Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Another Kennedy Crime: Child Abuse: Institutionalizing, Lobotomizing & Never Visiting Sister Rosemary Kennedy

Criminal Injustice, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Relatives

Other than that she was not “perfect” like her siblings; there was nothing terribly wrong with gorgeous Rosemary Kennedy. She had learning disabilities. But Rosary looked lovely and was a sweet child.

Alas, she “never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence.”

WHICH BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, YOU’VE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL.

Still, after being locked up in “a boarding school for misfits,” she was smart enough to pen a heartbreaking (grammatical) letter to her ruthless father, patriarch Joe Kennedy:

Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.

Are these the words of an irredeemably retarded girl?

The rest of her life reads like a Medieval horror story. This is worse than genital mutilation, which can be survived. The bloody Kennedy clan was never implicated in decades of cruelty:

In November 1941 Dr. James Watts carried out a frontal lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy’s brain at a facility in upstate New York.

A psychiatrist present at the lobotomy asked Rosemary to tell him stories and repeat the months of the year. The doctor kept scraping away brain tissue until Rosemary could no longer talk.

Only then did Dr. Watts stop.

Following the lobotomy Rosemary could barely walk and knew only a few words. She would spend most of her life hidden away from the world and even her own family.

Such was the price the young Kennedy girl paid because her parents feared her condition would puncture the perfect impression of the relentlessly ambitious Kennedy clan.

Kate Clifford Larson revealed a host of new sources for her story of the tragic Rosemary for her book “The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,”published last year.

It is a book that shows Joe and Rose Kennedy in a dreadful light, prepared to sacrifice their daughter for their sons’ political careers.

Larson says that right from the beginning, when the obstetrician who was to deliver Rosemary was several hours late and a nurse botched the birth, Rosemary Kennedy was deeply unlucky.

By kindergarten Rosemary was called “retarded,” in the lingo of the times, and such children were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, it was a disaster.

Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence and she was packed off to a boarding school for misfits.

From there she wrote her father a heartbreaking letter as Larson reveals: “Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.”

Rosemary finally caught a break when her father became Ambassador to Britain and she thrived in a London convent school. But back in the States, Rosemary, a stunning looking girl, began attracting admirers. At twenty she was “a picturesque young woman, a snow princess with flush cheeks, gleaming smile, plump figure, and a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met.”

As Larson writes, “Her parents found her sexuality dangerous.”

In early 1941 Joe learned about frontal lobotomy, then coming into vogue, which allegedly “calmed” hyperactive patients.

Joe Kennedy ordered the surgery done immediately.

Later, Joe and Rose told all who asked that Rosemary was teaching at a school for handicapped students in the Midwest. In fact, she was in a home in Wisconsin, had the mind of a two-year-old, and was unable to do anything for herself.

After Joe Kennedy’s stroke Rose went to meet the daughter she had abandoned. When Rosemary saw her mother she ran to her then began beating her mother’s chest in deep distress crying and moaning.

It seemed, despite all the covering up, she still remembered her and what had been done to her.

The other Kennedy children also learned the truth and adopted an entirely different approach, visiting Rosemary and bringing her to Boston on many occasions.

Eunice Kennedy based her creation of the Special Olympics on Rosemary. She broke the family’s silence on Rosemary in the Saturday Evening Post, but it was not until 1987 that the story of the lobotomy became public.

Rosemary Kennedy was never allowed to live any kind of life by her ambitious parents, but in the end how she was treated by them, especially Joe, says far more about him than anything about her.

She just had the misfortune to be a Kennedy in an era when mental retardation was a large and ugly secret. She died in 2005 and, ironically, we have learned far more about her since her death than when she was alive and this new book adds valuable knowledge.


From: “The sad and dreadful life of Rosemary Kennedy.”

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The Dismal Scientists Of Microeconomics Are ALSO Struggling To Do Science

Critique, Economy, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, Science

Almost every bit of research cited in support of some or another ridiculous claim in the popular press seems abysmally designed. At least to this former student of research methodology.

Samples are too minuscule to claim generalizeability of findings beyond the sample, to the broader, targeted population. Likewise, you just know sample selection is poor, too. Variables are not often operationalized in an intelligent way. The actual hypothesis frequently sounds wacky. On and on.

It transpires that the same methodological flaws that “bedevil most social sciences, and some hard sciences, too,” have infected the dismal scientists of microeconomics.

“Many results in microeconomics are shaky.” From the a series “on the shortcomings of the economics profession” in the Economist:

A recent examination in the Economic Journal, of almost 7,000 empirical economics studies, found that in half of the areas of research, nearly 90% of those studies were underpowered, ie, that they used samples too small to judge whether a particular effect was really there. Of the studies that avoided this pitfall, 80% were found to have exaggerated the reported results. Another study, published in Science, which attempted to replicate 18 economics experiments, failed for seven of them.

Harvey Sweinstein Is Evil, Not ILL

Feminism, Hollywood, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

For once and for all, conservatives will have to reject outright the illness model of misbehavior if they want to hold on to their delicious outrage over Harvey Weinstein’s exploits.

If you’ve sexually assaulted individuals, you’ve committed a crime. You’re not sick; you’re just a SOB.

Sexual compulsion, like drug addiction, is a misbehavior, not a disease. It certainly does not compel crime. Human beings as moral agents are expected to control their impulses. If they don’t, you punish them. If they can’t; you have them locked up (after due process) for the protection of others .

There is a price for using the therapeutic idiom for crimes or misdemeanors. The price is the medicalization of misconduct. Punishment, then, becomes problematic. For if the offender is seen as without an ability to form the intent to harm—how do you justify punishing him?

Punish evil, don’t exculpate it. The idea of rehab for Harvey is as laughable as the notion that Harvey Sweinstein is deprived, rather than depraved.

Practice: Is this red-carpet celebrity “sick,” in need of a group hug, or just an exhibitionist and a slut? (Feminists will tell you she has the right to walk around like this and expect the Harveys of the world to behave around her. But that’s for another day.) Ol’ Harvey’s was not exactly surrounded by upstanding women. Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them (“naive, innocent young things”).

UPDATE II (5/3): Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa

Africa, Crime, History, Pseudoscience, South-Africa

“Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa” is the current column, now on American Thinker. An excerpt:

Farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world. Farmers there suffer more murders per-capita than any other community on earth outside a war zone. Since the dawn of democracy in the country, farming South Africa has been slaughtered by black South Africans in ways that would do Shaka Zulu * proud.

The Transvaal Agricultural Union’s numbers (purported to be the most reliable) are bolstered by Genocide Watch. (I wrote about this here.) By this assessment, South African farmers were being exterminated at the annual rate of 313 per 100,000 inhabitants, 3,000 since the election of the sainted Nelson Mandela (1994), two a week, seven in March of 2010, “four times as high as is for the rest of the [South African] population,” in the words of Genocide Watch’s Dr. Gregory H. Stanton.

The number of farmers martyred on land many their families had farmed since the 1600s has since been revised downward by the African National Congress (ANC) government, its police and lickspittle social scientists. This is good if true; bad if doctored for the purpose of diminishing the facts.

The Democratic Alliance used to dispute any crime statistics issued by the South African Police Service (SAPS). The tiny, tokenistic, opposition to the “all-powerful black majority party” puts the ostensible drop in crime down to the fact that 51 percent of victims no longer bother to report crime, given that corruption is rife, arrests rare, and prosecutions and convictions still rarer. Findings suggest that the SAPS’s optimistic, homicide statistics are not to be believed. According to the Economist (citations in Into the Cannibal’s Pot), the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has confirmed the existence of a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of statistic.”

Every year, millions in taxpayers’ money are forked out to private security firms to protect … the new South Africa’s police stations. “South Africa’s protectors can’t protect themselves,” they can’t protect the country, and they probably can’t count. The orgy of crime in South Africa reflects the capabilities of this reconstructed police force. …

… READ THE REST. “Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa” is now on American Thinker.

UPDATE (5/1): Rhodesia, RIP

“A Handful of Hard Men: The SAS and the Battle for Rhodesia”: Once there were warriors, righteous men who fought for their homes–not to display their virtue and force their values on faraway primitives à la America. The men who built and fought for Rhodesia were great warriors and patriots, betrayed by the political clones of South Africa’s F. W. de Klerk and the same Anglo-American Axis of Evil, exposed in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot.”

UPDATE II (5/3): Tutu, tut-tut. 

Sainted Mandela.

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