I Just Don't Know What To Say...Oh, Wait, I Do...

MSNBC.com First Read on Friday had a post on the Unemployment numbers entitled "Liberal Blog Buzz, More on jobs #s".

Who did they list as the "liberal blogs"?

Andrew Sullivan. And then...

Megan McArdle. The woman who started blogging under the pseudonym "Jane Galt".

Jesus fucking Christ. Next I expect to see, "From the left leaning Cato Institute," from these brain fucking dead uber-moron mouthbreathers. That anybody is paid to produce information so misleading is infuriating. Now, Sullivan is at least not a right-winger. But he fucking well describes himself as conservative. McArdle, on the other fucking hand, has spilled so many pixels justifying her preconceived glibertarian positions with made up data that she might as well have been Karl Rove's enlarged prostate. Fuck me!

You want to know why America is so fucked up? Because too goddamned many people rely on these (and similar) twits for information. You might as well consult as a Magic Fucking Eight Ball for info...it might occasionally actually be right. Unlike these utter wastes of what would otherwise be useful proteins and amino acids.

I've Blogged Before, And I'll Blog Again...

About guns.

Full Disclosure, I own, but am not currently in possession of, a 9mm Handgun, a .30-30 Rifle and a 12 Ga Shotgun (the Wee Pedant being who she is, I'm inclined to require unlocking procedures akin to nuclear weapons release before I bring them into my home). Having said that, I am highly ambivalent about unlimited gun rights.

Maybe I've run too many ranges, but the vast majority of my fellow citizens have no more business possessing firearms than they do possessing crystal meth. Too much potential for misuse. Allow a liberal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment and eventually someone's kid blows his own head off. And now this.

Apparently open carry leads to, shall we say, serious consequences.

Soccer mom in Pennsylvania horrified fellow soccer moms by openly carrying a holstered pistol to a soccer game. She had her carry permit revoked then reinstated 8 days later. She's dead now, in an apparent murder/suicide at which her three children (now orphans) were present. Domestic dispute.

Which leads to my point. I will emphasize this for the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," folks out there. The presence of a gun in any highly emotional situation immediately raises the stakes to life and death. Instantly. Am I saying that the gun in this caused the violence? No. Did the gun make it lethal? You are fucking-A right it did. Were her fellow soccer game attendees unreasonable in being worried (batshit upset, more like) at someone carrying a gun to events that time and again in this country devolve into shouting matches or violence between coaches, refs and parents? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

So let's be honest about the bargain we make when we interpret the 2nd Amendment the way we've decided to. We are arguing for MORE accidental or spur of the moment homicides. Look at that chart again (or for the first time). Other than the District of Columbia (a special case...if you carved out any poverty stricken zone that compact in this country, you'd get that result), the top ten per capita (corrected for population size, in other words) firearms death states you get in order are Alaska, Louisiana, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Mississippi, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Alabama.

(Bitter Sarcasm) Clearly the strong gun control laws in those states has led to poor defenseless citizens gunned down by rampant crime. (/Bitter Sarcasm)

As it turns out there's a high correlation between a shitload of guns, and a shitload of gun deaths. As Eddie Izzard says, "And the National Rifle Association says that, 'Guns don't kill people, people do,' but I think the gun helps, you know? I think it helps. I just think just standing there going, 'Bang!' That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that…”.

So I own guns. I enjoy firing guns. I am comfortable around guns (the Army saw to that). But I DON'T FUCKING KID MYSELF about the implications of the firearms culture in this country. More people die because of it. Period. Either own up to it, or give up your guns, damnit. Quit blowing sunshine up your own ass about what you're doing...

A Load Of Fatuous Crap

"An armed society is a polite society,"--Robert Heinlein

See the title. Firstly, we're talking the gateway drug to Ayn Rand. And Ayn Rand is beyond fatuous crap. Heinlein has some redeeming qualities, whereas Ayn Rand specializes in telling pubescent pimply faced boys that the highest goal in life is to be a self centered asshole. Like they need encouragement in that.

But beyond that, the statement is demonstrably false. I thought of this post while I was listening to an NPR report on the way to work this morning about Afghanistan. Afghanistan is, not to put too fine a point on it, the NRA's wet dream of a society.

Damned near every Afghani has a gun, most of them have automatic weapons, and the majority of them either own or, in a pinch, could easily put their hands on a rocket launcher. Wayne LaPierre would LOVE it there. There are a lot of adjectives that leap to mind when thinking about Afghani society. Polite isn't high on the list. Polite isn't even ON the list.

Insular, tribal, violent, sectarian, vicious, dangerous. They are on the list. Polite? Nope. I'm not saying that Afghan society would be Nirvana without weapons. It wouldn't. Thousands of years of Afghan history make it the way it is. But Heinlein claims that the presence of a large number of weapon carriers makes a society polite. A priori, and regardless of culture. And he's wrong. What makes it worse is that he knew, or SHOULD have known, that he was wrong.

History is loaded with societies where an armed society is a violent society. The example Heinlein plainly had in mind is actually in contravention to his claim. The American West may have been "armed", but it requires rose-colored hindsight to consider it "polite". It was a lot more "Deadwood" than "How The West Was Won".

Here is what an armed society is: in thrall to the people most likely to use weapons to get their way. Most of whom are Ayn Rand's favorite type of person: sociopaths.

The fun part is, by carrying carbines to town hall meetings, conservatives are attempting to strongly imply they are the latter, whilst pretending to the fictional condition. Polite isn't what they're doing. Ask Tiller. Ask the kids at that Unitarian Church in Tennessee. Polite isn't on the agenda.

Republicans And Love Of Country

Basically, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. Obama is making a patriotism speech where basically he says that he won't let anyone impugn his patriotism.

Which McCain has, if not in so many words. Has the man never heard of the Intertubes?? He says outrageous shit and then simply denies he said it. This may be the first year in which YouTube is used more to debunk a lying politician than to check out Leeroy Jenkins.

OK. Plug your ears and lock up the kids. I'll wait...


WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH REPUBLICANS?!?!?!?

Seriously.

Did you somehow become fucking convinced that only YOU love your Country(TM)? News flash assholes, not only do you NOT have a monopoly on loving America, I'm still not convinced that upwards of 90% of you ACTUALLY love America. Sean Hannity dry humping the country (and one sort of envisions that happening to Florida...like a little rat dog humping a leg) notwithstanding, what Republicans ACTUALLY do is TALK about loving America.

I'm going to give you a little hint. Republicans (in the main) don't love America, they love themselves. The reason they spend so much time talking about loving America is that they figure that America is the country most likely to allow them to love themselves with the least amount of interruption or inconvenience. If another country, say Albania, made them a better offer...they'd be on a plane in a second, all those country and western songs notwithstanding.

How can I say this? Simple. If, when discussing taxes, your first words about taxes are something on the order of, "It's MY money, how dare they tell me what to do with it," you love yourself.

If you are terribly concerned with a terrorist attack on American soil...putting YOU at risk...without regard to whether an attack is an existential threat to the country? You love yourself.

Are you concerned with what "Teh Gay" is doing to our moral fabric (LINK WARNING: Shower before and after clicking on the link)...mainly because it makes you feel icky (or even worse, vaguely titillated)? You love yourself.

Basically, what we have is a group of people who are like an abusive boyfriend. As long as America puts out, in whatever kinky way these Republicans want it to, they'll let America occasionally go out to the mall or see friends. If the bitch crosses them though? She'll be sorry.

So spare me your patriotic chest thumping. Go play with a tub of butter or something and leave those of us who actually care about her take her to the ER and have the broken bones looked at.

Racism in America (or) Posting Again

Sorry for the long delay. Been spending waaay too much time in Warcraft. My main made 70, got a flying mount and has been socking away money at a high rate of speed. In fact one of my friends has been 70 almost as long and has about 50G...I have 950G...and the guy in question is into me for 50 large. Big L wants his money, AND the vig. I'm turning into the Shylock of Azeroth.

Which, bwah-ha-ha, leads me into the topic I need to write about...racism. Yes. The favorite topic of many a blogger (not). That minefield and morass into which many soul has wandered, never to be seen again.

The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Pedant teaches at inner city schools, so the issue of racism is one that we don't really have the luxury of sticking in the back of an unused kitchen drawer and thinking about only when we see a news report on the Jena 6 or something. It seems to me that one of the reasons this subject is so fraught is that people, or at least the people who speak about racism, fall into one of the two categories...the "Reverse Discrimination" crowd or the "Everything bad comes from the White Man" crowd.

Mrs. Pedant has a saying after 5 years of inner-city teaching: "We load the gun, and then they shoot themselves in the foot with it."

Which is to say, both sides of the racial divide have some work to do. So let's take a look, shall we?

On the "Whitey is the root of all evil," front, there's lots of posts refuting it. Whitey is, like everyone else chained to the great wheel, both good and bad, perpetrator and healer. Blaming Whitey for every inner-city problem ignores that fact that black on black violence is on the rise. Gangs exist not because "The Man" is deliberately keeping inner city kids from having a viable social net of family and community, but because in the absence of viable families and communities, for whatever reason, the kids in the inner city will make those social groups for themselves.

And because they're conceived by and run by children the social groups will rapidly descend, Lord Of the Flies-like, into tribalism with all the attendant paranoia regarding anyone in the "out group". They shoot each other not because "Whitey makes them," but because the only family they really know expects it. Because the people at the other end are from another tribe, because in some way they aren't really human.

This isn't happening because some white dude in a corporate board room wants it. But, and here is where the power structure ISN'T off the hook, it IS happening because the white dude in the corporate board room doesn't CARE enough to be active in STOPPING it. Why? Because in many cases, he thinks discrimination is sooooo last century. He listened to Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. He reads the words and somehow he convinces himself that we're already there.

Yes. Really. That's what anyone who talks about "Reverse Discrimination" about affirmative action is saying. They may ADMIT to YOU that there's still discrimination but, in the immortal words of John Roberts, "The way to end discrimination is to end discrimination." But you know what campers? If right after you say that you make it harder to PROVE discrimination, if your only contact with affirmative action seems to looking for ways to tear it down, and other than that you spend NO TIME dealing with the problems of discrimination, then you aren't saying "The only way to end discrimination," (against blacks and Latinos and native Americans), "is to end," (all forms of), "discrimination," you are ACTUALLY saying, "The only way to end discrimination," (once and for all), "is to end discrimination," (against whites, which the only remaining form of discrimination).

Look, if to disadvantage whites in the hiring process or the admissions process is "discrimination," the clear corollary is that non-whites are not suffering discrimination. Because if non-whites ARE suffering discrimination then affirmative action is STILL fulfilling it's original function: to level the playing field between whites and others with regard to schools attended or jobs filled.

So, if as everyone knows and has proved with scientific studies, hiring and admissions bias DOES still exist how could one POSSIBLY believe that affirmative action is discrimination? The only method I can see is defining discrimination down. What can we point to as an absolute 100% success in the last 50 years against discrimination?

Strange Fruit.

It's been a long time since a black community woke up to find one of their own hung from a tree for the crime of: looking at a white woman funny, sassing a white man, drinking from the wrong fountain, etc. What an accomplishment! We should give ourselves a round of applause that white men can no longer kill black men with impunity, certain that a jury of THEIR peers would never convict.

This is where the fainting violets amongst you might want to avert your eyes.

What a fucking GREAT accomplishment; "We don't do the shooting ourselves." Give yourself a pat on the back!

So, apropos of my comparison that in the conservative mind "Being made to look at a Democrat's placard equals Rosa Park's being told to go to the back of the bus," we can NOW add, "My kid not getting into law school because that slot went to a black kid equals that same black kid getting strung up in a tree and fucking LYNCHED."

Jesus Christ On A Crutch, what the FUCK is wrong with these people? How unbelievably self-centered do you have to be to not notice how unequal that equation is??

If you think affirmative action should be ended, I had better see some MAJOR equality work, Mother Teresa level work, or you're just a goddamn bigot.

OK, all safe for your tender virgin eyes again.

All told, racism in this country is alive and well and arguments to the contrary are woefully misled at best and deliberately disingenuous at worst. Affirmative action is necessary because Mrs. Pedant's students are far less likely to get into a good school or get a good job than the Wee Pedant (To Be Named Later), and she's not even born yet. If you're white, you are still enjoying the fruits of the racism of your forebears. You ain't off the hook yet, Skippy.

**Update**
Bad grammar and gratuitous commas removed. I need an editor.

Rush Limbaugh, Hypocrisy and...Oh, who the fuck cares? The man's a MORON.

So, if you were exceptionally careful the last few days you might have noticed Rush Limbaugh calling any soldier who disagrees with the Deciderator a "phony soldier". Transcript, unedited, unredacted and unaltered of the pertinent section:
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RUSH: It's not possible intellectually to follow these people.
CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.
RUSH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.
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And I thought about blogging about it. About how pointing out this fat fuck and his polynoidal cyst have, oh, I dunno, FOUR FUCKING YEARS less service on active duty than I do. About how every time one of these right wing blowhards gets up and claims that all "real Americans" stand with them, and then try to claim that they aren't saying someone like me, who clearly DOESN'T stand with them, isn't a real American they advance the date I will even CONSIDER voting for a Repub off another damn decade. About the rank hypocrisy of the right's politicians calling MoveOn.org's ad "disgusting" and the chorus of cricket chirps about this one.

And I though to myself, Fuck It. I just do not have the time, the mental energy, or the patience to blog coherently about this particular case. The speed with which a post would devolve into nonsense as I banged my head on the keyboard repeatedly would be remarkable.

This incident simply reinforces my thinking that compromise is impossible. I seriously can claim that if Rush Limbaugh were bleeding to death by the side of the road...no one to call 911 but me, no one to see what happened...I would SIT AND WATCH HIM BLEED TO DEATH. I'd tell him exactly why his life was pumping away while I watched. If he begged, I'd laugh.

But then, I'm bloodier minded than most of you. As the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Pedant has said on a number of occasions, the creepiest thing she knows about me is this: I spent my time on active duty in a line artillery battery with nuclear capability and made a conscious decision that I could start a nuclear war if in circumstances where the order was lawful and appropriate*. The fact that I decided, cold-bloodedly, that I could destroy the world under the proper conditions bothers her. I can't understand why.

What it means, along with my tendency to hold grudges slightly less long than the half life of lead, is that I really could just watch Rush die, and never think of more of it than if I were cutting my fingernails. Something about that man, and Ann Coulter, simply rubs me so much the wrong way that I would gladly sell tickets and eat popcorn at a gladiatorial match between them (my money's on the fat fuck over the stick figure whore by the way). In fact, much like a Yankees/Mets World Series, I'd be rooting for injuries, preferably fatal ones.

I'm not looking for praise or horror. I simply say this to illustrate how gobsmackingly TIRED I am of the constant verbal and written diarrhea promulgated by this guy. At some points words simply fail me, I realize how unutterably different a world view I have from right-wing true believers and I simply cannot tolerate an open-minded attitude to my fellow Americans on the right. I'm tired of even trying to understand them and I wish they would all just GO AWAY. I'm done with them.


*For strategic, foreign policy and military theory reasons too numerous to go into, by FAR the likeliest route to Nuclear Holocaust during the Cold War was the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads, by some unit just like the one I was assigned to. My wartime position in the Fulda Gap just about ENSURED that, had a nuclear war broken out in the years 1989 to 1991, I had a, say, 1 in 50 chance of being the "guy who started it."

The Email That Started It All

Below is the email that led to "Blog, blog, BLOG" requests...

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"Why Is Compromise Impossible?"

Because of batshit arrogant crap like this I find in Talking Points Memo: "Schlozman [a former US Attorney and head of several departments within Justice at various times] has further been accused of politicizing the hiring at the Civil Rights Division, famously commenting that he was replacing Democratic hires with "good Americans." It's this activity which the Department's joint internal investigation, led by the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, is probing."

You know why it's war to the knife, Repubs? YOU made it that way. Because of your "I don't wanna pay taxes, I don't wanna pay taxes, wah, wah, WAH!" temper tantrum, there are near 4000 dead US Soldiers in Iraq, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted (including several billion with a B in CASH simply LOST...these huge pallets of currency seemed to just "grow legs"), Iran turned into THE major regional power and now the Justice Department may require an actual PURGE...the kind with firing squads and last cigarettes...to get rid of the Young Republican Frat Boy Apparatchiks YOU'VE put there.

You'll be lucky if we don't just saw off the theocrat South and let it slowly devolve into a third world nation with crappy sanitation and babies running around naked with swollen stomachs based on its stated hostility to the scientific method as their engineers and doctors begin to think natural laws are open to church input.

If you don't understand the difference between George W Bush's corrupt, mendacious, TOXIC administration and mere doofery (a la Jimmy Carter) in a government, if you GENUINELY don't GET that this is one of the two worst adminstrations in history* (that's a FOOTNOTE guys, how many rants are annotated?) and you still believe "They're all the same, government is just like this, both parties do it" then sit down and STOP VOTING. The adults have to clean up the mess from your tantrum and they'd appreciate you NOT BOTHERING THEM WITH YOUR INANE WHINING while they work.

Until the last presidential election I still harbored hope that there were some ADULT Republicans we could work with, but apparently they've either left the country, became Democrats or Democratic Leaning Independants or just had a total ball-ectomy and have given in to the Bushies special brand of religion and hatred for the Constitution's civil rights provisions. No matter why, there IS no Republican, currently carrying water of ANY sort politically, that doesn't richly deserve contempt at this point, and who shouldn't be run out of office with extreme prejudice (I'm talking to YOU, Snowe, Smith and Sununu). Why is there no compromise? Because you people killed any possibility. Negotiating with you just gets us Lieberman. Time to get nasty.



*Depending on whether you think the Civil War was worse for the country than a total loss of geopolitical authority and "destruction by neglect" of the all volunteer military and hence our strategic position in the world...James Buchanan is neck and neck with Dub. Buchanan was worse for the country inside the country, Bush was worse for the country in the WORLD. You pays your money and you makes your pick. Given that the Civil War at least produced ONE worthy outcome, emancipation, I've gonna pin the medal on our current Idiot Manchild President. But if you think it's Buchanan, well, I won't derogate the choice.