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N. Waziristan clashes: Troops pound militant hideouts, 40 killed
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Page 6: Politix
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-Land of the Free
Brandon Webb: The Gun Problem in America
Brandon Webb, prior service US military wants to run for a spot in the NRA's board, and to burnish his credentials as a fascist. So far, he is really doing a great job.
Mass shootings in America have become something of a national past time. A lot of young men, frustrated with life, overmedicated, armed with the fresh realization that everyone ISN'T a WINNER in life, go get guns and shoot people. In 2008 America had over 12,000 deaths at the end of a firearm, compared to 11 in Japan, skew for population ratios and it's still a massively high number.
Like statistics, Webb oversimplifies matters, first by charging that young men are overmedicated, setting up his first strawman. I know a number of young men, most of whom own firearms who would never conceive of shooting anyone let alone in mass numbers, and who are unmedicated.
I was watching CNN's Piers Morgan's exchange with Alex Jones the other night, it was crazy (see below for yourself).
Shit! Alex Jones is crazy. Using a conspiracy theorist and conflating him with the right to keep and bear arms is another means of the propagandist. Jones is a TWANLOC. Piers Morgan has Jones on as a guest for the pro 2nd Amendment side precisely to damage one side of the argument before it even began, and Jones, obliged him.
More minutes of my life wasted watching my fellow Americans continue to spiral into the polarized black hole that has become the gun debate in the US.
The gun "debate" (which is really a lecture by leftist fascists) is polarized because our fascists opponents want to make it polarized. They are doing the polarizing!
Congrats to CNN for increasing their ratings, make no mistake that Piers's producers knew exactly what they were doing, and what they would get with Alex Jones. Be careful what you wish for Piers.
Huh?
Mass shootings with "Active Shooters" is a problem we can't ignore any longer. I for one am willing to take a leadership role on the issue.
I for one am willing to do everything, spend any amount of time and resources to stop you.
America's culture is rooted in gun ownership. I'm a gun owner and enjoy shooting with my son in a safe controlled environment. I personally wouldn't have taught him firearms safety at such a young age if given the option. However, America is rooted in gun ownership culture I thought it best to drive home firearms safety and the responsibility that comes with handling firearms. His mother and I did decide to take away all his violent shooting video games, not a good thing for a ten year old to practice taking head shots, and this could potentially lead to mental health issues, better safe than sorry I say.
Sounds like your boy already has mental problems coming down the pike from his parents. My bet is that he will go over to friends' house and play the games anyway. Way to lose your son.
I don't have all the solutions on this issue but I do know that I'm personally ready to compromise to limit mass shootings, and I'm ready to have an intelligent conversation on this issue.
Good. Gather up your firearms, the ones you own, and sell them. Just keep your hands and the hands of your governmental allies off everyone else's
If leading gun organizations like the NRA don't take a leadership role in proposing realistic solutions, then they will have failed to truly represent gun owners.
The NRA has already failed to do that. You just want to accelerate the process of selling our rights to the government.
The result will be that politicians will end up passing more ridiculous laws that don't make sense for anyone.
My guess is that you are not paying attention, nor have ever had your rights taken from you for life without trial.
The issue is cultural also, you can't just go after gun control. Most silly laws passed, especially magazine limitations. It's like trying to get rid of drunk drivers by shrinking the size of gas tanks in cars. Yes, it really is that silly.
Broken clock
Sometimes change, and healthy debate, as difficult as it can be at first, is a good thing.
Those who want to keep and bear arms don't have a debate. What we have is a lecture by people who at the outset want to use US statutes and its security forces to destroy right enshrined in the Constitution.
After all it was once within our constitutional rights to own and enslave other human beings.
Nice one.
I believe in the 2nd Amendment and our right to bear arms but, if we continue to do nothing on the issue (mainly a mental health one) of mass shootings then we can expect more of them in the near future. Remember that when you kiss your kids goodbye on their way to school.
Brandon Webb: Savior of your school aged children, who wants to pass laws that do nothing to protect anyone but politicians and their armed henchmen.
Posted by: badanov || 12/21/2013 00:00 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under:

#1  They're too expensive, can't get enough of them and the ammo costs too much, that's the problem!
Posted by: Skidmark || 12/21/2013 7:11 Comments || Top||

#2  The so-called "gun problem" has little if anything to do with crime. A government which gives millions of tax dollars each year to 'Planned Parenthood' cannot possibly be concerned about the loss of human life.

Firearms offer personal security [that is the job of big government] and are a proven, long term financial investment. The little people are not supposed to profit from investments, especially investments which cannot be tampered with by the tax man. Financial investments, thriftiness, and savings makes one independent of government and provides freedom from oppression and security.
Posted by: Besoeker || 12/21/2013 7:22 Comments || Top||

#3  In 2008 America had over 12,000 deaths at the end of a firearm, compared to 11 in Japan

Japan is pretty much homogenous culturally and racially. First remove those deaths that occurred in incidents of self defense. Second remove all those associated with self hyphenated ethnic groups. Third, then do a comparison with a similar ethnic group back in the old home counties (1.5 million Japanese out of 320 million Americans is not a viable sample to compare the bulk of the American population with other than to make an politically charged comparison - try using European numbers).
Posted by: P2kontheroad || 12/21/2013 9:27 Comments || Top||

#4  I shied away from Brandon Webb when he began backing the Obama administration's explanation of events concerning Benghazi. I used to visit his SOFREP site faithfully, but no more.
Posted by: OCCD || 12/21/2013 9:54 Comments || Top||

#5  Piers Morgan.
My fellow American.
Gimme the keys duude.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 12/21/2013 11:55 Comments || Top||

#6  1.Race and homicide. According to the United States Department of Justice: Blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicides, whites 45.3% and Native Americans and Asians 2.2%, from 1980 to 2008. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most murders were intraracial, with 84% of white homicide victims murdered by whites, and 93% of black victims murdered by blacks.
2.Hispanics statistically treated as whites. Hispanics folded into whites in UCR (Uniform Crime Reports collected monthly by the FBI0. The UCR classifies most Hispanics into the "white" category. The NCVS classifies some Hispanic criminals as "white" and some as "other race". The victim categories for the NCVS are more distinct [The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) program, established in 1972, is a national survey of a representative sample of households in the United States which covers the frequency of crime victimization and the characteristics and consequences of victimization. The primary purpose behind the NCVS program is to gather information on crimes that were not reported to police, though information is also collected on reported crimes].
3.Youth Gang Crime. The "National Youth Gang Survey Analysis" (2009) state that of gang members, 49% are Hispanic/Latino, 35% are African-American/black, 9% are white, and 7% are other race/ethnicity. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, in the year 2008 black youths, who make up 16% of the youth population, accounted for 52% of juvenile violent crime arrests, including 58.5% of youth arrests for homicide and 67% for robbery. Black youths were overrepresented in all offense categories except DUI, liquor laws and drunkenness.
4. A cultural and racial problem. Homicide tends to be a cultural and racial problem in the US. It is not clear how the US homicide rate compares to other countries if culture and race are considered.
5.Sources. FBI UC, and Race and Crime
Posted by: JohnQC || 12/21/2013 11:56 Comments || Top||

#7  Repeal the NFA. Why does no one run on that platform?
Posted by: Iblis || 12/21/2013 12:47 Comments || Top||

#8  His mother and I did decide to take away all his violent shooting video games, not a good thing for a ten year old to practice taking head shots, and this could potentially lead to mental health issues, better safe than sorry I say.

A wise move, considering he has a family history of wetting themselves when exposed to CNN.

Sounds like the kind of a-hole who watches Cars 2 and cries over the written letter, but then never realizes that cars cannot write letters, even in Cars.

After all it was once within our constitutional rights to own and enslave other human beings.

It was? Where? In the traditional sense of any culture enslaving any peoples, the slaves are not allowed to express their opinions, own their own property, experience privacy, openly worship, and for Moses' sake have weapons. Every single bit of the Bill of Rights protects individuals from slavery, and indeed sets into motion the freeing of New World slaves, a practice which predates British colonialists never mind the Revolution, Confederation, then our Constitution.

You can take your whimpering personally reasons for training your kids with skills and shove them up their potty holes. Do you regret teaching your kids about crossing the street because Car Culture? One of the primos in those video games is the stealth kill via knife or whatnot, do you regret teaching your kids about tableware?

Can't just go after gun control. Your tiny fascist is showing. Its quite dinky.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 12/21/2013 12:55 Comments || Top||

#9  Mass shootings in America have become something of a national past time.

In a nation pushing 300,000,000 people, there's one every nine months or so.

This clown needs to be taught what "mistaken vividness" means.
Posted by: Rob Crawford || 12/21/2013 15:27 Comments || Top||

#10  In Japan people don't have guns, so of course that isn't what they're using to kill themselves. Instead, they most commonly hang themselves, or jump to their deaths, whether off mountainsides or in front of trains. Men kill themselves when they lose their jobs, or retire, or can't repay loans, or are divorced; teens and young adults kill themselves because they didn't get into the college of their choice, or because they didn't get a job, or because of love, and always, at all ages, because life is too hard and they are depressed. And beyond that the young people aren't getting married or having children, or even allowing themselves to fall in love, because what is the point when they can't afford an apartment or the demands of independent adulthood? So the suicide rate can be expected to continue to increase as the population ever more rapidly ages.

Last year the death rate in Japan rose above the birth rate for the first time, with worse to follow, as outlying villages empty, and a typical single person's efficiency apartment in the outskirts of Tokyo is too cozy to have even a single visitor. Trailing daughter #2 spent eight months in Tokyo on an internship this year, and although she is very glad she went, her stories are full of distressing details.

And, as it happens, hanging is second most common method of suicide in the U.S. but the whole gun death thing needs to be parsed carefully. Among whites, as I recall, most gun deaths are the result of suicides, whereas among blacks most gun deaths are of young men either in or related to gangs during crimes, drive-bys, and shootouts. So to address the gun death problem in the white community you'd want to address depression, whereas in the black community reducing criminality and illegally acquired guns would significantly reduce the problem. But to reduce criminality, abysmal education and an anti-education culture would have to be addressed concurrently with a significant increase in entry level, skills-training jobs that would allow the males in the community particularly to hope for achievement beyond the neighborhood gangs... among other societal changes to discourage welfarism and single motherhood.

Schools and jobs would be just as good for poor whites, but people tend not to break out the death statistics that way. And to do that, of course, we would have to send/drive home all the illegal residents crowding out the citizenry at the bottom of the work skills ladder.

As for mass shootings, most of those in the post-Reagan era turn out to have been done by paranoid schizophrenics whose parents had been frantically trying to find a mental hospital accepting patients for lifelong care, even as the few remaining mental hospitals are looking at closure. Open more mental hospitals and allow involuntary commission of the most egregious cases, and not only the number of mass murders but the number of family murders would go down significantly. (See one current proposal here.)

Are you ready to tackle all of that, Mr. Webb, instead of blithering on in glittering generalities?
Posted by: trailing wife || 12/21/2013 15:51 Comments || Top||

#11  Absolutely TW.

Not everybody enjoys that nice, safe controlled environment so pomply demonstrated, security or emotional wise.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 12/21/2013 22:09 Comments || Top||


Europe
Things are not what they seem
As pro-European Union demonstrations swell in Kiev's equivalent of Tahrir Square and Western leaders sing hosannas to Ukrainian ostensibly Europhile demos, it's easy to forget that that there is a reality behind the apparent reality.

Western media started writing about the skeletons rattling in the closet of Ukraine's "democratic opposition" mainly in the last couple of days, after Senator John McCain took his usual traveling Neocon circus to the Ukraine and was photographed with some individuals of questionable connections. But in Eastern Europe, where people speak languages kin to the Ukrainian, and have some troubling memories, scrutiny of the "Euro-maydan" -- the Kiev square on which pro-EU, anti current-regime demonstrations have been taking place, began earlier.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 12/21/2013 03:20 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
North Waziristan blast
[DAWN] WHETHER it is a mosque or a church, religiously motivated gunnies care little; whether it is a school, a hospital or a garrison, they are indifferent. What matters to them is the enemy's death -- and it is of little consequence whoever else gets killed in the process. Wednesday's suicide kaboom killed reportedly five soldiers and maimed many others when the driver of an explosives-laden truck rammed his vehicle into a mosque next to a major checkpost in Khajori, North Wazoo, although some reports indicate that it was the checkpost that was targeted. The jacket wallah struck when nearly 50 soldiers of the Frontier Corps were offering evening prayers. Such was the power packed into the bomber's vehicle that the mosque collapsed.

This is not for the first time that a mosque has fallen victim to the practical manifestation of the Taliban's concept of jihad. In their attempt to kill politician Aftab Sherpao, they bombed an Eid prayer congregation at Charsadda, killing over 50 people in December 2007; two years later, the gunnies blew up a Rawalpindi mosque during Friday prayers in a high security zone, killing 40 people, including children and a major general; and in 2010, over 70 Mohammedans lay dead after the Taliban blasted a mosque in Darra Adamkhel. The list is long. With talks in the air and some mainstream politicians acting virtually as Taliban spokesmen, the hard boys' attack on the soldiers at prayer conveys a chillingly clear message -- the Taliban leadership is not going to exercise restraint to create a congenial atmosphere for talks. That the Taliban have left to the government to do -- unilaterally and without expecting any reciprocity. It is now for those who conferred shahadat on Hakeemullah Mehsud to let us know who was the shaheed this time round: the suicide bomber or the soldiers at prayer?
Posted by: Fred || 12/21/2013 00:00 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under: al-Qaeda in Pakistan

#1  The Mosque collapsed?

Couldnt be muslims, who NEVER target other muslims (Sarc, should anyone not know)
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 12/21/2013 13:11 Comments || Top||


Hostility to vaccine
[DAWN] SOME people in our country are campaigning against polio
...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set...
vaccination on the basis of apparently religious reasons. It is important, therefore, that the reasons they are presenting are analysed on religious grounds to see if they are valid.

Two reasons are often presented: the campaign is a conspiracy of the non-Moslem world against Moslems to check their population growth by making their future generations impotent and infertile. It is said that Dr Shakeel Afridi's fake hepatitis campaign has lent further credence to this theory.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred || 12/21/2013 00:00 || Comments || Link || [8 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan



Who's in the News
40[untagged]
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5Arab Spring
3Govt of Syria
3al-Qaeda in Pakistan
2Jamaat-e-Islami
1Houthis
1PLO
1al-Qaeda in Sinai Peninsula
1Boko Haram
1Commies
1Govt of Iran
1Hezbollah

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Two weeks of WOT
Sat 2013-12-21
  N. Waziristan clashes: Troops pound militant hideouts, 40 killed
Fri 2013-12-20
  AQ in Syria executes top US backed FSA commander.
Thu 2013-12-19
  Suicide attack kills 5 soldiers in Miranshah
Wed 2013-12-18
  Iran nuke deal implodes
Tue 2013-12-17
  Ansar Al-Sharia homes attacked in revenge for Benghazi kiilling
Mon 2013-12-16
  Assailants stab Japan diplomat in Yemen
Sun 2013-12-15
  Six killed in US drone strike in Khyber Agency
Sat 2013-12-14
  Deadly clashes in Bangladesh after top JI leader hanged
Fri 2013-12-13
  Bangladesh executes Islamist leader and convicted war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah
Thu 2013-12-12
  Boko Haram slaughters nine people in Borno
Wed 2013-12-11
  French Army Kills 19 Islamist Militants in Mali
Tue 2013-12-10
  MILF, Manila reach power-sharing agreement
Mon 2013-12-09
  Top Hizbullah Military Commander Ali Bazzi Killed in Syria Fighting
Sun 2013-12-08
  Gunmen Kill Nine at Baghdad Alcohol Shops
Sat 2013-12-07
  Gunmen kill ASWJ Punjab chief in drive-by shooting in Lahore


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