Wall Street Greed

The Only Numbers That Matter This Memorial Day

The Real Patriots Are The Ones Taking the Knee

Turning In His AR-15

Truly, a profile in courage. I wonder how many more gun owners will do this? I suspect it could be more than the gun humpers would like. They are so fucking insecure that if they lose just a few, they will foam at the mouth about how we are all going to die in boiling pits of sewage.

Football Players Kneeling

The Good Guy with a Gun Trope Disproved Yet Again

This past Thursday a gunman opened fire at an Oklahoma restaurant and was killed by bystanders.

The gun nuts are thrilled! Finally, after all these years of repeating the mantra "only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns," a shooting was finally stopped by an armed bystander.

Except it wasn't. The bystanders didn't stop anything:

The man, whom police identified as 28-year-old Alexander Tilghman, planted himself outside the door to Louie's Grill & Bar in Oklahoma City at about 6:30 p.m. local time. He began firing a handgun into the restaurant. Three people, including two juveniles, were wounded, according to police. A fourth person fell and broke his arm when the shooting started.

The gunman turned to flee and was confronted by two armed men outside, Carlos Nazario, 35, and Bryan Wittle, 39.

Police say the two men had arrived at the restaurant separately and saw the man open fire. They went and got handguns they each had stored in the trunks of their vehicles. The men then shot and killed the gunman, according to police, who gave no further details.

The "heroes" shot a guy who was running away. Yay for vengeance!

Because, by definition, only bad guys shoot first, armed bystanders cannot prevent shootings. As in this case, they can only retaliate once the shooting starts. The only reason the shooter was the sole fatality was that he was a terrible shot.

The only way to prevent shootings is to keep guns out of the hands of people who don't need them for work.

Arming teachers will not prevent school shootings. At best it will reduce the number of fatalities by putting down shooters while they're reloading. Which means they can fire 6 or 10 or 17 or 100 rounds before anyone can react, depending on the magazine capacity of the weapon.

So far this year we've had 23 school shootings (there was another one Friday in Indiana). That's one a week for the second year of the Trump administration. Trump is winning school shootings so hard!

Arming bystanders will not reduce the number of shootings, though it might reduce the number of victims. Making guns harder to obtain will directly reduce the number of shootings: the fewer guns there are, the fewer shootings there will be.

Would-be shooters will have to work harder to get guns and may just give up once they've cooled down. If they're more persistent, many of them will draw the attention of their families and the authorities, and they'll be stopped. Some percentage will still get hold of guns. But many shootings will never happen in the first place.

As a bonus, reducing the number of guns in circulation will reduce the number of suicides.

Arming teachers and bystanders just puts more guns in circulation, increasing the number of shootings, both intentional and accidental. People will inevitably lose or drop or have their guns stolen and bad guys will get hold of them. More guns also increase the number of suicides.

This is just a fact, based the experience of pretty much every other civilized country in the world.

If I Die In A School Shooting...

"If I die in a school shooting, then I hope I'm the last one."

After 10 people were shot and killed at Santa Fe High School, students are sharing what they'll miss if they die in a school shooting. pic.twitter.com/alQ9k5bCuM

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) May 25, 2018

Get Up!

North Korea Summit Canceled: More Proof Trump is a Moron

Today Donald Trump canceled the summit he had scheduled with King Jong Un. This was completely predictable, because Kim will never give up his nuclear weapons.

The Kim dynasty is more vicious and recalcitrant than Iran's leaders have ever been, so only an idiot would have thought that there was a snowball's chance at the sun's core that North Korea would agree to denuclearization, much less actually go through with it.

The summit fell apart after both John Bolton and Mike Pence started talking about the "Libya model" for North Korea's denuclearization. That model involves a dictator giving up his nukes and then being ignominiously murdered by his own people. For some reason Kim wasn't interested.

North Korea has been trying to get a summit with an American president -- any American president -- for two decades. Giving Kim the meeting was huge concession to North Korea by the United States.

Only Trump was stupid enough to fall for it. A summit between Kim and the president of the United States elevates Kim to the level of a world power, and lowers the president to the level of a tin-pot dictator.

This was pointed out to Trump by pretty much every opinion columnist in the free world, but Trump is such a needy, attention-seeking little bitch that he blew them off, one and all.

Ever since his dealings with the mafia in New York, Trump has been most comfortable with criminals and tin-pot dictators. Trump's preferred company is violators of human rights like Russia's Putin, China's Xi, the Philippines' Duterte, Turkey's Erdoğan, Israel's Netanyahu, the Saudi monarch and Egypt's el-Sisi, not people like Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.

Trump is not comfortable with diplomats and statesmen. He's a know-nothing bull-shitter, huckster and charlatan who is completely out of his depth with serious people. He is the stupid uncle at a wedding who keeps making unfunny off-color jokes about the bride -- and his own daughter.

Remember how just last week Trump was demanding a Nobel Peace Prize? Looks like he'll have to settle for a Trump-Kim summit commemorative coin. I hear they're still available!

The Supreme Leader can't stop laughing. When a scumbag like Kim Jong Un can sucker the American president you know the world is in deep, deep trouble.

Beneath the Planet of the NRApes

When the original Planet of the Apes movie came out in 1968 the world was living under the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The hero of the film, George Taylor, is an astronaut who lands on a world run by intelligent chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas. Humans are mute and animalistic. In one of the most iconic moments in 1960s film, Taylor discovers the Statue of Liberty half buried on the beach.

Taylor realizes that he has been on earth all along. Humanity had nuked itself into oblivion and the apes had taken over. Taylor was, of course, played by former NRA president Charlton Heston.

The company that produced Planet of the Apes was 20th Century Fox. The film reportedly saved Fox from bankruptcy, so they decided to cash in with a sequel. But they had a difficult time making a go of it. Heston wanted nothing to do with it. They had serious problems coming up with a script. The budget was cut to the bone.

Different iterations were named The Planet of Men, The Dark Side of the Earth, and Planet of the Apes Revisited. In the end they called it Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

In the film another astronaut (played by James Franciscus) follows Heston. He discovers a race of mutated humans with mental powers who live in the abandoned subway system of New York. These mutants worship a planet-killing nuclear bomb etched with the ominous initials "ΑΩ".

The apes and the mutants go to war, and in the end Heston got his wish. He put his character out of his misery by pressing a trigger, detonating the bomb, and destroying the planet.

Though not the Planet of the Apes franchise. Three more Apes movies were produced in the 70s, there was a live action TV series, an animated TV series, a 2001 remake directed by Tim Burton and another reboot that has spawned three films since 2011, making Andy Serkis a tidy sum of money.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was an allegory on the folly of war (Vietnam was in full swing in 1970 when it came out). It was also a bad, depressing, didactic flick.

But it was on the money with its portrayal of mutants worshiping the instruments of death. The film was filled with Christian imagery: monks in habits, a creepy chorus accompanied by an eerie organ, inverted crucifixes and the Alpha-Omega.

Lest you think that worshiping a nuclear missile is over the top, consider that most Christians worship the instrument of Christ's death, the crucifix. Some sects, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, consider the crucifix a graven image and claim that its use is idolatry. At its core, Christianity is a death cult, obsessed with death and resurrection, engaging to this day in ritual vampirism and cannibalism.

It is ironic that some 20 years after the release of Beneath the Planet of the Apes Charlton Heston came to be the president of the NRA, the leader of another cult that worships the instruments of death. After destroying weapon idolaters in the movie, he became the Moses of his own cult of gun worshipers.

The problem with worshiping these instruments of death is the ever-present temptation to use them for their true purpose. Someone always wants to pull the trigger to end their own misery and take as many others with them as they can, just like Heston's character in the movie.

These days Heston has many followers: in Parkland, in Santa Fe, in Sutherland Springs, in Newtown -- in far too many places to remember any more.

And we already know how this movie ends.

Guns: Where We Currently Stand

With the Sante Fe High School shooting, the number of school children killed in school shootings has surpassed the number of servicemen killed this year. The blame for this lies directly at the feet of gun owners. If they want our children to stop being killed in schools, they need to figure out other ways to feel secure in their lives. The particular group who are most at fault are members of the NRA, gun rights activist and any gun bloggers and gun blog commenters who, on a daily basis, advocate for unstable people to remain able to acquire firearms. In short, this particular group of individuals are domestic terrorists. They should be arrested by the Department of Homeland Security and summarily Gitmo'd.

At this point, I think it's important to summarize many of the ideas that I've had  for how we can change this and cease living in a fucking war zone. The first step in considering the problem we have with gun violence in this country is to look at the intent of the 2nd amendment. It was written by James Madison and was meant for local militias at the time to protect themselves against possible tyrannical governments in the future. That's why it says...

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." 

It does not mean that people can carry guns with them whenever and wherever they want. Recall that both Madison and Jefferson voted to ban guns on campus of the University of Virginia when it was founded. Further, Alexander Hamilton explains the meaning of  the 2nd Amendment quite well in Federalist Paper #29:

This desirable uniformity can only be accomplished by confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority. It is, therefore, with the most evident propriety, that the plan of the convention proposes to empower the Union "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by congress.

If a well regulated militia be the most natural defence of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security...confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority...(and) reserving to the states...the authority of training the militia

Since the time the 2nd amendment was written, the ensuing tort has shifted towards broadening individual gun ownership.

Yet even Justice Scalia, writing for the majority in DC v Heller (2008) wrote:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. ... For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.(54)

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our [majority] opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. (54-55) 

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. [Precedent says] that the sorts of weapons protected were those 'in common use at the time' [the Second Amendment was approved]. ... We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons. " (55) 

So, with all of this, here's is what I think we should do based on why gun violence continues to happen.

First, the current gun regulations are terrible. It’s very easy to obtain weapons that make mass shootings more efficient. People with little or no training can buy a gun at Wal Mart. Mental health history doesn’t matter. Some gun sales and transfers of ownership don’t even require a background check. Many states have very loose gun laws and some now allow guns in schools and churches. Here is how they should be changed.

-Background checks on every single gun purchase. This would include private transfers of sale.

-Mental health checks for every single gun purchase followed by annual mental health checks for every gun owner.

-Regular training similar to what police and military must accomplish in order to use their firearms. Organizations like ALERRT could be used.

-All restrictions removed at the National Trace Center in Virginia

-All restrictions removed from the CDC in their research into the public health issue of gun violence. -Insurance required for gun owners

-All gun manufacturer exceptions for liability removed

Second, mass shootings are #trending and have been since the Columbine shooting in 1998. People in the United States believe that they can solve their problems by shooting up some place. I think that many mass shooters want attention and the media certainly gives it to them.

Third, The United States is very rooted in gun culture even though less than a third of its citizens owns guns. Our entertainment (films, video games, television) are very violent. Even our language is gun based. Here are some examples…

“Number one hit—-with a bullet” (music)

“Rodgers, out of the shotgun” (football)

“Faster than a speeding bullet (comics, films)

“He went off like a loaded gun” (common phrase)

With so many references to guns, it’s no wonder we don’t have more mass shootings.

Fourth, there is still a stigma in this country regarding mental health. Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, was severely mentally ill. He was not given adequate treatment and was likely shunned by the people around him. His mom, an ardent 2nd amendment supporter, was ill equipped to deal with his issues. She paid for it with her life. If we addressed the mental health issue by removing the social stigma surrounding visiting a therapist, we’d have less mass shootings. It should be as common as going to the dentist with an equal amount of indifference when someone says they are seeking psychological help.

Fifth, the United States has a gun culture that makes it easier for unbalanced people to obtain weapons. These folks allow their own hubris and emotions about guns to override public safety. They don’t really care if people die in mass shootings. Their first reaction after a mass shooting is “Don’t take my guns!!!” or “More guns in more places” as opposed to “Hey, how can we help? Let’s make it safer out there.”

They are enablers to mass shootings and bear a great deal of responsibility for all of the deaths the US has experienced from gun violence. In short, they are domestic terrorists and should be labeled as such by the Department of Homeland Security. Given that we have lost more people to gun violence just in the last 50 years than all of the wars we have ever fought in, they are a danger to public safety. 

Finally, it’s hard to implement changes to existing gun law because there is no equivalent of the NRA on the gun safety side of the equation. Gun rights activists vote more reliably. It’s just that simple. This may be changing, however, as Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America just had their fifth anniversary. As more of these shootings happen, more people join their cause. This is the kind of group that could easily counter or even surpass the NRA if more people helped their cause.

Until there is a significant counter balance to the NRA, we aren’t going to see any changes soon.

The Culture of Vengeance

Since the Santa Fe school shooting conservatives have been offering various crackpot causes for the violence. One guy says that religion is missing from the schools. Another says it's video games. Another says it's abortion.

Huh? High school boys never give abortion a first thought.

Ollie North, the new NRA bigmouth, says it's the "culture of violence." For once he's hit the nail on the head: the NRA's gun culture promotes everyone walking around armed, ready to shoot anyone that scares them. Or crosses them. For them the solution to every problem is a gun.

The real problem is that easy access to guns allows petty grievances to turn into mass murder.

But the exact motivations behind mass shootings are not all the same. The Santa Fe shooter was apparently a rejected suitor. Others have been motivated by racism, bullying or the thrill of notoriety.

What most shooters have in common is a mindset: they have been unjustly denied their due -- sex, attention, respect, an all-white society, an Islamic caliphate. They want to avenge their perceived suffering on innocent people.

Most are suicidal, expecting to commit suicide by cop or their own hand. They are whiny little bitches who know they're whiny little bitches and want to end it all in a blaze of glory, taking as many others out with them as they can.

It's this culture of vengeance that's the problem. With Donald Trump's election the idea that you have to hit back 10 times harder for every slight has gained cultural dominance.

Combined with the conservative rejection of common courtesy and empathy (which they call "political correctness") everyone is hurling the most vicious insults left and right. This results in an explosion of perceived slights, all of which must be retaliated against tenfold.

Then mix in the Southern "code of honor" (honor demands retribution), libertarian self-absorption promoted by Ayn Rand fans and the corrosive influence of social media. The pettiest insults can quickly escalate to deadly violence.

Jesus preached that we should turn the other cheek. Perhaps this is what people who say we need religion in the schools mean. But Christ's pacifist ideology is not limited to Christianity -- it is the cornerstone of Buddhism and secular liberal philosophy. You don't need religion to realize the Golden Rule is essential for a functioning society.

The fact is that American conservatives are the ones who most vehemently reject Christian humility and compassion (for proof, see Donald Trump and his cronies).

With nonstop demonization and dehumanization of political opponents and the less fortunate, their presumed white superiority, their thin-skinned lust for vengeance, and their non-stop promotion of violence through their pagan deification of firearms, it is American conservatives that have brought this epidemic of mass murder upon us.

Stock Buybacks Reach Record Heights

When Republicans passed gigantic tax cuts last year Donald Trump and his cronies claimed it would result in huge pay increases for workers. Democrats said companies would use the money to buy back their own stock, in order to drive up share prices, enriching CEOs and the wealthy.

Guess who was right?

Companies repurchased $178 billion of shares during the first quarter, up more than 42 percent from the same period in 2017, according to S.&P. Dow Jones Indices. That was the largest amount ever repurchased, topping the previous record from the third quarter of 2007.

It used to be illegal for companies to buy their stock back: it was considered stock manipulation. But in 1982 -- during the Reagan administration, of course -- the SEC changed the rules. This adds a whole new level of corruption to the stock market, allowing CEOs to manipulate stock prices and jack up the stock price for themselves and shareholders whenever they like.

Since CEOs are usually compensated in stock and that compensation is linked to share value, the only incentive CEOs have is to literally concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Buybacks aren't the only thing companies are spending on:

But even as companies splurged on their shares, investments in real estate, equipment and factories also jumped more than 21 percent compared with the first quarter of last year. Typically the first quarter is weak for investment, so the rise bodes well for corporate spending this year.

The only thing corporations aren't spending money on is pay increases for the people who actually do all the work.

Accomplices in School Shootings

This is America

I've been a fan of Childish Gambino for many years. No doubt, he's going to be fab as Lando Calrisian in the new Star Was film.

His newest video is called "This is America" and it's the best damn video I have ever seen. What a massively spot on statement of the United States in 2018, especially in terms of gun violence.



Stunning!

Here's a list of all the Easter eggs if you are interested.

Thank You, Wisconsin!

I love how conservatives foam at the mouth about voter ID as if there is so much voter fraud going on that we are all falling into a boiling pit of sewage. Their arguments are just a giant smokescreen for their fear at losing more voters year after year. They are already at the point where they can't win elections unless some Democrats swing their way. So, they need to figure out how to suppress votes without being so obvious. Hence, voter ID.

It looks like their strategy worked in Wisconsin.

According to federal court records, 300,000 registered voters, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked strict forms of voter ID in Wisconsin. A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes.

So much for adhering to the Constitution.

Gun Sharing

Take a look at this.

Welcome to the Metro Gun Share Program in Chicago. Wanna a problem solved? Just go pick yourself out a gun and take care of it! Tyrannical governments will quake in their boots....shiver...shiver...

OK, full disclosure...this isn't an actual thing. Well, it sort of is because that's how easy it is for anyone to get a gun. This is a protest art piece that came about as a partnership between Chicago-based advertising agency The Escape Pod and gun safety organization the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. It's currently located on Daley plaza in downtown Chicago.

I'm hoping we will see more exhibits like this in the future!

ZTE: Proof Positive that Trump is a Total Moron

Last week Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, announcing that he would reinstate sanctions on Iran. All our allies opposed the move, and all indications were that Iran was abiding by it.

But since Barack Obama negotiated that deal, Trump wanted to kill it. Because, like some stray dog, Trump has to piss all over everything that smelled of the other guy.

The immediate effect was to cause a flurry of Iranian rocket attacks against Israeli targets in the Golan Heights and retaliatory strikes on Iranian targets in Syria by Israeli jets.

Then the Chinese cell phone manufacturer ZTE announced that it was shutting down because the US government banned it from buying American technology. Last year ZTE paid a $1.19 billion fine for violating sanctions by selling cell phone technology to Iran and North Korea.

Many in the intelligence community believe that ZTE's technology is used by the Chinese government to spy on Americans. When Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked the heads of the CIA and FBI if they would recommend Americans buy ZTE phones, they would not. And a bill has been introduced in Congress to prohibit the use of ZTE equipment by the US government.

But now Trump says he's going to help ZTE get back into business:

“President Xi [Jingping] of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

What?!? Trump has been screaming for years about how China is raping the United States and stealing our jobs, and now he's worried about Chinese people losing their jobs and saving a company that spies on us and stabbed us in the back by helping Iran. Right after he reimposed sanctions on Iran? Huh?

Trump is a total moron. Maybe he's got some corrupt backroom deal going, and he's using ZTE to extort something from China. Maybe to get to China to pressure North Korea to disarm. But since Kim Jong Un will never give up his nukes (it would be suicide), Trump is being played by Xi and Kim.

The shutdown of ZTE was supposed to be a signal to the world that the United States means business when it comes to sanctions on Iran and North Korea. By caving in to Chinese pressure to help a company owned by the Chinese government Trump showed he is either an idiot, a pussy or a crook.

I'm betting on all three.

A Cheap Mafia Thug

Negative=Fake!

Check out this Tweet from President Trump

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

4:38 AM - 9 May 2018

I see. All negative news is now fake. Isn't that what all (adolescent) conservatives think?