I read the news today (oh boy) - Current world events | Page 91 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

So, @Starr Shine?, the point you appear to be raising, is following gun massacres in the US, many of us – including some of your fellow Americans – point at your gun laws and the role they play in such incidents, while we do not bring up, following such incidents as the recent homemade bomb that failed in London, how that perpetrator was able to get hold of the chemicals needed to create his bomb?

The trouble with coming up with ways to prevent a bomber getting hold of ingredients to make a bomb, is that many everyday chemicals and items with perfectly normal uses can be turned into homemade bombs. Do you ban mobile phones, for instance, because they can be used as a trigger device? Do we ban certain fertilisers because, as well as being useful in cultivation, they can be used to create an explosive?

These are trickier things to find answers to, than a man holed up in hotel room, surrounded by enough legally bought weaponry and ammunition for a small army, twelve of the guns equipped with perfectly legal “bump-fire” stocks – whose sole aim is to get a weapon to respond more like an automatic, who injuries 528 people, and kills 58 people. Incidents such as that makes many of us feel compelled to express our amazement that your laws are such – especially in a open-carry State like Nevada – that the shooter did nothing wrong until he broke the window in his hotel room to take aim.

A year ago today President Trump was elected.

God Bless America!

@meanmistermustard said
[Trump] hasn’t actually started the destruction of the world…

I’d say it’s too early to say.

Extremists, from both sides of any debate, always tend to disappoint me, especially in this social media age when it is so easy to reveal yourself as nasty scum because you think you can hide behind a mask of anonymity, so it’s alright to say vile things and make threats that you wouldn’t in person.

Here is a case in point, the very wonderful Mandy Harvey, a truly terrific artist discovered on America’s Got Talent this year (she reminds me quite a bit of Emmylou, which means @meanmistermustard might like her):

Much as I hate these shows, they do sometimes throw up unique talents who would take much longer to be exposed via the traditional route for one reason another, and this is a case in point: a great singer, a great songwriter, she just happens to have lost her hearing at the age of 18 (now 29). After that first remarkable performance though, truly inspirational in my opinion, she received death threats from the deaf community via social media for promoting “oralism”.

There is a section of the deaf community that, for some reason I do not understand, object to deaf people using anything but sign language to communicate with the hearing world. Now, first off, what a stupid attitude. It’s like me saying I’m off to live in Paris but won’t be bothering to learn French.

While I think more of us should know signing (I, myself, have rusty Makaton), I wouldn’t encourage the attitude that because the hearing community is lazy, the deaf community should make it an offence to communicate with the hearing world in its way, audibly. Especially when considering a talented young woman who, having been hearing until she was 18, spent around 2/3 of her life understanding sound.

Death threats for singing? Feck off! Disgusting!

This is her live show appearance – just her and a uke and another original song. She came 4th, but I bet it’s a good bet Simon has signed her: