January 18, 2012 at 1:29 pm ·
Filed under 5 - Amazing Alcoholic Antics
Story from “This is True” by Randy Cassingham, with his “tagline:”
“NOT A COMPELLING ARGUMENT: ‘You are going to make me lose my job,’ whined Donald Leet, 37, to Hillsborough County, Fla., sheriff's deputies. He had drunk ‘a glass of wine’ with dinner, so naturally he had let his girlfriend's 11-year-old daughter drive. The girl lost control and crashed into the First Baptist Church of Brandon, severing a water pipe, which sent water spurting 50 feet into the air. Deputies arrived to find the girl climbing out the driver's side window, with a 7-year- old girl right behind her. ‘Why don't you arrest a rapist or murderer instead of me?’ Leet demanded. ‘You're an illiterate Southerner. You don't know anything. You ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:54 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
The London Riots: Feral Humans,*
Resentment of Enablers and Alcoholism
Alcoholics experience distortions of perception and memory. One of these distortions, “euphoric recall,” causes practicing alcoholics to view everything they do or say through self-favoring lenses, which leads to a God-like sense of self. As explained in Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics, this is the root cause of alcoholic egomania, which manifests in a compulsion to wield power over others.
This key distortion also reveals itself in the act of blaming others for one’s problems. After all, if everything you do is good and right and nothing bad or wrong, how can you be to blame for anything that you perceive to be inequitable in your life? It’s certainly ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:53 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Runner-up for top story of the month:
San Diego motorcycle officer David Hall, a 14-year veteran, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 41. Hall was off duty in February when he (allegedly) struck another car and fled the scene. The married father of three was later arrested and, while on paid administrative leave awaiting trial, ordered by a judge to attend AA meetings. There can be little doubt that officer Hall’s suicide was preceded by dozens if not hundreds of incidents for which close people or the law—or his employer—could have intervened, but either didn’t or didn’t do so adequately. “Adequately,” once someone has proven to society he can’t safely drink or use, requires court-monitored ankle bracelets for the ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:51 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Alcoholic victims of the month:
A number of airline passengers who have recently been on the receiving end of a too-desperate need to pee, which may include those on an Air France flight when actor Gerard Depardieu took a pee in the aisle (see “Enablers of the month,” below). They also include an 11-year-old girl who was with her father, a Stage 4 cancer patient, and her sister on their way to visit her grandmother for the first time since her father’s diagnosis, who was on the receiving end of 18-year-old would-be Olympian skier Robert Vietze’s need to go potty. In a possibly life-saving act of disenabling, Vietze reportedly has been kicked off the U.S. Ski Team.
Co-dependents of the month:
Non-addicted ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:50 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Enablers of the month:
British taxpayers, who provide an education costing $80,000, a guaranteed income, “free” medical care, “free” housing, “free” food and everything from cell phones to flat-screen TVs to those who, because they are “fed up with being broke,” riot—as if the needs of some bestow a right to the property that others took time, ingenuity and expertise to buy or produce.
Left-wing former mayor of London Ken Livingstone who, within hours of the start of the London riots, said the unrest was “the fault of the government,” citing a 9% cut in central government grants to Tottenham, where the rioting began. It’s odd, then, that the rioters didn’t mention this as they looted high-end luxury goods shops.
...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:48 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Disenablers of the month:
Conroe, Texas resident Tracy Allen, who spotted Gliddon William Davis, 73, driving erratically two years ago, somehow stopped him and tried to take his keys and, after he fled reported him, resulting in a 55-year sentence for Mr. Davis. A jury took less than three hours to find Davis guilty of using his vehicle as a deadly weapon and render the effective life sentence. The surprising result may have had something to do with the fact that Mr. Davis had previously been convicted of two counts of attempted rape, one assault with intent to commit rape, several other unspecified felonies and seven previous DUIs. Now, wouldn’t it have been so much cheaper and better for society, not ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:47 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Quotes of the month:
“At its core, addiction isn’t just a social problem or a moral problem or a criminal problem. It’s a brain problem whose behaviors manifest in all these other areas.”
So said Dr. Michael Miller, past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), who oversaw the development of a new definition of addiction requiring a four-year process involving more than 80 experts. This, about a decade after one singular amateur refined his redefinition of alcoholism as “A genetic predisposition to biochemically process the drug alcohol in such as a way as to cause that person to act badly some of the time.” Oh, that amateur must have forgotten to explicate where “acting badly” might be relevant: in ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:46 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
“This young man is a quality young man.”
So said the former Rhode Island House Speaker John Harwood, now acting as the attorney for Clayton Hardon, 22, following Hardon’s release on a DUI charge. Hardon is a volunteer firefighter who was off-duty when he (allegedly) stole a “special hazards” truck while under the influence, took it on a joyride and crashed into a tree, which is the only object that prevented the truck from smashing through a home and possibly killing its occupants. Mr. Harwood, we’ll see how high a quality of a young man Mr. Hardon is when he decides to plead guilty to the crime (assuming he committed these acts).
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January 18, 2012 at 12:45 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
“At first it seemed as if the [London] riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs….The truth is, it’s not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have…children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement….Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of the instinct.”
So wrote the chief rabbi ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:43 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
There are some things you just can't make up (if it were fiction nobody would believe you):
New Jersey physician Dr. Sylvia S. Lee, who faces felony charges for having stabbed her 13-year-old adopted daughter with a screwdriver at least 100 times for failing to wash her dog’s clothes and towels in the correct order. For those of you doggie-clothes owners who want to avoid being repeatedly stabbed for doing it wrong, doggie clothes are washed first.
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January 18, 2012 at 12:43 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
What would you do...:
If you’re sitting in your nephew’s front yard drinking beer together and you give him $6 to go buy more beer, and he pedals off on his bicycle in the summer heat while you wait and it takes too long, you would:
1. Call your nephew to make sure he hasn’t been involved in an accident,
2. Call the police to see if there are any reports of an accident involving a bicyclist between your place and the beer place, or
3. Smash a brand new soon-to-be installed toilet against his front door and, after shattering it hurl porcelain chunks at the door and then rip electrical wires out of the meter box and smash the plastic piping ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:42 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
The Rev. Zachery Tims, Jr., who founded a ministry of 8,000 Floridians and became well-known due to frequent television appearances, found dead in a Manhattan hotel room at age 42 with what appeared to have been illegal drugs (“a white powdery substance”) in his pocket. He chronicled his teenage drug addiction in a 2006 memoir after, according to Rev. Randolph Bracy, catapulting “a church that started in a hotel room [10 years earlier] into a megachurch.” In 2009 after admitting to an extramarital affair he and his wife of 15 years divorced. It was “unclear” what brought Mr. Tims to Manhattan a week earlier. Inexplicable goings-on when associated with recovering addicts almost always suggests relapse, as ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:40 pm ·
Filed under 2 - Movie & Book Reviews
Ten Years After 9-11: Sadly, Hardly Anyone has Connected the Dots Linking Terrorism to Substance Addiction
Ten years ago, my wife and I were about to fly from Cusco to Lima, Peru on an early morning flight after an extraordinary stay at the fabulous El Monasterio Hotel before and after visiting the amazing ruins of Machu Picchu. It was the final leg of our three-week visit to South America, where we skied Portillo, Chile and Bariloche, Argentina, stayed at the International Hotel in Santiago, Chile (and fell in love with the country) and did the fabulous Andean “Lake Crossing” from Bariloche to Puerto Montt, Chile. We were due in Lima late morning, where we were to catch a 1a.m. flight ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:37 pm ·
Filed under 3 - Dear Doug...
Needy Sister
Dear Doug:
My 48-year-old sister is divorced and broke. She blew through an inheritance years ago. She’s been fired from several jobs, lost her home to foreclosure and is now continuously facing eviction. She’s a defendant in a lawsuit which, if she loses, could result in significant time behind bars.
She is always begging for money for food and dog food (she’s a breeder and says her dogs are her “life’s work”). She makes me feel guilty and has threatened suicide if I don’t help her. Our other sister cut her off after giving her more than $10,000 on top of the $12,000 or so I have given her over the years. I always seem to cave and have promised my ...
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January 18, 2012 at 12:35 pm ·
Filed under 4 - Alcoholic Myth of the Month
“Deputies don’t make stuff up, the hope is, and we contend they did not fabricate anything."
So said Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore in defending Deputies Samuel Orozco and Scott Giles, who claimed a couple, Erick Hosey and his girlfriend Shatwan Smith, resisted arrest and had rock cocaine in their car. Orozco’s past on-duty behaviors were scrutinized during a subsequent trial in which L.A. County was ordered to pay $650,000 in restitution to the couple for “ruining their lives.” Witnesses told of run-ins with Orozco, including one in which he used the N-word against a local resident and another who said she’d been roughed up and subsequently acquitted after being booked for an unnamed offense. Sorry, Mr. Whitmore, but alcoholics not only ...
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