I know that you have often discussed your ideas about the Kennedy assassination, and we disagree profoundly. I doubt this will change your mind about anything, but I very much suggest you read Vincent Bugliosi’s tome on the subject, Reclaiming History. (See this and this.)

As for the reason the Secret Service was not on Kennedy’s car’s running board, see this.

I assume you reject Bugliosi’s voluminous, comprehensive, meticulous research on the subject, but I find it extremely convincing.

The FBI and others were likely ordered to “stand down” on certain internal security matters. The same reason why JFK didn’t have his SS guards along the car.

Stand down orders are a convenient tool. Police unions used it to order the police to stand down and let Antifa rape, murder, pillage. Shrugs, no skin off their flesh. ALlies help allies.

Benghazi, the US military African command said to the various CIA ready teams and military forces “stand down, let them die”.

Am I stupid enough to believe that this was merely coincidence, sorta like the Tea Party getting strategically knee capped by the IRS?

Humans are easy to manipulate. The smarter and saner they think they are, the more vulnerable they are.

This happens more often than people wish to believe. On an internet comment zone, like this one, somebody will say/write something and it will be taken 180 degrees from the origin source. This usually causes dissent, conflict, and confusion. Humans cannot even pretend to control their own emotions and psycho pathetic behaviors. Even when nothing is on the line for them personally, financially, and etc. When it comes to putting their lives on the line, they will crumble before the might of the DS.

They aren’t really listening.

Since then I have seen enough mental illness up close and personal to know how intractable mental illness is.

Mark Vonnegut’s recovery was impressive but, as neo notes, he fit the profile of a minority with better prospects.

In his second memoir Vonnegut admits the voices he heard in his head never really went away.

I found R.D. Laing’s “The Politics of Experience” on a paperback bookrack at the ripe old age of 16. It shattered me:

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

That resonated. I was deeply alienated from the so-called normality of family, school and church. Just about all adults I knew struck me as fools or knaves or both, to use neo’s terms. I didn’t see a clear future ahead.

Laing springboarded from there to a defense of insanity and altered states of consciousness as possible solutions, which fit in well with the percolating drug romanticism of the time.

So I took to the Szasz/Laing anti-psychiatry movement like a duck to water.

I ended up at an experimental college where one group of students took over a dorm for communal living and named it “Kingsley Hall” after Laing’s communal London experiment where staff and mental patients lived as equals. The real Kingsely Hall lasted longer than one might think — five years.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/02/rd-laing-mental-health-sanity

Later I became part of a commune with ambitions to become an intentional therapeutic community to take in mental patients and heal them with equality and craft work.

This probably isn’t the time for snark, but it is hard to resist observing that the FBI should spend less time trying to bring down a president who is not of the same party as the Bureau’s political leadership, and more time trying to prevent mass murder.”

There Were Three School Shootings This Year, Not 18. That’s Still Too Many. by JIBRAN KHAN February 15, 2018 5:29 PM

Any number of school shootings is too many. And, at this time when we are so rightly hurting at yesterday’s brutality in Parkland, Fla., a sensationalist report has gone viral, claiming that there have been 18 such acts this year alone. The factoid has been promoted by countless major media and political figures, as well as by celebrities. Indeed, such a number would mean an unprecedented crisis. But it’s not true.

The original source of the figure is Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control advocacy organization, Everytown for Gun Safety. The organization arrives at the figure by defining a “school shooting” as any time a gun is fired at or near a school, college, or university, regardless of whether students are present or anyone is injured. In fact, if one counts only events where a shooter enters a school and shoots someone, there have been three school shootings, including yesterday’s. (The other spree shooting was in Kentucky and a murder happened at a school in Texas.) …
While such acts are obviously cause for concern in their own right, all that conflating these incidents with “school shootings” does is to create a climate of terror.

Suicide and violent crime are very real social problems, but they are not the same thing as school shootings.

Yesterday’s events are horrific enough on their own. There’s no need to amplify them by manipulating the public with falsehoods.

* * *
With Bloomberg et al., amplifying events with falsehoods is a feature, not a bug.

I read The Eden Express back when it first came out and remember liking it. I don’t remember much about it, though, except that I recall thinking that the author fit into a subset of schizophrenics I’d learned about in Abnormal Psych who tended to have a good prognosis: normal pre-morbid personality and rapid onset of schizophrenia.

Szasz I also liked at the time, but I think that while his movement did some good it also did a great deal of harm. It appealed to the libertarian in me, though, although at the time I didn’t even know that word.

I read Szasz ,The Myth of Mental Illness, back during my college years and briefly swallowed his argument, until finding Ellis who was more of a fit following my Rand worship phase. Cognitive rational therapy was perfect for a kid trying to find order, and escape from a chaotic upbringing. I haven’t delved all that much into Peterson’s treatment methods but did note the similarity to Ellis. Peterson says, clean up your room, and Ellis said, pull up your socks!

The Mark Vonnegut story is fascinating. His books look interesting. Thanks for pointing them out.