Science Fiction

U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch Announces Unmanned AircraftGun Registration Requirement

New Task Force to Develop Recommendations by November 20

WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch and FAA AdministratorATF Director Michael HuertaTodd Jones today announced the creation of a task force to develop recommendations for a registration process for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)Guns.

The task force will be composed of 25 to 30 diverse representatives from the UAS and manned aviationfirearms industry, the federal government, and other stakeholders.  The group will advise the Department on which aircraft should be exempt from registration due to a low safety risk, including toys and certain other small UASto limit any exemptions, as all guns are dangerous.  The task force also will explore options for a streamlined system that would make registration less burdensome for commercial UAS operatorshunters in rural areas.

The task force may make additional safety recommendations as it deems appropriate.  Secretary FoxxAG Lynch directed the group to deliver its report by Nov. 20.

“Registering unmanned aircraftguns will help build a culture of accountability and responsibility, especially with new users who have no experience operating in the U.S. aviation systemfirearms safely and responsibly,” FoxxLynch said.  “It will help protect public safety in the air and on the groundthe public and at home.”

Every day, the FAAATF receives reports of potentially unsafe UAS operationshandling of guns.  PilotPolice sightings of UASopen-carry guns doubled between 2014 and 2015.  The reports ranged from incidents at major sporting eventsschools and flights near manned aircraftmovie theaters, to interference with wildfirepolice operations.

“These reports signal a troubling trend,” HuertaJones said.  “Registration will help make sure that operatorsgun owners know the rules and remain accountable to the public for flying their unmanned aircrafthandling and maintaining their guns responsibly.  When they don’t fly safely, they’ll know there will be consequences.” 

While the task force does its work, the FAAATF will continue its aggressive education and outreach efforts, including the “Know Before You Fly”“Know Before You Shoot” campaign and “No Drone Zone”“No Gun Zone” initiatives with the nation’s busiest airportsschools.  The agency also will continue to take strong enforcement action against egregious violators. At the same time, it will continue working with stakeholders to improve safety to ensure further integration and innovation in this promising segment of aviationin the United States.

Secretary FoxxAG Lynch was joined by representatives from the following stakeholder groups:

• The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems InternationalThe National Rifle Association 
• Academy of Model AircraftCoalition of Gun Owners against the NRA
• Air Line Pilots AssociationSensible Republicans
• American Association of Airport ExecutivesSensible Democrats 
• Helicopter Association InternationalSensible Independents
• PrecisionHawkParents 
• AirMap/ Small UAV CoalitionTeachers 
• Consumer Electronics AssociationOrdinary Americans

To read statements in support of today’s announcement, please click here. 

For non-media inquiries, please email UASRegistration@faa.govGunRegistration@atf.gov.

Monday, October 19, 2015

- See more at: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportation-secretary-anthony-foxx-announces-unmanned-aircraft-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpufhttps://www.atf.gov/briefing-room/us-attorney-general-loretta-lynch-announces-gun-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpuf


Not everything lines up of course.  Original here, and yes I do approve of the idea.

For the record, I do support Americans' right to own guns in general.  But I don't support absolutist interpretations of the second amendment, and don't think a gun-registry is a unreasonable violation of that right, anymore than background-checks, limits on the type of weaponry available*, or limits on cartridge-capacities.  Oh, and a tax on bullets.



* I know, AR-15's are cool.  So, in their way, are surface-to-air missiles.  But do you really need one to defend yourself ?

AJ+: Young Swedes React To U.S. Democratic Presidential Debate

C'mon AJ+, surely you could have found a few fascists even in Sverige ?

Wonders...What reason might Al Jazeera's backers have to encourage a Sanders presidency ?...Feel the Bern !

Bors on Ben Carson & Mass Shootings

SNL Nails It

Still have their moments after all these years

Inscrutable

As it should be.

The Nightly Show on Fox News' Phoney War on Cops

Shit, Balko made it on to the Nightly Show.  Mentioned this nonsense earlier here.  Meanwhile, notice that Fox has apparently modified this particular story...

Police officer reported as killed "execution-style" may have actually staged own suicide: http://t.co/xBJqZIsxWt

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 15, 2015

Keith Knight on NYPD Gun Battle

Had to look up the headline in question: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nypd-84-shots-brooklyn_55ec4b31e4b093be51bbb978

I Feel Much Safer Now

This was going into the next link-dump, but for two words...

US cinema chain Regal introduces bag search after attacks

One of America's largest cinema chains, Regal, is now searching bags of film-goers following several attacks on movie theatres across the US.

Regal's updated policy says it wants customers and staff "to feel comfortable and safe" in its cinemas.

It is not clear when it began, but reports say some people had their bags checked at some of the company's 570 cinemas this week.

Earlier this month, a man attacked cinema-goers in Tennessee with an axe.

He was shot dead by Nashville police, but no-one else was killed.

"Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America," Regal Entertainment Group's admission policy now reads on the company's website. The company has not yet commented publicly on the new regulations.

"To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission," it continues.

Last week, police were deployed outside the Regal cinema in Los Angeles ahead of the premiere of the film Straight Outta Compton.

Two weeks before the Nashville attack, two people were shot dead and nine others injured when a man attacked a cinema in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The change in policy also comes the same month Colorado theatre killer, James Holmes, was given a life sentence for killing 12 people and injuring 70 others at a screening of a Batman film in 2012.

Bag-searches & metal-detectors make me feel comfortable & safe, how about you ?  Far more so than having rational gun-laws & freely available treatment for mental health-issues in the twenty-first-fucking-century.  And machine-guns in airports, limits on liquids, removing shoes, patdowns & body-scans, cabin-doors that can't be forced even if it turns out your pilot is a suicidal nut determined on taking everyone with him into the side of a mountain...

Well at least we don't have to worry about nuclear weapons any more...except that our leaders seem determined to provoke a new cold war with Russia.  And then we have armed drones, and the weaponisation of space.  And who knows what new biological horrors our increasing understanding of the human genome will unleash in terms of new weapons, never mind all the conventional illnesses that we thought conquered till our commercialised use of antibiotics increased resistance across the board.

If only writers in the twentieth century had had the foresight to warn us against this sort of madness...

* And yes, that is the entire 'article'.  Sorry, Beeb, but if you will limit your entire article to a tweetable length, then it does become rather harder to excerpt.

Jade Helm 15

So, years of the GOP and the right-wing media in the United States fomenting irrational fears about the Federal government and Barack Obama, led some of their followers to actually believe that a routine training-exercise by the US military represented some sort of threat of invasion/illegal takeover by the Federal government.  To the degree that actual sitting Congressmen expressed concern publicly, and the actual Governor of Texas, ordered the State Guard to monitor the activity, being carried out by...the military of the United States of America.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it.  But what could actually go wrong ?

Other than shots being fired by two white guys in a pickup, at soldiers in training.

Or a bunch of anti-government nuts hoarding guns and making explosives, to use apparently in defence against said non-existent federal takeover.

And the exercise isn't even halfway over yet, so who knows what more might be in the pipeline ?

Not that the conclusion of the exercise in September with the US somehow miraculously not under martial law will do squat to ease the paranoia of the nuts in question (ie, a huge swath of the GOP's electorate).  'No', they'll say, 'what really happened is that we spooked 'em.  We showed Obama and those other UN New World Order-types that we knew what they was up to and they warn't gonna mess with Texas**.  You wanna come here, 'n' take our, guns, then suck on this !'  Followed by the explosive sound of a gunshot as one of them accidentally blows off their own head, or that of their dog, or their child.  But they died free, see, and that Commie Muslim Kenyan interloper didn't get 'em after all.


* I didn't intend to say a word on this idiocy, but it...just...won't...go away...And now we're getting close to people actually being killed over this nonsense.

** I know, I know, these two cases in question weren't in Texas...Oh that it were only the population of one state that had gone batshit-insane.

The WaPo Maps Mass Shootings & Police Killings in the US

Last line of the article in the Washington Post:

What's missing from this series, of course, is a map of all of the shooting incidents that don't involve police and affected one to three people. That map, we suspect, would show an indistinguishable red blot on the United States.

Speaking of which, that last image does remind me of something...

Population-Density of the United States

Oh yeah.  Where there are people in the United States, cops are bound to be there killing them.

Bonus link for the 'guns make me safe' crowd: Gunfight or Flee: New Study Finds No Advantages to Using a Firearm in Self-Defense Situations

Obama Late to the Party on Gun-Control ?

Here's Piers Morgan on Barack Obama's 'frustration' with his failure to pass 'sufficient common-sense gun-safety-laws.'

Well, I just think it's too little, too late.  Y'know, the president's been in office now, er nearly eight years; He's had plenty of time to prioritise gun-violence in America, and it's only very recently that we've heard him talk this way.

Really ?  Seems to me that the president has been out there time and time again, after one mass shooting after another, decrying gun-violence, and urging Congress to work with him across party-lines, only for the Republicans (and some Democrats) in Congress to consistently block any efforts at gun-control.

But, perhaps not quite, memory being what it is after all.  Looking over a review the Guardian did on Obama's responses to mass-shooting on his watch, tells a slightly different story, with Obama only really pushing for action in the last two or three years.  So Piers may have a point after all.

---

As for what it will take for actual meaningful change in US gun-laws ?  Well probably a complete sweep of the Congress for one, on such a scale, that will only come about when the underlying culture changes.  And can we hope for such change as the millennials take over ?  Well...don't count on it.

Here's one more poll-result, I just have to include because it's so utterly bonkers.

Story after story in the media of gun-owners accidentally shooting themselves or their loved ones, of children accessing guns and blowing their brains out.  Never mind the increased risk of suicide.  But Americans actually believe having a gun in the house increases their safety.  This is the kind of crazy that decades of propaganda from the NRA has wrought, and with which Barack Obama has to battle.

What ? I Paid 'Em for It Afterwards !

Deposition: Cosby paid women to keep affairs secret 

NEW YORK — Bill Cosby, in sworn testimony a decade ago, said he had paid women after sex to keep the affairs from his wife, suggested he was skilled at understanding nonverbal cues for sexual consent and called one of his accusers a liar.

The New York Times reported the revelations Saturday after obtaining a copy of a transcript from a deposition Cosby gave in a lawsuit filed by a former Temple University employee who alleges he drugged and molested her.

According to excerpts from the deposition released a month ago, and first obtained by The Associated Press, Cosby admitted he procured Quaaludes with the intent of giving them to young women he wanted to have sex with.

The Times, citing the transcript, reports that Cosby told lawyers for Andrea Constand, who worked at Temple in Philadelphia and brought the suit, that he was a “pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.”

He said he offered to pay for Constand’s education and paid another woman whom he had met in 1976. He said he funneled money to one of the women he had sex with through his agent so his wife wouldn’t find out.

Cosby’s publicist, David Brokaw, did not immediately return a message seeking comment late Saturday.

So, it's not so much that Cosby drugged and raped women, as that he drugged and raped women, then tried to pay them off afterwards so his wife wouldn't find out.  Well that's much better.

...

At points during the deposition, Cosby also described his sexual encounters with the women in detail.

The deposition also paints Cosby as emotionally charming, but he also spoke about disregarding relationships to pursue other women.

He suggested he was skilled at understanding women and nonverbal cues signaling sexual consent.

Wonder what the specific nonverbal cues are for 'please drug me into unconsciousness and then rape me' ?  Completely imaginary ones existing only within Cosby's head perhaps ?

See America Has to be Exceptional No Matter What, Whether That is in a Good Way or a Bad

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."

A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."

Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.

Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans.  Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.

And as for the thing about the US being out of step with the rest of the world, the thing you have to understand, is that this is a point of pride in the US, where obsession with national greatness and inherent national superiority has turned the international and indeed consensus generally into something inherently suspicious.

One case in point being, the US' pride in being just one of three nations still refusing adoption of the metric system.  The US had pledged to do so, and presumably originally intended in fact to someday so do, but at some point, as it dragged its feet on and on, rather than let itself feel any guilt or sense of failure over the continuing delays over adopting Metric, politicians instead seized on the outlier status of the US as a point of pride, and started to turn what was once accepted consensus over international standards into an absurd bogeyman-style conspiracy.

Hence, here we are in the year 2015, such that when a Democratic candidate for the presidency says this:

Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.

He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."

The response of one of his Republican candidates for the same office is inevitably this:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”

Because the entire rest-of-the-world would benefit so much from replacing something as easily understandable and easily calculated as a base-ten system of measurement with something from the Middle Ages based around such things at the size of a particular monarch's foot or hand !

The country is run, to the shame of its sane residents, by a bunch of childish extremists.  The sort of people who, in the wake of a historically black church being shot up by an evident white-supremacist extremist racist (the event itself in the wake of so many other acts of mass-shootings and so many other demonstrations of racial violence), argue that we must not make the event 'about race', and that those who want to bring discussions of gun-control into the debate are radical demagogues, and who insist that, really, the asshole was targeting Christians, not blacks.

Who did so, despite his own words to a survivor of the attack, explicitly outlining his motivations, and his desire to start a race-war.  Some of whom, will no doubt continue to do so, even given the recent discovery of an online manifesto making his violent racist aims and motivations even more explicit.

The United States' problem is perhaps its own success.  A nation rich and powerful for much of its short history, and so rich and powerful since the end of the Second World War that it has come to see itself as beyond criticism, as beyond the purview of mere mortals.  The US is/has long been suffering from a sort of God-complex.  Rather than embracing criticism, and learning from its mistakes, the tendency is to demonise the critics, and to celebrate even its own failings (such as say the dismal state of healthcare in America) as successes (it's a sign of how free we how we compared to you Euro-commies !).  Live free, die young and poor; But opportunity abounds; You could have been rich and successful...theoretically...

Perhaps demographic changes will one day reduce the ageing lunatic fringe to enough of a minority that the non-maniacs can take over the asylum.  The numbers are promising.  Then again, the lunatics may just burn down the asylum before that could/in order that that never be allowed to...happen.

Especially as the tool of choice in burning down this particular asylum would likely be not lighters, but cheap, readily-available, and hugely (especially, thanks to the NRA, since the inauguration of a certain black president) stockpiled bullets.


* As always, Thanks Harriet Miers !

Nina Paley: This Land is Mine

Was looking for something else entirely, but this piece by Nina Paley is a classic, and arguably says something more universal about us humans, than the specific historical/spatial context might imply.


Sita Sings the Blues is worth checking out as well, if you like her style.

'Officer involved shooting' in Pasco, Washington

Another day in America.  Really, it isn't surprising that a disturbed homeless guy throwing rocks at American police would end up with his body riddled with bullets -- That's as likely to be the result of someone, especially of the non-melanin-deficient variety, looking at a cop the wrong way in the United States.  What's really surprising is that he somehow survived a incident a year earlier in which he supposedly 'grabbed for one officer's gun while he was being detained'.  Michael Brown could perhaps tell us how that might go down...were he not very dead, from his own encounter.