Most See Trump As A Force For Bad And Untrustworthy

 

These charts are from a YouGov Poll -- done between July 1st and 17th of adults in the U.K. (2340), Australia (2003), Canada (2057), France (2109), Germany (2079), Poland (2098), and the U.S. (2039).

Two Mass Shootings Miles Apart _ The Gov. Reactions Were Also Miles Apart

 

The following is part of a post by Dan Rather:

Over the weekend, two senseless shootings were separated by 10,000 miles. During both, innocent people were murdered, but the reaction of the countries’ leaders was as far apart as the deadly incidents.

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
On Saturday afternoon, a man gained access to an engineering building at Brown University and opened fire on a group of students reviewing for an upcoming exam. According to people in the first-floor classroom, the gunman entered wearing a face mask and carrying a rifle, yelled something and started shooting students arrayed in the stadium-style seating. Two students were killed; nine were injured. . . .

Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia
On the other side of the world, just 11 hours later, a deadly mass shooting unfolded on a beach in Australia. As hundreds gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, two men positioned themselves on an elevated footbridge above the beachside party. Then they opened fire on the crowd. . . .

Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, said, “The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary. Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws … People can be radicalized over a period of time. Licenses should not be in perpetuity.” His proposal could include limiting the number and type of firearms an individual can own.

Donald Trump’s reaction to the Brown University shooting was not quite as strong. “All we can do right now is pray,” he told reporters on Air Force One. . . .

The president restored gun rights to felons, closed the White House office of gun violence protection, and canceled funding for mental health and community anti-gun violence programs.

Australia, which has some of the world’s strictest gun control measures, had two mass shootings in almost three decades. The United States, with some of the least restrictive gun laws, has had hundreds, perhaps even thousands (depending on the reporting organization and the criteria they use), in the same time period. . . . 

Regardless of the number, if you want to prevent mass killings, it is clear that the only way to do so is to control who can own guns.

And if you think for a second that new gun laws will be proposed in this country after Saturday’s shooting, let alone passed into law, think again. We have a three-word phrase that has benignly become the go-to from anti-gun control politicians, “thoughts and prayers” — which has as much chance of making things better as saying “good luck.”

The U.S. Still Averages More Than A Mass Shooting For Every Day Of The Year

 

There are two mass shootings in the news. One was at Brown University in Rhode Island and the other was in Australia. Both were deplorable, and neither should have happened. But the shooting in Australia was a rare occurrence because they have reasonable gun laws. The U.S. mass shooting wasn't rare at all. The U.S. is still averaging more than one mass shooting for every day of the year. That's not acceptable, but it will continue as long as Republicans have enough power in Congress to block any attempt to pass reasonable and constitutional gun laws.

Australia Had A Gun Culture & Fixed Their Problem With Gun Violence - Why Can't The U.S.?

Gun lovers like to claim that we can't get rid of gun violence in the U.S. because the U.S. has historically been a gun culture. But that ignores the fact that other countries have historically had a very similar culture. One of those is Australia. But they solved their problem with gun violence (and did that under a Conservative government). 

Here is an op-ed on that by Aaron Timms in The New York Times:

Within hours of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month, as President Biden flew home from a trip to Asia, he found himself wondering why liberal democracies like Australia, Canada and Britain can get gun violence under control, while America has tried for decades without success. “They have mental health problems. They have domestic disputes,” he said in an address to the nationlater that night. “They have people who are lost. But these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency that they happen in America. Why?”

It’s easy to imagine his mind lingering on Australia. After a bitter fight with rural gun owners and conservative activists, Australia introduced sweeping measures to restrict gun access in the wake of a 1996 shooting that left 35 dead. The reforms were truly comprehensive in scope and included a ban on all automatic and semiautomatic shotguns, stringent licensing and permit requirements, and the introduction of compulsory safety courses for all gun owners, who were also required to provide a genuine reason for owning a firearm that could not include self-defense. The federal government also announced a gun amnesty and federal buyback that led to more than 650,000 weapons being surrendered to the police and destroyed.

Mass shootings and firearm deaths, including suicides, have markedly declined in the 26 years since Australia reformed its gun laws. To Mr. Biden, crossing the Pacific Ocean on Air Force One, that story must have offered a glimmer of hope, a sign that sometimes, countries can change, reducing gun violence and tragedy. If it could happen in Australia, why not in the United States?

Like America, Australia was a European settler colony, founded in the blood of massacred Indigenous people, and has a frontier myth in which guns and conquest have played a historically important cultural role. America had its cowboys, buckaroos and gunslingers; Australia its squatters, drovers and bushrangers. And like America, Australia today is a multiethnic state-based federation in which gun-friendly rural areas enjoy considerable political influence.

But these similarities tell only part of the story. Australia’s success in pushing through gun reform in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre was mostly the result of timing, luck and the idiosyncrasies of the Australian Constitution. On gun policy, the fundamental differences between Australia and America outnumber the similarities. If anything, a closer examination of Australia’s success with gun reform reveals the magnitude of the task ahead for America.

Resistance to gun reform in Australia had been fierce in the years leading up to Port Arthur. In 1987 two massacres in Melbourne left a total of 15 people dead and placed the issue of gun control firmly on the national political agenda. But the firearms lobby and lawmakers in gun-friendly states like Queensland and Tasmania worked to frustrate efforts at federal reform. Part of the problem, and an obvious point of similarity with the situation in the United States today, was that guns were mostly regulated by the states, which made reform dependent on national coordination.

Mere weeks before the Port Arthur massacre, a federal election was held that saw the conservatives — a coalition between the mostly urban and suburban center-right Liberal Party and the rural National Party — return to power after 13 years in opposition. The magnitude of their victory gave the incoming government an overwhelming mandate. Capitalizing on the depth of revulsion across Australia at the slaughter in Port Arthur, the new prime minister, John Howard, moved quickly to push through reforms, coordinated across all the states, that had stalled in the wake of earlier shootings.

The Australian gun lobby did not take these changes lying down. Gun owners protested against reform in the thousands. Effigies of the National Party leader, Tim Fischer, were burned at several rural demonstrations, and Mr. Howard took the extraordinary measure of addressing a crowd of gun supporters in the Victorian coastal town of Sale in a bulletproof vest. (He later said that he regretted wearing the vest.) But as in the United States, the 1990s in Australia were a politically more innocent time, with less polarization, more bipartisan agreement on basic issues of justice and fairness, and a less toxic media environment than the one we have become accustomed to.

It still took conviction and courage for conservative leaders to stand up to their constituents and advocate change. Mr. Fischer, in particular, faced fearsome opposition within his own party to his support for Mr. Howard’s reforms, and these divisions created real, lasting damage, permanently poisoning the country’s political discourse. But reform was still possible, thanks in large part to the shared norm of bipartisanship and the willingness of conservatives, acting on principle, to risk alienating their base.

In addition, Australia faced none of the structural or constitutional obstacles standing in the way of gun reform here in the United States. Australia does not have anything resembling the Second Amendment. It has no filibuster, no Bill of Rights and no constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms. The Australian Constitution explicitly codifies a handful of other rights like the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion, and Australia’s High Court has ruled that the Constitution contains an implied right to freedom of political communication. But on guns the country’s founding document has nothing to say. The great drama of contemporary Australian jurisprudence is about enshrining, rather than removing, rights within the Constitution, making the debate on individual rights and freedoms in Australia quite distinct from the one in America.

Australia loses as much as it gains from this constitutional deficiency — a point that’s often lost in American media coverage of gun policy in the emotional days that follow a mass shooting. Compared with the herculean effort that would be required to repeal the Second Amendment, Australia’s gun reforms entered into law relatively easily. But without a Bill of Rights, there’s no constitutional framework in Australia to prevent the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, or to insulate free speech from the chilling effect of defamation suits.

The Port Arthur gunman reportedly chose his site, a former penal colony turned into an open-air museum, in part as a homage to Australia’s bloody history of colonial violence: The weakness of Australia’s architecture of express individual freedoms may have inadvertently helped put an end to frequent mass shootings, but the absence of a Bill of Rights is also, arguably, one of the reasons Indigenous Australians, those dispossessed and murdered by the same people who built Port Arthur, continue to endure life expectancy and standards of living well below the national average.

And despite the very real drop in gun violence witnessed across Australia since the mid-1990s, signs of erosion in the national framework of gun control have recently begun to emerge. There are now more guns in Australia than there were at the time of the Port Arthur massacre (3.8 million in 2020 compared with 3.2 million in 1996), and a quietly resurgent gun lobby is spending, on a per-capita basis, about as much as the N.R.A., according to a recent report. Stringent gun control standards have not stopped Australia from incubating its own radicalized killers and exporting violence abroad: The gunman in the 2019 Christchurch massacre that left 51 dead was an Australian.

So the Australian experience of gun control resists easy translation to America. But if Australia is to serve as any kind of example, it is for the bravery and principle shown by conservative and rural leaders, often at great cost to their own political fortunes, in making the case for reform to their gun-loving constituents. Character of this caliber may be far harder to extract from the ranks of today’s Republican Party than it was from Australia’s conservatives in the 1990s.

A Foreign Reporter Looks At A Trump Press Conference

(Caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

The photo at left is of Australian journalist (Guardian Australia) Lenore Taylor. The post below is what she had to say after viewing one of Trump's press conferences.

As a regular news reader I thought I was across the eccentricities of the US president. Most mornings in Australia begin with news from America – the bid to buy Greenland, adjustments to a weather map hand-drawn with a Sharpie or another self-aggrandising tweet. Our headlines and news bulletins, like headlines and news bulletins everywhere, are full of Trump.

As a political reporter for most of the last 30 years I have also endured many long and rambling political press conferences with Australian prime ministers and world leaders.

But watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.

The press conference I tuned into by chance from my New York hotel room was held in Otay Mesa, California, and concerned a renovated section of the wall on the Mexican border.

I joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced “concrete technology”. It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it.

There were inner tubes in the wall that were also filled with concrete, poured in via funnels, and also “rebars” so the wall would withstand anyone attempting to cut through it with a blowtorch.

The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 “world-class mountain climbers – That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains”, who had been unable to scale it.

It was also “wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through”, although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it”, which the president said was a “very good answer”.

The wall was “amazing”, “world class”, “virtually impenetrable” and also “a good, strong rust colour” that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was “hot enough to fry an egg on”. There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made.

He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

What Makes A Person An American ?

This chart is from the Pew Research Center. They asked 1,003 people in the United States what was important to make a person an "American". The survey was done between April 4th and 24th of 2016, and has a margin of error of 3.4 points.

The quality deemed most important was the ability to speak English. That was considered at least somewhat important by 92%, and very important by 70%. About 84% said sharing American customs and traditions was important (with 45% saying it was very important).

Finishing far behind were being born in the U.S. and being a christian. About 55% said it was important to be born in this country, but only 32% said it was very important. And while 51% said being a christian was important, only 32% said it was very important. About 44% said it was not important to be born in the U.S. and 48% said it was not important to be a christian.

The charts below show the results of the same questions in Europe, Canada, and Australia.

A Breakthrough In The Solar Generation Of Energy

The following post is from the staff at Science Alert. I thought it was important enough to repost it here for my readers.

A solar thermal test plant in Newcastle, Australia, has generated “supercritical” steam at a pressure of 23.5 mpa (3400 psi) and 570°C (1,058°F). 

CSIRO is claiming it as a world record, and it’s a HUGE step for solar thermal energy.

"It's like breaking the sound barrier; this step change proves solar has the potential to compete with the peak performance capabilities of fossil fuel sources," Dr Alex Wonhas, CSIRO’s Energy Director, told Colin Jeffrey for Gizmag.

The Energy Centre uses a field of more than 600 mirrors (known as heliostats) which are all directed at two towers housing solar receivers and turbines, Gizmag reports.

This supercritical steam is used to drive the world’s most advanced power plant turbines, but previously it’s only been possible to produce it by burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas.

"Instead of relying on burning fossil fuels to produce supercritical steam, this breakthrough demonstrates that the power plants of the future could instead be using the free, zero emission energy of the sun to achieve the same result,” Dr Wonhas explained.

Currently, commercial solar thermal or concentrating solar power power plants only operate a “subcritical” levels, using less pressurised steam. This means that they’ve never been able to match the output or efficiency of the world’s best fossil fuel power plants - until now.

The commercial development of this technology is still a fair way off, but this is an important first step towards a more sustainable future.

The Problem Is A Lack Of Strong Leadership

Female troops "are vital to us maintaining our capability now and into the future."

"If that does not suit you, then get out. You may find another employer where your attitude and behavior is acceptable, but I doubt it. The same goes for those who think that toughness is built on humiliating others."

"No one has every explained to me how the exploitation or degradation of others enhances capability or honors the traditions of the Australian army. I will be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values, and I need every one of you to support me in achieving this."

Those are the words of General David Morrison, the top military official in the Australian Army. That was what he told the troops under his command after suspending three soldiers and continuing to weigh the suspension of five others (who had all been implicated in the distribution of videos he deemed to be demeaning of female soldiers). The general didn't mince words. He made it clear that he will not tolerate the mistreatment of any soldier.

Which makes me wonder, why haven't we heard a similar statement from the leaders of the United States military establishment? There are about 19,000 reported cases of sexual assault in this country's military each year, and that is just a fraction of the sexual assaults that occur in the military (because many victims are afraid to report those assaults, since there is a good chance the victim will be punished as harshly, or more harshly, than the criminal). 

Meanwhile, our military leaders (and those in Congress) fumble around looking for some kind of answer to the problem -- some kind of magic solution that will take the problem out of their hands. They all act like they are afraid to rock the boat (even though that boat badly needs rocking). Frankly, their reticence to deal with the problem highlights just where the problem lays.

The problem is a lack of strong and decent leadership. Believe me, in a top-down organization like the military, no problem exists for long unless it is tacitly approved of by the top leaders. If those leaders want a problem to go away, heads will roll (and continue to roll) until that problem does go away. Why aren't heads rolling right now? Is it because our top military leaders don't have the guts necessary to deal with the problem? Or is it because they don't really see it as a problem?

And I don't want to hear that tired old excuse of being in the middle of a war. Wrong is wrong whether we are in a war or not -- and every decent American knows that sexual assault is wrong.

President Obama needs to make it clear to our top military leaders that if they don't deal with this problem, swiftly and decisively, then he will replace them with people who will do that. And our generals and admirals need to make it clear to those under their command that the mistreatment of any American soldier (regardless of gender or gender identity) will not be tolerated at all -- and that goes double for sexual assault. And then they need to commence with the rolling of heads.

Sexual assault in the military is not an unsolvable problem. But it is a problem that can only be solved with strong and determined leadership. Where are those leaders?

Going Global

This is just more evidence that the movement for economic justice that started over a month ago on Wall Street has gone global. This picture is of Occupation Melbourne (in Australia), and it looks like they had a great turnout. People everywhere are angry over the unfairness. They are tired of being ripped off just so the rich can get richer.

"Grumpy" People Are Better Thinkers

It looks like there may be some hope for us grumpy people after all. Most people tend to think happy carefree people have all the advantages in life, but an Australian psychologist has shown that may not be true at all.

Professor Joe Forgas (University of New South Wales) has done some experiments, and he believes that while happy people do possess more creativity, grumpy people are less gullible and better critical thinkers. Forgas says this is because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies."

According to the BBC, Forgas "asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their lives, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood. Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events. Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly -- they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators."

Forgas said, "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental short-cuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world." He went on to say a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style."

So before you make fun of us grumpy people in the future, remember that we're probably out-thinking you. In fact, it may be the critical thinking that's feeding our grumpiness.

P.S. -- You ornery kids get off my lawn!!

Snipers Hired To Protect Penguins

The fairy penguins of Australia are the smallest species of penguin. A full-grown adult will only be about 40 centimeters tall (slightly more than one foot). The picture above shows the fairy penguins being fed in the Melbourne Zoo.

There is a colony of these penguins in an Australian National Park near Sydney Harbor. But in the last two weeks, nine of these penguins have been found killed and mutiliated. Because of their tiny size, the penguins are very vulnerable to predators. Park officials don't know what kind of predator is killing the penguins, but they suspect it is a fox or a dog.

Park officials are afraid if they don't act, the unknown predator will wipe out the whole colony. So they have taken some radical action. They have hired two snipers to act as bodyguards for the penguins. They have been instructed to "do what it takes" to protect the colony.

Hopefully, these "bodyguards" will take out the predator before any more of the penguins are lost.