In 2012, I have published 163 blog posts with a few notable contributions by Darbikrash and Kramerfaust. All 163 posts are hyperlinked and listed in chronological order below. The top 10 most-viewed posts for 2012 were:
To recap 2012, I would say it was the year of catastrophic environmental changes with both poles melting, Frankenstorms and global wierding, and severe droughts. We’re following in the steps of most other civilizations through environmental overshoot and destruction of our land-base by industrialization. Climate change is not something humans will be able to adapt to since we have already set into motion a cascade of feedback loops which will raise the global temperature to levels unheard of in the history of mankind. Amazingly, a large percentage of the population still does not believe that climate change is caused by man’s industrial activities over the last couple centuries or that it’s of any consequence. Mass media propaganda has served the interests of the elite well, but to the detriment of us all.
2012 also saw the further rise of the Security and Surveillance State which has strengthened and consolidated the power of corporate rule in America. Grass-roots movements can be preemptively disbanded and discredited through covert intelligence operations that make use of America’s hi-tech monitoring system integrating all electronic communications.
The corporate state knows that the steady deterioration of the economy and the increasingly savage effects of climate change will create widespread social instability. It knows that rage will mount as the elites squander diminishing resources while the poor, as well as the working and middle classes, are driven into destitution. It wants to have the legal measures to keep us cowed, afraid and under control. It does not, I suspect, trust the police to maintain order. And this is why, contravening two centuries of domestic law, it has seized for itself the authority to place the military on city streets and citizens in military detention centers, where they cannot find redress in the courts. The shredding of our liberties is being done in the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. But the NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us. That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights. The new version of the NDAA, like the old ones, provides our masters with the legal shackles to make our resistance impossible. And that is their intention.
You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.
Now we have official confirmation that this indeed was and is the case. Surprise, surprise:
Newly obtained documents confirm that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring peaceful protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement before the first OWS demonstrations even began…
…The list of documents, says Verheyden-Hilliard, “is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement.”
“These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” she writes. “These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.
What more proof do you need that we live under a corporatocracy? Since solving dire problems like climate change would require a complete dismantling of the current capitalist system, i.e. an economic system driven by the profit motive is incompatible with ecological sustainability, we can see why the financial and corporate elite would be hostile to a grass-roots movement which seeks social and environmental justice. Such issues don’t compute with the bottom line of corporations or our war-based economy. Interestingly, the only real attention that was given to OWS by those in power was on how their discontent could be co-opted by the status quo:
As I [Glenn Greenwald] noted several weeks ago, White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what “Occupy Congress” is designed to achieve.
Of course the Tea Party was never really a threat to Corporate America because it’s what is termed an astroturf group, as was first reported a few years ago by Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham:
Do you think these free-market idealogues of capitalism are going to clean up the mess left in the wake of climate chaos? Hell no. The unwashed masses are on their own. As long as the elite have the money to insulate themselves from the ravages of our fossil fuel-dependent economy, they will have no real concern for the catastrophes that lie ahead. A case in point is the recent aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy Frankenstorm:
Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. […]
Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote” — meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last [Friday] night. […]
Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.
‘Change’ will always be an empty campaign slogan when you have a federal government which:
…wastes resources on a multi-trillion dollar Security and Surveillance apparatus to spy on its entire citizenry, in particular OWS protestors, minorities, and government critics/whistleblowers.
…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.
…is not alarmed that 50 million Americans are dependent on food stamps while U.S. corporations hoard $22 trillion in secret offshore bank accounts.
…thinks that tax revenues can be maintained while its manufacturing base is off-shored to exploit cheap foreign labor pools.
…uses the growth in corporate profits as the only yardstick for societal well-being.
…marginalizes and prevents the participation of third party candidates within our two-party oligopoly.
…believes that the system described above should be bailed out for its criminal excesses from the billfold of a now beaten-down middle class.
New ‘smile guards’ will soon become mandatory in the work environment of the corporate state:
I was starting my next post when I inadvertently ran into my piece of work being used on another site without referring to the original creator – me. The owner of that site lifted my work and then changed a few words and presented it as his own sweat and blood. Look people, most of these posts take four to six hours of reading, research, and thinking on my part before I present them to you. If you are going to use my work, then show some basic morals and etiquette by referencing where you got the material as I always do. Using another author’s work without acknowledging that person’s effort is extremely disrespectful and it creates copyright infringement problems. It’s just like taking an artist’s painting or other work and erasing their signature so you can replace it with your own fraudulent name. It’s theft no matter how you look at it.
I don’t charge anyone or collect any monies for the work I do here in my effort to try to shed light on the real news that’s underreported or not reported at all. All I ask is that you reference where you got the work. This is a basic code of the internet. A number of places use my work such as 3es.weebly.com and Carolyn Baker in her newsletter, and they always reference this site. As long as proper recognition is given, I don’t have a problem with anyone using my work. But until I get some resolution on this particular infringement, I am withholding further blog posts on this site.
Amongst all the drama of the fiscal cliff, the story that should have gotten front page space this week is that the Antarctic is melting much faster than previously thought. In my post ‘Burning the Candle at Both Ends‘, the recent finding that the Antarctic was indeed losing ice came as a revelation to many and dispelled the popular belief amongst the global warming ‘denialist’ crowd that the South Pole ice sheet was increasing. The situation has now gotten more dire:
What are the ramification of this? We’ve released another ticking methane time bomb and opened up one more pandora’s box of known and unknown feedback loops:
…Half the West Antarctic ice sheet and a quarter of the East Antarctic sheet lie on pre-glacial sedimentary basins containing around 21,000bn tonnes of carbon, said the scientists, writing in the journal Nature.
British co-author Prof Jemma Wadham, from the University of Bristol, said: “This is an immense amount of organic carbon, more than 10 times the size of carbon stocks in northern permafrost regions.
“Our laboratory experiments tell us that these sub-ice environments are also biologically active, meaning that this organic carbon is probably being metabolised into carbon dioxide and methane gas by microbes.”
The amount of frozen and free methane gas beneath the ice sheets could amount to 4bn tonnes, the researchers estimate…
And what will happen to coastal communities? If one were to perform a linear projection of sea level rise from recent records, then you would get the following results:
…Currently, sea level is rising at the rate of 3 mm each year. Given 1″ = 25 mm, this means by the end of the century a rise of 87 (yrs) x 3 mm / yr. = 261 mm or (261 mm/ 25 mm/in) = 10.44 inches – enough to wash away roughly one third of S. Florida and most of the sea level areas of the Atlantic coast…
…IPCC (2007) suggested a most likely sea level rise of a few tens of centimeters by 2100. Several subsequent papers suggest that sea level rise of ~1 meter is likely by 2100. However, those studies, one way or another, include linearity assumptions, so 1 meter can certainly not be taken as an upper limit on sea level rise…
…Hansen (2005) argues that, if business-as-usual increase of greenhouse gases continue throughout this century, the climate forcing will be so large that non-linear ice sheet disintegration should be expected and multi- meter sea level rise not only possible but likely. Hansen (2007) suggests that the position reflected in IPCC documents may be influenced by a “scientific reticence”…
…Perceived authority in the case of ice sheets stems from ice sheet models used to simulate paleoclimate sea level change. However, paleoclimate ice sheet changes were initiated by weak climate forcings changing slowly over thousands of years, not by a forcing as large or rapid as human-made forcing this century. Moreover, in a paper submitted for publication (Hansen et al., 2013) we present evidence that even paleoclimate data do not support the degree of lethargy and hysteresis that exists in such ice sheet models…
…The increasing Greenland mass loss in Fig. 1 can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 and 5 meters by 2090. The dates are 2045 and 2057 for 5-year doubling time and 2055 and 2071 for a 7-year doubling time.
However, exponential ice loss, if it occurs, would encounter negative (diminishing) feedbacks. Our simulations (Hansen and Sato, 2012) suggest that a strong negative feedback kicks in when sea level rise reaches meter-scale, as the ice-melt has a large cooling and freshening effect on the regional ocean. Such a slowdown in the rate of sea level rise would be little consolation to humanity, however, as the high latitude cooling would increase latitudinal temperature gradients, thus driving powerful cyclonic storms (Hansen, 2009), and coastlines would be continually moving landward for centuries.
West Antarctic ice is probably more vulnerable to rapid disintegration than Greenland ice, because the West Antarctic ice sheet rests mainly on bedrock below sea level (Hughes, 1972). The principal mechanism for mass loss from West Antarctica is warming of the ocean, melting of West Antarctic ice shelves, and thus increased flux from the ice sheet to the ocean.
The several analysis methods compared by Shepherd et al. (2012) concur that the West Antarctic ice sheet mass imbalance has grown since 2005 from an annual mass loss of 0-100 Gt ice to a recent annual mass loss of 100-200 Gt ice (Fig. 4 of Shepherd et al.)…
There are roughly seven billion humans on Earth at this time, all of whom have a death sentence hanging over their head via anthropomorphic climate change. Perhaps this partly explains the recent popularity of zombies and the ‘walking dead’ in our culture. Forthright thoughts on this subject from a scientist commenting at the Arctic Sea Ice Blog:
The first signs have appeared of what will be a mass culling of the human population by way of famine in the decades to come:
…According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, global wheat production is expected to fall 5.2% in 2012 and yields from many other crops grown to feed animals could be 10% down on last year.
“Populations are growing but production is not keeping up with consumption. Prices for wheat have already risen 25% in 2012, maize 13% and dairy prices rose 7% just last month. Food reserves, held to provide a buffer against rising prices, are at a critical low level. It means that food supplies are tight across the board and there is very little room for unexpected events,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the FAO…
My youngest son, who is eight years old, shocked me last week with a certain question. I don’t talk about the subject matter of this blog to him for obvious reasons. He asked me whether in the future the world would become a sort of technological paradise or a destroyed planet. I couldn’t answer his question. I didn’t even want to try.
In my previous ‘arms industry’ posts (Guns, God, and Greenback$ as well as Guns ‘R U.S.), I alluded to the revolving door between the arms industry and the government and the corruption of politics by the money involved therein. In one of the most interesting interviews of 2012 aired today on DemocracyNow, arms industry analyst Andrew Feinstein, author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade” and a former African National Congress member of Parliament in South Africa, sheds more light and insight on this very subject:
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: …The global arms trade is a $1.74 trillion-a-year business. That’s $250 for every person on the planet. And the profit motive behind the global arms trade is absolutely crucial. This is a business that is about big, big money. The trade contributes around 40 percent of all corruption in all global trade. So its impact on countries, on governments, on ordinary individuals in terms of the economic opportunity costs are absolutely massive.
Now, you will find that many spokespeople for the trade would try to distinguish between the legal or formal trade, on the one hand, and the illegal or illicit trade, on the other. I argue in the book that this distinction is a fallacy, that the boundaries are in fact extremely fuzzy and that the licit and the illicit are very closely intertwined, in addition to which the industry is largely protected because of its very close links to governments, to intelligence agencies, obviously to the military, and to lawmakers. So it is very seldom—even with the inadequate regulations that exist globally around the trade in weapons, it is very, very seldom that people who break those regulations are actually brought to book…
…Now, the situation that pertains at a global or international level has very many similarities with the domestic situation, particularly in the U.S., because let’s—let’s bear in mind while discussing this that the U.S. buys and sells almost as much weaponry as the rest of the world combined. So what happens in the U.S. is going to have enormous impact on the rest of the world. And what happens domestically, in terms of the ownership of weaponry within the U.S., really does, as I say, reflect the global trade in arms, in that we see it’s a $3.5 billion-a-year industry. And here we’re talking about smaller weaponry—about handguns, about assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons, the sorts that are used in the tragedy at Sandy Hook and all of the others that we’ve seen over the years throughout the U.S.
But the NRA, the gun sellers, the gun users seem to be afforded an extraordinary level of protection by government, by law enforcement authorities, just as happens on the global level. And part of this is because of the revolving door of people between, for instance, the NRA and government. Recent figures suggest that 15 of 28 officials in the NRA came from—sorry, lobbyists in the NRA came from important positions within government dealing with some of these same issues, so that the sorts of decisions being made by government are being informed disproportionately by those who want guns to be unregulated, by those who are making massive profits out the suffering of the victims of gun crime…
…let me make another point that I think is absolutely crucial about this and to understand where the NRA is coming from and, unfortunately, where the global trade in arms comes from, as well. And that is the linkages between politics and the gun lobby, and particularly, in terms of those linkages, money. One of the reasons that I focus on the global trade in arms in my work is because I saw, both in the context of South Africa, but also at a global level, the way in which money has come to pollute our politics. And the relationship between defense contractors on an international level and political parties and individual politicians are deep and profound. At a domestic level, the relationships between the NRA and specific elected representatives, not only in terms of money contributed, but also in terms of support given, are, again, profound. And unless we are able to break these linkages between money and politics that so pollute the way we are governed around the world, we will not be able to deal with some of the most intractable problems that face us as human beings —problems of the weaponization of the world, problems of climate change…
…I have not seen anywhere else in the world a gun lobby that has the same level of influence on its own government as the NRA does in the United States. My own assessment of what happened in July with the arms trade treaty is that the NRA, through the words of Mr. LaPierre and others, made clear to the Obama administration that it would make the president’s re-election a lot more difficult if he supported an international arms trade treaty. And I think it’s in that way that the NRA had such direct influence on the U.S. decision to effectively scupper negotiations for what in my opinion wouldn’t have been a strong-enough arms trade treaty, but would have been far better than any form of regulation that we have at the moment. So, yes, I think this is something of a unique situation, where a gun lobby has the extent of influence that it has in the United States of America…
What I find most disturbing is that in an age of resource constraints and austerity measures aimed at the lower class, global sales from the arms industry are booming and that growth is coming primarily from the United States of America (aka ‘Guns ‘R U.S.’):
As was stated by Feinstein, the world-wide anti-corruption body, Transparency International, reports that the arms industry is one of the most corrupt business sectors, accounting for 40-50% of corruption in global trade.
Corruption plays a significant role in influencing arms procurement. But despite repeated scandals, this situation has been largely ignored by governments, NGOs and academics.” ~ Laurence Cockroft, Chairman of Transparency International’s UK chapter.
‘Commissions’ are the euphemism for bribes which are paid by manufacturers to governments and average at least 10% of contracts that run in the tens of $billions per year. Some reasons for the rampant corruption in the arms industry:
The merchants of death have only grown more powerful in recent times, and their horrific impacts to the well-being of humanity are as true today as they were after World War I when the League of Nations listed six primary criticisms of global arms dealers, as quoted by J.W. Smith:
Stung by the horrors of World War I, world leaders realized that arms merchants had a hand in creating both the climate of fear and the resulting disaster itself.
Americans need to understand that the NRA is very much a part of this global arms trade. If one follows the money, the reasons why the NRA is adamantly opposed to any sort of regulation on guns becomes painfully apparent. While the US domestic arms industry conveniently wraps itself and its profit motive behind the patriotic fervor of the Second Amendment and the colonial ghosts of Founding Fathers, the horrors of the Sandy Hook massacre are blamed on everything under the sun except for that which hides in plain sight — an unregulated, out-of-control global and domestic arms industry.
As I’ve explained in the past, my peculiar work routine really makes this site a sort of biweekly affair. So in keeping with that loose schedule, I’ll be taking the next several days off and will post again in earnest after Christmas. In the meantime, I’ll be partaking in the traditional family yuletide activities such as drinking funky-tasting eggnog and cruising through the neighborhood to take in all the lit up decorations like inflatable Walmart snowmen and Santas. Notwithstanding everything I’ve blogged about here, the world’s not coming to an end, right? Putin apparently had a 4 hour news conference which included this very subject:
So all these observable facts that we’ve been documenting here are just our own personal viewpoint of the world and certainly not the perspective held by the vast majority of the population, including world dictators leaders. We should just take a ‘glass is half full’ point of view, shouldn’t we?:
1.) Peak Oil? Not a problem… We’ve got more fossil fuels to exploit as revealed by the melting Arctic. And of course we can always fall back on our seemingly endless supply of coal:
2.) Overpopulation? Not a problem. Endocrine disrupting chemicals and other stressors of industrial civilization are decimating the sperm count of the global male population:
3.) Climate Change? The top minds of science are right on top of this one. Who said you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again:
4.) And the most dire threat of all… The Fiscal Cliff. Are you kidding? The bankers and corporate elite already have that one solved. Three for them and none for you:
…Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty – with cash incomes as low as $10,000 a year for a family of four. Is it any wonder that the US has the third highest poverty rate out of 30 leading industrial nations?
The problem is exacerbated by decades of economic and political policies that have resulted in a massive shift of national wealth from working people to the corporate boardrooms and the yacht owners. One result: real wage growth for workers has stagnated for 30 years; median household income has steadily fallen since the Wall Street produced economic crash of 2008. Much of the limited job growth since then has been in the lowest wage sectors, primarily food service and retail.
Sadly, the issue remained almost as invisible on the 2012 campaign trail as it was when Harrington shocked the nation in 1962. But it is not a surprise to nurses who, every day, see the faces of poverty and the suffering of families left behind – even as corporate profits once again soar and the parties and good times are back on Wall Street…
Well, we can always take up dumpster diving in the wealthy neighborhoods. I hear they “throw a lot of good shit away.”
Have a merry Christmas and don’t let the bastards wear you down!!!
Obama’s history on gun control has been long on rhetoric and nonexistent on results. Politics was always the primary concern for him. Having studied Obama’s political behavior in Illinois, Ralph Nader said very discerningly in a recent speech that Obama is risk averse. He avoids confrontation with the powerful interests and caves in to their demands. From the too-big-to-fail banks to the for-profit healthcare insurance industry, Obama has shown himself to be a milktoast and socket-puppet of the corporate elite. Wow, what a surprise. Who knew you had to sell your soul to get into the White House? His tear-drenched words aside, Obama’s abysmal record speaks for itself:
…the president received a dismal review from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the most visible gun-control advocacy groups.
“President Obama’s first-year record on gun violence prevention has been an abject failure,” the group wrote in a 2010 report, adding, “his campaign promises have gone unfulfilled and a year’s worth of opportunities to bring sanity to the gun issue have been lost.”
Should he want to bring forward legislation now, Obama faces a major obstacle: Congress. Even the Democratic-controlled Senate has shown little appetite to touch the controversial issue.
Multiple gun control bills have been introduced in recent years, but not a single one has advanced to a floor vote…. – link
And the ‘MericanPeople don’t wan’t nobody touchin’ their guns. Even after particularly horrific massacres of children, any uptick in favor of gun control quickly dies in the lesion-riddled brain of the United States of Amnesia:
With an economy predicated on growth, we’ll take it anyway we can, i.e. war and military Keynesianism. And the belief that every ‘Merican needs a gun is a part of that militarized American culture. Guns are the norm just like cars and televisions.
Clearly, increased gun availability has not protected America’s civil rights which have been whittled away in the age of the Security and Surveillance State. And it has not prevented the corporate takeover of the government either. I can, however, readily see that the profits of an active gun industry have been protected. This firearms industry then uses those profits to lobby state and federal legislatures for relaxation of restrictions on gun ownership and the de-criminalization of gun use – a familiar refrain in our government-corporate-lobbyist complex.
The NRA has spent 73 times what the leading pro-gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has spent on lobbying in the 112th Congress ($4.4 million to $60,000, through the second quarter of 2012), and 4,143 times what the Brady Campaign spent on the 2012 election ($24.28 million to $5,816). (One caveat on the data is that the NRA itself does a very poor job of accurately reporting its spending, and we must rely on its self-reports.)
As I pointed out in my last two blog entries, guns are a big and growing business for America, just like the metastatic growth of the military industrial complex over the last half century. The NSSF (the trade association for the gun industry), located just across the highway from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut, touts this fact in its 2012 Firearms and Ammunition Industry Economic Impact Report:
…During difficult economic times and high unemployment rates nationally, our industry has grown and created over 26,325 new, well-paying jobs over the past two years. Our industry is proud to be one of the bright spots in this economy.Take a look for yourself and see the impact we have nationally and on your home state.
The Firearms Industry Creates Jobs in America
United States companies that manufacture, distribute and sell sporting firearms, ammunition and supplies are an important part of the country’s economy. Manufacturers of firearms, ammunition and supplies, along with the companies that sell and distribute these products, provide well paying jobs in America and pay significant amounts in tax to the state and Federal governments.
Economic Impact of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Industry in the U.S.
An Important Part of America’s Economy
Companies in the United States that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment employ as many as 98,752 people in the country and generate an additional 110,998 jobs in supplier and ancillary industries. These include jobs in companies supplying goods and services to manufacturers, distributors and retailers, as well as those that depend on sales to workers in the firearms and ammunition industry. [1]…
So the predictable outcome of a country awash in lethal guns would be more gun deaths. Oh that’s right, the NRA says “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Guns are just the handy instrument that is so effective for someone bent on maximum destruction. Is there political will to try to stop the toxic effects of this flourishing gun industry, a by-product of our war economy and militarized society? I doubt it. The sheer number of guns already in circulation will guarantee a continuum of grisly mass murders throughout the country far into the future. And as long as there’s money to be made from guns and weapons, nothing will ever really change:
“America isn’t a country. It’s a business. Now pay me my fucking money.” ~ Killing Them Softly
In the previous post, aubreyenoch commented on the toxic effects of our current socio-economic system, i.e. industrial capitalism. These “off balance liabilities” are a reality which persists despite the standard business-world practice of ignoring them. The last topic was guns; so lets look at how firearms have become an integral part of our economy. Reading the article ‘In America, guns are a boom, regulation a bust‘, we learn that America is driving the production and spread of guns here and abroad as well as propelling the creation of foreign gun industries:
…the Small Arms Survey, or SAS, an independent research group in Geneva, valued global small-arms sales for 2011 at $8.5 billion, more than double its 2006 estimate of $4 billion.
Although the increase partly reflects improved information gathering, the gun trade has undoubtedly expanded in recent years. The report identifies two primary sources: large government purchases for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased spending by U.S. civilians.
Matt Schroeder, who heads the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists, says the U.S. “appetite for weapons” is one of the world’s largest and most diverse.
“There aren’t a lot of countries that are similar in terms of the quantities demanded and the types that are legally purchased here,” he said.
American small-arms purchases in 2009 accounted for 38 percent of the global total at $1.8 billion, more than 47 other leading importers combined, according to the SAS.
Private citizens provide the main source of demand for small arms around the globe. Of the 650 million firearms owned by civilians worldwide, more than 41 percent are in American hands.
It’s no surprise the United States has by far the highest proportion of guns per person, an estimated 89 civilian firearms per 100 residents…
And contrary to the popular fear by gun zealots that ‘Socialist’ Obama is going to take away their guns, he has not put forward any new gun laws and actually worked to relax regulations on the export of U.S. firearms abroad:
Despite decrying gun violence, however, Obama hasn’t pushed for gun control. His administration is also advocating new regulations that would make it easier to export weapons abroad.
Washington was chiefly responsible for the collapse of talks last summer on a UN arms trade treaty—a reflection of the vast political influence wielded by the U.S. gun lobby, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure the highly lucrative industry keeps expanding…
Gun lobby groups have claimed credit for sinking United Nations negotiations over an international arms trade treaty last summer—when Amnesty International activists handed out bananas in New York’s Times Square, saying treaties regulate the global trade of fruit, but not guns and ammunition.
The talks concluded with no agreement on the draft text after the United States refused to sign, saying it needed more time to review the text.
Jeff Abramson, director of the Control Arms Secretariat, said the U.S. delegation’s actions were especially disappointing because the draft text satisfied all concerns Washington expressed during the negotiations.
“The best conclusion is that the Obama administration made a political decision to not deal with the treaty during an election cycle,” he said.
However, Abramson dismisses the NRA’s claim it “killed” the agreement, saying the strong American gun culture “makes it very difficult to have a rational conversation about regulations, even ones that do not impact U.S. law.”
Marsh agrees politics don’t fully explain the industry’s influence. Although gun owners who rushed out to buy more firearms after Obama’s first election may have contributed to the sales boom, the spending reflects a “much deeper, underlying trend” that dates back to 2001—and which he believes will continue for the foreseeable future.
Now let’s look at some of the “off balance liabilities“. The flintlock pistols and muskets of bygone frontier days are a far cry from the firepower of today’s semi-automatic weapons, something the founding fathers did not envision:
It’s actually pretty fun, you’ve got the guns with Santa and everything and you get to hold them, just a fun family event,” said Scott Daugherty after taking a family photo with Santa as well.
This is the third year the gun club has offered this “Santa and machine guns” photo opportunity.
While some people find the idea of posing with Santa and guns inappropriate, the line out the gun club’s door proves gun aficionados love it.
“We got here about an hour early to make sure because last year the line was really crazy and we decided not to stay, so we figured we better come early this year, we were about third or fourth in line and we’re off to breakfast and ready to ship these pictures off to our family,” said a woman by the name of Abby on her way out.
Such a yuletide family event by Pax Americana in its twilight years:
I had to go back and look up the definition(wikipedia) of Christmas after seeing those photos. I have to wonder if this gun culture is reinforced by a country whose economy revolves around war and the militarization of our society. Maybe a previous President had a point when he said:
“We cannot be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war.
Chart of Smith & Wesson revenues:
I’m sure this year will break records for gun sales. Oh, it already did:
And you think this species has a chance at long-term survival?
…we encounter another fact about our planetary life: the fragility of the balances through which the natural world that we know survives. In the field of climate, the sun’s radiations, the earth’s emissions, the universal influence of the oceans, and the impact of the ice are unquestionably vast and beyond any direct influence on the part of man. But the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation, the interplay of forces which preserves the average global level of temperature appear to be so even, so precise, that only the slightest shift in the energy balance could disrupt the whole system. It takes only the smallest movement at its fulcrum to swing a seesaw out of the horizontal. It may require only a very small percentage of change in the planet’s balance of energy to modify average temperatures by 2C. Downward, this is another ice age; upward, a return to an ice-free age. In either case, the effects are global and catastrophic.
~ Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet)
In my two posts about climate tipping points, I spoke of the Amazon forest and boreal forests as specific tipping points, but we can lump the planet’s entire collection of wood, forest and jungle ecosystems into one global system that will be decimated in the current human-generated climate armageddon. Man will realize he is just a temporary visitor of planet Earth, soon to be evicted by the cruel and unforgiving laws of nature. The following factors, now well underway, will obliterate the Earth’s tree ecosystems in the coming decades: massive pest outbreaks like that of the bark beetle into new regions whose climate zones have been altered, hotter and more severe droughts, the spread of invasive weedy plants which act as fuel for bigger and more devastating wildfires, and the spread of tree-killing diseases.
There are four recent articles in the news which describe how we are fast converting the world’s woods, forests, and jungles from massive carbon sinks into massive carbon emitters, ultimately to treeless wastelands:
These studies sound a warning bell that we can expect to see forest diebacks become more widespread, more frequent and more severe — and that no forests are immune,” Engelbrecht continued. “The ramifications of this scenario are diverse and, in many respects, dire: forest mortality will be accompanied by changes in species composition, changes in ecosystem function and losses of services and biodiversity.
Professor Frank Fenner’s prediction will invariably come to pass. And the intuition of the unwashed masses is correct – we are living in End Times:
But no ‘believers’ will be saved from this eco-apocalypse and no God will appear. The only thing visited upon mankind will be his own self-annihilation brought on by ignorance, hubris, and greed.