Today's Gun Nut

It never fails.  Some jag-off with a small penis and a big gun shoots up a school and before the bodies are even in the ground, some other jag-off with a similarly small penis - but with a great big mailing list - starts jumpin' up and down screamin' about how all this horrible shit happens because the kids aren't allowed to pray in school anymore, and... wait, what?

From The Daily Mail, 12-21-12:

Horror as gunman executes woman while she decorates church for children's party in new shooting rampage that left four dead.

 From MLive-Flint Journal, 1-15-13:

Deadly church shooting at Flint funeral is widely ignored outside of Genesee County

There have been 20 or more Church Shootings in the last dozen years in the US.

And yes, I know it's not really about praying away the bullets; it's supposed to be about teaching the right values to the kids so they don't grow up to be shooters - but that's just the same ol' Authoritarian/Theocratic shit in a different package.  If the assholes in school don't get to pray and they end up shooting people; and the good people in all these churches do pray and they still end up shooting people - then don't we need to consider the probability that prayer doesn't have one fucking thing to do with it?

So what else ya got there, Skeezix?

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Music

One more from Melody Gardot - put on your headphones.

Music

Rumer - this is the studio version.

(the cover at Live From Daryl's House is decent too)

Today's Gun Nut

So, this Dorner guy, who's had years of training in the use of firearms, goes off his trolley and guns down some of his buddies.  Buddies of those buddies hit the streets looking for the guy - apparently with a little get-back in mind.

LA Times:

An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked nothing like the suspect.

Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others.

Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger.

"The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn't take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don't look like a large black man," Jonas said.

2 Latina women are very nearly killed.  These 2 Latina women - who were in a pickup truck that looks nothing like the one Dorner was reported to be driving - barely survive the encounter with some highly trained and experienced officers of the law.

But somehow, I'm supposed to feel comfortable with the prospect of being "protected" by hoards of random yahoos carrying semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity ammo clips.

We are so fucked.

Fugelsang

That Dodge Commercial (redux/update)

Updating a post from earlier this week:

God Made A Factory Farmer - watch more funny videos      

hat tip = JR

About The Drone Thing

As usual, Hayes gets pretty close to what it's about.



The main thing to remember is that process counts.  The US was set up to put Process in front of outcome.  If we take care in how we get to the conclusion, we stand a much better chance of getting to the right conclusion.  That seems pretty important when we're trying to figure out who's next in line for a Hellfire Anal Probe.

We gotta get this one right, and I'm not convinced Obama's gonna get there for us.  Seems like he's willing to do some good Democrat things (equal rights, gun regulations, etc) but just as you start to think he's really pulling in the right direction, he cuts back and does something like this extra-legal assassination-by-drone shit.

I guess I'm just really hoping he's trying to rearrange the legalities - not to make it easier to blast somebody we don't like - but to be a little more sure that we blast the right guy(?), and to be a little surer about knowing who pulled the trigger and why they targeted any given dude.

Also hoping this isn't just another cynical move to defang the usual Repub attacks on Dems as being insufficiently BadAss.

Today's HipHop

My 2nd son said, "Hey Dad - If you wanna know what the kids are listening to these days..."



First, if you're of a certain age, try not to think about Annie Hall right now.  And then you can stop wondering about shit like "history repeats itself" or " everything runs in cycles" or "the more things change, the more they stay the same" blah blah blah.  People say shit like that because for good or ill, there's some truth to it.

When Culture and Economy are all tied up together; and when both are driven by fad and fashion; and when things can change so quickly - I guess we have to expect a certain wastage left behind as we lurch along the timeline.

Is it the latest iteration of RetroChic, and do we call it Gleaning?  Or what?

This Is How We Do It

A little Journalism; a little Community Organization; a little Crowd Sourcing; a little Citizen Participation - pretty soon it starts to add up to that thing we used to call 'democracy'.

Slate has a gizmo that lets you put in start and stop dates to pull up the total reported gun deaths in the US.

Here's a partial screen shot of the chart showing how many Americans have died of gunshots in the 55 days since Newtown:

That's a partial look - it only includes the last coupla weeks, and it only includes the deaths reported by everyday regular people.  And notice that they haven't included the number of dead Americans in the last few days (because it takes a while to gather, confirm and publish the findings).

But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.

About 5500 Americans are dead because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In 12 years of war, 5,500 dead Americans.

In those same 12 years, here in the US, well over 330,000 Americans have been killed with guns.

Today's Oxymoron

"Reasonable Conservative"

Keeping in mind the immortal words of Ferris Bueler - "Isms, in my opinion, are not good".

This bit from Andrew Bacevich at The American Conservative is actually pretty close to what I've held to be true for a good long time.

Conservatives take human relationships seriously and know that they require nurturing. In community lies our best hope of enjoying a meaningful earthly existence. But community does not emerge spontaneously. Conservatives understand that the most basic community, the little platoon of family, is under unrelenting assault, from both left and right. Emphasizing autonomy, the forces of modernity are intent on supplanting the family with the hyper-empowered—if also alienated—individual, who exists to gratify appetite and ambition. With its insatiable hunger for profit, the market is intent on transforming the family into a cluster of consumers who just happen to live under the same roof. One more thing: conservatives don’t confuse intimacy with sex.

--and--

The key to success will be to pick the right fights against the right enemies, while forging smart tactical alliances. (By tactical, I do not mean cynical.) Conservatives need to discriminate between the issues that matter and those that don’t, the contests that can be won and those that can’t. And they need to recognize that the political left includes people of goodwill whose views on some (by no means all) matters coincide with our own.

So forget about dismantling the welfare state. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare are here to stay. Forget about outlawing abortion or prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives may judge the fruits produced by the sexual revolution poisonous, but the revolution itself is irreversible.

Of course, I have to diverge from some of his points (eg: his take on "Original Sin" is actually pretty good, but I've come to view it from the opposite perspective), and some of his agenda items leave something to be desired.

The thing that gets me is that here's a guy trying to make some sense of his own thinking, and to extricate himself (and his fellows) from having been lumped in with the screaming wingnuts of the GOP.  Hope springs eternal.