Debunkment Redux

Over the last 20 years, the odds of an American being killed by

an undocumented immigrant or a foreign-born terrorist:

about 1 in 3 billion

Americans killed every year by lawn mowers:

about 1 in 4 million

You're almost 1000 times more likely to be killed by your lawn mower than you are by an undocumented immigrant or refugee terrorist.

 

If you really feel like banning something, ban gardening equipment.

Fact Check: No evidence 4,000 people are killed yearly by undocumented immigrants

There is no evidence to suggest undocumented immigrants are responsible for 4,000 U.S. deaths every year, contrary to social media posts sharing the unsubstantiated statistic.
The social media graphic, opens new tab contains statistics comparing the alleged deaths by undocumented immigrants to the number of people killed by rifles.

“Less than 500 people a year are killed by rifles… let’s ban them! Over 4,000 people a year are killed by illegals... let’s give them $2,200 a month taxpayer assistance, register them to vote in our elections and keep the border wide open to invite more of them into our country,” reads the graphic.

The rifle figure is somewhat true, as fewer than 500 murders were committed yearly with rifles from 2019 to 2021 according to the FBI’s latest annual figures, opens new tab, but the figure rose to 556 in 2022 and 511 in 2023 (See “Crime in the United States Annual Reports,” click “Expanded Homicide Tables” and open “Table 8”). The number of homicides committed using all types of firearms was 13,529 in 2023, according to the report.

There is no evidence for the “4,000” figure, however. Studies and estimates by academics and think tanks show undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born individuals.

NO NATIONAL STATISTIC

There is no nationwide data on crimes committed specifically by undocumented immigrants, but research shows they do not commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans.
“We know of no national statistics on the numbers of deaths committed by unauthorized immigrants,” Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director of the Migration Policy Institute think tank, said in an email.

Despite the lack of official data, there is significant research demonstrating “unauthorized immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S. born,” Mittelstadt said.

Texas is the only state that logs immigration status in its arrest records, and several studies use data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to examine criminality among immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

TEXAS DATA

Two studies found that undocumented immigrants in Texas commit homicide at significantly lower rates than their U.S.-born counterparts.

Authoritarian governments are doomed to fail because they all have a fatal flaw: They insist on not releasing much information in general, but especially not damning information, while also insisting on very thorough record-keeping. Those records are meticulous because eventually the ability to show how shitty your behavior has been is what gets you ahead - documenting your shittiness gets you that promotion you want.

We know all about Pol Pot, and Sadam, and Stalin, and the Nazis because the bureaucrats and underlings were very good at showing the boss how bad they were making things for "the enemy within."

And that shit always gets out. Always.

A June 2024 analysis, opens new tab by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh found that, for the years 2013-2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for “illegal immigrants” was 2.2 per 100,000, while that of native-born Americans was 3.0 per 100,000.

• For example, in 2022, undocumented immigrants made up about 7.1% of the Texas population and accounted for 67, or 5%, of the 1,336 people, opens new tab convicted of homicide.
• That same year, 1,209, or 90.5%, of people convicted of homicide were native-born Americans, who made up 82.5% of the population, the analysis said.
• “I’ve seen zero evidence for illegal immigrants killing 4,000 people a year,” Nowrasteh said in an email. “I've never seen that number defended by anybody spreading it.”
• Similarly, a 2020 study, published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found that undocumented immigrants were less than half as likely to be arrested for homicide than U.S.-born citizens, based on Texas data.
• The study, by Michael Light, sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and two other researchers, found the arrest rate, opens new tab for homicide was 1.9 per 100,000 people among undocumented immigrants and 4.8 per 100,000 among U.S.-born citizens from 2012 to 2018.

IMPLAUSIBLE STATISTIC

The social media graphic’s assertion that undocumented immigrants kill 4,000 people per year is unlikely even when taken at face value, Light said in an email.
“Put simply, the 4000 figure is implausibly large given what we currently know,” he said.
When applying the figure by using the Pew Research Center’s latest estimates of 11 million, opens new tab “unauthorized immigrants” in the U.S. in 2022, the homicide rate would be 36.4 per 100,000 people.

“This would be greater than a six-fold higher homicide rate than the overall homicide rate,” Light said. The murder rate in the U.S. in 2023 was 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2023, according to the FBI’s annual report on crime statistics released on Monday.

VERDICT

No evidence. There is no evidence that 4,000 people are killed by undocumented immigrants every year.

Good Government

We're constantly bombarded with nonsense about how government is always bad and can never be good because it's always getting in the way of free enterprise and blah blah blah.

5 people are dead - 4 of them were paying customers who stupidly (IMO) gave $250,000 to some jagoff with an out-sized ego, expecting him not to cut any corners, and to take good care of them.

Suckers.

‘Titanic’ Director James Cameron Points to Flaws in Titan Sub’s Design

The “Titanic” director and diving expert said he’d had concerns from the start about the vehicle’s hull composition and claims about its network of hull sensors.

James Cameron with short white hair and a dark shirt stands next to a green scale model of his Deepsea Challenger diving vessel.

“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.

Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.

In an interview, Mr. Cameron called the presumed loss of five lives aboard the Titan submersible from the company OceanGate like nothing anyone involved in private ocean exploration had ever seen.

“There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions,” he said.

An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”

In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep. Mr. Cameron had not sought certification of the vessel’s safety by organizations in the maritime industry that provide such services to numerous companies.

“We did that knowingly” because the craft was experimental and its mission scientific, Mr. Cameron said. “I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified.”

Mr. Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush, the OceanGate chief executive who piloted the submersible when it disappeared Sunday, for never getting his tourist submersible certified as safe. He noted that Mr. Rush called certification an impediment to innovation.

“I agree in principle,” Mr. Cameron said. “But you can’t take that stance when you’re putting paying customers into your submersible — when you have innocent guests who trust you and your statements” about vehicle safety.

As a design weakness in the Titan submersible and a possible cautionary sign to its passengers, Mr. Cameron cited its construction with carbon-fiber composites. The materials are used widely in the aerospace industry because they weigh much less than steel or aluminum, yet pound for pound are stronger and stiffer.

The problem, Mr. Cameron said, is that a carbon-fiber composite has “no strength in compression”— which happens as an undersea vehicle plunges ever deeper into the abyss and faces soaring increases in water pressure. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

The company, he added, used sensors in the hull of the Titan to assess the status of the carbon-fiber composite hull. In its promotional material, OceanGate pointed to the sensors as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.” Early this year, an academic expert described the system as providing the pilot “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

In contrast to the company, Mr. Cameron called it “a warning system” to let the submersible’s pilot know if “the hull is getting ready to implode.”

Mr. Cameron said the sensor network on the sub’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he saw as intrinsically flawed.

“It’s not like a light coming on when the oil in your car is low,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”

Dead Kids

We should be clear, and acknowledge that a total FUBAR like this can happen pretty much any time, and under any type of administration - political or otherwise.

That said, I think we need to widen out the scope a little, and understand that Democrats are always trying to get a few things in place that stand a chance of preventing this shit.

But we also have to stop talking about this in passive terms. ie: "Republicans refuse to do anything about it."

Bullshit.

Republicans have been very actively doing everything possible to ensure nothing gets done in government except increasing the "domestic infant supply", giving more yacht money to rich people, and making it easier for ammosexuals to threaten every living being in this country with horrifying bloody slaughter.

Republicans are not "doing nothing".

And no - that's not one-sided, biased or unfair. That's just the fuckin' truth. And if that's not obvious to you by now, then you've got your head so firmly up your ass that even when you open your eyes, all you see is your own shit.

Dallas Morning News: (pay wall)

Timeline of Uvalde’s fatal hour: Kids call for help, police hesitate

A timeline from DPS shows police waited more than an hour for back-up before entering the classroom and killing the shooter.

An 18-year-old gunman named Savador Ramos entered an elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday and killed 19 fourth graders and two teachers. At least 17 people were injured.

According to a timeline from Steven McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, one hour and 20 minutes elapsed between the first call to 911 and police finally confronting the shooter, who had fired at least 142 rounds in the school. What happened in between at Robb Elementary School has ignited public outrage over whether police could have saved lives by acting more quickly.

The following is a timeline outlined by McCraw at a press conference on Friday. The portion of the timeline in bold represents the time when law enforcement stood outside the classroom.

11:30: Teacher calls 911 and reports a car crash and a man with a gun.

11:31: An officer arrives at the school and drives past Ramos, who is hiding between cars in the parking lot, around to the back of the school.

11:32: Ramos begins shooting into classrooms from outside the school.

11:33: Ramos enters the school and begins shooting into room 111 or 112. He shoots more than 100 rounds.

11:35: Three Uvalde Police Department officers enter the school through the door Ramos used, followed by four more.

The three officers who first arrived go to the door of the classroom. The door is closed, and two receive grazing wounds from the shooter.

11:37: Ramos fires 16 more rounds.

11:51: Police sergeant and sheriff’s department agents start to arrive.

12:03: Officers continue to arrive in the hallway; 19 officers are in the hallway by this time.

12:03: First 911 call from inside the classroom from a girl who whispers that she’s in room 112.

12:10: Second 911 call: She calls back and says multiple people are dead.

12:13: Third 911 call: The same girl calls again.

12:15: Border Patrol Tactical Unit arrives with shields.

12:16: Fourth 911 call: The same girl calls and says eight or nine students are still alive.

12:19: Fifth 911 call: A different girl in classroom 111 calls. She ends the call when another student tells her to hang up.

12:21: Ramos fires again; he’s believed to be at the door. Police found 142 rounds of spent cartridges after the shooting ended.

12:36: Sixth 911 call: The initial caller in classroom 112 calls and is told to stay on the line and be very quiet. She says: “He shot the door.”

12:43: She asks 911 to “please send the police now.”

12:46: She says she can hear the police outside the door.

12:50: Law enforcement opens the doors with keys they got from a janitor. They kill Ramos.

12:51: Children leave the classrooms.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

19 kids and 2 teachers ended up in the morgue, and some of the victims were so fucked up that parents had to submit DNA samples in order to identify them.

When anything like that happens, there had better not be any cops in clean uniforms right afterwards.

What the fuck is wrong with our fucking cops?

Today's Tweet

I counted 6.

Marco Rubio was asked about keeping kids from being shot to pieces in school, and the fucker shrugged 6 different times.

19 dead kids, 2 dead teachers - and that asshole shrugged.

Asked Rubio why not ban AR-15s, and he said: "The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes, whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they're going to figure out a way to do it." Also contends more background checks won't fix problem pic.twitter.com/crfprWZSyQ

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 25, 2022

Did I forget to mention Mr Rubio is near the top of the list of NRA donees?

NRA Blood Money

1. Mitt Romney: $13,648,000
2. Richard Burr: $6,987,000
3. Roy Blunt: $4,556,000
4. Thom Tillis: $4,421,000
5. Marco Rubio: $3,303,000
6. Joni Ernst: $3,125,000
7. Josh Hawley: $1,392,000
8. Mitch McConnell: $1,267,000
9. Ted Cruz: $176,000

COVID-19 Update

"Conservatives" like to cherry-pick a number they think illustrates the no-big-deal-ness of COVID-19. They say the chances of dying from this thing are ridiculously low - about 1%.

And while, overall, they're right about that, there are three basic problems.

1. That 1% is 100 times worse than the worse flu season we've had in 100 years.
2. If you're infected, and it turns out you're one of the unlucky bastards who gets a severe case, the death rate isn't 1% - it's more like 10-20%, and that could easily be the low end because there are lotsa folks who get sick and die at home without hospital care, and so they don't show up in the numbers.
3. If you don't do the Mask-Distance-Hygiene thing, then you're increasing your chance of getting really sick by orders of magnitude.

And as always, it's about the outcomes overall. 6% of all cases that have been resolved resulted in the death of the patient.

6-fucking-percent

WaPo:

The coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working.

This is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives.

“Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,” declared a report released this week by Johns Hopkins University.

The rest of the piece gets even more depressing and frightening.

Dead Americans by Election Day = 311,000

Dead Americans by Year's End    = 484,000

Burying The Hoax

Drone video from Hart Island NYC. Mass burials as the bodies have to be quarantined - and the funeral homes can't keep up anyway.

The bodies will eventually be exhumed and the families will dispose of the remains "as usual".

Today's Eternal Sadness

32-year-old Tony Timpa died at the hands of poorly trained cops in Dallas three years ago.

It took over two years and a decision in federal court to get the video released.

Dallas Morning News:

The officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. By the time he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, the 32-year-old was dead.

Timpa called 911 on Aug. 10, 2016, from the parking lot of a Dallas porn store, saying he was afraid and needed help. He told a dispatcher he suffered from schizophrenia and depression and was off his prescription medication. The News first reported Timpa’s death in a 2017 investigation that showed Dallas police refused to say how a man who had called 911 for help ended up dead.

Those three officers -- Kevin Mansell, Danny Vasquez and Dustin Dillard -- were indicted by a grand jury in 2017 on charges of misdemeanor deadly conduct, three months after The News published its investigation into Timpa’s death. Following two days of testimony, the grand jury’s indictment stated that the "officers engaged in reckless conduct that placed Timpa in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”

But in March, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot dismissed the charges.

Creuzot previously told The News that he met with "all three medical examiners" who had testified to the grand jury. They reportedly told him they did not believe the officers acted recklessly and "cannot, and will not, testify to the elements of the indictment beyond a reasonable doubt."

Today's Eternal Sadness

Stephen Romero

LA Times:

A shooting at the famed Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday evening left at least three dead and 15 injured, sending hundreds of terrified visitors running for their lives.

The popular food festival at the “Garlic Capital of the World” in Santa Clara County was about to close around 5:30 p.m. when at least one gunman opened fire. Authorities said police officers fatally shot the assailant, but they were continuing to investigate whether he had an accomplice.

Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said witnesses reported that a second man was somehow involved, but police were still searching for him. He said the gunman was able to circumvent the festival’s security by entering from a creek area and cutting through a fence.

The gunman was not immediately identified, and Smithee said the motive was unclear.

KNTV reported that 6-year-old Stephen Romero of San Jose was killed in the shooting. His mother and grandmother were also injured, according to the NBC station.

- and -

Jack Van Breen, lead vocalist and guitarist for TinMan, told KGO-TV that the band was playing an encore when he heard a pop. He turned in the direction of the noise and saw a man “in a green top with a gray handkerchief kind of around his neck and what appeared to be an assault rifle.”

“He started shooting again in the direction of where all the food people were dining,” Van Breen said. He directed his band members to clear the stage, which they ducked beneath so they couldn’t be seen.

Van Breen told the Associated Press he heard someone shout: “Why are you doing this?” and the reply: “Because I’m really angry.”

America is sick in the head.

Today's Eternal Sadness

Every year, more Americans are killed by grade-school kids with guns than are killed by illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorists combined.

Atlanta Journal Constitution:

A 6-year-old girl has died after being shot by her 4-year-old brother in Paulding County on Monday evening, authorities said.

The girl was identified as Millie Drew Kelly on a GoFundMe page set up to help with the family’s expenses.

The accidental shooting happened about 6 p.m. inside a car parked in the driveway of a home on Laurelcrest Lane in unincorporated Dallas, Paulding County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ashley Henson previously told AJC.com.

“They were all loaded up to leave the home and the car wouldn’t start,” Henson said. Their mother hopped out to find the source of the problem, and somehow the young boy got hold of a handgun, he said.
- and -

After speaking with the children’s mother, detectives believe the handgun was retrieved from the center console, and the 4-year-old accidentally discharged it. 

“Our hearts break for this family and we hope God puts his healing hands around them during this difficult time,” Sheriff Gary Gulledge said in a statement Thursday morning.

No charges will be filed.

We don't have an immigration problem. And we don't have a Muslim Terrorism problem.

We have a gun-violence problem - fueled by a hyper-macho culture that spouts bullshit rhetoric about killing our way out of our problems, and is happy to cash in on our misery by supplying us with the means of our own destruction.

Today's Trump Effect

45* runs his little shit show like a non-stop pro wrestling hustle.

And the Press Poodles play right along.

Media Matters For America:

On Tuesday, Harvard researchers published a study estimating that approximately 5,000 deaths can be linked to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The same day, ABC canceled Roseanne Barr’s eponymous show Roseanneafter Barr sent a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an adviser to former President Barack Obama. Cable news covered Barr’s tweet and her show’s cancellation 16 times as much as the deaths of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico.

While the official death toll remains at just 64, the Harvard study, written up in The Washington Post, “indicated that the mortality rate was 14.3 deaths per 1,000 residents from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2017, a 62 percent increase in the mortality rate compared with 2016, or 4,645 ‘excess deaths.’” BuzzFeed News, which also reported on the study, further explained that the researchers adjusted their estimate up to 5,740 hurricane-related deaths to account for “people who lived alone and died as a result of the storm” and were thus not reported in the study’s survey.

Cable news barely covered the report. The May 29 broadcasts of MSNBC combined with the network's flagship morning show the next day spent 21 minutes discussing the findings. CNN followed with just under 10 minutes of coverage, and Fox covered the report for just 48 seconds.

By contrast, cable news spent over 8 and a half hours discussing a tweet from Barr describing Jarrett, a Black woman, as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes and the subsequent cancellation of her show.

Today's Eternal Sadness

A North Texas mother is hospitalized after her ex-husband came to her home early Wednesday and opened fire, injuring her and killing their three children and her boyfriend before turning the gun on himself, sheriff's deputies say.

The identities of the children were confirmed by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office Thursday as Drake Painter, 4, Caydence Painter, 6 and Odin Painter, 8.

- and -

"All of us are letting her know that we're praying for her and I cannot imagine losing three children," said neighbor Katie Garcia.

Fuck that noise, Ms Garcia - thanks, but fuck it. Instead of not imaging the loss of 3 kids, maybe you could start imagining politicians who have the balls to stand up to the NRA, address the public health issue of gun violence, and get something done. 

So yeah - sorry not sorry, but your prayers are less than worthless.

Today's Eternal Sadness

WaPo:

Police say they saw an object in Stephan Clark’s hand before they fired 20 bullets that killed him in his back yard Sunday night in Sacramento, a disturbing moment that was made public through body camera footage released Wednesday night.

The two officers were responding to a 911 call about a man breaking vehicle windows when they encountered, then killed, Clark, an unarmed black man.
Two things get stuck in my mind. I guess the main thing is this: 

Why are the cops so afraid that everybody has a gun? 

But the second big thing in my mind is: Why do the Press Poodles never ask that question at the news conference as the authorities try to explain that killing an unarmed citizen was somehow the only viable option at the time?

And a third one comes to mind as well - why don't the cops do some more to support initiatives that might make it less likely that they'll have to kill somebody with their guns, by making it less likely that someone will kill them with a gun?

Genius is not required to figure out that gun violence has something to do with guns.

Without cars, nobody dies in a car crash

Without airplanes, nobody dies in a plane crash

Nobody gets killed by hand-thrown bullets

How It's Done

Mrs Myeshia Johnson

NYT:

“When she got off the phone, she said, ‘He didn’t even know his name. He kept calling him, ‘Your guy,’ ” Ms. Wilson recalled the widow saying. “He was calling the fallen soldier, ‘your guy.’ And he never said his name because he did not know his name. So he kept saying, ‘Your guy. Your guy. Your guy.’ And that was devastating to her.”

I think 45* tried to say what John Kelly said from the podium yesterday. I think he had Kelly's words in his head, but he said it so badly, it made him look like a jerk.  

And of course, he is a jerk - there can be no mistake about that at this point. 

The guy has no soul and no honor, both of which are required if you're going to have even a marginally positive effect when trying to console someone who's just suffered the worse kind of loss any of us can imagine.

Starting at about 6:00, John Kelly says it really well.

I think 45* got a warm fuzzy feeling from the way Kelly puts it, because it sounds noble, and manly, and heroic - all the things 45* desperately wishes pertained to him. But those characteristics have nothing to do with 45*, so he's always looking to appropriate them for himself without doing the work necessary to earn them.

If he'd known just a tiny bit about it, he might've pulled it off, but 45* doesn't know anything. He doesn't really want to know anything. He doesn't listen. He doesn't study. He doesn't learn. He's never prepared.

So when he needed to say the right thing in a way that gave the grieving family someone to lean on; or a reason to feel something other than their crushing sorrow, he blew it. He screwed the pooch. Again. As always.

He failed at one of the basic duties of a Commander in Chief; a leader; POTUS. The guy isn't man enough to pack a lunch for any one of those dead kids. Because he refuses to learn one fucking thing about his fucking job.

This is how it's done:

(to Mrs Lydia Parker Bixby)

Executive Mansion,
Washington, 21st November, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln

-and-

(to 21-year-old Fanny McCollough, on the death of her father, Lt Col Wm McCollough)

Executive Mansion,
Washington, December 23, 1862.

Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.

Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln.

Dead On, Mr Fallows

James Fallows, The Atlantic:

Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:

The additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.

And here we are, two days after Las Vegas, and we're being distracted by Press Poodles alternately concentrating on people's grief and/or the technical details of how the fucking gun works, and worse - the bullshit about "maybe something good can come from this senseless tragedy and blah blah blah".

No.

We choose to do nothing. We choose to listen to the passive voice - "Mistakes were made" or "Isn't it just awful" or 

Nothing will come of this enormous horror except the next (nearly-identical) enormous horror.

Something else that pops up now and again - and is purposefully ignored: "...the worst mass killing in modern American history..."

I'm not giving partial credit on this one.  It's the worst mass killing since Wounded Knee, which was the worst mass killing since Sand Creek, which was the worst mass killing since Trail of Tears...and on it goes.

But OK - we don't need to look at anything but the last 50 years to be duly impressed with our diligence when it comes to murdering each other in large numbers.

WaPo:

(Bonnie Berkowitz, Lazaro Gamio, Denise Lu, Kevin Uhrmacher and Todd Lindeman)

949 victims

Each gun was used to kill an average of four people, not counting shooters. The 949 people came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background, and 145 were children or teenagers.

The oldest victim

Louise De Kler, 98, still took her pool cue and boombox to the rec room at Pinelake Health and Rehab and shot pool with the “young guys,” her daughter told the Associated Press. She was shot to death on March 29, 2009, along with seven other residents and a nurse, by a man who had come to the Carthage, N.C., nursing home looking for his estranged wife.

There's a very enlightening infographic that you need to see.

So this thing is big and ugly and complicated, and it goes in 37 different directions - sometimes all at once. But I'm not interested in hearing about how we just can't do anything about it.

We sent 14 guys to the moon - 12 of them walked on its surface - on the fucking moon. And we got 'em all back, and we did it when we were working out the math using slide rules and pencils and chalkboards - bear skins and stone knives compared with what we can do now.

We're closing in on Autism and PTSD and Alzheimer's.

Don't tell me we can't get this done.

Here's a pretty good place to start:

Overturn Citizens United

Fresh Info

From an interview with Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic:

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse?

Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus Princeton economist, pointed out that inequality among countries is decreasing, while inequality within countries is increasing. China and India are making dramatic economic improvements, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing much more modest gains. In developed countries, the rich have gotten much richer while the middle class has shriveled. A study he coauthored with the famed Princeton economist Anne Case highlights one particularly dire outcome: Mortality is actually increasing for middle-aged white Americans, due in no small part to overdoses and suicides—so-called “deaths of despair.” (Case also happens to be Deaton’s wife. More on that later.)

(This is what Blue Gal refers to in The Professional Left podcast this week - click that link or scroll down a little to listen)

Lowrey: You have made the argument that OxyContin deaths are deaths caused by rent-seeking. Talk me through it.

Deaton: I don’t know if you read Sam Quinones’ book, which is terrific, called Dreamland. It’s a wonderful book and he spent a lot of time in some obscure part of Mexico where a bunch of people had not been selling drugs before and took to selling drugs and had a much better delivery system. Sort of like Walmart of drugs! They’d deliver to your house and give you discounts, and they wouldn’t use guns. At the same time, he’s contrasting this with OxyContin and the pharmaceutical companies. The parallel is that here are two sorts of drug dealers. And one of them is doing it under the license of the United States government.

A lot of the drugs that were pushed in the early phase were being prescribed to people who were poor enough to be on Medicaid. A lot of these people were addicted to OxyContin—Sam actually describes a town in Indiana where the currency is OxyContin units. They’ve stopped using money and they’re using grams of OxyContin!

Lowrey: It’s not a bad currency, right? Easy to carry around. Stable price. Fluid market.

Deaton: There’s enough of this being prescribed for every American to have a supply for a month! So it’s not like it’s scarce. Nicholas Eberstadt makes this very cute remark about how this gave a whole new meaning to “dependence on government.” It’s a very nice essay. Eberstadt tries to be the nicest of the AEI guys.

There's also a piece of the puzzle that fits well, and reinforces part of the argument of "The Forgotten American" as a driver in the election.

45*'s Cherry

I'm not using his name any more than is absolutely necessary. 

From here on, I'll being calling him 45*.

Reuters:

A U.S. commando died and three others were wounded a deadly dawn raid on the al Qaeda militant group in southern Yemen on Sunday, which was the first military operation authorized by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The U.S. military said 14 militants died in the attack on a powerful al Qaeda branch that has been a frequent target of U.S. drone strikes. Medics at the scene, however, said around 30 people, including 10 women and children, were killed.

The gunbattle in the rural Yakla district of al-Bayda province killed a senior leader in Yemen's al Qaeda branch, Abdulraoof al-Dhahab, along with other militants, al Qaeda said.

Eight-year-old Anwar al-Awlaki, the daughter of U.S.-born Yemeni preacher and al Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, was among the children who died in the raid, according to her grandfather. Her father was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

"She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours," Nasser al-Awlaki told Reuters. "Why kill children? This is the new (U.S.) administration - it's very sad, a big crime."

This is day 9 and we've got a dead trooper.  I wonder where 45* plans to be when that kid's body lands at Dover? And all the others that're sure to follow.

Ding Dong

Paraphrase Bette Davis. My mom told me only speak good the dead. Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Good.

— Packers (0-0) (@ShomahKhoobi) September 6, 2016

I'm never gonna celebrate anybody's death, but the news of somebody like Phyllis Schlafley dying doesn't exactly make me sad.  She was destructively wrong about a lotta things for a long time.  And the things she was wrong about - things she led the fight to stop or deflect or delay or mitigate - are all things that would've helped make life a little better for millions of women in this country and (probably) hundreds of millions of women around the world.

If we help women, it's almost automatic that we'll get whole big batches of better men out of it too.

So if such a thing is possible, when Ms Schlafley gets to hell, she can hang out with Fallwell and Scalia, and they can cogitate on why there seems to be such a shortage of Liberals down there.

Today's Tweet

#PhilandoCastile #AltonSterling #Me pic.twitter.com/ynpiYuPjSS

— rootwoman123 (@rootwoman123) July 7, 2016

It's like we never have a chance to get past one shitty thing before the next shitty thing happens.

Alton Sterling

Philando Castile



What happens if somebody starts an effort to build a memorial wall in DC to list the names of all the black folk who've been killed by the cops?

Actually, here's a design suggestion: Let's build a memorial that has all the dead white people listed on one wall, and all the dead black people listed on a wall facing that one.

I wonder which one gets all the names, and I wonder which one gets all the attention.

The Ablative Absolute

I've done this one before - or one like it.

The sentence structure of our 2nd amendment is important, and too many of us are either willing to be bamboozled by the Ammosexuals, or we're not willing to risk sounding soft and Librul on the issue of Gun Control.

Here's a bit I dug up in The Denver Post from a few years back:

The main argument about the amendment has always been a semantic one: What is meant? What is the intention? I use the present tense, because grammatical deconstruction is done in the here and now. We are not trying to divine intentions from our personal beliefs of what the Founders “stood for” or what they “believed.” The Founders are dead, but their words remain alive in the present, and their words, as well as their meticulous grammatical construction, leave no doubt as to their intentions.

Read these sentences:
“Their project being complete, the team disbanded.”
“Stern discipline being called for, the offending student was expelled.”

In both cases, the initial dependent clause is not superfluous to the meaning of the entire sentence: it is integral. The team disbanded because the project was complete; the student was expelled because his offense called for stern discipline. This causal relationship cannot be ignored. Reading the Second Amendment as “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed,” clearly shows the same causal relationship as the example sentences; in this case, that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed because it is essential to maintaining a well-regulated militia.

Words matter.  What those words meant to the people who wrote them 230 years ago can give us a decent perspective on what they thought was important back then and what can be carried forward to us all these years later, but that was way back then and this is right here right now. We have to deal with what's going on today.  We need laws that help us sort ourselves out now.  We need lawmakers and industry leaders who can see past their own profits and venal ambitions. And we need everybody to stop fuckin' around. Get something done. Now.

Cuz guess what, chicken butt - a coupla hundred more dead Americans since Orlando:

(the interactive map crapped out, so I put up this link to Slate instead)