by cameron | Dec 18, 2012 | Australian politics, US politics
Based on this data from The University of Sydney, you are safer living in Iran or Iraq than in the USA.
By the way, I included France because one justification I’ve heard for America’s gun obsession lately is that they fought a revolution and a civil war, so, you know, they, like, need guns.
Yeah well France had a revolution, too. Oh and they were fucking INVADED BY THE NAZIS. Was America invaded by the Nazis? No? Then shut up. The French actually have a very high rate of gun ownership. In a comparison of the rate of private gun ownership in 179 countries, France ranked at No. 12. However their access to handguns, semi-automatics and full automatics is highly restricted.
Here is how France’s gun homicide ranks against the USA:
by cameron | Dec 17, 2012 | US politics
It's funny the kinds of bullshit you hear from people when they are trying to justify their ideology.
I got into a Facebook discussion today with Rob McNealy, my guest on a recent podcast about gun control in the USA. Rob posted comparing gun laws in Mexico to America, suggesting that tighter gun laws in Mexico haven't made it safer. I pointed out that Mexico's GDP is about one fifth that of the United States and he should really compare the USA to a country with similar economics – like Australia.
Rob replied “You are trying to deny the fact that gun control don't stop murder from happening. You are a typical anti-liberty liberal that wants to create MORE murder victims.”
I explained that in the years after the Port Arthur massacre, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia fell by more than 50% — and stayed there, quoting an article from CNN.
He then replied with this post, claiming that “the percent of murders committed with a firearm (in Australia) was the highest it had ever been in 2006″. His source even claimed this data was from “Australian Bureau of Criminology”.
Oh really? I googled “Australian Bureau of Criminology” and I came up blank. There is an “Australian INSTITUTE of Criminology” but Rob's source doesn't reference any particular report or website, so I don't know where they got their data from. In fact, it is likely they pulled it out of their asses.
This information about the high rate of 2006 gun murders is totally at odds with data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which shows that in 2006, gun homicides in Australia were at an all time LOW.
Here is a graph from UTS. See that huge drop after 1996? That's when Johnny Howard introduced the National Firearm Agreement and the buy-back scheme that aimed to eliminate semi-automatic firearms in Australia. It appears that our gun homicide rate fell by 50% immediately and has continued to drop.
Tell me again how “gun control don't stop murder from happening”?
This second graph is from the ABS and shows the falling rates of guns homicides as a percentage of all homicides. Again – a big drop off after 1996. Although this chart stops at 2003, the ABS site for 2006 confirms that the percentage of homicides from firearms in 2006 was an all-time low.
Unfortunately, Rob's source was the “National Center For Policy Analysis” which, according to SourceWatch, is funded by conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers. You can tell people are desperate when they resort to making up bullshit to support their arguments. Of course, most of their readers are not likely to do their own research, much like Fox News viewers, and will just regurgitate the NCPA's claims.
The real question is whether or not the NFA had much of an impact on overall homicides or if they were already dropping due to other factors. What we *do* know for certain is that there hasn't been another mass shooting in Australia since 1996. However homicides have only demonstrated a slight decrease since then. The rise in sexual assault is thought to be an increase in reporting of sexual assault, not an actual increase in incidents.
By the way, here is a chart of America's gun homicides since 1998:
So, the next time you hear someone tell you that gun control didn't work in Australia, you can just send them to this post and facepalm.
by cameron | Dec 13, 2012 | Iran, Podcast
Today I welcome back to the show Brad Heitmann (aka Brad The Mormon). This time we’re talking about Iran. FOR TWO HOURS. Fer realz.Ermahgerd.
Brad travelled to Iran in 2009 around the time of their Presidential elections and the riots. He spent a couple of hours at a dinner listening to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
We discuss the history of Iran, their current nuclear program and America’s history of invading countries to get at their natural resources.
by cameron | Dec 1, 2012 | US politics
I’ve been reading some fascinating posts lately on the attempts – past and present – to rig U.S. elections. As with all theories that don’t have sufficient supporting evidence, these need to be read with caution. However, there seem to be enough circumstantial evidence to suggest there might be some element of truth in these stories.
If you haven’t been following the story, just after the U.S. election, Anonymous claimed they prevented Karl Rove from hacking the result in Ohio – which is why, they say, he was so convinced the result was going to go in Romney’s favour. A number of people claim that Rove pulled this trick back in 2004 – that is, he used electronic vote counting services which were linked to the GOP to alter the result of the election in Ohio in Bush’s favour. Adding concern to the story, there were “last-minute, uncertified” software patches made on the Ohio voting machines just days before the election. Sounds dodgy to me.
Of course, there are plenty of stories of the GOP “stealing” or “rigging” elections as far back as Nixon that are also worth reading.
In fact, this article in Harper’s, published weeks before the election and worrying about election rigging in 2012, has stories about elections being rigged in the U.S. as far back as 1932. This same article also explains the connections between the two companies that dominate the electronic voting machine market in the U.S. and their connections to the GOP and the Romney family.
Unfortunately, Australia is also moving towards electronic voting systems. Will we see the same kinds of scurrilous behaviour in future elections too?
by cameron | Sep 19, 2012 | banksters, capitalism
Step 1. Start a financial services firm.
Step 2. Make sure you are the only person in the company who sees the bank statements.
Step 3. “Using a combination of Photo Shop, Excel, scanners and both laser and ink jet printers… make very convincing forgeries of nearly every document that came from the Bank.”
At least, that’s how Peregrine CEO Russell Wasendorf Sr. did it – for over 20 years.
He wrote a suicide note explaining the whole scam before attempting suicide. He failed at that and has now pleaded guilty to fraud and embezzlement.
What about the Regulators? Why didn’t they catch him?
“It was relatively simple to deceive the Regulators” according to Russ. Good to know.
He ended his suicide note with “I am ready to die. I guess this is the only way out of a business I hate so much.”
It’s a far cry from his most recent “Chairman’s Letter”, where he wrote
“At PFGBEST, our consistent hallmarks remain: respectful and conscientious care of customers and their accounts; a keen sense of their evolving needs; and, the talent and resources to provide analytical, flexible and customized solutions.”
Guys like Wasendorf are fascinating to me. How high would he score on a test for psychopathy? Surely he would score highly on many of those factors.
You have to wonder how many CEOs, politicians and entrepreneurs are psychopaths? And what is it about capitalism that allows them to prosper?
Of course, the history of socialism and communism has it’s fair share of psychopaths as well. Why is it so hard for us to design a socio-economic system that weeds out psychopaths?
by cameron | Sep 18, 2012 | capitalism
In the NYT today, David Brooks makes some interesting points about motivation, reflecting on Romney’s latest gaff:
The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.
But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.
People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.
If rich people really think benefits don’t help you, then they wouldn’t send their kids to private schools and elite universities. They wouldn’t use their personal networks to land their kids high-paying jobs in friends’ companies. They wouldn’t buy them a car, or give them a credit card or a mobile phone.
And we know this isn’t how it works.
So the next time one of your wealthy right-leaning friends tells you that the welfare system destroys ambition, you might want to point our their hypocrisy. If they really believed it, they would send their own kids to live by themselves in Kabul for a few years.
I grew up on the poverty line (by Australian standards) and I’m grateful that we had healthcare and education made available to us. If we hadn’t, I’d probably still be living in Bundaberg, either unemployed or doing some kind of manual labour. I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with those things, but it was only because I had a decent education that I could explore other opportunities.
Yes – growing up poor made me hungry. And in my 20s that was a hunger to be rich. In my 30s and 40s that turned into a hunger to improve the system.
What people like Romney don’t understand is that altruism is about enlightened self-interest. If you build a strong society of people with a decent education and decent healthcare, you will get rewarded a thousand-fold. These people will become the next generation of doctors, inventors, engineers, artists, authors, journalists, film-makers, musicians, scientists and historians that improve society for all of us.
(HT to @NikolasKozloff for the NYT link)
