Wrapping Up the Week
Michael Jackson has been laid to rest, finally, in a private service held in California Thursday evening. The legal repercussions of his death, however, are far from over. Stay tuned.
Jaycee Dugard’s aunt has spoken publicly about Jaycee’s reunion with her family. The aunt said that there have been many joyful moments in the past week and that she, like me, is optimistic about the prospects for Jaycee’s and her children’s futures. She remarked on how intelligent the two children seem to be despite having had no formal education, which, in conjunction with the resilience and “plasticity” (malleability) of children’s minds that I mentioned earlier in the week, bodes well for the children’s prospects of “catching up” educationally. People have been asking me whether I think we’ll see Jaycee on t.v. anytime soon. I don’t know how soon, but I predict that it will happen eventually, so again, stay tuned. (By the way, Garrido apparently was arrested for raping a young girl even before the rape and kidnapping for which he was sentenced to 50 years, which should’ve had him behind bars instead of out on parole at the time Jaycee was kidnapped. The charges in the first rape case – the first one that we know of anyway – were dropped, apparently because the victim didn’t want to testify.)
Last week, I told you about an Ohio teen who fled to a Florida church after converting to Christianity, fearing that her Muslim father would kill her. A judge now has ruled that there’s enough of a question about her safety with her parents that she can remain in Florida indefinitely.
Check out these bizarre crimes: A Pennsylvania woman is in custody for allegedly raping a man by restraining him and using the threat of being burned with a hot curling iron to coerce him into having sex with her. A bystander at a California health care reform rally was mistaken for an opponent of health care reform and confronted physically by a pro-health-care-reform demonstrator who ended up biting one of the bystander’s fingers off during the ensuing fracas – obviously the attacker, who got away, is highly concerned about people’s health! A Las Vegas woman is in custody for allegedly murdering another woman by restraining her and pouring boiling water over her body in an apparent dispute over crack. And, a Montana teen has been charged with assault for attempting to get her father to eat Jello that she made with lamp oil in it, apparently because she was angry at him for grounding her and wanted to give him diarrhea, no lie.
Study this: A German woman with a benign tumor on her amygdala (a brain structure known to be involved in emotional activation, excitement, fear responses, etc.) reportedly has developed hallucinations that she and other females are becoming males, the first case of its kind, suggesting that the amygdala may also be involved somehow in gender perception. You may have learned in school about Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railroad worker whose personality changes after an accident in which an iron rod penetrated his skull helped the fledgling field of neuroscience begin to understand the role that certain brain structures played in psychological functioning. This new case shows how, despite all of the technology now available in the field, the experiences of individual patients still help shape our understanding of how the brain works.
Finally tonight, it’s looking like a giant fire that’s been raging in California and has killed two firefighters was caused by arson. When a similar arson fire was raging back in 2007, I wrote about why someone would do such a thing. If you’re interested, I’ll reprint it below. Thanks for reading and watching this week, and have a great Labor Day weekend!
Motives for Arson (originally posted 10/27/2007):
Now that we know that some of the devastating forest fires burning in California this week were caused by arson, people are asking why someone would commit such extreme and seemingly random violence. First of all, let me just say that the “experts” who’ve been talking about some connection between arson and sex need to stay off of TV and just curl up in front of their fireplaces at home with their long-outdated Freud books. Now, let’s get real. Deliberately-set fires fall into two categories: 1) fires set to accomplish tangible secondary goals, and 2) fires set for purely psychological reasons.
Fires that fall into the first category can be set to terrorize random people or specific groups of people (there’s been no indication that this week’s fires involve terrorism, but recall the string of fires at southern black churches a few years ago), or to harm a specific person or organization financially (like the burnings of luxury homes in California and ski resort buildings in Colorado by environmentalists a few years ago, or the burning of a business by a disgruntled former employee), or as a means of committing murder (even mass murder), or to cash in on an insurance policy (despite the weak housing market right now, the suspects who’ve been identified in this week’s California fires so far have not been area homeowners), or to cover up evidence of another crime (it’s been suggested that at least one of this week’s fires may have been a diversion, set to distract federal authorities while large quantities of drugs and illegal aliens were smuggled across the southern border).
Fires that fall into the second category can be set for the arsonist’s excitement, or to give the arsonist a sense of power, or to draw attention to the arsonist (there have even been cases in which firefighters and forestry workers have set fires apparently so they could fight them and be “heroes”), or to accomplish some psychotic, delusional goal (like “to purify the Earth”). People talk about “Pyromania,” a trance-like fascination with watching fire, as a potential psychological motivation for setting fires like the ones burning in California, but that’s probably one of the lower-probability explanations. While Pyromania remains a psychiatric diagnosis, there’s controversy about whether it really should be one. If it truly exists as a distinct disorder, it’s extremely rare and probably occurs more in children who, for example, keep lighting matches despite repeated warnings from their parents (setting small fires that would grow out of control only by accident rather than big fires that were meant to be big, as evidenced by spreading accelerant over a forested area).
