Waukesha pre-teens’ attempt to kill classmate

So, yes…all women….were involved in this. No patriarchy, no misogynist saying he wanted to kill women and the black men they dated. Remember that Rodger, who identified himself as white, claimed that his enemies were not only the beautiful white girls who constantly turned him down and rejected him sexually, but also all the men of color he believed the girls chose over him.

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more,” Rodger wrote in his manifesto.

It was just three white girls. There was an attempted murder of one female. That was one less than who died by the hands of Elliot Rodgers. Where is the twitter campaign?

If two men had planned this, all hell would break loose…on twitter…as if twitter really means much.

Do people really think anything could be done to stop this?

All I can say is that we should all hope to not be caught up on gunfire in Chicago, a stabbing in Wauesha, or a mugging in any city in America. This is a bizarre and tragic story, but a truly rare event on the grand scheme of life, and an incredibly sad one. This should never ever happen to anyone.
From this article: http://m.jsonline.com/more/news/crime/waukesha-police-2-12-year-old-girls-plotted-for-months-to-kill-friend-b99282655z1-261534171.html

The 12-year-old girls had been plotting the murder for months, police say.

Morgan E. Geyser was allowed to have two friends over each year for her birthday. This year, she’d celebrate on May 30. That is the day she and Anissa E. Weier would try to kill their friend during a sleepover.

On Monday, the two Waukesha girls were charged in Waukesha County Circuit Court as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide, each facing up to 65 years in prison. Their victim, another 12-year-old from Waukesha, was stabbed 19 times by either Geyser or Weier or both, according to a criminal complaint. All three attend Horning Middle School in Waukesha.

Geyser and Weier are being held on $500,000 bail each. The pre-teens attempted murder, they told police, to pay homage to a fictional character who they believed was real after reading about him on a website devoted to horror stories.

On Saturday, a bicyclist found the victim, lying on the sidewalk and covered in blood, with injuries to her arms, legs and torso. She had managed to crawl out of the woods, where the suspects had left her. She was rushed to a hospital, where she was in stable condition Monday evening, but fighting for her life.

A Waukesha County sheriff’s deputy found Geyser and Weier hours later, walking near I-94 in Waukesha. A knife with a five-inch blade was in Weier’s backpack.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel normally does not name juveniles involved in crimes, but is naming the suspects because they are in adult court and because of the severity of the charges. A criminal complaint filed Monday detailed the allegations.

Both suspects explained the stabbing to police referencing their dedication to Slender Man, the character they discovered on a website called Creepypasta Wiki, which is devoted to horror stories.

Weier told police that Slender Man is the “leader” of Creepypasta, and in the hierarchy of that world, one must kill to show dedication. Weier said that Geyser told her they should become “proxies” of Slender Man — a paranormal figure known for his ability to create tendrils from his fingers and back — and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him. Weier said she was surprised by Geyser’s suggestion, but also excited to prove skeptics wrong and show that Slender Man really did exist.

The suspects believed that “Slender,” as Weier called him, lived in a mansion in the Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. The plan was to kill the victim and walk to Slender’s mansion.

After school on Friday, Weier told police, she and Geyser went to Weier’s house, where she packed a backpack with clothes, granola bars, water bottles and a picture of her mother, father and siblings. She didn’t want to forget what her family looked like after leaving for Slender’s mansion.

The girls then went to Geyser’s house. With Geyser’s father, they picked up the victim and all went to Skateland.

They came home around 9:30 p.m. and went to sleep in Geyser’s room.

Geyser and Weier originally had planned to commit the murder at 2 a.m. Saturday, according to the criminal complaint. They’d duct tape their victim’s mouth, stab her in the neck and pull the covers up to make it look like she was sleeping. Then they’d run.

But the plans changed after they’d been out rollerskating Friday night. Instead, they’d try to kill her in a bathroom at a nearby park the next morning. Weier knew there was a drain in the floor for the blood to go down, she told police.

‘This was really happening’

The next morning, Geyser’s mom said they could go and play in David’s Park, on S. East Ave., just north of Les Paul Parkway. As they left, Geyser lifted up the left side of her white jacket; the knife was tucked in her waistband. Weier told police she gave Geyser a look with “wide eyes.” When asked by police what that meant, Weier said, “I thought, dear God, this was really happening.”

Weier said they eventually ended up in the park bathroom where Weier planned stab her friend. Once in the bathroom, Geyser handed Weier the knife, and Weier indicated that Geyser tried to restrain the victim, but Geyser had a “nervous breakdown” and Weier had to calm her down.

Weier then suggested they go for a walk, pointing out a wooded area near Rivera Drive and Big Bend Road. They could play hide and seek, distract the victim, then kill her. Geyser was the first “seeker,” and Weier and the victim hid. Weier told the victim where to hide and told her to lie facedown in the dirt. The girl refused. Weier then pushed the victim and sat on her, thinking Geyser could stab her. But the victim began to yell and complain that she couldn’t breathe. She was attracting attention, so Weier got off her.

Geyser gave Weier the knife, but Weier said she told Geyser she was too squeamish and gave it back.

Weier said that once Geyser got the knife back, Geyser told Weier, “I’m not going to until you tell me to.” Weier said she started walking away from Geyser and then told her, “Go ballistic, go crazy.” Geyser said she would go ballistic, and Weier said, “Now.”

Weier said Geyser then tackled the victim and started stabbing her. The victim was screaming. Weier said when Geyser got off the victim, the victim screamed, “I hate you. I trusted you.”

Weier said the victim tried to walk toward the street but was stumbling. They didn’t want anyone to see her, so Weier grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the street. The victim fell. Weier said the victim couldn’t breathe, see or walk. Weier told the victim to lie down and be quiet — she would lose blood more slowly. Weier told police she gave the victim those instructions so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself, and so she would die. Weier told the victim they were going to get her help; but they never planned on actually doing so. They hoped she would die, and they would see Slender and know he existed. With the victim lying on the ground, they began to back away.

When police asked Weier if she knew what it meant to kill someone, Weier said, “I believe it’s ending a life and I regret it.” Weier also said, “The bad part of me wanted her to die, the good part of me wanted her to live.”

‘I didn’t feel remorse’

Geyser’s report to police was much shorter.

She confirmed the details of Weier’s interview with law enforcement officials, but said she thought that Weier stabbed the victim first.

“Weier put the knife in my hand and then I continued to stab her,” the complaint quoted Geyser.

When asked how many times Geyser thought she stabbed the victim, Geyser said she did not know; all she heard was screaming.

At one point, when talking with police, Geyser said she was sorry. She said she had put the knife back into her bag and wiped it off on her jacket. She then told a detective, “It was weird that I didn’t feel remorse.”

Geyser said they had to do it or “he would kill our family.” When asked who “he” was, Geyser said she didn’t know him. When asked what she was trying to do when she stabbed her friend, Geyser said, “I may as well just say it: Kill her.”

When asked about Slender Man, Geyser said she had never met him but said he watches her and he can read minds and teleport. Geyser said what she did was “probably wrong.” She asked a detective if it is illegal to stab someone in self-defense. The detective said sometimes, and asked her if that was what happened in this instance.

No, she said.

In court on Monday, Geyser’s family members broke into tears several times during her appearance.

“The family is very horrified at what has happened,” attorney Donna Kuchler said.

Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel stressed the girls were innocent until proven guilty, but added he has never encountered allegations like this as a prosecutor.

“Most of the time in a crime like this, with such violence like this, there’s spur of the moment, there’s the heat of passion,” he said.

This time, he said, it was calculated.

“It’s troubling when a person lashes out in anger,” he said. “It’s more troubling when they lash out in cold blood. Isn’t that the worst kind of killer, the cold-blooded killer?”

Schimel, a Republican running for state attorney general, said he had to bring the case in adult court because of the level of charges against the girls. He said he expected the girls’ attorneys to attempt to “reverse waive” them into juvenile court, which he said he would resist.

If moved into juvenile court and convicted, the girls could be held at most until they were 25 years old, Schimel said.

“It’s a very shocking incident. There’s no two ways about it,” Schimel said.

Lydia Mulvany and Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

 

 

Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries

An excerpt from this New York Times article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/among-experts-scrutiny-of-attention-disorder-diagnoses-in-2-and-3-year-olds.html?_r=2&referrer=

ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.

The American Academy of Pediatrics standard practice guidelines for A.D.H.D. do not even address the diagnosis in children 3 and younger — let alone the use of such stimulant medications, because their safety and effectiveness have barely been explored in that age group. “It’s absolutely shocking, and it shouldn’t be happening,” said Anita Zervigon-Hakes, a children’s mental health consultant to the Carter Center. “People are just feeling around in the dark. We obviously don’t have our act together for little children.”

Dr. Lawrence H. Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in Walnut Creek, Calif., said in a telephone interview: “People prescribing to 2-year-olds are just winging it. It is outside the standard of care, and they should be subject to malpractice if something goes wrong with a kid.”

…….

Dr. Doris Greenberg, a behavioral pediatrician in Savannah, Ga., who attended Dr. Visser’s presentation, said that methylphenidate can be a last resort for situations that have become so stressful that the family could be destroyed. She cautioned, however, that there should not be 10,000 such cases in the United States a year.

“Some of these kids are having really legitimate problems,” Dr. Greenberg said. “But you also have overwhelmed parents who can’t cope and the doctor prescribes as a knee-jerk reaction. You have children with depression or anxiety who can present the same way, and these medications can just make those problems worse.”

Dr. Visser said she could offer no firm explanation for why she found toddlers covered by Medicaid to be medicated for the disorder far more often than those covered by private insurance.

Dr. Nancy Rappaport, a child psychiatrist and director of school-based programs at Cambridge Health Alliance outside Boston who specializes in underprivileged youth, said that some home environments can lead to behavior often mistaken for A.D.H.D., particularly in the youngest children.

“In acting out and being hard to control, they’re signaling the chaos in their environment,” Dr. Rappaport said. “Of course only some homes are like this — but if you have a family with domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, or a parent neglecting a 2-year-old, the kid might look impulsive or aggressive. And the parent might just want a quick fix, and the easiest thing to do is medicate. It’s a travesty.”

Read the rest HERE

Mike Bloomberg on The Intolerance Of Liberals On College Campuses

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Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg lashed out Thursday against intolerance by liberals on college campuses during a fiery speech to Harvard graduates.

I am intolerant of intolerance.

Most people don’t know what the word intolerance even means…or sexist, or racist, or homophobic. I hope some of these colleges rid themselves of these ideological cults that have infested so many campuses by the time my kids want to attend. If not, I might have to go back to school like Rodney Dangerfield as set a few of these communists, I mean students out.

I follow what is going on. I’ve been seeing how incredibly “intolerant” so many people on the political left truly are. It’s crazy. I’m glad someone with enough money to not give a damn finally spoke up about the totalitarianism, the shadow court system to try felony crimes and the mob rule that is so pervasive in colleges today. Thanks Bloomberg!

Delivering the main speech at Harvard’s 363rd commencement in Cambridge, Mass., Bloomberg complained that campuses have become citidels of “modern . . . McCarthyism” where conservative views are too often shunned and shouted down.

“In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left-wing ideas. Today, on many campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species,” he said.

“And that is probably nowhere more true than it is here in the Ivy League.”

“Isn’t the purpose of a university to stir discussion, not silence it?” Bloomberg continued.

Read more HERE

Mass Incarceration

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#yestoomanybrownMEN

Hashtag activism is futile.

Real activism has been taking place on the streets, in city council and in the state legislature. It also takes place in the HOME. Children do best with their fathers IN THE HOME..not in the prison system.

I would have never been so involved in issues related to widespread fatherlesness and it’s devastating effects unless I was dragged deep into the matrix of family court-due to circumstances beyond my control. The family court is one of the biggest players in the game.

Michelle Alexander who wrote the book The New Jim Crow was also skeptical of some of the things she read until she did her research and found out the truth.

Now, most of our media is seeing the light….

“The severity is evident in the devastation wrought on America’s poorest and least educated, destroying neighborhoods and families. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers in prison rose from 350,000 to 2.1 million. Since race and poverty overlap so significantly, the weight of our criminal justice experiment continues to fall overwhelmingly on communities of color, and particularly on young black men.

After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing — all of which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble. This web of collateral consequences has created what the National Academy of Sciences report calls “a highly distinct political and legal universe for a large segment of the U.S. population.”

……

“The research is in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough.”

Read the entire New York Times Op-Ed HERE:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/end-mass-incarceration-now.html?referrer=

We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings’

Chinua Achebe's postcolonial classic Things Fall Apart is one of the books that Oberlin College has recommended faculty teach with a trigger warning. Photograph: Michael Neal

Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial classic Things Fall Apart is one of the books that Oberlin College has recommended faculty teach with a trigger warning. Photograph: Michael Neal

If someone carries a level of trauma and sensitivity, they can utilize student services and have proper accommodations made for them in private. There are resources available to those people.

Indulging in the general philosophy, however, of avoiding issues simply because they are uncomfortable or offensive, these people are never going to survive in the wild. I feel it is time to call out the ideology that has infected so many aspects of our modern culture. I really feel that this particular ideology has turned into a cult and needs to be stopped. They have really gone to far.

Spoiler alerts are not required in college. Life is tough before you get there, while you are studying for your degree, and is even tougher when you get out. We can’t go around bubble-wrapping every sharp corner that exists in the world. It’s frightening and incredibly sad that we are attempting to do so.

By Jill Filipovic
theguardian.com, Wednesday 5 March 2014

Trigger Warning: this piece discusses trigger warnings. It may also look askance at college students who are now asking that trigger warnings be applied to their course materials.

If you’ve spent time on feminist blogs lately or in the social-justice-oriented corner of Tumblr, you have likely come across the Trigger Warning (TW): a note to readers that the material following the warning may trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction. In the early days of feminist blogging, trigger warnings were generally about sexual assault, and posted with the understanding that lots of women are sexual assault survivors, lots of women read feminist blogs, and graphic descriptions of rape might lead to panic attacks or other reactions that will really ruin someone’s day. Easy enough to give readers a little heads up – a trigger warning – so that they can decide to avoid that material if they know that discussion of rape triggers debilitating reactions.

Trigger warnings in online spaces, though, have expanded widely and become more intricate, detailed, specific and obscure. Trigger warnings, and their cousin the “content note”, are now included for a whole slew of potentially offensive or upsetting content, including but not limited to: misogyny, the death penalty, calories in a food item, terrorism, drunk driving, how much a person weighs, racism, gun violence, Stand Your Ground laws, drones, homophobia, PTSD, slavery, victim-blaming, abuse, swearing, child abuse, self-injury, suicide, talk of drug use, descriptions of medical procedures, corpses, skulls, skeletons, needles, discussion of “isms,” neuroatypical shaming, slurs (including “stupid” or “dumb”), kidnapping, dental trauma, discussions of sex (even consensual), death or dying, spiders, insects, snakes, vomit, pregnancy, childbirth, blood, scarification, Nazi paraphernalia, slimy things, holes and “anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD”.

It is true that everything on the above list might trigger a PTSD response in someone. The trouble with PTSD, though, is that its triggers are often unpredictable and individually specific – a certain smell, a particular song, being touched in that one way. It’s impossible to account for all of them, because triggers are by their nature not particularly rational or universally foreseeable. Some are more common than others, though, which is why it seems reasonable enough for explicitly feminist spaces to include trigger warnings for things like assault and eating disorders.

College, though, is different. It is not a feminist blog. It is not a social justice Tumblr.

College isn’t exactly the real world either, but it’s a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text. It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student’s world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges – not a place that contracts to meet the student exactly where they are.

Which doesn’t mean that individual students should not be given mental health accommodations. It’s perfectly reasonable for a survivor of violence to ask a professor for a heads up if the reading list includes a piece with graphic descriptions of rape or violence, for example. But generalized trigger warnings aren’t so much about helping people with PTSD as they are about a certain kind of performative feminism: they’re a low-stakes way to use the right language to identify yourself as conscious of social justice issues. Even better is demanding a trigger warning – that identifies you as even more aware, even more feminist, even more solicitous than the person who failed to adequately provide such a warning.

There is real harm in utilizing general trigger warnings in the classroom. Oberlin College recommends that its faculty “remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals”. When material is simply too important to take out entirely, the college recommends trigger warnings. For example, Oberlin says, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a great and important book, but:

… it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.

Students should be duly warned by the professor writing, for example, “Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide.”

On its face, that sounds fine (except for students who hate literary spoilers). But a trigger warning for what Oberlin identified as the book’s common triggers – racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide (and more!) – sets the tone for reading and understanding the book. It skews students’ perceptions. It highlights particular issues as necessarily more upsetting than others, and directs students to focus on particular themes that have been singled out by the professor as traumatic.

……………

The kinds of suffering typically imaged and experienced in the white western male realm – war, intra-male violence – are standard. Traumas that impact women, people of color, LGBT people, the mentally ill and other groups whose collective lives far outnumber those most often canonized in the American or European classroom are set apart as different, as particularly traumatizing. Trigger warnings imply that our experiences are so unusual the pages detailing our lives can only be turned while wearing kid gloves.

There’s a hierarchy of trauma there, as well as a dangerous assumption of inherent difference. There’s a reinforcement of the toxic messages young women have gotten our entire lives: that we’re inherently vulnerable.

And there’s something lost when students are warned before they read Achebe or Diaz or Woolf, and when they read those writers first through the lens of trauma and fear.

Then, simply, there is the fact that the universe does not treat its members as if they come hand-delivered in a box clearly marked “fragile”. The world can be a desperately ugly place, especially for women. That feminist blogs try to carve out a little section of the world that is a teeny bit safer for their readers is a credit to many of those spaces. Colleges, though, are not intellectual or emotional safe zones. Nor should they be.

Trauma survivors need tools to manage their triggers and cope with every day life. Universities absolutely should prioritize their needs – by making sure that mental health care is adequately funded, widely available and destigmatized.

But they do students no favors by pretending that every piece of potentially upsetting, triggering or even emotionally devastating content comes with a warning sign.

Read the entire piece here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-be-counterproductive

The real Rx for campus rape

Campus Sexual Assaults

An excerpt from THIs article: http://nypost.com/2014/05/06/the-real-rx-for-campus-rape-give-up-on-liberal-answers/

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Sexual assault is a serious crime. If campuses are really seeing these rates of violence, then nothing less than an overwhelming police presence is called for.

Not the keystone campus cops, either, but gun-wielding officers protecting women as they walk to classes, parties and club meetings, even escorting them home from dates. Maybe Ray Kelly would be up to the job; then again, even New York’s worst neighborhoods don’t report these rates of violence against women.

In the second (more likely) scenario, there’s been no epidemic of assault but instead a preponderance of sexual encounters fueled by bad judgment and free-flowing alcohol.

In which case, again, things would’ve been much better handled had conservatives been in charge. We’d get single-sex dorms, more restrictions on drinking, perhaps even some classes on chivalry instead of ones about the “rape culture.”

Recall the response of the late John Silber when Boston University students objected to his policies restricting visits to the rooms of members of the opposite sex. BU’s president explained: “It is not our job to provide a ‘love nest’ for our students.”

Just think of how many unwanted sexual encounters that policy alone might have prevented.

Instead, the liberals have run the show when it comes to dealing with regrettable campus sex — and screwed things up completely.

First, they stepped back (far back) from endorsing (let along enforcing) traditional beliefs about sexual restraint.

Then they embraced the claim that every drunken hookup is rape. The idea was to stigmatize such hookups (or at least the men involved) — yet the result was at least equally to undermine the notion that rape is a serious violation whose perpetrators must be stopped and punished.

Next, the campus bureaucrats substituted college disciplinary hearings for actual prosecutions. Yet these hearings protect the rights of neither the victims nor the accused.

Finally, these administrators have perpetrated the myth that rape is some kind of political issue. No, it’s a crime. As with any other crime, when it happens, students should call the police. Not the dean, and certainly not the White House.

Read more HERE