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.

The Security Apparatus Loves White Supremacy

My parent's "dream location" for retirement recently voted to rename public schools for traitors who fought to defend white supremacy and human enslavement. I'm sure those kinds of sentiments as well as the opportunity to destroy the environment and public health by needlessly mowing acres of lawn and driving miles and miles to get to anywhere were big draws for them. After all, they spent the vast majority of their waking time as adults either devoting hours and hours a week in supporting a white supremacist organization or spending hours and hours a week in destroying the environment by commuting from the middle of nowhere.