistling song.

First Wednesdays

The guy in DC Lottery's ubiquitous First Wednesdays ads kind of looks and acts like Chicago/Howard College Bowl legend John Edwards.

Lavender Scare

PBS stations will be showing the excellent "The Lavender Scare" documentary about the federal government's brutal discrimination against gay employees this month for Pride.  It's chilling to see a retired FBI agent proudly recount that he spent the bulk of his 30 year career spying on federal government employees at gay bars in the DC area so that their careers and lives could be ruined for absolutely no purpose.

I can't imagine that people would be so jar-droppingly stupid and thoroughly bigoted as to replicate such colossal stupidity and horrific waste of resources! 

Ethics

When I was in grad school, we had to listen to an annual lecture that was ostensibly on ethics - things like not making up data or running a million regressions and then just cherry picking the few significant results.  It was incredibly painful because everyone knew management was systematically violating the the actual ethical code that we were all required to follow - 

The expression "basic ethical principles" refers to those general judgments that serve as a basic justification for the many particular ethical prescriptions and evaluations of human actions. Three basic principles, among those generally accepted in our cultural tradition, are particularly relevant to the ethics of research involving human subjects: the principles of respect of persons, beneficence and justice. 

1. Respect for Persons. -- Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy.
An autonomous person is an individual capable of deliberation about personal goals and of acting under the direction of such deliberation. To respect autonomy is to give weight to autonomous persons' considered opinions and choices while refraining from obstructing their actions unless they are clearly detrimental to others. To show lack of respect for an autonomous agent is to repudiate that person's considered judgments, to deny an individual the freedom to act on those considered judgments, or to withhold information necessary to make a considered judgment, when there are no compelling reasons to do so. (emphases added)  

Oh well, we all knew that Ewen Cameron had systematically violated the Nuremberg Code (despite having been a psychiatrist at Nuremberg) and that Maitland Baldwin had engaged in and facilitated all manner of heinous torture (despite being a scientific officer and branch chief at NIH), so the thoroughgoing hypocrisy wasn't surprising.

Of course, I've also heard utterly ridiculous defenses of such egregious ethical violations.  I once had someone actually claim that these basic ethical principles only apply to officially designated research studies and that people could safely commit atrocities otherwise, this despite the fact it had been repeatedly stressed that this ethical code was rooted in Kant's notion of the categorical imperative.  Even though this person had probably never read a word of Kant in their life they still felt supremely confident in arguing that the categorical imperative was not categorical!

Where's My Trip to London?

For whatever reason, over the last 25 years people have come to overwhelmingly refer to the South Asian political party as the Indian National Congress, its full name, or INC instead of as the Congress Party.

"Let's Play the Scene!"

I happened to notice James Karen as the LA newscast director on "The China Syndrome" this morning.  I always enjoy seeing him on "Eight Is Enough" as Sacramento newspaper editor Elliot Randolph.  The character has a certain smarmy WASP charm to him.  It's similar to his past-his-prime movie director Wally Bruce auditioning ingenue Naomi Watts for a role in "Mulholland Drive."

The American Religion

Hofstadter devotes much of the first half of his work to explaining how evangelical Christianity provided the basis for American anti-intellectualism.  Of course, some sects took this anti-intellectual impulse to an extreme.

"Lower-class religions are likely to have apocalyptic or millennarian outbursts, to stress the validity of inner religious experience against learned and formalized religion, to simplify liturgical forms, and to reject the idea of a learned clergy, sometimes of any professional clergy whatsoever.

America, having attracted in its early days so many of Europe’s disaffected and disinherited, became the ideal country for the prophets of what was then known to its critics as religious “enthusiasm.” The primary impulse in enthusiasm was the feeling of direct personal access to God. Enthusiasts did not commonly dispense with theological beliefs or with sacraments; but, seeking above all an inner conviction of communion with God, they felt little need either for liturgical expression or for an intellectual foundation for religious conviction."

The Security Apparatus LOVES White Supremacy and Anti-Intellectualism

When I was growing up, people HATED that I liked learning.  They always celebrated the supposed superiority of heartfelt emotion, no matter how bigoted or absurd, and demonized knowledge and expertise.  Hofstadter, in his magisterial Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, quoted extensively from a leader of a similar social movement, Hiram Evans, writing in the 1920s -  

“We are a movement,” Imperial Wizard Evans wrote, "of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock. Our members and leaders are all of this class—the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who hold the leadership, betrayed Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is almost automatic. 

This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack skill in language... 

Every popular movement has suffered from just this handicap... 

The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain.... They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot."

Scientific Rigor Is Wonderful and Cargo Cult Quackery Is Harmful

Fortunately, rigorous scientists such as epidemiologists and ophthalmologists actually do empirical analysis such as a case-control study of children in Minnesota diagnosed with strabismus, specifically my condition intermittent exotropia (IXT) (JAMA Ophthalmology article).  They estimated an odds ratio of 2.7 (95% CI = 1.7, 4.1) for psychiatric conditions for cases and concluded, "Children diagnosed as having IXT, especially males, are more likely to develop mental illness by the third decade of life compared with children without strabismus."  Well, that makes sense because seeing, reading, and learning are so much more difficult thus making it extremely hard to obtain an education, get and keep a job, and have successful relationships.  Once again, the empirical data are in complete agreement, given that among the 63% of males with IXT who had a psychiatric diagnosis the most common conditions were depression and adjustment disorder (interestingly there were no specific cases of BPD reported and only a few personality disorders generally in each group).  Of course, the CIA quack psychiatrists completely messed up even more because they assigned my older sister obsessive compulsive and eating disorders, even though females with IXT actually were significantly LESS likely than controls to have these specific conditions.   

The Most Self-Absorbed Generation

My gullible mother and her bigoted church friends (who spent most of their adult lives gossiping about the social lives of teenagers who weren't even related to them) never comprehended why people were reasonably embarrassed by their profound ignorance and naive bigotry.  It was astounding even for her given that people with common sense being appalled by being forced to associate with such stupidity has traditionally been one of the most common tropes in US history and literature.

For example, Ted Williams, paragon of the Greatest Generation for his military service and ability to hit a baseball, was always embarrassed as a kid that his mother was an evangelist and soldier for the Salvation Army who spent the vast majority of her time trying to save souls on San Diego's skid row.  According to Wikipedia, "Williams resented his mother's long hours working in the Salvation Army,^[8] and Williams and his brother cringed when she took them to the Army's street-corner revivals.^[9]" 

Then again, the protagonist of Dreiser's An American Tragedy had the exact same experience when his poor but devout evangelical parents forced him to join them in their humiliating mission work of distributing tracts and singing hymns in Kansas City's version of the Tenderloin .

"... he seemed more keenly observant than most of the others - appeared indeed to resent and even to suffer from the position in which he found himself....  During all this time Clyde was saying to himself that he did not wish to do this any more, that he and his parents looked foolish and less than normal - "cheap" was the word he would have used if he could have brought himself to express his full measure of resentment at being compelled to participate in this way - and that he would not do it any more if he could help."

Dachau for Sale

The Central Virginia Training Center, formerly the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptic, closed in 2020.  None of the local TV stories I've seen online even mention that it was the site of thousands of medical atrocities committed by the commonwealth of Virginia.  On the other hand, they do not lack for Chamber of Commerce boosterism -

"Our region has a unique opportunity,” said Megan Lucas, CEO of the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance. “We can create a vision for this site that can change the future of our region. It is in our hands.”

“Things are great in Amherst County and they’re getting better,” said Dean Rodgers, county administrator."

Apparently, the commonwealth of Virginia has $25 million to pave the way for business redevelopment but never had money to compensate victims of its medical atrocities.

Well, That's a Complicated Legacy!

Paul Lombardo has a complicated legacy.  On one hand, he's exhaustively researched and publicized the history of medical atrocities in Central Virginia.  On the other hand, he was at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2006 where he directed the Center for Mental Health Law at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and the Program in Law and Medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics.  It was during this time at UVa that I was -

    - beaten and robbed in a stunt involving UVa police and football players such as All-American Anthony Poindexter

    - lured to attend a Med School psychiatry class lecture where Medical Education Dean Randy Canterbury tried to publicly diagnose and shame me with a psychiatric diagnosis that is generally seen in the field as so problematic as to be meaningless and in a manner that was in completely violation of ethical standards for psychiatry

among many other things simply because I was born with strabismus although the diagnosis was never revealed to me at the time.  Was Professor Lombardo complicitous or just ignorant of a similar case of overweening arrogance and medical misconduct at his own institution?  Either way, I'm sure he'll never investigate or publicize these matters. 

Boondoggles and Con Jobs

When I was a really little kid Jack Anderson, who was kind of a thing in the '70s, gave a fireside at my hick Manassas LDS ward explaining how Mesoamerican antiquities somehow "proved" the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.  It was the sort of well-intentioned but profoundly amateurish and inherently racism misinterpretation of indigenous American culture that Alicia Puglionesi masterfully explores in her recent book.

On the other hand, a few years earlier Anderson had properly exposed the massive government waste that was the CIA's Glomar Explorer boondoggle.  DCI William Colby asked him to spike the story because of supposed national security interests, but Anderson said, "Navy experts have told us that the sunken sub contains no real secrets and that the project, therefore, is a waste of the taxpayers' money."

Of course, Anderson's analysis was completely corroborated by Blind Man's Bluff, the definitive work on submarine espionage during the Cold War. 

Pardon Me

It turns out I kind of knew a kid growing up who ending up getting a pardon on Trump's last full day in office.  Good for him.  He got busted in college for selling acid.  Given that the CIA introduced and promoted LSD in this country, it really doesn't seem like a big deal.

Of course, my being aware of the inherent racism and deception of the LDS church was the real problem though. 

Far from the Top

When I was 12 or 13, I had to put up with a church teacher who was openly bigoted named Brent LaMar Top.  He used to make fun of the Community of Christ for having the courage to modify their succession procedures even though they had infinitely better claims to Mormon succession than the Brighamites in Utah.  He also said that they might as well just become a Protestant church after having repudiated offensive elements of Mormon tradition such as the profound racism of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, I was chastised for reasonably asking why the LDS church was mindlessly following seniority in selecting an avowed white supremacist who openly and falsely claimed that the US civil rights movement was a Community conspiracy.  The Southern Poverty Law Center properly condemned these views as "vicous and racist."  That leader then made emphasizing the profoundly racist Book of Mormon the focus of his church presidency before the church dishonestly tried to conceal his incapacitation.  

The bigoted teacher guy also mocked Fawn McKay Brodie while somehow claiming that supposed prophets, seers, and revelators being quick to believe and suppress any claim about their founder's actions no matter how bizarre or fraudulent as demonstrated by the Salamander Letter wasn't a problem.  He thought it perfectly reasonable that his wife's parents weren't allowed by the church to attend their wedding but was dismayed that the people of a developed country such as Denmark with a functional educational and social welfare system had little interest in a 19th century racist text being peddled by an uneducated teenager fresh off the boat from Idaho.  He eventually went on to teach in the religion department at BYU where he wrote on such rigorous topics as accounts of near-death experiences being used to justify LDS beliefs, but even active devout members have always been embarrassed by the lack of rigor and actual knowledge in that non-academic department.   

Oh, and this guy forced twelve year-olds to go out and solicit money for this discredited organization.  For shame!

Dr. Pepper

There was this guy named Murphy Pepper from Alexandria in my first year suite at UVa who was an obvious plant.  His father was a psychiatrist, so he must have worked for the CIA because they like cargo cult stuff like polygraphs and mind control that they think is scientific even though it obviously isn't or even useful.  He was really dumb, spending his time listening to derivative gangsta rap, playing video games, and eventually going to a Christian fellowship group.  It was obvious that he wasn't really an Echols Scholar, let alone a National Merit Scholar, and even with the incredibly low standards for in-state students at the time probably wouldn't have gotten into UVa otherwise.  He ended up in the Comm School and now works doing real estate titles.

Memorial Day

Raymond Hudlow was forcibly sterilized by the commonwealth of Virginia without anesthesia at the age of 17 for running away from an abusive home.  A year and a half later, he was discharged from the state farm for the feebleminded and drafted into the Army where he landed on the beaches at Normandy and won Bronze and Silver Stars and a Purple Heart.  He ended up serving over 20 years in the Army and Air Force.  He later said that he had more flashbacks to his torture in Central Virginia than he did to combat or imprisonment in a German POW camp.  

"They treated us just like hogs, like we had no feelings."

Chaz

I sometimes watch old "Flipping Out" episodes even though the lead guy is a jerk.  There are some seasons where they do some work for Chaz Dean, who may be even more annoying in his own way.  I vaguely recall him constantly being on an infomercial, perhaps with Alyssa Milano, about 15 years for his Wen line of hair care products.  The supposed main advantage was that the shampoo didn't lather, which doesn't seem like a great thing.  Tens of thousands of people also complained that it caused their hair to fall out, which certainly seems like a bad thing, and led to a big class-action settlement.

Central Virginia, Epicenter of Medical Atrocities

I guess Central Virginia has always attracted horrific violators of medical ethics.  Eventually, defenders of civil liberties such as the ACLU and actual legal scholars expose these atrocities.

Randy Can't Diagnose

I was once lured into attending a psychiatry med school class when I was at U.Va.  Randolph Canterbury delivered a bizarre lecture that included an unrelated anecdote about his having recently been assaulted by a prostitute in Amsterdam and his supposedly having walking pneumonia and being offered a cough drop by my med student friend who had invited me there.  He then started talking about borderline personality disorder and how a sure sign was his female patients telling him that was he the greatest physician ever, which was by far the most implausible element of his nonsensical remarks.  Anyway, I didn't really understand the point of the proceedings or even his explanation of BPD, but it turns out I'm not alone because apparently no one has ever agreed on its definition or what it's supposed to represent.  From the New Yorker:

B.P.D.’s nebulous nature is encoded in its name. The concept is generally attributed to the psychoanalyst Adolph Stern, who used it in 1937 to describe patients who were neither neurotic nor psychotic and thus “borderline.” The committee charged with designing measures for personality disorders for the DSM-III discussed its confusing status when debating its inclusion. Some members noted that key symptoms such as identity disturbance, outbursts of anger, and unstable interpersonal relations also featured in narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders. During the internal deliberations, Donald Klein, then a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, complained that “every conceivable variety of character disorder has been described as borderline at one time or another.” In “Personality Disorders: A Short History of Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial, and Other Types” (2023), Allan Horwitz, the medical sociologist, asks why the DSM still treats B.P.D. as a disorder of personality rather than of mood. “Its trademark indicator—emotional dysregulation—is virtually the opposite of the rigidity that characterizes a PD,” he writes.

Then again, a director of the National Institute of Mental Health (the NIH institute that employed sociopath Maitland Baldwin) has characterized the DSM, psychiatry's major diagnostic reference and tool, as an "absolute scientific nightmare."  And the major organization for BPD has advocated for changing the name of the condition to something comprehensible such as emotional regulation disorder on the grounds that "the name BPD is confusing, imparts no relevant or descriptive information, and reinforces existing stigma."

The Times Sure Have Changed

According to Paul Lombardo's masterful examination of medical atrocities in Central Virginia, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, apparently there was a time when religious figures in Charlottesville opposed rather than participated in egregious violations of medical ethics -

Not every [person] of the cloth embraced eugenics.  An Episcopal pastor in Charlottesville, Virginia, ventured up to the gates of Jefferson's home at Monticello, where in a grand gesture of protest he burned his robe and his prayer book.  He denounced his church for turning its back on the poor and "wasting time on eugenics."    

Ethics

It's reasonable to ask how NIH could have so egregiously violated the Nuremberg Code and compromised its credibility in facilitating the quack torture of Ewen Cameron at McGill?  One answer lies in the excessively cozy relationship with and scientific prejudices of the responsible NIH official who helped champion the atrocities.  Maitland Baldwin, like Cameron, had studied under Donald Hebb, obtaining an M.S. from McGill in 1952.  In 1955, Baldwin was approached by the CIA with results from a sensory deprivation test in which an Army volunteer had been reduced to "crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion" after 40 hours in a small isolation box.  Rather than being appalled by this outcome, Baldwin was thrilled, replying that "the isolation technique could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed."

  

Baldwin and the CIA soon learned that Cameron had gone far beyond the work of Hebb and was administering massive amounts of electroshock, placing patients in medically-induced comas for weeks or months at a time, and feeding them a steady regimen of LSD and other mind-altering drugs as part of his program of "depatterning" to supposedly eliminate harmful thought processes.  And though he like many others demonstrated that torture in sufficient quantities can break down anyone physically and mentally he never had the slightest success in reprogramming patients to produce more beneficial thoughts and behaviors, although it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.  As part of his regime of "psychic driving," patients were forced to listen to the same recorded messages thousands of times while profoundly medicated or sensory deprived.  The reality is that Cameron's experiments only tortured and traumatized people seeking treatment for relatively minor psychological issues such as mild postpartum depression to the extent that many no longer functioned for the rest of their lives.  

Of course, torture was of great interest to the Agency, going back to their employment of literal Nazis in secret prisons in West Germany following World War II, so Baldwin was dispatched to Montreal to persuade Cameron to apply for funding, which was swiftly provided.  

As for Baldwin, he apparently received CIA MKUltra funding himself not just for work on sensory deprivation but also ESP and radio frequency energy, which he claimed had "been found to effect reversible neurological changes in chimpanzees."  He even supposedly worked to remove a chimpanzee's head and reattach it on another chimp in a project that was of course called Operation Resurrection.  Then again, he probably did a great job filling out his timecard.  Nazis are always very meticulous about documenting their atrocities.