We’re in the best of hands.

Physics Geek mentioned a news item for which there is not enough alcohol to numb the pain, and of course it’s about President Precious. Articles like this make me feel like I need to find a good therapist now to help me cope with the inevitable emotional breakdown when I realize there’s no point in moving back to America when Rupert’s European assignment ends in another two years. America will be just like Europe by then, but without the great food and pretty old buildings and fast trains. Therefore, worse.

What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’”

I am talking to Mr. Boehner in his office on the second floor of the Capitol, 72 hours after the historic House vote to take America off the so-called fiscal cliff by making permanent the Bush tax cuts on most Americans, but also to raise taxes on high earners…

The president’s insistence that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called “a health-care problem.” Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment — “They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system” — he replied: “Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.” He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: “I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.”

…Mr. Boehner confirms that at one critical juncture he asked Mr. Obama, after conceding on $800 billion in new taxes, “What am I getting?” and the president replied: “You don’t get anything for it. I’m taking that anyway.”

It’s times like these that I wish Mr. Obama was this TV reporter in this hurricane:

Matt Welch provides a nice graph that shows why Obama’s bullshit is stunning in its insanity:

But as Welch says, this presidential bullshit is not really surprising since so many people seem, insanely, to agree with it, including plenty of Republicans like Speaker Boehner himself.

This is hopeless.

We’re going to have to start our own country.

“Why the 2nd Amendment?”

I’m tired of talking about gun rights as though they’re purely bestowed by the 2nd Amendment. No man-made law blesses me with the fundamental human right to defend myself in the most effective possible way, a right I was born with , no matter what any government documents say or don’t say. Americans should stop using the Bill of Rights as the lone permission slip for self-defense. Of course I realize it’s our legal protection but even if the 2nd Amendment were repealed, I will never surrender my guns. In America, that is.

All of my guns, and Rupert’s, are obviously still on U.S. soil right now, waiting patiently inside the gun safes of our most trusted people, as we’ve spent the last four years living in European countries where that fundamental human right of armed self defense is ignored and outright denied, and where we’d go to prison if we exercised it the “wrong” way, but that’s okay. We’ve freely made the choice to live over here. Temporarily.

But the legislative violation of that right is the precise and primary reason that I would never decide to live over here permanently. The only reason I can tolerate being disarmed is because that’s a condition of having this overseas-living experience and the trade-off is worth it to me for a few years.

And frankly, I owned guns in America not because I was constantly in fear for my life but because goddammit, I’m a free adult with a sound mind and I think people who fit that description should be armed, for exactly the reasons laid out by the founders. I don’t feel in any more physical danger here without guns since we live in a great neighborhood, but I do feel like less of a grownup and more like a potential victim. Simple fact is that Rupert travels for work constantly and if someone did break in while he was away, I’d be completely at their mercy, a feeling I never had in Texas. (Not helped by the fact that I now have a 25-pound dog who loves everyone rather than a 90-pound dog who hated strangers, ha!)

A couple of my European acquaintances have lately told me that they don’t care about that feeling, because if it came down to it, they don’t think it’s right for a person to “create justice” on their own, in the heat of the moment.

It takes my breath away to hear self-defense described like that. This is why I don’t have many European friends. I can’t fathom their passive mindset. I can’t respect it.

Sam Harris, an atheist who by my observation is a generally very left-leaning, has a mostly-great piece about this (there are parts I don’t love, you’ll know them when you get to them if you read the whole piece). Bolding mine, italics in original:

Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards (who generally do not carry guns) helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and “diffusion of responsibility” has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?

…Coverage of the Newtown tragedy and its aftermath has been generally abysmal. In fact, I have never seen the “liberal media” conform to right-wing caricatures of itself with such alacrity. I have read articles in which literally everything said about firearms and ballistics has been wrong. I have heard major newscasters mispronounce the names of every weapon and weapons manufacturer more challenging than “Colt.” I can only imagine the mirth it has brought gun-rights zealots to see “automatic” and “semi-automatic” routinely confused, or to hear a major news anchor ominously declare that the shooter had been armed with a “Sig Sauzer” pistol. This has been more than embarrassing. It has offered a thousand points of proof that “liberal elites” don’t know anything about what matters when bullets start flying.

…Gun-control advocates appear unable to distinguish situations in which a gun in the hands of a good person would be useless (or worse) and those in which it would be likely to save dozens of innocent lives. They are eager to extrapolate from the Aurora shooting to every other possible scene of mass murder. However, a single gunman trying to force his way into a school, or roaming its hallways, or even standing in a classroom surrounded by dead and dying children, would be far easier to engage effectively—with a gun—than James Holmes would have been in a dark and crowded movie theater.

…Needless to say, it is easy to see how things can go badly when anyone draws a firearm defensively. But when an armed man enters an office building, restaurant, or school for the purpose of murdering everyone in sight, things are going very badly already. Imagine being one of the people in the Houston video trapped in the office with no recourse but to hide under a desk. Would you really be relieved to know that up until that moment, your workplace had been an impeccably gun-free environment and that no one, not even your friend who did three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be armed? If you found yourself trapped with others in a conference room, preparing to attack the shooter with pencils and chairs, can you imagine thinking, “I’m so glad no one else has a gun, because I wouldn’t want to get caught in any crossfire”? Despite what the New York Times and dozens of other editorial pages have avowed in the weeks since Newtown, it isn’t a vigilante delusion to believe that guns in the hands of good people would improve the odds of survival in deadly encounters of this kind. The delusion is to think that everyone would be better off defending his or her life with furniture.

Etc, etc. But back to the 2nd Amendment thing and the title of this post, which I got from Jeff Goldstein, which he got from Walter E. Williams. They both provide many helpful quotes for our liberal friends who are still struggling, despite being educated adults, to understand why some of us don’t want the decent, peaceful portion of the populace to disarm itself.

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”

…Said Adolf Hitler.

“If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.”

…Said Josef Stalin.

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements…They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

…Said Benito Mussulini.

“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.”

…Said Mao Tze Tung.

Goldstein suggests adding in a few quotes from another few sources that our liberal brethren may find it within their enlightened hearts to take seriously:

The Dalai Lama: “If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

Gandhi: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.”

George Orwell: “That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

I sincerely don’t understand what’s so difficult about all of this. Like Goldstein says, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

And I am honestly goddamned sick of hearing stupid platitudes about violence and power. A very close friend of mine (we aren’t that close anymore and you’re about to find out why) hates guns and has said many times that they are for rednecks and paranoids and hillbillies – this is why she didn’t want me to have them – and once she told me, straightfaced, that the reason she doesn’t need guns to protect herself is because she relies on her own personal inner strength. Of course I laughed long and hard and repeatedly asked her what the fuck she was even talking about, and she explained – seriously, she was serious - that, “You seem to think that the only way to defeat danger is with a tool of violence. I’d rather use my mind.”

I asked her how well the Holocaust victims did in using their minds and their personal inner strength to avoid mass slaughter and genocide and she said, “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

And now you know why we’re not close anymore.

Good thing this mindless redneck hillbilly mom was unevolved enough to defeat danger with a tool of violence.

The truly frightening incident began Friday afternoon in Loganville, Georgia. A woman was working from home while her 9-year-old twins, who had the day off from school, were playing downstairs.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she heard knocks on the door around noon, but ignored them because she figured it was someone selling something. But as the knocks grew more persistent, she became worried. So she got the twins and took them with her into a crawlspace that was connected to her office in the attic.

From there they heard a man, later identified as Paul Slater, break into their home with a crowbar then start going through their things…

But when he opened the door to where they were hiding, he got a surprise. He found himself “staring down the barrel of a .38 revolver,” Sheriff Joe Chapman told the paper. The mother fired six bullets, hitting him in the face and neck five times.

Even though she was out of bullets, she told him she’d shoot again if he moved. So as he lay there crying, she ran with her children to a neighbor’s house. Slater was trying to flee the home in his car when police captured him.

“When you got five bullets in you, it makes you kind of disoriented,” Chapman said.

I imagine so.

That article comes from a “Mom” site, by the way, and it’s nice they’re even reporting about it since the mainstream press sure isn’t, but it ends with the idiotic statement that though the author believes “adamantly that we need to reform gun control laws, stories like this do make me lean toward a more moderate approach. Of course, for every story like this, there are plenty more in which a child accidentally shoots and kills himself or someone else, so it’s much more complicated than one-off incidents” and then the real humdinger: “In this specific case, however, it’s hard to deny that it was a good thing the woman had a gun.”

No it isn’t hard to deny at all. It’s impossible to deny. It’s stupid to deny. It’s evidence of brain damage to deny. As Glenn Reynolds suspects, “a guy who would chase down a woman and her kids to an attic crawl space was planning on something worse than lifting a TV”. Especially a guy with at least six arrests in the last few years, at least one of which was for battery (which of course that article doesn’t mention but this one does).

Exit video: my new favorite dude on YouTube presents “WHY does anyone NEED an ASSAULT RIFLE?”

Palate cleanser of Dog between Posts of Doom

I decided I’m going to start posting links to at least half the stuff I bookmark, which is a lot. It’s almost all about economics and guns and politics, which makes most of us want to vodka ourselves into dreamless sleep, so I should probably post something sweet between the despair. So here, 29 Dogs That Don’t Want To Grow Up. I don’t know why it’s titled that because it’s really 29 Gigantic Dogs Who Like To Sit In Laps.

My favorites:


(source)

In our neighborhood, there is a family who has THREE of those giant black dogs, exactly like that one. I knew the name of the breed once but am too lazy to look it up again. All I know is that these people walk these three gigantic beasts on the same streets and in the same parks where we walk Primo and HOLY SHIT THEY’RE VERY VERY LARGE.

Little Primo doesn’t seem to understand that and he gets a little too eager about their butts and the odors emanating therefrom, even though with one bear-sized paw they could reach out and topple him over and swallow him in one piece if they felt it prudent. But as usual with giant dogs, they’re freakishly, preternaturally mellow. They move so slow, like sleepy bored elephants.

The primary thing I wonder every time I see those three woolly mammoths is how much does it cost to feed them? Especially in Italy, where food prices are at least double America’s. My God.

The second thing I wonder is how much time the humans spend every day cleaning up dog fur in their apartment. The third thing is how much they must spend on jumbo-sized poop bags and how they decide which human gets to pick up each whale-sized turd on the walks.


(source)

That one reminds me of my friend Nicki, who adopted an abandoned 130-pound Saint Bernard this past summer, named Tucker, who is huge and who has an extreme farting issue.

I kinda want a Saint Bernard some day. Just not this day. Because I’m pretty sure I would not fit in the elevator with such a dog (if you’ve been to Italy, you know the elevators are tiny, I mean seriously, it almost feels like a Survivor challenge to ride in one with one other person, and no way are you getting a third or fourth person in there unless you all mutually want full-body contact).


(source)

I just like that one’s face.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

And finally:


(source)

I don’t have any pics yet of Primo on anyone’s lap because one quirk about him is that he refuses to ask for lap-sitting and he never tries to get on furniture or anything like that; obviously his previous owners trained him to stay four paws on the floor no matter what. I recognize this as a useful and desirable behavior in general, but sometimes I can’t stand how cute he is and holy god I want to cuddle him on my lap.

But he will not climb onto a person, even if the person is on the floor and even if he’s being gently or firmly commanded to do so (again, don’t get me wrong, we appreciate this because we never would want a dog that thought he could climb everywhere, including all over friends who might be allergic to dogs or not want their clothes covered in fur), so if I want him in my lap I have to actually pick him up and set him upon me, with which he complies because he trusts me, but it still seems to scare him at first. I know it’s because he’s been trained not to do it, and then I feel bad for scaring him, plus confused for wanting to hold him even though I know it scares him, and then I just feel like an asshole of a person about the whole thing. But if I stay mellow and keep my voice low, and scratch his ribs and massage his ears, he calms down and enjoys it. And then falls asleep and farts. So we’re making progress.

I’m never going to be liberated from the intense curiosity about where he lived before and why he ended up at the shelter. This dog has zero serious behavior issues and is a genuine joy to have around. He’s quiet and calm and smart and sweet. I’m more sure than ever that he had a great owner who died and left behind no family who could take care of him, and since they don’t euthanize stray pets in Italy (that’s a whole other post), to the shelter went Primo. I’m eternally glad we found him there.

Anyway I have no pictures of him in a lap, but here’s one of him on our spiral staircase as seen from the kitchen door. The kitchen is downstairs and our offices are upstairs, so when I’m cooking while Rupert is working from home, Primo isn’t always sure where he wants to be. The other day, I thought I heard the clicky noise of his paws coming down the stairs but he didn’t appear in the kitchen and I wasn’t really sure if I’d even heard him because I was listening to an Adam Carolla podcast on my iPod so I figured he was still up with Rupert. Half an hour later, I came out of the kitchen and there was the Staircase Stalker. He even stayed perfectly still long enough for me to get my iPad and take a crappy photo:

He sat there silently staring into the kitchen like that for at least 45 solid minutes. He really wanted chicken. He got some.

Thank God our heroic president spent more than three million dollars of our money to heroically help our heroic Congress heroically do exactly shit-all.

I don’t know what we’d do without him. How we’d cope. How we’d heal. How we’d survive.

Keith Koffler explains one of the reasons I am just so goddamned grateful to Heroic Obama right now.

In a move that is rich in irony, President Obama agreed Tuesday night to sign an emergency deficit reduction bill that does almost nothing to rein in spending and then jetted out to Hawaii to resume his vacation at an extra cost of more than $3 million to taxpayers.

The price tag is in addition to more than $4 million that is already being spent on the Obamas’ Hawaii idyll, bringing the total cost of the excursion to well over $7 million.

The added cost was incurred because by the time the Obamas return from Hawaii – whenever that is – the president will have used Air Force One to travel to Honolulu and back twice.

Obama was forced to return from Hawaii just after Christmas to complete negotiations to avoid the Fiscal Cliff, talks resulting in the bill that was passed by Congress last night. Obama resisted significant spending cuts throughout the negotiations, and the final legislation relies almost solely a new taxes to reduce the deficit.

Air Force One is known to cost about $180,000 an hour to fly. Based on an estimated 18 hours roundtrip flying time for the jet between Washington and Honolulu, the travel cost alone of Obama’s decision to return to Hawaii amounts to around $3.24 million. And that doesn’t include the price tag for the massive security operation required to move the president or the cost of the cargo plane that follows Air Force One around.

The Obamas could have saved taxpayers millions by returning from Hawaii together after Christmas and then resuming their vacation at one of the many ritzy resorts that lie outside of Washington. If the beach is a must, even a trip to Florida would have been far less expensive.

Or they could have simply stayed at the White House or Camp David, each a luxurious government-run installation, billing taxpayers a relative pittance.

They could have, if they were Little People, or possessed a fraction of the self-awareness or shame of even some of the 7-year-olds of my acquaintance, or most importantly if they did not have the entire mainstream press heeling like eager-to-please trained dogs, not daring to be skeptical of any of Master’s odd, unpleasant behaviors.

Must please Master. Mustn’t question Master.

Anyway, about this “fiscal cliff” bill that has been passed by the most useless Congress fathomable and that I’ve spent the day reading about, and about which I’m still not sure if I should be furious, relieved, or just drunk because what is the fucking difference anymore? What have we hired these fools to do? Why do we blame them when they’re just kabuki-dancing like the performance clowns we knew they were when we elected them?

Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner says there is good, bad, and ugly about the deal, and he’d “rate the deal as objectively bad, but relatively good”, with which Mary Katherine Ham, someone I usually am completely on board with, agrees (and she does call the deal a “crap sandwich”). I understand the point. It’s an awful bill, but there really weren’t any other realistic options. But that is exactly the problem, and is the reason for despair. And, frankly, it pisses me off that half the country will get another delay in their long-overdue reckoning that elections have consequences.

DrewM at Ace’s place:

When the Team Happy GOP starts telling you how great this is, remember Obama got $600 billion in taxes for free but they want you to believe in two months the GOP will get a trillion plus in cuts for no additional taxes. This is a fairy tale.

And while not getting a tax hike is good personally for a lot of people, shielding 98% of Americans from the fiscal reality of their big government votes is going to kill the country.

Sure, most taxpayers will actually feel something because of expiration of the payroll-tax holiday and some new Obamacare-related taxes, but they’ll pretend they don’t feel it for a while longer because denial feels so goddamned good, and every inch further the can gets kicked down the road, the heavier and denser and more unkickable it becomes, until…there is no good ending to this story.

I sometimes wonder if the worst thing I’ve ever done for my own mental health is to have minored in WWII History in college and spent years before and after studying in too much detail how events in Europe played out between the world wars, economic and fiscal and governmental. I can’t recite all those details now and never pretend I can, but the impression that was left on my psyche almost socially cripples me sometimes. When I encounter people in conversation who acknowledge the set of facts about what’s happening in the Western world right now and then say, “Meh, bah, blah blah, there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just going to enjoy my life,” I literally – I do mean literally - almost burst into tears because it feels so hopeless and frustrating if even the most reasonable of us flat-out do not give a shit. I actually have burst into tears when certain people very close to me have offered those rhetorical shoulder-shrugs.

Sorry to be so pessimistic. Last thing I want is for this blog to become depressing for anyone who likes it. It’s just that I read all that insanity about the fiscal cliff “deal” today, and then a trainload of terrifying anti-2nd Amendment rhetoric by fascists dressed in sheep’s clothing, and then two pieces by the excellent historian and writer Victor Hanson Davis, and I’m ready to offer a cash reward for anyone who can convince me that America as we’ve known it is not irretrievably gone.

The first VDH piece, at NRO and about the clown-college tryouts in Washington this week:

It is an academic point whether Obama’s aim in the vast borrowing of $5 trillion in four years was to grow a political constituency reliant on entitlements or to create enough pressure to hike taxes on the suspect affluent — or both.

Yet in almost every unguarded moment over the last decade, Obama, quite apart from compiling the most partisan voting record in the Senate, made his redistributionist intentions quite clear — lamenting the Supreme Court’s failure to take up forced redistribution, the sloppy spread-the-wealth riff, the no-time-to-profit warning, the failure of the rich to know when it was time to stop making money, the “you didn’t build your own business” snarl, and the gratuitous slurs such as fat-cat, corporate-jet-owners, the Vegas junketeering, and demonization of those who make $250,000 as the vulture rich.

So it is odd — especially after Mitt Romney was destroyed by being reduced to an car-elevator-owning, unkind to the garbage man, outsourcing, greedy felon, whose callousness killed people — that the Republican leadership does not fully comprehend the Obama modus operandi of waging a vicious ad hominem class war, only to step back at opportune moments and lament the growing acrimony and incivility. They better wake up in the next two years to the fact that they are dealing with a Nixonian mind with a folksy Reaganesque veneer.

The second VDH article is at his PJMedia blog and which made my blood run cold and then made me get the whiskey:

These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.

There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.

Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.

In that same piece, he talks about some recent mainstream op-eds that are evidence of that disturbing but helpfully loin-girding new tendency of liberals/progressives to say what they really mean over the last few months.

You may have already heard about these but if not, feast your eyes on what a well-known journalist named Donald Kaul wrote in the Des Moines Register (via Instapundit):

Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth…

Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did…

Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Bolding mine, to make sure you get the requisite foamy face-full of that “new civil tone” with which the Left keeps insisting we subliterate cavepeople must comport ourselves.

Another piece VDH mentions is one that’s been linked everywhere, a New York Times op-ed written by a Georgetown constitutional law professor named Louis Michael Seidman. Professor Seidman, Expert on the Constitution, is not a fan of the Constitution, for it is evil.

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

That last part, bolded, I’ve read 10 times now and each time I get a little bit more shaky with the creepers. The person who wrote those sentences teaches the Constitution at one of the best universities in the world, and he cannot imagine that it may be rational that a lone government official – “say, the president” – should be subject to checks and balances.

He also does not want to share with the reader that not all those “white propertied men” thought it was “fine to own slaves”. He definitely does want the reader to view all those men as elitist racists, because that furthers the agenda.

Many others have commented on this NYT op-ed. Volokh. Reynolds.

And Jeff Goldstein:

So argues Louis Michael Seidman, who, as is routine with progressives from Woodrow Wilson onward, is gracious enough to keep the parts of the Constitution he likes, but bemoans the very checks and balances that serve to protect individuals from the government, and deny temporary demagogues the power to affect enormous sudden systemic change. He also (predictably) ignores that the Constitution contains an amendment process, a strategic rhetorical bracketing on Seidman’s part, presumably because that process is too slow and cumbersome and doesn’t allow progressives to capitalize immediately on the latest ginned up crisis to savage the framework for our constitutional republic…

I’m tired of such treachery, disguised as it always is in appeals to “getting things done” and decrying having to answer to dead white propertied slave owners. So I’ll say only this (yet again): go find a state or set of states with people who agree with you, Mr Seidman, and secede. Declare your independence from the tyranny of the Constitution. Declare your independence from our founders and framers, with their dogged insistence on keeping government constrained and the individual empowered. Declare your independence from independence, and be content that you’ve salved your psychic wounds and political conscience.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year 2013

That’s my beloved hero Carl Sagan telling you all how I feel about you for being a huge part of making my 2012 not only bearable, but happy. We’ve been overseas for four years now, with two years to go, and sometimes I think I will dissolve from the homesickness and feeling of distance from my homeland. But when I started blogging again in April, it got better because I can always come here and talk to y’all, and you talk back to me, and I don’t really know how to explain how much that helps and how much I appreciate it.

So a Very Happy New Year to every single one of you who is reading this and who has ever commented or emailed me with encouragement, or even who never comments or emails but who knows what’s up and fights the fight.

It’s already almost 7 p.m. here in Turin, and Rupert (NHRN) and I are going out tonight to celebrate. The Italians know how to do holidays and New Year’s Eve is one of their best efforts. In this city of a million people, there will be shitloads of fireworks and live concerts in the piazzas, and people romping in the streets with their own bottles of wine and champagne, but somehow, almost certainly, there will be no violence or mayhem. This is northern Italy. Not Naples…or Chicago.

Stay safe, and have fun tonight no matter what you do.

Buon anno!

The last Sunday of 2012

I’m having a weird time accepting that 2012 is almost over. For the last 15 years or so, I knew 2012 was the year I’d turn 40 and I really thought it would be different than it has been.

Examples: when I was 27 in 1999, I assumed that by 2012 I would both look and feel “old”; thankfully, neither is true (as long as I ignore the arthritic joint damage in my fingers). When I was 33 in 2005, I worried that by 2012 at the latest I’d begin to regret not having kids; also happily not true.

But when I was 29 on September 11, 2001, I figured that by 2012, America would be completely different, for the worse. That it’d be unrecognizable compared to what I knew of it throughout my 20s in the 1990s. Turns out I was, unhappily, right about that.

What about you? Did you have ideas about 2012 that have either manifested themselves – for good or bad – or proven themselves – gloriously or tragically – wrongheaded? I wonder if this sort of thing only occurs to you in the years you have a milestone birthday. I mean, if you turned 29 or 46 or 63 in 2012, you probably never gave the year much special thought. Or am I the only one who thinks about this crap at all?

You know who definitely does not ever think about this crap, or about anything other than treats and belly rubs?

He still displays an extreme aversion to sleeping with more than 80% of his body on his bed. Sometimes he puts his butt-end off the cushion but usually it’s his head, which he doesn’t even to want on the rug underneath the bed. His head wants hardwood.

By the way, in honor of the late lamented Sunny, we have introduced Primo to the glories of green beans. Sunny loved the canned version but Primo prefers the frozen ones (I suspect because of the satisfying crunch).

Anyway, what are your thoughts about 2012?

Obviously we were all (except for my two liberal readers) traumatized by the November election but I know for a lot of us, that wasn’t the most important event of the year. We’ve had births and deaths and weddings and divorces and joys and agonies that had nothing to do with politics. Ruminate here if you like.

The funniest thing you’ll read all week
UPDATED with Gusset Award

The wonderful British blogger David Thompson links to a piece by the pompous leftist British writer George Monbiot, who describes an encounter with reality many years ago that apparently did not sink in very well, seeing as how he’s still a pompous leftist (or even “anarchist” as he fancies himself). I bolded my favorite parts.

A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, 70 miles from where we now sat. In 1649, the Diggers had built their settlement there, in the hope of establishing a “common treasury for all”. Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van.

Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.

Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back.

They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”

We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.

Read that bit again: “We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us.”

Literally – literally - the funniest thing I’ve read all week, especially since those three sentences aren’t shared as a moment of clarity, as the pivot point on which he realized maybe it was fucking stupid to go out of his way to accommodate thugs because This Land Belongs To Everyone. Rather, he seems openly sad that his “anarchist beliefs” were once again defeated by real life experience. But not sad enough to perhaps reevaluate those beliefs.

As Thompson puts it in his own comment thread:

What’s almost – almost – touching is the implied revelation, i.e., that members of Designated Victim Groups, with which Guardianistas feel obliged to side whatever the particulars, can in fact be obnoxious and predatory scumbags. Apparently this thought hadn’t previously occurred to George. Which suggests a well-rehearsed imperviousness to reality. One commenter praises Mr Monbiot for his “refreshing honesty,” which rather gives the game away. Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended.

It always is.

Another commenter on Thompson’s blog mentions that Monbiot is not a “liberal” but an authoritarian lefty – there is a difference in the UK – and Thompson replies:

Indeed. (And yes, the ‘authoritarian’ is pretty much redundant.) But maybe we should spare a thought for poor George, who seems forever troubled by personal demons, and for whom arrogance and envy are to be paraded as virtues. Which is why almost every Monbiot article starts with a display of his deep, deep compassion and ends with breathless, almost masturbatory authoritarianism. If only he could tax people enough and take away their stuff, if only he could control everything, the voices would stop.

I’m mostly quoting that comment because it’s a great example of why Thompson is one of my all-time favorite bloggers.

Also, he’s written about Monbiot a few times before, most notably when Monbiot declared that people with extra room in their houses should pay a severe tax penalty, which hopefully would force them, if not to pay that penalty, then to take in a lodger (presumably for free) or move into a smaller house. Because, said Monbiot, “the total housing stock is a common resource. Either we ensure that it is used wisely and fairly, or we allow its distribution to become the starkest expression of inequality…We have allowed the market, and the market alone, to decide who gets what.”

How dare we.

………

UPDATED to present this to the lovely Mrs. Hill:

I loved her comment instantly, and then she was nominated and seconded and thirded and fourthed for the award, and that’s that. She absolutely nailed the progressive mindset:

Apparently, in the Universe of Progressivism, all sub-groups of people – because to a prog, people are only recognizable in group form – can must be assigned to either the the Set of Oppressors or the Set of Oppressed. If you are not the one, you are the other. Oppressors are obliged to feel corporate guilt and to accept any and all recriminations against them. Once granted membership in the Oppressed group, however, one can do no wrong. Any transgressions against the basic rules of civil society are explained away as symptoms of oppression. (Therefore Israel’s defensive missiles are Bad, Evil, and always fired at Innoccents, while Palestinian rockets, no matter how many children they kill, are merely a justifiable protest against tyranny. And gang bangers only use guns because evil NRA members make those weapons available.) So it was necessarily the duty of Monbiot and his fellow occupiers to overlook the Travellers’ thuggery, simply because they were Travellers – not to do so would have been to increase the campers’ share in the oppression that, according to their thinking, created these thugs in the first place. (It would seem that Monbiot and his fellows were never read Aesop as children.)

And somehow, the prog never recognizes the hideous bigotry of his thinking. His Oppressor is granted near God-like powers over the actions and fortunes of other men, while the Oppressed is reduced to a helpless, child-like stature, incapable of self-determination so long as a single Oppressor exists. So Monbiot, faced with what would be, to us, intolerable levels of cognitive dissonance, soldiers on, unenlightened…

Bam. It is that profound bigotry and condescension that drives me most mad about progressives, who almost seem to want you to laugh at their rank hypocrisy and the obvious cognitive dissonance they must be laboring under but never manage to identify or overcome.

Merry Christmas 2012

Primo hurt his rear left leg running too hard at the dog park the other day so I didn’t have the heart to make him pose for formal Christmas hillbilly dog performance art photos; I just waited until he was asleep and then wrapped my Christmas socks around his head.

I think Primo likes Christmas, though, because Rupert finally has a few days off and we’re both really homesick and tired of missing our families, and we’re worried about our poor little guy’s leg, so we’re giving him so much fawning attention it’s embarrassing. He’s very sweet and cuddly; we can’t help it.

Some of my friends have asked me how the Italians do Christmas and the answer (based solely on my two Christmases of experience here in northwestern Italy) is that they do it exactly the same way Americans do it. There are stuffed Santas dangling from balconies, strings of lights strung beautifully over the streets, green garlands and wreaths on the doors of small shops, decorated Christmas trees in front of the churches, poinsettias everywhere, big ads for toy stores and shopping centers, Christmas giftcards at every cashier station, Christmas music on the radio, and parties. The only real differences are that I’ve seen no nativity scenes (in my neighborhood; they may exist elsewhere in Italy), and that you say Buon Natale instead of Merry Christmas.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be right to wish you a Merry Christmas on this blog without my dear Sunny (Peace Be Upon Her), who was the reason I have half the blog-friends I do. Despite appearances, she loved Christmas too, because she got many green beans for tolerating a hat and tinsel.

2007:

2008:

……….

All my best to you and yours. Stay warm and safe.

Things I wish my liberal friends would read

The great Thomas Sowell, on Gun-Control Ignorance – How many times do the same arguments need to be refuted?:

The key fallacy of so-called gun-control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun-control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun-control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun-control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

The rate of gun ownership is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand-gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

Why the gun is civilization.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

…People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

We know how to stop mass shootings:

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.

Bill Whittle’s essay, Freedom, which, I’m happy to brag, was birthed as a comment on my blog over 10 years ago but despite that (haha) is brilliant:

Assume for a moment you could vaporize every gun on the planet. Would crime go away? Or would ruthless, physically strong gangs of young men be essentially able to roam free and predate at will?

The history of civilization shows time and time again how decent, sophisticated city dwellers amass wealth through cooperation and the division of labor — only to be victimized by ruthless gangs of raping, looting cutthroats who couldn’t make a fruit basket, sweeping down on them, murdering them and carting away the loot, to return a few years later, forever, ad infinitum. Vikings, Mongols, desperadoes of every stripe — they are a cancer on humanity, but there they are and there they have always been.

If civilization is worth having — and it is — then it has to be defended, because the restraining virtues of justice, compassion and respect for laws are products of that civilizing force and completely unknown to those who would do it harm.

Therefore, since I believe in this civilization, in its laws, science, art and medicine, I believe we must be prepared to defend it against what I feel no embarrassment for calling the Forces of Darkness. Those forces could be raiders on horseback, jackbooted Nazi murderers, ecstatic human bombs, or some kid blowing away a shopkeeper.

For the gun-ban argument to be convincing, you’d have to show me a time before shopkeepers were blown away, hacked away, pelted away or whatever the case may be. You would have to show me a time in history before the invention of the firearm, when crime and raiding and looting did not exist, when murders and rapes did not exist. We may lose 11,000 people to handguns a year. How many would we lose without any handguns, if murderers and rapists roamed free of fear, ignoring reprisal from citizens or police? I don’t know. You don’t know either. Maybe it’s a lot fewer people, and maybe, in a world where strength and ruthlessness trump all, it would be a far higher one.

You may argue that only the police should be allowed to carry guns. Consider this carefully. Do we really want to create an unelected subculture that views itself as so elite and virtuous as to be the only ones worthy of such power, trust and authority? Have we not clearly seen the type of people drawn to such exclusive positions of authority, and the attitudes and arrogance it promotes?

Furthermore, I can’t see any moral distinction between a policeman and a law-abiding citizen. Policemen are drawn from the ranks of law-abiding citizens. They are not bred in hydroponics tanks. They are expected to show restraint and use their weapon as a last resort. Millions upon millions of citizens, a crowd more vast than entire armies of police, do exactly this every day.

If all of these horrors had sprung up as a result of the invention of the handgun I’d be right there beside those calling for their destruction.

But clearly, this is not the case. In our cowboy past we used to say that “God created Man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” This is simple enough to understand. It means that a villager, let’s say a schoolteacher, can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing the art of war. Firearms are what tipped the balance toward civilization by eliminating a lifetime spent studying swordplay or spear play or pointed-stick play. The bad guys have always used weapons and they always will. The simple truth about guns is that they are damn effective and even easier to operate. They level the playing field to the point where a woman has a chance against a gang of thugs or a police officer can control a brawl.

I don’t see how vaporizing all the guns in the world would remove crime or violence — history shows these have always been with us and show no signs of responding favorably to well-reasoned arguments or harsh language…

Please, people. Know facts. There are graphs and everything if words are too complicated:

Clearly, the U.S. had a higher homicide rate than Australia long before Australia enacted such strict gun control. But more crucially, the U.S. and Australia saw a similar reduction in homicides during the 1990s, while Australia was curtailing gun rights and the U.S. was expanding them.

…………….

Why not overturn the 1st Amendment instead of the 2nd? Don’t you care about The Children?

Mass Shootings Require Curtailing Rights:

The time for action is now. The recent spate of mass shootings must finally spur us to do what must be done. We need press control. That’s right, the media is out of control and they are enabling and certainly promoting the sick bastards who are slaughtering innocents. The Founders could not have envisioned a 24/7 news cycle with blaring soundtracks, garish headlines, and a relentless, almost pornographic sensationalism. There is no doubt the sad souls who plot these horrors can picture their faces beaming from screens around the world. They gain a notoriety they could never achieve otherwise and the ghouls who give them a stage must bear their responsibility.

Back in the day, you had to take quill to parchment, or if you were doing mass media you could run off a couple of hundred pamphlets. The high capacity, assault weapons of cable news and the internet were as unimagined in colonal times as nuclear weapons. The Bill of Rights is not suicide pact and an unabridged press does not mean very channel should be as well-armed as the New York Times. Semi-automatic handguns have been around since the 1890s but school shootings are a much more recent development. What has changed since then? Instant fame, or more properly infamy, that’s what and it is time to put some common sense controls on the folks who give these losers a chance to live forever.

Even super-liberal Roger Ebert had a moment of clarity several years ago on this issue:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them.

………….

Jeff Goldstein, An open call to gun-control advocates and gun supporters:

It’s time to stop being afraid of the press and the left and the academics who wish to mold us and stand up for principle by forcing facts into the debate.

And it’s time for gun control advocates to make their case rationally and logically, because once their arguments are stripped of a knee-jerk emotionalist appeal, they cease to make any kind of coherent sense. Suggesting to me that they are merely opportunistic and have no connection whatsoever to wanting to keep people safe. Rather, they want removed what they don’t understand simply because they don’t wish to understand what it is they want removed.

As it’s a natural right of mine they’re hoping to take away, the onus needs to be placed on them to make the case — and then take the issue to the states for a constitutional amendment battle.

Finally, one of the longest but best pieces I’ve read in the last few days, worth every moment for any gun-control advocate who wishes to act on facts not feelings, here’s the wonderful Larry Correia’s Opinion on Gun Control:

Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.

And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.

So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?

And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.

Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened in America.

…You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.

We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.

They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.

Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.

But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.

So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.

Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.

However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.

And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.

So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?

………..

Okay, enough links and quotes. It’s just that I’ve reached my limit with certain acquaintances in real life and on Facebook who are still asking some of the stupidest fucking questions I have ever heard, such as, “Why can’t we ban guns?” and “Why don’t we ban guns?” and “Are you seriously saying you will not give up your guns even while The Children die?”

Nevermind that I did “give up” my guns when I moved to Europe four years ago and have remained unarmed and unable to defend myself with anything other than my spindly arms attached to my 5’2″ skeleton, and yet somehow, mysteriously, England and Italy have not turned out to be crime-free utopias. Whatever. I don’t want to talk about Europe, and all my guns will be waiting for me when I finally get back to America because my dad has them. And he’s going to buy more for me in the next few weeks.

What I’m actually, sincerely most interested in at this point in this whole “discussion” is exactly why we all feel compelled to have a National Conversation all of a sudden because of these specific 20 children. I’m just trying to figure out the protocol – we are to ignore the more than 20,000 other children who die every day? Is that how it is? We are not going to have National Conversations, including talk of amending the Constitution itself, because of the several children who are murdered by their own parents every single passing day? Why not outlaw parents? They kill more innocent little kids than school shooters, by orders of magnitude. Why not outlaw, or even just put more “common-sense restrictions” on, car ownership or alcohol consumption? Have we all forgotten, or are we just not that interested in, the never-ending bloodbath of children from road accidents and beatings and drownings and skateboard/bike/playground accidents and I could go on and on and on. Don’t even get me started on the unfathomable universe of constant pain and suffering in children’s cancer wards or burn units that never seems to move President Obama to give speeches and shed tears on camera, or to attend funerals, and which certainly doesn’t move any of my Facebook friends to post pictures of candles and offer up their “thoughts and prayers” for the families.

I want to say “I don’t get it”, but I do get it: this kind of story is great for TV ratings, so it’s given 24/7 coverage. The hundreds of kids getting chemo this afternoon and who are probably going to die agonizing deaths in the next few months aren’t “exciting” and don’t get ratings or Presidential pressers or Tweets from celebrities. The media tells us to be upset about these particular 20 children, therefore we are, because we are well-trained and it feels great to go along with the crowd.

I don’t know about you but I find the whole thing incredibly revolting. The murder of those sweet little innocent kids was absolutely awful. Of course it was. But no more awful – and no more deserving of a National Conversation and new federal legislation – than the thousands of other heartbreaking child deaths on the same day and every day before that and every day since then, on into the future as far as our horrified eyes can see.

It used to be easier to forget how stupid people are

I blame the internet for spraying proof of abject human imbecility right into my face.

I would rather not know this:

[NASA] said it has been flooded with calls and emails from people asking about the purported end of the world — which, as the doomsday myth goes, is apparently set to take place on Dec. 21, 2012.

The myth might have originated with the Mayan calendar, but in the age of the Internet and social media, it proliferated online, raising questions and concerns among hundreds of people around the world who have turned to NASA for answers.

Dwayne Brown, an agency spokesman, said NASA typically receives about 90 calls or emails per week containing questions from people. In recent weeks, he said, that number has skyrocketed — from 200 to 300 people are contacting NASA per day to ask about the end of the world.

“Who’s the first agency you would call?” he said. “You’re going to call NASA.”

No, sir, I’m not going to call NASA first if I find myself existentially concerned about a superstitious myth based on the primitive “calendar” of an extinct civilization. I’d call a psychiatric hotline.

But the hippies are totally grooving it, man.

In the words of a high-profile attendee, American self-help author Barbara Marx Hubbard: “The Mayan calendar has said something is coming to an end, but what will be born?”…

Hubbard, and those like her, hope the lifted veil reveals the need to treat our world and ourselves with greater care, arguing for a “consciousness revolution”.

At just 12 years old, Xiuhtezcatl [pronounced Shoo-tes-cot] Martinez from Boulder, Colarado, and known for a youth program called Earth Guardians campaigning for global sustainability, agrees and says the forecast apocalypse is the perfect time to take action.

Xiuhtezcatl, who will also speak in Byron Bay, made a speech at the United Nations Rio+20 conference on climate change, earlier this year.

The Rio+20 summit “was actually a disaster”, he said. “Leaders from around the world came together to politically solve climate change which didn’t work at all. They couldn’t come to any decisions and they were all greedy…

“But, the really inspiring part was we met so many kids from all around the planet who were doing stuff in their communities just like us…it was like, ‘Wow, I’m not alone.’”

God, I hate hippies.

But one should expect stupid childish bullshit from hippies without being too annoyed by it. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.

It’s not so easy to laugh at when it comes from school administrators.

Thousands of students will have an extra long holiday break after school administrators in at least two Michigan counties decided to cancel classes because of talk surrounding the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and rumors connected to the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world.

Five districts in Lapeer County and 20 districts in Genesee County posted announcements Wednesday evening cancelling classes Thursday and Friday.

“Given the recent events in Connecticut, there have been numerous rumors circulating in our district, and in neighboring districts, about potential threats of violence against students. Additionally, rumors connected to the Mayan calendar predicted end of the world on Friday have also surfaced,” a letter from Matt Wandrie, Superintendent of Lapeer Community Schools said.

“These rumors of violence have been thoroughly investigated and determined to be false. There have been no credible threats made against any of our students. However, these rumors have been a serious distraction for students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Therefore, given the significant disruption to the teaching and learning process, I have decided, along with my fellow superintendents of Lapeer County, to cancel school for both Thursday, December 20th, and Friday, December 21st,” the letter said.

Seriously? Is this real? I honestly feel like I’m being hoaxed by The Onion or something with that article.

I cannot fathom such obnoxious, blatant, absurd idiocy. I can’t conceive of school being cancelled when I was a child because of a crime in another state and rumors about a primitive myth hyped by grown adults.

Are there no capable, common-sense grown-ups left in charge, anywhere?

It’s all gone mad.

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Nature is a crafty bugger

Check out The Year’s Best Microscope Views of Biology. Some of the images, like this one of “Unicellular green alga Micrasterias from lake sample” are gorgeous, all pretty colors and astounding symmetry:

Image: Rogelio Moreno Gill / Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®

…while others are deeply hideous and terrifying in that way that makes you shudder and gasp hopelessly into the darkness, WHY GOD WHY?

Image: James Nicholson / Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®

That’s “Live mushroom coral Fungia sp., close-up of mouth during expansion.” So they say. I call it the Mouth of Sauron, But Worse.

I’ve always been fascinated by ants; one of my favorite things to do as a kid on long boring summer days in Missouri was to set out some sweet bit of food or even spill a little bit of Coke on our front porch and then watch the ants scout it, then come in a single-file column that quickly turned into a tiny little ant superhighway until all of the treat was gone. When it was bits of food, I couldn’t believe the size of the chunks some of those little bastards would awkwardly lumber away with. Crumbs four times their size! Well it turns out that they’ll even carry off an entire gecko skull in one piece (after stripping the entire corpse of all flesh). It takes a few of them to do it, but still, it’s kind of amazing. They don’t like to waste anything, do they. Watch all the way to the end:

The only thing I regret about having watched that video three times in a row is that now that horrible Elton John song about the circle of life is in my head. Gahhhhhhh.