What I love especially about Harper’s Weekly Review is how it manages to pick up facts from news stories — some of which I’ve already forgotten or never knew — and compact them in a way that punches up the relevance and discordance so that each segment is really sort of profound.<\/p>\n
So, Harper’s on the school shooting, in which Donald Trump’s “courage” and the NRA’s claimed Second Amendment rights are compared and contrasted to, well, reality:<\/p>\n
…US president Donald Trump, who has previously expressed a fear of sharks, blood, stairs, watching prostitutes urinate, collecting rent in Cincinnati, and holding a 27-year-old bald eagle named Uncle Sam, said that an officer who did not intervene in the Parkland shooting was a “coward,” that he would have stopped the shooter himself even if he “didn’t have a weapon,” and that “highly trained” teachers should be armed in the classroom.<\/em><\/p>\n …<\/p>\n Trump said the country must “do something” about how “young people’s thoughts” are shaped by “violence on video games”; and the NRA’s president said that “socialists” wanted to take away American’s handguns and semi-automatic rifles so that citizens wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against an attack by the US government, which employs a total of 1,373,650 active-duty personnel; owns 5,884 combat tanks, 41,062 armored vehicles, 1,934 self-propelled artillery guns, 19 aircraft carriers, 63 destroyers, 70 submarines, 2,296 fighter planes, and 947 attack helicopters; maintains a stockpile of 6,800 nuclear bombs, including some that are 80 times more powerful than the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima during World War II; and operates on a budget of about $600 billion, which congressional Republicans said should be increased, and which the military used in part to fund Army-themed video games designed to recruit teenagers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I love especially about Harper’s Weekly Review is how it manages to pick up facts from news stories — some of which I’ve already forgotten or never knew — and compact them in a way that punches up the … Continue reading