Don’t Watch The Monsters

Don’t watch.
If the victim of this attack was an active duty soldier then there is a purely semantic argument to be made that this was technically not terrorism, but that would facile in the worst way; clearly, this cowardly ambush and grisly slaughter in broad daylight is a terrorist act of unjustifiable murder regardless what political or religious cover the perpetrators attempt to claim.

Secrets, Lies, & Wishes #Benghazi #IRS #AP #MayorFord #Crack #BungaBunga #TeaParty #Really?

It totally looks like the Mayor of Toronto actually smokes crack. Like, on the street, with the people who supplied to him, which is pretty hardcore. Even Marion Barry did it in a motel room with a hooker, which might not qualify as someone you trust, but I mean, if I were to do crack I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel safe buying it from a crack dealer let alone doing it with them. And I don’t want that to sound elitist; there is a spectacular story about my first cousins’ cross country crack binge that brings tears of hysterical laughter to the eyes of my listeners but breaks my heart to tell because I still love him and my grandmother still reads his letters from prison.

What’s really strange is that the Mayor of Toronto smoking crack isn’t even the biggest political scandal in Canada right now.

Which brings us to the strange scandals here at home.
One of the reasons I haven’t written much about Benghazi is because while the right wing has worked itself into hot frothing lather of rabies over it, I still don’t see what the problem is any more than the Republicans who freely move the goalposts all over the field do; I think the conservatives who have been fabricating emails actually in some strange way agree with me that the biggest problem with the Benghazi scandal is that the only scandalous behavior has been on the part of the GOP who are trying to make political hay with the bodies of Americans murdered by our enemies on foreign soil. When one looks at the big picture or for that matter, specifically the attacks that occurred on the previous administrations watch that were never investigated as a complete failure of Bush’s foreign policy, the crass cynicism of Republicans in this case is clear to behold. When one considers that the Republican Congress voted to cut the Embassy security budget by $300 million, one should question why we are blaming the Executive Branch for the failure to protect our diplomats.

While we are speaking of Republicans and budget austerity, it seems that the tragedy in Oklahoma is going to make things awkward for the Senators of that fair state that repeatedly voted against and schemed to reduce federal aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy. Senator Inhofe is a practiced hypocrite so he will probably have little trouble performing the requisite contortions to justify whatever position he finds himself in. Of course, it would be reprehensible to suggest that the people of Oklahoma be punished for the poor politics of their representatives, but they do vote for these people and should realize that there are consequences for those decisions; if we are going to slash taxes and cut services, infrastructure and safety nets things get real very quickly. It is one thing to get all giddy about Ayn Rand while you’re hanging on the quad with your bros, but in the aftermath of an EF4 tornado Objectivism is as useful as a bucket with a hole in it. I am wrenched to hear the stories coming out of Oklahoma and I just want to hold my own loved ones near. I pray that everyone who can be saved is and that the victims will be spared any further wrath of nature while they recover.

Gun Dialogue #NRA #Ted Cruz #Wayne LaPierre #Sarah Palin #Ted Nugent #26.4 a day

[This is from an exchange with someone responding to a political cartoon from the Plain Dealer that I had liked. His verbatim remarks are in italics. Anything I added I put in brackets. I am posting the Jeff Darcy cartoon for context.]

Not every parent of the victims agree with this. blame the shooter not the gun. Thousands are killed every year without a shot fired. Luckily only 3 died in Boston.

I look at Boston and I see how easy it was for a foreign terrorist to arm themselves to the teeth. Al-Qaeda sees it too and mentions it prominently in their training manuals.

Guns are tools and I’m not blaming guns for a damned thing. I am blaming the irresponsible chuckleheads who think guns are toys and the neurotic obsessives who make a fetish of their guns; I’m blaming the paranoid liars who make it impossible to have a conversation about an enormous problem in these Unites States. If the NRA were a legitimate organization they would be leading the conversation instead of trying to stifle it and gut the regulations that exist and promote the increased proliferation of firearms; they don’t represent their members, they represent arms dealers. During Obama’s Administration there has been one piece of gun law passed, and it was to allow guns to be carried onto Federal lands, which is an expansion of gun rights. The Supreme Court recently overturned over two hundred years of judicial thought and now recognizes the 2nd Amendment to mean an individual right to bear arms, which is a radical change in favor of the NRA point of view. Activist judges have thrown out gun bans in cities like Chicago and are forcing the State of Illinois to allow concealed carry, which is an expansion of gun rights that completely overrides local control and states’ rights (but I didn’t hear any complaints from conservatives about that). The assault rifle ban has been lifted for a decade. The paranoia and irrationality of the NRA and those who stand with them is now dangerous to all of us. There have been 3,835 [as of this posting a few days later, it is 3,875] Americans killed by gunfire in the 145 days since those children in the picture were gunned down in December. [If you do the math you will see that more than one person an hour has died from a gunshot between this past December 14th and May 8th.]

How well has the Chicago gun ban worked all these years. How many people have been killed by knife or drunk driving since the shooting. Gun ownership was protected in the constitution for a reason. Until the constitution changes the right remains.

The homicide rate has skyrocketed since the gun ban was lifted. The Constitution says ‘A Well-Regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’. Well regulated’ is what we are talking about here. There were no police forces in most of the colonies or a standing army at the time and citizens were responsible to come when called with their gun. Which was a musket, not an AR-15.
Also, drunk driving deaths are down to historic lows even as the rate of deaths by firearm are increasing; there are some forecasting that by as early as 2015 more people will die by gunfire than by traffic accidents-not just DUI’s, but all traffic accidents. Also, there are 16 times as many knives as guns in circulation, so unless there have been more than 61,380 knife murders since the middle of December the comparison doesn’t work well for guns. In any case, I don’t understand what the threshold for acceptable loss of life is so that people can own more firepower than an infantryman had in Vietnam.
Again, no one is discussing banning guns , just ‘Regulating them Well’. Like the Founders said to.
[I've heard NRA officials and lawmakers that do their bidding use the term 'slippery slope' when trying to frame their rejection of the Senate bill as a reasonable position despite the fact that the logical fallacy they are employing in the argument is actually called the 'slippery slope'. They may as well be saying 'The False Dilemma of our Circular Reasoning Begs the Question of our Straw Man's Equivocation, so suck it. Furthermore, their slippery slope is as steep as it is paranoid; the jump to confiscation from background checks or even registration is a madman's leap that cannot be regarded seriously.]

Dennis Prager is a Sad Little Man #Dennis Prager #Dennis Prager is an arrogant hack

Dennis Prager is a third rate right wing hack who excretes content for the likes of NRO and other terrible websites, as well as poisoning the minds of Americans through his syndicated radio show. He is a moral scold who frets about gays destroying the institution of marriage while he himself loves getting married so much he’s done it three times He also thinks that there are no hungry children to speak of and that if there are, those children should be ripped from their parents and put into foster care. Unmitigated audacity of this magnitude is nauseating to behold; that he probably congratulates himself for what he thinks are his brave and daring observations is sad in the same way as a clown stuck in a meat grinder is sad*.

 

*It’s sad because it is very difficult to wash clown out of your meat grinder.

South Carolina Elects Mark Sanford Again

It’s like they’re electing him to spite the rest of us.
But then, the state of South Carolina is kind of like your drunken cousin who got a tattoo of the word ASSHOLE across his forehead, so this shouldn’t be a big surprise.

Effete Conservative Crybabies. #Fuckface Von Clownstick

The Daily Caller is embarrassing itself again.

It’s good to know that children represent something besides collateral damage to the gun industry; maybe since they are beginning to see them as a potential market they might be willing to do something to keep them from getting shot. 

Oh, I’m sorry! Conservatives aren’t effete crybabies! They are brave maverick-y rogues!

Why ‘conservative journalism’ is to journalism what Christian Rock is to music.

Trolling Fuckface Von Clownstick is good times for everybody.

They love the Constitution sooooooooo much…

Many Republicans think Democracy is so awesome that they will violently overthrow it to get their way.

According to this FOX guest, ‘Reason’ is the reason for the Holocaust.

John Galt Goes To Heaven.

So now when do the other journalists who make egregious mistakes lose their jobs?

Conspiracy Theorists: This is how stupid you sound. No, wait, you sound this stupid.

Weep for the poor makers.

Have a happy Friday.

Letter to Lily (rage against the bastards) #Adam Savader #Steve Kush

Lily,

It’s been really weird and I miss talking with you; with age I find fewer people give me answers while more and more come to me for them, but I don’t feel like I have any more than I ever did. I don’t mean to sound melancholy; it’s always been weird and I always miss talking to you. I have noticed the movement of decades in the past few weeks, however, and feel the need to connect with my tribe. The river flooded like hell again just like in ’86 and washed up a bunch of memories that had drifted away and I started feeling the an urge to wax nostalgic like a Springsteen song that was a nostalgic paean to twenty years before that, and decided that would so very very lame.

Instead, let’s rage against the bastards and mock the deserving.
Lets start with Adam Savader, Paul Ryan’s sole intern who has also worked for Romney and Gingrich, and, it turns out is also allegedly a creepy extortionist. As Miss Mayweather said earlier today, this guy should be treated like a terrorist, because that’s what he did to fourteen women; his mother should be confronted with a camera and asked what she thinks of her son, and so should his acquaintances and co-workers and Frat buddies. What he is accused of (did) is a combination of extortion, cybercrime and sexual assault and that he could have been working in the White House is insane; this picture of Adam Sadaver debasing himself as a furry slave-boy for Newt and Callista Gingrich’s last swinger orgy will make you never want sex again.

Obviously what Steve Kush did is absolutely not even remotely in the same league as Savader. However, it is still worth pointing out that he clearly pays women to spank him and change his diaper while he weeps and recites verses from Leviticus. You see that, too, right?

Recently, a cretin Wikipedia editor decided that the primary qualification for being an American novelist was possessing male genitalia.God damn. Some days I don’t know why women aren’t the ones who are going around murdering total strangers.

Then there’s this stupid jackass shrieking about false flags and conspiracies as if it were somehow helping anything but his ratings. Speaking of conspiracies, why is it completely unsurprising to read that the complete failure of a human being who bombed Boston was a fan of Alex Jones?

I have to run. More later.

One more. This guy is a world class bastard.

Winston

inbetween magnets

As a child I was endlessly fascinated by holding two magnets near to each other and feeling the invisible pressure between them; the word ‘magnet’ and ‘magic’ were interchangeable in my mind for years. Today while doing the dishes I realized that if there is a thing called truth, it is in the invisible pressure that holds beliefs apart; truth is what we turn away from to cling to our beliefs. While beliefs are solid unchanging stones you can hold in your hand, truth is an invisible pressure that shifts and varies according to the situation; a belief can be summed up in a finite series of words, truth must be experienced. This is a very unsettling idea, especially for those who cling tightly to their beliefs; when the stone of this belief is near those stones, the pressures can be enormous. Still, not every belief is connected to truth any more than any stone can generate a magnetic field despite however much the holder wishes it would; this does not stop us from fooling ourselves like moving a planchette about an Ouija board.

A Practitioner of Incivility and Unreason #James Taranto #NRA

This is Gabby Giffords NYT Op-Ed from last week about the moral failure of the US Senate to protect our citizens. It is a passionate and eloquent plea for citizens to bring pressure on their elected officials to do their jobs and respect the will of the people as opposed to the will of Wayne LaPierre and his paymasters. This is James Taranto’s WSJ-published response to the Giffords essay. It is a cynical and crude screed that distorts and smears Giffords even as it cowers from  the issue it is desperately trying to hide, which is the disastrous failed gun policy that conservatives have demanded we live with for the past two decades. He then doubled down and has suggested that Giffords couldn’t have even written the piece, as if he could not comprehend how someone with brain damage could outwit him. That anyone on the GOP side of this debate could seriously accuse anyone, much less this person, of incivil and unreasonable behavior is laughably outrageous. It is understandable why the gun industry apologists and lapdogs simply want to silence and dismiss voices like Giffords; they cannot hope to win the argument if they engage directly with her.

In 2014, let us not just simply make gun control an issue; let us truly bring civility and reason back to our discourse, let us make good governance and stewardship the standard we set for our officials and not tolerate the kind of cowardly fealty to special interests that has marked this era.