1521
The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.
1862
American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas.
1955
Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.
1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech
1968
Riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention.
1979
An IRA bomb explodes on the Grand Place in Brussels.
1991
Collapse of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1991
Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1996
Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce.
***
Denmark publicly apologized on Wednesday to Greenlandic women who were victims of a decades-long involuntary birth control campaign. The birth control campaign came to light in 2022 when records showed that thousands of women and girls as young as 13 had been fitted with intrauterine devices without their knowledge or consent between 1966 and 1991, the year Greenland was given authority over its healthcare system.
***
Denmark publicly apologized on Wednesday to Greenlandic women who were victims of a decades-long involuntary birth control campaign. The birth control campaign came to light in 2022 when records showed that thousands of women and girls as young as 13 had been fitted with intrauterine devices without their knowledge or consent between 1966 and 1991, the year Greenland was given authority over its healthcare system.
***
The Salvadoran man--or the Maryland man--Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is seeking to remain in the United States by renewing his bid for asylum. He wants protection from a rival gang back home.
We are a sanctuary for criminals.
Who will protect us from him?
***
China is the world’s largest booze market. For millennia, liquor has lubricated social gatherings and business deals. Wedding banquets are referred to as “happy alcohol”, while the celebration to mark a child’s first month of life is “full-month alcohol”.
But alcohol sales are down, and a growing number of young Chinese say they’re “disgusted” by their country’s drinking culture. China’s leaders have banned alcohol from official events.
***
Analyzing the Unanalyzable
There has been another group shooting, this time in Minneapolis, in a Catholic church where the parish school children were attending mass. Two children were killed and seventeen injured.
The political and journalistic classes reflexively responded. "Thoughts and prayers." The shooter was a "coward." Were the parents responsible? Guns should be better regulated.
There will be a search for reasons, motives behind a murderous, armed attack on children. All of these reactions imply the killer was just a normal guy distorted by the rigors of life, an average citizen gone wrong. We are supposed to search for a diary, comb through his social media history, and find mitigating circumstances, forks in his developmental path that resulted in this behavior.
But this, like all the others, was not a cruel or senseless act. This was simply madness. This was completely separate from the reflective, thoughtful bonding qualities that separate our species from the other great predators. Even the rogue wolf or elephant is recognized as crazy by his fellows.
But we are free. We revere the bell curve and embrace the outlier. And the outlier bites.
There have been 118 mass shootings in the last 20 years. Gun legislation will do as much as drug legislation because they are not the essential problem. The problem is mental health--in a population of 300,000,000.
But we are cautious with rules, accept the eccentric, and are suspicious of the State. Everyone knows that Simpson killed that poor girl, but an American jury could not convict him. Nor will we start mimicking the Minority Report. and insinuate ourselves into people's lives to intercept the outlier.
Worse, we are basically disinterested. We accept a few dead and injured in our lives to be left alone to do our jobs and live our lives. We have our own standards but, like the post-modern world around us, are unsure we can apply standards to others. We ignore even the basics of education, refuse to demand any criteria of social virtue. Live and let kill.
So, we will continue with the occasional candlelight ceremony and step over the bodies on the sidewalks, with the unspoken understanding that the current attitude and quasi-management is simply a placebo for the practitioners.
Who will protect us from him?
***
China is the world’s largest booze market. For millennia, liquor has lubricated social gatherings and business deals. Wedding banquets are referred to as “happy alcohol”, while the celebration to mark a child’s first month of life is “full-month alcohol”.
But alcohol sales are down, and a growing number of young Chinese say they’re “disgusted” by their country’s drinking culture. China’s leaders have banned alcohol from official events.
***
Analyzing the Unanalyzable
There has been another group shooting, this time in Minneapolis, in a Catholic church where the parish school children were attending mass. Two children were killed and seventeen injured.
The political and journalistic classes reflexively responded. "Thoughts and prayers." The shooter was a "coward." Were the parents responsible? Guns should be better regulated.
There will be a search for reasons, motives behind a murderous, armed attack on children. All of these reactions imply the killer was just a normal guy distorted by the rigors of life, an average citizen gone wrong. We are supposed to search for a diary, comb through his social media history, and find mitigating circumstances, forks in his developmental path that resulted in this behavior.
But this, like all the others, was not a cruel or senseless act. This was simply madness. This was completely separate from the reflective, thoughtful bonding qualities that separate our species from the other great predators. Even the rogue wolf or elephant is recognized as crazy by his fellows.
But we are free. We revere the bell curve and embrace the outlier. And the outlier bites.
There have been 118 mass shootings in the last 20 years. Gun legislation will do as much as drug legislation because they are not the essential problem. The problem is mental health--in a population of 300,000,000.
But we are cautious with rules, accept the eccentric, and are suspicious of the State. Everyone knows that Simpson killed that poor girl, but an American jury could not convict him. Nor will we start mimicking the Minority Report. and insinuate ourselves into people's lives to intercept the outlier.
Worse, we are basically disinterested. We accept a few dead and injured in our lives to be left alone to do our jobs and live our lives. We have our own standards but, like the post-modern world around us, are unsure we can apply standards to others. We ignore even the basics of education, refuse to demand any criteria of social virtue. Live and let kill.
So, we will continue with the occasional candlelight ceremony and step over the bodies on the sidewalks, with the unspoken understanding that the current attitude and quasi-management is simply a placebo for the practitioners.
2 comments:
The Turks were out best troops in
Korea
The IRA a patriotic army
They didn't fence their compounds; they just planted a flag.
Post a Comment