"The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II..."

"... according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal."

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals....

“Realistically looking back, the diagnosis didn’t really matter—it was the behaviors,” says psychiatrist Max Fink, 90, who ran a ward in a Kentucky Army hospital in the mid-1940s. He says veterans who couldn’t be controlled through any other technique would sometimes be referred for a lobotomy. I didn’t think we knew enough to pick people for lobotomies or not.... It’s just that we didn’t have anything else to do for them.”

In a standard lobotomy, the surgeon opens the skull and severs the prefrontal part of the brain from the rest of the brain.

Much more at the link. It seems that the government was looking mostly at men with what today we would call PTSD and taking advantage of a way to control intractable people. I'd like to see more details on how this related to homosexuals. Presumably, as Fink said "it was the behaviors." This was back in the days before Thorazine, so it's hard for us today to picture what these doctors were seeing.

During eight years as a patient in the VA hospital in Tomah, Wis., [Roman] Tritz underwent 28 rounds of electroshock therapy, a common treatment that sometimes caused convulsions so jarring they broke patients’ bones. Medical records show that Mr. Tritz received another routine VA treatment: insulin-induced temporary comas, which were thought to relieve symptoms

To stimulate patients’ nerves, hospital staff also commonly sprayed veterans with powerful jets of alternating hot and cold water, the archives show. Mr. Tritz received 66 treatments of high-pressure water sprays called the Scotch Douche and Needle Shower, his medical records say....

“You couldn’t help but have the feeling that the medical community was impotent at that point,” says Elliot Valenstein, 89, a World War II veteran and psychiatrist who worked at the Topeka, Kan., VA hospital in the early 1950s. He recalls wards full of soldiers haunted by nightmares and flashbacks. The doctors, he says, “were prone to try anything.”

My mother, who is no longer alive, was a WAC who worked in wards like this in the 1940s, but I never heard her say anything about the treatments, only very general things about how the men suffered.

"Mandela Interpreter Says He Was Hallucinating/Says He Entered Altered State As He Took His Place on Stage."

That might excuse him, but it does not excuse whoever did the security check.

Thamsanqa Jantjie said... that as he took the stage within arms' length of Mr. Obama and other leaders at a memorial in a Johannesburg soccer stadium on Tuesday, he slipped into an altered state. He said he saw angels coming into the stadium.

"I don't know the attack of this problem, how will it come... Sometimes I get violent on that place. Sometimes I will see things chasing me."

The neverending cruise, promoted as the "world's first floating city."

It's the Freedom Ship, a name that does not work on me. It telegraphs imprisonment.

And I love that it uses the roof for an airport and landing strip on the top level, so the 50,000 residents — instead of having a place to experience sunlight and sky — can feel and hear jets landing and taking off.

The benefits of ocean occupation would involve brand new schools, hospitals, businesses, parks, promenades, landscaping, public art and saltwater aquariums.

What's the law enforcement? Will that be experimental too?

"This will be a very heavily capitalised project and the global economy in the last few years hasn't been too inviting for unproven progressive projects like ours. Happily, though it has experienced a hiatus, the Freedom Ship now looks as if it is a live project again. In the last six months we're getting more interest in the project and we are hopeful we will raise the $1 billion to begin construction."

Looks as if... as if...

It looks as if this is a project for bilking billionaires getting articles written about nonsensical boyish fantasies.

I know. I shouldn't give these clowns attention. But I just hate cruises.

A friend "remembers occasionally going to watch a movie with [Adam] Lanza after a dance marathon and chatting with him about current events and chimpanzees."

The inane/absurd search for meaning in the mind of a lost and now-hated soul.

"Movember as microaggression... characterized by too many moustaches, overarching shows of masculinity, and a general overload of testosterone."

"The pure and charitable sentiment is there – raising money for prostate and testicular cancer research, and fighting mental health problems among men – but what once started out as a harmless campaign has become sexist, racist, transphobic, and misinformed."

The idea of suggesting that men show solidarity with each other by growing moustaches is completely absurd....

[Blogger Jem] Bloomfield... remarks that, “This campaign, intended as a project by men for men, has immediately been turned into a pretext for demanding that women submit themselves and their bodies to male approval.... I don’t want to be told that a moustache makes me a man, or that my identity depends upon shaming women into being presentable to the male gaze.”

"Completely absurd" is a great phrase here. Who knew mustaches were such a problem beyond the mere aesthetics of a given man's face?

Normally, we admire actors whose performance looks like real life. But if it's actually real...

... and we're being scammed into thinking it's acting, there's no performance that can impress us, only the illusion of performance.

Once you know it's real, you can't admire the acting. You could admire the nerve of the performers to go through the ordeal, but only if they chose to do it that way. Were they paid enough? Did they willingly submit to whatever surprises the filmmaker had in store for them? Did they know there were limits to what would be imposed on them? What power did they have to draw the line?

What if you knew that the actress in a rape scene had no idea what the scene would be and a willing actor was directed to rape her on the set? Assume that afterwards, she was convinced that it worked to produce what looks like a great acting performance, for which she might receive an Oscar, and she was persuaded to keep the director's methodology secret. But the truth slipped out somehow. Would you refuse to see the movie because of the way it was made? If others chose to see it, would you denounce them as moral cretins?

Related questions:

What did Alfred Hitchcock do to Tippi Hedren to produce the footage that became the movie "The Birds"?

Should an actor get drunk to play drunk?

Do we prefer to watch love scenes with actors who really love each other or actors who have to act like they love someone they hate?

Did Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fall in love because they got so deeply into the roles they were playing in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and never found their way back to their previous personas?

If an actor stays in character for months — on set and off — is that acting or something like madness?

Are very young children playing movie roles undeserving of acting credit because their performances arise out of their childish inability to distinguish fantasy from reality?

What do they say to little child actors to make them cry and emote?  

Were animals harmed in the making of that movie?

"After she ran him down, she gunned it, and she just went screaming down Pennsylvania Avenue."

"They were busy calling on their phones, on the radios. It was like poking a hornet nest. There were guys everywhere. I didn’t see anyone with their guns out, but they were sure busy."

What was this all about? The woman is dead. Will we never know?

A young child was found in the car, the authorities said. It was not clear whether the woman was armed when the authorities fired on her.

“We have no information that this is related to terrorism or is anything other than an isolated incident,” Chief Dine said.

Here's what I thought when I heard about it: There's all this heated rhetoric around the shutdown. That's American politics, and we have freedom of speech. But there are always human beings out of balance. They hear what they hear and who knows how it sounds to them? It feels like a war or like existential desperation. We can't shut up just because there are people out there with distorted thinking, but let's contemplate what it takes for those of us who are sane to behave with good character.

ADDED: To those in power, here's a word: demagoguery. Stop it. Let's see some maturity. 

Where are the calls for scissors, bottle, and bicycle-pump control?

"An emotionally disturbed man wielding scissors stabbed or slashed at least five people, including a father and his toddler, in a park along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side early Tuesday, according to the police."

Meanwhile, last Friday, in another Upper West Side park, "a man approached [a] woman as she was pushing her 8-month-old baby in a stroller. The attacker had a broken bottle and grabbed the woman but she fought back and hit him several times with a bicycle air pump, the police said. The mother and her child escaped unharmed. There has been no arrest in the case."

If you are a gun-control advocate, I know your response to my snark: No one died in either of these incidents. If the emotionally disturbed man had had a gun, the 5 victims might be dead, and if the mother with the stroller had had a gun the broken-bottle man might have died or if broken-bottle man had had a gun then she and the baby might have died.

Isn't this the city of your dreams — a kinder, gentler place where everyone is armed only with household objects, objects with manifold peaceful uses, and not those terrible guns, objects designed only to kill?

"An ultra low frequency attack is what I’ve been subject to for the last three months..."

"... and to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this."

"Naval Yard Gunman Is Said to Have Had Mental Ills for a Decade."

"[Aaron] Alexis, according to a report filed by an officer with the Newport Police Department in Rhode Island, was suffering from hallucinations so serious that he had called the police last month, a police official said."

Mr. Alexis told them that he had gotten into an argument with someone at an airport in Virginia. He said the person he had argued with “had sent three people to follow him and to keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations to his body” via a microwave machine, according to the police report.

Mr. Alexis had moved to three different hotels in a single night to elude strange voices and people he believed were sending the microwave vibrations. At a hotel at a nearby naval base, Mr. Alexis told the police that he had heard “voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling,” Lt. Fitzgerald said.

ADDED: My God, can't we help these people? Even if only for the sake of their potential victims, we should help them, but aside from that: Help them!

I was going to send you to this piece about a fashion designer "pushing" women "into a trap" or "a prehistoric exoskeleton."

It's Robin Givhan expatiating about Thom Browne. She seems to be going overboard.  But then I clicked through to the first picture in the slide show and I'm frozen in horror. Please look at that picture first.

Okay, now, I've settled down, and I think that picture is funny. I'm amused. I can go on with the slideshow. It's quite amazing!

I like this one too. Not as something that could be worn in a real person's life, but as theater. And this.

And — isn't it just perfect? — when the artist emerges, he's a man in shorts!

Back to Givhan. Would you like the job of describing this stuff in a world that has photography? Givhan develops a theme about the literary tradition of portraying women as crazy. It's an old feminist theme. "The Madwoman in the Attic." Were you ever trapped into reading that? Anyway, what does that have to do with Thom Browne?

Browne is not a feminist scholar nor an academic of any sort, but his fashion told a lucid and thoughtful story about constraints, social expectations, and cultural prejudices....

... Browne’s intricate, high-minded gestures served as an invigorating reminder that fashion has the potential to tell stories and raise fundamental questions about how we live our lives. 

After all that, Givhan comes to rest on the same idea anyone flipping through the slide show:

One only wished that Browne had allowed his audience to see more clearly, if only for a moment, something fundamental to a fashion show: What he proposes women wear.

I thought the fashion cognoscenti were aloof from the proletarian question: Who can wear that? When the artist goes this far, it's gauche to ask.

"12 Personal Finance Lessons, Broken Down, In Woody Allen's 'Blue Jasmine.'"

A nicely done piece in Forbes, which I arrived at after Googling "blue jasmine is a movie about handbags," because that's what I said at the end of the closing credits: "That movie was about handbags." In the middle of the movie, I nudged Meade and said: "I've never seen a movie with so many women so attached to their handbags."

The 2 main female characters were constantly carrying around big handbags. One of them was dancing at a party with a big, clunky bag hanging from her shoulder. There was a scene where the 2 women carried big bags while buying a smaller bag, and yet they continued to carry big bags after that. We saw the main character — Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett — dig in her bag for money, throw her bag on a sofa in a tantrum, accidentally dump the contents of the bag on the street in a moment of hysteria.

That darned bag — Hermes — should get a nomination for Best Performance in a Supporting Role.

But importantly — spoiler alert — when Jasmine leaves the apartment in the final scene, after she takes the shower, she walks out to go wandering the streets talking to herself, she has no handbag. That's how you know she's really crazy now. She was pretty much crazy from the first scene, but she had her handbag every step of the way. And now: No handbag!

"Antoinette Tuff Had Empathy for the Georgia School Gunman. We Can Learn a Lot From Her."

Writes Dahlia Lithwick.

In her first interview after the standoff, Tuff mentions that in the initial terrible moments she thought about a sermon series on “anchoring” that her pastor had been preaching, and it helped her to see that Hill was bereaved and in pain, and she was praying for him. I don’t know anything about anchoring, but I know I want to learn. Tuff’s compassion and her ability to see herself in her assailant (and him in her) might be as useful a way to think about school violence as any other I’ve seen. In the course of a few days, Tuff proved that the national debate doesn’t have to be about “bad” guys and “tough” guys (or even just “guys” at all). This doesn’t have to be about lose-lose split-second decisions or the simplification of complicated situations for political gain. She shows that this debate is about ongoing, years-in-the-making problems: isolation and loneliness, medical failures, depression, and the allure of being a copycat in a culture that celebrates violence. She shows that polarizing debates about bad guys and good guys in the heat of battle are both fatuous and pointless.

Much more here, with details about the hour-long interview Anderson Cooper did with Tuff last night. I highly recommend that. You'll see that Tuff is very strongly grounded in religion — more than Lithwick seems to want to talk about. I don't think religion is essential to developing the kind of skill that Tuff displayed, but it is most certainly Tuff's own understanding of why she was able to do what she did, as she continually returned to statements like "God gives us a purpose in life" and "God has a way of showing you what's really in you."

"One of the reasons I love living in New York is that no one gives a shit about celebrities."

"Susan Sarandon comes to your deli, Lou Reed's in your kickboxing class, David Mamet flips you off, whatever, most New Yorkers really don't care."

A stray line from an article that's basically about "7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider's Perspective)."

Personally, I don't care about celebrities, but somehow I care that Lou Reed is kickboxing.

Michael Tomasky thinks the idea of impeaching Obama is "industrial-strength insane," which is why the GOP will try to do it.

Because they are industrial-strength insane.

I love the way it's his idea that he's calling insane, and he's so sure other people are insane. Isn't that kind of... insane?

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office. I get all this, and I agree with you.

Why do people say "logic" when they are obviously not talking about logic? He's talking about what the facts are, how to characterize the facts, and what the standard for impeachment is. None of that is pinned down. We always only have evidence of what the facts are, and currently we don't even have all the evidence of the facts. Whether the facts say "tragedy" and "confusion" and "mistakes" or something more nefarious hasn't been resolved. And the standard for impeachment has never been resolved.

"Wausau woman finalist in potato chip flavor contest."

"[Karen] Weber's cheesy garlic bread is head-to-head against two other flavors: Sriracha hot sauce and chicken and waffles."

First prize is $1 million, which Weber says she'll spend on her children's education and maybe a new used car and shoes. She's "too middle class to really go crazy." It is a little crazy to want potato chips to taste like bread, but since chips that taste like waffles is also a finalist, who's to say what's really crazy?

"Man who died in blast lived in foil-wrapped home, filmed neighbors."

"... About 5:45 p.m. Sunday, Costa Mesa police were called to Harris’ home for a report of a man down. When they got there, Harris got up and went back inside. He told police he was fine, and he was wearing a hat that said in effect, 'I don’t need any help,' said Sgt. Jerry Hildeman."

"Terrorists want large, splashy attacks on specific sorts of targets that have high emotional resonance..."

"... for both the victims and the people on your side who you hope to recruit, or tap for money.  This helps explain why Al Qaeda was so obsessed with the Twin Towers, a place that — until they fell — most New Yorkers regarded as a rather ugly landmark containing some so-so office space.  To a terrorist group looking for publicity, on the other hand, it had immense symbolic value: the tallest building in America's biggest city, with the hubristic name of 'World Trade Center.' That's why we don't get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad [sic] has ever heard of.  When attacks on those places happen, they tend to be the provenance of local lunatics for whom the nearby mall, or primary school, has some immense symbolic emotional importance."

Says Megan McArdle. This reasoning suggests that if only we'd avoid prideful spectacles we could deflect the Qaeda crowd. But there will always be local lunatics, and it's impossible to avoid all the tiny targets like schools and shops that every town has....

Adam Lanza was bullied while he attended Sandy Hook Elementary and his mother Nancy considered suing the school for turning a blind eye to the abuse, an unnamed Lanza family member told the New York Daily News.

“Adam would come home with bruises all over his body,” the relative told the Daily News. “His mom would ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say anything. He would just sit there.”

Know your local lunatics. And for God's sake don't torment them. Don't create them out of whatever raw material you find around. Here's a pressure cooker. What can we put in it?

Now, these local lunatics tend to show their faces. It's a showdown. They die or get captured quickly. We know who did it.

On 9/11, every building I saw seemed shockingly vulnerable. I wondered if all buildings would come down. How deceptively solid these things seem, but there are people in the world who would destroy everything anybody builds. And yet so many buildings have remained standing all these years. I didn't think it would work out this well. Terrorists in my town bombed a minor spectacle of a building 40 years ago, but since 9/11, the building have held up.

After 9/11, I obsessed about what the terrorists would do next and, naturally, I thought of the things that would hit me and the people I knew. I pictured a day when 100 suicide bombers, one by one, in 100 different college towns stepped into a crowded café or movie theater or sports event and blew up. But that never happened. McArdle's theory suggests why. That's local-lunatic level. Too lowly for the Qaeda-type brand.

But is a crowd waiting at the finish line of the Boston Marathon such a spectacle? Are crappy pressure-cooker bombs the mark of a prideful organization that once commandeered 4 jet planes and piloted 3 of them into major landmarks?

We don't yet know who the Boston bomber is or even whether it's bomber or bombers. Using McArdle's reasoning, one wonders who fixates on the Boston Marathon. Do the people in Abbottabad care about our lengthy footraces? And why target the spectators? Or was the first bomb, planted in the spectators, supposed to make the runners run toward the second bomb? That's an evil trick, but hardly anything that seen from the other side of the globe could look like glory.

Have you seen "Room 237" — the movie about what people think about the movie "The Shining"?

It was released for streaming — watch it here — at the same time that it opened in theaters. We watched last night. It will be quite fun for you, I think, if you've seen the movie "The Shining" — even if you're not obsessed with the movie — if you're interested in the way a work of art can draw people in and open up the doors of perception. With the revered genius director Kubrick cramming visual details in every shot, a viewer's mind can run wild with theories. The viewers' response to the movie parallels the Jack Nicholson character's response to the hotel. How crazy are these people? What do those cans of Calumet Baking Powder really mean?



Was Kubrick deliberately nudging you to think that the movie is really about the genocide of the Native Americans? Start looking for the other clues. It's amazing. It's a maze. You could get lost in there.

Was Kubrick trying to drive Stephen King crazy, like by making Jack's Volkswagen Beetle yellow instead of red and then later showing a crushed red Beetle under that semi in the snow?

Kubrick does these dissolves between scenes that have some interesting superimposed images — liked the peaked hotel roof and the ladder in the lobby — and the movie has several instances of characters walking backward — Shelley Duvall retreating up the stairs and swinging a baseball bat at Jack and the little boy retracing his steps in the snow to escape — and there's the backwards writing — "redrum" — so maybe Kubrick would like us to project the movie backwards and forwards simultaneously on one screen? Think what you could learn! All the secrets!

Well, I learned that Kubrick likes symmetry and puts things smack in the middle of the screen, which increases the likelihood of interesting combinations if you project backwards over forwards, but these people who obsess about the movie think Kubrick was trying to say something important. And what a coincidence! The message is about that person's central obsession — the slaughter of the Indians, the Holocaust, sex... 

Secret recording of Mitch McConnell strategy session about how to go after Ashley Judd.

David Corn at Mother Jones has lots of audio clips and transcript, but he doesn't tell us who made the tape and gave it to him. Surveillance on a political campaign? If that's not bad, should we revise our opinion about the Watergate burglary?

Corn would like us to think he's got material that's quite nefarious, because "McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views." But doesn't every campaign brainstorm about everything that could possibly be used? One campaign aide said:

She's clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it's been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s.

And there's a quote of Judd's about how bright and flashy things are in America, such that when she returns home from overseas things, like "pink fuzzy socks on a rack" can make her "absolutely flip[] out" and she "can never anticipate what is going to push [her] over the edge." We're supposed to be offended that McConnell's people even considered using material like that? Hey, she kind of used "pink fuzzy socks" against America. Surely, the pink fuzzy socks can be used against her. No! Not the fuzzy socks!!!!

How about using religion? Well, it depends on what kind of material you have!

She says Christianity gives a God like a man, presented and discussed exclusively with male imagery, which legitimizes and seals male power, the intention to dominate even if that intention is nowhere visible.

Is there something bad about a campaign thinking of using and how it would use material like that? Obviously, there's some overall theme that Judd is flaky and not in synch with mainstream Kentucky. 

CNN reports:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's re-election campaign is "working with the FBI" on how Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, obtained a recording of political aides meeting with McConnell and discussing opposition research on Ashley Judd, McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton told CNN Tuesday....

"Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell's campaign office without consent. By whom and how that was accomplished will presumably be the subject of a criminal investigation," Benton said in a statement.

Either this kind of bugging is acceptable or it's not. I'm surprised Corn went forward with it when the material isn't even shocking. It's actually quite bland... in comparison to what I assume is batted around within all the various campaigns as they decide how to attack opponents. Can we get transcripts of all that crap? I'd love to blog it.

Suddenly, I realize why Corn may believe this material is worth printing: These are attacks on a sweet and pretty lady. Corn's decision to publish is — ironically — evidence of sexism.

ADDED: There's an update at the first link that says the tape came from "a source who wishes to remain anonymous" and:

We published the article on the tape due to its obvious newsworthiness. We were not involved in the making of the tape, but it is our understanding that the tape was not the product of any kind of bugging operation. We cannot comment beyond that, except to say that under the circumstances, our publication of the article is both legal and protected by the First Amendment.

Here's my question to Mother Jones: Do you want to encourage the activity that produced the tape? Do you endorse this activity as applied to all the politicians you love? You are profiting from this activity. Whether you are protected from legal action or not, your actions imply that you believe what you are doing is ethical and good journalism. That applies across the board, whether the intruded-upon politicians are ones you loathe or ones you love. Step up and endorse that, explicitly and clearly. I challenge you!