Luke:

There are several levels of your 'purely physical' question.

Can anyone guarantee 100% effective contraception using any means?   Because a consequence of our purely physical interactions can be a human life.

There is no such thing as 'accidental conception.'   The closest thing I can think of is, there is a man on a ladder with an erection, he accidentally falls off and accidentally lands on a women and accidentally impregnates her.   I'd be willing to bet nothing like this has ever happened in the history of mankind.    'Unintentional' is not 'accidental' in this regards, it is just irrational, as in, 'we intended the act to not have any biological consequences, and took imperfect steps to see to that, but the Universe refused to bend to our whims in this instance.'

Can anyone guarantee 100% effective prophylactic prevention of transmission of disease?   Because a consequence of our purely physical interactions can be one or more damaged human lives, well beyond the principals of the act.

and finally, the hardest:

Suppose the above could be guaranteed-- say, human intimate interactions via purely virtual means(it's here.)   

Can anyone guarantee 100% effective prevention of significant psychological impact of our intimacy with others?  Because a consequnce of even our purely virtual interactions with others can be psychologically damaged human lives.   Discontinuation, change in investment in the relationship, breakup, rejection, heartbreak...

What excites us about intimacy, in part, is exactly the fact that it is consequential.    It -should- be regarded as more than a handshake.    It -may- be regarded as same or less.    It -can- be regarded as same or less.

regards,

Fred

Fred,

I'm familiar with axis. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) used to categorize collections of symptoms for psychology with a multi-axial approach. (I don't know why DSM 5 abandoned that approach but I've heard that the DSM has been taken over by those who want to put everything in so that everything can be billed - e.g., redefine explosive anger disorder so that it includes a normal two year old's temper tantrum.  And that somehow the UN got involved and there was a desire to see it 'globalized' - a merging with European ICD codes.)

The old DSM - IV Axis

Axis I: All psychological diagnostic categories except mental retardation and personality disorder (and these are divided further into categories like, "Mood disorders," "Dissociative disorders," "Depressive disorders," "Sleep Disorders," etc.)

Axis II: Personality disorders and mental retardation (These are separated out because they begin in childhood, tend to endure for the lifetime, and can co-exist with Axis I disorders. Personality disorders include Narcissim, Histrionic personality disorder, Paranoid, Obsessive-Compulsive, etc.)

Axis III: General medical condition; acute medical conditions and physical disorders

Axis IV: Psychosocial and environmental factors contributing to the disorder

Axis V: Global Assessment of Functioning or Children’s Global Assessment Scale for children and teens under the age of 18

For example, you could have a person with good health (axis III), who meets the Axis I category for a Major Depression, and shows narcissistic personality tendencies (Axis II), recently lost his job and is under a lot of stress (axis IV), and even with the depression is a high functioning individual (Axis V).

It is using the axis as categories for getting the best grouping of symptoms so that a diagnosis isn't a misdiagnosis and the clinician doesn't, for example, treat a physical disorder as if were susceptible to talk therapy or visa versa.

It is like you said, using the process of looking at a subject from the different axis it is more likely that the issue to be understood will be properly understood. And then each of the items within each of the axis will either need further categorization or when it gets to an appropiately singular nature, then it can be viewed for its gradient.

Wikipedia has a fairly good list of the disorders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-IV_codes
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Luke, does someone really think that masturbation NEEDS to be condoned? Isn't that a religious position?

Luke,

I'm fairly familar with Maslow's work and I can't see him having any negative views on masturbation.  There are some religious folk opposed to any form of sexual pleasure that isn't an unavoidable side-effect of earnest attempts to procreate, but why would any secularist be opposed?

Steve:

A psychologist I worked with in the 80s-- my very first client as an independent(MMPI testing and scoring automation, biofeeedback displays for children, office billing automation ) and I recently got back together for a lunch, and one of his comments was how DSM has "exploded" in recent years, as you point out.   My niece is working on her PhD in pschology, and she also commented how huge DSM is now.   It seems anyone I know who knows about DSM is struck mostly by how it has grown.   Your example of DSM is a really good example of folks searching for those axes to try and understand a really complex topic.

I'm also struck with how it not only simply grows, like a catalog, but also changes; as you no doubt know, for example, what used to be classified as 'Multiple Personal Disorder'(MPD) in the 70s no longer even exists as that;  it is now part of some new classification, Dissociative Identiy Disorder.   So not only is it 'growing' but 'morphing' at the same time.  

The only reason I have any concept of that at all is, an old freind of mine, 'Beth', a girl our age who my first wife knew from business school and worked with in a small office, was diagnosed back then as having MPD. We knew her socially as well, but we had no idea, nor suspected anything at all unusual about her, and learned this suddenly at her commitment hearing over an incident when she was 26.   I testified at her hearing, along with about 30 other folks who she had all called.   Few of us had anything particularly bad to say about her(one small group of biker thugs in a sea of otherwise yuppy assholes accused her of all kinds of murky behaviour associated with money/fraud), other than the fact that most of us knew her by a totally different name and background. We new her as a totally delightful, fun-loving, professional, only slightly quirky mini-librarian type.   Other's knew her as a kind of brash femme-fatale. The only constant was that every group had a different background story of who her father was; one person, her live-in boyfriend, claimed she drove him past her father's home, but he described her boss's family home-- the scene where her boss's 17yr old daughter had been brutally murdered in March 1979, two years earlier.      It was a -really- disturbing incident, because(I much later came to learn-- in 2009)  she was being stalked in the context of that murder by a murky fake P.I. (who had also come to my door in 1980 asking truly odd questions about just her),   This same fake P.I. stalked her directly and admitted to have made a deal with her for -her- to shut up about the murder.    (He was, I believe, also ridung shotgun on her associates to make sure she wasn't talking to them-- that was, I am convinced, the purpose of his odd visit to us in 1980.)    She was later discovered one day(in 1981) by her live in boyfriend naked, catatonic, hidden in a bedroom closet, clutching a kitchen knife, in the home they shared.    She was non-responsive, he was bewildered, called the police/ambulance, she was hauled off for 120hr observation.   Someone had earlier dropped off a house plant at their home with the ominous note "We know where you are, Beth."   (I learned in 2009 that was done by this same murky fake P.I.)     She wasn't hiding; she was going to work every day at that same office.    At the hospital psych ward, she eventually started speaking again, and within those 120 hrs, called people she knew to 'come speak for her' at her commitment hearing.   That was sometime in 1981...and it was the last time I ever saw this girl.  She was committed for 90 days, and when released, I heard she immediately moved to CA; her own family has no idea where she's been for over 33 years since.    The murder of her boss's daughter is still unsolved, is the occasional focus of a local cold case grand jury, and LE has been trying to locate her, with no luck at all.    That cold case is bizarre beyond belief; the murdered girl's slightly older brother, after seeding the community with false rumours that he knew who killed his sister, died in a freak gasoline station explosion less than six months after his sister's murder.    Those are just the basic facts, but the bizareness surrounding the case are truly mind boggling.   Myself and 3 others have been jointly working on a book for the past five years, and the 35 yr old cold case keeps getting stranger and stranger; the book is not lacking in material, it is lacking in an ending.

It also turns out that Beth had been dating the fake P.I.s roomate around the time of the murder; a then twentysomething local drug dealer who was driving around town in Ferraris, Jaguars, Corvettes, etc.  

The murder in 1979 occurred on the first day of the Three Mile Island accident, March 28, 1979, and the fake PI and his roomate were so wigged out that day over an 'imminent radioactive storm cloud' that they had actually packed a car for Florida and were awaiting the sign to evacuate the area(Bethlehem, PA, about 80 or so miles East of TMI.)   Like... nobody else in the Lehigh Valley that day.    It was a day that put most normal people a little on edge; folks were carefully listening to the radio over the course of the day, but there was mostly no panic.   Mostly.   Because it was the kind of news that might push folks already on the edge clean over.

This is just -one- odd thread surrounding the murder; there are many, some even odder.

regards,

Fred

Luke,

Here's my two cents for what they are worth in these inflationary times.

Don't screen. Don't measure. Don't evaluate. Just enjoy the company of the other person and learn about them. They are like a foriegn country that you get to visit, and enjoy, and then you will go home.  You aren't there to judge their customs, to measure them against any standard, but just to have fun and experience.  (I usually like the women I get to know, even if it never becomes romantic, or never looks like someone I'd want to have a deeper relationship with.  By far the best thing about being a man, is.... women.  They are fascinating and delightful... on average, given a chance.)

Above all learn to enjoy being with someone for no other purpose than to enjoy each other's company. This should be done again and again and again and with lots of different women. I say this because I don't believe that we can bring our conscious mind to bear on the issue of choosing a person for some deeper commitment with any accuracy of prediction till we know them well - know them in a way that screening will never do.

Asking yourself hard questions about being able to accept this or that in the other person comes later - after you start to feel an attachment - a liking that goes beyond just a physical attraction.

After all, what you want is a person that you enjoy being with for a long period of time.  How to test that?  See if you enjoy them over the shorter run of time.  Do you like being with them?  Do you make them laugh and have a good time?

Protecting against a financial predator isn't a difficult task - a good pre-nup before getting married takes care of that, as long as you don't engage in sharing of your financial goodies or info before hand - the same precautions you'd take with a friend or even some relatives.  Nothing you'd do early on.

I think you are coming from the wrong direction with the screening and worries of criminal and financial dangers and with the concern about what they might or might not hold as beliefs regarding producers versus takers. That approach can't help but to generate a kind of background feeling that most women would pick-up on and feel confused or worried, or put off - kind of like, "What's with him? Did I do something wrong? It's like he thinks I'm trying to steal something!"

All you want to do is have fun together and see if you are lucky enough to fall in love.  Set things in your advantage - Don't go out with women who aren't doing alright in their fields and don't go out with women that appear to have any big problems.  Avoid the trap of trying to fix broken damsels or save them dire straits.  And don't look for perfection either.

Have fun. You have a fine mind and it will learn with experience and you'll get better at being open, and at seeing which women are more likely to good for you.

Are there any women out there in RoR land that want to chime in and offer their two cents (would be worth more than mine, I'll wager)?

Fred,

The original idea for the DSM was great. It was to separate the theory from the practice. That is, each different theoretical orientation had its own names for collections of symptoms, along with a different theory of how the disorder arose and how it should be treated. All therapists will end up adopting some orientation, usually along fairly uniform lines (Freudian, Jungian, Cognitive, Gestalt, etc.), but some are eclectic in the techniques they employ - that is they were willing to borrow techniques from other orientations, and apply them to their clients who they viewed through the theories they believe best explained things.

The DSM, in effect, said you keep your own theories of cause, or personality, etc. and you choose whatever techniques you want to employ, but let us all agree on a common name for a common set of symptoms so that we can talk to each other.

And I suspect that it was the different psychologists in the room arguing back and forth to get the best grasp on what a given disorder had to have to be diagnosed that saw the multi-axial approach as a good approach to get the needed specificity.  

For example, here is what you need to be diagnosed with PTSD (just Axis II):

A: Exposure to a traumatic event. This must have involved both (a) loss of "physical integrity", or risk of serious injury or death, to self or others, and (b) a response to the event that involved intense fear, horror, or helplessness (or in children, the response must involve disorganized or agitated behavior).

B: Persistent re-experiencing. One or more of these must be present in the victim: flashback memories, recurring distressing dreams, subjective re-experiencing of the traumatic event(s), or intense negative psychological or physiological response to any objective or subjective reminder of the traumatic event(s).

C: Persistent avoidance and emotional numbing. This involves a sufficient level of:
avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, such as certain thoughts or feelings, or talking about the event(s)
avoidance of behaviors, places, or people that might lead to distressing memories as well as the disturbing memories, dreams, flashbacks, and intense psychological or physiological distress, inability to recall major parts of the trauma(s), or decreased involvement in significant life activities, decreased capacity (down to complete inability) to feel certain feelings and an expectation that one's future will be somehow constrained in ways not normal to other people.

D: Persistent symptoms of increased arousal not present before. These are all physiological response issues, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, or problems with anger, concentration, or hypervigilance. Additional symptoms include irritability, angry outbursts, increased startle response, and concentration or sleep problems.

E: Duration of symptoms for more than 1 month. If all other criteria are present, but 30 days have not elapsed, the individual is diagnosed with acute stress disorder.

F: Significant impairment. The symptoms reported must lead to "clinically significant distress or impairment" of major domains of life activity, such as social relations, occupational activities, or other "important areas of functioning".

I pulled that from Wikipedia because I'm not at home where I have my DSM manual. It seems to be missing a component. If I remember right, a person has to have had 6 months pass since the traumatic event and the full set of symptoms coming into play.

The genius of the DSM is that in the end, if they haven't ruined it, it will become clearer, much sooner, as to which techniques work for which disorders and can even open the possibilility of empirical research on different theories - in theory.
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During my time working with clients I only had one person who showed symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorder.  It is best thought of as an extreme form of escape. I think it would only happen to someone when they were young.  Imagine a child being tortured.... repeatedly. They can't physically escape. They haven't lived long enough to have a context in which they can see themselves as being abused despite having done nothing wrong. They escape by becoming someone else - the old self was obviously not working. That's a very simplistic view, but the one client I had seemed to back it up. He would "grow" a new personality when an older one seemed inadequate to meet the really scary things in his life. It provided him with a kind of hope that this new, tougher personality could deal with things.  I'm sure it has many more complications than that, and a much more complex path leading up that particular escape.

Most debilitating or just painful ways of dealing with life involve attempts to escape - substance abuse for example, being a recluse for another.  And these practices look to the person like they will work, but actually they usually lead to some kind of dead end that generates greater pain, and a new level, often more intense form of avoidance.  
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I look forward to reading your real life mystery, but not till you have some kind of ending.

Steve:

re: 

During my time working with clients I only had one person who showed symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorder.  It is best thought of as an extreme form of escape. I think it would only happen to someone when they were young.  Imagine a child being tortured.... repeatedly. They can't physically escape. They haven't lived long enough to have a context in which they can see themselves as being abused despite having done nothing wrong. They escape by becoming someone else - the old self was obviously not working. That's a very simplistic view, but the one client I had seemed to back it up. He would "grow" a new personality when an older one seemed inadequate to meet the really scary things in his life. It provided him with a kind of hope that this new, tougher personality could deal with things.  I'm sure it has many more complications than that, and a much more complex path leading up that particular escape.

Most debilitating or just painful ways of dealing with life involve attempts to escape - substance abuse for example, being a recluse for another.  And these practices look to the person like they will work, but actually they usually lead to some kind of dead end that generates greater pain, and a new level, often more intense form of avoidance. 

Interesting.   Before the commitment hearing, I and my ex were really bewildered; why was she being committed?   We knew none of the details (the stalking, etc., except for the odd visit by the fake PI a year earlier, which we had all -- including Beth-- laughed about.  She showed no signs then of having any idea who that was.)     We met with Beth before the hearing in the psyche ward at a small table, sitting across from her, to ask her what this was about.  She was in a hospital robe, no makeup, totally washed out. Almost unrecognizable.   We knew her as a happy, perky, quirky, 'mini-librarian' type.   Curly hair, dimples.   Fun to be around.   A little 'zany.' Completely and totally harmless.   When we asked her, she reached up to her mouth and took out a small dental appliance-- her front top tooth was artificial.  She played with the appliance in her hand and looked at us and said "They think I'm crazy."  It was one of the many disturbing aspects of this whole event. We'd never been in the locked down psych ward before, and this odd behaviour didn't help.    We'd had no idea(nor should we)that she had an artificial front tooth at such a young age.    So how did she lose her tooth?   Was that a sign of some abuse at some point in her life?   We learned more about her much later; there were some rumors not only of child abuse, but abusive relationships in her young adult life.   Not the boyfriends we knew her to have, but others (including the drug dealer/roomate of the fake PI.)     

Interestingly, in the time we knew her, we only knew her to have exactly two boyfriends, both of them long term.   The first was an assistant psychology professor(!)who also testified at her commitment hearing; he told us and also testified that at the time he knew her, he knew she was MPD.   We never had a clue.   The second was a fellow nerd, an engineeer from San Francisco in the area working on a coal gassification project who had moved into the area after the murder and knew nothing about it; Beth had never told him any of what had happened to her boss's daughter.    He was the one who found her naked in the closet of the home they shared; they were living together.     In between, we kind of lost touch with Beth for a while(we'd moved to Boston for a year), and much later, we learned that during that year, Beth married and divorced!   We had no idea.   She kept her various lives separate, and yet, she had a full time job at a sales office the whole time.

Her only words to us on the phone , in reference to the commitment hearing were "Come speak for me,"   She'd been threatened (I later learned--in 2009)for her to 'shut up' about something she knew about the murder.   And when asked what this was about, she pulls out a false tooth and says "They think I'm crazy."

I'm not so sure she was crazy; we'd known her socially for over six years at that point.   She'd been in our wedding in 1976. 

After talking to Beth at the commitment hearing, we met up with her boyfriend(who had called the ambulance/police , who took her into custody for 120 hrs, which is permitted under PA law, but a commitment hearing is required to hold someone in this condition for longer than that, and this was that hearing.)    He told us about the house plant with the ominous note, but said Beth seemed to laugh it off; he was more upset about it than she seemed to be, until now.   He was totally bewildered.

She kind of came apart during the hearing; most people had nothing bad to say about her, just the different names and back stories about her father("He works at Bethlehem Steel as a shopworker/laborer...he is a sales executive in Bethlehem ....he is involved with diamond mines in South Africa"   Seriously-- that was one of the back stories testified to.)       There was not any overlap of the groups obviously, but even some who knew each other had slightly different ideas of who her family/father was.   The folks who testified were overwhelmingly yuppy assholes like me and my ex and the Beth we knew.   She didn't object to any of that, even though none of it lined up, she just sat quietly at the front of the hearing and listened.   But one small group -- maybe three -- stood out; were kind of biker thuggish, leather, tattoos, etc., and they testified that she owed them money, that she had extorted money from them in some fashion.    Remember....these were all people who -she- had called to come 'speak for her.'    Some of what they were saying sounded like some of the murky stuff that the fake PI was claiming the year before.   When they testified, Beth stood up and stamped her foot, exclaiming "This isn't fair!  They are making this up!" or some such.

I think there clearly could have been (at least) The Good Girl Beth(GGB) and The Bad Girl Beth(BGB).  The GGB was a young professional woman, who worked as an executive secretary for a cement company sales VP, whose daughter was brutally murdered, whose son died in a freak gas station explosion, and whose wife had died less than three years earlier of leukemia.  (He lost his entire family in the span of three years.)      I suspect, but don't know all of the details yet, that a relationship that BGB had might have dragged some unsavory folks into her boss's family's lives.   Beth had house sat and babysat for her boss over the years, she was more involved with the family than just an exec sec at the office.

Your insight into the abuse aspect might explain her other clearly odd behavior, and in terms of 'escape' -- few people have managed to vanish from the face of the earth (without WITSEC help) with quite the skill of Beth.    She has a brother nearby.   He claims she communicates with him by phone or card every so many years, but never in such a way that he can tell exactly where she is.   He hasn't seen her in over 33 years.

It is for me personally a compelling story. Elements of it reach even into the casino building binge in Nicky Scarfo's Atlantic City of 1979.  (Scarf, Inc. had 100% of the casino cement contracts in Atlantic City, and Beth's boss was a sales VP for a company that sold bulk cement in the NE.   On the day his daughter was murdered...he was in Atlantic City, and Beth was back in the office, answering his phone and typing his letters and knowing all about his business, like any exec secretary would.)    But it is not a book unless it finds an ending, and so far, it has no ending.  In fact, after 35 years, the probability of finding an ending is slim to none.    And since I started to research this story heavily, I've come to learn that this whole 'Beth' thing(which I am most familiar with) is just one facet of a case with -many- such odd facets.   Without an ending, however, it is just a massive rabbit hole of seemingly endless "W.T.F.?"   But we haven't given up yet.

Luke, sorry to abuse the thread this way; but ... imagine a first date with a 'Beth.'  Because by far, Beth is not the only Beth in this world.

regards,

Fred

Steve:

The 'baggage' with sex is certainly there because the activity is filled with real and potential consequences; life itself, biological, psychological.   It is not just a hardwired reptilian drive(although it is certainly that, too), but it is the reality of the consequences that is part of what excites us about it, beyond the reptilian drive, I think.

The knowledge of and consideration of the consequences, I think, is above the reptilian brain stem.   (It -shouldn't- be regarded as a handshake; it may and can be regarded as a handshake.)

Also, your comment about being drunk I have been thinking about alot lately, in the context of the UVa RollingStone fraternity rape article.

A group of young adolescents enter a fraternity party, the explicit design and purpose of which is to get drunk out of one's mind.  They are not going to a wine and cheese pairing party to quietly listen to some piano music with mildly buzzed socius.   They are going to partake in the local adolescent cultural concept of weekend fun, which starts Thursday night on many campuses.   Those experiences are mostly survived, just like adolescence in general, but not all survive.

What should we call an expectation of reasonable behavior in walking into those circumstances-- in placing oneself in those circumstances?   It is risk/reward behavior; adolescents do it because on some level it is rewarding to them.   But the downside of that is 'risk.'  

A father and mother of a rape victim understands this before the rape.  The victims, not so much.

This is not to excuse the acts of drunken rapists.   But neither is it to excuse the risk/reward behaviour of those who place themselves into circumstances where others are 'drunk out of their minds.'   After the fact, we generate all kinds of outrage at the activity that occurs only in the reptilian brain stem.     On what basis?   On what level of expectations of reasonable/rational bebavior do we assess an environment soaked in alcohol?

We'd hope the events would be mostly self-limiting: (too drunk to reason aligning with too drunk to perform much of anything dangerous at all, including driving a car or rape.)  .

regards,

Fred

Deanna:

You are at the very top of my very tiny literary fan club, and I appreciate that.

We're trying, but non-fiction is much harder in some regards because we can't make up an ending.   I, a reporter from Phila NBC-10 who grew up in the neighborhood, a younger classmate of the girl who was murdered, and a woman who grew up in the area -- the four of us have been jointly working on this story since about March 2008. 

March 28, 2014 was the 35th anniversary of the murder; there was the usual say nothing spread in the local paper.  Local LE even announced for the first time in 35 years a 'primary suspect of interest.'    They didn't make the name public, but we knew who they meant from other contacts, and he was in our list of about 10, but out of 10, he was at the very bottom, for sure, with the least specificity.   And sure enough, nothing ever came of that announcement.   We discovered on our own -- it was easy, from public records -- that, soon after that article came out(within days)he put his home up for sale.   We assumed that LE knew that because he was their 'primary suspect' but when we shared this with them about six weeks later in a periodic conversation -- (we provide them with everything we come up with, they have 24/7 access to our joint project repo via Google Drive where we keep all our material and notes), the lead detective expressed surprise-- he had no idea the guy was selling his home, nor that he had put it on the market within days of the splash in the local paper.    This was ... very frustrating.    BTW, this behavior, although it sounds incriminating, is not really so incriminating;   it costs as much to defend yourself from charges that aren't true as it does from charges that are true, and this 76 yr old, with a modest home that was paid for, might easily have concluded 'screw this' and was just trying to make it through the home stretch reasonably intact.   The details of why he is under suspicion are -really- thin -- basically, something anonymous that was blurted out at a court proceeding in 1992 by a disgruntled girlfriend, that was overheard by everyone in the courtroom, including LE.   She hollered out "You are going to get away with this just like you got away with that other thing with that young girl."     That's it.   Pretty thin, it seems.  No specificity.  Could mean anything.   So why was he shoved to the front of the list(and ignored?)    It seems like, as a sacrificial lamb.  Head fake.  Hey look, a squirrel.  We need to do something on this case.    But his name wasn't announced in the paper, so it was a safe play all around.   I suspect it was a headfake, but ... why?  The guy definitely had some anger issues(which is why he was in court; he'd been accused of stalking a former student, and also, had struck a constable-- allegedly attacked him with his car when he was served papers-- and this is why he was in court in 1992.   But, no known direct connection to the victim, later or in 1979 or ever.  

The Beth story is 1, this guys story is another, and there about 8 more.  Some overlap, which is interesting.   Just, not this guy's.   So pick one...

We have tons of material, that isn't the problem.   The problem is... the story has no ending.   It would be a -very- frustrating story to read at this point.

Some of it includes a bizarre conversation I had with the DA, and discovery of a potential conflict of interest in the case; the fake PI claims that he knew the DA back in the day.  As well, the DA has an old poltitical ally and former 'boss'(county executive)whose relationship with the DA was the cause of his having to recuse his office from a criminal investigation about twelve years ago and hand it over to the PA Atty General's office. here was a big stink in the local papers over that, it doesn't happen all that often.   But the DA did the right thing in that case and recused his office.    This same person has also admitted to knowing the fake PI back in the day.   This same person today lives in and owns the property that the fake PI was living in on the day of the murder in 1979-- a place where Beth had been seeing the fake PI's roomate on occasion.   A wierd set of coincidences.     When I outlined the Beth scenario to the DA on the phone in 2012, he denied ever hearing about it.   When I also asked the DA about his relationship with his former boss who lived at that house today, he asked me 'Who is [his name]?'  When I told him "Your former boss, your political ally, the person whose relationship with once caused you to recuse your office from a criminal investigation..." he blurted out, "Oh yeah... we think we've confirmed that Beth is deceased."      W.T.F.?    I am not family.   Why would he blurt that out in that context?   As well,  I'd been told by Beth's brother that he had talked to her within the past year, so if she was 'confirmed deceased' it was a recent development.    I told him, "That's the first I've heard anything like that.  When did it happen?"  ... and his DA radar came up to max and he recanted, claiming he wasn't sure, he'd have to check on that.   It was all odd.   Why would he tell me anthing at all?  He seemed stressed.   When he asked me to explain the basis for the conflict of interest, and I connected the names, including the fake PI, to the case and that house specifically, the DA never asked me who the fake PI was(I'd used his name), only who his former boss and political ally was.    Nobody who knows the principals involved, such as the then police commissioner, finds it credible at all that the DA didn't know who his former boss, etc., was, and are baffled by his reponse to this.   

There might be a reason why the investigation has been stymied for 35 years.    The DA today lives within a half mile of where this girl was murdered, within hundreds of feet of where she is today buried, and has since 1984, and principals who were murkily stalking folks and acting  the fool back on the day of the murder claim to have known the DA back then, even as he today is showing no curiosity about them at all;  I had put much of the Beth story in writing and sent it to LE in January of 2009.  I added to it as I learned more, but never a single question from LE.   It wasn't until Feb 2012, after acdvising the DA of a potential confict of interest, that I was even asked one question about the Beth story;   Within weeks of telling all that to a special detective who worked for the DA's office, that detective was removed from not only the case but county employ, and the case itself was dropped by the county and turned back over to Bethlehem City PD, who had been sitting on it for 30 years, and where it is back today, except for the fact that the county DA has involved himself in city politics, picked the new mayor, and also, picked the new Chief of Police for the City of Bethlehem....

As an objective outside observer, if you were investigating an unsolved cold case, would you be interested at all in the Beth story?   It has left residue(commitment hearing records and so on; it can't have been made up. When someone is committed for 90 days, those records become permanent court records.).   So what does it imply when LE avoids it like the plague, and instead, throws a guy who had someone blurt out literally nothing specific in court under the bus...and then ignores him?

There was one item from this true story that made it into the work of fiction you read a while back; I used the date of the Three Mile Island accident as an anchor in time in that story.   Writing all that was fun; this has been like real work.

regards,

Fred

Fred,

I have my doubts about the baggage of sex.  Not that there aren't consequences - physiological consequences like STDs and pregnancy, social consequences such as being seen as a slut or a womanizer, even financial consequences (a fellow I know spent 18 years paying child support after a one-night stand), and there are obviously instances of emotional consequences - hurt or shame.

But, drinking too much can also have grave consequences.  And I'm not talking about repeated abuse, but just a one time thing.  The consequences can be fatal.  But we don't assign drink, in the case of the single or infrequent occasion the same level or flavor of scariness. We say that you have to drink in a responsible way... and that we don't demonize drink, despite that its very nature is to blot out the consciousness and create self-made idiots for the night.  So, I'm not saying that sexual activities can't be  bad new when done irresponsibly or for the wrong reasons.  And notice that we don't give a moral downgrade to driving a car because of the fact that it carries a risk - with young drivers we properly focus on their sense of immortality, their degree of personal responsibility, and the maturity they bring to that area.  I'm not seeing the great divide such that sex should be demonized.

As to Frat parties... well, late adolescence and young adulthood are almost intoxicating times even without alcohol or drugs because of the natural exhuberence of becoming independent, feeling adult, exercising ones own choices.  It is a giant shift from the model of childhood which was all about obeying.  And our current social structure has stretched adolescence far beyond anything in history, which combined with the sudden chasm of generational gap that appears at that age (and earlier), and the fact that our society as a whole has ceased to a large degree to value personal responsibility, all account for one thing: Bad Decisions.  We have young adults that behave like kids. Drinking too much is a bad decision.  Driving while drunk is a bad decision.  Having unprotected sex with someone whose name you don't even know (drunk or sober) is a bad decision.  Hell, majoring in Ancient Roman Band Instruments instead of something that prepares one to be productive and successful is a bad decision.

These should all be looked at as parenting issues, as cultural issues, as emotional maturity issues, as self-esteem issues, as Good/Bad decision issues... and not put sex in a box by itself as if it had some toxcity inherent in itself.  Focusing on sex instead of character traits will lose the war by fighting the wrong battle.