There are a great many ways in which a person can die other than by natural causes such as disease and old age but some people bring about their own deaths and the deaths of others by being really stupid. When you read this piece, ask yourself this question; “How many people like those in this piece are killed every year by their stupidity or the stupidity of others?
In 62 BC: Eleazar Maccabeus was crushed to death at the Battle of Beth- zechariah by a War elephant that he believed was carrying King Antiochus V. Eleazar rushed underneath the elephant and thrust a spear into its belly, whereupon it fell dead on top of him. That is about as dumb as when soldiers during the Second World War would sleep under tanks in order not to get wet during rainfalls. During the night, the tanks sank in the mud and crushed the soldiers.
In 1771, Adolf Frederick, king of Sweden, died of digestion problems on 12 February, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk.
In 1871, Clement Vallandigham, U.S. Congressman and political opponent of Abraham Lincoln, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound suffered in court while representing the defendant in a murder case. Demonstrating how the murder victim could have inadvertently shot himself, the gun, which Vallandigham believed to be unloaded, discharged and mortally wounded him. His demonstration was successful, and the defendant was acquitted.
I remember when I serving in the Canadian Navy in the early 1950s when a petty officer was showing his men how not to load a four-inch naval gun. He told the men to quickly move their hand from the breach as soon as they shoved the shell into the breach. He didn’t pull his hand away quickly enough and as a result the breach closed, cutting off his hand,
In 1912, Franz Reichelt, tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy. It appears that it really was a dummy that went over the railing.
In 1920, Dan Andersson, a Swedish author, died of cyanide poisoning while staying at Hotel Hellman in Stockholm, because the hotel staff had failed to clear the room after using hydrogen cyanide against bedbugs.
In 1923, Martha Mansfield, an American film actress, died after sustaining severe burns on the set of the film The Warrens of Virginia after a smoker's match, tossed by a cast member, ignited her Civil War costume of hoopskirts and ruffles.
1927, Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of a broken neck when one of the long scarves she was known for caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger. Something like that happened years later when a belly dancer was practicing for an upcoming competition while in her home. She practiced one a particular move where she wrapped one end of her sash around her neck and threw the other end in the air. Unfortunately for her, the other end got caught in a moving ceiling fan and she was strangled to death.
During the 1920s, at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, a group of women who worked in the company’s watch factory used fluorescent paint that contains radium to paint the numbers on the faces of watches. They also noticed that the paint glowed when they applied it to their skin so they applied it regularly to their skin. They eventually exposed themselves to much higher amounts of radium that normally they would be exposed to and as a result, they invariably died from bone cancer.
In 1932, Eben Byers died of radiation poisoning after having consumed large quantities of a popular patent medicine containing radium.
In 1944, Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr. accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.
In 1947, the Collyer brothers, who were compulsive hoarders, were found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some time later. Their bodies were recovered after massive efforts in removing many tons of debris from their home.
In 1960, over 100 Soviet rocket technicians and officials died when a switch was turned on unintentionally igniting a rocket. The dead included Red Army Marshal Nedelin who was seated in a deck chair just 40 meters away overseeing launch preparations.
In 1972, Luigi Greco, the Mafia boss of the Sicilian faction of Montreal, died from an incident occurring while renovating a family pizzeria. He used a mop dipped in gasoline and a metal scraper to remove the filth on the floor. Obviously, the combination provoked an explosion and flash fire, and Greco died four days later at the Sacré-Cœur Hospital.
In 1973, Bruce Lee, an American martial artist and actor, is thought to have died by a severe allergic reaction to Equagesic. His brain had swollen about 13%. His autopsy was written as "death by misadventure."
On December 21, 1978, in St. Augustine, Florida, a female scuba diver was recovering in a decompression chamber after getting decompression sickness due to making an emergency swim to surface. A crew worker accidentally released the pressure of the room causing her body to instantly explode, thereby killing her instantly.
A similar incident like that occurred five years later. Four divers and a tender were killed on the Byford Dolphin semi-submersible, when a decompression chamber explosively decompressed from 9 atm to 1 atm in a fraction of a second. The diver nearest the chamber opening literally exploded just before his remains were ejected through a 24 in (60 cm) opening. The other divers' remains showed signs of boiled blood, unusually strong rigor mortis, large amounts of gas in the blood vessels, and scattered hemorrhages in the soft tissues.
On December 21, 1978, in Bordeaux, France, a man with the eating disorder called Pica Syndrome had a habit of swallowing small metal objects. The objects filled up his stomach and then cut the veins and arteries filling it up with blood. Eventually, his stomach ruptured and blood spilled into his abdomen. He died a slow death.
In 1978, Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox ten months after the disease was eradicated in the world, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some Small Pox virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.
1978, Claude François, a French pop singer, was electrocuted when he tried to change a light bulb while standing in his bathtub that was full of water at the time.
On July 28, 1979, in Norman, Oklahoma, a man who pleasured himself by shoving large items up his rectum was recovering in the hospital after shoving a shampoo bottle up his rectum. While the doctor was out of his hospital room, he grabbed nine thermometers, taped them together and shoved them up his rectum. When the doctor walked in, he sat back down on the hospital bed to avoid being noticed, but when he sat down, the thermometers in his rectum shattered causing internal bleeding and mercury poisoning. He died.
In 1981, American photographer Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska in March to photograph wildlife, but failed to confirm arrangements for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.
There was a similar case like that one where a man was dropped off at a lake and who had made arrangements for the pilot to pick him up when he signaled the pilot on the return trip two weeks later. Unfortunately, he gave the wrong signal and the pilot left without picking the man up. The man later starved to death in his cabin in the mountains.
In1981, Boris Sagal, a film director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail rotor blade of a helicopter and was decapitated.
In 1982, actor Vic Morrow, was decapitated by a helicopter blade during filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Two child actors, Myca Dinh Le (who was decapitated) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (who was crushed), also died. Later the court found the Morrow and the children weren’t at fault.
In 1982, David Grundman was killed near Lake Pleasant, Arizona while shooting at cacti for fun with his shotgun. After firing several shots at a 26 ft (8m) tall Saguaro Cactus from extremely close range, a 4 ft limb of the cactus that was weakened by the gunfire detached and fell on him, crushing him.
I don’t know when this next incident occurred but it also involves cacti. Two men with a large collection of cactuses were leaving the desert with a stolen Saguaro cactus. They stopped to celebrate by sharing a bottle of Mezcal and getting drunk. They later had a shared hallucination where the cactus told them that they are going to die causing the two men to panic and run away. One man fell on an Agave plant and was impaled through the heart and the other ran head on into another Saguaro cactus and its needles pierced his eyes and went into his brain. He later died after telling his rescuers what had happened.
In 1983, American author Tennessee Williams died when he choked on an eye drop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eye drops in each eye. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to the effects of drugs and alcohol abuse, and it is highly likely that Williams was high when the cap ended up in his throat as drugs and alcohol were found in his room and inside his body. When I was seven-years of age, I accidentally swallowed two pennies. Why I put those two coins in my mouth is beyond me. My youngest daughter also swallowed a ring which got lodged in her mouth. Needless to say, we both lived through our ordeals.
1983, George Schwartz, a factory owner in Providence, Rhode Island, was injured in a factory explosion, which toppled every wall except one. After being treated for wounds, he went back to the factory to search for files. Unfortunately, the final wall toppled and crushed him.
On July 4, 1983, at Happy's Trailer Park, Lawrence, Kansas, three rednecks celebrating the Fourth of July with beer and a barbecue got the idea of having a fireworks display in their yard. They tried to launch a homemade firework from a homemade launcher, but when the firework won't ignite, one of the three rednecks looks directly into the launcher only to have the firework explode into his face causing pieces of his skull to shatter into his brain.
In 1984, Jon-Erik Hexum, an American television actor, died after he shot himself in the head with a prop gun during a break in filming, playing Russian Roulette using a revolver loaded with a single blank cartridge. Hexum apparently was not informed that blanks have gunpowder that explodes into a gas with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired too close to one’s head.
On July 3, 1992, at the Cross River Links in Monrovia, California, an Irishman who had taken a golfing trip to the United States was on the golf course when a rat crawled up his pant leg and while the rat was scratching his leg, it urinated on it. The urine seeped into the cut which caused leptospirosis that caused the man to die a week later. There were parasitic aerobic bacteria in the rat’s urine which can be fatal. He should have sought medical help after the rat scratched him, after all it could have been rabid.
1993: Actor Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, (who also died accidentally) was shot and killed by Michael Massee using a prop gun while filming the movie The Crow. A cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in the pistol before the fatal scene; this caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck. The malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was used again later to shoot the death scene. His death was not instantly recognized by the crew or other actors; they believed he was still acting
On July 9, 1993, Garry Hoy, a 38-year old lawyer and a senior partner at the Holden Day Wilson Law firm in Toronto, Canada, fell to his death after he threw himself against a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in an attempt to prove to a group of visiting Law Students that the glass was unbreakable. His first attempt failed to damage the glass at all. On his second attempt the glass still didn't break but instead actually popped out of the window frame and he fell over 300 feet to his death. He must have read about the janitor in an American city who wanted to assure the women working in a high rise office building that they didn’t have to fear falling out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. He ran full force into one of the windows and bounced back. Then he immediately left the office. The women were assured.
In 1993, Michael A. Shingledecker Jr. was killed almost instantly when he and a friend were struck by a pickup truck while lying flat on the yellow dividing line of a two-lane highway in Polk, Pennsylvania. They were copying a daredevil stunt from the movie The Program. Marco Birkhimer died of a similar accident while performing the same stunt in Route 206 of Bordentown, New Jersey.
In 1995, a 14 year old girl, Ryan Bielby, plummeted to her death while riding the rollercoaster the Timber Wolf at Kansas City's Worlds of Fun amusement park. She had unbuckled her seatbelt and maneuvered herself free from the lap bar and restraint devices in an attempt to switch seats with a friend. She fell about 25 feet to her death
On November 21, 1995, at the Owanda Steel Corporation in Kobe, Japan, two Japanese business men accidentally banged their heads together after bowing to each other, rupturing a previously unknown aneurysm in one of the men’s brain. He died. Bowing to one another is a time honoured custom in Japan but there should be a reasonable distance between the two people before bowing to each other.
In 1996, Sharon Lopatka, an Internet entrepreneur from Maryland, solicited a man via the Internet to torture and kill her for the purpose of sexual gratification. Her killer, Robert Fredrick Glass, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the homicide. In 2001, Bernd-Jürgen Brandes from Germany was voluntarily stabbed repeatedly and then partly eaten by Armin Meiwes (who was later called the Cannibal of Rothenburg). Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten as it was to be a sexual high for him. Meiwes was sentenced to thirty years in prison for the murder of Brandes. I should add that several others came to Meiwes’ apartment but changed their minds about being killed and eaten by the cannibal.
On October 14, 1997, in Newark, Delaware, a female sex addict was given an ultimatum by her boyfriend to either give up her smoking habit or to give up sex with him. Not wanting to give up sex, she tried to give up her smoking habit overnight by putting a month's worth of nicotine patches all over her body. She later died of a heart attack brought on by a nicotine overdose.
On June 19, 1998, in Waterloo, Iowa, a thief tried to steal from some patrons at an arcade before closing time. He hid behind the virtual golf display and he then cut a hole in it with his pen knife to see if the coast was clear. The man playing the game at that precise moment the thief was looking through the hole; hit the ball, which then hit the thief in the forehead, killing him.
In 1998: Tom and Eileen Lonergan were stranded while scuba diving with a group of divers off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The group's boat’s captain accidentally abandoned them owing to an incorrect head count taken by the dive boat crew. Their bodies were never recovered. The incident inspired the film Open Water and an episode of 20/20.
When my wife and I went scuba diving off of the Florida Keys and later off of the east coast of Cuba in 1999, the crew on the boats counted heads two times to make sure that everyone was on board. The two-man crew didn’t have to count heads when my wife and I were scuba diving off the Island of Bali in the Indian Ocean in 2005 because we were the only passengers in the small boat.
On February 20, 1998, Bucket-O-Wings, Naperville, Nevada, a man who was on a date began to belch constantly due to peptic ulcers in his stomach. Thinking that his belching was just due to gas, he asked his date to punch him in the stomach to stop the belching, but the impact of his date's punch caused his stomach to rupture. He died naturally. The great Houdini died when he was punched the same way at the request of a college student.
On September 20, 2000, in Encino, California, a Gothic teenager who had spent her life in and out of foster homes and was recently adopted by a couple of religious fanatics who believe her Gothic life was a sign that she was possessed by the devil. She was tied down onto a pentagram inside an enclosed tent while her foster parents burned coal and incense. The combination of the two created carbon monoxide inside the tent which eventually caused the two foster parents who were standing up, to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. The teenager on the other hand was able to escape death because she was breathing in clean air that was closer to the ground where she was tied up.
In 2001, Michael Colombini, a 6-year-old from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, was struck and killed, at Westchester Regional Medical Center, by a 6.5-pound metal oxygen tank when it was pulled into the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine while he underwent a test. He began to experience breathing difficulties while in the MRI and when a technician brought a portable oxygen canister into the magnetic field, it was pulled from his hands and struck the boy in the head.
Another incident involving an MIR occurred at another hospital when a drug addict sneaked into a hospital at night and ordered a nurse at gun point to give him drugs. Once the addict had had his fix, he then threatened her into having sex with him. The nurse then fooled the robber by stripping off her clothes and while the robber was distracted, the nurse turned on the MRI machine. The strong magnetic forces of the machine attracted the metal of the robber's gun, thereby disarming him. However the addict had a steel plate in his skull and the MRI machine was attracted to it causing the addict to have his head being slammed into the machine causing fatal brain damage.
On April 2, 2001, at the La Paz liquor store in Jasper, Tennessee, a shoplifter choked to death on a hot dog after he shoved it in his mouth while fleeing from a convenience store. Didn’t his mother tell him to not eat his food on the run?
On August 19, 2001, at Bonelli Park, San Dimas, California, two really stupid teenagers who were obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne, celebrated an Ozzfest by snorting fire ants, because they believed in the urban legend that Ozzy Osbourne did the same with fellow rocker Nikki Sixx. However, the fire ants latched onto the teenager’s nasal cavities and then onto their tracheae, and the ants proceeded to bite and sting causing swelling of their tracheae. They both eventually died from suffocation.
On March 9, 2002, in Newton, Massachusetts, a man claimed that he could lift a 350 pound I-beam he found at a construction site. He lifted it but when he lost is grip, he dropped on his neck, breaking his windpipe and killing him. Never lift a heavy weight without someone next to you.
On October 9, 2003, in Dallas, Texas, a thief stole a former stripper's purse and threatened her with a screwdriver. When a neighbor spotted the thief, he escaped on a bicycle but the bike’s front wheel hit a rock and the thief was impaled through the heart with his screwdriver when he fell off his bike.
On October 24, 2003, in Gould's Gym, Seattle, Washington, a body builder who used anabolic steroids and human growth hormones on daily basis died of a heart attack due to cardiomyopathy caused by the steroids. Didn’t he read all the warnings published about steroids?
In 2004, a 24-year-old man, Phillip Quinn, who was high on drugs believed his lava lamp was not flowing fast enough so he placed his lava lamp into the microwave so that the heat would make the simulated lava move faster. When he removed it from the microwave, the lava lamp exploded into his face causing severe burns from the lava lamp liquid and glass shards getting embedded into his skull and heart and killed him.
On June 5, 2004, in Manatee, Florida, a car thief attempted to steal a muscle car by descending down from the garage ceiling from a rope. His leg got tangled in the rope leaving him dangling upside down. Unable to free himself, he died due to rising blood pressure and multiple strokes caused by hemorrhaging in his skull.
On March 15, 2005, in Portland, Maine, two groups of drunken men tried participating in extreme sports. One group decided to kill time by bungee jumping off of a cherry picker, and the other group decided to create a new extreme sport by tying a mattress on top of their pickup truck and having one of the two friends ride on it. While one of the bungee jumpers died when his bungee cord was too long; another fell off the top of his friend's truck going 60 miles per hour. Those are two sure ways to kill time----permanently
On May 2, 2005, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a jealous man crashed his ex-girlfriend's wedding for revenge against her. He bribed a waiter to slip laxatives into her champagne, but the waiter became aware of his scheme and switches the drinks so that the man would be the one to get the spiked drink. After the man drank all of his champagne, he got diarrhea and rushed to the bathroom, only to discover that it was locked. He then went outside and defecated in a garbage can, but was unable to get out of the can as he was stuck in it. During his attempts to extricate himself from the can, it tipped over and the man began rolling downhill in the can, causing spinal injuries and a fatal fractured skull, thereby killing him.
On July 23, 2005, in Beijing, China two Chinese heavy metal enthusiasts spent their nights playing an air guitar, listening to loud music and jumping back and forth on their beds. However, one of the dummies slipped off his bed and crashed through the open window and fell six stories to his death. Not wanting to rock out all alone, his friend followed suit and jumped to his death.
On August 19, 2005, in Irvine, California, a man was texting his girlfriend while he was driving and his girlfriend was texting him while she's walking. Both were not paying attention to where they're going, and as a result the boyfriend ran over his girlfriend with his half ton pickup truck after she unknowingly stepped in front of it.
On October 19, 2005, at the Hallandale Ranch in Tooele County in Utah, a really stupid man was electrocuted after he rigged a dead cow’s heart to a car battery and used it as a sex toy. That was a shocking way to die. Now there is a pun for you. You know what they say about puns? Whereas a bun is a form of wheat, a pun is a form of wit. Oh my. Will he ever stop?
In 2005, Kenneth ‘Mr. Hands’ Pinyan of Gig Harbor, Washington died of acute peritonitis after seeking out and receiving anal intercourse from a stallion, an act he had engaged in previously on numerous occasions without injury. Pinyan delayed his visit to the hospital for several hours out of reluctance to explain the circumstances of his injury to doctors. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in that state.
On July 18 2006 in Dallas, Texas, a man was trying to steal copper from a telephone pole in a vacant lot. He died by electrocution when he cut into the live wire.
In 2006, Erika Tomanu, a seven-year-old girl in Saitama, Japan, died when she was sucked down the intake pipe of a large pool at a water park. The grille that was meant to cover the inlet came off, yet lifeguards at the pool at the time deemed it safe enough to allow swimmers to stay in the water as they had issued a verbal warning about the situation. She was sucked head first more than 10 metres down the pipe by the powerful pump and it took rescuers more than 6 hours to remove her by digging through concrete to access the pipe.
A similar event occurred two years later when Abigail Taylor, age 6, died nine months after several of her internal organs were partially sucked out of her lower body while she sat on an excessively powerful swimming pool drain. After several months, surgeons replaced her intestines and pancreas with donor organs. Unfortunately, she later succumbed to a rare transplant-related cancer.
On January 17, 2007, in Paso Robles, California, a woman who has stolen millions of dollars from her millionaire husband played with the money in her personal vanity room. An earthquake then shook the room and she was crushed to death after the heavy sacks of money on the shelf fell on her.
On August 11, 2007, Miami, Oklahoma, a drunken clown who strangely enough suffered from coulrophobia (fear of clowns) as a child, was driving to his next kiddie party. After stopping suddenly, a CO2 canister in his car activated thereby inflating a giant balloon he used for his act. He was too drunk to sense the danger and when he did it, is too late. He died from suffocation after the balloon pinned him inside his car. If he was sober, he would have gotten out of his car as fast as he could before the balloon enveloped him.
On August 12, 2007, at the reservoir at New River in Arizona, a college student jumped off a cliff and into the lake but he hit the water at an angle where water rushed into his rectum and ruptured his large intestine. He died. That is one of the consequences of jumping into water from a high place.
On August 20, 2008, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a man who was traumatized by his abusive uncle who abused him while wearing a cow suit; develops a fetish of being humiliated by animals. His fetish then drove him to sneak into a barn one day to drink milk from a cow's udder, but when he bit down too hard on one of the cow’s teat, he was killed after the cow kicked him in the face.
On October 29, 2003, in Los Angeles, California, an unhappily married couple took a hike in the mountains, only the husband planned on murdering his wife to make it look like an accident, so that he can have her insurance money. He tried to take a photo with his wife so that he can push her off the cliff, but he ended up tripping and falling off himself breaking most of his bones on the ground below and being killed in the process.
On November 7, 2008, in Hollywood, California, a musician who was about to be evicted by his landlord, hid out in his hide-a-bed in his wall. The bed got stuck and he suffocated since no one could hear his cries for help because he sound-proofed his apartment.
In 2009, Sergey Tuganov, a 28-year-old Russian, bet two women that he could continuously have sex with them both for twelve hours. Several minutes after winning the $4,300 bet, he suffered a heart attack and died. It is believed that the heart attack was the result of Tuganov ingesting an entire bottle of Viagra just after accepting the bet.
This following story also proves that old age that too much of a good thing can be fatal. A man's erectile dysfunction caused his sexual life with his wife to fail. At dinner his wife ground up three Viagra pills and slipped them unseen into his beer in an attempt to ‘jump start’ his sex drive. He then got a call from his mistress and took three more Viagra pills before he left his house. Later on, his mistress dropped three more Viagra pills unseen into his drink. The man who by then had taken nine times the recommended dose of Viagra when he began to have sex with his mistress and after his orgasm, he died from a heart attack after overdosing on the Viagra. It must have been one hell of an orgasm. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to brag about it.
In 2009, Vladimir Likhonos, a Ukrainian student, died after accidentally dipping a piece of homemade chewing gum into a sensitive explosive he was using on another project. He mistook the jar of explosive material for citric acid, which was also on his desk. The gum exploded, blowing off his jaw and most of the lower part of his face.
I don’t know the dates in which these following fools died.
Three fools got high off of the paint fumes from their aerosol spray paint cans. They later found some varnish and poured it all over their clothes so that they could get high off of it. One of the fools then lit a cigarette causing his clothes to ignite, engulfing him in flames. He died by being burned to death because the other two fools couldn’t get near him lest their own clothes burst into flames also.
A young couple got high on painkillers in their hot tub. The hot tub temperature gauge malfunctioned causing the temperature in the hot tub to rise resulting in them boiling them to death. Why didn’t they get out of the tub? They didn't get out because they were too high to notice what was happening to them.
Two Japanese American teenagers got bored of their video games and samurai movies so they began to fight each other with real samurai swords. Just when one of the teens tried to kill the other, his sword came into contact with a bare high voltage electric wire above him which resulted in him immediately being killed by electrocution.
Five strippers posing as college cheerleaders organizing a car wash fundraiser to con men out of their money. When they washed an old widower's car, they dried off the car with an electric car buffer. However the buffer had an exposed wire and it got wet causing all five strippers to be electrocuted simultaneously. They all died.
A man with anger issues was invited to watch wrestling with a group of friends. He then fought with them and in an attempt to tackle one of the guys; he tripped over his own foot and crashed head first through the television set; embedding glass shards into his skull, breaking his neck and electrocuting him.
An elderly widower who hated Christmas went outside with rotten fruit in his hands to pelt carolers who where on his property. A hailstorm suddenly occurred and he was killed when suddenly a two pound chunk of hail fell on his head. If he had any sense, he would not have tried to chase the carolers of his property.
This reminds me of the true story of a Greek who two thousand years ago was afraid to go outside because when he was a small child, his mother was told by a seer that if he did, he would die. When he was an old man, he finally decided to test fate so he stepped outside for the first time in his life. As fate would have it, within minutes of him stepping outside of his home, a large bird carrying a turtle it had captured accidentally dropped it and it fell on the Greek’s head and killed him. Now that is what I call fate.
A woman who was always drinking energy drinks so that she could work harder. As most people know, energy drinks have large amounts of caffeine in them. When humans drink caffeine, (which is actually a drug) it acts as a stimulant which can make us feel more awake and alert. It's also known to affect heart rates and force the heart to work harder. The woman was working hard to impress her boss for a promotion. Her boss offered her the promotion but he told her that to get the promotion, she would have to engage in oral sex with him. In disgust she refused and guzzled down more energy drinks. Then she saw the new employee get the promotion. She barged into her employer’s office in anger and suddenly her heart stopped because of the caffeine overdose.
A purse snatcher's windpipe was crushed by an elderly woman who had over 30 years of experience in Taekwondo after he tried to steal her purse. You have to watch these old folks. Some have been known to carry concealed weapons.
To prepare for a farting contest, a college student hired a flatulence trainer. (I didn’t now that such a trainer exists; did you?) When the trainer held a lit blow torch near the student's buttocks, it killed the student when gases emanating from his anus caught on fire. I guess I will have to explain this to you as to how this could happen. Gastrointestinal gas (farts) is a heterogeneous mixture of gasses that have been swallowed and which have passed through the digestive system, gasses that have been released from the bloodstream into the intestine, gasses that have been generated by the interaction of internal fluids, and gasses that have been generated in the intestine by the action of microorganisms. In general, the major components of gastrointestinal gas are Nitrogen (N2), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Oxygen (O2), Hydrogen (H2) and Methane (CH4). These five gasses represent 99% of the gastrointestinal gasses. Methane is used as a fuel and NASA is looking into its potential use as rocket fuel so it follows that you don’t want to be bringing a flame in the immediate area where Methane mixed with Oxygen and Hydrogen is leaking, if you follow my meaning.
A talented but clumsy violinist fell down a flight of stairs. Refusing to break the fall with her hands, she ended up slamming her head against the wall on the way down, fracturing her skull and killing her. I have some mixed thoughts about her actions before she was killed in her fall. Twenty years ago, I tripped over a wire in our living room and on the way down; I braced myself with my right arm lest I fall on my face. The upper bone in my right arm literally broke in two and in doing so; it tore some of my nerves in the arm. I no longer have full use of my arm and a day doesn’t go by when I don’t feel pain in my right arm. Now had I fallen on my face; well I won’t ponder that possibility. The pain in my arm is bad enough.
A robber trying to hide from the police in a drainage pipe; got stuck in it. When night time approached, rats appeared and they begin to eat him alive all the way to his brain. That is a horrible way to pay for one’s crime. Of course, he didn’t suffer as long as Mithridates did in 401 B.C., who was condemned for the murder of Cyrus the Younger. He was executed by scaphism, (the insect torture) for 17 days before he died from the insect bites.
A French maid performed a striptease for an old millionaire who was hooked up to a respirator. The maid then plugged in Christmas lights and wrapped them around herself to amuse the old man. It caused the house's circuits to overload resulting in a power failure. The respirator stopped working and the man died due to lack of oxygen. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall as she was explaining to the cops how the old man died.
An Italian man made the mistake of borrowing money from the Mafia and was forced to dig his own grave as two mobsters who were going to shoot him were having a picnic in the Sicilian countryside. While digging, the man inadvertently dug up a shrapnel grenade which was left over from World War II. He threw the live grenade at the two sitting killers which then blew up in the mobster’s faces.
A necrophiliac (a person who likes having sex with dead bodies) had sex with a corpse before delivering it to a funeral home. Before driving to the funeral, he forgot to secure the wheels of the cart holding the casket in place and after suddenly stopping after almost hitting a car in front of him, the casket rolled to the front of the car ramming into his head and severing his brainstem. Obviously, his mind wasn’t on his work.
A paroled man planed to rob a jewelry store. He put a pair of pantyhose over his head and the material was so dark, he could barely see where he was going. For this reason, it caused him to walk into a gun store next door with gun in hand instead of the jewelry store. The customers and employees in the gun store shot him to death in self defense.
A drunken man missed his chance to have sex with a women so when he saw a wild raccoon and caught it, he tried to have sex by putting his penis in the animal’s mouth. Big mistake. His penis was severely bitten by the raccoon and he subsequently bled to death.
A woman was riding on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle when the vibrations of the motorcycle caused her to have an orgasm and for a moment she forgot that she is still on the motorcycle until she fell off the bike and broke most of her bones, killing her. Many years ago when I was riding my motor bike, a woman sitting behind me tried to fondle me. I told her to stop. Being fondled and driving a motor bike at the same time are not compatible, I assure you.
A thief who has just stolen groceries from a blind pregnant woman was on the run from the police. He hid in a car wash to evade them but car wash owner not being aware that the their was in the car wash then turned on the car wash for a daily maintenance check. The thief tried to find the exit of the car wash but was disoriented by the spraying water nozzles and the moving brushes. Not being able to see where he was going, he ran headlong into a water nozzle which impaled his head, resulting in his cranium being filled up with water. The pressure of the water in his skull caused his head to explode.
A man cheated in a cock fighting competition by placing razor blades on his rooster's feet. His rooster immediately killed his opponent's rooster but his opponent immediately noticed this and pointed it out to the crowd. The crowd then turned into an angry mob and before they could kill the cheater, the man's own rooster cut his jugular vein, causing him to bleed to death.
A woman went online via a webcam with her husband who was away on business. She tried to sexually gratify him by duct taping her mouth shut and handcuffing herself to the chair that she was sitting in. After she was handcuffed to the chair, a robber broke into her house and after he robbed her, he talked to her while standing close to her. Because the robber had extremely bad breath, she began to vomit as response to the robber’s breath but the duct tape prevented the vomit from exiting her mouth. The vomit then traveled from her mouth into her lungs. She then drowned in her own fluids. Tying yourself up is stupid enough but taping your mouth also just adds to the stupidity.
Two dwarf wrestlers got paid lots money by battling each other for a crowd. They celebrated one night by going to a hotel room to have sex with women and to get drunk. They trashed the hotel room and then they tried to impress the women by running their heads into the wall hoping to break it. One successfully put a hole in the wall with his head but the other ended up running head on into a 2x4 stud that was in the wall. The veins inside his head burst and he died from combination of brain swelling and loss of blood.
A man who was paranoid to the point of insomnia, placed booby traps around his house to protect himself from burglars. To get some much needed sleep he took sleeping pills that were prescribed by his doctor, but the pills came with the side effect of sleep walking. In his sleep walking state, he walked to the refrigerator to get some food avoiding every trap he placed in the house but when he sat down on the couch, he triggered a laser operated shotgun which shot him in the head.
Two men searched the world for the ultimate high. They went to Peru to look for the Colorado River Toad so that they can get high off of the hallucinogenic effects of its secretions but they end finding a Yellow Banded Poison Dart Frog. They licked the secretions hoping that they can get high off of it but the frog's poisonous secretions paralyzed them and shut down their hearts.
A woman gardener was searching for a vegetable in her garden to practice oral sex on for an upcoming date. She found a zucchini and placed in her mouth while she was walking to her house. She accidentally stepped on the blade of a hoe. The handle then sprung upwards and hit the zucchini which was then forcefully lodged into her windpipe, choking her to death.
A drunken man and his equally drunken friend got into a car and drove on road in the country. The driver felt sick and stuck his head out of the window to throw up. Not noticing the mailbox in front of him, he hit his head on the mailbox and was decapitated.
A boxer who lived a secret life as a cross dresser got confronted by a rapist who didn't know that the female he was attacking was actually a man. In self defense the cross dresser punched the rapist so hard, the rapist died from brain damage.
A brewer sampled a taste of his family whiskey and asked his workers to perfect it. He gets drunk after sampling the whiskey repeatedly but ended up making the batch. He wanted to update the family recipe which was locked in a safe but he was too drunk to remember the combination. In a fit of drunken rage, he kicked the safe but ended getting a cut on his big toe. His cut soon got severely infected and he died two weeks later from blood poisoning. He should have sought medical help. Back in the 1950s, I got blood poisoning after climbing a mountain in British Columbia. Within days, the pain was so bad; I went to a doctor who immediately said I was suffering from blood poisoning. I was hospitalized for several days. The doctor in the hospital said that I was within days of dying of blood poisoning.
A woman asked a man with asthma to smell spices for a meal she was preparing for him. The man inhaled the spices and then suddenly he stopped breathing due to an asthma attack. He died because he had used up his inhaler from smelling the previous spices he was asked to smell.
An elderly man was sitting in his old car and he later passed away while he was still in it. Meanwhile, a thug robbed a gas station nearby. While the robber was fleeing the scene, the old man's car emergency brakes suddenly failed and the car rolled down a hill while the thug was running across the street. Then he was run over by the moving car and killed. Even when you are fleeing from the police, you should follow the instructions your mother gave you when you were a child. Look both ways before you cross the street.
When three friends took an airplane trip after scuba diving, Nitrogen bubbles formed in their blood and they became paralyzed from decompression sickness so there was nothing they could do to stop the plane from crashing to the ground and killing them.
A fish fanatic created his own fish-suit to swim like a fish and took it to a lake to try it out on a hot summer day. Unable to cool down his body because of the suit, he eventually died of a heat stroke.
A chef who earned a living cooking and serving dangerous and endangered animals sold on the black market in a restaurant was killed by the poisonous king cobra that he tried to cook when it escaped and bit him on the cheek.
All of these deaths were needless and caused by stupidity. No doubt there were millions of other needless and stupid deaths that occurred that I haven’t read about. Do you think that what happened to these people is nature’s way of culling (not killing but culling) the human population on earth to reduce our planet’s population growth?
Friday 26 February 2010
Thursday 25 February 2010
What should we do for mentally ill prisoners after their release?
In April of this year, I will be addressing the 12th United Nations Congress on the treatment of offenders and criminal justice being held in Salvador, Brazil. This article is the speech I will be giving to the three thousand delegates from around the world who will be attending that Congress.
Prisons are woefully ill-equipped for their current role as any nation’s primary mental health facilities according to Jamie Fellner, the Director of the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch and I am in complete accord with his view.
Ideally, a mental hospital is the best place for someone who is mentally ill. Unfortunately, in the province of Ontario in Canada, many of our mental hospitals were closed several decades ago and as a result, many of the mentally ill inmates of these facilities were put back onto the streets and left to fend for themselves. A great many of them subsequently ended up in our detention centers and other correctional institutions. It goes without saying that correctional facilities are generally not equipped to handle these kinds of inmates. To make matters worse, prisoners with mental illnesses find it more difficult to adhere to prison rules and to cope with the stresses of confinement than non-mentally ill prisoners do. This results in their mental illnesses becoming worse.
Further, the taxpayers end up paying millions of dollars a year to keep them locked up when they commit new crimes and are sent back to prison because they weren’t properly treated upon their release. This is not cost effective at all.
The American Psychiatric Association, in a study published in 2000, concluded that as many as one in five prisoners were seriously mentally ill, with up to 5 percent being actively psychotic at any given moment. Nine years later, I don’t think those figures have really changed that much since the number of mentally ill prison inmates continues to grow. Over the past few decades, the American prisons and jails have become its default mental health system. On any given day, tens of thousands of male and female inmates in U.S. prisons are psychotic. At least a quarter of a million of these U.S. prison inmates suffer from a number of mental disorders such as bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and major depression. Those prisons hold three times more people with mental illness than do psychiatric hospitals, and U.S. prisoners have rates of mental illness that are up to four times greater than rates for the general population because they are not given any or alternatively, sufficient psychiatric treatment while they are incarcerated or even after they are released.
Ten percent of all federal offenders in Canada have a significant mental health problem. Canada's ombudsman for prisons has found an "immediate and troubling" shortfall in mental-health-care services for federal offenders and predicts the problem will get worse as the prison populations grow.
What is really happening to these unfortunate people is that they are being merely warehoused until their eventual release which of course doesn't really do anything for them nor does it to anything for the rest of society.
In addition to being highly effective at restoring mentally dysfunctional persons to a wholesome existence and increasing community safety evidenced by fewer arrests, treating these people after their release is far cheaper than re- incarcerating them considering the fact that each inmate in the general prison population costs taxpayers as much as $50,000 per year per prisoner plus an additional $100,000 annually for each chronically ill prisoner who receives special housing, trained guards, and regular treatment. These hefty prison fees come after the cost of police services, legal fees, and court costs.
Mentally ill prisoners who are on remand or waiting for transfer to other facilities or are serving short sentences are incarcerated in detention facilities in the province of Ontario, Canada. If they were mixed in with other prisoners, the mentally ill prisoners would invariably be vulnerable to assault, sexual abuse, exploitation, and extortion. For this reason, mentally ill prisoners in that province’s detention centers are placed in separate wings so at least they are not harassed by the rest of the inmates. Very little however with respect to treatment is being done for them while they are in those facilities.
After I retired, I worked five days a week as a volunteer group counselor in a Toronto detention facility and as such, I worked with many mentally ill inmates. I was aware that many of them were in need of psychiatric treatment but I was amazed at just how much they understood the complexities of life once it was explained to them.
Since all inmates of correctional facilities in Ontario are entitled to appropriate medicine that is required for their needs and is given to them at no cost to them, I have to presume that they were all taking their medicines during the time they were in the facility so their sense of reasoning was considerably improved compared to when they were on the street and not taking their medicine.
Not long ago, Roger Bruyere of West Warwick, Rhode Island used his bed sheets to hang himself in the maximum-security section at that state’s Adult Correctional Institution. He had a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for arson, larceny, and assault with a dangerous weapon. He had an extensive history of mental illness while in prison, including two hospitalizations at the locked Forensic Unit at the state Department of Mental Health Retardation and Hospitals. Similar problems extended to his uncle, Joseph Bruyere, who also hanged himself at the ACI in July 1993 after earning the nickname ‘The Sticker’ for stabbing himself in the abdomen at least 30 separate times during his incarceration. And, at the time of Roger Bruyere’s death, the Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Joy Fox said that he was one of the few prisoners being forced to take mental health medications, thanks to a court order and yet, he still hanged himself. His death makes him the latest illustration of Rhode Island’s failure to adequately treat mentally ill prisoners. He should have also been seeing a psychiatrist.
In Ontario, our correctional institutions where inmates can be kept up to two years less a day; assist those mentally ill prisoners in need of psychiatric help but unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to the provinces’ detention centers because the prisoners are there for shorter periods of time. However, some of them are there for much longer periods of time while waiting for their trials and those that are in need of getting psychiatric help are not getting it.
In Toronto, there is a special court that was opened in 1998 that hears cases where the accused are suspected of being mentally ill. It is called the Mental Health Court and it is presided by Justice Richard Schneider who sits in that court as a Justice of the Ontario Court of Justice. He previously worked as a criminal defence lawyer, often representing individuals with mental disorders. Between 1994 and 2000, he was Counsel to the Ontario Review Board, a body designated under the Criminal Code to provide annual reviews of persons who have been found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible for their crimes on account of a mental disorder. His unique understanding of many of the issues related to mental illness and the courts also stems from his previous experience as a clinical psychologist in an outpatient forensic program in Calgary.
In his capacity as the sitting judge of that special court, he can give community treatment orders which can be extended from six months to a year with automatic reviews to ensure that the treatment is successful and that the individual needing the treatment can be trusted to keep up his treatment.
Mentally ill prisoners are more likely to get into trouble and end up back in prison after they are released because detention centers and prisons turn them loose without the follow-up care they need. Mental patients very often stop taking their medicines and keeping psychiatric appointments soon after their prison or hospital release due to a condition called ‘anosognosia’ that makes it impossible for them to know that they are still sick. The discontinuation of their psychiatric medicine frequently causes these persons to lapse back into psychosis and eventually break the law again. This is why it is so important that those prisoners who are released should be placed on probation or parole so that a follow-up can ascertain as to whether or not they are still taking their medicine as prescribed. It is foolish to simply leave it up to sick people on their own to decide whether or not they should take their medicine, especially after they have just been released from detentions centers or prisons.
In Canada, prisoners can be released after serving a third of their sentence and during the remaining third of their sentence, they are on parole and so it is possible to do follow ups to make sure that they are taking their medicine. However after the parole period is over, they are left to fend for themselves and then many of them stop taking their medicine.
It is morally wrong to put any of our released sick prisoners in the position of being left untreated, resulting in them being jailed again for crimes and/or wandering on our streets as the homeless because they don't have the mental stability to seek help. Seriously mentally ill prisoners who are released untreated are even more likely to hurt themselves than to hurt others and many die during arrest attempts or by suicide and often because of their illness, they succumb to other illnesses because they don’t have the common sense to seek medical help. This is particularly sad because in the province of Ontario, everyone who is a Canadian citizen or a landed immigrant and is severely ill; be he a millionaire or a beggar on the street; is entitled to free hospitalization and free medical treatment; be it brain surgery or an organ transplant, no matter how much it costs the taxpayers.
In 2003, New York City stated that it would provide mentally ill jail inmates with treatment and other services when they were released, under an agreement signed January 8, 2003 that settled a class-action lawsuit. Previously, for many years, most mentally ill inmates at Rikers Island jail were released without assistance of any kind, or dropped off in Queens with a $3 MetroCard and $1.50 in cash which was the routine practice with other inmates. Under the agreement, the city agreed to provide mentally ill inmates access to treatment they need to maintain psychiatric stability after their release. That treatment can include assistance to secure appropriate housing, access to outpatient treatment and medication and the means to pay for those services if the inmate is indigent.
In the City of Toronto, a prison inmate who is released and has no home to go to, may stay at a homeless shelter and later apply for welfare (until they find employment) so that they can live in a home of their own.
There has to be a better way to deal with mentally ill prisoners than merely stuffing them into a detention center where they won’t get psychiatric help. I think that every correctional facility, be it a detention or a correctional facility should have a psychiatrist on staff so that he or she can deal with those prisoners who need psychiatric treatment. Even if a prisoner is being held in the detention facility for a short period of time, he or she should have access to the psychiatrist and also to a social worker. The detention facility that I did my counseling in had two social workers who assisted the mentally ill prisoners in finding a place to live and receive psychiatric treatment after their release.
If we release mentally ill prisoners back into society without first assuring ourselves that they will get psychiatric help and get the medicine they need to help them overcome their psychiatric disorders and further assist them in finding a place to live and a job to go to, then we are not only failing them, but we are also failing society in general. In the long run, society will continue to pay an enormous debt, which is not only the financial costs with respect to the repeated apprehension, trials and incarcerations of these individuals, but also the cost endured by the many victims in society who fall prey to them.
Prisons are woefully ill-equipped for their current role as any nation’s primary mental health facilities according to Jamie Fellner, the Director of the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch and I am in complete accord with his view.
Ideally, a mental hospital is the best place for someone who is mentally ill. Unfortunately, in the province of Ontario in Canada, many of our mental hospitals were closed several decades ago and as a result, many of the mentally ill inmates of these facilities were put back onto the streets and left to fend for themselves. A great many of them subsequently ended up in our detention centers and other correctional institutions. It goes without saying that correctional facilities are generally not equipped to handle these kinds of inmates. To make matters worse, prisoners with mental illnesses find it more difficult to adhere to prison rules and to cope with the stresses of confinement than non-mentally ill prisoners do. This results in their mental illnesses becoming worse.
Further, the taxpayers end up paying millions of dollars a year to keep them locked up when they commit new crimes and are sent back to prison because they weren’t properly treated upon their release. This is not cost effective at all.
The American Psychiatric Association, in a study published in 2000, concluded that as many as one in five prisoners were seriously mentally ill, with up to 5 percent being actively psychotic at any given moment. Nine years later, I don’t think those figures have really changed that much since the number of mentally ill prison inmates continues to grow. Over the past few decades, the American prisons and jails have become its default mental health system. On any given day, tens of thousands of male and female inmates in U.S. prisons are psychotic. At least a quarter of a million of these U.S. prison inmates suffer from a number of mental disorders such as bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and major depression. Those prisons hold three times more people with mental illness than do psychiatric hospitals, and U.S. prisoners have rates of mental illness that are up to four times greater than rates for the general population because they are not given any or alternatively, sufficient psychiatric treatment while they are incarcerated or even after they are released.
Ten percent of all federal offenders in Canada have a significant mental health problem. Canada's ombudsman for prisons has found an "immediate and troubling" shortfall in mental-health-care services for federal offenders and predicts the problem will get worse as the prison populations grow.
What is really happening to these unfortunate people is that they are being merely warehoused until their eventual release which of course doesn't really do anything for them nor does it to anything for the rest of society.
In addition to being highly effective at restoring mentally dysfunctional persons to a wholesome existence and increasing community safety evidenced by fewer arrests, treating these people after their release is far cheaper than re- incarcerating them considering the fact that each inmate in the general prison population costs taxpayers as much as $50,000 per year per prisoner plus an additional $100,000 annually for each chronically ill prisoner who receives special housing, trained guards, and regular treatment. These hefty prison fees come after the cost of police services, legal fees, and court costs.
Mentally ill prisoners who are on remand or waiting for transfer to other facilities or are serving short sentences are incarcerated in detention facilities in the province of Ontario, Canada. If they were mixed in with other prisoners, the mentally ill prisoners would invariably be vulnerable to assault, sexual abuse, exploitation, and extortion. For this reason, mentally ill prisoners in that province’s detention centers are placed in separate wings so at least they are not harassed by the rest of the inmates. Very little however with respect to treatment is being done for them while they are in those facilities.
After I retired, I worked five days a week as a volunteer group counselor in a Toronto detention facility and as such, I worked with many mentally ill inmates. I was aware that many of them were in need of psychiatric treatment but I was amazed at just how much they understood the complexities of life once it was explained to them.
Since all inmates of correctional facilities in Ontario are entitled to appropriate medicine that is required for their needs and is given to them at no cost to them, I have to presume that they were all taking their medicines during the time they were in the facility so their sense of reasoning was considerably improved compared to when they were on the street and not taking their medicine.
Not long ago, Roger Bruyere of West Warwick, Rhode Island used his bed sheets to hang himself in the maximum-security section at that state’s Adult Correctional Institution. He had a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for arson, larceny, and assault with a dangerous weapon. He had an extensive history of mental illness while in prison, including two hospitalizations at the locked Forensic Unit at the state Department of Mental Health Retardation and Hospitals. Similar problems extended to his uncle, Joseph Bruyere, who also hanged himself at the ACI in July 1993 after earning the nickname ‘The Sticker’ for stabbing himself in the abdomen at least 30 separate times during his incarceration. And, at the time of Roger Bruyere’s death, the Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Joy Fox said that he was one of the few prisoners being forced to take mental health medications, thanks to a court order and yet, he still hanged himself. His death makes him the latest illustration of Rhode Island’s failure to adequately treat mentally ill prisoners. He should have also been seeing a psychiatrist.
In Ontario, our correctional institutions where inmates can be kept up to two years less a day; assist those mentally ill prisoners in need of psychiatric help but unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to the provinces’ detention centers because the prisoners are there for shorter periods of time. However, some of them are there for much longer periods of time while waiting for their trials and those that are in need of getting psychiatric help are not getting it.
In Toronto, there is a special court that was opened in 1998 that hears cases where the accused are suspected of being mentally ill. It is called the Mental Health Court and it is presided by Justice Richard Schneider who sits in that court as a Justice of the Ontario Court of Justice. He previously worked as a criminal defence lawyer, often representing individuals with mental disorders. Between 1994 and 2000, he was Counsel to the Ontario Review Board, a body designated under the Criminal Code to provide annual reviews of persons who have been found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible for their crimes on account of a mental disorder. His unique understanding of many of the issues related to mental illness and the courts also stems from his previous experience as a clinical psychologist in an outpatient forensic program in Calgary.
In his capacity as the sitting judge of that special court, he can give community treatment orders which can be extended from six months to a year with automatic reviews to ensure that the treatment is successful and that the individual needing the treatment can be trusted to keep up his treatment.
Mentally ill prisoners are more likely to get into trouble and end up back in prison after they are released because detention centers and prisons turn them loose without the follow-up care they need. Mental patients very often stop taking their medicines and keeping psychiatric appointments soon after their prison or hospital release due to a condition called ‘anosognosia’ that makes it impossible for them to know that they are still sick. The discontinuation of their psychiatric medicine frequently causes these persons to lapse back into psychosis and eventually break the law again. This is why it is so important that those prisoners who are released should be placed on probation or parole so that a follow-up can ascertain as to whether or not they are still taking their medicine as prescribed. It is foolish to simply leave it up to sick people on their own to decide whether or not they should take their medicine, especially after they have just been released from detentions centers or prisons.
In Canada, prisoners can be released after serving a third of their sentence and during the remaining third of their sentence, they are on parole and so it is possible to do follow ups to make sure that they are taking their medicine. However after the parole period is over, they are left to fend for themselves and then many of them stop taking their medicine.
It is morally wrong to put any of our released sick prisoners in the position of being left untreated, resulting in them being jailed again for crimes and/or wandering on our streets as the homeless because they don't have the mental stability to seek help. Seriously mentally ill prisoners who are released untreated are even more likely to hurt themselves than to hurt others and many die during arrest attempts or by suicide and often because of their illness, they succumb to other illnesses because they don’t have the common sense to seek medical help. This is particularly sad because in the province of Ontario, everyone who is a Canadian citizen or a landed immigrant and is severely ill; be he a millionaire or a beggar on the street; is entitled to free hospitalization and free medical treatment; be it brain surgery or an organ transplant, no matter how much it costs the taxpayers.
In 2003, New York City stated that it would provide mentally ill jail inmates with treatment and other services when they were released, under an agreement signed January 8, 2003 that settled a class-action lawsuit. Previously, for many years, most mentally ill inmates at Rikers Island jail were released without assistance of any kind, or dropped off in Queens with a $3 MetroCard and $1.50 in cash which was the routine practice with other inmates. Under the agreement, the city agreed to provide mentally ill inmates access to treatment they need to maintain psychiatric stability after their release. That treatment can include assistance to secure appropriate housing, access to outpatient treatment and medication and the means to pay for those services if the inmate is indigent.
In the City of Toronto, a prison inmate who is released and has no home to go to, may stay at a homeless shelter and later apply for welfare (until they find employment) so that they can live in a home of their own.
There has to be a better way to deal with mentally ill prisoners than merely stuffing them into a detention center where they won’t get psychiatric help. I think that every correctional facility, be it a detention or a correctional facility should have a psychiatrist on staff so that he or she can deal with those prisoners who need psychiatric treatment. Even if a prisoner is being held in the detention facility for a short period of time, he or she should have access to the psychiatrist and also to a social worker. The detention facility that I did my counseling in had two social workers who assisted the mentally ill prisoners in finding a place to live and receive psychiatric treatment after their release.
If we release mentally ill prisoners back into society without first assuring ourselves that they will get psychiatric help and get the medicine they need to help them overcome their psychiatric disorders and further assist them in finding a place to live and a job to go to, then we are not only failing them, but we are also failing society in general. In the long run, society will continue to pay an enormous debt, which is not only the financial costs with respect to the repeated apprehension, trials and incarcerations of these individuals, but also the cost endured by the many victims in society who fall prey to them.
Saturday 20 February 2010
Should non-natives be evicted from an Indian Reservation?
I was shocked when I read in a newspaper that the Mohawk chiefs in the Kahnawake Indian Reserve (southwest of Montreal, Canada) want the non-natives and their native spouses to vacate their homes and pack up their belongings and leave the reservation within ten days.
It seems that in 1981, a moratorium was held in that reservation and it was decided that there was to be no intermingling of races.
As news of the band council's action with respect to the evictions emerged, its political press attaché, Joe Delaronde, was on the defensive. He said in part; "We sound like a bunch of Nazis here but really, they shouldn't be here based on any law, Canadian or Kahnawake." When he said, ‘they’, he was speaking about the non-natives and their native spouses.
It is beyond me as to how he can say that such action isn’t similar as to what the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. As of April 30, 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany were being evicted from their homes without a reason given and without notice being served. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the entire Polish civilian population in Warsaw was evicted and their houses were confiscated and/or demolished. Albeit, the evictees in the reservation are being given notice and the reason for their evictions but their evictions are not a mere smear on the remaining members of the reservation, it runs deeper than that.
What has happened in that reservation is something from a distant, darker time. Acting on anonymous calls to a snitch line, authorities single out people on the basis of their race and order them to leave town. This is what happened in Europe when the Nazis overran it.
Kahnawake law is clear that racial inter-mingling is forbidden on the reserve. Since 1981, a moratorium on mixed marriages has said that any Kahnawake Mohawk who marries a non-native will lose the right to live on the reserve. The principle was reinforced in a 2004 Membership Law, which was aimed at "fulfilling our responsibility to defend our community and our Nation from external threat."
The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of their rights of citizenship, giving them the status of ‘subjects’ in Hitler's Reich. The laws even forbid Jews to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans.
What is happening in the Kahnawake Indian Reserve and what happened in Germany after 1935 is outrageous. Just as the Nazis wanted Arayans (blond hair and blue eyes) to be pure, so do the Mohawks in the Kahnawake Reserve want their Aboriginals to be pure.
I married a young Japanese woman in 1976 and we have been happily married for 34 years. Our two daughters have caucasion (white) and oriental blood in them which makes them Eurasians and their children have Indian and Black blood in them which means that aside from having Caucasian and Oriental blood added to the mix, they have two more sources of blood in them and despite that, they are very beautiful and smart to boot.
The argument against mixed marriages is sometimes framed in terms of dwindling space. There is a housing shortage on the reserve at the foot of one of the main bridges onto Montreal Island. But what really seems to be driving the latest evictions is a preoccupation with preserving Mohawk bloodlines and culture.
Grand Chief Mike Delisle said in an interview that Kahnawake takes a harder line on these issues than most other native communities. He said in part; "There are other First Nations where, in my opinion, maybe it's too late. They have been overrun by outside marriage, and a lot of the community members as well as the leadership don't possess the type of lineage that Kahnawake demands. There are fears in Kahnawake of complete integration into Canadian society if nothing is done.” Is integration such a bad thing?
Jeremiah Johnson, a 31-year-old small business owner in Kahnawake, started a Facebook page called "Non-natives out of Kahnawake?" He supports the band's initiative to expel non-natives. "We don't want to stay 300 years in the past, but we don't want to be assimilated into the mainstream world either. It's not our way and it's not how we think," he said. He understands that outsiders might say, " ‘Oh my God, those racist Indians,' but when you're here and you see it from our point of view, what we have left and what we're fighting to hold onto, it really is an invasion."
I can appreciate why this man hopes that the lineage of his people will last forever but that isn’t going to happen. It is very rare nowadays that the original lineage of a group of people remains intact unless the group is living in the recesses of a tropical forest.
The mixing of blood from healthy spouses is not a bad thing and it is done all over the world. It is even conveivable that as the centuries pass, all of Mankind will be of one grand mixure of the same blood. Will that be so bad? If that happens, it doesn’t mean that the people in the future can’t trace their bloodlines and honour the traditions of their past.
The debate was unsettling to the editor of The Eastern Door, Kahnawake's weekly newspaper. In an editorial, Steve Bonspiel said relying on anonymous complaints to identify evictees "reeks of an old-fashioned, gruesome witch-hunt." (The band council said it received about 100 complaints over the past 18 months.) Bonspiel added, "So, now that meddling in our neighbours' love lives is applauded as protecting the Nation, what will come next?"
In an interview, Mr. Bonspiel said he finds the band council's approach hard to swallow. The names of those facing eviction have been kept confidential so far, but they are said to include long-time community volunteers and people who are caring for disabled or seriously ill partners. "I know non-natives who live here, who are married and have kids here, and they're contributing to the community. They're giving back," Mr. Bonspiel said. "They're not taking anything from the community, yet they will be targeted in the future if the Mohawk council continues along these lines."
Sandra Schurman, 44, has a distinct perspective on the debate. Her mother is Mohawk and her father white. She is allowed to live in Kahnawake but is not recognized as a member of the band, meaning she cannot vote in band elections. When she dies, she will not be allowed to be buried in the Kahnawake cemetery next to her mother.
A few years ago, after the latest membership law was passed, she appeared before a council of elders seeking to be listed as a Kahnawake member. Her application was denied because she did not have the requisite four Mohawk great-grandparents; one of her great-grandmothers on her mother's side was half-Mohawk. She said; "They even had my family tree displayed on the overhead projector," she recalls of the hearing before the elders. "My great-grandmother grew up here, spoke Mohawk and raised her children here, but the council wouldn't accept her as being Mohawk. "
She finds it hypocritical, considering how common intermarriage was in the past. "There are many people on this reserve who claim full native ancestry who are running around with red hair or blond hair, so I'm not the only one," she said. "I can totally understand them wanting to protect, (the band’s heritage) because the elders are scared how this place is going to be in fifty years. There are going to be hardly any Mohawks left, things will be lost and it will be mostly white people in this town. I can understand that too, but at the same time it's like, c'mon, this town is half-white anyway."
Julius Grey, a Montreal lawyer who specializes in Charter of Rights cases, questions whether a policy like Kahnawake's could withstand a constitutional challenge. "I think it's time to challenge that whole nation that they can remove people on the basis of percentage of Indian blood or whatever," he said. If people identify themselves as Mohawk and follow certain cultural pracctices, that should be enough, he said.
The argument that drastic measures are required for survival does not wash. "I don't believe groups have a right to survive," Mr. Grey said. "I think individuals have a right to belong to groups. There is freedom of individual association. If they wish to make it survive, then they will survive. If some other people who do not qualify by blood wish to join, that will in fact improve their chances for survival."
As to the evictions, the federal Indian Act in Canada allows First Nations to establish rules for band membership, and a Department of Indian Affairs spokeswoman told La Presse this week that the eviction controversy is an internal Kahnawake matter.
I disagree. Everyone in Canada, whether or not he or she is an aboriginal, is governed by our Charter of Rights. Section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights states;
“Everyone is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion or sex, mental or physical disability.” unquote
It is obvious that absolute and unrestricted individual rights do not totally exist in any country including Canada but such rights must nevertheless yield to the common good. By evicting people from their homes simply because they are of a different race in the Kahnawake Indian Reservation, then who is next to be evicted from their homes? Will it be the black family down the street or the Asian family across the street? Racism is an ugly scourge that can ravage a community as history has shown us. A local law should not really be considered valid if it does not adhere to the fundamental values enshrined in the Charter of Rights.
As sailors are well aware, if you put too much wind in your sail, your boat will keel over. If an Indian reservation keeps discriminating against the members of their community that are of mixed blood, their community will die out. This has happened time and time again in the past all over the world.
The young people in the Indian reservations will eventually have to leave their reservations to seek work elsewhere and while living outside their reservations, they will find mates who are of a different race than they are. If this happens, they will not be invited back to live in their reservations and finally, as generations move on, the older remaining natives will die off and then what will be left, are the physical remnants of a community that no longer exists.
In the past, the Indians in Canada were mistreated, of that there is no doubt. They should have been assimilated with everyone else in our country and given the same opportunities afforded the rest of the nation but they weren’t given a chance to do so. It would now appear that the Indians in the Kahnawake Indian Reservation are taking their revenge out on the people they believed mistreated them. This is a mistake.
A community, be it a non-Indian community or an Indian community should treat all of its members, be they white or Indian; with respect, courtesy and fairness. Throwing out families of mixed blood from the community is not respectful, courteous or fair. It is outrageous. If a small community of whites had people of mixed blood living in the community, and the council brought in a law that said that no one of mixed blood could live in the community, you can be sure that the resulting hue and cry that followed would be heard all over the world.
UPDATE:
A quarter century after aboriginal women won the right to remain status Indians when they marry non-aboriginal men, new legislation proposes that their grandchildren also be entitled to the designation.
The changes suggested by the federal government in March 2010 will add about 45,000 people to the Indian Register and have native leaders fearing that Ottawa would not help reserves with the costs of a sudden influx of people.
There is disagreement within the native community over who should have status, and many bands have their own membership codes to determine who is entitled to live in their jurisdiction. The government also does not yet know what the actual cost would be, because there is no way of predicting how many people would apply and what benefits they would want.
Like other status Indians, the people who gained status would be entitled to such benefits as tax exemptions, extended health coverage, and the potential for special post-secondary financial assistance if they live and work on reserves.
It seems that in 1981, a moratorium was held in that reservation and it was decided that there was to be no intermingling of races.
As news of the band council's action with respect to the evictions emerged, its political press attaché, Joe Delaronde, was on the defensive. He said in part; "We sound like a bunch of Nazis here but really, they shouldn't be here based on any law, Canadian or Kahnawake." When he said, ‘they’, he was speaking about the non-natives and their native spouses.
It is beyond me as to how he can say that such action isn’t similar as to what the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. As of April 30, 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany were being evicted from their homes without a reason given and without notice being served. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the entire Polish civilian population in Warsaw was evicted and their houses were confiscated and/or demolished. Albeit, the evictees in the reservation are being given notice and the reason for their evictions but their evictions are not a mere smear on the remaining members of the reservation, it runs deeper than that.
What has happened in that reservation is something from a distant, darker time. Acting on anonymous calls to a snitch line, authorities single out people on the basis of their race and order them to leave town. This is what happened in Europe when the Nazis overran it.
Kahnawake law is clear that racial inter-mingling is forbidden on the reserve. Since 1981, a moratorium on mixed marriages has said that any Kahnawake Mohawk who marries a non-native will lose the right to live on the reserve. The principle was reinforced in a 2004 Membership Law, which was aimed at "fulfilling our responsibility to defend our community and our Nation from external threat."
The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of their rights of citizenship, giving them the status of ‘subjects’ in Hitler's Reich. The laws even forbid Jews to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans.
What is happening in the Kahnawake Indian Reserve and what happened in Germany after 1935 is outrageous. Just as the Nazis wanted Arayans (blond hair and blue eyes) to be pure, so do the Mohawks in the Kahnawake Reserve want their Aboriginals to be pure.
I married a young Japanese woman in 1976 and we have been happily married for 34 years. Our two daughters have caucasion (white) and oriental blood in them which makes them Eurasians and their children have Indian and Black blood in them which means that aside from having Caucasian and Oriental blood added to the mix, they have two more sources of blood in them and despite that, they are very beautiful and smart to boot.
The argument against mixed marriages is sometimes framed in terms of dwindling space. There is a housing shortage on the reserve at the foot of one of the main bridges onto Montreal Island. But what really seems to be driving the latest evictions is a preoccupation with preserving Mohawk bloodlines and culture.
Grand Chief Mike Delisle said in an interview that Kahnawake takes a harder line on these issues than most other native communities. He said in part; "There are other First Nations where, in my opinion, maybe it's too late. They have been overrun by outside marriage, and a lot of the community members as well as the leadership don't possess the type of lineage that Kahnawake demands. There are fears in Kahnawake of complete integration into Canadian society if nothing is done.” Is integration such a bad thing?
Jeremiah Johnson, a 31-year-old small business owner in Kahnawake, started a Facebook page called "Non-natives out of Kahnawake?" He supports the band's initiative to expel non-natives. "We don't want to stay 300 years in the past, but we don't want to be assimilated into the mainstream world either. It's not our way and it's not how we think," he said. He understands that outsiders might say, " ‘Oh my God, those racist Indians,' but when you're here and you see it from our point of view, what we have left and what we're fighting to hold onto, it really is an invasion."
I can appreciate why this man hopes that the lineage of his people will last forever but that isn’t going to happen. It is very rare nowadays that the original lineage of a group of people remains intact unless the group is living in the recesses of a tropical forest.
The mixing of blood from healthy spouses is not a bad thing and it is done all over the world. It is even conveivable that as the centuries pass, all of Mankind will be of one grand mixure of the same blood. Will that be so bad? If that happens, it doesn’t mean that the people in the future can’t trace their bloodlines and honour the traditions of their past.
The debate was unsettling to the editor of The Eastern Door, Kahnawake's weekly newspaper. In an editorial, Steve Bonspiel said relying on anonymous complaints to identify evictees "reeks of an old-fashioned, gruesome witch-hunt." (The band council said it received about 100 complaints over the past 18 months.) Bonspiel added, "So, now that meddling in our neighbours' love lives is applauded as protecting the Nation, what will come next?"
In an interview, Mr. Bonspiel said he finds the band council's approach hard to swallow. The names of those facing eviction have been kept confidential so far, but they are said to include long-time community volunteers and people who are caring for disabled or seriously ill partners. "I know non-natives who live here, who are married and have kids here, and they're contributing to the community. They're giving back," Mr. Bonspiel said. "They're not taking anything from the community, yet they will be targeted in the future if the Mohawk council continues along these lines."
Sandra Schurman, 44, has a distinct perspective on the debate. Her mother is Mohawk and her father white. She is allowed to live in Kahnawake but is not recognized as a member of the band, meaning she cannot vote in band elections. When she dies, she will not be allowed to be buried in the Kahnawake cemetery next to her mother.
A few years ago, after the latest membership law was passed, she appeared before a council of elders seeking to be listed as a Kahnawake member. Her application was denied because she did not have the requisite four Mohawk great-grandparents; one of her great-grandmothers on her mother's side was half-Mohawk. She said; "They even had my family tree displayed on the overhead projector," she recalls of the hearing before the elders. "My great-grandmother grew up here, spoke Mohawk and raised her children here, but the council wouldn't accept her as being Mohawk. "
She finds it hypocritical, considering how common intermarriage was in the past. "There are many people on this reserve who claim full native ancestry who are running around with red hair or blond hair, so I'm not the only one," she said. "I can totally understand them wanting to protect, (the band’s heritage) because the elders are scared how this place is going to be in fifty years. There are going to be hardly any Mohawks left, things will be lost and it will be mostly white people in this town. I can understand that too, but at the same time it's like, c'mon, this town is half-white anyway."
Julius Grey, a Montreal lawyer who specializes in Charter of Rights cases, questions whether a policy like Kahnawake's could withstand a constitutional challenge. "I think it's time to challenge that whole nation that they can remove people on the basis of percentage of Indian blood or whatever," he said. If people identify themselves as Mohawk and follow certain cultural pracctices, that should be enough, he said.
The argument that drastic measures are required for survival does not wash. "I don't believe groups have a right to survive," Mr. Grey said. "I think individuals have a right to belong to groups. There is freedom of individual association. If they wish to make it survive, then they will survive. If some other people who do not qualify by blood wish to join, that will in fact improve their chances for survival."
As to the evictions, the federal Indian Act in Canada allows First Nations to establish rules for band membership, and a Department of Indian Affairs spokeswoman told La Presse this week that the eviction controversy is an internal Kahnawake matter.
I disagree. Everyone in Canada, whether or not he or she is an aboriginal, is governed by our Charter of Rights. Section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights states;
“Everyone is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion or sex, mental or physical disability.” unquote
It is obvious that absolute and unrestricted individual rights do not totally exist in any country including Canada but such rights must nevertheless yield to the common good. By evicting people from their homes simply because they are of a different race in the Kahnawake Indian Reservation, then who is next to be evicted from their homes? Will it be the black family down the street or the Asian family across the street? Racism is an ugly scourge that can ravage a community as history has shown us. A local law should not really be considered valid if it does not adhere to the fundamental values enshrined in the Charter of Rights.
As sailors are well aware, if you put too much wind in your sail, your boat will keel over. If an Indian reservation keeps discriminating against the members of their community that are of mixed blood, their community will die out. This has happened time and time again in the past all over the world.
The young people in the Indian reservations will eventually have to leave their reservations to seek work elsewhere and while living outside their reservations, they will find mates who are of a different race than they are. If this happens, they will not be invited back to live in their reservations and finally, as generations move on, the older remaining natives will die off and then what will be left, are the physical remnants of a community that no longer exists.
In the past, the Indians in Canada were mistreated, of that there is no doubt. They should have been assimilated with everyone else in our country and given the same opportunities afforded the rest of the nation but they weren’t given a chance to do so. It would now appear that the Indians in the Kahnawake Indian Reservation are taking their revenge out on the people they believed mistreated them. This is a mistake.
A community, be it a non-Indian community or an Indian community should treat all of its members, be they white or Indian; with respect, courtesy and fairness. Throwing out families of mixed blood from the community is not respectful, courteous or fair. It is outrageous. If a small community of whites had people of mixed blood living in the community, and the council brought in a law that said that no one of mixed blood could live in the community, you can be sure that the resulting hue and cry that followed would be heard all over the world.
UPDATE:
A quarter century after aboriginal women won the right to remain status Indians when they marry non-aboriginal men, new legislation proposes that their grandchildren also be entitled to the designation.
The changes suggested by the federal government in March 2010 will add about 45,000 people to the Indian Register and have native leaders fearing that Ottawa would not help reserves with the costs of a sudden influx of people.
There is disagreement within the native community over who should have status, and many bands have their own membership codes to determine who is entitled to live in their jurisdiction. The government also does not yet know what the actual cost would be, because there is no way of predicting how many people would apply and what benefits they would want.
Like other status Indians, the people who gained status would be entitled to such benefits as tax exemptions, extended health coverage, and the potential for special post-secondary financial assistance if they live and work on reserves.
Friday 19 February 2010
Are the complaints about wind turbines valid?
Electricity is a form of power in which our world is always in need of. We can get electricity in a number of ways from the use of, water (dams and waves), nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind. This article deals with wind turbines.
There are many types of wind turbines. They can be separated into two general types based on the axis about which the turbine rotates. Turbines that rotate around a horizontal axis are the most common kind. All existing HAWTs (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine) have the main rotor shaft and generator at the top of a tower and must be pointing directly into the wind. Large turbines generally use a wind sensor coupled with a servomotor. They have a gearbox which turns the slow rotation of the blades into a quicker rotation that is more suitable for generating electricity.
Since a tower produces turbulence behind it, the turbine is usually pointed upwind of the tower. Turbine blades are made stiff to prevent the blades from being pushed into the tower by high winds. Additionally, the blades are placed a considerable distance in front of the tower and are sometimes tilted up slightly.
Downwind machines have been built, despite the problem of turbulence, because they don't need an additional mechanism for keeping them in line with the wind, and because in high winds, the blades can be allowed to bend which reduces their swept area and thus their wind resistance. Because turbulence leads to fatigue failures and reliability is so important, most HAWTs are upwind machines.
The most common modern wind turbines are usually three-bladed, but sometimes they are two-bladed or even one-bladed (and counterbalanced), and pointed into the wind by computer-controlled yaw motors. The rugged three-bladed turbine type has been championed by most electrical suppliers. These have high tip speed ratios, high efficiency, and low torque ripple which contributes to good reliability. This is the type of turbine that is generally used to produce electricity. For large, commercial size horizontal-axis wind turbines, the generator is mounted in a nacelle at the top of a tower, behind the hub of the turbine rotor.
With the availability of long distance electric power transmission, wind generators are now often on wind farms in windy locations and huge ones are being built offshore, sometimes transmitting power back to land using high voltage submarine cable.
Offshore wind turbines are considered to be less obtrusive than turbines on land, as their apparent size and noise can be mitigated by distance. Because water has less surface roughness than land, the average wind speed is usually higher over open water. This allows offshore turbines to use shorter towers, making them less visible. This gives the whiners less reason to complain but despite that, they still complain.
The government of Ontario has stated that there were only 750 complaints filed about wind turbines and only 50 people were behind the complaints in which 20 of those 50 that complained were the source of the majority of the complaints.
The offshore wind turbines are however, more expensive to build and operate. Offshore towers are generally taller than onshore towers once one includes the submerged height, and offshore foundations are generally more difficult and more expensive to build as well. Power transmission from offshore turbines is generally through undersea cable, which is far more expensive to install than cables on land and requires high voltage direct current operation if significant distance is to be covered which then requires yet more equipment. The offshore environment is also corrosive and abrasive. Repairs and maintenance are much more difficult, and much more costly than on onshore turbines. Offshore wind turbines are outfitted with extensive corrosion protection measures like coatings and cathodic protection. Despite these problems, they are still built offshore for two reasons, the first being the wind in unobstructed and they are for the most part, out of sight.
Unfortunately, there are people who have their homes on the shore who complain that offshore turbines look ugly and they want them out of sight. They are simply complaining because they want unobstructed views of the lake or ocean. It is not as if the wind turbines are their next door neighbours. They are generally quite some considerable distances from the shores so there isn’t any real justification for complaining.
A modern HAWT turbine running at its desired speed can deliver electricity to 500 households. So if you lived in a small village of 1,500, your electrical needs along with all of your neighbours would be met with just one wind turbine. It is a cheap method of providing electricity. The wind turbine can be several miles from the village. And equally important, it doesn’t polute the air.
A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used for production of electric power. Individual turbines are interconnected with a medium voltage (usually 34.5 kV) power collection system and communications network. At a substation, this medium-voltage electrical current is increased in voltage with a transformer for connection to the high voltage transmission system.
When my wife and I drove around southern California in 1990, we were amazed at the size of some of these wind farms. The wind turbines were quite close to one another and the wind farms stretched for miles. Of course, that is because the wind farms were in less populated areas.
When we drive around southern Ontario, we see wind farms but the wind turbines are some considerable distance from each other. The reason is quite obvious. Practically all the areas of Southern Ontario is farmland and it follows that the farmers don’t want their fields cluttered with large wind turbines.
Now one would think that wind turbines are a welcomed necessity but alas, there are many people who don’t want them in their back yard, rhetorically speaking.
High-school teacher Sandy MacLeod is near tears as she pulls out a plastic bag filled with orange earplugs. She says that she wears them every night when she goes to bed in order to muffle the sound of the blades whirling in the wind. MacLeod has a large wind turbine about 800 metres (approximately 2,400 feet) from her home which is part of Suncor Energy's Ripley wind farm located in the Townships of Huron-Kinross. She says the wind turbine disturb her sleep, trigger headaches and cause heart palpitations.
I have difficulty understanding her complaint. I have stood within a hundred feet of wind turbines and all I could hear is a slight swoosh as the blades rotate through the air. Wind turbines are hundreds of feet away from the nearest homes and standing outside when the wind turbines that are that far away; it is impossible to hear anything. And being inside a house would make hearing the swooshing noise an impossibility. This woman says that even when she puts earphones over her ears, she still hears the noise. Give me a break.
Others cite nausea, ringing in the ears, high blood pressure, heightened anxiety and depression as side effects. I need a bigger break.
Standing at the entrance of the Ontario Legislature, enduring rain on a chilly spring day, MacLeod is among a small group of rural citizens that call themselves Wind Concerns Ontario. They've gathered to protest the rapid development of wind farms in a province determined to go green, while Ontario is insisting there is no credible scientific link between human health and the noise or electromagnetic fields generated by properly sited wind turbines.
Indeed, a March 2009 survey of 301 residents in Essex County found that 87 per cent of those polled support plans to develop wind farms in their rural corner of southwestern Ontario. Admittedly, that could be because if they permit the wind turbines to be built and leased on their own farmland, they will be paid handsomely each year by the government for that right.
But this small, highly organized group of complainers will have none of it. Its members consider modern wind turbines over-hyped, underperforming industrial eyesores that threaten their rural way of life and many say, their health also.
They can't prove it, but MacLeod argues that nobody has demonstrated that wind turbines don't make people sick. Is that logical? If I can’t prove that drinking properly treated water doesn’t make people sick, shall I presume that it does. Either wind turbines do have health effects or they don't. Both claims can't be true.
I agree however that turbines should be set back at least 1.5 kilometres (4,921 feet) from the nearest residence, though these people would prefer a complete halt in development of wind turbines.
What is true is that the wind industry in Europe has grown at a phenomenal rate, and North America is catching up fast. There are more than 1,700 wind turbines in Europe generating enough electricity to meet 4 per cent of continental demand.
Total wind-power capacity in the United States grew by 50 per cent in 2008 and is proceeding at another record pace each year. Here in Ontario, the province boasts the country's highest wind capacity and, under a new Green Energy Act and European-style feed-in tariff program, it hopes to accelerate development and attract green manufacturing jobs.
There's no shortage of projects on the drawing board. A recent survey commissioned by the Ontario Power Authority found there were 164 wind-energy projects under various stages of development, representing 13,382 megawatts of potential capacity.
That works out to the equivalent of 7,000 wind turbines, most scattered across southern Ontario. That's on top of the 900 megawatts of wind capacity built and connected to the provincial grid – and another 600 megawatts being developed under contract.
Under a new law, the Ministry of Environment set a universal minimum setback standard that all municipalities must meet. The current setback distance recommended by the Ministry of Environment is 400 metres. What they should do is set the wind turbines back 1.5 kilometres from the nearest home. An unscientific survey recently conducted that found 53 of 76 people living an average of 780 metres from the nearest wind turbine experienced what they described as negative health effects. Any such effects greater than a kilometre, would undoubtedly be highly unlikely.
"I don't take it seriously when they ask for a two-kilometre setback," said the former Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman in February 2008 when he tabled his green-energy legislation. In his view, a 500-metre minimum is a reasonable starting point that goes beyond the distances previously set by most municipalities.
Several wind developers said that any setback one kilometre or more would kill the economics of most wind projects in Ontario. Developers would have to purchase or access significantly more land and lay more electrical cable to accommodate such distances.
At the moment, however, there's no convincing evidence that wind turbines located a few hundred metres from a dwelling negatively effect health. A 2008 epidemiological study and survey, financed by the European Union, generally supports that view. Researchers from Holland's University of Groningen and Gothenburg University in Sweden conducted a mail-in survey of 725 rural Dutch residents living 17 metres to 2.1 kilometres from the nearest wind turbine. The survey received 268 responses and, while most acknowledged hearing the swishing sound that wind turbines make, the vast majority; 92 per cent said they were satisfied with their living environment.
Perhaps most telling is that those most annoyed by turbine noises had a negative view of wind turbines to begin with, while those least annoyed gained economically by having turbines on their land or owning shares in a community wind-turbine venture. The study also concluded there was no indication that the sound from wind turbines had an effect on respondents' health.
Our home is less than a block from a railway line. Admittedly when we are on our outside deck at the rear of our house, the trains going by are disturbing but when they go by when we are inside our home, we don’t hear a thing.
People are always complaining about their health. Some of the complaints are real and others are merely imagined. But you can be sure, if a wind turbine is anywhere near a home, the people in the home will complain about their health and will state that their symptoms are related to the wind turbine.
But as any politician knows, gaining complete public acceptance is rare, indeed, impossible in the world of energy planning. Opposition to energy plans comes from every corner: groups opposing nuclear, communities against natural gas plants, farmers against solar parks, and rural residents against wind farms. However, if it is our goal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution from coal-fired electricity, then wind, while not the only answer, must be part of the answer. Obviously, the well-documented health effects from coal use and the threat that climate change poses to humans and other species must be weighed against the unproven links between wind turbines and human health.
There will always be people who complain about new advances in our society. They complained about automobiles on our streets. Their complaints were justified with respect to the potential of accidents and pollution but motor vehicles are a necessary evil that we have to live with. Without them, society would still be a century behind what we are accomplishing today.
Wind turbines are here to stay, although some will complain that they are noisy and ugly. However, when you look back to the beginning of the last century and consider that a great many people died from inhaling the smoke from the millions of coal-fed furnaces around the world, the wind turbines are satisfactory replacements for providing us with light and heating our homes and buildings with electricity.
FOLLOW UP: I have obviously offended some people with respect to this article and I am sorry that they feel this way. I have removed the word, "whiners" and replaced it with "people". I appreciate the fact that there are a great many people who don't want wind turbines in their areas because they honestly believe that the turbines have a detrimental effect on their health. However, if I later learn through a valid study that the government of Ontario is going to stop building them near homes because of health issues, I will withdraw this article from my blog and write another one saying why wind turbines are dangerous to the health of people living near them.
I have been advised by one of my readers that someone has taken the province of Ontario to court with respect to wind turbines. I will write about the court's decision no matter what the decision is.
When I write these articles, I write them with sincerity. I may very well be wrong in some of my opinions but right or wrong, my opinions are honest ones. I take the task of writing articles in my blog very seriously since it is read all over the world. To do otherwise, would be an insult to my readers.
There are many types of wind turbines. They can be separated into two general types based on the axis about which the turbine rotates. Turbines that rotate around a horizontal axis are the most common kind. All existing HAWTs (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine) have the main rotor shaft and generator at the top of a tower and must be pointing directly into the wind. Large turbines generally use a wind sensor coupled with a servomotor. They have a gearbox which turns the slow rotation of the blades into a quicker rotation that is more suitable for generating electricity.
Since a tower produces turbulence behind it, the turbine is usually pointed upwind of the tower. Turbine blades are made stiff to prevent the blades from being pushed into the tower by high winds. Additionally, the blades are placed a considerable distance in front of the tower and are sometimes tilted up slightly.
Downwind machines have been built, despite the problem of turbulence, because they don't need an additional mechanism for keeping them in line with the wind, and because in high winds, the blades can be allowed to bend which reduces their swept area and thus their wind resistance. Because turbulence leads to fatigue failures and reliability is so important, most HAWTs are upwind machines.
The most common modern wind turbines are usually three-bladed, but sometimes they are two-bladed or even one-bladed (and counterbalanced), and pointed into the wind by computer-controlled yaw motors. The rugged three-bladed turbine type has been championed by most electrical suppliers. These have high tip speed ratios, high efficiency, and low torque ripple which contributes to good reliability. This is the type of turbine that is generally used to produce electricity. For large, commercial size horizontal-axis wind turbines, the generator is mounted in a nacelle at the top of a tower, behind the hub of the turbine rotor.
With the availability of long distance electric power transmission, wind generators are now often on wind farms in windy locations and huge ones are being built offshore, sometimes transmitting power back to land using high voltage submarine cable.
Offshore wind turbines are considered to be less obtrusive than turbines on land, as their apparent size and noise can be mitigated by distance. Because water has less surface roughness than land, the average wind speed is usually higher over open water. This allows offshore turbines to use shorter towers, making them less visible. This gives the whiners less reason to complain but despite that, they still complain.
The government of Ontario has stated that there were only 750 complaints filed about wind turbines and only 50 people were behind the complaints in which 20 of those 50 that complained were the source of the majority of the complaints.
The offshore wind turbines are however, more expensive to build and operate. Offshore towers are generally taller than onshore towers once one includes the submerged height, and offshore foundations are generally more difficult and more expensive to build as well. Power transmission from offshore turbines is generally through undersea cable, which is far more expensive to install than cables on land and requires high voltage direct current operation if significant distance is to be covered which then requires yet more equipment. The offshore environment is also corrosive and abrasive. Repairs and maintenance are much more difficult, and much more costly than on onshore turbines. Offshore wind turbines are outfitted with extensive corrosion protection measures like coatings and cathodic protection. Despite these problems, they are still built offshore for two reasons, the first being the wind in unobstructed and they are for the most part, out of sight.
Unfortunately, there are people who have their homes on the shore who complain that offshore turbines look ugly and they want them out of sight. They are simply complaining because they want unobstructed views of the lake or ocean. It is not as if the wind turbines are their next door neighbours. They are generally quite some considerable distances from the shores so there isn’t any real justification for complaining.
A modern HAWT turbine running at its desired speed can deliver electricity to 500 households. So if you lived in a small village of 1,500, your electrical needs along with all of your neighbours would be met with just one wind turbine. It is a cheap method of providing electricity. The wind turbine can be several miles from the village. And equally important, it doesn’t polute the air.
A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used for production of electric power. Individual turbines are interconnected with a medium voltage (usually 34.5 kV) power collection system and communications network. At a substation, this medium-voltage electrical current is increased in voltage with a transformer for connection to the high voltage transmission system.
When my wife and I drove around southern California in 1990, we were amazed at the size of some of these wind farms. The wind turbines were quite close to one another and the wind farms stretched for miles. Of course, that is because the wind farms were in less populated areas.
When we drive around southern Ontario, we see wind farms but the wind turbines are some considerable distance from each other. The reason is quite obvious. Practically all the areas of Southern Ontario is farmland and it follows that the farmers don’t want their fields cluttered with large wind turbines.
Now one would think that wind turbines are a welcomed necessity but alas, there are many people who don’t want them in their back yard, rhetorically speaking.
High-school teacher Sandy MacLeod is near tears as she pulls out a plastic bag filled with orange earplugs. She says that she wears them every night when she goes to bed in order to muffle the sound of the blades whirling in the wind. MacLeod has a large wind turbine about 800 metres (approximately 2,400 feet) from her home which is part of Suncor Energy's Ripley wind farm located in the Townships of Huron-Kinross. She says the wind turbine disturb her sleep, trigger headaches and cause heart palpitations.
I have difficulty understanding her complaint. I have stood within a hundred feet of wind turbines and all I could hear is a slight swoosh as the blades rotate through the air. Wind turbines are hundreds of feet away from the nearest homes and standing outside when the wind turbines that are that far away; it is impossible to hear anything. And being inside a house would make hearing the swooshing noise an impossibility. This woman says that even when she puts earphones over her ears, she still hears the noise. Give me a break.
Others cite nausea, ringing in the ears, high blood pressure, heightened anxiety and depression as side effects. I need a bigger break.
Standing at the entrance of the Ontario Legislature, enduring rain on a chilly spring day, MacLeod is among a small group of rural citizens that call themselves Wind Concerns Ontario. They've gathered to protest the rapid development of wind farms in a province determined to go green, while Ontario is insisting there is no credible scientific link between human health and the noise or electromagnetic fields generated by properly sited wind turbines.
Indeed, a March 2009 survey of 301 residents in Essex County found that 87 per cent of those polled support plans to develop wind farms in their rural corner of southwestern Ontario. Admittedly, that could be because if they permit the wind turbines to be built and leased on their own farmland, they will be paid handsomely each year by the government for that right.
But this small, highly organized group of complainers will have none of it. Its members consider modern wind turbines over-hyped, underperforming industrial eyesores that threaten their rural way of life and many say, their health also.
They can't prove it, but MacLeod argues that nobody has demonstrated that wind turbines don't make people sick. Is that logical? If I can’t prove that drinking properly treated water doesn’t make people sick, shall I presume that it does. Either wind turbines do have health effects or they don't. Both claims can't be true.
I agree however that turbines should be set back at least 1.5 kilometres (4,921 feet) from the nearest residence, though these people would prefer a complete halt in development of wind turbines.
What is true is that the wind industry in Europe has grown at a phenomenal rate, and North America is catching up fast. There are more than 1,700 wind turbines in Europe generating enough electricity to meet 4 per cent of continental demand.
Total wind-power capacity in the United States grew by 50 per cent in 2008 and is proceeding at another record pace each year. Here in Ontario, the province boasts the country's highest wind capacity and, under a new Green Energy Act and European-style feed-in tariff program, it hopes to accelerate development and attract green manufacturing jobs.
There's no shortage of projects on the drawing board. A recent survey commissioned by the Ontario Power Authority found there were 164 wind-energy projects under various stages of development, representing 13,382 megawatts of potential capacity.
That works out to the equivalent of 7,000 wind turbines, most scattered across southern Ontario. That's on top of the 900 megawatts of wind capacity built and connected to the provincial grid – and another 600 megawatts being developed under contract.
Under a new law, the Ministry of Environment set a universal minimum setback standard that all municipalities must meet. The current setback distance recommended by the Ministry of Environment is 400 metres. What they should do is set the wind turbines back 1.5 kilometres from the nearest home. An unscientific survey recently conducted that found 53 of 76 people living an average of 780 metres from the nearest wind turbine experienced what they described as negative health effects. Any such effects greater than a kilometre, would undoubtedly be highly unlikely.
"I don't take it seriously when they ask for a two-kilometre setback," said the former Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman in February 2008 when he tabled his green-energy legislation. In his view, a 500-metre minimum is a reasonable starting point that goes beyond the distances previously set by most municipalities.
Several wind developers said that any setback one kilometre or more would kill the economics of most wind projects in Ontario. Developers would have to purchase or access significantly more land and lay more electrical cable to accommodate such distances.
At the moment, however, there's no convincing evidence that wind turbines located a few hundred metres from a dwelling negatively effect health. A 2008 epidemiological study and survey, financed by the European Union, generally supports that view. Researchers from Holland's University of Groningen and Gothenburg University in Sweden conducted a mail-in survey of 725 rural Dutch residents living 17 metres to 2.1 kilometres from the nearest wind turbine. The survey received 268 responses and, while most acknowledged hearing the swishing sound that wind turbines make, the vast majority; 92 per cent said they were satisfied with their living environment.
Perhaps most telling is that those most annoyed by turbine noises had a negative view of wind turbines to begin with, while those least annoyed gained economically by having turbines on their land or owning shares in a community wind-turbine venture. The study also concluded there was no indication that the sound from wind turbines had an effect on respondents' health.
Our home is less than a block from a railway line. Admittedly when we are on our outside deck at the rear of our house, the trains going by are disturbing but when they go by when we are inside our home, we don’t hear a thing.
People are always complaining about their health. Some of the complaints are real and others are merely imagined. But you can be sure, if a wind turbine is anywhere near a home, the people in the home will complain about their health and will state that their symptoms are related to the wind turbine.
But as any politician knows, gaining complete public acceptance is rare, indeed, impossible in the world of energy planning. Opposition to energy plans comes from every corner: groups opposing nuclear, communities against natural gas plants, farmers against solar parks, and rural residents against wind farms. However, if it is our goal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution from coal-fired electricity, then wind, while not the only answer, must be part of the answer. Obviously, the well-documented health effects from coal use and the threat that climate change poses to humans and other species must be weighed against the unproven links between wind turbines and human health.
There will always be people who complain about new advances in our society. They complained about automobiles on our streets. Their complaints were justified with respect to the potential of accidents and pollution but motor vehicles are a necessary evil that we have to live with. Without them, society would still be a century behind what we are accomplishing today.
Wind turbines are here to stay, although some will complain that they are noisy and ugly. However, when you look back to the beginning of the last century and consider that a great many people died from inhaling the smoke from the millions of coal-fed furnaces around the world, the wind turbines are satisfactory replacements for providing us with light and heating our homes and buildings with electricity.
FOLLOW UP: I have obviously offended some people with respect to this article and I am sorry that they feel this way. I have removed the word, "whiners" and replaced it with "people". I appreciate the fact that there are a great many people who don't want wind turbines in their areas because they honestly believe that the turbines have a detrimental effect on their health. However, if I later learn through a valid study that the government of Ontario is going to stop building them near homes because of health issues, I will withdraw this article from my blog and write another one saying why wind turbines are dangerous to the health of people living near them.
I have been advised by one of my readers that someone has taken the province of Ontario to court with respect to wind turbines. I will write about the court's decision no matter what the decision is.
When I write these articles, I write them with sincerity. I may very well be wrong in some of my opinions but right or wrong, my opinions are honest ones. I take the task of writing articles in my blog very seriously since it is read all over the world. To do otherwise, would be an insult to my readers.
Wednesday 17 February 2010
Abusing the elderly (Part 2)
There is no set age for being called an elder, but it may be defined as when a reaches the age of at least sixty.
Every year an estimated 2.1 million elders in the United States alone are victims of physical, psychological, or other forms of abuse and neglect. For every case of elder abuse and neglect reported to authorities, experts estimate that there may be as many as 5 cases not reported. It is estimated that somewhere between four and ten per cent of seniors in Canada experience some kind of abuse; which also often remains hidden or goes undetected.
As elders become more physically frail, they’re less able to stand up to bullying and or fight back if attacked. They may not see or hear as well or think as clearly as they used to, leaving openings for unscrupulous people to take advantage of them. Mental or physical ailments may make them more difficult to live with.
Elder abuse is a serious issue that affects a growing population. There are four kinds of abuses that elderly people are subjected to. They are; physical, neglect, financial and psychological.
Physical abuse
90% of elder abuse and neglect incidents are by known perpetrators, usually family members, 2/3rds are adult children or spouses. 42% of murder victims over 60 were killed by their own offspring. Spouses were the perpetrators in 24% of family murders of persons over 60.
When we think of elder abuse, the abuse of older women promptly comes to mind. People generally presume that men are more capable of protecting themselves from abuse however, older men are also abused. What follows is a case in point.
A 69-year-old emaciated stroke-victim man was found by the police, tied to his bed with a dog leash in his apartment in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The police were called after his adult daughter found him in that way when she visited him. The man’s so-called live-in girlfriend, Yasmin Madi and her real boyfriend, Ghassem Shakeri were living in the apartment also. Further, theyhad placed make-up on his body from head to toe and the catheter hadn’t been changed. He also suffered from three broken fingers and a badly swollen arm. Madi had tried to conceal Mr. Shakeri's repeated assaults on Mr. Butler, who weighed just 68 pounds when his daughter found him. The victim had been paralyzed since 2004.
Madi, 42, was sent to prison for eighteen months after pleading guilty to failing to provide the necessities of life. A day earlier, Madi's heroin-abusing boyfriend, Ghassem Shakeri, pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr. Butler and to breaching probation. In custody since his arrest in April 2008, Shakeri, 42, was released and handed a further 18 months probation.
Signs of physical abuse
Overt signs of physical trauma (e.g. scratches, bruises, cuts, burns, punctures, choke marks); signs of restraint trauma (e.g. rope burns, gag marks, welts); Injury - particularly if repeated (e.g. sprains, fractures, detached retina, dislocation, paralysis); additional physical indicators; hypothermia, pain upon being touched; repeated "unexplained" injuries; inconsistent explanations of the injuries; a physical examination revealing that the older person has injuries which the caregiver has failed to disclose; a history of doctor or emergency room shopping; and repeated time lags between the time of any injury or fall and medical treatment.
Neglect
David Ribarchik, 47, of Flint Township, in New York was charged with a felony that is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. His own mother was the purported victim. On November 25, 2009, medics got a call about a 75-year-old woman who had fallen from a chair. It was later determined she had actually been lying on the floor at least three days. Before she fell out of the chair, she virtually lived in it. The victim had been sleeping in the chair by the door for at least two months. There were sores on her body and her physical condition was not good at all. She had been under her son's care for at least one year.
Signs of neglect
Evidence that personal care is lacking or neglected; Signs of malnourishment (e.g. sunken eyes, loss of weight); chronic health problems both physical and/or psychiatric; dehydration (extreme thirst); pressure sores (bed sores)
Doctors are for the most part, required by law to report suspected elder abuse of their patients. Unfortnately, many of them do not do this even if they fear that their silence may subject an elderly person to continued abuse at the hands of a caregiver.
Financial
Financial abuse refers to the misuse of a senior’s money, property or other assets by
a relative or a person in a position of trust.A relative may be a spouse, sibling, or child, and a person in a position of trust may be a neighbour, home care worker, or staff person in a care facility.
Some examples are: forcing or tricking a senior into selling his or her property; stealing money or personal possessions; forcing a senior’s signature on pension cheques or legal documents; misusing a Power of Attorney.
Detecting financial abuse
Financial abuse is often difficult to detect and frequently occurs over a long period
of time. Some behavioural indicators of financially abused seniors are: sudden removal of large sums of money from a bank account; unexplained inability to pay bills, purchase food or personal care items; fear or anxiety when discussing finances or being visited by a family member only when pension cheques arrive; inaccurate or no knowledge of the person’s finances; unexpected revision of a will or sale of property.
In December 2009, a woman in Genesee, New York was arrested and charged with dozens of charges for allegedly embezzling up to $1.4 million from her elderly brother. Mary Jo Davis had been her brother's guardian. At the time of this writing, she faces 35 counts including embezzlement, fraud and then first-degree vulnerable adult abuse, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
The victim was a 78-year-old paraplegic with dementia and hypertension, was being taken advantage of by her sister. She has written checks to people totally unrelated to his care. She spent some of the money on court costs for a man charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct, her home repairs, new appliances and other items from Home Depot. She also spent money on two vehicles and even a race car shop. The police originally tbgought she embessled $700,000 but now suspect that the loss could be as high as $1.4 million.
For Victoria Gilbert, the seventh question on the caretaker agency’s background form was easy: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Fresh from three years in a Nevada slammer for felony embezzlement, Gilbert said “No.”
The San Diego caretaker agency hired her on the spot. She went to National City and took care of an 86-year-old man who had suffered two strokes. Within seven days, she had persuaded him she needed to move in with him to provide 24-hour care. Within another week, her boyfriend, whom she had described as her husband (he wasn’t) and as a deputy U.S. marshal (he wasn’t), moved in also. The pair took the elderly man for a financial ride, using a credit card they stole from him while at the same time, they neglected his health. They literally ate caviar and drank expensive wines while he was fed hamburger.
In December 2009, Anthony D. Marshall, who is 85, was convicted of siphoning millions of dollars from his mother, Brooke Astor. He was sentenced to one to three years in prison.The sentence was for the most serious of 14 counts on which Mr. Marshall was convicted: first-degree grand larceny, for giving himself a retroactive lump-sum raise of about $1 million for managing his mother’s finances. Justice Bartley also sentenced Mr. Marshall to one year on each of the 13 other charges he was convicted of, to run at the same time as the longer sentence.
The trial focused on a tangle of wills and codicils that the prosecution said Marshall’s mother signed under pressure from Mr. Marshall. Most prominent among them was the will she signed in 2002 calling for most of her fortune to go to him. Mrs. Astor, who all but single-handedly gave away nearly $200 million of her late husband’s money while she was alive, had promised millions more to institutions like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on her death.
An elderly woman in Canada gave her credit cards to a gambling addict between September 2007 and July 2008 because she couldn't get out as much to do her own shopping. Carol Jean McQuade, 60, stole $28,500 from the elderly woman she was being paid to care for. McQuade began caring for the victim in her home when she and her husband moved in with the elderly woman in 2008. The victim was a 92-year-old retired public health nurse who served as a nurse in the European theatre during the Second World War. She has befriended McQuade in 2001. In 2007, McQuade was paid to provide in-home care through a Veterans Affairs Canada program designed to benefit veterans who served overseas. The victim underwent surgery in 2007 and it became hard for her to get around.That's when she entrusted McQuade with her debit cards and PIN numbers. She completed depleted a TD Bank account of thousands and then turned her attention to a Royal Bank account. The court also heard Thursday that McQuade has a theft conviction on her record.In 1997, when she was working as a teacher in Fredericton, she was tasked with collecting money from parents for a student trip to Quebec. All told, she collected $12,000, which then disappeared. She was sentenced to one year in prison for stealing from the woman she was hired to care for. She was given until the end of her probation to repay the money she stole otherwise she would go back to prison to serve more time.
Denise Elizabeth Sheaves, 29, of Fredrickton, New Brunswick, was a home-care worker who who forged cheques on an elderly client's account and impersonated her to get a credit card and a computer. She was an employee of ‘We Care Home Health Services’ and in that capacity worked for 13 months as a home-care worker for an 83-year-old Fredericton woman. Sheaves wrote four cheques to herself on her client's account in the amounts of $50, $100, $120 and $700. Sheaves told the court she used the money from the cheques and credit card to help a friend who needed money to feed her kids and pay her rent. Sheaves had found the elderly woman's social insurance number and other personal information in a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency so she
used that information to fill out an HBC credit card application in the elderly woman's name, but had the card and bills sent to her own address.
Obviously, greater care must be undertaken before someone his retained to care for an elderly person. Background checks are paramount.
Government abuse of the elderly
Some institutions are operated by local governments or are at least, answerable to them. Here is a rather sad case where the government abused an older man.
Al Gosling was 82 years of age when he was a tenant in a Toronto Community Housing Corporation building. He had had some rent problems in the past, and for a couple of years in a row he neglected to fill out his annual declaration of income form, a requirement of tenancy. Bear in mind that his only income is his pension; he has no hidden source of cash, no secretly lucrative job.
The TCHC took his case to the Landlord and Tenant Board and got an eviction order, after which they changed the lock on his door. When he came home, he had no other place to sleep but under the stairts in his building.
After a week, the cops came and took him to the hospital; he stayed there for a few days, and then the hospital sent him to a shelter. Al could not sleep or eat properly in the shelter. He picked up an infection, and he ended up in the Sherbourne Community Health Centre. When Al was unable to fight off the infection, he was sent to Toronto General Hospital. He was out on a life-support.
The officials realized that it was wrong to evict this unfortunate man because no one had gone to the trouble to help the man fill out the necessary forms. They repainted his room so that he could return to it when he weas released from the hospital. Unfortunately, Goslin died shortly after that while stll in the hospital.
Abuse in Nursing Homes
Jerry Rankin was told he was on the road to recovery when doctors checked him into a California nursing home for a short stay to heal sores on his legs caused by diabetes. Rankin says his room was so filthy he almost lost his legs. He said, "I looked down at my left leg and it was totally covered with ants," says Rankin. "I mean, thousands of ants on my leg. When his legs got worse, his family insisted he be taken to the hospital. Instead, the Manorcare home he was libing in refused to take hiom to a hospital. He laid in his bed in the nursing home for almost a year trying to get his legs healed. Rankin then sued Manorcare, one of the nation's largest and most profitable nursing home chains for their nerglect of him.
There was a major lawsuit against every Manorcare home in California accusesing the company of fraud -- putting "profits over proper medical care."
Basic care was an issue for Bruce Lemoine at one Manorcare. He died from exposure after he was left outside, strapped in his wheelchair, in near 100-degree heat. He was so dehydrated, he was like a mummy. The home settled his family's lawsuit and further, it paid the state $52,000.
In fact, families across the United States and elsewhere are suing nursing homes, claiming the care they were promised is not what loved ones got. Unfortunately, every year there is a substantial number of nursing home abuse victims who are unable to recover from the wounds they’ve received from either the direct abuse or intentional neglect of the staff supposedly dedicated to helping them. Many nursing home employees are taken to court and criminally convicted of these crimes each year. Although criminal charges may provide satisfaction that the wrongdoer is punishedf, criminal claims who are abused in some of these nursing homes do not typically provide any sort of financial compensation to a victim’s loved one.
But for quality care, don't rely on the tours of nursing homes. Take the time to look at complaint files, inspection reports and lawsuits that reveal a nursing home's true track record. And equaqlly important, talk to the residents.
I was very fortunate. My mother and stepfather were in the eighties when they decided to sell their home in Hawaii and moved into a nursing home in Olympia,Washington. Everyone in that place was well treated. They all had their own apartments and could eat in the dining room if they so choose to do so. They were taken on shopping trips and site-seeing trips. Medical care was always available to them when needed.
Psychological and Emotional abuse
Older women more than older men are often shouted at, put down, or otherwise denigrated. Such mistreatment may lead to anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, or other health problems. Emotional abuse is a form of family violence. Psychological or emotional abuse occurs when an abuser or someone causes mental or emotional pain, distress, suffering, or anguish to an elder. This may be unknowingly or purposely done by family members or any person that is caring for an elder. Psychological or emotional abuse includes insulting, threatening, humiliating, intimidating, or harassing through words or actions. This may also involve ignoring the elder, giving silent treatment, keeping the elder inside the house and not letting other people call or visit him, not giving mail, electronic mail, or phone calls to the elder, not allowing or making it possible for the elder do his usual activities, such as going to church, or visiting friends and preventing the elder from deciding or acting for himself even if he has a sound mind.
There are many things that may cause someone to psychologically abuse an elder. Poor or crowded living conditions may be one of the reasons why it occurs. The following are other possible causes and conditions that may increase an elderly person's risk of psychological abuse.
The abuser depends heavily on the elder for things such as money or housing, drinks alcohol or uses illegal drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, has a personality disorder, depression, or another mental illness, has a history of family violence, such as physical or sexual abuse, has stress due to work, taking care of the elder, or financial problems.
Summary
I believe that every state or province should have a seniors ombudsman who has the authority to look into accusations of elder abuse, be it in a private home or nursing facility. Many years ago when the United States made it manditory that every state have an ombudsman that acted on behalf of seniors in each state, my mother and stepfather were very fortunate indeed when they lived in Hawaii. The governor of that state appointed my stepfather to be the ombudsman for seniors for that state. In that capacity, he was only answerable to the legislature of the state of Hawaii.
I feel that everyone who is hired to care for a person who is either elderly or infirm irrespective as to whether or not the person in need is in a private home, or nursing home or government institution, should be licenced after a thorough background check is undertaken to determine the fitness of the caretaker.
Further, there should be inspectors who have unfettered authority to enter a private home or nursing facility or government institution at any time to investigate suspicions of elder abuse. Animal rights inspectors can do this, so why shouldn't we protect senior citizens the same way?
I am a senior person since I am 76 years of age. Fortunately for me, I am mentally sound and not physically infirm even though I have difficulty in walking. No one is taking advantage of me, of that you can be sure. But if anyone should be stupid enough to try it, they do so at their own risk. But unfortunately, many of my contemporaries are not so fortunate. It is these people we have to help.
If anyone suspects that a elder is being abused, they should contact the authorities. It is the right thing to do.
Every year an estimated 2.1 million elders in the United States alone are victims of physical, psychological, or other forms of abuse and neglect. For every case of elder abuse and neglect reported to authorities, experts estimate that there may be as many as 5 cases not reported. It is estimated that somewhere between four and ten per cent of seniors in Canada experience some kind of abuse; which also often remains hidden or goes undetected.
As elders become more physically frail, they’re less able to stand up to bullying and or fight back if attacked. They may not see or hear as well or think as clearly as they used to, leaving openings for unscrupulous people to take advantage of them. Mental or physical ailments may make them more difficult to live with.
Elder abuse is a serious issue that affects a growing population. There are four kinds of abuses that elderly people are subjected to. They are; physical, neglect, financial and psychological.
Physical abuse
90% of elder abuse and neglect incidents are by known perpetrators, usually family members, 2/3rds are adult children or spouses. 42% of murder victims over 60 were killed by their own offspring. Spouses were the perpetrators in 24% of family murders of persons over 60.
When we think of elder abuse, the abuse of older women promptly comes to mind. People generally presume that men are more capable of protecting themselves from abuse however, older men are also abused. What follows is a case in point.
A 69-year-old emaciated stroke-victim man was found by the police, tied to his bed with a dog leash in his apartment in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The police were called after his adult daughter found him in that way when she visited him. The man’s so-called live-in girlfriend, Yasmin Madi and her real boyfriend, Ghassem Shakeri were living in the apartment also. Further, theyhad placed make-up on his body from head to toe and the catheter hadn’t been changed. He also suffered from three broken fingers and a badly swollen arm. Madi had tried to conceal Mr. Shakeri's repeated assaults on Mr. Butler, who weighed just 68 pounds when his daughter found him. The victim had been paralyzed since 2004.
Madi, 42, was sent to prison for eighteen months after pleading guilty to failing to provide the necessities of life. A day earlier, Madi's heroin-abusing boyfriend, Ghassem Shakeri, pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr. Butler and to breaching probation. In custody since his arrest in April 2008, Shakeri, 42, was released and handed a further 18 months probation.
Signs of physical abuse
Overt signs of physical trauma (e.g. scratches, bruises, cuts, burns, punctures, choke marks); signs of restraint trauma (e.g. rope burns, gag marks, welts); Injury - particularly if repeated (e.g. sprains, fractures, detached retina, dislocation, paralysis); additional physical indicators; hypothermia, pain upon being touched; repeated "unexplained" injuries; inconsistent explanations of the injuries; a physical examination revealing that the older person has injuries which the caregiver has failed to disclose; a history of doctor or emergency room shopping; and repeated time lags between the time of any injury or fall and medical treatment.
Neglect
David Ribarchik, 47, of Flint Township, in New York was charged with a felony that is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. His own mother was the purported victim. On November 25, 2009, medics got a call about a 75-year-old woman who had fallen from a chair. It was later determined she had actually been lying on the floor at least three days. Before she fell out of the chair, she virtually lived in it. The victim had been sleeping in the chair by the door for at least two months. There were sores on her body and her physical condition was not good at all. She had been under her son's care for at least one year.
Signs of neglect
Evidence that personal care is lacking or neglected; Signs of malnourishment (e.g. sunken eyes, loss of weight); chronic health problems both physical and/or psychiatric; dehydration (extreme thirst); pressure sores (bed sores)
Doctors are for the most part, required by law to report suspected elder abuse of their patients. Unfortnately, many of them do not do this even if they fear that their silence may subject an elderly person to continued abuse at the hands of a caregiver.
Financial
Financial abuse refers to the misuse of a senior’s money, property or other assets by
a relative or a person in a position of trust.A relative may be a spouse, sibling, or child, and a person in a position of trust may be a neighbour, home care worker, or staff person in a care facility.
Some examples are: forcing or tricking a senior into selling his or her property; stealing money or personal possessions; forcing a senior’s signature on pension cheques or legal documents; misusing a Power of Attorney.
Detecting financial abuse
Financial abuse is often difficult to detect and frequently occurs over a long period
of time. Some behavioural indicators of financially abused seniors are: sudden removal of large sums of money from a bank account; unexplained inability to pay bills, purchase food or personal care items; fear or anxiety when discussing finances or being visited by a family member only when pension cheques arrive; inaccurate or no knowledge of the person’s finances; unexpected revision of a will or sale of property.
In December 2009, a woman in Genesee, New York was arrested and charged with dozens of charges for allegedly embezzling up to $1.4 million from her elderly brother. Mary Jo Davis had been her brother's guardian. At the time of this writing, she faces 35 counts including embezzlement, fraud and then first-degree vulnerable adult abuse, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
The victim was a 78-year-old paraplegic with dementia and hypertension, was being taken advantage of by her sister. She has written checks to people totally unrelated to his care. She spent some of the money on court costs for a man charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct, her home repairs, new appliances and other items from Home Depot. She also spent money on two vehicles and even a race car shop. The police originally tbgought she embessled $700,000 but now suspect that the loss could be as high as $1.4 million.
For Victoria Gilbert, the seventh question on the caretaker agency’s background form was easy: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Fresh from three years in a Nevada slammer for felony embezzlement, Gilbert said “No.”
The San Diego caretaker agency hired her on the spot. She went to National City and took care of an 86-year-old man who had suffered two strokes. Within seven days, she had persuaded him she needed to move in with him to provide 24-hour care. Within another week, her boyfriend, whom she had described as her husband (he wasn’t) and as a deputy U.S. marshal (he wasn’t), moved in also. The pair took the elderly man for a financial ride, using a credit card they stole from him while at the same time, they neglected his health. They literally ate caviar and drank expensive wines while he was fed hamburger.
In December 2009, Anthony D. Marshall, who is 85, was convicted of siphoning millions of dollars from his mother, Brooke Astor. He was sentenced to one to three years in prison.The sentence was for the most serious of 14 counts on which Mr. Marshall was convicted: first-degree grand larceny, for giving himself a retroactive lump-sum raise of about $1 million for managing his mother’s finances. Justice Bartley also sentenced Mr. Marshall to one year on each of the 13 other charges he was convicted of, to run at the same time as the longer sentence.
The trial focused on a tangle of wills and codicils that the prosecution said Marshall’s mother signed under pressure from Mr. Marshall. Most prominent among them was the will she signed in 2002 calling for most of her fortune to go to him. Mrs. Astor, who all but single-handedly gave away nearly $200 million of her late husband’s money while she was alive, had promised millions more to institutions like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on her death.
An elderly woman in Canada gave her credit cards to a gambling addict between September 2007 and July 2008 because she couldn't get out as much to do her own shopping. Carol Jean McQuade, 60, stole $28,500 from the elderly woman she was being paid to care for. McQuade began caring for the victim in her home when she and her husband moved in with the elderly woman in 2008. The victim was a 92-year-old retired public health nurse who served as a nurse in the European theatre during the Second World War. She has befriended McQuade in 2001. In 2007, McQuade was paid to provide in-home care through a Veterans Affairs Canada program designed to benefit veterans who served overseas. The victim underwent surgery in 2007 and it became hard for her to get around.That's when she entrusted McQuade with her debit cards and PIN numbers. She completed depleted a TD Bank account of thousands and then turned her attention to a Royal Bank account. The court also heard Thursday that McQuade has a theft conviction on her record.In 1997, when she was working as a teacher in Fredericton, she was tasked with collecting money from parents for a student trip to Quebec. All told, she collected $12,000, which then disappeared. She was sentenced to one year in prison for stealing from the woman she was hired to care for. She was given until the end of her probation to repay the money she stole otherwise she would go back to prison to serve more time.
Denise Elizabeth Sheaves, 29, of Fredrickton, New Brunswick, was a home-care worker who who forged cheques on an elderly client's account and impersonated her to get a credit card and a computer. She was an employee of ‘We Care Home Health Services’ and in that capacity worked for 13 months as a home-care worker for an 83-year-old Fredericton woman. Sheaves wrote four cheques to herself on her client's account in the amounts of $50, $100, $120 and $700. Sheaves told the court she used the money from the cheques and credit card to help a friend who needed money to feed her kids and pay her rent. Sheaves had found the elderly woman's social insurance number and other personal information in a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency so she
used that information to fill out an HBC credit card application in the elderly woman's name, but had the card and bills sent to her own address.
Obviously, greater care must be undertaken before someone his retained to care for an elderly person. Background checks are paramount.
Government abuse of the elderly
Some institutions are operated by local governments or are at least, answerable to them. Here is a rather sad case where the government abused an older man.
Al Gosling was 82 years of age when he was a tenant in a Toronto Community Housing Corporation building. He had had some rent problems in the past, and for a couple of years in a row he neglected to fill out his annual declaration of income form, a requirement of tenancy. Bear in mind that his only income is his pension; he has no hidden source of cash, no secretly lucrative job.
The TCHC took his case to the Landlord and Tenant Board and got an eviction order, after which they changed the lock on his door. When he came home, he had no other place to sleep but under the stairts in his building.
After a week, the cops came and took him to the hospital; he stayed there for a few days, and then the hospital sent him to a shelter. Al could not sleep or eat properly in the shelter. He picked up an infection, and he ended up in the Sherbourne Community Health Centre. When Al was unable to fight off the infection, he was sent to Toronto General Hospital. He was out on a life-support.
The officials realized that it was wrong to evict this unfortunate man because no one had gone to the trouble to help the man fill out the necessary forms. They repainted his room so that he could return to it when he weas released from the hospital. Unfortunately, Goslin died shortly after that while stll in the hospital.
Abuse in Nursing Homes
Jerry Rankin was told he was on the road to recovery when doctors checked him into a California nursing home for a short stay to heal sores on his legs caused by diabetes. Rankin says his room was so filthy he almost lost his legs. He said, "I looked down at my left leg and it was totally covered with ants," says Rankin. "I mean, thousands of ants on my leg. When his legs got worse, his family insisted he be taken to the hospital. Instead, the Manorcare home he was libing in refused to take hiom to a hospital. He laid in his bed in the nursing home for almost a year trying to get his legs healed. Rankin then sued Manorcare, one of the nation's largest and most profitable nursing home chains for their nerglect of him.
There was a major lawsuit against every Manorcare home in California accusesing the company of fraud -- putting "profits over proper medical care."
Basic care was an issue for Bruce Lemoine at one Manorcare. He died from exposure after he was left outside, strapped in his wheelchair, in near 100-degree heat. He was so dehydrated, he was like a mummy. The home settled his family's lawsuit and further, it paid the state $52,000.
In fact, families across the United States and elsewhere are suing nursing homes, claiming the care they were promised is not what loved ones got. Unfortunately, every year there is a substantial number of nursing home abuse victims who are unable to recover from the wounds they’ve received from either the direct abuse or intentional neglect of the staff supposedly dedicated to helping them. Many nursing home employees are taken to court and criminally convicted of these crimes each year. Although criminal charges may provide satisfaction that the wrongdoer is punishedf, criminal claims who are abused in some of these nursing homes do not typically provide any sort of financial compensation to a victim’s loved one.
But for quality care, don't rely on the tours of nursing homes. Take the time to look at complaint files, inspection reports and lawsuits that reveal a nursing home's true track record. And equaqlly important, talk to the residents.
I was very fortunate. My mother and stepfather were in the eighties when they decided to sell their home in Hawaii and moved into a nursing home in Olympia,Washington. Everyone in that place was well treated. They all had their own apartments and could eat in the dining room if they so choose to do so. They were taken on shopping trips and site-seeing trips. Medical care was always available to them when needed.
Psychological and Emotional abuse
Older women more than older men are often shouted at, put down, or otherwise denigrated. Such mistreatment may lead to anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, or other health problems. Emotional abuse is a form of family violence. Psychological or emotional abuse occurs when an abuser or someone causes mental or emotional pain, distress, suffering, or anguish to an elder. This may be unknowingly or purposely done by family members or any person that is caring for an elder. Psychological or emotional abuse includes insulting, threatening, humiliating, intimidating, or harassing through words or actions. This may also involve ignoring the elder, giving silent treatment, keeping the elder inside the house and not letting other people call or visit him, not giving mail, electronic mail, or phone calls to the elder, not allowing or making it possible for the elder do his usual activities, such as going to church, or visiting friends and preventing the elder from deciding or acting for himself even if he has a sound mind.
There are many things that may cause someone to psychologically abuse an elder. Poor or crowded living conditions may be one of the reasons why it occurs. The following are other possible causes and conditions that may increase an elderly person's risk of psychological abuse.
The abuser depends heavily on the elder for things such as money or housing, drinks alcohol or uses illegal drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, has a personality disorder, depression, or another mental illness, has a history of family violence, such as physical or sexual abuse, has stress due to work, taking care of the elder, or financial problems.
Summary
I believe that every state or province should have a seniors ombudsman who has the authority to look into accusations of elder abuse, be it in a private home or nursing facility. Many years ago when the United States made it manditory that every state have an ombudsman that acted on behalf of seniors in each state, my mother and stepfather were very fortunate indeed when they lived in Hawaii. The governor of that state appointed my stepfather to be the ombudsman for seniors for that state. In that capacity, he was only answerable to the legislature of the state of Hawaii.
I feel that everyone who is hired to care for a person who is either elderly or infirm irrespective as to whether or not the person in need is in a private home, or nursing home or government institution, should be licenced after a thorough background check is undertaken to determine the fitness of the caretaker.
Further, there should be inspectors who have unfettered authority to enter a private home or nursing facility or government institution at any time to investigate suspicions of elder abuse. Animal rights inspectors can do this, so why shouldn't we protect senior citizens the same way?
I am a senior person since I am 76 years of age. Fortunately for me, I am mentally sound and not physically infirm even though I have difficulty in walking. No one is taking advantage of me, of that you can be sure. But if anyone should be stupid enough to try it, they do so at their own risk. But unfortunately, many of my contemporaries are not so fortunate. It is these people we have to help.
If anyone suspects that a elder is being abused, they should contact the authorities. It is the right thing to do.
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