The Lasso of Truth

I am speechless

This is truly one of the most tragic stories I have ever heard...

A "baby-faced" 12-year-old in Florida may spend the rest of his life in jail for the murder of his 2-year-old half brother.

Cristian Fernandez allegedly killed the toddler in March. Last week, the boy was indicted by a grand jury for first-degree murder, the first time someone so young has faced such a serious charge in Jacksonville.

If convicted, he would be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

[..]

The 2-year-old, David Galarriago, was hospitalized on March 14 after being "physically battered" by his older sibling, according to a police report.

The child suffered "a skull fracture, subdural hemorrhage, subdural hematoma, bruising on the left eye, and bruising on the bridge of his nose."

While the toddler was in the hospital, police said Fernandez confessed to beating him. He also allegedly admitted to having broken his younger brother's leg in January.

Two days after he was savagely attacked, David died.

[..]

Fernandez's mother was only 12 years old when she gave birth to him, Mason said. The two ended up in foster care together, and his grandmother was a drug addict.

The boy was also the victim of child abuse at the hands of his stepfather, who shot and killed himself in front of the boy last year

But I am still hard-assed enough to hope this boy goes away for the rest of his life, at the very least for the sake of whatever is left of his community.

Where has personal responsibility gone?

Apparently, getting sauced is a perfectly acceptable excuse to get away with any number of crimes these days...

A judge has reopened a major legal controversy by ruling that accused people can claim they were too drunk to be found culpable of committing crimes.

Presiding over a sexual assault case in Southwestern Ontario, Mr. Justice Terrence Patterson of the Superior Court of Ontario ruled that Parliament violated the Charter of Rights with a 1995 law that prohibits the so-called defence of excessive intoxication.

The ruling opened the door for Carl Frederick Fleming, 62, to argue that he was too drunk to appreciate his actions when he sexually assaulted a St. Thomas, Ont., woman in 2009.

Even worse though, will be the predictable caterwauling we will hear from the hypocrites on the slut-walk side of the spectrum, arguing that a drunk man who sexually assaults someone should be held responsible for his actions, but a drunk woman who dresses like a hooker and wanders into the woods with a perfect stranger should not be.

Two legs good, three legs bad?

On ‘violence’ in the UK

And the "principled" smashing of windows...

The term criminal damage is harder to diminish and smashing windows with bricks in a non-violent manner is not an easy thing to do, at least not on the streets of central London. Needless to say, it takes a fair amount of effort to heave larger, heavier objects through someone else’s windows. Just as it takes a certain disposition not to care particularly about where, or on whom, those objects may land along with shards of flying glass. And perhaps we should assume that Laurie has no objection to her belongings being destroyed by those who disagree with her, provided they feel sufficiently righteous and entitled.

Just a pillar of the community

Living up to everything his community values, and dying with a bullet in his face...

Clifenton Ford died around 2:25 a.m. at G’s Chill & Grill, on Eglinton Ave. E. near Midland Ave.

Family and friends said Ford was the father of 10 children ranging in age from 6 to 17, born to six different mothers.

Ford’s fiancée, Ayisha Spence, 28, refused to leave until his body was taken out of the bar. “We can’t leave him here,” she said, clutching one of Ford’s T-shirts close to her chest because it smelled like him.

Spence is the mother of two of Ford’s children, an 8-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy. She said her fiancé worked as a janitor at a fitness facility and was “finally settling his life.”

“He was a great father,” Spence said. “He was a great son. He was an all-around amazing man.”

"All-around" being the operative term here, apparently.

She showed up at the crime scene when one of the other "baby mamas" called her to tell her the bad news, they were all so very close.  All 6 of them, and their 10 fatherless children.

Clearly, what this community needs is an afri-centric school.

Atta girl!

Is there a special place in hell for brutes who earn their lead from a pink handgun?

I certainly hope so.

My Advice to "Concerned Neighbours"

If just one "yob" gets a gun muzzle to the face, ten other "yobs" will think twice next time.

Just sayin'.

Oh, Canada!

Where 3 masked thugs can firebomb your house in the middle of the night - with you in it - but you are the one facing charges...

The incident began six years of trouble for Mr. Thomson that culminated early one Sunday morning last August when the 53-year-old former mobile-crane operator woke up to the sound of three masked men firebombing his Port Colborne, Ont., home.

“I was horrified,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was happening. I had no idea what was going on.”

So Mr. Thomson, a former firearms instructor, grabbed one of his Smith & Wesson revolvers from his safe, loaded it and headed outside dressed in only his underwear.

“He exited his house and fired his revolver two, maybe three times, we’re not sure. Then these firebombing culprits, they ran off,” said his lawyer, Edward Burlew.

His surveillance cameras caught the attackers lobbing at least six Molotov cocktails at his house and bombing his doghouse, singeing one of his Siberian Huskies. But when Mr. Thomson handed the video footage to Niagara Regional Police, he found himself charged with careless use of a firearm.

The local Crown attorney’s office later laid a charge of pointing a firearm, along with two counts of careless storage of a firearm. The Crown has recommended Mr. Thomson go to jail, his lawyer said.

Cuttin' to the chase

As usual...

Pencils, pens... or even bleeding edge laptop computers... do not write lyrical poetry. Parachutes... even negligently packed... do not smash the life out of innocent, random people. Cars... even rip-snorting 400 horsepower street racers... do not chase down pedestrians like panicked bunnies... and guns... even the dark & dastardly Glock... do not foment murder.

So instead of trying to divert all the attention here to an inanimate object... be it a length of pipe, a snowplow, or yes... even a handgun... perhaps you could explain, how not discussing letting obviously mentally defective people with flagrantly violent ideation carom consequence-free throughout the larger field of folk is some sort of inconsequential side-issue.

Amen brother.

The great equalizer

Proof that there is still common sense to be found in Arizona...

Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers after a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center on Jan. 8.

Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

“We’re at double our volume over what we usually do,”

All due respect to Fun Boy Three

But the lunatics no longer need to take over the asylum.  Most of them never end up seeing the inside of it anyway...

In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.

Brings to mind, the senseless bloody murder of Tim McLean.  And the shockingly bucolic treatment granted to his killer - a man who violently stabbed a total stranger, sawed off his head and shovelled bits and pieces of the body down his gullet during a 4-hour standoff with police.

Rooting around in the sock drawer

Much like my friend Skippy, I don't much care for when a big-news tragedy hits and the hacks start lining up to parse every angle and split every hair.  Case in point, Victor Davis Hanson - who I do honestly like as a rule - starts his recent statement on the political firestorm surrounding the shootings in Tuscon Arizona, with this catchy, yet disingenuous throw-away opener...

Very few Americans are fans of both The Communist Manifestoand Mein Kamp, as the Tucson killer, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, apparently was.

Not to ruin a perfectly inflammatory insinuation, but when you take into account the entire list from which these texts were cherry picked, it seems as though the pundit who decries those trying to score political points for one side of the aisle or t'other has deliberately selected for mention only the books that would fit his chosen narrative and elicit the most favorable agreement from his audience.

Sharing the killer's list of faves with these notable fascist and communist tomes, are such firebrand titles as The Wizard of Oz, To Kill A Mockingbird and We The Living - the last of which is most noted for being the virulently anti-communist screed authored by the notoriously anti-left wing Ayn Rand.

In fact, perusing the whole list gives one no further insight into Jared Loughner than the impression of a muddled, confused and contradictory mind.  This can likely be attributed to the fact that whatever else he may be, Jared Loughner is a crackpot.  Which leads me to wonder why anyone who is still in at least marginal control of their own faculties, would think that any logic, motive or sentiment can be garnered from an examination of the guy's reading habits.

He is insane.  The things he does only make sense to him, and the voices in his head.  Therefore, it makes perfect sense to hold in equally high esteem both Mein Kampf and Peter Pan - but only to him.  Anyone else who professes to see some obscure logic, or who claims to have divined some masterful grasp of the kook's inner psyche from the list of his bathroom reading, is either equally addled with mental illness or is simply taking a few cheap shots in the dark as a way to pander to the base under the guise of the moral high road.

They're books...not tea leaves.

Glenn Reynolds characterizes it as blood libel

For the less refined among us, it looks more like they're smearing their hands in the blood of the dead and making cutesy little finger paintings with it...

A lot has been made of Sarah Palin's now infamous graphic showing which Congressmen her PAC was "targeting" for defeat using cross hairs. Politics uses war imagery -- just as any cause does ("war on cancer" "battle against X" and the "fight against Y"). I just don't see a connection between the cross hairs and shooting Gabrielle Giffords and think you have to be an idiot to make such a connection...

Idiot is a charitable way to put it.  I somehow doubt I'm the only person who considered the possibility that Warren typed his post with only one hand.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if he types every post that way.

A rare thing indeed

The father of a dead black punk who is not afraid to tell the truth about his son's death.

Oh Canada!

Contrast this...

When officers arrived they found Joshua Dexter Watson, 24, of Knoxville dead from multiple wounds administered by a .357-caliber revolver belonging to the homeowners, DeBusk said. . . . Watson has a criminal history that began even before his 18th birthday, records show. He was facing a charge of aggravated robbery in 2004 before he turned 18. After that, Watson racked up dozens of charges, including drug possession, theft, evading arrest, reckless driving and violation of probation for the aggravated robbery conviction, records show.

with this...

Manzer has been charged with possessing a weapon for a purpose dangerous to the public peace after he went out to help a neighbour dealing with three young men who were spotted trespassing in his Burton neighborhood late one night in March.

[..]

Manzer, who took restricted firearms training during his time in the military, said he knows he can't use potentially lethal force to protect property and kept the gun pointed at the ground throughout the brief incident.

"I wasn't out there to take the law into my own hands. I never left my property," said Manzer, who said that between November and March, residents of his small neighbourhood had to contend with break-ins to sheds, thieves rummaging through parked cars and vandalism ranging from damage to Christmas decorations to uprooted fruit trees.

"I yelled at them and said everyone be quiet and I told my wife to call 9-1-1."

He said he watched as his neighbour rounded up three strangers - all of whom looked like adults but turned out to be minors.

With the situation under control, Manzer, shirtless in the minus-13 degree night, went back inside and locked up his gun before hading back out.

He said Mounties arrived on scene 15 minutes later, took the three youths into custody and confiscated a near-empty liquor bottle.

When a Mountie showed up at his door six days later on Good Friday, Manzer assumed they were coming to take a statement.

Instead, he was arrested in front of his wife and kids. Then the Mounties seized his shotgun and hunting rifles.

The neighbour who nabbed the youths was also arrested and told he was being charged with assault.

I know where I'd rather live.

Mommie Dearest

I'm glad to see that a mother who murdered her own children will be seeing the inside of a jail cell for most of the rest of her natural life. 

I am however more than a little disgusted at how many times the news coverage about it mentions the father - who is also a victim - as the "abusive former husband".

She systematically took each child, one at a time, into the bathtub, held their heads under the water until they stopped breathing and then carefully changed their clothes, posed them on her bed and sat down to record a spiteful videotape, practically bragging about it to their father.  But somehow this is still about him being the abusive one?

That's effed up.

Previous.

It begins at home

Perhaps if these mothers spent a little more of their time at home, actually doing things with their children -- as opposed to marching to the front lawn of Queen's Park on a Sunday morning -- their kids might have something better to do with their time, than run around the city shooting each other.

I've got a closet filled with board games, my kitchen has been victim to more than several messy cupcake-making extravaganzas and I have spent countless hours dragging our hoard out on every god-forsaken backwoods trail, mossy cliff, sun-drenched beach and packed amusement park known to man.  I drag them out to dig in the garden with me.  I cajole them into eating dinner all together, as a family, every night they are there.  I rent lame movies with inappropriate humor, and make root bear floats and crappy microwave popcorn and force them to watch and laugh with me -- even the older ones who have become too cool for family movie night.  Tough.  Humor me.

This is how you stop your children from joining gangs or selling drugs out of their locker.  This is how you keep them off a street where they'll run into a character they just shouldn't mess with.  The investment you make, as a parent, is time.  Giving them your time shows them they matter to you, and if they matter to you, they will matter more to themselves.  And kids who have a high regard for themselves, their lives and their family, don't get mixed up with the kind of thugs who will shoot them in the face in the hallway at school.  They just don't.

With very rare exceptions, the kind of kids who get shot in this city, are the ones who know or hang around the dudes who do the shooting -- if they're not the shooters themselves.  And if these punks didn't have guns, they'd resort to car bumpers, baseball bats or just good old fashioned fists, to settle disputes.

These mothers need to face the honest truth of that and re-examine their own priorities, before calling on the government (or anyone else for that matter) to parent their children for them.

Guns

In the still of the night, when you hear the thump of an intruder with unknown intentions, do you really want to rely solely on the speed of the police to respond, or your ability to summon a frightening tone?

As the debate over the gun registry goes around, it's necessary to remember one salient thing: guns solve more problems than they create and in a situation where the bad guy has the advantage, a gun can even the odds for the victim.

I am not a gal who is lacking in personal confidence but as a petite woman, if I were walking down a deserted street at night and had a choice between packing my purse with a cellphone or a handgun, to protect me in an attack, I know which one would give me better odds of being the one left standing.

 

Dalton McGuinty's Ontario

Where Native hooligans can take over and trash an entire housing development for almost 4 years, terrorizing the non-native residents nearby, and all with police protection and impunity from prosecution...

Where Tamil terrorist supporters can take over a major highway in the downtown core, without a single arrest being made...

But a simple resident of Toronto cannot stroll down the street without facing risk of arrest and prosecution.

Crazy or just devoted?

Just try to follow this family tree...

the suspect shot and killed his wife, 19, who was pregnant, and shot five other family members. Three children are among the dead.

Relatives said the deceased victims include the suspect's 7-month-old son, Jahad Larry; the suspect's niece, 3-year-old Keleasha Larry, known by the nickname of "Pooh Pooh;" a woman believed to be the suspect's wife, 19-year-old Tawanda Thompson; and another niece of the suspect, 16-year-old Keyshai Fields.

[..]

Also wounded were Keyshai's brother, Demond Larry, 13, and the suspect's mother, Leona Larry, 57. Demond was in stable condition Wednesday afternoon. Leona was in critical condition and being kept alive on a ventilator.

Keesha Larry, the mother of two of the children – Keyshai Fields and Keleasha Larry – said she feels almost numb. Her son, Demond Larry and her mother, Leona Larry, were also injured.

[..]

The suspect's 12-year-old niece, Lala, was able to escape while shots were being fired.  She ran to a nearby gas station, wearing only a bra and underwear, and told a clerk that her uncle was chasing her and trying to kill her. The clerk immediately called police.  They arrived in minutes.

Police said Lala told them the suspect, her 32-year-old uncle, had come from Wisconsin with his wife and began shooting family members.

Lala's brother, 7-month-old Prayvion, was covered up and also survived and escaped.

It's unclear what sparked the rampage, though court records show the suspect has a lengthy criminal record dating back 15 years. He has spent time in prison on drug charges and, most recently, a battery charge.

He has a criminal record going back 15 years, but his pregnant (for the second time) wife is only 19?!  Why would a man, from a fine stable family such as this, suddenly go on a murderous rampage..?

The suspect's sister, Letisha Larry of Wisconsin, said that, while her brother has no diagnosed mental illness, he started acting strangely recently. She said her brother had been saying Allah was telling him to kill people for the past week.

"He just flipped out. He said the Muslim in some book he always carried around and read said that yeah ... in the book he said he must kill someone, so he killed his family," Letisha Larry said. "He was like just saying little weird little stuff, talking about about he an angel and we demons -- there's demons in the house."

She says while her brother was behind bars in Wisconsin, he had become a Muslim. Sources say he told them he had been hearing voices that told him to kill his family. Sources also say he had planned on killing more people in the house, but had run out of bullets.

The perfect family man.

Intemperate words are the new incest

Alberta man apologizes for stating observed facts that contradict the warm and fuzzy feelings of the do-gooders...

Chris Perry admits it: When he opposed a low-income housing project in his posh Alberta suburb, he could have chosen his words with a little more care.

The St. Albert man apologized for what he says was a poorly worded letter he wrote to the local paper opposing a proposed Habitat for Humanity project, linking it with elevated crime rates and "unruly".

Name one single low-income/subsidized housing complex on the continent that is not dominated by unruly families and crime.  I've lived in many of them and I know it's true.

Of course, admitting as much may force us to re-examine the precepts of our helping hand society and it's coddled welfare horde.

Making the rest of them look bad

And where is Mr. Amnesty, now that we finally have an example of an immigrant who genuinely took the term "rehabilitation" to heart..?

The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

Now Judge Corriero, 67, retired from the bench, is trying to keep his side of the bargain.

It seems to me a few more of these would be a welcome change, in the long line of "humanitarian exceptions".  Which is also why I think it likely he will be deported post haste.

Put the suspect in a military uniform...

And suddenly the Good Canadian Virtue of Mercy^TM goes out the window...

As of late Tuesday, more than 2,000 people had joined the Facebook group “Russell Williams Should Get the Death Penalty.” While the air force colonel and former top commander at CFB Trenton is accused and has not been convicted of any crime, the online community is already comparing him to infamous American serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Not that I object to bringing back the death penalty, for this kind of crime, if he's found guilty.  But for the sake of comparison, I wonder how many people who have signed on to this, made the same call for, say, Omar Khadr.

Just wondering.

What justice?

'In this case I believe there is a legitimate public interest in naming this offender. It may prove to be a deterrent to others.'

Not when the see what his sentence was.

Or how about this one?

And they keep on coming...'You have to remember just how unusual this case is. These children were so young.'  Yes.  I see that.

I have a suggestion

Since they don't like us using the word "Allah", we can make up a few nicknames to use instead.  For example, we could call him a "goat-humping pedophile", or maybe "violent retard"...

That way they can have Allah all to themselves.

We're all about peaceful compromises here, at The Lasso.

And in the spirit of plentiful diversity, please feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments...

One down...

Only several million more like him to go...

John Allen Muhammad, the sniper who left 10 dead in a 2002 killing spree in the Washington, D.C., area, is slated to be put to death by lethal injection Tuesday in a Virginia prison unless the state's governor intervenes.

[..]

Some of the families of Muhammad's victims plan to be at the prison to watch the execution.

"He basically watched my dad breathe his last breath," Cheryl Wits said. "Why shouldn't I watch his last breath?"

Malvo confessed that he shot Wits's father, Jerry Taylor, on a Tucson, Ariz., golf course in March 2002 at Muhammad's direction.

The only true shame is that it will be painless.

How many times do the followers of this death cult have to slaughter innocents before we're going to admit there is a pattern here?

Willfully Blind

Whenever I hear about a shooting in the east end, I immediately expect the victim and/or perpetrators to be black.

Whenever I hear about a baby murdered or abandoned in central Canada, I immediately expect the delinquent parent to be Native.

That same instinct kicked in on the first report of a bloody massacre at a military base in Texas, and led me to the assumption that somehow, the Koran and one (or more) of it’s deranged followers had to be involved.

We’re all made to feel bad for thinking it, but the truth is stereotyping is just patterning based on informed observation.  My own bigoted assumptions, mentioned above, are accurate more than 90% of the time and I make them without the benefit of a psychology degree or any training in criminalistics – something which can’t be said of the scores of “learned experts” who spent the entire network prime time last night, prostrating themselves to avoid having to declare the blatantly obvious:  That 13 Americans died yesterday because the dozens of checks and balances in the U.S. Military were ignored or over-ruled by the politically correct notion that the radicals can only be found in caves in the desert.

***Or, in other words: 

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

Obama hates soldiers

The big, gaping O's "my pet goat moment" inspires my own Kanye West moment.

Can you imagine the outrage if George W. had been yucking it up at a partisan luncheon while the levies were bursting?

Fort Hood

I'm not sure the word "tragedy" adequately describes when a hand full of America's best and bravest are slaughtered on their own ground, by one of their own -- who apparently identified more with nations of nameless, faceless co-religionists he's never met, than the men and women he worked and trained with for 10 years.

A blind eye to evil

Rare insight from a man who spent time on the inside of a very ugly world...

I sat through a discussion where men believed it permissible to have oral sex with an eighteen-month-old boy as long as the boy wasn’t physically harmed.

[..]

What struck me about NAMBLA was how many men I encountered were high functioning members of our society…doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers.  Yet these men looked upon boys as sexual objects and had no desire to change their behavior.

No good deed makes this kind of behavior excusable.  No abundance of talent or wealth makes it acceptable and no societal contribution can accrue enough credit to pay back the damage of defiling a child for sexual gratification.

Shame on anyone who would allow or enable such a thing.

Save your tears for the ones left behind

Suicide is a coward’s way out.  It is a cruel, stiff middle finger to anyone and everyone who has ever loved you and an outlet for inflicting the maximum amount of damage, without the burden of facing consequences for it.

My strong feelings about suicide come from a full understanding of what it feels like to consider it as an option, as well as a complete awareness of the self-pitying martyr’s complex that motivates the choice. 

It is the last wickedly selfish act of a true coward.

Those who choose a public display for the spectacle of their death do so for the sake of spreading their misery, often to innocent bystanders, as well as to accomplish the public humiliation of their friends and family.  To mourn a man who laid his body down on subway tracks, is to give no thought or concern for the thousands of commuters affected by a shutdown of the entire line, or the poor souls charged with cleaning his remains off the tracks, or the next of kin who are forced to examine those remains to identify their loved one.  A man thinks only of himself when he does this, and in the wake of it, too many of us reward this selfishness by thinking only of him, too.

But how much worse is it when, in the act of taking his life this way, a man denies the opportunity for justice to those he may have victimized in life?  Guilty or not, he robbed every last one of us of the chance to know the truth.  Yet, despite that, he is mourned and hailed as a martyr, by those who now call him a victim of our viciousness.  No thought to the real victims, who may never have the chance to have their stories told and no thought to the rest of us who are left to further wonder about the potential predators in our midst.

He’s gone, and he still wins.