Blaming the poor for the financial crisis

There's a good article in The American Prospect, "Did Liberals Cause the Sub-prime Crisis?" which takes on the falsehoods being peddled by the right-wing that we can basically blame poor people and minorities for the current crisis. Don't buy the lies.

The fact of the matter is that Fannie and Freddie have had the same standards of lending for poor people since 1977, when the Community Reinvestment Act was passed, but we obviously didn't see the housing bubble even begin forming until around 2001. How can you blame a 25-year old policy for something that just started? Scapegoating black people, of course!

The problem with this argument is that CRA didn't even apply to 50% of subprime lending, and applied very little to another 30%! That's because CRA still had regulatory structure and transparency in lending, while the mess we have now is due to lack of standards and the shadiness of transactions involving mortgage-backed securities. So long as banks were on the hook if a mortgage failed, they had a vested interest in abiding by the standards of CRA. It was only in finding a way to magically pass on risk to others that predatory lending took off and the bubble was born. How did this happen? Fancy shuffling on Wall Street.

The fundamental issue is this: in 2000, a de-regulation bill called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act passed by McCain's right-hand man, Phil Gramm allowed for new fancy ways for banks to get around risk containment with mortgages, best summarized by the image of a bunch of fat cats with chainsaws tearing up regulatory law. In 2004, Bush and the GOP Congress pulled even more lenders out from under the regulatory structure of the CRA! Thus Gramm's "credit default swaps" legislation fueled the bubble and led to the free-for-all on Wall Street that we're paying for now. Paul Krugman explains that financial institutions were allowed to gamble with trillions of dollars with little to no regulation, and when risk became "spread" through the ability to bundle and sell mortgage-backed securities and investment vehicles, people went a little beserk by ignoring the serious risk that still existed and pretended that house prices would soar indefinitely. Financial institutions were allowed to play like banks, without the regulation that banks must submit to, and now are being bailed out like banks.

As Nouriel Roubini says, this is GOP welfare: privatize profits and socialize losses.

Don't buy the spin that this is the fault of liberals who wanted poor people and minorities to have houses. There were still rigorous standards of who could be lent money and at what rates, and transparency as to the creditworthiness of mortgage-related securities at that time. It was in 2000 that this changed, and it was directly thereafter that Wall Street began its party.

Setting expectations

I'm going in the opposite direction of the Obama campaign: setting the bar high for McCain bothers me. After blinking in a game of chicken, tonight is supposed to be McCain's "home field advantage" as everyone in the media tells me that McCain's "strength" is his foreign policy expertise. Well, I find that troubling...for many reasons:

McCain has made some serious errors in judgment in foreign policy, as well as some relatively minor confusions on the facts. Why then should he get the label "expert" in foreign policy?

This is, after all, the guy who confused the basic facts about the "Surge Policy" that he has claimed so much credit for.

The guy who won't meet with our ally - Spain?

The guy who is confused about his own position on the Iraq War, and whether or not he opposed it, and when, and whether or not he thought it would be "an easy victory"?

The guy who was confused about the need to go into Iraq way back in Jan 2002?

There's more:

Let's also not lose sight of the broader pattern. McCain thinks the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia was "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War." He thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border. He believes Czechoslovakia is still a country. He's been confused about the difference between Sudan and Somalia. He's been confused about whether he wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more NATO troops in Afghanistan, or both. He's been confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq. He's been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. He's been confused about Iran's relationship with al Qaeda. He's been confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi'ia. McCain, following a recent trip to Germany, even referred to "President Putin of Germany." All of this incoherence on his signature issue.

Indeed.

Seth is here!

Seth Elliott Morgan was naturally born this Sunday morning at 4:58 am (9/21/08). [surprise!]

He weighed 6 lbs, 12.4 oz, was 19.75 in from head to toe, and is in excellent health.

Mom and baby are doing great!

View some pics of Seth and family here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/s.daniel.morgan/Seth

They'll be updated frequently.

Seth is on the way

For those few of you who read my site, my son Seth Elliott Morgan will be born by c-section Monday morning around 7:30 am.

He didn't turn until very late into the pregnancy (8 months) and still hasn't descended into the birth canal, despite his due date being 9/22/08. Thus, the doctor advised taking him now, rather than waiting until she starts labor on her own and having to do an emergency c-section.

My parents and Amber's parents will be in town, I have interim grades and comments due by Mon at 8 am, and it will be a crazy week. It may be a long time...perhaps a very long time, before I'm regularly writing anything of note here on this site. I will be posting pics soon, of course.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for caring. Wish us luck!

Democrats v. Republicans on the economy

Americans will be hearing a lot from the media in the next few days about the underlying causes of the financials market freeze-up, but they won't be hearing the hard facts:

1. When Bush and the GOP Congress started out this decade, they projected a $5.6 trillion surplus from 2002-2011. Instead, we will have a $3.8 trillion deficit. Thanks, GOP, for pissing away $9.4 trillion.
2. The "credit swaps" legislation passed by McCain's economic adviser Phil "nation of whiners" Gramm directly contributed to the current crisis. Thanks, GOP.
   
3. We've enjoyed stronger "fundamentals" under Democratic presidents than Republicans (I mentioned one of these fundamentals a while back -- income inequality)
4. Republicans are all for "capitalism"...so long as that means letting really really wealthy people make billions, then bailing them out: privatized profits & socialized losses. When the really wealthy power brokers of the GOP are getting hurt, it's time to step in with nationalized finance...but not when people like you and I are.
5. McCain and the GOP have no clue on health care, the leading cause of bankruptcy in America, causing 1.9 M / yr.
6. McCain's strong de-regulation emphasis goes all the way back to the Keating 5 scandal, and he has been shown to have been a major player in the S&L crisis that resulted.
7. On that note, McCain is advised by a bunch of financial lobbyists, while Obama is endorsed by economists 2:1 over McCain.
   

Rothkopf and Krugman on regulating financials

In response to the laissez-faire-style GOP economics of the past two decades or so, I offer this:

“We are at the end of an era — the end of ‘leave it to the markets’ and of the great cop-out that less government is always better government,” argues David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration and author of a book about the world’s financial leaders who brought about this crisis: “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.” “I think, however, it is important to stress the difference between smart government and simply more government.

“We do not need a regulatory ‘surge’ on Wall Street,” he added. “We need a complete rethinking of how we make global financial markets more transparent and how we ensure that the risks within those markets — .many of which are new and many of which are not well understood even by the experts — are managed and monitored properly.”

As always, Paul Krugman (MIT-trained Princeton prof. of economics) is the go-to guy for concise explanations on how and why the financial crisis happened and what to do about it.

In this post from March 21, he explains what is happening:

Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.

This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.

As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand what banks do.

Banks exist because they help reconcile the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers. Savers want freedom — access to their money on short notice. Borrowers want commitment: they don’t want to risk facing sudden demands for repayment.

Normally, banks satisfy both desires: depositors have access to their funds whenever they want, yet most of the money placed in a bank’s care is used to make long-term loans. The reason this works is that withdrawals are usually more or less matched by new deposits, so that a bank only needs a modest cash reserve to make good on its promises.

But sometimes — often based on nothing more than a rumor — banks face runs, in which many people try to withdraw their money at the same time. And a bank that faces a run by depositors, lacking the cash to meet their demands, may go bust even if the rumor was false.

Worse yet, bank runs can be contagious. If depositors at one bank lose their money, depositors at other banks are likely to get nervous, too, setting off a chain reaction. And there can be wider economic effects: as the surviving banks try to raise cash by calling in loans, there can be a vicious circle in which bank runs cause a credit crunch, which leads to more business failures, which leads to more financial troubles at banks, and so on.

That, in brief, is what happened in 1930-1931, making the Great Depression the disaster it was. So Congress tried to make sure it would never happen again by creating a system of regulations and guarantees that provided a safety net for the financial system.

And we all lived happily for a while — but not for ever after.

Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe.

For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.

As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.

In fact, however, we were partying like it was 1929 — and now it’s 1930.

The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.

Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are doing all they can to end that vicious circle. We can only hope that they succeed. Otherwise, the next few years will be very unpleasant — not another Great Depression, hopefully, but surely the worst slump we’ve seen in decades.

Even if Mr. Bernanke pulls it off, however, this is no way to run an economy. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1930s, and get the financial system back under control.

So now the question is -- what lessons do we learn and what do we change?

In this post from March 24, Krugman makes the essential argument that must be made to prevent the toxic mixture of "hand-off" government and greedy banks from happening again:

America came out of the Great Depression with a pretty effective financial safety net, based on a fundamental quid pro quo: the government stood ready to rescue banks if they got in trouble, but only on the condition that those banks accept regulation of the risks they were allowed to take.

Over time, however, many of the roles traditionally filled by regulated banks were taken over by unregulated institutions — the “shadow banking system,” which relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass those safety regulations.

Now, the shadow banking system is facing the 21st-century equivalent of the wave of bank runs that swept America in the early 1930s. And the government is rushing in to help, with hundreds of billions from the Federal Reserve, and hundreds of billions more from government-sponsored institutions like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks.

Given the risks to the economy if the financial system melts down, this rescue mission is justified. But you don’t have to be an economic radical, or even a vocal reformer like Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to see that what’s happening now is the quid without the quo.

Last week Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, declared that Mr. Frank is right about the need for expanded regulation. Mr. Rubin put it clearly: If Wall Street companies can count on being rescued like banks, then they need to be regulated like banks.

But will that logic prevail politically?

Well it certainly hasn't with the Bush Administration.

In this post, he argues that the Administration's response is not real regulation and change, but re-shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic:

To reverse course now, and seek expanded regulation, the administration would have to back down on its free-market ideology — and it would also have to face up to the fact that it was wrong. And this administration never, ever, admits that it made a mistake.

Thus, in a draft of a speech to be delivered on Monday, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declares, “I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil.”

And sure enough, according to the executive summary of the new administration plan, regulation will be limited to institutions that receive explicit federal guarantees — that is, institutions that are already regulated, and have not been the source of today’s problems. As for the rest, it blithely declares that “market discipline is the most effective tool to limit systemic risk.”

The administration, then, has learned nothing from the current crisis. Yet it needs, as a political matter, to pretend to be doing something.

Way back in March, Obama offered six specific reforms (video, transcript) to an audience at Cooper Union aimed at regulating "shadow banks" like real banks and preventing a rerun of the ugly show we're watching today. Two days ago, McCain said that, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," and has desperately backpedaled since, offering rhetoric about how what he really meant was the American worker is strong. And McCain has to pretend he hasn't been against regulation for 26 years. Are the American people listening?

Politics stuff

This is your GOP government in action:

Keep an eye on the TED spread to see how bad things will get. It is basically a quick snapshot of the liquidity crisis. It shot up to 2.01 within a few hours yesterday from near 1.0. That's a bad sign.


A few points:

• The collapse on Wall Street can be laid squarely at the feet of people like Phil Gramm, who inserted deregulation language covertly into finance bills:

  If McCain wants to hold someone accountable for the failure in transparency and accountability that led to the current calamity, he should turn to his good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm.
  
  As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions.
  
  Lehman's collapse threatens the financial markets because of swaps.

  Don't forget McCain's role in the Keating 5 scandal was basically to deregulate the market, which ended up costing taxpayers about $165 B total in the S&L scandals. And don't forget how people like McCain cheered as bankers took chainsaws to the regulation laws that King W and congressional Republicans did away with. Their libertarian philosophy tells them, "all regulation bad," but reality tells a different story, doesn't it?
  


• The DNC has a great "Count the Lies" site up documenting McCain's mendacity. As others have noted, he's basically trying to reinvent himself, going from "honorable man who happens to be a politician" to "sleazy dishonorable politician who will fulfill W's 3rd term"...


• Even David Brooks thinks Palin is not the woman for the job:

  Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.
  
  The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

  Preach it brother.


• Bob Herbert's column on McCain's disastrous health care "plan" is worth reading in its entirety. Here's a snippet:

  Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?
  
  These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.
  
  A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.
  
  There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense — lipstick, celebrities and “Drill, baby, drill!”
  
  For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.
  
  “It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
  
  Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.
  
  According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”
  
  The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”
  
  Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.
  
  While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used “to help pay for your health care.”
  
  You may think this is a good move or a bad one — but it’s a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?
  
  The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)
  
  Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.
  
  When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.
  
  That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.
  
  The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”
  
  Yet another radical element of McCain’s plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless...

  How's this even a close race? Do people care about the issues? Sadly, I'm starting to conclude, "No."

The "Out Campaign" for freethinkers

Here's my proposal: give freethinkers an "out campaign" just like the atheists have.

(graphic source)

Palin is empty and McCain is a liar

Watching Sarah Palin's part two tonight was painful: an exercise in vague platitudes and duplicity.

Watching the erosion of McCain's character as he continues to tell lie after lie about Barack Obama is more painful. He lies about Barack's bill to protect kindergartners from sex predators and he lies about Barack's tax CUT for those making under $250K / yr and basically everything else:

It's time to vote for someone whose campaign doesn't point towards Bush III.

Palin's dangerous ignorance on foreign policy

Sitting at home watching this, I knew that Charlie referred to the justification given by Bush for pre-emption. Sarah Palin didn't. I know more about key foreign policy stances than her. Perhaps I should run for VP?

She doesn't know what pre-emption is and is willing to start World War 3 with Russia if they invade Georgia. How awesome! Let's put her in the WH!

New WaPo article on Cindy McCain's drug addiction

I am inclined to agree with Barack that:

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics."

On the other hand, a case can be made that when a politician's policies collide with their actions and personal beliefs, there is a hypocrisy to talk about. Kind of like Palin's denial to women who are victims of rape or incest the right to choose while claiming, straight-faced, that her daughter had "made the choice" to keep her baby: a choice she wants to deny to other women. Kind of like McCain's accusations that Obama was a "celebrity" with his own dozens of cameos, the TV memoir "Faith of my Fathers" and TV appearances. And so a politician, by their duplicity and stupidity, can drag their family into the middle of a serious discussion on issues.

In this case, John McCain supports the drug war (Obama doesn't, but has weakened his earlier stance on full legalization), while he got his wife out of trouble for stealing drugs from her medical charity during her hydrocodone-addiction phase. We may never end the drug war, although some concrete first steps are being taken in the right direction. However, we can't continue to allow politicians to "look tough" by putting potheads and crack addicts behind bars (rather than getting them help) while in their own personal lives, using their power to exonerate a family member from legal prosecution.

A Tangled Story of Addiction
Consequences of Cindy McCain's Drug Abuse Were More Complex Than She Has Portrayed

By Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A01

When Cindy McCain is asked what issues she would champion as first lady, she often cites one of the most difficult periods of her life: her battle with -- and ultimate victory over -- prescription painkillers. Her struggle, she has said repeatedly, taught her valuable lessons about drug abuse that she would pass on to the nation.

"I think it made me a better person as well as a better parent, so I think it would be very important to talk about it and be very upfront about it," McCain said in an interview with "Access Hollywood." In an appearance on the "Tonight Show With Jay Leno," she said she tries "to talk about it as much as possible because I don't want anyone to wind up in the shoes that I did at the time."

In describing her struggle with drugs, McCain has said that she became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet in early 1989 after rupturing two disks and having back surgery. She has said she hid her addiction from her husband, Sen. John McCain, and stopped taking the painkillers in 1992 after her parents confronted her. She has not discussed what kind of treatment she received for her addiction, but she has made clear that she believes she has put her problems behind her.

While McCain's accounts have captured the pain of her addiction, her journey through this personal crisis is a more complicated story than she has described, and it had more consequences for her and those around her than she has acknowledged.

Her misuse of painkillers prompted an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration and local prosecutors that put her in legal jeopardy. A doctor with McCain's medical charity who supplied her with prescriptions for the drugs lost his license and never practiced again. The charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team, eventually had to be closed in the wake of the controversy. Her husband was forced to admit publicly that he was absent much of the time she was having problems and was not aware of them.

"So many lives were damaged by this," said Jeanette Johnson, whose husband, John Max Johnson, surrendered his medical license. "A lot of good people. Doctors who volunteered their time. My husband. I cannot begin to tell you how painful it was. We moved far away to start over."

McCain's addiction also embroiled her with one of her charity's former employees, Tom Gosinski, who reported her drug use to the DEA and provided prosecutors with a contemporaneous journal that detailed the effects of her drug problems. He was later accused by a lawyer for McCain of trying to extort money from the McCain family.

"It's not just about her addiction, it's what she did to cover up her addiction and the lives of other people that she ruined, or put at jeopardy at least," Gosinski said in an interview this week.

Cindy and John McCain declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article. The McCain campaign also declined to comment.

Based on the limited details they have provided in earlier interviews, it is impossible to tell the full story of a difficult period in their lives. The following account of Cindy McCain's prescription drug abuse and her and her husband's efforts to deal with it is based on official records, including a report by the county attorney's office in Phoenix, and on interviews with local and federal officials involved in the probe.

Politics and Philanthropy

In 1988, during her husband's first Senate term, Cindy McCain founded the American Voluntary Medical Team, a nonprofit that sent volunteer doctors and nurses to provide free medical care in Third World countries and U.S. disaster zones. Cindy McCain served as president, operating out of her family's business, a giant Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship in Phoenix owned by her father.

The McCains had married in 1980. They moved to Washington after he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1982. But she later returned to Phoenix, her home town, believing it was a better place to raise a family. Sen. McCain commuted home on weekends.

Even far from Washington, politics took a toll on Cindy McCain. In 1989, she was pulled into a Senate investigation that focused on her husband and four other senators who had intervened with regulators on behalf of savings-and-loan owner Charles Keating.

When questions arose about a vacation the McCains took to Keating's home in the Bahamas, Cindy McCain, as family bookkeeper, was asked to document that they had reimbursed the Keatings, but she could not. She has repeatedly cited the stress of the Keating Five scandal and pain from two back surgeries that same year as reasons for her dependence on painkillers.

Her charity, AVMT, kept a ready supply of antibiotics and over-the-counter pain medications needed to fulfill its medical mission. It also secured prescriptions for the narcotic painkillers Vicodin, Percocet and Tylenol 3 in quantities of 100 to 400 pills, the county report shows.

McCain started taking narcotics for herself, the report shows. To get them, she asked the charity's medical director, John Max Johnson, to make out prescriptions for the charity in the names of three AVMT employees.

The employees did not know their names were being used. And under DEA regulations, Johnson was supposed to use a form to notify federal officials that he was ordering the narcotics for the charity. It is illegal for an organization to use personal prescriptions to fill its drug needs.

"The DEA told me it was okay to do it that way," Johnson told The Washington Post recently, in his first media interview about the case. "Otherwise, I never would have done it."

The county report showed that Johnson told officials he knew it was wrong, but he wrote prescriptions at McCain's request at least twice.

After Johnson wrote the prescriptions, McCain, and sometimes her secretary, picked them up from his home. Once they were filled, Johnson was supposed to maintain custody of the narcotics, but he said he let McCain control them and carry the medications in her luggage on charity trips.

No one tracked the narcotics in between the charity's missions, the county report shows.

When the county investigator asked Johnson where the charity stored its narcotics, he said they were in a safe. When asked where the safe was located, Johnson said he had never seen it.

Officials with other medical charities contacted by The Post said it is unusual to distribute narcotics overseas, particularly in Third World countries where medical teams treat disease and infection rather than performing painful surgeries.

Some of the doctors and nurses who went on McCain's missions said they never saw narcotics on AVMT trips and would have discouraged carrying such medications. "You don't bring narcotics into a foreign country, especially with people who have machine guns around," said Michele Stillinger, a nurse during a 1991 AVMT mission to Bangladesh.

'I Noticed the Mood Swings'

Tom Gosinski, then 32, met Cindy McCain while working for America West Airlines and coordinating an AVMT flight to Kuwait. She hired him in 1991.

He grew close to the McCain family. He knew the domestic staff, as well as Cindy's father, James, and mother, Marguerite.

Thinking he might one day write a book, Gosinski kept a journal that he later turned over to investigators. His entries about AVMT suggest that McCain's behavior led employees to believe she was using drugs.

"Right away, I noticed the mood swings," Gosinski told The Post in June. "She wouldn't show up at the office, and we'd call her home. Her house staff would say she hadn't come out of her room yet. It would be 11 a.m. or noon."

As time wore on, his diary chronicled office concerns that McCain was taking pills from the charity's inventory. Gosinski developed a code for her behavior, the county report shows. On days when his boss appeared to be in a good mood, he wrote "OP," for "on Percocet." Bad days were called "NOP," for "not on Percocet."

On July 20, 1992, he wrote, "I really don't know what is going on but I certainly hope that Cindy does not get herself of [sic] AVMT in trouble."

A relative of McCain's told charity staff members that McCain's parents planned to confront her about her behavior, according to the journal. McCain has said they did so in late 1992, asking whether painkillers were causing her "erratic" conduct. Gosinski's journal indicates he heard about the confrontation the next day, Oct. 2, 1992.

McCain's relationship with Gosinski soon deteriorated. In January 1993, she ordered him to stop gossiping about her, Gosinski said. Soon after, she fired him but wrote him a glowing termination letter.

Gosinski eventually returned to America West as a travel consultant and worked part time in a bookstore.

The Investigation Begins

Three weeks after his firing, Gosinski contacted Phoenix DEA agents and gave them a copy of his journal.

The DEA questioned the charity's doctors, and McCain hired John Dowd, a powerhouse Washington lawyer, to represent AVMT. Dowd had defended John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, helping the senator win the mildest sanction of the five senators involved. Dowd declined to comment for this article.

Soon, the DEA began looking at Cindy McCain. Dowd informed Johnson, the physician, that "there's been further investigation and Cindy's got a drug problem," Johnson told county investigators.

The DEA pursued the matter for 11 months. Dowd kept tabs on the investigation from Washington, writing letters and making frequent phone calls to the agency, according to sources close to the investigation.

McCain's conduct left her facing federal charges of obtaining "a controlled substance by misrepresenting, fraud, forgery, deception or subterfuge." Experts say she could have faced a 20-year prison sentence.

Dowd negotiated a deal with the U.S. attorney's office allowing McCain, as a first-time offender, to avoid charges and enter a diversion program that required community service, drug treatment and reimbursement to the DEA for investigative costs. Johnson agreed to surrender his medical license and retire.

With final negotiations between federal prosecutors and Dowd still underway, Gosinski sued McCain for wrongful termination.

On Feb. 4, 1994, Gosinski's attorney, Stanley Lubin, wrote to McCain, saying his client had omitted certain details in his lawsuit "due to their sensitive nature." He said that for $250,000, Gosinski would drop the action. Lubin said in an interview that he met with Dowd, who said the lawsuit was without merit. "He told me if I thought the senator was going to cave into this extortion, I was going to learn a very serious lesson," Lubin recalled.

On April 28, 1994, Dowd wrote to Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley, a Republican, asking that Gosinski be investigated for attempted extortion.

Romley agreed. Dowd and Cindy McCain lined up witnesses and prepared a brief to support the contention that Gosinski's job performance was unacceptable and that he was of questionable character, assertions he denied.

In May of that year, county investigator Terry Blake interviewed McCain at her Phoenix home. He asked questions about Gosinski and then grilled McCain about prescription painkillers. He later wrote:

"Mrs. McCain was asked if AMVT procured narcotic drugs as a part of their normal operation. She said they did.

"I asked if she ever obtained narcotic drugs by using her employee's names. She said she did.

"Mrs. McCain was asked if prescriptions were written in Mr. Gosinski's name without his knowledge. She said yes."

McCain told Blake she once had a dependence on painkillers, according to the report, which included the interview summary and copies of her illegal prescriptions. The probe of possible extortion by Gosinski was closed without charges.

After the case was closed, prosecutors told McCain's lawyer that they would make the report public. Before it was released, Sen. McCain dispatched Jay Smith, then his top strategist, to Phoenix to line up interviews between Cindy McCain and journalists from four selected media outlets who were unaware of the report. Smith did not include two news organizations that had learned about the report, the Arizona Republic and New Times, an alternative weekly in Phoenix.

McCain told the reporters that she was stepping forward willingly. "If what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile," she said.

Two reporters wrote that McCain said she had completed a drug treatment program at the Meadows, a facility in Wickenberg, Ariz., as part of the agreement with federal prosecutors. But days later, federal officials said that no agreement had been reached and that she had not yet been accepted into a diversion program, which would include approved treatment. McCain issued a statement saying the reporters erred, but she did not disclose details of her treatment.

The only public reference to treatment is her mention in the county investigator's report of a one-week stay at the Meadows.

Once the county report was released, along with Gosinski's journal, a few reporters challenged McCain's account. Only New Times published excerpts from Gosinski's diary. Within a few weeks, the story died in Arizona, without receiving national exposure. Gosinski ultimately ran out of money and let his lawsuit against McCain die.

Gosinski, who has moved to Nebraska, was initially reluctant to tell his story when contacted by The Post in May. He is still viewed with enmity by some in the drug investigation, including the Johnsons, who hold him responsible for the doctor's troubles.

He eventually gave several lengthy interviews and provided The Post with a copy of his journal. He subsequently cut off contact and asked that his name not be printed, saying he became frightened by the prospect of facing the McCain campaign on his own.

On Wednesday, he said he had changed his mind. He appeared at a news briefing in Arlington set up by a Democratic Party consultant. Gosinski, a registered Republican, said that he sought help orchestrating a single media event because so many reporters wanted his story, but that he has had no contact with the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee.

He also signed an agreement with the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a D.C.-based watchdog group, which will provide legal representation for him in the event of a lawsuit.

Controversy Fades

McCain's drug use became national news during her husband's first presidential campaign in 2000. Newsweek published a first-person account of her struggle, but it included some errors.

"It began with Vicodan [sic]. In 1989, I had ruptured a couple of disks carrying my 1-year-old, Bridget, in a pack on my back," she wrote.

But Bridget was not born until 1991. In other accounts, McCain said she hurt her back while picking up her son Jimmy, who was a toddler at the time of her injuries.

As the McCains traveled in the Straight Talk Express bus in 2000, interest in Cindy McCain's story faded when it became clear that she and her husband weren't headed for the White House.

This year, as the McCains campaigned again, Cindy McCain granted interviews about her past problems to "Access Hollywood" and Jay Leno. She called her addiction a life-changing crisis.

"Your life experiences make you," she told "Access Hollywood," "and hopefully you learn from them."

Research editor Alice Crites and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Does this make McCain unfit for the presidency? No. But I think it shows the clear double standard on his part as to how he treats other people in Cindy's situation by sending them to prison, rather than helping them get treatment and recover.

Frazer on "Christian Nation" nonsense

Arguments that purport to show that nearly all of the Founders of our nation were Evangelicals are based on bullsh*t. I've written before of the common rumors that float around in email chains (does everyone have a mother like mine, who forwards EVERY ridiculous email to you?). From a legal standpoint, it matters not one iota what the Founders believed, only what they wrote into the Constitution.

Anyway, Ed Brayton brings us a more accurate look at what the views of the Founders really were from Evangelical historian Greg Frazer: theistic rationalism.

Theistic rationalism was a hybrid belief system mixing elements of natural religion, Protestant Christianity, and rationalism – with rationalism as the decisive factor whenever conflict arose between the elements. Theistic rationalists believed that these three elements would generally be in accord and lead to the same end, but that reason was determinative on those relatively rare occasions in which there was disagreement. Rationalism as used here is the philosophical view that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Educated in Enlightenment thought, theistic rationalists were at root rationalists, but their loosely Christian upbringing combined with reason to convince them that a creator God would not abandon his creation. Consequently, they rejected the absentee god of deism and embraced a theist God of, to a significant extent, their own construction. Hence the term theistic rationalism.

An emphasis on reason had long been accepted in the Christian community, but in Christian thought, reason was a supplement to revelation, which was supreme. Theistic rationalism turned this on its head and made revelation a supplement to reason. In fact, for theistic rationalists, reason determined what should be accepted as revelation from God. Unlike deists, theistic rationalists accepted the notion of revelation from God; unlike Christians, they felt free to pick apart the Bible and to consider only the parts which they determined to be rational to be legitimate divine revelation. They similarly felt free to define God according to the dictates of their own reason and to reject Christian doctrines which did not seem to them to be rational.

The God of the theistic rationalists was a unitary, personal God whose controlling attribute was benevolence. Theistic rationalists believed that God was present and active in the world and in the lives of men. Consequently, they believed in the efficacy of prayer – that someone was listening and might intervene on their behalf. Theistic rationalism was not a devotional or inward-looking belief system; it was centered on public morality. God was served by living and promoting a good, moral life. The primary value of religion was the promotion of morality, and the morality generated by religion was indispensable to a free society. Since all of the religions with which they were familiar promoted morality, they held that virtually all religions were more or less equally valid and led to the same God who is called by many names. Theistic rationalists generally disdained doctrines or dogmas. They found them to be divisive, speculative, and ultimately unimportant since many roads lead to God.

Interesting.

The impact of meat on global warming

Time magazine has a great article on how meat makes global warming worse:

In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions.

I've written a few things on my experiment with complete meatlessness, and how one of my motivations is the environmental impact of raising cattle. As of a few months ago, I started eating white meat again. I never plan to eat pork or beef again regularly, although there will probably be times when I'm trapped somewhere and all they offer is BBQ or something. On the ethics, I suppose I just don't think that birds have the same sort of conscious awareness as mammals like pigs and cows do.

Orally v. Obama

Bill Orally [sic] had a great informational segment called "Dubious Associations" where basically he got to live out Sean Hannity's wet dreams and ask Barack Obama all about Wright, Ayers, Rezko, etc.:

Gotta love Faux News!

Genius and depression

I've been fascinated with prodigies since I was young. Perhaps it was watching Doogie Howser, Searching for Bobby Fischer and Little Man Tate growing up. Once in high school, after reading Asimov's On Numbers, I remember being frustrated that some of the things I felt (intuited) about mathematics had already been articulated by others, rendering my sense of genius and creativity null and void. In geometry class, I impressed my teacher (James DeBord) by multiplying 500 times any 2-4 digit number faster than he could punch it in on the calculator. Of course, cutting things in half is fairly easy by mental calculation standards. Later, I borrowed a book called, "The Great Mental Calculators" and it set me to rights on how un-prodigious I was with numbers.

I've always lamented my lack of profound talent, and my sense of ego, though probably inflated, remains grounded enough to recognize my intellectual and artistic inferiority. Although I can play the piano, and I suppose it came "naturally" to me in some ways, I wasn't one of the kids who can play Mozart at 6 years old (or Beethoven at 4) in a concert hall. I always had such respect for that level of talent that perhaps I never put as much stock in my own as I should have. What I mean by that is I recognized sublime talent in others and the lack thereof in myself, and probably as a result, quit playing sports and piano in middle school, as well as grew very apathetic towards grades.

I would never describe myself to others as a "genius" or "prodigy". Gifted? I would honestly say so. Most people would probably not believe me if I told them how little studying I did for courses like Diff Eq, Physics and Physical Chemistry. While I've never had my IQ tested, I once did a self-test while waiting in a bookstore and got over 140, so by that metric alone I do qualify. I've met a lot of people smarter than I am, though, and I've always had a bit of a self-confidence issue when it comes to test scores. I remember how much I wanted a perfect SAT score, but I wanted to be smart enough to get it without the same preparation I saw in those around me striving with note cards and Kaplan books (I got a 1400).

Anyway, one of the things I remember having strongly impressed on me by popular culture was that profoundly gifted children are not supposed to be all that psychologically healthy, although this is not factually accurate:

The literature on depression does not support a correlation between high IQ and depression among children and adolescents (Mash & Barkley, 1996). All empirical studies examining depression among gifted children have found gifted students to exhibit levels of depression similar to, or lower than their nongifted peers (Baker, 1995; Bartell & Reynolds, 1986; Berndt, Kaiser & Van Aalst, 1982; Kaiser & Berndt, 1985; Kaiser, Berndt, & Stanley, 1987; Neihart, 1991; Parker, 1996). There is no empirical support for higher levels of depression among gifted children and adolescents.

"The impact of giftedness on psychological well-being" by Maureen Neihart, Roeper Review Sep 1999 22(1), (source link)

It's apparently a common notion, going all the way back to Aristotle and Seneca. Although it doesn't seem to be supported by any studies to conclude that high-IQ kids are more likely to be depressed, they will face obvious social obstacles. One such kid was Brandenn Bremmer, whose sad story was outlined in The New Yorker in January 2006. I've pasted the full-text of the article below:

PRAIRIE FIRE.(Brandenn Bremmer)
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/01/16/060116fa_fact_konigsberg
Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-JAN-06
Author: Konigsberg, Eric

Last May, Patti and Martin Bremmer promised each other that they would get through the second Sunday of the month without mentioning that it was Mother's Day. Brandenn, their son, had committed suicide in March, at the age of fourteen, and Patti was intent on treating the day like any other. To the Bremmers, who live on a farm in western Nebraska, in the village of Venango (population a hundred and sixty-five), and who have earned money over the years by raising organic grain and by breeding dogs, this meant getting up at five-thirty to feed the animals and pitch tumbleweed--the very chores, they could not help but be reminded, that Brandenn used to do.

"We're having a real hard time right now, because we didn't have any routines that didn't involve Brandenn," Martin said. It was a little before noon, and they were sitting down to eat. Their dining room has lavender walls and a large picture window overlooking the front porch. In the distance, they could see a cluster of outbuildings on their property: an old horse barn, a bunkhouse, a washhouse (where Martin's ancestors made soap and did their laundry), a kennel building, and a quonset hut they had long ago converted into a storage shed for grain and tractors. Patti had prepared a freshly killed chicken, baked potatoes, and a salad with redorange Dorothy Lynch dressing. For dessert, there was a store-bought cherry pie. With Brandenn gone, she didn't have the energy for baking.

Their son had killed himself with a single shot to the head from a .22calibre rifle. It was his own varmint gun, which he'd been using on intrusive skunks since he was ten years old. He had been shooting since he was six, an early age at which to become acquainted with a firearm, but almost from the time of his birth the Bremmers had known that he was exceptionally precocious. "He was born an adult, basically," Patti said. "He chose when he would wean himself. I wanted to nurse for a full year, but at eleven months he crawled into the kitchen and motioned for a cup." Though Brandenn didn't talk until fifteen months, Patti said, "he started right off speaking in complete sentences." He potty-trained himself at eighteen months and memorized an entire book of "Mother Goose" nursery rhymes when he was two and a half. At the age of four, he drove a tractor that had a hand-controlled throttle and gearshift, and once, when he was eight, he sat on his father's lap and drove the family car home from town.

Brandenn was known as a child prodigy by almost everybody in this part of Nebraska. When he was a little boy, his I.Q. was scored at 178, and his parents decided to make sure that he was adequately engaged and challenged. They homeschooled him, and when he was six years old they enrolled him in high school through a distance-learning course at the University of Nebraska. He was ten when he finished, in 2001, the youngest graduate in the history of the program.

"We never pushed him," said Patti, whose own experience with higher education, like her husband's, went only as far as some commuter-college credits. "All of his motivation came from within. We never could explain why it was, but one day when he was nine and a half he just decided to finish up, and we didn't want to stand in his way. So he did the last two years' worth of classes in seven months, going at it twelve hours a day, six days a week."

Brandenn went on to take piano lessons through Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, two hundred and fifty miles away. In 2004, he recorded and released a CD of his own compositions, New Age-style washes of chords and arpeggios, entitled "Elements." In January, 2005, he enrolled in an introductory biology class at Mid-Plains Community College, in North Platte, Nebraska, the first step on an intended path to medical school. He was planning to become an anesthesiologist.

Brandenn was handsome and gangly, with blue eyes and curly auburn hair that in the final year of his life he had allowed to grow past his shoulders. He liked the musician Yanni, medieval history, making jewelry, baking cheesecake, lifting weights, playing video games (especially SimCity, SimFarm, and the Command and Conquer series), and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." He was also interested in animals, gross-out humor, and science experiments that he devised at home.

Late in the afternoon on Mother's Day, Martin and Patti took me upstairs to Brandenn's bedroom. In opposite corners of the room, each of them curled up in the same position: arms around legs, knees to chin--a child's pose. Martin, who is tall and lean and sharp-featured, sat on the bed with his back against the wall. Patti--small and fair-skinned, with a Friesian mane of hair--was on the floor. For a while after the suicide, Martin stopped by Brandenn's room almost every day. "Now I don't come up," he said. His eyes were filled with tears.

Brandenn and his father had remodelled the room in a Middle Ages theme, gluing floor tiles resembling rough-cut stone to the walls and festooning them with brocaded tapestries. There were swords and shields that Brandenn had ordered from a theatrical-supply Web site, a carved chest full of his piano trophies, wrought-iron candle holders, figurines of dragons, colored crystals. Patti pointed out five perfume bottles that were for Brandenn's ashes; they were made of red glass and had pewter screw tops. "Brandenn always liked expensive," she said.

His suicide was a mystery to them. They had searched the house for clues, and found nothing. He had left no note, and they hadn't seen any warning signs. "Brandenn wasn't depressed," Patti said. "He was a happy, upbeat person. There weren't sudden changes in his behavior." Neither recalled him being particularly upset about anything in the preceding months. He hadn't suffered a breakup, or endured a personal rejection. He hadn't been giving away prized possessions. In fact, Patti said, he'd just added to what he called his "unfinished list": he was selling some old Nintendo games on eBay in order to buy a PlayStation 2 console. And they'd ruled out the possibility of an accident. "Brandenn knew way too much about guns for that," Martin said.

Patti led the way down to the basement so that we could watch videotapes of Brandenn on TV. "We didn't want him to feel like he had to hide his gifts," Patti explained. "But we were very careful to protect him from doing too much media." When he was four, he appeared on "Real Life," a nationally syndicated show ("Meet the next Doogie Howser"). The segment depicted him adding four-digit numbers, and then, with another child prodigy, playing pool and fencing with a plastic sword.

"See? He was normal," Patti said. "He got along with everybody."

"It was almost like he was amphibious," Martin said. "He was good on water and he was good on land. Adults took to him and children took to him." Brandenn's personality seemed to invite such metaphors. "He was like a therapy dog at a nursing home, making people feel better just by being himself," Patti said. "He calmed a whole roomful of children as soon as he started playing the piano."

A segment on "Leeza" showed Brandenn at the age of five, wearing a thrift-store suit. The Bremmers had been flown to California for the taping. "Martin and Brandenn had never seen the ocean," Patti said. "The waves knocked Brandenn down and took his breath away."

Watching Brandenn on the tapes was difficult but enchanting. He had freckles and long, giraffe-like eyelashes, and when he opened his mouth he really did sound like a little man. He spoke fast and in complete sentences. He had strident elocution and charm-school intonation. We watched as, at the age of eight, he told a local reporter about his high-school correspondence work. "I thought it would be neat if I graduated from high school in the year 2000," he said with convincing modesty, "but if I don't--well, what the heck?"

"That was Brandenn's attitude," Martin said. "No pressure." Then he held his head in his hands. "The three of us ate and lived and worked together every single day," he said. "Each of us knew what the other two were feeling at all times. We would have known if something was wrong."

Martin's maternal forebears came to Nebraska from Illinois by covered wagon in the eighteen-eighties, and received free land from the government near Venango, in Perkins County, on the condition that they stay for five years. (About half of the people who came to Nebraska under the Homestead Act managed to stick it out.) The high plains of western Nebraska were particularly rough country, and, to hold on to what was theirs, Martin's ancestors survived a drought in 1892, a plague of grasshoppers in 1904, and a prairie fire in 1905. Eventually, the family prospered. The descendants in Martin's line still own some four hundred acres, half their original portion of the land.

Martin was born in 1966 and grew up in Denver, where his mother had moved as an adult. In junior high school, he was briefly placed in a pilot gifted program, but he didn't take to it or to the other children, and he was a C student through high school. He took classes in agronomy and business at a local college, but didn't get a degree. "I knew I wanted to be farming," he says. "I came to my grandparents' place for a summer and never went back."

He met Patti in 1989, when she asked him to audition for a bit part in a production of "Grease" that she was directing for a local community-theatre troupe. After two failed marriages, Patti was living with her daughters, aged eight and thirteen, in a small house on the Colorado border, next door to the dairy where Martin worked. "The first time I visited Martin's family's farm, this feeling came over me: I'm going to live here," Patti recalled. Six months later, she and Martin were married.

Like Martin, Patti was an expatriate from city life. She'd come to Perkins County from Omaha, three hundred miles to the east, a dozen years earlier, with her first husband, a horse trainer. Patti had been marked as gifted in elementary school, and was put on an accelerated schedule that allowed her to skip seventh grade (although she ended up repeating eighth grade). She attended a vocational college in Omaha, but dropped out and worked as an accountant. As a single mother, she had a business raising greyhounds and selling them to racetracks.

Martin's grandparents were happy to keep the land in the family, and sold him the house. Branden (he added the extra "n" on a computer when he was two years old) arrived within a year of Patti and Martin's marriage. His sisters' time at home did not coincide much with his childhood; both moved out and married young, and Brandenn later said that in many ways he felt like an only child.

"He was definitely the focus of my mom's attention," said Patti's younger daughter, Dawn, who dropped out of high school after ninth grade, homeschooled herself, earned her diploma, and now lives in California with her three children. "When she puts her attention to a project, she expects it to get her noticed. She's always working on a masterpiece."

In the past few years, Patti has tried her hand at writing mysteries, and set up a vanity press to publish four of them. She says that she decided early on not to seek a commercial publisher. "I don't want an editor telling me how to change what I write," she told me. "I don't follow all the conventions of mystery writing." Once, when she was thinking about turning one of her books into a screenplay, she asked a friend's advice. "He told me, 'You've got too many characters, and you don't have enough action at first.' Well, I like to let it build slowly." Patti also likes having control over the books' covers, which feature photographs by Brandenn or, more recently, Martin, who then does the layout on his computer. In 2004, for the cover of her third novel, "Death Foreshadowed," Martin took a picture of Brandenn outside on a foggy morning, dressed as the Grim Reaper, with a hooded cloak and a scythe.

Even before Brandenn was born, Patti had definite ideas about her child. She and Martin knew that this was the one child they would have together--he had a vasectomy as soon as she gave birth--and Patti wanted a boy. She consulted the book "How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby," which says that intercourse within twelve hours of ovulation is more likely to result in a male. "So we timed it," she recalled. As a baby, Brandenn was colicky and in constant need of stimulation. When books and pictures were held in front of him, he looked as if he were already reading or comprehending them. When he wasn't being challenged or engaged, he squalled.

One day when Brandenn was eighteen months old, the Bremmers say, he clamored vigorously for his mother's attention while she was doing some bookkeeping. Brandenn had been playing with a set of magnetized plastic letters, and she absent-mindedly tried to keep him occupied by telling him to bring her an "A." When she looked up, a few moments later, Brandenn was holding up the letter "A." When she asked for a "B," he retrieved a "B." And on he went through nearly the entire alphabet.

"I ran outside and told Martin," Patti said. "Martin wanted to see. So Brandenn did it again."

At the age of two, the Bremmers say, Brandenn read aloud all the Dr. Seuss books they could order from a book club. "It gave me goose bumps," Martin said. "His muscles were still working to verbalize the words, but he knew all of them, and what they meant. He never had to sound them out." By the time Brandenn was three, he had read everything in the curriculum for first-grade students at the public school in Grant, a nearby town, so his parents asked the kindergarten teacher to enroll him a year early. The teacher told them that this was a bad idea. "She said, 'Just take everything away from him and slow him down,' " Patti recalled. "She wanted us to let the other kids his age catch up to him for a couple of years."

Patti and Martin were outraged, but Brandenn was perfectly happy to spend his days around his parents. "The kids were so below him intellectually that he had no desire to be with them," Patti said. "The teacher was giving them paper cups with seeds in them to teach science." Brandenn's sister Jennifer says, "He preferred adults." He once told his mother that he wouldn't mind going to school if the teachers were there and all the kids stayed home. If the Bremmers had another family over for dinner, he insisted on sitting at the adults' table. "It was almost a phobia he had about doing things associated with children," Patti said. He comported himself as if he were a grownup, clipping on a necktie to leave the house and telling women at the grocery store, "Excuse me, Madam, but you're looking exceptionally lovely today."

In November, 1994, just before Brandenn turned four, the Bremmers drove to Denver to meet with Linda Silverman, a psychologist with a practice devoted almost entirely to gifted children and their families. They'd got her name from Brandenn's pediatrician. On the parent questionnaire that Patti had filled out in advance, she described their son as "very strong willed" and "exhausting." She also wrote, "He questions authority on a regular basis and is quick to pick up on how serious the situation is and how far he can push. He doesn't like to be asked questions. He often responds with 'Why don't I ask you a question?' "

He was given an I.Q. test consisting of verbal, mathematical, and pictorial questions and problem sets that began at a level deemed answerable by a typical child slightly older than Brandenn. Each correct response increased his "mental age" score, and was followed by a more difficult question. Since Brandenn was three years and eleven months, his mental age went up by one month for each correct answer to questions appropriate for children aged between four and five. For every correctly answered question aimed at children between six and eight years old, he received two months' credit.

Brandenn's orneriness made a precise I.Q. score difficult to ascertain. He scoffed at age-appropriate questions (when a tester asked him what eyes were for, he said, "To bug out"), and tried to leave the room whenever he didn't know the answer to a question. Although Brandenn, according to the evaluation form, grew "bored" and refused to answer enough questions for the tester to complete the assessment, he got as far as answering questions at the level of a nine-year-old. Using a scale that compares a child's mental age with his chronological age, Silverman's office recorded Brandenn's I.Q. as 146.

At Silverman's recommendation, the Bremmers had Brandenn retested a year later. This time, although his attitude toward the test-taking was playful--he answered math questions in Spanish, which he'd been learning from a computer program--his I.Q. was scored at 178.

The scale that Silverman used on Brandenn classifies people who score between 130 and 144 as "moderately gifted" (the range for average intelligence is from 85 to 115), those who score between 145 and 159 as "highly gifted," between 160 and 174 as "exceptionally gifted," and above 174 as "profoundly gifted." The probability of someone's having an I.Q. above 176, according to standard I.Q.-distribution theory, is roughly one in a million, which means that at any given time there ought to be fewer than three hundred people in the United States with an I.Q. as high as Brandenn's.

Since 1979, Silverman's testing facility and practice, the Gifted Development Center, has given nine hundred and eleven children I.Q. scores of 160 or above, including sixty-four in the 200s. Unless almost every young genius in the country is coming through her office, then, she is recording a far higher incidence of profoundly gifted children than the statistical distribution of I.Q. results should allow. The particular I.Q. test that Silverman, almost alone among her peers, relies on may have something to do with this. Although she begins each assessment with one of the more widely employed I.Q. tests, when a child scores extremely high Silverman goes to the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Form L-M.

The Stanford-Binet was first developed in 1916, and enjoyed the status of the most widely accepted I.Q. test through three iterations, up to and including the Form L-M. The Form L-M (after the first names of its authors, Lewis Terman and Maud Merrill) came out in 1960, was updated in 1972, and then was replaced in 1986, by the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition. The update was never well liked by psychometricians, and several more recently developed tests, such as the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition and the current Woodcock-Johnson exam, are considered more comprehensive and reliable. Silverman uses the Form L-M because it's the only version that officially calculates scores above 160. "There's nothing else to use with kids this gifted," she told me. But some critics of the test say that it not only assesses higher scores; it tends to produce them. "The Form L-M uses children from several decades ago as its comparison group, so of course the scores are going to skew much higher if it's used on today's kids--every generation of children is more academically and environmentally advanced than the previous generation," Susan Assouline, the associate dean of the gifted-education program at the University of Iowa, said. "It's not a useful test in this day and age."

Modern-day I.Q. tests were designed primarily to assess learning difficulties--to find the children in a typical classroom who might be lagging behind and in need of remedial attention. "These tests are most reliable at scoring average children or determining whether a child falls somewhere outside of average, but they're not intended to assess various levels of extreme giftedness," Sidney Moon, a gifted-psychology expert at Purdue, said. And a number of Silverman's colleagues say that there's no practical reason for an I.Q. test to measure high levels of intelligence. "Many of us who are lifers in the field agree that there are the gifted, and then there are the rare few who are really superstars among the stars," said Tracy Cross, a professor of gifted studies at Ball State University, in Indiana, and the editor of the Journal for the Education of the Gifted. "It's hard to argue that those superstars don't exist." But, Cross said, "I don't believe there's much difference between a person with an I.Q. of 160 and one with 170, or 180."

Silverman disagrees strenuously. When I visited her at her house, an A-frame high in the hills above Golden, Colorado, she bristled at her peers' lack of interest in these distinctions--and at the standard public-school practice of placing exceptionally and profoundly gifted children in classes designed for merely advanced students. She described an effort, in the nineties, to eliminate gifted programs in public schools as "a form of discrimination that makes me think of Nazi Germany."

Silverman is a slight woman in her sixties, with dark, stiff hair set in a grandmotherly pouf, and a manner of severe, white-knuckled resolve. She and her husband, Hilton, have reared two children of their own and have taken care of sixteen foster children. Their house was decorated with Jewish- and Christian-themed art, and dozens of photographs of gifted children. "The gifted are my passion," she said, noting that her own children "didn't come out technically gifted."

Even her adversaries in the field of gifted education say that they have yet to encounter a more ardent advocate for children than Silverman, and speak of her intimate and youthful manner around prodigies and their parents. But there was nothing about her that seemed the slightest bit playful, except perhaps the leopard-print blouse and costume jewelry she wore. When a telephone call came and went unanswered, and the woman on the other end introduced herself to the answering machine, Silverman cautioned Hilton not to pick it up, explaining to me that it was one of their foster children. "She's trying to sell us insurance," she said.

Silverman arrived in Boulder in 1972, after receiving a Ph.D. in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California, and taught at the University of Colorado. When her contract was not renewed after the first year, her family struggled for a time (they briefly went on food stamps). Meanwhile, she independently pursued her interest in gifted children, and her husband opened a day-care center in their house and a group home for wayward or abused kids. Over the years, she has published numerous books, including a widely used textbook, "Counselling the Gifted and Talented," and she was a research consultant for the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition. Though she has held college teaching posts since she left the University of Colorado, her work, unlike that of most of her gifted-education colleagues, isn't funded by a university.

Her reputation was damaged in 2001, after an eight-year-old boy whose I.Q. she had scored at "298-plus" (she said that he was "way beyond genius" and "probably unique in the world") threatened suicide and was later found to have been heavily coached on the Stanford-Binet test by his mother, who had obtained a copy in advance. The Rocky Mountain News revealed that Silverman had allowed the boy to take the test while sitting on his mother's lap, because he had an auditory-processing problem that sometimes made it difficult to understand his answers if his mother wasn't there to translate. Silverman appeared to be heavily invested in her appraisal of the boy's genius; he and his mother moved to Colorado from New York State, and she secured sponsors for them--they had been living in subsidized housing--and helped him enroll at a school for the gifted near Boulder. Even after his mother admitted that she had also forged his S.A.T. scores (800 math, 650 verbal), Silverman continued to insist that he was a prodigy: "Just memorizing the hardest I.Q. test would take an I.Q. of around 200!" she wrote in an e-mail to an acquaintance.

Silverman felt that the boy suffered from a culture that treats extremely bright children as freaks--that he was pressured not to achieve but to be average. "You would have appreciation for the difficulty for the parents of a seventeenyear-old trapped with a nine-year-old's mind," she told me. "But what about a seventeen-year-old trapped in a nine-year-old's body?" It can make for a miserable childhood, she said. "These are the children who are often told by educators and even parents that they're too much--too driven, too perfectionist. It's the gifted kids who are beaten up in school. It's not safe to be gifted."

After a second meeting with Silverman, Patti and Martin gave some thought to moving to the Denver area, which had eight or ten very strong gifted schools and programs, and where Brandenn had grandparents and cousins. But Silverman encouraged them to homeschool their son. They were initially skeptical. "We had always considered homeschooling something for religious freaks, and both of us were hard-core anti-organized religion," Martin said. "But Dr. Silverman told us that, even in the gifted programs, out of twenty kids maybe three would be able to keep up with Brandenn."

"All of these schools have had mixed success up in Brandenn's range," Silverman told me. "Their programs are aimed at the 130-ish kids--that's three standard deviations from him." On an I.Q. distribution chart, she counted three standard deviations down from 100, the average I.Q., and landed at 55. "Putting Brandenn with them would be like putting an average kid in school with the 55-I.Q. kids. A kid who has an I.Q. of 55, do you know how developmentally delayed that kid is?"

Besides, moving to Denver would have meant giving up the farm in Venango. "Martin's family had had the land for generations," Silverman, who once spent a weekend at the Bremmers' house, told me. "They had an idyllic life style and the most beautiful family relationship. Brandenn had trees to climb and animals to be around. It meant so much to his parents that he was on that farm."

When Brandenn was four, his parents started him on the Perkins County elementary-school coursework, and within two years he'd finished the fourth-grade curriculum. Their routine varied from day to day. Typically, Brandenn was in charge. "We'd say, 'O.K., it's nine o'clock. What do you want to learn about?' " Patti recalled. "If he was passionate about reading that month, we'd do that. If he said, 'I want to learn about a dairy,' we talked about how cows work, making milk, all that. His goldfish died one day, so we dissected the fish under the microscope."

"It was kind of like the Biosphere Project," Martin said. "He had everything he needed: a greenhouse, books, land. It was like the ultimate school. He got to see birth, death, to see seasons in their entirety."

Along the way, the Bremmers became advocates for other parents in their situation. When they had started out, the state of Nebraska allowed homeschooling only on the ground of "sincerely held religious beliefs," but they persuaded a state senator to get a bill passed that broadened the exemption. They also started a charitable organization that raised and disbursed money to help needy parents of gifted children pay for tutors and tuition. For their part, the Bremmers realized that they were spending thousands of dollars a year on school materials that were typically free, and because Brandenn was absorbing information so rapidly anyway they decided to save money by skipping grades five through eight and going straight to the high-school curriculum. "Dr. Silverman said he was ready; we just had to follow his lead," Patti said. "She told us he was having every stage of a normal childhood--he just did it faster. He'd done the terrible twos in a few weeks."

The high-school correspondence program run by the University of Nebraska was designed for children who live far from the nearest school. Although it has a self-paced format that makes it a popular option for parents of gifted children, the program is more commonly used as a supplemental measure--for those who, according to a school catalogue, "find themselves short a few credits close to graduation" and still want to graduate on time, as well as for N.C.A.A. aspirants looking to boost their grade-point averages and students who want to take courses that may not be offered in small rural high schools.

There was no homework and few papers to write. Exams were administered in town and monitored by a neighbor who was registered with the program as a proctor. At first, the Bremmers limited Brandenn to two classes per year. "We were dragging it out, because we didn't know what else to do when he got through it all," Martin said. Eventually, Brandenn went on his tear. His transcript for the final two months looked like this:

4.03.2001: Personal Finance, B+, 4.04.2001: World Geography 1, A, 4.04.2001: Multicult Literature, B, 4.10.2001: Small Engine Repair, B+, 4.10.2001: Career Planning, A, 4.19.2001: General Math 2, B+, 4.19.2001: World Geography 2, A, 5.15.2001: American Government, B+, 5.18.2001: Ninth Grade English 1, B , 5.19.2001: First Year Spanish, A, 5.29.2001: American History 1, A, 5.31.2001: American History 2, A, 5.31.2001: Health Sciences 1, A, 5.31.2001: Ninth Grade English 2, B+

He took only one year of a foreign language and no advanced math, and had his fair share of gut classes--nutrition, career planning, personal finance, and driver ed (which he completed when he was nine years old). And it was strange that Brandenn, who intended to go to college, followed the curriculum that, according to the catalogue, was recommended for "students whose immediate after-graduation plans include vocation or technical school, a job, or other noncollege situation."

Still, Silverman assured the Bremmers that what he studied was irrelevant. "He was so smart he didn't need to follow anybody's curriculum," Silverman told me. "It didn't even matter if he read books or not. He could already read at an adult level at the age of six." When it came time for college, she said, he would be able to adapt.

As Brandenn was finishing his last round of courses, Patti and Martin asked him if there was anything he wanted to do to celebrate. They offered to have a set of "senior pictures" taken, and Brandenn was delighted. He was photographed in a coat and tie, and then in a Harry Potter costume. He'd always liked the idea of graduating in a traditional cap-and-gown ceremony, so he persuaded the principal of the program to hold one, for the first time in the program's history. Only five other kids, all of them seventeen or eighteen years old, took part, out of a hundred and ninety students in Brandenn's class. (Among the qualifying graduates was Britney Spears, though she has no connection to the state of Nebraska.) Local news reporters were invited to film Brandenn at the event. From a lectern he could scarcely see over, he gave a very brief address--a stock commencement speech that he had found on the Internet, he said--and then ran through the auditorium playing tag with his nieces and nephews.

For the next three years, Brandenn focussed on the piano. With his parents' encouragement, he travelled across Nebraska for Lions' Club competitions--"He always took first place," Martin said--and put out his first CD. ("All music on this CD is original and composed by Brandenn Bremmer," the album cover says. "Produced by Brandenn Bremmer: Age--13.")

Beverly Dismukes, a kindly woman in North Platte who taught Brandenn music theory and gave him piano lessons for two years, said that, despite what his parents thought, she didn't consider him one of her musical prodigies. "But you could play something once, and he would play it back to you--that's unusual," she said. "He was gifted in that he could do that." On a "fact sheet" that Patti and Martin had printed and distributed to the media, they listed, along with Brandenn's high-school grade-point average of 3.8, the items "His music has made it to Japan"; "Writes a song sometimes in less than an hour"; and "He holds all of his music in his head, never writes it out."

"He was what they call globally gifted: intellectually, physically, emotionally, musically," Martin said. "Mozart had his mathematicality going, and Brandenn's talent was more on the emotional, spiritual side of the music." He said he had always assumed that when Brandenn was in his twenties and thirties someone might "write a little biographical book and look back at when he was fourteen and see that this was when he was learning the groundwork for what was going to make him famous in music."

Every corner of the Bremmers' house reveals the extent to which their lives were built on his: a microphone dangling from the ceiling of the den, which served as his recording studio; a life-size plastic skeleton, for the study of anatomy, in the dining room; a grand piano on which Patti and Martin still have another year and a half of payments to make. For a time, Martin kept above his computer a black-and-white photograph of a smooth-faced woman in a Mission rocker, her hair pinned up in a Willa Cather bun. The woman, Leta Stetter Hollingworth, is known to many today as the godmother of gifted education: she was a founder of the first public school for the gifted, in New York City, and, while on the faculty at Columbia's Teachers College, she started the world's first long-term study of the extraordinarily gifted. Hollingworth became particularly interested in children with an I.Q. above 180, and from 1916 until her death, in 1939, she found only twelve of them. In a landmark, posthumously published work, "Children Above 180 IQ (Stanford-Binet): Origin and Development," she presented case studies of these children, vast accumulations of detail pertaining to family histories ("A's great-grandfather . . . a tailor, devised and patented a union suit, said to have been the first union suit"), head circumferences, grip measurements, and prepubescent doodles.

Hollingworth's enduring legacy stems from the emphasis that she placed on understanding the social and emotional difficulties endemic to extreme giftedness. By studying peer relationships among children of differing levels of giftedness, she came to define the I.Q. range of 125 to 155 as socially "optimal," because those children were most likely to be outgoing and confident--not so smart that they couldn't win over their peers. But children with an I.Q. above 170, she said, were so unlikely to find mates of like ability that they were demoralized. "To have the intelligence of an adult and the emotions of a child combined in a childish body is to encounter certain difficulties," she wrote.

Her findings about this profoundly gifted minority contradicted the work of the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, her contemporary, who, in his famous longitudinal study tracking some fifteen hundred high-I.Q. children, asserted that his subjects were as socially well adjusted as anyone else, and that as adults they tended to be more emotionally stable than average. Hollingworth brought her personal history to the issue as well. She had grown up, like Brandenn Bremmer a century later, on a pioneer farmstead in the westernmost part of Nebraska, and she spent most of her childhood in self-imposed solitude. According to her biographer, Ann G. Klein, the ten-year-old Leta, beset by a string of family tragedies, willed herself to become an adult overnight. As Hollingworth later described the moment in a letter to her future husband, "I decided to grow up then and there, solemnly renouncing the rest of childhood."

Hollingworth's work fell into obscurity after her death, and was rediscovered only decades later. In 1980, a seventeen-year-old prodigy named Dallas Egbert III committed suicide. Egbert was from Dayton, Ohio, and had entered college at fifteen. "Before his death, almost nobody had thought to look at the social or emotional components for these kids," Elizabeth Meckstroth, who is now a consultant for families of gifted children, told me. The next year, she was moved to help start a support group for parents of gifted children, and later she wrote, with James Webb and Stephanie Tolan, "Guiding the Gifted Child." "The National Association for Gifted Children conference until then had been all about finding tutoring, improving the math curriculum at schools, and so on," she said. "But Dallas Egbert's suicide was a call to arms."

Many articles have been published during the past two decades on the subject of suicide among gifted children, and, although there is no good evidence for it, some people think that their rate of suicide may be higher than average. Among the factors cited, besides the risks of social and intellectual isolation, are the attendant pressures of perfectionism (described by one psychologist as "an emotional need to develop themselves and master the world") and the possibility that the gifted have heightened sensitivity: even if they treat success and failure as equals, they take them both hard.

"The way these kids' minds work has to do with more than just being quick and right," said Meckstroth, who got to know the Bremmers over the years at various functions for gifted children and their families. "It's an ability to make connections between all kinds of things and sense meaning in the abstract: everything matters to them." If an average child's mind is like a pair of rabbit ears that picks up four basic TV channels, Meckstroth said, the minds of profoundly gifted children are like satellite dishes, receiving hundreds of signals at once. "It can be overwhelming," she said. "An ordinary four-year-old might dig a hole in the ground for the pleasure of digging the hole. And one of these children might be digging and thinking of all the animals he'll encounter underground, and the children in China he could help."

Linda Silverman believes that there is a higher incidence of a compassionate streak among gifted children, and told me of several ten-year-old peace activists she has encountered. "A lot of gifted kids are angels who are on this earth with responsibilities to help others," she said. "There's no other way to explain it."

Between homeschooling and the self-containment of a rural existence that didn't involve much dependence on, or obligation to, fellow-townspeople, Brandenn was seldom in the company of children his age. A major exception was the week or two each year that he and his parents spent at retreats and conferences for the highly gifted. The first gathering they went to, when Brandenn was eight, was the Davidson Institute's inaugural Young Scholars program, at Lake Tahoe. The program was filled with activities, like a public-speaking workshop, in which participants designed advertisements, and a class for future archeologists, in which participants dissected owl pellets.

"Brandenn and I became good friends right away," a boy from Long Island who met him at the Lake Tahoe retreat said. "I think we both figured anybody who'd been willing to go this far was willing to make the best of it. The whole thing was fun--a group of kids like me, you know? Although I had some friends back home who were pretty bright, this was different. Everybody was just very engaged."

The boy, who has asked that I call him Duncan, was about Brandenn's age, and the two stayed in touch over the years. When I met him this summer, at his home, he told me that he was helping a physics professor in a study of fluid dynamics and organizing a Wiffle-ball league with his friends. He and Brandenn shared a goofy sense of humor. In the summer of 2004, he visited Brandenn, and they made a short documentary film about Venango. It began with a shot of the single block that constitutes downtown, and then the camera rested on a street sign that said, "Slow Children," as Duncan walked in front of it and, in slow motion, pretended to trip and fall. They filmed a vending machine outside the laundromat and made note of the bullet holes in its coinoperating mechanism. "We can safely say that this vending machine is past its prime," Duncan said. "Let us have a moment of silence for this vending machine." Then Duncan lowered his head, and Brandenn, who was holding the video camera, followed, tilting the lens down and filming his own feet.

Patti and Martin drove Brandenn to Denver that summer for a four-day retreat hosted by the Gifted Development Center, Linda Silverman's organization. Brandenn hit it off immediately with K., a pretty girl from the West Coast. They were together constantly that week, K. said, and added that she and Brandenn weren't quite boyfriend and girlfriend, though she wasn't sure how to characterize the relationship. "What would you call someone who makes you a ring and a necklace on Valentine's Day, and a bracelet on your birthday?" she asked. "And the person who, when you decide to make him a scarf for Christmas, you spend three hours picking out the wool?"

In Denver, Brandenn, Duncan, K., and a few other kids spent most of the time together in their hotel, watching movies on TV ("Groundhog Day," "Spaceballs") and sitting around talking. "The thing about being gifted is the way you can be totally consumed by passionate interests," said K., who, at fourteen, is enrolled full time as a college student, plays three musical instruments, competes on a high-school gymnastics team, and cantors at her synagogue. "Lots of normal thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds find us off-putting. By 'normal,' I mean kids who are basically able to move from school to hobbies to their social lives, from subject to subject, without having to get obsessed about things. So for four days it was nice to pretend we were normal teen-agers."

K. described Brandenn as "a true gentleman." One night, there was a dinner dance to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gifted Development Center, and Brandenn performed "Spirit's Dream," a piano piece that he'd named for Silverman's Doberman pinscher. Later that night, he asked K. to dance, but she told him that she would have to take a rain check. She found Brandenn formidable, she recalled, which made her nervous around him: "He wasn't just a musician--he was a performer." A few days later, as the kids prepared to depart, they made plans to stay in touch and reconvene at the next summer's retreat. K. helped Brandenn carry his bags to his parents' car and told him, "You owe me a dance."

Patti and Martin enjoyed meeting other parents on the summer gifted circuit--who often refer to themselves as POGOs, for "parents of gifted offspring"--but say that a high I.Q. was the only thing that Brandenn had in common with many of the kids. "A lot of them were the stereotypical gifted kids, with emotional deficiencies, manipulating their parents like a trainer would be leading a horse," Martin told me. "Some of the kids had real frailties--they wouldn't let different foods on a plate touch each other. One kid had a rat tail hanging down his back--hair that was ten years old. He said to cut it would be like cutting off a part of him." It frustrated Brandenn to be around kids like these, Martin recalled. "Brandenn wasn't a geek, he wasn't overweight, he wasn't pimply-faced."

"Which is why his suicide rocked their world," Patti said. "Many of these kids across the country are in counselling now because of Brandenn." She smiled a wistful smile. I thought Patti was referring to K., but when I mentioned her the Bremmers were dismissive.

"All the girls were madly in love with him," Patti said. "They were all planning to marry him. None of them knew about each other."

His parents were in no hurry for Brandenn to start dating. "I went all the way through high school without doing the girlfriend thing," Martin said. "The temporary girlfriend--what a waste of time."

Even though the Bremmers seemed to want to protect Brandenn from an immature adolescence, their description of the kind of mate and marriage he hoped to find someday sounded a lot like a young boy's idea of adulthood.

"He wanted someone who would share his interest in computer games and in music," Martin said. "Someone who liked to cook, who was good with raising kids, who wasn't dependent on him to make decisions for her. He wanted a house in Lincoln and one in Omaha for medical school"--the two cities are only forty-five minutes apart. "He wanted to trade in his old Ford Escort for a stylish new car. And then he would pursue a relationship." When he met the right girl, he would buy her an engagement ring that should probably, he figured, cost three hundred thousand dollars, because that was what he'd heard doctors earned in a year.

In the fall of 2004, Brandenn settled back into his routine at home, which included a piano tutorial he'd been taking for a year with David Wohl, a member of the music department at Colorado State. When Brandenn first performed for Wohl, he played a New Age piece he had written--"a lot of pedal, a lot of floating textures," Wohl told me. "It's like water music, basically. It doesn't require tremendous technique. I said, 'I'll take you on, but you're going to learn how to read music and you are going to learn the "Moonlight" Sonata and Bach.' " In return, Wohl taught Brandenn how to improvise more thoughtfully, manipulating harmony and using different chord spacings. Brandenn abruptly terminated his lessons in December, although he continued to compose and work in his music studio on his own. "It was odd," Wohl recalled. "I thought, Why stop now, just as he's getting into it? He'd been making a lot of progress, especially toward the end." Brandenn explained to Wohl that he was quitting lessons because he wanted to become a doctor, and after the holidays he was going to begin taking premed classes. "I guess I'm not going to make a career in music," he said.

"He had it all stepped out," Patti recalled. Brandenn planned to start with a couple of classes at Mid-Plains Community College, in North Platte, ninety miles from Venango. When he turned fifteen, he would get the rest of his premeds out of the way at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where his oldest sister, Jennifer, is a surgical nurse. When he turned sixteen, he would start medical school.

"He liked the challenge and he liked the income," Martin said, referring to Brandenn's talk of becoming an anesthesiologist. "I think he also liked the idea of not having to see patients all day long. He didn't want to be dealing with a lot of hypochondriacs coming in."

"He wanted to ease people's pain," Patti said.

He began in January, with an introductory college biology course. "He was a quiet boy who seemed at ease for the most part," his instructor, Sara Morris, told me. "The other students didn't know how young he was. One time during lunch break, his parents came and brought him a sandwich. Sometimes he ate in the cafeteria with the other kids."

There were a lot of new academic challenges. "He was kind of feeling his way along," Morris said. "I'd assigned a term paper on natural history. I knew from talking to him that he'd never done anything like that, and of course he had to learn how to do the citations. And he was nervous. We talked about doing some typing of his notes and how that might help him. It was an adjustment for him, but he was going to do just fine."

Brandenn spoke frequently on the phone with Duncan. "His biology course--he said he wasn't trying all that hard at it," Duncan recalled. "He just was never excited about it. He said, 'Basically, O.K., there's this living stuff and we call it organisms.' He found it incredibly abstract." It wasn't such a big deal to be disenchanted with a class, Duncan understood, but he was surprised to hear Brandenn sounding so listless. "He always went with such rapid fire at stuff he liked. But, with the bio, he was kind of detached from it."

At the time of his suicide, Brandenn had been graded on only a single exam, the course midterm. "It was either a B-minus or a C-plus, I can't remember," Patti said. "But it was scaled, so he was carrying a high B. He wasn't happy with it. But he always finished all his classes super. He sometimes got a C on a test in high school, and he'd always bring it up. It was like burning a piece of toast: 'I'll just put in another one.' "

Brandenn's sister Dawn didn't come home for Christmas in 2004, but she called from California. He was making cookies, he told her, and he was bored.

"Well, that sucks," Dawn said.

"Yeah, it does," Brandenn said.

Dawn wasn't speaking to Patti at the time. "My mom and I have fought my whole life," she told me. "I was the complicated sibling. I moved out when I was young." As Dawn saw it, her mother and Martin had created a life for their family that cut them off from the rest of the world. "They liked being that isolated, that whole all-we-need-is-each-other thing," she said. "I always called it Bremmer Island."

Brandenn talked with K. in intermittent bursts through the fall and winter. "There was probably a month when he called me every night," she said. "It always sounded like he was hiding, going outside the house to make calls, or only calling when his parents weren't there. He'd say, 'Oh, I gotta go--my mom's home from the grocery store.' "

He told her that he hoped to move to New York for medical school. "I want to go to school where there are people," he said. They talked about how much they missed each other, and began counting the days until Silverman's summer retreat in Denver. "He said he wanted to be there, but his parents might have something else for him this year," she said.

K.'s mother wrote Patti an e-mail in December. "I said our kids have created this nice relationship, albeit long distance," she recalled. "I just wanted to let her know how much Brandenn meant to my daughter. Patti wrote back that Brandenn had mentioned her, but his private world was all his own. She said she wasn't sure he was going to go to the POGO retreat, because of summer school."

Something else was going to change for Brandenn. Because the commute to the Mid-Plains campus was so long, Patti and Martin had made arrangements for Brandenn to start boarding in North Platte during the week, at the home of a Venango neighbor's grandmother. "He wasn't worried about being lonely, because he was happy with himself," Patti said. "He didn't need to have someone around all the time. He thought about it for a couple of days and then he said, 'No, I want to make the move.' We let him know he didn't have to. We kept telling him he could stay home and wait until he was in his twenties."

Over the holidays, K. received a text message from Brandenn. His mother had taken him to the library in Ogallala, where she was signing copies of her latest novel, "Victim Wanted," and at the moment he had little interest in being there. "Save me," he wrote, and later, in an e-mail, "IT'S HER FAULT I WAS BORED OUT OF MY MIND." He had complained in the fall that Patti had put him up to delivering a speech to a group of children at the library, and wrote, "I'm still kind of mad at my mom, since I wasn't asked for my opinion on doing this thing at all, it was just a 'Hey Brandenn, your going to give a talk at the end of the month to a bunch of kids.' " Still, he had said he wasn't that upset: "It was alright, and we ate at a Subway that day, so hey you can't go wrong with that (I'm a healthy eater so Subway is my favorite place to eat out). So yeah, I'm content with my life right now."

K. wrote to ask how Brandenn's Christmas had been. She said that she and her parents had spent the day at the movies. A couple of hours later, Brandenn responded that, aside from watching "Shrek 2," the Bremmers had done "nothing, as a family anyway." He explained in another e-mail, "Yeah, that's kind of what it's like here, I mean, we're a close family. . . . we just don't spend much. . . . time. . . . being. . . . that. . . . way. . . . Yeah."

In the middle of their exchange, a gift for Brandenn arrived in the Bremmers' mailbox. It was the scarf that K. had knitted, in marled gray alpaca, with suede fringes. He wrote to thank her:

Your timing couldn't have been better, for the past week or so I've been depressed beyond all reason, so this was just what I needed, thank you very much.

She wrote back:

Now, what's this about you being depressed all week? Talk to me, I want to hear about it. Because trust me, I've been there, done that and all I got was this lame t-shirt. ;) Just let me know okay? I want to help if I can, and it's really important to me that you're happy and all that jazz.

Brandenn replied:

Thanks . . . I'm glad there's someone who cares. I don't know why I'm so depressed, before it was just every now and then, and you know, it was just "bummed out" depressed. But now it's constant and it's just, "What's the point of living anymore?" I don't know, maybe I just don't spend enough time around good friends like you. But like I can. Not out there in the middle of nowhere. At least there's this family kind of near by that aren't "Cowboys," or else just plain idiots, that I can spend time with. But even still, that's only like once every other week at the most. Oh well. Well I should probably go, thanks for being such a good friend.

Brandenn phoned K. that night. "He just said he was feeling down about everything," she recalled. "What teen-ager doesn't go through unhappiness, you know? I told him to talk to his parents. He said, 'Yeah, I'll think about it,' but he never mentioned them again." The two of them fell out of correspondence for a while, "not for any good reason," K. said. "We were both probably just too busy." On Sunday night, March 13th, Brandenn called her to say hello, but she was out.

Two days later, on March 15th, Brandenn finished recording a second CD of piano music, which he planned to call "Dimensions." He listened to it with his parents at around noon, then went upstairs to sew up a hole in one of his favorite shirts. Martin came up to discuss Brandenn's design for the CD cover; it was an Escher-like tableau of three-dimensional geometric shapes assembled in a desert before a reflecting pool. A bit later, Patti and Martin drove to the town of Grant, thirty minutes away, to run errands. They stopped first at the public library to pick up a stack of unsold copies of Patti's novel, and then bought groceries.

At five-forty-five, when they pulled up to the house, Patti heard what sounded like choking noises coming from inside. She ran upstairs to Brandenn's room and saw his body crumpled on the floor. He had shot himself in the head. He was unconscious but breathing shallowly. She screamed for Martin.

"I knew right away what had happened," Martin said. "Seeing him like that was like stepping into a room and none of your five senses work. It was like seeing the snow falling upward."

Martin carried Brandenn in his arms to the car, called 911, and began driving him toward town until they were met by an ambulance. The hospital doctors in Grant tried unsuccessfully to revive Brandenn, and told them that he was not going to make it. A hospital employee asked the Bremmers whether they were willing to allow their son's vital organs to be harvested. They immediately said yes. Back in December, when Brandenn turned fourteen and obtained a rural student's driving permit, he had checked off the organ-donor box. The subject came up at supper that night, and Brandenn had told his parents that he was all for it.

While a helicopter airlifted Brandenn's body from Grant to Children's Hospital, in Denver, Patti and Martin drove through the night in order to get there. A neurologist performed a CT scan and a radiograph and rushed Brandenn to the I.C.U., again in vain. Martin cut a lock of his son's hair to save, and gently removed the stud earring that Brandenn wore. He got his own ear pierced right away, so that he could wear the earring himself.

The harvesting of Brandenn's organs took place over the next two and a half days. Despite extensive damage to his brain, the rest of his body was functioning. "They used everything--organs, veins, arteries," Patti said. "The hospital said his epidermal tissues will help fifty people. They said they were fortunate to get a body in such good shape."

The next afternoon, Patti sent an e-mail to more than seventy people, including friends, family, reporters, and POGOs:

The latest from the hospital a few minutes ago was that Brandenn's kidneys were a "Perfect Match" there were only 6 perfect matches in the US and the chances of those 6 getting kidneys were almost impossible. Once again Brandenn did the impossible. His liver went to a 22 month old baby that would have . . . died within days without it. His heart is now beating in the chest of an 11 year old boy who was down to hours. He was flown to Children's as a last ditch effort in a holding pattern counting the minutes for someone in the United States to find a match. His heart was on a man-made machine to keep him alive until they could find a donor. . . . Brandenn was in the next operating room they thought what are the chances and he was a perfect match . . . ., I am trembling and crying as I write this but I want to share with you and the rest of the world that knows him.

The Bremmers had no health insurance, and to pay the local hospital and ambulance bills they sold the CDs that Brandenn had recorded and the Bernese-mountain-dog puppies he'd raised. After the suicide sank in, Patti says, she became taken with the idea that perhaps he'd actually killed himself so that his organs could be put to use in those who needed them.

"Brandenn was so spiritually aware that if he sensed that people needed his help he would have helped," she told me once.

"So you're saying he had the ability to sense that people needed something from him and that's why he did what he did?" Martin put in, elaborating on the thought.

"Yes," Patti said. "I'm ambivalent about Christianity, but a lot of people have said he reminded them of Jesus. You know: 'He came, he taught, he left.' "

Patti told me that she thought Brandenn might have been an "Indigo Child," a concept that she learned about after his death, and that was described in a book by the New Age authors Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" includes essays by psychologists and doctors, and suggests that a new breed of children born in recent decades possess not only great cognitive ability but supernatural insight. While these children are often misdiagnosed as having attention-deficit or hyperactivity disorder, they may actually be old souls reincarnated. Linda Silverman told Patti she believed that Brandenn was spiritually gifted, and that his mission to assist others in this lifetime may have been fulfilled by his death.

The idea that gifted children have supernatural abilities has gained some currency in the past few years. They have some origin in observation: intelligent children often pick up what's going on around them so well that they're able to intuit others' emotions; they can be extremely aware of themselves and their environment. "It's not so much of a leap to see that if all kids sense their mother or father's bad mood, a more intelligent kid can sense his mother's bad mood with less data," Sal Mendaglio, a psychologist and professor at the University of Calgary, told me. "And a child who sees more is more likely to experience anxiety himself when his mother is anxious. So that child's ability for greater empathy, his interest in doing altruistic things, then, is not so mysterious, either." Some people like to interpret this behavior, Mendaglio explained, as evidence of psychic ability or a divine mission.

"It wouldn't surprise me, the way he was, if he was so connected that he knew his organs were needed," Silverman told me. "There was always something otherworldly about Brandenn. He had a kind of ancient wisdom that was beyond anybody I'd ever seen."

During one of my visits to Silverman's house, just after she invited me to stay for lunch, she said, "Patti and Martin had contacts with him after he'd left his body. There was none for forty-eight hours. Martin cried the entire time. But then they both felt a sense of peacefulness. And he took the memory away from them of finding him." In effect, she said, Brandenn was healing his parents.

"With a suicide, especially of a child, the assumption we make in this society is that somebody is to blame for it," she went on. "I was extremely undone the night I found out that Brandenn had been lost. You couldn't help but examine the possibility of something going wrong. I asked him for guidance, because I could have missed something." And when she woke up the next morning, she said, "I had this overwhelming sense of peace, and just the feeling that he'd gone home."

Hilton Silverman, who had been in the kitchen, brought a platter of Reuben sandwiches to the table. Hilton has a gray beard, a wrestler's posture, and a heavily lined forehead. He wore fleece pants, a zippered skiing turtleneck, and flip-flops with socks.

"Well, I can tell you what the spirits are saying," he said. "He was an angel."

Silverman turned to face me. "I'm not sure how much you know about my husband. Hilton is a psychic and a healer. He has cured people of cancer."

"It kind of runs in my family: my grandfather was a kabbalist rabbi in Brooklyn, and my father used to heal sick babies with kosher salt," Hilton said. "Brandenn was an angel who came down to experience the physical realm for a short period of time."

I asked Hilton how he knew this. He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he was pulling my leg and trying to think up something even more outlandish to say next. "I'm talking to him right now," he said. "He's become a teacher. He says right now he's actually being taught how to help these people who experience suicides for much messier reasons. Before Brandenn was born, this was planned. And he did it the way he did so that others would have use for his body. Everything worked out in the end."

"I'll tell you who else is an angel," Linda Silverman said. "I think Martin's an angel."

"Oh, Martin, for sure," Hilton said. "He has a positive spiritual alignment. He and Brandenn meet a lot when he's asleep."

Linda looked at me helpfully. "You see, we don't know how to explain these kids--not scientifically."

"Scientifically!" Hilton scoffed.

Silverman seemed to hold fast to her interpretation of events, even after she saw the unhappy e-mail messages that Brandenn had written. She doubted they were representative, and suspected that they'd been taken out of context, or even manipulated.

At first, K. struggled to make sense of the e-mails. She worried that perhaps she ought to have prevented Brandenn's suicide. "I think I'm cycling through all stages of grief at once," she told her parents. They brought her to Vancouver to see a psychologist, and had her talk on the phone with another. K.'s mother shared the e-mails with Duncan and his family, and--through a coincidence of mutual acquaintanceship in Dawn's home town--ended up sharing them with Dawn, too.

All of them found something like relief in the e-mails. At the very least, the suicide appeared now to be something they had the vocabulary to understand. Brandenn hadn't been under a strange influence that told him he'd be doing something good for others by killing himself; it didn't seem that there was some awful secret behind his death. His friends and his sister agreed that he had probably felt alone or sad or frustrated or some combination of those things, and was momentarily helpless to find a way out. And, unfortunately, he had been in a position to act on a suicidal impulse. Perhaps if the gun hadn't been in his room just then, he wouldn't have gone through with it.

When Dawn tried to discuss the e-mails with her mother, she says, Patti dismissed them immediately, saying, " 'Depressed' is a word we use all the time around here. It's just a figure of speech. It meant he was having a bad day." K.'s mother, she added, "is probably just into doom and gloom."

Patti told me that she thought it was K. who might have been unhappy. "Maybe Brandenn wanted her to feel better, so he wrote that he was miserable, too," she said. "That was Brandenn: if one of his sisters was struggling in school and said, 'I'm so dumb,' he'd say, 'Well, I'm really dumb.' He never sent any e-mails like that to anyone else."

Brandenn's sisters doubted that if he was feeling low he would ever have shared it with his parents. "He wasn't the sort of kid who'd have ever complained to us," Jennifer said. Dawn said, "I still feel a lot of guilt, like I should have done something to help--talk to him or let him know that life gets better when you're older. I'm sure my mom and Martin feel guilty, too. But with Brandenn it really would have been hard to see it coming."

One afternoon when I was with the Bremmers, the sky darkened over their front porch. It had been hot and dry for weeks, and finally a severe thunderstorm was rolling in from central Kansas. "We used to watch how Brandenn walked from the sidewalk to his biology class," Patti said. "In the past year, he became such a graceful young man."

"He glided," Martin told me earlier. "Until then, he walked like any other kid does, like Shaggy from 'Scooby-Doo,' you know? Like he has no bones in his body." Patti had added, "Oh, and he had a six-pack. His stomach was rock hard. I'd punch his stomach and make a joke about how it hurt my hand."

On the porch, Martin took off his glasses and wiped them with his undershirt. "It's hard to convince yourself right now that we were good parents," he said. He felt embarrassed that, all these years, he and Patti had offered their services as advisers to parents of gifted children. "What right did I have to tell them how to raise their kid if this is my track record? I thought I had it all figured out, and then he kills himself. Now I think I must be a total failure as a person, because the one thing I devoted my life to was raising Brandenn."

"We did everything right," Patti said, wrapping her arms around her husband.

Martin said, "I see moms who smoked all through gestation, or moms who yell at their kids at the grocery store, and I look at the kids and they're just so beaten down. Then I think, Why is that family getting by?"

It started raining, gently for perhaps a minute, and then hard and fast. The Bremmers' Bernese mountain dogs--two mothers and a litter of new puppies--scampered from their pen into the kennel, a converted milk barn. When Brandenn was thirteen and taking time off from music class, Patti recalled, Martin had taught him construction. They'd gutted the barn, put in insulation and sheeting, and reinforced the walls with two-by-sixes. Over a single weekend, Brandenn learned woodworking and how to pour concrete, and he put up most of the aluminum siding himself.

This memory brought to mind a horticulture project that Brandenn had done when he was eight, in which he developed a sprinkling method--one that actually worked in their yard. "It's too windy here, and our pool sprinkler sprayed so hard it wasted a lot of seeds," Martin said. Brandenn found a misting hose and kept it going lightly twenty-four hours a day. The land remained soaked, even on ninety-five-degree days, and the grass seed finally took. "He changed all the rules," Martin said. "It was the first year we had a real lawn."

Despite the lack of empirical evidence supporting the stereotype, it lives on...