Affluenza: Ass-Backward Social Conditioning

As a trapped society are we now chewing off our own leg to survive?

THE PATHOLOGY OF WEALTH IS WHERE EXCUSES GO TO DIEAmidst the dumbing down and de-waging of America, are we now also agreeing that if a child is raised in a household where excuses are the norm, this in itself is insurance from liability? Holy crap! Are there no limits to the a-hole ethics and diminished expectations we’ll sign off on?

Whatever your answer, we’re probably still going to be arguing about this five years from now, so get used to the term “affluenza.”

Welcome to Where Excuses Go to Die’s 2013 Excuse of the Year.

After killing four people, Ethan Couch  –a lethally spoiled  16-year-old drunk driver–  got off  essentially scot-free: not because he’s rich, but because of complications resulting from wealth. What complications? Well, for starters, mom and dad never taught him right from wrong.  Also, being raised in a monstrously overprivileged environment provided freedoms that Ethan’s child brain was incapable of processing. Unsupervised access to disposable income and empty luxury homes didn’t help, as they conditioned Ethan to remain separate from his peers, i.e. immune to the lessons learned in moral training grounds teenagers tend to create for themselves. The kicker, far as I see it, is that, as a child, Ethan learned if you hurt someone you sent them money. Read more

LA County Sheriff’s Christmas Special

Top 10 reasons you’re glad these

losers are being made examples of

County Sheriff’s Christmas Special_Where Excuses Go to Die

“There’s no perfect law enforcement agency anywhere in the world, let alone the United States.”
– Sheriff Lee Baca on the FBI indictment of 18 LA Sheriff’s Deputies
(A ceremonial dagger of an excuse for poor leadership if there ever was one.)
Read more

Cops and Cathedrals – Part I

For me, really embracing Detroit means being a wreckage dork first

Downtown Detroit Lives_©Where Excuses Go to DieI’m in Detroit this week and have assorted free days to leave the safe confines of my host’s Grosse Pointe neighborhood for Mad Max Island, aka downtown.

I’m sitting at a table with coffee now, preparing  for the 21º weather and listening to police scanner feeds covering Wayne County, which itself is like sticking my hand into a bucket of ice water before it’s poured over my head.

Off Waverly Street, a policewoman reports, a fight between two women has just ended with one holding the other’s hand in a car door and breaking it. A suicidal man is offering to kill himself, but through police observations from across the street, he has a severely autistic adult in tow who is resolutely unwilling to step away.

“Daughter is threatening mother with a gun over a check” crackles over the air, followed by an officer in another location answering a call involving “a group of people” attempting to “force their way into a home” where workers are inside. Aside from that literal siege, a mile away, an actual home invasion is announced as being “in progress.” Read more