PERSONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Archive for the ‘Dumb Citizens’ Category

This woman in New Jersey, USA (where else) is accused of endangering her 5 year old daughter by taking her into a tanning booth. She denies the charge and of course, despite the fact she looks like Al Jolson’s sister, she is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But really, take a look at this woman. She says she loves tanning. OK, but why the aversion to mirrors? I mean has she seen herself lately? I know, I am being judgmental, but we all are. We discriminate, too. Every time we choose coffee over tea or chicken instead of the beef we discriminate. We can’t choose everything and the fact we are offered choices only perpetuates the discrimination we exercise. Yet isn’t discrimination a bad thing?

Perhaps it is, at least when we discriminate for the wrong reasons. But who decides which reasons are good and which are bad? Keep in mind we make our choices based on a number of things, one of which is our culture and societal programming. To some people in our community it is OK to treat women like goods or providers of services, to have them wear clothing that positions them in the hierarchy of their social group and so on. Then we have those who want to be brown and brown people who want to be white, like the late Michael Jackson and millions of women in the Philippines and India. Skin whitening cream is the biggest seller in pharmacies in both countries. Some kind of insecurity throwback to colonial days, I guess and not something I think they need. Especially not now, in the 21st Century, the time of the emergence of BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. A move away from the Anglo-centric world of previous centuries.

I think the face of Australia has changed, but many still expect to see an Anglo-Celtic face on billboards and in ads on TV or in magazines, despite a quick peak at the platform of any railway station at peak hour, at least in Sydney or Melbourne, will show we have a lot more brown faces standing next to the white ones. We have some ‘yellow’ faces for want of a more PC hue for those Asiatic people not quite white and not quite brown, with some very black ones here and there, too. Of course there will be some teething problems and adjustments to be made on all sides but we have always done that From adjusting to having white people landing on shores owned by aboriginal people, to free settlers among our convict originals to those from Europe before and after the World Wars to later waves from South East Asia and lately, from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa and everywhere else. We adjust, they adjust and eventually we change and grow. But not everyone.

Yesterday some of our nation’s finest used a chainsaw to defend their decision to annoy everyone else in the street with their loud music and dangerous driving. When questioned their attitude was typically bogan, or yobbo or whatever term you wish to use. On the other hand, there was a tragic murder suicide involving a migrant family. The point is, you can’t paint everyone with the same brush. There is good and bad in every ethnic community, religion, racial group or however you want to divide us up and analyse us. None of this excuses the Trifecta of Stupid. The scary thing about these people, no matter who they are, where they live, where they came from or what colour their skin is…. they can vote, breed and drive on the roads. You can’t stop them doing any of the three, so the best thing is to not be a part of the problem. Open your mind, think outside the envelope and accept that we live in a society made up of very different people from very different origins and that is our strength.  So ask yourself a few simple questions. Who did you vote for? How are your kids being brought up? How good a driver are you, really? Ignorance is based on fear, usually of the unknown. Knowledge dispels fear so educate yourself. Think about that, then find someone with a different skin tone and say G’Day! Find out that behind that skin tone there is a human being, more alike than different to you. You never know, you might make a friend.

The shooting of two criminals in Sydney’s Kings Cross over the weekend has given the media the feeding frenzy they need to sell ads and maintain ratings. A stolen car full of teenagers attempted to escape from the police and the driver drove the car onto a crowded footpath and allegedly struck a female pedestrian. The police shot at the driver to stop him, hitting him and the front seat passenger. Then they removed them from the vehicle and attempted to handcuff them, however at least one criminal was passively resisting or at least refusing to allow the officer to handcuff him and so he was punched to gain compliance. All of this was filmed, as is usual nowadays, on a mobile phone camera. The police acted decisively in a very tense and rapidly changing situation… now the arm chair experts chip in, safe from their upscale suburban homes and tax payer funded parliamentary offices.

First of all the criminals were minors. The father of the 17 year old front passenger moans how his son was treated as an adult, not a minor. I’m sorry, but a 17 year old doesn’t have a sign on him saying he is not 18 yet. He looked pretty adult and full grown to me and never forget, he was in a stolen car that was being driven on a crowded footpath. The driver was 14 and those in the back included a 13 year old. So? Old enough to do the crime, old enough to be dealt with the same as anyone else. They refused police directions to stop like adults, they stole a car like adults, they drove it on the footpath like adults and they weren’t behaving like my 13 year old does. If age is so relevant in this situation, how old was the car? Old enough to be stolen and driven into innocent pedestrians on a footpath.

The next issue is those teenage criminals were indigenous. so now the Police have to liaise with the indigenous community to keep things calm. Why? Criminals are criminals regardless, surely? Why do they get special treatment? It is the same with any ethnic community other than Anglo-Europeans. How racist is that? And we keep pandering to them so it is no wonder they feel special.

Worst of all is the Greens MP who says the Police should have shot at the tyres. Mr David Shoebridge… get real. Get real. This is not the movies. Apart from having seen bullets bounce off tyres (used as a backstop at a pistol range) tyres don’t matter when the driver still has the intent to drive the car on its rims and run over more people. Shoebridge, these officers have to make split second life or death decisions and then stand by them months later in calm, quiet courtrooms while people like you who know nothing, have never done anything and probably don’t have the guts to ever do anything have to clean up the mess made all too often by do-gooding people like you and your political party. Stay in parliament, Shoebridge because I can’t think of a single serving officer who would want you one of your ilk beside them in such a situation. Back-up? I think the only compound word with back in it politicians understand is back-stab, but I digress.

To all of you living in that perfect world in your heads, the criminals stole a car and refused to stop, drove onto a footpath and risked the lives of law abiding citizens. When stopped in the only sensible and immediately effective manner available to the officers on the scene the criminals continued to refuse police direction. As for comments of being ‘forced to lie face first in a pool of his own blood’, the footage shows him lying there and his neck is bleeding. Punched? Yes because it is obvious the criminal is refusing to be handcuffed. Dragged? Yes, away from the car where officers have three other criminals to manage and to be searched for weapons. As for the fact these criminals are Aboriginal…so what? If they were all left handed would it rate a mention? Let’s not give the media and the midget minded fuel. The sooner we treat everyone equally the better.

If that were my 17 year old son I would be grateful the Police bullets didn’t kill him. It would hurt to watch the footage but as the father admits, his son is ‘known to police’. I would hazard he has been ‘known’ as a little criminal mongrel since he was in primary school. Don’t blame the police for dealing effectively with a lethal situation. Ask that father why his 17 year old boy was running loose in a stolen car trying to run down pedestrians and police. Where was he when the boy was growing up and needed a solid role model?

I am the first to hammer the police when I think they have over stepped the mark but I am not going to stand back and allow these officers to be hung out to dry for doing a very tough job in very dangerous circumstances simply because the world is getting soft and swallowing the line that so long as we keep spending and especially with credit cards all will be well. But that’s another blog for another time.

Read this, then shake your head in wonder. How can anyone treat anyone like this, let alone a sibling? Some might say that these people are African and Africans are still pretty savage and primitive and in many ways there is still a lot of primitive and savage behaviour found in Africa… but that isn’t the answer. This is a human thing. All of our ancestors believed in witchcraft and similar supernatural concepts. Many in our so called civilized western world still do. There are many people who do cruel things to people, even their own children and they don’t try to blame witchcraft, so let’s not point the finger, or the bone, at any race. Like I said, this is a human thing.

Run a search using words like ‘boy+tortured+parents’ and see how many articles there are. Just this past week I read two reports of parents torturing their little children. Why? The only reason I can think of is that they are psychotic, brought about by substance abuse or circumstance. By circumstance I mean they were brought up that way and know no different. The cycle of poverty, low IQ, lack of education and abuse creates a class of human who can still create life, they just have no idea how to nurture it.

How we treat each other is a major issue for us all, at grass roots level. It is not confined to any social class but it is more prevalent in low socioeconomic classes. It is not confined to any one race but it is more prevalent in some than others, but not because that race is genetically inferior, so don’t go down that path. That race is that way because of other factors, not genetics. Given a fair run anyone from any race can achieve anything. The reality is that for many, there is no fair run. Even for those where society attempts to level the playing field, too often they or someone influential near them sabotages any chance they have of making worthwhile change.

Like I always say; if you can’t be a part of the solution, don’t be a part of the problem. How do you treat other people? Start with your loved ones, then move to your friends and work outwards to neighbours and colleagues and then consider strangers and people of other classes and races. Do you give them all a fair go or lump them all into the same pile because of the actions of some? If we are going to change the way we as a society think and interact, then we need to start with the person we have the most influence and control over. Ourselves.

Perhaps the longest title I have ever had, while not recommended as good SEO, it just might get some attention. I was sent an email from Causes.org today focusing on this despicable habit of murdering girls simply because the culture they are born into has beliefs that boys are more important. How does one communicate one’s opinion without judging, condemning, abusing and basically running the all too ever present risk of being labelled ‘racist’? Frankly, I don’t care what people think of me. Here is what I think of this misogyny.

There is no place in our world in 2012 for any culture or society that believes boys are more important than girls. People who will terminate the pregnancy because the foetus is a girl when they want a boy are not civilized people. They are murderers. While I support a woman’s right to choose abortion over giving birth, I do so reservedly. If the woman was raped, has no fair chance of supporting the child and giving it a fair chance at life within its community or there is a risk to the life of the mother or child should the pregnancy go ahead, then let the mother decide. It doesn’t change the fact the foetus has been terminated or killed as you prefer, but I don’t see that as murder. Terminating the foetus because you want a boy is malicious and thus, murder. Where does this go on?

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are three countries well known for this practise, as is China thanks to the ‘one child’ policy implemented to keep the population growth in step with resources and so on. Many Asian societies place boys over girls and so too, African, American and European societies. Until fairly recently women in the USA, UK and elsewhere were chattels, property of their fathers, husbands and brothers. They had no voting rights and personal property rights were limited also, as was their movements, associations and other basic human rights. But these societies have changed. The ones where women are so horribly treated just for being women haven’t. They have remained in the past and many claim their religion permits these beliefs, even sanctions them and some claim their god told them to do it.

It’s not right. I don’t care why or who or how. It is not right. There is plenty of information on this disgusting behaviour all over the web, just look at stories about women being set on fire so the husband can remarry and get another wife with another dowry. Read how these societies make it hugely expensive to find a husband for their daughter so she can give the husband an heir, yet if she only produces girls they die, she dies and her family is disgraced.

I know, this is their way and it has been that way for eons and who am I to say anything about it. Well I am one man and I say it is wrong. These people who no doubt in many ways, if not every other way, are good people, extinguish all the good in their lives by this one thing. That is my belief. That is my opinion. I have friends from these countries who have all daughters and no sons, just like myself and they abhor the practise also. They are educated, intelligent and kind people. One can only hope the practitioners of this cultural aberration are ignorant peasants but sadly that is not so. There is an argument that this is a beat up and a hoax, read the other side of the topic, here.

Speak out, take a stand, discuss this amongst your friends and family; don’t sweep it under the carpet and ignore it because you are not one of these people. We need to make it known that we don’t approve. If these people migrate to Australia they need to know we do not tolerate medieval misogynistic mindsets. We do not accept their attitudes to women, often expressed in how we ‘allow’ our women to parade like ‘hoori’s’ (virgins or prostitutes, depends on the context and dialect) because we don’t hide them under hijabs, niquabs and burkas. No, we control our impulses and our lust because we are civilized men who respect the 50% of our community called women and girls.

Women are half of the population. They are half of the procreation and creation of future humans. It is the male, I believe, who is responsible for the gender of the foetus as we carry the X and Y chromosomes, women only have Y. All these men who torture and kill their wives for failing to give them boys should get an education and realise they are as much ‘at fault’ in the Life Lottery as the female, if not more so. And if their god made them that way as they claim, then why? If he is all powerful and perfect then there is a reason why and that is not the fault of the women. But none of this will make any sense to these bigots and misogynists, will it?

We can change the status quo, even if it is simply more of us saying no, we don’t accept this. No, if you want to live here with us then you must change your thinking. No, we don’t want to spend our money visiting your country on vacation or business because we do not want to support your society while it continues to do this. When the governments of these countries take action, then by all means vacation there and show your support for their efforts. This post is not about inciting racial hatred but addressing a very serious issue of human rights. Whatever you do, don’t gang up on some poor individual just because you think they are from one of these societies and that maybe they also think boys are better than girls.  You just might be beating up my mate, and I won’t like that.

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?