The Lacey Spears Case, Gender Dysphoria, And Munchausen By Proxy

Last night, my wife and I watched a true crime show on the Lacey Spears case, in which Spears, a single mother desperate for attention, wildly overshared on social media about her son Garnett's health struggles. Garnett passed away at the age of 5 from high levels of sodium leading to swelling in his brain. On March 2, 2015, a jury found Spears guilty of murdering her son by poisoning him with table salt, which she had administered to him from infancy through his feeding tube.

The case has become a well-known example of Munchausen by proxy:

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick.

Most discussions attribute its motivation to attention-seeking by the mother, but in another case, the Dee Dee Blancard murder, the mother exploited her daughter's putative handicaps and disabilities to live entirely on charitable donations and public assisstance. She was able to represent her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, as much younger than her actual age due to "medical" treatments that disfigured her and stunted her growth.

Many people who met Gypsy were charmed by her. Her 5-foot (150 cm) height, nearly-toothless mouth, large glasses and high, childlike voice reinforced the perception that she had all the problems her mother claimed she did. Gypsy often wore wigs or hats to cover her baldness; her mother regularly shaved Gypsy's head to mimic the hairless appearance of a chemotherapy patient, allegedly telling Gypsy that since her medication would eventually cause her hair to fall out, it was best to shave it in advance. When they left the house, Dee Dee often took an oxygen tank and feeding tube with them; Gypsy was fed the children's liquid nutrition supplement PediaSure well into her 20s.

. . . Dee Dee seems to have at least once forged a copy of her daughter's birth certificate, moving her birth date to 1995 to bolster claims that she was still a teenager; Gypsy said in a later interview that for 15 years she was not sure of her real age. She sometimes also claimed that the original had been destroyed during the post-Katrina flooding. Dee Dee did keep another copy with Gypsy's actual birth date. Her daughter recalls seeing it during one of their hospital visits and becoming confused; Dee Dee told her it was a misprint.

The Dee Dee Blanchard case ended when Gypsy Rose met a man online and prevailed on him to murder her mother. A remark in the TV program on the Lacey Spears case mentioned that Munchausen-by-proxy mothers must normally kill their victims in childhood before they can figure out what's being done to them; Garnett Lacey is an example of the norm, while Gypsy Rose Blanchard illustrates the danger of not doing this. Her mother Dee Dee probably delayed killing her daughter because continuing the game brought her significant financial benefits, while we must assume Lacey Spears exploited her son's condition primarily for attention and could dispose of him more easily.

The big thing I noticed in the Garnett Spears program happened because I wasn't paying full attention: There were lots of video clips of the child as a toddler, since the mother was a social media oversharer. Somehow I missed references early in the program to Garnett's gender, and throughout the first part of the show, I thought Garnett was a girl. This is clear in the photo at the top of this post, Garnett clearly has a girl's hairstyle, and in most of the videos, he's wearing only a diaper, so there was no gender-specific clothing.

There was a time, of course, when boys didn't have their hair cut or begin to wear trousers until they were roughly Garnett's age when he died. In this case, his mother seems to have wanted to keep him in a more innocuous female state, although she always identified him as her son, until he reached the age when she'd need to dispose of him in any case.

This brings me to the question of early childhood gender dysphoria, where certain children are encouraged to believe well before puberty that they're the wrong gender, and puberty blockers and pre-surgical therapies are prescribed. According to Wikipedia,

Gender dysphoria in children (GD), also known as gender incongruence of childhood, is a formal diagnosis for children who experience significant discontent (gender dysphoria) due to a mismatch between their assigned sex and gender identity. The diagnostic label gender identity disorder in children (GIDC) was used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until it was renamed gender dysphoria in children in 2013 with the release of the DSM-5. The diagnosis was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder.

The problem I have with this whole idea is that a child with gender dysphoria can never be anything but a proxy for some adult, either a parent or a school official acting in place of a parent and approving and supervising the child's medical treatment. There is no assurance that the parent isn't effectively running a Munchausen con for attention, and there's also no assurance that school officials promoting such treatment aren't simply making a good living from the game.

An individual who undergoes hormone or surgical treatment for gender dysphoria effectively becomes a permanent medical patient, bad for the individual, good for unethical doctors and school officials, good as well for attention-seeking parents. For some parents, the idea of delaying puberty or transforming a potentially disruptive boy into a more agreeable girl would also bring benefits, no matter how damaging to the child.

And at this point, we've had little experience with what happens to children who've been through this therapy. I've got to think there are more Gypsy Rose Blanchards waiting to emerge in these cases.

The Return Of Colonel Reisner

Somehow I've always had a soft spot for Austria, in some measure due to its consistent history since the death of Prince Metternich of getting things about as wrong as they could be gotten, but in a charming, lost-cause sort of way. An example of what I like about Austria is Federal Army Col Markus Reisner's YouTube commentaries on the Russo-Ukraine War, which originally struck me as impressive, but of which I've been skeptical since his more recent ones. He's actually been silent since early July; for comparison, that presentation is below.

This was a generally pessimistic assessment for the Ukrainian side -- the only favorable factor he saw for Ukraine was that it had kept control of Kyiv, while he foresaw increasing Russian efforts to close one or more cauldrons in Donbas, relying especially on closing a pincer from Popasna north and Izyum south. He saw attrition as a key factor, and he especially saw attrition as a factor that would minimize the effects of the heavy weapons like HIMARS that only then were being introduced.

What appears to have developed instead was an attritional advantage for Ukraine. After the Russian advance into Lysychansk in early July, which Col Reisner stressed as a key event, there was little movement on that front, although there were continuing small-scale Russian attacks that in effect ground down Russian forces with little to show for the losses.

Instead, throughout July, Ukraine began to stress its putative buildup for a counterattack in Kherson presumably to begin in August, with attention focused on HIMARS attacks on key bridges over the Dnieper. Ukraine was completely successful in deflecting attention from its actual buildup in Kharkiv, the outcome of which currently bids to be an offensive comparable to the Falaise Pocket in 1944. Col Reisner's mention of the comparison is grudging indeed.

On the other hand, he doesn't mention at all the circumstance that the rout of the Russian strongpoint at Izyum completely eliminates any current likelihood of Russia closing a cauldron between there and Popasna, that he predicted as of early July.

At the end of his latest YouTube, he explains that he hasn't been making as many presentations because he's been put in command of the Honor Guard in Vienna. According to Wikipedia,

The Gardebataillon ("Guard Battalion") is a ceremonial unit in the Austrian Armed Forces. The Gardebataillon is one of the most important military units in the Austrian Armed Forces as its main task is to represent Austria at home and abroad. It is stationed exclusively at Maria Theresien Barracks in Vienna.

I see. The ceremonial battalion is one of the most important in the Austrian armed forces, and Col Reisner is now in full-time command. He certainly looks the part. I guess this is why I have a soft spot for Austria.

It's just as well he isn't advising President Zelensky.

The Anglican Conundrum

A video in my YouTube feed caught my eye, from a UK channel that's usually pretty highbrow in its tone. As you can see, its title is "Church sings for the first time God save the King". This actually didn't strike me as an earth-shattering event, since it mainly involved some gender pronouns, but I decided to watch it, just because we ex-Anglicans like that sort of church music. What struck me was that the actual singing wasn't going to take place until well into the service, and it was preceded by extended reflections from the celebrant meant to prepare those attending for this change.

The celebrant was wearing a purple chasuble. I looked this up, and in the US Roman Catholic Church, white, purple, or black vestments may be worn at masses for the dead, so this is OK -- but it was hard for me to shake the idea that the Queen's death had a special quasi-sacramental character, especially as related to the pronouns in the national anthem. The Queen is the supreme governor of the Church, and they seem to take this very seriously. Indeed, the Church of England has published a special liturgy for the event.

The biggest thing that struck me was that the celebrant adopted the same patient, explanatory tone toward the changed pronouns that a US Roman Catholic priest would adopt in a homily on, say, the Immaculate Conception, except that the Immaculate Conception isn't something people easily understand, while it's key to understanding the faith. New pronouns in the anthem, not so much. With clear regret and almost a tear in his voice, the celebrant said at one point, "We may never sing God save the Queen again."

Now, I'm no longer an Anglican, and I wouldn't normally attend that parish anyhow, I've got to wonder what other parts of the Anglican faith this celebrant normally explains with such diligence. I think of our own Roman Catholic parish clergy who normally explain to us that going to confession is important, and that sort of thing is helpful so we can avoid living double lives. Do any Anglican clergy explain things other than new pronouns in the national anthem with such diligence?

I tried fast forwarding so I could finally hear God save the King with the new pronouns, but even that seemed like it was going to take a lot of work, and eventually I gave up.

More Zelensky Wartime Rhetoric

This has been reported on social media as a message from Zelensky to the Russian people. Over the course of the war, he seems to be giving fewer formal addresses, and instead, somewhat like Trump, he's relying on shorter Twitter-style posts. The original source of this one appears to be hard to trace, but a reddit comment carries what is claimed to be the most reliable text:

Even through the impenetrable darkness, Ukraine and the civilized world clearly see these terrorist acts.

Deliberate and cynical missile strikes on civilian critical infrastructure. No military facilities. Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were cut off. In Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy there are partial problems with power supply.

Do you still think that we are "one people"? Do you still think that you can scare us, break us, make us make concessions? You really did not understand anything? Don't understand who we are? What are we for? What are we talking about?

Read my lips:

Without gas or without you? without you

Without light or without you? without you

Without water or without you? without you

Without food or without you? without you

Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your "friendship and brotherhood".

But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food. . . and WITHOUT you!

Another interesting development is that reporters have begun to notice that since last month, Ukraine has been putting captured Russian military equipment back into service without full repaint or refurbishment, simply crossing out the "Z" sign and replacing it with a cross. According to the link,

The choice of the cross has a certain logic, since it is an easy symbol to distinguish from the Z, and also the emblem of the Ukrainian Armed Forces includes a cross. It should also be borne in mind that Ukraine is a predominantly Christian country (around 80% of Ukrainians belong to different Christian denominations).

What sort of Christian denominations remains to shake out. Orthodoxy is undergoing a schism in the wake of the Russo-Ukraine war, and as I've noted in passing, explicitly Russian Orthodox writers like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are being reevaluated in Ukraine in light of contemporary Russian Orthodox support for imperialist, and indeed genocidal, Russian policies toward Ukraine.

On the other hand, Zelensky, a nominal Jew, has recognized Ukraine's strong Jewish heritage as well as its Christian population, but I suspect the cross would not have been used on military equipment without his approval.

Anyone Want To Trade?

I think the great unspoken insight over the past few days has been, for all the low expectations the world had for the Prince of Wales, King Charles III actually looks like a head of an important state. Beyond that, he's at least been acting like the head of a family:

The King ordered his warring sons to set aside their ongoing feud ahead of the Queen's funeral, leading the pair to reunite in public for the first time in more than a year, it was last night revealed.

Royal sources say Prince William attempted to bury the hatchet by extending an '11th-hour olive branch' to his younger brother Prince Harry, by asking him to join him on a walkabout outside Windsor Castle following a phone call with his father Charles.

In a scene that clearly delighted royal fans, who had come in their hundreds to the gates of the Windsor estate to mourn the Queen's death, William and Harry walked out side-by-side with wives Kate and Meghan.

"The King ordered. . ." Think of that. In another account,

William is believed to have extended the olive branch with Harry after a chat with Charles III, following the King's first ever speech in which he conveyed his love for Harry and Meghan.

A call was said to be made to the Sussexes early on in the day to ask them if they would join Will and Kate, and they accepted.

So it looks as though the King exerted his influence to create an impression of order and unity in the country at large. By having two feuding branches of the family visibly unite in the process of greeting the people. Imagine that.

In other royal news, America Says Offer To Trade Biden For The Queen Still Stands:

LONDON — Trade representatives in the United Kingdom were surprised to learn that the offer made by the United States to trade President Joe Biden for Queen Elizabeth II still stands, even after the Queen passed away yesterday at the age of 96.

"We just assumed that the offer was only valid as long as Her Majesty was still living," said Sir David Cathcart, the recently appointed Minister of Human Trades for the British government. "The offer was initially taken into consideration quite seriously due to Mr. Biden being significantly younger than the Queen, but after doing our research, it became evident that his mental capabilities had degraded to a rather absurd level."

Officials on the U.S. side of the trade proposal expressed hopefulness that the British would still be willing to consider the trade despite the longtime monarch's death. "It's got to be an even more tempting trade to make now, right?" asked Dr. Nate Thomas, a high-ranking member of the U.S. People Swapping Bureau. "I mean, come on, he's still alive, so that has to count for something. I'm not saying you can trust him to make any decisions or provide strong leadership of any kind, but he's still got a pulse. That's a good deal, right? Right?! Come on, just take him. Please?"

It's starting to look to me as though they wouldn't make a deal for King Charles, either.

TheContinuing Puzzles

At this point, Ukrainian successes from what analysts currently think is a surprise counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region have simply been outpacing the ability of media to cover them. Here's Newsweek as of midday yesterday, Putin's Troops Have Two Days to Attack or Face Defeat: Ex-Military Leader:

Igor Girkin, who also goes by Igor Strelkov, gave an update on the situation near Izium in a Telegram post on Friday, writing that Russia potentially not being able to restore land communication lines between Izium and the city of Kupyansk in that timeline may also play a part in whether or not it withdraws. Russian forces may even have to leave Izium itself depending on if and when it embarks on its own counteroffensive against Ukrainian advances, he added.

"The question of the time of the counterattack is very acute: if the enemy manages to gain a foothold in the positions reached, pull up artillery and air defense, then it will be extremely difficult for our units to throw him back .... if at all (given the extremely low staffing, especially infantry) Maybe," he wrote, according to an English translation of the post.

But within hours of this assessment, reports were that the Russians had abandoned both Izium and Kupyansk and fled eastward, so even Girkin's/Strelkov's appreciation was overtaken by events. It simply isn't my job here to make blow-by-blow reports on the progress of the war, except to note at this point that Ukraine has been outperforming the most optimistic predictions. What are the implications? We can only speculate wildly about what this means for Russia, except my judgment has been that the Poles, Swedes, Balts, and Finns have been most on top of this and will be the quickest to seize advantage. (This is also the sort of outcome that I think George Kennan had in mind.)

As I've been saying for months, the best analysis of the military situation has been at the left-wing Daily Kos. For instance, today:

It’s worth noting that as much as people screamed that Ukraine needed this or that, the Pentagon and allies had a very clear understanding of what needed to be delivered, balancing ease of learning, operation, maintenance, and supply, with battlefield utility. Ukraine didn’t need NATO armor, it got close to 300 Soviet-era tanks from allies. M113s were sufficiently good infantry carriers (the YPR-765 is actually an M113 variant). Down in Kherson, where wide-open flat spaces expose advancing forces to deadly artillery barrages, Ukraine is using fast Humvees to speed from town to town, giving artillery little chance to zero in on them.

. . . HIMARS really is doing a lot of the roles aircraft have traditional taken (destroying bridges, hardened defenses, ammo depots, and command and control facilities).

. . . So kudos to the Pentagon for having a clear vision of what it would take for Ukraine to retake territory as quickly as possible, even as the peanut gallery wailed that “NATO isn’t playing to win, just not to lose!”

But none of this would have been possible if Ukraine hadn't been in a position to take advantage of the NATO weaponry, training, and intelligence. The initial fear of the US right had been that Ukraine would prove to be as corrupt as the Russians, with Ukrainian generals selling off inventory to all comers as quickly as the Russian ones, with monetary aid disappearing down the rabbit hole just as fast. This hasn't taken place, and the actual strategy for the Kharkiv attack appears to have been Ukrainian:

According to inside information, this raid was planned by Colonel Oleksandr Syrskyі. At first, because it was too risky, the high-level officials did not agree, and he was finally persuaded.#Ukraine #Kyiv #NAFO pic.twitter.com/kxjYxSbO8P

— 番外联邦 🇺🇦 (@dsbxtw9991) September 9, 2022

And of course, the memorable quote of the war continues to be from that real-life Victor Laszlo, Volodymyr Zelensky, "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride".

So in light of this, here are some puzzles. To start with, US intelligence got Russian preparation for the invasion in February right, but not much else.

• How did the US apparently assume Zelensky would be evacuated from Kyiv in a C130 with his cronies, mistresses, and pallets of cash at the start of the war? That he didn't do this changed everything.
• How did US intelligence grossly overestimate Russian (and by implication, Soviet) military capabilities? And why?
• What drove the initial hesitancy to start a putative World War III by denying or delaying effective support to Ukraine?
• How did a second level at State and the Pentagon apparently circumvent that hesitancy to support Ukraine in the early months of the war?

Interestingly, in addition to George Kennan, another figure who seems to have had a more realistic view of Soviet capabilities was the popular novelist Tom Clancy, an insurance salesman, war gamer, and deep state groupie who foresaw how quickly Soviet forces would collapse in hypothetical confrontations with the US and NATO. But this view never seems to have been current in the upper echelons of the deep state. A similar theme runs through the Cold War spy novels of John le Carré .

On the other hand, another set of more optimistic questions covers the speed with which those second levels at State and the Pentagon were able to recognize the actual state of affairs in Ukraine, recalibrate, and work with NATO actors like Poland and the UK to train the Ukrainian armed forces, supply them with the needed weapons, training, and intelligence, and prosecute an effective resistance.

What's actually been striking me over the past several years has been the resilience of US and other Western institutions.

George F Kennan's Long Telegram, The Elites, And Ukraine

I've kept ruminating on the quote from C Wright Mills that appeared in the Washington Post piece I linked in yesterday's post:

“[The power elite] are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.”

But to that I added another, from Mills's The Power Elite:

[T]he focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic problems, centered in the ‘thirties around slump, to international problems, centered in the ‘forties and ‘fifties around war. Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and traditions for the handling of international problems. Such formal democratic mechanics as had arisen in the century and a half of national development prior to 1941, had not been extended to the American handling of international affairs. It is, in considerable part, in this vacuum that the power elite has grown.

A key document in this period was George F Kennan's Long Telegram of February 22, 1946, which is viewed as forming the basis for US Soviet policy in what would become the Cold War. Kennan is an intriguing figure. Not often noted is that a great uncle, also named George Frost Kennan (1845-1924), was an adviser to the railroad baron Edward H Harriman on, of all things, Russian policy. According to Wikipedia, the younger Kennan (1904-2005), following the early death of his mother,

At the age of eight, he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Unaccustomed to the elite atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in History in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly-formed United States Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination and after seven months of study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, he gained his first job as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. During 1928, Kennan considered quitting the Foreign Service to return to a university for graduate studies. Instead, he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate-level study without having to quit the service.

. . . In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin's Oriental Institute. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan (1845–1924), a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system.

Although the younger Kennan remained with the State Department, he became steadily more unhappy there and was especially disturbed by what he saw as President Roosevelt's pro-Soviet policies.

In January 1944 he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan became even more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of beginning the job, he was appointed deputy chief of the mission in Moscow upon request of W. Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the USSR.

Averell Harriman was the son of Edward Harriman, and he had become the public face of the Harriman fortune (the Harriman family had left the Republican party after the Theodore Roosevelt justice department sued to break up the Harriman railroad empire; Averell throughout his life was a highly influential Democrat). There can be no question that the younger Kennan had the ear of Averell due to the older Kennan's relationship with his father.

In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by President Truman and policymakers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet government in favor of a sphere of influence policy in Europe to reduce the Soviets' power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.

Kennan via Averell Harriman strongly influenced US Cold War policy, and I find it hard not to conclude that this policy was, first, ultimately successful, and second, in conformance with the wishes of the elites, since Averell Harriman was a centrist figure, and some version of the Cold War containment policy advocated by Kennan was maintained through alternating Republican and Democrat administrations until the Soviet collapse.

This is not to say that the execution of the policy was perfect. The Wikipedia account goes on to stress that Kennan thought the Soviet Union was too weak to risk all-out war, and his recommendations had been misunderstood as pursuing only military containment, which he is quoted as saying, "as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War".

This is one explanation for the failure, first, of the US intelligence establishment to foresee the Soviet internal collapse, and second, the failure of the US military establishment to foresee the weakness of the Russian army in the Ukraine invasion. I think estimates have been correct that, had Russia even tried to invade Poland instead, the result would have been an immediate rout instead of the months-long stalemate in Ukraine.

This leads me to a puzzle: the US military and State Department, backed by what must surely be the defense elites, has pursued a remarkably successful policy of fighting Russia "to the last Ukrainian" with US and NATO weapons and intelligence but no troops, a strategy which Ukrainian leadership itself has backed. For six months, the White House has effectively kept hands off, and indeed it appears that initial reluctance by the administration to supply first Migs and then long-range artillery to Ukraine has quickly been circumvented behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, we see continued efforts by the US military, presumably encouraged by a different branch of the military elites, to promote something beyond a gender-neutral culture; as of last year, the Pentagon has fully embraced the latest transgender fad:

The Pentagon announced new policies on Wednesday that undo the Trump-era rules that effectively banned transgender people from serving in the military.

The new regulations provide "access to the military in one's self-identified gender provided all appropriate standards are met," the Defense Department said in a statement, and "provide a path for those in service for medical treatment, gender transition, and recognition in one's self-identified gender."

Is this a quid pro quo? Let's recognize that people who undergo surgical gender change become lifelong medical patients, requiring ongoing hormone and other therapies, as well as psychological counseling. The military may feel this is a cost worth paying if the political authorities will give them a free hand in Ukraine and similar conflicts, but I don't think this is any sort of long-term solution. It's an attempt to patch over ever-widening cracks among the elites themselves, and that's the actual state of affairs.