-

When I was in the Navy, I was stationed less than 50 miles from Lockerbie when the plane explosion happened in 88. Things were pretty tense there for a while. Rumors flew everywhere. Everybody had their own theories. There was a lot of confusion.

All the mass media have a simple formula.  "If it bleeds, it leads."  Accent the negative, down play the positives.  That way, people keep coming back to the news to keep up with the latest disaster.  And they use all that return views to charge high rates for advertising.

And this is aided and abetted by politicians all over the planet, people tend to not change politicians in stressful situations.  Ever wonder how the same do nothing politicians keep getting reelected?

Why do you think Time Warner is one of the largest and richest corps on the planet?

Quite simply, all media outlets manipulate you.

That's not saying things are not tense in a lot of places but it does mean that you have to take every media report with a large dose of salt.

lol - nah this is pretty much par for the course: SNAFU (Situation Normal All F****d Up)

put it this way, when i was growing up and living in germany, we had the baader meinhof blowing things up and shooting people and armed police all over the place.

While in the uk we had the ira blowing things up and killing people all over the shop.
Not to mention the cold war, the cod war, the falklands war and the balkans wars.

The difference at the moment is that the current mess seems to be based on religious grounds rather than political or national.

Personally, i feel a lot safer than I did growing up.

At least these muslims tend towards suicide and stupidity. One ira bomber could set multiple bombs and frequently did.

Today those same murdering scum are now sein fein politicians.
One of the many sins committed by tony blair was pardoning the ira killers.   

So no, current situation seems normal to me.

As far as shootings in the states goes - well you have that many firearms in a population then people will get shot.

One statistic I'd like to see is how many Non-black people were shot by the us police last year. Seems to me that only the occasional black shooting makes the news. Given how trigger happy those cops are - there must be  a lot more non-black shootings we never hear anything about. 

From a purely subjective point of view I'd like to see the statistics of ALL cop shootings in the usa for the last 12 months.

I think all shootings are bad, it just seems to me that the reporting of them is seriously skewed.

Mankind is clinically insane. An evolutionary behaviour that allowed us to clear an area of potential predators so that were could raise herd beasts.
Not for man sharing a water hole with a sated lion. Kill it and it won't eat you when it's hungry. This behaviour is unique to man.   

When there are no natural predators left, we turned on ourselves and have kept that behaviour up ever since. 

Throw religion and politics into the mix and you've got a an ongoing situation that won't die until the human race does.

And no it doesn't depress me. There's nothing I can personally do about it, so no point worrying about a situation I can't change.

Pretty much my only concerns are Vladimir Putin and Donald trump.
Both men are  scary and completely unpredictable.

Putin worries me more than donald trump becoming president of the us. And that's pretty damn worrying in it's own right.

At least trump seems to be for total isolationalism where putin wants to recreate the glory days of the soviet empire. And given the military situation in europe - if he wanted to wage a land war - I don't think anyone could stop him.

But again - nothing I can personally do until russian troops land in england. So no point worrying about it until I have to form a local militia of sling grenadiers  

I disagree that Putin is unpredictable. He's eminently predictable. Just pretend he's a 19th century European.

No seriously. Americans are quick to forget how bloody Europe was. The invention of the Maxim gun (so the story goes) was that Maxim wanted to make money and someone told him to "give the Europeans a more efficient way to slit each other's neck and you'll make a mint". So he did. And he did.

After WWI, and WWII, and the butcher's bill being beyond the pale (and your militaries being laughable compared to the USSR) the Europeans turned away from the hard thinking that had so long been their forte. Yay cooperation and all that. However, Putin uses that kind of hard thinking. He looked, saw that none of us would be willing to go to war over crimea, so he took it. We all clucked and tutted and said "We'll make more money when we grow up!" and tried not to think about the victory that Putin pulled off. But he's not irrational or unpredictable. We've just gotten soft. He would be quite at home with 19th century Europeans.

-

I'm not going to touch your conclusion, but for comparison sake, the overall rate works out to be a little over 0.000306% of the US population dying in police custody or in confrontation with police in 2015. In the UK in 2014, it was about 0.000350% of the population. The difference is within the margin of error.