School Shootings: A Retrospective

Another mass shooting but not at a school (for a change)….this time in Birmingham, Alabama…..

A mass shooting killed four people and wounded 18 others in a popular nightlife area in Birmingham, Alabama, with many of the victims caught in the crossfire, police said. No one was immediately arrested, and police asked the public for information. The shooting happened shortly after 11pm Saturday in the city’s Five Points South entertainment district, said Officer Truman Fitzgerald in an email to the AP. Officers arriving at the scene found two men and a woman on a sidewalk with gunshot wounds, and they were pronounced dead there. An additional male gunshot victim was pronounced dead at a hospital.

A preliminary investigation showed that “multiple suspects fired upon a large group of people who were outside in a public area,” Fitzgerald said. “Detectives believe the shooting was not random and stemmed from an isolated incident where multiple victims were caught in the crossfire,” Fitzgerald said. Injured people began showing up at hospitals, Fitzgerald said. By early Sunday, police had identified 18 other victims with injuries, some of them life-threatening.

That attack lead me to look at the school shootings that are all too common.

Almost daily there is a school shooting or a bomb threat or other assorted attacks on the schools of our great nation….it has become commonplace and gets nothing more than a shrug from the people that we depend on to make our schools safe…..why is that?

School shootings are American Exceptionalism in action. No other country does them like we do. None even come close. USA! NRA! USA! NRA! USA! NRA!

A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.

This is just a retrospective of these incidents and how some politicians handle them.

JD Vance, who now speaks at outdoor rallies inside a box of bulletproof glass, said that school shootings are now “a fact of life” in America.

Number of school shootings in the US by year…

2024: 45
2023: 82
2022: 79
2021: 73
2020: 22 (Pandemic school closures)
2019: 52
2018: 44
2017: 42
2016: 51
2015: 37
2014: 36
2013: 26
2012: 13
2011: 15
2010: 13
2009: 22
2008: 18

States with the highest per capita school shootings since 2008

Louisiana: 32 shootings; 0.69 shootings per 100,000 people
Maryland: 32 shootings; 0.52 shootings per 100,000 people13 s
Alabama: 25 shootings; 0.50 shootings per 100,000 people
Tennessee: 33 shootings; 0.48 shootings per 100,000 people
Mississippi: 13 shootings; 0.44 shootings per 100,000 people
Arkansas: 13 shootings; 0.43 shootings per 100,000 people
North Carolina: 41 shootings; 0.41 shootings per 100,000 people
Georgia: 41 shootings; 0.38 shootings per 100,000 people

How long will we tolerate this kind of crap?

Instead of action against this obscenity we get such platitudes as “thoughts and prayer’ or the ever politician BS…’there is no place for violence in America’….have these idiots ever watched a news story?

Violence does have a place in America unless you are too blind to see it…..and will continue as long as some garden slugs believe there is a Constitutional right to kill children.

Thanx to my friend at beetleypete.com for bringing this quote from Tom Waits to my attention.

“We are moneys with money and guns”

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo me agitare”

Is US Devoted To The Constitution?

The recent rulings by the corrupt Supreme Court got me to thinking about the Constitution…..is the US truly devoted to the document?

Let me tackle the question….I think the people of this nation is all caring about the Constitution and the people we elect could care less about the document.

The people warp themselves in the Constitution as some sort of misguided patriotism but once you get pass amendment 1 and 2 they know nothing.

In reality….it shows up often in political discourse as some sort of symbol of freedom and then quickly disappears until it is needed in some sort of explanation for a particular political action.

In a new book it is surmised that the worship of the Constitution has warped our politics……

Which version of the Constitution will shape America’s future? Emboldened coalitions on the right purport to tether the country’s tomorrows to the original meanings of an eighteenth-century Constitution—or to so-called natural law principles that are even older. Anxious liberals, by contrast, hold out frayed hopes that a living Constitution will be able to translate the nation’s constitutional history into a new century. An increasingly vocal cadre on the left proposes something altogether different—to scrap the whole arrangement, to make a clean break from a tarnished constitutional tradition by marginalizing the Supreme Court and doing away with the project of the Constitution entirely

In his new book, The Constitutional Bind, lawyer and political theorist Aziz Rana adds his voice to this swelling chorus, urging that a truly emancipatory politics requires breaking free from the U.S. constitutional project. Rana takes aim at what he calls the worship of the Constitution. U.S. politics today, he contends, idealizes the Constitution to its own detriment. Our political formations—especially those on the left—trim their sails in advance of doing battle by accepting the charter’s historical compromises. But such compromises, Rana says, come at a galling democratic cost. They grant unelected justices on the Supreme Court unwarranted authority over the basic terms of our social life. And they sustain voting inequities in the Electoral College and the Senate, which confer unwarranted representation on rural states with disproportionately white and conservative populations.

As late as the first decades of the twentieth century, Rana proposes, Americans took part in a more robust debate over the Constitution, one that nurtured a wild profusion of alternative political visions. The most promising of those visions, in Rana’s eyes, chafed at and often even rejected the Constitution as a parochial and limiting framework. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, U.S. politics marginalized the political formations that were most critical of the Constitution’s basic terms. And since the middle of the twentieth century, Rana argues, constitutional politics has shape-shifted into a kind of idolatry. Constitutional devotion has sustained American global empire, supported white ethno-nationalism, justified security panics, and cabined real democracy. Constitutional fetishism, according to Rana, sustains “a fundamentally undemocratic order” by granting the Constitution undue “immunity from challenge”; it produces an anti-democratic “cultural genuflection” before a Supreme Court that supports the interests of elites over the liberation of the masses. We are, Rana tells us, bound “by a narrow constitutional narrative” that constrains our collective life and imposes severe limits on our aspirations for true freedom and equality.

https://newrepublic.com/article/182334/united-states-devoted-constitution

My question now is….given all the stuff happening is this the society that the Founders envisioned with the Constitution?

Now what do you think about the question?

I know there are some great thoughts out there….voice them here and now.

I Reads, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo me agitare”

Christian Bullshit At Its Best

The nation is confronted with the rise of what some called ‘Christian Nationalism’….a forceful attempt to make all American conform to their warped sense of country.

And yes I wrote about it (go figure)….

Does Theocracy Approach?

It began many years ago when the Right started with their opposition to the freedom of choice (abortion) and when Roe v Wade was overturned by SCOTUS it opened a door that had been closed for about 200 years.

Now states are flexing their misguided religious muscle…..fist with Louisiana….

Under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities, the AP reports.

The displays, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

The posters would be paid for through donations. State funds will not be used to implement the mandate, based on language in the legislation. The law also “authorizes”—but does not require—the display of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance in K-12 public schools.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits are likely to follow. Proponents say the purpose of the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The Tennessean reports that Landry boasted about the bill at a Republican fundraiser in Nashville on Saturday. “I’m going home to sign a bill that places the Ten Commandments in public classrooms,” he said. “And I can’t wait to be sued.”

This is a bad idea and should not be allowed to stand.

After Louisiana’s assault the great state of Oklahoma had to inject its brand of ignorance…..

Coming to classrooms in Oklahoma: the Bible. The state’s superintendent has ordered the religious text be taught in Oklahoma’s public schools, reports the New York Times, which calls it “an extraordinary move that blurs the lines between religious instruction and public education.” “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Ryan Walters said on Thursday, though the AP notes that the directive from Walters, a 39-year-old conservative Christian and ex-AP history instructor, applies to classrooms from fifth grade through 12th.

“Immediate and strict compliance is expected,” the order reads. It comes about a week after Louisiana ordered the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a move that has already been hit with legal challenges. This, too, will likely face pushback in the courts. “Public schools are not Sunday schools,” Rachel Laser, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, tells the Times, adding to the Wall Street Journal that the decision is a “transparent, unconstitutional effort to indoctrinate and religiously coerce public school students.”

Her group is also challenging the Louisiana Ten Commandments mandate. Some aren’t even sure that Walters has the authority to make such a sweeping order, as state law leaves such authority on instruction and curriculum to individual school districts. The superintendent, however, is adamant that the Bible be a required study topic in his state. It’s “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” Walters says, per the Times.

Both these will make it to the Supreme Court and I have NO faith that the judges will even take the Constitution into consideration before the make their ruling. After all only the First Amendment is at stake….no big deal.

I am truly sick of these lying assholes about the history of this nation.

The sooner we can pull the plug on this mindless twats the better.

I personally do not want to0 live in the theocracy….do you?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo me agitare”

Playboy Gets Fined

British media regulator Ofcom has fined Playboy TV 22,500 pounds ($32,990) for airing sexually explicit images in breach of broadcasting rules.

It said on Thursday the free-to-air channel Playboy One had broadcast unencrypted raunchy, and what the watchdog deemed offensive, material until September 2008.

Ofcom had received five complaints relating to seven late night programs broadcast between September and December 2007.

Shows investigated included: “Sexy Girls Next Door,” “Sexy Urban Legends” and “Adult Stars Close-up.”

“Depending on the individual breach, the explicitness, strength and, or, sustained nature of the sexual content and language was unacceptable for broadcast on an unencrypted free-to-air channel,” Ofcom ruled.

It said Playboy TV UK/Benelux Ltd had failed to ensure adequate protection for viewers from “potentially harmful or offensive material.

First of all….HUH? What did they think they were gonna see when they tune in to a channel labeled “the Playboy Channel”? Are there people that stupid that they think a show called “Sexy Girls Next Door” was about 6 maids a milking? Absolutely no one is that flipping stupid! This is just a ridiculous story.

To Smoke Or Not To Smoke

OKay, Irene….where do these people plan to stop this whole thingy?

Oregon smokers have been elbowed out of bars, shooed away from entrances, and now they could get a ticket for lighting up in their own car.

The Oregon House voted Wednesday to fine anyone caught smoking with a child in a vehicle, windows rolled up or not. Minors are defined as children younger than 17 and tobacco as cigarettes, cigars or the loose stuff in pipes.

If approved, House Bill 2385 would make such smoking a primary offense, punishable by a maximum $90 fine for a first-time offender.

I can see where they are going with this and I can see where it would be a more healthy thing…but I also see where it is involving the government into the lives of a family…..child abuse? Then why not say because the government is not moving fast enough on emissions that they are also practicing a form of child abuse? We can play this lame ass game for ever.

Vermont Joins Other States

Vermont on Tuesday became the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote.

The House recorded a dramatic 100-49 vote, the minimum needed, to override Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto. Its vote followed a much easier override vote in the Senate, which rebuffed the Republican governor with a vote of 23-5.

Vermont was the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples and joins Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in giving gays the right to marry. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.

Tuesday morning’s legislative action came less than a day after Douglas issued a veto message saying the bill would not improve the lot of gay and lesbian couples because it still would not provide them rights under federal and other states’ laws.

Douglas called override “not unexpected.” He had called the issue of gay marriage a distraction during a time when economic and budget issues were more important.

The list grows longer and longer.

About Damn Time

The Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Friday finding that the state’s same-sex-marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples, making Iowa the third state where marriage is legal.

In its decision, the court upheld a 2007 district court judge’s ruling that the law violates the state constitution. It strikes the language from Iowa code limiting marriage to only between a man a woman.

“The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa constitution must be declared void even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion,” said a summary of the ruling issued by the court.

Are you sure we are talking about Iowa? A unanimous decision? All the others like New Hampshire or California were split decisions, but Iowa?

This is a great civil rights victory for gays and will be interesting to see where it will lead. Will other states follow suit?

Someone Thank A Smoker

Federal taxes also are going up Wednesday on other tobacco products, including cigars. Federal per-cigar taxes, which vary based on weight and price, used to be capped at 4.9 cents but now are capped at 40.26 cents.

The tobacco tax hikes, which President Obama signed into law in February, will be used to finance an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. The expansion, which will cost $35 million over five years, is expected to secure federally funded health care for an additional 4 million children.

Before the expansion, SCHIP covered almost 7 million children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid — the federal health insurance program for the poor — but can’t afford private insurance.

So if anyone is benefitting from the SCHIP program in the future then the smoker is helping your child get the medical care that they are needing.

Someone…somewhere…say thanks.

Here Is A Thought

When did identity theft become a big problem? Could it have been around 2000 or 2001? Why do you ask, Professor?

Back in the days of all the arguing about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and then the Financial Services Modernization Act of 2000, which by the way, could be traced back as the beginning of the economic crisis, because of its deregul;ation of the finance industry, which in turn allowed all the credit trading and as we have been told was the “culprit” in the present economic situation.

But there was another argument in the opposition to these two pieces of legislation….it was the fact that the personal information of consumers was not adequately protected. All the supporters of the Act assured the people that the Act was not going to effect consumers in anyway, but rather make it easier for the people to have access to loans to better their lives.

In a report written by the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

Consumers have no right under the GLBA to stop sharing of NPI among affiliates. An affiliate is any company that controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with another company. The individual consumer has absolutely no control over this kind of “corporate family” trading of personal information.

There are several exemptions under the GLBA that can permit information sharing over the consumer’s objection. For instance, if a financial institution wishes to engage the services of a separate company, they can transfer personal information to that company by arguing that the information is necessary to the services that the company will perform. A financial institution can transfer information to a marketing or sales company to sell new products (different stocks) or jointly offered products (co-sponsored credit cards). Once this unaffiliated third party has your personal information, they can share it with their own “corporate family.” However, they themselves cannot likewise transfer the information to further companies through this exemption.

Last year, identity theft cost the consumer billions upon billions, and it has been steadily on the rise since the enacting of the FSMA of 2000.

Sen. Dorgan of North Dakota said the the Act would put the US economy in peril in 10 years and so far …HE WAS RIGHT. And consumer institutions were concerned that the people’s privacy was not protected in the ACT….so far…THEY WERE RIGHT!

So far the FSMA, started in the Clinton Admin, has been nothing but sorrow for the people of the US. It helped make the economic crisis….it did not protect the consumer……and it definitely help turn the American consumer into an incurable credit addict…….it was a lose…lose…lose….piece of legislation that made millionaires into billionaires and the middle class into the homeless.

We can all be proud of Washington……(btw, that is sarcasm)

I Am Protected!

U.S. District Judge David S. Cercone ruled David Hackbart exercised his constitution right to free speech in 2006 when he angrily displayed his middle finger to another driver during a parking dispute in Squirrel Hill and when he displayed the same gesture to Officer Brian Elledge, who told Hackbart to stop.

“The United States Supreme Court has long recognized that non-verbal gestures and symbols may be entitled to First Amendment protection,” Cercone wrote in his 19-page opinion and order filed Monday. “Moreover, several courts, including federal and state courts in Pennsylvania, have found that the expressive use of the middle finger is protected speech under the First Amendment.”

Now there is a precedent for the use of the middle finger as free speech…….my only problem is that few display it properly. Just raising you middle finger does convey the thought but it is not proper “English”. As part of the generation that made the finger a symbol of the times, I cringe when I see people just throw the finger out there, instead of taking the time to learn to display it properly and more effectively.