Thursday, April 18, 2013

THE RICIN GUY SEEMS TO BE AS MENTALLY ILL AS JARED LOUGHNER (AND POLITICS DOESN'T SEEM TO BE HIS REAL PROBLEM)

I don't normally recommend articles at the Blaze, but Glenn Beck's people have rounded up a persuasive collection of links and quotes about Paul Kevin Curtis of Tupelo, Mississippi, who's been arrested in connection with ricin-contaminated letters sent to President Obama and Republican senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

Curtis's politics don't fit into a neat pigeonhole. On his Facebook page, there's a photo of him smiling and pointing to a bumper sticker that reads, "CHRISTIAN and a DEMOCRAT." He calls himself an Independent. But in one Facebook post, he parrots a right-wing line on guns:
I'm thinking that no matter WHAT laws are EVER passed thru the REVOLVING doors of our justice $y$tem & Congress.....that BAD PEOPLE who refuse to allow God into their hearts will ALWAYS find a way to get their cowardly little hands on a weapon......I might also ad that if a person spends enough time on thinking how to take another person's life, he or she could do so with a hair pin, a thumb tack or a wall clock (they just don't have the "CLIP" like those ole nasty assault weapons do....
But the key point here is that the guy is obsessed with ... body parts. As the Blaze post reports:
In a separate 2007 post on RipOffReport.com, a man going by the name "Kevin Curtis" references sending several letters to Sen. Wicker and other lawmakers about some legal troubles....

The Kevin Curtis from Mississippi who wrote the post on RipOffReport.com is clearly disgruntled over allegedly being fired years ago from the North Mississippi Medical Center after he claims he found "dismembered body parts" and a "severed head" backing up the hospital's drainage system. He claims he received death threats and was threatened by police over the incident....

He goes on to claim he was forced to endure a years-long battle in court over the incident....
On Facebook, he's written, "I'm on the hidden front lines of a secret war. A war that is making Billions of dollars for corrupt mafia related organizations and people. (bone, tissue, organ, body parts harvesting black market)...." He's posted an online petition to the president, House, Senate, and Mississippi's governor and senators seeking "legislation on a federal level as well as investigations into the secret world wide business of illegal bone, tissue, body parts and organ harvesting."

I've known someone like this. Years ago, I worked with a woman who was suddenly terminated. We found out that she'd been telling HR that elaborately decadent sexual activity was taking place in regular meetings where we all knew it couldn't possibly have taken place, allegedly masterminded by an eightysomething employee who couldn't possibly have been guilty. Sometime later, after the fired employee had been institutionalized, she wrote letters to government agencies in the names of some of her former co-workers, including one that referred (in the first person) to a co-worker's decapitation. That letter began, "My severed head was found..."

This is pure mental illness, although politics may work its way in. This poor bastard is crazy like Jared Loughner, with his number and letter obsessions ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar"; "If B.C.E. years are unable to start then A.D.E. years are unable to begin"). The trigger in Durtis's brain that made him do this is only incidentally a political trigger.

5 comments:

aimai said...

Yes, well, crazy people will always be crazy. Neither political party has anything to say abou that except to this extent: the Republican party devolves responsibility onto the families of the insane and then basically allows them (or forces them) to slough it off or leave it to the streets or the courts or the jails when it rises to the level of public dysfunction and disturbance. Hypothetically, if there were enough money and no Republican intransigence, Democratic politicians and societies would work to ensure that such a person was monitored and cared for and their family given help in caring for him as long as possible.

Victor said...

This is today's edition of "What aimai just said!"

Tune in tomorrow, for Friday's exciting edition of "What aimai just said!"

Steve, you lived in NYC during the Reagan years, didn't you?

Remember the influx of people in the early 80's who were let out of mental institutions, and ended up homeless on the streets and subways and train and but stations - and the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

Releasing people started under Nixon, continued under Ford and Carter, and then sky-rocketed after Reagan came into office.

Now, as Geraldo (who was once a good and reputable reporter) showed, not all mental institutions were good, or clean, or safe - but not all of them were guilty of the neglect and abuse of mentally retarded patients as Staten Island's Willowbrook State School was.

And, mental illness is where the "Do-gooder" Liberalism, met "Cut any sh*t that helps people" Conservatism - and out went the mental patients, many of whom did not belong outside the institution - or, at least not without careful and regular check-ups and visits. Which, of course, with budget cuts, our society couldn't afford.
Hey, we had to rebuild our military after the humiliating debacle of Vietnam, right?
And taxes had to keep being cut, right?
So who had the money, time, or energy to worry about what happened to the people whose families couldn't afford round-the-clock care for them?

And this guy sounds like, if he shouldn't have been in a mental institution the whole time, at least needed people checking to see if he was taking his meds regulalry, like he was probably supposed to.

My family knows a thing or two about mental disease, and people not taking their meds, so I have a lot of sympathy for this guy (and his family, if he has any).

Now, hopefully, they won't put him in the general population in some prison somewhere, but get him the psychiatric help he needs.

Steve M. said...

Aimai, what I said about politics is a response to this.

Steve M. said...

And Victor -- yeah, I fear this guy is going to wind up in the general prison population. As a nation, we're terrible at dealing with this sort of thing.

The Kenosha Kid said...

The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar

Godlstein has really gone around the bend.