Replies

Re: Vast LDS Conspiracy: "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." I don't know if you've seen The Manchurian Candidate, but in an early scene the man played by Frank Sinatra says this about the Lawrence Harvey character (the villain); a bit later another member of his platoon says the very same thing to his wife, word for word. The point is they've both been "brainwashed". The "contradictions" some have noted (I should call them "discrepancies") are what you'd expect among people who are not part of a conspiracy and have not got their story straight.

Re: Ed Smart's hospital stay: A while ago a friend of mine had a terribly bad scare concerning his child. It turned out okay, but he had to run around doing stuff, phoning people, etc., and I suppose didn't have time to soak it all in. A few weeks later he woke up one morning to find he couldn't stand up without falling over, because his sense of equilibrium was shot. He had no other symptoms but he would get completely dizzy if he moved his head the least bit. This went on for 24 hours and then he was fine. It turned out to be an anxiety attack. It can take other forms though.

Re: Other officer: I imagine the other officer in the patrol car was busy on the computer checking hospitals, juveniles picked up, other disturbances, checking up on the Smarts. I notice here whenever the police talk to anybody they ask for name and date of birth and then discreetly go back to the patrol car to do some checking.

About Ed Smart's hospital stay:

Thanks for your input on this, to me, interesting subject. Your account of your friend's experience did remind me of something similar--after a really bad storm in this area, I happened to be at the pediatrician's with my child. The doctor and I discussed a mutual acquaintance who had had a huge tree fall through the roof, separating him from his child's bedroom. (They scrambled through the mess and the child was very luckily unharmed.) He'd brought the child in immediately to be checked out, and the doctor said the kid was fine, but she'd noticed that the father was so nervous/stressed as to almost require medication.

What we're talking about with these fathers, though, is a species of psychiatric mishap, isn't it? I call it mishap, b/c it seems to me that anyone can be temporarily driven to be "mentally off" by extreme circumstances--while not being "mentally ill." So that's one explanation of Ed's hospitalization.

Another possible explanation is that some people will take refuge in illness/hospitalization when they feel they have literally nowhere else to hide.

Like most things in this case, the point of Ed's hospital stay is only partly explained to us, the public, and so it can be interpreted more than one way.

I realize that your suggested interpretation is the more likely one.

Re: the other officer:

Thanks for pointing this out. It rings true to me. I also have often seen at least one police officer remain in their car for a while, b/c nowadays a police car is almost like a mini-office, and they can check all sorts of information from inside it.