America is exceptional for its unique, deadly gun
culture
Americans woke up Monday morning to grisly news: From the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel, a 64-year-old gunman rained down fire on a crowded concert, indiscriminately killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 others. He then appears to have killed himself, according to local police. It was the worst mass shooting in the modern history of a country now all too accustomed to such carnage.
Details are still emerging about the assailant, identified as Stephen Paddock, and what could have motivated the slaughter; U.S. authorities looked skeptically at the Islamic State's claim of responsibility. Meanwhile, President Trump and a host of other politicians offered their prayers and condolences, lowered flags to half-mast and stood for moments of silence that only underscored their impotence in the face of such violence. Even the local sheriff in Las Vegas mused that he didn't “know how this could have been prevented.”
But to those elsewhere in the world who look on aghast each time a shooting rampage rocks the United States, the answer is blindingly obvious: guns.
Police say Paddock had a cache of 18 to 20 guns with him, including some rifles that were fully automatic and therefore heavily restricted by federal laws. American gun laws are complicated and vary by state, but in no developed nation is it as easy or as accepted for citizens to acquire weaponry and ammunition capable of exacting mass violence. The state of Nevada, home to Las Vegas, is particularly lax.
Not surprisingly, the firearm homicide rate in the United States far outstrips those of its peers — 16 times the rate in Germany and six times that of Canada, north of the border. The Guardian compiled a staggering data visualization of 1,516 mass shootings in the United States over the past 1,735 days. Elsewhere, sweeping measures taken to ban or restrict access to guns, such as in Australia, have led to a marked decline in homicides and the end of mass shootings, but are seen as nonstarters in the United States. Why is this the case?
The United States is simply awash in guns. There are almost as many privately owned firearms in this country as there are people living inside it — a figure that may also account for about half of the known number of civilian-owned firearms in the entire world. The sheer volume of such weaponry is testament to a long history of American gun ownership, but also the successful marketing of arms companies.
“One answer to the nebulous but compelling question of why Americans love guns is simply that the gun industry invited us to,” wrote Pamela Haag in her recent book, “The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.” “As an unexceptional, agnostic imperative of doing business
. . . its marketing and advertisement burnished the gun as an object of
emotional value and affinity.”
But that commercial imperative is tied up profoundly with the myths of the American republic. Gun rights advocates invoke the Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which declares “a well-regulated Militia” a necessity for a free state and therefore guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.”
“The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence,” wrote the venerable American historian and journalist Garry Wills in the aftermath a series of mass shootings in
2012. “Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails.
Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its
acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and
safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how
can law question it?”
As if on cue, the Republican
governor in Kentucky issued a tweet on Monday in which he unintentionally
seemed to suggest it would be easier to question the foundations of law
than contemplate gun control.
Of course, it's unlikely the
framers of the Constitution would have conceived of the sort of
destructive machinery available at gun shows across the United States a
couple of centuries later. More importantly, the United States is far
from the fragile confederation of ex-colonies that needed to defend
itself in the face of meddling European empires. Indeed, it's now the
world's unquestioned hegemon, deploying its overwhelming military might
around the globe and occupying countries with no pretense of extending Second Amendment protections to locals.
At home,gun politics remain highly racialized,
with whites far more keen to champion the Second Amendment than
minorities. It's also the subject of a sharp partisan divide, with
Republicans and Democrats radically diverging on what should be done.
The leading pro-gun lobby group,
the National Rifle Association, is an influential player in American
politics and helps bankroll a slate of pro-gun candidates in elections.
It waged a culture war during the Obama administration, casting the
liberal president as a tyrannical figure intent on destroying gun rights.
But even with Trump in the White House and Republicans in the majority in
Congress, the NRA has only accelerated its messaging, issuing chilling videos warning that its enemies in the media seek to “assassinate real news” and undermine
the president — and then deploying veiled threats against them.
Trump, whose campaign
received $30 million from the NRA, knows where his bread is buttered.
In his first weeks in power, he moved to reverse Obama-era regulations that attempted to make it harder for people with records of mental
illness to acquire guns. In April, he became the first sitting president to address the NRA itself, engaging in his periodic bashing of the media and
Hollywood liberals and promising they now have “a true friend and
champion” in the Oval Office.
“Only one candidate in the general
election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of
the United States, standing before you,” Trump said. “You came through
for me, and I am going to come through for you.” The people affected by
the latest atrocity, meanwhile, might wonder how he and Congress plan to
come through for them.
• At
the White House media briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought to nip questions regarding gun control in the bud, insisting "there will certainly be a
time for that policy discussion to take place, but that’s not the place that
we’re in at this moment.” But in the same session, she raised a right-wing
strawman, pointing to Chicago homicide statistics as supposed proof that
gun control measures don’t necessarily save lives.
“Apparently it also is hard for Trump’s team to resist talking
about policy, even when it insists that ‘today is a day for consoling
the survivors and mourning those we lost,’” wrote my colleague Callum
Borchers.
President Trump, of course, is at this point notorious for his
relative insensitivity in the wake of terror attacks. He sought to scold London’s Muslim mayor in June as terror hit the British capital and, on the campaign trail, pointed
to a mass shooting in Orlando carried out by a U.S. national of Afghan origin
as justification for his ban on Muslims entering the United States.
• Regarding
racial politics and gun rights in the U.S., Adam Winkler, a
UCLA Law School professor, wrote a fascinating piece on the topic for The Post last year. Here’s an excerpt:
“The founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment
also enacted racially discriminatory gun laws. Fearing slave revolts, early
American lawmakers prohibited slaves — and often free blacks, too — from
possessing weapons of any kind. Even in states where blacks were allowed to
have guns, such as Virginia, they had to first obtain the permission of local
officials. And while the ‘well regulated Militia’ mentioned in the
Constitution largely fell out of military use, such groups continued to be
employed to capture runaway slaves.
"After the Civil War, the question of guns and race
changed: Many blacks from the South had obtained firearms when they fled to
join colored units of the Union Army. When the war ended, the Army allowed
them to keep their guns as compensation for unpaid wages. As many of those
black soldiers returned to their home towns, those guns were seen by white
racists as a threat to the enforcement of white supremacy. Armed blacks could
fight back.
"So Southern states passed the Black Codes, which among
other things barred the freedmen from possessing firearms. Racists formed
groups like the Ku Klux Klan, riding at night to terrorize blacks and take away their guns.
Congress, still controlled by the North, reacted by proposing the 14th Amendment
to make the Bill of Rights, which previously limited only the federal
government, a limit on the states, too. It was the greatest expansion of
constitutional rights in American history — and, as historians have shown,
it was prompted in part by the desire to protect the right of freedmen to
have guns for self-defense."
• Over
the weekend, Jagmeet Singh, a charismatic, 38-year-old Sikh Canadian,
won the leadership race for the progressive New Democratic Party, the
third-largest in Canada. He cuts a fascinating figure on the electoral scene,
and is gearing up to challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He is the first
“visible minority,”as the Globe and Mail put it,
to lead a major Canadian federal party. Last month, a video of Singh calmly
talking down a racist protester who thought he was Muslim went viral and won him online acclaim. But he has a hard job ahead of him, the Canadian daily reports:
"His success is rooted in the large following he has
amassed in the South Asian community. But Mr. Singh's win is also being
celebrated by many in the party's old guard who see the Ontario politician as
a force for renewal: someone who can capture the imagination of voters and
invigorate the New Democratic rank-and-file after the demoralizing losses of
the past election.
"The sharply dressed, cosmopolitan, multilingual lawyer
was drawn to the New Democrats through his social activism. At the age of 38,
he is inheriting a party that is starved for money and has fallen
significantly behind the Liberals and Conservatives in terms of donations
with just two years to go before the next federal election."
• TheGuardian’s soccer
writer in Spain, Sid Lowe, wrote a terrific dispatch on the role that soccer giant FC Barcelona plays in the larger drama of Catalan nationalism.
(For more on what has followed the region’s turbulent independence
referendum, scroll down.) Here’s an excerpt from Lowe’s essay:
“They say sport and politics shouldn’t mix, by which they tend
to mean other people’s politics. It’s a line Spain’s secretary of state for
sport has used… but sport and politics do mix, especially with Barcelona, who the Marxist
writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán described as the ‘symbolic unarmed army of
Catalonia.’
"That identification with Catalonia, while nuanced,
shifting, unevenly embraced, sometimes vague and often problematic, is part
of what gives Barça an explicitly socio-political dimension. It comes
together, of course, in the slogan: mes
que un club, more than a club. And that meant this was always
going to be more than a match even if in the end it was less than one.
"In September 1976, Las Palmas came to the Camp Nou for
the first Barcelona game broadcast in Catalan on Radio Barcelona. In October
1977, they were again the visitors when Barcelona invited Josep Taradellas,
former head of the Catalan government, in exile since 1939, to preside over
the game. ‘I’ll come on one condition,’ he said: ‘You win.’ Before the match,
he told supporters they shared the ‘same faith’ he had 40 years earlier,
insisting they had inherited a Barcelona ‘rooted in Catalanism’. Later in
1978, Las Palmas were again their opponents when they won the Cup for the
first time since the transition to democracy, Johan Cruyff collecting the
trophy from Juan Carlos. And then on Sunday, the day of the referendum, Las Palmas arrived
once more. This time they said they didn’t want to be silent witnesses: they
came with special shirts, Spain flags stitched to their chests."
The following files contain basic terms related to the following language areas :
BUSINESS
BUYING
SELLING
IMPORTING & EXPORTING
CONTRACTS
LEGAL TERMS RELATED TO BUSINESS, ETC
SHOPPING - PAYMENT TERMS
C.A.E AND C.P.E. Students REVISE these glossaries and make sure you know all these terms with their definitions Look them up in the LONGMAN DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPRARY ENGLISH to make sentences,
INTERPRETING STUDENTS
For the PREPARATORY COURSE, these glossaries make up what has been called VOCAB AREAS
or GROUNDWORK VOCABS These are the words you must have a translation term at the tip of your tongue for, almost without thinking . Make sure you know what they mean . In your case, you must do what C.A.E AND C.P.E. sts must do AND MOVE A STEP FORWARD : PROVIDE the Spanish equivalent off the cuff
Election hacking might be more widespread than previously thought
The presidential election was fraught with problems, which potentially could be attributed to cyberattacks.
Noting that investigators have been so focused on Russian meddling in the presidential campaign that they haven't conducted a thorough probe of the state election systems that Russia targeted and that the hacking of those systems might be more expansive than originally thought.
Citing problems at the polls and puzzled poll workers on Election Day, the New York Timesreported the concerns of observers, like Susan Greenhalgh, who was monitoring polls in Durham, N.C., for nonpartisan group Verified Voting.
“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” the Times quoted Greenhalgh -- who was aware that e-pollbook vendor VR Systems, which provided Durham's software, had been hacked by Russians -- as saying.
But that and similar incidents in at least 21 states have not yet be subjected to a thorough digital forensics probe, the Times reported.
The election director in Durham, Derek Bowens, told the Times, "We do not believe, and evidence does not suggest, that hacking occurred on Election Day."
But Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee,called for greater scrutiny. “We must harden our cyberdefenses, and thoroughly educate the American public about the danger posed by attacks,” the Times quoted him as saying. “In other words: we are not making our elections any safer by withholding information about the scope and scale of the threat.”
TOPICS:
cybercrime
jueves, 7 de septiembre de 2017
THE NITTY GRITTY
DECLUTTERING
Are u sure you should keep so many things in your life ?
It’s been a rough couple of days. I haven’t delivered on prior commitments. Work pressure has been high and my relationship with Aaliyah is suffering. Altogether, it has weighed down heavily on my mind. Stress and anxiety have become second nature and my health is deteriorating. I was desperately in need of talking to someone who could truly help me in this situation.
My friend Naomi is a professional psychologist and therefore has enough experience in dealing with these issues. I rang her up and arranged for a meeting. We met at Central Park on a beautiful sunny day to have a quiet conversation, with our take-away cups of coffee.
I had been nervous all morning about our meeting even though she was a close friend. Deep down, however, I knew this was the right thing to do and I was not mistaken.
Naomi listened attentively to everything I had to say. She understood how I was feeling. She asked me if I’d like to embark on a 21 day journey where I would have to make a few lifestyle changes for a better, simpler way of life. It would help me attain a new perspective and sense of calm. I readily agreed.
If you find yourself in the same position, join me in this journey. We begin with decluttering. Decluttering of our mind, relationships and surroundings will help us clear everything unnecessary, allowing us to focus on our priorities.
Declutter Your Surroundings.
Ever since I can remember my grandparents had a habit of clearing out and cutting the number of material objects around them, on a weekly basis. They always told me, “Clearing your room will clear your mind.” It’s true. Decluttering your surroundings can give a sense of organization and clarity that would otherwise be unavailable in a cramped room. Remove objects that are not required or used. Clean it all out.
What’s more, feel and show gratitude for things that you consider important. Take up the habit of writing down five things that you are thankful for every day. This will help you to truly value and appreciate your life. You could also empty your thoughts on paper.
Declutter Your Relationships.
Look around you. Are you surrounded by people who have your best interests at heart? Do these people prioritize you like you do them? If not, these relationships are toxic and are hampering your piece of mind. Cut it out and free yourself from its burden.
Instead, cherish the people who support you, uplift you and are there for you in the tough times. Surround yourself with people that make you laugh. It is the best medicine. I know I’m lucky to have a safe zone in my friend group, here in New York City.
At the same time, focus on yourself. What are you waiting for? Don’t postpone joy. Get in touch with your creative side. Take a trip to your favorite city. Do things that make you happy, rather than add to your stress. Love and respect yourself.
Declutter Your Mind.
In today’s day and age, our mind’s clock is constantly racing with innumerable thoughts running through our head. Take responsibility for the clutter present in your mind. Don’t blame the external environment. Alternatively, make a conscious effort to start from the root – your mind.
Negativity acts as a barrier to peace of mind. Sometimes, the task ahead of you can look overwhelming. Instead of dwelling on the worst, break it down into manageable steps and focus your energy on constructive thinking and positive action. Let go and develop a new perspective.
Clutter can weigh you down and cause stress, effecting every sphere of your life. Devote a little bit of your time to the task of decluttering. Each baby step when combined will have a positive impact on your life.
Social networking has drastically changed the way people interact with their friends, associates and family members. Although social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Snapchat and FourSquare, play a major role in our day to day lives, I have also come to discover that they could also pose serious privacy risks. When using these social media sites, it’s quite important to know and understand the privacy risks involved. I recently had an encounter withPhilip Scala, a private investigator based in New York. Below are some of the things I learned from him on the privacy risks that comes with the use of social media.
Privacy Risks on Social Media
Nowadays, hackers prowl the social media networks looking for victims. They tend to use the shortened URLs like those which are created with bit.ly. They use these shortened URLs to trick their victims into visiting harmful sites or to inject viruses into their computers or mobile phones. Hackers also use spyware which they can easily install on your mobile phone, laptop, iPad or/and computer remotely via downloads, emails, shortened URLs or instant messages. The spyware gives the hacker information about the passwords you use on your social media networks and other accounts which you access online. The simplest way to avoid being a victim, is to never click on links unless you’re sure of the actual source.
Most of the social media sites have information that’s required, like your birthday and email address. Identity thieves tend to gather their victims’ personal information from the information available on the social media sites. Many identity thieves tend to hack their victims email accounts by simply using the personal information available on social media profile. For instance, one of the more common techniques used by identity thieves, is clicking on the “forgot password,” and then trying to recover the password via email. Once they access your email account, they basically have access to all of your personal information.
Social media sites utilize mobile apps and the location based services to allow users to check in at their current locations. This normally reveals the user’s current location to all of the people they are connected with in their particular social media networks. The information posted can be easily used by malicious people to track your whereabouts. Moreover, telling the online community where you are, or where you are going to, can end up inviting burglars and thieves to your home or business. For instance, by posting your current location and saying that you are on a long vacation in Australia, you will be letting the potential burglars or/and thieves know exactly where you are, and how long you will be gone. To mitigate such risks, you should avoid posting your travel plans, and using the location based services.
Tips For Protecting Your Privacy On Social Media
Create strong passwords; the stronger your passwords are, the harder it will be to guess. You can include special characters such as symbols, numbers, and capital letters in your password. Also, do not use some common passwords, like your child’s name, wife’s name or birthday.
Review your social media profiles and pay close attention to the way each profile lets you protect sensitive personal details. Some social media sites like Facebook gives you the opportunity of restricting access to certain friends, family members and colleagues. Also take advantage of the enhanced privacy options which are offered by social media sites like blocking the messages from strangers. For most people, their setting is set in a way that their Facebook likes are easily visible to anyone. There are strategies that can be employed to stop people from snooping on you on Facebook.
Install a good antivirus and anti-spyware; it’s essential you’ve a software that will protect you from malware, viruses, and spyware. Get the latest antivirus and anti-spyware software and make sure you have it regularly updated with all the latest malware definitions. For extra security, you can update all of the critical applications, including the operating system, your internet browsers, and such other programs which are prone to attacks.
When you use social media, you are basically posting personal information online. When that information gets posted online, it is no longer private, and may end up falling into wrong hands. Even if you have put in place the highest possible security measures, some of your friends, colleagues and companies you interact with on social media, can end up leaking your personal information. Therefore, you need to be very careful about what you post online, else, you will end up giving the would-be burglars, stalkers, cyber bullies and identity thieves the information they require to cause harm.
Follow Sam Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/samcohenusprivacy
Floodwaters surround several houses in Rocky Mount, N.C., near the Tar River in October 2016. (Thomas Babb/News & Observer via AP)
RALEIGH, N.C. — The day that President Trump’s climate science-slashing budget landed last week, his government held a public meeting here to prepare the nation’s Southeast region for rising seas, wildfires, extreme downpours and other impacts of climate change.
Despite White House budget director Mick Mulvaney’s assertion Friday that studying climate change is a “waste of your money,” federal scientists are required, by a 1990 law, to do just that — and are carrying on for now, even under the cloud of budgetary uncertainty created by the Trump administration.
It’s no easy task. Trump’s “skinny” budget proposes to slash many climate-related programs at agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but often doesn’t go into specifics — raising doubts about the implications for climate science programs across 13 government agencies and the production of an exhaustive report about the impact of climate change in the U.S. that is required by law.
“For each of these programs, real people live on the other side of the budget line item,” said Ali Zaidi, a Stanford energy researcher who previously served in a key role in Obama’s Office of Management and Budget overseeing funding for climate and environmental programs. “Students, small business, and sources of economic growth for communities count on this data. Now you’ve got folks waiting by the phone to learn whether they’ll be going to work tomorrow or whether the data that informs their livelihoods will still be available.”
“For agencies, this means they will be less creative and more conservative,” Zaidi continued. “They will plan to the lowest possible funding level. And that will hurt both the programs and the supply chains.”
Regarding the future of the $ 2.6 billion U.S. Global Change Research Program, a White House Office of Management and Budget official said it would be “premature to speak to final funding levels prior to the full budget in mid-May.” Requests for comment to the federal climate program were not returned.
The program produces a sweeping report on how climate change is wracking different regions of the U.S. that is mandated every four years under the Global Change Research Act, signed into existence in 1990 by Republican president George H.W. Bush. The last installment of the report, released in 2014, ran over 800 pages. The next is due in 2018.
Last week’s event at North Carolina State University, aimed at drafting just one of the document’s many chapters, brought together around 50 federal researchers, university scientists, local activists, and students, among others — all working on different pieces of the climate problem in the U.S. Southeast.
U.S. regions are already preparing for climate change. The Southeast in particular faces severe threats from rising seas.
The town of Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, has had to grapple with the question of how and whether to close a beachside road, Seagull Drive, that has been damaged by several coastal storms.
Some residents still want to use the road and are looking at ways to protect the community from future sea level rise, said Jessica Whitehead, a geographer who works for the North Carolina Sea Grant program at North Carolina State University and is working with Nags Head on adaptation.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Grant program would lose its funding under the proposed Trump budget. “From my point of view, we keep going until we’re told to stop,” Whitehead said.
Another threat to the U.S. Southeast was underscored in tragic fashion last fall in Gatlinburg, Tenn., when the resort town was engulfed by a deadly wildfire driven by a combination of strong winds and drought conditions.
“Without a doubt, the managers I talk to, say more and more, they’re seeing fire behavior that they’ve never seen before in their careers,” Kevin Hiers, a former Air Force wildfire manager turned fire researcher with the Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy in Tallahassee, said. “And that change in fire behavior definitely corresponds with weather parameters that we have not typically had on average here in the Southeast.”
Hiers, who is drafting the climate assessment’s section on Southeastern fires, acknowledged concern about climate policy and budget cuts among federal scientists.
“I think that there is a general unease in government about the future of global change research,” Hiers said. But communities in the Southeast are going to have to prepare themselves for change. “There’s such a commitment across such a broad range of public and private entities to simply prepare for contingencies. That’s all just part of strategic planning.”
The scientists at the Raleigh meeting don’t just write their reports behind closed doors. They hold public meetings around the country, bare the guts of their drafting process, hear feedback about what’s happening in communities and go back to the drawing board to make it better.
They ask communities to provide them with particular case studies of places that are being harmed by climate change or places that are innovating in their way of adapting to it.
“They’re trying to be really constructive at a time when you’ve got the administration saying it’s a waste of money, literally,” says Anthony Janetos, a climate scientist at Boston University who served on advisory committees for the last three national assessments.
There’s a protracted process for releasing such a massive and influential document — raising fears that, if it so desires, a hostile Trump administration could derail or slow things down at many steps along the way.
First, there’s a review process in which scientists must answer not only critiques from the National Academy of Sciences, which vets the document, but also comments submitted by the public. “We are required to respond to every single comment,” explained Lynn Carter, a researcher at Louisiana State University who co-chaired the event in Raleigh and will be one of the chapter’s lead authors.
To be formally adopted as a government report, the 2014 version of the document also had to go through a review process at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — currently leading the blueprint for slashing the federal government — which sent it out to all 13 federal agencies in the Global Change Research Program for critical review and further changes.
Any of those agencies or the White House could, presumably, balk at the report’s content and delay its formal release to Congress.
“Does that clearance process become one more fact check, or does that become a process that is more problematic?” Janetos asked. “And I just think we don’t know.”
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The first test of how the thinly staffed Trump administration will handle the ongoing national assessment process could come later this year — when it will have to make decisions about the publication of a separate, more than 500 page report designed to serve as the National Climate Assessment’s scientific foundation. That fundamental climate science document recently received a largely positive peer review from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and, if it stays on schedule, would come out in the fall of 2017, with the broader regionally focused report to follow a year later.
National Assessments have been delayed extensively in the past. After the Clinton administration produced the first one in 2000, it took until 2009to publish the second — the very early Obama years.
So as the process continues, university scientists and communities and activists around the country will be watching closely — just as they were at the meeting in Raleigh.
“With the current administration, is [the report] really going to be reviewed and are they going to have the staff to review it?” asked Karen Bearden, a volunteer with the Research Triangle branch of the climate advocacy group 350.org, during a question-and-answer session at the meeting.
“What I can tell you, this report, and the actions that are being taken to write it are being required by law,” answered Chris Avery, a contractor with the Global Change Research Program. “This is an obligatory thing.”
