Colorado – praag.org

Pat Buchanan asks if America is going to pot

Smoking Marlboros is now forbidden in Irish bars in New York City. But buying, selling, and smoking marijuana is legal in Colorado.

It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

But where are we going?

One certain result of the legalization of marijuana is that there are going to be more potheads, more dropouts, and more deaths on highways from those high or stoned — and more rehab centers.

Scores of thousands of Coloradans may relish the freedom they have voted for themselves. But the costs will be borne by society and the families of future victims of potheads behind the wheel.

So it has been with alcohol. All of us can recall classmates injured and dead in auto accidents, jobs lost by friends, lives destroyed, and families smashed because of booze.

Just as beer opens the door for the young to bourbon, scotch, gin and vodka, marijuana is the gateway drug, the escalator drug, to cocaine and heroin.

And if marijuana sales bring in the revenue Colorado envisions, other states will follow suit, and some state will become the first to decriminalize cocaine.

Undeniably, the cultural revolution is gaining converts and picking up speed. The haste with which some Republicans are deep-sixing the social issues to focus on tax cuts testifies to this.

What does this tell us about our country?

America is not only diversifying racially, ethnically and religiously as a result of continuous mass immigration, legal and illegal. We are diversifying, and disuniting morally, culturally, and politically.

The government has shouldered aside organized crime to take over, tax, and regulate the rackets. At federal, state and local levels, the government rakes off vast revenues from taxes on booze, bars, cigarettes, casinos and, coming soon, online poker.

Contraceptives are now handed out to high schoolers and a right to contraception has been written into Obamacare.

Abortion and homosexuality used to be scandalous. Now they are constitutional rights and popular social causes, and same-sex marriage is the civil rights cause of the 21st century.

As Justice Antonin Scalia noted, if tradition, religious beliefs, or a community animus against conduct is insufficient to restrict private behavior, upon what legal ground do we stand upon to outlaw polygamy, adult incest, or prostitution?

Yet traditional America is not rolling over and playing dead.

While a libertarianism of the left appears ascendant, there is also a rising and militant libertarianism of the right.

The triumph of the sexual revolution has not been without its casualties, e.g., an endless supply of new HIV/AIDS and STD cases and a national illegitimacy rate of over 40 percent of all births.

And the correlation between that illegitimacy rate and the dropout rate, drug use rate, delinquency rate, crime rate, and incarceration rate is absolute.

Undeniably, the claims of the individual to maximum autonomy and freedom appear triumphant over the claims of community. The clamor of me is prevailing over the claims of us.

But in yielding, America has not only tossed overboard the moral compass that guided us for two centuries. We no longer even agree on what is “True North” anymore.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

First gay divorce in Colorado

Colorado’s first recognized same-sex divorce is final.

Supporters of Colorado’s new civil unions law say the court ruling sets a precedent for gay couples married in other states who want to legally terminate their relationships here without uprooting their lives.

Juli Yim and Lorelei Jones wed in Massachusetts in 2009, where same-sex marriage is legal.

Yim tells the Fort Collins Coloradoan the relationship went sour and she found a new partner in Colorado.

Colorado is one of several states that treat gay and straight couples the same in almost every respect through civil unions or domestic partnerships. Gay couples are not allowed to marry in Colorado but can get divorced there under state statute. – myfoxdc.com

No use looking for mass murder motives, says US expert

Tempting as it might be, it’s futile to dwell on the motives behind a mass murder like the one at the midnight Batman screening in Colorado, a police officer turned threat assessment expert says.

Doing so means diverting critical attention from the real objective –spotting telltale behavior in an individual about to perpetrate a bloodbath, said Steve Albrecht in a telephone interview.

“We’re all shocked (but) it certainly doesn’t make people feel any better to know what the motive is,” said Albrecht, who heads the San Diego branch of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals.

“I’d want to working on interrupting the opportunity (to commit a mass murder), to stop these guys when they exhibit those (suspicious or worrisome) behaviours early on.”

James Holmes, 24, is suspected of donning a mask and body armor, then opening fire during a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, killing at least 12 people and wounding nearly 60 others.

The bloodbath shocked Americans, even though the United States sees about 20 mass murders — defined as three or more deaths at the hands of a single perpetrator in a single uninterrupted incident — every year.

Albrecht, a former police officer in Holmes’ hometown San Diego who holds psychology and business degrees, is co-author of “Ticking Bombs: Defusing Violence in the Workplace” and advises businesses on threat assessment.

Speaking to AFP within 24 hours of Friday’s tragedy, Albrecht speculated that the Colorado gunman — who has yet to appear in court — was likely a “serial loser” in search of infamy.

Many troubled people never get beyond fantasizing about committing an act of violence, but “here’s a guy whose probably ruminated over this for weeks and months and moved from ideas to action,” he said.

“It was a lot of pre-attack preparation for a guy who’s hard to notice because he’s not part of an organized group or on a terror watch list. It’s very difficult to stop these people.”

Albrecht added: “I suspect we’re going to discover that the guy had a lot of issues that he chose to solve through this method” of raking a midnight movie audience with gunfire.

Prior to the Columbine high school massacre, in which two students cut down 12 students and a teacher in 1999 before killing themselves, law enforcement agencies concentrated on building profiles of mass killers, Albrecht explained.

But as it emerged that anyone of any age, race, gender or socio-economic background could and did commit mass murder, the focus swung towards picking out acts of behavior that would reveal a solitary killer in the making.

“Now we’re really looking at behavior and moving away from profiling,” he said, recalling how a 1998 rampage in an Arkansas school in which five died had been carried out by two boys aged just 13 and 11.

Typical questions to ask: “What were the pre-attack behaviors that this guy exhibited? What were the relationship failures, relationship problems that he had? Was he disconnected from society and disconnected from reality?”

Elaborating on an essay he wrote on the topic for Psychology Today magazine, Albrecht said people “tend to rationalize the irrational behavior of the people around us” and thus skip over signs of an individual on the verge of violence.

“My suspicion is that they’re going to learn a lot of things (about the Aurora gunman), and that people were very concerned about this guy — but didn’t know what to do.” – AFP

Batman shooter James Holmes was a ‘loner’

The man suspected of shooting 12 people dead at a screening of the new Batman movie in Colorado was often seen carrying guns to and from his home and was described Friday as a “loner.”

James Holmes, 24, was enrolled since June 2011 as a student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado, but was reportedly in the process of withdrawing from his PhD program.

In a photo released by the university, Holmes wore a burnt-orange T-shirt and sported a smile, but one neighbor at the apartment block where the suspect lived in Aurora recalled a subdued character.

“He was always wearing camouflage pants and a hat,” said Gabriel Macias, a Mexican who works at a meat factory and recalled seeing Holmes carrying guns and weapon cases to and from his apartment.

“We did not know him well because he talked to nobody. He was always locked up behind his door,” said Macias.

A second photo, from Holmes’s San Diego high school yearbook, showed him in a dark suit, this time flashing a toothy smile. He graduated from Westview High School in San Diego in 2006.

Melvin Evans, a security guard from a nearby building said he occasionally saw Holmes at a local bar.

“He was always by himself. Looked like a nice guy,” said Evans, 33. “I go to the bar every Sunday for Karaoke. I’ve seen him there every now and then. We would talk sometimes, the weather, you know.”

The FBI described Holmes as a white male, 6-foot-3 (1.9 meters) tall, born on December 13, 1987, with no significant criminal record and no links to terrorism.

Residents at the apartment block were removed in the wake of the shooting after it appeared that Holmes’s home had been booby-trapped.

Police in Aurora, Colorado, told reporters records showed that the shooting suspect’s only infringement in the city was a speeding ticket in 2011.

In an apartment rental application he submitted in early 2011, Holmes described himself as a “quiet and easy-going” student, the Denver Post said on its website (www.denverpost.com).

“No one knew him. No one,” it quoted a pharmacy student living in the same building — reserved for medical students, faculty and staff — in Aurora as saying.

The student, who only gave his name as Ben, said Holmes kept to himself and would not say hello or acknowledge other people in the hallway.

Ben also revealed he had called police shortly after midnight –coincidentally around the time of the massacre at a Batman premiere — to report a song blaring from inside Holmes’ apartment.

Ben could not make out the song, but it appeared to be playing on repeat.

Tom Mai, a next-door neighbor of the Holmes family in San Diego, remembered Holmes as a shy teenager who did not play or socialize with other youngsters in the neighborhood, the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper said.

“He said that he last saw him two years ago when he came home during summer recess from college,” it said on its website (www.utsandiego.com). “The family, he said, was nice and involved with a Presbyterian church.”

Holmes graduated from the University of California in Riverside in 2010 with a degree in neuroscience, said its director of communications Kris Lovekin, who added she could not release any further information about him.

Mashable.com, which monitors social media, said Holmes was “an online ghost” with no apparent presence on sites like Facebook or Twitter, although people sharing Holmes’ name found themselves suddenly bombarded with attention.

In a statement, Holmes’ family said they were cooperating with investigators.

“We are still trying to process this information and we appreciate that people will respect our privacy,” the family said, after Holmes’ mother Arlen confirmed her son was the suspected shooter. – AFP