Wickemt

To liberals, progressives, peaceniks, social justice activists — whatever you’re calling yourselves this week: please don’t write and tell me that not all Muslims are Nazis, that you, personally, know some very civilized, moderate Muslims.

Those unicorn Muslims are irrelevant.

That Nazi flag flying proudly in an Arab settlement inside Israel is the true face of pan-Arab nationalism.

The so-called Palestinians — a national identity invented by the KGB for their Arab clients in the mid-1960s — have zero interest in creating a viable state.

Their primary interest is in destroying Israel, the Jewish state. The Arab Muslim love affair with jihad, a cult of murder, torture, and death, finds its apotheosis in the Nazi party. Thus, even as the Muslim world publicly denies the Holocaust, behind closed doors it celebrates the German genocide of the Jews and draws inspiration from it.

Note that the so-called Palestinians already have a state: Gaza, home to a variety of competing Islamist terrorist armies, including the Iranian militia Hizbullah. Naturally, the reichlet of Gaza is Judenrein. All too soon the members of its various terrorist groups — adherents of the religion of peace — will complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s Christians as well.

The best Israel can hope for in the foreseeable future is to manage the various IslamoNazis and their chronically unstable nations.

For at least the second time in five months, Arab residents of Beit Umar in the Palestinian Authority (PA) have placed a Nazi flag over a major thoroughfare where Jews pass in their vehicles.

Beit Umar is located between Halhoul and the Etzion Bloc, not far from Hevron.

Soldiers from the Haruv battalion in Kfir Regiment tried to take down the flag Saturday, but encountered difficulty because it was placed very high up.

A similar event took place at Beit Umar in May, when hundreds of residents of Gush Etzion who drove down Highway 60 were astounded to see an oversized Nazi flag flying next to a mosque in the Arab town.

In a recent key spech, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu quoted numerous historical sources showing that the leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the first half of the 20th century, Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was “one of the initiators of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe,” and that he was constantly encouraging the Nazi leadership to annihilate the Jews, throughout the war. He cited evidence that the Mufti even visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz with Adolf Eichmann.

“The Mufti is still a greatly admired figure in the Palestinian national movement,” said Netanyahu. “These are the weeds that need to be uprooted,” he said. “The root of the conflict is the deep resistance among a hard core of Palestinians to the right of the Jewish people to its own state in Israel.”

Source: Arutz Sheva

Just two weeks ago we discussed the dismal smog that had closed roads and ariports around Beijing during the recent holiday. The situation has got worse, far worse, since then. As Reuters reports (and the stunning images below show), choking smog all but shut down one of northeastern China's largest cities on Monday, forcing schools to suspend classes, snarling traffic and closing the airport in the country's first major air pollution crisis of the winter. An index measuring PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people. A level above 300 is considered hazardous! China’s leadership is concerned about air quality because it is a constant source of public anger.

 

Via Reuters,

Users of China's popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging site reacted with both anger and bitter sarcasm over Harbin's air pollution.

 

"After years of effort, the wise and hard-working people of Harbin have finally managed to skip both the middle-class society and the communist society stages, and have now entered a fairyland society!" wrote one user.

 

Other parts of northeastern China also experienced severe smog, including Tangshan, two hours east of Beijing, and Changchun, the capital of Jilin province which borders Heilongjiang.

Via EuroNews,

The World Health Organisation recommends daily levels of particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers to be no more than twenty. Anything above 300 is considered dangerous. Levels around 1,000 were recorded in some parts of Harbin. All schools were shut and the airport was closed.

 

Harbin is home to some 11 million people and lies in the northeastern Heilongjiang province of China. Other parts of northeastern China also experienced severe smog.

 

Visibility has reduced to only around 10 metres causing traffic jams.

 

China’s leadership is concerned about air quality because it is a constant source of public anger.

 

The smog is expected to continue for the next 24 hours.

 

This is the freeway... (spot the cars)

 

Via CTV,

(Eugene Volokh)

Last week, JAMA Pediatrics published Prevalence Rates of Male and Female Sexual Violence Perpetrators in a National Sample of Adolescents, which promptly hit the news (see, e.g., this USA Today story and this National Geographic story, among many others). The results, based on a survey of 1058 youths age 14 to 21, were shocking:

1. “Nearly 1 in 10 youths reported some type of sexual violence perpetration in their lifetime” — that means they had committed sexual violence.
2. Indeed, 5% (including 7% of the males) had either “attempted or completed rape.”
3. What’s more, of the “perpetrators of attempted or completed rape,” more than a third believed the “victim [was completely] responsible for what happened,” and most of the remainder believed the victim was “somewhat” responsible.

How horrible — 7% of 14-to-21-year-old boys and young men had “attempted or completed rape.” Who would have thought the fraction would be so high?

But then one looks closely, and what does one see under “tactics used” (a question asked about the last “perpetration” of “attempted or completed rape”)? Of the 49 perpetrators, 10 reported that they used physical force or threat of physical force; 10 more reported that they used alcohol, 23 reported that they used “guilt,” and 21 reported that they used “arguing and pressuring victim” (since more than one answer was possible, the amounts add up to more than 49). So 80% of the reported “rape[s]” involved neither force nor the threat of force, and 59% involved only “guilt” or “arguing and pressuring victim,” with no use of force, threat of force, or even alcohol.

So actually only 1% of the respondents had used physical force or threat of physical force to get sex. Another 1% used alcohol; this might involve what the legal system would label rape (e.g., getting someone so drunk that they became unconscious and then having sex with them), but certainly need not (e.g., giving someone some alcohol to loosen their inhibitions). The remainder of the supposed rapists or attempted rapists aren’t really rapists at all.

This gives us a better sense of how people likely perceived the questions that the researchers asked:

Youths were asked about how often they had ever done the following: (1) “tried, but was not able, to make someone have sex with me when I knew they did not want to”; (2) “made someone have sex with me when I knew they did not want to”; and (3) “gotten someone to give in to sex with me when I knew they did not want to.”

Item 3 was labeled as “coercive sex” (itself an unsound label, I think, especially when treated as a subcategory of “sexual violence”); items 1 and 2 were labeled as “attempted rape” and “completed rape.” And this could describe rape, if “made” referred to physical coercion, or coercion through the threat of violence. But it could also describe “making” someone do something by cajoling, nagging, or emotional pressure, where the target consented to sex even though deep down inside they would have preferred not do it (much like many of us consent to many things under the influence of “guilt,” “arguing,” and “pressuring,” especially when this involves someone we know and feel obligated to in various ways). And indeed in the great majority of incidents of supposed “attempted or completed rape” reported by the study, the respondents apparently viewed “made” to refer to such emotional pressure.

What does the study say to justify this definition of “rape” to cover such a vast range of behavior, including behavior that’s very far removed from what is normally understood as “rape”? Here’s the core explanation:

Some may argue that the definitions of rape and sexual assault in our investigation are too broad. Indeed, this may be why the perpetration rate among females is higher than might be posited. Rape includes acts beyond those in which the victim is physically overpowered, however. Restrictive definitions have potentially led to undercounting of sexual assault experiences. For example, in the National Violence Against Women Survey, respondents were asked whether anyone had ever made them engage in a sexual activity “by using force or threat of force.” Psychological coercion was not clearly specified even though there are multiple coercive strategies other than physical force that can be used in a rape. To ensure that comprehensive rates of sexual assault and rape are identified as well as to begin building the research base on female perpetrators, research needs to include a fuller spectrum of rape scenarios.

Well, of course rape “includes acts beyond those in which the victim is physically overpowered” — it also includes acts in which the victim is threatened with violence, which can indeed be labeled a form of “psychological coercion.” But it doesn’t include all forms of psychological pressure, just as robbery doesn’t include getting people to give you money using “guilt,” “arguing,” or “pressuring” short of violence or threat of violence.

Of course, much of the behavior reported by the study (beyond the actual rape and attempted rape) might be wrong for various reasons. Some might involve statutory rape, though that’s impossible to tell, given that the study doesn’t report clearly on the ages of the parties involved, or the age of consent laws in each particular jurisdiction. Some might involve illegal furnishing of alcohol to minors. Much might involve behavior that’s unkind, emotionally manipulative, and generally reprehensible.

But the great bulk of what the study describes isn’t “rape” or even “sexual violence,” and the study is misleading to label it as such (even if people who read the study’s text carefully will recognize just how overbroad the definitions are).

UPDATE: I originally read questions 1, 2, and 3 asked of the respondents (see above) as all referring to completed or attempted rape, but commenter Scott pointed out that a yes answer to item 3 was treated as “coerced sex” instead (though still a subset of what the authors labeled “sexual violence”). I’ve revised the post accordingly, but the analysis remains the same: The numbers I was using all along referred to people who were viewed as having committed “attempted rape” or “completed rape” (not the “coerced sex” population); “[y]ouths who reported attempted or completed forced sex were asked follow-up questions about the most recent event”; and the majority of them reported that the alleged coercion during that event did not involve physical force or threat of physical force — it only involved guilt, arguing, or pressuring without force or threat. Thanks to Scott for the correction.

Dr. J. was sent this infographic yesterday:


He found it quite informative, except for the lack of bias. He took to Adobe Illustrator and made some minor corrections in the name of balance; something we Sith Lords excel at:

(Stewart Baker)

It turns out that at least one Washington mugger is a little too well informed about current affairs:

An attempted mugging on Capitol Hill was thwarted Monday night by a quick-thinking victim — one who apparently keeps an eye on national security news.

The victim, who weighs a petite 95 pounds, explained to the assailant she was an intern with the National Security Agency. …

The victim elaborated further, warning the would-be mugger that the phone she held in her hand — complete with a pink-and-blue Lilly Pulitzer case — would be tracked by the NSA if she were to turn it over.

“I told him that the NSA could track the phone within minutes, and it could cause possible problems for him,” the victim recounted.

 

Smartest tools in the shed:

The closure of nearly two thirds of Europe's gas-fired power generation facilities by 2016 will lead to regional price hikes and make outages inevitable, Cap Gemini has warned.

UK households are already feeling the squeeze of soaring energy bills but a particularly cold winter this year could mean that 1970s style blackouts start to become a more regular occurrence again.

The consultancy's annual European Monitoring Centre for Energy Markets briefing encapsulates much of the crisis in European energy policy - one almost entirely of its own making.

Aggressive "Green" (read: "unreliable") energy targets and subsidies for the same have led to the impending shutdown of much of the UK's natural gas fired generation plant as non-economic.  Translation: government subsidies to alternative energy is so enormous that the fuel that powers fully a third of the US grid is withering on the vine in Old Blighty, as electricity prices skyrocket.

Philosopher Kings in action, right there.

But that's not the part that's so shadenfreudalicious.  This is:

Cheap gas in the USA has had a related consequence in Europe, the report notes.

"With this low price, gas has replaced coal as fuel in fossil fuels creating a surplus of coal in the U.S. market. This surplus was exported to Europe resulting in lowering coal prices by 30 per cent between January 2012 and June 2013. This decline has promoted the competitiveness of plants coal in Europe which has resulted in a much better utilization than gas-fired plants".

UK "Green" energy targets combined with the US boom in shale gas has led to where the UK is reverting to coal - with its higher CO2 output.  So "Green" policies designed to reduce carbon emissions have led not just to much higher electrical costs, but to increased carbon emissions.

Philosopher Kings.  But pay no attention, Citizen.  All will be well when these sorts run your health care.  And we have always been at war with Eastasia.  Fortunately, the chocolate ration was just increased ...

(Eugene Volokh)

The Religious Kidnapping-for-Hire Ring thread has brought up the old dispute about what the term “Jew” refers to. One commenter wrote,

“Jew” has been a racial (as opposed to a religious) descriptor for, let’s say, at least the last century, and there’s not much to be done about it now. “Jews” as a category includes “secular Jews,” who are a big slice of the pie.

Another wrote,

The problem, though, is that words ought to mean something. If someone said, “I’m a libertarian because I believe in socialism,” or “I’m a communist who thinks free markets are wonderful things,” people would justifiably wonder if that person has any concept of what those words mean.

If someone tells me that he’s a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, that should theoretically tell me something about his world view. In practice, it may mean nothing more than that he was born into that faith and is too lazy to actually think it through. So, when I take the position, as I do, that people shouldn’t call themselves Christians or Jews unless they actually believe the historical tenets of those faiths, that is not a moral judgment about their belief system. Rather, it’s a desire that they speak clearly and unambiguously so I know what they’re saying.

A third wrote,

Being a Jew means following the 613 mitzvah. If Judaism is a race, then liberal Jews are admitting that it’s okay to hang out “socially” with people of only one race. Which goes against everything those liberal Jews say in all other respects.

I’m in the first commenter’s camp (though I’d say “ethnic” rather than “racial,” to follow the more modern terminology, though in the 1800s “racial” used to include what we’d now call “ethnic”). As a matter of how the word is actually used, “Jew” and “Jewish” have two main meanings:

1. An adherent of one of the streams within the religious belief system called Judaism, an analog being Christianity.
2. A member of an ethnic group called “the Jews,” even if he is irreligious (and, in the view of some though not others, even if he has converted to a different religion), an analog being Gypsies, or the Irish in the sense of people of Irish extraction rather than Irish citizens. Note that the ethnic boundaries here are potentially rather vague, as they are for many ethnic groups. For instance, whether someone who is Jewish on his father’s side but not on his mother’s is seen as ethnically Jewish depends a lot on where he lives, how he sees himself, and who is evaluating his ethnicity and for what purpose.

In some languages, these words might be distinct — for instance, in Russian I was taught that a member of the religious group is generally called “ИУДЕЙ” (eeooDIEY, the root being the same as Judaism), and a member of the ethnic group is generally called “ЕВРЕЙ” (yevRIEY, the root being the same as Hebrew), though it’s possible there might be some slippage among the definitions. But in English, those two definitions happen to share the same word.

The second commenter seems to disagree, on the grounds that it would be better if the line were more sharply drawn. Perhaps it would, just as it might be better if “Indian” didn’t mean both an American Indian and a South Asian Indian, or if “sanction” didn’t mean both approve of and punish. But in the English language that we speak, the word “Jew” bears both definitions.

What’s more, the view that “Jew” refers to an ethnicity is actually an orthodox (and especially an Orthodox) view within the Jewish religion. I’m not religious, but I’m Jewish by ethnicity — and to Orthodox Jews, that makes me a Jew who doesn’t follow The Law, not a non-Jew. This makes it even less likely, I think, that the English word “Jew” could be stripped of either of the meanings.

The third commenter’s definition is even more unusual, I think. Observant Jews don’t follow it, since to them someone born of a Jewish woman is a Jew even if he follows none of the commandments. And non-Jews who primarily view “Jew” as a religious label don’t follow it, either, since to them Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism are streams of Judaism that are at least as familiar and legitimate as Orthodox Judaism (or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism).

The third commenter’s argument about the supposed inconsistency of liberal Jews is not sound, I think, since I don’t think that liberal Jews generally think that it’s improper for people to like to hang out with those who share a particular ethnic and cultural background. (I think here “ethnic” is indeed more helpful than “racial,” since it focuses on generally smaller groups that have generally closer cultural similarities, so that a desire to hang out with people of the same group is more likely to stem from affection for the culture and a sense of common historical bond, rather than from hostility to other groups.) But in any event it doesn’t tell us anything about the actual meaning of the word “Jew.”

To return to a point that I’ve often stressed, in other contexts as well as this one: A word means what speakers of the language generally see it as meaning. (I oversimplify slightly here.) If speakers of the language generally understand a term as meaning one of two (or more) different things, that word has two (or more) meanings. And even if the world would be a better place if the word had a narrower or more precise meaning, that doesn’t change the actual meaning of the word, however confusing that meaning might at times be.

I was intrigued by an article by a New York-based City Planner in the latest issue of Planning magazine (no link -- subscribers only). He was on a bicycle trip to Cuba when his friend dropped dead of a heart attack. “The experience, while traumatic, would take me into places difficult for a foreigner to reach.” Although Cuba has a reputation for excellent medical care he found “a country that was shockingly primitive. The medical attention my friend received was rudimentary, in a facilities that were skeletal.” He was “shocked at the worn, run down hospital corridors and the appearance of staff simply standing around, doing nothing.” He had to move his friend’s body into the hospital himself. “Parts of the hospital were dirty. To cite one vivid example: Directly across from the examining room where doctors tried to revive my friend was an overflowing toilet with a broken sink; there was no place for visitors to wash their hands.”

And yet, according to the article, "Cuba’s life expectancy matches the U.S., according to United Nations statistics.” Hmmm.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Cuba’s statistics are fraudulent. Although as I noted when U.S. life expectancy was found to be falling for certain sub-groups of the population, vital statistics – like murder for crime statistics – are the social measures that are most difficult to fudge, easiest to count, and least likely to be wrong.

The second possibility is that the U.S. healthcare is, for the most part, a waste.

How could Cuba’s life expectancy match the U.S.? Well, there is what they have. “While the hospital facilities I saw there were worn, public health specialists I interviewed in the U.S. said Cuba excels at primary care, including things like clean water, vaccinations, and neonatal care” the article reported.

And what they don’t have. According to the article “by American standards the traffic here was light. But it was amazingly diverse, mixing horse drawn vehicles with cars, as well as bicyclists and people on foot.”

Bicyclists and people on foot! Without the affluence required to buy and fuel machines to do the work for them, Cubans have to use their bodies to get around. And probably to do other things as well. Americans do not.

That reminds me of a passage in a book “Reinventing Collapse,” a humorous analogy between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the possible collapse of the U.S. economy, and how to survive it. The author underestimates the adaptability of capitalism, and its ability to shift from collapse to mere diminished circumstances, such as those most Americans are experiencing. But he does have some interesting things to say.

“Economic progress creates a ratcheting effect, by which what are at first comforts and conveniences gradually become necessities” according to the author. “True necessities are those few items found at the base of Maslow’s necessity hierarchy: oxygen, water and food in that order. The order is determined by seeing how long someone can stay alive when deprived of any of these few: a few minutes for oxygen; a few days for water; a few weeks for food. These are followed by non-necessities such as shelter, companionship, opportunities for sexual release and meaningful activities, such as exercise, play or work.”

“Turning the comfort/necessity dichotomy around,” the author of Reinventing Collapse wrote, “beyond the first three (air, food, water), the only true necessity for survival is discomfort. Deprived of discomfort, our bodies turn into a tender, marshmellowy mess.” The kind of discomfort one gets from exercise, which gets the muscles sore but makes them and the bones stronger, or heat and cold, which the body can acclimate to.

Another thing Cubans don’t have, according to the Planning magazine article, is meat, particularly red meat. The lack of beef is something Cubans are more likely to complain about than the lack of democracy. “Cubans are fond of beef dishes like ropa vieja, but it is difficult to obtain because most of it goes to tourists in restaurants that Cubans can’t afford. To the extent that they have meat at all, Cuban’s eat pork and chicken.”

That is their situation. Life is hard there, and there are many things they are forced to do without, but at least Cubans are not a “marshmellowy mess.” But what about our situation?

Under the pre-Obamacare set of arrangements, no American has the right to basic, preventive, primary care. Most received it under one program or another, through private but publicly-subsidized insurance contracts, or otherwise, but this is not guaranteed, and does not always occur. So the basic, dirt -cheap health care that is needed to get most people through most of their lives in good health is considered by our society to be optional, or at least optional for other people. And there are those who are apparently willing to throw the federal government into bankruptcy, and set off a downward financial spiral, to keep things that way.

Upon reaching age 65, on the other hand, Americans gain a right to force other Americans (or future Americans) to pay for them to receive nearly unlimited health care at a nearly unlimited cost, even if vast sums must be spent in order to achieve a few short years of constant pain, disability or dependence. Multiple courses of chemotherapy are made available until the patient can’t stand them anymore, even as the chance of a cure goes down. So are multiple surgeries for the cardiovascular system. And artificial knees, hips and other appendages. None of which are available to those of working age who cannot afford them.

Given this difference in priorities, it is likely that the similar average life expectancy of the U.S and Cuba masks a significant difference in the distribution of health by age. With Cubans far more likely to make it to age 65, in part because they are not a “marshmellowy mess,” and in part because they have a right to excellent primary care. And the Americans who make it to age 65 living far longer once they get there.

Not that anyone under age 55 or under today can expect to receive the same benefits upon reaching age 65 that prior generations have had. Because prior generations have been unwilling to pay for what they insisted on having., and voted for those who promised to tax them less and given the more. When one political party, the Republicans, had control of the White House and Congress it pushed through a huge increase in Medicare spending for today’s seniors, and put it on the credit card while cutting taxes. That same party later objected to any restraint on soaring Medicare spending for today’s seniors.

But with the federal debt soaring, as what were private debts are shifted to the public sector to prevent an economic collapse, that same political party demands drastic cutbacks in the health care today’s middle aged and young people will be entitled to when they get old. Because, even though they are poorer on average, they have “time to adjust.” The adjustment? If the age of Medicare eligibility is increased for those now age 55 and younger, as Paul Ryan and the Republicans have proposed, more Americans will die of curable conditions before they become eligible. In fact I personally know of two people who had a multiple bypass operation right at age 65, after becoming eligible for Medicare.

What is the point of view of the Democrats on the cost of Medicare? They want to pretend there is no problem for another decade, until the entire 1960s generation is already in the program, borrowing as much money as possible to put off the day of reckoning. And then slash benefits for those coming after not because they want to or planned it that way (they will say), but due to “circumstances beyond our control.” That whole passionate clash over ideology in Washington? Theater, about shifting the blame of screwed younger generations for what Generation Greed has done.

What if the U.S. was to take the opposite approach? Imagine that the federal government were to simply pay for all the inexpensive primary and preventive care that the National Institute of Health recommended, so that everyone would receive that level of basic care regardless of ability to pay? Instead of having a thousand funding streams, with some of those who were paying taxes for others to have unlimited corrective care falling through the cracks and entitled to nothing?

Take flu shots for example. If your insurance won’t pay for it, you have to pay to get one. But when people get flu shots they not only protect themselves from the flu, but through “herd immunity” they protect others. In fact, public health measures were not something the rich generously provided to the poor 100 years ago. They were something the rich IMPOSED on the poor, if necessary, to protect themselves from disease, and ensure a productive workforce. So why isn’t it the case that the federal government gives away vaccines for free, and charges people to NOT be vaccinated?

And at the other end of life, what if instead of increasing the age of eligibility for Medicare (after grandfathering in Generation Greed), the government were instead to limit the amount of time one would be eligible for Medicare to 20 years, allowing people to enter the program when they chose at any point after age 45? And include today’s seniors in the limit.

Once eligibility ran out, people would be entitled to preventive care, palliative care and perhaps hospice care, but not to unlimited drugs, surgeries, and radiology. If you got cancer, heart disease or suffered a stroke at that point, it would be your time to go – at home, not in an expensive hospital. Those who got Medicare at 65 would be ineligible at 85, starting now. Those who started at 45 would only be eligible to receive Medicare (and Medicaid) to age 65. Etc.

I’ll bet that under that system the differences in U.S. life expectancy among rich and poor would be much narrower. Life expectancy might go up, because a higher share of people reaching age 65 of 70 would more than offset people who no longer have a year or two added after age 80. And spending might be somewhat lower. But we would have to admit that all of us will have to die sometime, even the most selfish and entitled Americans, even Generation Greed. So why is it that everyone seems willing to condemn younger generations to a more and more diminished future and even a shorter and shorter life, but no one would ever suggest something like this?

In the meantime, let’s get back to that “marshmellowy mess” issue. More and more research is in the press extolling the benefits of exercise, but no one is going to prescribe it unless someone with power makes money off it. And prescribing it doesn’t mean that anyone is going to do it. In fact my health insurance company (or, more fairly, the health insurance company chosen by my employer) is prepared to subsidize membership in a health club, for those who have time to go to health clubs. But they won’t provide any subsidy for the fact that I ride a bicycle nine miles each way to work three or four times a week.

Why not? Because, I’m told, they have the health club take attendance to make sure that people show up, as a requirement to receive the subsidy. Which makes me wonder – how does Citibike track how many miles people are riding? Could whatever device they are using be put on individual bicycles as well, so people could qualify for similar health insurance subsidies?

That might be a good plan. Because riding a bicycle fits perfectly with the situation younger generations find themselves in, here in the United States. They can’t afford one automobile per adult, which is what Generation Greed insisted on. They won’t be getting as much health care. They’ll have to work and pay taxes for those who came before and those who have more power, while doing for themselves what those who came before had lesser people do for them.

In fact, their situation is similar to that of Cubans after the Soviet Union could no longer prop them up with cheap oil. Americans can no longer prop up their lifestyle with more debt, and will be forced to pay back the debts run up by others. On that Republicans and Democrats agree. But at least, perhaps, they can use their own bodies to get around on their own power, and thus not become a “marshellowly mess.” Although with the risk that others might “exercise their rights as Americans” and run them over in their motor vehicles, as encouraged by the New York Post.

Stay in shape as long as you can, so you can keep working and paying for Generation Greed. And after that, all you’ll get is medical marijuana followed by legal assisted suicide. And that’s if the Democrats are in. The Republicans won’t even give you that. If younger generations are those who can be legitimately disadvantaged to benefit Generation Greed because they have “time to adjust,” at least older generations can stop lying to them so they can start making adjustments.

© "The Flower" [3:35] By: Stoned Productions and Lava Jumper Studios

...and every advocate for marijuana legalization should make sure they do by sharing it with friends and family who are pro drug war or ambivalent about its effects.

"The Flower" tells the story of the government's violent war on drugs in a Dr. Seuss-style animated short:



But are the depictions in "The Flower" really fair and accurate?

This weekend at PolicyMic, I put together and published news reports, government data, and scientific studies that support each depiction in the cartoon.

Take a look and you'll see why "The Flower" should start with the words: "Based on a true story..."

Over at Reason, Ed Krayewski has a story about a particularly outrageous Catch-22 at the intersection of police lawlessness and modern free speech law.

NYPD Officer Craig Matthews complained about an illegal quota system for stops and arrests. As anyone familiar with NYPD culture could predict, he experienced retaliation from his superiors for doing so. When he sued, the NYPD hit him with an argument that's outrageous but very likely legally correct: it's your job to report misconduct, so the First Amendment doesn't prohibit us from retaliating against you for doing so.

Wait, what?

The Association of Lawless Broomstick-Fetishist Brown-Person-Groping Can't-Shoot-Straight Thugs has a point. Because their employer is the government, public employees have limited First Amendment rights to be free of employer retaliation for their speech. But in in Garcetti v. Ceballos the Supreme Court said that right protects speech on matters of public concern unless the speech is part of a job duty:

We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.

Thus in Garcetti the Court said a Deputy DA had no right to be free of retaliation for pointing out perjury in an arrest warrant application because doing so was his job. I explained how this doctrine works — and how courts have made an exception for professors at public colleges — in this post.

The result is that an entity like the NYPD can argue that its officers are required by their job to report unlawful activity by their superiors and fellow officers, and that therefore their act of reporting such misconduct enjoys no First Amendment protection. They may still enjoy protection under state or federal whistleblower laws, but not the First Amendment. (Whistleblower laws have their own issues, a subject for another post).

The district court's opinion dismissing Officer Matthews' complaint is here. The opinion is very likely correct under current Supreme Court precedent. I submit that it fails to confront adequately one massive problem with this doctrine: a public employer can claim it has a formal policy requiring public employees to report misconduct, while having an actual real-life policy of firing, retaliating against, and even brutalizing whistleblowers. Under this doctrine, as currently applied, the public employer's lie about its policy will protect it from First Amendment claims by whistleblowers. Whatever alleged obligation to report wrongdoing the NYPD may impose on its officers, functionally it has an unwritten doctrine of abusing whistleblowers. That doctrine is demonstrated in practice by case after case after case after case.

But Garcetti apparently permits the NYPD to indulge in a culture of lawlessness while claiming devotion to the law.

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Today’s AM fix was USD 1,255.50, EUR 929.59 and GBP 787.79 per ounce.
Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1,276.00, EUR 941.49 and GBP 799.50 per ounce.

Gold inched up $2.50 or 0.2% yesterday, closing at $1,272.70/oz. Silver slid $0.03 or 0.14% closing at $21.26. Platinum climbed $12.80 or 0.9% to $1,376.50  /oz, while palladium rose $0.09 or 0% to $711.59/oz.

 

Gold In USD, 3 Days - (Bloomberg)

Gold  snapped a four day losing streak yesterday but is under pressure again today. Gold traded in a narrow range overnight prior to aggressive selling that saw gold fall to $1,255/oz. Gold is hovering near three month lows despite the political shenanigans and impasse in Washington.

Gold, whose safe-haven appeal is usually burnished during times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, has failed to gain despite protracted wrangling over the fiscal deadlock in the United States.

It has dropped about 5% towards $1,250/oz since a partial government shutdown began on October 1 and this is, in conjunction with frequently strange trading patterns is leading to deepening concerns about price suppression.

The massive single sell trade on Friday, estimated to be worth a staggering $650 million, which knocked prices $25 lower in three minutes and the poor performance of gold despite the appalling political chicanery in Washington and the U.S. fiscal and monetary position is leading to more questions regarding price manipulation and suppression.

Alex Rosenberg, a producer at CNBC (click on link for story) wrote the following:

“Gold dropped $25 in two minutes Friday morning following what appeared to be a single massive sell order, and professional traders are now pronouncing the sale a deliberate attempt to manipulate the market.

At 8:42 a.m. ET Friday morning, a firm appeared to sell 5,000 gold futures contracts "at the market," meaning at whatever price was available. The massive order was more than the market could take at once and led the CME to automatically halt trading for 10 seconds.

Eric Hunsader of Nanex told CNBC.com on Friday that 2,700 contracts were sold, which triggered the halt, and that the remaining 2,300 were sold once the market resumed trading.
Since one futures contract controls 100 troy ounces of gold, and each troy ounce was worth $1,285 at the time of the sale, this party was selling some $640 million worth of gold in one shot. And it overwhelmed the liquidity in the market.

"Anyone with knowledge of the size and volume in the market would absolutely never, ever place a 5,000 [contract] sell [order] at market, because you could not estimate the offset price," said iiTrader CEO Rich Ilczyszyn.

If Ilczyszyn's firm were placing the order, he said, "we generally would piece the order in to work a better price." That's why he believes the trade was "an error."

Jim Iuorio, managing director at TJM Institutional Services, sees similarities between what happened to gold Friday and what happened Sept. 12, when a big gold sale at 2:54 a.m. ET similarly caused a trading halt and hurt the market.

"There is only one conclusion that seems logical regarding Friday's gold trade and the one from a month ago, and that's that they were designed to manipulate prices," Iuorio said. "They were slightly different, in that the one from a month ago was done when the market was illiquid in order to get the biggest prices movement. Friday's was done around the opening to ensure that there was maximum visibility." 
 

Gold In USD, 20 Days - (Bloomberg)

Meanwhile in Australia, Robin Bromby, veteran finance journalist, author and publisher wrote in The Australian (click on link for story) below:

OCCASIONALLY it's useful to be reminded that not everything in the metals markets revolves around China.

That country has an interest in lower gold prices (making it cheaper to buy up much of the world's supply) but Beijing seems unlikely to have been involved in "unusual" events on Friday in New York. Out of the blue, just after the opening at Comex, there was placed a sell order covering two million ounces, an order so big it triggered an automatic 10-second trading interruption (and a $US30 an ounce fall in the metal's price).

If you were to round up the usual suspects, your first instinct would be to pull in the Federal Reserve and other central bankers along with the funds that do their bidding. After all, gold is the enemy of the money printers. The more money being created out of thin air, the more people trust those yellow bars.

There was a huge order unloaded on October 1, too, and then we had that episode in April when, within two hours, 13.4 million ounces was unloaded through Comex. Someone is determined to knock the stuffing out of gold.

 

Gold in US Dollars 5 Years with Support and Resistance - (Bloomberg)

Gold’s price falls are very counter intuitive and suggests that Wall Street banks, either independently or in unison with the U.S. authorities possibly through the Working Group On Financial Markets  or the Plunge Protection Team, are suppressing gold lower.

This appears to be being done through manipulation on concentrated selling on the COMEX.

The Gold Anti Trust Action Committee’s (GATA long asserted claim that gold is being manipulated in order to maintain faith in the dollar and erode confidence in gold as a safe haven is looking more and more plausible by the day and appears to be going mainstream.

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As a follow up to our post the other day about progressive, anti-circumcision groups, here are a few panels from a comic book published by members of that movement in California.

Brace yourselves, this is deeply anti-Semitic imagery, reminiscent of the hate propaganda used by the Nazis, and currently a daily diet in the Arab Muslim world.

The comic book is called “Foreskin Man.”

The imagery is classic Jew-hatred. The Jewish man is swarthy with a prominent nose. He’s lit from below, like a movie monster. The hero is an Aryan superman, blond and muscular.

The ending, as you can see, is designed to open the tear ducts, as the hero kidnaps the child so he can be brought up, “intact,” as a non-Jew by a hot Aryan babe.

The anti-brit milah people frequently claim to be Jewish, as if this exempts them from charges of Jew-hatred. Most of them are lying. Those who are Jewish follow in the footsteps of the Hellenized Jews of ancient Greece who were so ashamed of being Jewish they endured painful surgeries to reverse their circumcisions.

Jew-hating Jews are as old as Judaism.

The anti-brit milah people claim to be against all circumcision. But as you can see from the comic book, their true target is Judaism. They have not, to my knowledge, published a comic book about Islamic circumcision.

Why?

Because if they did, Islamists would hunt them down and behead them.

In June 2011, the Jewish Journal reported:

The backers of a ballot initiative in San Francisco aiming to ban circumcision in that city have consistently maintained that their efforts are not anti-Semitic.

But the “Foreskin Man” comic book, which was written and edited in 2010 by the founder of a San Diego group supporting efforts to ban circumcision in San Francisco and Santa Monica, gives further credence to the accusation that so-called intactivists are in fact motivated by anti-Semitism.

“The imagery in ‘Foreskin Man’ is functionally Anti-Semitic,” Abby Michelson Porth, associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), said. “The motives of the proponents of this ban are questionable given their direct connection with “Foreskin Man.”

The story told in the second issue of “Foreskin Man,” which is available on its website, centers on the story of Sarah and Jethro Glick and their newborn son. Sarah thought that she and her husband had agreed not to circumcise their son, but Jethro had other plans. He secretly invited the villain, “Monster Mohel,” to circumcise “little Glick.”

On the website foreskinman.com, Monster Mohel, a bearded man with a black hat on his head and a tallis around his neck, is described this way: “Nothing excites Monster Mohel more than cutting into the penile flesh of an eight-day-old infant boy.”

After this vile comic book was made public, the initiative was defeated. But we are talking about San Francisco and Santa Monica—bastions of progressive ideology—so you can be sure these creatures will return with a more user-friendly, Jew-hating campaign.

H/T Elder of Ziyon

Short summary: Alexian Lien [name corrected -- hat tip to the commenter] and his family were driving down the Hudson Parkway behind a group of motorcyclists. One of the bikers apparently felt the family were encroaching on their "space" and so pulled in front of him and hit the brakes (it was no coincidence; you can see him looking back over his shoulder to gauge the result). Lien bumped him, and the rest of the motorcyclists began to attack Lien, smashing his window with a helmet, slashing his tires.

He gunned the engine, went over one of the motorcyclists, inflicting serious injuries, and the chase was on. They eventually caught up with him, and inflicted a serious beating

Now it turns out that at least five NYPD officers were among the motorcyclists, none of whom tried to stop the attack.

Yes, Bloomie, we know ... your police will protect us. You can reflect that it's a good thing the victim didn't have a gun, because this way there were no gun deaths to report.

Jonathan Franzen’s recent article on Karl Kraus and modernity makes one of those arguments whose real proof comes inevitably not from anything he himself offers, but rather from the flurry of responses it so hastily elicits, ranging in this case from wounded hostility to feigned disinterest. Vulture’s overview of the more than 6,000 word piece provides a useful demonstration of this phenomenon, claiming to document the essay’s trolliest paragraphs in such a way as to unintentionally reaffirm many of the melancholic reservations Franzen has toward modernity.

Start with the title, “Jonathan Franzen Still Doesn’t Like the Internet,” which both invites clicks while also conveying helpfully to the reader that what follows will necessarily be a shallow treatment of the topic at hand; a commentary on the person in question rather than the apparently scandalous position they hold. Then there’s the body of Caroline Bankoff’s post, which veers from attempting to reveal something about Franzen by concisely juxtaposing excerpt and quip, to righteous admonishment—surely Franzen has better things to do than “coming down on everybody else for liking their computers,” even if Bankoff has nothing better to do than aggregate it.

Franzen accuses modernity of having submerged America in a sea of techno-capitalist inspired, existential “restlessness,” the only escape from which is distraction and forgetfulness. Inequality grows and the earth warms and generations are severed from one another by the increasing rapidity of cultural change. What better way to greet Franzen’s apocalypticism than by meme-ifying the messenger and clinging oh so defensively to that shiny new iPhone, all while chanting through gritted teeth, “Same as it ever was. Same-as-it-ever-was?” If only Old Man Franzen would lighten up a bit. Take a selfie maybe and bask in the life-affirming after-glow of Instagram’s flattering “Rise” filter, or at least L-O-L at some cats!

Perhaps the Vulture piece, and others, chose to snark around the edges of Franzen’s essay because, as Maria Bustillos points out, so much at the heart of it is almost inarguable, either because it’s about Kraus, or Franzen, or the problems which plague America (and those countries globalized in its image). His digs at Twitter, Apple, and the ever more ubiquitous Internet are, she rightly notes, “little infelicities” which “shrink to nothing beside the incontrovertibility and importance of Franzen’s principal arguments.”

Another strain of discontent among Fanzen’s critics can be traced to the sickly level of attachment many of us have to our personalized, market-branded instruments of technological progress. This set of hostile reactions resembles the overblown protests of addicts in denial, responding to “I think we’re developing an unhealthy dependence on new information technology” with “Screw you, boorish old white man!”

Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times responded to the piece by comparing the number of times Franzen’s name appears in the whole of Google Books to the likes of Toni Morrison and John Updike. This shouldn’t be surprising though, since two things Internet writing is often great at are telling us nothing about anything and sly takedowns. Surely Schuessler meant to do something other than insinuate that Franzen’s discontent stems simply from the impoverished number of times his books and name are cited in a digital database.

After all, she couldn’t actually think that was the case after reading the following, right?

“Our far left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our far right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that markets have gone global, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction.”

Shuffle past the hyperbole for a moment and you get to one of the real questions posed by Franzen’s article: when progress is measured in chamfered edges and the ability to watch cat videos in higher resolution, where has modernity left us?

The essence of Americans’ fantasies about ourselves can be, for the moment at least, reduced to Steve Jobs –THE designer and THE entrepreneur whose product was nevertheless expensive and manufactured by wage slaves, whose business model is environmentally unsustainable and predicated on rapid obsolescence.

“To me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker,” writes Franzen, “may be how early and clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress.” Acknowledging this divergence is the difference between allowing that certain technologies make a better life possible, and falling into the trap of thinking that new technology is necessarily a part of that better life. Does Facebook become a tool for meeting up with people or a substitute for doing so? Does the twitterverse and blogosphere make civic dialogue more likely, or simply prevent people from actually organizing? Franzen is even willing to admit of his own prejudicial role in all of this,

“But a judgment like this obviously depends on what you mean by ‘humanity’. Whether I like it or not, the world being created by the infernal machine of technoconsumerism is still a world made by human beings. As I write this, it seems like half the advertisements on network television are featuring people bending over smartphones; there’s a particularly noxious/great one in which all the twentysomethings at a wedding reception are doing nothing but taking smartphone photos and texting them to one another. To describe this dismal spectacle in apocalyptic terms, as a ‘dehumanisation’ of a wedding, is to advance a particular moral conception of humanity; and if you follow Nietzsche and reject the moral judgment in favour of an aesthetic one, you’re immediately confronted by Bourdieu’s persuasive connection of asethetics with class and privilege; and, the next thing you know, you’re translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful.”

While this is certainly an indictment of Franzen’s critique, it’s also an indictment of those who so easily reduced the rest of the piece to “Franzen hates Internet.” Their infatuation is simply the inverse of Franzen’s own fatalism, grounded almost always in what they love about the techno-information age, and little if at all in how it has made the lives of various other people measurably better off. Some of them want to hitch WiFi hotspots to homeless people, but how many of them have devoted a #slatepitch or Wired cover story to what that homeless person thinks of making faster Internet speeds the cornerstone of the Great Society 2.0?

Franzen is even willing to take his self-criticism to its logical conclusion, admitting that he’s just like every well-off old white man who feels betrayed by the world when it turns out to be different from the one he’d always believed he would eventually inherit,

“Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.”

It’s here that Franzen gets lost in his own conceit, playing up the cyclical nature of personal (generational?) apocalypse without giving due deference to the fact that in only the last century were the “last days of humanity” actually made possible. Nuclear war could destroy the world, or global warming could make it eventually uninhabitable for humanity as we now understand it, outcomes that were not even conceivable during the height of Kraus’ disaffection.

And while America’s jobless, under-employed, and impoverished working class continue to struggle, in a country whose infrastructure is literally falling apart, and where equality of opportunity remains a distant mirage, who is helped by the fact that it’s easier than ever for Senators to play poker online during oversight hearings, and for Congressmen to disseminate pictures of their members?

Franzen is dismayed by literature’s impotence to affect these events, or stir readers to change them. You don’t have to like his books, or his pompous disposition, to see an urgency to the issues that motivate them.

 

The author is Mark Lawrence Schrad and the subtitle is Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.  This is a gripping and original book, even if it overstates its conclusions sometimes.  Here is one bit:

Shcherbakov — Stalin’s today drunkard — died from a heart attack two days after the Nazi surrender…at the ripe old age of 44.  While Stalin valorized him, Khrushchev and the rest of the circle “knew that he died from drinking too much in an effort to please Stalin and not because of any insatiable urge of his own.”  Likewise, Andrei Zhdanov — once thought of as Stalin’s heir apparent — died less than three years later at 52, to the end ignoring his doctors’ frequent warnings to stop drinking.  It was clear to all that this situation was disastrous both for their work and their physical health.  “People were literally becoming drunkards, and the more a person became a drunkard, the more pleasure Stalin got from it.”

…the use and abuse of alcohol is crucial to understanding the dynamics of autocratic rule in Russia.

What else do you learn from this book?  It seems that Raymond Llull, still an underrated figure, is the one who spread vodka-making techniques to much of Europe (he also discovered an early version of social choice theory in the 13th century, not to mention he advanced the theory of computation).

I liked this bit:

The financial needs of the early Russian state dictated pushing the more potent and more profitable distilled vodka over less lucrative beers and meads.  To maximize its revenue, the state not only benefited from its subjects’ alcoholism, but actively encouraged it.

As late as 1927, the state’s vodka monopoly accounted for ten percent of government revenue.

Gorbachev, by the way, was known as “Mineral Water Secretary,” because he did not drink like the others did.  Here is a joke from the book:

Q: What is Soviet business?

A: Soviet business is when you steal a wagonload of vodka, sell it, and spend the money on vodka.

From the Yeltsin years to the Putin years, the average Russian boy lost a measured eighteen percent of his muscle mass.

Recommended, and you can pre-order the book here.  Here is my earlier post, “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol.”

Do you ever find yourself arguing with liberals on the internet? Are you tired of people telling you about how awesome free healthcare is for the economy? Or how you should just shut up and pay your fair share because crack whores need iPhones too? Or how we should ban the super ultra-deadly assault rifle AR-15 shotgun Glock? Or been asked why do you hate old people, you cismale gendernormative fascist, hatey-McHaterton-hatey-hate-hatemongering racist?

Have you grown frustrated because arguing with the willfully ignorant is like repeatedly punching a really dumb cactus?

Well, I’ve prepared a handy checklist so you can accurately predict what your willfully ignorant statist will spout next! Have fun with this, as you can follow your friends arguments and play bingo with these. If you are new to internet debate, just find any kerfuffle on Facebook and see how long it takes for you to check most of these off. It is fun for the whole family!

This may come as a shock to some of you gentle readers, but I am politically opinionated.

Okay, never mind, but as one of the handful of politically outspoken conservatives or libertarians working in an entertainment industry that is overwhelmingly left leaning, at some point I became the voice of an angry generation. (in reality authors are about as evenly divided as the rest of America, but most of the ones on my side keep their mouths shut, but we’ll get to that when we detail Concern Troll Threats)

WARNING!

Left wingers who can actually produce a solid argument are to be treasured and debated fully (that’s sort of the point of debate). Unlike many of my liberal contemporaries, I don’t “manage” my blog comments until I have an echo chamber and my self-esteem isn’t predicated on how many sycophants pat my tender head while telling me how brilliant I am for standing up for some straw man cause de jour. I’ve got a bunch of regular left wing readers who can bring their A Game. I love them. Arguing with them, and honing my points against them makes my arguments stronger for the future.

Sadly, for every intelligent, articulate Eric Flint out there, most arguments against liberal group think results in a legion of poo flinging monkeys showing up.

This checklist is intended only for the willfully ignorant, banally stupid, sound byte spewers incapable of thinking through anything more complicated than a Facebook meme. The lowest form of debater is the pathetic crap sacks that can only follow this checklist.

WARNING 2!

If you are on my side, but this is how you debate, shut up. You’re making us look bad. Good arguing should consist of compelling rhetoric which is backed up with facts and logic. If your tactics are to shut down debate, you are an idiot. It should never be to shut down or scare off, but to WIN.

THE LEFT WING INTERNET ARGUING CHECKLIST

1. Skim until Offended
2. Disqualify that Opinion
3. Attack, Attack, Attack
4. Disregard Inconvenient facts
5. Make Shit Up
6. Resort to Moral Equivalency
7. Concern Trolling
8. When all else fails, Racism!

So let’s break this down so you know what to look for, and you can have a good laugh as people who have zero substance, critical thinking skills, or facts make fools of themselves!

SKIM UNTIL OFFENDED:

A poo flinging monkey never actually reads their opponent’s article (That could introduce them to dangerous badthink!). Instead they simply skim down the page until finding something that they can loudly proclaim you were offended by. Remember, being offended grants liberals super powers!

True Example: I would go through this big gun control essay, but the author said that he made a state legislator cry. What a terrible person!

Fascinating, since in that particular case it was because I was testifying about mass shootings the day after a mass shooting, and as I described how disarmed and helpless people had no choice but to hide and pray, she became very emotional… But hey, #1 is satisfied! No danger of badthink here!

This one is hilarious. For example, if you are responding to something from somebody who self-identifies as a democrat or liberal and you use the term, democrat or liberal, they’ll be offended that you are “using labels”. (note, you never see conservatives or libertarians who mind being labeled as such. Go figure).

Today I was arguing gun control, and I put a link to my exhaustive essay on the topic. One poo flinger was a champion of skimming, clicked the link, only saw the covers of my novels, and didn’t like that they were “men with guns and big breasted females” and that was enough to disqualify my years of experience on the topic. I think that might be a new record. Interestingly enough, authors don’t even get much input on covers, as that is up to the marketing people at our publishing house, but whatever, I’ve sold a friggin’ ton of books with those covers.

The thing to get offended by doesn’t actually matter. Remember, liberals are all about claiming victimhood, so anything that allows them to claim that sainted status equals victory.

DISQUALIFY THAT OPINION

This one is lots of fun. Liberals never want to argue ABOUT a topic. They want to argue about why your opinion on that topic doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter who or what you are, there is some reason that your opinion doesn’t count, and it doesn’t have to make sense.

Say that you are a man who thinks abortion is murder, well your opinion obviously doesn’t count because you’re a man! What if my wife said that? Well, her opinion doesn’t count because she’s biased because she has children. What if a childless woman said that? Well, her opinion doesn’t count because she’s probably religious. What if she’s an atheist libertarian who happens to believe that a fetus should be considered a human being and thus receive the same rights and legal protections as any other human being? Hurr… Derp… Don’t legislate my vagina! War on women! Quick, switch to another item on the checklist!

There are several subcategories to this one, as it is the most common tactic on the checklist.

Race, sex, culture, economic status. Say you want to comment on any social issue. Well your opinion doesn’t count because you’re not part of that race or culture or economic group. Usually the liberal you are arguing with isn’t part of that group either, but it doesn’t matter, because white guilt liberals are automatically exempt, and their soft racism allows them to feel good about themselves as they declare that other groups are too stupid to survive without their benevolent guidance.

How dare you say that gangster rap thug culture of single mothers on welfare isn’t the way to go! Your opinion doesn’t count because you didn’t grow up there. And if you did grow up there, well you’re not “authentic” or one of my personal favorites I’ve seen thrown around Twitter against black conservatives “house negro” which totally isn’t racist if it is said by a smug liberal.

The problem with that is that most poo flinging monkeys are white suburbanites, and when they try to disqualify you, and you stop them and say “but I’m not white” which is a problem for them. Obviously this is going to happen more and more as race is an artificial construct that really only matters so liberals can make you check a box on an EEOC form so they can continue to foist social programs on us. Since the poo flingers freak out when their opponent isn’t white, liberals invented the ultimate disqualifier of “privilege”.

Privilege is amazing. It is the new race card, because pick any topic and regardless of what it is or who you are, a liberal can say your opinion doesn’t’ count because you have privilege. What does that actually mean? Hell if I know. It is such a nebulous term that surely everybody has some form. It means whatever the liberal wants it to mean. It is the new Neo-Con.

So you are against some dipshit welfare program because you’ve seen first-hand how that culture of government dependence destroys the human spirit, well obviously you are privileged so your opinion doesn’t count. So wait, even if I was born into a family with dark skin and super crazy poor, and worked my way out of it rather than becoming a crack whore, I’m now too privileged to have an opinion? YES.  It doesn’t matter if you were born in a 3^rd world hell hole and were a boat person refugee, if you disagree with liberal group think it can only be because you have privilege.

YOU SOUND ANGRY: This is one of my favorite disqualifiers. Type up a 10,000 word essay going into a great deal of detail, with cites, and graphs, and research, and you could have done it completely dispassionately and some liberal is going to say “wow, you sure sound angry!” Boom. You’ve been safely disqualified. In reality, considering the shit we have to put up with, yes, I’m extremely angry, but I’m still right. What’s your point?

YOU KNOW TOO MUCH/TOO LITTLE: I love this one. My big gun control article was dismissed by many because I am an expert on the subject and was thus “biased”. I’ve seen doctor’s opinions dismissed on health care reform because they were “biased”. Gee whiz, wouldn’t you think that somebody who invested their life into a topic would have a strong opinion on it?

But this also goes the other way. Say you own a small business and think your taxes are too high? Well, you’re not a PhD in Economics from Yale turned democrat appointed Treasury Secretary, so obviously your opinion doesn’t count… So you can be disqualified for knowing too much or for knowing too little.

So how much do you need to know for your opinion to be accepted by a poo flinger? If you are conservative? The answer will either be too hot or too cold. If you are liberal? Well, then whatever you know is just right.

EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that I forgot one. The YOU SURE DID WRITE A LOT. Yes, because if you care enough to write something that covers all the pertinent information, that somehow proves that you care too hard, and thus your opinion should be dismissed.

ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK

The dumbest of poo flingers must find something, anything about their opponent and attack it rather than the actual topic or salient points. Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, nothing is off the table. I watched one on Facebook where one of my fans disagreed with a lib about Obamacare, and was attacked because of their profile picture “your kid looks retarded.” And yes, their kid was handicapped, but that’s what you get with caring liberals.

When you argue with a liberal online, no matter what you do, you’re doing it wrong. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. I make my living as a novelist. I get paid large sums of money to write books. I’m rather successful. But whenever I argue with a liberal on Twitter I’m not a “real” novelist. And because I write sci-fi/fantasy, I’m no longer allowed to have an opinion regardless of the long and varied career I had before that, which takes us right back to #2. I have witnessed this with many conservative or libertarian authors.

You’ll note that once any of my political posts go viral and it hits the lib blogs, there will be a deluge of posters all feeling the need to point out what a shitty writer I am (which is really funny since they’ve probably never read any of my books, but obviously, a conservative is going to write bad novels!)

And it isn’t limited to my field. I’m friends with some well-known actors. Same thing. Follow Nick Searcy or Adam Baldwin on Twitter for a few days. You’ll see. Doesn’t matter if you’re second billed on one of the top shows on cable, you’re a conservative, so you’re not a “real” actor. Doesn’t matter if you go to DragonCon and there is a line a thousand people long wearing Jayne hats wanting your autograph, you’re a conservative, so you’re not a “real” actor.

You’ll note that I just fisked a cartoonist. Note. I made fun of his ideas, his misconceptions, and his general idiocy, but I never made fun of his art, because the quality of his artwork is totally irrelevant to the worth of the ideas.

Another fun part of this one is the following scenario:

Liberal 1: Attack, attack. ATTACK!

Liberal 2: Attack attack, attack attack!

Conservative: Defend.

Liberal 1: How rude.

Liberal 2: Indeed, how rude.

Liberal 1: You Sound Angry.

DISREGARD INCONVENIENT FACTS

This one is really self-explanatory. It goes hand in hand with our next item on the checklist of Make Shit Up. So you see a liberal post something false. You post the truth. They ignore it. Say that you post a link to an article. They will find a reason to dismiss it. “The Drudge Report? That’s not a *real* newspaper!” So you post the same story from when the WaPo got around to finally copying Drudge a month later. They ignore it.

A subnote on disregarding inconvenient facts. You can be the leading expert in the world on some topic, but if you are arguing with a liberal then you will get “That’s anecdote, not evidence!” or “Link or it didn’t happen!” But the minute that you are quoted in Salon or Mother Jones, it magically turns into evidence. Crazy how that works. While arguing about Obamacare I could truthfully cite the regulations and hoop jumping I had to do for my company of 200 people, and how my equivalent at the company across the street was cutting all their 500 employees back to 28 hours a week because of Obamacare. That’s anecdote. A liberal comedian makes a video about how awesome Obamacare is with emotional music, totally evidence.

So let’s say there’s a new study showing that Japan has fewer violent crimes and fewer guns than America, so the liberals cite that these apples and oranges prove gun ownership equals more crime… They disregard the fact that we’re so socially different that you could flood Japan with AK-47s and their crime rate probably wouldn’t change, and then they’ll disregard any apple to apple comparison like El Paso’s crime versus Detroit’s’. Large cities, similar in population, both ethnically, economically, and socially diverse, only El Paso (right across the border from one of the deadliest crime cities on Earth) has lower crime, but more gun ownership than Detroit (right across the border from big peaceful Canada) with its draconian gun laws… Ignore. Or do Houston versus Chicago. What? I couldn’t hear you. Jamie Foxx was talking about his expertise in use of force laws.

MAKE SHIT UP

This one can get pretty crazy , but if they’ve made it this far down the checklist things are getting desperate, might as well go for the gold.

There are a few levels of this. The easiest one is taking the most absurd batshit insane person they can on the right and putting them as our poster child “Republicans don’t believe in dinosaurs and think the earth is flat and religious people hate science and homeschooling will make children into racist bigots who wage a war on women stay out of my vagina!” This is your usual straw man stuff. Fairly typical.

Then you’ve got the propaganda accepted as fact. Here we are years later, the ACA is going into effect, and millions of us have already had to deal with it, we’ve seen costs skyrocket for three years in a row, we’ve seen the doom and gloom come to pass, we’ve seen the jobs switching to 30 hour work weeks, yet still, STILL you run into people on Facebook ignoring reality and telling you about awesome stuff the ACA is going to do, even though they are talking about hype from when it was getting passed, which never made it into the actual bill.

Then you get into things which are simply flat out lies. As a gun guy, pick any argument involving the technical and legal aspects of building, buying, or using firearms, as reimagined by somebody huffing paint.  But if you’re a liberal, and you just believe hard enough, then reality doesn’t matter, just how hard you feel about something.  I saw where one recently where a particularly dumbass sci-fi author actually told an audience in Australia that Stand Your Ground laws were to make it legal for white people to just shoot blacks whenever they felt like it…

Wow.

RESORT TO MORAL EQUIVALENCY

Find something, anything bad as done by a liberal? “Well, republicans did it too!” Did the president do something stupid? “It is Bush’s fault.” So? Was it okay then? No. Then it shouldn’t be okay now, hypocrite. And of everything on the checklist, this is the one that I’ve seen people on the right be guilty of the most often. Do republicans suck too? Hell yes. They’re pathetic (most often when they’re trying to be democrat lite, oh, freaking retire already, John McCain). So sometimes this is totally true.

But the interesting thing is that this goes hand in hand with Make Shit Up, in that oftentimes it isn’t even true, and they’re not the same on that issue, but it is parroted so often that it has become an accepted truth. Even well-meaning people fall for this trap. Though it can be fun when they automatically regurgitate “well, both sides are the same.” And you come back with “Okay, name one time the republicans have done that.” And they sit there and go “Uh…. Hmm…. Uh… Oh, look Jim Carrey made another gun control video!”

So it now looks like Treasury Secretary Geitner was briefed on the IRS specifically targeting opposition conservative groups prior to the election, so this scandal goes straight to the top. “Bush did it too!” they bleat.  No… No, actually he didn’t. And if he had, the stupid press would have done their stupid job and actually exposed it, rather than just being a propaganda mouthpiece for the administration, you dipshit. To ether party, you can’t whine about statist 1984 nonsense when the other guys do it, and then do the same thing bigger when you end up in charge.

But that check isn’t as big a deal, because elected democrats mostly suck, and elected republicans only half suck, so half the time it’s true.

CONCERN TROLLING

A personal favorite. There are two types. The classic Concern Troll and the Boycotter.

Concern Trolling is a tool to enforce the illusion of monolithic group think where the liberal responds like they care. They care so hard about you, poor misguided right winger, and they care that you are saying these horrible, nasty, awful, racist, mean, things. What will everyone think of you?  What would your friends think if they knew that you don’t like giving a third of your income to support crack whores? Why, they’d think you were a horrible person.

One of my favorites is “I read your article, and it like totally would have swayed me to your side, BUT the way you called liberal ideas liberal and talked about people who are liberals by using the word liberal just ruined the whole thing. You’d be more effective if you used no labels.” Or substitute whatever bullshit there you want, but the important thing is that this combines dismissal and offense, all wrapped up in the fact that they’re not a mindless poo flinger at all, but are rather motivated by how much they care about you.

Horse shit.

These drip with self-righteousness. But it is rather effective, especially on people new to the whole debating thing, or who are easily frightened and don’t want to rock the boat. You see this when you happen to be a relative or coworker of the poo flinger, and they try to scare you on Facebook. Because of course, nobody is a better arbiter of what is correct and good than people who subscribe to the same political philosophy which eventually spawns gulags, purges, and concentration camps.

The Boycotter is rather specialized Concern Troll that usually only gets used on those of us who have some sort of public persona, like entertainers or business people. Because the left absolutely hates dissent, they will try to squish anyone who gets out of line.

“I came to your blog/facebook/twitter because I’m SOOOO very interested in your book/movie/product, but then I found out what a horrible, awful person you are, so now I’m never going to buy any of your stuff ever again. You should totally never share your badthink again because it will totally scare away the legions of people like me and you’ll starve in a ditch.”

Uh huh… How about I just keep on producing the best quality work I can and keep on sleeping on a giant pile of money? The thing is this type is super effective. I’ve been shocked how many conservative Hollywood people I’ve met who keep a low profile about their beliefs out of fear of getting blackballed. For every openly conservative writer like me there are probably half a dozen who share my opinion who won’t talk.

That’s what the poo flingers want. Screw them.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, RACISM!

The most obvious one of them all, because if you are going to argue with liberals you WILL be called racist. It is inevitable. However that is good, because it means you just won. It is the final line on our checklist for a reason.  Just keep in mind that you’re in good company. Charlton Heston marched across the Selma Bridge with Martin Luther King, and he was smeared as racist for believing that the 2^nd Amendment applied to everyone equally.

The topic probably doesn’t even have anything to do with racism. Don’t matter. You disagree with liberals, you’re a racist. The clever poo flingers will snidely insinuate it, while the dumb ones will screech it at the top of their lungs. This one has been epidemic since we elected Barack Obama, and obviously the only reason you could hate a weak foreign policy, stupid gun control proposals, a shitty economy, a ridiculous bloated monster of a healthcare law, and the general corruption of our federal apparatus, is because you don’t like a black president.

You may not have had a racist thought in your life, but it won’t matter. A good author friend of mine was smeared as racist because he was against some stupid liberal nonsense even though he’s been married to a black woman for 20 years and has biracial children, and worked with every ethnicity there is during a career in the military.

I mentioned Nick Searcy above. He fights with liberals on Twitter for fun and has made it into an art form. At least a couple times a day, Nick will be called racist—usually for not being an Obama fan is enough—and he always posts the same thing. “Don’t tell my adopted son that because he’s black and thinks I love him.” Outspoken conservatives get uselessly tarred as racists so damned often that you can have the response ready as a cut and paste. Shit. I used the word tarred. I guarantee some liberal just thought that was racist (probably because they don’t know history).

Back in the olden days calling somebody racist was the liberal nuclear option. It was what they would use to instantly squash dissent, because most people are decent human beings who think actual racism is repulsive, so their opponents would recoil and backtrack, desperately trying to avoid giving perceived offense. The problem was that they overused it. It lost all its meaning. And people like me got sick of their shit and transformed it into a joke.

For years and years they kept calling people racist for things that clearly weren’t racist even if you squinted at them really hard, so now when real racism occurs it is lost amid the noise of poo flingers crying wolf.  The definition of racist turned into anybody who has won an argument with a liberal. They were so used to the word having such power that they pulled it out at every opportunity. 1/8^th black Peruvian Obama supporter who’d never done a racist thing in his life shot a young black man in a fairly obvious self-defense shooting? You’d have thought it was the second coming of Robert Byrd (D).

You think every law abiding citizen should have the right to have a gun to defend themselves? RACIST. You think Eric Holder illegally shipping thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels in an illegal effort to frame gun dealers to promote more gun control is bad? RACIST. Because obviously I only dislike felony gun smuggling when the Attorney General is black?  EXTRA RACIST. But what if those guns were used to murder hundreds of Mexicans, including innocent women and children? RACIST. Because obviously liberals only care about Mexicans when they are an easily exploitable near slave class with no rights brought across the border, and made dependent upon democrat social programs so that they can be used to fraudulently increase democrat voter turnout. HOLY SHIT I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW RACIST THAT IS!

And off topic, but that reminds me that I really need to write a blog post about the most racist term still in use, People of Color. Man, I hate that term so very much. It is just Colored People backwards, but of course, liberals are all about grouping people into easily manageable victim blocks and don’t really give a crap about the content of anyone’s character, so this shouldn’t exactly be a surprise. And they love individuality, as long as you totally agree with them, because otherwise, out comes the Check List!

THE MORAL OF THE CHECKLIST

I often get people who agree with me posting stuff like “well, you wasted your time on that doofus!” Ah, but you miss the point. You don’t defend your beliefs in the hopes of convincing the willfully ignorant. That’s a lost cause. The willfully ignorant aren’t to be convinced, they are to be mocked. Their flaws are to be pointed out until everyone around them realizes how full of crap they are. Remember that argument is theater, and your performance isn’t aimed at your opponent, but rather at the audience. If you choose to follow the Fisker’s Path, your goal is three fold.

Give ammo to the people already on your side.

Convince the undecided .

Allow your opponent’s to display their petty ignorance to the world.

EDIT 2: WARNING! Somebody suggested making this into  drinking game… If you do that, YOU WILL DIE! If you took a shot each time you saw one of these on Facebook you’d be dead in less than twenty minutes.  :D

EDIT 3: Some fun new ones were pointed out on Facebook that I forgot. These all happened in a single thread! They fall under Dismiss. If your profile picture has you holding a gun? Instant Dismiss! A PFM actually looked at my bio and pointed out that I only went to a state college! Dismiss! (by the way, if you are an adult and you are still listing going to college as some sort of achievenment you probably suck at life).

And a particularly vile one, if you are active duty military or your profile pic shows you in uniform, then you probably must have PTSD or a Traumatic Brain Injury, you poor Bush tool victim. Dismiss! That’s really disgusting, but not surprising.

EDIT 4: Read through the comments. Hilarity ensues as a PFM comes in, hits all the points, and then calls me racist. We’ve even got object lessons.

May 5, 2011 the Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff's Office SWAT team put on their battle-rattle, climbed into their armored personnel carrier, and did an early morning raid on a suspected drug distributor's home.  Said suspect was José Guerena, a combat veteran of the Iraq war who worked  third shift at a local mine. Seeing armed men in their front yard, Guerena's wife apparently woke him. He put his wife and 4-year-old son in a closet, retrieved his AR-15 rifle, and prepared to confront what he thought were home invaders.

When the Sheriff's deputies broke open his front door, they saw him in the hallway, armed, and opened fire. Seventy rounds were expended, 22 of them striking Guerena. He never received medical attention. It is believed that he lived for approximately an hour after being shot.

Here's helmet-cam footage of the incident. Check the "professionalism" of the PCSD SWAT team:


Three months after the raid, in which no drugs were found in the Guerena home and no evidence of wrongdoing on his part, no one had been charged with any crime. Guerena's family sued for $20 million. They have been awarded $3.4 million.

José Guerena's crime, for which he paid with his life? Having relatives involved in the drug trade.

Had they wanted to, the Sheriff's department could have arrested him at work and then searched his home at their leisure.  Instead, they suited up and did a "raid."  And an innocent man is dead because of it.

And as Radley Balko documents, this is not an exceptional case, except possibly for the settlement.

This editorial was sent to me by a reader. Calling it an editorial is doing it a disservice, as it is really more of a letter to the boogieman written by a petulant man-child.

As usual whenever there is a mass shooting on the news, the ignorant come out of the woodwork to pontificate about a topic they know absolutely nothing about, setting up straw men and knocking them down, and matching wits with phantoms. This one was particularly obnoxious in its self-righteousness, but it is still fairly useful in that it demonstrates a lot of the defective logic that goes into the gun control side of things.

If you want a serious in depth discussion of pretty much every major point in the gun control debate, read this:  http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/  an article which was written based upon years of experience by a legally certified subject matter expert, which went viral, was read a million times in the first few weeks after it came out, and wound up on the national news.

(I’m going to refer to that link a lot, because it beats having to type out long responses to the same tired arguments over and over again)

Or if you prefer a bunch of emotional bullshit and logical fallacies, read Dear Gun Nuts by Matt Bors instead: https://medium.com/p/7fc34ed66268 an article which was written by a cartoonist who shot a .44 once (it was loud) and which will mostly be read because I linked to it here in order to make fun of it. Or you can save time and just read my fisking of it below.

As usual the original article is in italics. My comments are in bold. If you want to see his cartoons or graphs, they’re at the link above, but I’ll warn you that they’re about as clever as the article.

Dear Gun Nuts

 

I’d say I qualify as a Gun Nut. My full weapons/tactics/legal resume is in the first link above.

 

So, a few things.

 

After the first time I shot a gun, I couldn’t hear anything for two days. This is because it was a .44 magnum and because I was eight and not wearing any ear protection.

Speaking as a retired firearms instructor, your father is an idiot.

It’s a huge gun—the kind Dirty Harry used—and my dad had to help me hold it as I pulled the trigger.

Dirty Harry would have slapped your dad upside the head for not giving you any ear plugs.

The next day, he had to explain to my third grade teacher why the only thing I could hear was a loud ringing.

If the explanation didn’t start out with “Because I’m an idiot— ” it was insufficient.

There are right ways and wrong ways to go about your gun-having. (And your son-having.) My dad did do a good job of teaching me about gun safety once I was able to hear him speak words again. He even went and bought ear protection.

Wow. He’s father of the year. And as we’ll see as Matt’s essay goes on, he didn’t do much to teach his kids critical thinking skills either.

 Growing up around guns made me feel comfortable with them. So, gun owners, I’m not against you.

He says before he goes into an article about how gun owners evil and stupid.

For a while, the 60 percent of Americans who don’t own personal firearms had a hard time figuring out how to communicate in the jargon of gun people.

You still can’t. When you people try to speak “gun culture” you sound like a white upper class suburbanite attempting hard core gangster rap. It is just pathetic and everyone is laughing at you. You learned your jargon from MSNBC or the New York Times, sources which are about as reliable and unbiased as Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed.

But over the course of the last few dozen national conversations after mass shootings, we’ve all become armchair experts in arsenals.

Well, armchair expert. I’m an actual expert, which is why I can say with complete certainty that everything you go on to pontificate about in this letter is either flat out wrong or hyperbolically misleading.

Was the killer using hollow points or full metal jacket rounds? Big difference.

Nominally, but I say that as a guy trained on mass shootings and wound ballistics, not as a cartoonist who pulled a couple of terms off of Google.  My first link above goes into detail about ammo types.

Is there a collapsible stock on that Bushmaster AR-15?

And, pray tell, how does a stock that is adjustable a few inches for length of pull make that gun any deadlier? And Bushmaster is one brand of AR-15 manufacturer which is almost exactly the same as the gun produced by dozens of other AR-15 manufacturers. The AR-15 is the most common rifle in America. But Bushmaster sounds scarier than Stag, Smith & Wesson, Colt, DPMS, Armalite, POF, LWRC, Ruger, or many others because a Bushmaster is a type of snake… Or something…

Oh, he used Colt pistols instead of Glocks?

Wow. You were able to name two of the most famous pistols ever made? Including one brand has been around since the 1800s and another which is the most common handgun in the world? Did you just type the word pistol into a search engine? I bow before your armchair expertise.

Weird.

No. Weird would be having a mass shooting where the perp used a M1907 Roth-Steyr.

After every mass shooting—which is essentially all the time these days—

Actually, it isn’t all the time these days at all. Mass shootings are still statistical anomalies. (see my link above where I go into this in great detail) They get reported on a lot by a breathless media in the hopes of pushing a gun control agenda, when actually you are far more likely to be a victim of a regular crime, but you know that, because you’re the armchair expert.

gun rights advocates drag out the “more guns = more safer” argument.

Yep. Again, see my link above. This has been demonstrated time and time again, but why should we go with facts, reality, and crime statistics when we could get all spun up and emotional instead?

And yet: we’re still not safe!

By that logic, because people still die in car crashes, Matt wants to ban seat belts and air bags. Using the stats provided by even the staunchest anti-gun advocates, guns are used far more often to save lives than to take them. (broken record here, but the numbers are in the top link).

Despite having almost one gun for every man, woman, and child in the nation, peak safety has yet to be reached.

Interesting… His armchair expert education must have skipped the part where 12 out of every 13 mass shootings happen in Gun Free Zones, where every man, woman, and child (except for the bad guy who doesn’t care about the law or Matt’s tender feelings) is legally disarmed. It would seem that “peak safety” is certainly not found in Gun Free Zones.  

Now. You’re allowed to oppose gun control on grounds that restricting the ability to purchase a gun violates your second amendment rights and will leave you up shit creek without a Smith & Wesson when it comes time to overthrow a tyrannical government.

That’s really nice of you to tell me what we’re allowed to oppose, Matt.  

And I agree that many proposed gun control laws won’t do anything, especially patchwork ones put forward in response to mass shootings.

Yep. This is the smartest thing you’ve said all day.

But wait… Do you have evidence that ANY gun control laws accomplish anything? Go ahead and look, because if you can find some evidence the DoJ would love to see it, because they didn’t have any luck.

Most murders are committed with handguns and banning those is not even on the table.

Except for where handguns have been banned in America, and we’ve seen how that has actually worked out, since those places are all cesspools of violent crime and high murder rates.

Don’t forget, the mass shootings that force Matt to retire to his fainting couch are statistical anomalies. Most shootings in America are gang/drug/thug events. Last time I checked, the gun culture that Matt is addressing aren’t the ones shooting hundreds of people in beautiful gun free Chicago. The Gun Culture doesn’t tend to congregate in places where we can’t own, buy, or use guns, go figure, and the liberal dominated inner cities ran us out a long time ago with their annoying regulations. Yet, those places are still where people keep on getting murdered…  

That topic gets into the whole sticky wicket of drug laws, incarceration policies, economics, culture, politics, and race baiting democrats subsidizing the self-destructive thug life, and addressing all that stuff is really HARD. On the other hand, insulting law abiding gun nuts (who aren’t named T-Bone and who won’t pop a cap in you for dissing them) is super EASY.

At least Matt is smarter than the average low information voter who thinks that “assault weapons” kill zillions, and thus need to be heavily regulated, when according to the FBI only 367 of our 12,664 murders in 2011 were committed with any rifle, which means you’re more likely to die of autoerotic asphyxiation than to get murdered with an “assault weapon”.

Some dudes wrote the Second Amendment on piece of paper a while ago and we all have to live with the result of that.

There are a couple hundred other utopias that you can move to where you don’t have to put up with that dastardly “piece of paper”. Meanwhile, most of us are rather fond of our founding documents which put limitations on the ability of our government to infringe upon our rights and liberties.

But you know what we can do in lieu of new laws?

Oh, please do share. I’m giddy with anticipation.

Change our culture so fewer people die every year.

You should share this wondrous message in beautiful gun free Chicago or Washington DC. That should knock out most of our deaths right quick. Give T-Bone a call. I’m sure he won’t curb stomp your face in or anything.  

Gun people, we need to talk about your behavior a bit.

Because obviously, 90,000,000 American gun owners haven’t done anything wrong, so it is time to get all preachy at them. Americans love that shit.

First of all, can you stop saying video games cause violence? They don’t. Countries where people play way more video games than we do have lower rates of gun deaths. The thing about violent video games is they don’t feature characters going around killing people with video games. They use guns. Or Hadoukens or Babalities or stuff.

This is a straw man. Most gun owners don’t bring up video games after a mass shooting. The NRA president brought it up during a press conference last December and it turned into a joke because newsflash, gun owners play video games too.

In fact the only thing I saw mentioning violent video games in connection to this latest mass shooter was an interview with one of his friends, who said that the guy seemed really normal, though he did enjoy violent video games. However, this is the same interview which revealed the bad guy was also a self-proclaimed liberal and big Obama supporter. So, obviously a huge member of the gun culture there!

On that note, if you want to do something really super uncomfortable, go through all the mass shooters you can find and see where they self-identified on the political spectrum…  I did this back after the media was swooning in the hopes that Gabby Giffords had been shot by the Tea Party. You’ll find that far more of them would be a lot more comfortable occupying Wall Street than hanging out at the SHOT Show.

Hey, it’s time for a chart break!

Yes. There is a chart. Because obviously the only possible comparable data point between the crime rate of the giant, ethnically, socially, and economically diverse US with the tiny, relatively homogenous Netherlands, is that we both really dig Call of Duty.

A more interesting chart would be how many of these mass shootings took place in legally mandated Gun Free Zones. I’ll save you some time. Draw a capitol L.   

Now on to my second point: guns kill people.

Oh, and what a stunning point it is!

They are not made for pressing sandwiches or sopping up grape juice spills in the kitchen.

No shit? I’ve totally been making sandwiches wrong.

Guns are specifically designed to propel bullets through a person’s body at a velocity sufficient to kill them.

Which is odd, because when Matt was out getting permanent hearing damage from his father, he never specified that they were actually shooting people.

Saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is not an argument for more people having guns. You just said, sir, that people kill people. Guns are inanimate objects full of deadly potential. How do we help them realize their destiny to be peaceful, non-lethal objects and keep them away from people?

That is some convoluted shit right there.

Here, let me help you out armchair expert. Yes, we are fully cognizant that guns are dangerous and can poke high velocity holes into people. That is sort of the idea behind having a firearm as a tool. Guns are extremely effective at what they were designed to do, which is why when you really need one (like say for example, a bad person is really intent upon causing you grievous bodily harm) you really want to have a gun.

You pick the right tool for the job. If the job is to protect myself from a perpetrator with the ability and opportunity to cause serious bodily harm, acting as an imminent threat to myself or a third person, I’m not going to reach for a sandwich maker.

Lastly: You’re carrying around an assault rifle in public because…?

Because nothing makes a real American want to do something more than having a nosy busybody tell them that that can’t. The handful of Gun Culture guys walking around with a slung rifle at a political rally are the equivalent of the feather boa and black electrical tape clad dancing dudes at a gay pride parade. Both of them are saying “We’re here. Deal with it, bitch.”

I know you are not out on a killing spree, just a nice stroll, but it’s… sort of hard to tell?

Sure, I suppose if you go through life as a gutless pussy, then it would be hard to tell. For most of us we can see the person open carrying and ascertain by their activities if they
are up to no good or not. Odds are they are completely normal. If they intend to do evil and they start shooting the place up, then you can hide under something and pray to God that somebody from the Gun Culture shows up in time to save your pathetic ass.

And when I say the Gun Culture has to come save you, I mean the responders too. Once again, read the other link. The cops that can actually shoot well? The cops that end up as the firearms instructors? Guess where they fall? Yep. Gun Culture. I spent a decade working with that crowd. I can count the number of gun grabbing statists on one hand.  

Shootings that are stopped by regular folks have a much lower body count than shootings that are stopped by cops. That’s simply a matter of response time. (the big article goes into the psychology of mass shooters and how their fantasy bubble is popped) Either way, the best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. People like me just like to cut out the middle man and get faster service. That’s the difference between my culture and yours, Matt. We take responsibility for ourselves.

Insisting on carrying your gun in public is like asserting your free speech rights by screaming at everyone you see.

Here, let me help you out, Matt. As somebody who taught CCW classes and certified over 3,000 people to carry firearms, I’m not a proponent of open carry for purely tactical target selection reasons. However, I do understand why some people choose to open carry. It is a giant “Fuck you” to people like you, and that I can applaud.

No one is saying that isn’t “legal,” but we’re not looking at you like you’re Rosa Parks. More like a total douche.

I’m sure you know that feeling well, but luckily we live in America where you can’t simply ban people from an activity because it makes you squeamish.  

The fact that you are intentionally drawing police attention smacks of crazy privilege. The Black Panthers used to carry arms in public—usually didn’t end well for them. I’m a white guy who is not homeless and thus have a low risk of incurring police brutality, and even I know better than to involve police unless it’s utterly necessary.

Trust me. It’s mutual. The cops don’t want to deal with whiney, pathetic cowards like you either.

Boo friggin’ hoo. It was hard to read that paragraph through the salty tears of sadness. I’m sorry that people carrying firearms openly in public offends your delicate sense of white privilege.

Interestingly enough, that famous photo of the gun rights activist carrying the AR slung on his back at a Tea Party rally? You’ll note that the media always crops his head from the shot and focuses on the gun. Because he’s black. And that doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative.

Firearm technology is one of those things that really could have stayed frozen in time two hundred years ago and we’d all be doing fine right now, really.

I thought you assholes were all about Progress?

There would still have been plenty of opportunity to get our war on and defend our homes with single shot muskets you had to arduously reload by hand. The playing field would be even for criminals, do-gooders, and armies alike.

And a magic leprechaun might fly out of the sky on a unicorn and fart rainbows of world peace… However, your hypothetical bullshit goes right out the window as soon as you realize we don’t live in that world. We live in the real world, where technology advances, and things change.

We could still “get our war on” with single shot weapons, until we got invaded by a country that wasn’t stupid. Or in the words of the great philosopher Jack Handey, “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.”

Plus, it wouldn’t be fair if we were still in the days of single shot firearms, which is why criminals in those days usually worked in gangs. But you already know about the history and evolution of gun fighting, with all that armchair expert MSNBC watching you did.

And by the way, repeating firearms had already been invented at the time the Bill of Rights was written, not to mention several of the founders were inventors, warriors, and gun nuts, so none of this would have surprised them. They’d also look at your cartoons and high five each other that their 1^st Amendment still protects even the lamest forms of free speech.  

Instead, now guns are a multi-billion dollar industry and the only way to keep making money is to foster a climate of fear that drives people to purchase all sorts of tactical, military-style weapons no one could possibly need.

What a bunch of crap. This whole super evil arms industry bullshit keeps popping up as a meme. Having worked in the gun industry, they don’t have the marketing budget to “foster a climate of fear”. Gun nuts buy stuff that they think is useful, fun, or awesome. The only climate of fear part comes in when liberal politicians float new gun control proposals, backed up by ass kissing statists like Matt, and Joe Public runs out to buy stockpile guns before it is too late. There is a reason my gun shop had a picture of Obama up on the wall labeled “Salesman of the Year.”

One of the most powerful lobbying groups in America is the National Rifle Association and their name is apt: The NRA is an association representing rifles (and other guns), not you.

The NRA is a mushy lobbying organization that individuals in the Gun Culture donate money too. The main reason I’m a member is because they make a decent shield and they enrage people like Matt. If the NRA was half as badass as the media makes it out to be, I’d be far more proud to be a member.  

They’re playing you.

Thank you, Concern Troll! I keep forgetting that all liberals see the world in shades of victimhood, so if you choose to belong to the NRA because you believe in your right to keep and bear arms, then the only possible explanation is because you’ve been bamboozled by the awesome marketing powers of the evil gun industry!

The paranoia they’re pushing is designed to get you to put more of your money in their pockets.

Seriously, I laugh my ass off at this. They wouldn’t know the gun industry if it bit them in the ass. The ultra-monolithic industry exists only in the minds of the Piers Morgans of the world.

The men and women who make up the Gun Culture are the most independently minded folks you’ll find, which is why the statist ass kissers hate them so much. You know the biggest reason most of us who already have lots of guns continue to buy more? Simply because we enjoy pissing people like Matt off.

You probably don’t need to have so many weapons for self-defense. You can only really use one at a time.

Yet… if you can only use one at a time, why are you so dead set on not letting people have more? Why is there this bizarre fixation in the media whenever somebody gets arrested and they freak out about his “arsenal” (which usually consists of fewer guns than my children have) when the perp can only use one at a time?

Shouldn’t an armchair expert know that there are different types of tools for different types of jobs? And I can have various size concealed carry pistols for different modes of dress? And I can have different type guns for home defense? And I can have them in multiple locations so that I can reach them in case of emergency? (and I have an extremely large house!). And what about my wife and children? Shouldn’t they be allowed to have whatever tool fits them best as well?

Oh, but wait. It doesn’t have to make sense! This is about control and emotions! My bad. You say you’re okay with people having guns for recreation, hunting, and home defense, but that’s all a lie. You know it, and we know it.

And guns are sturdy products. They aren’t falling apart all over the place. Get rid of some of yours and go buy yourself a nice pair of boots. You’ll look great!

I have a nice pair of size 15 Danners. And I just applied one of those boots to your ass.  

Chart Break Number Two: The Dead People Meter

And here is a totally out of context apples versus oranges chart supposedly showing that more people have been “killed in domestic gun incidents since 1960” (looks like almost 1.4 million) vs. “Americans killed in all wars ever” (looks like about 1.1 million). Even if that was true, all it means is that Americans are super good at making war.

But wait… That would mean that an average of 26,000 people would have to die of gunshot wounds in the US every year, except during most of my adult life that number has been in the teens. Not to mention that I remembered that the US Civil alone was 625,000, so a cursory Wiki search gives us 1,321,612 American deaths in war. So then pulling up the crime stats, the only time our murders have gotten anywhere near that 26k was in the low 20s for a few years in the early 90s, and every other year was far lower. (and despite what the gun grabbers have been saying, has been DECLINING as more states have allowed concealed carry).

Faulty stats in a gun control essay? This is my shocked face.  But it is from PolitiFact! Which all liberals insist is totally true because it has Fact in its name!

If you take the positions of the NRA and add them up, you can see how the world would look if the gun lobby got everything it wants: Every American would have easy access to assault weapons,

First off, “assault weapon” is a made up propaganda term. See the very first link where I delve into the legal terminology in great depth. Second, other than a handful of states with democrat dominated legislatures, most of the US can have access to the scary black rifle type of gun Matt is thinking of, and we’ve got no problem with it.

And the gun that makes Matt wet the bed the moistest? The AR-15. Which is also the BEST SELLING rifle in the country. So this dreadful position has already been achieved. NOOOOOOOoooo!  

gun dealers would not be required to check the criminal record and mental health history of someone before selling them a gun,

Background checks have proven useless for stopping crime, and I’ve gone into that topic in great deal elsewhere, but hold on one second… My straw man detector is tingling… What is the NRA’s stance on guns for the mentally ill? Oh, wait a sec. That’s right. Almost all of our mass shootings have been by people who are mentally ill, and the system has dropped the ball so they wouldn’t show up on a background check anyway… But moving along our checklist of NRA sponsored evils.

the capacity of gun magazines could be near-infinite,

Except for that whole pesky physics thing, Captain Hyperbole…  But if anybody wants actual facts, read the first linked article where I delve into the tactics of magazine capacity, and how more rounds on hand is good not because you can shoot more, but because you are forced to manipulate less.  

 and it would be illegal for a city to stop people from carrying guns in public.

Because once again, Gun Free Zones are simply hunting preserves of the innocent. Criminals know this. When will you dumb shits get it through your thick skulls that bad people aren’t scared of your signs, and if they’re about to commit a couple hundred felonies including murder, they really don’t care about the additional misdemeanor gun charge.

This would be a country where you could literally buy an AR-15 at Walmart,

Hey, dumbass, I can walk into Walmart right now and buy a detachable magazine fed semi-automatic rifle.   So you already live in that country. You feel that, Matt? That’s freedom. Soak it up.

 immediately put on full tactical gear worn by SWAT teams,

And again, I’ve got a full set of Level 4 body armor and ballistic plates. Welcome to America. A country that you live in (I’m assuming).

I have SWAT armor, because I used to sell body armor to police departments, and I once had a big fellow cancel his order, and there aren’t many other 6’5” customers with a 56 inch chest, so I kept it. I love dealer cost. Most states have no law whatsoever against regular people having ballistic vests. When I taught basic pistol classes I would often wear a Level 2 concealable under my shirt just in case I ended up with an unsafe doofus like Matt’s dad at the range.

and stroll into a school for your parent-teacher conference with another fully armed adult. Practical!

This one already exists too. In my home state, concealed carry permits allow for carrying a firearm into a school. I carry a gun to parent teacher conferences, and since my kids’ teachers care about actually protecting their charges from crazy people, I can compliment her on her choice of concealed sidearm.

Yes, Matt. We have guns in schools in my state. MIND BLOWN. I’ve also gone before state legislatures and onto national news programs and talked about how and why volunteer school staff who are trained and equipped with concealed handguns are an excellent deterrent against school shootings. All it takes is a few tweaks to state law and you can have a cheap and effective speed bump against school shootings, tomorrow. And in my other article I go into exactly how this works safely, logistically, legally, and especially tactically as it directly effects the target selection and psychological response of the bad guy.

But oh no… We can’t have that. Screw effectiveness. Forget things that actually work! Because armed people make a gutless man-child like you feel icky inside. So why don’t you spew more nonsense about how nice it would be if you could magically reverse centuries of technology and human nature and other impossibilities, all why continuing to insult the character of the very people who you count on to protect you?

Shoot. All those scary things about this hypothetical NRA country, and you already live here! Tag a hit off your asthma inhaler and calm down. It is going to be okay, Matt.

You think I’m anti-gun. I’m not.

You don’t want people to have too many, and you don’t want anybody to have any that you find scary, and you don’t want people to have too big of magazines, and you don’t want them to actually take them anywhere where they might need them, and you want them kept in safes, and you don’t ever want to see them… Yeah… You’re totally not anti-gun.

 I think of guns like I do cars. Go ahead and own one. Waste your money on something fancy!

You know, the last time I pulled a gun on somebody in order to save an innocent man’s life, I came away feeling that was money well spent. Go figure. Ever since my wife pulled a pistol on a would be rapist, she’s never complained about all the money we’ve spent on guns.

On the topic of cars, since Matt is bloviating about deadly assault rifles, which are basically normal rifles that look scary, he probably thinks if you put a spoiler on a Honda Civic it transforms it into a high performance race car.

But the scenarios you are preparing for aren’t going to happen.

Says the dude writing an essay in the wake of a mass shooting…

Yeah, crazy scenarios totally never happen, until they do. I also have a fire extinguisher handy because it is the best tool for that job, even though my car is never going to catch on fire, except for that one time it did.

You aren’t going to save the day by shooting a terrorist in the grocery store.

Reductio ad absurdium. Sure, you probably won’t have a terrorist in the grocery store, but right down the road from here, we recently had a mad man slashing people with a knife at the neighborhood Smith’s grocery until he ran into a permit holder with a gun.

Remember, the big flashy mass shooting events are statistical anomalies that dominate the news, which armchair experts like Matt like to glom onto, as they go on to pick and choose what local crime events count.

 We need fewer guns so fewer people shoot their feet off, kill their girlfriends, kill themselves, and go on shooting sprees.

You know who is really super good at teaching gun safety? The NRA… Yes, that same super evil corporate mega-conspiracy of Dick Cheneyian Illuminati Bilderbergers swindling the easily bamboozled working man, is also the single best resource for teaching gun safety. In fact, that’s mostly what they do. (they certainly would have taught your father about the importance of hearing protection).  

As for fewer guns, now we’ve wandered back into happy rainbow unicorn land, where you can magically wish evil scary bad guns out of existence. We can see how well this has worked out in the various gun free paradises of the world. If you are going to use magic solutions, why don’t you just skip the part where you annoy the shit out of us, and just make all the bad people quit being bad instead?

You can have guns for hunting.

That’s mighty white of you, Matt. But let’s be honest, those scare you too. And since the only difference between a “gun for hunting” and an “ultra deadly assault rifle” is a few cosmetic features (and the fact that the hunting rifles is usually MORE powerful), we all know that you assholes will be along to regulate those as well.

And before you tell us the obligatory Nobody Wants To Take Your Guns! Here is a handy compilation of some of the many people on your side, who do in fact, want to confiscate our guns. http://coldservings.livejournal.com/51731.html

You can have them to ward off Mexican drug lords or whoever is going to storm into your house.

Wow. Terrorists at the grocery store and Los Zetas at your house? I’m glad I don’t live in Matt’s neighborhood. Of course, since he’s an armchair expert Matt is surely aware that most criminal encounters will be against run of the mill rapists, muggers, and violent assholes who just enjoy hurting people. If you carry a gun because of those regular and understandable threats then that doesn’t sound unreasonable, but people like Matt work in a world of magic and emotional exaggeration, which is why those dipshits need to spin it to sound like we’re expecting Die Hard.

Keep them there, in a locked safe.

Because when you need a gun, you need it right fucking now….

And if we by chance ever need a well-regulated militia for a revolution or zombie apocalypse, by god, we’re going to be really happy you were born with a micro-penis.

Yes, my penis has proven completely incapable of accurately launching a 230 grain lead projectile at 850 feet per second, and is thus totally inadequate for self-defense use, so I carry a .45 to compensate.  Thank you for your concern.

Nothing shows you mean serious business like closing a political argument by talking about your opponent’s dick. Quick question though, all of those hundreds of female students that I certified to carry concealed weapons, were they compensating for their tiny vaginas?

I’ve always been confused by that, but since Matt brought in the pop psychology, here is our word of the day: Hoplophobia. Meaning the irrational aversion to weapons. And to use it in a sentence: “Some may say that Matt suffers from Hoplophobia, but I think it is more likely he is simply too immature to accept responsibility for his own safety, and so projects his weakness, cowardice, and feelings of inadequacy onto others… Or he might just be a moron. Flip a coin.”

 

  

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Is This the Classiest McDonald's in America?

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz]

Head out to Long Island right to the edge of the city, then cross the Nassau County border on Jericho Turnpike, and you'll find what just might be the fanciest McDonald's in America. I don't mean a McDonald's where the seats aren't broken and the air doesn't have that smell; I mean a bona fide McDonald's mansion.

I found myself on this part of Long Island after a meal at one of the area's many excellent Indian restaurants; my travel companion had told me about a McMcMansion that had to be seen to be believed, and lo, just off the main thoroughfare, there it is. It even has a name: Denton House.

The house (which, in my post-trip research, I learned has been documented diligently on Scouting NY, the city's best blog about strange and incredible places) dates back to 1795. It was renovated in 1860 to appear like a Georgia plantation house, porch and all, then used as a space for local businesses through the 20th Century until it was once again abandoned and fell into disrepair.

Main dining room.

McDonald's bought Denton House with the plan to tear it down and build a standard restaurant, but a speedy local initiative to register the building as a landmark—after McDonald's had already bought it—meant that the chain became the unintentional steward of the mansion, and charged with its preservation. To its credit, McDonald's has done just that, restoring the house's fine architectural details while transforming most of its spacious first floor into a series of dining rooms. The second floor is cordoned off by a velvet rope; it can be reserved for private events.

The veranda.

This is all old news to regular customers, who think nothing of eating their Big Macs in a glass-enclosed veranda or on the restaurant's front porch, watching the cars go by. But if you head over for a visit, you'll likely be blown away by the grandness of the place. And if you're wondering, the food's as McDonald's-y as you expect. No secrets to the menu that I could suss out.

Take a look at the slideshow for more snapshots of the place (some dark night photos, unfortunately), and read more about its history on Scouting NY. Then pay a visit for yourself.

About the author: Max Falkowitz is the editor of Serious Eats: New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz.

What happens when you cross two carefree college students in their late teens and early 20s with the New York City Board of Elections? The loss of the ability to vote, in something as rare in New York City as the reappearance of as the 17-year cicada – a real election with a real choice. From the time they came from college in May, I pestered my daughters to send in a new absentee ballot form, but like most Americans that age they didn’t want to do something unless and until they had to. And when they finally got around to looking at the absentee ballot form, they decided they didn’t have to do anything at all. The form allows you to put in the dates when you will be away. They filled out the form last year, voted in last year’s election, and put in as the dates that they would be away all four years of college. That’s it, they decided, they were covered and didn’t need to fill out the form again. “That’s what the form says Dad,” followed by my least favorite phrase. “It’s fine.”

I checked and that is in fact what the form says. And there is nothing online at the NYC Board of Elections that says you have to fill out a separate absentee ballot every year. Though I’m sure they didn’t bother to check the actual election law, I just did, and it turns out they may have been technically right. TITLE IV, 8–400, 3, (c), i. “if the applicant expects to be absent from such county or city for a duration covering more than one election and seeks an absentee ballot for each election, he or she shall state the dates when he or she expects to begin and end such absence.”

Or maybe not. IV, 8–400, 3, (d) “Such application shall permit the applicant to apply for an absentee ballot for either a primary election or the general election in any year (emphasis mine) and for those persons who will be continuously absent from their county of residence during the period between the fall primary election and the general election in any year to apply for ballots for both such elections in such year.”

But regardless of what the law says, and even though I assume there are retired public employees in Florida who get absentee ballots every year, after filling out a form once and saying that they planned to be absent from New York City the rest of their lives, I knew damn well they wouldn’t be getting those ballots. If they really wanted to vote, they should have been smart enough to realize that the powers that be don’t want them to, and made damn sure by filling out the form again, required or not. As I told them. “It’s fine?” Hardly. And not just with regard to this election.

So today I called them up and asked who they had voted for, fully expecting to hear their shocked response. I’m sure some folks at the Board of Elections are going to have a laugh over this.

Now my daughters aren’t the least responsible young people in New York City. They are probably close to being the most responsible young people in New York City. So my guess is that all over New York City, there are people in their 20s who didn’t get around to registering to vote. Or who will forget to show up on Tuesday, or not go because they are too busy with things that are too important to them, and they are too important. (The same is true of people in their 30s, and people in their 40s, and people in their early 50s).

But I guarantee you Generation Greed will be voting. Some egalitarian members of that generation made a lot of noise about “peace, love and understanding” back in the 1960s, but the majority of its members have been acting out and voting their self interest ever since. Every generation thereafter has been worse off, the availability of I-phones excepted. Many of those in the public employee unions – and more importantly government retirees -- will be voting too. They got a series of retroactive pension enhancements, followed by cuts in pay and benefits for new hires and service cuts for the general public, and want to be better off still relative to the vast majority of people who don’t matter, and a future that doesn’t matter because many of them live in the suburbs and most expect to be in Florida. As for the rich, the financial sector, and the real estate sector, they voted long ago -- with their wallets. And they are expecting to be repaid as well.

I called my generation, the back half of the baby boom, and Gen X after us, Generation Apathy. Those our age knew we had been made the losers, and instead of doing something about it most of us just ignored our institutions and concerned ourselves with ourselves individually alone. We’re going to find out how good an idea that was. Occupy Wall Street to the contrary, it appears that Generation Apathy has been followed by Generation Apathy II, and they are even more screwed than Generation Apathy I. Perhaps young people have always been always clueless and self-absorbed, but back then they had the older generations looking out for them instead of taking advantage of them. Not now.

Not only do those who took the better deal for themselves in Generation Greed, and the shrinking number of people to grabbed a better deal for themselves in subsequent generations, expect more and more goodies in every economic upturn. And to be exempted from all sacrifices in every economic downturn. And they expect their elected officials and their media to rationalize for them the reason that they are the first generation of Americans who will leave those coming after worse off than they were, so they don’t have to feel bad about it. As in the movie. Kids are resilient. It’s fine.

When I ran for (or rather against) the New York State legislature in 2004, I put the following in my manifesto. “The State of New York represents feudalism, American style. Under capitalism, you get what you earn, at least in theory. Those who believe that people need an incentive to work and innovate can agree with that. Under socialism, you get what you need, at least in theory. Those who believe that we are all part of one human family can agree with that. But over time, when you have the same group of people in power, both capitalism and socialism degenerate into feudalism, under which the privileged expect to continue to get what they have been getting, and perhaps a little more, whether they need it or not, deserve it or not. For those who have real needs, and who produce real earnings, it's just tough luck. The feudalism of unearned privilege explains much about the state of the State of New York, where all past deals are set in stone.”

Well, my stand against feudalism didn’t get very far, did it? In fact, feudalism has been nationalized and infected the city government, with those inside the room grabbing more and leaving those outside the room increasingly worse off, with less. Something that seems certain to get worse in the next election.

Particularly if Bill Thompson is elected. If there is one candidate who is certain to protect unearned privilege and provide the beneficiaries with deceptive rationalizations as others – generally worse off -- become worse off still, he’s the man. When I first noted something he said, he was proposing more tax breaks for senior citizens, who already pay far less than working taxpayers with identical incomes.

Later, to pay for the pension increases for those in his generation that evidently Bill Thompson though were just fine, he decided to shift a lot of the pension money to hedge funds, were Wall Streeters get paid even more to rip off investors. 

Finally, as Comptroller Thompson stood by quietly while New York City teachers of his generation were allowed to retire five years earlier in 2008, and again while future teachers were screwed and less education money was available to be spent on actual education to pay for it. In the hopes of getting the endorsement of the United Federation of Teachers, which he later received.

As it happens, one of my daughters once expressed an interest in being a teacher. I explained to here that once the UFT got through robbing the children and their own future members to benefit those cashing in and moving out, she would end up underpaid (despite high spending on teachers in general) in failing schools (despite high school spending). Fortunately, that time she listened to me, helped by the budget cuts that rolled in while she was at a NYC high school.

After re-wrecking the schools (the cost not yet fully being felt because it is being hidden and deferreed, which is why the UFT is so desperate to get its cronies in as Mayor and Comptroller) and screwing its younger members to benefit those going to Florida, the UFT also sought to take advantage of the apathy of the loser generations. Its leader Mike Mulgrew pushed through a change to increase the voting weight of retirees relative to those actually still teaching. According to GothamSchools the retirees outvoted the active teachers in the last union elections. Add in the “not my job” grifters, and the retirees plus the not my job grifters probably outvoted those busting their ass to do their best for New York City children by a wide margin. No wonder the unions do what they do. And now the dues of those who did not vote are being spent to put out propaganda denying what that union has done. 

Speaking of propaganda, where has the mainstream media, with its dwindling Generation Greed readers, been while the future was being sold? Here is a recent editorial in the New York Times.

“Come January, a new mayor of New York will take office with the city facing a bad budget forecast: cloudy, chilly, with a chance of apocalypse,” said the Times editorial board. “It would be good for voters at least to hear answers to tough questions. How are you going to solve the budget puzzle, starting with filling the $2 billion hole that Mr. Bloomberg left behind, and the $8 billion the unions are demanding? What services will you cut? What taxes will you raise?”

“The next mayor will have a chance to repair Mr. Bloomberg’s abysmal labor relations, engaging the unions in a tough-but-honest conversation. He or she can start doing the same with the rest of us, right away. That will require saying things that are risky and unpleasant. But that’s the difference between campaigning and governing. The sooner we hear the truth, the better off we’ll all be.”

Where was that tough but honest conversation in the pages of the New York Times over the past 12 years? When did I see the front-page headlines asserting that their mayor, Mayor Bloomberg, was selling off the future of New York City to benefit their older readers and his own career in the short run? (And he was my last hope not to do this sort of thing, which they all do). When did the Times editorial board raise generational equity as an issue? When did the Times say that as a result of what their Mayor, and their generation, has done the next Mayor will be the next Mayor Beame? Did I miss something?

The recession is over. The Great Recession may have been the worst in 80 years for the nation as a whole, but it was the mildest since the early 1980s in New York City. Stock prices are near record high. New York City employment is at a record high. Real estate prices are back in a bubble.

State income taxes have been increased. Federal income taxes have been increased. Federal payroll taxes have been increased. A new MTA payroll tax has been added. New York City property taxes have been increased. Services have been cut. The take home pay and retirement benefits of younger and future NYC public employees have been cut to a level far below what the Times’ Generation Greed readers and Thompsons (and Lhota’s) Generation Greed voters had been promised to begin with, let alone what they later retroactively received. That Tier IV passed with the enthusiastic endorsement of the New York Times – and the behind the scenes endorsement of the public employee unions. And despite all that we have a fiscal disaster? Why, and who benefitted?

We are at the point where every generation is becoming worse off than the one before, in family life, in the workplace, and now in public services and benefits. And trying to stand up to it, trying to even talk about it, provides nothing but frustration. Because younger generations are too clueless and self absorbed to stand up for themselves, and too lazy to pay attention. And the politicians whose main ideology is the advancement of their own careers, to the point where they will not be affected by the general deterioration of our social institutions, know this damn well.

When I ran against the state legislature, I asked the following questions, among others. “Why are the credit ratings of New York City and State so low? Why are debts so high? Why did the City and State borrow so much in the middle of the 1990s boom, with New York's state and local debts rising from $133 billion to in 1994 to $178 billion in 2000? If New York City had a $2 billion surplus for several years in the 1990s, why didn't it have $8 billion in the bank instead nothing when the recession arrived? Why did the 2000-04 MTA capital plan include so much debt, even as the Second Avenue Subway and other major improvements were just in the planning stage? How will the improvements be built now that so much has already been borrowed? How will the state's infrastructure even be maintained with all that debt already on the books?”

“The State of New York claimed that the big pension deal it passed in 2000 would be ‘free,’ since the City and State pension funds were over-funded. Then why is the City of New York being forced to drastically increase its pension contributions, at a moment of financial crisis, leaving absolutely no money for wage increases? Why does the state impose benefit pension increases for public employees with seniority in booms, resulting in wage and benefit reductions for new public employees-the ones actually providing services now and in the future--again and again?”

And I made the following promise, among others. “As your representative, I would take the difficult road of standing up for generational equity. Yes, we need to do right by the seniors, but we need to do right by someone other than the seniors as well. I would oppose additional debt, and demand that the ongoing renewal of our infrastructure continue, paid for out of current revenues. I would reject attempts to defer paying for public employee pension liabilities from the past into our future. I would insist on health care for the uninsured before any additional benefits are added for those over age 65. I would tell the truth about the future of Social Security. And, unlike the city's representatives in Albany over the past 30 years, I would not vote for state budget that denied New York City's children a fair share of state school aid. Even if offered a grant to provide a select few with taxpayer-funded trips to Atlantic City in exchange.”

Well, that didn’t attract much interest. Certainly the MSM didn’t want to write about the questions I gave up a job to ask. But that was the campaign of an angry Don Quixote who managed to sneak onto the ballot on a minor party line. This is a campaign for Mayor, one of perhaps two offices that people in this city bother to pay attention to. Are younger people going to bother to vote? And if not, do they deserve what their elders keep doing to them? Mario Cuomo, the former Governor, had a short-lived radio show after he was voted out. I tuned in once and he was admonishing young non-voters. “If you don’t participate in the system it is going to hurt you” he said. That was 18 years go. And during those 18 years, the future that younger generations are going to live in has been sold out continuously.

(David Kopel)

Yesterday voters in Colorado recalled two State Senators. One result was not a surprise, and the other is a shock. Of course the votes are Second Amendment victories for the right to arms, but more fundamentally, they are Fourteenth Amendment victories for Due Process of Law.

Former State Senate President John Morse represented Colorado Springs, plus the somewhat hipster mountain community of Manitou Springs. While El Paso County is strongly Republican, the interior city of Colorado Springs has been center/center-left for years. Senate District 11 was carved to make the election of a Democrat possible, and it worked. Voter registration in SD 11 is about a third, a third, and a third among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, with Democrats having the largest third and Republicans the smallest. Morse barely won re-election in 2010, and might have lost if not for the presence of a Libertarian on the ballot.

As the conventional wisdom expected, voter turn-out was relatively low. Morse was recalled by  51-49%. The conventional wisdom of Colorado politics had been that Morse would probably lose, but that the election would be tight, and there was a chance that he might win. As things turned out, Republicans turned out greatly in excess of their registration percentage, and that was probably the difference.

Both sides had hard-working GOTV programs, but apparently the Democrats did not succeed in convincing enough of their less-enthusiastic voters to vote. This is in contrast to 2012, when Obama won the district by 21%.

Pueblo, the largest city in southern Colorado, delivered the result that stunned almost everyone. For more than a century, Pueblo has been a Colorado stronghold of working-class union Democrats. Like most of southern Colorado, it has a large Hispanic population. Obama won Senate District 3 by 19% in 2012. In 2010, Democratic Senator Angela Giron won her race by about 5:4. This year, Giron chaired the Senate’s State Affairs Committee, helping to shepherd gun control bills to the Senate floor.

Pueblo’s Senate District 3  typically has a much higher turnout rate than SD 11 in Colorado Springs. The same was true today: about 36,000 votes cast in Pueblo, compared to 18,000 in Colorado Springs.

Based on the latest campaign disclosure reports, Morse/Giron enjoyed an 8:1 spending advantage over recall advocates, in terms of direct contributions to campaigns. Michael Bloomberg contributed $350,000 to fight the recalls, about equal to the $361,000 contributed by the NRA, which is probably about $3 per NRA member in the state. Another wealthy contributor gave $250,000 to oppose the recalls.

When early voting began in Colorado Springs,  Republicans quickly developed a lead of several hundred voters over Democratic turnout. Democrats outperformed Republicans on Monday, and also today, but not by enough. Morse lost by 343 votes.

Meanwhile in Pueblo, Democratic turnout in early voting was ahead of Republicans by several thousand. Although Republicans were outperforming their registration percentage, they never came close to closing the large Democratic lead. The Colorado conventional wisdom was that Giron was probably safe, and was certainly relatively safe compared to Morse. While the Colorado Springs results started coming in soon after 7 p.m., Pueblo results were delayed. With only one precinct reporting, Giron had a 69-31% lead. Things seemed to be going as expected.

But about the same time that Senator Morse was delivering his concession speech, a landslide of Pueblo results started coming in. Giron quickly fell very far behind. She was recalled from office by 56% to 44%.

It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.

The Colorado Senate is now 18-17 Democratic, and 19-16 pro-Second Amendment. On gun issues, and on many others, the balance of power is now held by moderate Democrats, rather than by the hard left faction formerly led by Morse.

The Republicans (for a change of pace in Colorado) ran near-flawless campaigns with strong candidates: new Senators Bernie Herpin (Colorado Springs) and George Rivera (Pueblo). I’ve long known Herpin for founding and leading the Pikes Peak Firearm Coalition, and I have high respect for him. He has dedicated a quarter century of his life as a civic volunteer to defense of the Second Amendment. At the same time, he has a sense of what is politically realistic in a given situation, and does not press issues for the mere emotional satisfaction of being “hardcore.” Thus, in the Republican nomination process, he was opposed by Dudley Brown’s fund-raising organization Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. Brown’s preferred candidate, a believer in the nutty legal theories of “sovereign citizens,” would certainly have lost the recall election.

In Pueblo, the new Senator is George Rivera, a retired police officer, and former Democrat who left the party during the Clinton administration.

While both races became nationalized and attracted lots of outside money (an economic boon that far exceeded the expense of holding special elections), the recall movement was created by citizen activists making their first ventures into politics. The recall group Pueblo Freedom and Rights was led by Victor Head, who runs a family plumbing business.

It would be accurate to say that the recall campaign was driven by opposition to the anti-gun bills which Morse and Giron pushed through the legislature. But this is only the first part of the story. As it turns out, Morse and Giron sealed their fates on March 4, the day that the anti-gun bills were heard in Senate committees. At Morse’s instruction, only 90 minutes of testimony per side were allowed on each of the gun bills. As a result, hundreds of Colorado citizens were prevented from testifying even briefly. Many of them had driven hours to come to the Capitol, traveling from all over the state.

That same day, 30 Sheriffs came to testify. They too were shut out, with only a single Sheriff allowed to testify on any given bill. So while one Sheriff testified, others stood up with him in support.

Admirably, Morse had urged his Committee Chairs to be polite and courteous to all witnesses, and they were. But President Morse did not follow the standard practice of the Colorado legislature, by which any citizen who wishes to testify is allowed to be heard, at least briefly. The patient endurance of Colorado legislative committees which have heard hour upon hour of testimony on bills about gay rights, motorcycle helmets, and other social controversies is a tribute to our republican form of government.

When Morse shut that down, and Chairperson Giron went along, they crossed the double-red line of Colorado government. Had the seven gun control bills (one of which I testified in favor) been heard on March 4-6, instead of being rammed through committees on March 4, the recall might never have happened. It’s one thing to lose; it’s another to thing to lose when you didn’t even have the opportunity to present your reasoning. While the gun control bills were before the Senate in March, President Morse urged his caucus to stop reading emails, to stop reading letters from constituents, to stop listening to voicemails, to vote for the gun bills and ignore the constituents. Giron, presciently following this strategy, had allowed citizens to raise Second Amendment concerns at a single town hall meeting, and thereafter refused to discuss the issue at public fora.

If an 8:1 Bloomberg money advantage can’t buy an election, then elected officials will be more reluctant to support repressive gun bills. As Giron told The New Republic, “”For Mayors Against Illegal Guns, if they lose even one of these seats, they might as well fold it up. And they understand that.”

There were other issues too, including the dubious claim the Republicans Herpin and Rivera would take away women’s birth control pills, as well as discredited financial ethic charges against Morse.

The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was the secondmost important reason why Morse and Giron were removed from office. The first reason was the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment principle of Due Process of Law. The opportunity to be heard is the fundamental to Due Process of Law, and not solely in adjudications. When Morse and Giron squelched the testimony of law-abiding citizens and of law-enforcing Sheriffs, they grossly abused their constitutional office of being law-makers. And so, for abuse of office, John Morse and Angela Giron have been recalled from office by the People of Colorado, to be replaced by legislators who will listen before the vote.

Hey, this anti-war veteran posturing against baseless American military interventions in far-flung lands to shore up a failing president looks kind of familiar, doesn't he, Secretary Kerry?

'Puter's not fond of open-ended American military interventions in foreign countries, unless the interventions result from a direct threat to national security and the goal of any such intervention is the complete and unconditional surrender of the enemy achieved through the unrestrained use of all military assets at our disposal. Short of that, 'Puter's a stay-at-home kind of guy.

But Secretary of State John F. Kerry not a 'Puter kind of man.  Sec. Kerry made an impassioned plea in support of President Obama's proposed military action in Syria to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.

My, how the years have changed Kerry's position on American military interventions in foreign lands where America's national security is not directly at issue.  Perhaps Kerry's excessive drug use during the 1970s accounts for his failed memory.  Thankfully, 'Puter's here to remind him of his words.

'Puter recalls a much younger John F. Kerry testifying before the very same Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971.  Kerry then was leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and delivered his (in)famous "Winter Soldier" speech.

Thus spake Mr. Kerry:

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

...

We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now.

But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.

Secretary Kerry may not remember his words that April day over forty years ago, but 'Puter does. So, too, do many of the men still fighting and dying in Vietnam remember Kerry's words.

So, 'Puter puts this simple question to Secretary Kerry.

Mr. Secretary, forty-two years ago you stated unequivocally that America should not engage in military interventions in foreign lands without Congressional consent, against the will of the people, fought solely to shore up the reputation of a failing presidency.

Mr. Secretary, were you lying then or are you lying now?

(Will Baude)

Pseudonymous blogger and political theorist “Miss Self-Important” has an interesting and entertaining post in defense of country music that I thought I’d share. My two favorite passages:

Country music’s virtue is its adherence to the view that music has real emotional power, and that lyrics are part of that power. If a song bothers with lyrics, the lyrics must be coherent. They don’t have to be sophisticated or edgy (in fact, they should probably never be so), but they should assume a language-enabled audience that connects words to music and can be moved … by the combination.

and

The “closedness” argument that country music is about fearing change and clinging to the good ol’ way of living assumes that it’s completely sincere (as angsty pop music is) — it’s really by and for naive rubes who’ve never left Festus, Missourah and are terrified by all the cosmopolitan modernity swirling around them. But country music is much more like Benjamin Franklin at Paris in his fur cap posing as the simple colonial that the French imagined all Americans must be, while securing war loans from them and bagging their wives for good measure. … Country music has in fact heard of and experienced Manhattan and corporate finance and divorce and the importance of whole grains in a healthy diet, and it is not impressed or convinced that these things supersede its own narratives.

(Ilya Somin)

Two years ago, John McCain derided “Tea Party hobbits.” Now Tulane University assistant dean Jim Letten is using the same insult against conservative “guerrilla journalist” James O’Keefe:

Former U.S. attorney and assistant Tulane University Dean Jim Letten unleashed a barrage of verbal abuse at conservative “guerrilla journalist” James O’ Keefe and his film crew in an altercation on Tulane’s campus early last month.

“You are a nasty cowardly little spud, all of you, you’re hobbits,” Letten shouted in the video, which was released by O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, on Monday.

“You are less than I can ever tell you,” continued the former-attorney, who briefly lead a prosecution effort against O’Keefe in 2010. “You are scum. Do you understand?”

Letten, who was surrounded by campus security personnel, also appeared to throw a copy of O’Keefe’s book “Breakthrough” back at him, after O’Keefe had handed it over just seconds before.

Letten added that O’Keefe was “a snail,” a “horse’s ass,” and an “asshole.”

Depending on whose version of events you believe, it’s possible that Letten has some legitimate grievances against O’Keefe. Still, he, Senator McCain, and everyone else should realize that “hobbit” is not an insult. The hobbits were the good guys in The Lord of the Rings; they destroyed the Ring of Power and saved Middle Earth from tyranny. They bravely explored the world long before humans did. If O’Keefe really is ” ‘a snail,’ a ‘horse’s ass,’ and an ‘asshole,’” that probably means he is not really like a hobbit. People who want to vilify their enemies with Tolkienian insults should try “orc” or “balrog.”

A three-fer.  First, from Sippican Cottage:

You see, there are no public schools in America that I know of. They're reeducation camps for people that weren't educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime -- but there's not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.

I grew up in the same town as Horace Mann. I know all about public schools. The concept is as dead as a Pharaoh. The idea that universal literacy and a coherent public attitude toward citizenship would result in a better life for the country as a whole was a sweet one, and it worked for a while, until they "fixed" it. They've been fixing the hell out of it for over half a century now. They fixed it the way a veterinarian fixes dogs, to my eye.

Second, from Salon.com:

This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

And third, from John Taylor Gatto, a repeat:

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.

The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do.