Why Terrorists Target America

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If someone had asked me last week, "Madam, could you please explain to me why America is a target for foreign terrorists?"  Being an academic, I would have mumbled something sufficiently professorial about  Huntington's theory of a clash of civilizations or economic imperatives.  But I wouldn't have had an honest, that is, gut-level answer.  However, now I do and can even convey it in a single word -- Benghazi.  But what insights does a diplomatic tragedy in Libya involving the loss of four Americans offer to our understanding of rabid anti-Americanism abroad?

Lies Told by Castro's Daughter at Center of Sex Slave Kidnappings

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Arlene Castro, daughter of Kidnapper

 Arlene Castro -- the daughter of the psychopath who kept three women as sex slaves for ten years appeared on "Good Morning America" several days ago. She begged forgiveness for her dad's monstrous deeds.  The tears rolling down the cheeks of the baby-faced, twenty-two year old,  nearly broke my heart.  But then I found out more about the role she played in the original investigation.  Arlene Castro's lies are at the core of this tragedy.  

In November 2004, Arlene's stepfather, Fernando Colon was indicted on 28 counts of rape, kidnapping and molestation, based on the daughter's testimony.  Colon declared his innocence, insisting that Arlene was being manipulated by her father, Ariel Castro, to make the accusations because of his hatred of Colon.   Because of this indictment, law enforcement officials focused on Colon as a probable suspect in the disappearance of Arlene's best friend, Gina DeJesus, and allowed Ariel Castro to slip through their dragnet.  

Shortly after DeJesus, disappeared, Arlene's dad began buying his daughter expensive gifts, including fashionable clothes, a Walkman and cellphone.    A private investigator named Chris Giannini also told The Los AngelesTimes that  Castro had called his ex-wife on Aug. 25, 2005, threatening to kill her if the daughter did not testify against Colon.  

Had the Cleveland police paid attention to Colon's accusations against Castro, then the dad would have been a prime suspect.  But since the police saw no reason for a fourteen year old to lie about being raped, Castro slid off their radar screen.  

RELATED POSTS:

• Castro's Family Enabled Sexual Predator
• Cleveland Police Department Should be Locked in Basement for 10 Years

Ariel Castro's Family Enabled Sexual Predator

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Okay, most folk would agree that Ariel Castro, the man who kidnapped, raped and tortured three women in his basement for ten years is a sexual predator and psychopath.  But what about the rest of the Castro family?  Of course people can do diabolical things for which their families are the last to know. But psychopaths and sexual predators distance themselves from their families so that they feel free to perpetrate their crimes without the bothersome meddling and questions of relatives.  In contrast, Ariel Castro's mother and two brothers lived down the street from him in Cleveland.  The family got together on  a regular basis. They didn't ask questions about the padlocked rooms and off-limits basement because they didn't want to know the answers. 

Ariel Castro and son in front of basement door

The son, Anthony, clearly spent time in his father's house.  A snapshot has surfaced showing him with his father,  standing in front of the basement door, where the three women were being held captive.  This son subsequently launched a career as a reporter by writing a news story about one of the missing women. 

The twenty-two year old daughter, Arlene Castro, went on "Good Morning America," tearfully asking for forgiveness from her "best friend," Gina DeJesus.   Arlene was the last person to see DeJesus before the 14 year old girl disappeared.  In 2005, Castro's daughter even appeared on America's Most Wanted stumped for answers or even leads as to her friend's disappearance.  Even though the father had savagely beat her mother, pushed her down a flight of stairs, broken her nose, dislocated her shoulder, and possibly caused the brain injury that killed the woman, it never even occurred to the daughter that Daddy might be hiding something in his padlock-riddled house.


Denial is not a prosecutable offense.  Thus family members are not legally culpable for this ghastly crime. But every single one of them bears some responsibility for this nightmare.  Presenting the face of a relatively normal family to the world outweighed any sense of real decency.

If society wants to take this type of crime seriously, it will first have to grapple with the pathology of those who enable sexual predators.  In the case of the Castro family, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they lured victims into the monster's lair in order to keep him sufficiently satiated, hidden and quiet.  In this way he would not do anything in public that might dishonor the family's name.       


 

Cleveland Police Dept. Should Be Locked in Basement for 10 Years

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Castro brothers alleged kidnappers

I understand that law enforcement can be a challenging, oftentimes dangerous job.  But the failure of the Cleveland police department to investigate neighbors' complaints of female screams and pounding as well as a naked and bruised woman crawling around in the backyard, was unconscionable.  As a consequence, three women, kidnapped as teenagers, were chained to the walls of a dungeon-like basement of the Castro brothers' Cleveland home, and violated for ten years.

Could the NRA be Gearing up for Civil War?

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Florida Militia Training 9 Year Olds

The tragedy of 9/11 did not just galvanize supporters of al-Qaeda, because it proved that America was indeed vulnerable to terrorism.  The incident also affected the psyches of our home-grown malcontents. It got them to thinking.   I'm not referring to certifiable lunatics, but rather to politicians like,  Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who called the NRA gathering of 70,000 in Houston this weekend  "an army."   NRA chief executive and vice president Wayne LaPierre told the gun lobby's membership:   "We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation fight for everything we care about."

Yes, America is even more vulnerable to domestic terrorists than it is to fanatics from the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

The NRA's motto this year is "Stand and Fight." We would be fools to believe that it is all bluster and empty rhetoric. We Americans are polite, maybe even too polite for our own good at times. So with those around me being far too genteel to broach the subject, I  will.  Those militias and tea party types are preparing for war. What has driven otherwise mainstream Americans to the brink of building the kinds of arsenals that would put the  U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division to shame is the two-term presidency of Barack Obama.  According to a fairly large proportion of mainstream American voters, not just lunatic fringe conspiracy theorists,  the man is a Muslim, he's a Socialist, he's a Kenyan, who is trying to usurp the power and authority of our Constitution.  He is, in short, destroying America.  If you insist on details, just listen to Rush Limbaugh or one of the growing number of conservative talk show hosts. 

Who are these disgruntled, assault-rifle hoarders?  They are, in the main, conservatives who find no possible way to gain electoral victory in national elections for the foreseeable future. Their frustrations have devolved into a type of nihilism, in which they see perpetual chaos preferable to the current government of the U.S.

Those who laugh at the hubris of these NRA-malcontents, truly miss the point. Their goal is not the  unconditional surrender of the U.S. Armed Forces.  It is rather to undermine the federal government, which, these people hope, will find itself unable to protect civilian life from the seemingly ubiquitous attacks of domestic terrorists.  That is exactly the lessons these domestic militias have been learning from their Middle Eastern counterparts.  Terrorism is not at its essence a moral debate.  It is, pure and simple, a military strategy applied to situations where the military arsenal and standing army far overwhelms the resources of the insurgents. And sometimes it works.  But let's all hope, that in the end, sanity prevails and the radicals in the NRA reconsider their path to glory.

Medical Biases that Sabotage the Health of Blacks & Latinos

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The Nordic Fallacy

My mother died of complications from breast cancer at the age of fifty-one.  The doctors did all that they could for her.  Well actually, they did all they could had she been of Northern European ancestry. Medical researchers are only now realizing that black women are less likely to get cancer than white women.  However,  when they do, that group is three times more likely to develop the aggressive, triple-negative form of breast cancer, which affects less than fifteen percent of white women.  Given the type of cancer, which may be exacerbated by traditional treatment protocols, and many black women’s lack of access to adequate medical care, it is no wonder that African-American women  suffer a breast cancer death rate (according to the Center for Disease Control), that is sixty percent higher than that of white women.  It may have been too late for Mama, but present-day cancer specialists are finally beginning to recognize ethnic differences in breast cancers and adapt treatment protocols accordingly.  If only ancestral factors were researched in other arenas of medicine and public health as well.

 Most premature deaths among blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are caused by complications from such lifestyle diseases as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.  But the medical community operates under the dictates of an unexamined paradigm, which I have come to call “Nordic universality.” 

The Marathon Bomber's Wife

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Yesterday's blog puzzled over the difference in treatment between Puerto-Rican American,  José Padilla, who was sent to Guantanamo in 2002, waterboarded, drugged and tortured for "pal-ling" around with terrorists," and the wealthy Anglo wife of Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  Understandably Katherine Russell Tsarnaev's lawyer, hoped to get public sympathy for his client and  downplay the possibility that she might have been an accomplice.  Thus, he portrayed her as a hapless dupe,  who worked eighty hours a week while her husband sat at home taking care of their baby, and (unbeknownst to her) making pressure-cooker bombs. But, in truth, Mrs. Tsarnaev had a far more intimate relationship with a terrorist than the "pal -ling around" that sent Padilla to Guantanamo.   And yet, the last I heard, the FBI was asking permission to interview her about her late husband's activities.


What is this really all about?  I posited at first that race might account for the difference in treatment.  But after further consideration, I've concluded that the real difference between the two situations was the matter of  who occupied the Oval Office.   President George Bush fueled public hysteria and the lynch mob mentality that made any semblance of justice for José Padilla, impossible.  The constitution was trampled upon as was international law.

It is a relief to hear that President Barack Obama is upholding the deepest values that Americans share, justice, fairness, innocent until proven guilty.  The surviving bomber, 19 year old DzhokharTsarnaev, was read his Miranda rights and will be tried as an American citizen rather than as an enemy combatant.

Time will tell whether the wife was as clueless as her lawyer claims.  But in the meantime, constitutional guarantees will be adhered to; the wheels of justice (not lynch mob hysteria) will prevail.  And the world will be watching. 

RELATED POSTS:

Would FBI Be Asking for Permission to Interview Spouse of Marathon Bomber If. . .

Was FBI too Inexperienced in Global Politics?

Would FBI Be ASKING FOR PERMISSION to Interview Marathon Bomber's Spouse if She Weren't From Wealthy White Family?

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Katherine Russell Tsarnaev

FBI officials are now saying that they would like to interview the wife of the suspected Marathon bomber, but she has not expressed an interest in talking with them.  An NBC News headline reads: "Federal officials ask to interview wife of slain bombing suspect." 

Katherine Russell Tsarnaev lives in a $450,000 home in Rhode Island with her parents on weekends (her father is a medical doctor and her mother a registered nurse).   During the week, according to her lawyer, she stayed in a Cambridge apartment, and financially supported her late husband, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and mother-in-law.

But my question is this?  If the American criminal justice system follows procedures so meticulously that it seeks permission to talk with a wealthy white suspect in a terrorist bombing, how is it that so many blacks and Latinos end up in prison for crimes they did not even commit? What possible procedures could have been followed in railroading innocent people?

Or maybe the answer is what I have come to call  "anti-profiling."  I don't mean to offend anyone's racial sensibilities.  But I'm trying without success to understand what is going on here.  I have yet to hear any law officials talking about sending this woman to Guantanamo.  However, for all we know, she may have helped  her husband  plant pressure-cooker bombs all over Massachusetts.

In contrast, does anyone even remember José Padilla, who like the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, converted to

José Padilla

Islam?  He is the Puerto-Rican American from Brooklyn, who was convicted of plotting a bomb attack, sent to Guantanamo, tortured, drugged and waterboarded, for presumably "palling around with terrorists" even though he never killed anyone.  Katherine Russell Tsarnaev was, on the other hand, truly sleeping with the enemy.  And her husband is responsible for at least four deaths, and 180 injuries,some critical, and including a number of victims with lost limbs.

I'm sure the FBI has come up with a convoluted legal rationalization for how the Marathon bomber case is being handled.  However, who but themselves are they deceiving?

Was FBI too Inexperienced in Global Politics to Prevent Boston Marathon Bombing?

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Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev

The FBI did a masterful job of apprehending the Boston Marathon bombers. I am proud of their efficiency and speed and congratulate them. But three people died in this tragedy, including an eight year old boy. Countless others lost their limbs. Could this nightmare have been prevented? The answer is "probably".

Did Anti-Gay Pastor Rick Warren Bully his Son to Death?

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Matthew Warren died of suicide

When evidence suggests that a parent bludgeoned his child to death with a baseball bat, more expressive members of the public may convey their horror at the deed in raw emotional terms.  Nobody denounces them for "hate" and "vitriol."  Nor does anyone accuse them of being "monsters" for not offering their condolences to the parent suspected of the crime, before the truth is known.  Supporters of Pastor Rick Warren, have launched campaigns all over the Internet denouncing anyone raising questions about his son's death.  

It is sad but true that parents and family members are always the first suspects when a child dies of unnatural causes. Why should anti-gay Pastor Rick Warren be treated any differently?  "Did he drive his son to commit suicide" is a legitimate question to ask under these circumstances. The answer may not put the founder and pastor of the 20,000 member Saddleback Church in legal jeopardy, but it certainly raises (or puts to rest) moral issues that pierce the core of that man's humanity.

Rick Warren, not his enemies,  generated the initial suspicions about the true cause of his 27 year old son, Matthew's suicide. For instance, in colloquial American English the term "inner city" is often a code for "black ghetto."   The Warren family's description of their unmarried son as an "incredibly kind, gentle and compassionate young man whose sweet spirit was encouragement and comfort to many," are commonly used code words for guess what?  We do not know whether or not Matthew Warren was gay.  But we do know that if he was, the homophobic Reverend and Mrs. Warren may indeed have driven their son to suicide, and attempted to cover it up by claiming that he was "mentally ill."

A severe pattern of bullying that leads to the victim's suicidal death  may be considered involuntary manslaughter. We don't yet know whether the Warrens are guilty of any such actions or not.  But for his supporters to denounce those who raise legitimate questions as being "sickos," only serves to fuel the speculation that the Warren family may indeed have something to hide. 

Adam Lanza's Dad Abandoned Family When They Needed Him Most

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School Shooter Adam Lanza

What responsibility does a father have toward a mentally disabled son and a wife who may be sliding into  paranoid insanity?  Adam Lanza's dad believed that he could buy his way out of the problem with generous alimony payments and a perky new wife.  I guess he was wrong.

Discussions about this tragedy should focus far more attention on the father, Peter Lanza. I do not say this because he's the only one still alive, but rather because his cowardice may have set this whole tragedy in motion.  I don't know details of the divorce nor do I care to look for them.  But what I do know is that  Adam Lanza needed two parents. The father has explained in news reports that he and his son had been estranged for several years.  You don't have to be psychic to guess why.  Daddy walked out on him and his Mom, a woman who was clearly unable to cope with her troubled son alone.  One report even suggests that she became a gun enthusiast after her husband left her.  

It's too late for Peter Lanza.  He cannot remake the decisions he made to leave a wife and troubled son, now that we can all see and weep over the consequences.  But this should be a cautionary tale for any parent who thinks that he or she can slip  away from family dynamics they helped to create and not have to pay in ways they never reckoned for.

Does Priesthood Attract Men with Psychosexual Problems?

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"Celibacy" by Nathan Huang

There is no way to know what percentage of Roman Catholic priests, having taken vows of celibacy, live up to them.  But one thing is for sure.  We are now living in an age defined by the Internet revolution.  It is no longer possible for adult priests, however high their station, to hide  illicit sex affairs.   

Maybe as Catholic theologians assert, celibacy worked for centuries.  Or maybe it didn't.  In any era,  the most highly-paid historians tend to be those who take their jobs of sanitizing the human record of scandal, with the utmost seriousness. Why else did it take two hundred years for so-called legitimate scholars to confirm what was common knowledge during the life of Thomas Jefferson, namely that he and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, had several children together.  Nowadays, the Internet has  made such subterfuge virtually impossible.

The historical record shows that priestly celibacy was plastered onto Roman Catholicism rather late in its history.  According to George T. Dennis SJ of Catholic University of America:  "There is simply no clear evidence of a general tradition or practice, much less of an obligation, of priestly celibacy-continence before the beginning of the fourth century"  ^[Dennis, George T. SJ on Cochini, The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (book review), Theological Studies, 52:4 (1991:Dec.) p.738].

In modern times, there is growing evidence that young men with unresolved sexual identity issues are sometimes drawn to the priesthood.  Frank Bruni noted in a New York Times op-ed column:

It’s a trap, falsely promising some men a refuge from sexual desires that worry them. That’s one explanation for what many church experts believe is a disproportionate percentage of gay men in the priesthood. In a world that has often convinced these men that they’ll be outcasts, the all-male priesthood can seem like a safe haven, and the vow of celibacy an opportunity to tuck one’s sexuality away on a shelf.

The promise of celibacy most likely factored into the church’s child sexual abuse crisis. Many years ago, when I wrote a book about it, more than a few mental health professionals told me that men trying to vanquish a sexual attraction to kids might well drift toward the priesthood in the hope that extra prayer and an intention of chastity would make everything right. One Catholic archbishop, Daniel Sheehan, who has since died, told me: “It could well be that a person with this kind of a hidden psychosexual problem could escape to the seminary and the like, thinking in some way that this would be a way of sublimating this problem.”

Unless the Catholic Church radically changes its celibacy rules, it will be bankrupted by scandal in the industrialized world.  In reaching out to other continents in order to fill the breach, celibacy laws may be even harder to enforce.  The deeply-rooted western tradition of equating sexuality with evil, which allowed for Catholic celibacy laws to take hold, is fortunately absent in many other parts of the world.   

Killer Christopher Dorner is an American Anti-Hero and his Fan Base is Growing

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Christopher Dorner Killer Anti-Hero

After reading media accounts of a crazed psycho and his incoherent, rambling manifesto, I thought I knew everything that needed to be known about  Christopher Dorner.  He was just another lunatic with an assault weapon like the Newtown and Aurora shooters.   But then I read his manifesto. Rather than being the incoherent ramblings of a psycho, it was a perceptive and penetrating account of how his efforts to report the abuse of a mentally ill young man resulted in the Los Angeles Police Department systematically destroying his life. 

I do not under any circumstances condone this man’s murder of innocent people. However, I have come to believe that  accusations made in the manifesto must be taken seriously and investigated, if we don’t want a repeat of this kind of tragedy. After reading it,  I can understand how a decorated military officer whose life goal was to be a policeman might snap, which is apparently what happened, under conditions of cascading injustices.  Please read this manifesto before forming an opinion of who this man really is. And then ask yourself whether the LAPD and mainstream media’s mischaracterization of the document, and the police’s almost lethal attack on two innocent women mistaken for Dorner might inadvertently support the fugitive’s claims.  Here is what Christopher Dorner actually wrote:   

Insanity is Believing that Assault Weapons Should be Used for Psychological Therapy

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Within the space of weeks, twenty elementary school children, their teachers, and others have died because two so-called "sane" people believed that they could use assault rifles to cure insanity.    The mother of Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, often took her son, who suffered from violent fantasies, to a shooting range, so that he could hone his skill at using assault weapons.  And now we have the case of  America's most dangerous sniper being gunned down with an assault rifle. Chris Kyle had taken his alleged killer, Eddie Ray Routh  to a gun range in hopes of  "working off" the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder the young veteran had developed while a soldier in Iraq.

I do not wish to trivialize the deaths of Chris Kyle and Nancy Lanza. But I do hope that we can all gain a few insights into America's "gun culture."    The term represents a belief system, or more to the point, "a religion,"  held by many in this country, that almost all of society's problems can be solved with guns.    The inherent unpredictability of life itself can be mitigated with guns.  Evil can be banished from the earth with guns.  Innocence can be protected with guns.  Courage and manliness can be expressed through the use of guns.  Hated presidents and the kind of oppressive governments that make us pay income taxes can be blotted out with guns.  This mentality, writ large, is what pushed America into Iraq, in the first place, believing that our superior fire power could show those Middle Easterners "who's boss."

It does not take a crystal ball to see that America will continue to kill its children, bystanders, and others until it gains a grip on the mindset that underlies the guns-as-God mentality. 
   

  

Shooter Killed Chris Kyle Because He Hated what Sniper Stood For

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The more news reports I read about the shooting death of famed sniper, Chris Kyle, the more frustrated I become.  The corporate news media lacks the courage to say what should by now be obvious.    Whether or not 25 year old Iraq war veteran, Eddie Ray Routh suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the former soldier was no deranged, mumbling lunatic.   Routh in all likelihood killed the greatest sniper in history because he hated what Kyle stood for.  Period.

But why would the media evade this issue?  The reason is that American society, already preoccupied with issues of gun violence, is not ready to investigate the mainstream media's support for launching a war, contrived by neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration for the sole benefit of arms manufacturers.  It is not necessarily mental illness for some soldiers returning from the Iraq war, to believe that their lives have been destroyed.  It is, in all too many cases, true.   Whether they are able to control their rage is of course a different matter. But it would be delusional for the rest of us to pretend that soldiers who lost limbs, buddies and the innocence of youth to fight people who, contrary to what they had been told,  had nothing to do with 9/11 can just fade into the wood work.   Because from time to time we will be hearing from more of these angry soldiers, it is yet another reason for Congress to get semi-automatic weapons out of everybody's hands.
 
Even though I disagreed with the politics of Chris Kyle, I feel deeply saddened at his tragic death.  His wife and two children have had a husband and father wrenched from them just when they believed they could relax and enjoy his presence in their lives, because he had survived several  tours of duty in Iraq.  Next time the U.S. flippantly decides to go to war,  it might remember that its highest cost will not be found in the Congressional budget. 

In Gun Debate Which Side REALLY Has the Moral High Ground?

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America's Gun Culture

Personally, I'm a gun control advocate.  But my position on the issue does not stop me from seeing the underlying hypocrisy on all sides of this nation's current debate about guns and America's gun culture.  The reason is this.

America did not suddenly become a violent country this year when young people began killing their parents, elementary school children and movie goers with assault rifles.   The Second Amendment is merely a reminder of who and what we've always been.  As Americans we are either too polite or otherwise too lacking in introspection to use the word "genocide" in describing the disappearance of ten million native Americans.  However, most scholars agree that this was the size of the Native American population, who inhabited the territorial United States during the time of the early American colonies.  Yes, some proportion of this population succumbed to the diseases brought by the Europeans to which they had no immunity.  In fact, even if ninety percent of Native Americans died of disease, that leaves one million, who were slaughtered by the colonists and the U.S. Cavalry.

So what's my point?  Everyone living in this country today, apart from the indigenous Indians, are living off the spoils of gun violence.  This is true whether they came to these shores as free people or even as slaves. This may be an especially uncomfortable truth for African-Americans. But the fact of the matter is that the descendants of everybody who landed on these shores are more financially secure than those left behind in the motherland.  America has the highest standard of living in the world. But what would those statistics be, if our nation had not violently expropriated this resource-rich land from the Indians, and we were forced to live in a society walled in by the narrow boundaries of the thirteen colonies?

America's wealth and superpower status is not merely a function of "cultural dynamism."   It is also a function of violence, of having ancestors who realized with brutal certainty that the quickest way to raise a population's standard of living was to expropriate the land and other resources of those who possessed in. 

I fear that some NRA members may indeed be lunatics.  But their "gun culture" is not as false as those of us who'd like to see all weapons gotten rid of, would like to think.  Anyone and everyone in this country (apart from the Indians) who lives a better life than the present inhabitants of wherever their ancestors came from (voluntarily or in chains), is living off the spoils of gun violence.

RELATED POSTS:

 The NRA Has Become Bunker for Lunatics

Newtown, Connecticut's Feigned Innocence

『ハンガーゲーム』が稼いだ莫大な収益のため、評論家は日本の小説からの引用であったという事実に目を背けている

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English version

「これ以上何も驚くことはない」という決まり文句を十分なほど繰り返しつぶやいてはいたのだが、それは今日の午後、腰をかけて1999年の日本映画『バトル・ロワイヤル』を見る前までの話であった。私が心底までショックを受けたのは、アメリカ人作家スザンヌ・コリンズによる2008年のベストセラー『ハンガーゲーム』が、この作品が書かれる以前に書かれた日本の高見 広春によるベストセラー（2000年に映画化）から逐一引用されていることだった。スザンヌ・コリンズは、アメリカをゲストとして闊歩し、事実上一字一句コピーした海外映画から大金を得ることに恥を感じないのであろうか？もしかすると、出版社の巧妙な弁護士が、原本が日本語で書かれているため、それを写した作業が判明することはないと想定しているのであろう。アメリカ合衆国には、このようなことを禁ずる法律があるべきではないか？ それとも、出版社業界はどのような形であれ、現金を得るためにうわべの世間体を売ってしまうまで落ちぶれてしまったのか？ 

社会的、法的エチケットが丁重過ぎて、盗作者を徹底的に訴えることのない国に住む作家が書いた本を盗用することが、アメリカにおける本の販売の新たな流行とならないことを願う。

Astronomical Profits from Hunger Games Cows Reviewers into Ignoring Story was Lifted from Japanese Novel

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Hunger Games Lifted from Japanese Film

While I have often enough murmured the cliche that "nothing surprises me anymore," that was before sitting down this afternoon to watch a 1999 Japanese film called Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル). What shocked me to the core was this. The story line for American author Suzanne Collins's 2008 bestseller Hunger Games was lifted point by point from the earlier Japanese bestseller by Koushun Takami  (adapted to film in the year 2000). Has author Suzanne Collins no shame,  prancing  around the country holding guest appearances and making gazillions from a foreign movie she copied practically word for word?  Perhaps her publisher’s slick attorneys assumed the copy and paste job would never get traced back because the original was in the Japanese language.  Aren't there supposed to be laws against this sort of thing?  Or has the publishing industry fallen on such hard times, that it will prostitute any semblance of respectability for whatever cold cash it can grub?

I hope we’re not seeing a new trend in American book selling, stealing works from authors living in countries whose social and legal etiquette make them too polite to sue the crap out of plagiarists?  As the book industry has shrunk to a handful of mega-publishers representing a handful of mega-authors,  I have also noticed another disquieting trend.   Too many American book reviewers  apparently see their job as hobnobbing with famous authors and never ever slapping the hand that passes out those gilded invitations.  How else could New York Times reviewer John Green write that this plagiarized novel was "brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced" or that  "the considerable strength of the novel comes in Collins's convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine?" A Time Magazine review praised the book as “hypnotic.”  When controversies such as this arise, any reviewer too arrogant, lazy or cowardly to sit through the foreign sub-titled original in order to make an honest comparison needs to be fired.

RELATED POST: Author of "The Help" Exploits Black Maid's Life Story 

Sham Sites Offering FREE Services that Demand Payment to Complete Transaction Should Be Shut Down

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I was helping a young friend with his resume yesterday on  a website that claimed to be a "free resume formatting service."   After we spent an hour and a half inputting the information, we were informed that we would have to pay a recurring monthly fee to print or email the new resume.  Because I had been told that some sites offering free services conned people in this way, I had spent a good fifteen minutes scouring the site and reading the fine print before using it.  "FREE" was even capitalized on the webpage.

The reason this scam is so annoying is because there are indeed free websites that perform certain services, financing their services through advertising or other means.   But the problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing whether a site is free or not until you have spent an hour or two working to input and polish the information.

These are hard times for many of us.  But that is no excuse for allowing  large chunks of commerce on the Internet to devolve into bait-and-switch scams.  Isn't some agency supposed to be regulating Internet advertising? I did a little research and found the following FBI website that investigates various types of Internet fraud, which you may find useful if you come up against these types of problems:

Stopfraud.gov

To report computer-based fraud:

Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): File a Complaint
Online Form: https://complaint.ic3.gov/ctf.aspx

IC3 accepts online Internet crime complaints from either the person who believes they were defrauded or from a third party to the complainant.

eConsumer.gov: Report Your Complaint
E-mail: econsumerwb@ftc.gov  

eConsumer.gov is a portal for consumers to report complaints about online and related transactions with foreign companies.

I hope that you find this information helpful.

Newtown Connecticut's Feigned Innocence

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Like everyone else, I believed  that Newtown, Connecticut was a peaceful hamlet, whose wealthy residents were shocked to the core that the most horrifying mass shootings in American history could happen in their midst. But that was before I learned the town had its own well-kept secret.   With a population of only 27,000, it has earned the dubious distinction of being the assault-rifle capital of the United States. The town maintains two legal firing ranges,several ad-hoc ranges and is home to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the second most powerful gun lobby in the country.

At first glance, Nancy Lanza, the mother of the shooter, seemed at least as isolated and unhinged as her son.  She taught the mentally unbalanced child to shoot and maintained an unsecured arsenal of weapons that would have been excessive  for a police station in Kabul.  But here again, I misunderstood the sub-culture in which she lived.  For, Newtown, Connecticut had become a mecca for assault weapons fanatics.   According to an article in the New York Times:

 ". . . recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts, and a modest tolerance for bearing arms competing with the staunch views of a gun industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which has made Newtown its home."

Even more heartrending and grotesque than the scariest Stephen King novel, is the fact that in tolerating this assault weapons culture, Newtown killed its own children.  I can only hope that other such towns learn from this tragedy before it's too late.

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