“It’s better to marry young because you can marry a girl straight out of high school, before she gets set in her ways and too comfortable by herself.” –Clem “Golden Boy” Hartford

“You have to get to them when they’re young before they get set to certain ways of thinking.” –Jonas, probably.

Unsurprisingly, Gannon finds it interesting that the honchos behind the FLDS, unconstrained by feminism and social convention, chose to mate with very young ladies. I find it interesting, too, though for different reasons. I actually agree with Gannon that men frequently can be sexually attracted to younger women and even people that we call children (but aren’t in any biological sense). Where Gannon and I differ is that he finds this to be determinative that to struggle against it is counterproductive and unnatural and that’s not how I see it at all. From my perspective, to the extent that it is a natural instinct it is sometimes natural in some men in the same sense that a propensity for violence is natural and the desire for men to have sex with as many women as he can is natural. In other words, it’s an aspect of our nature that we set up societies to moderate.

One of the more disturbing aspects of a lot of Gannon’s comments here and elsewhere and the comments of those like him are their talks about how unsullied young women are. They haven’t been embittered by feminism or a perpetually broken heart or whatever. He talks of how… fresh… they are. Not just in the physical sense, but in the mental and emotional senses as well. This disturbs me the same way that it would disturb me to hear a land developer talk about how natural and pristine a particular place is. He likes it natural and pristine so that he can himself develop it.

Between the ages of 15 and 25, a young lady will do her growing and by the end of that will become the core of the woman that she’ll be for the rest of her life. What Gannon, Golden Boy, and Probably Jonas are essentially saying is that it’s better to get in on the ground floor of this elevator and that the woman that appears at the top is inferior to the one at the bottom. She hasn’t been properly trained. The 25 year old has all sorts of inconvenient ideas and desires.

And I’ll be honest and say that I understand what they’re talking about. It’s nice to able to influence someone into being interested in what you’re interested in and doing the things that you like to do. My ex-girlfriend Julie (who was in the 15-25 bracket) was wonderfully malleable. She came around to agree with me politically, religiously, and we’d watch anime together, play video games, and listen to the same sorts of music and watch the same sorts of shows despite not having a whole lot of similar interests when we first met. It was something of a big deal when she wanted to watch Will & Grace and I wanted to watch SportsNight, which came on against one another.

My wife, I’ve learned, is not nearly so malleable. Getting her interested in a number of the things I am interested in is a longshot. Comic books and anime are out. Playing video games against one another is also not going to happen. Alternative rock? Not so much. Politics? We disagree a lot. Religion? Woooooo boy. Some of it is because I married a much more hard-headed woman than I dated a decade ago, but at the same time I’m less malleable when I was then. Ten years ago I acquired an interest in country music from Julie but I haven’t really made a similar effort with Clancy’s preferences of chick rock and classic rock, to pick an example.

To me there is an inherent problem when it comes to someone that has grown out of their malleable years dating someone that hasn’t. I can agree with Golden Boy’s comment so long as he says that men should get married young, too (which, since the LDS advocates it, I suspect that he does). But people with the wisdom of 25 years experience extolling the virtues of the inexperience of a 15 year old troubles me. It makes me believe that there is an element of control involved. A desire to be Pygmalion and create a statue to fall in love with.

While Gannon sees the FLDS situation and the apparent preference for teens on the part of the old men as supportive of his belief that such relationships should be more commonplace (or at least not illegal), I look at the same and see exactly what I fear about such relationships. The FLDS is built upon the manipulation and control of the young. So it’s not at all surprising to me that they would bite the bullet and take control of their sexuality as soon as they possibly can. Marry them off at 14 and they’ll never have anything to compare their sexual experience as a member of an old man’s collection.

I’ve thought about what I would do if my fifteen year old daughter came home with a twenty-five year old boyfriend and whether or not I could bring myself to approve. In the end, I couldn’t, and more than anything I think that the reason would be that she hasn’t fully discovered who she is yet and he probably has. Further, it is not necessarily in his interest for her to become all that she is capable of becoming. Unspoken would be the corollary that he is in a better position to prevent her from becoming all that she is capable of becoming than some numbnut that she’s going to school with.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been discussing the CPS raids on the FLDS and the subsequent court battles with various people over the last week and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. There is a near even split. The dividing line is not between liberals and conservatives or big government folks versus libertarians. Rather, it’s men against women. Probably about two thirds of the men I’ve talked to believe that the CPS was way out of line and that this is an egregious example of government over-reach. About the same portion of women take the opposite view. Republican voter or Democrat, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Men seem to look at the situation abstractly as a legal or philosophical issue. Women seem to look at the situation more personally as young women are stripped of their autonomy to become tools of procreation and the playthings of much (and sometimes much, much) older men.

For my part, from what I know about the case and the laws surrounding it, I think that the judges came to the correct legal conclusion. The CPS did a very poor job of getting its evidenciary ducks in a row. Even setting aside the faulty tip that triggered the raid, it seems likely that they could have done a better job of seeking out the women that escaped and the men that were kicked out of the compound. Or maybe even with all those ducks in a row the situation is cloudy enough that they can’t realistically legally intervene. Not sure. It’s frustrating when the prosecution (or in this case a government agency) botches a case that really could have been worthwhile, but when that happens the system needs to do what the system needs to do in order to prevent those botches from happening in the future.

And so I would agree with the men, for the most part. Except that a lot of them take it a few steps further. In their view, the CPS folks are the bad guys and the FLDS – or at least the majority contingent of the FLDS that is not actively sleeping with minors – their victims. More than one person has suggested that the FLDS is being picked on because it’s different, that the belief that all of these bad things are going on is largely the product of prejudice, and that we’re punishing an entire group for the actions of comparatively few.

That’s where they lose me.

From my perspective, the CPS folks are the inept and overzealous good guys in this case. The FLDS members are the victims only insofar as criminals are sometimes the victim of illegal searches. Well that’s the extent to which they are victims of the state, anyway. A majority of them are victims of the system they grew up in, but then they’re also the perpetrators. The moral perpetrators here are not simply the men that are having sex with people that they shouldn’t be having sex with. The perpetrators are the families giving up their young women to this system and raising their sons to be future perpetrators or else allowing them to be kicked out of the compound. While some people wonder why they don’t just take the men out of the picture and let everyone else be are in my mind insufficiently weighing that by participating in the system, their hands are bloody to. The women are victims, but they’re not just victims.

Don’t get me wrong. They have my sympathy. I don’t pretend that if I were raised in that environment that I wouldn’t believe exactly as they believe and support the system exactly as they support it. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But while I have sympathy, that doesn’t entitle them to the moral right to perpetuate the system that warped them. Though I don’t have as much of it since they were profiting from the system in a sense, I even have sympathy for the men that are collecting the young brides. As the saying goes, they know not what they do. They believe that they are doing God’s work. That doesn’t mean that letting them do what they were doing is right, either.

I’ve no doubt that the FLDS parents love their children. The problem is that either they love their church more or are stuck so far under the thumb of their church that they are powerless. So in a sense, Warren Jeffs is their parent. Their argument that nothing should be allowed to come between their family loses its resonance when they quite frequently allow their church to do just that:

To reduce competition for wives, the church systematically expels adolescent boys, thus trimming the eligible male population. It’s estimated that the FLDS has thrown out between 400 and 1,400 male members in the last decade.

Church elders excommunicate boys as young as 14 ostensibly for bad behavior—like flirting with girls, watching a movie, listening to rock music, drinking, playing basketball, or wearing short-sleeve shirts. Sometimes called the “Lost Boys,” they’re considered apostates and cut off entirely from their relatives. Parents or siblings who protest are sometimes asked to pack their bags as well. Girls have also been cast out of the church, but this happens much less often. Usually this punishment is reserved for women who don’t wish to be part of a polygamous marriage.

Excommunication doesn’t just mean that they lose Temple privileges or can’t take Holy Communion anymore. The church is the community. They’re not only kicked out of Mass (or whatever the FLDS equivalent is) but kicked out of their homes and their physical communities. Complaints from FLDS members about how wrong it is for them to send these kids into the world at large ring hollow. The church does it and the parents allow it to happen. Either they agree with what’s happening or they’re powerless to do anything about it. The end result is the same either way.

So how well do these young men fare in the world of iniquity that they are thrust into? It’s not a pretty sight:

They aren’t used to remembering when job interviews are or how to pay bills. They don’t know how to mingle with people, and some struggle to talk to girls.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

A therapist meets with some boys; some attend self-improvement classes. They are learning to manage money and signing up to take the GED. Fischer evaluates them, asking about future plans and if they want to go to college. He is working to match each boy with a mentor and find them places to live. For now, they live in hotels and in houses that the Fischer brothers own.

Many are highly skilled in construction, a main job in the creek. But all this support from outsiders is confusing. The boys say FLDS members and even their own families often turned on them, so it was easier to distrust everyone.

“In a way, it scares us,” said Raymond Hardy, 19. “I’m not used to it.” Ream wants to know what the catch is. “There’s always a catch. Why are they doing this?”

Of course, one could read this and say that the CPS is just condemning more kids to this fate. This is true, but I am unpersuaded that this is the worst fate. As difficult-going as this was for the Lost Boys, their situation is not unsalvageable. Many of them will grow up and have children and those children will be born free. Their sisters, on the other hand, will have children that will be born into the same machine that they were, believing that free thought and action are stops on the road to Hell. Regarding the kids in Eldorado, as substandard as our Foster Care system is, I’m not convinced that it’s worse than the alternative. I’m further not convinced of the notion that because the FLDS screwed them up so royally that the only responsible thing to do is to return them to that oppressive environment.

The tricky part, though, is the question of “What next?” This is a question where the CPS has fallen woefully short and the question to which I am not sure there is a good answer. Even if they do take the kids and more of them eventually adjust, the women in the compound will simply have more kids. The machine will likely live on. Perhaps the result will be an insurrection among the rank-and-file towards normalizing the church’s relationship with its surroundings. It seems unlikely that such an insurrection can be cultivated where free thought is grounds for explusion and besides, they’ve lost their children before in service of The Cause and no such movement has occurred.

From the CPS’s perspective, this will quite likely result in a retreat from Texas and that may be all the CPS and the State of Texas want. The Creek compounds in Utah and Arizona will continue on, though. Willard has expressed great concern that any attempts to pierce the armor surrounding that will result in rivers of blood. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. After Waco, it seems unlikely that the federal government is going to take that chance and the governments in Utah and Arizona seem to have moved on from their investigations.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all of this. It’s also why I have become so frustrated with those that are celebrating the reunion of parents and child. Even though I believe the courts likely ruled correctly given what they had to work with, I am more inclined to feel sad and angry that moral justice was not done even if legal justice was. This represents not the greatness of our system, but the inherent weakness of it. It is apparent that either our governments are too inept to handle the investigation or otherwise that cults can escape justice so long as their circle their wagons tightly enough. No thorough investigation can occur without ripping the community apart from one end to the other… and we can’t rip the community apart without being able to thoroughly investigate it first.

Further, they’ve managed to win people over people by virtue of the very insularity that keeps them beyond the government’s reach. The fact that they’re so different becomes a reason in itself that they should not be released into the general system. The kids are so brainwashed that they can’t handle the outside world without the guidance of their brainwashed parents. Except that arguments of coercion are shrugged off because you can’t call it coercion when the conditioning begins at birth. The fact that members of the church are so stripped of their autonomy that coercion becomes redundant simply doesn’t make me feel better.

Due to the site being down and last week being my last week at work, some of the posts I’d been planning to put up didn’t get posted. They should be going up this week, though, as I put some finishing touches on them.

It’s funny how you would think that being unemployed would make a blogger more prolific, but thus far I seem to have less blogging neurons firing than I did two weeks ago. We’ll see if that changes.

In an earlier thread, Gannon took exception to how many people the US has in jail. I’ve already begun discussing this in the context of Jamal Damon Barack, and the types of repeat theives that public universities see.

On the competing side, two stories recently: First, a CNN video on a man who served his time, came back into society, but couldn’t make it so he handed a cop some crack and begged to be re-incarcerated. Secondly, a story on some teenagers who ran a violent prostitution ring, but managed to get off with a year and a half in juvie due to a plea bargain.

If you’re going to make a case study for where the US prison system is messed up, these are a pretty good place to start. People fall into a life of crime for a lot of reasons – some are actually in need, some simply have no respect for the law/life/property of others, some are medically sociopathic, some see an opportunity for profit that bypasses or outweighs the risk calculation of being caught, and some (though this is generally relegated to more obscure/arcane areas like tax law or financial reporting) honestly try to follow the law but simply have no clue what it actually means.

In the case of JDB, I mentioned that the (a) courts are too lax in sentencing and the comforts of prisons and (b) prisons themselves are not really set up to do a good job rehabilitating people. The homeless gentleman doesn’t appear to have gotten a lax sentence – but at the same time, when he got out of prison, he literally had no support structure to turn him back into a productive and law-abiding member of society. He sounds like the type who would have done better for it. On the other side, we have people like JDB and the pimp boys, who probably would leave jail and go right back into crime no matter what prison tried to do to rehabilitate them.

Prisons, obviously, have dual purposes. There is a large amount of debate as to which of these purposes is primary. Speaking neutrally, they can be enumerated as corrective and protective. In the corrective element, prison is supposed to serve as a place where individuals who’ve committed crime can be rehabilitated, shown the error of their ways, and then return to society and become productive and law-abiding. In the protective, prison is supposed to both serve as a deterrent to criminals (the sane ones who will weigh risk/reward and decide crime isn’t worth the risk) and also keep those who are not yet rehabilitated away from those they otherwise would harm.

Where this falls down:
#1 – Prisons and the Justice system currently do a lousy job working out who’s actually rehabilitated or not. Part of this is due to the lax sentencing problem, part of it is due to well-meant but ill-thought-out plans to try to keep prison populations (and thus maintenance costs) down, and part of it is due to the construction of the system in the first place. The end result is that a lot of people who have no business being released back into society are let out anyways.

#2 – Prisons do a lousy job of showing prisoners the reward for being productive and law-abiding. Let’s face it, most prisons have corruption problems, they have a high criminal-to-guard ratio, and the underlying society between prisoners isn’t run like normal society. People learn plenty of the wrong lessons in prison.

#3 – Prisons, especially short-term/”low security” ones, are cushy. I wouldn’t say that I’d want to live there, but I can certainly see where a guy who’s homeless and desperate might indeed see prison as “no worse” than where he currently is – in prison, he gets his meals covered, he gets a roof over his head and warm bed to sleep in at night, and he has things like cable TV and a weight/recreation room available at least part of the day. In the case of the story above, we’re lucky he didn’t go violent. If your calculation is that prison’s no worse (or even better) than you are now, the deterrent effect and protective goal of prison kind of vanishes.

Oddly enough, though it would take some and money, at least a partial solution to these problems has already been discussed in the area of sex offenders. A number of states have been considering laws that change the sentencing of sex offenders from a strict “X years unless shortened for other reasons” or “X years with first parole chance at Y years” to, instead, “jail until you can prove rehabilitation and minimal likelihood to re-offend.”

The American Criminal Liberties Union and associated well-meaning (but almost never well-doing) groups opposed these laws, but I submit that if expanded, it would improve the prison structure on both goals.

Consider the following hypothesis: all sentences from this point on (and all existing sentences commuted to the new structure) remove the “cap” of a sentence. Instead of a judge pronouncing “stealing a car at knifepoint, 10 years with possibility of parole in 5” on someone, the simple pronouncement: “Guilty. Remanded to state custody, first possibility of parole in 5 years.”

This changes the game in a number of ways.

First, it removes the idea of shortened sentences from the equation. Gone is the idea that someone will simply “get off with a slap on the wrist”, gone is the idea of someone waiting out their sentence. It also adds a sanity check on judges who are unnecessarily light to start with – a second panel would be responsible for releasing the individual, and hopefully catching the unrepentant criminals who got a light sentence to start with.

Second, it alters the game for those who actually want to get out of prison. If you really want out – if you really are repentant, really DO want to be outside the walls – then your best bet is not going to be to participate in the underlying prison dynamic, but to really learn a skill, really become marketable, really show that you can be a productive member of society. Those who don’t, simply won’t be released – and the goal of protecting society would be served. Moreover, the example to other prisoners would be there: thugs who wait around don’t get out, those who learn to play by the rules actually do get released.

Lastly, this very filter would help with the final problem – the current difficulty of ex-cons in finding work and re-entering society after prison. Those who go through construction apprenticeships, or college courses, or any other form of learning a useful skill will necessarily be the type to market that skill when they get out. The idea of someone who made a mistake, but learned their lesson and served their time and are coming out fresh, might actually have some meaning.

Looking at the three cases above – in the case of our homeless guy, he likely wouldn’t have had zero support structure when he got out of prison. In the case of Jamal Damon Barack, hopefully a parole/release board would have realized after the first few convictions that perhaps he wasn’t learning his lesson and kept him back. And in the last case, I hope to god no parole/release board would be as stupid as the judge who gave violent multiple-time rapists a year and a half each.

I went to the dentist yesterday morning, wherein they had a helpful sign to remind me to turn my cell phone off. Today, I realized that my cell phone was still off. The same thing happens when I go to the movies. Or when I’m anywhere that respectfully requests that I turn my cell phone off.

Cell phones have been around for quite a while now and this has plagued me for quite a while, too. My thought a couple weeks ago was “How come movie theaters never remind you to turn your cell phone back on?”

Then again, movie theaters might if you stay until the very, very end, which since the advent of IMDB I do not.

Here’s my question for today, though: Why can’t I tell my cell phone to turn off for a specified period of time? If I’m at the movie theater, I can say “three hours”. I know that the cell phone is at least somewhat cogniscent when it’s off because if I set the alarm it will go off whether the cell phone was on or off at the time. My workaround to remembering to turn the cell phone back on has been to set an alarm to remind myself to do so. Sometimes I forget. I’m like that sometimes.

Anyhow, considering everything that cell phones can do, how come not this basic piece of functionality?

Some comments in this post reminded me of an incident at Southern Tech University a while back, and an underlying statement about the justice system.

Southern Tech, like most universities worldwide, has a theft problem. It has this problem partly because it’s in the nature of universities to be insecure, easy targets. Universities combine large amounts of people, relatively open buildings, unknown or shifting class schedules that leave rooms full of steal-able items exposed, and a generally open atmosphere that can lead people to let their guard down; they then mix in personal belongings that are more and more expensive (laptops, PDA’s, cell phones) and a decent amount of fairly high-ticket items (projectors, computers, equipment of varying sorts) owned by the university itself. The end result is, universities are a reasonably easy place for would-be thieves to snag something that will later be sold to a pawn shop. SoTech’s location right next to what is generally a drug- and gang-ridden slum area of town makes the problem worse, but they’re certainly not unique – nearby colleges in both rural and very rich neighborhoods have similar theft issues.

Recently, the SoTech police department sent out a memo to the entire system. Jamal Damon Barack* had been let out of prison again, and as a condition of his parole he was warned that he was no longer welcome on our campus or any others he has stolen from. We were to post fliers with JDB’s face, and keep an eye out – calling the cops if he did show up.

Gannon claims:

On the other hand, the US tries 10, 11, 12, 13 year old children as Adults and sends them to jail. In general, there a way too much people in jail.

Actually, the US has the opposite problem – we’re far too lenient on many crimes, and for many criminals, the system of rehabilitation is a joke to start with.

In discussions with the police investigator, I’ve found out a number of things. It turns out JDB is one of 5 or 6 serial thieves in the area (in addition to garden-variety opportunists, who also hit campus) who make a living out of (a) targeting educational institutions and (b) living in jail. They all have a rap sheet a mile long – JDB, for instance, has over 50 arrests in 20 years, and over 300 convictions on various counts of theft (and those are just the ones they could prove: the estimate is that he’s responsible for at least twice that number). He’s known by virtually every campus cop who’s ever worked in Colosse or its neighboring areas.

Each of them have learned to game the system and have the following things in common:
#1 – They are nonviolent. The most any have on their record is a “resisting arrest (running away)” notation, rather than citation for attempting to injure an officer.
#2 – They know how to fool judges into thinking they’re contrite.
#3 – They know precisely how to behave in jail and quickly get into the good-behavior and “trustee” positions even before their sentencings.
#4 – They exploit any “other” circumstances (one has a “terminal disease”, others have other sob stories or elderly mothers/other relatives who constantly speak on their behalf in court) for reduced sentencing.
#5 – For them, the minimum security prisons are a joke. They get a comfortable bed, 3 square meals a day, cable TV, the equivalent of a health club in the prison gym, and aren’t required to do anything at all unless they take jobs in the trustee program. The trustee program not only gets them preferential treatment but money as well, all for just a couple hours of work a day. While they’re on the streets? They have to provide their own basic necessities like food and shelter, while worrying about anyone else who might try to attack them or steal from them.

The result? A virtual revolving door for these guys, with the educational institutions pretty much supplying their income (along with the shadier pawn shops where they hock their stuff after presenting ridiculously-fake “receipts”) while they’re out. And it’s not as if they are stupid, either; they are incredibly inventive in managing to break off theft-prevention devices or get into areas they’re not supposed to be in, including traveling over false-drop ceilings or blending in with student crowds.

SoTech’s police, along with the other police departments, have repeatedly tried to get these guys longer sentencing and serious sanctions on parole to try to clean up their behavior, but the system’s not having it. Colosse already has enough trouble with a relatively constant stream of violent/drug/gang crime due to turf wars between rival gangs of Blood/Crip/MS13 backgrounds; the judges don’t want to catch grief from misguided racial advocacy groups for contributing to the numbers of incarcerated minorities and one way that they can keep their numbers down is to let “nonviolent offenders” off as quickly as they can.

Gannon thought we are “too tough” on crime, for trying murderers as adults in some specific cases; I think we’re too easy on crime. There are way too many ways for a criminal to game the system and get out early, and not enough rehabilitative ways for the system to actually work on them once a criminal’s decided that crime pays. The added problem is that, societally, many of these kids in the black/latino subcultures are being taught precisely that by parents or “role models” who themselves are gang members or glorify “thug life” behavior.

It gets worse as the gangs have begun recruiting younger and younger members, as well, which relates somewhat to Gannon’s cry about “tried as adult” children. I’d argue that a kid who joins a gang and then shoots 4 people in cold blood has made a pretty adult decision to commit murder or his other crimes, and that seems to be the general consensus as well – but even then, such prosecutions are relatively rare compared to the number of kids committing gang crimes overall.

I’m willing to take a bet that, if these kids didn’t start out learning that (A) crime pays and (B) as a child criminal, the system would give them just a slap on the wrist (especially “first time offender”), they might grow up making a different calculation on crime. Fix the culture and treat crime seriously with greater punishment and stronger rehabilitative efforts, and you might just manage to reduce the number of people willing to take the risk and ending up in prison in the first place.

*name changed for purpose of the story, naturally.

Fans of the TV show Frasier may be able to appreciate the Wikipedia entry on Maris Crane, which helpfully compiles a list of her medical problems and various peculiarities:

Among other problems, it is revealed during the series that Maris exhausts easily under the pressure to be interesting, cannot produce saliva, once had a $25,000 face lift and is allergic to roses. She also has abnormally rigid vertebrae, slightly webbed fingers and an underbite. Perfume gives her hives and her skin has no pigmentation. Getting angry causes one of her eyes to twitch.

Foods she claims she cannot eat (due to allergies or other reasons) include shellfish, poultry, red meat, saturated fats, nitrates, wheat, starch, sulfites, MSG, dairy and nuts. She also claims she is hypoglycaemic. It is revealed that Maris has an eating disorder, probably anorexia.

She has a fear of flying due to a bad experience when she was bumped from first class; she also dislikes public display of rhythm.

She cannot have pets because, according to Niles, she distrusts anything that loves her unconditionally (this contradicts the statement about the ocelot and the dogs, mentioned above).

She is too light to activate a whoopie cushion and is so weak that she once became trapped in a revolving door. She is also so weak that she couldn’t activate a clapper light. She once tried to stomp grapes to make wine, dancing herself into a frenzy, but did not crush a single grape. She needs help slamming a door, and does not leave footprints in the snow

She once sprained her wrist from having too much dip on a cracker. In another episode, Niles commented that wearing a pair of the latest hooped-earrings had compressed Maris’ spine.

She cannot ride a horse because her quadriceps are so tight she cannot straddle anything larger than a border collie (This is also later contradicted, in an instance involving chemical bonding, and a horse saddle Niles had bought her, although since she was doing a “Lady Godiva Impression”, she may have been riding side-saddle).

It was alluded to in the season three episode “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fired” that she once was addicted to cough syrup.

Sorry for the downtime, everybody. Word is that there was a fire at the building that was hosting the site and that the entire building was taken off the power grid.