It seemed that the maniacal slaughter of students and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, did not dampen voters’ enthusiasm for Republican Governor Greg Abbot, who does not believe in gun control. Abbot has pushed through legislation to allow people to carry guns without a permit, whether open or concealed.
I swear I do not understand why voters vote against their best interests.
“The fight goes on”: For several families of the victims killed in the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, the election this year wasn’t like other elections. It was personal.
In May, an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers with a semi-automatic rifle he bought days earlier. The tragedy caused some families to become politically active. They threw their support behind Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, hoping that he would be the catalyst to change gun laws in the state.
But O’Rourke lost badly on Tuesday. And Uvalde County decisively voted for Gov. Greg Abbott.
John Lira, the Democratic candidate who challenged U.S. Rep. Tony Gonazles for the seat that represents Uvalde, joined families at a watch party Tuesday night. He said that while Abbott’s victory was “crushing,” he was proud of the families for becoming politically engaged after experiencing a tragedy.
“It just means the fight goes on,” said Lira, who also lost on Tuesday.
As the night went on, many families said their effort to force change in Texas isn’t close to being done. Jerry Mata, whose daughter Tess was killed in the massacre, consoled his oldest daughter, Faith, after the election results were announced.
“Five years from now, the media may leave, everybody may leave, but we’re not going to leave. We’re going to continue the fight and get what we deserve for our kids.”
If you visit Texas, be sure to bring or buy a gun for self-protection.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Again, I’ll reference the Sneakers principle: it’s all about the information. People vote against their own interests simply because they’re told to do so. We have some very skillfully cunning and slippery creators of sneaky, not to mention obnoxiously loud, propaganda
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Very depressing. Also depressing is listening to/reading about the highly paid (!!!) pundits excusing their predictions of the red wave that wasn’t now telling us that “it could have been worse.” It shouldn’t even be close.
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Some tribal Republicans would vote for a cactus, if it had an R next to its name. Democrats also need to work on their messaging and not be afraid to point out the GOP’s failure, and they need to do it earlier in the campaign with multiple Democrats reinforcing the message repeatedly in the media. This approach has worked well for the GOP despite their lack of platform. The Dems also need to get out and register more young people and newly minted citizens.
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“If you visit Texas, be sure to bring or buy a gun for self-protection.”
If I visit the moon, I will also bring or buy a gun for protection.
The latter is about as likely as the former
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Let’s put the blame where it lies. The Republican members of the House and Senate, along with their gubernatorial allies, carried out 1,000 incidents of SSP (school shooting by proxy) in the ten years after Newtown and 590 mass shootings so far in 2022.
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These are the folks who make this possible. Evil. Just evil.
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I guess FL, TX and GA are hopelessly red states for the foreseeable future. It just boggles the mind that people would keep voting for these GOP splenetic Cro-Magnons who love guns but hate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The Democrats keep losing these gubernatorial races by sizable margins, not even close. Silly me, I actually thought that Crist, O’Rourke and Abrams had a chance to win……..WRONG again.
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Each of these states has a well funded, anti-democratic GOP political machine in them, and lots of gerrymandering to help them win. I am just happy Pennsylvania and Michigan didn’t go down the rabbit hole too.
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Yes, PA was a huge victory, thank goodness. Fetterman will be a great addition to the Senate (hoping that his health holds up and he improves and makes a complete recovery). And Shapiro beat out that maniac/fool Mastriano for the governorship, all good news.
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Jersey Joe,
I think the correct word for candidates like Mastriano and Kari Lake is “lunatics.”
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Florida and Texas appear solid red, for now.
Too soon to put Georgia in that column.
Let’s see how the runoff goes.
Last time a Jew and a Black won.
Will the people of GA choose a brain-damaged, adulterous, athlete who opposes abortions except when he pays for them over a Baptist minister?
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Georgia also allows vigilantes to demand that voters be purged from the voter rolls, without having to document any reasons for their demand.
The law permitting this clearly violates several federal statutes, but with the Federalist Society appointees having commandeered SCOTUS, it’s highly unlikely this law would be declared unconstitutional.
Greg Palast has done incredible work documenting the shenanigans in Florida.
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The Sociopathic Continuum Of The United States (SCOTUS) stretches down from the highest court of the land to the schoolyard, shopping mall, and street and it will not be cured by amount of salving the symptoms, however much we try. The massacres will continue until we root out the cause at the top.
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What ever happened to the investigation of the Roe leaker, by the way?
John Roberts seemed very upset about the leak at the beginning, but six months later is completely silent.
Are we really supposed to believe the “investigation” turned up nothing?
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Haha, for the Roe leaker.
My hunch is that it was Alito’s clerk, who wanted to get it out there in the public eye so that no justice could back down (looking at Kavanaugh–Roberts was trying to persuade K to join him in a separate decision that split down the middle).
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We would have already been entertained by the spectacle of a perp walk if the leak had sprung from the liberal faction.
It’s no longer the Roberts Court; it’s the Thomas Court.
Or the crazy-eyed Alito Court.
Their version of “choice.”
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There is a sociopathic continuum that stretches down from the Sociopathic Clowns of the United States (SCOTUS) to the Loonies of the Common A–hole Level Greying Old Party (the LOCAL GOP).
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The census reports that about 72% of Uvalde County is Hispanic or Latino.
One may ask, why did so many Hispanic or Latino voters in Uvalde County vote for a racist Caucasian Republican?
I’m going to attempt to explain the why here:
My 2nd wife’s surname was and still is Castaneda. Even when we got married, she kept her surname. She looks Latin (with incredible, glossy dark hair and high cheekbones) but only speaks pidgin Spanish and doesn’t understand anyone that talks to her in Spanish because they think she is one of them. Since we met in a middle school where we both taught and 80% of the student population was poor Latinos, her students often thought she was one of them. She wasn’t. She just looked like she was. Her first language is and has always been English.
Her ancestors came from Spain to Texas centuries ago, because the King of Spain gave them a land-grant where Houston sits today. Before Texas split from Mexico, one of her great… uncles gambled/lost the land and married a native American woman. None in her North American ancestors ever lived south of the US border. And most of Spain’s population has always been Caucasian, even today.
“Hispanic and Latino are often used interchangeably though they actually mean two different things. Hispanic refers to people who speak Spanish and/or are descended from Spanish-speaking populations, while Latino refers to people who are from or descended from people from Latin America.”
You do not have to speak Spanish to be considered Hispanic and even if you speak Spanish and have a Spanish surname, that name came from Spain, not the Americas. Children that are Latino with Spanish surnames is because colonizers from Spain married or had children with native American women or men that may have been poor or slaves. Not to get often topic, but when it comes to the history of slavery, most people in the US have no idea that the most of the slaves from Africa did not end up in North America. The biggest ratio went to Brazil and other counters south of today’s US border.
The Spanish in Spain are Caucasians. Many of the descendants of the brutal Spanish conquerors in North America still look Caucasian and do not consider themselves descended from any Latin countries in the Americas. The invasion of the North American continent and its peoples began with the Spanish in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida. It is estimated that during the colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86 million Spaniards settled in the Americas, and a further 3.5 million immigrated during the post-colonial era (1850–1950); the estimate is 250,000 in the 16th century and most during the 18th century, as immigration was encouraged by the new Bourbon dynasty.
If you are interested, click the next link to see how much land the Spanish Empire controlled in the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Imperios_Espa%C3%B1ol_y_Portugu%C3%A9s_1790.svg
So, in conclusion, when an area where a lot of Hispanic people live with Spanish surnames votes Republican, I suspect they look more Caucasian than what most Caucasians think they look like, and even some Latinos may look more Caucasian than a native American or Latino American with a darker skin tone.
If you look like a shark but have a bird’s name, do to you think of yourself as a shark or a bird?
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Correctio:
“The invasion of the North American continent and its peoples began with the Spanish in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida.”
No, it began with Cortez in what is now Mexico, roughly 50 years before 1565. Mexico is considered to be a part of North America.
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It is my feeling that rural areas are so used to firearms that the have a hard time seeing the firearms as the problem. Almost every day, some of my neighbors shoot. It does not threaten me. I know them. I grew up hearing Russell’s shotgun during rabbit season. When deer became common, I got used to hearing bigger booms, usually associated with specific people.
It is hard, when raised around such a culture, to think someone might be owning a gun in order to train it on a person. You are obliged to rethink the purpose for guns in general and simultaneously distrust your neighbors.
This, I think, explains why rural people often reject tighter gun laws: it’s like rejecting your own people. I am neither defending nor indicting these people. I only mean to explain.
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Just a few of the lovely diseases people can contract from contact with or eating wild game meat:
Anaplasmosis
Avian Influenza
Babesiosis
Brucellosis
Campylobacteriosis (Campylobacter jejuni)
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)
Cryptosporidiosis
Deer Parapoxvirus
Hydatid Tapeworms (Echinococcosis)
Ehrlichiosis
Equine Encephalitis Viruses
Escherichia coli Infection (E. coli)
Giardiasis
Hantavirus
Leptospirosis
Lyme Disease (Lyme borreliosis)
Plague
Q fever
Rabies
Raccoon Roundworm (Baylisascaris procyonis)
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (tick-borne typhus fever) and other spotted fevers
Salmonellosis (Salmonella species)
Sarcoptic mange
Toxoplasmosis
Trichinellosis (trichinosis)
Tuberculosis
Tularemia
West Nile Virus
Specific Risks Associated with International Hunting
Chikungunya
Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever
Rift Valley Fever virus
Plenty of fun to go around!
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People and their dogs
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That list doesn’t scare me. I’ll continue eating wild game, thank you!
And I’ll continue eating live plants-veggies, fruits, etc. . . . I can hear them screaming as I eat them!
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Unlike animals, including humans, for we are members of the Kingdom of Animalia, plants don’t have c-fibers or a-delta fibers or other biological machinery for pain.
Do plants have nociceptive cells and molecular receptors for noxious stimuli such as ASICs (acid sensing ion channels) or TRPs (transient receptor potential channels), the two most frequently occurring nociceptors in animals (Smith and Lewin 2009)? In regard to nociceptive sensory cells, the answer is definitely no. In regard to the receptor molecules, the answer is most probably not, but one should bear in mind that plants have receptors and ion channels with similarities to the molecular constituents of animal nociceptive systems. Among these are plant ion channels that alter their gating with pH, similar to ion channels in animals within and outside the nociceptive system. For example, both of the guard cell K+ channel families (gated outwardly rectifying potassium channel, GORK; gated inwardly rectifying potassium channel, KAT) are sensitive to pH (Dietrich et al. 2001), as are many mammalian K+ channels (Sepúlveda et al. 2015). Likewise, both plants (Hamant and Haswell 2017) and animals (Jin et al. 2020) have mechanoreceptors. In animals, these receptors serve multiple functions from mediating touch to hearing, posture, and balance. While some mechanoreceptors in animals monitor mechanical damage and are thus nociceptive, this does not justify any claim for a nociceptive sensory system in plants just by analogy.
b)
Do plants have a system for integration and experience of damaging stimuli, similar to the complex, highly specialized pain processing network in animals? Definitely not: we reiterate that plants lack both neurons and a brain or any other substrate for central representations of inner states. They therefore cannot experience pain. Advocates of consciousness and cognition in plants point out, however, that plants react to damaging cues with widespread electrical and chemical signals, resembling a coordinated reaction (van Bel et al. 2014; Gallé et al. 2015). Plants do indeed respond to burning injuries and destructive wounding by “slow wave membrane potentials” (Nguyen et al. 2018; Lew et al. 2020), by accumulating jasmonate (Pavlovič et al. 2020) and releasing various volatile substances (Baluška et al. 2016). None of these processes has, however, any similarity to the initiation and distributed processing of pain in animals. An important limitation of electrical signaling in plants is that, as far as we know, it is all one way without any feedback messaging to allow signal exchanges (R. Hedrich, personal communication). Thus, plants have no coordinated network nor center for integrating the specific cues and reactions to damage, in sharp contrast to pain-experiencing animals and humans.
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Still killing living beings!
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A little experiment. You don’t actually have to carry this out.
Stab a carrot.
Stab a pig.
Notice any difference?
QED.
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Sad, so meretricious.
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falsely attractive, like an overly made-up prostitute? I hardly see how that word applies.
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Was it here that I read that Texas made it incredibly difficult to vote for Democrats, not just gerrymandering but the way ballots were set up?
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Yes, they diminished the number of drop boxes and thought of other ways to make it harder to vote.
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File this under WTF! ________________________________
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