Arizona has lax laws about getting someone committed. Even his professors or fellow students could have requested to have someone assessed for psychiatric reasons. It is so unfortunate no one intervened sooner. Nearly 50 Percent Of Mental Health Services Recipients In Giffords' County Were Dropped In 2010 |
In the past year, Pima County, Ariz., where Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others were shot Saturday, has seen more than 45 percent of its mental health services recipients forced off the public rolls, a service advocate told The Huffington Post. |
The deep cuts in treatment were protested strongly at the time, with opponents warning that they would result in a spike in suicide attempts, public disturbances, hospitalizations and brushes with the police. But according to Clarke Romans, executive director for southern Arizona's branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the state government ignored requests for relief, citing the need to implement strict budget controls. |
This is more serious than we realize. Bees in freefall as study shows sharp US decline |
Disease and low genetic diversity might have caused US bumblebee decline over the past few decades, say scientists |
The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects. Scientists said the alarming decline, which could have devastating implications for the pollination of both wild and farmed plants, was likely to be a result of disease and low genetic diversity in bee populations. |
The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon pollination by bees, which means they contribute some £26bn to the global economy. |
It's amazing that as long as the list is, it is still only partial. Yet, they can't figure out how this climate would influence an unstable person to act violently. January 8, 2011—Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shoots U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others at a "Congress in Your Corner" event at a Safeway supermarket in Tuscon, Arizona. He kills six, including federal judge John Roll, and wounds 14, including Giffords, who is shot in the head. Loughner has an extensive history of mental illness and substance abuse, yet is able to purchase two handguns and a high-capacity ammunition magazine legally at Sportsman's Warehouse on November 30, 2010. In a YouTube video posted in December 2010, Loughner states, "You don’t have to accept the federalist laws ... Nonetheless, read the United States of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws." |
July 18, 2010—California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to " start a revolution" by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams' mother says her son was angry at " Left-wing politicians" and upset by " the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items." |
May 30, 2010—Sharron Angle, a candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator in Nevada, tells the Reno Gazette-Journal that a recent increase in gun sales nationwide " tells me that the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways." These comments echo ones made by Angle in January, when she told conservative radio show talk host Lars Larson, " You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take [U.S. Senator from Nevada] Harry Reid out." |
May 31, 2009—Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group. In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate. Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car. |
March 3, 2009— FOX commentator Glenn Beck interviews NRA celebrity spokesman Chuck Norris. During the interview, Beck states that, “ Somebody asked me this morning, they said, ‘you really believe that there's going to be trouble in the future?’ And I said, ‘if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country … Americans will, they just, they won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up.’ And they said, ‘where's that going to come from?’ And I said, ‘Texas, it's going to come from Texas.’” Read more at www.csgv.org |
Evidence suggests that a 26 year old black youth committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in Mississippi a mere 12 miles from where Emmett Till was lynched.
The tragedy presents several possibilities. First, the man was lynched in a place where lynching has been popular relatively recently in history. Or, a second possibility, which I find more plausible given his background of mental illness and previous suicide attempts, also deserve some discussion. My theory is that it is the tremendous negative weight of the culture, history, and relations in the area for a black man that makes vulnerable people mentally ill. In accordance with his personal interaction with the social structure around him, he ended up picking a means of death that provided a statement about those things which had hurt him. It was a symbolic choice of death if nothing else. A powerful statement that would require little interpretation to comprehend. On Friday, Dec. 3 the remains of Frederick Jermaine Carter were found hanging from an oak tree in Greenwood, Miss. This week, the county sheriff ruled the death a suicide but there are some very interesting details that seem to point elsewhere.
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Preliminary autopsy results have found that there is no validity or support for the claim made by the NAACP that someone else was involved. According to Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks, Carter’s family indicated that he had spent eight months in the state mental hospital in 2008, and had even tried to kill himself by drug overdose and cutting himself. |
County Coroner Debra Sanders said that the autopsy’s preliminary finding of suicide is consistent with what was observed at the scene: that “Carter dragged the frame of an old table from one side of the tree to the other, propped it against the tree trunk, and then tied himself to the lowest limb.” In addition, there were no other footprints by the tree. |
Carter, 26, was found in the predominately white area of north Greenwood. Prior to his death, Carter’s stepfather, a painter, said he and Carter were working in Greenwood and that Carter wandered off after he was instructed to go and get some tools. |
North Greenwood is a wealthy area located 12 miles from Money, Miss., the place where 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in August 1955.
Read more at rollingout.com |
Hockey is a white sport. It has white players and white fans and comes from countries with very few people who are not white. But, it's not a discriminatory sport, or it doesn't have to be.
When my brother bought me season tickets to the St. Louis Blues in the early 2000s, they had a black player, Jamal Mayers. I was pleased to see there would be a tinge of diversity in the game I love. There are other black players across the NHL, almost always from Canada, and they are often quite good. That one great star who becomes the breakaway player with name recognition outside diehard fans has yet to emerge. Or has he? NHL Analyst Suggests That a Black Hockey Player Do Things 'The White Way' |
Hockey analyst Darren Pang recently made a disparaging remark when discussing a black National Hockey League player named P.K. Subban of the Montreal Canadiens. |
The 20-year-old Subban is an NHL rookie who has the skill and attitude that is comparable to a LeBron James on ice. His hockey game is superior to most players his age, but players and coaches around the league have criticized the young player for his flair and confidence on the ice. The Canadiens' coach, Jacques Martin, benched Subbon for three games, saying that the rookie must understand the team structure.
Subbun's situation made national headlines after Pang suggested that Subban be more like a white hockey player named Alex Pietrangelo. "Subbun is full of life," Pang said. "The more gregarious he got, the more full of life he got, the more everybody wants to settle him down. He should look at Pietrangelo as an example who does everything on the ice, off the ice, the white way."
Although Pang later apologized for his gaffe, it's apparent that he and the rest of the NHL really want Subban to do things the "white way." The majority white league has never had a black hockey player who played the game so well at a young age and is unafraid to let his competitors know it. |
In our post-factual world, history has become another battlefield, with far-flung hostilities over cultural and political differences as well as the imperial adventures abroad. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked, we are entitled to opinions, not to our own facts. |
Glenn Beck peddles a notion of the “Progressive Era”—a time when Republicans and Democrats and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson proudly called themselves “progressives”—as the period when all the evils of modern America became manifest. Original, yes. Factual, no. |
The right’s twist of history to please its backers and fuel its agenda is a vigorous enterprise. Serious history, serious scholarship and serious discussion of facts and ideas are dismissed with tunnel vision. Read more at www.laprogressive.com |
The elite of a society are not liberal, and the kinds of people being called liberal elite are merely our best & brightest Searching for the Liberal Elite |
My only elite quality, the intellectual skills that allowed me to become a professor, is apparently held against me by many people who dismiss learned people as living in an “ivory tower”. My opinions about matters of history, politics, and society are not as valuable as a plumber’s. |
The funny thing is that the elite is never liberal. In every society I have lived in or studied, the elite ferociously protects its privileges. They fight against things like taxes on the rich, restrictions on their businesses, programs to help the poor. For example, based on exit polls in the 2004 Presidential election, the more money voters made, the more likely that they were Republican; voters who made over $200,000 were 62% Republican and 37% Democrat. |
Some social scientists see the depth of Omaha's black poverty today rooted in that economic upheaval. Subsequent generations, often raised in poverty and with role models scarce, have struggled to raise their education and skill levels. That's left them largely isolated from the wealth of finance, professional, administrative and technical jobs that drive Omaha's growing, 21st century economy. |
However, educational shortcomings alone don't explain the struggles of blacks in the work force. Latinos in Omaha have lower education levels but unemployment and poverty rates that are half those of blacks. |
Employment experts and social scientists talk of other serious barriers to even entry-level jobs for some blacks: criminal records that make many jobs off-limits; big unpaid child support bills that deter men from entering the work force; a “cool pose” culture that glorifies street life; hardworking and motivated immigrants who often compete for the same jobs; a lack of role models to show the way to better jobs. |
“The reasons for why any one individual is in this position are so complicated,” said Kirby Moss, a University of Colorado anthropologist who grew up in north Omaha. “You have to talk about the history, economics and culture that filter down to this one person.” |
Most experts say the long-term answer to better jobs for black workers begins with improved educational success for black children. That makes efforts like Omaha's Building Bright Futures critical. |
“A lot of it has to do with changing the psychology and making it clear to kids that there are tremendous opportunities available for the taking,” said Marty Shukert, an Omaha economic development consultant. |
The education push, however, does little for adults already mired in poverty, and their financial struggles are one of the biggest threats to their children's school success. There need to be short-term strategies, too. |
Poverty experts say policymakers should look at boosting public assistance but tie any increase to work requirements. Read more at www.omaha.com |
Because of the European American belief in Manifest Destiny, in addition to slavery, the 19th century was our great shame because of the provoking of wars that would allow our border to extend to the Pacific Ocean. White Americans know that Mexicans and Native Americans had lived for centuries along this land, usually in tribal or village communities, and didn't consider defeat of a central Mexican government a legitimate justification for forced migration. This means that the grandparents of elderly people from these groups have memories of hearing the stories of injustice. It makes the white outrage over illegal immigration close in time by family narrative when it looks far away in time by years.
http://www.historyguy.com/Mexican-American_War.html
Iowa is a relative gray state. However, it has large college towns that have concentrations of young people. In addition, it has an interesting history of racial relationships that help explain why they would ever have supported Obama, given this generational conflict. The Gray And The Brown: The Generational Mismatch |
A contrast in priorities is arising between nonwhite young voters and white, older voters. |
In an age of diminished resources, the United States may be heading for an intensifying confrontation between the gray and the brown. |
Two of the biggest demographic trends reshaping the nation in the 21st century increasingly appear to be on a collision course that could rattle American politics for decades. From one direction, racial diversity in the United States is growing, particularly among the young. Minorities now make up more than two-fifths of all children under 18, and they will represent a majority of all American children by as soon as 2023, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution predicts. |
These twin developments are creating what could be called a generational mismatch, or a "cultural generation gap" as Frey labels it. A contrast in needs, attitudes, and priorities is arising between a heavily (and soon majority) nonwhite population of young people and an overwhelmingly white cohort of older people. Like tectonic plates, these slow-moving but irreversible forces may generate enormous turbulence as they grind against each other in the years ahead. |
This competition for resources takes place amid a stark divergence in the political preferences of the old and the young. In 2008, Obama won the backing of two-thirds of voters under 29 and fully four-fifths of all minority voters, but he lost a majority of all seniors and nearly three-fifths of white seniors, according to exit polls. The public reaction to Obama's performance so far suggests that those differences will persist, and possibly widen, in 2010 and even 2012. In Gallup's weekly tracking poll through mid-July, Obama received positive approval ratings from about two-thirds of nonwhite voters and three-fifths of young people, but only about one-third of whites over 50. |
In that world, the generational and racial implications of the choices between tax cuts and spending reductions, and between public spending aimed at the old or the young, could grow increasingly explicit and explosive. Rosenberg isn't alone in believing that the way the United States sorts through those options will powerfully shape not only its economic but also its social future. "The challenge for us in the next few years is creating a politics of investment during a time of potential austerity to make sure that we're ... funding the future and not the past," Rosenberg says. "This is going to be a titanic battle not only at the federal level but at the state level as well." Read more at www.nationaljournal.com |
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