People are going nuts in this country. Some lunatic sent ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), apparently with a return address. Shooting up shopping centers, malls, movie theaters, 1st grade classrooms, bombing the Boston Marathon…
Stuff like this used to happen once in a blue moon. Now it’s becoming almost routine.
I don’t know what is wrong with people.
….Sigh….
If only we had more guns. Then we would be so much safer.
and lower taxes.
….and an electrified, razor wire border fence.
Or more cable channels.
There’s cheese on top of the pizza. There’s cheese inside the crust.
There’s gotta be a way to get cheese underneath the pizza.
and some cheese in my super-sized mountain dew.
What happens when a dysfunctional Congress keeps the economic pressure on for five years and states go into austerity mode.
For every 1% increase in unemployment there is a fairly established correlation (the network of causation is too complicated to tease out) with a certain increase in divorces, murders, suicides, and mass attacks (whether from “going postal” or otherwise).
If the US elites think they can force down wages over time to be “competitive” with other countries in a race to the bottom, they don’t realize they will be creating political instability within this country. And it doesn’t matter how many security forces and military you have. It could get uglier–300 million plus firearms.
And just wait until climate change really hits.
Yes. This.
ou live in a militarized surveillance society with no guaranteed health care and with a job market that doesn’t provide enough jobs for those who need it, allowing bosses to treat those who do have jobs like shit, and executives to take virtually all productivity gains for themselves. The economic model is to pile debt on consumers to create rental streams, but constant debt payments put people under major psychological pressure, all the time.
~Ian Welsh
There it is, seabe.
The William Burroughs “Walk!!! Don’t Walk!!!” thing.
Eventually people go nuts.
The weak ones first.
So it goes.
What goes around comes around.
Watch.
Watch, and duck for cover when you hear the gunshots.
Bet on it.
AG
I don’t have the facts at my fingertips but there is also a pretty well established body off knowledge of what happens when the top 1% earn so many multiples of the bottom 1%.
The CIA and the UN and others use it openly.
Bad political and societal things happen. Predictably.
Sorry but this bombing smells bad and I just don’t know how I will accept our response. After 9/11 I was most depressed by our response as a nation and culture and not the attack.
Is hope we have learned something.
And I cried badly tonight to learn about 8 year old Martin who died yesterday in Boston
The reported ricin tainted letter may be overstated. However, if essentially correct and could have injured someone, it would be the first time a nutter managed to take ricin from a fantasy weapon to a real one.
Difficult to say that the level of craziness in the country is increasing. It may just get acted out in different ways and the singular and weird gets more media attention which attracts crazy copycats.
Contrary to you whiners, I have a vague understanding of the history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of this country. You know, the period when assassination attempts on civic leaders were routine, mayors were shot, presidents were shot, anarchists blew things up just because, unaccountable immigrant gangs and mafias existed in ghetto isolation from any semblance of a unified “state,” there was little such thing as a public police force, and oh yeah, half the country existed under a white supremacist terror regime where you could lynch a black guy from a tree for kicks?
We objectively live in the safest, sanest America that ever was. It’s not utopia, but it’s not hell. You just have the detriment of education and access to quality national news and information that allows you to learn of every incident of note in a nation of 310 million people, rather than the parochial knowledge of your immediate neighborhood and city, plus whatever an avid reader could piece together from assorted newsletters and periodicals they could get their hands on.
I tried to make this same point a couple of weeks ago to some people I know; that statistically speaking, we live in probably the safest time in human history. One guy, who lives in Detroit, almost jumped out of his skin when I said this. But the data really do spell this out in almost every way. Sure, there are areas of the country (Detroit???), and the world, that are wickedly dangerous. But on the whole, we are more safe than we have ever been. People’s intuition, mainly because of the instantaneous nature of the 24-7 new cycle, is just horribly off the mark.
Excellent point.
Bingo! This needs to be repeated as often as possible.
Yessirrebob, Don.
We jes’ fine!!!
Wake the fuck up.
Please.
We have taken the American bloodlust craziness and dispersed it among the third world countries that we have
selected to be our economic imperialist slave nations.WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
At least with the lynchers one had a chance to escape to the north.
Where are the Afghanis gonna run?
WTFU.
We are the Roman Empire gone berserk.
AG
Arthur, you wake the fuck up.
You actually think that the use of force overseas is greater in 2013 that is was when we used to invade and occupy Latin American countries every so often just because?
Why don’t you read a book about American history. It will be an enlightening experience.
No greater.
No less, either.
Just about the same.
Only more efficient now.
Does that make for fewer enemies?
I think not.
Can we sustain our position in the brand new world of burgeoning weaponry by using slightly more efficient means to cow the various neighborhoods from which we have historically stolen our excessive wealth at the point of a gun?
On the evidence of our ongoing decline, I say no. We cannot.
What to do?
Either bomb ’em all into the stone age or back the fuck offa the feed trough and take care of our own business.
Which one sounds best to you, numbnuts?
Lord save us from Neanderthals like you, sir. And that’s probably not giving Neanderthals a fair shake.
Lord save us all.
AG
No greater.
No less, either.
Just about the same.
Yeah, no.
Much, much less.
Much less than in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or 00s.
Can we sustain our position in the brand new world of burgeoning weaponry by using slightly more efficient means to cow the various neighborhoods from which we have historically stolen our excessive wealth at the point of a gun?
No, but then, we aren’t actually trying to do that. When we want to “sustain our position in the brand new world” and “cow neighborhoods,” we use massive air campaigns and invasions and occupations involving many thousands of troops. You might have noticed that we haven’t done any of those things in the last few years.
Drones can’t take or hold ground. They can’t secure resources. They can’t overthrow governments, or install new ones. They are incredibly poorly-suited to achieving imperialistic ends. All they are good for is keeping an eye on, and killing, a small number of operatives.
You should try to avoid losing your temper. Your thought process is shaky enough under the best of circumstances. Numbnuts? What are you, eleven?
Nineteen.
Forever.
What’s it to ya?
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Further…
The U.S. is indeed trying to maintain its position in the world as the greatest, most successful imperial nation that has ever existed.
Its position as the greatest “user” nation on earth.
Its position as a nation comprised of people who have gotten rich off of the suffering of others. (Always remember, owning a house in the suburbs and a couple of cars is being “rich” in most third world countries. That’s why so many people emigrate to the U.S. from those countries.)
The failure of the Vietnam War…you remember, the one that used your “massive air campaigns and invasions and occupations involving many thousands of troops”…was a wakeup call for the controllers here, as have been the proliferation of nuclear weapons among the nations that have been previously targeted by our economic imperialism, the failure of the Iraq War due to guerrilla-style opposition that has made it impossible to truly “win” that kind of war…i.e., maintain our financial advantage as user of a given country’s natural resources…and the astonishingly effective use of the mere threat of terror attacks to keep the entire country in a state of fear. (A state of fear that the controllers have very profitably used to their own advantage to create a security state that now has a death grip around the psyches of almost all Americans whether they realize that fact or not. The citizens of the U.S. are now coming under the same “terroristic” control that the U.S. has used to cow the populations of other nations. Again…you know…the constant fear that they can be murdered or arrested and locked up in Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo-level prisons with no recourse to any trial or representation? Wake the fuck up.) As fearsome as is our military strength and weaponry, the U.S. can no longer win wars based solely on military strength unless it uses nuclear means, and to do that would be a risk that even the craziest of our controllers have so far been loath to take. The best that it has been able to do is to fight to a stalemate in such situations, and stalemates of that sort drain the country of power instead of turning a profit.
What to do, what to do?
Take a page from our successful adversaries and become a “terrorist” nation as well, but do it one better with the use of death from the skies. One more time…you know, like Hitler w/the V2s, only much efficiently practiced. Once the population of a given nation realizes that it can be selectively murdered…or not so selectively, as is the case with this kind of terrorist aim…w/absolutely no warning and also absolutely no possibility of defense or escape, just “BAM!!! Yer outta here!!!” then that population is more easily manipulated politically into a position that favors U.S./NATO hegemony.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see how well it works over the next three years of O’Bomb’em. If it’s working out…that is, if the U.S. continues turning a profit that is acceptable to its owners…then we will see Hillary Clinton in there to continue the operation unless she is not well enough to do so, and if she isn’t well enough then some other neo-liberal will be groomed to fit the bill. If this tack fails to produce “acceptable” profits then some other tack will be taken.
Like I said…we’ll see.
Those of us who are awake enough to have a clue will see, anyway.
You?
Not.
So it goes, and have a nice day in lovely Lowell.
Later…
AG
Hi, I’m Arthur. I’ve never heard of the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine, or the Philippines, but I’m going to condescend to people when discussing foreign policy and history anyway.
Jesus, your kind of devoted ignorance irritates me.
I was thinking of Steven Pinker’s research (see brief review here), when I wrote my original comment – along with of course the last couple decades of falling violent crime statistics within the boundaries of the US (we are an outlier among developed nations, but we’re trending in the right direction).
Otherwise, <sigh>.
Exactly. I know it seems like this happens a lot more often but that is because the communication level is so intense.
Look up terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. Look up mass shooting events over the decades. These aren’t new.
Since 1960, twice as many people which may mean twice as many violence prone crazies. And more of them today than then can more easily build home arsenals with much higher firepower and obtain bomb making instructions off the internet. Considering just that, it’s surprising that the major home grown terrorist attacks aren’t more frequent.
You’re absolutely right.
Have you ever met an old lady who responds to every story in the newspaper about a shooting somewhere by proclaiming that things are getting worse and worse and it’s not safe to sit on her front porch anymore? Even though violent crime has been dropping for more than two decades?
Same thing.
Glass flooring
“I don’t know what is wrong with people.”
Probably global warming. Expect more as it get’s hotter.