A new study on Australian volcanoes has changed what we know about explosive ‘hotspot’ volcanism

The Conversation
March 27, 2023

Warrumbungle national park. Colin Slack/Shutterstock

Our new study published in Nature Geoscience on an ancient chain of Australian volcanoes is helping to change our understanding of “hotspot” volcanism.

You may be surprised to learn eastern Australia hosts the longest chain of continental hotspot volcanoes on Earth. These volcanoes erupted during the last 35 million years (for 1 to 7 million years each), as the Australian continent moved over an area of heat (a hotspot) inside the planet, also known as a fixed heat anomaly or mantle plume.

But it appears the Australian hotspot waned with time. And we have found the volcanoes’ inner structure and eruptions changed as a result. Our new findings show hotspot strength has key impacts on the evolution of volcanoes’ inner structure, along with their location and lifespan.

Hotspots change Earth’s surface

Hotspot volcanoes can produce very large volumes of lava and have an important role in Earth’s evolution and atmosphere. Today, famously active hotspot volcanoes include the Hawaiian volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. These are known as ocean island volcanoes.

The Australian hotspot chain provides a continental perspective and covers the life cycle of a hotspot – a unique opportunity to better understand how hotspot volcanoes work, why they erupt, and how they evolve with time.

We found the strength of the hotspot and magma supply controls the duration, make-up and explosiveness of volcanoes at the surface. Around 35 to 27 million years ago, the early Australian hotspot was strong and generated enormous, long-lasting volcanoes across Queensland where magma (molten rock) took a direct route to the surface.

In contrast, the more recent (20 to 6 million years ago) New South Wales volcanoes are smaller and had shorter lifetimes, suggesting the hotspot lost strength with time. Interestingly, reduced supply made the magma’s journey to the surface more complicated, with many stops (magma chambers) and more explosive eruptions.

The tipping point occurred at the stunning Tweed-Wollumbin (Mount Warning) volcanic landscape, which formed 21–24 million years ago at today’s border between Queensland and New South Wales.


A view of the volcanic Tweed Valley with Wollumbin (Mount Warning) in the foreground. Jiri Viehmann/Shutterstock

The secret journey of magma

To discover the journey of magma inside the volcano, and the stops it made on its way to eruption, we analysed volcanic crystals. These are the little heroes that make it all the way to the surface. Mainly composed of silicate minerals like olivine, pyroxene and plagioclase, the crystals grow in the guts of the volcano at high temperature, and register what happens before eruptions start.

These crystals are quite simple in northern volcanoes like Buckland in Queensland, which means they travel through few, simple magma chambers. In contrast, the crystals become very complex in southern volcanoes like Nandewar and Warrumbungle in New South Wales, which means they had a complicated journey through lots of busy magma chambers – lots of stops.

Importantly, when magma stops in a chamber, it cools down and becomes more viscous and difficult to erupt – a bit like cold toothpaste, instead of hot coffee. This thick, lazy magma may need new, hotter magma (caffeinated!) to come and push it to erupt.

If that happens, the gases trapped in the colder magma may not be able to escape, since the magma is so thick. This results in a pressure buildup, eventually exploding like a shaken bottle of fizzy drink – an explosive volcanic eruption.

A special clock

The cold and hardened lava flows we see in the form of volcanic rocks contain a special clock – radioactive chemical elements have slowly broken down into stable daughter products that accumulate and increase in concentration as time passes.

The beauty of this process is that we know how fast it occurs. By measuring the ratio of the radioactive element and its stable daughter product we can calculate the age of a volcanic rock. By measuring the age of each lava flow from the bottom to the top of the volcano, we can measure its lifetime.

Our study shows the relevance of Australian volcanoes, even if mostly extinct, in better understanding eruptions that have shaped the evolution of our planet. We demonstrate the fundamental role of hotspot strength and magma supply on Earth’s landscape, as well as the eruption styles and lifetimes of volcanoes.

This breakthrough makes it possible to visualize the inner structure of hotspot volcanoes, and their evolution, uniquely easily accessible in the ancient, exposed Australian landscape.

Al-Tamini Tapu, Geoscientist, The University of Queensland; Paulo Vasconcelos, Professor, The University of Queensland, and Teresa Ubide, Associate Professor - Igneous Petrology/Volcanology, The University of Queensland


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient DNA is restoring the origin story of the Swahili people of the East African coast

The Conversation
March 29, 2023

How are people today related to those who lived centuries ago in the Swahili civilization? 

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The legacy of the medieval Swahili civilization is a source of extraordinary pride in East Africa, as reflected in its language being the official tongue of Kenya, Tanzania and even inland countries like Uganda and Rwanda, far from the Indian Ocean shore where the culture developed nearly two millennia ago.

Its ornate stone and coral towns hugged 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of the coast, and its merchants played a linchpin role in the lucrative trade between Africa and lands across the ocean: Arabia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

By the turn of the second millennium, Swahili people embraced Islam, and some of their grand mosques still stand at the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Lamu in Kenya and Kilwa in Tanzania.

Self-governance ended following Portuguese colonization in the 1500s, with control later shifting to the Omanis (1730-1964), Germans in Tanganyika (1884-1918) and British in Kenya and Uganda (1884-1963). Following independence, coastal peoples were absorbed into the modern nation-states of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar.
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The Swahili island settlement of Kilwa, in present-day Tanzania, grew over centuries to be a major coastal city and trading center. 

Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

So who were the Swahili people, and where did their ancestors originally come from?

Ironically, the story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people, a challenge shared with many other marginalized and colonized peoples who are the modern descendants of cultures of the past with extraordinary achievements.

Working with a team of 42 colleagues, including 17 African scholars and multiple members of the Swahili community, we’ve now published the first ancient DNA sequences from peoples of the Swahili civilization. Our results do not provide simple validation for the narratives previously advanced in archaeological, historical or political circles. Instead, they contradict and complicate all of them.
Colonization affected how the story was told

Western archaeologists in the mid-20th century emphasized the connections of the medieval Swahili to Persia and Arabia, sometimes suggesting that their impressive achievements could not have been attained by Africans.

Post-colonial scholars, including one of us (Kusimba), pushed back against that view. Earlier researchers had inflated the importance of non-African influences by focusing on imported objects at Swahili sites. They minimized the vast majority of locally made materials and what they revealed about African industry and innovation.

But viewing Swahili heritage as primarily African or non-African is too simplistic; In fact, both perspectives are byproducts of colonialist biases.

The truth is that colonization of the East African coast did not end with the departure of the British in the middle of the 20th century. Many colonial institutions were inherited and perpetuated by Africans. As modern nation-states formed, with governments controlled by inland peoples, Swahili people continued to be undermined politically and economically, in some cases as much as they had been under foreign rule.

Decades of archaeological research in consultation with local people aimed to address the marginalization of communities of Swahili descent. Our team consulted oral traditions and used ethnoarchaeology and systematic surveys, along with targeted excavations of residential, industrial and cemetery locations. Working with local scholars and elders, we unearthed materials such as pottery, metal and beads; food, house and industrial remains; and imported objects such as porcelain, glass, glass beads and more. Together they revealed the complexity of Swahili everyday life and the peoples’ cosmopolitan Indian Ocean heritage.


For generations, Swahilis have maintained matrilineal family burial gardens such as this one in Faza town, Lamu County. Chapurukha Kusimba, 2012, CC BY-ND

Ancient DNA analysis was always one of the most exciting prospects. It offered the hope of using scientific methods to obtain answers to the question of how medieval people are related to earlier groups and to people today, providing a counterweight to narratives imposed from outside. Until a few years ago, this kind of analysis was a dream. But because of a technological revolution in 2010, the number of ancient humans with published genome-scale data has risen from nothing to more than 10,000 today.

Surprises in the ancient DNA

We worked with local communities to determine the best practices for treating human remains in line with traditional Muslim religious sensitivities. Cemetery excavations, sampling and reburial of human remains were carried out in one season, rather than dragging on indefinitely.


A detailed line drawing captures the way one person’s remains were discovered during cemetery excavation at Mtwapa in 1996. Eric Wert, 2001, CC BY-ND


Our team generated data from more than 80 people, mostly elite individuals buried in the rich centers of the stone towns. We will need to wait for future work to understand whether their genetic inheritance differed from people without their high status.

Contradicting what we had expected, the ancestry of the people we analyzed was not largely African or Asian. Instead, these backgrounds were intertwined, each contributing about half of the DNA of the people we analyzed.

We found that Asian ancestry in the medieval individuals came largely from Persia (modern-day Iran), and that Asians and African ancestors began mixing at least 1,000 years ago. This picture is almost a perfect match to the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest narrative told by the Swahili people themselves, and one almost all earlier scholars had dismissed as a kind of fairy tale.

Another surprise was that, mixed in with the Persians, Indians were a significant proportion of the earliest migrants. Patterns in the DNA also suggest that, after the transition to Omani control in the 18th century, Asian immigrants became increasingly Arabian. Later, there was intermarriage with people whose DNA was similar to others in Africa. As a result, some modern people who identify as Swahili have inherited relatively little DNA from medieval peoples like those we analyzed, while others have more.

One of the most revealing patterns our genetic analysis identified was that the overwhelming majority of male-line ancestors came from Asia, while female-line ancestors came from Africa. This finding must reflect a history of Persian males traveling to the coast and having children with local women.

One of us (Reich) initially hypothesized that these patterns might reflect Asian men forcibly marrying African women because similar genetic signatures in other populations are known to reflect such violent histories. But this theory does not account for what is known about the culture, and there is a more likely explanation.


Even under colonial rule and through modern times, traditional Swahili culture has retained its matriarchal nature. 

Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Traditional Swahili society is similar to many other East African Bantu cultures in being substantially matriarchal – it places much economic and social power in the hands of women. In traditional Swahili societies even today, ownership of stone houses often passes down the female line. And there is a long recorded history of female rulers, beginning with Mwana Mkisi, ruler of Mombasa, as recorded by the Portuguese as early as the 1500s, down to Sabani binti Ngumi, ruler of Mikindani in Tanzania as late as 1886.

Our best guess is that Persian men allied with and married into elite families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders. The fact that their children passed down the language of their mothers, and that encounters with traditionally patriarchal Persians and Arabians and conversion to Islam did not change the coast’s African matriarchal traditions, confirms that this was not a simple history of African women being exploited. African women retained critical aspects of their culture and passed it down for many generations.

How do these results gleaned from ancient DNA restore heritage for the Swahili? Objective knowledge about the past has great potential to help marginalized peoples. By making it possible to challenge and overturn narratives imposed from the outside for political or economic ends, scientific research provides a meaningful and underappreciated tool for righting colonial wrongs.

Chapurukha Kusimba, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida and David Reich, Professor of Genetics and of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s a bad year for California salmon. Here’s how it hurts the economy and environment
2023/03/30

A male chinook salmon jumps out of the water at it swims up the American River near the Nimbus Fish Hatchery 

 Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/TNS

State officials were supposed to take a conservative approach to approving salmon fishing season this year — and they did.

California’s fishing season had been scheduled to open April 1. Instead, as a result of low salmon projections, the seasonhas been canceled.

Salmon provides more to the state than meets the eye.

“People don’t realize how much California’s a salmon state,” said Micheal Milstein, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesman. “The Sacramento River is one of the big salmon rivers off the West Coast.”

As commercial and sport fishing comes to a pause this year, here’s what to know:
Economic consequences

According to the Golden State Salmon Association, “California’s salmon industry is valued at $1.4 billion in economic activity.

Roger George, a Central Valley fishing guide, says he is hoping to protect salmon by “taking a hit right now in order to have something more positive happen later.”

“Some of the people, the commercial fisherman off the coast, their businesses and their livelihoods, their way of life for those people is being jeopardized,” George said.

Salmon will still make its way to plates across California, but the price tag may be higher as fish are brought in from Oregon, Alaska and Washington, The Mercury News reported.
Why is salmon important to the environment?

Salmon help feed the ecosystem by pushing oceanic nutrients into rivers streams.

More than 50 species benefit from the nutrients brought into the streams from salmon. They are then dispersed throughout the landscape through river food webs, according to the Wild Salmon Center, a conservation organization.

Overall, salmon “contribute to the richness of the river and the river ecosystem,” Milstein said. “Those nutrients feed other things and in particular they also generate food for the young salmon when they hatch.”

The healthier a river stream, the healthier the salmon stocks for future runs will be.

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, salmon numbers are irregular during the three year life cycle. Data has shown that in years following wetter seasons fish stock has increased. Consequently there has been a decline in stock for years following drier seasons.

Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told The Los Angeles Times in early March: “The salmon are struggling, and we have great concern about their future, knowing we are fully committed to rebuilding them and saving them.”
Why was the season canceled?

California’s extreme summer temperatures and drought have both contributed to unsuitable conditions for salmon stock.

As a result, the National Marine Fisheries service canceled all ocean salmon fishery openers through at least May 15, according to a California Department of Fish and Wildlife news release on March 10.

“They’ve gotten hammered during the drought,” Milstein said. “Many of the eggs have died from the water being too low or too warm.”

In 2018, Chinook salmon nearly went extinct due to the five-year drought, in California. Fish officials put together a $100 million plan to rehabilitate the fish. Despite past efforts, 2023 projections for Sacramento River fall Chinook are forecast as one of the lowest since 2008.

This year’s winter season has brought hefty rainfall to the Sacramento region, but whether the significant amount of water will help the Chinook is unclear.

“Certainly it’s going to provide better conditions in the springtime,” Milstein said. “But whether it lasts long enough to really benefit winter run and turn things around still remains to be seen.”

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, current water levels in California can positively effects stock levels, but “evolving ocean conditions and ongoing climate disruptions” are reasons for caution.
When will fishing be allowed again?

The decision canceled all ocean salmon fishery openers between Cape Falcon, Oregon, through the U.S. border with Mexico through at least May 15

But Pacific Fishery Management Council has proposed three regulatory options for May 16 through May 15, 2024. All proposed options would stop commercial and sport fishing until April 2024.

That means it’s likely there is no more salmon fishing this year.

PFMC is scheduled to meet April 1 to 7 in Foster City to make a final decision.

How democracies are transformed into fascist oligarchies

Thom Hartmann
March 28, 2023

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy speaks during a news conference after a budget briefing at the U.S. Capitol March 8, 2023, in Washington, DC. - Drew Angerer/Getty Images North America/TNS



The Republican Party has adopted a motto embraced by despots throughout history. In other democracies, people are rebelling against this embrace of fascism: will we here?

They’re revolting in the UK against Boris Johnson’s lack of accountability, viz “Partygate.”

In France, people are burning things in the streets protesting President Macron’s raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 without subjecting it to the accountability of a vote of parliament or the people.

In Israel, millions are in the streets protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s government changing laws and seizing courts so the Israeli prosecutors can’t hold the Prime Minister accountable for corruption and bribery.

Here in the US, Trump and the GOP are trying to provoke a revolution of their own, although it’s not to hold the rich and powerful accountable. It’s the opposite, albeit in costume.

Sandra Bland gets pulled over for a broken taillight and dies in jail; Trump steals an election by paying off a porn star, then tries to steal a second by launching a violent insurrection, and still walks free while making a million dollars a day fundraising.

“Accountability for thee,” is the GOP motto, “but not for me.” The law must bind average working people with accountability, but not the morbidly rich and their Republican toadies.

Republicans in the House of Representatives — the party of “lock her up!” — are now even considering legislation to outlaw prosecuting former presidents, although apparently only whose last names end with “rump.”

In the modern world, there are basically two forms of government: liberal democracy and fascist oligarchy that pretends to be democracy. Both go by numerous names, but those are pretty much the options. Either the people rule, or the fatcats and their friends with guns who run rigged elections do.

And Donald Trump and the GOP have made their choice: they’re doing everything they can to end democracy and install a permanent oligarchy that can never be excised from our bodies politic and economic.

The main difference between these two forms of government — democracy and oligarchy — boils down to that one point (as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy): accountability.

In 1776, King George III of England held total power over the American colonists. The laws of that day bound the colonists, but not the king. They were accountable to the King and his laws, but he was not accountable to them.

The essence of the American Revolution was to overthrow that lack of accountability by the sovereign and replace it with a form of government where those with political, military, and police powers were directly accountable to We The People via representatives elected in free and fair elections. (Yes, it took centuries and we’re not fully there yet, but that was and is the idea.)

When the people of France stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they were similarly demanding accountability from the French monarch, Louis XVI, who was that month in the process of raising taxes on working-class people (the “Third Estate”) while cutting them on the nobles (“Second Estate”) and the clergy (“First Estate”).

Most democratic revolutions — even those that aren’t violent, like FDR’s radical remaking of America’s economy and social order — are reactions to a lack of accountability by a “noble” class.

This reaction to unfairness is so wired into the core of our humanity that you can see it played out in a kindergarten class by giving 20 cookies to a single student and only one each to everybody else.

But it’s not just pro-democratic revolutions that work this way: even fascist revolutions that bring to power oligarchic despots are always first sold to the people as being against unfairness and an alleged lack of accountability.

Hitler’s fascist “revolution” was a reaction to the German economy being trashed by the extraordinarily punitive Treaty of Versailles (as predicted by John Maynard Keynes in 1919). To mobilize the masses, however, he needed a “noble” class of “others” who could be the villains in his revolutionary morality play.

Because he didn’t want to alienate Germany’s actual nobility or oligarch industrialists and bankers (whose money and media he needed), he accused Jews and “union bosses” of being the unaccountable nobility against whom they should direct their anger.

Today’s Republicans are repeating that playbook here in the US, ranting against what Hitler called the “international Jewish conspiracy” by boiling that three-word phrase down to a single name: George Soros.

And, sure enough, just like Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, and Mussolini, they’re simultaneously going after the queer community, teachers/librarians, and institutions like the FBI and courts (“weaponized government” Gym Jordan calls them) that enforce laws which could otherwise be used to hold the rich and powerful to account for their thefts and crimes.

Republicans are now riding high.


Their “Proud Boys” strut the streets with weapons of war on display and allegedly tried to murder the Speaker of the House and Vice President of the United States.

Their legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene lead an expedition to the DC jail to visit and celebrate traitors who tried to bring down our government.

Their morbidly rich paymasters pay only 3% in income taxes while launching half-billion-dollar yachts and shooting themselves into outer space with their pocket change.

The armed, politically powerful, and billionaires are exempt from oversight by the law while those same three groups work hard to pass laws controlling America’s powerless. In state after state, they’re binding women, queer people, students, and people of color under the very system of law that they themselves flaunt.

Accountability for thee, but not for me.

This can’t last if we want to remain a democratic republic. Ever since 1978, when five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized wealthy people and corporations bribing politicians and members of the Court itself (and doubled down in 2010 with Citizens United), Americans have been bristling at the consequences.

The 1980 Reagan Revolution — also sold as overthrowing existing “elite” power structures including unions, regulatory agencies, and “pointy headed liberals” teaching public school and college — has reduced the American middle class from about two-thirds of us in 1980 to around 45 percent of us today.

It produced a transfer of over $50 trillion from the homes and savings of working class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent. Republicans accomplished this by reducing the top tax bracket from 74% down to 27% and opening massive tax loopholes for the morbidly rich.

Tax breaks and wealth for me, but not for thee.

Reagan’s neoliberal “free trade” policies, including his and Bush’s negotiation of the GATT/WTO and NAFTA, moved over 60,000 factories out of the US leaving at least 15 million American workers without a job while, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, turning fascist oligarchy China into the second richest nation in the world.

Wealth and employment for me, but not for thee.

As you’re reading these words, American voters are being purged from the rolls of Red states (five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice in 2018 and over 20 million have been purged since then, as I documented in The Hidden History of the War on Voting). In 2024, particularly in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, millions of people will show up thinking they can vote but will either be turned away or get handed a placebo “provisional ballot” that is never counted.

Political power for me, but not for thee.

Eventually, people reach a breaking point.

This frustration with the damage done to our country by the Reagan Revolution was exploited by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” and Donald Trump, telling working class and poor Americans that their problems are caused by “International Jew George Soros,” librarians, teachers, drag queens, Black and Hispanic people, Asians, and queer people.

(Not coincidentally, this is the same message being peddled by Putin to Russians, Orbán to Hungarians, and Le Pen to the French.)

It worked to get Trump into the White House and put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives along with about half the American states.

GOP media and Republicans have developed an entire lexicon around their embrace of “accountability for thee, but not for me.”

— “Tough on crime” means “crack down on Black people but not on banksters.”

— “Protect the children” means “crack down on queer people, librarians, and teachers but not on predators in churches and the GOP.”

— “Freedom” means the freedom of rightwingers to own and carry weapons of war, but not for children to attend school without fear of death.

— “Critical Race Theory” means don’t talk about (and, thus, don’t do anything about) the structural imbalances of power and wealth in America rooted in 400 years of oppression and discrimination, but do lionize the contributions of the white Founders.

— “Socialism” means government-funded healthcare and retirement for working-class Americans, but not bank bailouts, tax cuts, and “regulatory relief” for giant corporations and billionaires.

— “Witch hunt” means trying to hold Republicans to account for their crimes, but not stopping bigots who harass trans people who just want to use the bathroom.

— “Illegal immigration” means brown people from south of the border, but not prosecuting the wealthy white employers who hire them and pay them under the table.

— “Fighting Inflation” means cutting wages for working people, but not stopping price gouging by corporate monopolies.

— “Antifa” used as a slur means cops can imprison or kill Black people and their allies, but can’t arrest former Republican presidents.

— “Radical leftists” means politicians wanting universal healthcare, a clean environment, and free/cheap college like every other developed country in the world has but America should never consider such things.

Now Republicans are coming right out and saying that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to vote in Red states, that America isn’t really a democracy, and that it’s time to set aside American values of compassion and inclusion in favor of hate and fear.

This is how democracies are transformed into fascism oligarchies. We’ve seen it in country after country, and today the Republican Party is committed to bringing it to America.

Political power, wealth, and impunity for me, Republicans say, but not for thee.

Guns don't kill Americans — Republicans do
Thom Hartmann
March 28, 2023

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (R-CO) walks to the House Chamber during the third day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)


Yesterday a 28-year old graduate of a Christian school shot up the place, killing three 9-year-old students and three adults. This was almost 2 years to the day that Republican Governor Bill Lee signed a wide-ranging gun deregulation bill allowing Tennesseans to carry guns — open or concealed — without a permit or any other government interference.

Republicans are trying to distract America from the easy access Audrey Hale had to weapons of war by discussing Hale’s personal life, but the availability of guns and the Republican embrace of death as a political weapon are the only real issues here.

We’re the only developed country in the world that unconditionally allows civilians to own military-style assault weapons, that allows “open carry,” and that lets gun manufacturers openly buy politicians (thanks, Republicans on the Supreme Court).

As a consequence, we’re also the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for children is being blown apart by bullets.

Today is the 87th day of the year. So far, we’ve had over 130 mass shootings. Yesterday’s was the 33rd school shooting. This is not happening in any other developed country in the world.

The last time there was a school shooting in the United Kingdom, for example, was 26 years ago.

These guns have been put into American’s hands by Republicans. Bill Clinton passed an assault weapons ban in 1994, but Republican President George W. Bush led the charge to refuse to renew it. It died in 2004.

The result is clear from the graphic Hillary Clinton posted here.

There are two simple reasons why Republicans want America drenched in guns and the deaths they bring.

The first is that they’ve been taking piles of money from explicit peddlers of death: the NRA and gun manufacturers. This form of corrupt political bribery was legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court in 1978 and doubled-down on with Citizens United: it’s not just corrupting politics in America, it is killing our children.

The second is that there’s a substantial part of the violent white racist GOP base that is actively arming in preparation for a civil racial war in America, egged on by multiple Republican members of Congress.

These America-hating legislators — these sick, twisted bastards — delight in posing their white families with military assault weapons and posting the pictures on social media, their way of telling Black people and “liberals” what’s coming.

Last weekend in Waco, Donald Trump ran clips on a giant screen of his January 6th mob assaulting and killing people, producing three dead police officers, as he and his followers stood with their hands over their hearts singing a version of the national anthem that was interspersed with quotes from Trump himself.

The leading Republican candidate for president and his followers were literally celebrating the deaths they had caused, while calling for an end to our form of democratic republican government.

If that bloody mass murderer Vladimir Putin wanted to kill a few hundred thousand Americans, for example, he couldn’t have done better. We’ve lost more Americans to guns in just the past three years than Putin has lost on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Which reminds me of the September 17, 2019 article from National Public Radio (NPR):

“The National Rifle Association acted as a ‘foreign asset’ for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation...”

Or the April 11, 2018 piece in Politico that opened with:
“The National Rifle Association reported this week that it received more money from people with Russian ties than it has previously acknowledged, and announced that it was officially done cooperating with a congressional inquiry exploring whether illicit Kremlin-linked funding passed through the NRA and into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign…”

The Republican-controlled congressional committee and the Republican-blocked Federal Elections Commission that learned about this both failed to issue or enforce a subpoena to learn more.

Nothing to see here but thousands of dead children. Republicans will use them as an excuse to ban books or harass drag performers, but they don’t really give a damn if our kids die from bullets.

Setting aside the Putin theory — regardless of how we got over 400 million guns in this country, the majority of them since the Reagan Revolution, earning hundreds of billions for the weapons industry — we are experiencing an orgy of death unparalleled in the rest of the developed world. Brought to us by the GOP.

America has just a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, but, with more guns than people in our country, we have more than 40 percent of all the civilian guns in the world.

Specifically, as a Swiss-based research group found, there are “approximately 857 million civilian-held firearms in the world’s 230 countries and territories” and, as ABC News points out, in America there are “over 393 million firearms in civilian possession” as of 2017.

About fifteenth million more have been sold in the US since then: we are the only nation in the world with more guns than people.

For every 100 people in America, there are 120 guns. Among developed nations, next highest on the list is Canada, at 34 per 100 people, and all other developed countries are lower down the list than that: South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, for example, all clock in at fewer than one gun per 100 people.

This is entirely a recent phenomenon. Before the Reagan Revolution, gun ownership numbers in America resembled Canada’s and school shootings had not yet become a thing.

Today, however, America not only leads the world in gun ownership but we also lead the world in gun deaths. As an exhaustive study of gun deaths in the world’s 23 wealthiest countries published in The American Journal of Medicine found:

“US homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the gun homicide rate in the United States was 49.0 times higher. Firearm-related suicide rates were 8.0 times higher in the United States... Unintentional firearm deaths were 6.2 times higher in the United States. The overall firearm death rate in the United States from all causes was 10.0 times higher.”

Astonishingly, they added, ninety percent of all women murdered by firearms in those 23 countries were killed here in the United States, as well as 91 percent of all children killed by firearms.

Thanks to the Republican Party, fully 82 percent of all the human beings living in the world’s wealthy countries killed by firearms lived in the USA.

Only ten percent of the wealthy world’s firearms deaths occurred in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland combined.

Other countries have gotten their gun violence under control by simply reducing the number of guns in circulation and requiring gun owners to do two of the three things we do across America for car owners: be licensed and register your weapon.

I’d add that we should include mandatory liability insurance, like we do for cars: the insurance companies would then sniff out the “high risk” gun owners and refuse to insure them, thus preventing them from easily and legally owning a gun. (San Jose, CA just put this into law!)

Gallup found last year that Americans are sick and tired of seeing our children slaughtered by guns just to satisfy fanatics and on-the-take politicians in the GOP: 57 percent of Americans and 85 percent of Democrats want stricter gun laws in America.

Giving American voters a giant middle finger, Republican politicians are moving in the opposite direction, endorsing gun violence and terror: then-Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn said after the Rittenhouse verdict that Republicans should “be armed and dangerous” while Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “[G]un rights are the only thing holding back the Communist Revolution the Democrats are waging.”

Because death-promoting fascists like these in the GOP continue to try to push America toward armed civil war, opposition to gun control appears to be an issue that animates the hard-core white supremacist Republican base who are openly enthusiastic about seeing Democrats and people of color die at the hands of vigilantes.

It used to be that Republicans promoted guns because of the NRA’s money, but the NRA is now a shell of its former self. Today, it appears they’re opposing rational gun control measures because so many of them are openly promoting gun-based rightwing terrorism and the death it brings to America’s streets.

Killer Kyle Rittenhouse, for example, is lionized by the GOP, embraced by the House Sedition Caucus, a popular speaker at Republican political events, and feted on Fox News and rightwing hate radio.

America is caught in a crossfire between gun manufacturers bribing politicians with the blessing of 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and a fascist movement fed by billionaire-owned media machines that has seized control of the GOP.

Mass shooters, rightwing terrorists, and child-killers are celebrating. Meanwhile Republican politicians vow to protect us and our kids from — wait for it — librarians, drag queens, and history teachers.

Every developed country in the world has guns, and most have lots of them. But only America has a crisis of mass slaughter of our children.

Republicans and their sociopathic policies and rhetoric are causing people to use those guns to murder others.

It’s the Republican promotion of violence as an acceptable part of American politics — indisputably on display in Waco last weekend — that has led rightwing terrorists to commit virtually every act of political murder in the past 20 years.

It’s Republican austerity and tax-cut policies that have gutted the middle class, led to an epidemic of homelessness, and destroyed our system for treating mental illness.

And then those same Republican politicians cynically tell formerly middle-class white men that their economic crisis was caused by women, Black people, teachers, immigrants, and “radical” Democrats rather than the morbidly rich and massive corporations who are actually funding the corruption of our government.

They promote the language of dehumanization and victimhood, demonize immigrants and queer people, and encourage antisemitism and racial hate with their Great Replacement Theory, which has made it all the way to Fox “News” and has recently been cited by multiple mass murderers.

Even during the worst pandemic in a century, Republicans chose to politicize a virus, leading the British medical journal The Lancet to conclude that a half-million Americans died unnecessarily, the majority of them followers of conservative media.

All while GOP politicians condone the slaughter of our children with their silence, hypocritical “prayers,” and refusal to do anything about over 400 million guns.

The rest of the world is watching us, boggled. It’s way past time to wake the hell up and do something about the Republican-led slaughter of Americans and our children.

The number to call your members of Congress and demand immediate action is 202-224-3121.

And double-check your voter registration every few months: since 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that Red states could throw you off the voting rolls without even letting you know, GOP governors and secretaries of state have already purged millions.

'Follow the money': DC insider explains how the gun debate changed in the last 25 years

Robert Reich
March 28, 2023

Delaney Peterson looks on as teens kick off a voter registration rally, a day ahead of the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, U.S., April 19, 2018. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Yesterday morning, a 28-year-old armed with assault rifles entered a Christian school in Nashville and fatally shot three nine-year-old children and three staff members before she was shot and killed by the police.

It makes me weep. It’s happening gain and again and again. Our children.

President Biden renewed his call for Congress to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban, but with Republicans in control of the House there’s little to no chance.

So far this year, there have been 129 mass shootings in the United States.

Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s. In a review of the history of the AR-15, the Washington Post reports that it was originally designed in the 1950s as a soldiers’ rifle. “An outstanding weapon with phenomenal lethality,” according to an internal Pentagon report. It soon became standard issue for U.S. troops in Vietnam (where the weapon was called the M16).

Few gunmakers envisioned that ordinary people would buy the semiautomatic version, which didn’t seem suited for hunting and appeared overkill for home defense. The National Rifle Association and other industry allies focused on promoting traditional rifles and handguns.

Today, the AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, owned by about 1 in 20 U.S. adults, or roughly 16 million people. It dominates the walls and websites of gun dealers. (Republican Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama has even introduced a bill to declare the AR-15 the “National Gun of America.”)

What accounts for this dramatic change? Follow the money. The early 2000s were a tough time for the firearms industry. Gun sales had been flat for several years. But after the Assault Weapons Ban ended in 2004, gun manufacturers saw a chance to ride a post-9/11 surge in military glorification. As America soldiers were seen in Afghanistan and Iraq wearing tactical gear and holding M16 and M4 carbine rifles, gunmakers used the conflict-zone images to market AR-15s.

“We made it look cool,” said Randy Luth, the founder of gunmaker DPMS, one of the earliest companies to promote AR-15s. “The same reason you buy a Corvette.”

One Smith & Wesson AR-15 ended up in the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who fatally shot two people and wounded a third during 2020’s racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As Rittenhouse explained during his trial, he chose an AR-15 because “I thought it looked cool.”

Another AR-15 was alluring to the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo in May 2022. “The AR-15 and its variants are very deadly when used properly,” he wrote in a manifesto filled with racial vitriol. “Which is the reason I picked one.” Ten days later, 19 schoolchildren and two adults were shot to death in Uvalde, Tex., with another AR-15.

The string of attacks prompted President Biden, who as a senator had strongly supported the 1994 assault weapons ban, to promise a renewed effort to stop the sale of military-style weapons. Last year, the Democratic-led House passed a new assault weapons ban on a tight party-line vote of 217-213 — the first time the measure had been voted on in nearly three decades. But the Senate, also run by Democrats, never took action.

***

When Bill Clinton signed the original Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, he was widely condemned by Republicans and gun owners. The Democrats’ subsequent losses of the House and Senate in the 1996 midterm elections were partly blamed on the ban. But it saved lives.

The 10-year length of the ban has allowed researchers to compare mass shooting deaths before, during, and after the ban.

Before: From 1981 (the earliest year analyzed) until the ban went into effect in 1994, the proportion of deaths in mass shootings in which an assault rifle was used was lower than it is today, and the average number of yearly deaths attributed to mass shootings was 7.2.

During: In the years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, the average number of yearly deaths from mass shootings fell to 5.3. Even including 1999’s Columbine High School massacre (the deadliest mass shooting during the period of the ban), the 1994 to 2004 period saw lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and deaths resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.

After: In the years after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004, the data shows an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths to an average of 25.

Researchers have calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower when assault weapons ban was in place than it is today.

Facts, data, logic, analysis — do they play any role in what our government decides? The Republican Party in particular no longer listens, or thinks. It is owned — lock, stock, and barrel — by the gun industry.

You might think that preventing young children from being murdered in random mass killings by assailants with assault weapons would be a goal shared by all lawmakers. But you’d be wrong.

The Assault Weapons Ban must be reinstated — the greed of gun manufacturers be damned.

The GOP won’t act because mass death is a means to an end
John Stoehr
March 28, 2023

Man holds gun in front of US flag (Shutterstock.com)

Expect the Republicans to remain silent in the immediate aftermath of the massacre Monday, in Nashville, that left three adults and three 9-year-old kids literally shot to pieces. The shooter is also dead.

This is a familiar pattern. While the Democrats, this time led by Joe BIden, demand that Congress renew the ban on semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”), the Republicans will offer no more than prayers for families of the victims, and gratitude for “first responders.”

At some point, however, maybe a week, the Republicans will break their silence. They will re-dedicate themselves to preserving the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense. They will accuse the Democrats of “politicizing a tragedy.” They will also fake being outraged by the risk of “infringing the rights of law abiding citizens.”

We know this pattern of behavior will recur, because we’ve seen it so many times over the last 20 years, the period after the Congress allowed the old ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to expire. We also know, on account of this past behavior, that the Republicans, who control the House, won’t do a damn thing to stop mass death.
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That’s the end of one story, but it should be the beginning of another, a story waiting to be told by liberals in a context of democratic politics about what the Republicans really care about and what they really want. They don’t want to solve problems. They don’t want to help people. They want to control people, especially outpeople who use democratic politics to undermine “the natural order of things.”

That they want to control outpeople was evident Monday in rightwing discourse on the shooter, Audrey Hale. The Nashville police chief said that she was transgender. Whether that’s true remains to be seen. But for rightwingers, that was enough to call for a crackdown. Guns didn’t shoot six people to pieces. “Wokeness” did.

From this, you can see the punitive desire behind rightwing politics. On the one hand, the government can’t do anything to stop mass death because stopping it might “infringe the rights of law abiding citizens.” On the other hand, the government must do something about “wokeness,” because failing to act will lead only to mass death!

How do the Second Amendment rights of trans people figure into this thinking? They don’t, because outpeople don’t deserve them.

They are not “law-abiding citizens.”

If trans people are not included among “law-abiding citizens,” that means that “the law” isn’t the law, but “God’s law,” which, from the rightwing viewpoint, puts white Christian men on top of society – the natural order of things. There are males and there are females. Being trans breaks God’s law. Lawbreakers deserve punishment.

That we talk at all about trans people is a consequence of democratic politics, of outpeople raising hell until a majority starts listening and is brought around to the reality of trans people. So rightwing politics not only seeks to punish trans people for breaking God’s law. It seeks to punish anyone using democratic politics. If the law won’t do it, then God’s people are free to take the law into their own hands.

This is why I have argued that shooting massacres are, one way or another, an outcome of democratic politics running up against God’s law. To adherents, the law is a gun. A gun is the law. If God’s people fail democratically – if they fail to gain control of the government in order to enact laws that will punish outpeople – they are free to take the law into their own hands. If mass death is the result, so be it.

In other words, mass death, or the threat of mass death, is another way in rightwing politics to control people, especially outpeople, who don’t buy guns the way God’s people do. The people with the most guns are the people most in control. The right to bear arms is the right of God’s people to force outpeople to stay where they belong.

When the Republicans finally break their silence, maybe in a week, to say that they can’t and won’t use the government to solve the problem of mass death, that’s because, to them, mass death isn’t a problem. Mass death is a means to an end, which is social control.

To be sure, Audrey Hale does not fit the profile. Whether she’s transgender or not, it’s rare for shooters not to be white men. It happens, but these are not exceptions to the rule. They prove it. After all, if you’re a target of punishment, for breaking God’s law, for being who you are, you might think if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

New poll shows ‘startling’ decline of traditional values

Gideon Rubin

RAW STORY
March 29, 2023

Family arguing at Thanksgiving dinner - SNL screenshot

A new poll shows Americans care more about money and less about religion and patriotism than they did a quarter century ago, and a

New York Times columnist calls the decline in the extent to which Americans care about traditional values “startling.”

According to the findings of the newly released Wall Street Journal poll, 43 percent of respondents cited money as very important, a 12 percentage point jump from 1998.

Patriotism has tumbled from being a top priority among 70 percent of respondent to 38 percent today, and religion has fallen almost as much as a top priority, from 62 percent in 1998 to 39 percent today.





The poll was conducted by NORC, a research organization at the University of Chicago.

Prioritization of money is bipartisan, according to the poll, with 45 percent of both Democrats and Republicans cited it as very important.

In 1998, 70 percent of Americans said patriotism was very important to them. This year only 38 percent said so. In 1998, 62 percent said religion was very important to them. This year only 39 percent said so.

The poll also saw big declines in the extent to which people value having children and community involvement.

The WSJ poll tracks with similar polling conducted by Gallup and and the Pew Research Center.

“The declines in traditional values are startling,” NYT columnist Peter Coy wrote.

'They're ready for executions': Author sounds alarm after interviewing 'ordinary' conservatives

Travis Gettys

RAW STORY
March 30, 2023

Trump supporters (Shutterstock)

Author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.

Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.

"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."

He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.

READ MORE: Trump's new embrace of his 'bloody riot' is a 'huge mistake': conservative

"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."

The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.

"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"

"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.' It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."

The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.

"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"

Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.

"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"


"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."

How right-wing activists are using school shootings to reignite the 'homeschooling' movement

THE PANDEMIC PROVED HOME SCHOOLING A FAILURE

ASK ALL THOSE PARENTS WHO WANTED SCHOOLS OPEN

Matthew Chapman

RAW STORY
March 29, 2023

Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash

Elected Republicans around the country have no plans of any kind to pass laws to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands after the devastating mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee this week.

Instead, many of them have another idea, wrote Molly Olmstead for Slate: get kids out of public shools altogether.

"After the mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school this week, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett was asked how Congress should respond to the violence. And Burchett was remarkably forthright. 'It’s a horrible, horrible situation,' he said. 'And we’re not gonna fix it,'" wrote Olmstead. "But there was another part of the interview that revealed the specific place this belief was coming from. When asked what should be done to protect children like his own daughter, Burchett replied, 'Well, we home-school her.'"

Similar rhetoric was pushed after the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas last year, which actually led to the first major federal gun legislation passed in 30 years. “It is clear now from the long list of school shootings in recent years that families can’t trust government schools, in particular, to bring their children or teachers home safely at the end of the day,” wrote Jordan Boyd for the far-right site The Federalist. “The same institutions that punish students for ‘misgendering’ people and hide curriculum from parents are simply not equipped to safeguard your children from harm.”

On the face of it, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since the vast majority of shooting deaths of children occur in the home, not in school shootings. But this is part of a pattern, wrote Olmstead, of the right-wing religious homeschooling movement latching onto unrelated issues to push their influence.

"The modern 'parental rights' movement was built off the work of conservative Christians who bemoaned changes in public schooling that occurred in the 1960s — namely that the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings in the classroom were unconstitutional," wrote Olmstead. "Those Christians pushed white evangelicals to pull their children out of schools to give them a more 'Christian' education. The Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian organization, campaigned during the 1980s to popularize and legalize home-schooling — and it quickly won political victories: home-schooling went from being largely illegal to legal everywhere by the early 1990s."

Burchett, Olmstead noted, makes no effort to hide this as his own motivation. “I think you’ve got to change people’s hearts,” he told reporters in the viral interview. “You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church — and I’ve said this many times — I think we really need a revival in this country.”