Category: Current Events

I'd never even heard—much less knew the definitions—of more than half of these (in red)…

Oxford Word Additions for February 2013

appletini
Baggy Green
biosimilar
blootered
braggadocious
burrata
cane corso
cruft
dumbphone
feature-complete
flexitarian
FOSS
friend zone
hump day
metabolic syndrome
omnium
range anxiety
schlumpy
sillage
social sharing
SSD
touchless
tray bake
tweetable
upcharge
voluntourism

(Source)

Now Pakistan now has their panties in a pinch.

I'm sure this is going to spark more howls of outrage from my regular readers, but fuck it.  Until we address the underlying causes of gun violence in America (i.e. the lack of mental health care and the ridiculously easy availability of firearmss), it's true.

From John Aravosis at AMERICAblog:

Americans do a great job of proclaiming our collective shock and outrage when some nut for the gazillionth time opens fire on a crowd of innocent bystanders at a movie theater, a college, a high school, a museum, or a post office, but at some point, if we aren't going to do anything about it, maybe it's time we stopped the charade of pretending we actually care.

How many times does someone have to drown in front of us, while we do nothing (and, instead, actually enable the death), before it's time to conclude that perhaps we are part of the problem?

From EJ Dionne at the Moderate Voice:

For all the dysfunction in our political system, a healthy pattern usually takes hold when a terrible tragedy seizes the nation's attention.

Anyone who dares to say that an event such as the massacre at a Colorado movie theater early Friday morning demands that we rethink our approach to the regulation of firearms is accused of "exploiting" the deaths of innocent people.

This is part of the gun lobby's rote response, and the rest of us allow it to work every time. Their goal is to block any conversation about how our nation's gun laws, the most permissive in the industrialized world, increase the likelihood of mass killings of this sort.

So let's ask ourselves: Aren't we all in danger of being complicit in throwing up our hands and allowing the gun lobby to write our gun laws? Awful things happen, we mourn them, and then we shrug. And that's why they keep happening.

The Boomtown Rats wrote "I don't like Mondays" in 1979, thirty-three years ago. Violence in America isn't a recent problem. It's been going on for a while now. And nothing serious is ever done about it because the gun lobby is ruthless, owns the Republican party, and preys on the Democrats usual fear of doing anything that isn't agreeable to 100% of the American people.

So the next time some nut goes on a shooting spree with weapons the gun lobby made it easier for him to get – and he will – let's stop pretending like we care, because as a nation we really don't.

Amen,  John.