Hillary's Cheese Slid Off Her Cracker

Just as Obama's early life and Islam connections were not properly vetted by the democrats and the media. Hillary's bizarre behavior is just one aspect of her personal/professional life that the media is covering up.

If the Secret Service sees this aberrant mental behavior they must know she is unfit to fulfill the duties and obligations of the Office of the President. If they keep silent about her condition they are endangering the country and violating their oath to defend the Constitution that every federal officer must take. They are abetting a criminal action and should be prosecuted.

Do We Treat PTSD By Healing America?

Journalist Sebastian Junger has an extremely interesting view on PTSD and how we might address it.

He posits that the armed forces of many other nations have a very low rate of PTSD among their combat troops as opposed to ours (i.e., US armed forces, 50% claim PTSD, whereas in Israel it is only 1% - the Kurds don't have any).

Junger claims that their societies are more supportive than American culture and that our troops would normally recover completely within a few weeks or months if it were not for the screwed social mores of America that tend to isolate from each other.

Video and supporting article here. It's really worth a read.

Now, Junger, who announced his retirement from war reporting soon after Hetherington was killed in Misrata, Libya, during the civil war, is shifting his attention to the home front. His latest book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” which hit shelves on May 24, takes a hard look at the difficulties veterans face as they transition back into civilian life. Front and center is the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Junger believes is overdiagnosed, and, in cases where it’s misdiagnosed, damaging to long-term psychological health. The veteran struggle, he theorizes, has more to do with the nature of American society than it does combat itself.

[...]The irony is that 10% of the U.S. military experiences combat. Something like 50% of the military has applied for PTSD disability. So what’s going on with that 40%? Now, I’m not prepared to be as cynical about that 40% as some people might be. I think an awful lot of those people are honestly describing something that is actually a transition disorder. It isn’t PTSD, but the only vocabulary we have right now is PTSD, so they call it PTSD. And a lot of these people are honest people, and I think they’re probably quite insecure about the fact that they know they were never traumatized, and, yeah, PTSD is the only category that they have available to describe what they’re truly feeling. What they’re truly feeling is this tremendous depression that comes from going from a close-knit communal life to the alienated life of modern society.

You can see the same effect in Peace Corps volunteers. There’s an incredibly high rate of depression among Peace Corps volunteers when they come home. They’re in Guinea, they’re in Sierra Leone, they’re in all these fucked up places. You’d think when they’d get home it’d be this big party. It’s not at all. About half of them struggle with depression afterwards. They don’t call it PTSD because they’re not vets. In their mind, they weren’t traumatized. What they’re really experiencing is the trauma of transitioning from a close-knit life in a village or a platoon to everyone’s living in their own apartment in New York City and contemplating hanging themselves in their closet.

That’s the irony of modern society: As wealth and affluence goes up, independence goes up and so does suicide, and so does depression, and so does all this other stuff.

RIP Robin Williams

What a terrible shame. Robin Williams took his own life. Never saw it coming and I wonder why those close to him didn't either. Failing financially and emotionally the poor soul saw no other way out. I wonder how long it took for him to reach that decision and then do it without his wife or somebody intervening. Could he be that good an actor?

IMHO suicide is a helluva lousy way to self medicate.

NYC Subways - Not So Fresh

I can sympathize with NYPD cops. When the judges and politicians get on your ass, back off and CYA. Nothing on your pay stub says you must get sued to cash a check. The NYPD is reacting to the decision of the lame federal judge who severely restricted their stop and frisk operations. If the cops violate that order, they can be arrested and sued civilly in federal court.

From the NY Post:

It’s an express train — to the bad old days.

Cops are giving homeless people and panhandlers in the subways the kid-glove treatment, arresting subterranean scofflaws far less frequently than just two years ago, data show.

The ranks of the homeless, meanwhile, have swelled to 1,841 this year — a 13 percent increase over last year’s tally, the city’s Department of Homeless Services says.

For straphangers, it has created an atmosphere of fear.

“I feel threatened, especially taking the train at night,” explained Brooklynite Lortashia Smith, who said she has been followed off trains several times. “The police can definitely do more.”

Now this instance is an enforcement activity that is definitely affected by that loon judge. Someone is following you? A cop would do a stop and frisk.

The NYPD said panhandler/peddler arrests in the subway have increased over the past year, with 409 pinched so far in 2013 versus 395 in 2012. But those numbers pale in comparison to 2011, when it was reported that in a six-month span that year, a whopping 930 panhandlers and peddlers — the two are not separated in the data — were arrested.

“There’s been a drop-off,” acknowledged one police source.

The stop and frisk ruling is perhaps tangential to the panhandling enforcement, but it is a similar activity where the officer has to confront someone. These two issues may or may not be related, but there is little doubt in my mind that they are.

Even panhandlers are scared.

“There’s more people down here,” noted Sarah Colon, who said she has been homeless ever since Hurricane Sandy. “The city’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing. They need to make the shelters better than what they are now.”

Things could get a lot worse.

“I believe this can turn into ‘Mad Max’ down here,” said Maurice Solomon of The Bronx. “It’s a safe haven — it’s warm for them, and people give them food.”

Here's a Colorado EDP that shot 70 people, killing 12.

You also have to take into consideration the relaxation of mental health laws back in the seventies when mentally/emotionally disturbed persons (EDP) were mainstreamed back into society. It is estimated that EDP's kill perhaps a thousand or more people a year.

When looking at the rates of violent crime overall — homicide, for instance — the best estimate is that 5% to 10% of murders are committed by people with mental illness. But a far larger proportion of mass homicides, including the brutal July 2011 attacks in Norway, the Tucson, Ariz., shooting that wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, involve perpetrators with mental illness. The proportion far outstrips the rates of mental illness in the population.

Last year over 24,000 people were murdered in the US. The 5-10% range specified in the article above indicates that from 1,200 to 2,400 of these victims were killed by EDP's.

Unfortunately the only way to check the veracity of this is to see what happens to the homicide rate in NYC over the next few years. It may be a good idea to stop taking the subway.