Noted in passing, even though the City of Washington (District of Columbia) is fiscally sound and furthermore has behind it every last resource Congress can throw at it, 388 teachers got laid-off/fired and it's being called Union Busting.
Not that I want to see any teachers fired here in Montgomery, there are some people that I suspect are in the position of being eminently "fire-able". And I further suspect that as pressures mount to try to salvage anything from the firestorm of crashing revenues from both County taxables and State hand-me-down funding, the County is going to start looking for the least hint of malfeasance as an excuse to let people go.
Perhaps they'll let them go for failing to relentlessly promote the ascendancy of illegal aliens over law-abiding citizens. It's a fact that as of now, former President of the Board and CASA de Maryland co-founder Tom Perez is head of the US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. Mr Perez, many immigration-enforcement proponents fear, will turn out to be nothing more nor less than given the task and authority of dismantling all roadblocks to replacing the last vestiges of the old Republic and burying the old body politic -- so to speak -- with a big fat bucket of extra squirmy worms (of the litigator variety) to hasten the decomposition and rot.
One test of this would be to ask him directly how it is that every morning I get up before dawn, and see about 30 or so day-laborers congregating at the Aspen Hill 7-11 as I drive to get a newspaper or three additional to the Washington Post that is delivered to the doorstep. Additionally he could ask why it is that when I sit in the park and read the papers, all of the construction workers building the hiker-biker trail bridge are "latino", with no exceptions. Not one black, not on asian, and not one euro. Nothing but central-american and Mexican indians and mestizo "latinos". I guess that would be clear and blatant racism, eh? It's not as if there are no whites or blacks or asians who would take the job; nationally the official figures for unemployment are about 10 percent and construction workers traditionally will relocate to any project that will last 6 or more months. Indeed, I see out-of-work local construction workers day in and day out... all bitterly complaining about the blatant anti-American racism they see at almost every jobsite and get from almost every hiring representative. "We have all of the people that we need", they are told, and the rep waves a hand at a jobsite full of nothing but central-american foreign born. Yet somehow I suspect that CASA de Maryland co-founder Tom Perez won't do a thing about this blatant racism; the organization he co-founded has the express goal of displacing all Americans with "immigrants".
But I digress.
If Montgomery is looking to find some people to fire for something, they probably have already started with the program that reimbursed County employees for tuition for courses which in most cases were not at all related to their workplace duties, and in many case might tend to violate the constitutional separation of Church and State.
For the County to be paying for people to learn how to meditate or how to run prayer classes, that's clearly a case of taxpayers being forced to subsidize someone else's religion, and heads should and must roll for this, so to speak.
Yet at least one County employee took a very valuable course, and I think that this tuition-reimbursement program should be continued, but with much more oversight and with a much tighter focus on off-work training and coursework being in line with the student's employment niche.
The course in question?
Studies in "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy".
The Astute Readers who stole this out of my psychiatrist's files when he was off at home sleeping soundly ahem who are reading this from the Google web crawler cache should be able to go straight to Google as I shall do, to learn a bit about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, often erroneously called "munchausen" or less erroneously "munchausen by proxy".
To summarize, generally speaking it comes under the heading of factitious disorder, a mental pathology in which the sufferer feigns symptoms of an illness or condition, and does so intentionally. This goes beyond mere hypochondria in that the hypochondriac is merely obsessed with a disorder and fearfully watches for symptoms, however slight, mild, or due to unrelated cause. The sufferer of "direct Munchausen" or "primary factitious disorder" actually causes symptoms. A hypochondriac might fear the ascending paralysis caused by a tick bite. A sufferer of direct Munchausen (primary factitious disorder) might go bathe their feet in mercury salts in order to cause nerve damage imitating an ascending tick bite paralysis.
As scary as is primary factitious disorder (or direct Munchausen), the real problem is Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Why would any Montgomery County employee need to know about this disorder?
That would be because it's potentially one of those really scary mental illnesses that almost by definition straddle the line between Crime and Insanity:
Münchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP), referred to in the DSM-IV-TR as Factitious Disorder by Proxy, is a disorder in which a person deliberately causes injury or illness to another person, usually to gain attention or some other benefit.[1][2] Münchausen by proxy has been described by some as a form of extended child abuse.[3] The motivation is to assume the sick role by proxy.[4]
The caregiver is usually a parent, guardian, or spouse, and the victim is usually a child or vulnerable adult. Most cases involve inducing physical illness, however it is also possible for a perpetrator to simulate or fabricate conditions that appear to be psychiatric or genetic problems.
See references.
The prevalent estimate of victimizers of others in a scenario of Munchausen by Proxy is that they are 90-percent female and that in most cases their victims' illnesses are caused by one or another variety of poisoning. This is not to be confused with the so-called TARGET="pop86e5GB1">Black Widow "poisoners for profit" of the same type as the rightly infamous Dorothea Puente, who ran a boarding house and cashed the checks of her elderly and disabled boarders and killed them if they complained and buried them in her yard.
And one may question, of course, whether it's to be excluded from consideration, or to be thought of as part and parcel of a syndrome, with religiously-motivated violence within families such as the sad case of poor Anna Slabaugh:
When Anna turned 11, she told me, her 19-year-old brother began molesting her, stopping just short of intercourse. When he moved away, another 17-year-old brother started raping her.
[ ... ]
In 2001, while cleaning house for her family's landlord, Anna used the phone to call a battered women's shelter in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. The counselors on the other end of the line didn't take her seriously. But after a month of calls, the shelter alerted Children and Family Services Division of Knox County.
When a social worker visited Anna's home, Anna told her about the sexual abuse. She also reported that her parents were moving the family to Pennsylvania. Laurie Roberts, one of the social workers on Anna's case in Ohio, said she was taught in training that sexual abuse among the Amish is pervasive, and seldom reported.
[ ... ]
Anna tried to run away. But when her parents figured out where she was and called the woman who was sheltering her, Anna was sent home. Fannie began locking Anna in her room. The family moved to Tionesta, Pa., where Fannie tried to get her daughter declared mentally ill. She took Anna to a doctor who found that Anna's eardrum had collapsed from blows to her head and seemed doubtful that the damage had been caused by buggy accidents as he'd been told.
[ ... ]
When Fannie found out about the CYS visit, she and Anna went with 13 other kids to the home of John Yoder, an Amish dentist who lived an hour and a half away in the town of Punxsutawney. Yoder's living room had a recliner with a tin pan and some needles next to it. Anna watched as the other kids each had one or two bad teeth pulled. When it was her turn, Yoder shot some novocaine into her upper gum. She shook her head and told him that two of her lower teeth had cavities. He shot the lower gum, and asked Fannie which teeth should go. Anna's mother answered, "Take them all," and Yoder pulled—along the upper gum, along the lower gum, until every tooth was gone. "After he had pulled the last tooth," Anna remembered, "my mom looked at me and said, 'I guess you won't be talking anymore.' " [italics mine --tjh] ("The Gentle People", Ladi, Nadya, Legal Affairs, January 2005, downloaded 2009 October 9)
Of course, this only demands that we need to ask ourselves some really tough questions.
First, where do we draw the line between willful child abuse -- where someone intentionally is violent with a minor in their care -- and other behaviors which result in the harm of a minor. We might even have to consider "vulnerable persons", for example, adults with pervasive/persistent developmental or emotional disorders.
Can we divide those behaviors into "willful" and "reckless" and perhaps even into "distraught" or "emotion driven"? When does the abuse become symptomatic of mental illness, and thus amenable to the "insanity defense"? What if there's no clear and demonstrable profit motive in terms of property or money or even control of stockholder shares or a seat on the voting board of directors... but there's a clear benefit in any case?
Looking at the case of poor Anna Slabaugh, can we as a society afford to overlook the fact that acceptance and tolerance of molestation, child sexual abuse, and even incestuous child sexual abuse approaches "culturally normal"? Can we further afford to tolerate that what otherwise would be classified as a horrid motivation for intolerable crime will be seen by many as "religious freedom"?
Maryland used to have a law called "Defense of Clergy", which limited fines and jail sentences for all sorts of crimes. One need merely take the stand and declare, with supporting documentation or testimony, that one was a cleric, or even an alderman in a church or other house of worship. Taking a cane to the backside of a blasphemous child taking the name of the Lord in vain in church on Sunday would otherwise perhaps have resulted in serious charges before the law... but for the "defense of clergy".
So far as I am aware, this is the only situation in which a person is excluded from culpability on grounds amounting to an insanity defense, and who is by the same exclusion declared by default to be in loco parentis and further legislatively excluded from full prosecution for assault and abuse of a minor.
Others evidently saw the same curious hypocrisy. "Defense of Clergy" has been legislatively stricken from the Code of Maryland.
This might be a better idea than the Astute Reader knows. I am in fact an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church and have been such since the mid-1990s. Despite the fact that the ULC doctrine states that "[e]very person has the natural right (and the responsibility) to peacefully determine what is right," under the old "Defense of Clergy" I could have gone upside the head of assholes with a tire-iron for doing what I believed to be wrong, and the worst that could have happened to me would have been ten days in jail and a $10.00 fine.
And regardless of the repeal of "defense of clergy", if I thought someone had pulled all of their daughter's teeth for complaining to the law about her brother repeatedly raping her, going upside someone's head with a tire-iron is probably what I'd cheerfully do. I don't smile a lot, but I do believe I'd be showing every last one of my teeth.
Poor Anna Slabaugh got no actual revenge on her behalf, and not much justice. All she really got out of it, in the end, was a pair of top-and-bottom 100-percent replacement dentures, and shunned by her community.
Considering that her community had stood by while she was repeatedly raped by siblings and then had every last tooth yanked out of her head, that she was later shunned by them is probably a good thing.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is not widely known to the general public.
Possibly the most widely seen example would be in the theatrical film the Sixth Sense, in which a little boy who sees ghosts finds a videotape of a woman slowly poisoning her daughter to death, and then plays it at a funeral wake where the "bereaved mother" is basking in the attentions of friends and family.
This is a fairly accurate depiction of the perpetrator who suffers from the worst variety of Munchausen by Proxy: they don't profit financially, but the profit immensely from attention, from solidarity of emotion, from outpouring of friendship and sympathy from the community... for the loss that they orchestrated.
Plus -- and for a lot of Munchausen perpetrators, this is a big bonus -- they get to hang out with a lot of doctors, who are as concerned and caring as they themselves are.
While on the subject of Attention Whores Who Kill Their Own Babies, let's take a look at a genuinely sickening website.
Mothers Against Munchausen by Proxy Allegations ("MAMA") "[...] was begun in response to the fast growing number of false allegations of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). Parents are being accused of making their own children ill. Increasingly, families across America, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are being destroyed by doctors and other professionals who make false and even malicious allegations against desperate mothers of chronically/critically ill children."
In other words, they claim they weren't crazy people slowly killing their own offspring.
No, really, it was the doctors who made those poor kids sick, long before the doctors ever saw the kids.
Furthermore, it was all a plot by a madman who is out to get poor suffering moms.
Or so MAMA would have you believe.
Now I do agree with them that it's far too easy for a bad practitioner to pass the blame onto the mother simply by saying a few words... and I do agree with the website that no court or social-services agency should proceed with any actions until there is medical support for a diagnosis or claim of Munchausen by Proxy.
But I do not agree with the tone of the site which is trying to claim that Munchausen by Proxy is effectively nothing less than a collusional hoax by bottom-feeding attorneys and their quack clients.
Notice one thing about the site and the narrative tone: it's all about the poor poor mothers. There's almost nothing that expresses actual concern for the children. That's typical of Munchausen by Proxy.
This is not to say that nobody's ever tried to dodge a malpractice suit by bringing up the matter of Munchausen by Proxy... it's just saying that the first defense of someone actually perpetrating from Munchausen by Proxy is that it has been used as a spurious defense in malpractice cases.
Seriously, let the experts decide. That's why I support Montgomery County providing tuition to County employees who might in fact encounter variations on the theme in the course of their careers.
We can't let them be misled by the protestations of women who try and try to dodge the suspicions or even actual accusations, because they want, they need, they have to have their babies back...
So they can finish killing them.
1 comments:
“Yet somehow I suspect that CASA de Maryland co-founder Tom Perez won't do a thing about this blatant racism; the organization he co-founded has the express goal of displacing all Americans with ‘immigrants.’”
Not all Americans, just the vulnerable ones.
Now they have to assuage “immigrants” by keeping them employed during the recession, otherwise there may be more crime by idle landscapers, plumbers, etc. Crimes that tarnish the image of CASA and the Democratic Party.
Not to mention keeping all the social/human services workers who stay employed tending to the underclasses in dual languages. These people ensure their job security by voting in CASA supporters like Perez who are pushing for a county that is teeming with a poor, needy underclass.
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