Reflections From a Murky Pond

I came across this post on WordPress’ Tag Surfer and it really set me off on a rant. The blog’s owner apparently dislikes dissenting opinions and deleted my comment, so I’ll quote him verbatim below and add my commentary.

Mental Illness in America II

December 14, 2007 by nightbird16

Just a week ago, Richard Dawkins, a distraught and mentally ill teenager in Colorado, shot eight shoppers. Sunday morning, another young mentally disturbed young man, Matthew Murrey’, shot five members of a missionary training center and church, also in Colorado. Although a few years older than Richard, Matthew exhibited the same symptoms of an isolated, depressed and failure-plagued young person: relationship problems with parental figures, isolated from possible friends his own age, feeling a failure and abused, and at last hearing voices in his mind, he struck out at a christian community he felt had rejected and let him down.

His parents chose to take him out of the public school to home school him in a strict Christian fashion, which he resented because it deprived him of opportunities to make friends. He felt unable to “live up to the strict behaviorial standards set for him by his parents and fundamentalist theology and that plunged him into a deep and suicidal depression. His parents put him on medication to control the depression, but that apparently didn’t help. He sought aid from church and missionaries, and they too failed to heal his panic and suffering.

Finally, he armed himself with an assault rifle, handguns and 1000 rounds of ammunition and went to take revenge on a Christian community which he could not join and could not escape.

Guns and mental illness is a fatal combination, but parents and church must share responsibility for what happened. Without support and effective counseling, many teens fall by the wayside in America. And the story looks dreadfully similar: isolation, failure, unrelenting pressure and control leads to tragedy again and again. When something goes wrong, parents blame “the wrong crowd.” The church blames evil values. Politicians blame evil children.

I blame a sick society that devours its own children.

Yes, Nightbird16, America suffers from a sick society. That sickness is manifest in the people that put on their oh-so-comfortable blinders and claim any sort of evil or selfishness as an illness. Evil exists! Selfishness, Evil’s bastard spawn exists! They don’t magically go away because people mislabel them as some sort of illness, or blame them on society.

Dawkins and Murrey were a pair of selfish, self-centered losers who wanted to die in a blaze of fame and supposed “glory” – nothing more. They weren’t mentally ill; they were evil, selfish and useless. Do their parents share the blame for that? Yes, they raised a pair of misborn freaks who turned to evil. Does society share them for that? Only insofar as it doesn’t have an effective means of culling such human trash before they can harm others.

It’s is decades past time for America to start forcing people to be responsible for their own choices and their own actions. It is decades past time to stop excusing the criminal and evil behavior of individuals because we’re too cowardly to look evil in the face and pull the trigger.

I blame it on a sick society who’s too afraid to face evil.

From a post by Gerri L. Elder on Total Lawyers:

It seems that in New York, the police officers no longer have -after Mayor Guiliani cleaned up the city – enough existing criminals to justify their numbers. They have to resort to entrapping citizens into breaking the law.

Have you ever seen a lost wallet or misplaced purse and picked it up with the intention of returning it to its owner? In NYC you might be committing a crime – a crime that the NYPD set you up for.

Plainclothes NYPD officers have been planting purses in NYC department stores. They then secretly surveil who picks them up. In one Macy’s store, three people were arrested when they picked up the purses. These people, who could have easily intended to return the bags, are now faced with being indicted on charges that could send them to state prison.

This supposed sting operation is very similar to a previous scam run by the NYPD nine months ago called Operation Lucky Bag. That attempt at entrapment was shut down by a Brooklyn judge. Afterwards notes were added to the prosecutor’s handbook to clarify that in order to prosecute these types of cases there had to be proof that the person who found the valuables had criminal intentions since under the law – what the NYPD is supposed to enforce – a person who finds valuables has 10 days to turn any found property if it exceed $20 of value.

They’re back at it again though – with a particularly nasty twist that upgrades the charges into Class E felonies. The purses that now are being left lying around have real American Express cards in them that have been issued to the police department under fake names. This dramatically raises the risks to the citizenry; since the purses contain credit cards with an available balance exceeding $1000 the crime of picking up one of these bags is considered Grand Larceny in the Fourth (4th) Degree.

Grand larceny 4 carries a penalty of up to 4 years in prison. Legal defense fees for defendants can easily exceed $20,000. This seems a harsh thing to do someone who might have been a Good Samaritan.

So, as in all things today, if you see something or find someone keep on about your business. Do not help, do not get involved. By doing so you would be interfering in the domain of the NYPD and they will protect their jobs by having you incarcerated!

One day a rather inebriated ice fisherman drilled a hole in the ice and peered into the hole and a loud voice said, “There are no fish down there.”

He walked several yards away and drilled another hole and peered into the hole and again the voice said, “There’s no fish down there.”

He then walked about 50 yards away and drilled another hole and again the voice said, “There’s no fish down there.”

He looked up into the sky and asked, “God, is that you?”

“No, you idiot,” the voice said, “it’s the rink manager!”

Surprisingly it got crowded in heaven, so, for one day it was decided only to accept people who had really had a bad day on the day they died. St. Peter was standing at the pearly gates and said to the first man, “Tell me about the day you died.”

The man said, “Oh, it was awful. I was sure my wife was having an affair, so I came home early to catch her with him. I searched all over the apartment but couldn’t find him anywhere. So I went out onto the balcony, we live on the 25th floor, and found this man hanging over the edge by his fingertips. I went inside, got a hammer, and started hitting his hands. He fell, but landed in some bushes. So, I got the refrigerator and pushed it over the balcony and it crushed him. The strain of the act gave me a heart attack, and I died.”

St. Peter couldn’t deny that this was a pretty bad day, and since it was a crime of passion, he let the man in.

He then asked the next man in line about the day he died. “Well, sir, it was awful,” said the second man. “I was doing aerobics on the balcony of my 26th floor apartment when I twisted my ankle and slipped over the edge. I managed to grab the balcony of the apartment below, but some maniac came out and started pounding on my fingers with a hammer. Luckily I landed in some bushes. But, then the guy dropped a refrigerator on me!”

St. Peter chuckled, let him into heaven and decided he could really start to enjoy this job.

“Tell me about the day you died?”, he said to the third man in line.

“OK, picture this, I’m naked, hiding inside a refrigerator …”

Al Gore’s Greenwash is stripped away as repeated note of his energy hogging, extravagant lifestyle is taken. Here’s an excerpt from an article on Green Hypocrisy:

While the former veep and nouveau-$100 millionaire jets around the world squawking about the “planet having a fever” and demanding that we all lower our standard of living, his own personal electricity use is 20 times the national average, including an indoor pool costing $500/month to heat.

While Gore deflected criticism of his inconvenient electric bill during March congressional testimony by saying he purchased “green” electricity, the truth is, he didn’t start doing so until 2007.

Is it just me, or does Al Gore strike anyone else as someone who may “talk the talk“, but who is completely unwilling to “walk the walk” – all the while stridently demanding that the rest of us, who have fewer resources the he does, do so in his stead?

I’m not going to discuss Global Warming in this post because it’s secondary to the point of Al Gore’s hypocrisy. Let’s suppose though that Global Warming is terribly real. Let us also, for the sake of this particular discussion, suppose that human actions are the primary cause of Global Warming. Is a grandstanding hypocrite really the icon people should want for the issue? Think about it.