Malignant narcissism, fired through the point of a gun

We will tell you that it is not easy blogging about the Virginia Tech murders. We're not Dr. Phil nor are we psychologists. The murders bring back memories of 9/11/2001, when confusion and frustration reigned, and everyone seemed to concentrate on dead bodies and fear, rather than people getting out and being in safety. While administrators and police were in mass confusion on how to handle the situation, students were locked down. A brave teacher who survived the Holocaust sacrificed his life for his students, who managed to escape. The numbers could have been much higher than 33, had the shooter not taken his own life.

If there was ever a grand manifestation of malignant narcissism, the murders of 33 VT students certainly qualifies. Narcissism - the act of elevating yourself to a God-like status - is bad enough. Malignant narcissism takes it to a frighteningly dangerous, cult-like height. Dictators in the world didn't get evil reputations by being milquetoasts. The world's worst cult figures and dictators have brought malignant narcissism to the forefront, thinly disguised as charisma. Often, charisma can bring about good feelings among people without making them feel at the edge. Malignant narcissism makes people wonder if they can survive the day without angering the "powers that be."

Cho Seung-Hui managed to prove how dangerous malignant narcissism can be. He could have kept himself quiet and out of the way, but there were too many warning signs around him. The violent plays, the self-indulgent manifestos, blaming everyone else, and scaring everyone in the campus with his antisocial and violent fantasies catapulted Cho into a notoriety only reserved for cold-blooded assassins and the most evil of evil incarnate. Cho discharged his malignant narcissism through the barrel of a gun before turning it on himself, itself a selfish and pitiful act that will gain him no fans.

Cho's actions also brought up new - and hysterical - calls for gun control. In this age of political correctness and passive submission, the last thing we should be doing is trying to take the ability to practice self-defense, with or without weapons, away from those who know its power and use it with extensive training, a sharp mindset, and utmost discrimination, and only when in extreme danger. Cho could never have "engaged in a dialogue" and appeased to stop shooting. No skilled hostage negotiator would have survived five seconds attempting to quell Cho, as Cho's mindset was stuck on killing as many of his purported targets as possible. No politician, no lobby group, and no non-governmental organization could have come to the campus and convinced Cho that "shooting was not the answer." To Cho, shooting was an answer, and the only solution, to his problems.

The Virginia Tech students - still shaken to the core by these acts of domestic terrorism - are putting the blame for this right where it belongs: on Cho. The students could have taken the easy way out and blamed his actions on convenient bugaboos, and tied it up with calling for resignations and arrests of politicians who didn't protect them sufficiently. They could have also allied themselves with other groups with PhD's in quack religion, agitation and troublemaking, pouring gasoline into an already heady fire. They could have also elevated Cho to a legend, a martyr, and an anti-hero. They could have also easily denied that "shootings only happen in urban areas with high crime" as easily as they can order a coffee at Starbucks. When that reality comes to rural areas, that cant phrase makes obvious the utter denial of fools who try to wish things away, like conflict and war.

The VT students chose to band together instead, similar to 9/11/01. They bypassed the easy sound bites for something more concrete and difficult: moving on after these murders. They will attend funerals, light candles, and talk to psychologists, and deal with nightmares, each less vivid than the next. They will move on, wary that the next Cho will be in their midst, and not necessarily on their college campus.

Thumbs up to the BAA: keep the early marathons, please!

When the Marathon was moved from 12 noon to 9:35am, we noticed the following good things:

- Hardly any traffic in the morning (a windy, rainy, yucky day helps; so does April School vacation)
- No amateur runners in wrapped in mylar blankets, loitering around the train station
- The broadcasters seemed a little more subdued - no 'it's almost noon time' cheerleading or tearjerker stories (we'll take the ones where the runner had a really nasty disease and beat it, and are back to their old selves)
- Back Bay/Downtown area: clean as a whistle by 4:00pm
- Never knock Kenya - 15 out of 17 years as winners
- No drunks or college kids to be found

White guilt and control freaks are "retarded"

"Retarded" is a politically incorrect word - only if you use it incorrectly. If you're growing tomato plants and the growth has slowed down to a yield of maybe one or two green tomatoes, that's the correct use of the word "retarded." If you don't like your teacher, or your friends did something unusual, then you can jokingly use "retarded" among yourselves. (Just don't use it on a talk radio program to refer to one of your rivals or like-minded guests.)

The gray area occurs when someone has Down's syndrome or any other developmental deficiency. The correct way might be to use the syndrome connected to the person. Using PC terms like "differently abled" might elicit eye rolls and even more questions you might feel uncomfortable answering.

The incorrect way to illustrate that "retarded" may not be helpful? Having an arrogant, elitist tone to dictate to others how someone should talk, while attempting to relieve your own guilt (see "The Right Response?")

Having two last names separated by a hyphen and plagiarizing a PBS slogan doesn't help either, and using Paris Hilton as an example is no excuse.

Munchkins and Bob Ross trade burnt sienna for yellow ochre on I-495

"Follow the yellow brick road? That's not a bad idea for a painting...let me go back and get some pthatlo blue, titanium white, Van Dyke green, and the blood of the Wicked Witch of the East we'll paint some happy trees on the way to the yellow brick road."

Bob Ross, gentle painter, gentle man, and sometimes a little on the wicked side.

Upscale parents and elitists love Lecommunist Blocs!

Yes, comrades, it's Lecommunist Blocs, the new toy that's sweeping socially conscious and rich, guilty, white neighborhoods across the nation!

You can make real-life Soviet-era apartments for the serfs, complete with listening devices so that the Kremlin can hear every word (and squelch any dissent)!

Gulags...hard labor camps...Communist Party chambers...swank party member palaces...hotels for useful idiot celebrities...even Josef Stalin himself can be built with Lecommunist Blocs!

Each set comes with precisely 100 pieces, all colored gray and all the same size. They are to be distributed ten pieces per person, or else the Secret Police may take you in for "having too many pieces."

Act now, and we'll throw in How To Overthrow the Imperialist Amerikkkans And Avoid Treason and Jail Time* for free. We'll also give you How Rich White Guilty People Can Be Duped Into Hard Line Communism By Convincing Them It's "Social Justice" plus a few "secret" Lecommunist Blocs (the colored ones only Party Leaders have!)

* For residents of Seattle, Madison, San Francisco, Berkeley, Cambridge, Santa Cruz and Austin: we will substitute this book with Hate America, Love the Money for an additional $2.95.

Make Income Redistribution History, Backwards Sherwood Forest edition

Boston Magazine's John Wolfson does an excellent piece on how the Massachusetts State Lottery is the ultimate redistribution scheme: it takes money from the poor - earned or paid by the government - and gives it to the government, who then distributes it to all 351 cities and towns in the form of lottery aid.

The shiny new fire engine in Weston? Thank the people in West Roxbury who shelled out $300 on a book of scratch tickets and ended up winning a mere $75-80. Newburyport gets to avoid a property tax override because the residents of Lawrence were able to spend 2/3 of their paycheck on Keno. And the city of Lynn probably financed new teachers, firemen, policemen, and other public works for Swampscott, Marblehead, and very small Western New England towns that have all but one Lottery agent, if any.

And, of course, the other people who depend on the poor's paychecks - the ones that have low if not nil Massachusetts state income taxes - is the Legislature, who will happily recoup the monies given in Medicaid, WIC payments, and other government payments in the form of Lottery revenues; if you can entice a poor person to whom you're shelling out benefits to try to become rich and get rid of welfare/debt through the path of least resistance, rather than hard work and education, chances are they'll take the bait...and continue being poor, if not penniless.

The right way to show the poor that the lottery is not the best investment scheme is to show them the real odds of some of these games, not the odds the Lottery promotes*. Treat the Lottery like the do cigarettes, drugs and alcohol - it's a vice, a stupid tax, it's legalized robbery - and make it unattractive and nasty. Reducing the prize payouts from a liberal 71% to a more realistic 52-55%, posting the real odds on the backs of tickets, and showing exactly what taxes will be taken out and how much the prizes are really worth will make the poor think twice on buying a strip of tickets, eliminating or hiding the verification codes on scratch tickets, introducing harder, more complex scratch games (Bingo is a good start), and reducing promotion and public relations may diminish that bromide "You Have to Play" to "Do You Really Want to Waste Your Money On This Scheme?"

So robbing Peter to pay Paul, and then having Paul give back all of his money and arrive in Peter's lap is an "opiate of the masses" that benefits only two people - the wealthy and the government.

*For instant tickets, the odds are calculated by taking the number of tickets and dividing them by the total number of tickets available for that game. For example, the new Red Sox $10 ticket is listed by the MSL as having odds of 1 in 3.55. This is actually correct - if you consider how the prize is paid out (e.g. for $20, you get get $20, two $10's, $10 plus two $5's, etc. and each prize has different odds; the odds of getting $20 as a single value is tougher than getting 4 $5's.) We took their odds and ran it through an Excel spreadsheet, and it indeed came out to 1 in 3.55.

Then we asked ourselves what the odds were on getting a certain prize without regards to how the prize is paid (e.g. a $50 prize, no matter how it came out). We noticed that the total odds for a certain prizes actually went down - but the total odds went up! To get any prize on this new ticket, the real odds are 1 in 74.56 - roughly 21 times more than the Lottery advertises! The Lottery also states "you have the best chance to win $100!" Not quite...the odds of winning $100 on that ticket are actually 1 in 54.84. In a book of 100 tickets, this comes out to a ticket, maybe two, giving you that magic $100.

And for the people who think they'll get that $1 million on that scratch ticket they bought all at once, tax-free, think again: 30% in taxes are taken out automatically for all winnings over $5,000, and anything over $600 - $4,999 gets 5% taken by the Commonwealth (since 2004; before then, anything under $5,000 merely had to be reported to the IRS and no mass taxes were taken out).

Lynn invades Swampscott, annexes Marblehead, film at 11

"Lynn students will be slaves to the captains of industry!" saith a pol/hack from Swampscott.

"Like, as if, grody to the max, barf me out, Mr. Bufu," retorts Lynn students, before making mustaches and missing teeth out of this pol's picture.

Lynn, for those of you who don't know Massachusetts, is a city about 15 miles northeast of downtown Boston, and is a large city in Essex County. It used to be an industrial city, but some sections are actually quite nice and verdant. But this doesn't mean people should run right out to Lynn - some sections rival Roxbury and Dorchester, and are definitely not for casual walking.

"Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin...you don't come out the way you came in." The old ditty is true, we tell you!