Under Watch: a scientist, a would-be despot and an actor
Under watch:
Actor Wesley Snipes, indicted on charges of tax fraud and failure to file income tax returns since 1999. Statistics in Drunks, Drugs & Debits suggest that 80-90% of convicts, or those who should be, are alcohol or other-drug addicts. I found early in my research that those who went beyond reason in “interpretation”of tax law were usually no different. Who else could think they are more powerful than the U.S. government? Snipes also has recently been embroiled in civil lawsuits, including one brought by United Talent Agency, Inc., for failure to pay nearly $1.5 million in commissions, along with another suit brought by Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp. for failure to make payments on his Florida mansion. The combination of troubles gives sound reason to think Snipes has a disease that causes confabulated thinking”alcoholism. As a result, Snipes, who could face 16 years, may soon join tax-evading alcoholic Richard Hatch of “Survivor”fame in the pokey.
Ecuadorian Rafael Correa, a 43-year-old with a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois, who has pledged to raze the political system in Ecuador and rebuild it to ensure his long-term agenda. Sounding eerily like Hugo Chavez, who has become de facto dictator of Venezuela, Correa is charismatic and ambitious enough to have come from nowhere to force a runoff in the Ecuadorian presidential election November 26. After Chavez’ rant before the United Nations in which he called Bush the devil, Correa said that Satan should be insulted. Note that Chavez has militarized the Venezuelan government, centralized all power, run the private sector into the ground and, judging from his friendship with Fidel Castro, yearns to make Venezuelans as successful as Cubans. Just who is the devil here?
Mrs. Stephen Hawking, Elaine, from whom the wheelchair-bound Professor Hawking, 62, is finally seeking divorce. Hawking, who is perhaps the most well-known long-term survivor of Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), publicly denies that he has been the tragic victim of abuse. However, a number of his former nurses, all of whom have left his employ because of Elaine’s abusive behaviors, have no doubt that various injuries over the years, which Hawking refuses to explain, were inflicted by his soon-to-be ex. The injuries and indignities, which represent a lexicon of extraordinarily mean-spirited behaviors designed to control and manipulate, are indications of alcohol or pharmaceutical drug addiction. They include slamming Hawking’s wrist on his wheelchair, fracturing it; refusing access to a urine bottle, resulting in his wetting himself; allowing him to slip beneath water while bathing, letting water enter his tracheotomy; and leaving him alone in his garden on the hottest day of the year, resulting in heatstroke and severe sunburn. According to a family friend, after marrying in 1995, Elaine, herself a nurse, began letting go the nurses caring for her husband, replacing them with care-givers. The friend explained that Elaine didn’t “want to be on the same level as those who looked after her husband. It was very important to her that she was superior to them,”which she could show by employing less qualified staff.
The fact that Hawking was complicit is evident from the story of a former employee, who asked the wheelchair-bound Hawking how he got a black eye. He replied, “I bumped into a door.”The reason he stayed so long is, paradoxically, similar to that of young wives of alcoholic men who have few skills, a baby and nowhere to go: any relationship, he told a former employee, is better than none. In addition, one friend says, “For a man like Prof. Hawking to admit that he made a big, big mistake [in marrying Elaine] would be the ultimate humiliation.”Memo to Prof. Hawking: practicing addicts can be cunning, charming and charismatic. You are an exceedingly rational person and were never given the tools to understand irrationality. Therefore, you had no chance to avoid such an error. Congratulations on your decision, Prof. Hawking. The world supports you.