David McElroy

What if police were warned that James Holmes might be dangerous at some point before he took guns to a Colorado theater and started shooting people? Surely he would have been arrested and many lives would have been saved. Right?

That’s the standard sort of thing we tend to assume, but it appears that police were warned about Holmes ahead of time and did nothing to stop him. Does this mean police are indirectly to blame for the shootings? This article from The Atlantic certainly implies something like that. It says the latest revelation is “bound to elicit even more frustration and anger.” The writer then says “it’d be infuriating” to learn that police had a warning and didn’t act on it.

What kind of world does that writer want to live in?

According to ABC News, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado was worried about her patient weeks before the shooting occurred. So she talked to a university police officer, but we don’t know what (if anything) the officer did with the warning. What should police have done?

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What if I told you that some people who are alive today are never going to die? To some Russian scientists, that’s a very real possibility. They believe they might have the technology by 2045 to allow a human being to live forever.

The human body is always going to wear out — as far as we know — so how is this possible? The scientists of the 2045 Initiative believe they’ll have the technology by then to transfer what they see as the essence of a human being into a machine. If you’re interested in the stages of development they plan to go through to get there, this story will interest you.

For the most part, I’m going to set aside the science of this and assume that some very smart people are able to develop the technology to sustain a human brain. I’m even going to assume that human consciousness is centered there, at least for the purpose of this discussion, even though I have serious doubts about that. (If you’re interested in why I started doubting this commonly accepted belief, you might be fascinated by Paul Pearsall’s book, “The Heart’s Code.”) I’m mostly interested now in the question of whether this kind of immortality would be a good thing or not.

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I’m sick of people begging me to be offended at something they’ve imagined to be offensive. I’m suffering from “outrage overload” because so many people seem so eager to tell me I should be offended at an ever-growing list of things.

Here are two recent things that have me banging me head against the wall in frustration with the pathetic folks of the Fellowship of the Offended.

First, a black gymnast named Gabby Douglas won a gold medal at the Olympics and NBC’s Bob Costas had a segment about her being the first black winner of the all-around. Then the network went to a commercial break, which happened to start with a promo for a new NBC comedy called “Animal Practice,” about life at a vet clinic. The commercial imagines a monkey who lives at the clinic seeing himself (herself?) winning an Olympic medal. (See the video at the end of this article.)

The promotion had been running regularly throughout the Olympics as a tie between the show and the games. But because it happened to run after a black woman won a gold medal, well, you know the rest. The ad was clearly racist — and NBC was forced to apologize. (See this article for some of the outraged tweets about it.)

When I told someone the story Sunday night and asked for her reaction, she almost shouted her reply: “Tell these people to get a life!”

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