Trump's head is up his ass and he is fighting for air.

If you want your happiness back, you'll need to stop lying to yourself. It's the hardest thing to do but you'll be stronger for it.

"We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."

Thank you for your reply Harlequinn.

I beg to differ: The rate of gun deaths in the USA is only low when compared to countries that are either active (civil-) war zones or basically run by drug cartels. When compared to other, similar developed countries, it is at least 4 times as high (when excluding suicides/accidents) .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
I would call that a significant deviation from the norm and stand by my use of "staggering".

You compare gun deaths to deaths from car crashes. Others have already pointed out that one of the main differences is that cars are not tools for killing that are put into public hands and furthermore, since I asked you the question (that you did not answer): "Is the reason for the Second Amendment worth the amount of gun violence in the USA?", my follow up question would be: I can show you the (financial, societal, etc.) benefits of cars (i.e. individual travel by car) for the society, what exactly are the benefits of private gun ownership?
(Whether cars are really worth it, is a whole other discussion.)

Regarding suicide rates, this seems to be a compelling argument until you notice that suicide rates in some, equally developed countries and some lesser developed countries are higher than in the USA and that the number of gun killings that are not suicide is still way higher than in comparable countries (see above).

I do not think that gun violence in the USA can be blamed on mental health issues though <irony>unless you count gun/power fetishism among mental illnesses </irony>.
Edit: Saying that whoever commits an act of gun violence must be mentally ill is tantamount of saying that any criminal must be mentally ill and thus not responsible for his/her actions.

<aside>
One nice observation about this gun fetish (not by me, I think it was Bill Burr): Another common argument pro guns is that people are in it only for home security, if that were the case you would have tons of photos of people with their new door locks or magazine-covers with girls in bikinis in front of security doors.
</aside>

I applaud your stand on public (mental-) health policies though.

Now to your main question:
Have I ever encountered interpersonal violence against me or others?
Yes, but not on a level that bringing lethal force to the situation ever seemed warranted. Thankfully. One obvious reason for that is that I live in a country where I don't need to expect everyone else to carry a gun.
Would it be possible that I would think otherwise, if it would have been the case? Yes.
Would I be correct in thinking that way? No.

To explain: I am not a friend of passive aggressive "stand you ground" thinking. The sane response chain is: 1. Try not to let yourself be provoked, 2. try to de-escalate, 3. try to evade/flee, 4. try to defend yourself.....And of course: CALL THE COPS!

Does that harm my male ego? Yes.
Does that matter enough to me for me to risk killing another human being? No.

This is the longer 1 hour chase. If nothing more it has the comments from the news team as the chase plays out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M9YbnJi2nI

Mohmed Ahmed Abu-Shlieba, driver in 'Hellcat' muscle car, sentenced after memorable chase.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- The driver who memorably led authorities in a high-speed chase behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Challenger Hellcat muscle car has been sentenced to three years in prison.

Mohmed Ahmed Abu-Shlieba, 25, pleaded guilty to evading arrest stemming from the October 2017 chase, which started in Houston and wound up in a cow pasture two counties away in Jefferson County.

https://abc13.com/hellcat-muscle-car-driver-sentenced-after-memorable-chase/3627759/

Seems they stuck it to themselves.

-----------------------------------------

A viral video making the rounds Monday shows a boy going to extremes to avoid detection by Bend Police.

The video, captured by a home security system, shows a boy running near the driveway of a single-family home on a south Bend cul-de-sac before climbing inside one of the home’s garbage cans and closing the lid. Seconds later, a Bend officer walks by and asks several nearby girls if they saw a boy run by. They say no.

Thirty minutes later, the boy exits the garbage can and runs off, seemingly consequence-free.

But according to Bend Police spokesperson Lt. Juli McConkey, that boy and three others were ultimately contacted at their homes and cited with second-­degree theft for allegedly stealing Pokemon cards from Walmart.

On July 5, Walmart loss prevention staff called the Bend Police Department to report several boys had stolen Pokemon cards from the store in south Bend. The store turned over security footage and still images of the boys that a Bend school resource officer used to identify them.

The boys, between the ages of 13 and 15, were not contacted until Sunday, when Walmart personnel called Bend Police to report the same boys were back in the store and had stolen more Pokemon cards.

Police arrived, but the boys were by then hiding somewhere in the store and playing the card game, McConkey said.

They eventually came out and were spotted by officers. The boys ran, spilling into the surrounding neighborhoods, which is when the home security camera captured one of the boys evading capture.

On Monday, the video had been viewed more than 1 million times.

The Bulletin does not typically identify juvenile criminal suspects or defendants.

— The Bulletin

Perhaps you are ignorant of the fact that the vast majority cross where walls already exist. To answer your question, nearly all of them would still try. Do you really think a fence is deterrence when the alternative is go home and see your family raped to death before you're decapitated? Would you just say "oops, sorry, didn't mean to trigger you....let me just take my daughter back to the narcos for a life of sex slavery and just die then, so sorry."?

A better immigration policy that makes it easier to get a work visa or asylum at ports of entry instead of making illegal entry easier, simpler, cheaper, and faster would discourage people from taking the easier, but illegal path. We are moving the other direction, which is why illegal immigration is on the rise under Trump after falling steadily for decades.

This doesn't cost America except for fighting it, they make us money with cheap labor, taxation without representation or access to government assistance, and by lowering the per capita crime rates by being far less criminal on average than Americans. You want to deport a group that's well above average in criminality, that would be Republican politicians and or Trump associates...no one will miss a single one.

A $50 billion wall (Trump's never built anything that wasn't at least 100% over budget) that can be evaded with a ladder, shovel, car, truck, saw, torch, boat, plane, and in many many places, absolutely nothing (it's no longer a single solid wall from coast to gulf, it's now a fence in a few more places for your $50 billion.) is not just vastly more expensive, it's also uselessly wasting that money for almost zero return, the few places it might help will just see the migrant paths move a few miles over.

If we had a 40+ ft high, 20 ft deep, 4+ft thick reinforced concrete wall coast to coast that was somehow ladder proof, it still wouldn't stop most illegal immigration or drug trafficking, because the vast majority of both come through ports of entry. The wall is a useless solution to a non existent problem that's been solving itself for decades....side note: what do you think it was like in the good old days when America was "great"? Contrary to Chump's claims, operation wetback (that he wants to reimplement) was a failure....
https://www.cato.org/blog/enforcement-didnt-end-unlawful-immigration-1950s-more-visas-did

The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.

@heropsycho
here here..we need a special prosecutor.
i have been fairly reticent jump on board during this whole media circus,not because i am a trump fan,but because i saw no evidence,just conjecture and speculation.which i felt more politically motivated than anything.

now to be honest,there STILL is no HARD evidence,but the circumstantial and political machinations of the trump administration has become increasingly suspect.reminiscent to the nixon administration during the watergate scandal.

could this all just be an innocent mistake,from a bumbling president and an inept staff?

sure..that is a possibility,but with the mounting evidence,and the trump administration continually evading and obfuscating and in some instances,outright blocking any inquiry into the russian connections?

yeah,we need a special prosecutor.

Kevin Gosztola's beautiful rundown of how the Clinton campaign tries to dodge, evade and spin the Podesta emails:

https://shadowproof.com/2016/10/20/clinton-campaign-makes-wildly-inconsistent-claims-emails-published-wikileaks/

Donna Brazile, in particular, needs to up her game. When Jordan Chariton kept pressing her on the issue, I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

His follow-up is less entertaining, visually, but contains a lot more information.

That or just your mom using social media.

Edit:
Heck, even those of us who pride ourselves on our health, still experience occasional infirmity. I count myself among those people - in fact, I believe that I suffer these dips more often than many. There is an ironic aptness, I have often felt, in the fact that I named my daughter 'Grace' - a virtue I find myself lacking all too frequently.

Just recently, when rock-running, I tripped over my own two feet and fell face first to the ground. I received excellent medical care and recovered, but if I were of a progressive mindset, I would no doubt find the very idea of someone inquiring as to my recovery both condescending and sexist. I would also be glad that Hillary can evade that kind of questioning, thanks to the biased support she receives from the pro-establishment media which shields her from legitimate inquiries. The fact that she is running for the highest office in our nation does not seem to persuade the media that these questions are legitimate and necessary to pose.

If you ask me, the real sexism on display now is the odd reluctance of the media to ask hard-hitting questions, and its willingness to accept the ridiculous excuses offered by Hillary Clinton's campaign for the lack of proper e-mail management. Rather than demand the real contents of those e-mails, the media is content to accept a disarming and stereotypical list of everyday 'women's activities' such as yoga or wedding planning, for fear that if they point out the obvious ridiculousness here, they will be lambasted as sexist.

#SAD

If the gang is smart enough to make such sophisticated skimmers, I'm sure they're smart enough to evade the police.

"Hey kid, here's $10 Euros, go put this on that ATM."

"Hey kid, here's $10 Euros, go get the card skimmer."

"Hey kid, if you finger me, your whole family is going to die."

Cops pick up one kid, there's 100 more willing to take his place.

It seems like it's time to petition the white house to go after ANYONE named in the papers, and let them prove in court that they weren't really evading taxes and that they had a legitimate, legal reason to have their money there, or go to jail for tax evasion like Capone. If 95% of what they do there is tax evasion, it's reasonable to presume their customers guilty until proven innocent.
If we aren't going to prosecute these people for clearly and massively stealing from the country, then there is no rule of law and it's already Mad Max times, and the Koch brothers are really the Lord Humongous and Immortan Joe .

It keeps astounding me how the catholic church keeps evading any kind of charges regarding their child fucking issues. If any other organisation had as many incidents of accusations of raping children as the catholic church, they would've been closed down for good so many freaking years ago. If Lidl, a grocery store chain in my country, had as many complaints regarding child abuse as the catholic church had, it would be illegal to take children into a single Lidl store.
Apparently, Jersus loves you. Especially if you love children. With your cock.

The devil is in the details, isn't it?

For instance, what kind of guaranteed minimum income are we talking about?

The context they used (automatisation, labour supply) suggests to me something along the lines of an unconditional basic income. If that's the case, it cannot be compared to a minimum wage at all, since it has effects that go far beyond the labour market and the income situation. It's a massive reshaping of how we organise society. And it becomes a pain in the ass to even conceptualise properly once you talk about how to finance it...

A minimum wage, no matter how decent it is, doesn't even put a dent into the disparity between income from labour and income from capital. It makes life less horrible for those it applies to and it somewhat curtails the welfare queens among corporations who like their wage slaves being paid for by society. Yes, I'm looking at you, Walmart! Still, on its own, it does very little about income inequality, and nothing at all about wealth inequality.

How would I address income inequality?

In German, the words for taxes and steering are the same: "Steuern". If you want to steer the income towards a more equal distribution, taxation might be the easiest way to go about it. Treat all forms of income equally in terms of taxation. Or go one step further and treat wages preferentially to support employment.

However, redistribution will only get you so far. So why not address it at an earlier stage: distribution. Mondragon serves as a successful example of how a cooperative structure puts democratic checks and balances on the wage structure within a corporation. One person, one vote puts the lid on any attempts by higher-ups to rake in 300 times as much as the peasants on the factory floor.

Yet it doesn't do anything about the inequality between wages and capital income. Even a combination of progressive taxation and fixed income-ratios doesn't do much about it. Especially since non-wage income can evade taxation in a million different ways and most politicians in every country in the world seem more than eager to protect what loopholes they created over the decades.

So what's my suggestion? Well, progressive taxation of both income and wealth, living wage plus job guarantee, support of democratic structures at the workplace, international pressure on tax havens (which includes my own fecking country). Realistic? No. But neither was our welfare system until it was implemented.

First off, the city is already a powder-keg over segregationist tactics that were employed by the predominantly white city government to prevent affordable housing for lower income residents in the affluent parts of town.

http://www.ibtimes.com/mckinney-north-texas-city-center-pool-party-video-controversy-was-sued-over-housing-1955995

Now, the pool was in a upper crust luxury community and to celebrate the end of the school year, quite a few non-whites obtained passes to the pool. It was not until a bunch of the adult white residents of the community started calling in reports of fights and trespassing (people without passes).

These same nice white folk made the visitors feel wanted by throwing out racist comments "Several adults told the black teens to go back to their “Section 8 [public] housing” developments."

Now, the white kid who took the video, and who was not thrown to the ground by the police (he said they basically ignored him), said that most of the kids had passes and that the problems began before the few people who did not have passes showed up.

“I think a bunch of white parents were angry that a bunch of black kids who don’t live in the neighborhood were in the pool,” said Brooks, who is white.

Grace Stone, a white 14-year-old, told BuzzFeed News that when she and her friends objected to the racist comments about public housing an adult woman then became violent.

So the story is pretty much that a bunch of upper class white folks didn't like the 'darkies' getting uppity and brought the cops in. Everyone except the guy in the blue hat was released after being 'put in their place' by the cops for a while. Blue hat guy went to jail on charges of interference and evading arrest.

On Sunday afternoon, a sign left at the pool thanked McKinney police “for keeping us safe.” Because, as we all know, ethnic teens are the root of all evil and could hurt us white folks!

I doubt the cop loses his job, but he fucking should. Pulling a gun on unarmed teens is ludicrous. Putting your full weight on the back of a teen girl half your size and resting there for minutes is uncalled for. The jackass was PISSED that he tripped while chasing kids and felt he needed to get his own back.

As far as the community, they don't mind taking money from rich black folks to build a sports center, but don't let those uppity blacks think they can hang out there.

*promote

Phil is going to move Silent Circle to Geneva to evade US mass surveillance:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/25/philip-zimmermann-king-encryption-reveals-fears-privacy