A Pistol for Every Bar Stool - Gail Collins

JUNE 16, 2016

The nation hasn’t exactly joined hands in a united response to the Orlando massacre. But since this terrible mass shooting happened in one of the most weapons-friendly places in the country, maybe we can at least all agree that having wildly permissive gun laws does not make a city safer.

O.K., probably not.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump took time out from vilifying Muslims and put some of the blame on gun control. If the patrons of Pulse, the gay bar in Orlando, had been carrying concealed weapons, he said, they could have taken control of the situation. The gunman would have been “just open target practice.”

(This was at the same speech where he congratulated himself for his stupendous relationship with the gay community, suggesting he didn’t “get enough credit” for having a club in Palm Beach that was “open to everybody.” This is a little off our topic today, but I have to once again point out that Trump’s club is open to everybody with $100,000 to cover the membership fee.)

But about guns. Let’s follow Trump’s thought. It’s easy to buy a gun in Florida and supereasy to get a permit to carry around a concealed weapon. Even the Florida Legislature, however, doesn’t allow people to carry guns into bars. Trump did not specifically say that we need to uphold Americans’ freedom to drink while armed. But there doesn’t seem to be any other way to interpret his argument.

Also, there actually was an off-duty police officer working in the club who tried to shoot the gunman but failed. This is important, because the myth of the cool and steady shooter is one of the most cherished beliefs of the National Rifle Association and its supporters. Trump himself has bragged that if he’d been in Paris on the night of the attacks there, he would have shot the terrorists. (“I may have been killed, but I would have drawn.”)

This is an excellent example of delusional gun thinking. Although Trump frequently reminds us he has a permit to carry a gun, there’s no indication he’s ever done so. And there’s certainly no evidence whatsoever that he has any skill in hitting things.

It’s very, very difficult to draw, aim and shoot accurately when you’re under severe stress. It’s one of the reasons that police officers so often spray fleeing suspects with bullets. They can’t hit a moving target, even though they get far more weapons training than your normal armed civilian.

In Florida, people who want to carry a gun merely have to be able to demonstrate they can “safely handle and discharge the firearm.” Nowhere does it say anything about accuracy.

A few weeks ago in Houston, a 25-year-old Afghan war veteran named Dionisio Garza walked up to a stranger sitting in a car at a carwash and shot him in the neck while railing about “homosexuals, Jews and Walmart,” according to local reports. He fired off 212 rounds, mostly from an assault rifle, hitting a police helicopter and a nearby gas station, which burst into flames. The police said a neighbor who heard the shooting came running with a gun, but was shot himself.

People who hear this story may draw different morals. The way we’ve been going, it’ll be a miracle if some member of the Texas Legislature doesn’t submit a bill requiring employees of carwashes to be armed at all times. However, others might note that the weapon in this case was an AR-15, the same type of military-style rifle that was used in the Orlando shooting, the Newtown school shooting and the terrorist attack in San Bernardino. It would seem as if the best way to cut down on mass shootings would be by eliminating weapons that allow crazy people to rapidly fire off endless rounds of bullets.

The possibility of banning assault weapons like the AR-15 is most definitely not on the table in Congress, although Hillary Clinton supports it, and has brought it up a lot since Orlando. No, the current debate in Washington is over whether people on the government’s terror watch list should be kept from purchasing arms.

The fact that even people who aren’t allowed to get on a plane can buy a gun in this country is obviously insane. Yet most of the Republicans in the House and the Senate regard changing the status quo as an enormous lift. “I think you’re going too far here,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told the backers during one of the bill’s pathetic trips to nowhere.

Since the Orlando shooter had actually spent some time on the terror watch list, the pressure seems to be growing. Trump says he’ll meet with the N.R.A. to talk over the matter. Perhaps, after all this time, we’ll get some pathetically minor action. Then only apolitical maniacs would have the opportunity to buy guns that can take out a roomful of people in no time flat.

Meet Deadeye Donald – Gail Collins

Meet Deadeye Donald – Gail Collins

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/opinion/meet-deadeye-donald.html?_r=0

MAY 20, 2016

Donald Trump has a permit to carry a gun.

“Nobody knows that,” he told a gathering of the National Rifle Association on Friday. Well actually, it’s pretty hard to not know since he brings it up all the time.

“Boy, would I surprise somebody if they hit Trump,” he told the audience. People, have we ever had a president who spoke about himself in the third person? Something to consider. But more important, what would that surprise entail? Was Trump trying to say that he’d quickly draw his concealed weapon and take the gunman out of circulation?

“If I wasn’t — if I wasn’t surrounded by, like the largest group of Secret Service people,” he began, and it did sound as if we were about to get a description of his shooting prowess. But then Trump veered off to demand a standing ovation for police officers and never did get back to the original point.

Chances are he couldn’t hit the side of a barn. (If he could, don’t you think we’d have been forced to watch videos of Trump taking that barn out of commission?) Last summer, an NBC interviewer asked if he ever used his weapon on, say, gun ranges. Trump replied that it was “none of your business.”

This is a more important matter than just the ability to make fun of Donald Trump for bragging, although that’s pretty enjoyable. The entire mythology of the N.R.A. and its supporters is based on the idea that if a person is armed, he or she will be capable of shooting accurately. That the big problem is lack of gun availability, not gun owners who are sloppy, inept and occasionally psychotic.

If we required that anyone who wants to buy a gun first demonstrate the ability to hit a target, sales would plummet overnight.

In his speech, which came after he received the N.R.A.’s enthusiastic endorsement, Trump bragged about his sons’ marksmanship. “They have so many rifles and so many guns, sometimes I even get a little bit concerned,” he said, to rather uncertain laughter from the audience — the N.R.A. theory is that you cannot possibly have too many guns. But give credit to Donald Jr. and Eric — they apparently spend a lot of time practicing. We are not going to revisit the day they killed the elephant.

The myth of the masses of skillful shooters is also central to Trump’s much-repeated claim that terrorists would be deterred if they thought they were going to run into an armed citizenry. He’s described the way ISIS gunmen in Paris would have been undone if people at the Bataclan theater had been able to get up and start firing back — an image that presumes Europeans bearing arms would have the capacity to stand up in a dark, hysterical auditorium and take out the villains without mowing down the rest of the audience.

“I can tell you that if I had been in the Bataclan or in the cafes, I would have opened fire,” Trump told a French magazine. “I may have been killed, but I would have drawn.”

More likely, he’d have hit the waiter. It’s very, very hard to shoot accurately when you’re scared or under stress. Police officers generally can’t do it. There was an armed security officer at the Columbine shootings, and he couldn’t do it. There was an armed bystander at the shopping center mass shooting that nearly killed Representative Gabby Giffords. He said later he was “very lucky” not to have shot the wrong man.

However, the N.R.A. vision of the world is one where every shot is true. “Americans use guns to defend themselves against violent crime more than a million times a year,” said Trump. This is a fantasy, based on one phone survey conducted in 1992, and frequently debunked.

And nobody in the presidential race wants to prevent law-abiding people from keeping guns in their homes. Certainly not Hillary Clinton, who has been known to brag about her previous hunting triumphs. She’s probably not very proficient now, but she could probably still beat Trump in a shoot-off.

At the N.R.A. gathering, where Clinton was depicted as a near-maniac intent on freeing criminals, confiscating guns and repealing the Second Amendment, Trump claimed that “Heartless Hillary” wants to disarm the nation’s grandmothers, leaving them defenseless against murderers and rapists. He’s had great success tacking unflattering adjectives on his opponents’ names. Since we’re having so much trouble keeping track of his own evolving positions, let’s try referring to the candidate’s prior incarnations as “Previous Donald.”

Previous Donald told TMZ that he was surprised his sons liked hunting and that he himself was “not a believer.” He favored banning assault weapons and expanding the waiting time for gun purchases. Beyond that, the Second Amendment didn’t seem to be a big issue in his pre-campaign life. Except for a snide reference to Republicans who “walk the N.R.A. line and refuse even limited restrictions.”

So Previous.

Statement from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on the Passing of Muhammad Ali

Statement from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on the Passing of Muhammad Ali

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/04/statement-president-barack-obama-and-first-lady-michelle-obama-passing

June 04, 2016

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

Muhammad Ali was The Greatest.  Period.  If you just asked him, he’d tell you.  He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.”

But what made The Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is that everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing.

Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing.  But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.

In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston.  I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic Gold Medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.

“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right.  A man who fought for us.  He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t.  His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing.  It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail.  But Ali stood his ground.  And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.

He wasn’t perfect, of course.  For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved.  But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes – maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves.  Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the world.  We saw a man who said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the greatest.  We watched a hero light a torch, and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again; a battle against the disease that ravaged his body, but couldn’t take the spark from his eyes.

Muhammad Ali shook up the world.  And the world is better for it.  We are all better for it.  Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family, and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all finally rests in peace.

I Have Met the Enemy, and It Is the Airlines – Gail Collins

May 26, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/opinion/memorial-day-weekend-ranting.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fgail-collins&_r=0

Summer is upon us, and we are facing important travel decisions. Such as who to blame when we get stuck in interminable airport lines.

So many options. There’s the government, but how many times can you can complain about Congress in the course of a lifetime? There’s the public — air traffic up 12 percent since 2011. But really, people, don’t blame yourself.

Let’s pick a rant that’s good for you, good for me, good for the lines in security: Make the airlines stop charging fees for checked baggage.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Plus, if you do manage to make it to your flight, these are the same people who will be announcing there’s a $3 fee if you want a snack.

The largest airlines charge $25 for the first checked bag, thus encouraging people to drag their belongings through the airport, clogging the X-ray lines and slowing the boarding process as everybody fights to cram one last rolling duffel into the overhead compartment.

The idea that travelers should be hit by an extra charge for, um, having luggage began in 2008, when the cost of fuel went through the roof. We understood the airlines’ pain, sort of. Maybe. But now fuel prices have fallen into the cellar. The airlines are taking in stupendous profits — last year nearly $26 billion after taxes, up from $2.3 billion in 2010.

Yet the baggage fees are still with us. In fact, they’ve gone up by about two-thirds. Last year, the nation’s airlines made more than $3.8 billion off what I believe it is fair to call a scam. It’s also an excellent way to make your prices look lower than they really are when people surf for the cheapest ticket, a number that never includes details like the special fees for bags, food, canceling a reservation, booking by phone, sitting in a minimally more comfortable emergency row or, in some cases, requesting a pillow.

Shouldn’t the airlines offer up the baggage fee as a token of solidarity with their miserable passengers? The idea has come up. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson asked the airlines to “consider possibly” this modest bow to air travel sanity. Two U.S. senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the airlines asking them to just drop the fees during the high-traffic summer months.

We pause now for the sound of silence and crickets chirping.

The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Boeing Company found a way to cram 14 more seats into its largest twin-engine jetliner by reducing the size of the lavatories.Bloomberg quoted a Boeing official as reporting that “the market reaction has been good — really positive.” We presume the market in question does not involve the actual passengers.

But the industry is so powerful that it seems to be able to get away with squishing people into smaller and smaller spaces. Last month, SenatorChuck Schumer of New York offered an amendment to a bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration that would have imposed a moratorium on reductions in seat size and space between rows. It failed, 54 to 42.

Nobody spoke out against the proposal, but only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted for it. We salute Susan Collins, who has been, for a number of years, virtually the entire population of the Moderate Republican Caucus.

When Schumer flies, his first move is to empty the seat pocket in front of him. “I take out the magazine and the airsickness bag so I have an extra eighth of an inch,” he said in a phone interview. It’s a matter of some passion — when the presidents of three airlines visited Schumer’s office for discussion of a totally unrelated issue, he moved the coffee table so it was an inch from their knees. “I said: ‘O.K., now you know how it feels.’”

But about the bags.

Rather than reducing the number of bags in security lines, the airlines would like the government to deal with the problem by adding more workers to screen them. And the perpetually beleagueredTransportation Security Administration is going to spend $34 million to hire more people and pay more overtime this summer. Which, it assured the public, is not really going to solve much of anything.

(Who, you may ask, pays for the security lines anyway? For the most part you the taxpayer do. Also you the passenger pay a special security fee on your tickets. Which Congress tends to grab away from the T.S.A. for use in all-purpose deficit reduction. I know, I know.)

A spokesman for Delta Air Lines, which took in more than $875 million on baggage fees last year, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that bowing to the extremely modest Markey-Blumenthal request for a summer suspension of the baggage fee wouldn’t “really help alleviate a lot.” It would also, he said, require a “considerable change to the business model.”

Heaven forfend we mess with the business model.

암을 극복할수 있는 반가운 소식

https://story.kakao.com/ch/ecmed/gFHvS3Oau80

아래는 암에대한 기본적인 생각과 치료법에 대하여 존스 홉킨스 대학이 최근에 발표한 내용이다.  - 노부호 교수

(1) 모든 사람들은 몸에 암 세포를 가지고 있다.  이 암 세포들은 스스로 수십억 개로 복제될 때까지 일반적 검사에는 나타나지 않는다.

의사가 치료 후 암 환자에게 더 이상 암 세포가 없다고 말하는 것은 암 세포를 찾아내지 못 했다는 것을 의미할 뿐인 것이다. 왜냐하면 그 암 세포가 발견하지 못할 크기로 작아졌기 때문이다.

(2) 암 세포들은 사람의 수명기간 동안 6배에서 10배 이상까지 증식한다.

(3) 사람의 면역체계가 충분히 강할 때 암 세포는 파괴되며, 증식되거나 종양을 형성하는 것이 억제된다.

(4) 사람이 암에 걸리면 복합적인 영양 결핍을 보인다. 이것은 유전적, 환경적, 식생활, 그리고 생활습관 상의 요인들에 의한 것이다.

(5) 복합적인 영양 결핍을 극복하기 위해, 건강보조식품을 포함한 식습관을 바꾸는 것이, 면역 체계를 강화시킨다. 

(6) 항암주사 요법은 급속히 성장하는 암 세포를 독살하는 것이다.  그러나 골수, 위장 내관 등에서 급속히 성장하는 건강한 세포 역시 파괴한다. 뿐만아니라 간, 콩팥, 심장, 폐 등과 같은 기관까지도 손상을 야기한다.

(7) 또한 방사선치료 요법은 암 세포를 파괴하는 동안 방사선은 건강한 세포, 조직, 기관 역시 태우고, 흉터를 내고, 손상을 입힌다.

(8) 화학적 요법과 방사선의 주요 처치는 종종 종양의 크기를 줄이기는 한다. 그러나 화학적 요법과 방사선의 오랜 사용은 더 이상의 악성종양 파괴를 가져오지는 않는다. (치료의 한계)

(9) 인체가 화학적 용법과 방사선으로부터 너무 많은 독한 부담을 가지면, 사람의 면역 체계는 굴복하거나 파괴되고 만다 또한 사람은 다양한 감염과 합병증에 의해 쓰러질 수 있다.

(10) 화학적 요법과 방사선은 암 세포를 돌연변이 시킬 수 있으며, 저항력을 키워, 파괴되기 어렵게 만든다. 수술 역시 암 세포를 다른 곳으로 전이시킬 수 있다.

(11) 암과 싸우기 위한 효과적인 방법은 암 세포가 증식하는데 필요한 영양분을 공급하지 않음으로써, 암 세포를 굶어 죽게해야 하는 것이다.

;암 세포의 영양분.

a. 설탕은 암을 키운다.

설탕 섭취를 줄이는 것은 암 세포에 영양분을 공급하는 중요한 한 가지를 없애는 것이다.  NutraSweet(뉴트라 스위트),Equal(이퀄),Spoonful(스푼풀)  등과 같은 설탕 대용품들은 아스파탐으로 만들어진다. 이것 역시 해롭다. 좋은 자연적 대용품은 마누카 꿀 또는 당밀 같은 것이지만 이것도 매우 적은 분량이어야 한다. 식용소금은 색을 하얗게 하기 위해 화학적 첨가를 한다. 좋은 대용품은 Bragg’s amino(브랙의 아미노)

또는 바다 소금(천일염)이다.

b.우유는 인체 특히 위장내 관에서 점액을 생산하도록 한다. 암은 이 점액을 먹는다 따라서 우유를 줄이고 무가당 두유로 대체하면, 암 세포는 굶어 죽을 것이다.

c. 암 세포는 산성(acid) 환경에서 나타난다.  육식 중심의 식생활은 산성이다.  생선을 먹는 것과 소고기나 돼지고기 보다, 약간의 닭고기가 최선이다.  또한 육류는 또한 가축 항생제, 성장 호르몬과 기생충을포함하고 있다. 이것들은 모두 해로운데, 특히 암 환자에게 해롭다.

d. 80% -신선한 야채와 주스, 잡곡, 씨, 견과류, 그리고 약간의 과일로 이루어진 식단은 인체가 알칼리성 환경에 놓이도록 도와준다. 20%는 콩을 포함한 불에 익힌 음식들이다.  신선한 야채 주스는 살아있는 효소를 생산하며, 이것은 쉽게 흡수되어 15분 안에 세포에까지 도달하고,건강한 세포에게 영양을 공급하여 성장을 돕는다.

건강한 세포를 만들기 위한 살아있는 효소를 얻으려면 신선한 야채 주스(콩의 새싹을 포함한 대부분의 야채들)를 마시고,하루에! 두세 번 생 야채를 먹도록 노력해야 한다.  효소는 화씨 104도 (섭씨 40도)에서 파괴된다.

e. 카페인을 많이 함유한 커피, 차(홍차),초콜릿을 피하라. 녹차는 암과 싸우기 위한 좋은 대용품이다.

독소와 중금속을 피하기 위하여 수돗물이 아닌 정수된 물을 마시는 것이 최선이다.  증류된 물은 산성이다. 피하라.

(12) 육류의 단백질은 소화가 어렵고 많은 양의 소화 효소를 필요로 한다.(과식은 피한다.)소화되지 않은 육류는 창자에 남아서 부패되거나 더 많은 독소를 만들게 한다.

(13) 암 세포벽은 견고한 단백질로 쌓여 있다.  육류 섭취를 줄이거나 삼가 함으로써, 더 많은 효소가 암세포의 단백질 벽을 공격할 수 있도록 하여 인체의 킬러 세포가 암 세포를 파괴하도록 만든다.

(14) 몇몇 보조식품들(IP6, Flor-ssence, Essiac, 항산화제, 비타민, 미네랄, EFAs 등)은,인체 스스로 암 세포를 파괴하기 위한 킬러 세포를 활성화하여,면역 체계를 형성한다.  비타민E와 같은 다른 보조식품들은 유전자에 의한 세포의 능동적 죽음(아포토시스, apoptosis) 또는 손상 입은 필요치 않은 세포를 인체의 자연적 방법에 의해, 없애는 프로그램 세포사를 일으키는 것으로 알려졌다.

(15) 암은 마음, 육체, 정신의 질병이다. 활동적이고 긍정적인 정신은, 암과 싸우는 사람을 생존자로 만드는 데 도움을 준다. 분노, 불관용, 비난은 인체를 스트레스와 산성의 상태로만든다.  사랑하고 용서하는 정신을 배워라

(16) 암 세포는 유산소(oxygenate)환경에서는 번성할 수 없다. 매일 운동을 하고 심호흡을 하는 것은 암 세포를 파괴하기 위해 적용되는 또 다른 수단이다.