Month: June 2019

Suicides

Closing Thought–24Jun19

I have been watching the rate of suicides among our veterans and farmers as well….It is troubling at the rate these groups are killing themselves…..I wrote recently about military suicides……https://lobotero.com/2015/04/02/military-suicides-arent-linked-to-deployment-study-finds/

More articles:

https://lobotero.com/2019/03/06/to-help-our-veterans/

https://lobotero.com/2008/05/29/gi-suicides-at-record-high/

Let’s look at the suicides by active military personnel……

The suicide rate among veterans and, now, among active-duty GIs is at an historic high. The U.S. Marine Corps, for example, just turned in an all-time record in 2018 for attempted and successful suicides in a year (354 active and reserve). Marine Colonel Dom D. Ford, writing in the Marine Times, is grasping at straws to explain the rising rates, from claiming there is too little Christian religion in the ranks to the Marines not being willing to accept counsel and advice. As for the too little Christianity in the ranks, as an advisory board member of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I know the opposite is true: there is too much Dominionist Christianity in the ranks. In fact, as soon as Colonel Ford made his comments, the phones at MRFF began ringing.

But might there be far greater reasons than these desperate efforts suggest behind such a deadly development?

GI Suicide: Maybe It’s the Job?

Once the soldier leaves the service he becomes a stat for the VA…..let’s look at those issues as well….

Veteran health care and specifically veteran mental health is a severe problem in this nation. The Department of Veterans Affairs has over 150 hospitals nationwide and over 2,000 community-based outpatient clinics.

Still, 20 veterans each day lose their lives to suicide — a number that has not changed for almost a decade.

The same number of suicides occur each day despite billions of dollars being funded to the VA through Congress to hire mental health clinicians, develop and implement programs and services, and increase awareness and provide education to veterans.

https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/veteran-suicide-is-not-just-military-issue-1.585829

This one issue is so sad for it is the easiest to help…..the VA needs to be more in-tuned to the needs to vets and stop playing politics with the rest of the toads in DC.

Our veterans deserve the best care money can buy….not bargain basement pseudo-science that the deficit hawks would have them treated with……we need to do better…..much better.

Now the hardest hit group by suicide is Trump supporters……

In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves. In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly seven times greater than the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.

A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes. What’s more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually — the suicide rate — has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides, even though the murder rate gets so much more attention.

A Deadly Epidemic Is Hitting Trump Supporters the Hardest

Then there is the info about Native American women…

Suicide rates for Native Americans have been rising faster than any other group, a new CDC analysis says: 139% for women and 71% for men since 1999. Experts say poverty, substance abuse, unemployment, and lack of access to mental health care are all contributing factors, USA Today reports. For the US overall, suicide is up 33% in the same period. A 2018 report from the CDC listed the suicide rate non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Natives was more than 3.5 times higher than the incidence among racial and ethnic groups with the lowest rates.

Maybe now would be a good time to make mental health a priority…..and spend less time debating semantics.

Just A Thought!

Tulsi Is The One For Me

******For a Disclaimer:  I am in NO way being compensated by the Tulsi campaign for my writings and opinions.******

AS the debates approach I will make my feelings known on the candidates…..

I make no secret that I am antiwar and have been since 1972 and I seldom have a candidate that is not a third party trying to get a hold in mainstream politics.

2020 I will have a candidate that is my in line with my thinking, Tulsi Gabbard……she is anti-intervention and that makes her antiwar and that makes her my choice as a candidate.

The problem is her stands on war is making her very unpopular with the wars main cheerleaders…MSM…..

Presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has not garnered much press coverage since announcing her bid on February 2; she’s the 13th-most-mentioned Democratic candidate on TV news, according to FAIR’s most recent count (4/14/19).

But when corporate media do talk about the Hawaii congressmember, they tend to reveal more about themselves than about her.

A veteran of the Iraq War, Gabbard is centering her presidential campaign around anti-interventionism (2/3/19): the belief that US interference in foreign countries, especially in the form of regime-change wars, increases the suffering of the citizens in those countries

https://fair.org/home/corporate-media-target-gabbard-for-her-anti-interventionism-a-word-they-can-barely-pronounce/
 
The media is doing as much as they can to keep her views off the airways….but she has made the cut and will be on the stage for the first debate in June…..but I look for her to be mostly ignored by the MSM pundits that control the debate stage.
 
The one interview that she gave that did her credit was the one for Glen Greenwald of the Intercept……

Ever since Tulsi Gabbard was first elected to Congress in 2012, she has been assertively independent, heterodox, unpredictable, and polarizing. Viewed at first as a loyal Democrat and guaranteed future star by party leaders — due to her status as an Iraq War veteran, a telegenic and dynamic young woman, and the first Hindu and Samoan-American elected to Congress — she has instead become a thorn in the side, and frequent critic, of those same leaders.

Gabbard’s transformation from cherished party asset to party critic and outcast was rapid, and was due almost entirely to her insistence on following her own belief system and evolving ideology, rather than party dogma and the longstanding rules for Washington advancement. In 2012, Rachel Maddow, upon announcing Gabbard’s victory, instructed her audience to learn Gabbard’s name because, the MSNBC host gushed, “She is on the fast track to being very famous someday.” In 2015, Maddow invited Gabbard on her show to herald her as one of the leaders of what Maddow touted as an urgently needed, new bipartisan congressional caucus composed of military veterans in the war on terror.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/09/watch-interview-with-democratic-congresswoman-and-2020-presidential-candidate-tulsi-gabbard/

I appreciate Greenwald giving her a chance to voice her opinion without being treated like she had one eye in the center of her forehead.

She is still the candidate for me.

Hopefully more people will come to her side in this contentious election.

Learn Stuff!

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/tulsi-gabbard-pushes-no-war-agenda-and-the-media-is-out-to-kill-her-chances/

To be honest there is one part of Tulsi’s stances that is disturbing to me…….her comments on the War on Terror……but as with everything I will research it more before I comment.

Then GO VOTE!

Just Nuke It!

The US is concerned with the nukes in development by nations like North Korea and Iran…..and yet they freely give them technology to nations that are the bane of human society like the Saudis….

So do we want nukes or not?

The report is that nuke warheads are on the decrease….

The number of warheads has decreased over the past year, even as countries continue to modernize their nuclear forces, according to an annual assessment of global nuclear arms.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released the SIPRI Yearbook 2019 on the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security.

The report found that 13,865 warheads in existence at the start of 2019 were owned by nine nations: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The year before hosted an arsenal of 14,465 warheads.

https://www.defensenews.com/global/2019/06/16/heres-how-many-nuclear-warheads-exist-and-which-countries-own-them/

All in all this is good news right?

But rest of the story…..

The Pentagon’s inability to win America’s recent wars in any convincing way may be about to become a much bigger problem than anyone realized, as experts express major concerns about a new policy doctrine adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

US struggles with conventional warfare, despite massively outspending everyone else, and they are hoping to turn that around by using nuclear weapons in America’s assorted conflicts, seeing nuclear war as creating “conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability.”

This Nuclear Operations document was published online by the Pentagon briefly last week, but was subsequently removed, and approved by the Joint Chiefs, with officials saying it is “for official use only” now.

Experts see it as a substantial change in US military policy, and particularly nuclear war policy. They say in particular this document does not focus on nuclear deterrence, but rather on US nuclear first-strikes as a war-fighting doctrine. That they see nuclear strikes as a potential cure-all is particularly troubling.

It is not clear if it is directly related to the low-yield nuclear weapons whose funding is a topic of major debate in Congress. Some in Congress were concerned that creating more low-yield nuclear arms would make their use a lower-threshold issue.

Though more usable nukes would clearly fit nicely with the Pentagon’s doctrine of using nukes more, it’s not clear that the doctrine is dependent on having lower-yield options, or if the US will just nuke with whatever they’ve got.

(antiwar.com)

Sorry but this type of double standard is typical for American thinking……and foreign policy.

So are the warheads decreasing or are they on the rise?

The Pentagon publishes a report for nuclear stability……

The U.S. military appears to believe it can somehow prevail in a nuclear war, according to a Pentagon document that was briefly made public, and has plans for using atomic weapons in “small and limited” capacities in order to create “strategic stability” for itself in the world.

The document, Nuclear Operations (pdf), describes the current political and military environment and the challenges faced by the Pentagon in strategizing how to most effectively deploy nuclear weapons in war. It was first reported on by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which downloaded and released the document on June 19.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/20/pentagon-releases-then-deletes-document-detailing-use-nuclear-weapons-restore

Please make up our minds for us….or at least stick to at least one version of the truth…..

Catch 2020–

WAIT! Before anyone’s tiny head explodes read the post and the accompanying articles.

These days there is lots of lip service to the failing of the American political process…..and many say the Trump is merely a symptom……

Don’t try to deny it! The political temperature of this country is rising fast. Call it Trump change or Trump warming, if you want, but grasp one thing: increasingly, you’re in a different land and, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the results down the line are likely to be ever less pretty. Trump change isn’t just an American phenomenon, it’s distinctly global. After all, from Australia to India, the Philippines to Hungary, Donald Trumps and their supporters keep getting elected or reelected and, according to a recent CNN poll, a majority of Americans think Trump himself will win again in 2020 (though, at the moment, battleground-state polls look grim for him).

Still, whether or not he gets a second term in the White House, he only seems like the problem, partially because no president, no politician, no one in history has ever gotten such 24/7 media coverage of every twitch, tweet, bizarre statement, falsehood, or fantasy he expresses (or even the clothes he wears). Think of it this way: we’re in a moment in which the only thing the media can’t imagine saying about Donald Trump is: “You’re fired!” And believe me, that’s just one sign of a media — and a country — with a temperature that’s anything but 98.6.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/17/if-donald-trump-symptom-then-whats-disease

And then there is the “F” word being applied to Mr. Trump and his policies……

There are so many people going on the TV machine to call Trump a fascist and too many people that will shake their tiny heads in agreement…..So this post is to try and help answer that burning question for so many of Trump’s detractors.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? The question is usually posed as an insult rather than as a serious inquiry. A common response is that “he is not as bad as Hitler”, but this rather dodges the issue. Hitler was one hideous exponent of fascism, which comes in different flavours but he was by no means the only one.

The answer is that fascist leaders and fascism in the 1920s and 1930s were similar in many respects to Trump and Trumpism. But they had additional toxic characteristics, born out of a different era and a historic experience different from the United States.

What are the most important features of fascism? They include ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism; the demonisation and persecution of minorities; a cult of the leader; a demagogic appeal to the “ignored” masses and against a “treacherous” establishment; contempt for parliamentary institutions; disregard for the law while standing on a law and order platform; control of the media and the crushing of criticism; slogans promising everything to everybody; a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and war.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/11/is-trump-a-fascist-well-hes-not-hitler-or-mussolini-yet-but-hes-getting-closer/

In my opinion he is not a fascist at all….just a self-centered megalomaniac that got elected because of nothing he did just a luck of the electorate.

Again I can help those that are not capable of reading a book……

NO!  Our Dear Beloved Supreme Leader is no fascist…..however he is a horrible president for all Americans…..his ideas will only benefit a few not all….. should stop using the word “Fascist” as well as the word “Socialist”….for these words are used to scare not explain anything.  Keep it scary for the simpler minds.

But what is Trump’s political end game?

The President has consistently manufactured spectacles and provocative tirades on Twitter and elsewhere as a means of exploring the limitations of his purview and assailing opposition.

In characteristically authoritarian form, Trump regularly releases trial balloons, which if not met with significant resistance create dangerous precedents used to revoke, confiscate and monetize public assets. This anti-democratic, hyper-capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal pattern will continue until Trump is either removed from office or the entire public sphere is gutted and privatized.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/18/catch-2020-trumps-authoritarian-endgame/

Try focusing on issues and stands and not some terminology that has lost all its meaning other than inciting fear.

Do you have any idea what is happening in this country?

2020 is approaching and we should be consuming all data on candidates….

Learn Stuff!

Then VOTE!

Those Puppy Eyes

Every person who has a canine companion will know what I mean about “Puppy Eyes”…….yes those glances in your direction and it gets your attention every time.

MoMo has many different ways of giving me those eyes…… this is just an example…..

 

I bring up this up because science has proven that dogs evolution was to manipulate humans……and you knew it all long just now there is science behind thoughts…

Sure, it may seem as if your dog is just giving you a cute and dopey look, but a new study suggests much more is going on. Your cute and dopey dog is skillfully arching its levator anguli oculi medialis muscle—a muscle that seems to have evolved for precisely this reason—to execute what scientists have dubbed the “AU101: inner eyebrow raise.” In other words, he’s giving you puppy dog eyes to get what he wants, explains the New York Times. The upshot of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is that dogs evolved to manipulate humans to increase their odds of survival, and they did so by developing the aforementioned muscle to better move their eyebrows.

“When dogs make the movement, it seems to elicit a strong desire in humans to look after them,” says the study out of the UK’s University of Portsmouth, per the BBC. The key discovery came from a comparison of wolves, which do not have the LAOM muscle. Dogs split off from wolves about 33,000 years ago, notes the Atlantic, meaning they developed the new facial muscle in a “remarkably short” amount of time. And it stuck: Dogs able to move their eyebrows would be more likely to be nurtured by humans, which would give them “a selection advantage over others and reinforce the ‘puppy dog eyes’ trait for future generations,” says researcher Juliane Kaminsky, per a news release.

So now when you feel like you have been played by your best friend…..take solace in the science that you have been played.  We knew all along that our “buddies” were capable of manipulating us and new it is not just a feeling….there is science behind it.

In closing I will share MoMo’s “Jean Harlow” pose…..

This is my final post for this Sunday……for I have the French Gran Prix to watch…..

I would like to thank everyone for the visits and comments this past week…..you are much appreciated.

Go enjoy your early Summer day.

It Is 4:20 Somewhere

Sunday and a history lesson…..

Weed has become a major news generator these days….not the old stuff but the move to legalize around the country.

We think of weed as a product of the 60s, the Hippies, and the counterculture…..but actually the herb has been used way before those long hair hippies came around…..

Archaeologists have unearthed the earliest direct evidence of people smoking marijuana from a 2,500-year-old graveyard in western China. In a complex of lofty tombs in the Pamir Mountains—a region near the borders of modern China, Pakistan, and Tajikistan—excavators found 10 wooden bowls and several stones containing burnt residue of the cannabis plant. Scientists believe heated stones were used to burn the marijuana and people then inhaled the smoke as part of a burial ritual, the AP reports. “It’s the earliest strong evidence of people getting high” on marijuana, said Mark Merlin, a botanist at the University of Hawaii. He was not involved in the research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The history of ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. In the past century, archaeologists have found cannabis seeds and plants buried in tombs across Central Asia’s highlands. But since the cannabis plant has other uses—seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth—the presence of seeds alone doesn’t confirm drug use. Using new techniques for chemical analysis, the study’s scientists examined the residue and found evidence of THC, the compound that gives pot its high. Most wild cannabis plants have low levels of THC, so the researchers believe the people who built the graves deliberately selected or cultivated plants with higher amounts. “During funeral rites, the smokers may have hoped to communicate with the spirit world—or with the people they were burying,” says study co-author Yimin Yang.

But do not take my word for it……read the article for yourself…..

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/smoke-cannabis-get-high-weed-history-ancient-tombs-a8956021.html

Just a little something to think about on this 1st Sunday of Summer……

Designer Babies–Pros?

I try to be as neutral as I can be on some subjects….I try to give both sides of an issue so the reader can make up their own mind.

There have been several SciFi movies and TV series that have touched on the subject of genetic engineering of humans…think Khan Noonien Singh…..

Because I a m an opinionated SOB I have written about thise subject and let my thoughts be known over the past decade or so…..

https://lobotero.com/2009/03/08/design-a-kid/

https://lobotero.com/2015/02/06/could-it-lead-to-designer-babies/

https://lobotero.com/2015/05/03/on-the-road-to-designer-babies/

Yeah, I had a lot to say on the subject……most of which was in opposition….so in the sense of fairness I have read a report in support of “designer kids”……

Soon, some of you will try to make “better babies.”

Already, people pay labs to examine embryos so they can pick ones with DNA they like. Some screen for gender or eye color. Some screen out certain diseases.

So far, they’ve been limited to selecting genes that exist in the parents. They haven’t designed genes. But that is about to change.

Chinese scientists recently altered DNA in human embryos.

The designed babies—twin sisters—were born with immunity to common strains of HIV, claims the scientist responsible. (The added gene might also shorten lifespans. Most scientists say it’s too soon to gene-edit humans safely.)

The Case for Designer Babies

I know the good this could do…..but I also know the greed of the human race and that will lead to this process being misused in search of higher profits.

The “Rare Earth”

You would think that on this first Saturday of Summer I would be writing something literary…..wrong…..it is something geopolitical  (as usual)……

Rare earth minerals are the cornerstone of the electronic age…….I have tried to educate my readers in the past…..https://lobotero.com/2019/06/04/it-is-about-rare-earth/

As the sector grows and more and more electronics are needed to power a society it is only a matter of time before a rare earth trade war erupts into a major conflict…..

Rare earth minerals have emerged as the latest front in the escalating US-China trade war. Nearly a decade after the Chinese government controversially suspended rare earth exports to Japan during the 2010 Senkaku dispute, similar threats are now being made if the bilateral trade dispute with the US deepens.

How prepared is the global economy for another deployment of the so-called “rare earths weapon”?

Rare earths are an ideal instrument for economic coercion. They are an essential input into a wide range of high-technology products, across the electronics, petrochemical, renewable energy and defence sectors. As there are few economically-feasible substitutes for their use, any suspension to rare earth value chains would have a disastrous impact on an economy’s technological ecosystem.

This article below is what made me start this post……the rise of electric cars will mean much more destructive mining…..

Climate warriors like to imagine a future where electric cars put oil companies out of business. Firms would stop injecting known carcinogens into the ground to break up the layer of hard, shale rock hiding stores of fuel, and they would no longer plumb the ocean depths for oil, letting sticky black goo leak into the sea.

To get to that future — a future where we don’t need to dig oil out of the ground— companies will need to dig a whole lot of metal out of the ground, and that’s potentially bad news for people who work in mines or live nearby.

Like solar panels and wind turbines, electric car batteries are made from some of the most hard-to-get metals on Earth— dysprosium, neodymium, manganese, cobalt and lithium — the list of materials reads like Tony Stark’s shopping list. Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers are going to need a lot more of these metals if we are to build enough electric cars to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the stated goal of the Paris Climate Agreement.

More electric cars means more destructive mining

As with everything….one step forward, two steps backwards.

Enjoy the the first days of Summer.

I Have More Space Force News

That time again….a Saturday and time for IST News from Space…..

I know this does not interest most of my readers…but I feel obligated to keep informing my readers and trying to make sense of the space force thingy……

Besides the bureaucracy the cash needed to fund this new branch of the military will be staggering….cash needed elsewhere in the society…health, infrastructure, education, et al….but for some reason a Space Force is a priority.

The House Armed Services Committee voted to establish a United States Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force. The vote came in the overnight hours Thursday. The committee began its markup of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act Wednesday morning. After a nearly 21-hour session, the committee passed the NDAA 33-24.

The Space Corps amendment was offered by the HASC Strategic Forces subcommittee leaders Chairman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.). The proposal is similar to what the committee proposed in the 2018 NDAA, including the name of the new space service, U.S. Space Corps, rather than the Trump administration’s preferred name, U.S. Space Force.

Like the Marine Corps, the Space Corps would be led by a four-star Commandant who would be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

House Armed Services Committee votes to create a U.S. Space Corps

Space will be something to watch for it will siphon off more taxpayer money…..meaning that social services will be the first to suffer with cuts to pay for this adventure.

FYI

It will be hot here today…..I wrote this draft at 0300 hrs and it was already 94…..we already have heat advisories and it is only the second day of Summer…..gonna be a long Summer for us down here.

Yes We Have No SecDef

Closing Thought–21Jun19

First,  good news for US soccer fans…US has moved on from group play scoring 18 goals in 3 games…They start the knock out round with Spain…….the other good news is the French Gran Prix this Sunday……

The first day of Summer and we still have no real SecDef…..

It’s a difficult time for the Pentagon to be without a permanent U.S. defense secretary.

The Trump administration is grappling with an escalating crisis with Iran, an unusual and controversial deployment of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, the nearly two-decade-old war in Afghanistan and stalled talks with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.

Amid all that, and more, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan stepped down this week and the man tapped to replace him on an interim basis appears to face legal hurdles that could initially prevent him from serving more than about six more weeks. It’s an unusual level of uncertainty for one of the most important jobs in the administration.

https://www.apnews.com/a6cfc870fb8e4f9ca2dce63471eefce0

Pres. Trump’s acting SecDef Shanahan has tucked tail and ran from the Pentagon….but which war hawk will get the nod as the new chief of the Pentagon?

Arkansas’ senator, Tom Cotton, has be auditioning for a cabinet post for two years……or will Trump be satisfied with another ‘acting” secretary he has appointed Mark Esper……

Who will be the next SecDef?

For the second time in six months, President Donald Trump is searching for his next defense secretary.

After enjoying stability atop Pentagon leadership for the first two years of his presidency, Trump has been unable find a permanent appointee for his Defense Department Cabinet post since Jim Mattis was forced out of office on Jan. 1.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was announced as that replacement last month, but on Tuesday withdrew his name from consideration amid reports of past domestic violence incidents involving his family. Army Secretary Mark Esper will take his place while a new nominee is chosen.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/06/18/five-names-to-watch-as-trump-searches-for-his-next-defense-secretary/
 
So far the five names being floated around show NO indication of being qualified for the job….but that has NEVER stopped Trump from nominating subservient toads…..something the Pentagon does not need.