Gun Violence in U.S.: We know what the problem is

H. Holden Thorp

Science | May 26, 2022

America is reeling from yet another devastating spate of mass shootings. In the last 10 days, shooters have targeted a Taiwanese church in California, a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in New York, and an elementary school in Texas. Although opponents of sensible gun control—the kind that prevails throughout most of the civilized world—continue to put the spotlight on the shooters’ motivations or unstable mental states, these are cynical diversions from the one obvious truth: The common thread in all of the country’s revolting mass shootings is the absurdly easy access to guns. The science is clear: Restrictions work, and it’s likely that even more limitations would save thousands of lives. So why not take the laws much further, as other countries have done? The alternative is painfully obvious—living with more and more senseless carnage, courtesy of the National Rifle Association and their well-funded political lackeys.

U.S.: When Thousands Are Evicted Each Day in A Land of Fabled Riches

Bharat Dogra

Countercurrents | January 02, 2022

Recently on December 15 Eli Saslow wrote a very important feature in The Washington Post on the daily routine life of an elderly police constable Lennie who has been charged with the responsibility of evicting those families or persons from their homes who have not been able to pay their rent.

Essentially his daily duty during the last two decades has been to go from house to house, based on a list of those households who have lagged behind in rent payment, carrying a gun as well as handcuffs, and evict them. Astonishingly, this single police constable has evicted 20,000 Arizonans from their homes over a period of 2 decades, or 1000 per year, or about 3 per day.

Millions Of Armed Americans Ready To Seize Power, Warns U.S. Weekly

Countercurrents | December 24, 2021

Citing Nieznany, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran, a Newsweek report said:

Millions of fellow would-be insurrectionists will be there, too, says, “a ticking time-bomb” targeting the Capitol. “There are lots of fully armed people wondering what is happening to this country,” he says. “Are we going to let Biden keep destroying it? Or do we need to get rid of him? We are only going to take so much before we fight back.” The 2024 election, he adds, may well be the trigger.

Nieznany is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down — by force if necessary — a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.

Possibility Of Civil War in U.S., Warn Three Retired Generals And CIA Consultant

Countercurrents | December 22, 2021

Three retired U.S. army generals warned of an insurrection or even civil war if the results of the 2024 presidential election were not accepted by some in the military.

Former Major Gen. Paul Eaton, former Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, and former Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson made the warnings in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Friday.

They wrote that they were “increasingly concerned” about the 2024 election and the “potential for lethal chaos inside our military.”

USA: “Four Meals from Anarchy”: Rising Food Prices Could Spark Famine, War, and Revolution in 2022

Alan Macleod

MintPress News | December 17, 2021

WASHINGTON – Already dealing with the economic fallout from a protracted pandemic, the rapidly rising prices of food and other key commodities have many fearing that unprecedented political and social instability could be just around the corner next year.

With the clock ticking on student loan and rent debts, the price of a standard cart of food has jumped 6.4% in the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the cost of eating out in a restaurant similarly spiking, by 5.8% since November 2020.

The most notable change has been in the price of meat, with beef costing 26.2% more than it did last year, pork 19.2% more and chicken 14.8% more. Bacon prices have reached historic levels, and are now 36% higher than in 1980, even after adjusting for inflation. And with new animal welfare laws coming into effect soon regarding the minimum space required for pigs, some have predicted widespread shortages of bacon and a further price increase of up to 60%.

Bless the Traitors

Chris Hedges

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning.

Hale’s 2019 booking photo from the Nashville Police Department. Photo via AP

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

U.S.: Gun violence is surging — researchers finally have the money to ask why

Nidhi Subbaraman

Nature | July 21, 2021

People light candles at a memorial to three women who were shot by a gunman at a spa in Atlanta, Georgia, in March. Credit: Chang W. Lee/NYT/Redux/eyevine

Maeve Wallace has studied maternal health in the United States for more than a decade, and a grim statistic haunts her. Five years ago, she published a study showing that being pregnant or recently having had a baby nearly doubles a woman’s risk of being killed¹. More than half of the homicides she tracked, using data from 37 states, were perpetrated with a gun.

In March 2020, she saw something she hadn’t seen before: a funding opportunity from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study deaths and injuries from gun violence. She had mentioned firearms in her studies before. But knowing that the topic is politically fraught, she often tucked related terms and findings deep within her papers and proposals. This time, she says, she felt emboldened to focus on guns specifically, and to ask whether policies that restrict firearms for people convicted of domestic violence would reduce the death rate for new and expecting mothers. Male partners are the killers in nearly half of homicides involving women in the United States. “This call for proposals really motivated me to ask the research questions that I may not have otherwise asked,” says Wallace, an epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

America’s Impressive History of Bioweapons Attacks Against Its Own People

Forget China-bashing conspiracy theories, let’s look at the fogging of SF, the microbial attack on the NYC subway and other unpleasantries perpetrated by the CIA and US military in our not-so-distant past

Lee Camp

MintPress News | July 08, 2021

Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — The Biden Administration, the mainstream media and pretty much all the politicians in our country continue to throw fuel on the Sinophobia fire initially stoked by former President and current Mar-a-lago “fungineer” Donald Trump.
(Word to the wise, “Sinophobia” means anti-China hatred, not anti-cinema hatred as I had thought. So I apologize to all the people who posted a movie review for Fast And Furious 27 and noticed a response comment from me reading “GODDAMN SINOPHOBE!” Under the circumstances, that was an odd thing to yell.)

During the Trump Administration, the Wuhan lab leak theory was called a ridiculous conspiracy that blossomed out of Trump’s racist brain — which it did. It absolutely did. And he should get some credit for that because anyone can be racist but Trump is a racist inventor. He comes up with new and exciting ways to be racist. So he deserves some credit for his innovation.

School Children, Fracking Fumes, Immigrant Parent’s Daughter, Climate Crisis and Billions of Dollar

Countercurrents | June 21, 2021

Media reports from the U.S. tell about environmental incidents and hardship of the common people in the society.

Fracking and Children

A Fort Worth Star-Telegram report (Thousands of Arlington’s schoolchildren are exposed to fracking fumes, report warns, Thu, June 17, 2021) said:

More than half of Arlington’s public school children attend classes within half a mile of a natural gas drilling site, prompting concerns about the effects of fracking on their health, according to a new report published Tuesday.

A year-long investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting — which produces the popular news podcast Reveal — found that more than 30,000 Arlington kids go to school near a drilling site. Up to 7,600 infants and toddlers are dropped off at private daycares within the same half-mile radius of drilling, according to the center’s analysis.

The Disintegrated States of America

USA IN DECLINE

Pepe Escobar

Thankfully, considering its urgent message, Martyanov’s book is finally being widely read. It’s already an Amazon bestseller.

Andrei Martyanov is in a class by himself. A third wave baby boomer, born in the early 1960s in Baku, in the Caucasus, then part of the former USSR, he’s arguably the foremost military analyst in the Russian sphere, living and working in the US, writing in English for a global audience, and always excelling in his Reminiscence of the Future blog.

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing Martyanov’s previous two books. In Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, nearly three years ago he conclusively proved, among other things, how the missile gap between the US and Russia was a “technological abyss”, and how the Khinzal was “a complete game-changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically”.

He extensively mapped “the final arrival of a completely new paradigm” in warfare and military technology. This review is included in my own Asia Times e-book Shadow play.

Then came The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, where he went one step beyond, explaining how this “revolution”, introduced at the Pentagon by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the de facto inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept, was in fact designed by Soviet military theoreticians way back in the 1970s, as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution).