Followers

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

I need a new T-shirt

I just skimmed a story about elderly protestors being arrested at the NC lege after refusing to leave the chambers. That, this story, the other stories about the attacks on voters’ rights, a woman’s freedom of choice, education, science and the old stand-byes of race and poverty gives me an idea for a graphic that I, unfortunately, cannot do myself.

Anybody’s got the mad skilz at graphics is welcome to this idea.

A group of robed and hooded figures with crosses and confederate battle flag logos, standing at the base of a tree. The tree is festooned with the hanged and broken bodies of black men, “illegals”, women, children, the infirm, the elderly, welfare recipients, scientists, muslims, democrats and other people who are the subjects of the GOP & SKKKrotalMurKKKanPatriotiKKK Front vitriolic and hyperbolic hatred.

A legend under the image would read, “Strange fruit–it ain’t just black, anymore” and, emanating from the mouth of one the hooded figures in the foreground:

“We’re gonna need BIGGER trees!”.

I really have fucking had it with the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, illogical assholes who comprise the ReiKKKwing and all of its various factions.

Somebody out there has to be able to make this image.

Damn it! I forgot; they should have gunz, too, LOTS of gunz and maybe a few Wholly Babbles.
As long as I’m off on a disjointed rant…I think that the NRA, Walmart, HCA, Chick-fil-Aholes and the the like are missing an opportunity. They could have sponsorship deals with the hate groups whom they enable/use. It could be like the NASCAR of misanthropy.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Youse can haz the controls of my Donzi when you kin pry them from my cold, dead and wrinkly fingers.

I put this elsewhere first so maybe it's autoplaigarism--I'll leave that decision to a competent authority to make.

"This:
Is nothing to do with gunz, except for the contrast in what happens when you stupidently hurt people with objects that don’t fire projectiles.

Well, I sure hope that boy in Cumberland, TN don't lose his gunzritez; cuz' he was only being an irresponsible fucking moron  with a boat, not a handcannon!

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Guns, Homicides and Suicides, and the U.S. Constitution

 Guns, Murders and Suicides, and the U.S. Constitution
Lincoln, sulpted in stone on Mount Rushmore

cross-posted from IVN:

Although it is a statement widely attributed to Abraham Lincoln relating to a temporary suspension of habeas corpus under the Suspension Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, clause 2), the first actual recorded quote that the U.S. Constitution is “not a suicide pact” was made by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his Terminiello v. Chicago dissent, not quite 100 years later. It was used again almost 15 years later in another SCOTUS decision in 1963, also about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

That should apply as well to the Second Amendment.

What the U.S. Constitution IS supposed to be and do, instead of functioning as a suicide pact,  is explicitly spelled out in the preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In that larger context, looking at how we interpret and implement the Constitution, it is fair to look at the Constitution generally, and the Second Amendment specifically so that it is not LITERALLY a suicide pact, which permits gun violence that kills large numbers of Americans (and for that matter, others who are not citizens, but who are within the borders of the U.S.).

Saturday, July 20, 2013 is the one year anniversary of the Aurora, Colorado mass shooting, and a little more than six months from the Sandy Hook, Colorado mass shooting.    It is worth looking at both murders and suicides, especially mass shootings, together because most mass shootings are murder suicides.  We have  some 17,000 suicides a year using firearms, which is HALF of all suicides.
Gun Murder and Suicide Rate Guns, Murders and Suicides, and the U.S. Constitution
In looking at homicides, in comparison to other countries in the world, which is a fair comparison for a larger sense of how our constitution is functioning to assess and evaluate how successfully or unsuccessfully  our interpretation of the constitution is working to fulfill its expressed  purpose in the preamble, which is in part about the public safety of citizens, not only from foreign threats, but from our fellow Americans.  In that regard, expressed as homicides per 100,000 persons, we are second behind Pakistan, and FAR higher than for example, Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom.  The graph below reflects data from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime; if you use the FBI statistics, we fare even worse in the comparison, by about 0.5%.
Murders per 100000 Guns, Murders and Suicides, and the U.S. Constitution
The Preamble specifically mentions the Posterity of the founding fathers and other citizens of the United States.  Such a reference to posterity inherently presumes that the offspring of citizens survive to enjoy all of the benefits outlined in the preamble, and are safe from firearms injury.  Therefore, not only when we think of the Sandy Hook mass shooting but the other statistics of children dying from firearms, and being injured by firearms, this is a significant concern in the context of the preamble of the Constitution.
From a USA Today news article earlier this year:
In 2010, 15,576 children and teenagers were injured by firearms — three times more than the number of U.S. soldiers injured in the war in Afghanistan, according to the defense fund.
Nationally, guns still kill twice as many children and young people than cancer, five times as many than heart disease and 15 times more than infection, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We see guns as much of a threat in their life as we used to see bacteria and viruses,” said Dr. Judith S. Palfrey, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the co-author of the New England journal report. “If you look at what’s actually killing children and disabling children, guns is one of the major things.”
Although the following comparison is a bit dated, because the pattern of these statistics has remained relatively constant over the past twenty years, it is worth noting, in looking at ‘Posterity’, to evaluate how well we are interpreting and implementing the U.S. Constitution, including the 2nd Amendment.  The original figures come from the Center for Disease Control, by way of the American Bar Association web site:
  • The overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children younger than 15 years of age is nearly 12 times higher than among children in 25 other industrialized countries combined.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 1997;46:101-105.
  •  The United States has the highest rate of youth homicides and suicides among the 26 wealthiest nations.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rates of homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death among children: 26 industrialized countries.
MMWR. 1997;46:101-105
Here is what is wrong with how we have applied the 2nd Amendment, especially in permitting lax gun regulation, which contributes heavily to gun violence, both homicides and suicides, and to gun accidents, and which includes making it relatively easy for mass murders to acquire firearms to use in mass shootings.  An excerpt from the Huff Po around the time of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting murder/suicide makes it clear:
How freely do guns flow in the United States compared with the world’s other industrialized countries?
According to GunPolicy.org, run by Philip Alpers, a firearms analyst at The University of Sydney, the United States is unusual with what Alpers described as the “two pillars” of gun control: licensing gun owners and registering weapons.
“You are basically the only country in the developed world that doesn’t license gun owners across the board and you are almost alone in not registering guns across the board,” Alpers said. “It’s very difficult to compare [the U.S.] with others, because you simply don’t have those things.” New Zealand and Canada are the other developed countries that don’t register guns across the board, Alpers said. The two countries register handguns and military-style semi-automatics, but not rifles and shotguns.
The Small Arms Survey, an independent research project based in Geneva, noted that of the 28 countries it surveyed for its 2011 report on civilian firearm possession, only two consider civilian ownership of a firearm a basic right: the U.S. and Yemen. But even Yemen has begun clamping down on civilian guns, Alpers said.
It is literally not a suicide pact regarding guns used in homicides or suicides or accidental shootings, and when it becomes such a large problem that it is resulting in the deaths and injuries of so many Americans, where much stricter limitations on firearms could dramatically reduce those deaths, injuries, as well as the fear of threat and intimidation by firearms in the hands of our fellow Americans, it is time to follow the wisdom attributed to Lincoln in the 19th century, and specifically expressed by Supreme Court Justices Jackson and Goldberg, respectively at different times in the 20th century.  It is time for we the people to be protected from we the people with guns, not just the crazy ones, not just the mass shooters, but all the other people who pose a significant safety and public health risk to the rest of us who should be more rigorously regulated for ourselves and posterity.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

There are none so blind...


I heard about this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/stevie-wonder-boycotts-florida-stand-your-ground-zimmerman_n_3603571.html

on the Syracuse FM drive-time show (Gomez&Dave........and Lisa*). One of the guys surmised that Mr. Wonder only wants to perform in states where he "can't defend himself".

I think it's a safe bet that Stevie Wonder, despite his vast accomplishment in the field of music is still not able to see well enough to aim and fire a gun with any degree of accuracy (my bad if I'm wrong). I don't know, maybe there IS a "Stevie, The Blind Pianist" who wields weaponry with the same degree of efficiency that he demonstrates with his music--I'm guessing, "Not.

Unless he's got accountants and managers that are aemoral thieves and idiots, Stevie Wonder prolly has no genuine need to pander to an audience. I think it's probably been obvious to anyone who's ever listened to "Living for the City" (released on "Innervisions", 1973) that his take on inner-city violence was that it WAS a racist thing. I'm sure that lots of folks don't care for his "political" music, preferring to listen to tunes like, "You are the Sunshine of My Life"--a fine tune, btw--or, maybe, "Ebony and Ivory" (performed, on the album, "Tug of War", with the best white songwriter prior to Justin Bieber or something like that). Stevie Wonder has taken a number of unpopular stances (well, unpopular with white folks--radiKKKal asshole whitefolks) during the last 50 years--yeah, he's been around that long--including being banned from performing in South Africa for a while. I don't think that he really does a CBA to determine whether his opinions are going to hurt his box office or record sales.

Stevie was born blind, but he has an ability to "see" which transcends a lot of folks' 20/20 vision.


*  Lisa doesn't get the same billing, I don't know who makes that decision.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

George Zimmerman is a murdering scumbag

Yeah, I know, that's mean.

Fuck it.

Because of jury "nullification" or prosecutorial misfeasance a man who murdered a teen-ager armed with candy and a soft drink walks free.

Is it a coincidence that many of the same people cheering the Florida jury's verdict were cursing the jury in LA after they acquitted OJ Simpson? I think not. You see, in both cases there were "good" (white or armed, or both) people and "bad" (black or, well, black). Now, OJ Simpson is a piece of shit who murdered two people for no reason other than that he wanted to make them stop laughing at him. I'm not precisely sure what George Triggerman's motivation was but I think it boils down to his being very upset that people get away with shit and he's mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore.

I wonder how long it will be before one of the NRA's primary constituents (gun companies) issues a "Zimmerman" model 9mm handgun.

George Zimmerman is a murdering scumbag. Otoh, he's still alive, so I guess that worked out pretty well for him.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

The limits of "Free Speech" here and elsewhere

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