The Curiosity of “Facts”: Black Mass
The Human thing: Fact or Fiction?
Send: Opiods, Guns, and Cars
Corporate America, the National Rifle Association, General Motors and Ford, Big Pharma (to name a few), the U.S. Senate and U.S. House as well as the President and all their lobbyists and supporters belong to the “American Death Cult.” The print news and broadcast media, plus a few minutes of “Google time” provide us with “the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” thanks to Sgt. Joe Friday.
Here are the “facts” or Big Data
CDC: Opiod Deaths: The United States is in the midst of an opioid overdose epidemic.Opioids (including prescription opioids, heroin, and fentanyl) killed more than 33,000 people in 2015, more than any year on record. Nearly half of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid. (90 per day) I.E. Big Pharma.
Gun Deaths (Newsweek) Guns are linked to roughly 33,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; about two-thirds of them are suicides. (90 per day) I.E. NRA/Gun and Weapons Industry.
Auto Deaths (Wickepedia)
The National Safety Council estimates 38,300 people were killed and 4.4 million injured on U.S. roads in 2015, which saw the largest one-year percentage increase in half a century. (105 per day) I.E. Auto manufacturers.
Rio de Denio
The corporate tools that kill people, whether drugs, cars, or guns, are merely instruments. Killers are crazy, never blame the tool or equipment. Capital corporate analysis and the Congressional Analytics group “cost-out” the price of life and liberty as another cipher on the balance sheet or on a fund-raising caper. Blame it on the crazies or deny it and let the 24/7 cycle of “tears and forgetting” cover up the losses. Let the victims cry in private. This last week government scientists came out in support of the notion that humans cause “global warming” (planet death) while the (so-what) deniers, led by Exxon and the Koch Brothers and their political stooges, focus on decimating Mother Earth. Who will admit to matricide?
Still tools must be used, not ignored.
Write your Notes Now
Yesterday, I mentioned the Joan Didion documentary as a kind of living eulogy for the extant writer. Perhaps we should consider writing our own. The local Bridge jumpers can be counted in as prophetic casualties. The great experiment in humanity seems a miserable failure as we watch the death throes of innocent and not so innocent per the “Christian Jihadists” in America.
Perhaps the cultists are thinking about the “Rapture,” whose believers helped promote the schism in the Middle East and supported the Iraqi episode, destroying the home of the three great religions, and the classical tradition born in Greece. Love thy neighbor has been transformed into “kill your neighbor.” Has that drone in the sky come for me and mine? (I’m only asking.)
More Facts for the Misbegotten From a Different “Mass.”
Mass shootings (Gun Violence Archive): Las Vegas: 59 deaths + 500 injured; Sutherland Springs, Texas, 26 dead, 19 injured. In Sutherland, neighbors estimated the number in attendance at 50 or 60, say the gunman killed anywhere from 80 to 90% of church goers.
There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, which catalogues such incidents. A mass shooting is defined as a single shooting incident which kills or injures four or more people, including the assailant.
Vegas marked the 273rd mass shootingin the U.S. in the 275 days that have passed so far in 2017, according to Gun Violence Archive. Mass shootings are a near daily occurrence in America, but what happened in Las Vegas stands out: It was the deadliest such incident in U.S. history, with more than 50 killed and 200 injured. There have been more than 11,600 deaths linked to gun violence so far in 2017, which is roughly equivalent to nearly four 9/11 attacks in terms of the total number killed on September 11, 2001. Comparatively, more than 15,000 were killed by gun violence in 2016, and there were 383 mass shootings.
A mass shooting is defined by Gun Violence Archive as any incident in which “four or more [are] shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location not including the shooter.”