Cults are Usually Led by Addicts and are Capable of Great Atrocities. This Includes ISIS.
The more precise the generally recognized meaning of a word, the more useful it is. The physical sciences have done well in providing such meaning to words, while most social sciences have lagged far behind. When everyone ascribes different meanings to words, rational discourse is impossible and social progress is difficult.
“Cult” is one of those ill-defined words. The most useful part of the common definition is “excessive devotion directed at a particular figure or object.” I suggest that since the devotion to those figures is quasi-religious, such excess includes that directed at ideas. I would add that cult leaders are so venerated their minions are willing ...
Great athletes: Michael Phelps, alcoholic.
Runner-up for top story of the month:
From swimming in the Olympics to swimming in booze, the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps, 29, arrested on charges of driving under the influence at excessive speed (84 mph in a 45 mph zone). This comes a decade after he was first arrested for DUI. “I recognize the seriousness of this mistake,” Phelps said at the time. “I’ve learned from this mistake….” This recent incident proves that, unfortunately, he hasn’t and he can’t. A second DUI increases the odds of alcoholism to near-certain; he will need to deflate his ego to get sober, which is not something that can be learned. In the meantime, the Michael Phelps Foundation focuses on growing ...
Alcoholism could explain Michael Brown’s mother, Kaci Hickox and World War 1.
Michael Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden, allegedly involved in a violent brawl with her dead son’s grandmother, Pearlie Gordon and cousin Tony Petty, over the sale of Michael Brown merchandise near where Brown was shot and killed on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. McSpadden is reported to have yelled at Gordon and Petty, “You can’t sell this s%$&!” to which one of the relatives responded (paraphrasing), “Prove that you own the patent!” Someone with McSpadden then hit Petty in the face with a metal pipe or pole. Violence is nearly always associated with alcohol or other-drug addiction. However, as I’ve learned in the case of married couples with serious marital problems, I can only say that someone is an addict—I ...
Codependents can be crazy. If she runs over her drunk husband, she might instead by alcoholic.
Codependent of the month:
Angela Reynolds, 40, arrested on charges of first degree domestic violence after hitting her husband, John Reynolds, 44, and then running him over with her car “several times.” According to a police department investigator, “She was upset with him for being intoxicated.” A neighbor added, “They were always having domestic disputes.” Where there’s domestic violence, there’s usually an addict; which one is hard to know. I have identified a spouse as an alcoholic seven times only to discover I pegged the wrong one (I finally gave up trying). We can be pretty certain of the husband, but can’t really be sure about the wife. If she’s not an addict, his behaviors may have made her act like ...
Sylvia Plath: another writer, another addict.
Alcoholic retrospective of the month:
“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” So wrote poet Sylvia Plath in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. I suggest she understood an alcoholic’s brain because she was afflicted with the disease herself. I stumbled on to Plath on a list of “other artists” who, according to Maria Puente writing for USA Today, followed the same tragic path as did Robin Williams. Her list “includes painters, poets, writers, musicians and designers: Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, Alexander McQueen to name just ...
From happy meals to budding young (13-year-old) addicts.
Alcoholic side dish of the month:
Allen Trammell, 29, arrested for selling crack cocaine in a McDonald’s parking lot in Radnor Township, Philadelphia, PA; he was between food preparation shifts. Radnor police Lt. Andy Block quipped it gives “a new definition of what may be considered a Happy Meal.” Except for the victims of the addicts who purchased those drugs.
Alcoholic scam of the month:
Eric McLean Slighton, 53, arrested on suspicion of public drunkenness after allegedly posing as an airport security screener for the Transportation Security Administration at San Francisco International Airport. Slighton, an apparent partner with a private equity firm in Singapore and, before that, managing director of Barclays Capital in Hong Kong and Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, steered ...
Amanda Bynes: train wreck in action, and journalists misdiagnose.
Grown-up child alkie of the month:
Former child star Amanda Bynes, 28, getting her second DUI and, again, put under the conservatorship of her mother. In the space of two years, she’s made a mess of her life. Two years ago, she sideswiped a police car and was charged with DUI; separately, she was charged with two hit and run incidents. In another incident, a DUI charge was dropped only because she pled out to reckless driving; after that, she was cited for driving with a suspended license. Off the road, she was arrested for criminal possession of marijuana, tampering with evidence and reckless endangerment for throwing a bong out the window of her 36th floor Manhattan apartment (she claimed it ...
Lies, DUIs; airline passengers and a good-cop/bad-cop in one.
Alcoholic passengers of the month:
Two women, Lilia Ratmanski, 25, and Milana Muzikante, 26, who went to the lavatory and consumed a “significant quantity of their duty-free alcohol purchase,” lit a cigarette, got into a physical altercation with each other and made a “threat against the aircraft” on a Sunwing flight from Toronto to Cuba. NORAD scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to escort the flight back to Toronto. Assuming the women won’t be able to shoulder the cost of fuel, salaries and inconvenience to Sunwing, NORAD and the passengers, the costs alcoholics impose on the rest of us are incredible.
Alcoholic hero-villain of the month:
NYPD Officer Eugene Donnelly, 27, pleading innocent to having allegedly battered a 30-year-old woman after going out ...
Criminals and law enforcers, including a judge and some amazing chutzpah.
Alcoholic blackout of the month:
Daniel Suba, 36, waking up to find a neighbor’s televisions, electronics and jewelry in his apartment but no recollection of how it got there. He remembers drinking and pill-popping the night before. He’ll also remember—hopefully for the rest of his life—charges of grand theft and burglary, and perhaps connect the dots between the “night before” and the jail in which he will hopefully spend a few months.
Alcoholic law enforcement malfeasance of the month:
Aaron S. Jansen, 29, clocking in at 90 mph on Interstate 70, igniting a police pursuit. After evading spikes, Jansen drove into a soybean field, where he drove in circles for 40 minutes as law enforcers set up a perimeter, blocking all exits. ...
A doctor gets sober despite the medical board’s misdiagnosis.
Alcoholic medical analysis of the month:
The Medical Board of California explaining that Jason Lane, M.D. showed up at work with a .39 percent blood alcohol level, because he was “self-medicating” to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. The board overlooked the fact that Lane’s obviously alcoholic bio-chemistry allows him to drink to a point where non-addicts would be comatose and possibly dead. Alcoholics “self-medicate” because they can; PTSD coincides with heavy drinking because the afflicted can drink heavily. Therefore, Lane showed up at work with a .39 percent BAL because he’s an alcoholic.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if he was given a chance to clean up his act and be regularly and randomly tested prior to his likely ruining countless ...
Relatives can be addicts, to the detriment of everyone around them. Moms and dads, uncles and granddads.
What follows is a slew of alcoholic “relatives of the month,” showing that family has nothing to do with the prevention of alcoholism and alcoholic misbehaviors.
Alcoholic dads of the month:
Mark Allen Hughes, 35, catching his 15-year-old son drinking alcohol and deciding to teach him a lesson: he gave his son multiple shots of vodka. The learning experience landed the son in the hospital, on a ventilator. Hughes has been charged with aggravated child abuse. Regular readers wouldn’t be shocked to learn that Hughes has a record of arrests on charges such as DUI, public intoxication and evading arrest. However, even you might be shocked that he has had 18 such arrests; he’s simply teaching what he knows best.
Charles James, 36, ...
Most turncoats are alcoholics. John Anthony Walker, like Robert Hanssen (see the movie “Breach”), was likely no exception.
John Anthony Walker, Soviet spy, dead in federal prison at age 77 of causes related to diabetes and throat cancer. Walker specialized in communications during his time as a United States Navy Chief Warrant Officer; this expertise allowed him to create a spy ring that deciphered more than one million encrypted American messages, likely resulting in more damage to the U.S. military than any spy ring in history. Even more shocking was that close family and a friend made up the spy ring: his son Michael, his older brother Arthur and best friend, Jerry Whitworth. This spying allowed the Soviets to track every U.S. submarine 24/7, which then U. S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, admitted would have resulted ...
Narrow the scope of the war on drugs: decriminalize and focus on addicts.
The Case for Drug Decriminalization
I’ve long been a proponent of decriminalization of all drugs. To an addict, a psychotropic drug is a psychotropic drug; addicts can nearly always fall back on any available substitute. Make one drug illegal and either the addict will find a way to get his hands on it, or find another drug. When the U.S. tried prohibition of the drug alcohol in the early 20th century, the results included monstrous black markets, corrupt cops and no reduction in use by addicts. Current prohibitions do the same, and as before it allows really bad people—nearly always alcohol and other-drug addicts—to become obscenely wealthy; illegality results in immense mark-ups. Worse, due to civil forfeiture laws that didn’t exist ...
Don’t let your drunk mother see her grandchild.
Sloshed mom
Dear Doug:
My husband and I are both well-educated, own a home and are ready to start a family. My mom is less than enthused, however. We were out enjoying some drinks with my folks when mom, who seems to have been a bit sloshed, told me she wished my older brother and his wife would have a child first, “No offense intended.” They’ve been trying for years and, due to the cost of fertility clinics, have decided to stop trying until my sister-in-law earns her degree.
I’m obsessing over my mom’s comment and fear discussing it, because she may not remember she said it. I think we’ll make great parents; I only wish my mom was on board with us.
Signed,
Ready ...
Without understanding alcoholism, one cannot understand Beethoven. This includes nearly all of his biographers.
“Beethoven is one of those historical figures so famous that everything worth knowing about him has been known for a long time.”
So writes Edmund Morris in a review of Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in The Wall Street Journal (“The Mystery of Creativity: The madder Beethoven got, the more lucid his musical intelligence became,” August 2-3, 2014).The trouble with Morris’s observation is, knowing is not understanding.
He says Beethoven was “so unable to relate to other people’s feelings as to suggest a modern-day diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.” (For Myers-Briggs enthusiasts, this suggests he was either INFP or INTP.) “Nor did he ever really understand love….Hence the long list of occasions when Beethoven unfeelingly hurt those who loved him and whom ...