PERSONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Archive for the ‘Dumb Citizens’ Category

In Florida a rich man has adopted his 42 year old girlfriend to avoid losing his inherited fortune in a court case. The case was brought against him by the parents of a young man he caused the death of due to driving under the influence. Basically a court had previously ruled that the part of his fortune willed to his two biological children could not be touched by anyone sueing him or his estate. So now he has made his girlfriend just seven years his junior his adopted daughter. In most jurisdictions adopted children are considered to have the same legal standing as naturally born children. Surely such abuse of the law could only happen in America? In Australia it is rare that adoption is approved for non-minors as it is considered unnecessary for the good of the child. But this is America and it is about the good of the rich man and how he has the clout to flout the law and common decency, let alone morality.

So no doubt he has continued a sexual relationship with his girlfriend/daughter. Surely that is incest? This is a deliberate abuse of the law, the spirit if not the letter, to deny another party their due compensation or to avoid punitive action. But then what’s new? The rich are not like the rest of us, as F.Scott Fitzgerald pointed out to Ernest Hemingway many years ago. They are indeed different and they think differently and they think of us as being here to make their lives easier. We are still serfs in their minds.

I would be so bold as to say I think this rich bloke drove drunk because he arrogantly believed the law doesn’t apply to his class. He took a life or caused the loss of one and he will use his money and power to avoid paying for his mistakes. If you or I had done this we would be in jail still, and probably staying there.

What galls me the most about this is not that he has deliberately abused the laws of adoption to serve his own ends but that he probably has no inkling of how wrong this is. It will never occur to him that what he did was wrong just as no doubt his only regret about the death of the man he caused is because of all the bother it has put him and his lawyers too. I mean, why can’t these peasants just go away and be grateful we are no longer made to wear pigtails or hand over our brides on our wedding night to the lord of the manor.

I read with sadness and anger that another teenager had committed suicide due to being bullied. This included ‘cyber bullying‘ and the report made a big deal about how the bullying never stopped. When the girl got home it was there on her social network page. OK, this is where it gets a little hard for me to follow. If the bullying was going on online… why not close the account? Why not change name and password? Why not simply stop going online? Sooner or later the bully would get the hint and lose interest.

I am sorry, it is a tragedy for sure but the biggest tragedy has to be that the girl valued her social network more than her life. She would rather kill herself than go without her Facebook or whichever social network it was. This is ridiculous! Don’t blame the social network or the internet, don’t even blame the bully. If the bully intended her to kill herself, then charge him and take him through the courts. If the bully was just another mental midget, troubled teen with issues, then that is sad but the choice to end it all was hers, nobody else’s.

Which makes me think that some people are predisposed to dealing with stress and pressure that way, rather than fight back, confront the bullies or simply switch off the computer. It is sad, no argument but I think we need to keep things in perspective and not get too wound up, too ‘you poor thing’. We are tending to get softer and softer as we conquer more and more of the every day risks life has for us. We will never totally eradicate all risk and that is a good thing because danger is the best instructor there is.

This woman certainly can’t. She was disfigured for life in a 2004 meth lab explosion and she was recently found right back at it, cooking methamphetamine in her trailer. The meth cooking process is extremely dangerous and claims many lives and hundreds of homes every year. The chemicals and process used in making meth is volatile and dangerous at the best of times in proper facilities, doing it in the kitchen with home made equipment is a recipe for disaster.

So why do they do it? The answer is money. It is easier to make meth and sell it as crack than to get a job and work hard. In the USA where someone like her with not education would be making $2.75 an hour as a waitress plus tips (and the IRS presume you will make $X an hour in tips and tax you regardless) or less than $8 an hour minimum wage in other industries it is often worth the risk. America carries on about communism and socialism and what have you, yet unless you are making $250K a  year some experts say there is little value voting Republican. Make no mistake, the land of milk and hollywood is one tough place to make it in. If you keep your head above water it can be a wonderful place to live your life in. But if you have some bad luck and fall through the cracks, then you are doomed.

The middle class is scared stiff of becoming poor and it is no wonder. They are the tool of the rich, keeping the economy going with their consumerism in response to the conditioning of Madison Avenue on behalf of the Wall Street 1%. Will Rogers said back in the Great Depression that alone out of all the people in the world, only Americans would drive to the poor house. Poor takes on a different meaning in a developed nation like the USA and while you should make no mistake there are some 30% or more of the population considered officially poor, they do have it better than the poor of a third world country. It is relative after all.

Part of the affect of poverty is the poorer nutrition that contributes to lower average IQ levels. Garbage in, garbage out and if the baby and child don;t get the nutrition they need, their brains are not going to develop to their full potential. Then there are other factors like the school boards being partly funded by property taxes so if the district is full of slums, there won’t be as much funding as there will be in a more upscale area. But then this is the user pay capitalist way. Let’s not even start on health care. If anything, the amazing thing is how many Americans manage and even thrive. How many people, despite the draconian laws and political motivation behind so much they mislabel as ‘justice’, the one sided bias towards the haves at the expense of the have nots and the societal shame placed on those less fortunate through cultural mores that are no longer present in other western societies, manage to stay alive and well and keep consuming and using their credit and keeping the dream alive, albeit a dream that sees the top few percent enjoy by far the majority of the wealth and prosperity of the world’s richest nation. Personally, the vast majority of Americans I have known through my military service and as an expat overseas have been brave as lions and generous to a fault. Particularly when you are on their turf in the USA, they are some of the most hospitable people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. I like and respect Americans and love vacationing there, I just would not want to live in the place.

While this is all going on, many just take the initially easier road and turn to crime. Violent crime is rife but so too fraud in various forms and larceny. Desperate people do desperate things and the system is such that it is easy to become desperate in the US of A. We here in Australia can learn from this because we follow the USA more or less, sooner or later. We need to be selectively tough on criminals and selectively compassionate, too. Not hammer everyone into the ground for a mistake usually caused by a circumstance change beyond their ability to control or manage. Not give them the keys to the candy store and pay for dental check ups while apologising for rotting their teeth. No, a happy medium needs to be struck.

Keep in mind not everyone is as smart as you and even if you are just average, with an IQ of 96-98 for Australians and Americans, there are plenty who are dumber than you and many of those end up in prison. Being dumb is not a crime but too often it leads to a life of it. If we are smart enough to know better and keep out of trouble we should spare a thought for those too dumb to know better and try not to judge them. Don;t trust them, but don’t tread on them and make it any harder for them either. By all means give them a fair go if you can, but don’t turn you back at the same time. Maybe in time they will realise that they don’t have to exploit everyone who isn’t busy kicking the crap out of them. Maybe they will learn to trust society and society can lower its guard and trust them. Maybe.

The recent QANTAS grounding is just one event in many that show how the rich 1% are totally disconnected from the 99% of the rest of us. Alan Joyce is a classic example in my eyes. I have no idea why QANTAS needed to hire a foreigner to head our national airline. There is an old Irish saying; ‘If you are going on a journey,never take an idiot with you, you’ll always find one when you get there’. I’m not saying Joyce is an idiot, far from it. He is, however, totally out of touch with the reality that is our lives. I believe the last time he worked in Australia was for another airline, Ansett and that went out of business around that time! He is a hatchet man, brought in because he is not Australian, doesn’t have to live here and can always scuttle off somewhere else with his golden parachute once he has done the dirty work needed to make a few rich people richer. The same thing happened with that other former public entity, Telstra and the yank Trujillo. No connection to Australia, do the dirty deeds and disappear. Surely we have an Australian citizen as able as this bloke?

He was paid $3.8 million a year to be the CEO. A disgusting amount of money when you think how half of that could make a huge difference to many old age pensioners, or anyone on a low income for that matter. Then during the worst period of industrial disputes in the airline’s history, he gets a $1.7 million pay rise! The very next day he strands 68,000 people around the world and blames it on the unions. He makes all sorts of mouth noises about being forced to do this or suffer a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as industrial action would otherwise drag on but the truth is he had other options. I think pilots are paid too much and so too many of the staff of QANTAS but then they would disagree and fair enough. I definitely think CEOs and politicians are paid too much, too. Look at the woman in charge of Westpac Bank. She used to be the boss of St George Bank, then switched banks right before the new employer bought out her old one. And of course we are expected to believe she knew nothing about it, didn’t bring over any confidential info to help the buyout and so on. Then, like all the big banks they make phenomenal profits at our expense and still have to sack people and take jobs offshore as well as refuse to lower interest rates because of the cost of money or whatever! The truth is it is all about the dividend to the share holder and they hold a lot of shares themselves, these CEOs. They don’t care about lost jobs, they think people can just get another one right away but they can’t. These people, the disconnected 1% are different to you and me in many ways. Not necessarily smarter or more hardworking but definitely more focused and ruthless and without a care for anyone but themselves. They are a form of corporate sociopath.

The problem lies in the mindset these huge salaries help create. If I was making $150,000 a year I would not worry about being ripped off at the petrol pump for ten cents or more a litre for my imported, luxury vehicle. A few years ago when the AUD$ was worth US$0.70 and oil was US$150 a barrel we were paying up to $1.50 a litre. Today the Aus dollar is worth the same or more than the US$, oil is US$90 a barrel and we are still getting stiffed up to $1.50 a litre except for a day or two a week when Woolworths, Coles and the big oil companies play footsie with us and drop it a few cents. The government will say nothing because they would lose billions in tax revenue. Instead they create an overpaid bureaucrat and give him a budget and cost us millions a year and he has done nothing to watchdog petrol prices like he is supposed to. He has probably watched them but that is all. He, like the politicians and the corporate executives are disconnected. Big Time.

The ‘Occupy’ movement is reminding them of this but they see it merely as a nuisance. The rest of us are being manipulated y the media into siding against the Occupy protestors because a few long hairs will agitate the protest beyond common sense and stir up the police and make good television with violence and so on. I support the Occupy concept, but I think once you have occupied and disrupted you have made your point, no need to give the other side any sympathy by overstaying your ‘unwelcome’.

Times are a’changing and we will see more and more civil disobedience as ordinary people, the 99%, finally have too much. The ignorance and arrogance of the 1% and those who suck at their teat will be their undoing. As we trend more and more towards fighting hot wars in smelly, remote places, we will find the new cold war will be an economic one and between  the haves and the rest of us who have not as much and never will, thanks to the haves owning everything, including the politicians we think we voted for to represent us. Mark and Engels will be laughing their beards off.

What goes around comes around and if you make a habit of breaking into people’s houses you have to expect the odd home owner to take umbrage. In Sydney today a man was stabbed by the home owner after he bailed him up in his own home with a stun gun. There have been a spate of assaults and robberies with stun guns of late, this might quieten things down a tad. I know I am in no shape at the moment to wrestle with anyone, let alone a young, fit criminal armed with a stun gun. I would prefer to reach for a stick but if the knife was handy, so be it. Bottom line, don’t brreak the law and you have no reason to complain. Or die. No doubt this young thug will turn out to be a much loved, beautiful young boy with his life (of crime) ahead of him. Spare a thought for the homeowner, he nearly became a victim of crime. Now he might become a victim of the legal system.

A snapshot of his daughter and her two friends caught the last image of a man killed just seconds later. He was standing near a blow hole in Hawaii when a large wave knocked him into the hole. He has not been found and is presumed dead. Tragic as this is it shows how people simply don’t think. Do we need a large fence and huge sign to warn us of the dangers of getting close to these natural wonders? Think about it. A blow hole occurs when water is forced up it from the sea. So that usually means the sea is channeled through a small opening to build up force and it would not be smart to get trapped in there, you can’t fight nature. So since he is on the seaward side of the hole, any wave breaking over the rocks behind him would push him into the hole. So why stand there? Why not on the other side where the chance of a freak wave would push you away from the hole?

Most people don’t think this way as they have never been taught to do so. We live in a society that thinks everything is either safe or should be and if it isn’t then we can make a law and fine whoever and it will be ok because now rules and money is involved. Real life is still a one way trip to the grave. It is just a question of how long before you reach it and how what will put you there. We spend so much time learning to drive safely, going to self defence classes and learning to cross the road safely as a kid yet we forget to take time to learn how to assess everyday situations for risk instinctively and maybe not doing the dumb things that do us in. I could teach that course, but who would pay for it?

A poor child in Florida is dead, strangled by a large Burmese python. Her mother and mother’s boyfriend are charged with her death as they were responsible for the family pet, and the fact it hadn’t been fed for a month. Under the usual overkill that passes for law in the USA, they face up to 35 years in a, no doubt  private profit center, prison for their stupidity. When you can buy shares in prisons it makes sense to have lots of people in them for long periods of time, that’s capitalism at work. It also lets you get tough on crime and as most crime is done by dumb people without the income to hire a proper lawyer, it is a remote risk to the well off right that vote for any judge, sheriff or politician who advocates more of this ‘justice’.

But what justice does the poor toddler get? She is dead. The snake has a better chance of being saved by animal rights activists than she ever had of being able to graduate high school. The dumb people who were responsible for her well being, and the snake’s are now looking down the barrel of life behind bars. And the winner is…?

The simple precaution of counting heads before leaving a venue would have prevented a 5 year old boy being left in the toilets of a restaurant while on a school excursion last month. Fortunately the little lad had the presence of mind to find his way to his grandparents home fairly nearby. What if he hadn’t been able to do that? What if he had been injured crossing the several roads and the rail crossing he needed to navigate to get there? No wonder he feels he was not important enough to be missed…

No teacher does this on purpose, but then that is the meaning of the word negligence. Whoever was in charge of the trip neglected to make sure they had all the students with them when they left to head back to school. How? How could this happen? Who was in charge? Are they still in their job?

It is simply not good enough. I accept teachers have considerable responsibility yet to be fair, they do earn a good wicket so they are compensated and if they are not happy they can take their education and experience elsewhere. Children deserve our very best efforts at all times, even the naughty ones. This has not been the case here. It is, in a word, a disgrace.

There is a report of a Sikh being asked to leave a Brisbane pub because he refused to remove his turban, despite the pub having rules against the wearing of headgear such as hats, caps etc. Now the owners of the pub (part of the Coles Group) are trying to find him to apologise. Not that he has complained but we must be seen to be taking action, heaven forbid we are accused of racism. Ignorance and stupidity is fine, but racism, never. It shouldn’t be hard to find him, just ask for Mr Singh. Oh, they are all called Mr Singh. Nevermind, these muzzi’s are all in the one spot. Muslim? Sorry, Sikhs are a very different kettle of fish, a totally different religion despite what the redneck idiots might claim on the Yahoo forum.

The turban is worn to maintain the hair in a manageable fashion. The Sikh never cut their hair on religious grounds. They keep it in a turban because they tend to find it gets in the way when soldiering or policing, two roles they have traditionally held for centuries. In the service of the British Commonwealth, Sikh troops fought bravely alongside our own in two world wars and won 14 Victoria Crosses. Lest We Forget. The turban is not a hat, although one could argue it is headwear and as such, it would be counter to the pub’s dress rules to wear it indoors. However, surely common sense would dictate that it is quite acceptable and very appropriate to make an exception in the case of a Sikh. That the gentleman apparently left without making a fuss tells us something of this race and their maturity, at least for this man on this occasion. Can you imagine if it were a yobbo with a baseball cap on sideways?

A tragic stabbing death of a 44 year old mother in Melbourne after she confronted the three teenagers that threw eggs at her house has rocked her community. Haled as a ‘lovely lady’, apparently this last egging took her over the edge and she got stuck in when her and her husband chased the three that did the deed. One, a 14 year old turned and stabbed her. She died there in the street, in front of her 11 year old daughter and with her husband trying desperately to resuscitate her.

One could say it was not worth getting killed over, why not just clean off the eggs? The holders of this view miss the point. True, it was not worth getting stabbed over, but the criminals should not have egged her house, or broken any of our laws. Yet they do and they hold these laws and the rest of us in utter contempt. We are here to amuse them, to feed and house and entertain them. They are special and deserve everything society can offer, for nothing. They got this attitude from their parents, obviously, mixed in with messages from the authorities at school who are powerless to deal with them. All because some over educated idiot with no kids and a fairyland world in their heads of how it should all be perfect pushed for the rights of the punks, without worrying that maybe they lacked the IQ, the upbringing and the common decency to understand about responsibilities.

There is no point parliament jumping up and down and promising tougher laws. The laws are already there and tough enough. If anyone had the will to enforce them. Courts seem reluctant to do this and too eager to accept social workers and psych reports and so on, anything to give an excuse not to hammer the swine. If the criminals are a minority, be they muslim, indigenous or whatever, then all the more reason not to leave oneself open to allegations of racism no matter how unfounded. The police know the offenders nearly everytime but they have to prove it. If the punk is under 14, they also have to prove the criminal knew what they were doing was wrong. Yes, even as they stab a woman in the guts with a knife, if they claim they didn’t realize that was wrong, they stand a good chance of getting off. Sometimes so called advances in psychology have gone too far and we haven’t caught up with methods of instilling decency and discipline in the offspring of society’s dross.

Bottom line, these punks should not have egged the woman’s house. They are the criminal swine and their parents need to accept part of the blame also. Even if the woman ‘over reacted’ it will never excuse murder. I would not be surprised if some do-gooder called for a ban on the sale of eggs to minors. So next time they throw tomatoes and before we know it, the Fruit and Dairy (Restricted Sale) Act 2012 as Ammended will be law!