How Did I Become a Wackjob, Lord?  And Why Me?

(L) Mary Maxwell’s newest book about the Boston bombing (R) Hypermobility of joints in the hand. Photo: Wikipedia

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Gosh, did I ever have a big week!  Discovered new things about Politics. Then, today, a friend, “Glenda,” phoned me because I had asked her to please comment in my newly revised Boston book. It’s now called “Stop Lying about the Marathon Bombing — Or Else.” Glenda spoke in her most non-committal voice, but the bottom line is that she did not “fall for” any of the careful arguments I made as to the illegality of things that went on in the Tsarnaev trial.

That is, she defended the (absolutely outrageous) judge, and the (on-beyond-hopeless) Public Defender.  I cannot say that Glenda loosened my grip on the belief that the defendant — then age 21 — was wrongly convicted in 2015.  But she has now almost turned around my view of my brain and why I am the odd man out.  Why I am a wackjob.

Some Members of H Sapiens Just Can’t Get on the Train

I have never been a schoolteacher. So I haven’t seen a kid get left behind, unable to keep up with the class. Actually, there was such a boy in my elementary school. Poor thing did not even try. He was taller than everyone else and seemed adjusted to the idea that he just didn’t belong there.   Probably it’s a common occurrence. At Girl Scout camp, I was the only person who could not catch onto what came natural to everyone else — swimming. I still can’t swim a stroke. Nothing is going to get me on that train, alas.

About an hour after Glenda’s phone call, while still briefly wondering why she doesn’t “get it,” it struck me that I am the one who does not get it. Glenda is on the train. Glenda’s brain is working the way God (or evolution) made it work. She reads in the newspaper, in 2013, that yet another Islamic terrorist, has caused trouble. By January 2015, she hears on radio that the jury is being selected, to try Jahar Tsarnaev.

For all of the next two months in 2015 she reads bits of what happened that day in court. Example: A student at MIT, who finished doing his “math set” around 10pm, walked across the campus and witnessed a possible murder. Two persons who suffered leg amputation at the Marathon stood outside the courthouse today, making angry remarks. A pal of Jahar said he lent him a gun on New Year’s Eve, and never got it back. Etc. Like an Agatha Christie novel.

Perceive, Decide, Act

All the normal listeners took this on board as demonstrating the inevitable conclusion — that Jahar is guilty. I now believe they are correctly employing their neurons. The human brain does a brilliant job of taking in information and sort of running it through certain processes. All day, every day. This happens mostly unconsciously. The result, overall, is beneficial.

Even for a small child, there’s a ready-made way to put the world together. He does not need to be taught every trivial piece of reality. A comment by the parents, after he has heard it, say, three times, is plenty. The neurons do what the neurons are supposed to do and Mom’s remark becomes part of his knowledge, his culture.

By a later stage, teen-hood, God has laid on the peer-pressure factor. So now, even a fairly worthless behavior pattern, if engaged in by the most popular kid, finds imitators and probably no resistors. “It’s the thing.  It’s what we do. This is normal.” Only a fruit cake (in my day, a fink) would refrain from doing it.

Glenda, my book-reviewer, is well past teen-hood, at age 60. She “knows deep down” that Jahar is guilty. She is pulled along by the routineness of it all. “Muslims” like to make war. A young guy in Boston can make a bomb and insert it in a pressure cooker. The older brother Tamerlan bought 5 pressure cookers, months earlier, and even had the receipts still in his wallet when he died.

Like what more could you want, Mary Wackjob? This case is perfect. All we need to do is concentrate on our own busy schedule and let the Boston Globe or ABC fill us in, on the evening news, as to the jury’s logical decision — guilty on all 30 charges, death penalty plus billing the kid a million dollars ‘retribution’ to pay for the damage on the street.  Later, Congress can add some new laws to try to prevent similar bombings.  Hooray! Most people feel satisfied. Surely no one at Harvard yelled “Hey, wait a minute!” Case closed.

Something from a Midwestern Doctor

As indicated above, I now accept that I am “not in the train.” I am a wack job. This is not a complaint sheet — my long life has been unusually lucky.  (Sometimes the good luck borders on the spooky.) For one thing, I get every chance to learn new stuff.

At some point during the pandemic, I discovered the website “Substack.com.” I didn’t like the sound of the word, and wondered why they didn’t use a prettier handle. Yet I soon got sucked into Substack as they ran many Covid articles.

Three outstanding substack authors are Toby Rogers, Marianne Williamson, and someone called A MidWestern Doctor, who uses only the initials, MWD. I have the impression this doc is female.  She is practically dragging us all into medical school. Not the standard bland, vanilla medical school, but one where she in-depth shares her intense research and her considerable experience. Look up her study of “DMSO.” Your arthritic uncle will thank you.

The other day, Midwestern Doctor showed how to diagnose a certain class of victims of the Covid shot. These people suffer from “ligature laxity.” They already had that bodily structure, so that when Covid troubles struck, they were worse off than other folk, as their ligature laxity made their response to Covid (or maybe it was their response to the vaccine) awful.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with the Boston bombing, I now explain. It has to do with my theory, shown above, that your brain material, your neurons, know how to absorb information from the environment and make of it a whole picture, effortlessly.  God is in charge, so to speak. Thank you, God.

“Hidden Link Between Hypermobility and Vaccine Injuries“

Above is the title of MWD’s Dec 16, 2024 article at Substack.com, subtitled “How ligamentous laxity predisposes sensitive patients to vaccine-induced microstrokes.” Don’t worry, I will go light. “Ligament” and “ligature” are from the Latin ligare, to tie or bind. You may know that some fonts have ligatures where two letters are conjoined, such as ff. Or maybe you do birth control by “tubal ligation,” a tying of the Fallopian tube that will prevent any more eggs coming down to meet Mr Sperm.

Our Midwestern doctor says it is well known that ligature laxity is associated with many illnesses. It gives the patient less ease with dealing with the environment. Note this 2021 snippet from PubMed:  “Considering that the expanded … (ePTFE) suture is slippery on the surface, adequate ligation without laxity should be critically considered, especially in robotic surgery. …”

Oh, and she thinks manganese may help overcome laxity. Also see this:

“Ligamentous laxity can also create a variety of other issues throughout the body [e.g., gastro problems] One … consequence of hypermobility is that the body depends upon ligamentous tension for proprioceptive feedback (knowing where the body is in space), and as a result, once the ligaments become lax, hypermobile patients lose some of the general awareness that allows us to subconsciously navigate through the world.”  [Well, son of a gun.]

“Constitutional Archetypes”

There. I know what you’re thinking. You’re expecting Mary Maxwell to do what she does 83% of the time — broach the subject of the US Constitution. No way! For MWD, a “constitution archetype” is how she gets a quick measure of your likelihood to be the lax-ligament type. Indeed:

“Once you become familiar with an archetype, and you spot indicators of it in someone, it then becomes possible to identify to predict many other characteristics of that individual. [I, MWD, am helped by] the three Gunas (from Hinduism), which posits that three primordial energies exist that individuals can be composed from:

Sattva, which has qualities including “goodness, calmness, harmonious.”

Rajas, which has qualities including “passion, activity, and movement.”

Tamas, which has many qualities including “ignorance, inertia, laziness.”

“From a medical standpoint, Tamasic patients tend to have a general thickness, heaviness and solidity to them, while Sattvic patients tend to have a more light and ephemeral quality to them. Each in turn has a very different response to medical therapies. Tamasics typically tolerate and often only respond to forceful interventions (e.g., many of the standard medical therapies) whereas Sattvic’s respond very poorly to aggressive therapies and instead need gentle ones to coax their health back (which are often energetic in nature like acupuncture) —something which often does virtually nothing for Tamasic patients.”

I have lax ligatures. I “bend” more than I am supposed to. (Think of the Shen Yun dancers’ hypermobility, bending further than they really should.)

Recall my claim that the human brain takes what’s out there in the environment and puts it together very well, subconsciously. (Of course I don’t claim that it’s MY idea.) Recall Glenda? She did not even see what I was saying about Jahar’s trial, in my book “Stop Lying about the Marathon Bombing.” Glenda has good ligatures. Glenda is on the train.

Maybe if I took some manganese, I could stop thinking about false flags, or writing books about family-court judges who traffic kids.

A Word about Robin Allott

So if it is healthy for Glenda, and kazillions of others, to see things the way the crowd sees them, might there be an even deeper mechanism in the brain to accommodate that?  Flash back to a time last year when I discovered the research of the late Robin Allott.  Robin is the brother of Philip Allott, author of Eutopia (who encourages non-stop breaking out of the box intellectually).

Robin seems to have known what goes on in the brain when we hear words. It was a shock for me to learn about his theory of the motor response to language.

Bet you assume that when we hear “Let’s go for Italian tonight,” you scan your brain to see if it’s a good idea. After all, maybe you’re allergic to tomatoes and what Italian dinner omits the tomato? Or maybe it’s too far to drive to Luigi’s.  Well, Robin Allott, in “The Motor Theory of the Origin of Language” (1989), says you probably don’t bother to think. You just whip out the car keys and get on the road to Luigi’s.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but for Allott, the motor cortex obeys words, just as the motor cortex does what other sensory perceptions demand. If you see a rock being thrown at you, you duck. If you smell a dead bird, you hurry away. No thought needed, your perception of the foul odor is enough. And everyone knows that if your hand touches a hot stove, you pull it away automatically. The perception and the action are married.

Summary

In this article, I touched upon three different things:  First, there was my noticing, after Glenda’s dismissal of my Marathon book, that Glenda is not the odd-man-out. She is using her brain in the way it was intended, the way it generally works well. Babies and teens pick up a trend in behavior and it is usually pays them to do so. I somehow don’t do this, I insert a layer of critical thinking. I get labeled a wack job, and now I have to agree that yes, I am apparently not-normal.

Second, I stopped to discuss another brand-new explanation of my (or anyone’s) behavior, as found in a December 16th article by a person who publishes only under the name MidWesternDoctor, at substack.com. Although I gave it little space, I mentioned MWD’s ability to recognize a patient’s “constitutional archetype.” She has seen many patients in whom the binding function is weak. Their fingers may be hypermobile, as in the photo above. That guy’s ligature laxity can throw off his sense of balance. And it takes extra effort for him to absorb some environmental things.

Third, I brought up the work of the late Robin Allott, whose broad mission was to find how language emerged in our species. He says “Easy peasy — look at the motor cortex.” It takes only one rock being thrown at you for you to duck, with nary a thought about why you are ducking.

Thus, three ways that God has prevented people appreciating my clever, clever investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing: Get on the train with your society’s culture. Develop good (not lax) ligatures. Have a normal motor cortex that obeys not only sensory perceptions but words. E.g., “Punish Muslim terrorists.”

Signed, Genuine biological specimen of a wack job, Mary Maxwell

P.S. “Tonight — Luigi’s.”