Saturday, 12 January 2013
These news seem to have turned into a series, all about the problems with a gun nation. It's not a polite nation and it's not a safe nation.
Here are today's installments:
First, the angry gun-lover I mentioned in an earlier post (part 2) had his handgun carry permit suspended by the state of Tennessee. That was because he threatened to start killing people with his gun.
Second, a home invasion with guns resulted in more guns stolen from the family living in that home. Being armed didn't work as defense in that case.
Third, young men get shot in Chicago and in San Francisco, Sometimes these are drive-by-shootings, without any reason at all but made possible by a weapon which can hurl out bullets from a distance. Sometimes the victims are children as in this Boston case.
Just following the news about shootings tells me how blind I have been to them in the past. Perhaps how blind we, as a country, have been to them when they are not mass massacres.
Friday, 11 January 2013
The New York Times tells us that French troops have arrived in Mali, to fight the Islamist takeover of the northern parts of that country. That Islamist takeover has odd roots in the events which took place in Libya, or that's what at least the linked article argues.
But if we dig deeper into the Original Causes, so to speak, this is what we find, all over the world, whenever a radical kind of Islamist thinking takes over:
Such a draconian interpretation of Islam has shocked Malians, yet it has been creeping in for several years. The Saudi government has funded the building of mosques in the capital, Bamako. The head of the High Islamic Council, Mohammed Dicko, who is negotiating with the jihadis in the north, studied in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is a rising trend.
A spokesman for the Islamist section has stated that they hold Afghanistan's Taliban as their model. Perhaps that is the reason for the destruction of cultural artifacts?
An extreme form of the shariah law has been adopted in the Islamist controlled areas of Mali. As a consequence, there is the usual focus on women's behavior:
Fanatical Islamists have imposed the strictest form of sharia on the moderate Muslim population of northern Mali, forcing women to adopt a strict Islamic dress code and enforcing segregation of the sexes.
...
According to Prezi extremists are now compiling lists of unmarried mothers and detaining Malian Muslim women not adhering to the Islamic dress code. One human rights activist reported that forced marriages are becoming commonplace. USA Today reported Ivan Simonovic of the U.N. Human Right's observed: "The price to buy a wife is less than $1,000 and it's often misused." He explained the forced marriages were often a smokescreen for prostitution and rape.----
Thanks to Moonbootica for the original links.
It's very good of the Republicans to keep that war as clear as possible, because otherwise we with the fleeting memory capabilities might forget. This way we won't.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga), used to be an ob-gyn and is still a wingnut. He clarified Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments:
“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”He also argued that women DO have a way of "shutting all that down," meaning that a nervous and frightened woman won't ovulate! Gingrey knows this:
Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”An interesting theory. I wonder how that could be tested in the cases of rape and if that "not-ovulating" thing would work in a microsecond or so, say, at the time of the rape, or if it might take a few months of tension to happen. I tend to think it's the latter case because the hormones releasing the egg are not working instantaneously but over some amount of time in the cycle.
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”
But it's that first quote which is the really interesting one because Gingrey removes the curtain to show us the sculpture. It's called False Rape Accusations. That's what those boys mean by a rape not being a "legitimate rape." The woman is lying.
If you cruise certain kinds of MRA sites on the net you will find large flowering False Rape Accusation subcultures, like bright green mold patches in a lab! On some of those sites 90% of all reported rapes are false accusations, and in essentially all of them at least half of all rapes are not real. And given that I was cursed at birth by that "see-all-sides" flaw, I understand where all that comes from. For heterosexual men who never plan to rape anyone the looming menace of false accusations is the only truly frightening bit about rape, at least until someone they know becomes a rape victim.
But that's no excuse to inflate the likelihood of false accusations. They are a small minority, and inflating their numbers will become a true injustice to all those women (and men) who actually are raped but get no help in a culture which has prepped people not to believe them in the first place.
Of course Gingrey ends his clarification by defending Mourdock's comments, too:
Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”So what do we get when we put together all these measured slight clarifications? That women who are raped are not terribly likely to get pregnant, that women who say they are raped might not be raped and that women who ARE pregnant from rape are still carrying a child of God.
“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Provided by Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Governor and one of the Republican hopes for one-day-president of this country. Jindal has proposed scrapping Louisiana's income and corporate taxes and replacing them with a sales tax. The change is supposed to be revenue neutral, meaning that the state government should get the same amount of money under either system.
Jindal explains his proposal like this:
"The bottom line is that for too long, Louisiana's workers and small businesses have suffered from having a state tax structure that is too complex and that holds back economic prosperity," Jindal said in a statement released by his office. "It's time to change that so people can keep more of their own money and foster an environment where businesses want to invest and create good-paying jobs."That is precious! Note that verb "to suffer" and then note that it actually refers to the complexities of the tax system! That's what holds back economic prosperity! By scrapping the income and corporate taxes, somehow "people" (still Louisiana workers, too?) can then keep more of their own money.
But but but. There will be a sales tax, and if it's to be revenue-neutral it might have to be fairly large. So people won't, after all, be able to keep their "own" money. They just pay it out in a different tax.
The change is not meaningless. Sales taxes are more regressive than income taxes, which means that if Louisiana actually follows Jindal's proposal, lower-income people will pay more than now and higher-income people will pay less than now. The reasons:
1. Wealthier people spend a small portion of their income on goods and services than poorer people. Wealth is not the same thing as income, but the two are closely related.
2. Income taxes typically have a minimum income level at which you do not have to pay taxes. In Canada, this exemption is for people who make around $8,000 or less. Everyone, however, is forced to pay sales taxes, no matter their income.
3. Most countries do not have a flat tax income rate. Instead the income tax rates are graduated - the higher your income, the higher the tax rate on that income. Sales taxes, however, stay the same no matter your income level.
Because of this regressive nature, many sales tax systems omit the tax for necessities, such as basic food and shelter. But if Louisiana decided to do that, to avoid really hurting the poorest, then the average sales tax would have to be made even higher.
1. What's the saying about those who grab the sword getting pierced by it? Whatever it is, it appears to apply to this recent homicide:
One of the operators of a popular YouTube channel promoting high-powered guns and explosives was found shot to death last week in northeast Georgia.
Keith Ratliff, 32, was found dead at 5:45 p.m. Thursday at his business on Hayes Road in Carnesville, said Franklin County Sheriff Steve Thomas in a press release.
Ratliff, of Frankfort, Ky., had been shot once in the head, and his death is a homicide. He had been dead for some time when the body was discovered, Thomas said. He was last seen alive Wednesday around 7 p.m.
Another newspaper notes that
Police found numerous weapons at the crime scene, according to WSB-TV. Some of the weapons were even manufactured by Ratliff himself. "He (Ratliff) did sustain a gunshot wound that was not self-inflicted,” Mike Ayers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told FoxNews.com.Those guns didn't help Ratliff to defend himself.
2. A video at this site tells us about the strong feelings of one gun lover. If you watch the video, note th way the term "patriot" is being used. One cannot be anything but a far-right-winger to be called a patriot, these days, it seems.
3. In California, a school shooting could have ended much worse had it not been that a teacher, together with a campus counselor, were able to talk the shooter (a student) into surrendering. As things stand, one student is in hospital critically injured.
-----
More recent accidental gun news here, here and here.
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Given the recent appointments of the Obama administration, including that today of Jacob Lew for the 76th US Treasury Secretary, some are asking questions about what happened to all that diversity.
The New York Times article mentions pipeline problems in the context of women applicants and that age-old need for mothers to be the hands-on parents with their children:
But Mr. Obama’s recent nominations raised concern that women were being underrepresented at the highest level of government and would be passed over for top positions.
For instance, many Democrats had hoped that Mr. Obama would name Michèle Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, to the Pentagon post. They had also hoped that he might name Alyssa Mastromonaco or Nancy-Ann M. DeParle, who are top White House aides, to the chief of staff job, or Lael Brainard, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, as secretary. But speculation about the chief of staff position now rests on Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, and Ronald A. Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. For the Treasury position, most expect Mr. Obama to name his current chief of staff, Jacob J. Lew.
Interviews with current and former members of the administration, both men and women, suggested that there was no single reason for the gender discrepancy in administration appointments, and several repeatedly spoke of the administration’s internal commitment to diversity and gender equity.
But several said that the “pipeline” of candidates appeared to be one problem. They said it seemed that more men than women were put forward or put their names forward for jobs. In part, that might be a result of the persistence of historical discrepancies: men have traditionally dominated government fields like finance, security and defense.
...
“It is not just a pipeline issue,” said Marie C. Wilson, a women’s leadership advocate who is the founder of the White House Project, a New York-based nonprofit group. “The pipeline in government has loads of talented people in it, and loads of talented women.”
She noted that women with young families, more so than men with young families, tended to drop out of jobs that demanded long hours — a trend also noted by administration officials. Perhaps as evidence of that skew, there were about 57 percent more male appointees than female appointees at the assistant or deputy assistant level.
The Salon article argues that the pipeline problem cannot be as bad as it was during the Clinton administration, yet the Obama administration has pretty much only matched what Clinton could achieve:
Still, leadership matters, and here we are with this top-level lineup of too-familiar faces. Hillary Clinton is gone, and we don’t have Sheila Bair, Michele Flournoy or Susan Rice (a pretty good selection given that “pipeline problem”) and another white man is expected to succeed Jack Lew as chief of staff should be become the treasury secretary. The numbers look even worse now that Hilda Solis, a Latina woman, has resigned as secretary of labor.It's hard to know what the pipeline might look like now, as compared to the early 1990s, but it's certainly true that there are women who are qualified. Susan Rice seems to have been Obama's initial pick for Secretary of State though he caved on defending her fairly early.
I have no deep thoughts on any of this except for the fact that until we are all used to the history of women in powerful jobs everywhere someone has to keep poking the powers-that-be in the back and reminding them of the fact that competent women exist. Yes, it gets very boring very fast, but I don't see any good alternatives to doing just that. The squeaking wheel and the oil, sigh.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
