Updating the Idiot Alert Files

Today I have two mew memberships to bestow. One is for a group; the other is for an individual. Let's get the group taken care of first, shall we?
This en masse induction takes in every cat owner in every city, anywhere, who allows their pet to roam the great outdoors freely. Such freedom too often comes at the price of the poor pet's life, when it encounters a motorized vehicle. Cats were originally wild creatures, it is true, and at one time they were pretty much safe to roam about outside, as they chose. Humankind domesticated the creatures many long centuries ago, but it was still alright for any feline owner to let Puss out the back door and not worry about his or her safety. That all changed, however, with the advent of motorized vehicles and the widespread ownership of same.
Yesterday, I gave my daughter a ride to work and during the half-hour ride home I saw the remains of three family pets who had met an untimely end under the wheels of some one's ride. I could tell it was unlikely that any of the three were strays because, unfortunately, each of the three sad, little corpses were lying near spots where red lights or slow traffic held me back long enough to see the state of their fur. These animals had all shared some one's home, until the idiots who owned them let them out to deal with the dangers of traffic.
Yes, I know the whole nonsense-line some owners give about running free being the natural state for a cat, but it is a line of bullshit. If the cats are truly to be left to their natural state, they will have nothing to do with the inside of anyone's house, let alone the commercial (or otherwise) cat food put out for them in that house. People who claim their pet to be part of the family and then let them out to take their chances with dying unnecessary, agonizing deaths are shooting a thoughtless line of shit. If they really regard the pet as part of the family, they will take better care of it. They will acknowledge the fact that pet ownership today, in a city, is different than it was in past years. To take a pet into your home means to take the responsibility for safeguarding that life. To let the cat out, without restraint, is to put it in mortal danger. Doing so brands the one who takes this action as an idiot, plain and simple.


The second membership in the Idiot Alert Files goes to Neil MacGregor, the Scottish loonie who has declared himself to be a vicious racist and worthy of little more than long-term residence in a jail cell. This pea-brained menace to society has uttered threats that should have resulted in his being locked up and the key being thrown away.
The xenophobic MacGregor has seen fit to demand that all mosques in Scotland should be closed down. He has also seen fit to threaten that if his demands are not met, "we'll kidnap one Muslim and execute him or her on the internet, just like they did to our Ken Bigley." Not being shy of labels, MacGregor slapped one on himself in an e-mail he sent to Strathclyde Police. "I'm a proud racist and National Front member,” he wrote. MacGregor was arrested last year, but rather than being tried by a high court, he was tried by a sheriff and indicted only on a charge of breach of the peace, aggravated by racial hatred.
Scottish Muslims are rightfully declaring the sentencing of the mentally-deficient MacGregor to be a glaring example of double-standard justice, saying that if someone with dark skin and/or a beard had uttered such threats they would be tried under terrorism laws. They are very likely right, but the idiots responsible for his sentence will not be offered membership in the Files. After all, as the members of the Files have previously declared, they do have standards rather like those of the honour-among-thieves variety. The purveyors of such perfidy as dealing gently with a self-declared racist with murderous intent would not be welcome in the Idiot Alert Files.