An Alarm Bell

 abcNEWS/538 - Sep.29:

"...Monmouth University asked Americans this month who would be most responsible for a potential shutdown. Forty-eight percent said President Biden or Democrats in Congress, while 43 percent said congressional Republicans. The same share of the vote also said that Biden is "not really concerned with looking out for the economic well-being of average Americans." So those numbers might be a better indicator of respondents' political party preference than actual engagement with the issue."

Extinction

 A recent PBS Newshour interview featured a member of the vestigial group of Republicans who do not support Trump, GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York.  He started off with the call for reduced spending and a lower deficit which has been the centerpiece of their platform since before the invention of the wheel. That relic has seldom been supported by any respectable economist since the Great Depression and, of course, the Republicans have never hesitated to throw money at any of their favorite projects.  Everybody, including most Republicans, know that party line is BS -- the current crop of office seekers may pay it lip service, but the Trumpists have moved on to a xenophobic obsession with building a border wall -- out of gold bricks if that is what it takes.  The bottom line for all this is that the "moderate" Republicans really don't have anything to say of interest to anyone at this point.

Fly-in

 I spent a Sunday morning at an airshow at the Double Eagle airport on Albuquerque's west side.  I shot a lot of digital with my little Lumix, and also most of a roll of Kentmere 100 film in my half-frame Mercury CX. It is an event mostly for vintage and home-built aircraft.

Here are the digital pictures.  

The star of the show was this little two-seater jet.  It appears to be a French Fouga CM.170 Magister.

Chile, 50 Years Beyond the Coup

 

Pascale Bonnefoy

We spent two hours on Sunday at the Art Museum listening to a marvelous lecture about Chile's recovery from the Pinochet coup.  The speaker was Pascale Bonnefoy, an investigative journalist based in Santiago, Chile, and associate professor of journalism at the University of Chile, Santiago.

Seventeen years after the 1973 coup which ended the Allende presidency the Chileans voted the dictator out of office.  That unique termination of a dictatorship was accomplished only with carefully crafted compromises, the first of which was to grant amnesty to Pinochet and to leave him as the commander of the armed forces for eight years after he stepped down from the highest office.

While many of those responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Chileans remained safe from prosecution for a time as well, the advocates of human rights gradually assembled the facts of the period and identified the perpetrators, many of whom are only now being brought to justice.  Pinochet, however,  escaped that justice.  He always denied any direct knowledge or responsibility for the human rights abuses and in the end he threw his subordinates under the bus.  So, while he was able to die in his own bed, he did ultimately earn the hate, not only of most of the citizens, but also of the army that had supported him.

Bonnefoy spent years assembling the story of the search for justice in Chile and produced a detailed account of it in her book, The Investigative Brigade.

------------------

The story continues:

Aljazeera 29 Aug 2023

Chile court upholds jail term for retired soldiers over Victor Jara murder.

Guns

 The level of gun violence which plagues the U.S. at present is clearly the product of a corrupt, rightwing Supreme Court which abandoned 250 years of precedents with a preposterous interpretation that gave credence to the arguments of the gun lobby.

Two transgressions underlie the Second Amendment interpretation of the Court.  The first is the failure to recognize the conflict between the right to bear arms and the fundamental "unalienable Rights" spelled out in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

The second is the Court's failure to give due consideration to the likelihood of harm resulting from the prohibition of any regulation of gun ownership. The correlation between rates of gun ownership and gun violence is unequivocal, as shown by a simple comparison of gun ownership and gun violence rates among countries with economies similar to that of the U.S.

Country Gun ownership rate (per 100 people) Gun homicide rate (per 100,000 people)

United States     120.5                     6.7

Canada     34.7                     0.2

United Kingdom      5.0                     0.2

Germany      20.0                     0.1

The problem the country faces now is that there no clear way out of the dilemma which the Court has created.  The rate of gun ownership and the momentum which the Court has given to the radical right is such that changes in laws or the composition of the Court will not undo the harm. Those might be good first steps, but they will not negate the existence of a heavily armed minority willing to use violence to intimidate the majority of citizens who support gun controls.

Intruder Beware

In the News

 NM Political Report:

"On Thursday, Lujan Grisham issued an executive order declaring a public health emergency with regards to gun violence on Thursday. This was replaced by a more in-depth public health order released at Friday’s press conference.

The public health order restricts firearms in either open or concealed carry on public property for 30 days as a cooling off period, she said.

The change was made to open up more resources to help New Mexico get the gun violence issue under control, Lujan Grisham said.

“We need to use the power of a public health (order) in a state of emergency  to access different levels, different resources, and different opportunities to keep New Mexicans safe,” Lujan Grisham said. “So that’s what’s changed today and we’re gonna keep doing this work very closely until we see dramatic additional productive changes in the state.” 

* * * 

The responses from Republicans in and around the State were as predictable as they were cynical, mostly along the line that we need to lock up more people.

And then this from Colorado:

* * * 

KOB 4 News:

Dudley Brown, founder and president of the Colorado-based gun-rights group, called the governor’s action unconstitutional.

“She needs to be held accountable for stripping the God-given rights of millions away with the stroke of a pen,” he said in a statement announcing the lawsuit and request for a restraining order."

 * * * 

Lujan Grisham's order came right after the road rage murder near the UNM Sports Complex of an eleven-year-old and the serious injury of his aunt who was driving the car.  In August a five-year-old was killed lying in her bed during a drive-by shooting.  Hardly a day goes by in Albuquerque without the report of a shooting.  

* * * 

KOAT Action 7 News:

According to Albuquerque police, there have been 73 homicide cases opened, with a total of 77 victims in the city so far this year.

Update:

KOAT 4 News: 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – More than a hundred people openly carried their guns in Old Town as they protested Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s recent controversial move on firearms. 

* * *

And for a preview of where all this is going see the Aljazeera interview of Arundhati Roy on the G20 get-together in Delhi. 

AI: Pros and Cons

 Aljazeera hosts The Bottom Line, a program which offers unusually thoughtful discussions of current issues and events.  Recently, the possible threats and potential benefits of Artificial Intelligence were considered there by two experts in the field, Jason Lanier and Jaan Tallinn.

Pro

Con