Dylann Roof

The murderer appears to be all smiles. He is on TV. You drop out of school, kill a few people, and you'll be on TV,  especially in summertime when there are less exciting news.  My guess is that we'll have another similar murder in the next few weeks.
What kind of society is this?

***

I look in horror at people ready to "forgive". We do not have the right to forgive the harm done to somebody else, only the harm done to ourselves. Right now, only the dead could forgive, and they are not there to do it. The murderer does not even asks for forgiveness. He is basking in the new glory that the media are eager to offer him. Something new to boost the audience index!
What kind of society is this?

***

Yes we have a gun control problem. 

We also have a big education problem. In this generation,  teachers are so afraid of being sued that they have become totally inefficient. From educationworld.com: "The majority of school principals have been threatened with lawsuits."(in an article by Gary Hopkins, 2004). The same paper says that defensive teaching is to teach in such a way that you avoid legal challenges. There is no free speech for the prof.  Maybe it is the reason why the basics of living together are ignored.

What kind of society is this?

***

the majority of school principals have been threatened with lawsuits -- lawsuits that have changed the atmosphere in their schools. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin371.shtml#sthash.3SMmJ2Yx.dpuf

82 percent of teachers and 77 percent of principals say the current legal climate has changed the way they work. More than 60 percent of principals surveyed said they had been threatened with a legal challenge. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin371.shtml#sthash.3SMmJ2Yx.dpuf

82 percent of teachers and 77 percent of principals say the current legal climate has changed the way they work. More than 60 percent of principals surveyed said they had been threatened with a legal challenge. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin371.shtml#sthash.3SMmJ2Yx.dpuf

82 percent of teachers and 77 percent of principals say the current legal climate has changed the way they work. More than 60 percent of principals surveyed said they had been threatened with a legal challenge. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin371.shtml#sthash.3SMmJ2Yx.dpuf

82 percent of teachers and 77 percent of principals say the current legal climate has changed the way they work. More than 60 percent of principals surveyed said they had been threatened with a legal challenge. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin371.shtml#sthash.iZVxgaf4.dpuf

I listen to all the comments, the correct ones and the sensitive ones and I just realize that there is one word always missing. Nobody ever uses the word gratitude. As if we were tolerant, but never grateful for what black people have done for this nation. 

What kind of society is this?

 

Hypocrisy is tiresome

 Image from: http://www.thedogrescuers.com/statistics--facts.html

If nobody was using any contraceptive method, all women, Christian or not,  would have 14 children. So all these scenes and posturing against contraception, that is pure political garbage.
Thanks to the same guys, we already have one  million abused and neglected children in this country every year that God made: to pressure people who do not want children to have kids (you will love them when they are born) is not working. Worse: it is criminal. Some people are not meant to have children (like some people are not meant to have dogs and cats). We may not like it, but it is a fact. It is also their right. 

The loss of self-preservation

One thing I knew for sure: my young 30ish-years-old neighbor had a self-esteem problem. I kept buying him a small gift every month (like a nice T-shirt or a pair of black socks): I thought it would help. In time. 

About a month ago, my  neighbor came once more to borrow some gas (I usually let him get the gallon I keep for mowing). He looked high and had pin-head pupils, which made me mad, so I thought it was time for me to stop pretending I did not know he was on drugs. I said:
"It seems to me you are very close to the bottom. You ruined your parents, you lost your job, you lost your girlfriend, you lost the custody of your kids, you lost most of your teeth, I bet you don't have a sex life anymore. How low can you go? The bottom is next. Maybe you should think about rehab."
He was shocked that I was so direct, then he mumbled: "Maybe you are right." and he was gone.
As of last week, he is in jail for attempting to build a meth lab. There is at least ten years of prison for that in Georgia, and a 200,000 dollars fine.
I never thought he was a seller: I thought he was too disorganized, too hazy for it. I am certainly happy the Narcs caught him: I would not want to blow up because the guy next door is not a chemist: I would not trust him to boil water. In a less selfish way, the idea that he would push other young people like him into that free fall where self-preservation does not matter is repulsive. So, it is good thing he got caught.
I am also very sorry.  Free fall is a terrible thing to watch. And how on earth do you stop it?

Lent in the Great South

Two ladies came to my door to invite me to celebrate Jesus' death. I was shocked and I told them it was not for me. I would celebrate a resurrection, but there is no way I'll celebrate anybody's death.
One lady looked at me sternly and said: "The Bible says Jesus died for our sins."
I answered: "You want to celebrate that?"
YES THEY DO.
You would think that they are a little be ashamed that somebody died for them, or worried that they may not be worth it, or try to be better persons to avoid Christ some suffering. But no, mainstream theology, specially in the South, says that the sacrifice of Christ is sufficient, you do not need to do anything, just accept it, and that is what they do. "Thank you Lord, I repent and I am washed of all sins ..."
Early theologians did not talk to the sophisticated narcissistic crowds we deal with today.
As a result, we got in Georgia a staggering number of people "in the system, " meaning in jail or in prison, or on parole. It is hard to find neighbors who never got to jail around here.

And in the USA, the best country in the world, there is close to one million kids abused or neglected every year.
A.D. of course.

New Cons, New Cheats, New Scams

It is always the same dishes, but they come in new flavors:
On the food market:
Have you noticed that whatever you buy, the serving size is about 170 calories? That is because the food industry knows that you are going to check the number of calories, right? You never check the serving size. I had a bag of potato chips the other day, with a serving size of three chips. So what they do is divide the total amount of calories in any food package by 170 and they get a serving size.
Conclusion: there is no use checking the number of calories, check the number of servings!
On my tele:
There is a new trend of trying stuff for free or at a low price. That is very nice. What bothers me is that if you can try it with good conditions, they never tell you the real price. Why, do you think, are they doing that?
Using the government's authority: there is a lot of healthcare companies that try to make you believe that they are somewhat "official"; they use some declaration of the President and then they send you letters stamped "public" or "official". I guess there is nothing illegal with that. The last offer I got was to be returned to some "Administrative Processing Center" at a POBox in Atlanta. I turned the letter around and around, there was no way to know who these guys are.
Telephone scams :
Phone scams are as old as phone companies. What is new is that some companies who call do not tell you their name. "I am John from the credit company" is typical. They do not say "Your credit company", that would be illegal, they think that you will not notice, or that you do not know that "the credit company" does not mean anything.
The other day, a well known national bank called me. The guy on the phone was also named John, he said. He was calling from India: the probability that his name is really John is no greater than the chance that I would be called Rabindranath. I do not mind being called from India, I just do not like being lied to: should I trust a bank whose first call starts with a white lie?
The worst new scams of course are directed at people who look for work. They are all going to get rich with the internet. I would say that this is a specially disgusting kind of scam, but I know that the blind and the handicapped are the first to be robbed and that the desperately ill are promised miraculous cures every day, so robbing the poor comes next.
What frightens me is that people who use these tricks lack elementary morality. They do not see that there are crimes against the law but also crimes within the law. Some crimes are crimes against the heart and should not be called "a part of business" when it is the wrong thing to do.

Small cons downtown: how to steal from the poor

There are small Ponzis and small cons that seldom make it in the justice system: in Savannah where I live, for instance, small crimes against poor people are committed every day. There is this nice couple trying to sell some exotic fruit juice to a small restaurant owner: it cures cancer, they tell him. I raise my head over my coffee to explain that they have no right to say that. They are defensive: it is on the list of qualities that the juice company manager has recommended to them. They show me the list in good faith: of course it has no name or address on it. I explain to them that they can be sued, not the manager, because they cannot prove the paper came from him. The fruit in question not only cures cancer, but every disease you can think of such as the flu or broken bones.

A more successful con around here is a pyramid: you pay 500 dollars for a lecture (usually about how to get rich), then you find three people who will pay you 500 dollars for the lecture, and your benefit is a thousand bucks. It has to work, right? If it does not work, it is your fault. The victims do not even know that it is an illegal scheme, so they do not complain.

The worst financial crime in Savannah is against black women, although an old white lonely woman is a likely victim too. Why black women? I guess there is in some families a cultural bias, a make-believe that the man has more authority, more competence than the woman. Any woman who believes it is prone to become a victim. Here is how the con works. Imagine a situation, very common around here, where the woman is working and the man is mainly going out and spending money, if he makes any. When comes the time to buy a house, the man says: "Let me take care of it. I know how to deal with this". The sale happens with the name of the man on the deed, no trace of the name of the woman. Later, divorce or separation occurs, and the woman discovers that she has no right to the house. Cases like this are difficult to prove. I have seen four cases without making any research, so it has to be common.

Corruption everywhere

OK, after every election, there is a cleaning up factor plus of course rumors that are shown later to be untrue. But I cannot remember an election followed by the discovery of so many bad guys in so many high places and in so many fields (I do not claim that these bad guys belong to any political party, I am just surprised that we got so many popping up).
There is of course the wave of investment schemes like Madoff followed by Allen Stanford. We are over 60 billions dollars for these two, which explains that the many millionaires recently arrested by the FBI do not make headlines: Canadian George Georgiou (a fraud of only 26 millions so far), David Gwin from Colorado (only a multi-million dollar fraud scheme), Niketa Williams, of San Francisco, California (condemned for wire fraud to reimburse 1.6 million dollars), Robert Miracle, of Bellevue, Washington, Mukhtar Kechik and Fahimi Fisal (operating a $65 million Ponzi scheme, five people in Oklahoma (for a fraud over 41 millions), Scott Luster from Missouri (only a 4.5 million fraud) all of them arrested in February alone. What is a million dollars nowadays? Not much, of course, it is easy to spend, but in my neighborhood it is still the value of about ten houses. All these frauds add up to a lot of money lost by innocent people. On the budget I am on, I could feel the difference when a thief took off with my purse and less than 100 dollars in it. Ponzi schemes are very common at all financial levels: here in Savannah GA I find that I frequently have to explain it to naive and uneducated people in my neighborhood: there is always a false prophet or a false friend ready to take advantage of the poorest people.

We are all aware of the housing problems, but there is also a lot of pure mortgage fraud. In the first 20 days of February alone, we see cases popping up in Missouri, in Maryland, in Florida and in New York.

I have been surprised to see educators on the take too. It ranges in the last few months from a Professor of Western Kentucky University misusing Federal money to people accused of embezzlement, bribery, corruption, kickback and racketeering.

And to top it all, we now get judges on the take in activities so mean that it is hard to comprehend. Two Pennsylvania judges have been charged in a fraud scheme involving the placement of juveniles in juvenile detention facilities. The two judges "jailed juveniles for profit". You can read that story in the New York Times here and here

And there are the things that we seem unable to correct: dishonesty in sports, 30 million Americans on illegal drugs, enormous frauds in medicare-medicaid, and the horrible abuse of the military by their suppliers (The military are easy victims: it is the same all over Europe).

I am not claiming that we, ordinary people, are perfect, just saying that we, ordinary people, do not want to hurt other people. Some of the public sense of morality has degenerated in the US since the 1980s. Maybe too much easy money- easy credit produces that. Maybe it is a side effect of women having to work instead of staying at home, maybe it is linked to increases in separation and divorces, maybe it is the increasing disparity between the poor and the rich so lavishly exposed on TV. Maybe all of it. What I do know is that it starts early: most kids, according to surveys, cheat at school. But we got to reduce this corruption before we fall like the Roman Empire or the British and French Empires once dominating the world and brought down by their own rot.
This corruption is going too far.

Watergate and other mistakes

There was today an interesting paper about Watergate and the tapes transcripts by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times.

When you have a job and kids, you listen to the news, have a look at the paper, but you never have the time to study a political subject in depth. That is how a lot us ignore the facts an dwelve into conspiration theories or faulty judgments. For example, I never believed that I was told the whole truth about what happened to Apollo 13: every day when the accident happened the news stories were confusing and there was no objective link between all the things that went wrong: no explanation. It did not dawn on me that nobody knew at the time what was going on ; I only understood what happened when Tom Hanks, blessed his soul, made a movie about it.
During Watergate, I misjudged what happened because I candidly believed what the White House was saying. It did not come to my mind that the President of the United States would tell blatant lies. Since I retired, I had the time to read about 15 books on Watergate, and then I bought the tapes. You got to listen to the original tapes, though they are very difficult to understand, because listening to a "reading" by an actor gives you a very different take of what was said.
For what it is worth, here is what I think about Watergate:
1) Republicans who say that Nixon was a victim because "everybody else does it" never listened to the tapes. It is like saying nowadays that everybody is a Blagojevich: only fascists would say that.
2) President Nixon often sounds very uncertain, seeking advice: he lowers his voice, leaves his sentences unfinished and sounds rather pitiful. His "advisers" never have the guts to give him any advice at all. I do know that Nixon did not like to be contradicted, so this may be a catastrophe of his own making, but at some times President Nixon sounds unbearably lonely and surrounded by cowards.There is a lot of Richard III in Nixon, from the paranoia to Despair and die!
3) The tapes are extremely difficult, and instead of attacking Stanley I. Kutler for errors and omissions, one should just publish corrections and be thankful to the man. But of course it is less conductive to publicity than to attack him.
4) Howard Dean comes out as the worst lawyer in the history of mankind. And not a very decent person to boot.

The wrong planet

Photo courtesy of photos8.com

"If somehow that's impeachable, then I'm on the wrong planet and I'm living in the wrong place" This is what Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said to a WLS-TV reporter, as reported by the Huffington Post.

It makes me wonder on what planet he is living.

A lot of people ignore that the mind is a pleaser: our mind finds excuses for everything we want to do. You might define this as the original sin, on the Christian side or as some evolutionary safeguard, on the scientific side. We all know that animals cheat (monkeys more than cats and cats more than dogs), so it is human nature to cheat and feel good about it or find excuses for it. It might go back to the necessity to deceive when you hunt. If you do not know this about your own mind, you might wonder indeed on what planet you stand.

Tit-for-tat: "everybody does it"

Murder: "If I had done it, it would have been because I loved her very much" said O.J., never wondering what kind of "love" is that!
He did the same thing recently, going at some people with guns "I did not know it was illegal" he said (really?) and "I did not mean to hurt anybody"(then why use guns to confront his "friends"?)

Rape: all pedophiles on TV say that "they would not hurt a child" (they "love"children) and most rapists explain that "the bitch deserved it" or "the bitch wanted it"(nothing to do with them, poor guys trapped in this unjust world)

Stealing in a grocery store: "they can afford it"(even though it is never Walmart paying for the theft, it is just you and me)

"The boss is a jerk, so I can do this" (why don't you get another job?)

We don't have to claim that we are the most honest person in the world. We just have to know what is going on. If I was (God forbid) Gov. Rod Blagojevich' mom, I would suggest that he takes a honesty test on the web, just to know where he stands on this planet.

Everybody's brain is a pleaser: tell your kids.