Open Thread Feb. 15: Insert Thoughts and Prayers Here, Repeat as Often as Necessary
Unless you’re an obsessive consumer of school-shooting stories, there’s not much in the news today. White House reporters are keeping up the heat on Sarah Huckabee over the Rob Porter scandal, but nobody outside Politico has noticed because the air is so thick with thoughts and prayers.
Elizabeth Warren has been dogged for six years now by questions about whether or not she has Cherokee heritage, so yesterday she tackled it head-on with a speech to the National Congress of American Indians.
I never suspected that Bibi Netanyahu was a crook. I had long thought he was a nationalist ideologue along the lines of Charles de Gaulle, but recent revelations indicate otherwise. Maybe he’s just trying to fit in with the globe’s growing strongman movement, but he’s now pulling a Trump by attacking the investigators who turned up his alleged crimes.
Jason330 told you last month about the approach of Day Zero in Cape Town, when the city will run out of water (the date has moved back from April to June 4). The main problem is drought, but its effects were made worse by politics and lack of planning which, in human affairs, qualify as “the usual suspects.”
You know when the U.S. passed its most comprehensive gun control legislation? October 1968.
You know how many politicians running for national office were victims of assassination attempts in 1968? Two, RFK and George Wallace.
Coincidence?
Dig this. Velda Jones Potter, of the Potter disorganized crime family, has asked the city for a $20,000 wage increase. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
h/t Christina Jedra
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2018/02/15/wilmington-treasurer-requests-20-000-raise/340409002/
After every shooting I wait to see if we’ve had enough. My key indicator is the time it takes for the “thoughts and prayers” to surface. The shooting started at 2:59. Gov. Rick Scott won as the first notable to offer “thoughts and prayers.” He came in at 3:44. Trump tweeted “prayers and condolences” at 3:50, but was disqualified because he deviated from the approved form for “thoughts and prayers.” Perhaps he did not have any thoughts.
We haven’t had enough yet apparently.
It’s like cocaine. There’s never enough. We’re all extremely sick.
Purely hypothetical thought here:
If I said I felt like shooting every politician who makes no mention of guns and says these incidents prove a need for better mental health services … would that make me crazy?
For one to hold such a view, I would consider it quite rational.
As I pray for the victims, I also pray for the lawmakers who have yet to develop the wisdom required to realize that the best way to reduce the likelihood of such incidents recurring is to enact meaningful restrictions on the owership and possession of firearms.
“Desalination plants were deemed too expensive and cumbersome for a situation that the city’s bureaucrats believed would resolve itself. A fully completed plant in the nearby Mossel Bay municipality was mothballed in 2011; at slightly less than a dollar a kiloliter, the water it produced was deemed too expensive.”
Austerity is expensive.
“a need for better mental health services ”
There is a need for better health services, but that does not obviate the need for keeping firearms out the hands of those who need those health services. Nor does it obviate the need to keep weapons originally developed for the military out the hands of civilians or obviate the need to keep such “tools” out the hands of those who brains are not fully formed, which science says is around 25, or obviate the need to do background checks to ensure that someone should own or have a firearm. Yadda, Yadda.
None or all of the above may have prevented this tragedy. We cannot truly know what would have done that. However, prudence dictate the we define an approach that increases the likelihood of preventing such future tragedies.
But alas, we do nothing because organizations like the NRA won the war of words by conflating any action with regards to guns as an infringement and we are not adept enough to create a new language around the topic that focuses on safety and responsibility, etc.
“thoughts and prayers” ??
There’s a good reason that faith and piety are considered to be the false virtues.
The GOP’s words and actions explain this perfectly… how faith and piety can be used as a cover for malfeasance, depravity, and hate.