I heard an early report that she had “The Truman Show” delusion that her life is a reality show. This has become pretty common recently.
And there was a similar story in the Sept 16 New Yorker. And the Naval Yard shooter thought he was being manipulated through microwaves and such.
There is a schizophrenic in my family who was hearing voices from the walls in her late teens; not unusual. What was unusual was that during a remodel a few years later, they discovered heavy duty antenna wire in the walls; a previous owner had been a ham operator and the wires had been left in when the antennas were removed.
What do we know, for certain, about all the ways the human organism, with its myriad systems that rely on the electro magnetic signals, is impacted by the soup of vibrations we all swim in these days?
Folks who try and live a low EMF life are often ridiculed; yet I have myself felt agitated and uneasy…then looked around, and, for instance realized I was approaching ‘high tension’ wires…
just enough things to make me go, hmmm…
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I used to live near an AM radio station and when I talked on the cordless phone I could get a theromyne effect off household objects. But conspiracy buffs are obsessed with HAARP which is high frequencies.
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This is why it is a shame that mental health care is pretty much non-existant in the USA.
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Thank you for your example of just how the echo chamber justifies its own fear through baseless accusations. Rarely do we get such a clear example of the simmering hatred in these parts.
There was a press conference in Brooklyn, last night, where the family spoke. I wish I could have listened to the entire thing, but the local News 4 NY station broke away for something else. At that point, the baby was still not with any member of the family. It seemed that the family received very little information about the circumstances surrounding this woman’s death, but they stated that they believed it should have been handled differently. It was quite moving.
I prefer the corollary… Just because they are watching you, does not mean you are not paranoid. No one at the NSA cares about your my little pony fetish.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend dating NSA employees:
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The other thing about mentioning conspiracy and Fascism is that it’s important to remember that Fascism is a conspiracy theory. It’s the granddaddy of CTs about how the liberals and their multicultural army are coming to enslave you, which is the whole premise of Mein Kampf. Go to any CT website about FEMA camps and you are never more than two mouse clicks away from a white supremacist website. You will also see ads for books like “The Holocaust Hoax.”
Also notice that the alleged shadowy puppet masters controlling Obama aren’t giant corporations, they are supposedly a handful of elderly Jews. Soros, Pivin, Saul Alinsky. BTW Saul Alinsky has been dead 30 years.
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She “believed President Obama was electronically monitoring her Connecticut home in order to broadcast her life on television”?
Well, given that the president is ultimately responsible for the workings of his government, then she was at least half right.
Hell I’d watch it. I hope someone is going to pitch this project!
I find it somewhat surprising that no one has questioned the way the police handled the situation.
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“questions were also being raised about whether she posed enough of a threat during the fast-moving sequence of events that the police needed to shoot her,” reports the New York Times this evening
Have you even read what Xeni wrote (or the NYT for that matter)?
I’ll put it this way – I haven’t seen the questions. In forums like this one, people talk mostly about how crazy the driver was. I think the police response might have been excessive, to say the least.
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This topic was specifically about her mental illness, so that is why people are mostly focusing on it.
Have you read the first topic about what happened? Connecticut woman killed after attempting to "ram White House barricade"
I agree. I can understand about them hesitating in shooting at the driver initially, but what about taking her tires out? Are Run-Flat tires that common on modern cars?
Except that 1) there are other simpler, more plausible ways to explain the symptoms people associate with alleged EM sensitivity and 2) there is absolutely zero scientific evidence to support the allegations of humans being affected thus by EM waves and signals.
Your anecdotal evidence about old wires in walls and your own experiences with high tension power lines have some logical gaps in them.
Firstly, it is incredibly unlikely that your family member suffered the symptom of hearing voices only when in proximity to the particular section of wall that contained the wiring - they surely experienced them elsewhere in the building, or even in other places entirely.
Secondly, the presence of the wiring does essentially nothing to alter to ambient EM waves - such waves are already all around you and all the wires do is pick up on them. If humans were somehow affected by EM and radio signals, they wouldn’t need to have external wires anywhere near them - they would be overwhelmed by being constantly bombarded by the waves that are already constantly in the air around us. All that an antenna does is convert radio waves into electricity. If your cell phone works somewhere, your already being bathed in EM emissions, regardless of what wires or antennas are nearby.
Thirdly, your personal associations of low EM regions with less apprehension and unease likely stems from other sources. For one thing, EM emissions go hand in hand with urbanity - if you’re in a region that has very high levels of emissions, you’re almost certainly near large numbers of people in a region of high population and structure density. It’s far more likely that any symptoms of unease actually stem from the changes in terrain and the increased crowding of such areas. After all, urban settings have been proven to be high stress environments.
Similarly, the phenomenon of feeling uneasy and then noticing ‘high tension’ wires can easily be explained by other factors, such as physically “seeing” the wires but not fully mentally noticing them, and thus being subconsciously aware of them, inducing a sense of unease whose source only becomes apparant once you actually consciously notice their presence. Such wires also typically emit an audible hum, which again can be perceived subconsciously and only later recognized consciously.
It is true that electricity traveling through such wires induces a magnetic field around them and creates EM emissions, but seeing as there is zero scientific evidence for humanity being able to detect such fields or emission, while simultaneously we know perfectly well that humanity does have organs which allow them to see and hear, the simplest and most likely answer is that you’re actually detecting the wires in other ways, and that you’re simply not aware of that fact at the time.
It’s kind of like the atmosphere. We’re all constantly awash in sea of fluid - except we don’t realize that fact most of the time. We don’t really notice the presence of air, except through the phenomena of weather. This is why humanity spent millenia talking about wind and cold and the like, but was never really aware of the presence of a cloud of invisible gases all around us.
We’re often only aware of something when it makes itself obvious to us. You can walk down a certain road a hundred times, and every single time except one fail to notice the beautiful flowers growing beneath a stop sign. The flowers were always there, but you didn’t see them. And the fact that you’ve walked the road a hundred times and only now do you notice the flowers has the odd effect of suggesting to us that they weren’t there before - it’s easier to believe that the flowers magically appeared overnight than it is to believe that you were wrong.
The same sort of thing is at work when people argue over petty disagreements. “You never take out the trash.” Well, no, surely they do take the trash out now and then! You just aren’t watching them when they do so, or you’re not around to see it, or you saw it but didn’t consciously register it, et cetera.
The whole EM sensitivity is overwhelmingly likely to be the exact same thing. You feel ill at ease? Well it must be the radio waves, right? It couldn’t possibly be some other environmental factor like noise, or lighting, or smells, or pollution, or barometric pressure, or any of countless other variables that change with your location and which we know for a fact humans are able to detect.
And that doesn’t even get into the whole psychological aspect of things.
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Seriously folks – Was she being monitored? This is the 21st century, nothing will surprise me.
Um, what? I think you’re taking my comment too literally. By “quite the little fascist” I mean that Obama’s policies share some authoritarian aspects with a traditional fascist ideology. If you wanted to accurately describe his political position it would be “center-right authoritarian” or as another commentator put it, “authoritarian corporatist”.
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I know people want to comment on the NSA’s monitoring of American civilians, but arguing that she was “right” seems rather dismissive of her mental illness. She thought she was being monitored so that her life could be broadcast on television. I have not read that she thought that everyone was being monitored, that the lives of other people were being broadcast, that other towns were being put on lockdown or that other people could communicate with Obama like she could.
I heard of someone in graduate school who thought that her apartment had cameras in it watching her. People tried to get her help, but it is difficult to help someone who does not want it.
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I see all the stuff about “crazies” which may be correct. But on the other hand, did the people there just eliminate a handy lost tourist?
