NEWS OF THE WORLD - Current Events (May Be Disturbing, No Politics Please)

[Halloween Jeff]

Problem is, will there ever be enough answers?  Was listening to a former profiler from the FBI talking about the case, and he said there will always be a little dark corner of the mind that we will never know......

I'm already overwhelmed by news online and on CNN.....I just can't watch anymore...

Bizarro Jeff

[Paladin]

I can't watch any more.
One of the local reporters couldn't continue with the story and the station cut to the studio.

[Fester]

This is just the tip of the iceberg.
The following stories have popped up on the internet in the last 24 hours or so.


2 dead after shooting at Las Vegas Strip hotel
http://news.yahoo.com/2-dead-shooting-las-vegas-strip-hotel-091315706--finance.html

Gunman Opens Fire in Alabama Hospital
http://news.yahoo.com/gunman-opens-fire-alabama-hospital-181915757.html


Death threat prompts police response to Newtown church on Sunday
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/newtown-church-evacuated-due-unspecified-threat-during-noon-182416799.html

Ind. man with 47 guns arrested after school threat
http://news.yahoo.com/ind-man-47-guns-arrested-school-threat-164928349.html

137 police shots, 2 dead: Many questions in Ohio
http://news.yahoo.com/137-police-shots-2-dead-many-questions-ohio-163330872.html

Gunman fires shots outside California mall, no one hit
http://news.yahoo.com/gunman-fires-shots-outside-california-mall-no-one-061055510.html

Man with assault rifle shot dead by police after Alabama triple murder
http://news.yahoo.com/man-assault-rifle-shot-dead-police-alabama-triple-193516652.html

[Dr. Madd]

Thus my reasoning for believing these attacks are coming from one source.

[Fester]

Sure hope he had a good time . . .


Man ordered to pay $28,000 strip club tab

NEW YORK, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- A New York court ordered a man to pay the $28,109.60 tab he accumulated in a single night at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club.

William Ilg had filed a lawsuit against the strip club, alleging he was being fraudulently charged because the number of drinks he was served left him "no longer capable of conducting financial transactions," the New York Daily News reported Thursday.

However, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Manuel Mendez tossed out the lawsuit, which was filed in 2011, and ordered him to pay the full amount.

"There is no duty upon [Hustler Club] to protect plaintiff from the results of his [voluntary] intoxication," Mendez wrote.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/12/13/Man-ordered-to-pay-28000-strip-club-tab/UPI-23591355436502/#ixzz2FHIXHRLV

[Paladin]

That's a healthy tab, Fester

phewww

[Fester]

For some reason, the killings at Sandy Hook brought to mind this movie review by Roger Ebert several years back.  The section I highlighted seems especially pertinent today.

Elephant

BY ROGER EBERT / November 7, 2003

Cast & Credits
Alex: Alex Frost
Eric: Eric Deulen
John McFarland: John Robinson
Elias: Elias McConnell
Jordan: Jordan Taylor
Carrie: Carrie Finklea
Nicole: Nicole George
Brittany: Brittany Mountain
Acadia:   Alicia Miles
Michelle:   Kristen Hicks
Benny:   Bennie Dixon
Nathan:   Nathan Tyson
Mr. McFarland:   Timothy Bottoms
Mr. Luce:   Matt Malloy


Fine Line Features presents a film written and directed by Gus Van Sant. Running time: 81 minutes. Rated R (for disturbing violent content, language, brief sexuality and drug use -- all involving teens). Opening today Pipers Alley and Evanston CineArts.

Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" is a record of a day at a high school like Columbine, on the day of a massacre much like the one that left 13 dead. It offers no explanation for the tragedy, no insights into the psyches of the killers, no theories about teenagers or society or guns or psychopathic behavior. It simply looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses to supply reasons and assign cures, so that we can close the case and move on.

Van Sant seems to believe there are no reasons for Columbine and no remedies to prevent senseless violence from happening again. Many viewers will leave this film as unsatisfied and angry as Variety's Todd McCarthy, who wrote after it won the Golden Palm at Cannes 2003 that it was "pointless at best and irresponsible at worst." I think its responsibility comes precisely in its refusal to provide a point.

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Van Sant's "Elephant" is a violent movie in the sense that many innocent people are shot dead. But it isn't violent in the way it presents those deaths. There is no pumped-up style, no lingering, no release, no climax. Just implacable, poker-faced, flat, uninflected death. Truffaut said it was hard to make an anti-war film because war was exciting even if you were against it. Van Sant has made an anti-violence film by draining violence of energy, purpose, glamor, reward and social context. It just happens. I doubt that "Elephant" will ever inspire anyone to copy what they see on the screen. Much more than the insipid message movies shown in social studies classes, it might inspire useful discussion and soul-searching among high school students.

Van Sant simply follows a number of students and teachers as they arrive at the school and go about their daily routines. Some of them intersect with the killers, and many of those die. Others escape for no particular reason. The movie is told mostly in long tracking shots; by avoiding cuts between closeups and medium shots, Van Sant also avoids the film grammar that goes along with such cuts, and so his visual strategy doesn't load the dice or try to tell us anything. It simply watches.

At one point he follows a tall, confident African-American student in a very long tracking shot as he walks into the school and down the corridors, and all of our experience as filmgoers leads us to believe this action will have definitive consequences; the kid embodies all those movie heroes who walk into hostage situations and talk the bad guy out of his gun. But it doesn't happen like that, and Van Sant sidesteps all the conventional modes of movie behavior and simply shows us sad, sudden death without purpose.


"I want the audience to make its own observations and draw its own conclusions," Van Sant told me at Cannes. "Who knows why those boys acted as they did?" He is honest enough to admit that he does not. Of course a movie about a tragedy that does not explain the tragedy -- that provides no personal of social "reasons" and offers no "solutions" -- is almost against the law in the American entertainment industry. When it comes to tragedy, Hollywood is in the catharsis business.

Van Sant would have found it difficult to find financing for any version of this story (Columbine isn't "commercial"), but to tell it on a small budget, without stars or a formula screenplay, is unthinkable. He found the freedom to make the film, he said, because of the success of his "Good Will Hunting," which gave him financial independence: "I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience."

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20031107/reviews/311070301/1023

[Haunted hearse]

If "Gun Free Zones" are such a good idea for schools, like the one in CT, thenj I think it's high time that we made the Senate and the White House Gun free zones.

[Fester]

If "Gun Free Zones" are such a good idea for schools, like the one in CT, thenj I think it's high time that we made the Senate and the White House Gun free zones.

They already are.  Go ahead and try to enter the White House carrying a weapon and see how far you get.

The House and the Senate each employ a man called the Sargent At Arms whose job is to serve as doorman and chief of security.
The office goes back to 1789 when the first sessions of the modern Congress were held.   The Sargent At Arms was tasked with keeping order in their respective chambers. This included confiscating weapons from members of Congress and visitors and keeping Congressmen and Senators in the chambers to ensure a quorum is maintained.  He is also empowered to compel the attendance of an absent Senator when ordered to by the Senate. With the Architect of the Capitol and the House Sergeant at Arms, he serves on the Capitol Police Board, responsible for security around the building. The Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate can, upon orders of the Senate, arrest any person who violates Senate rules.

Terrance Gainer the 38th and current Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate and has served in this appointment since January 4, 2007. Before Gainer continued his law enforcement career in Washington, D.C., he was the Republican candidate for Cook County State's Attorney in 1988. During his law enforcement career, Gainer served with the Chicago Police Department; director of the Illinois State Police; Executive Assistant Police Chief; second in command of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia; Chief of the United States Capitol Police.

Paul D. Irving,  the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Prior to this, Mr. Irving was an Assistant Director of the U.S. Secret Service from 2001 to 2008, serving as a Special Agent with the Secret Service for 25 years.

[CreepysFan]

Thus my reasoning for believing these attacks are coming from one source.

Just as I've said before.  An increase in shootings over the last few months, covered by the media, just after the gun control proposal came up earlier this year.  Coast to Coast predicted just this increase would happen to sway public oppinion.

[Haunted hearse]

They already are.  Go ahead and try to enter the White House carrying a weapon and see how far you get.

The House and the Senate each employ a man called the Sargent At Arms whose job is to serve as doorman and chief of security.
The office goes back to 1789 when the first sessions of the modern Congress were held.   The Sargent At Arms was tasked with keeping order in their respective chambers. This included confiscating weapons from members of Congress and visitors and keeping Congressmen and Senators in the chambers to ensure a quorum is maintained.  He is also empowered to compel the attendance of an absent Senator when ordered to by the Senate. With the Architect of the Capitol and the House Sergeant at Arms, he serves on the Capitol Police Board, responsible for security around the building. The Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate can, upon orders of the Senate, arrest any person who violates Senate rules.

Terrance Gainer the 38th and current Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate and has served in this appointment since January 4, 2007. Before Gainer continued his law enforcement career in Washington, D.C., he was the Republican candidate for Cook County State's Attorney in 1988. During his law enforcement career, Gainer served with the Chicago Police Department; director of the Illinois State Police; Executive Assistant Police Chief; second in command of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia; Chief of the United States Capitol Police.

Paul D. Irving,  the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Prior to this, Mr. Irving was an Assistant Director of the U.S. Secret Service from 2001 to 2008, serving as a Special Agent with the Secret Service for 25 years.

The fact that they have armed guards, means they are not gun free zones. There was none of that armed security at any of the places where massacres have occured.  In CT, the shooter took his own life, when he heard sirens, and knew he'd be confronting armed resistance to his acts.

[Fester]

The fact that they have armed guards, means they are not gun free zones. There was none of that armed security at any of the places where massacres have occured.  In CT, the shooter took his own life, when he heard sirens, and knew he'd be confronting armed resistance to his acts.

Are you seriously arguing that the President and Congress not be protected from criminal, terrorist, or enemy attack?  Sure the White House and both houses of Congress are gun free zones, just as much as any public school in the country. 

One of the main jobs of the Sargent At Arms has been to keep the Congressmen from carrying weapons into the chambers to use on each other. A fairly common occurrence In Ante-Bellum Washington. Of course, that did not stop one Congressman from beating a Senator nearly to death, over an insult.http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm
And gun free zones (or as we have here in Spokanistan weapons free zones) do not include disarming qualified law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties. To suggest so would be rediculous.

And there have been armed guards at places where shootings have occurred. Have you forgotten Columbine High School?
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/columbine.cd/Pages/DEPUTIES_TEXT.htm

And for a foreign perspective from a place that has plenty of experience with trying to maintain security, check this link out:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/nra-breaks-its-silence-on-newtown-shooting-by-calling-for-armed-guards-at-public-schools/

This issue can too easily slip into a political argument, so I will not be commenting any further.  It is interesting, however, to note in the Times of Israel piece that you can find the argument over whether to arm school guards crosses party lines. 

[Haunted hearse]

Allowing Teachers to carry concealed weapons would not be that big a burden on the taxpayer, and might even save lives.  Preventing law abiding citizens from protecting themselves, will never stop the lawbreakers (as was clearly the case in CT) from bringing guns to gun free zones.  Like CT, Columbine had the shooters taking their own lives, when confronting armed resistance after having shot several people even with armed guards.  Meanwhile, while waiting for the police to arrive, there is plenty of time for the killers to take out victims.  This is also the case of Fort Hood, where several people were shot and killed, because US Soldiers, who are trusted to carry arms for their country, are not trusted to have them on a military instillation. And Military instllations do have armed guards.

[Paladin]

I have a problem believing that any teacher would carry a holstered weapon in his/ her classroom.

[Haunted hearse]

I have a problem believing that any teacher would carry a holstered weapon in his/ her classroom.

Actually several do, but often in violation of the law.  The idea it's better to face legalities of protecting one's own life, then being mourned.  Isreal certainly has no problem allowing their teachers involved with Concealed carry.  Frankly, if a teacher has such mental issues, or a criminal background, they aren't allowed or can't be trusted with a firearm, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to teach children.  By the way, the website where our President's children go to school is very clear about having armed guards, so I don't believe we'll be hearing about anything like CT going on at the school where our nation's elite send their children.