Category Archives: gun violence

On the Rittenhouse Acquittal

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American criminal law trials are decided in favor of whichever of the competing attorneys spins the most compelling story that resonates with the consensus bigotry of the jury. Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted of three shootings with two murders of unarmed Black Lives Matter protestors, it is time for the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to file a federal civil suit against Rittenhouse, for violating the civil rights of the people Rittenhouse shot and killed. This is how the Ku Klux Klan killers of the four Voting Rights Workers, in Mississippi in 1964, were finally successfully prosecuted, after being acquitted of murder, which is a state charge. It is also how O. J. Simpson was successfully prosecuted to win large damages for the families of his murder victims. The previous criminal trial, even with an acquittal, establishes the fact of the taking of the lives and with them their civil rights. Why should the U.S. Attorney General do this? Because it would signal that the Federal Government is not irredeemably White Supremacist, and that it actually wants to be representative of all Americans. Allegiance is only justified to the extent this is true, and that extent is sorely lacking today.
(19 November 2021)

In a statement released today, President Biden said: “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.” This seems a pretty clear signal that no Civil Rights suit will be filed by the US Attorney General.
(19 November 2021)

The purpose of the American Police and Justice/Legal System is to preserve and protect the status quo of a white supremacy racist and patriarchal country. Besides outright oppression, there is much deception and P.R. applied to this purpose. But, it is also important to remember that though “villains” come in every shape, age, color, ethnicity and socio-economic ($) class, there are also “heroes” and “good people” from every one of those categories as well — just not enough of them by a long shot.
(17 November 2021)

Another triumph of American White Supremacy: the 14th Amendment (“equal protection”) is voided by the Color Line. I do not pledge allegiance, and I will remember all of this when next drafted into jury duty.
(19 November 2021)

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My wife and I have been binge watching the ABC series (2014-2020) ‘How To Get Away With Murder’, streaming on Netflix (a new thing for us, in 2020, after no TV of any kind since about 2004).

What I find intriguing about this show is that it is a chained murder soap opera heavily laced with extensive social justice stories and courtroom speeches, all made commercially viable and popular by liberal use of hyperactive sex scenes, fast-paced hyper-dramatic emotionalism, cast inclusivity by all parameters (black, white, Latino/Latina, Asian, Muslim, gay, straight, bi, every possible permutation of those), fast-paced “gritty” violence, glitzy ‘hip’ (sic) modernism/colloquialism/argot, with a crew of millennials front and center, along with an Academy Award winning actress (Viola Davis, the lead) who is also producer/executive producer (which undoubtedly was essential to getting the original ABC approval and funding), and – excellently – a large number of African-American actors/actresses who are: strong, pivotal, quick, sharp, superb with language (from the King’s English all the way to ghetto, downhome and jailhouse argot), eye-appealing when that is necessary for the stories, and both “heroes” and “villains.” Even with the many exaggerations and razzmatazz for commercial appeal, the show has managed to really blast away (mercilessly) at many injustices in American society. I think the show is a good example of the entertainers behind it using their professional skills to really put out strong and timely social justice messages while simultaneously cutting good paychecks for themselves. Of course, one could instead argue that they are somewhat cynically exploiting popular social justice hopes (of the Barack Obama type of “hope and change” longings) to capture “audience share,” but I don’t think that is the case.

Because of our binge watching of this show (6 seasons of 15 episodes each = 90), those social justice issues (as expressed really vividly in the show) have been much on my mind.

Viola Davis is the star and standout performer, the whole series is built around her as an actress, and around her character. She’s phenomenal. Excepting her, my favorite characters are “Frank Delfino” and “Bonnie Winterbottom,” they have enviable fortitude. My favorite hairstyle for “Annalise Keating” (Viola Davis) is her last one.

I’ll be thinking of this show the next time I’m called to jury duty.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80024057

(16 November 2021)

One of the biggest and recurring targets of the ‘Murder’ show was the large over-representation of African-Americans in America’s jails, and as America’s victims of homicide by police (and framing by the Justice system: local, state and federal).
(19 November 2021)

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How to Get Away With Depicting Social Justice in Hollywood
19 November 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/19/how-to-get-away-with-depicting-social-justice-in-hollywood/

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Einsatzgruppen Were Militarized Police

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80 years ago today, on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa — the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union — was launched. The warfare between the Nazis and the Russians, which lasted until the end of WWII on 8 May 1945, made up the overwhelming majority of the military action and produced the greatest number of war deaths and casualties of the entire European War of 1939-1945 (in my mind I think of this fraction as 80%).

Here in the United States we are well versed in the folklore and stories of the actions, tragedies and victories that emerged from the War In Western Europe during WWII, but we are much less aware of the magnitude of the Russian (Soviet Union) contribution made, and sacrifices suffered, to secure victory for the Allies (the “United Nations”) in May 1945. Without diminishing the dedicated, painful and heroic contributions of the U.S.A, and its Allies, it is nevertheless a fact that, by and large, Nazi Germany (and its fascist Eastern European allies and proxies) was defeated by Russian guns carried forward by an ocean of Russian blood, and the Russian state and the Red Army were fed large transfusions of American military supplies to supplement their own industrialized war machine.

Hitler had planned Operation Barbarossa not merely as a war of armed political conflict and territorial conquest, but as a war of annihilation: Jews, and Communists with any degree of political or administrative power, were to be killed. The Nazi’s estimated (in written reports) that the number of Jews they wished to eliminate from Europe totaled 11 million. Specialized militarized “death squad” troops were formed to execute Jews (primarily) as Nazi armies raced eastward through Poland (from 1 September 1939) and then during Operation Barbarossa into the Baltic States (which Stalin had recently annexed), Western Russia (nearly up to Moscow), the Ukraine, Crimea and Southern Russia (as far as Stalingrad = Volgograd). Those death squad troops were called the Einsatzgruppen.

From Wikipedia: Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”; also “task forces”) were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–45) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the priesthood. Almost all of the people they killed were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.

Since Hitler had promised to establish a ‘1000 year Reich,’ the Nazis saw no need to worry about negative consequences to their genocidal campaign because in a few short generations after establishing their regime across Europe (and the world?) there would be few to have such raw memories of the atrocities and losses to mount any opposition. As one person commented: who today remembers the Crusades with enough anger to mount opposition to and make war on the descendants of its perpetrators?

A riveting and harrowing history of the Einsatzgruppen is presented by a 2009 four-part documentary series hosted on Netlfix: Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads. [weblink at bottom].

Nearly all the visuals of this series were supplied by the many photographs and movies taken by German Nazi officers, but also by members of the killing units manned by Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians, which were both encouraged by the German Nazis (where underlying antisemitism and a thirst for pogroms, and hatred of Russians, communists and Stalin’s NKVD existed) or such other killing units were directly supervised by the German Nazis. In a few cases Jews and anti-nazi partisans were surreptitiously able to take photographs of killing actions that were kept hidden until after the war and used as evidence in war crimes trials.

Most of the rank and file of the Einsatzgruppen had been policemen, and were men of limited education; repetitive actions of brute force motivated by simple bigotry, sanctioned by their obedience to superiors, and spiced up for too many of them by committing torturous atrocities as entertainment. The officers, on the other hand, were quite well educated and intellectual, they directed and guided this genocide machine as true believers in the inhuman vision behind it.

As I watched this tragic history unroll, I recalled that Telford Taylor had publicly stated that by the standards set by the Nuremberg Trials that American officials should be liable for war crimes prosecution over their perpetration of the Vietnam War. From Wikipedia: Telford Taylor was an American lawyer best known for his role as Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

And I thought of the My Lai massacre of March 1968, which was an infamous American cluster of war crimes that was not at all an isolated event as the US military claimed but actually just a typical action in an entire campaign made up of such actions conducted by US military forces in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army, which was trained and lavishly supported by the U.S., were routine savage perpetrators of atrocities to Communist Vietnamese prisoners and also regular peasants caught up by the military operations. The parallels here between America’s South Vietnamese Army ally, to the non-German proxies during Operation Barbarossa, are quite close.

I also recalled that the murders of civil rights workers and voting rights activists Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner (the Freedom Summer murders) in Neshoba County, Mississippi, occurred on 21 June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement. That was 57 years ago yesterday. Members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office, and the (local city of) Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident. None of the police departments or government agencies and officers of the State of Mississippi took any action to investigate the disappearance of the three civil rights workers after 21 June 1964, and they were certainly not interested in seeking to uncover any crime and prosecute its perpetrators as related to this incident. The remains of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were discovered by federal investigators on 4 August 1964, and federal prosecutions followed. The federal government acted because of intense national public outcry against first the disappearance of the civil rights trio and then their murders, and that outrage had erupted out of the new largely national awakening that had been sparked by the Civil Rights Movement.

There is a parallel between Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner facing the the guns of their killers — pogrom-thirsting bigots and policemen who were backed by the political powers of local and state public officials — on the night of 21 June 1964, and the millions of Jews who faced the guns of their killers in Eastern Europe during 1939-1944 — also pogrom-thirsting bigots and policemen who were also often enough their own countrymen.

And then one thinks of today, of George Floyd, of Black Lives Matter, and of the logic of “defund the police.” That logic becomes very clear to anyone who comes to experience police activity as even remotely similar in any way to Einsatzgruppen activity. For them it is better to disband the police than allow for a continuation of civilian murders (especially and disproportionately of minorities, particularly Black Americans) by armed operatives employed and legally immunized by the governing political authorities, under the justification of “keeping the peace” and guarding “public safety.”

I realize all this sad and painful history is not pleasant to think about, but I think it is helpful for Americans to know about it accurately, and not filtered by fantasies and preferred biases, so that our society in the present day and into our collective future can be significantly bettered, to really ensure everybody’s public safety, and to keep the peace in a just and compassionate manner.

Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads
https://www.netflix.com/title/80134093

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This Is Now (U.S.A.)

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Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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This Is Now (U.S.A.)

In his CounterPunch column on 30 October 2020 [1], the editor-publisher, Jeffrey St. Clair, made the following refreshing comment:

“In his resignation letter, Greenwald goes a little far in claiming his story was ‘censored.’ Call it the victim of a strong editorial hand. Cockburn used to apply his frequently to my stories and his normal scalpel was replaced by a ruthless chainsaw whenever my subject matter strayed onto the fraught terrain of climate change, assault weapons or catch-and-release trout fishing.”

I have had the same experience with my articles and papers in every single publication I have submitted them to (even CP). I came to learn that each journal has its ideological boundary, within which is its acceptable orthodoxy, and outside of which is rejected heresy. The arbiter determining the exact contour of that boundary is the editor, and moreso when also the publisher.

This is not necessarily bad if the precepts of the orthodoxy and contour of its boundary line are clearly stated, and uniformly adhered to. Then you as a reader and writer know how to pick and choose what to get into, or not. We all prefer to sing in our own choirs and thus perpetuate a world of mutually repellant cacophonous babel, because it is so much easier to maintain our ignorance and prejudices that way.

Having said this, I have to add in all fairness that CounterPunch has been the most tolerant of any journal toward my submissions (better than 50%). If you want to eliminate all censorship and editorializing on your writings, then just publish them yourself in a blog, or just don’t bother. Believe me, most people don’t want to hear or read what you think, however much your ego would be pleased to think they do.

At this point I thought I would editorialize a bit more on the editorial just cited.

+= Jeffrey St. Clair
– = MG,Jr.

+ Biden losing Texas because he made little to no effort to secure the Hispanic vote and couldn’t effectively distance himself from Obama’s inglorious record as deporter-in-chief will be one of the most biting ironies of this strange campaign.

+ The Biden campaign has made two shrewd strategic decisions: One, to limit Biden’s own appearances; and two, to keep Bill Clinton off the campaign trail, even though Bubba might have drawn some bigoted white men over to Biden in Georgia and South Carolina.

– Spanish speaking Americans are most likely voting overwhelmingly for Biden anyway as the obviously preferable lesser evil to raging Trumpian Hispanophobia. We (i.e., ‘Hispanics’) always know that U.S. elections are competitions between two corrupt gangs of ‘pasty-faced knuckle-headed palookas’ (a fabulous phrase from the Three Stooges) united by capitalist ideology. We make inroads as we can with young new progressives, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and with the numerous non-PFKHP activists over the years. Also, in time we will demographically bury PFKHP Trumpphilic America, because we are way better lovers.

+ Usually, the lies get more grandiose the closer we get to an election. This year, however, there’s been a refreshing outbreak of honesty. Biden has pledged that he will “not end fracking.” And Trump’s chief staff Mark Meadows has vowed that Trump “will not control the pandemic.”

– It’s all about the money. It has always been all about the money. This is the United States you’re talking about: “Capitalism is a religion. Banks are churches. Bankers are priests. Wealth is heaven. Poverty is hell. Rich people are saints. Poor people are sinners. Commodities are blessings. Money is God.” — Miguel D. Lewis

– Fracking = fossil fuel = power for U.S. military machines = international political power = profits = careerist orgasms; therefore the Next White (or Whitened) Guy In The White House is 100% for it.

– “Controlling the pandemic” is a tax on “the economy” a.k.a. the exclusive corporate casino subsidized by the public, both by their tax submissions and by their acquiescence to death by incompetence and neglect. Also, laissez-faire as pandemic control is the mentally easiest policy for PFKHPs to manage.

+ The grooming of AOC for a leadership position in the party seems to be well underway. Consider her placid reaction to Biden’s retreat on fracking: “It does not bother me … I have a very strong position on fracking … However, that is my view … It will be a privilege to lobby him should we win the White House, but we need to focus on winning the White House first.”

– Lighten up on AOC. She and Greta Thunberg have done more to wake people up to working for a better U.S. and better world than all the U.S. politicians and pundits of the last 50 years, excepting the activist kids of 2018 from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

– AOC has made the most startling and effective puncturing of the PFKHP political bubble since god knows when, and has near-instantly built up a political potential so threatening to PFKHP patriarchal control that its flaccid intelligentsia across its entire spectrum for reactionary Trumpofascism to Pelosischumer liberal pablum has been driven into apoplectic frenzies of attack against the future that AOC personifies: young, female, feminist, inclusive, non-PFKHP (and non-‘Karen’), multilingual, socialist, smart, honest, engaging and effective.

– Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s newly reelected Labour Prime Minister, is another personification of that advanced political future (a reality in New Zealand, as yet a dream in the U.S.). The fact that AOC is also urban and a Puertorriqueña is icing on the cake (for this Nuyorkino). The great fear in weakling PFKHP minds is demographic dilution, and they see their projected image of that fear as AOC, before whom they tremble: rage as pretense for fear.

+ Who will tell DiFi? McConnell, just after the Senate voted to limit debate on Amy Coney Barrett: “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

– Climate change (crisis, emergency, catastrophe) is a universally acknowledged fact, often brutally so in the wake of hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires. The culpability of major corporations in fueling global warming by the overproduction and sale of fossil fuels and petroleum products (like plastic by the Coca Cola Company) for the last half century, and of doing their utmost to cover up the scientific findings about the root causes of global warming (that’s where “anthropogenic” comes in) so as to continue maximizing their profits by destroying the environment, are all now public knowledge.

– Therefore, it is inevitable that the public will increasingly point the accusatory finger at the oil companies (for CO2 pollution fueling global warming) and plastic producers (for ocean and biodiversity destruction) in the form of class action lawsuits. The evidence of guilt is overwhelming; there is no exculpatory evidence. The only way that future corporate defendants would be able to secure favorable judgements once they have been harpooned by such lawsuits would be to advance payments now into insurance policies known as campaigns to install as many corporate-friendly judges into the higher echelons of the corporate-friendly U.S. judiciary as possible, and as soon as possible. This is how to buy judges legally in the United States, where “justice” is a commodity.

– And that is what the frenzy to install Amy Coney Barrett into the Supreme Court was all about. Her daddy was an oil exec, so she’s part of the family of the petrocorp ancien régime. Her religious fundamentalism is incidental to the corporatocracy (though it’s a great distraction for the hoi poloi); it’s all about the money.

+ Reporter: “What do you say to Philadelphia residents that are outraged by yet another unarmed Black man being shot by police?”
+ Biden: “What I say is that there is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence.”

– Except by the PFKHP supremacist U.S. military abroad, and occupation troops (a.k.a. ‘police’) domestically. It used to be called “manifest destiny,” now it’s called “exceptionalism.” What the ancien régime fears most is having its own tactics used against it, and its various euphemistic expressions of that fear, as given by Biden here, are its most forthright admissions of guilt.

+ It’s become a fixture of American political culture where those who later apologize for being wrong about a disastrous policy (regardless of the body count) are given more attention and credibility than those who made the right call from the beginning.

– This is because such heartwarming forgiveness is dispensed by the U.S. mass media, which in aggregate is the privatized propaganda ministry that touts disastrous-for-the-public corporate-friendly government policies with alacrity. These are sinners forgiving their own sins, which the public had to become impoverished and bleed and die to underwrite (as in the 2008 financial meltdown, and Vietnam and Iraq Wars).

+ In the last two years, Trump’s Department of Energy has blocked the release of more than 40 reports on renewable energy: “They just go into a black hole.”

– The U.S. Department of Energy is a government agency for the maintenance of U.S. nuclear weapons capability, infrastructure and production. Anything else they may do is auxiliary. While there is much more that the US DOE could do to further renewable energy (I know, I used to work for them through a contractor, and my renewable energy reports just ended up on my blog), that is not a concern of the petrocorp ancien régime that owns the government.

– It may help to remember that John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was fond of saying: “The people who own the country should run it.” By “people” Jay meant wealthy merchants and slave-owners like himself. This is what the Supreme Court has always been about (with the exception of a few deviations by people like William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and surprisingly by Earl Warren): the defense of property against democracy.

+ The Arctic’s giant methane deposits are beginning to leak their climate-wrecking fumes. Adjust your doomsday clock accordingly.

+ A worst-case climate scenario could produce almost $500 trillion in damages—about twice all the wealth in the world today. A best case still inflicts about $30 trillion in damage, a new study in Nature estimates, with intermediate scenarios between $69 trillion and $131 trillion.

+ According to a post-debate Morning Consult poll, only 28% voters oppose transitioning away from the oil industry. 52% of independents support transitioning away, and even 41% of Republicans.

– The exploding magnitude of the problem of global warming is only matched by the degree of reluctance by politically organized human society to reformulate its civilization into balance with Nature, and thus into harmony with the continuation of biodiverse Life-On-Earth. The mental inertia behind our non-action is from the static self-images many people have of themselves (‘I have to keep living and working this way because I can’t imagine otherwise’), and from our near-universal fetishizing of money.

– “The economy” is an artifice that can be constructed any way “we” want — so people could easily be made more important than profits — and money is just a token that is easily printed on government paper, and is now even generated as electrons vibrating in computer memory circuits. It doesn’t matter how much “money” it costs to formulate a decent society in harmony with Nature; money is shit, and shit is fertilizer.

+ Trump’s war on wolves just went nuclear…
+ The decision to remove the protections for gray wolves across all 48 states is going to have lethal consequences in Wisconsin, where the state’s “wolf hunt” will be immediately reopened.

– What it really is, deep down, it is the pleasure of inflicting cruelty on the helpless by terrified weaklings.

+ Ned Norris Jr., Chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, on the border wall’s desecration of Indigenous sacred sites: “As Americans, we all should be horrified that the Federal Government has so little respect for our religious and cultural values.”

– It’s all about the money; it is the pleasure of inflicting cruelty on the helpless by terrified weaklings; it is so much easier to maintain ignorance and prejudices that way; it is a reaction to the increasing fear of demographic dilution and the puncturing of the political bubble of PFKHP patriarchal control; it is manifest destiny and exceptionalism; it is the fearful wrath of the American money-constipated ancien régime.

– Capitalism must die for the world to live.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/30/roaming-charges-high-anxiety/

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Non-Violent Protest vs. Riot Violence, to Change Society

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Grace Hudson sketched this amazingly subtle and detailed portrait of an expert Pomo basket weaver, and friend, with bitumen (which I think of as a coal/tar crayon).

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Non-Violent Protest vs. Riot Violence, to Change Society

Some say: “Promote non-violent civil disobedience. Violence is hurting the George Floyd protests at this point.” Well, yes and no. Without violence the U.S. media won’t cover protests against our neoliberal paradigm and its occupation forces. Look at the Bernie Sanders campaign and his huge “unseen” rallies; and the large protest marches by Rev. William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, also “unseen.” “A riot is the language of the unheard” (MLK,Jr.).

By some Cheyenne accounts, when the U.S. Army of 1876 found the bodies of the dead 7th Cavalry soldiers at the Little Big Horn two days after the battle, General George Armstrong Custer’s eardrums would have been found to have been punctured (by two Cheyenne women) with awls so he could hear better in the next life. Custer (whose body was found with two gunshot wounds: one to his left chest and from which he had bled, and the other to his left temple and likely due to a post-mortem stray bullet), and the many American non-Indians like him, were so intransigently deaf to the cries of pain and pleas for peace and freedom from the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and all the other Indian nations and tribes, that the ear-piercing symbolism may rest on now-unrecoverable historical fact. That symbolism was certainly not recognized in 1876 nor heeded if it was, as the corralling of Indians and the murder of Crazy Horse in 1877, and the continuing Indian Wars all the way to the ‘final’ massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, showed.

Non-violent protests and waiting for “inevitable” social change didn’t do anything for the American Indians between 1492 and 1890 (the American Indian population reached its nadir in 1900). So, I understand where violent protest can come from with some anti-Trumpers. But I think most of the tide of violence comes in from the right, from cops desperate to keep exerting their Custer-like dominance (for, what else have they got in life to feel “big” about, being mere enforcers just like the legally deputized Lincoln County Regulators of 1878 in New Mexico, and which Billy the Kid was a member of), and from Trump-allied provocateurs and violence-hero wannabes, and certainly also some assholes just taking advantage of disorder. All that surrounding and threatening violent agitation during these May-June protest marches, plus well-justified and long-standing grievances, push some protestors over the edge of polite behavior.

Remember that Trump — our illustrious genius president — has repeatedly called for violence by his goon squads because the idiot thought it would only be inflicted on an eternally cowering “untermensch” population that he despises, and that he could control that violence. Well, now he’s got his violence and it’s out of his control, and it doesn’t seem to be helping his reelection campaign. An increasing number of mainline Republican “intellectuals” are now openly calling for a Biden electoral near-sweep (of Trumpy ideologues only), which I guess means they are completely confident that Biden and the usual gang of DNC-Democrats are seen as reliably loyal partisans to the preservation of corporate capitalism, which is what they all really only care about anyway. So, they’re looking to Slow Joe as their savior-of-the-year for their precious neoliberalism.

I hate violence — with its resulting injuries, deaths and destruction — and never encourage any of it; but how else do the poor, oppressed, disorganized and unmilitarized “lower classes” (everywhere and throughout history) frighten their rich and disdaining overlords to get those Big Brother boot-heels off their necks, and give them decent chances of living in physical safety and economic security?

I think of the American Indians, the Palestinians, and the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 (against the Nazis, who were immune to non-violent protests) for historical perspective. You can also throw in the American Civil War to that list, because in essence we are still fighting it.

As many wise commentators have already said: the only redemptive outcome of riot violence today would be if it sparks the creation of a large, organized and self-sustaining mass social and political movement against the entire neoliberal regime (and takes it down!) — a substantial, continuing, non-violent and effective socio-political force that aims far beyond just cop-reforms, Trump-tumbling, and the electoral reining in of Republican politicians for a couple of years.

The riot injuries, deaths and destruction that Americans are suffering today are at best a societal forward payment — like a first month’s advanced rent deposit — before we get the chance to “move in” to a better paradigm of American society.

May the battles and bleeding in the streets stop as soon as possible, and the sweeping transformation (and rebirth) of our society commence immediately.

See also:

Thoughts on the George Floyd Riots
2 June 2020
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/06/02/thoughts-on-the-george-floyd-riots/

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On “Good Cops” and “Bad Cops”

I posted the following comments on a public access blog of a long-term policeman and high-level police instructor of arrest techniques, where he excoriated the Minneapolis cops who killed George Floyd, but also said that 99% of cops are good and he asked that the public not judge them all by the 1% who are bad. The classic “bad apples” pose. I replied as will follow. The Counterpunch article linked after these comments says it much better.

Well said, but…

99% of all cops are not good, it only takes a few minutes of viewing all the videos being posted from around the nation to see that. Doing research back through time (even only from Eric Garner forward) makes that impression worse. By eyeballing the videos, the proportion of bad cops seems very, very, very high.

“No one hates a dirty, piece of shit cop more than a good cop who does this job with honor and pride. I beg you, do not judge the 99% of good police officers based on the actions of an ignorant and evil few.”

I know you have to believe that – if you are a good cop – in order to be able to do a cop’s job (which is what? and for whom?) and not lose all sense of self-respect or go insane. But…

The most likely fate of “good police officers” who turn in “a dirty, piece of shit cop” is to get disciplined, fired or worse, for ‘betraying’ the cop fraternity, while the “dirty, piece of shit cop” goes on unperturbed and free to continue exerting dominance over and wreaking havoc on the public (the part of the public he/she is most prejudiced against). Look what happened to Serpico.

“A policeman’s first obligation is to be responsible to the needs of the community he serves … The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around.” — Frank Serpico (in 2003).

So, it’s like opening a crate of oranges and seeing all the top ones moldy. You don’t think: ‘well, the bottom ones are probably okay, so I’ll take it.’ No, you throw them all away.

As another person said: if there are 10,000 good cops, and 10 bad ones, and the ten thousand good ones don’t kick out the bad ten, then you have 10,010 bad cops.

And finally, the municipalities and agencies that keep “dirty, piece of shit cops” on the payroll, and that do not prosecute them for their cop-crimes, are equally complicit in those crimes. They are the “institutions” of institutionalized racism and institutionalized oppression, and their cops are their bullying occupation troops stomping down on a victimized public.

The Fires This Time and Next
8 June 2020
John G. Russell
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/08/the-fires-this-time-and-next/

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I Rebel, Therefore We Exist, 2019

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I Rebel, Therefore We Exist, 2019

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke of her origins and family today (19 October 2019), I remembered my own story because they are so similar. My mother, too, is a lovely Puertorriqueña; I too was born in the Boogie-Town island stolen from the American Indians (Manhattan); we too lived in Parkchester, in the Bronx, in a basement apartment (concrete floor, concrete walls, tiny windows at the top at shoe-level to the sidewalk); I too have felt the glass ceiling pushing me down (my whole career), along with other melanin-rich talent.

My rebellion was never as brilliantly insightful nor as spectacularly successful as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, but it still goes on in my own idiosyncratic and annoying way (my unpopularity is deserved, and I’m proud of it). So I can easily bypass the cynicism and miffed sense of superiority of the self-regarding left intelligentsia who are so obviously jealous of the genuine popularity — and political effectiveness — of Alexandria and Bernie.

I can relish the first possibility for a real change in American politics, economics and life that I’ve seen since my heart sank on November 8, 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, defeating Jimmy Carter, and since December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered and Ronald Reagan went on the air to defend guns and the NRA. It was so clear America was plunging into an abyss as blithely and stupidly as the British, French and Germans marched into World War I in 1914; and America has in every way, hasn’t it?

Maybe now, 39 years later, enough people have been hurt by the institutionalized criminality of the American political economy that many of the survivors of those times — the workers, not the parasites — and our new, younger generations are really ready to join up and actually create a successful revolution. I have no shame in appearing to be “utopian” or “dreamy” or “immature” or “foolish” or “naïve” in holding and vocally proclaiming such a hope and such a wish. Bernie’s got 9 years on me, so I’ve seen almost as much as he has of 20th and 21st century American and world history; and I know what can be because it already was once, I lived in it. And I want the best of the past for my three children (two older than AOC). And for their children if they have them, and for everybody’s children, and all children everywhere.

I want the thieves robbing today’s youth of their futures — as they rob and have robbed their wage-slave parents and grandparents — along with the unctuous slimy hypocritical bottom-feeding careerist political ass-kissers (you see them daily on TV) — who tell you a decent life for you is impossible, or costs too much, and who pimp justice to claw their way to the top — to rot in a hell for them where they are discarded, ignored, profitless and robustly taxed: a new American society that is socialist, and democratic, and universally just, and enthusiastically ethical and intelligent.

Vision must precede any reality that one wants to realize, and so in these times don’t repress your vision out of fear of the future or (worse yet) fear of your public image being ridiculed. Let your vision be grand, let it soar, because we want that vision to take us as far as the yet unknown political opportunities of the next year may allow us to go. Don’t be so fearful of being disappointed by the “imperfections” of whatever the political outcome is in 2020 and beyond, that you repress your thinking and emotions in favor of the entirely possible “impossible dream” that Bernie Sanders (above all others) has articulated to the nation.

The “revolution,” as Bernie calls it, will never be perfect, no revolution ever is, but that is not the point. The goal is to get as much revolution as American politics, physical reality, and the inherent chaos of the universe will allow the American people, united in both uplifting aspiration and just purpose, to achieve. And not just in 2020, but continually from this moment on.

So, again, I don’t care how foolish I look or sound. Over my life I’ve seen too much lying, betrayal and exploitation palmed off as “the way things must be,” and I also know the opportunity of a lifetime when I see it. We blew it in 2016, but by now it should be obvious to everybody that a tsunami of change must drown the cold dead vampire of American capitalism, beginning with the ballot boxes on November 3, 2020, and then continuing far beyond electoral politics into every aspect of American society and American life.

So go ahead, be “foolish,” have a dream, have vision, pump out the vibes, because every revolution is powered by a unity of human aspirations, and every advance of civilization occurs as a jolt along the fault-lines of human society: by revolution. “I rebel, therefore we exist.” (Thank you, Albert Camus.)

Videos of Bernie and AOC, 19 October 2019

“Bernie’s Back” Rally with AOC in New York
19 October 2019
[complete speeches by all, at the rally today]
1:31:50 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
1:51:10 AOC ->to-> Bernie
2:52:04 end of Bernie’s speech.
https://youtu.be/0HbS65oiN18

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Endorses Bernie For President
19 October 2019
[Solo studio video appearance, 3:05]
https://youtu.be/DDGf39NkZe0

AOC’s Bernie Endorsement: HIGHLIGHTS
[Excerpts of AOC’s address at the 19 Oct. 2019 rally, 5:54]
https://youtu.be/QW-Nx1g8EpI

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Guns, Control, NRA, Mass Shootings, 2nd Amendment

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Guns in America is a topic of undying interest, and we can be assured that many thousands more innocent lives will be sacrificed to the Gun Moloch God to keep it that way. This web-page is a collection of all my writings on ‘Guns in America,’ in an easy-to-read format that minimizes click-digressions to other web-pages and web-sites.

While I have offered solutions to America’s (U.S.A.’s) gun violence problem, in truth there is no need to do so because the solution is obvious and already in daily practice in civilized countries around the world. Unfortunately for the random targets of gun violence in the U.S.A., this country has allowed itself to become an open-air asylum for people afflicted with the ‘viral’ mental disease of Gun Cling, and worse still the U.S.A. has allowed the untreated mental patients with this disorder to run the asylum!

Gun Cling is an auto-erotic mental disorder of arrested development into emotional infantilism and sociopathic isolation. At best its sufferers are harmless “gun nuts,” and at worst they can be suicidal mass atrocity perpetrators.

The best cure is of course prevention, which involves kind and enlightened upbringing and education. The next best remedy is self-cure by the individual becoming motivated to improve their knowledge about life, people and society, and to strive to improve their intellect and moral character by confronting their fears and eliminating their hatreds and fantasies (e.g., racist and/or crudely religious).

Beyond that, it may be that there are no reliable enforced cures or ‘deprogramming’ methods. The ultimate elimination of an individual’s guncling disorder is the blunt instrument of superior firepower by law enforcement. Ideally, we would want to arrange our society to make this violent sanction unnecessary.

A FLOWCHART for the progression of guncling might be as follows:

A vulnerable individual —>

Ignorance —>

Fear —>

Low self esteem, lack of confidence, sense of inadequacy, loneliness —>

Denial; cowardice about facing/beating fear by self-educating —>

Bravado-mask; suppression of empathy, being racist —>

Want-get gun(s) —>

Gain comfort and companionship in fear-minded gun herd/church/cult —>

Gun-crutch to maintain a stunted intellectual and character development: an inability to deal with emotional reactions to life challenges and disappointments —>

NRA infantile single-issue tantrum of security-blanket gun-clinging —>

Reason, logic, morality are not involved; all words are distractions and lies, and also just loud outbursts and threats; guncling is an all-encompassing emotional life-lock —>

A lost and imprisoned soul.

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Warren Burger “2nd Amendment Fraud” – 1991 PBS News Hour
https://youtu.be/Eya_k4P-iEo

The Second Amendment

The 2nd Amendment specifically states the “right to bear arms” is for the ability to maintain “a well regulated militia.” So the missing pieces of legislation are the requirements for each state that gun owners must be members of well regulated – by the Federal Constitution – state militias.

That means gun owners would have legal requirements on levels of training for the weapons they wish to own (more training and periodic testing for more powerful weapons), retesting (to maintain their qualifications to keep and bear arms – like periodic testing to keep drivers’ licenses), and the storage of those arms in armories.

When these militias are needed for local defense activities, or scheduled for required training exercises, then the members would have to assemble (as with jury duty, another civic duty) and follow the orders of their commanders in the use of their weapons. In fact they would be under disciplined military authority – not freelance or loose cannon unsupervised solo action.

Gun “patriots” would have no problem with adhering to this “strict interpretation” of the Constitution, and following the intentions of the sacrosanct Founding Fathers. The point of the 2nd Amendment is that everyone – young, old, sound-minded or insane – has the right to apply to prove they can meet the qualifications for being a member of a “well regulated militia,” or continue to participate in it – armed – so long as they maintain their required performance in it.

The failure to produce this necessary “regulating” and “supervisory” legislation is a dereliction of constitutional duty by both Federal and State legislative bodies, and executives, whose oath of office states they must “protect and defend the United States” and its Constitution.

Please refer to the comments (legal opinion) on this issue by former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren E. Burger (15th Chief Justice of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1986 – appointed by President Richard M. Nixon).

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Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

During the Roman Empire
crowds flocked to the Colosseum to see
their favorite gladiators kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans could experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

In the American Empire
crowds flock to the big-screen Colosseums to see
their comic-book superheroes kill mega-evil super-villains
who kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans can experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

Our bipolar dualities of superheroes and super-villains
require the mega-deaths of innocent mega-victims
– both real and imagined –
so our patriotic gunmen,
whether in police, the NRA, militias, or just lone sociopaths
– all in their closeted secret fears –
can fantasize about being would-be heroes
who will one day kill a bad guy and blaze to glory
to the ecstatic popular acclaim
of the telescreen-mesmerized masses
jammed into our handheld and big-screen Colosseums.

The reason we have so many guns in America
is because we have so many frustrated ignorant people.

21 February 2018

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/02/22/superheroes-require-mega-victims/

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When Life Is A Crime

The excrement of legalized racketeering by the vampire parasites on the nation’s life-blood
cultures the growth of murderous sociopaths who massacre the bright hopes
of our emerging and redeeming innocents, and our collective soul.

The raw cry of justice screams up from the blood-soaked streets and floors of our schools,
for retribution’s purge to sweep through the corridors of power, the temples of mammon,
and the sanctuaries of privileged bigotry and greed.

The peace of the nation is being blood-sacrificed in a raging war for power over life,
by our materialistic egotists of soulless privilege.

The warmth of kind hearts is freezing into the hardened prayer
for a just God to loose It’s avenging angels.

17 February 2018

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/02/17/when-life-is-a-crime/

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Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?

After the 1999 school massacre in Columbine, Colorado – an exurbia community – by two disaffected teenage boys (who also killed themselves), I came to the conclusion that the killers’ “motive” was not at all a purposeful urge, goal, revenge or obsession, but instead a complete self-abandonment into nihilism – a giving up – and the horrible eruption of that destructive nihilism was a symptom of those boys’ lack of culture – an abysmal lack of culture. I see the same about Stephen Paddock, the shooter in Las Vegas; his fury to kill emerged out of a profound lack of culture.

It seems to me that these rapid-fire suicide-killers had been born into and raised (probably somewhat thoughtlessly) in a cultural void. Their world was a generic beyond-suburbia commuter outpost of sprawl, malls, video games and Internet pablum and porn, instead of real books of literature, real art instead of plastic flamingo-level decorations, and real music instead of throwaway canned between-commercials pop. They had never absorbed real culture, which is the emotional and intellectual glue that binds an individual to the wider human communities both in the present and through the long arc of time.

Those boys (young and old) had lives of material ease, but they had absolutely no spirit because the nurturing and feeding of the spirit – the essential purpose of culture – was absent from their lives. I believe the spiritual-cultural hollowness of their cores was a reflection of the spiritual-cultural desert that was their environment.

By their late teens the two Columbine killers had had enough of it, and could see nothing in their possible 60 to 70 years of future living except more of the same. That “more of the same” is the listless life Stephen Paddock lived until he too had had enough, at age 64. As they looked into their futures the Columbine teens could have thought that maybe they could become insurance agents or realtors, or some other “normal” occupation that would see them harnessed to the spinning wheels of pointless money-making. And they would have their free time to be just as hollow as their comfort-providing work would be: more video games or video poker?, hanging out at the same beer joints with the same kind of empty-headed crowd?, watching another game on TV?, getting married and keeping up the same kind of families they had grown up in?

What would be the point? It was like looking down an arrow-straight empty four-lane freeway across a dry-lake salt-flat that stretched out to their 80th year and led to nothing but a dead end. Why spend the better part of a century bored, waiting to get to nowhere after having spent the whole trip doing nothing because nobody cared anyway, and end up just as useless as they were now, then die unnoticed and thereafter remain forgotten? Why not cut out all the slow stuff, the boring, tiresome waiting and pointless work, and just get one incredible orgasmically exciting machine-gun humping high, and then check out in a blink before the let-down set in?

I think it is the deep, personal absorption of and sensitivity to culture, and even tradition, that fills a psyche with the substance needed for living life joyfully; and the substance which occupies what would otherwise be a spiritual-cultural void that can only produce interminable lassitude or explosions of destructive nihilism erupting out of deeply submerged despair.

I think the appreciative absorption of culture, along with the received gifts of affectionate nurturing, kind friendship and confident love, are the necessary courses in a complete education of the human heart. I see major tragedies like the Columbine and Las Vegas massacres, as well as so many little-noticed murders of the same sort, to be the result of our society’s many failures at providing all our people with that necessary education of the heart.

I was prompted to write these comments after reading the following article, pointed out to me by Anthony Tarrant.

I went to School with the Vegas Shooter
Greg Palast
13 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/i-went-to-school-with-the-vegas-shooter/

See Anthony’s comments at his blog page:

Why Stephen Paddock Snapped In Vegas
15 October 2017
https://anthonytarrant.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/why-stephen-paddock-snapped-in-vegas/

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The photo above is of John F. Kennedy’s grave as it appeared in April 1964. My photos of this grave are the only ones I have with any relation to guns and gun violence.

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Above now published at Dissident Voice:

Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?
18 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/why-the-columbine-and-las-vegas-massacres/

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/10/16/why-the-columbine-and-las-vegas-massacres/

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Guns Are America’s Masturbation

The US news at the moment is dominated by the deep and shocking tragedy of the rampage killing on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, where a lone gunman (a 20 year old male) first killed his mother in their home, then went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School to randomly shoot 20 children (ages 6 and 7) and six adults dead, wound one other person, and finally kill himself. Total casualties: twenty-eight dead, one wounded.

The acrimonious debate on “gun control” versus “2nd Amendment rights” in the United States has been momentarily reignited. While this particular massacre is the evil work of one particular sociopath, undoubtedly precipitated by a lack of psychological soundness and moral strength completely disintegrating under the pressure of resisting some personal realization too shameful to confront, the fact that such a disintegration could so easily access modern semi-automatic weaponry and use it at will is a searing indictment of the abysmal state of the collective character of the American people.

So long as guns are America’s most fiercely held form of masturbation, there can be no rational discussion of how to keep shooting sports and mental illness separated, nor of the crafting of intelligent regulatory procedures for keeping the public safe from the pathological misuse of guns.

In 2011, I wrote two articles whose aim was to prod discussion toward such a rational solution. But, I have no hope such is possible until (if ever) a major change occurs in the collective character of the American public. The root of the problem is who we are as a people, not what we do with guns nor how we regulate them. We have to be, individually and collectively, a radically different kind of people in order to maintain a safe, orderly, intelligent and minimal use of firearms. Our debates and arguments about guns — “control” versus “rights” — are all excuses and denials because we don’t really want to admit to the root failure, nor take responsibility for it. We just want to masturbate no matter who has to die for it.

[The following two DV articles are given in full further below.]

Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/gun-malpractice-insurance/

Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/owning-a-gun-the-way-the-constitution-intended-you-to/

Looking back on these articles, I see them as retreats into the absurd in desperation to find some effective procedure to prevent such overwhelming and unnecessary tragedies. One can only hope.

15 December 2012

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2012/12/15/guns-are-americas-masturbation/

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Gun Malpractice Insurance

In response to my recent article [next below] on “gun freedom”, I received several disapproving letters from people with a “pro-gun” attitude. Most of their arguments centered on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the taken-for-granted assumption that having a gun close at hand would always offer them greater protection. Another pro-gun argument is that gun owners are prepared to “defend freedom” and the “constitution” at a moment’s notice in the event of some attack, invasion or national catastrophe — so long as they haven’t been “disarmed” in advance by “gun control.”

The “defend freedom” argument is laughable. Gun owners, as an organized political group, have been invisible in the defense of freedom in the U.S., and they have had many opportunities to do so, from defending civil rights in the 1960s right up to today: fighting against the Patriot Act, fighting to end the Iraq and Afghan-Pakistan wars, fighting to stop the ongoing “renditions,” fighting to close down U.S. military torture prisons like at Guantanamo, fighting to deconstruct the prison-industrial system and black confinement gulag. You can look in any direction today and find a freedom that needs defending immediately. The gun owner PACs have only shown an interest in defending their own freedom to play with their guns, regardless.

However, one pro-gun argument I received was mildly creative, and deserves a response. The argument states that 120,000 (120K) accidental deaths occur every year because of mistakes by some of the 700,000 (700K) U.S. medical doctors. This is a ratio of medical accident deaths per doctor of 1/5.83, which we can round to 1/6. So, for every 6 U.S. doctors there is one medical-accident death per year. However, for 80,000,000 (80M) gun owners (in a total U.S. population of 311.9M) there are only 1500 accidental gun deaths a year, or one per 53.3K gun owners, annually. The claim is then made that “statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.”

I guess this proves you should quit going to the doctor (and taking any prescriptions, which might just poison you), and you had better pack a gun. That way you can be sure that any gun accident occurring near you happens to somebody else (since you’ll be doing the pointing), and you can also protect yourself by shooting any doctor that comes too close.

This silly comparison of (and obvious joke on) iatrogenic and gun-caused accidental deaths does suggestion one idea, which is amplified in what follows: gun malpractice insurance.

Consider the following data:

75.7K non-fatal gunshot injuries per year in the U.S., of which:
52.5K are deliberate,
23.2K are accidental (statistics for 2000, from the US-CDC);

16K homicides/year in the U.S., of which:
9K by hand guns,
2K by other guns
(11K for gun homicides, total),
2K by knives,
2K by other methods,
1K by blunt objects;

17K suicides/year by guns (2004).

So, about 28K gun-deaths/year in the U.S.

For 311.9M people (U.S. population), this works out to:

gun homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by a gun): 1/28K,

total homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by any means): 1/20K,

gun suicides/person (or, probability you’ll shoot yourself dead): 1/18K,

gun deaths/person (or, probability of being killed by a gun): 1/11K,

gunshot injuries/person (or, probability of getting shot, and living): 1/4K.

Now, lets see how this comes out per gun owner (using 80M U.S. gun owners):

gun homicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/7K,

gun suicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/5K,

gun deaths (in general population)/#owners: 1/3K,

gunshot injuries (in general population)/#owners: 1/1K.

So each year:
for every 1000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot,
for every 3000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot dead,
for every 5000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person shoots themselves dead,
for every 7000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is murdered by gunshot.

Recall that for every 6 doctors there is 1 medical-accidental death per year. The hazards of medical practice have long been known and form the basis of the malpractice insurance industry (which, by the way, does a lot to raise the cost of “medicine,” this cash flow overhead going to insurance companies; how about nationalizing those companies to lower the cost of health care?)

A U.S. human is worth about $2M for a “reasonable” wrongful death damages/insurance settlement (the equivalent of $50K for a 40 year working life). (Yes, this is all very crass, but we are restricting argument to the absurdist confines of U.S. capitalist realpolitik.) However, court challenges to wrongful death claims, and legislation for protecting many industries like the airlines, set ridiculously low limits on settlements for fatal accidents, nearer $250K. So, I’ll use an average settlement of $0.5M to estimate the cost of malpractice insurance:

120K medical-accidental deaths/year, at $0.5M/per = $60B.

In fact the cost of medical liability insurance in the U.S. is about $55.6B/year, close to our estimate. However, since insurance companies probably absorb 30% to 50% of revenue for profit and overhead, the actual “average” settlement paid out must be closer to $250K to $350K.

For the 700K U.S. doctors, the average cost would be: $60B/700K = $85.7K = $7K/month. So U.S. doctors making $170K/year may spend up to half their income on their malpractice insurance (and or legal fees).

Fine.  Now let’s apply the same principle to gun owners. Let us allocate the cost of gun injury and death to “gun malpractice,” to be paid for by gun malpractice insurance, which gun owners would buy to compensate gunshot victims.

To estimate the cost of gun malpractice insurance let’s use measly settlements of:

$250K per gunshot death (paid to family members, obviously),
$100K per gunshot injury (paid for victim’s medical/rehabilitation & job/pay-loss expenses),

then for:

11K gun homicides/year, at $250K/per = $2.75B,

17K gun suicides/year, at $250K/per = $4.25B,

(28K gun deaths/year, at $250K/per = $7B),

75.7K gunshot non-fatal injuries/year, at $100K/per = $7.57B.

Total gun malpractice liabilities/year = $14.57B, round to $15B.

Now divide the cost among a total of 80M owners:

gun malpractice insurance premium (cost per owner) = $15B/80M = $188. A bargain, round generously to $200/year.

So it is entirely fair to charge gun owners about $200/year for “gun malpractice” insurance, which would help defray the costs to victims of gunshot. If the average awards were higher by a factor of 5 (to $1.25M per death and $500K for non-fatal injury), then the insurance premium would be $1000/year (and profit overhead for the insurance companies would raise premiums further).

Charging gun owners $1000/year for mandatory gun malpractice insurance does not seem unfair by comparison with what is done with M.D.’s, and it would not in any way infringe on gun owners’ sacred 2nd Amendment right to “defend freedom” personally. Such insurance would do a great deal to rein in both the private and public costs of U.S. trauma-response and health-care. Also gun malpractice insurance would be a great new capital industry, and such companies would probably be desirable investment vehicles.

It is obvious that the people of the U.S. accept the costs in gunshot injuries (76K/year) and deaths (28K/year) in the general population (312M), for the maintenance and convenience of unrestricted (or nearly so) gun ownership (80M owners). While no individual wants to be a victim of gun violence, we accept possibly having to make such personal sacrifice in order to uphold the higher social benefit of preserving the 2nd Amendment right of almost anyone being able to have all the guns of their choice as soon as possible.

However, some less-indulgent people, who do not have as high a regard for the U.S. Constitution as to accept this socialist accommodation, may agitate annoyingly for “gun control,” the restriction to gun ownership by legislation, even constitutional amendment. One argument they can use favorably is that the costs of gun violence are now borne unfairly by members of the public, gun owners or not, who happen to get shot.

This argument can be met by issuing gun malpractice insurance to gun owners, the proceeds of which will help compensate victims of gun violence (and create a new line of profitable insurance products). The existence of such insurance could be used by gun owners to indemnify them, individually and collectively, from “gun malpractice” liabilities. Indemnification would undoubtedly be set by legislation making gun malpractice insurance mandatory, in a similar way that medical malpractice insurance and automobile driving liability insurance are mandated.

Gun malpractice insurance would make maintenance of our 2nd Amendment freedom a win-win for both gun-owners and the non-gun members of the public, so long as you personally didn’t get shot up too badly. But if you did find yourself randomly chosen to participate in the socializing duty of gun action absorption, then you would have the comfort of knowing that the gun owners of America had provided for you to receive an immediate award of insurance money to help defray your medical expenses, and whatnot. That, and the red badge of courage pride you would have for your part in upholding the 2nd Amendment, would make you happy to be able to live with such freedom as we have in this country. Freedom carries responsibilities.

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Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/gun-malpractice-insurance/

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Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To

Since the January 8th shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in which 13 others were wounded and six killed, including 9 year old Christina Taylor Green who was born on September 11, 2001, there has been a renewed public debate about “gun control.”

If you have ever masturbated or been hosted to an orgasm with a living or even an artificial phallus, or you have experienced the deep satisfaction of a nitrocellulose-warmed and jolted Muladhara chakra, as described by John Lennon in his primal scream song “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” then you know that the gun control debate is impervious to logical assault.

Nevertheless, I wish to make a suggestion.

First, let me say that I have no problem with anyone owning all the guns they want, so long as they don’t actually kill anyone (or anything) with them. Actually, that is too stringent; I don’t mind if a gunslinger absolutely hellbent on killing someone kills themselves — and no one else. This is a clean solution to the problem of finding a target for the killing urge and simultaneously safeguarding the public. I admit the result may not be entirely satisfactory to the family members of the killer, but I think it the best compromise short of avoiding a killing entirely.

Some have suggested that it is remotely possible that on rare occasions a shooting death would be a humanitarian blessing. This type of thinking usually seeps out of militaristic and war-games fantasies. However, I think such possibilities are so rare in civilian life that we can discount giving this excuse further consideration.

Proponents of unrestricted gun ownership and use usually base their argument on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the further argument of applying a “strict interpretation” to the Constitution: “following the intent of the framers,” or the intent of “the founding fathers,” without allowing for any re-interpretations — “deviations” they would say — as informed by later historical developments and evolved social thought.

Very well. My suggestion is the following. Allow for the unrestricted ownership and use of guns and ammunition as they existed in 1789, when the Constitution and its first ten amendments were written. This would conform EXACTLY to the intent of the framers. It would satisfy the 2nd Amendment freedom to “bear arms,” without allowing for any deviations from ‘strict interpretationalism’ that would excuse the weaseling in of ownership of semi-automatic and automatic guns, and anything beyond ball, shot and black powder for ammunition: no full metal jackets, no nitrocellulose propellant, no late 19th century cordite-filled cartridges, not even percussion caps (from about 1830). Just flintlocks.

If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for you.

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Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/owning-a-gun-the-way-the-constitution-intended-you-to/
and
https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/01/12/gun-freedom/

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Rampage Killing In Aurora, Colorado

The outrage in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 is now dominating the news.
Just below is a partial list of rampage killings in recent times in the U.S. (otherwise Europe), and all after 1983 (those selected are mostly between 1999-2012). A much fuller set of lists (by category of rampage killing: in geographical regions, as school shootings, workplace shootings, hate crimes, familicides, vehicular, grenade, and by other means of mass killing) is given at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

Some recent rampage killings:

City/Town – State – Date – (died/injured)

San Diego, California, July 18, 1984, (21/19)

Jacksonville, Florida, June 17-18, 1990, (11/6)

Killeen, Texas, October 16, 1991, (23/19-22)

Littleton, Colorado (Columbine High School shooting), April 20, 1999, (13/21)

Atlanta, Georgia, July 27-29, 1999, (12/13)

Red Lake, Minnesota (school shooting), March 21, 2005, (9/5-7)

Blackburg, Virginia (school shooting), April 16, 2007, (32/17)

Binghamton, NY, April 3, 2009, (13/4)

Kinston, Samson and Geneva, Alabama, March 10, 2009, (10/6)

Fort Hood Texas (workplace shooting), November 5, 2009, (13/30)

Tucson, Arizona (shooting of US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords), January 8, 2011, (6/12)

Oslo and Utoya, NORWAY (hate crime) July 22, 2011, (77/42-242)

Toulouse and Montauban, FRANCE (hate crime), March 11-22, 2012, (7/8)

Oakland, California (religious school shooting), April 2, 2012, (7/3)

Aurora, Colorado (“Dark Knight” Movie House), July 20, 2012, (12/58)

The Aurora tragedy has rekindled the debate over gun control in the media, for example:

58 Murders a year by Firearms in Britain, 8,775 in US
by Juan Cole (21 July 2012)
http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/58-murders-a-year-by-firearms-in-britain-8775-in-us.html

and

Colorado Gun Laws Remain Lax, Despite Some Changes
by John Schwartz (20 July 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-gun-laws-remain-lax-despite-changes-after-columbine.html

However, the presidential candidates have been careful to avoid talking about gun control, even as they “honor” the victims at Aurora:

Obama Joins Romney in Gun-Control Silence After Shootings
By John McCormick (July 21, 2012)
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-20/obama-joins-romney-in-reticence-on-gun-control-after-shootings

Gun control is not an issue that can be discussed rationally in the United States, because in this country gun ownership is masturbation. After the shooting rampage and attempted assassination of US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), I wrote two articles on guns and society (“gun control”):

Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
[see further above]

Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
[see further above]

It’s hopeless. These occasional massacres, perpetrated by young to early middle aged frustrated males, are the price we accept to keep our personal arsenals. Why do we need them? Because we are afraid. Why are we afraid? Because too many of us are of weak character and cruel. Why is that? Because ignorance is allowed to dominate too many of our lives.

23 July 2012

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2012/07/23/rampage-killing-in-aurora-colorado/

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Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

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Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

During the Roman Empire
crowds flocked to the Colosseum to see
their favorite gladiators kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans could experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

In the American Empire
crowds flock to the big-screen Colosseums to see
their comic-book superheroes kill mega-evil super-villains
who kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans can experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

Our bipolar dualities of superheroes and super-villains
require the mega-deaths of innocent mega-victims
– both real and imagined –
so our patriotic gunmen,
whether in police, the NRA, militias, or just lone sociopaths
– all in their closeted secret fears –
can fantasize about being would-be heroes
who will one day kill a bad guy and blaze to glory
to the ecstatic popular acclaim
of the telescreen-mesmerized masses
jammed into our handheld and big-screen Colosseums.

The reason we have so many guns in America
is because we have so many frustrated ignorant people.

21 February 2018

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Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?

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After the 1999 school massacre in Columbine, Colorado – an exurbia community – by two disaffected teenage boys (who also killed themselves), I came to the conclusion that the killers’ “motive” was not at all a purposeful urge, goal, revenge or obsession, but instead a complete self-abandonment into nihilism – a giving up – and the horrible eruption of that destructive nihilism was a symptom of those boys’ lack of culture – an abysmal lack of culture. I see the same about Stephen Paddock, the shooter in Las Vegas; his fury to kill emerged out of a profound lack of culture.

It seems to me that these rapid-fire suicide-killers had been born into and raised (probably somewhat thoughtlessly) in a cultural void. Their world was a generic beyond-suburbia commuter outpost of sprawl, malls, video games and Internet pablum and porn, instead of real books of literature, real art instead of plastic flamingo-level decorations, and real music instead of throwaway canned between-commercials pop. They had never absorbed real culture, which is the emotional and intellectual glue that binds an individual to the wider human communities both in the present and through the long arc of time.

Those boys (young and old) had lives of material ease, but they had absolutely no spirit because the nurturing and feeding of the spirit – the essential purpose of culture – was absent from their lives. I believe the spiritual-cultural hollowness of their cores was a reflection of the spiritual-cultural desert that was their environment.

By their late teens the two Columbine killers had had enough of it, and could see nothing in their possible 60 to 70 years of future living except more of the same. That “more of the same” is the listless life Stephen Paddock lived until he too had had enough, at age 64. As they looked into their futures the Columbine teens could have thought that maybe they could become insurance agents or realtors, or some other “normal” occupation that would see them harnessed to the spinning wheels of pointless money-making. And they would have their free time to be just as hollow as their comfort-providing work would be: more video games or video poker?, hanging out at the same beer joints with the same kind of empty-headed crowd?, watching another game on TV?, getting married and keeping up the same kind of families they had grown up in?

What would be the point? It was like looking down an arrow-straight empty four-lane freeway across a dry-lake salt-flat that stretched out to their 80th year and led to nothing but a dead end. Why spend the better part of a century bored, waiting to get to nowhere after having spent the whole trip doing nothing because nobody cared anyway, and end up just as useless as they were now, then die unnoticed and thereafter remain forgotten? Why not cut out all the slow stuff, the boring, tiresome waiting and pointless work, and just get one incredible orgasmically exciting machine-gun humping high, and then check out in a blink before the let-down set in?

I think it is the deep, personal absorption of and sensitivity to culture, and even tradition, that fills a psyche with the substance needed for living life joyfully; and the substance which occupies what would otherwise be a spiritual-cultural void that can only produce interminable lassitude or explosions of destructive nihilism erupting out of deeply submerged despair.

I think the appreciative absorption of culture, along with the received gifts of affectionate nurturing, kind friendship and confident love, are the necessary courses in a complete education of the human heart. I see major tragedies like the Columbine and Las Vegas massacres, as well as so many little-noticed murders of the same sort, to be the result of our society’s many failures at providing all our people with that necessary education of the heart.

I was prompted to write these comments after reading the following article, pointed out to me by Anthony Tarrant.

I went to School with the Vegas Shooter
Greg Palast
13 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/i-went-to-school-with-the-vegas-shooter/

See Anthony’s comments at his blog page:

Why Stephen Paddock Snapped In Vegas
15 October 2017
https://anthonytarrant.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/why-stephen-paddock-snapped-in-vegas/

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The photo above is of John F. Kennedy’s grave as it appeared in April 1964. My photos of this grave are the only ones I have with any relation to guns and gun violence.

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Now published at Dissident Voice:

Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?
18 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/why-the-columbine-and-las-vegas-massacres/

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Paradise Rejected

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Paradise Rejected.

History, if it continues to exist beyond the mid 21st century, will record the society of the United States of America as the most idiotic that ever existed on the face of the Earth. Having achieved the pinnacle of wealth, physical power, knowledge and technological advancement of any society during the entire course of humanity’s existence, it nevertheless managed to miserably and abysmally fail to use its unparalleled capabilities to ensure lives of physical, economic and medical security for all its people, as well as liberation for them from unnecessary work – and most work today is unnecessary.

Also, the society of the United States of America has failed miserably and abysmally to use its unparalleled capabilities to effectively and unselfishly assist the other 95% of humanity to eliminate poverty, eradicate curable diseases, dampen conflicts and quell wars, and in partnership with that “rest of humanity” to expeditiously raise the standard of living of the least advantaged and most vulnerable of this world’s people.

The incredible stupidity of myopic ultra-capitalist greed, and the obdurate stupidity of the ultra-egotistical, navel-gazing, bigoted, racist, willfully ignorant self-absorption of too many (I think most) of the American people will ultimately spell out the epitaph of what we now call the American Civilization.

It is true that much of humanity outside the United States of America shares these failings, but all of their societies, even in combination, lack the magnitude of capabilities that the United States possesses, and which could be put to authentically good uses.

If archeologists from alien worlds or future Earthly life-forms ever decipher the history of the United States and of humanity from their dead remains, they will no doubt conclude that the extinction of the United States was inevitable and well-deserved on the basis of its behavior. Those archeologists might also conclude the same about humanity as a whole if it had escaped destruction as a result of the American collapse, and yet had not overcome the same failings that doomed American Civilization.

What is most infuriating about all this is that such a sad degeneration and painful extinction need not happen at all. It is entirely in our power right now to think right and act right to literally make an Earthly Paradise of both the United States of America, and even the World.

What I have learned about people is that there is always an infinite reservoir of excuses for insuring inaction, and for continuing with conditions of abject stupidity and unconscionable cruelty.

My Biggest Mistake.

My biggest mistake is to place what turn out to be too high and unrealistic expectations on other people, and then being disappointed when they fail to meet them.

When I try to compensate for this error by assuming the worst about people I don’t know, and interacting as little as possible with others, I am accused of being negative, unsociable, grouchy, and unfair. If I respond to this criticism by being more positive, sociable, not grouchy, and fair, then I find that I fall back into my original and most frustrating error. In an effort to avoid this nauseating oscillation, I try to dampen my enthusiasm (which kills the spirit) and moderate my disgust (which insults intelligence), by being reserved – not extroverted – and saying as little as possible to others, especially when it comes to being truthful about them and their preoccupations.

People believe what they want to believe, and it is nothing but trouble to contradict them. Almost always it is an illusion to think you can help others by contradicting what you know are their mistaken ideas. What is frustrating about keeping your unwanted counsel is watching the everything all around you needlessly degenerate.

Even knowing that you yourself have your own preferred illusions, it remains disheartening to feel you are living as the sole sane individual in an insane asylum – The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari – or the sole hairless speaking ape on the Planet of the Apes.

As I sit here, looking out onto a beautiful scene of glorious early fall sunshine illuminating crystal clear air, and the radiant greenery of forested hillsides, with Stellar Jays squawking as they scavenge for Hummingbird eggs, remnants of fresh cat kills, and other morsels of protein; and of the many Hummingbirds clicking and twittering around my head as they drill through the air and swoop in to lap up the sugar water I put into feeders for them, I think of how slowly the elegant and amoral natural world and its animal life-forms evolves, and of how far these animals are from developing a civilization. And yet, compared to us humans, these animals are incapable of degenerating as precipitously as we have so abundantly shown we are prepared to do.

Bleed Patriotically For America’s Gun Masturbation.

The NRA is lobbying Congress for a state funeral for Stephen Paddock (look him up if you don’t know) as a patriotic ritual of celebrating the 2nd Amendment, which is the Holy Sacrament of the United States of America.

Gun Clutchers are obsessive-compulsive sociopaths whose sacred right to kill must be protected by whatever degree of human and animal sacrifice is required. It is the patriotic duty of all Americans (humans and animals) to accept being personally sacrificed (or have their children and family members sacrificed) to uphold the sacrament of the 2nd Amendment. Don’t cry, instead bleed patriotically for the freedom of American gun masturbation.

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Guns Are America’s Masturbation

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The US news at the moment is dominated by the deep and shocking tragedy of the rampage killing on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, where a lone gunman (a 20 year old male) first killed his mother in their home, then went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School to randomly shoot 20 children (ages 6 and 7) and six adults dead, wound one other person, and finally kill himself. Total casualties: twenty-eight dead, one wounded.

The acrimonious debate on “gun control” versus “2nd Amendment rights” in the United States has been momentarily reignited. While this particular massacre is the evil work of one particular sociopath, undoubtedly precipitated by a lack of psychological soundness and moral strength completely disintegrating under the pressure of resisting some personal realization too shameful to confront, the fact that such a disintegration could so easily access modern semi-automatic weaponry and use it at will is a searing indictment of the abysmal state of the collective character of the American people.

So long as guns are America’s most fiercely held form of masturbation, there can be no rational discussion of how to keep shooting sports and mental illness separated, nor of the crafting of intelligent regulatory procedures for keeping the public safe from the pathological misuse of guns.

In 2011, I wrote two articles whose aim was to prod discussion toward such a rational solution. But, I have no hope such is possible until (if ever) a major change occurs in the collective character of the American public. The root of the problem is who we are as a people, not what we do with guns nor how we regulate them. We have to be, individually and collectively, a radically different kind of people in order to maintain a safe, orderly, intelligent and minimal use of firearms. Our debates and arguments about guns — “control” versus “rights” — are all excuses and denials because we don’t really want to admit to the root failure, nor take responsibility for it. We just want to masturbate no matter who has to die for it.

Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/gun-malpractice-insurance/

Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/owning-a-gun-the-way-the-constitution-intended-you-to/

Looking back on these articles, I see them as retreats into the absurd in desperation to find some effective procedure to prevent such overwhelming and unnecessary tragedies. One can only hope.