Tag: Opinion

With America roamed by angry white dudes for whom firearms are a prop for lost power, what sort of message are kids getting?

America has a free-for-all gun culture, which, unsurprisingly, means that America also has a problem with children getting accidentally killed by guns. Specifically, America has a problem with boys in particular getting into accidents with guns, as reported by the New York Times. In its review of the data, the Times found that male shooters fired nearly all guns that were accidentally fired and killed a child. Boys made up 80% of the victims of accidental gun deaths of children. Reporters Michael Luo and Mike McIntire described boys as having a “magnetic attraction of firearms”, and added this:

   Time and again, boys could not resist handling a gun, disregarding repeated warnings by adults and, sometimes, their own sense that they were doing something wrong.

So, what is it with boys and guns? Presumably, the same thing that defines the relationship of grown men and guns.

Maureen Dowd: That’s Not Amore

John Boehner wakes up in his English basement apartment on Capitol Hill, his head still in a merlot fog.

It’s a glorious autumn morning, but Boehner doesn’t want to open his baby blues. He lies there, in his “Man of the House” T-shirt and Augusta National gym shorts.

He wishes he didn’t have to go to work. He reaches for his Camel Ultra Lights in his supposedly smoke-free apartment.

“Oh, Lord,” he growls. “How did I become that idiot Newt?”

Sarah Jane Stratford: The latest message to women: ‘Lean In’ at work, but ‘get retro’ at home

For all the glass ceilings women are breaking, we can’t get away from antiquated notions of how to be perfect housewives

2013 started out with a lot of “you go, girl” news. The US elections sent a record number of women to Congress, including 20 in the senate – a whole fifth – a harbinger of change not experienced since the 1970s. Then Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was published and despite some controversy, it brought modern women’s lives to the forefront of the national – and international – discussion. Women were encouraged to openly discuss their goals and ambitions and network with each other to achieve them.

But for all the “lean in” rallies and glass ceilings women are breaking, we can’t seem to get away from antiquated notions of how women must first and foremost be perfect wives. Women might be told to lean in at work, but the message is still, too often, “get retro” at home.

Robyn Greene: It’s Official: NSA Wants to Suck up All Americans’ Phone Records

The NSA has officially stopped sugar coating the fact that it wants to spy on every American.

At last Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on FISA legislation, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) asked NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, whether his spy agency should be collecting all Americans’ phone records. Gen. Alexander, in a shockingly forthcoming response, admitted that he “believes] it is in the nation’s best interest to [put all the phone records into a lockbox that we can search when the nation needs it.” He also explained that “there is no upper limit” to the number of Americans’ phone records that the NSA can collect.

This admission is particularly unnerving in light of the last few months’ revelations of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of Americans’ communications under programs authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. And Sens. Wyden (D-Ore.) and Udall made it crystal clear that in spite of all that we have learned about these programs since the NSA leaks began, there may still be a lot that we don’t know – and as they’ve been warning since 2011, they think we deserve to find out.

I start my approach to healthcare from two very basic premises. First, healthcare must be recognized as a right, not a privilege. Every man, woman and child in our country should be able to access the healthcare they need regardless of their income. Second, we must create a national healthcare system that provides quality healthcare for all in the most cost-effective way possible.

Tragically, the United States is failing in both areas.

It is unconscionable that in one of the most advanced nations in the world, there are nearly 50 million people who lack health insurance and millions more who have burdensome co-payments and deductibles. In fact, some 45,000 Americans die each year because they do not get to a doctor when they should. In terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and other health outcomes, the United States lags behind almost every other advanced country.

Robert Kuttner: Beyond the Shutdown

We already know the next two acts of this drama. The Senate will refuse to accept the latest disingenuous House offer of allowing temporary government funding in exchange for a one-year delay in implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Barring a miracle, the government will then be forced to cease all non-emergency operations as of midnight tonight.

We also know that at some point, the government will have to re-open, and that Republicans will have to relent on their fantasy of destroying Obamacare. The Republicans picked the president’s signature achievement, the one issue on which he can’t be rolled. But what will be their price for allowing the government to function?

Norman Solomon: The NSA Deserves a Permanent Shutdown

To the people in control of the executive branch, violating our civil liberties is an essential government service. So — to ensure total fulfillment of Big Brother’s vast responsibilities — the National Security Agency is insulated from any fiscal disruption.

The NSA’s surveillance programs are exempt from a government shutdown. With typical understatement, an unnamed official told The Hill that “a shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA operations.”

At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of “core NSA operations” is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to make it achievable.

NSA documents, revealed by intrepid whistleblower Edward Snowden, make clear what’s at stake. In a word: democracy.

Dilip Hiro: [A World in Which No One Is Listening to the Planet’s Sole Superpower ]

The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam

What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known — repeatedly — and finds that no one is listening?  Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension.  Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.

In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region.  In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Africa that President George W. Bush and his neocon acolytes dreamed of thoroughly pacifying, turmoil is on the rise. Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower.  The list of defiant figures — from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians — is lengthening.

The Obama administration’s rule requiring employer health plans to cover birth control without a co-payment has given rise to a slew of lawsuits by private companies claiming the mandate attacks religious freedom. Three federal appeals courts have ruled on the issue, with two correctly rejecting that view as without legal foundation. Given the conflicting rulings, it is a good bet the Supreme Court will agree to address this issue in the next term. [..]

Allowing employees to make independent decisions to obtain contraceptives does not violate anyone’s religious freedom. If the Supreme Court takes up these cases, it should soundly reject the warped view that some employers can get out of complying with the new law, and in effect use their religious beliefs to discriminate against women.

Dean Baker: Social Security Does Not Redistribute From Young to Old, It Is a Public Pension System

One of the most pernicious myths of the Fix the Debt Gang and other Peter Peterson type outfits is that Social Security redistributes money from the young to the old. This is bizarre because people pay for their benefits with the taxes they contribute during their working lifetimes. In fact, the average return current beneficiaries receive is not especially high (less than 2.0 percent real).

If workers contributed the same amount to a privately managed pension fund and then collected an annuity in their retirement no one would call it a redistribution from young to old. It hard to see how it becomes a generational redistribution because Social Security is run by the government. But that is what Robert Samuelson is telling readers in today’s column.

Paul Rosenberg: The US needs to adopt a new mythos that’s not at war with facts

From guns to health care, conservatives push a mythically-driven politics that’s actively hostile to facts.

Antoinette Tuff is the NRA’s worst nightmare.  In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre infamously said, “The only way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.” But when Tuff talked Michael Brandon Hill into giving up his gun and surrendering to police on August 21, she showed the whole world just how wrong LaPierre was.  A good woman with no gun did the job perfectly, thank you very much. ]..]

It’s not that Tuff disproved LaPierre. It was something much more basic than that. Disproving LaPierre’s statement would imply it was a factual claim, when actually it was not. It was, instead, a form of mythic utterance, a ritual incantation, a drawing down of higher powers, into the holy vessel of the gun.  In the introduction to The Battle For God, Karen Armstrong distinguishes between two radically different forms of knowledge: logos, which has to do with how things work in the world, and mythos, which has to do with ultimate meanings.

How many more rounds of this must America take?  How many more times must the economic neck of the nation have a knife pressed against it by Republicans demanding a ransom?

It seems the answer is at least once more – or twice.

Washington is still wrangling over a way to avoid a government shutdown next week, while Republicans are already gearing up to refuse to raise the debt limit – something that no Congress under any other president has ever refused to do.

Ralph Nader: The UN Needs a Larger ‘War on Poverty’

The United Nations has recently been the source of much discussion and controversy. In a speech this week to the UN General Assembly, President Obama continued to make his case for a military strike against Syria. The president posed this question (which he could have asked himself) to the assemblage: “What is the role of force in resolving disputes that threaten the stability of the region and undermine all basic standards of civilized conduct?”

I’ll pose another question. What is the role of ending extreme poverty on a global scale that threatens the stability of millions of innocent human lives and undermine all basic standards of civilized conduct? What about access to food and water, education, and immunization to diseases?

Michelangelo Signorile: Why Barilla Pasta CEO Is So Clueless About Gays

A lot of people are scratching their heads, wondering how the CEO of Barilla Group could be so profoundly stupid as to slam gays by saying they should go eat someone else’s pasta. “For us, the ‘sacral family’ remains one of the company’s core values,” Guido Barilla, CEO of the Parma, Italy-based company, said in an interview. “Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta.” Barilla also said that he wouldn’t depict a gay family in an ad, responding to a question about a female Italian politician’s criticisms of the stereotyping of women in ads in Italy, saying of his advertising, “the women are crucial in this.”

What many people don’t understand is that in Italy what Barilla said is, sadly, too often perfectly acceptable. He was speaking on an Italian radio program. He was likely oblivious to how it would play globally, and probably not very conscious of how the rights and conditions of LGBT people, and the role of women, have changed dramatically in the rest of the industrialized West. His pasta may be the No. 1 pasta in the world, but it appears he leads the insular life that many Italian straight men lead — yes, including educated, wealthy men — keeping women in their place and dismissing gays.

Les Leopold: Is the President Selling Out Higher Education to Wall Street?

The Obama Administration is transporting Wall Street logic into higher education by proposing to measure the value of a college by the earnings of its graduates. This conceptual coup may be the best news for Wall Street since the abolition of Glass-Steagall.

We need not repeat all that has been written about how this money-making metric misses the point of college — about how students should be studying to become good citizens and leaders, to find and know themselves, to discover which pursuits in life best suit them, to develop an inquiring mind and so on. But such musings, however admirable, miss the main point: Using future earnings as a measuring stick transforms the entire notion of higher education into yet another financial instrument. No doubt some Wall Street hustlers are already dreaming up how to create derivatives they can sell to insure students and their families against less than expected earning outcomes from the college investment. Wow, an entire new casino in the making, right up there with the ethanol market.

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent the House a very serious warning that, for the first time, the United States would be unable to pay its bills beginning on Oct. 17 if the debt ceiling is not lifted. House leaders responded on Thursday with one of the least serious negotiating proposals in modern Congressional history: a jaw-dropping list of ransom demands containing more than a dozen discredited Republican policy fantasies. [..]

But the absurdity of the list shows just how important it is that Mr. Obama ignore every demand and force the House extremists to decide whether they really want to be responsible for an economic catastrophe. He made a mistake by negotiating in 2011, hoping to reach a grand bargain; that produced the corrosive sequester cuts.

To prevent the House from making every debt-ceiling increase an opportunity to issue extortionist demands for rejected policies they can achieve in no other way, the president has to put an end to the routine creation of emergencies once and for all by simply saying no.

John Nichols: House GOP Debt-Ceiling Plan: Paul Ryan’s Losing Ideas From 2012

Was there a presidential election in 2012? Yes.

Who won? Barack Obama.

Who was elected vice president? Joe Biden.

Who lost for president? Mitt Romney.

Who lost for vice president? Paul Ryan.

Cool, just wanted to get that straight.

The latest scheme (pdf) from House Republicans might have confused folks.

House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan are not quite done threatening a government shutdown as part of the “Defund Obamacare” debacle. But they are already on to their next project: holding hostage any agreement to allow the debt-ceiling to rise.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Robots Are Coming – Now What?

A new study says that nearly half of all American jobs may soon be performed by robots. And the White House has just announced the formation of “the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Steering Committee ‘2.0,’” which it describes as “part of a continuing effort to maintain U.S.leadership in the emerging technologies that will create high-quality manufacturing jobs and enhance America’s global competitiveness.”

That seems like a good idea, but it raises a number of questions. There is only one labor representative on the committee, as compared to eleven corporate CEOs, and it would be good to know why. What’s more, labor isn’t acknowledged in the President’s statement that “industry, academia, and government must work in partnership to revitalize our manufacturing sector.”

That’s unfortunate, because the working people of America should have a strong voice in designing the future of our manufacturing sector. In fact, that role is more important than ever, as a manufactured product – a range of devices commonly described as “robots” – may change the face of work in America.

Jill Filipovic: The way America eats is killing us. Something has to change

Another report confirms: we’re the United States of big meals, yet we do little to change our disastrous corporate food culture

It will shock no one to hear that Americans are remarkably unhealthy eaters. A new American Diet Report Card (pdf) confirms it: we eat far too much cheese, sugar, starch and red meat. We don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. We consume almost 500 more calories per day than we did in the 1970s.

Our eating habits are poor, but it’s not because we’re a nation of lazy fools jonesing for our daily Big Mac fix, health be damned. It is because we are far too deferential to the interests of big companies, too invested in a corporate-serving narrative of personal responsibility with no parallel requirement of social responsibility, and too culturally wedded to a food model of quantity over quality. [..]

The message is getting through, but slowly: the way we’re eating is killing us. Something has to change.

There’s something profoundly despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate the First and Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be reassessing such policies after an avalanche of criticism-and then proceed, as it did this week, to gloat that those policies made possible a long prison sentence for a journalistic source.

Welcome to the Obama Justice Department.

While mouthing platitudes about respecting press freedom, the president has overseen methodical actions to undermine it. We should retire understated phrases like “chilling effect.” With the announcement from Obama’s Justice Department on Monday, the thermometer has dropped below freezing.

Lateefa Simon: When will the US stop building more prisons?

I was once a teen mom with an arrest record and few options. I know from personal experience how a job can change a life

America’s prison crisis isn’t about a lack of space; it’s a systematic lack of opportunity in poor communities. We have failed as a society to understand what it takes for previously incarcerated people to live meaningful, productive lives – and to keep them out of prison in the first place.

It sounds deceptively simple, but my own experience – and a growing body of research – shows that one thing can help keep people from entering prison and prevent those released from going back: jobs. Employment opportunities give people a sense of purpose, help build confidence and foster strong social connections and pay the rent.

William Pfaff: Time for the West to Cease Intervention

We have today entered a new political-or politico-religious-period in which the Muslim peoples of the Middle East are seizing control of their own fortunes, a control lost as a result of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which, with its Arab Caliphate predecessors in Crusader times, traces back to the very origin of Islam in what now is Syria, Iraq and Arabia proper.

Few in the West seem to have grasped the significance of the fact that Muslims themselves have taken over the struggle against Islamic radicalism. The West did not start the war in Syria. Until chemical weapons were used in the war, it has had no direct implication in it, and feeble indirect ones, other than to assist the victims. It is the Syrians’ war, and that of the other Arabs who have chosen to take part.

Robert Sheer: Obama’s Friends in Low Places

That Barack Obama is such a kidder. No matter how awkward the moment, he’s got just the right quip to purchase some wiggle room. Remember when his old Chicago banking buddy Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, first ran into that bit of trouble over his bank’s “London Whale” derivative scam? That scheme has already lost $6 billion with close to $1 billion more piled on by the SEC in fines last week after JPMorgan admitted it broke the law.  [..]

It should be remembered that this same Dimon, who appeared before a Senate committee wearing presidential cufflinks, once worked with Sanford Weill in engineering the reversal of the Glass-Steagall law to make Citigroup, a previously illegal merger of investment and commercial banks, possible. But despite his record as a leader in the radical deregulation of banking that caused all of the trouble, Obama turned to Dimon for direction on fixing the economy.

These days it’s difficult to imagine Congress’s return to the business of governance. Still, several lawmakers have refocused their attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, suggesting that the resolve to reform did not die down during the August recess or the crises that followed. At least a dozen bills aimed at the NSA’s spying powers are pending in Congress, and key committees will hold hearings in the next two weeks. [..]

One of the greatest lessons to be drawn from the Church Committee is of the significant role Congress can play in investigating and challenging abuses of civil liberties by the government. While the committee’s tangible legacy was the laws that, for a while at least, curtailed domestic spying, it was the information made public through exhaustive hearings that made legislative action possible. These revelations were not about only domestic spying but also the assassination of foreign leaders and other shocking examples of executive overreach. Whether Congress will crack down on the intelligence community is one question; whether it will make room for a broader debate about the power of America’s surveillance state is another matter entirely.

Sadhbh Walshe: Michael Douglas blasts the US penal system at the Emmys. He’s exactly right

Cameron Douglas epitomises how the war on drugs caused US prisons to explode while doing almost nothing to thwart drug use

Michael Douglas caused a few ripples on Sunday night when he picked up an Emmy award for his performance as Liberace in the film, Behind the Candelabra. Aside from gently ribbing his co-star Matt Damon and thanking his estranged wife Catherine Zeta Jones, Douglas gave a shout out to his eldest son, Cameron, who is in currently being held in solitary confinement in a federal penitentiary.

“I’m hoping I’ll be able and they’ll allow me to see him soon,” Douglas told the audience before explaining to reporters backstage that he has begun to question the system that is preventing him from even visiting his incarcerated son. You can hardly blame the veteran actor for his disenchantment with America’s penal system as his son’s case pretty much epitomizes the futility of sending a person who is addicted to drugs into a bleak and lonely institution where drugs are readily available and treatment is not.

Elizabeth Drew: The Stranglehold On Our Politics

Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences–none of them good–for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects. [,,]

The citizens of a state have it within their power to press for such changes in the nature of their state governments and the consequent effects on their immediate lives as well as the functioning of the nation’s political system. By rousing themselves to vote, they could have a stronger voice in filling state offices that may not seem so exciting but are highly consequential. Is it possible that the off-year elections could be taken almost as seriously as the presidential ones? The radicalism of the right has become so extreme that it may have unintentionally provided an impetus in that direction.

In the end only the members of the electorate can restore the institutions and procedures that make our democratic system work, starting with the next chance they get.

Donna Smith: Weaponized Profits: The US Health Care System

Many people who advocate for an improved and expanded Medicare for all for life health system in the US tend to vilify the for-profit, private insurance industry and big Pharma but ignore the atrocities committed by almost every other segment of the system. If we are to fix what ails the US health care system, we will have to get a whole lot more honest about all of the factions that lift profit-making above all else when engaging in the delivery of health care services.

And no matter what Congress does or does not do with the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, until those of us being most grossly effected by our dysfunctional, profit-first health care system get honest about all the players and their roles in that dysfunction, we will continue to tinker around the edges and watch the numbers of health care dead and broke climb ever higher.

Congressional Republicans have gone directly from conservatism to fanaticism without any intervening period of sanity. [..]

A shutdown would be crippling. Soldiers would get IOUs instead of paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed without pay. National parks would close. Millions of Americans would feel the effects.

And who will get blamed?

Paul Buchheit: Add It Up: The Average American Family Pays $6,000 a Year in Subsidies to Big Business

$6,000.

That’s over and above our payments to the big companies for energy and food and housing and health care and all our tech devices. It’s $6,000 that no family would have to pay if we truly lived in a competitive but well-regulated free-market economy.

The $6,000 figure is an average, which means that low-income families are paying less. But it also means that families (households) making over $72,000 are paying more than $6,000 to the corporations. [..]

This is more than an insult. It’s a devastating attack on the livelihoods of tens of millions of American families. And Congress just lets it happen.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Why We Should Fear – and Fight – An Entitlement-Cutting “Grand Bargain”

It’s autumn, when a politician’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Grand Bargain.

Right now it looks as if the two sides are at an impasse. But the President’s “no negotiations” posture only applies to the debt ceiling, and his budget still includes the “chained CPI” cut to Social Security. The Republicans who are attempting to force a showdown over Obamacare are still railing against the programs they call “entitlements.”

They’re all looking for a face-saving deal, and Social Security and Medicare could very well become that deal’s Ground Zero.

Dean Baker: The Media’s Complicity in Cutting Social Security and Medicare

US media outlets are disingenuously claiming that social programs are putting Americans in debt.

Most people in the United States have probably heard about the Wall Street efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. There is a vast list of organisations such as Campaign to Fix the Debt, the Can Kicks Back, Third Way, and many more that have, as a central agenda item, cutting back or privatising Social Security and Medicare. When we hear one of these organisations tell us these programmes should be cut it is not a surprise.

The question is why do mainstream news outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post use their news sections to tell the same stories? Last week, when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued new long-range budget projections, both papers were quick to ignore the numbers and to tell readers that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Now it gets really interesting.

Republicans in the House are determined to shut down the government, by holding defunding of Obamacare hostage for continued funding of the rest of the budget. In past budget negotiations, Obama has often been too quick to fold a strong hand.

But this time, the Tea Party badly miscalculated. They targeted Obama’s personal crown jewel, the one piece of progressive social legislation that the president won’t throw under the bus. So a showdown is increasingly likely, and Democrats could well win it.

Yochai Benkler: In secret, Fisa court contradicted US supreme court on constitutional rights

Declassified Fisa rulings reveal a permissive approach to fourth amendment violations disturbingly at odds with supreme justices’

On Tuesday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) declassified an opinion in which it explained why the government’s collection of records of all Americans’ phone calls is constitutional, and that if there is a problem with the program, it is a matter of political judgment, not constitutional law. So, should Americans just keep calm and carry on phoning? Not really.

Instead, we should worry about a court that, lacking a real adversarial process to inform it, failed while taking its best shot at explaining its position to the public to address the most basic, widely-known counter-argument to its position. The opinion does not even mention last year’s unanimous US supreme court decision on the fourth amendment and GPS tracking, a decision in which all three opinions include strong language that may render the NSA’s phone records collection program unconstitutional. No court that had been briefed by both sides would have ignored the grave constitutional issues raised by the three opinions of Justices Scalia, Sotomayor, and Alito in United States v Jones. And no opinion that fails to consider these should calm anyone down.

Ralph Nader: Can the “New” Trumka Trump Trumka?

Sitting in the office of the AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, one sees books on labor history, economics, corporate crimes and proposals for change piled up everywhere. Perhaps that helps explain why Mr. Trumka, a former coal miner who became a lawyer, presented his besieged organization’s quadrennial convention in Los Angeles last week with a fiery visionary “big tent” design to develop more alliances with citizen and worker organizations that are not trade unions.

Citing common ground on some public policies, Mr. Trumka wants to strengthen ties with the likes of the NAACP, Working America, the Sierra Club, the Economic Policy Institute, Women’s groups, and the Taxi Drivers, the Domestic Workers Alliance and worker centers. He would like some of these organizations to be brought into the governing bodies of labor unions and the AFL-CIO’s executive council.

Henry Porter: American gun use is out of control. Shouldn’t the world intervene?

The death toll from firearms in the US suggests that the country is gripped by civil war

Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company’s concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald’s case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.

Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.