Chicken Soup with Matthew Barnett and the loyal football fans of Maryville, Missouri...

On the surface this is just another case of a small town football player doing what small town football players are best known for. And before the existence of social media, that's where it would have ended.

According to multiple news sources, Matthew Barnett, a football player from a politically connected family had intercourse with a drunk and incoherent 13 year old girl. And of course it was consensual. Barnett then dumped his date's limp body onto her parents' front lawn in 22 degree weather with nothing but sweatpants and a t-shirt to protect her from the cold.

Uuuuuh...here...I'm done with this...heh...heh...

What a man.

The victim's mother found her three hours later. In my book that's attempted murder, but I've found nothing in the news that suggests anyone else feels the same way. After filing charges with the police, the small town rapist fan club harassed her family so badly they had to move to another community...then the good Christians of Maryville, Missouri burned the victim's house down. Wonderful people those Christians are.

Did I mention that the prosecutor mysteriously dropped the charges? It sure must be nice to be politically connected.

Matthew Barnett is currently a student at the University of Central Missouri.

They like mail. Send them some. A copy of this post would make a fine addition to the student newspaper...or possibly any on-campus rape crisis types would appreciate a copy. Do your best. The bought and paid for prosecutor certainly did.

You can find more interesting reading here...

and here...

and here too... Goodness he's very popular with the media.

Matthew Barnett's family claims that he is the real victim in all this...Please stop...I'm peeing my pants.

Imagine being someone like Timothy McVeigh. You want to do something "big" but you're not sure...

And then the good citizens of Maryville come along and help you make up your mind. I can't say it often enough. Every time an American community displays the customary depraved indifference toward victims of violent crime...every time they put a rapist or some other violent animal on a pedestal, they make it very easy for criminals to rationalize that demolishing a building full of people, or spraying bullets into a crowded theatre or school, or committing some similar act of mass murder is no worse than what good American Christians do every day.

Enjoy the game...and don't forget to buy a $60 t-shirt on your way out.

Chicken Soup with the NFL's league of denial...

A recent episode of Frontline titled, "League of Denial" reported on the disturbing tendency of retired football players to develop degenerative brain disorders and the NFL's equally disturbing tendency to deny the existence of a link between this problem and football.

On the surface this story has all the earmarks of an industry shaking scandal, but I found nothing surprising about it. Make no mistake. I like PBS. I like Frontline. I like almost anyone who's willing to investigate and report on the depraved behavior of large, powerful institutions. What I did not like about the report was the feeling that Frontline expected viewers to be surprised by the NFL's denial and avoidance. One of the main characters interviewed was Dr. Ann McKee, an expert on brain trauma. On May 9, 2009 she was invited to present her findings to a panel with the comical title, "Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee." From what I could tell, this committee consists of individuals who owe their financial well being to professional football. Obviously they don't want to be told that football is responsible for causing any problem that would present the possibility of financial liability. When interviewed by Frontline, Dr. McKee acted as if she were surprised by the committee's negative reaction to her report.

Physicians are smart, but they can obviously be as naïve as anyone else. Dr. McKee admitted to being a football fan. In fact, she loves the game. This blinded her to what she needed to know. In order to alleviate her ignorance, Dr. McKee need only focus on two facts: Professional football is not a game, and professional football players are not people. Football, from the local Pop Warner league to the NFL is a multibillion dollar entertainment industry and players are highly valued commodities. Anyone who has ever been employed by a corporation should understand the concept of disposable "Human Resources." The football industry takes this concept to extremes. Scan down to the fourth paragraph of this link if you want to understand what football is really all about.

Readers should understand that most human relationships are utilitarian, not personal. Your best friend's well being is important to you because he or she is your best friend. You have a personal relationship that adds to the quality of your life. A football player's well being is important to the entertainment industry as long as he is generating cash flow or is likely to generate cash flow in the future. He is an investment, nothing more. This is a utilitarian relationship similar to that between smokers and Big Tobacco. Both football players and smokers generate cash flow for their respective industries and if they suffer and die off camera...what of it? Football players who die after retirement are a blip in the headlines, unlikely to deter children from becoming entertainers, and smokers who die in their 50's or 60's have no detrimental effect upon the tendency of children to start smoking.

Compared to most of the world America is a pretty good place to live. For example...I'm unlikely to be arrested for writing this. But there are aspects to life here that are ugly and shameful. For any individual who is angry or desperate enough to be considering an act of terrorism, these "aspects to life" in America present the opportunity to rationalize the idea that killing and maiming people in pursuit of a cause is no worse than what Big Tobacco and the NFL are doing.

Enjoy the game folks...and don't forget to buy a $60 t-shirt on your way out.

Chicken Soup with the quote of the week...

Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd caught my attention recently by arresting a couple of young sociopaths after they drove a 12 year old girl to suicide and then bragged about it on Facebook. Once again, this is what happens when assholes reproduce. Sheriff Judd was brave enough to reveal their names to the media and brave enough to place the blame on the bullies' parents in a society infamous for protecting the worst of the worst...so I conducted a bit more research on Sheriff Judd. And here's my favorite quote:

When asked why a man suspected of killing a deputy was shot 68 times for failing to surrender, Sheriff Judd responded, "That's all the ammunition we had."

I like this guy. He's both honest and politically incorrect.

Chicken Soup explains how society isolates victims...

To put it mildly and in strict technical terms, victims of bullying suffer from a problem. And all problems have common elements.

There are three basic methods available to solve any problem:

1) You can use your bare hands.

2) You can combine your efforts with others.

3) You can employ tools.

Method 1: Bullies rarely make the mistake of targeting individuals who are able to punish them using nothing but the strength of their own bodies. When the victim uses this method, either the bully escalates the violence until the victim is injured or killed, or the victim is forced to injure or kill the bully. When the victim is injured or killed, brave and caring adults are certain to blame the victim and tell him that fighting is not the answer to our problems. When the bully is injured or killed, the victim will be aggressively railroaded for going too far. Bare hands are rarely, if ever an effective option for victims of bullying.

Method 2: American culture aggressively attacks and condemns victims who attempt to address the problem by ganging up on the bully. And the number of fellow victims willing to make the attempt is vanishingly small anyway. In the unlikely event that a group of victims actually did make the attempt, the bully's toadying sycophantic associates would attack the victims. Again, brave, caring adults would condemn the victims, not the bullies. There is a second scenario to Method 2. Complaining to an adult in authority about the bullying is condemned as tattling. Adults don't really think this is tattling. They're just avoiding their responsibility as adults. And if any witnesses become willing to make a report, this is referred to as snitching. Remember the immortal words of the assholes over at Sucker Punch Athletics dot com, "Snitches Get Stitches."

Method 3: This is what the Columbine killers did. They didn't try to become the Karate Kid. They just bought a few guns and took their revenge. Once again, American culture came to the rescue of the bullies who precipitated the massacre. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were widely condemned as cowards by those who wouldn't dare say the same thing about any of Columbine's precious steroid trash. Method 3 is rarely used. It requires victims who are both homicidal and suicidal, a statistically unusual combination.

Fifteen years after Columbine should have pulled everyone's heads out of their asses, Americans still love bullies and still hate their victims. Search your memory of that critical decade between the age you reached puberty and the age that most people who attend college either graduate or drop out, and consider the following stereotype:

Soulless, social climbing whores reward bullies. Toadying, sycophantic cowards blame their victims. Insulting as it is, it probably rings true for an awful lot of people.

And if that's not a steaming bowl of Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul, I don't know what is.

Chicken Soup comments on Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis...

Media coverage and analysis of just about every mass shooting since Columbine includes an interview with Frank DeAngelis. As far as I can determine from watching or reading these interviews, not once has DeAngelis commented on his efforts to minimize our society's production of new killers nor has he admitted that community sanctioned bullying was a precipitating factor. Mostly he talks about his faith, how bad he feels about Dave Sanders, his PTSD, his divorce, the advice his "counselor for maintenance" gives him, and his commitment to stay at Columbine until those in kindergarten in 1999 finished high school. I'd never heard him say anything substantive until he slipped, perhaps unintentionally during a September 16, 2013 interview with Washington Post's Nia-Malika Henderson after the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.

In response to Henderson's inquiry about gun safety and mental health, DeAngelis stated that Harris and Klebold did not come out of their mothers' wombs hating the world. "What happened between the time that they were born and April 20, 1999?"

And that's as close as he got to admitting that the environment at Columbine High School might have precipitated their homicidal rage.

You can find the interview here.

Chicken Soup with the stereotypes...

Every demographic group has at least one negative stereotype and occasionally several, and includes an unknowable number of individuals who behave in a manner that reinforces one or more of those stereotypes. I don't hate black people, but if you behave like the knuckleheads I see on reruns of COPS or The Judge Hatchett Show, I'm probably going to develop a negative opinion of you. COPS is a cornucopia of young black men being chased down allies and over fences after robbing someone. And Judge Hatchett leaves me rolling with laughter. My favorite episode involved a black woman who was grossly overweight, ugly, and hostile. She must have done something awful in a previous life because God or nature or whoever's in charge of such things really slammed it to her. She had several children by several different absent fathers and was currently seeking paternity for her youngest. The defendants were three young men and I don't remember a thing about them but there were three of them. The woman was moving her head back and forth as if it were on roller bearings and bulging her eyes out and demanding a "dee-em-nay" test...because "one-a-dem be my baby's daddy." Judge Hatchett's bailiff, Lex Luther handed an envelope to the judge and after a few moments she announced that none of them were the father.

Imagine my surprise...

Women have a few negative stereotypes as well. Up until a few decades ago women were systematically prevented from entering most career fields. This created an environment where a woman who wanted to be successful had to marry a successful man. Thus, the stereotype of the payday seeking whore was born. The fact that men created and maintained this situation never seems to be mentioned.

Enter the women's rights movement...

During my lifetime women went from being Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand to being Captains and Admirals. That's obviously fiction, but it reflects a sea change in what the American public will accept as perfectly normal. Today we have female senators, senior military officers, fighter pilots, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and just about everything but President and Vice President. And I expect to see one or both of those before much longer. The point here is that woman clearly no longer have to marry success. They are free to make it themselves.

So when I see woman throwing themselves at high status males from their early teens into their mid-twenties, I tend to use uncomplimentary terms to describe them. They're behaving like the worst female stereotypes and usually rewarding a violent sociopath at the same time.

Individuals who behave this way only reinforce the hatred of tomorrow's serial killers, bombers, arsonists, and domestic terrorists. They truly are Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul.

Chicken Soup with Obamacare...

I've been accused from time to time of being a liberal. In reality I'm neither liberal nor conservative. When asked, I generally refer to myself as "issue specific." My opinions cover the spectrum from extreme left to extreme right. On the issue of health insurance, I tend to be politically liberal and economically conservative. I underlined the word "insurance" because I keep running into people who are too stupid to know there's a difference between healthcare and health insurance.

At this time there are a relatively fixed number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, ambulances, etc. available to treat patients. These numbers can change, but unlike insurance salesman, it takes a long time to train competent medical personnel, build hospitals, and manufacture all of the supplies and equipment they use. Politicians have chosen to ignore this reality. Instead of proposing a single payer health insurance system that could be introduced gradually as additional healthcare personnel are trained, they've decided to pass a law that simply requires every American citizen to buy health insurance from people who have a vested interest in blocking access to healthcare by denying even the most legitimate claims. Human life clearly has no value to these people and human suffering is someone else's problem. And they've managed to dupe the public with empty rhetoric. The rhetoric they've chosen to use to sell Obamacare to the public is characteristically unimaginative. In fact, the rhetoric of any universal healthcare system is always the same, and always an obvious lie. It usually goes something like this:

Today there are millions of Americans who do not have adequate access to the healthcare they need. If my plan is adopted every American citizen will have access to the healthcare they need. I can't do it without you. I need your vote! TOGETHER WE CAN DO IT!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!

Politicians seem to take a lot of liberties with the laws of economics. On occasion they stretch the laws of physics as well. They get away with it because the average American who bothers to vote is shockingly stupid. Most of them can't even tell the difference between health care and health insurance.

As I stated above, both medical personnel and the physical plant and equipment they need to treat patients exist in relatively fixed quantities. Suddenly increasing the number of patients by "millions" won't magically precipitate a corresponding increase in the number of doctors, nor will it increase the number of hours in the day those doctors can work. In a capitalist, market driven system, when the number of customers at your door increases beyond what you can comfortably serve, you raise your prices, restrict access, and make sure your wealthiest customers have a key to the back door. In other words...the situation we have today where the quality of health care available to an individual is a direct function of that individual's personal wealth will remain intact. What will change is the amount of money that flows into the health insurance industry. (Those are the people who put you on hold, drag their feet, deny legitimate claims, and hope you die quickly when you really, really need them.)

This is one more example of people in positions of wealth, power, and influence leaving no doubt that human life is cheap, plentiful, and disposable. Not only do they have no intention of increasing access to healthcare to American citizens, but they've come up with a brilliant plan to rip off the ever shrinking middle class even more than they already do.

And that is Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul.

Chicken Soup with Home Depot...

This is way off topic, but it was funny and it'll introduce a lighter subject to an otherwise depressing weblog.

I bought a large item a few days ago at Home Depot. It came in a box that would have been difficult for one person to lift into the back of a pickup truck and it probably weighed about 80 pounds. I had it on one of those orange flat carts and while paying for it, the cashier said that she'd call someone to help me load it into my truck. I rolled the cart outside and waited for about a minute or so before my "helpers" arrived. One was a woman who appeared to be in her 60's and the other one was also a woman. She was probably in her 20's but she was wearing a leg brace and limping. Neither appeared to be unusually strong. I laughed and said, "So you're the muscle around here." The younger one responded flatly, "Yup."

The three of us lifted the box into the truck bed and parted company.