[Thought Catalogue - 11 Sep 2019] Every time there’s a mass shooting in America it understandably starts up another "national conversation" about gun rights because, by definition, there would be no mass shootings without guns.
But since mass shootings are perpetrated by an extremely tiny minority of gun owners, many of whom don’t even own their guns legally, perhaps it’s naïve to think that gun ownership is itself the sole or even primary cause of mass shootings. Countries such as Norway, France, and Switzerland—all of which have stricter gun laws and lower per-capita gun ownership than the United States—have far higher per-capita rates of mass shootings.
When searching for other reasons for mass shootings, people blame things such as one-parent households, video games, loss of religious faith, or simply the vague sense that the nation is falling apart.
Although only 8.6% of American males are on antidepressants at any given time, they seem much better represented as a percentage of mass shooters. Here are 39 mass shooters who were either on antidepressants at the time of their rampage, had abruptly quit taking their medication when they went on their spree, or had been prescribed antidepressants at some point in the past. None of this is to imply that antidepressants make certain people go on mass shootings—just as few people with guns go on shooting sprees, so do few people on antidepressants. But it is an area that is definitely worth researching.
#1
Again, people with emotional and mental issues taking drugs that help with mental and emotional issues is as shocking as finding that a cancer patient is taking chemotherapy drugs.
This crap is pushed by Scientology, and I'm disgusted every time I see a "conservative" picking it up.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/10/2022 12:40 Comments ||
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#2
Even if every single mass shooter were on anti depressants, it wouldn't prove that antidepressants cause the mass shooting. What should matter is the percentage of people taking antidepressants who commit mass shootings.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
07/10/2022 14:08 Comments ||
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#3
All it proves is a lot of fucked up people do a lot of fucked up things. And they were on antidepressants. So are a lot of fucked up people on them, but they don't kill people.
#4
Honestly, the quest to blame antidepressants for mass shootings is no different than the quest to blame guns. Both movements place the blame on inanimate objects, and so both ignore the reality that people -- damaged, sick people, but still people -- chose to commit these atrocities.
But both routes let people ignore that, and to convince themselves there's a simple solution that's being blocked by bad people with evil motivations. I guess it's easier than being an adult.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/10/2022 19:39 Comments ||
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#5
Well Rob, you are certainly right about one thing. There appears to be no "simple solutions."
#6
I see no reason this shouldn't be investigated, but only in regards that all aspects of the path that lead to it should. Evidence is evidence, some leads nowhere, some leads to reasons. Nothing should be written off without actual reason, no matter what it is. Now, once there is reason, all well and good.
#8
Correlation is not causation, and as the article points out, a number of factors have been proposed as driving spree killings. More research is definitely a good idea before making claims.
In the meantime, though, training and arming staff at soft targets is a good idea, and changing the tone of the reportage to discourage copycats would be helpful. I was pleased to read, in one of the articles about the most recent one, that when the then-future killer stopped in at a synagogue during services, he was closely examined by congregants, some of whom regularly carried concealed weapons by arrangement. The spokesman thought afterward that the killer was casing the place and decided to take his massacre elsewhere.
#10
I found lots of articles when I searched that term, Woodrow. History, connection to hallucinations and schizophrenia..l It’s a standard watch-out when trying to find the right dose of seratonin-reuptake inhibitor antidepressants — we spent an unhappy night when that was the concern for trailing daughter #1 during her teen years, but she came out all right from it.
In them is revealed some of what has gone dangerously wrong in American culture. All reveal a deeply dysfunctional, deliberately chaotic, and pathetically nihilistic country gone off the rails thanks to progressive policies emanating from this White House, Democrat operatives, "progressives," and sympathizers. Everything is precisely backward from what it should be were the country psychologically, spiritually, and politically healthy.
We have the American military, once the finest fighting force on the planet, being forced to accept and embrace transgenderism in the shower, the most intimate place a person could be with others. We cannot fight a war to defend our people and our soil when the fighting force is split along a sexual and gender fault.
We have the White House and Democrat politicians who are fine with harassing and protesting, violently if necessary, SCOTUS justices who voted in a way that is distasteful to progressives. This goes against the American idea that in politics you win some and you lose some. The Left believe they should always win. This is political narcissism, unhealthy at best, freedom-killing at worst.
We have our president selling oil from America’s strategic reserves to Europe at the very time when our oil prices here in America are skyrocketing due to a shortage in supply which in itself is due to Biden & Co. shutting down our own production to placate the green agenda. Our reserves are reserved for America. That is why they are called reserves.
We have two illegal aliens plotting a July 4th massacre on our soil. One was given a measly $15,000 bail. The other was simply charged with being in possession of a firearm as an alien. Were they January 6 protestors, they would have been given life behind bars.
[American Thinker] No Democrat has actually said "all your child are belong to us," but every time I read a story about the Democrat push to sever the parent-child relationship, I’m reminded of that long ago Japanese video game with the horrible translation: "All your base are belong to us." Beginning with Lenin, all totalitarian takeovers have involved co-opting children and breaking them away from their families. We’re seeing this with a vengeance in the medical field, where children as young as 12 can make unilateral medical decisions—including destroying their bodies with dangerous hormones and mutilating surgery.
Vladimir Lenin, who formed the Soviet government in 1917, was quite explicit about the importance of children to the cause. "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." The core of Hitler’s growing cultural takeover during the 1930s was the Hitler Youth organization, which skillfully taught children to ally themselves with the state and against their parents. During the Iran-Iraq war, the mullahs outfitted children with cheap trinkets that they were promised were keys to heaven and then sent them out to do battle against hardened Iraqi troops. As Mussolini said, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State," and totalitarians have applied that rule to children too.
What does this have to do with children and healthcare? A little explanation may help.
What one needs to understand in America in 2022 is that the Democrat party is no longer your father’s party. Those of us older than 50 or so, vividly remember when our parents and their friends would get together and talk politics. Regardless of party, they had the same social, economic, and political values. They just believed in different ways to achieve their political goals.
#1
In Washington State, as one angry parent discovered, the school can put a child on antidepressants without informing the parent (never mind the increasing evidence that psychotropic drugs are almost invariably a factor when White kids engage in mass shootings).
#2
It is obvious, parents must have clearly defined legal rights and authority. As Government now seems to be ruled by the less than 4% that comprise the over-indulged politically represented Immoral Oddities of the Liberal Socialist Democrat party.
Many of which, are clearly seen by the American Psychological Association (APA) as having serious mental illness issues. Remember, we are told to follow "The SCIENCE", except when it shows how stupid or weird the Left is.
But, no matter how you look at it. This very, very, small group is actively pushing their Immoral Mental Illness based lifestyles on us and our kids that make up the 95+% of what we call semi-normal society.
Anti-depressants aren't "psychotropic", and mass shooters invariably have long histories of mental issues so finding they're being treated for those issues is only shocking to complete morons.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/10/2022 15:43 Comments ||
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#7
/\ Not pushing anything Rob. Might well be a chicken or the egg argument. Throw in the evil of 'Big Pharma' money and I think there is something to take note of. I'll continue to study it. Perhaps my views are too narrow. Jump in anytime, I am more than open to criticism, constructive or otherwise.
#9
Antidepressants are just incidental. An effect of a symptom of a deeper malaise. It begins with faulty academics, invasive government and rampant malignancies of liberal philosophy destroying the institution of family. Divorces, affairs, restraining orders, abuse, just no sanctity of the patent-child relationship anymore. And it's gaining takers everywhere now, not just in America.
The availability of firearms too is incidental, a factor that's just there. What's at fault is the feeb alphabeteers and judiciary who force society to accommodate damaged people with negative value to society. Philosophy that accords them sympathy for being victims of the civilizational malaise is fine too, as long as it stays confined to taxpayer funded rose gardens at funny farms.
But government will have none of that. It can't. You see, loonies have proliferated so much that now they are constituencies full of 'em! And they're represented by powerful loonies.
Antidepressants were just a necessity, like guns. It was a downward spiralling so ial order that made them necessary. Of course, demand ➡️ supply. And the corporations profit off peddling both to all and sundry. The role of a righteous State is to provide conditions where neither are in great demand. But then the State's full of grifters and motherfcukers on-the-take.
I remember it started with the psychiatrists, as they conveniently codified their half-baked theories based on who was fit for integration into the industrial machine and who were individualistic outliers. The film Matrix is somewhat about that. Then came the problems at school, the delinquency given a pass by assholes and idiots in legislatures and school districts. The whole 'fuck you, mom, I hate you!' thingy. Hollywood was certainly no help, it only beat the hammer harder, driving more and more nails into the lid. The straying from religion was a major factor in all of this, I know some of you will disagree, that's okay.
Children should not need mental healthcare at all, in an even remotely prosperous society. Unless they have genuine problems of course. Truth is, the Democrats envision a society that can be regulated easily, with just 'triggers' and stern voices. And fir that they'll go to the length of intruding into families, breaking them apart, intruding into churches, into sound doctrine, into your minds if need be... to produce unhealthy individuals.
#10
It's late but I"ll put in two cents worth.
I once read that people in the west during the Victorian were generally smarter and healthier than 20th century Americans.
My feeling is the drug era beginning in the 1950's and the survival of the weakest by modern medicine has contributed to the human race becoming dumber and mentally less healthy than in the past. Drugs damaging the DNA and weak individuals reproducing is beginning to take it's toll on Americans. Top that off with politicians putting party before country and we have a mess.
[SaharaReporters] The first casualty of capricious election seasons in Nigeria is security. Governance is abandoned, and all efforts and expense are dissipated on party politics. Nigeria’s security insalubrity is deteriorating steeply as the 2023 elections close in. It is all reminiscent of the build-up to the 2015 elections when ubiquitous violence seized the country and the elections had to be postponed. Will it be again as it was before? Will it be plus ca change?
On July 3, Udo Peter and Philemon Oboh, both priests of the Catholic church, were kidnapped by button men in Edo state. The button men reportedly kidnapped the Catholic priests on Benin-Auchi expressway. On July 4, the despoilers kidnapped Emmanuel Silas, a Catholic priest, in Kaduna state. Silas was reportedly kidnapped in Zambina, Kauru LGA of the state.
On June 25, the ravagers killed Vitus Borogo, the chaplain of the Catholic Church in Kaduna Polytechnic. Borogo was reportedly killed at the Prison Farm, Kujama, along Kaduna-Kachia road. Weeks before this incident, Joseph Bako, a Catholic priest who was kidnapped in March from his residence at St John Catholic Church, Kudenda, Kaduna, was found dead.
Continued on Page 49
[EERADICALIZATION] Since the Moslem Brüderbund’s arrival in Germany in 1950, the German policy towards the Brotherhood has gone through several phases. In the first phase, there was a huge lack of understanding of the phenomenon and the risk posed by Islamism in general and the Moslem Brüderbund in particular. The Brotherhood established itself in Germany via Said Ramadan (1926-1995), the son-in-law of the founder of the Moslem Brüderbund, Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949). In the 1960s, Said was put in charge of a "Mosque Construction Commission" for a house of worship in Munich. In cooperation with the Egyptian businessman Yusuf Nada and the Syrian-Italian Ghalib Himmat, the mosque became the headquarters of the Brotherhood in not only in Germany but the whole of Europe.[1]
The mosque Commission developed into a coordinating node for the Brotherhood presence in Germany, linking mosques, Islamic centres, and various front groups and associations across all major German cities. In the mid-1980s, this structure became the main representative of the Brotherhood in Germany, and it was renamed the Islamic Community of Germany (Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland or IGD), under the guidance of Mehdi Akef, an Egyptian Brother, who became the Imam of the mosque and later the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood overall.[2] The Brotherhood presence in Germany was reinforced by a flow of Brothers from Egypt and Syria, fleeing the government crackdowns on their activities. The Syrian Brothers who settled in Germany after the failure of their full-fledged rebellion in the early 1980s tended to concentrate around Aachen, near the border with Belgium. The Syrian-dominated Aachen node of the Brothers cooperated with the Egyptian Brothers in Munich, but the two remained separate.[3]
The lack of understanding and the indifference of German policy-makers enabled the expansion of the Brotherhood presence all over Germany. As one German diplomat stated: "There was a prevalent view that conflicts between the Moslem Brüderbund and its governments were of no concern to Germany and that these were ’domestic quarrels’. Our policymakers did not grasp the relevance of the Islamist movement because religion was widely considered to be an important factor for underdevelopment and the Islamists seemed backward-oriented while the dictatorships in the Middle East were seen as modernizing elements".[4]
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
07/10/2022 00:04 ||
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[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C. — Leader of the free world and President of the United States Joe Biden issued an apology to the American people for an embarrassing blunder that had occurred earlier, stating the following:
"As President, the buck stops with me, pause for dramatic effect. Earlier, I read the wrong words in the teleprompter, don't say telecommuter or helicopter. I apologize for my latest teleprompter gaffe, end apology."
Following the public statement, members of the press were quickly ushered out of the fake press room and off the premises where the duct tape was removed from their mouths. The journalists then began reporting on the relief of having a gracious, humble president who was not Trump.
Biden aides quickly logged into Twitter to remind everyone that Biden did not actually say those things that the whole world watched him say.
At publishing time, Biden's Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had responded to questions about his capacity to serve as president with the poignant reminder she was a black, gay, immigrant woman.
[Dawn] The Tehrik-e-Taliban ...Arabic for students... Pakistain (TTP) is vying to enter the political mainstream as talks with the outlawed group — sanctioned by parliament — inch forward amid reservations expressed by experts and victims alike over demands, including reversal of Fata’s merger, put forth by the murderous Moslem outfit to "gain political legitimacy".
For experts and victims of the violence perpetrated by the TTP during its reign of terror, it is very difficult to trust the murderous Moslem outfit, as several questions about the future of the talks and their possible fallout remain unaddressed.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
07/10/2022 01:32 ||
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[14 views]
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Seventeen years ago today, four al-Qaeda jacket wallahs attacked the London transport system and in just under an hour that morning murdered fifty-two people from eighteen countries and maimed seven-hundred, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. An important thread in the story was the role of Pakistain in fostering the ideological and material environment that created the killers, which did not get the attention it deserved at the time, nor in the years since.
THE PAKISTAN DIMENSION OF 7/7
At 8:50 on 7 July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer (aged 22) detonated his boom jacket on a tube train, a minute later another suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan (30), detonated on a second train, and a minute after that another train was blown up by Germaine Lindsay (19). Thirty-nine people were massacred. At 9:47, a fourth suicide-killer, Hasib Hussain (18), went kaboom! on a bus at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, slaughtering thirteen people.
The Security Service (MI5) confirmed that the killers had not been on their radar before the attacks, but once they were identified it became clear that Khan had been on the periphery of a prior investigation, Operation CREVICE, which in March 2004 had rolled up an al-Qaeda network in and around London that was planning to carry out a terrorist atrocity using a fertiliser bomb. Khan was found to have been in telephone contact with one of the conspirators, Omar Khyam, and both Khan and Tanweer had been briefly surveilled by the security services because of their contacts. After running various checks on Khan and Tanweer, it was determined that neither merited further resources: they seemed to be involved in minor fraud as part of financing the network, rather than having any involvement—and potentially not having any knowledge—of the terrorist planning that CREVICE was interested in.
Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5’s G-Branch dealing with international terrorism during this period and later the MI5 chief, noted later that the plot thwarted by CREVICE, led by Mohammed Qayum Khan, had been directed by al-Qaeda based in Pakistain’s tribal areas and involved "British citizens or British residents of Pak heritage, something which became something of a theme for this period". The 7/7 attack was in-keeping with this: all of its operatives (except Lindsay) were of Pak extraction, it originated in "plans from Pakistain", and indeed the logistics of the plot itself "did not fundamentally differ from all the other plans that failed to come to fruition" during the mid-2000s.
What only became clear after 7/7 was that in February 2004, Khyam had spoken in person to Sidique Khan in a car bugged by MI5, and from snippets of that conversation—and the testimony of a jihadist prisoner—British intelligence was able to work out, in retrospect, once they knew what they were looking for, that Khan and Tanweer had been to al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistain. It was a month after 7/7 when Pakistain handed over the photographs of Khan as he arrived there on 25 July 2003.
Pakistain’s reluctance to proactively assist—and its efforts to appear helpful in the aftermath—are hardly surprising. After tiring of the Mujahideen groups in the early 1990s, Pakistain’s Inter-Services Intelligence ...the Pak military intelligence agency that controls the military -- heads of ISI typically get promoted into the Chief of Army Staff position. It serves as a general command center for favored turban groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, tries to influence the politix of neighboring countries, and carries out a (usually) low-level war against India in Kashmir... (ISI) agency had turned to the Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... as its instrument to conquer Afghanistan, which was largely completed by 1996, and it was under the ISI’s close watch that the Taliban became entirely intermingled with al-Qaeda and its derivatives like "the Haqqani Network", as it did with the "Kashmiri" groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba ...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI... (LeT). It is analytically quite misleading to treat as autonomous "groups" what is in reality a fluid single network that shares personnel, geography, resources (everything from training camps to ammunition), and ultimately a unified command structure running through the ISI headquarters at Abpara.
Khan’s story testifies to this. Khan had, as it turned out, previously travelled to Pakistain and trained in a jihadist camp in Kashmir ...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it Azad (Free) Kashmir. The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there.... in July 2001, before being taken over the border to a Taliban camp near the frontlines with the final pocket of Afghan resistance, the Northern Alliance. al-Qaeda was woven into the fabric of this ISI-run jihadist infrastructure, designed significantly for an unending ideological war with India, that ran through—and now runs through again—Kashmir and Afghanistan, which simply shifts personnel from front to front as Pakistain desires. As well as the second trip to Pakistain by Khan in 2003, it transpired there had been a third trip, between November 2004 and February 2005, on which Tanweer had accompanied him. Whether Khan and Tanweer went into Afghanistan during this trip is unclear; they certainly made contact with al-Qaeda.
The ISI’s fingerprints had also been visible in the earlier plot that Operation CREVICE has dismantled. In court, Khyam said the ISI was threatening his family in Pakistain because "they are worried I might reveal more about them" and therefore he was "not going to discuss anything related to the ISI any more". It was pointed out to Khyam by the judge that "inferences" would be drawn from this; he understood that, but inferences had less repercussions for him than giving evidence about the role the ISI had played in facilitating a terrorist plot on British soil.
Britannia has a special place in this long-standing, transnational ISI jihadist network:
Masood Azhar ...One of the major players in Pak terrorism. In early 1994, India incarcerated him for his activities. In 1995, foreign tourists were kidnapped in Jammu and Kashmir. The kidnappers included his release among their demands. One of the hostages managed to escape but the rest were eventually killed. In 1999, he was freed by the Indian government in exchange for passengers on hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 that had been diverted to Kandahar. The hijackers were led by Masood Azhar's brother, Ibrahim Athar. Once he was handed over to the hijackers, they fled to Pak territory despite the fact that Islamabad had earlier stated that any of the hijackers would be jugged at the border. The Pak government had also previously indicated that Azhar would be allowed to return home since he did not face any charges there. Shortly after his release, he made a public address to an estimated 10,000 people in Karachi, firing up the rubes against America and India... , an ISI operative and United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... -listed terrorist, toured Britannia in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad, while laying down local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... . Azhar had created a template for "Londonistan" in the 1990s, where jihadists set up shop in London to provide resources to insurgencies in the Moslem world. There was a de facto agreement with the British state that so long as this activity was directed abroad, the jihadists would not be interfered with.
What happened on 7/7 was a demonstration that this jihadist network ran two ways: what had been exported could come home. The realisation was slow in coming. In September 2005, al-Qaeda released a video to al-Jazeera of Khan’s last testament declaring his "war" on the West and praising "today’s heroes": the late Osama bin Laden ...... who used to be alive but now he's not...... , al-Qaeda’s then-deputy (now emir) Ayman al-Zawahiri ...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area assuming he's not dead like Mullah Omar. He lost major face when he ordered the nascent Islamic State to cease and desist and merge with the orthodox al-Qaeda spring, al-Nusra... , and the founder of the Islamic State movement, which was at that time part of al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose real name was Ahmad al-Khalayleh.
And the dismount:
There was certainly some ignorance among Western officials about Pakistan’s game, but a lack of knowledge was never the real problem. The issue was fear, more precisely blackmail, that any challenge to Pakistan’s lawless conduct—its fundamental strategic commitment to the use of terrorism as a state policy under the protective canopy of pirated nuclear weapons—would make things even worse. As one scholar put it: “Pakistan has essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise.” If the West cut off the vast aid subsidies, let alone adopted a coercive approach to try to change Pakistan’s policies, Islamabad held out the prospect of instability that would lead to terrorists acquiring its nuclear weapons, so the West kept paying Pakistan to help solve a problem it created and sustained—and had every incentive to sustain, since without the problem there would be no more cheques.
Which returns us to the issue of Pakistani blackmail. Now that NATO is out of Afghanistan, with Western intelligence effectively blind, if and when a British citizen goes rogue, in or from Pakistan, the ISI will be there to offer a helping hand in finding them—for a price. And if Britain accepted the apparent necessity of cooperation with the ISI at a time when the ISI was killing British troops, it is unlikely this will change now. The mind-bending logic of relying on the organisation that nurtures the terrorist groups that threaten Britain will win out by bureaucratic exigency and inertia; what that ensnares Britain into giving away—whether in money or political concessions—will only become clear over time.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it 
