Wednesday, June 6th, 2018
Jeremy Adam Smith , Editor of Greater Good Magazine - Scientific American
Stephan: I got an email today from a reader who wrote to say, "All the people I know who carry guns are overweight White men with big guts and low self-esteem, but that is just my small observations. Is there any actual research about this? If so I wish you would publish it."
As it happens another reader whom I know disagrees very strongly with my views on guns challenged me on this very issue a few days ago, claiming on what basis I said people walking around with concealed weapons were so fearful they felt safe only when they had a gun with them. I sent him a Scientific American report, and told him there were a number of research papers on the subject which I could also send him.
When I saw two reports this morning about utterly unnecessary gun deaths I decided to publish that general audience piece, so here it is.
Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearmsmanufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.
So, who is buying all these guns—and why?
The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.
These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, […]
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2018
Dahr Jamail , Staff Writer - truthout
Stephan: If you read me regularly you know I have been predicting what this report describes for over a decade, further predicting that it would result in massive migrations and subsequent and violent social unrest.
A photo taken on August 1, 2017, documents the dwindling flow of the Slims River.
Credit: Richard Droker
A recent University of Alberta-led project, the 2018 State of the Mountains Report, has sounded the alarm bell of how the rapid loss of glacial coverage in Canada’s mountains is causing rivers to disappear.
One of the examples cited in the report is how the Slims River (Ä’äy Chù) experienced a “Piracy Event” in southwestern Yukon. During the spring melt of 2016, the Slims River, one of the primary water sources of Kluane Lake (Lhù’ààn Mǟn), dried up after the Kaskawulsh Glacier receded so much that its dwindling meltwaters started to flow in a completely different direction. Near the end of that summer, Kluane Lake was a full meter lower than its previous record low level.
“This is one stark example of a very big drainage system that utterly and permanently reorganized itself in a single season,” University of Alberta mountain historian Zac Robinson told Phys.Org. “Kluane Lake is a massive lake that […]
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2018
Kyle Mantyla, - Right Wing Watch
Stephan: In the christofascist world you seem to grow in stature depending on how well you lie, and how big and fantastic your lies are. These are frightened people easy to scare. But it is hard to believe how willfully ignorant this community is. Take this story for instance.
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor, the so-called “firefighter prophet” about whom Liberty University is making a movie, appeared on Sheila Zilinksy’s podcast over the weekend where he warned that those who oppose President Trump will use secret technology to create hurricanes just before the midterm elections in order to suppress voter turnout among Trump supporters.
Taylor, who is fond of promoting wild conspiracy theories, has long insisted that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were created by the Illuminati and struck Texas and Florida as punishment against those who voted for Trump. Taylor said that he saw signs in Subtropical Storm Alberto that these same nefarious forces are planning to use weather once again to target Trump voters.
“Look for some stuff right before the election,” Taylor warned.”Look for false flags, and one of the things that the Lord has been showing me is that this could be a very nasty hurricane season. We’re already getting effects down here in Florida, we just had one come through here, it was a subtropical system. It doesn’t normally start this early and that […]
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Yesterday I joined dozens of grizzly bear advocates in Lander, Wyoming, to speak out against the state’s plan that allows nearly two dozen grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region to be killed in a trophy hunt this fall. Tribal leaders testified eloquently about their long-standing cultural connections to the grizzly bear, considered a sacred relative since time immemorial. Many spoke about the continued threats that these bears face, and they questioned why Wyoming is rushing to initiate a hunt so soon after Endangered Species protections were removed last summer.
