Time to end thoughts and prayers and actually do something

[This post has been updated as new information comes in.]

And so we have another mass shooting less than a week after the last one. This time 14 people were murdered and 17 wounded in a matter of minutes because people were able to easily and legally obtain the kinds of lethal weaponry that combat troops use. And as usual, those opposed to any kind of reasonable checks on the ability to obtain such weapons have tried to find ways to not address this glaring problem.
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Call for Bush, Cheney, and others to be prosecuted

Human Rights Watch, a major human rights group in the US, has issued a report detailing all the abuses committed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others and calling for them to be prosecuted.

It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.

Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
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Dealing with religious grief

I recently heard that an old college friend of mine’s husband had died in Sri Lanka so I called her twice, once just after the funeral and then again a few weeks later. My friend is a lovely, gentle, generous person who is also a very religious evangelical Christian. When I reached her soon after the funeral, I learned that her husband had been in excellent health and had gone in for routine bypass surgery and, from what she described to me, seemed to have been the victim of a surgical misadventure.
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What was the Roman empire really like?

Of all the periods of earlier times, we are probably most familiar with (or more accurately think we are familiar with) that of the Roman empire because of the heavy focus of commercial films dealing with it. But how accurate are the perceptions we gleaned from them? Dave Davies of Fresh Air has a fascinating interview with historian Mary Beard about her new book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, where she discusses some of the myths about the rise and fall of Rome and describes what life then was really like, and discusses the many films and TV series made about that period.
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Why do people vote for a party that works against them?

One of the perennial puzzles that political observers in the US have struggled to understand is how it can be that a political party like the Republicans that is so nakedly supportive of the interests of the plutocracy manages to win so many elections. The Republicans consistently advance policies that are harmful to practically everyone except the very wealthy and yet they currently have majorities in the US Senate, House of Representatives, governorships, and state legislatures.
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