June 18- June 25, 2009editorial@boulderweekly.comThe few. The proud? We know it’s tough right now to get young folks to join the Marines. With two wars going on and U.S. servicemen and woman still getting shot and blown up, joining the military isn’t as appealing as it was back in the ’80s, when it was just a tough way to pay for college. But Staff Sgt. Bryan Damone Cunningham, 33, a Marine recruiter in Long Beach, Calif., seems to have come up with a unique incentive: give potential recruits their very own 14-year-old girl to rape.
Cunningham has been charged with seven felonies, including sodomy, attempted pimping and kidnapping with intent to rape, after allegedly picking up a young teenage girl he’d met online, having sex with her and then sharing her with two potential recruits, both of whom face charges of unlawful sex and oral copulation with a minor. Cunningham also allegedly tried to take the girl to Los Angeles against her will, where he said he’d pimp her out.
Men who rape 14-year-olds — aren’t those just the kind of men we want to represent the United States abroad in times of war? If you can talk them into raping children before they even hit basic training, they ought to pick up killing pretty quickly. Then they can head off to Iraq, armed to the teeth, and do like Steven Dale Green, who spotted a pretty 14-year-old, got his soldier buddies together and hit her house, raping her and then killing her, her 6-year-old sister, her mother and her father.
Of course, it was reassuring to hear the U.S. Marine Corps issue a statement condemning that kind of “sexual enticement.” But if stats coming from army bases are any indication, there seems to be a connection between a willingness to kill strangers and crimes against women — rape, domestic violence and murder. What would Gandhi say?
The American family threatened again Say it isn’t so! The ever-threatened American family is spending less time together these days, thanks in part to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, housed at the University of Southern California, is reporting that 28 percent of the Americans it interviewed reported that they’re spending less time with family members than in the past. That’s more than double the number who reported the same thing in 2006.
Michael Gilbert says this reported drop in family time is happening just as use of social networking sites is exploding. Being online is, he says, more isolating than watching TV.
“It’s not like television, where you can sit around with your family and watch,” he said.
But when did watching television come to constitute “family time”? Wasn’t it just yesterday that social scientists were complaining that television destroyed family time?
Perhaps Gilbert and his colleagues are looking at this backwards. It’s time for someone to do a poll asking Americans whether they like spending time with family members in the first place. Chances are that a lot of respondents would say they’d rather be on a blog roll or taking meaningless Facebook personality quizzes — Which Deadly Illness Are You? — than hanging with the family. After all, friends are the family members you choose, and strangers are people you haven’t yet learned to despise. Besides, if families are so desperate to spend time together, they can always get together in a nice, cozy chatroom.
High crimes Four men were arrested on Tuesday, June 16, after allegedly robbing a local medical marijuana clinic and stealing two 20-gallon containers of weed.
The suspects supposedly entered the facility and asked for an appointment. When the employee working at the facility requested to see their medical marijuana cards, they said they were going to rob her. They took the money, ganja and surveillance equipment and made their getaway in a black Escalade.
The police caught up to the suspects on U.S. 36, where they were apprehended and arrested. The paramedics were called in because one of the suspects, who was wearing a full back brace, complained of severe pain.
We do not have a licensed doctor on staff here at Boulder Weekly. However, we do have a few words of medical advice for the stoner in the brace. Dude, if you want some chronic for your chronic back pain, go get your goddamn medical marijuana card, idiot. It’s a fairly simple process. There’s no reason to go all Pineapple Express on the situation and get the cops involved. It’s legal for you.
Also, what was the next step in your brilliant plan after stealing all that skunk? Were you going to hijack a Frito-Lay truck and drive to a Phish concert? Next time, perhaps you should plan your clever marijuana robbery before you toke.
