Welcome to today's episode of Profiles in Stupidity. On our show today, a man from Parsippany, NJ who was arrested by police after asking them to search his home. What did they find? Crack vials and hypodermic needles! Parsippany police give man a ride, bust him for drugs.

That's right. This dude was wandering around on Route 46, trying to get someone to let him use their cell phone, when the cops pulled up. He explained that he was trying to call a friend to get a ride home. They offered him a ride, as he was endangering himself walking on a busy highway. When they got there, he asked them to enter the house, because the back door was open. When the police entered the house, they found "several hypodermic needles on the floor, vials containing a white powder residue and a pipe normally used for smoking crack cocaine."

Of course, they arrested the man. My question for you, dear reader, is this: who is the real moron here? Is it the man who asked police to enter his home when he knew he had needles and other paraphernalia lying around? The police officer, who didn't stop to think that maybe whomever left the door open might have also left the drugs in this man's home, that maybe the paraphernalia wasn't his? Or the reporter who couldn't be bothered to research his story and actually answer some of these pertinent questions?

Go read the article. I'll post the link again : Parsippany police give man a ride, bust him for drugs. Nowhere in there does the author mention if the suspect was on drugs, tested for drugs, or even acting strangely. Other than being out on the highway, looking for a ride home, we know nothing of the man's behavior that seems out of the ordinary. Even that is not really odd, considering the man was on foot 3 miles from home. We don't know how he got there. Did he walk? Maybe his car broke down. Did he get off the bus at the wrong stop? Or maybe he was so hopped up on crack that he walked for 3 miles before realizing it, and as he came down decided he needed a ride home. We'll never know.

I like to think the police in my community are somewhat intelligent people, that they don't just go around arresting people without cause. I mean, at the very least, it's a lot of paperwork that needs to be filled out. When I see this a few days later, it really makes me think. Maybe there's something going on here. Maybe the police are just arresting people because they have nothing better to do. I try to give police officers the benefit of the doubt; after all, they're putting their lives on the line to try to protect people. But when my news source is so inaccurate, when the reporter can't even get the basic facts of a story, it makes me wonder who I can trust.

People wonder why newspapers in the US are dying. They wonder why more and more of our news comes from the internet and cable TV. I can't speak for most Americans. I think that cable and network TV news is a load of crap. These two articles are an example of a plague that is killing newspaper reporting. The more newspapers try to be like the cable TV news, to try and distill and distort the news into little sound bites, the more people will stop reading. The more people will come to blogs like this one, which is more editorial than actual news.

Oh, and then there's this.




"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

Gertrude Stein