I hope she is convicted

Who can imagine that simple justice for the brutal murders of three children by their mother is less important than feminism or the opportunity to blame bad drugs and bad medical practice? I can't.

The eldest, Cora, was five when her mom strangled her. I remember being five. I knew my mother and my extended family. I communicated with them, trusted them all, and understood many things about my world along with them. Cora probably wanted to be like her mother. I doubt that she understood what was happening as she died in pain. To whatever degree she did understand, that must have made it worse.

Cora's younger brother Dawson was three when his mother put the cord around his neck. Maybe he first thought it was a game or some sort of odd caress, but then it was excruciating. And Callan, the baby, was eight months old. He was probably sitting up, maybe crawling a bit, focusing with big eyes, holding on to his mom, dad, brother and sister with chubby hands, trying to talk.

Many people I know would love to make an example of psychiatry: despite good insurance coverage, the "treatment" provided to these kids' mom was over-the-top terrible; psychiatrists quite literally turned her into an insane child killer with their drugs and their dehumanization, and she had never been evil until she was in their hands.

Some good friends argued around my dinner table earlier this week about how tragic it is that the trad-mom movement (the term is almost brand new to me, I had read it before but never heard it spoken) among younger conservative or evangelical women is just ruining all the progress brought by many decades of feminism.

I'd probably trade all feminist achievements and all public recognition of the truth about psychiatry to bring back three kids whom I never met.

Shake, Rattle & Roll (Unfit to Stand Trial at EMHC)

I have long suspected that many "patients" at EMHC who are supposedly there for "treatment" to make them fit to stand trial already are fit to stand trial. The taxpayers in Illinois are paying $1000/day/patient for "treatment" which is unnecessary and unwanted.

I was contacted recently by a patient (I'll call her Hortense) on Hinton Unit at EMHC, who gave me a confused story about family, various "doctors" (psychs), court personnel, police, and innocent bystanders. As best I can tell the short version is: she was mid-divorce (not her choice) and somebody decided the strategy against her should be to get her locked up as unfit, which might work just long enough to create an advantage. Meanwhile, Hortense managed to get charged with domestic battery and violation of an order of protection, which were not serious crimes in the circumstances, but enough to get her sold into psychiatric slavery for the time being.

Enter the slave overseers: Dr. Jehanzeb Sheikh ("Shake"), Dr. James Finn ("Rattle") and social worker Vita Robinson ("Roll"), respectively the psychiatrist, psychologist, and case worker on Hortense's "treatment" team. All three are on IDHS' payroll. Shake makes over $300,000, Rattle and Roll are also into the taxpayers for six figures each. One might think these guys were among the best at EMHC. But somehow, they are happy to prove their complete inability or unwillingness to simply do the job they're paid to do, which in this case is to get Hortense fit for trial.

I've attended two staffings for this "patient", and done my best to emphasize there are few specific components of fitness under Illinois statutes: a) the accused must understand the charges against her, the proceedings in court, consequences of a plea, judgment or sentence, and the functions of participants at trial; b) the accused must be able to observe, recollect and relate occurrences concerning alleged incidents, and able to communicate with her legal counsel; and c) the accused must be able to behave socially, remain oriented to time and place, recognize persons, places and things, and perform motor processes.

The short form of this is: you're fit if you can understand your legal situation and work with your attorney in your own defense. There is a written test for understanding the legal situation. Ability to work with counsel is more in the eye of the beholder. 

I can work with almost anyone no matter how crazy they are, or at least I like to think so. But some lawyers will only work with clients they like, or those who do exactly as they are told. Hortense has recently found it problematic to work with one or more attorneys, and she may not have financial resources to pay (or time to search) for one who is perfect for her. I knew one "UST" patient at EMHC who became his own crackerjack jailhouse lawyer fairly early in his confinement, yet he was held as unfit for at least a decade and a half. The EMHC overseers can probably keep anyone enslaved as "unfit" for more or less as long as they like, enabling her to be gotten rid of in the divorce. If the wrong people in the system don't like you or fear you, they'll say you're unfit, and they'll be believed.

Hortense is very well aware of her situation. She has repeatedly asked Rattle (the psychologist) to give her the written test to at least establish the first component of fitness. Rattle arrogantly told her this morning, "I can test you whenever I feel like it," which translates to, "I'll keep you here forever if you don't take Shake's drugs and convincingly swear allegiance to the mental health orthodoxy." Roll (social worker) continuously puts false reports in the (so-called) "chart" to turn everyone in court against Hortense and keep her enslaved.

If she doesn't get out of EMHC pretty quick, her chances for a decent life and any future relationship with her family will crash. Shake, Rattle & Roll! I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know.

Psychiatry destroys families, that's one of its main functions.

Hiroshima, Cannae and Troy

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is about an end of civilization brought on by the Greeks' violation of their gods' golden rule; but no simple "anti-MAGA" interpretation respects history, it only offends the gods anew. Homer probably believed Agamemnon's expedition was ruinous from its inception and Odysseus' trick with the horse-gift was ignoble; but no strategy to foreswear deception will redeem humanity, and treating others as you would be treated will never apply to enemies in war.

The sack of Troy was roughly a thousand years before the battle of Cannae, and roughly three thousand years before Hiroshima. But destructive war was frequent or almost continuous between and since those events, even as the hope was frequent or almost continuous, that humanity could someday, somehow, rise above such insanity. The lesson Homer offers is that people haven't changed and won't change. They think, feel, and behave exactly as they always have.

Against this enduring reality, we Westerners have recently settled upon what we call science, and a portion of it that we call medicine, as our best shot. Occasionally we are so enamored as to imagine that because of modern breakthroughs we are no longer kin to the king of Ithaca and his long-suffering bride, that we will never have to be slaughtered on a sweltering, stinking field, and that we ourselves did not and would not fly that airplane to Japan and incinerate all those people.

When we read about Achilles' rage at Patroclus' death and the golden urn containing their mixed ashes, or Penelope's proof that Odysseus was her returned husband by his simple knowledge of their great rooted bridal bed, Homer shows us we are progeny of the ancient people even as surely as we remember our own mothers and fathers. 

Our supposed upward progress from the horror of Cannae is belied by eerily comparable gore at Jonestown, Benedict Canyon, and Milwaukee. My father-in-law stood in radioactive dust on the outskirts of Nagasaki in August, 1945. He was 21 years old. Fifty years later I stood with my pre-teen children gazing across the beautiful graveyard above Omaha Beach. My youngest asked me, "Dad, who killed all these people?"

And then we encounter... psychiatry. It is a relatively recent endeavor that causes insanity, manufactures criminals and encourages war: the most destructive idea since the Inquisition, the cruelest system since chattel slavery, under a truly sick guise of "medicine".

We desperately hope the world isn't worse than ever before in history, but it's not much better. We are not saved.

I don't ask who is mentally ill, or for whom the bell tolls. 

Cannae and Hiroshima

Eighty-one years ago today on August 6, 1945, a nice man from Ohio named Paul Tibbets flew an airplane named after his mom to Japan to kill 70,000 people at 8:15 AM, with a single weapon named Little Boy.

An oddly comparable apocalypse had been perpetrated almost exactly 2,161 years earlier. On August 2, 216 BCE, 50-60 thousand Romans lay dead or dying in pools of their own blood, vomit and feces at Cannae. The Romans were killed in more intimate and terrible ways (limbs hacked off, faces, chests and abdomens punctured and mangled) over a more extended period of a few hours, rather than instantaneously vaporized like the citizens of Hiroshima.

These two horrible events, which if we would remember anniversaries should be observed together in the first week of every August, had similar impacts on the societies which lived through them.

Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Harper Perennial, 1996), is a startling book. I offered it to my father-in-law, who had been a 19-year-old American soldier trained to pilot Higgins boats to the beaches for thirteen Pacific landings, and who would have been ordered to storm mainland Japan in a deadly first wave if Truman had decided not to use the atom bomb to end World War II. Hypothetically but for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bob might never have survived the war, my wife would never have been born, and my children and grandchildren would not exist. I'll never forget Bob's perspective on the Lifton book. He very rarely spoke about the war, but he said Lifton was right, Paul Tibbets never had to drop that bomb: the USA, Truman, et al., were probably guilty of a transcendently immoral act that just incidentally saved his own life. 

At the same time, he said when societies fail to avert destructive wars, any and every terrible weapon simply will be deployed. No other morality exists. If Abraham Lincoln had been in possession of a nuke in 1863, he definitely would have used it against Richmond! Lincoln could only afford his wonderful "malice toward none and charity for all... to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who (had) borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan..." in 1865. That was after "every drop of blood drawn by the lash (was) paid by another drawn with the sword." That's the only way it ever works.

In The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell (Random House, 2011) a renowned military historian meticulously narrates one of the most famous battles in the history of Western civilization. My daughter was a classics major who wrote a fascinating thesis about Roman society, but coincidentally developed great admiration for Hannibal Barca during her studies. The Carthaginian commander was fatally wrong about the nature of Roman power, and his inability to separate the alliances ultimately brought the slaughter of his own people and such destruction of his once-great home city as can compare with the atomic obliterations in Japan many centuries later.

The impact of Cannae on the Roman psyche was analogous to the impact of Hiroshima in America. The handful of Roman survivors of the battle were shamed and banished to Sicily. Those disgraced remnants became a nucleus for a future army, but the spectre of Cannae haunted everyone. No matter how all-powerful Rome was later, she remained instinctively afraid, she always expected the empire's fall, and she always knew that it must deserve to fall. The Republic went into full panic after its catastrophic defeat in 216. The Senate appointed a dictator, began drafting young boys, criminals and slaves to fill the ranks of the legions for the existential crisis, and even banned public mourning for those 20% of military-age Roman men whose bodies were rotting in the southern Italian field. 

Perhaps Rome only became a brutal empire as a reaction to its chronic nightmare of another Cannae. Maybe if not for that nightmare the Republic could have survived. Perhaps the USA was similarly harmed by the unspeakable flight of the Enola Gay. 

It seems to be the same whether you are victor, vanquished, or both: when so much is destroyed and you were there, you think it must somehow have been at least partly your fault. It changes you toward a darker future.

That darker future often brings desperate solutions. E.g., "psychedelic assisted therapies" or psychiatry itself, little manipulations of the brain to "improve" human cognition, emotion and behavior which only cause more harm and make people crazier than ever.

We need to pay better attention, and solve this.