Cowboy Confessional

Posted By Guy Smith on May 20, 2013

Looks like we may be manufacturing our own demons.

Our gray orb has always produced psychopaths. Some folks are born bad as history and certain fiction maintains. Charlie Manson, Ted Bundy, Chuck Schumer – each ejected from the womb ready to wreak evil upon us. It is almost as if there is a genetic predisposition in many to manifest amoral and antisocial behavior.

As it turns out, genetics is one third of the threat trifecta.

Meet James H. Fallon (not to be confused with the occasionally psychotic Jimmy Fallon). He is a researcher at U.C. Irvine and among other investigations started examining the brains of psychopaths. He discovered that a variation of the MAOA gene (occasionally called the warrior gene) was common in psychopaths. Fallon discovered he had that gene and that he had descended from a family tree filled with murderous fruits. Yet Fallon wasn’t fatal himself, so other factors were at play. More digging inside suspect skulls led to the conclusion that this gene variant (3R for those who want more info) is created when a developing fetus is subjected to a lot of serotonin, the brain’s happy juice. Yet having this genetic quirk alone does not turn Jimmy into Jack the Ripper. It merely makes them cavalier about the situation of others (for more insight, start listening at around time mark 13:00 in this TED Talk podcast).

Add a little graphic violence before puberty though, and evidentially you mint monsters.

This trigger requires timing and vividness. The damage is caused by a boy witnessing 3D violence (or other profound trauma) before they become fertile. In the course of pre-televised societies, this required seeing inhumanity up-close and personal. However, in modern times where very graphic and photorealistic mayhem is acted-out in first-person shooter games, the triggers may be prepackaged and much more widely available.

Being a sex linked gene, most maniacs of the homicidal variety are men (though Lizzy Borden proves it isn’t exclusive and interestingly, one of Fallon’s relatives was Lizzy herself). Shortening the discourse; incubate a male fetus in a mother overloaded with serotonin and expose them to brutality before juvenility and you likely manufacture Satan’s own spawn.

Which may explain why so many psychopaths roam inner cities.

Drugs and violence are common entertainment in our ghettos. Many drugs are designed to increase serotonin levels in the brain, since that stuff makes people happier. Cocaine, ecstasy and other chemicals jack-up a person’s serotonin, as does small measures of alcohol. Since inner-city mothers are known to continue recreational drug use during pregnancy, they may be molding warrior genes in their male offspring. Let the lad loose in the hood to watch a drive-by or two before becoming of gang age himself, and you may have created a psychopath so complete that killing people for pocket change is a perfectly rational response for them.

This is happening in suburbia too. The most popular of happy pills – used for treating everything from PMS to ADHD – are the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which is a biologically correct way of saying the drugs let your brain keep more of its serotonin). Put a soccer mom on Prozac while she incubates her brood, then sit her offspring down in front of Splatterhouse and you may well produce equally indifferent violent predators as those found in MS13 gangs.

Good luck though getting any legislation passed that would regulate drugs (street or pharmacy) during pregnancy or violence (street or digital). Politicians would rather pass another meaningless gun control bill because those take no real work or the changing of human minds and hearts.

Category: Crime, Culture, Media, Science | No Comments »
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Posted By Guy Smith on May 13, 2013

Wealthy Californians would like to thank you for buying them expensive automobiles.

Didn’t know you that generous, eh?

In fairly recent political history, left-of-center ideologues and other special needs people have advocated “public/private partnerships”. Once opposed to anything corporate, alleged progressives now embrace funneling tax funds to corporations of every ilk that sustain their ideology, regardless of how insane the plot sounds to common folks with common sense. No less of a man than Bill Clinton (and given his serial freelance philandering, there is no lesser of a man) has focused his face into television cameras proclaiming that government funded private enterprise is wonderful, progressive, modern and futuristic. Oddly, this is not a new concept.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. Benito Mussolini

The fundamental flaw of feeding private organizations with public funds is that it rarely benefits the public. Choices are always made between policy and profit, between a perceived perfection and the elimination of alternatives. It is more than a clown cadre placing all-or-nothing bets by typically choosing their backers’ ventures. Public/private partnerships are the triumph of narrowing options and assuring that money finds its way into already well-padded pockets.

Which brings us to a green president using your green cash to buy cars for blue bloods in the Golden State.

If you haven’t seen a Tesla, prepare to be wowed by style, technology and sticker shock. These vehicles are not made for common folks. With list prices starting at $62,000 and peaking at well over $100,000, odds are this is not the car you’ll buy your daughter for high school graduation. Yet the Obama Administration, famous for making such wise green energy public/private decisions such as Solydra, also substantially subsidizes your rich neighbors Tesla, to the tune of $7,500 (a sum with which you can almost buy a new Nissan). A recent report also notes that California’s bankrupt government kicks in as much as $35,000 for each car Tesla manufactures (just the ones built, not actually sold). All told, as much as $45,000 of taxpayer “partnership” goes into a Tesla, making up 72% of the MSRP for the “cheap” model.

You can get a better government, but you can’t pay more.

Tesla is not alone in the public/private plunder. Bad governance poster child General Motors vends their arguably interesting Chevy Volt reverse hybrid car that sales figures show nobody wants (such vehicles make up about 0.1% of all new car sales). Buyers aren’t buying despite the feds offering the same $7,500 subsidy and a myriad of other incentives, making the unaffordable $49,000 Volt affordable … except by people who make so little they can’t afford any new car, yet pay taxes to buy them for wealthier folks.

A wag once said “If mass transit were such a great idea, corporations would have done it long ago.” They didn’t because the plunder known as public/private partnerships was not offered to them (well, they were offered to railroads, but let’s not echo how this was also of unilateral profitability).

Category: Corruption, Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »
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Posted By Guy Smith on May 6, 2013

“I suppose I’m reasonably happy.”

He seemed a bit sad when he said it. He was one of many people that British television serially stalked from age seven to forty nine. Every seven years a film crew would arrive and see how the lives of these media victims changed, rewinding the tape to remind each interviewee of how their lives had not progressed as planned (which surprised nobody aside from the interviewees). The fellow in question had a life similar to what he had envisioned in childhood, and was “reasonably happy.”

Which made me wonder why he was only reasonably so. Why are so few people unreasonably happy, especially given how unreasonable people tend to be? Perhaps when weighing reality against aspirations, and realizing it doesn’t suck to exist in the industrialized world – far away from warlords and wild animals wanting to eat you – the medium between ecstasy and death is reasonable. Yet dodging in and out of the mediocre mean of bliss are folks who are unreasonably happy, with seemingly irremovable smiles and a suspicious lack of stress.

You know … people who you suspect swallow too much Prozac.

My admittedly unscientific study of these odd creatures indicates that the only real thing that separates them from us is attitude. They suffer the same maladies we do, from broken bones to broken hearts. They bleed, marry, raise kids, grow old, die and do so with perpetual grins while normal people are prone to pout, sulk, display anger and otherwise sink to a merely reasonable level of happiness. Unreasonably happy folks possess two disgustingly sinister traits, finding happiness in common occurrences and not sweating the little stuff (and as my first boss noted, it’s all little stuff).

The latter trait is the easiest to develop. Masters of not sweating the small tend to laugh at the insignificant (they howl when meeting congressmen). A cat knocking a cocktail off the table may make a husband scowl and his wife to chuckle, for she has learned – by living with men – to not fret over minor maladies. Folks who have looked into death’s unblinking eyes are also unconcerned with transient inconveniences because they know the big inconvenience lies ahead. I once met a trauma surgeon who was insanely happy because he left work every day grateful that he was over the table and not on it.

Less common is the ability to take little moments and perceive them as special. Waking up at 5AM isn’t wildly popular with anyone, but I know one fellow who is happy to do so. Granted he lives in Hawaii, walks to work and kisses a sunrise five mornings a week, but it is that simple sunrise that makes his morning splendid. Grandparents often have unreasonable happiness because they get to be goofy with grandbabies and return the little tyrants once the sugar cookies hit pre-pubescent blood streams. Cool breezes, short skirts, horses and other commodities should make us appreciate the moment. Indeed, stopping for the sake of the moment is highly recommended. Try it. Stop reading, look around you, find something pleasing and enjoy a second of now. Then finish reading this and click all the links so you contribute to my financial bliss.

All this happiness aside, there remain people who are seemingly happy being unreasonably unhappy. I encountered one recently who by her shabby chic clothing, pocketbook puppy, excess makeup and jewelry and all around conspicuous consumption should have been reasonably happy, or at very least emotionally numb. Yet she was irritated by everything, from common strangers to the restaurant’s wait staff, to the amount of milk in her coffee. Nothing pleased her and she seemed intent on sharing her discontent with everyone. Her happiness derived from being unhappy.

We should get her a job in a Bangladesh clothing factory. That perspective might improve her chances of reasonable happiness.

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Posted By Guy Smith on May 3, 2013

Federal Finances

Sometimes it is better to not set expectations instead of setting low ones. The Federal Government is rather expert at the latter, evidenced by the fact that they are once again making payments on the national debt to the tune of an underwhelming $35 billion bucks, which is a mere 0.2% of our $17 trillion dollar credit card.

But that isn’t the pathetic part. While making a paltry $35 billion dollar down payment, they are slated to add another $223 billion of new debt in the next fiscal quarter and adding a total of $845 billion (yes, just shy of another trillion) for the year. One step forward, fifteen giant leaps backward, or as the dance is known to the intelligentsia, fiscal progressiveness.

Least Surprising Fact

The Boston Marathon bombers engaged in a shootout with cops before one died of police lead poisoning. Seems the suspects didn’t have a Massachusetts gun permit and it is doubtful they bothered with any (universal) background checks.

Politician Preposterousness

Politicians love to look smart, which is odd given how many fail at it. A recent case involves one of the few congress critters that make Joe Biden look bright, namely Oakland’s own Barbara Lee (between her, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein – all Bay Area bimbettes – I would not blame the nation for wondering if all of our local ladies are loons). Lee launched the loathsome notion that global warming will increase prostitution, which she feels is a very female problem. I should invite her to cross the bay and play my favorite Castro District game: guess the gender of the hooker.

Obama’s Obtuseness

Barack bitterly clung to the notion that the National Rifle Association was responsible for “universal” background checks not passing in the Senate. Big skulls over at Reason conclude it was Obama’s tap dancing on kiddie corpses along with the public’s simultaneous issue education and presidential revulsion that doomed the bill. Give up while you’re behind Barack.

Category: California, Crime, Gun control, Politics, San Francisco, Spotty Observations | No Comments »
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Posted By Guy Smith on April 22, 2013

“Most voters still get their news from television,” a Rasmussen survey sadly reported before dropping the big bomb. “[They] consider the news reported by the media generally trustworthy.”

Any serious student of media and propaganda rapidly comes to the conclusion that if one strives to be misinformed, they must watch the evening news. This is nothing new (and hence not news). Long ago a wag opined “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.” Little changed when news quit being produced with ink and started emanating with electrons. During the recent Boston Bombing, the media castrated their credibility by pimping purveyors of political propaganda.

Yes, CNN was involved.

Ted Turner’s bastard child is not the worst media outlet on the airwaves, though my conservative friends insist CNN stands for the “Communist News Network.” But in their rush to create news when little exists to report, CNN often reveals underlying biases. In the hours after Boston spectators were maimed, CNN aired their national security “analyst” Peter Bergen, who wasted bandwidth trying to equate America’s right wing with Al Qaeda terrorists. His feeble attempts at political skullduggery prove that security analysts should leave that work to propaganda professionals, namely CBS news anchors.

Early in Peter Bergen’s opinion piece (so labeled by CNN themselves), he says about explosives-based assassination attempts that “… 48 were right-wing extremists, 23 were militants inspired by Al Qaeda’s ideology, five have been described as anarchists and one was an environmentalist terrorist.” (emphasis mine). The phrase “right-wing” was repeated often and annoyingly, which was the first clue that Bergen had an agenda as opposed to a report. Permitting Peter as much leeway as one should give any member of the media, we have to understand what “right-wing” means and how Bergen may have become biased (aside from being part of an industry statistically heavy with left-wing extremists).

Etymologists note that right-wing devolved from revolutionary-era France, a place and time when left-wing restraint was unknown. In their parliament, first-estate elites – the few nobles who kept their heads about them – sat on the right side of the hall. Hence, any person who resists change has forever been labeled right-wing, which is odd given that “right” can also mean “correct” and the Latin term for “left” suggests “sinister” behavior. Where people and the media error is in using the term “right-wing” willy-nilly to describe anyone not progressing in ordained liberal directions (that direction evidentially being into the commode given demonstrated left-wing guidance of the U.S. economy).

This is where language becomes important and lexicographers become sinister. If opposition to change is the origin the term, we marvel that “right-wing” has been redefined as being “reactionary”. Even Google, a normally neutral organizer of bits, says right-wing means “conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system” and adds insult by following that summation with the example “a right-wing Republican.”

Like all things aside from Obama’s dogma, lexicons are malleable.

In 2002, when waterboarding was first called torture, I looked up the word’s definition in no fewer than four dictionaries. The original definition was “the use of extreme physical pain or discomfort”. Since waterboarding causes psychological terror by triggering an anti-drowning reflex, but not physical pain per se, it is not torture by definition. In the subsequent decade, dictionaries have been augmented to include non-physical inflictions in the definition of torture. Lexicographers have altered the meaning of a word to fit their own biases, just as the phrase “right-wing” has mutated to serve left-wing masters.

Karl Marx accelerated the realignment of the term.  One entomology dictionary notes that the father of socialist evil (no, not Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) used “reactionary” to marginalize anyone opposed to revolutionary conversion to communism. In America’s meme melting pot, agitators – who loved all things all things communistic – would interchangeably use “reactionary” and “right-wing” to describe people that preferred written constitutions and gobs of freedom. Hence, for decades kids absorbed the artificially dualistic obfuscation of the true origin and basic meaning of “right-wing” while attending their liberal arts colleges (tech school students would never suffer a socialist to be on campus).

Which brings us back to the media (populated by liberal arts graduates) and poor Peter’s propaganda. You’ll notice that his report posted on April 17th at 11:45AM. However, the afternoon before Bergen bemoaned that right-wingers were likely behind the Boston bombings, the National Journal (April 16th at 3:42PM) had already published a piece skeptical that “home grown terrorists” were behind the mayhem. And the Hindustan Times beat the National Journal by three hours in an analysis showing that pressure cooker bombs were in vogue with Al Qaeda. In short, CNN not only got it wrong, but did so a full day after east Indians got it spot-on.

Does CNN provide staff with ukulele lessons?

None of this slowed Bergen, who ham-handedly wove statements designed to associate “right wing” with Al Qaeda in particular and terrorism in general. After madly mentioning the right-wing moniker, he ties the general notion of being right-wing with white supremacists, caps that with a drive-by remark about “right-wing militia groups” before slithering into discussions of Muslim terror campaigns and finishing by resurrecting more white supremacists.

None of this should be surprising since Bergen is a director at the New America Foundation, a joint whose board is left littered with George Soros’ son and similar ilk.

It is little wonder that Americans are increasingly disenchanted with the media. The common man possesses common sense and sees through broadcast canards.

Category: History, Media, Politics, Propaganda | No Comments »
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