There’s a fine piece on Daily KOS today about the President’s legal options should Congress not come to any action on debt ceiling and spending cuts, etc.
The mainstream media has fallen in line to keep repeating Ben Bernanke’s line “fiscal cliff.” Sounds ominous. Ben, of course, is Wall Street’s best friend in D.C.
Major income tax reform in our time–another modern myth.
Huge military spending makes us safer–still another myth.
Let us compare the public safety in, say, Switzerland, or Norway, with anywhere in the U.S. So between ojur War on Drugs, War on Terror and various other wars we run simultaneously, the good old U.S.A. is really not all that safe. Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people. One good side to crime news: as the U.S. p[opulation ages, crije rates drop because the number of young males (chief criminals in all cultures across the planet) become a smaller fraction of the population. It’s not just the Internett and cell phones that made Arab uprising possible, it is the huge reservoir of young, uneemployedf males in big cites. It was, peace and revolt, testostwrone politics cannot be lightly dismissed in any nation.
Tags: fiscal cliff, guns, myths, national debt, Norway, Switzerland
January 12, 2013 at 3:59 am |
Came across this after reading your most recent post, wanted to see if I disagreed with you as much on other things as I do on gun control. Turns out the answer is a resounding yes
But that’s the beauty of these United States isn’t it? I found it odd that you mention Norway when asking the reader to compare public safety there to “anywhere in the U.S. Do you not know of Anders Breivik? Do you not know that after murdering 60+ people with guns and explosives, in that bastion of public safety Norway, that he was sentenced to just 21 years? This is not an American problem, it is not a gun problem, it’s a lunatic problem and it dates back to long before guns were around. In case you don’t know about Breivik: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
Have a great night, and keep on writing! (Just use some better examples when trying to make a point.)
January 12, 2013 at 6:07 am |
One of the next points I will make in my pst is the need to seriously look at the lack of mental health services in the US. And a need to redefine our laws so individual liberty is tempered in favbor of collective or social welfare. A great book has just been published comparing the New Zealand and American political paths, With a cultural inheritance tha is similar the two countries have diverged significantly. Eith unlimited space and seemingly unlimited resources the US went for individual liberty and the freedom to use and waste at will. new Zealand with small islands and limited resources has opted for fairness as the ultimate political litmus test.
Of course, I know of the Breivik case and nobody would believe that any kind of social mores or legal restrictions will head off all mass murderers. But Breivik is one of the few mass killers in recent western European history. After the mass shootings in a Scottish school late in the last century Britain opted to make it illegal to have handguns in anahy private home. You can own but they must be left at the gun club. Yet I would venture that most NBrits have every bit as much personal liberty as most Americans. And the Brits even share the share gang of greedy, immoral banks that we are so proud to have here in the Land of the Free.