The Second Amendment As A Leading Cause of Childhood Death

I've been busy tending to urgent family matters, and as a result, I had to fly back to So. Cal. last week.  When I arrived, all the American flags I saw were flying at half mast.  Because nowadays I'm allergic to the news except in extremely small doses, I had no idea why.  Today I finally found out the reason.

Learning the reason prompted me to do a quick Internet search for the incidence of firearms as a cause of death in the United States.  I learned today that firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.  (See this and this also.)  This inconvenient truth will no doubt be vigorously denied by the same patriotic right-wing Republican evangelical/Protestant white supremacist types who denied that the COVID-19 virus actually existed and that it could kill people.  These types will insist that the right to keep and bear arms is part of America's "Christian" heritage.  In saying this, they will conveniently elide the fact that Christ told Simon Peter to put away his sword, since "all who take up the sword shall die by the sword".  (Matthew 26).  In considering those who rabidly cling to their guns I am reminded of analyses I read about how the Vikings eventually had to abandon their ancient Greenland settlements even though the Inuit were able to remain and thrive.  The reason is that the Vikings tried to import a culture and way of life that could not survive the reality of their new environment.  Yet the Vikings stubbornly clung to this culture and way of life, even as some of their spiritual and cultural descendants are now clinging to a culture and way of life that has no future.  This can only end badly.

One other thing - I'm still working on the next installments of my series on precarity.  We will shortly start learning more about artificial intelligence.  Beware - some of the discussion will turn rather geeky...

Repost - The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'

A blog is a voracious beast, and feeding it with high quality material can seem at times like hoisting 50 pound sacks of elephant feed at a zoo.  While I enjoy the workout, there are things I need to fix and clean at my house this weekend, along with two fruit trees that I need to finish harvesting ASAP before the fruit spoils.

Therefore, I'd like to present you with a post I wrote back in 2015.  This post highlights some of the dysfunctional societal results of what had been until recently a highly effective long-term campaign of lobbying and propaganda by the National Rifle Association and the American Right.  (Note also how these two entities were helped along in their efforts by a certain foreign government.)  Enjoy.

Military Service, Patriotism, Guns, and The Church From Hell

Yesterday, I went to attend a tutoring group where I've been helping immigrant children with math.  "Did you know," one of them said, "there was a shooting at our high school today?"

I already had some idea of the details of the shooter before this morning, even though I know almost no one at that high school.  I knew that the shooter was a white male whose learned pathological narcissism and monstrous sense of entitlement had been threatened by the presence in this world of other people - people different from and independent from him.  But I did not know until today that the shooter was a devout Mormon from a gun-packing right wing military family who had gotten upset a week before when his fellow students disagreed with him about a speech he had made concerning Adolf Hitler.

The shooter is typical of the sort of young people many right-wing Anglo-American families are producing nowadays - people who feel monstrously threatened by the emergence of a world which they no longer control, which they can no longer dominate, and in which they will have to exercise the sort of politeness that goes with an accurate estimation of their real place in the world.  In response to the loss of their imagined specialness, these people kill and destroy indiscriminately, proving that they are not special, but worthless. 

There's a lot that can be said about malignant Anglo-American narcissism at the tail end of the American empire,  but I don't have time to say it.  I'll just say this: Jared Michael Padgett - an all-American, a patriot, a gun nut, a Mormon! is dead of a self-inflicted wound after indiscriminately killing an innocent young man.  Now Jared knows how wrong he was about life, about his cult church, about his place in the world, about his relations with his fellow human beings.  Try as I might, I can't feel sorry for him right now.