Gun Violence and Gun Control
This solution to gun violence is only a partial one, but it is practical and able to go under the radar on this controversial subject. The trouble is that, practically speaking, we as concerned citizens with children in school cannot force the entrenched Second Amendment fanatics to change gun laws or confiscate all guns (as was done in Australia.) The Second Amendment fanatics are just too strong. About a quarter of all Americans own guns, and there are about 300 million of them in circulation. What we can accomplish, with sufficient money from the government, is an attempt to protect all of the students most of the time in a practical way.
The solution, partial and temporary, is to hire former Special Forces soldiers who have children of their own to protect the schools. Use the carrot of good pay and retirement benefits to obtain highly skilled and experienced ex-soldiers. Bring them home from Afghanistan and Libya to protect their own children. Give them an alternative to working for Blackwater protecting rich scumbags in foreign countries. Post them, armed, one to a school; and put metal detectors at the entrances to every school.
The advantages of this plan are that, first, it is possible to quickly implement and there is a pool of experienced candidates for the post; second, it fits in with the prejudices of the Second Amendment fanatics: this is the plan they would have chosen if they were to decide what to do. The only question is a practical one: are there enough experienced ex-soldiers to guard every school?
According to Google, there are a total of 90,000 elementary schools and 36,000 high schools, both public and private, in America. There are currently 1.2 million service members and 800,000 reservists in the US armed forces. Therefore, obtaining at least 126,000 experienced, recently retired soldiers with children is conceivable if perhaps a slight stretch. Arming them would not be a problem. Installing metal detectors would present the most complex and difficult part of this plan.
The alternatives are either unacceptable or extremely problematic. Attempting to confiscate all guns would be a logistical nightmare that would only incite violent resentment among fanatics. Australia was able to confiscate all guns because there weren’t that many in the country to begin with.
Increasing mental health services and surveilling the susceptible population would be a huge endeavor and would likely involve additional infringements on personal privacy, possibly without providing any protection. The latest psychological analysis of the critical question “who will be next?” indicates that the process of incitement to violence among schoolchildren is already far advanced. Those who may be provoked have many examples to draw from, the most famous being such alternative “heroes” as Dylan Klebold. Thus, the next shooter is likely to come from a minimally disturbed background without major incitements such as being physically or sexually abused or alienated. Surveillance, therefore, would be difficult.
An example from the literature shows that the next shooter is probably a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome and so minimally disturbed that he or she would fit in readily. A sixteen or seventeen year old boy was apprehended with large quantities of incendiary and explosive materials and advanced, written and video plans to create mayhem. The boy had never gone through with his plans despite multiple opportunities. He fit in well in his school, had loving parents who were strict but gentle, and showed minimal signs of disturbance. He had a variety of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is like autism but much less obvious. He was sentenced to probation and psychiatric treatment.
Examples like this show that there is already a subculture of apocalyptic school violence in this country that goes back twenty years and has been getting worse steadily. A rapid, temporary response of providing armed, experienced guards to all schools could be followed by an extensive, long-term psychiatric surveillance program that eventually detects all the minimally disturbed children (as well as the seriously ill few) and puts them under treatment.
The only requirements for this plan are sufficient money to pay the guards and the will and experience to carry it out.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and volfdrag)
Hummingbirds at the Feeder
Hummingbirds are gathering at the feeder on my porch now. They start coming as soon as it gets light, and they stay all day. They come and go, spending more and more time at the feeder– sometimes as long as thirty seconds or more. Some of them are drab and grayish color, others have iridescent red patches on their throats, heads, and chests. They chase each other around and around the bare branches of the trees. They chirp and twitter angrily at one another.
When they drink at the feeder, they are fearless; I can stand next to it and, if I hold still, they will continue to come and go as if I were a rock that happened to be there. Standing there, I can see their throats rise and fall as they drink the nectar. I can’t be sure, but it seems as if they particularly like the new type of nectar. It has trace elements like calcium and vitamin A, and a flower coloring is used to make it red. I could be imagining things thinking that they like it better, but they certainly are drinking a lot of it.
Why Can’t Government Do Good Things?
Mr. Trump and his ilk bemoan the cost of taxes, although at least fifteen countries (advanced countries) in the world pay a larger percent of their income in taxes than we do. I won’t recite the benefits that those countries supply to their citizens. The point is that the men Trump employs consistently are trying to destroy what the average man would consider good government. They are always the villains, destroying caches of water left in the desert for exhausted refugees fleeing on foot ( ICE is responsible for this atrocity. )
Government is capable of good things. For example, we will take a historical incident– the emergency that the country faced after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941 (and secretly, before that) was a military emergency but it justified a complete mobilization of our country’s energy. This involved using the labor of every person available. Propaganda films made at the time showed a psychologist testing a group of men and putting every one of them into a job that fitted his abilities and particular needs, rather than rejecting some and employing others. This type of policy is unthinkable in a capitalist entity because there is an apparent loss of profit involved in employing everyone who applies.
This (capitalist) type of thinking is short-sighted, however. First, the advantages gained in testing each applicant and determining their most efficient operating modes, so to speak, will easily overwhelm the cost of hiring every applicant. It is axiomatic that a happy employee is an efficient employee. What could make one happier than going to a job that one is most efficient at?
In addition, the priorities of a government in war are different from those of a capitalist company. At war, one would want the greatest power regardless of profit, whereas in capitalist competition, the greatest profit is the goal. Thus, using the labor of every person who wants to work is the way to maximum overall power but only using the most efficient applicants will yield maximum relative profit.
It is these qualities which make the situation of present-day national governments so marginal. Many nation-states are failing, have failed, or are on the verge of failing– in part because they have been forced to accept loans from banks or other countries and the obligation to service those loans is beyond their power to support. There have arisen a group of capitalist companies that rival in size and power national governments. These companies are “too big to fail” partly because they have become bigger than governments.
The issue in our current government is that the business men who have taken over are attempting to dismantle the entire government (aside from the military) because of their interest in profit rather than national power. They are ham-stringing government because it is to their competitive advantage to do so.
Democrats everywhere must mobilize to prevent the destruction of good government! It is time to stop paying attention to the distraction that is Mr. Trump’s personal behavior (past and present) and Twitter attacks. The true issue is the business men in power who are trying to dismantle good government.
(the photo is from yesterday and shows an almond tree in blossom across the road from our house– spring is already here in the San Joaquin Valley)
Developed by Banyan Biomarkers, the Brain Trauma Indicator test is a quantitative assay for ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase L1 and glial fibrillary acidic protein, which are released into the blood following neural injury. The test should be performed within 12 hours of injury; results are available in 3-4 hours, the FDA said.
Trial data involving nearly 2,000 individuals with with suspected concussion or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) showed that the test was 97.5% accurate in identifying those with visible lesions on CT scans, and 99.6% accurate in predicting those who did not show such lesions.
The above is a quote from a “Medpage Today” article (medpagetoday.com)– an online medical news summary site that sends daily links to new stories by email.
The news is an exciting advance that will allow emergency room and acute care physicians to avoid performing CT scans on every patient with closed-head trauma and suspected concussion, a brain injury that, if repeated several times in quick succession (say, in a month) can lead to chronic traumatic brain degeneration (chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE). This syndrome entails personality changes, memory loss, and difficulty concentrating, among other serious long-term complications. The high specific sensitivity for ruling out visible CT lesions is particularly helpful in decision making. However, regardless of the presence or absence of this marker, patients should still be warned not to expose themselves to further injury for a significant period of time after being seen.
Football players are especially at risk for this very serious disorder– many professional football players have had their lives destroyed by first, the condition, and second, the National Football League’s denials that they were responsible (the NFL has recently reversed its position on this issue). Football players who commit suicide by gunshot wound have lately taken to shooting themselves in the chest and requesting autopsies of their brains to disclose the presence of this condition– something that may at least bring closure to their families. Imagine being suicidal and choosing such a method to show that your suspicions about the cause of your self-lethality are correct. Not a pleasant prospect.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and KeithJJ)
The real problem with allegations of sexual abuse is that the act of abuse is symptomatic of an attitude which is at its heart inhumane. Thus we are shocked by allegations of abuse against a person who shows caring for others in other actions, but not shocked by such allegations against a person who is generally abusive in other ways. Don the Con, to use an effete example, is abusive towards women just as he is abusive towards other people in general; he hates women just as he hates black people, Mexicans, and the poor. Bill Cosby, on the other hand, has been credibly accused of behavior that is completely out of character for his fatherly, loving persona.
What should we do to someone who has been accused of sexual impropriety ( or any other kind of impropriety, for that matter? ) We should reserve judgement until we receive credible information, for starters. Let that caveat not prevent us from calling out hateful words or policies, nor from endorsing loving action. A person’s career should not be held hostage to mere allegations but if one’s career is already damaging others before allegations have surfaced, there is no need to hold back.
Let us take former Judge Roy Moore for an example. Here is a man who, as a judge, twice defied precedence and the specific orders of judges from higher courts. Such actions, which prompted his removal from the bench, should disqualify him from holding public office, yet he made a credible and nearly successful run for the Senate from his home state– because the endorsement of a man who should never have been elected ( and should have been impeached immediately after taking office ) was considered probative by a large segment of his constituency.
I do not know what is the best remedy for these situations.
Here is the comment of the day, in response to a New York Times article about Robert Porter, the White House staffer under John Kelly who was recently removed after the accusations of his two ex-wives became public:
Carl hammerdorfer
Kosovo 2 hours ago
Every person compartmentalizes, loving the parent who perhaps hit or otherwise abused them, loving the child who lied or bullied, loving the self that is imperfect and sometimes even rotten or mean. But we feel better about it – far better! – when there’s honesty, contrition, maybe even restitution. But when the transgression is hidden, denied, or wantonly devalued, that’s when we should question the decency of the loved one, when we should withhold forbearance, forgiveness…and votes! If there’s anything good coming from the Trump administration, it may be that we have begun a gigantic truth and reconciliation effort. Trump and his people will be the last to join that.
The Con administration’s reasons for building the Wall included border-crossers with cantaloupe calves from carrying backpacks full of “drugs” (anything from penicillin to potpourri) and it seems that, in one respect, they are partly right: the rate of seizure of methamphetamine at the border south of San Diego has increased by tenfold in the last ten years, to over 20,000 pounds in 2016. Seizures at Laredo and Tucson have increased in a similar fashion. However, the rate of deaths from stimulant abuse has only increased by 2-1/2 times in the same ten years ( see this CDC publication, 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment. ) This represents a complete failure of Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”
The driver appears to be the Combat Methamphetamine Act, a law passed in 2005 that, in addition to other strictures, has placed pseudoephedrine behind the counter in pharmacies and limited individual purchasers to 7.5 grams every 30 days. The first result of the law was to reduce home-brewing of methamphetamine by a dangerous but simple to learn process involving large quantities of over-the-counter decongestants ( those who still do this acquire the starting ingredient by a procedure known as “smurfing” ) thereby reducing the strain on law-enforcement agencies that had been forced to do HAZMAT duties to clean up the poisonous byproducts.
The second result of the law was to encourage drug cartels to take up the slack, which they have done with alacrity. The fact that the “War on Drugs” has been lost is nowhere more apparent than in the low prices and ready supply of 100% pure methamphetamine on the street. In Portland, Oregon, methamphetamine is available for $5 a hit and has frequently been the only thing in stock. Like heroin, the supply of meth mostly comes from abroad, and like heroin, potency and affordability of meth has soared over the years since 1971, when Richard Nixon declared that drug abuse was the nation’s most serious threat and instituted the “War on Drugs.”
Another feature of our abject failure to win or even fight an effective rear-guard action in the War on Drugs is the fact that opioid overdose deaths have increased several-fold, partly because, due to competition, suppliers have increased the potency of heroin by adding fentanyl ( 50 times as strong as heroin ) or carfentanil ( 5000 times as strong ) to pure heroin while keeping the price the same. Heroin seizures have nearly tripled at the Southwest border over the last five years, according to the Washington Post, while in the same five years, methamphetamine seizures have quintupled.
Oddly, despite the public narrative blaming doctors for prescribing opioids as the cause of the dramatic increases in overdose deaths, the rate of prescriptions for these drugs has not increased very much– a table from the above-named drug threat assessment shows, for example, hydrocodone units prescribed at 7.2 billion in 2007, increasing to 8.8 billion in 2012, and decreasing to 6.2 billion units in 2016. Oxycodone showed a similar trend. It appears that the real cause of overdose deaths, in the majority of cases, is heroin, and latterly, heroin mixed with fentanyl. Perhaps doctors have contributed to the scourge by putting people on prescription drugs and then denying them further refills after they become hooked. Perhaps.
A future post will look at what has been, will be, and/or should be done about these problems.
Pogo Was Right
Hooray for Trump! As soon as he indicated cuts in Medicare, I knew that he would lose the votes of every senior citizen, including me. He has touched the third rail. Finally!
This person comments on the NYT frequently, and this time, he’s hit the nail on the head:
PogoWasRight
florida 4 hours ago
Hooray for Trump! As soon as he indicated cuts in Medicare, I knew that he would lose the votes of every senior citizen, including me. He has touched the third rail. Finally!
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and DarkoStojanovic)
Republicans Believe in Bad Government
… Republicans accept as an article of faith that government is the problem, not a solution. So now that they’re running the government, why would they provide us with anything other than bad government?
A succinct and telling summary of the last fifty years of Republican governing strategy, since Richard Nixon won the presidency.
Republicans have passed a tax bill that allows deficits of “less than” $1.5 trillion over ten years, followed by agreeing on a spending bill that guarantees those deficits will be more than a trillion dollars in the next year alone.
Their purpose is to stimulate the economy, at the risk of raising inflation. They are gambling that inflation will be manageable if the salary of the typical American worker is kept from increasing unduly. Suppression of wage raises is behind their destruction of unions and confiscation of tips. High medical expenses are another way to keep workers from making or keeping too much money.
The Republicans have realized that stock market gains are not as reliably profitable to the idle rich as the locking in of 10-year Treasuries at greater than 3 percent (after inflation) yields. Ten year Treasuries are sold in the market, not released by the Treasury at a fixed rate, and they are sensitive to fears of inflation. Their levels rise reliably as the economy improves. Most importantly, Treasuries are guaranteed to pay off, unlike the risky stock market.
If the economy improves enough, the Republicans think they will be forgiven for collusion with Russia. They will not be forgiven for racism, sexism, militarism, suppression of free speech, spying on the opposition, and violence against those who speak out. They will particularly not be forgiven for abrogation of the Constitution.
(photo “money laundering” courtesy of pixabay.com and johnhain)
Republicans Are Fraudulent Deficit Hawks
Republicans have passed a tax bill that allows deficits of “less than” $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, followed by a spending bill that guarantees those deficits will be over a trillion dollars in the next year alone; this proves that the Republicans are frauds when it comes to fiscal conservatism.
They screamed in outrage at the trillion-dollar deficits that were forced on the Obama administration during its first year by the worst recession in 70 years, yet they were silent (with the exception of Rand Paul) over the latest spending bill that prevented a shutdown of the government and guaranteed a trillion-dollar deficit this year. The shutdown was caused by the intransigence of the Republicans over DACA, not by any fiscal emergency. It is shocking, shocking I tell you!
The worst of it is that temporary deficits were really called for under Keynes’ economic theory during the first days of the Obama administration, when recession was eating the houses of every American who lost his job through the lack of demand caused by speculators in real estate securities who got burned. Even then, when Republicans offered solutions, it always involved tax cuts for the rich. Now, when deficits are NOT called for because the economy is doing well, the Republicans who have gained the power are serving up deficits as far as the eye can see. Now, when saving for a rainy day is really called for, the Republicans have given us– tax cuts for the rich.
Paul Krugman spells it all out in his latest New York Times column (op-ed): “Fraudulence of the Fiscal Hawks”
(photo “money laundering” courtesy of pixabay.com and stevepb)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 