“As I have repeatedly said, I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for […]
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Saturday, March 10th, 2018
Stephan: Now isn't this interesting?
America has around one mass shooting, defined as at least four people shot, per day on average. But for a few days in May this year, that gun injury rate is likely to drop.
A brief, partial respite from gun injuries is expected when some 80,000 gun owners descend on Dallas for the annual National Rifle Association convention. That’s because the convention has historically coincided with a temporary — and dramatic — drop in gun-related injuries, according to a new analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
To come to that conclusion, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Columbia University used an insurance database of nearly 76 million claims to tally emergency department visits and hospitalizations related to firearm injuries on NRA convention dates, and during identical control days in the three weeks before and three weeks after the meeting, from 2007 through 2015.
They then estimated the rates of firearm injuries for both the NRA convention dates and the control dates, hoping to test common assumptions: that gun injuries often occur among inexperienced users, and […]
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Erin McCormick, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: We are officially no longer a nation of immigrants, and now officially we don't give a rat's ass about racial housing discrimination. Really, that's who we are as a nation now. I keep telling you that under the toxic fog of Trump family scandals, at the operational level, the Trump administration is remaking America into a White supremacy society based on a population of peasants manipulated by fear and hate. I find all of this not just intellectually dishonest, and morally repugnant, but disgusting.
And Ben Carson. I heard him described as "an oreo" by a millennial with whom I was speaking and, although I dislike slurs, I had to agree. It is very hard for me to imagine a Black man actually doing this.
Ben Carson
The US housing department, helmed by the former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, has proposed a new mission statement in which the pledge to build “inclusive” communities “free from discrimination” is removed. (emphasis added)
The proposal comes just two weeks after the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services changed its mission statement to eliminate a passage that described the US as “a nation of immigrants”.
A 5 March internal memo, obtained by the Huffington Post, contained a draft of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (Hud) new, shortened mission statement, which emphasizes self-sufficiency. The author described it as “an effort to align Hud’s mission with the secretary’s priorities and that of the administration”.
Carson has long touted his own rise from poverty in Detroit and Boston to an Ivy League education and pioneering surgical advances. Yet while he advocates a bootstraps philosophy and has defended proposed budget cuts to his own department, the Guardian recently revealed that a $31,000 dining set had been ordered […]
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Sam Knight, Editor and Co-founder - The District Sentinel - truthout
Stephan: When I tell you that I do not care about partisan politics except anthropologically, and that all I care about is social outcome data, I mean it.
As a general rule Republicans produce inferior, often grossly inferior, social outcome data when they are in power, and they are almost mythically corrupt. It does not follow, however, that many Democrats are free of these failings. Many Democrats also suffer from ethical bankruptcy, and this report perfectly illustrates what I mean.
We need to clean house, sweeping away about about half the Democrats and almost all the Republicans and elect a government that like the Danish model, is focused on fostering wellbeing and creating a civilized society. America is not a civilized society.
Credit: Andrey Popov
Legislation that would relax major post-financial crisis banking regulations moved one step closer to clearing the Senate and becoming law.
The upper chamber voted on Tuesday 67-32 to limit debate on the bill, setting the stage for its final passage later this week.
Sixteen Democrats backed the motion to advance the legislation; twelve of them are cosponsors. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) offered no criticism of the bill, in his regular morning remarks on Tuesday, just fifteen minutes before the vote. Every single Republican present backed the measure.
“People in Congress may have forgotten the crash ten years ago, but I guarantee people across this country have not forgotten,” said Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at a press conference Tuesday morning.
Warren noted she would offer more than a dozen amendments — to try to mitigate the impact of the legislation, as it advances — though she also conceded she wasn’t sure how many, if any, would be allowed by Republican leaders.
“Nobody in Ohio apart from banking executives are clamoring for this bill,” Sherrod […]
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A new Social Psychological and Personality Science study published Thursday found that “neurotic traits positively predicted” shares of voters who opted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election or to “leave” in the Brexit vote that same year.
