Tracking the next pandemic: Avian Flu Talk |
Broward School shooting. |
Post Reply |
Author | |
jacksdad
Executive Admin Joined: September 08 2007 Location: San Diego Status: Offline Points: 47251 |
Post Options
Thanks(1)
Posted: February 14 2018 at 3:48pm |
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and families of today's mass shooting. As a father myself, I can only imagine the anguish and pain they're going through. Tragic beyond words.
|
|
"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary. |
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
The Florida School Shooting Was the 18th School Shooting of the Year. And It's Only Februaryhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/the-florida-school-shooting-was-the-18th-school-shooting-of-the-year-and-its-only-february/ar-BBJ8ZMd?li=BBnb7Kz American politicians and indeed the public as a whole have absolutely refused to do anything meaningfull to stop this sort of thing the only option is GET USED TO IT |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
What Bullets Do to Bodieshttp://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gun-violence/ well worth a few minutes of your time |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
EdwinSm,
Moderator Joined: April 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 24065 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Our local radio news has this story (so no link), but in addition to easy access to guns it also mentioned poor mental health care....a terrible combination.
Recently the UK High Court blocked an extradition to the States stating the poor mental health care in the prison system as one of the reasons. I am starting to see a common theme here. But prayers and hugs to all those who lost loved ones in the tragedy |
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Grandmother turns in teen after finding mass shooting plot one day before Florida massacrehttps://www.yahoo.com/news/grandmother-turns-teen-finding-mass-152359140.html |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(1)
|
Are Dead Children The Price of Freedom?https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/are-dead-children-price-freedom "There is a sickness eating at the body and soul of my home country, and it is on full view for the world to see." |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
EdwinSm,
Moderator Joined: April 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 24065 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
On the radio news I heard statements about BLOOD MONEY
It seems the the NRA paid something like $21 - $36 million* in the last election to make sure there was nothing done to stop "the shooting of children". * figures depended on which news source I read |
|
jacksdad
Executive Admin Joined: September 08 2007 Location: San Diego Status: Offline Points: 47251 |
Post Options
Thanks(1)
|
If I was the NRA or one of their paid politicians, I'd be awful worried. The kids are coming for you and they do social media better than anyone.
|
|
"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary. |
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
and as expected the NRA opposing even cursory reforms
The Latest: NRA protests minimum age hike for rifleshttps://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-trump-host-students-listening-session-172214502.html at this point they are just plain EVIL with no regard for society as a whole |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
California school shooting plot foiled, assault rifles foundhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/authorities-california-school-shooting-plot-thwarted-052756375.html |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
BREAKING: Trump Lays Out His Gun Agenda For Congresshttps://www.redstate.com/joesquire/2018/02/22/breaking-trump-lays-gun-agenda-congress/ now can ANY of this get passed by a Republican controlled Senate and House ??? who are the politicians most afraid of? the voters or the NRA ? (I'm going with the NRA on this one) |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
oh my God
NRA’s Dana Loesch: ‘Many In Legacy Media Love Mass Shootings’https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nra-dana-loesch-media-shooting_us_5a8ed8d2e4b077f5bfec1a85 VILE,NASTY,HATEFUL what horrible human beings |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Satori
Valued Member Joined: June 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 28655 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Gunshttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/ |
|
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
|
|
Technophobe
Assistant Admin Joined: January 16 2014 Location: Scotland Status: Offline Points: 88450 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Now who is "making political capital"?
I admit, I envy America's freedom loving attitude to such things as guns, but there has to be a limit when the price is so tragically, horribly high. Concealed carrying teachers might limit the numbers, so would overall tighter gun laws. Unlike the red and blue brigade I do not see this as an either-or solution. Why not both? If someone is determined to comit mass murder, they are going to find a weapon. The trick then is to limit The numbers as much as possible. So, concealed carrying teachers might help. Every single life saved is a treasure. However, many countries other than America have liberal gun laws, but no mass shootings and some countries with repressive gun laws have suffered mass killings by truck or car. This needs a deeper look at your society. Value your people more. Care for them in your system. Stop training people to jibe at each other all the time. - Have you looked at the TV your kids are watching? Even the Disney channel's stuff seems to encourage personal nastiness. And finally, stop murdering your own people. You can't teach the value of human life whilst taking it away. |
|
How do you tell if a politician is lying?
His lips or pen are moving. |
|
Dutch Josh
Adviser Group Joined: May 01 2013 Location: Arnhem-Netherla Status: Offline Points: 95327 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/call-the-douglas-high-shooting-by-its-name-an-anti-semitic-attack-1.5842172:
But what still isn't being discussed is that Douglas High School is more than 40% Jewish, that Cruz believed that Jews were part of a conspiracy to unseat white people from power and destroy the world, and that the shooting could credibly be termed an anti-Semitic hate crime. - We're not having that discussion and not taking Cruz’s anti-Semitism seriously because common anti-Semitic tropes paint Jews as powerful and privileged, which leaves room for people to ignore the fact that the long history of prejudice against us continues to this day. According to the FBI, 1.7% of Americans are Jewish, but last year 54.2% of religiously motivated hate crimes were against Jews and 11.5% of overall hate crimes were against Jews. - When I published my first response to the shooting, and asked why it wasn't being called out as an anti-Semitic hate crime, I was taken aback at the vitriol. Comments range from anti-Semites despising Jews for supposedly taking over the world to claiming American Jewish high schoolers deserve to be shot due to Israel’s crimes to completely denying that anti-Semitism is a problem that needs to be addressed and asserting that Jews are always "playing the eternal victim". |
|
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
~Albert Einstein |
|
Technophobe
Assistant Admin Joined: January 16 2014 Location: Scotland Status: Offline Points: 88450 |
Post Options
Thanks(1)
|
Surfing idly through my regular news feed, I found this article arguing my point for me:
"America’s Gun Sickness Goes Way Beyond GunsThe ongoing debate about gun control points to a deeper rot that pervades this country's culture and political economy.My friend George recently suggested I watch Grimm, a sort of Law and Order-meets-Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show about a Portland cop with the ability to see the fairy-tale monsters who live, disguised, among us. (As in, the Brothers Grimm, get it?) We’re both connoisseurs of bad TV, and because we are both temporarily in long-distance relationships (his girlfriend is in another city for work; my boyfriend is abroad on a research grant) we have a great deal of time to watch them. You know, the thing that struck me about the show—more than its absurd supernatural premise; more than the cheesy creatures and special effects—was that in almost every episode, our cop hero shoots someone to death. Yes, they’re monsters, wolf-men and pig-men and snake-men and so on, but their monstrousness is part metaphor for criminality, and while the precise timeline of an episodic series is a little tough to pin down, it’s hard to avoid the sense that this detective is aerating uncharged suspects something like every other week. I am for gun control in the abstract, although I have my doubts about the efficacy of piecemeal legislation in a nation with 300 million guns already bouncing around in private hands. As is frequently the case in American political culture, the “issue” of guns gets discussed largely in isolation from other “issues,” although it’s lately become fashionable to link it to so-called mental health, a bowdlerized catch-all term that mostly serves to reinforce the canard that guns aren’t a problem so much as crazy people are. The only particular evidence that Americans are in aggregate any crazier than any other people on earth that I can find is that we have so many goddamn guns, but let’s leave that aside. At root, the only political considerations permitted into the gun debate are those that exculpate the owners, distributors, and manufacturers of the guns. Better background checks, higher age limits, specifically banned modifications? Marginal improvements to be sure, but they, I believe, skirt some fundamental social problems. This year, the United States will spend about a trillion dollars for war—more than $700 billion in base “defense” spending alone. In the findings of a recent external audit, the Defense Logistics Agency (the purchasing and procurement arm of the Pentagon) simply could not account for hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. It seems they don’t keep the receipts. Back in 2016, the Office of the Inspector General found that the Army had made $6.5 trillion in erroneous accounting adjustments—a decade’s worth of defense appropriations—in a single year. And yet the money flows in, more every year; the military remains the most respected and beloved institution in public life, despite this endemic corruption and waste. And despite some desultory efforts to curb the practice in the Obama years, much used and surplus military hardware finds its way into the hands of police. Our police, in turn, are some of the most violent in the world. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but relatively conservative estimates put the number of Americans killed by cops at nearly 1,000 a year. It is impossible to know how many violent but non-fatal encounters citizens have with law enforcement annually. But while movements like Black Lives Matter and growing coalitions for criminal justice reform have drawn some public attention to the issue, our culture—especially our pop culture—continues to valorize the heroic soldier-cop, the SWAT team bashing down the door, helmeted and black-goggled, rifles ready to blaze. The radical right in America has an expression: “politics is downstream from culture.” Leftists often dismiss it as facile, and argue that much of what we consider cultural is a product of specific political and economic choices. I think the latter is true in a general sense, but I think the hard-right slogan is instructive nevertheless and points, if unintentionally, to a maddening feedback loop in American life. The political and economic choice to allocate so many of our society’s resources to endless, expanding war-making, to armed cops and barbaric prisons, has a deranging influence on our cultural life. Among other things, it makes warfare—a gun culture—quotidian and banal; it makes weapons of war perfectly ordinary tools; it makes TV cops taking body shots at suspects who are, obviously, always guilty, normal; it makes the idea of turning teachers and principals (and custodians! and guidance counselors!) into armed agents of the state, there to protect children against equally armed citizens, a topic for political debate rather than a notion as insane as fake moon landings and a flat Earth. And this, in turn, makes the billions and trillions we spend on warfare, at home and abroad, likewise seem like something other than the craziness that it manifestly is. To consider the preponderance of gun violence
in American society in isolation from the broader questions of how we
allocate our collective resources—of how we determine social value—is
inherently self-limiting. A strong anti-gun movement may make some
marginal gains; I would be thrilled to see even a modest effort to move
mental health out of the purview of police and prisons and back into the
realm of counseling and medicine. But in the absence of a larger
leftist agenda to move guns and war from their central position in our
government and political economy, I find it hard to imagine that there
can be really fundamental change, and I fear we will continue this slow
drift toward more armed guards, more locked doors, more checkpoints, and
more professions—educators now, then what: nurses? doctors? transit
workers?—simply deputized as armed agents of a violent state whose
citizens in turn enact in ever greater numbers the gun-happy antics in
which they marinate every moment of their waking lives." Source:https://newrepublic.com/article/147185/americas-gun-sickness-goes-way-beyond-guns I think a few of the views expressed a little extreme, but generally it simply put it better than I did. I can only see things getting slowly (but steadily) worse and the death toll rising. Unless a few mass shooters go after the gun lobby, or those who profit from it, instead of the completely innocent. Those who face death, lose loved ones or their own mobility and long-term health tend to go anti-gun, surprisingly. (I am not advocating that approach - every death or maming is a tragedy best avoided.) The refrence to "Grimm" does nicely illutrate the "gun and firearm killings are normal/laudable" culture. It does, however, fail to notice the acceptance of the: "I'm alright, Jack, so f**k you." attitude or the: "Isn't it fun to mock people - especially if they are different in some way?" culture. That omission does not surprise me, it is so endemic it has become totally invisible. Unless you are arthritic, when was the last time you really noticed how wonderful a design your knees have? Lack of care has become the norm to the extent it is even more invisible than Harry Potter under his cloak. Here is an illustration: A kindly soul going to church and making a sizeable donation to the "Repair The Roof" fund, walking outside after the sermon with a warm feeling of "having done Gods good work". Then walking on the other side of the road to avoid the beggar who is obviously dirty -and who might be mentally ill and dangerous. I am not saying America is full of heartless ba****ds, the vast majority of you are wonderful, warm and kindly. But, your culture is twisted and warping your young. You cannot treat that which is undiagnosed. Only your best friend has the courage to say: "You need a shower." or "Yes, it does make your bum look big." |
|
How do you tell if a politician is lying?
His lips or pen are moving. |
|
Post Reply | |
Tweet
|
Forum Jump | Forum Permissions You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You can vote in polls in this forum |