Thoughts and prayers apparently don't work

 

Two hearts that beat as one...

Thoughts and prayers. Too soon to talk about it. Fake news. Nobody saw it coming. Rinse and repeat.

Kids these days...

WestCoastFredCalifornia is right

From WestCoastFredCalifornia from the comments in the New York Times. 

The most corrosive thing about guns in something that is almost NEVER discussed. It is what possession of a gun does to the INSIDE OF THE HEAD of the person carrying it.

With a gun in one's pocket, one becomes a self-styled arbitor of right and wrong. In EVERY interaction with others -- no matter how trivial -- one becomes an "enforcer" who always has the option of forcing his own way - his own opinion on what is right or wrong - upon others. It creates a feeling of superiority. A feeling that "I am the one who is good, and if I decide you are bad, I can blow you away."

The more time one spends carrying a gun, the more pervasive and penetrating this feeling becomes. It corrodes the way judges other drivers, the way one interacts with the waitress or check-out person, the way one parents, and certainly, the way one filters political news and events. That attitude is what creates the swaggering, smug arrogance that is so pervasive among gun owners. And in an unhealthy person, it can, and does, lead to an obsession. An obsession that can grow and grow - like any addiction - until the person becomes crazy enough to go out and act on the very fantasy that prompted him to buy the weapon in the first place: commit mass murders.

If you buy a people-mower-downer AR-15 or the like, it's because you are fantasizing about mowing down people.

Nov. 12, 2017 at 1:18 p.m.

The history of mass shootings

America.  We're number one!

From feminism, Fukushima, reading to exploding manure. Which reminds me... and Trump.

What you read matters more than you think.

One way to identify potential mass killers: domestic violence and grievances against women.

Women activists around the world.

My new hero, Mary Beard.

A doctor who sees how climate change is affecting our health.  Records shattered.

Climate change in a nutshell: Heatwave leads to ice cream theft, flying cockroaches and exploding manure

Radiation Along Fukushima Rivers Up to 200 Times Higher Than Pacific Ocean Seabed

Pakistani doctor saves a Christian patient and has to flee for his life to the US.  Where Muslims are hated. Welcome to America.

Are we in a rerun of the 1930s?

What forced-birthers are like.

The making of Donald Trump.

So we know who they were

And can honor them.

The gnashing of teeth and the wailing of women...

How DARE Obama get the prisoners out of Iran using diplomacy!11!!1  We need a WAR to prove how manly we are!1!!1

The oceans are warming at a faster rate than we calculated. They are also filling up with plastic.

Nuclear gypsies:  those who are attempting to clean up Fukushima.

George Washington was right.

Actually, there hasn't been a mass shooting every day in 2015.

Now they are not allowed to tell us where our meat has been raised or processed.  That makes me feel so safe.

The Onion actually has a good take on the idiots in Oregon.

Quantum knots.

Monsanto Files Lawsuit to Stop California From Listing Glyphosate as Known Carcinogen

Tuesday Night News Dump

Warning signs of a mass shooting

Tom Tomorrow critiques 2015.   Good guy with a gun or bad guy?

Robot water cleaner

Windy enough for ya?

Now we are back to self-induced abortions and desperate women.  Guess the GOP wants back alley abortions and women bleeding to death all over again.

We're using up a non-renewable resource in ground water.

The oldest pants in the world.

Europe rejects GMO eco-farming.

Dealing with Isis means dealing with deep rooted causes.

Extinct squash plant's seeds grow again.

The California rich waste water because they can.

Worth reading

Inside The Race To Stop The Next Mass Shooter by Mark Follman

Dear NRA

What about our children's right to live?

This could have been me.  My children.  My husband.  My relatives.  When does it end?

Update: Amanda Marcotte gives us the 4 horrible pro-gun arguments that will be used.

Hacking, Porcupines, and Robocalls

Why hacking and invading privacy matters.

Porcupines like salt.  Really like salt.

We're boiling our oceans.  As well as melting all the sea ice.  And killing all the fish.

Jeb Bush is meaner than he looks.  And things are going to get serious.

Since Sandy Hook there have been 72 mass shootings.

Christian pastor stunned by secular Scandinavians.

How to be polite. (It may save the world.)

A petition to sign to end robocalls.

First Day of School

Thanks, NRA!

When these inevitable shootings occur, we need to start calling them an NRA event. Or Shootings sponsored by the NRA. Or start talking about how we must just accept the deaths because the NRA wants us to...

Open season

The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina
By Rebecca Solnit

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the official story. The media demonized the city's black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little too late. At one point FEMA sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in the National Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans's Superdome, only to find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, the media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place openly across the river, even though there were corpses lying in unflooded streets and testimony everywhere you looked—or I looked, anyway.

The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted African-Americans as out-of-control savages at a critical moment. The result was to shift institutional responses from disaster relief to law enforcement, a decision that resulted in further deaths among the thirsty, hot, stranded multitude. Governor Kathleen Blanco announced, "I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will." So would the white vigilantes, and though their exact body count remains unknown, at least 11 black men were apparently shot, some fatally.

The parish of Orleans includes both the city of New Orleans on one side of the Mississippi and a community on the other side called Algiers that can be reached via a bridge called the Crescent City Connection. That bridge comes down in another town called Gretna, and the sheriff of Gretna and a lot of his henchmen turned many of the stranded in New Orleans back at gunpoint from that bridge, trapping them in the squalor of a destroyed city, another heinous crime that was largely overlooked. On the Gretna/Algiers side of the river, the levees held and nothing flooded. Next door to Gretna, Algiers is a mostly black community, but one corner of it down by the river, Algiers Point, is a white enclave, a neighborhood of pretty little, well-kept-up wooden houses—and of killers.

Read the rest and know the truth.

Blackwater is deliberately unaccountable

Jeremy Scahill lists the reasons:

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by operatives of the Blackwater security company have concluded that 14 were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shootings. Some died in a hail of bullets as they fled. The investigators also have rejected assertions by Blackwater that its forces were defending themselves, saying there is no evidence to support that claim.

This initial glimpse into the evidence uncovered by the FBI bolsters the Iraqi government's claim (made within hours of the shootings in Baghdad's Nisoor Square) that the killings were criminal, as well as the findings of a U.S. military investigation that called all 17 of the killings unjustified. But that raises a crucial and complicated question: Who will prosecute the killers?

The answer may be no one. That certainly seemed to be the view of veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, who recently reviewed the State Department's use of private security. Kennedy and his team came back from Baghdad concluding that they were "unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law."

Although the FBI conclusions appear damning, each of the three potential avenues for prosecuting Blackwater have fatal flaws:

U.S. civilian law: The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 provides for prosecution in federal court of U.S. contractors for crimes committed overseas. The problem is that this law only applies to contractors working for or directly accompanying the U.S. military. Blackwater works for the State Department in Iraq as "diplomatic security," which is separate from military operations. Legislation has been introduced that would expand the act to apply to all contractors, but not retroactively. The Justice Department might argue that the Blackwater guards were indeed accompanying the military, but courts could well throw out such a case.

U.S. military law: In late 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) inserted an amendment in the Defense Authorization Act that places all U.S. contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. But this has not been tested, and the Department of Defense has shown no desire to use this option against any security contractors -- let alone ones who aren't working for the military. Facing a military prosecution, Blackwater could even get support from civil libertarians, who would see it as a creep toward applying military law to civilians.

Iraqi law: The Iraqi government wants to prosecute the Blackwater shooters in its courts, but that isn't going to happen. The day before L. Paul Bremer III ended his tenure as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in June 2004, he issued Order 17. It grants all contractors sweeping immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. There is a provision that allows the U.S. to lift immunity in individual cases, but Washington would never hand over a U.S. citizen to an Iraqi court.

"These legal loopholes amount, in practice, to a license to kill with impunity," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing Blackwater for wrongful death and war crimes in federal court over the shootings. "There is no genuine deterrence to acting unlawfully."

Even if the Justice Department moves forward, the investigation was contaminated from the start. The State Department's initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on U.S. government stationery. Two weeks passed before the FBI was dispatched to investigate; for two weeks, the only people looking into this crime were from a non-law-enforcment agency, the State Department, which had potential culpability of its own.

Then there is this fact: The State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, who previously has been accused of impeding investigations into Blackwater, has direct family ties to the company. His brother, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, former CIA executive director, this year joined Blackwater's advisory board as a paid consultant. While at the CIA, Krongard played a role in Blackwater's first soldier-for-hire contract in Afghanistan in 2002.

Deliberately setting up mercenaries above the law. And Blackwater wants to operate inside the United States.

Not only do we need new laws, we need a new government. Fire everybody who was hired in after January 2001 for starters. The whole place is contaminated.

The massacre of monks

Via Eli of Multi Medium, peaceable peaceful non-violent monks in Myanmar (Burma) were killed in their monastery:

A troop of lone-tein (riot police comprised of paid thugs) protected by the military trucks, raided the monastery with 200 studying monks. They systematically ordered all the monks to line up and banged and crushed each one’s head against the brick wall of the monastery. One by one, the peaceful, non resisting monks, fell to the ground, screaming in pain. Then, they tore off the red robes and threw them all in the military trucks (like rice bags) and took the bodies away.

The head monk of the monastery, was tied up in the middle of the monastery, tortured , bludgeoned, and later died the same day, today. Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the monastery, warded off by troops with bayoneted rifles, unable to help their helpless monks being slaughtered inside the monastery. Their every try to forge ahead was met with the bayonets.

When all is done, only 10 out of 200 remained alive, hiding in the monastery. Blood stained everywhere on the walls and floors of the monastery.

Outreach to Virginia Tech from those who really understand

Via the Guardian:

BAGHDAD (AP) - Students in Baghdad, where universities have been hard-hit by violence, said they were saddened by last week's massacre at Virginia Tech and hung up a banner to express their solidarity with ``our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge.''

``We want to let the whole world know that we do not support terrorism anywhere,'' said Yassir Nazar, head of the student union at Baghdad Technology University, who organized the hanging of the banner near the campus gate.

It reads, ``We, the students of Technology University, denounce the attack at Virginia Tech. We extend our condolences to the families of the victims who faced a situation as bad as Iraq's universities do. The sanctity of campuses must be protected around the world.''

``We have lost many friends and professors,'' Nazar said Monday. ``But in spite of our wounds, we want to show our solidarity with the students of Virginia Tech who are our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge.''

Troubled

And guns helped him take out 32 innocent people:

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as a English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school's counseling service.

News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.

Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said. He was living on campus in a different dorm from the one where Monday's bloodbath began.

Police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set him off on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Remember when drunk driving accidents were considered something we could do nothing about? Remember when kids were being killed on the road and the reaction was to say how sad and shrug your shoulders? What could you do?

MADD was started by a grieving mother who took drunk drivers to task and made them accountable.

Nobody is accountable here? How about the ease in which someone mentally disturbed can get guns off the street? How about the ease in which someone angry enough to shoot 60 times with a handgun into the bodies of innocent college students can get bullets for his guns?

Telling me that if every student was carrying a hand gun they'd have been safer is like telling me to keep safe from drunk drivers, everyone must down a quart of vodka before getting behind the wheel.

Will we be able to address this before we have the next horrible mass murder in a school, in a mall, in a public gathering?

It will take a grieving mother and a sense of furious indignation to wake this nation up.