Unfriend
The Oxford dictionary “word of the year for 2009″ was unfriend, meaning “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” The ability to unfriend someone, for no reason at all, is probably one of the last preserves of individualism left in the world. How long it can continue to last in a society where it has become impolite and sometimes illegal to exclude someone for anything other than a specific legal cause is an open question.
The LA Times, for example, has a long article on whether it wasn’t discriminatory to mention that James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter is white. “Is this racist? Racially insensitive? Or unobjectionably informative?” it asks. The amount of editorial effort devoted to avoiding the offense of describing a person is enormous. That puts us in a better position to answer Washington Post’s John Kelly rhetorical question that ‘if Holmes was so odd, how did he get guns legally?’
The same way he got his $26,000 National Science Foundation grant, free tuition and admission into the Colorado University medical school. He applied for it and nobody had a reason to say no. “No program that I’m familiar with in the United States requires a psychiatric evaluation for their students,” a Colorado University official said. ”To the best of our knowledge at this point, we did everything that we should have done,” Chancellor Don Elliman told reporters.
That odd phrasing suggests that none of the above disclaimers mean that nobody privately thought he was crazy. It’s just that institutions can’t unfriend you for no good reason.
Three days after the massacre, it still remained unclear whether Holmes’ professors and other students at his 35-student Ph.D. program noticed anything unusual about his behavior. His reasons for quitting the program in June, just a year into the five- to seven-year program, also remained a mystery.
The university declined to release any details of his academic record, citing privacy concerns, and at least two dozen professors and other staff declined to speak with the AP. Some said they were instructed not to talk publicly about Holmes in a blanket email sent to university employees.
Jacque Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the University of Colorado medical school, said that police have told the school to not talk about Holmes.
As if that were not enough, “the university also took down the website for its graduate neuroscience program on Saturday.” You can see why some critics thought the academy was overdoing the privacy routine.
Dan Keeney, president of DPK Public Relations in Dallas, said asking for silence from university employees because of a police investigation was appropriate, but taking down the website was “indefensible” for a publicly funded university unless the school believed it contained inaccurate information relating to the suspect.
But hey, if it’s potentially offensive to describe a person as “white”, then who knows what hurtful information might be revealed by the slightest substantive communication. Institutions are so terrified of controversy that they have come to prefer to say nothing rather than say anything. Recently, Penn State removed the state of Joe Paterno from Beaver Stadium. There is now nothing but a vacant space where the statue used to be. The statue once reminded the university community of their athletic achievement; later it came to remind them of their shame. Now it reminds nobody of nothing at all.
Earlier Sunday, a work crew arrived before dawn and used jackhammers and a forklift to remove the statue of Paterno from its spot outside the Penn State football stadium. The statue, which was taken to an undisclosed location, had become an object of scorn after the release of the Freeh report, which detailed Paterno’s involvement in covering up child sexual abuse accusations against Sandusky for more than a decade.
Penn State’s president, Rodney Erickson, made the final decision about the statue’s removal.
“I believe that, were it to remain, the statue will be a recurring wound to the multitude of individuals across the nation and beyond who have been the victims of child abuse,” Erickson said in a statement. “I fully realize that my decision will not be a popular one in some Penn State circles, but I am certain it is the right and principled decision.”
Cynics might argue that Erickson removed the statue for the very same reason his predecessors covered up for Sandusky in the first place: to keep the university’s reputation burnished and bright. And what better way to do it than in an information-free zone. Yet who can blame them? Institutions, like government, are governed by rules and their statements are parsed by lawyers. There is no room in them for what used to be called common sense, the lost art of looking at the facts without the legal goggles. Today, if it’s out there it can hurt somebody. And if it can hurt somebody, they can sue you.
The Joe Paterno Statue Vanishes
The only person who was free to act on his gut instinct was the gun-club owner. He was creeped out by Holmes’ behavior and instructed his employees not to let him join the club.
The owner of a gun range told the AP that Holmes applied to join the club last month but never became a member because of his behaviour and a “bizarre” message on his voice mail.
He emailed an application to join the Lead Valley Range in Byers on June 25 in which he said he was not a user of illegal drugs or a convicted felon, said owner Glenn Rotkovich. When Mr Rotkovich called to invite him to a mandatory orientation the following week, he said he heard a message on Holmes’ voice mail that was “bizarre – guttural, freakish at best.”
He left two other messages but eventually told his staff to watch out for Holmes at the July 1 orientation and not to accept him into the club, Mr Rotkovich said.
Some people might call this discriminatory behavior. After all, what reason did he have for refusing admission to a fine upstanding young man with no drug or criminal record, a member in good standing of a medical institution and the recipient of a prestigious Federal Grant, other than the fact that he gave off bad vibes?
In the aftermath of the shooting at Fort Hood shooting, it transpired that lots of people had been aware that Major Hassan was human time bomb waiting to go off. “But the Washington agents thought that interviewing American Muslims who visit extremist websites was a sensitive issue and did not reach out to Hasan’s bosses at the Defense Department, the official said.” It might be found in hindsight that many of Holmes acquaintances may have suspected that something was wrong — but there was nothing official they could go on. Possibly one reason the University of Colorado has clamped down on the information it has on Holmes is to determine for itself whether anything in the record should have impelled them to act in anticipation, as the officials in Penn State failed to do in Sandusky’s case.
But none of this should obscure the central point. Individual human beings can detect and act on information which institutions cannot even acknowledge. John Kelly suggested that massacres can be prevented if only gun-buyers were tested for insanity. “News reports have said that James Holmes bought his arsenal legally. But did he really? The mentally ill aren’t supposed to own guns, and is there anyone who thinks this guy wasn’t wrong in the head? He supposedly was odd enough to creep out a Colorado gun range owner. ”
But Kelly misses the point. No store-administered or government-provided test could have detected what Kelly hoped to prevent. Bureaucracies are blind to those who know how to game them. The power of subsidiarity lies in precisely that individuals on the ground, equipped with experience peculiar to their station, can generally find things a one-size fits all bureaucratic mechanism can never detect. Maybe that’s why the Israeli airline security uses human interrogators to focus on the human threat while the TSA processes millions objects in scanners. Despite that, TSA let Underwear Bomber through, and neither the National Science Foundation nor Colorado University ever found any real pretext to deny James Holmes.
Bureaucracies can never “unfriend” you unless the rulebook says it can. But individuals can act on their own initiative; sometimes it makes all the difference.
Belmont Commenters
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Wretchard, you’ll want to delete one of the sets of quotes from the owner of the gun range.
Well, it seems that Buraq Hussein Obama was correct in his statement after all.
“You didn’t create that massacre, the government did.”
If he wants to claim that individuals are not at all responsible for what happens, but the government is; then he owns this.
That said, then much is explained. The $26,000 government grant was supposed to cover tuition plus living stipend. The question remains, how much was the tuition [which may now be classified information], and also what portion, if any, was paid? It has since come out that he was not wearing bullet resistant ballistic armor from head to toe, as reported by Aurora’s Chief of Police, but rather utility tactical gear which is much cheaper. Thus the original estimates of how much he had spent to do this drops from the $10-20K range to <$10K.
A wonderful advertisement for the omniscience, benevolence, and care of the all-powerful State.
Subotai Bahadur
Fixed the doubled quotes and typos.
Institutions are necessary, but there must always be room for human discretion; some allowance for detecting the exception which the rule never envisioned. The Royal Navy of 300 years ago — Nelson’s Navy — operated in an age when it took months for messages to reach the Admiralty. Each captain was therefore on his own within the context of the general strategic framework.
Ambassadors of a hundred years ago had the scope for judgment which they may no longer have in today’s digital environment. The contemporary demand is for total control. Everything is assumed to be the fault of the man at the top because he has the database information to detect anything. And that’s so much better, isn’t it? Or is it?
The reason why man is in the loop is so that you can make mistakes. But that is a small price to pay because it allows you to avoid even bigger mistakes. Somehow we have edited individual judgment out of too many workflows. And I’m not sure it is all for the best.
SB #2:
Not only for the incompetence of the all powerful state, but for the incestuous relationship and shady accounting of the academy.
Flesh it out further. You asked the right question – I’d like your opinion. What percentage of the $26,000 went to the school, and what percentage went to “living”?
I’m guessing most of it went to the school, either as direct tuition payment, or to other “company store” expenses like lab fees, etc. Not much of a living, but there it is.
We laugh at the silly Victorian Era, with their way of calling a piano support; a piano “limb”.., To use the word “leg” in that time & place was not correct..It was considered crude, uncouth..How foolish will the future consider us, for all our politically correct speech.. We are no different from the Victorians..Only now it is not just a matter of refinement socially, its a matter of life or death…
I wonder how many lives were saved by that gun range owner? It sounds like the shooter’s carbine either jammed after 20 shots or he wasn’t proficient enough to quickly change the magazine. Either way, a little practice to work out the difficulties would have allowed him another magazine at close range–practice he apparently didn’t get because one guy got suspicious.
Well, do we want our freedoms, or not?
Holmes was left free, in spite of some doubts he did or might have engendered.
He might have dyed his hair red, loaded up the AR-15, sneaked into the theater, emptied it into the ceiling, and escaped in the confusion of a rain of plaster. Posted it all on YouTube, and gone on with his studies with a secret and a smirk.
No detection and prevention system is going to operate error-free. Holmes snuck into the error zone, the ever-shrinking error zone. If we remediate by letting other theater-goers pack heat, the next terrorist uses a bomb instead of bullets.
Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds, I’m not going to discount it that easily.
It sounds like Holmes was getting progressively worse and worse. It wasn’t a case of him always being a lunatic and no one noticed. People noticed as he got worse. As his mind deteriorated he lost his girlfriend and his academic career. Now lost his freedom. I wonder to what degree he really knows what has happened.
I don’t think this is the case of a violent jerk finally going one step too far.
We are poised on that slippery slope again. You can only punish actions. If you start punishing thinking about actions, we have fallen off. There are millions out there just as nutty as the Aurora fruitcake. I read that there has never been a mass shooting anywhere that gun carry was allowed. I would be interested in seeing that database.
The two extremes are removing ALL firearms from the American public’s hands. That is a) impossible and B) would just cause the nutters to go with weapons even more deadly. The opposite pole is using the USSC ruling on health care to pass a law requiring every American to own and carry a hand gun. That would lead to some nutter doing his two-gun Pete imitation in a mall the day before Christmas and 50 or 60 bystanders shooting back. The bodies would be stacked like cordwood. Nothing wrong with shooting back, unless you are in the wrong place. If shooting back causes more harm then good, shut up and take it like a man.
There has to be a happy medium. What we have now works more often then not. There are enough nutters out there to do a mass murder thingie every day for the next several decades.
I’m glad they got this one alive. Examine him. See if we learn anything. When done, put him in a cell with the Son of Sam. Under 24/7 surveillance.
I’m reminded of a go-to gag line on TV’s “Big Bang Theory.”
Occasionally when Jim Parson’s “Sheldon” character is acting, um, quirky, and his odd behavior is pointed out, he replies: “I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested.”
911 Call:
OPERATOR: “What’s the emergency?”
BANK EXECUTIVE: “A man armed with a handgun came in, stole money from a teller and shot a customer.”
OPERATOR: “Did you get a good look at him?”
EXECUTIVE: “Absolutely-Male, 5’10,” wearing black jeans and a white V-Neck T-shirt, approximately 180 lbs.”
OPERATOR: “His race?”
EXECUTIVE: “I’m sorry, company policy prevents me from revealing that.”
We are not allowed to be judgemental, not publicly anyway. How much crime has been comitted by the mentally ill that we have decided, legally, cannot be detained but foisted upon the general public. So much more I see that we are not really making that much progress socially, we are just relabeling and repackaging. I am reminded of a joke about the insanity defense of a deranged serial killer. The defense argues he doesn’t have a grasp on reality. Well if that is true, tell him the electric chair is a time machine, he is the first Chrononaught and pull the switch.
One of the drivers on this incessant growth in bureaucratic stupidity is the jack pot trial lawyers. Somehow since I was a teen in the ’70′s, the sue them all lawyers have run amuck and the result is protect your ass rules and stupidity for all.
If I was ever made king for a week, one of the first things I would do is to make tort and law suit reform of some sort a first day priority. That should go hand in hand with reducing the size of law schools and breaking the power of the bar to finance the Dem. party. I hear from my friends in the academy that they almost can’t help a student if they need individual assistance because of the threat of suits from parent of other students that were not offered similar assistance. This passion for suit needs to be exterpated from our society along with its advocates and practioniters.
A great first step.
When we think of empowering a society, somehow this is interpreted as granting more authority to the top of the pyramid. We rarely think of empowering the bottom. But a bottom powered community is much more flexible — potentially more capable and yet more understanding — than one which operates according to a rigid hierarchy of rules.
Back when people knew each other they could spot problems and inquire into them without creating things like arrest records or mental health registry entries. If you were right about a developing situation, you could act far more swiftly and yet if you discovered it was all a misperception you could back off without the whole arrest routine.
A ideal bottom-powered society is indistinguishable from your family and friends looking out for you. It is very different from one in which every intervention comes with lawyers, cops and social workers.
Now there’s a place for lawyers, cops and social workers. But to a large extent it is the impersonality of modern urban society that makes a mockery of “it takes a village”. There are no more villages. Just members of databases. What does it mean to be “your brother’s keeper” when everything is none of your business?
The probable outcome of the James Holmes affair will be a call for more gun control, more tests, more registries, longer waiting periods and in general, more bureaucracy. Yet in the end it might not even work.
Why is it that “empowering society” never actually means empowering society? It always seems to mean “create another agency”.
The ability of persons in authority to make decisions, that is exercise individual judgment, is what defines Management. That is being progressively (pun intended) replaced by Administration by Human Resources. In the military justice is dispensed by the Commanding Officer in public. When a sailor soldier marine or airman (if you consider the AF military, I keed) gets NJP everyone gets to know what happened and why. In civilian agencies and increasingly in private industry people vanish and rumors are all you have to go on.
There should be a sanity standard to having the right to vote. The militia should include everyone with the right to vote at any level, federal state or both. In theory people found incompetent could be denied the franchise, and the right to bear arms. One problem is that has been expressed as a finding of incompetence or moral turpitude. That could enable excluding not only convicted felons, which I would support provided that the legislature has the power to restore the rights of individuals, but also of homosexuals and others found offensive by nature. How can we identify preemptively the dangerous and destructive without casting to wide a net and yielding to much power to those who would do the screening?
On a prior thread people were asking why lunatics are walking around and why it has gotten so hard to get them committed. There is an answer. One day Geraldo Rivera walked into Willowbook. We live with the results.
Maybe it is just the memory playing tricks on me, but I remember a time when a lot things were people’s business. If you saw a weirdo walking around the neighborhood, you politely struck up a conversation to figure out if he was up to no good.
You could take risks that could never be taken today. At age 8 I was running around with kids my mom didn’t know in vacant lots a mile away. We’d improvise spear guns. We had slingshots with ball bearings.
I’d roller skate on streets, climb trees. There’s a picture of me with 112 pound tuna which I caught with a handline off northern Luzon, a shark of the same size too caught by the same method. Somehow there were fewer pedophiles or it seemed like it. I never met one. Nobody worried about it and if you ran into one, you only knew he was a creep. Some kind of sinister yet ultimately futile individual and you’d call up the gang and run him off the neighborhood. Today this would all be endangerment or a hate crime.
Maybe those days never existed. It’s just a fragment of false memory. But I swear it was true. At all events I have the picture of the tuna to prove it. Were we freer then? Or are we freer now with all the social precautions?
In part life was rougher then. You expected danger and not this perfect protection. People got run over, into fights and more than occasionally died. But you accepted that as part of life. Today people commit suicide if someone “bullies” them on Facebook? How the heck do you bully someone on Facebook? How does it work today? What are the parameters of crazy?
I did not know he was accepted to medical school. Or was it the medical science school? I think he was in the science rather than the clinical track.
I think it is not so different now, maybe it is. But to get accepted to clinical medical school there was no formal psychological evaluation. If you were accepted for potential admission on score numbers, you went through interviews. I interviewed with two practicing physicians from the community, a medical student in her third year, an administrator, and a medical scientist professor at the school where I landed. I remember conversations about such things as religion, the choice of cymbal setup for drummers ( Zildjian all the way for me), The origins of blues music, recombinant DNA, Mickey mouse watches (I wore one then), my history and why I dropped out of college for a few years, other stuff, but I think I was grilled pretty well. At the end of that day they just all got together with the stack of folders and placed them in different piles, something like yes-no-maybe.
I am worried when we get to the point where we cannot ask the pointed questions because of legal PC politics. Sometimes you have five minutes, or five seconds, to learn about the person in front of you.
“Three days after the massacre, it still remained unclear whether Holmes’ professors and other students at his 35-student Ph.D. program noticed anything unusual about his behavior.”
A few posts back wretchard told us about the unworldly but highly educated Dr Oh, whose uneducated but worldly wife knew that he was being fooled. Could it be, his behaviour in the company of his professional colleagues at least, was not unusual for that group? Maybe a non neuro-scientist would have thought he was bonkers, just as the owner of the gun range did. Or maybe they did think he was bonkers but had no procedures to deal with that circumstance.
<i<Maybe it is just the memory playing tricks on me, but I remember a time when a lot things were people’s business. If you saw a weirdo walking around the neighborhood, you politely struck up a conversation to figure out if he was up to no good.
You could take risks that could never be taken today. At age 8 I was running around with kids my mom didn’t know in vacant lots a mile away. We’d improvise spear guns. We had slingshots with ball bearings.
It’s definitely your memory, these things obviously took place in another dimension. Funny thing is I was there, too.
Wretchard #16
You are not being played. I was a kid of the 70′s-80s. I did the same things. The exact things you described. I remember at age 10 a bunch of us boys running off a man hanging out at the park with a police badge and pretending authority, watching us. We ran him off, with ridicule and a little salty language. We were in some vacant lots, but roamed a 3 mile radius from home, but our locus was about 3 blocks from everyone’s home. We fell from trees, spent all day in the woods building unsafe structures with our dad’s hammers and nails. Things of that nature. Home during summer was wake up, eat, then gone – a bit at lunch, a bit at supper, then back at dark.
Subsidiary was assumed as I remember neighbors all knew each other and parents backed each other up and watched over each other’s kids. This was in Suburban Minneapolis, MN during the 70′s when you saw the safe house sticker on every other house window and knew those mom’s and your mom knew those moms. Most conflict was handled individually between parents, or kids on kids, some times with fists and black eyes.
And you can forget about building systems to guarantee against the imagination and will of the most intelligent among the target population. The determined mind of a reasonably enabled person will assimilate, analyze, and defeat any combination of systems capable of being applied to a large population, just as surely as Holmes suspiciously-gratuitously told the answering machine he had no criminal record. Besides, that’s the essence of the totalitarian thought-trap – aside from the probably more fundamental resentment-aggression. Our people need to be reminded that there is no ultimate cure for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and perhaps they should return their gaze to something higher and longer-lived than their genitals and CT Scans. There is no “cure” for Holmes or Brevik, just as there is nothing other than the free market. There are multitudes; they contradict themselves, and shall forever.
The origins and support for bubble-wap kids derive almost exclusively from women a) having only one or two designer kids (upon whom they lavish all their parental neuroses, unlike earlier times when they had to spread between 4, 6, or more) and b) having ultimate veto power over all parenting decisions due to the emasculation of husbands in our society, either by the husband’s own timidity or with the legal force of the divorce environment.
Yes, to head off the inevitable comments, there are men who are so deluded they buy into the bubble wrap parenting technique by choice. They are a tiny fraction of the problem.
As a society we have gone from a time when kids rode their bikes without helmets to places far from home and had hours of unstructured play time and owned and used .22 rifles with few incidents and caught fish and cooked them and ate them . . . . to one where kids wear helmets to do just about everything and are never just hanging out with other kids without adult supervision and are in preplanned activities all waking hours and have no access to guns – until they do.
Female dominated parenting unbalanced by male voices and with heavy collusion from the apparatus of state (to include the legal profession) is directly responsible for this environment.
I’ll take the old way. Better by any logical, honest, mature yardstick.
The old folk-ways, wherein kids can scuff their knees in peace, and cook what they catch on fires that they built, still exist. You can find them in unfashionable and unenlightened small places where there are no powdered cable tv personalities or celebrities beaming their saccharine smiles into living rooms; no movie theaters projecting all the nihilistic horrors and vices of the sickest of minds; no universities enlightening one and all into the dark age; and no god-damned civil rights lawyers and community activists.
The safest place I’ve ever lived was on an island where I could drink, fish, and play guitar with the lone cop who made the crossing -with the provisions- from the slightly big[ger] island about once a week…Or so. The biggest downside, besides leaving that place, was being lightheartedly lectured by my neighbors/friends about the need to cut my hair so I didn’t look so much like some shiftless hippie or rasta.
Wretchard:
I think you (and I, and many others) who grew up in those days did so by unknowingly benefitting from the social and cultural equivalent of the Design Margin you often write about. To wit: In those days, fathers worked, and mothers worked at home or raised your baby brother or sister. Older children could be left to their own devices, not only because every other parent in the neighborhood kept an eye out, but also becuase of larger cultural norms, almost universally shared: Churches and Synagogues taught and lived by, Judeo Christian ethics (the Sermon on the Mount and the 10 Commandments). Kids were exposed to these rules and internalized them.
Except for the truly sadistic or mentally ill, adults, even the criminal elements, more or less abided by certain rules, one of which was that children were off limits. The larger culture of movies, TV, radio, etc; also believed in and reinforced these rules (look at any TV show around say, 1965-1975 and compare to today). If parents were not around they could pretty much leave kids to that larger culture. Parents, teachers, the local cop on the beat, all had authority, knew how to use it, and kids pretty much obeyed. The idea that a coach would abuse a kid was unthinkable.
Today we no longer have that Design Margin. Instead of the 10 commandments and the sermon on the mount we have dont be judgemental, if it feels good do it, and every value and norm is equal to every other value and norm. Is anyone really surprised by the result? I do not have a solution, I do not know how to re-create the design margin I had as a child. I do know that buying and carrying a gun and hoping I can out-draw the next armed lunatic is a sign that out society is in very bad shape indeed.
You can never recover the past. But subsidiarity and freedom are eternal quantities which take particular forms in each age. The question shouldn’t be whether the kids of today are like the kids of yesterday. The question should be, “are the people living today free”?
The big danger of the virtual world is that it provides us with illusion of freedom, in exchange we have had to offer up the reality of submission. We have become rather like the Talosians, content with the counterfeit in place of the real thing. We don’t mind being ordered around, groped, prohibited from carrying Swiss Army knives or saying things; prevented from taking anything seriously — as long as we can inhabit the world of Assassin’s Creed or World of Warcraft.
The risk of danger and unhappiness are the price of freedom. I don’t want my children to live as I did. But I do want them to know what the real world is; one in which salvation and damnation really do exist, or it is no world at all.
I think a lot of the problems with society are population related. People all jammed up living in each others laps behave different. Then you add in the fact that a certain percent are nutters and they have more normals to prey upon and things get wild.
World wide there is an entire generation that doesn’t give a sh1t. They know their future isn’t worth having, so they don’t plan on having any future.
I feel like I’m channelling Clockwork Orange. Or watching it be born.
In the past people behaved toward each other in ways that let their children be free inside a castle of spontaneous decency.
My childhood included England and New Zealand. In the first we wandered about overgrown bombsites, creeks, parks and city streets exploring whatever landscapes and objects we encountered. In the second, kids in our trailer park wandered by the river, ran through the bush, hung around a horse racetrack and made friends with two young bootleggers who (my parents told me later) died in a gun battle with revenuers.
We created our own danger by freely exploring our kid world. Around that world, grown ups had built a fortress of decency toward kids. Occasionally some pervert would slip through the fortress walls but we hardly registered that.
In a world of individuals it is possible for society to generate shared principles that celebrate freedom. In today’s process-choked world of the single collective, people lose their individuality until they share nothing but fear.
It’s insane.
re “Institutions, like government, are governed by rules and their statements are parsed by lawyers. There is no room in them for what used to be called common sense, the lost art of looking at the facts without the legal goggles.”
There was a piece in the WSJ describing the problems with Penn St.’s punishment.
The author had this to say about institutions:
“..the culture at Penn State is far from unique. At most of our modern campuses, we’ve replaced leadership with codes, judgment with zero tolerance, and standards of right and wrong with Who Am I To Judge—and then we are shocked, shocked when scandal erupts.”
and
“In truth, the scandal at Penn State is only incidentally about football. Mostly it is about the collapse of authority. There was a day when our colleges held themselves to higher standards than the society around them. Today they look to police, the courts, and outside institutions such as the NCAA to do a job they are clearly unwilling or unable to do.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443570904577545384018802236.html
Where will it all end?
I spent a big chunk of my childhood within about 200m of two “adult book stores” and a topless bar. I never remember anyone from those places bothering us, but I do know we sometimes taunted the customers.
My neighborhood was a mishmash of old-style broken homes (father “died” right after junior was born) and new style (openly admitting divorce or out of wedlock birth). A lot of parents were not looking after either their kids or anyone else’s. The single-mom raised children seemed to do OK. The real criminals were the foster kids.
I got to see the results of the Kennedy Round of GATT and Nixon’s response up close and personal. There were six major industrial plants within a 15 min walk from home. In 1969 all were open. By 1971 only the grain elevator (gotta eat) and can factory (empty cans were too expensive to ship from overseas) were still open. I got to witness the first wave of illegal immigrants up close and personal. It was too late and the labor was too unskilled to save the factories anyway. The kids I grew up with — all at least third generation Americans — didn’t get along well with the illegals’ kids. They played futbol and we were obsessed with football. The older kids joined gangs and took to the streets twice in two years to riot. They destroyed a lively retail district that took decades to rebuild. I suppose their fathers found jobs where they could.
The point to my rambling is that it has been too much. Too much dislocation. Too many dreams crushed. Immigrants’ descendants who were well on their way to integrating into American culture themselves overrun and really just submerged by their “undocumented” cousins. No stability in neighborhoods. Changing social mores that made it OK to deny the importance of fatherhood. Porn being sold openly in rough but decent blue collar neighborhoods. The merchant class abandoning the same neighborhoods because the reward was no longer worth the risk.
All of this happening in the space of five years… it was just too much! The reference points were all gone. No society could have possibly survived that. So we all retreated into our homes — locked the kids up for their safety. Neighborhoods became the hood.
I think a few here are jumping to conclusions. James Holmes may not be insane in the clinical sense, whatever that is.
If you are a parent and have kids, you know there are many, many delusional kids these days. They are spoiled rotten, are given no boundaries and are never told “No”. It goes way beyond ‘bubble wrap” parenting. These kids live a fantasy world where their every whim is the most important thing in the world. Many spoiled rotten kids now have no appreciation for what they have been given or the feelings of others, have a sense of entitlement with enormous expectations that will never be satified and are essentially bored stiff with life, often looking for the next thrill. They are functional nihilists. Whether James Homes is clinically insane or not, he fits the profile of a functional nihilist, spoiled kid to a Tee.
As for those who think the University of Colorado should have tested him for his sanity or some such, do you guys have any sense of have many University students, particularly the brainy kind, have his pre-shooting tendencies? Our school system prefers this kind of kid. They are excused and coddled at every turn, and ultimately given that very sought after admittance to a prestigious University program more often that not over a well rounded kid.
As for the thrill seeking part, Investigators are looking at an account at sex site AdultFriendFinder of “classic jimbo”, a dead ringer for James Holmes with obviously dyed flaming orange hair, from Aurora, Colorado with a birth date just a few days off of Holmes. Classic Jimbo’s profile says he is looking for “women, couples(man and a woman), Groups or couples (2 women) for an erotic chat or email, discreet relationship, 1 on 1 sex or group sex ( 3 or more )”.
His tag line is ” will you visit me in prison”. Under whether he uses drugs- he ‘ prefers not to say”.
His lifestyle and appearance screams bored, nihilist, counterculture Left. This sex site has been scrubbed, as have the University files, and who knows what else. I think there are politically inflammatory things about this kid, James, that the Media and our Nanny State keepers do not want us to find out.
just a quote
“It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
regards
SF
“The power of subsidiarity lies in precisely that individuals on the ground, equipped with experience peculiar to their station, can generally find things a one-size fits all bureaucratic mechanism can never detect.”
That is not the power of “subsidiarity” — a Euro/UN concept which allows the peon at the periphery to take the blame for anything that goes wrong while the Bureaucrat at the center retains the ultimate authority. You are actually referring to the power of “liberty” or “self-reliance”, Wretchard.
The Political Class certainly wants to slip the concept of “subsidiarity” into discussion — a camel’s nose into the tent of those who are in reality seriously opposed to what “subsidiarity” implies. But whatever we call that centralizing tendency, we have to recognize the broader reality: Central Governments are Broke, financially and morally.
The expensive overhead of bureaucratic pyramids, unreadable regulations, and mischief-creating lawyers is all as doomed as the Euro, and for the same reasons. Bankrupt cities will not be able to afford social workers and teachers, let alone police officers. Like it or not, “self-reliance” will return, to individuals and to co-operating communities of neighbors. It remains to be seen whether that greater self-reliance following the now-inevitable financial collapse of Big Intrusive Government takes us to a world closer to Tom Sawyer or to Mad Max.
I like my police procedural tv shows, but I will turn off any that features a super-criminal. But that may just be what we have here with Holmes. He may think that he’s faking insanity, but unfortunately he’s truly insane to think that that matters in the least. Well, let’s see what reality does with such a case, I think the reality machine is too dull to appreciate his brilliance and will steamroll him. I hope he is not too disappointed.
Or maybe it’s more like “Cool Hand Luke”:
“What are you in for, boy?”
“I was cutting the heads off parking meters, boss.”
“Was you stealin’ the money?”
“No, boss.”
“Well, where did you think that was going to get you?”
“Guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly, boss.”
No, he wasn’t.
A large part of the problem goes back to the lawyers and to contradictory legal standards. What night have happened had Paterno or other University officials confronted Sandusky? Charge of homophobic sexual harassment and discrimination? Remember that such activities had been growing in “legal acceptability” since the early 1970s. Might Paterno and Penn State been sued into pauperhood, with Sandusky and lawyerswaltzing away as multi-millionaires? Is it not an ironic clash of values that Sandusky and all asasociates are pilloried for an activity which has, at the same moment, been legitimized in the US military? And might not similar inhibitions have deterred intervening with the “red-headed peckerwood”?
There are several inaccuracies in the article and in the comment thread, but, in the end, they do stumble towards an interesting and worthwhile area of discussion: how much financial support should science grad students receive, how many students should receive it, and what should be the government’s role in that process?
First, the thing that is correct: the shooter did receive a $26,000 stipend and his tuition was waived. He probably also received health benefits and probably subsidized university housing.
However, all of those things (with some variation in specific dollar amounts, but basically in the same ballpark) are simply part of the deal when you are accepted into graduate school to study a “hard” science at any reasonably sized research university in the USA. Every single graduate student who studies neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Denver gets exactly the same package as the shooter did, regardless of whether they received a big government grant or not. (I went to graduate school in a similar field in NYC, and I received a very similar package.)
I realize that comes as a huge surprise to many people, but it’s true. If you are studying for a PhD in neuroscience, cell biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, etc. at a major research university, you are almost certainly being *paid* to do so.
Next:
1) The shooter did not apply for nor did he win a grant from the National Science Foundation. More than a decade ago, the neuroscience department at C.U. received an “Institutional Training Grant” from the National Institutes of Health, and it has been renewed several times. It’s a grant that is made to an institution to help the institution support grad students and postdocs. The shooter never applied for anything from NIH; the school decided to use some of the funds it received from NIH to support the shooter (and other students, too). It is not uncommon for universities to mix and match funds from numerous sources (like medical research foundations, alumni donors, etc.) to provide an identical aid package to its students. The fact that NIH is somehow involved is incidental (though money is fungible, so NIH grants allow schools to have more grad students, whether or not a student is the direct beneficiary of those funds). It’s fair to say that he was supported by funds originating from the NIH, but to suggest that he personally won a prestigious grant from the NIH is a wild exaggeration that many in the media are propagating.
2) The shooter was accepted into the University of Colorado Denver Graduate School. While the program is physically located at least partially on the School of Medicine’s campus, it is not the same thing as the University of Colorado Medical School. They are entirely separate units of the university, although many faculty members hold positions in both schools.
3) Neuroscience is not the same thing as psychiatry. There is no reason to assume that the faculty or students should have been able to determine that a guy that they knew relatively superficially for less than a year was in any way outside the range of acceptable eccentricity. The guy was in a neuroscience PhD program. Every message we ever get from popular culture is that people who pursue PhDs in the sciences are odd ducks, so why would he raise any red flags?
4) The $26,000 *was* the stipend paid to the student, though since he withdrew before the beginning of the next academic year, he either hadn’t collected all of it, or he would have been required to return any amount paid in advance of his departure. The tuition waiver and any other benefits were above and beyond the $26k stipend payment. Counting the tuition waiver, fees, health benefits, and subsidized housing (if any), the full package paid to C.U. neuroscience grad students is probably in the range of $50-75k per year.
So, back to my original point: a mid-tier university is able to pay in the range of $50-75k/year for 35 students to study for neuroscience PhDs. It probably funded a similar cadre of students to the same tune in a dozen or more other departments. As has been recently discussed in several other forums, even life science PhDs are facing uncertain job prospects. Now extend what C.U. is doing across thousands of graduate school departments across the country.
How much financial support should science grad students receive, how many students should receive it, and what should be the government’s role in that process?
Virtue is now gauged by how many ways you are offended.
16. wretchard
As kids (before baseball and girls) we used to take “bike hikes” from Berea, Oh via the “Emerald Necklace” to Lake Erie. It took us quite a while – maybe 4 hours. On one of the many trips we stopped to skip rocks at a ford on Rocky River. A guy pulled up, got out and started walking over to us tying to find out what we were doing. After a minute of pleasantries, he asked the three of us if we wanted to play strip poker.
To say we were shocked is an understatement. We immediately started to make our exits using the most benign “Well we gotta go now”, “yeah, no thanks see ya later.” That was around 1958 and I think and no adult told me, Donnie Conrad, or Jack Thompson what might be going on with that exchange and that we should make a hasty exit. My parents never warned me about child molesters, but my God-given BS detector (at age 10 or so) pegged out on schedule and activated my fight or flight adrenalin. We told our folks when we got home, but there was nothing we could do other than pass the word arond the neighborhood about the incident.
As an aside, it used to take us an afternoon to get up to the lake and return by dinner. About three years ago I took off on a power walk and made it almost to the lake in the same time. I think our bike hikes must have been more of a lollygag than a hike. Going back home…the distances between landmarks seems so small today than it did as a kid.
25. wretchard
You can never recover the past.
My family was lucky enough to find that “safe” neighborhood when I accepted orders in 1985 to Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland. Summers, where the temperatures rarely reached 60 degrees, were wonderful for the kids. No one locked the doors to their homes or their parked cars – there was no theft or vandalism. The kids wandered the NATO base literally untethered and groups of them could take in the movie theatre at will. And to get there there was a base bus system that ran free, and continuously.
I loved it because I had a good job and the kids loved it because of the freedom. The only one who hated it was Momma who got “rock fever” early on. Unfortunately, you know what they say when Momma ain’t happy! Otherwise, it was a paradise.
Girl Scout here: former neighborhood and woods wanderer, and ’60s kid!
We had the best darn woods when I was a kid (1 – 10 years old). Vines, a creek with a log bridge, an earthen dam, an overgrown apple orchard, a mysterious house in the middle of it all, and a magical “cathedral” of tall trees under a blanket of green vines, creating a space in the middle of the forest that only kids and dogs could access, via twisting paths through the underbrush.
We would also set out on our bikes, often solo, and just cruise through the neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods. Our only limit was our stamina. Helmets? heck, never heard of helmets for BICYCLES! Sheesh. Mothers watched out (unseen) through backyard windows as the Little Rascals circulated throughout the neighborhood. And if needed, called each other to let each other know where their little nippers were. (And they never let us know about this informal but very effective watch system: so we could experience the wonderful freedom of childhood.)
In the Girl Scouts, we went primitive camping in the Appalachian Mountains: canvas tents you had to know how to pitch, and dug our own latrine trenches. Swam in the icy mountain stream. Stayed up all night taking watches by the mountain lake: nothing but God, the mist, and the silence for company. We went whitewater rafting on the New River in West Virginia (the “River of Death,” say the Indians). WITHOUT HELMETS! WHAT were we thinking? It was a Blast. We even shot some of the smaller rapids in life jackets alone.
Now? I read that just a year ago, our old Girl Scout camp at the foot of a smallish North Carolina mountain (which we used to climb, without any fancy equipment or purpose-built shoes) just closed — the current crop of Girl Scouts can’t be prised off of their damn electronic gadgets and don’t want to experience being out in the woods, making their own fires, or breaking trail. (This according to the remorseful press release about the closing.) The camp used to be a two-week total immersion experience in living wild. And we Loved it, and cried on the Last Nights that we had to leave.
Then they switched to day camp only, as the poor little dears couldn’t bear to sleep on bunk beds in a cabin or tent, without their TV and cell phones.
Finally they gave up. The modern generation are useless, incapable, apparently, of communing with Nature or each other. A grievous loss to them, poor fools.
Re child molesters: We never saw any, either. We were told “Never take candy from a stranger,” but that was about it. I didn’t live in any big cities, so I never saw a “dicky-waver,” as the NY cops call them. Never saw any homosexuals, either. (They’ve grossly exaggerated their numbers, by the way: they’re 1.5% of the population, not 10%!)
My New York friends sometimes grouse that they don’t know anyone who grew up like “Leave It to Beaver.” “Oh, but you do — I did!” I tell them.
By the way, the house used for the Cleaver family home in “Leave It to Beaver” is now a part of the Wisteria Lane set, in “Desperate Housewives”! Man, that kinda says it all, doesn’t it?
JH has given a pretty good description of the funding situation. In the sciences, it’s rather rare, in my experience, for students to pay tuition out of pocket. There are usually various pots of money to pay tuition, and often, a stipend–essentially, they’re paid to act as skilled labor in someone’s research lab. A department at a good school will have landed a training grant so that they can pay their top students specifically to do research and nothing else. At a less prestigious institution, the training grants may not cover everyone. If you’re not one of those people, you’re subject to the funding vagaries of the researcher you work for. That doesn’t always make ends meet; the departments also have funds to pay TAs, graders, and so forth to keep the lower tier of graduate students from starving, but of course, that means they spend more time away from the research lab. You’re not going to get rich being a graduate student, but if the shooter lived frugally (and a good science graduate school will work pretty hard to discourage you from having much of a life outside of your research lab) and came in with some savings, he could certainly have had several thousand $ to throw around, especially if he thought it was the last thing he would do.
The training grants aren’t handed out on autopilot, either; he’d have had to interview in person to get into graduate school, and depending on the nature of the grant, there might have been an additional level of interviewing for that as well. If he’d been giving off the gibbering crazy vibe that spooked the gun range owner, that probably would have rung some alarm bells. Yes, science graduate students do tend to be a few sigma off normal social behaviors, but a fair bit of cooperation is required to maintain the social norms of the lab (don’t steal other people’s buffers, clean up after yourself, and whatnot), and no researcher wants to be saddled with the student so creepy it freaks out the rest of the lab and disrupts their operations.
For whatever it’s worth, I suspect the decision to drop out of graduate school may have been as much a catalyst as a sign of derangement. I dropped out of an institution very similar to JH’s description after several years–I was post-quals, so I got an MS as a consolation prize–and the decision and aftermath were psychologically stressful, to say the least. A person skillful enough to be accepted into a good graduate program is going to be very strongly socially conditioned to assume that completing graduate school and getting a Ph.D. *is* the only way forward. If you’re good in science as an undergraduate and don’t already have a clear, strong vision of an alternate path, everyone, including you, pretty much assumes that you’ll go to a good graduate school, do a postdoc in a strong lab, and go on to industry or academia and do research for the rest of your life. Doing anything else is tacitly assumed to be a mark of failure and/or inferiority.
If you get to graduate school, where you’ve always thought you wanted to be and planned on being, and wake up one morning and realize that actually you can’t bear to be here, certainly can’t face years and years of this–well. It’s rather disorienting when your careful plan for the rest of your life goes up in a white mental flash. (The revelation in my case was rather more drawn-out, but never we mind that now.) And when you make the decision to leave graduate school and go do something else, it’s as if you stepped off a train in a foreign country at a stop you hadn’t planned on. And you don’t speak the language. Or recognize the language. Or know what country it is. In short, a perfect formula for anomie, and the unleashing of “The Imp of the Perverse”.
I wonder if this Holmes character was just your garden-variety psychopath. I heard that he was on ADHD medication as a child, which is how they treat a lot of kids that show psychopathic tendencies. Was Holmes like the kid in this article from the NYT a few months back? It got a lot of attention. I know it definitely creeped me out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?pagewanted=all
Back in the day, the parents of a child like the one in the article would probably have quietly wrapped him up in a gunny sack and tossed him in the river. In those more barbaric times, when social cohesion was vital to human survival, a kid like the one in the article would have been a threat to the entire community. But now? What do you actually DO with a kid like this? There has been speculation that one of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris, was a straight-up psychopath as well and his parents knew he had major problems. But what could they do, besides the obvious, which was to make sure he wasn’t stockpiling weapons in the family basement?
Any pharmacologists out there who can enlightn us on the side-effects and contra-indications of some of the drugs that seem to be a huge part of modern “treatments” of ADHD, hyper-activity etc?
Too much in life is just a click away. It’s too easy to live alone. A functioning tight knit community identifies the psycho’s and keeps watch.
“Institutions are necessary…” –Wrechard
Well, maybe and maybe not.
It depends on how you define an “institution.” I will leave the obvious question of whether Al Qaeda is an institution and whether it is “necessary” for another discussion.
What concerns me is the number of people “gaming” the institution to their advantage. I see it daily in the welfare system and in the political system.
In the current case I am speaking of the criminal justice system. This Holmes guy seems to have done a great job at gaming several “institutions” on different levels.
He got paid to go to grad school. He diverted his institutional “education money” for guns and explosives (his booby-trapped apartment) and he use a theatrical ruse in a theater to commit mass murder.
Now, it appears he most likely be judged “insane” and thus will probably be confined to the soft walls of a mental institution.
Could it be that liberal institutions have permitted him to get away with such outrageously grotesque acts?
Shouldn’t there be a higher penalty for such acts. For example shouldn’t there be a death penalty for killing a certain number of innocent people. In fact, shouldn’t that penalty have already been put in place to deter the vary act that Holmes perpetrated?
My understanding is Colorado has a very sketchy past with the death penalty. Only one person since 1977 has been executed. Thus, it doesn’t take a PhD to know that you can get away with murder under a liberal institution using the right ruse.
My observation is that institutions CAN become out-dated and corrupt. At what point does an out-dated and corrupt institution become useless or harmful?
Holmes said he want sex from jail. Anyone what to place odds that this is exactly what will happen.
Which returns us to the “institution” and whether the institution is there just to appease certain groups and pay wages to people who administrate said institution.
“John Kelly suggested that massacres can be prevented if only gun-buyers were tested for insanity. “News reports have said that James Holmes bought his arsenal legally. But did he really? The mentally ill aren’t supposed to own guns, and is there anyone who thinks this guy wasn’t wrong in the head?”
Using today’s Progressive, Liberal Demoncrat test No One could own a gun! You’re Crazy to want to!!!
Our Modern Education system produced the lost soul that did this deed and more than likely “John Holmes” did this to be famous more than any other reason… John Holmes does know Right from Wrong and Good from Bad, un-doughtily John Holmes knows he did a “Bad” thing, Evil in the Christian sense is the last thing John Holmes think he is or did and it probably didn’t and doesn’t even become a conscious thought until someone else brings it to his attention! Our education system over many years influenced, produced, aided in this horrible event in many, many different ways…
I have an observation here, which may or may not be valid or clearly thought out.
So the people at the Gun Range behaved like Israeli airport security – based on behavior and responses – they denied service. They didn’t worry about sensitivity or discrimination.
But everyone else who now wants to do something, wants to in effect give us the full TSA treatment to all gun owners?
Rush has a word for some of the stupid driver on our world: chickafication. The leftist womans movement to politicize sex has done a LOT of harm to our culture and we are weaker, poorer for it. Bubble wrap, helicopter parents have destroyed the toughening process that leads to well functioning adults.
A lot of what caused our industrial problems that lead to 2 income families is the reduced production of oil/energy in the US and the subsequent transfer of wealth/industrial base etc. offshore. That started +/- 1970.
Wretchard, your didn’t live in that alternative universe alone. I was there also but the S.E. Texas version. It was a MUCH better world to rear children and produce citezans than we have today. We are on an unsustainable path and either the penduleum swings back very agressavely to the conservative side this election or it is truely over and we become France without better food or topless beaches.
Docbill @ 48: “A lot of what caused our industrial problems that lead to 2 income families is the reduced production of oil/energy in the US and the subsequent transfer of wealth/industrial base etc. offshore. That started +/- 1970.”
Not quite. Japan has no oil, and yet still built a very strong industrial base. Germany has next to no oil, and exports automobiles and aircraft to the world. China imports lots of oil, and manufactures most of what fills Walmart.
What actually started in the 1970s in the US was the federal Environmental Protection Agency, along with a tidal wave of other regulations which drove industry, jobs, & tax revenues offshore. In contrast, Germany & Japan managed the task of introducing somewhat more sensible regulations which improved the environment without throttling the Golden Goose.
The good news is that what mankind has done, mankind can reverse. But first, the Political Class Best & Brightest who caused the offshoring have to go. One optimistic scenario is that national bankruptcy will concentrate the minds of the rest of us wonderfully. We shall see.
E2- comment #42
A very interesting essay in the Times. I guess my question would be this-are those little sociopaths doing what they do, simply because they never had any real, immediate consequences? And I am not talking about “go to your room” stuff- In a rational world, kids who cut the tail off the family cat to “see how the cat would react”, should have severe and physically painful repercussions. We may be fostering monsters by our reluctance to punish evil behavior.
“I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested….”
I don’t know if this is an urban legend (i.e., if there’s any confirmation); but I heard it reported that as soon as she had heard about the massacre, Holmes’s mother was reputed to have said that she suspected very strongly (or “knew”) that it was her son who had committed it.
So what’s a mother to do…..
32. Kinuachdrach
I suspect that with respect to “subsidiarity” that W was incorporating the Catholic social doctrine meaning of that term.
In Catholic social doctrine subsidiarity means placing political decision making and public resource allocation at the lowest possible civic level. It’s exactly the opposite of political centralization.
Subsidiarity is one of the reasons that authoritarians of every stripe hate the Catholic Church and do everything possible within their means to fracture it and discredit its influence.
It’s too bad that most of the contemporary American Catholic hierarchy is comprised of wimps and charlatans who would rather get along with the string pullers than do the right thing. Nothing is going to change until the culture changes and the Catholic Church is the institution best positioned to make that happen, some day.
I wanted to point out that James Holmes looks like Ben Afleck. I believe it’s still safe to point that out. I think (?)
This “unfriend” function is fascinating to me. Being someone who is naturally suspicious of mobs, in my daily life I rely on my faculties of disassociation just as heavily as I do on my associating abilities. I believe that our constitutional right to free association has a corelary. It is the freedom to dis‘sociate.
This corelary, backed up by the 2nd amendment, scares the Left no end.
Anyone who has resigned a voluntary committee, or privately boycotted a merchant, or abstained from energy-zapping social circles, or rejected a gift from unwanted “greeks,” understands how important this freedom is to one’s individual autonomy.
To have not engaged in disassociation at some time in one’s professional or avocational affairs, is to exhibit a disturbing lack of discretion and, worse, an impotence over private affairs a kin to that displayed by a slave. With its attacks on personal discretion, and more bluntly, on discrimination of any kind, the Left reveals a slave-masters’ disdain for free Americans’ discretionary faculties.
Citizens’ ability to choose the company they keep poses big problems for today’s social aggregators. Having the ablity to “unfriend” these social aggregates could prove fatal to the aggregators’ plans- which may be the reason why progressive campuses like CU and Penn State are so unselective in granting their awards.
Kin:” What actually started in the 1970s in the US was the federal Environmental Protection Agency, along with a tidal wave of other regulations which drove industry, jobs, & tax revenues offshore. ”
Absolutely.
The derangement of these little sociopaths, as raven calls it, starts with permissive parenting where the child grows up with no moral boundaries or limits to develop a sense of consequences and reality. Then this pathology is further developed and encouraged by our school systems which deride traditional Judeo-Christian morals and promote alternative amoral lifestyles and life choices. Virtues, like personal responsibility and a purposeful life dedicated to pursuits that actually help people other than oneself, are discouraged, and replaced with an encouragement of a more self centered pursuit of personal gratification and exploration of one’s fantasies, no matter how evil. It’s no wonder that a vague sense of hip nihilism is so pervasive among our school kids today. James Holmes is only an exception in the matter of degree that he took his nihilism and to the extent that he actually killed people, rather than just hurt them callously in more fashionably acceptable ways.
We are looking at a widespread breakdown of society. The birth of ‘Clockwork Orange’;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVw7eJ0vGfM&feature=related
Nobody here will either like nor understand that video. Look at the hit counter. 120 MILLION people have found a message there. It reached #4 on the billboard top 100. If our children and grandchildren give up on the future, there will be no future.
to return to one of your original issues in this piece… when Holmes filled out the “white form” for his Federal Background Check (NICS) to purchase those firearms, there was a set of tick boxes to indicate his race. He HAD to tick the box next the word “White”. Other options are “African”, “Hispanic” American Indian”, and more. I’ve asked about this when submitting such forms myself, and am told that one of the boxes MUST be ticked, and to tick one obviously not correct (a negro ticking the “white” box, for example) will cause the form to be rejected by the FFL processing it. (I am waiting to watch what happens when a white South African ticks the “African” box rather than the “white”… either would be correct).
So, if the FedGov does not shy away from m aking such “distinctions”, why do the politically correct, “sensitive” press shy away from the same thing?
The stupid “discrimination” paranoia runs far too deeply to be healthy any more. God has seen fit to make people different. Sure, Marx’s set of proceedures to inflict his system upon the world centres round making distinctions within a people, then pitting those in divergent groups against each other until all cohesion and sense of unity is gone. Chaos ensues, then the “solution” arises and takeover is simple. On the other hand, we consider it unacceptable to make distinctions on any basis whatever, fearing to “offend” someone. Well, why should it be “offensive” to point out that one person is five foot naught in height, the next is six foot sixteen? Both are “outside the norm” for height. Both have advantages, disadvantages arising from their height, neither is “better” nor “worse”, more or less valuable. Even so, some have dark skin, some more redish, or yellowish, some pink or tan or… purple? So what? I’ve known negro people being more “white” than many of my current “white” friends. And some white, raised in strange places, be culturally blacker than anyone from the ghettoes. Pardon me, “ghetto” is possibly offensive to some….. perhaps some uppity individuals who grew up in one, have managed to escape, and regret their heritage. We should all be more like the Irish, of all races of people the most adept at laughing at themselves over a pint of Best…… so what if I’m a “mik”or my surname begins with an O’? Have a seat, a pipe, and let us lift up our glasses and drink a health…….
@51 Barry M.
Barry, what she actually said to the caller from the “news” station is that “you have the right person”. She was referring to herself as Holmes’ mother. As you may suspect this was misreported to make it sound as if she was aware he would try something like this.
Fox News is reporting:
“AURORA, Colo. – James Holmes, the accused gunman in last Friday’s midnight movie massacre in Colorado, mailed a notebook “full of details about how he was going to kill people” to a University of Colorado psychiatrist before the attack, but the parcel sat unopened in a mailroom for as long as a week before its discovery Monday, a law enforcement source told FoxNews.com.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/25/exclusive-movie-massacre-suspect-laid-out-plans-in-package-mailed-to/#ixzz21euLM9AE
I’m thinking that Sgt. Mom’s 48 hour rule need to be extended, a lot. I’m starting to think maybe 5 days would be the minimum.
Here is a short video on filling out a federal firearms purchase form:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgsRspRJoII
Also be advised the the gun store can not fill that form out for you. On the check box questions you need to go slow and read them carefully. If you have a question you can ask about it. Any mistake on the form requires a do over no erasing, white out, or mark overs are accepted by the ATF. Some of the records for filling out the form for first time buyers has been four forms started before it was finally good.
Another unexplained tidbit of the Colorado shooter’s background is the grad school application process requires anywhere from three to five references. At least they used to. Most professional registrations require a minimum of five references. A handful of somebodies vouched for this person at the grad level.
49. Kinuachdrach
Docbill @ 48: “A lot of what caused our industrial problems that lead to 2 income families is the reduced production of oil/energy in the US and the subsequent transfer of wealth/industrial base etc. offshore. That started +/- 1970.”
Not quite. Japan has no oil, and yet still built a very strong industrial base. Germany has next to no oil, and exports automobiles and aircraft to the world. China imports lots of oil, and manufactures most of what fills Walmart.
……………
All true.
Countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia are totally oil dependent. Both need to diversify their economies. Countries like Germany China and Japan are export driven and energy dependent. They need to get more domestic sources for energy.
Estimates are that as of today–increased oil & natural gas production and related industries over the last couple years have already added 1% to annual GNP. In the next couple years….. “Citigroup predicts the U.S. will be not just self-sufficient but also a huge exporter of oil and gas by 2020. The bank projects that the surge in domestic oil and gas supply will add 2% to 3% in real GDP, create 2.7 million to 3.6 million new jobs and cut the current account deficit by 2.4% of GDP.”
http://www.northcentralpa.com/feeditem/2012-07-12_shale-gas-%E2%80%9Cboosting-us-economy%E2%80%9D-leading-american-%E2%80%9Cenergy-sufficiency%E2%80%9D-0
Now subtract 2%-3% from US GDP going back decades and you get the impact of energy dependence.
Sgt. Mom’s 48 hour rule
Whazzat?
Charles @ 61: “Now subtract 2%-3% from US GDP going back decades and you get the impact of energy dependence.”
Let’s be careful not to become victims of poor accounting techniques. If that theory of ‘energy dependence’ were correct, then Nigeria would have to be the one of the best places in the world to live, and Japan would consist of poverty-stricken peasant farmers working their rice paddies by hand.
To put the issue differently, why is the standard of living so much higher in Germany (almost entirely dependent on energy imports) than in Russia (the only major industrial economy in the world which is also an energy exporter)?
Oil and gas are inputs — just like iron ore and tuna fish. The real economic issue is how much value does a society add to the inputs it uses. Japan is able to convert low value iron ore into high value speciality steels, and low value sand into high value computer chips. Take away the energy input, and Japan could do neither. So how do we assign value to the energy input — at its acquisition cost (low) or at the impact if it were withdrawn (very high)?
Of course it would always be preferable for a country to extract the inputs it needs from within its own borders. The US’s problem is that the huge overhead of regulatory barriers prevents adding enough value within the borders of the US, regardless of where the inputs come from.
Well, you have to admit that the way they awarded firearms carry permits in the bad old days gave police plenty of opportunity for the exercise of individual judgment on the basis of local knowledge. That didn’t work out so well either. The “man in the loop” abused his discretion so routinely that “may issue” became “shall issue” just about everywhere but Chicago.
I don’t want to hear anything about that murdering POS that doesn’t include the phrase: ‘was executed last night’. No subtleties, no nuance. ‘Was shanked in his prison cell by party or parties unknown’ would be an acceptable substitute. I find it unfortunate and demonstrative of a distinct lack of imagination that local LEO’s couldn’t come up with some reason to make this a non-issue at the point of apprehension.
63. Kinuachdrach
Charles @ 61: “Now subtract 2%-3% from US GDP going back decades and you get the impact of energy dependence.”
…………
Let’s be careful not to become victims of poor accounting techniques.
First of all the accountants at Citibank are going to be much more authoritative about matters of accounting than either you or I. If they say oil will add 2-3% GDP to the USA economy over the next 10 years then –its much more likely to be true than if some shlub on the street said it–or even you or I for that matter. Nor is it bad logic to extrapolate those numbers back in time.
On Russia and Nigeria … probably Russia’s greatest ex patriot Sergey Brinn had the most exacting remark. In 2002 Sergey Brin said: ‘Russia is Nigeria with snow’.
Why? They both produce oil and they both require large sums of cash in briefcases in order for any transaction to take place. Bribery and corruption are rampant. Finally, profits from oil flow only to a small number of people. Countries like Germany and Japan do not have high levels of corruption. High levels of corruption typically correlate with low levels of economic activity. Corruption works as a high (but unseen) tax on economic activity. Further, high levels of corruption place high levels of uncertainty on businesses. For businesses to flourish they have to have from the government a level of predictability that corruption doesn’t avail them. Russia’s corruption made Matt’s argument about the virtue of authoritarianism ring hollow. (Multiparty systems bring a level of discipline to the ruling elites that single party systems don’t enjoy. And yes I understand on paper that Russia is a multiparty system–for now.)
……………….
Russia (the only major industrial economy in the world which is also an energy exporter)?
Most people consider Russia to be a resource country. Russia has an industrial economy but no world class companies. Russia is not known for making stuff. That’s why you hear me say over and over again. Russia has to diversify its economy; find ways to encourage entrepreneurs-. The best governors are like top farmers who grow their tax base rather than top predators who prey on anything that moves.
If Japan and Germany produced their own energy — it would add 2-3% to their GNP. If Russia produced better finished goods for their domestic market and for export — they would add 2-3% to their GDP. And that would in turn increase their tax base.
……….
Oil and gas are inputs — just like iron ore and tuna fish.
Disagree with this. The cost of energy affects both the top line of consumers and the bottom line of producers. That is, if you lower the cost of energy–that works like a tax cut for tax payers/consumers. At the same time lower energy prices make workers more productive. Productivity translates directly into the wealth of a country. The more productive a worker is–the more valuable is the worker and the more the worker is paid. Millions of wealthier workers make for a more wealthy the country. Inversely the higher the cost of energy, the lower is the productivity of the worker and the poorer is he country.
That’s why Bill Gates has said repeatedly in the last couple years that his greatest wish is that a non polluting source of energy be found that’s +-1/4 the cost of the cheapest energy which is produced by coal.
If you collapse the cost of energy, you increase the wealth of the whole world.
(Understand that the demand for oil & gas is extremely elastic.ie if you increase the wealth of the world–the demand for oil & gas goes up.)
#65 jsallison
I find it unfortunate and demonstrative of a distinct lack of imagination that local LEO’s couldn’t come up with some reason to make this a non-issue at the point of apprehension.
Speaking from the point of view of the LEO’s, I can promise you that there is no lack of imagination at such times. In my career, I came extremely close to killing a child molester. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that my partner would either have had to rat me out, or lie, unprepared, which means he would have been taken down too. As it happened, it turned out that he was thinking the same thing.
But we have to overcome that urge at extreme times [and that WAS one of those extreme times in Aurora], when the higher portions of our mind are at war with basic limbic urges. And believe it or not, in those parts of the country where the rule of law does hold, we do remember our Oaths; to uphold the law and the Constitution.
Most cops [and all the good ones] are simultaneously the most cynical and the most idealistic b******s you will ever meet. Cynical, because we see the absolute worst of human behavior as the norm. Idealistic, because they believe, really believe that they are good guys. “Gray Tribe”. SHEEPDOGS!
You really don’t want the cops deciding at that point who lives and dies. Because not all situations are as clear cut. Not everybody apprehended is guilty, something to remember.
And as satisfying as shooting him down would have been, at least in the short term, there are other reasons to take him alive. Alive, before he lawyers up, he might say something that will tell us more about the attack. Most especially if there are others involved. As I suspect that there are.
LEO’s imaginations have to go beyond the moment.
Subotai Bahadur
47. Justin Case
I have an observation here, which may or may not be valid or clearly thought out.
So the people at the Gun Range behaved like Israeli airport security – based on behavior and responses – they denied service. They didn’t worry about sensitivity or discrimination.
Justin, folk at gun ranges are damn serious people. They know that in the wrong hands, and by that I mean some boozed up jackleg or someone too embarrassed by the strict rules that they try to act cool or simply the fool, someone may die. By mistake. Gun people are very serious about this stuff.
Here are the four basic rules and everyone (except those sent packin’, very quickly) follows them religiously because they know how serious target shooting as a sport, really is:
1. Every firearm is loaded (even if it’s not…because it is) – that iron-clad rule develops a habit pattern and a distinct sense of seriousness about a very serious subject.
2. Never point you firearm at anything you don’t intend to DESTROY.
3. Your finger should never be on the trigger unless your sight is on the target.
4. Always know what is in front of your target, what is behind your target, and that your target is where you truly want to point and fire your weapon.
When I was in a squadron that flew propeller aircraft, it was sacrosanct that you would never, never, never, never walk through a propeller arc even if the aircraft was shut down. Some didn’t learn that lesson and when immersed in the high tempo scenario of flight deck ops, lapsed. Not one of them made it through the prop arc of a turning propeller – and the sight was not pretty.
Neither is it pretty when some knuckle head at the range discharges his weapon – by mistake – if he has forgotten any of the four rules above. It would be your ticket home.
Unfortunately, people today don’t have that sense of seriousness about anything that they might do today: driving, swimming, snorkeling, riding a motorcycle, etc., and it surprises the Hell out of them when they end up dead.
52. Peter Boston
Nothing is going to change until the culture changes and the Catholic Church is the institution best positioned to make that happen, some day.
Based on their track record, I have no idea in the world what leads you to that conclusion.
I’m not Catholic bashing. I’m a Southern Baptist and I don’t see any of our faiths even remotely recognizing that the secular world is just waiting to gut us and leave us in a pile of our own goo.
The Religious community is 20 years behind the fight and that comes from 20 years of kow-towing to the PC world that gives us a bloody nose every single chance it possibly can. The faith based community is where America was on 911. America responded for about a year and then started patronizing our enemy – THE EVEMY. We are still asleep and violating our beliefs and the memory of our forebears to stay so.
James Dobson said it best about three years ago when his own organization forced him off the board of a movement he started 40 some odd years ago. He said, “It is clear, we lost the culture war.” Know why? Our troops deserted to the dark side; or like my Dad said before he died a la Ronald Reagan, “The Republican party left me.”
I’m ready to turn “the other cheek” INTO the hand that slapped me. America has left me – and most the guys that fought in the sandbox – especially the wounded warriors. But true Catholics and Baptists still believe in God and the Constitution, however most of our brothers and sisters don’t unless tough times leave them staining their drawers.
Heck, Pete, we kill about 1.3 million of our babies in the womb every year and what kills me about the femminists is they are completely happy that more than 50% are their “sisters in arms.” We lose 12 over the weekend and the libs start complaining what a bloodbath it would be if their were any “good guy” gunners in the theatre willing to take the heat off the sheep and direct the fire at the sheepdog. But the likes of Dianne Fiendstein says that to resist would result in a free-fire zone. I don’t know if she remembers the Holocaust but that was the quintessential bloodbath and just like in Aurora, perhaps she doesn’t remember the meaning of “Never Again.”
These libs are Hell bent on committing suicide and they want us to tag along for their guilt ridden ride.
Count me out.
/rant off
61. Charles
“Citigroup predicts the U.S. will be not just self-sufficient but also a huge exporter of oil and gas by 2020. The bank projects that the surge in domestic oil and gas supply will add 2% to 3% in real GDP, create 2.7 million to 3.6 million new jobs and cut the current account deficit by 2.4% of GDP.”
I’ve often thought cynically that the “environmental” efforts of the Democrats would only be employed until they got total control of the political process. By not letting those strengths be used by the country, it was just easier to do what we see happening today: an effort to collapse the economy and take over using emergency powers. Once that step was accomplished, the Democrats (the “new” ones) would simply ignore the environmental side of their constituents and plunder the newfound wealth for their totalitarian selves.
Well, it’s still just a theory….a work in process.
Raven@50
I too have wondered if these “psycho” kids are the way they are because of bad parenting. But then, maybe some kids just don’t respond to punishment, physical or otherwise. Reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where he tells the shrink that he used to choose the more painful, heavy wrench over the belt when his dad gave him a beating because, “F–k him.”
My solution would not be corporal punishment for bad behavior, but hard, manual labor. Make them too tired to act up. And hey, maybe that’s why kids were so much better behaved back in the day. My grandfather used to be up before dawn every day to milk cows before school, then came home to more chores and homework before getting up and doing it all over the next day. Now little Timmy comes home at the end of a cushy day (with little or no recess) at school and plops down to play video games all afternoon. No wonder he’s going bonkers all day in the classroom and during bedtime at home. Mom and Dad are too overprotective to let the little guy go outside and climb some trees, so he gets diagnosed as having ADHD and medicated into a stupor. And we wonder where the James Holmeses of the world come from?
SF @31, your quote brings to mind the movie To Sir with Love. One of the first things Sir does is get the kids to call him Sir and call each other Miss and Mr. There’s a great scene in which one of the newly-respectful kids comes to get Sir in the teacher’s lounge and one of the other teachers is absolutely shocked… by the kid’s polite language.
My dad took me to see that movie when I was about 13. He was pretty good at making sure school didn’t interfere with our education (as the saying goes).