The Crazy Among US

What do we do with the crazy among us?  The revelations about the recent shooter in Santa Monica and others reveals that they were primed to commit an egregious act.  "Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.1 When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.2 "  Of course, the numbers above apply to all disorders from Schizophrenia to Agoraphobia.  There is no number for the proportion of mental disorders in which the individual will go out and shoot people.  Medical conditions are private, as is their conversations with their care providers.  Adults have their own rights.  The Santa Monica shooter was given a mandatory psychological evaluation and released three days later.  If you are an adult, the standard is no incarceration unless you are an immediate danger to yourself or others.  Most aren't.  Most are, despite their condition, intelligent enough to tell the doctors what they want  to hear and save their rage until they are released.  Given the numbers, we should feel good about the number of crazy people who commit violent acts.  It is a very small percentage.  We should also realize that the numbers are overwhelming to any monitoring systems we might have in place.  Until we have an economic way of monitoring the most dangerous among us, we will always have Santa Monica scenarios.  

1. Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Walters EE. Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of twelve-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R). Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005 Jun;62(6):617-27.

2. U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates by Demographic Characteristics. Table 2: Annual Estimates of the Population by Selected Age Groups and Sex for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004 (NC-EST2004-02) Source: Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau Release Date: June 9, 2005. http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/

Phone Records and mass media

The government is doing their job.  Because we have sided with Israel and oil companies and have a huge military industrial complex to keep the Muslim world under what we consider control, we have for the last five or six decades pissed off the Muslims who can't fight us in a conventional war so they fight a guerrilla and terrorist war.  So our government is monitoring our phone calls and internet activity looking for terrorist patterns.  It should be no surprise given the circumstances.  The media runs the story trying to frighten the salivating masses because that sells advertising.  For the media and politicians, it's a wonderful thing.   They can get lots of advertising revenue and do a lot of grandstanding without ever defining the issue.  They can pretend it is about rights to privacy when it is really about a clash of cultures.  We could roll over the Muslims if they didn't have the petrodollars fueling their resistance.  We could ignore them and they would go away if we could get away from our compulsion to try to convert the Middle East into an American colony.  But we don't, so the government looks at our phone and internet records and the media drools.  They can have my records.  We still have a semblance of  a legal system and I really don't think they will be spending much time tracking my boring, tepid life.  The threat to my life comes from the salivating masses who hire used car salesmen and robber barons (i.e. Democrats and Republicans) to handle my money.  I believe the voters of this country will bankrupt me before the FBI knocks on my door and asks why I called LLBean at 3 in the morning.  

Elitism and Global Warming

The recent Scientific American magazine and several other stories have studied the eventual sea level rise, it's effect on low lying coastal regions, possible mitigation, but little on the elitist nature of the problem.  Here's what is going to happen:  Warming will continue to melt glaciers, poles, and ice caps with the water from that melting making it's way into the ocean which will rise relative to the land masses.  People in the United States love building on the coast.  Rich people love building on the coast.  The coast is going away when the oceans rise.  We can either spend trillions of dollars we don't have protecting the coast or let the ocean have it's way.  We will spend the money.  Because the rich people living on the coast will spend some of that wealth buying the decision makers.  The taxes that come from us all will pay to protect those most able to protect themselves, incurring more debt to pass on to future generations.  Hopefully, I will be gone before the politicians start defending the rich against the ocean.  Until the masses take their vote seriously and wrest control of the legislature from the elite, we will be under the thumb of the plutocracy.