Progressive Philosophy - Stupid or Evil?

Sometimes I just don't know what to say about things like this. 

Today is not that day.  

I see SWPL progressives going on about the evils of pesticides while millions of (I’m sorry, but it has to be said, because I know it has some sway in this discussion) brown people die every year because of insect-vectored diseases. I see them going on about the evils of GMO while millions of brown people die every year because of vitamin deficiencies. I see all of these things, and yet I'm supposed to think that they are the ones who care - who truly bleed for the less fortunate among us.

A progressive showing how much he cares by making a sign. Or something.

And what am I to think? That I'm surrounded by objectively evil people who support the deaths of millions of brown people every year? Or that I'm surrounded by an entire class of slavering dolts who are too insulated by their own safety, security, and satisfaction of need to understand that their policies and obstructionism are LITERALLY, QUANTIFIABLY KILLING PEOPLE EVERY YEAR?

And which of these two options is worse?  More abjectly horrifying? 

I prefer to use a certain razor every time I'm approached by a quandary like this, and it is a simple one:

"Do not attribute to malice, that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity." 

And so, I think that what you have here is exactly the same phenomenon about which I wrote the other day, which is to say that these people are more hung up about the theory and philosophy behind their positions than they are the objective result of them. They can't see the tangible result of the babies dying because all they can see is their having saved the world from the theoretical, philosophical scourges of insecticides or of GMO.  

In short, not evil – stupid.  

Or dense, if you will.  Or incapable of seeing beyond their own security and their own satisfaction of needs to understand that this discussion is not philosophical but actually real, and tangible, and horrible.  I’ll bet that their opposition to GMO golden rice would dry up quickly if they were forced to hold a blind baby in their arms while she died slowly and painfully from a vitamin A deficiency, which could have been cured easily if they had just shut their goddamned mouths and not stood athwart the forward progress of humanity, shouting “STOP!” 

The “progress” espoused by the progressive movement

Likewise, you don’t see opposition to GMO from the people who would benefit from it.  Nor do you see many poor people espousing the benefits of veganism, or organic food production.  All of these things are a product of a vain, spoiled and transparently racist population of people who think that their monumental fortune in life is a result of their own unique intelligence and superiority, and not the luck of the draw that it absolutely is when you are talking about individual success on a global scale.  If they were born in Nairobi, and didn’t have the benefits of the fully stocked local organic market down the street, they wouldn’t be worrying about how organic, or local, or vegan, or “cage free”, or “non-GMO” the food that they have access to was - a person who lives under the constant threat of starvation is going to eat whatever food they can produce or collect.  If their children were going blind from vitamin A deficiency, you can bet your asses that they’d be clamoring for golden rice.  

But their children aren’t dying or going blind – its only a bunch of “theoretical” brown children on the other side of the planet, and just think of how superior it makes a person feel to think that they are smarter than the scientists who created GMO. Consider the boost in status that an individual must get to stand in defiance of an entire industry. How philosophical  they must be.  How fashionable. 

To paraphrase the words that I used in my blogpost the other day:

"They are so enthralled with the philosophies of Zeno that they don't even notice when the sprinter passes the turtle with ease."

A Shotgun, a Rifle, and a Four-Wheel Drive, and a Country Boy Can Mildly Annoy A Pigeon...

Shotguns and rifles are totally different animals.  The inability to keep that point in mind is why so many rifle manufacturers have such a hard time making shotguns – especially autoloading shotguns. 

You see, one of the biggest differences between shotguns and rifles is ammo choice.  Yeah, with my .30-06, I could load small 125 grain loads and big 220 grain loads, but the end result was a pretty similar bang and a .30 caliber hole in whatever I was shooting at.  With my shotguns, I can get 2 ¾ inch poodle poppers that barely have enough juice to break a piece of clay at 25 yards, up to 3 ½” super magnums that will skin a moose at 30 and leave your shoulder feeling like that same moose had a boot party on it, in its honor*.  Thus, the problem with autoloader shotguns.  You can’t set up an auto-loading action in a shotgun so that it will cycle the low base rounds without having it so sensitive that it will disintegrate itself if you cycle some super mags.  Likewise, you can’t have it set up for super mags and expect it to cycle low base.  With a rifle, you can pretty much expect it to cycle any load that you put in it because they are all pretty similar, or at least similar enough that the action will make do with what you give it.  With a shotgun, you have such a range of choices that you have to tinker with it between uses to make sure that it will do what you need.

I tell you all of this so that I may tell you a story.  The recent panic on ammunition has lead to most of the stores in Spokane being sold out of almost everything except the weird calibers and gauges.  I saw lots of .38 super and 28 gauge on the shelves yesterday, but not much else.  I think that a lot of this panic buying is being done by folks that don’t have a lot of gun experience and are basing what they buy up on the price of the stuff per box.  With a rifle, this is not an entirely stupid plan – most rifle ammunition will get the job done no matter what you buy – yes, I like 165 grain in my 30-06 better than 150 grain, but it is close enough that it won’t make a whole lot of difference, and it will get the job done the way a .30-06 was intended.  With a shotgun, however, buying based on price without any regard for any additional factors will lead to you buying a case of worthless crap for the purpose that most of these folks are buying the ammo.  Presumably, they are buying them for doomsday prep – zombie apocalypse, government take-over, pandemic, epidemic, whatever.  The purpose behind that would be protection against bad guys, and having the ability to take game to feed your family. 

I tried to find low base clay breaker ammo for a round of sporting clays this weekend and 6 out of 7 stores were sold out entirely of 20 gauge low base clay rounds.  To me, what this means is that people are thinking “oh noes, I needs to buy teh ammos before Barack Obama takes it alls away!” and so they go out and buy as many rounds for their 20 gauge as they can, as cheaply as possible, without any regard for the fact that what they bought is pretty much worthless against any target more structurally sound than a 5” clay disc. 

That, or there is some prepper angle about pestering the zombies to death with handfuls of slow-moving lead sand that I haven’t read up on yet. 

A guy in one of the stores next to me commented with a bit of snark about how irrational panics are usually not marked by rationality, by definition.  I have to agree.

We won’t discuss how I did on the sporting clays Saturday, however, because I did horribly.  Let’s just say that my score out of one hundred rhymed with “nifty” and leave it at that. 

*As an aside, that’s why when someone says “he shot him with a .30-06 deer rifle” I say “Holy crap! That had to blow a big hole in him!” without needing any more information, but when someone says “they shot him with a 12 gauge shotgun” I find myself needing a little more detail, because being shot with a 12 gauge shotgun  could range from “Meh – been there, done that when my buddy wasn’t paying close attention when we were bird hunting, and the shot bounced off of my carhartt and stung my earlobe a little bit” to “they hauled a carcass out of there that resembled a huge mass of poorly ground hamburger, and it took several trips.”  Honest to god – the difference is that big.

Buggy-Whip Manufacturers Hardest Hit

Markets change and adjust to the times.  Sometimes, they do so because of revolutionary ideas, revolutionary leaders, and paradigm shifts catalyzed by the up-and-comers and movers-and-shakers of the day.  Sometimes, they do so in spite of the best efforts of the current providers.  Such is the case in the music industry, and there is a reason for this – the new technologies that are cheaply and widely available today have made record labels superfluous.  They have done everthing that they could do in order to resist the changes that are at hand, because these changes have literally made them as obsolete as a buggy-whip manufacturer after Henry Ford had his way with the transportation industry.  However, despite their best efforts and all the thrashing about that they can muster, the invisible hand of the market forces it’s hand, and they are absolutely despondent about it. 

You see, there was a time when widespread, mass-produced music simply could not have existed without them.  The up-front costs to developing, recording, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing a new album were astronomical. The cost of pressing records/recording tapes/burning the cds alone was in the millions and millions of dollars.  Then, throw in marketing, mixing, and so forth, and you’ve got a real huge bill on your hands – a bill of a magnitude that the struggling new musicians of the world could not possibly afford. 

The record companies stepped in to fill this niche, and they did so well, however focused on their own best interest they often were.  For the better part of a century, they sat atop the recording industry and parried every thrust that the market threw at them.  When artists became rich after their debut albums became hits, they no longer needed record companies to afford the up-front costs of their next album, so the record companies countered this by making the artists sign up for multi-album contracts (or even worse, lifetime contracts) when they were at their most vulnerable: before the first album was made.  That ensured that no matter how successful and rich the artist became later on, the record company would continue to get a piece of the action. 

The unending ebb of the technological tides has caught up with them, however, and my opinion is that their days are numbered, if only we could move beyond the paradigm in which we are currently mired.  The reason for this is because the costs of creating an album in the most popular media of the day have dropped from millions to thousands of dollars.  You see, you only need to rent the recording studio, record one cut on MP3, and then make as many copies as you want with virtually zero cost to do so.  Then, you distribute them using the internet, which is the forum under which most folks buytheir music, anyway.  Artists can go directly to music brokers like Amazon.com and Itunes and have them post their songs in MP3 format, give the distribution site a cut, and keep the rest for themselves. 

The only thing, then, that the record companies provide at this point is marketing.  But even that isn’t as difficult as it used to be.  Take the example of the band Ra-On.  They are Korean-American students at the University of California that did an acoustic version of Psy’s “Gangnam Style.”  It is totally awesome.  They got some recognition on a few internet forums after they posted their music video to YouTube.  Then, they got a mention in a Cracked article.  They’ve now sold a metric shit-ton of copies of their song on Amazon alone.  I don’t know how much money they’ve made, but my guess is that it is a startling amount for three college kids who only just created an acoustic song on September 28^th of 2012.  The total cost to them for doing this?  Next to nothing.  Close enough to nothing that it is negligible.  They had to buy the equipment, I guess, which looks to me like a webcam and an acoustic guitar. 

Justin Beiber was not discovered by the record labels, either.  He was “made” on YouTube and then signed to a label after he was discovered and already had a huge following.  He could be just as famous today without the label that he signed to. 

Maynard James Keenan of Tool fame created a side project called Puscifer.  They are not signed to any label, sell their music from their website, and distribute it all without help from the record labels.  Granted, Maynard has the money to do whatever he wants at this point, but the success of Puscifer is a testament to the fact that artists simply don’t need record companies anymore. 

The record companies are in their death knell, and you can tell by the vitriolic, angry ways that they’ve been protecting their perch atop the industry.  It won’t be much longer until you don’t have to deal with them anymore at all.  You will pay maybe a little less for your music, the artist that created it will get a much larger cut, and the recording industry will be frantically trying to find ways to re-insinuate themselves into the process, but they will fail.  We simply don’t need them anymore. 

The only way that they can be saved now is for them to lobby the government to pass laws to prop them up against the will of the market.  Guess what they’re doing?  

Piers Morgan

I despise Piers Morgan.  He is a sensationalist, soft-core journalist trying to pretend that he’s a hard-hitting Journalist (with a capital “J”).  His most recent attempt at capital “J” Journalism has been his attacks on gun ownership in America.  His arguments are feeble, and his response to someone responding to his arguments are to typically resort to ad-hominems.  He seems to follow a pretty predictable pattern – he picks out one thing that he doesn’t like, finds a way to present that one thing in the most sensational manner possible, and then hammers it until you’re sick of listening to him. 

One of the more annoying points that he continued to make after the Aurora Colorado shootings was that the shooter had managed to amass over 6,000 rounds of ammunition.  Piers liked to present himself as horrified – simply HORRIFIED – that we Americans are allowed to amass such a huge arsenal of ammunition, and seems to think that somehow, a law could be passed to restrict how much ammunition someone should be allowed to own.  Piers has presented no ideas to date about how he would proceed to enforce such an unenforceable law, but that isn’t the point that I want to make.  The point is that he is hammering this one point here because it sounds so sensational and outrageous – I mean, what could a private citizen possibly want with 6,000 rounds of ammunition?  The facts are a little more mundane.  First, the Aurora shooter used less than 100 round of ammunition in his spree, so a law preventing him from having amassed 6,000 rounds would have done nothing to prevent the shooting.  Piers, of course, doesn’t care, and when that is pointed out to him, he just attacks you as being backward and ignorant.  Second, I’ll bet that I use close to 6,000 rounds every two years with all the shooting I do.  6,000 rounds isn’t really that much.  I can’t really say if I’ve ever had 6,000 rounds in my possession at one point in time because I don’t keep track of such things, but I’ll bet I’ve been close, with absolutely no ill intent whatsoever – I participate in shooting sports, and buy ammunition in bulk when it’s on sale, sometimes having as much as 18 months supply on hand.  One round of sporting clays, which takes less time than a round of golf, takes 100 shots.  I do 20 rounds of sporting clays a year.  That’s 2,000 rounds, just out of my shotguns, and just for sporting clays – that doesn’t take into account the rounds I shoot hunting, or out of my pistols or rifles.  So once again, Piers is displaying his ignorance by sensationalizing the mundane, and he doesn’t even take the time to understand that shooting is a way of life here in America.  I can forgive his ignorance to that fact, since he is British and shooting is far more rare over there, but what I can’t forgive is his unwillingness to try and cure his ignorance, or to even try to understand that his ignorance exists.

The other thing that he likes to hammer is that if a concealed weapons carrier had been in the Colorado Theater at the time of the shooting, that things would have been far worse because we’d have had “the shootout at the OK corral!” (in his own words).  Piers has never taken time to explain why he thinks that a shootout between an armed bad guy and an armed good guy would somehow be worse than an armed bad guy shooting defenseless victims en masse.  He just breathlessly touts his “shootout” theory and expects everyone to understand why it would be so bad without ever once explaining why this would be undesirable.  Well let me be the first to say that I’d rather be killed in crossfire during a shootout than I would being a target in a shooting gallery.  At least the first option has me dying with my boots on instead of cowering under a theater chair, the way in which I would have to presume Piers would rather go out.  This “OK Corral” thing is actually pretty common with anti-gun folks, even beyond Piers Morgan, and it really glaringly belies their more evil intent in the whole matter: tThey would rather that you are unarmed and defenseless against the bad people of the world.  Piers Morgan would rather see you murdered and defenseless than fighting back against evil.  I’m not sure why, but he has obviously convinced himself that a shootout is far worse than a mass slaughter. 

It displays in stark relief, the underlying lack of logic in the entire gun control debate – bad guys are using illegal guns to kill people, and so the solution to that is to disarm the people that the bad guys are trying to kill.  Does that make sense?  Of course, Piers would argue that he is trying, instead, to disarm the BAD GUY, but fails to understand that almost all of them were already disarmed by the law – most of them didn’t possess their firearms legally in the first place – and so the disarmament that he is desiring HAS ALREADY FAILED.

And even if the bad guys do possess their guns legally, I always make this point and it never seems to sink into the brains of guys like Piers, but here it goes again – these are people who are PLANNING TO COMMIT MURDER.  Do you really think that they arre going to wither at the idea of a felony firearms violation when their plan is to commit multiple capital crimes and then kill themselves?  What possible good could adding a firearms violation to their rap sheet after the fact accomplish?  

Dorner Follow-Up Post

So I wrote this comment on another blog a few weeks back and I have this urge to do a post-mortem on it to see how this Dorner thing turned out before it fades away from our collective memories altogether.

First, here’s the comment:

I’m following this Dorner fiasco with curious attention.  Unlike a lot of the folks on my side of the aisle, I’m not on his side.  Assuming we’re getting the full story, here (which I guess could be a big assumption) Dorner is a killer.  After reading his “manifesto” it appears to me that we don’t have a nutcase so much as we’ve got a narcissistic bully that thinks that the entirety of the world, as well as a bunch of celebrities and politicians, need his advice.
 That being said, it appears, after two separate incidents where civilians were shot or shot at for committing the crime of driving a pickup truck, that the LAPD has issued a shoot-on-site order for Dorner, and if a bunch of the “sheep” get shot by the “sheepdogs” that are out there to ‘protect” them…  well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
 That being said, I do not find it the least bit curious that Dorner has become a folk hero on some fronts, for the following reasons:
 1.      The increased militarization of the police on all fronts in the United States has lead to an increased feeling of “us vs. them” in the rank and file of many police forces, and that feeling has not been well concealed, causing the non-law enforcement community to show increased resentment (I’ve spoken to this before).  This, in turn, has lead to a lot of people feeling like they’ve been abused, hassled, or harmed in some way from police interactions, which has increased the total amount of resentment against police forces by large factors in all groups, and especially in certain demographics, which leads me to my next point:
2.      Dorner is a black man.  Because of #1, there have to be a lot of disenfranchised black people in the country who are happy as hell to see a police force being given hell by a black man, even if that black man (by all accounts) would likely have been the first in line to give them grief before he got fired.  Many people live by the rule that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”;
3.      The actions of the LAPD subsequent to Dorner’s having gone rogue.  When you’re shooting Hispanic delivery women and short white guys simply because they drive a pickup truck (neither of which bear even a passing resemblance to Dorner’s, or at least, shouldn’t have to a trained police officer) without giving warning, without identifying the target, and without first verifying that a threat even exists (point being, even if it was Dorner – what if he was attemting to turn himself in?), you are going to feed conspiracy theories that the LAPD is scared of Dorner due to what he knows, and wants to “get rid” of him before he has a chance to speak out.  In other words, you’re going to feed the belief that the LAPD has a standing kill order out on him, and has no intention of even attempting to bring him in alive, because that would be catastrophic for them.  As much as I hate to admit it, I am actually starting to believe that this is the case – not that I’m given to conspiracy theories in general, but this one is just too much to not start suspecting something is going on here).
4.      The seeming irrationality of the crimes for which he has been accused, and his having committed no further crimes beyond those.  So you’re mad at the chief of police, your ex-boss.  So you kill his daughter and her fiancé?  That doesn’t make any sense.  To a public already skeptical of the intentions of the LAPD here, this seems beyond belief.  I believe that he did it.  Many folks think that it was a setup – that some high-rankers in the police department had a disagreement and that Dorner was used as a convenient patsy.
 All of that being said, I am not taking sides in this thing, because I think both sides are acting irrationally and in an abjectly evil manner.  To me, this entire situation is kind of like watching a bunch of Nazis and a bunch of communists going to war against each other – who would you root for?
 I’m rooting for winter.  Or Spanish Flu. Is it possible that neither side gets to win?  One can only hope.
 Best case scenario – Dorner doesn’t hurt anyone else.  He gets out of LA, gets caught and brought in by another police agency, and extradition to LA is denied.  He gets tried in that second venue, has his day in court, gets his say, and all that he knows that the LAPD is obviously afraid of gets brought to light.  Then, he goes to jail forever.  

 I stand behind my entire analysis above, including the part about the seeming irrationality of Dorner’s actions.  I also stand behind my belief that Dorner is guilty of those crimes, in spite of the conspiracy theories being bandied about in various other forums, and also that Dorner was not a hero, dark, anti-, or otherwise.

By all accounts, Dorner was a corrupt cop who got canned, then threatened to spill the beans on other corrupt cops in the department.  The fervent, violent, and irrational manner in which the PD went after Dorner seemed to me, at least, to prove this point, and also to indicate that Dorner’s claims to have some dirt were probably justified.  There seemed to be a shoot-on-site order out on Dorner.  Proof of this is the fact that in two separate indcidents, the police in LA opened fire on civilians simply because their vehicles vaguely matched the description of “pickup truck” which is what Dorner was last seen driving.  This sort of thing doesn’t happen during normal manhunts, so I’d have to figure that there was nothing normal about this one. 

Dorner, himself, was nuttier than squirrel turds, and showed it by turning violent instead of turning state’s evidence. 

As I said, above, I had really hoped that neither side would win, but it seems that the LAPD can put a notch in their stock and call this one a “win” because there is no outcry over this beyond the typical tinfoil hat sites on the internet.  No one is calling for heads to roll at LAPD headquarters, and DOrner is dead – burned to death in much the same way as the folks at the Waco compound in Texas. 

I do not give any credence to the idea that the police purposely allowed Dorner to burn to death in his cabin out of spite or in an effort to silence him, and this for two reasons – one, he had proven himself dangerous and willing to kill at the slightest provocation.  Any fireman sent to extinguish the blaze would have been in imminent danger from Dorner.  Were I a fireman in that situation, and they ordered me to put the fire out, I’d have refused unless I had some proof that the irrational nutbag inside wasn’t going to cap me for the trouble.  Two, the police running the standoff were not LAPD and so had no vested interest in covering up what Dorner had to say. 

SO, in summary, winter did not prevail.  The LAPD did.  Unfortunately.  However, at least Dorner lost finally, and is no longer out there shooting people and causing the LAPD to be so jumpy that they’re shooting people (and in fact, racking up a larger victim count than Dorner did, himself.)

The take-away from all of this is that once again, a police force has broadcast to the world that they are not out there to protect the citizenry, they are out there to enforce at any and all costs.  If a few elderly newspaper delivery women get shot in the process, well, quit your bitching or else we’ll accuse you of being PRO-CRIME!  So, you’re responsible for yourself, and keeping you and yours safe from harm, and away from the Dorner’s of the world.  Don’t rely on the police – Dorner WAS the police.  You are the only one you can trust when the chips are down. 

Finally, one more point – if I saw a truck pull up outside my house, and decided that the people in it meant me harm, and shot them to pieces while they tried to drive away, I’d be in jail and would probably not walk away a free man for the better part of the remainder of my life.  The police in this case did just that to those newspaper ladies, and they got a paid vacation and will almost certainly be back on the force, carrying guns amongst the public once again, once this all blows over.  You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, civilian.  How dare you question those who put their lives on the line daily to protect your helpless ass?  

Philosopher Kings

I dislike having conversations with philosophy majors.  Mainly because the regurgitate the crap that they learned in school without ever bothering to truly understand it.  Also because they often times have a sense of smug self-importance due to their perception that they have some unique outlook on life, and are particularly enlightened to a level that others just haven’t reached due to their studies in cheap mental parlor tricks.  They usually use their gift of enlightenment to tongue-tie people with stupid paradoxes that sound good but don’t hold water in true observation.  As I said, these mental regurgitations are nothing more than cheap parlor tricks that someone else far smarter than they are came up with eons ago, but these modern-day “philosophers” view them as proof of their intelligence. 

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does, indeed, make a sound.  I know this because the physics of sound waves do not depend on someone being there to observe them. 

You may think that your Zeno paradoxes are super clever, but when all I have to do is jog past a person that is walking away from me to refute your super-clever little word game, you are not smart – you’re boring.   

Such is the problem with so much that is going on in politics today.  They are more concerned with the philosophy of an act or a law than they are with the actual proven, real-world results.  They spend all of their time debating what color the Olympic-level sprinter should be wearing as he approaches, but never reaches, the position of the turtle that he is trying to run down, and totally miss the actual result when the Olympic sprinter easily catches the turtle and passes him in a few easy strides.  All of these things look good on paper but none of them hold up when put under real world scrutiny. 

They can’t fathom how lowering a tax rate can actually result in increased revenues, and how raising one can actually reduce them.  It never even occurs to them that we might be better off in the healthcare system if they’d LIFT laws, not stack on additional laws.  It never crosses their mind that our poverty problem is made worse by our current welfare and entitlement system, not better.  Far be it for them to truly understand how the minimum wage negatively impacts low-wage earners around the nation.  All of that is contrary to their clever little philosophy, so it can’t possibly be true. 

And so the philosopher kings continue to claim that an arrow cannot possibly move through the air while the rest of us take our bows out for target practice and prove them wrong.  Again.  

Drone Strikes, Hypothetically Speaking

I’d like you to picture a scenario in your head for me.  As I describe the situation in my hypothetical, I want you to try really hard to truly imagine the scenario and what it would be like to live under those conditions. 

Imagine that a group of hyper-religious Montana Freemen types decide that they want to bomb some tyrannical, atheist statists in Russia, and do so.  They take out a bunch of innocent Russian civilians in the process as unintentional collateral damage.  The United States government either doesn’t have enough proof of their guilt, or is too shiftless and lazy, or even worse, too much in support of their actions to actually do something about it.  It doesn’t matter why, the fact is that the Freemen types get away with it scot-free. 

Russia is righteously pissed off about this (rightfully so, I believe) and decides to do something about it.  They choose to begin flying unmanned drones over US airspace, and at the first sign of Freemen activity, they launch the Russian equivalent of Hellfire missiles at the area and level it. It is not uncommon, and in fact, it happens more often than not, that American civilians get caught up and killed in the crossfire.  In some unfortunate instances, Freemen weren’t even in the area and no legitimate target is killed – every person killed was an innocent.  In one particularly egregious example, a young man and woman are killed at their wedding, along with a not-unsubstantial portion of their families, when the Russian intelligence is faulty and a wedding party is mistaken for a Freemen rally.  It is an honest mistake on the part of the Russians, and they apologize for it afterward.

As an American citizen, you begin to take to looking to the sky no matter where you go, even though you know that this is a futile gesture – the drones are invisible, silent, and have a reach long enough that you’ll never see the missile coming that kills you.  You never know when the missile will drop.  Is there a Freemen boss in the house next to your’s as you eat dinner with your family? If so, you are mere seconds away from dying with him.  Is a Hellfire missile on its way to kill you right now?  When you send your kids off to school, do you fear that they will never return because of a Russian strike that wasn’t meant for them but got them anyway?  Do you fear that you’ll never return to see them grow up for the same reason?

Does it make your blood boil when a Russian official goes on record as saying that it is the fault of any innocents killed in their raids for being too close to a Freemen, not the Russian’s fault for killing them?  How about when the number of innocent American civilians killed in these unmanned airstrikes exceeds the number of innocent Russians that the original Freemen bomb killed?  Does that piss you off more than you can possibly put into words?

Does all of this make you more or less sympathetic to the Russian cause?  Would you support Russia in their efforts?  Or would you be more apt to take part in actions that harm Russia as a result?  If a group of those same Freemen came to you and told you that they were going to fight back against these Russian assholes, would you join them?  How about if it was a different, unaffiliated militia group that formed as a result of the Russian actions? 

Finally, do you think that Russia’s actions would lead to an increase or a decrease in the likelihood that Russia would be attacked by an American group in the future? 

What if I told you that America is doing everything that I described above to countries in the middle east?  Follow the links that I've placed throughout to get your proof. 

Do you think that these drone strikes are making us more or less secure?  Are we more or less likely to be attacked as a result of these strikes?  If your answer here isn't the same as your answer when I asked the same about the hypothetical Russians, then you are lying to yourself. 

President Obama is making us all less safe by using these drone strikes.  They are wrong.  They are unethical.  They are fucking evil, folks.  How this isn't murder, I’ll never understand.  These drone strikes are the best recruitment tool that the terrorist organizations could possibly ever have.  While I’m certain that they fear the strikes, they also have to sort of love them in a perverse way, for exactly that reason.  

Equality?

The US military has now opened up primary combat roles to women.  My first response to that is to ask if women now have to register for selective service on their 18^th birthday like men do (they don’t).  Or if they can opt out of combat roles like men can’t without a damn good reason (they can).  Or if they need to meet the same physical requirements as men going into combat roles (they don’t).

If you want equality, then fight for equality.  If you want to get all the good parts of being “equal” but still be able to eschew the nasty bits, then don’t parade around in front of me and brag about how equal you are, because what you have is not equality.  Until women who want equality are also fighting to make it illegal for a woman not to sign up for selective service on their 18^th birthday, I don’t want to hear about it.  Until women who want equality are also fighting to make it mandatory for women to fight in combat roles if they are selected to do so, I don’t want to hear about it.  Until women who want equality are also fighting to hold fighting women to the same physical standards as fighting men, I don’t want to hear about it. 

What we have now is not equality; it is special treatment for a special segment of the population, which is what these “equality” agitators were fighting for in the first place.  If they truly wanted to seek equality, they would view this special treatment as offensive.  They don’t, and so as a result of that, I’ve determined that equality is far from what they actually desire.   

I’ve spoken on this same issue in many different venues, including family courts, in the past.  Women who truly want equality should be absolutely offended by the special treatment that they are getting in equality’s name. 

I would be.  

From a time when women were really equal, and were damned proud of it

On “Chick Lean”…

Why does it not surprise me that the Most Powerful Man in the Free World R exhibits a serious case of “chick lean?”

Sad, but not surprising, I guess.  This is a man who is ordering our troops into harm’s way, to use guns and explosives and every manner of death-dealing weaponry, and he is leaning away from a low-base load in a heavy stacked-barrel 12 gauge because he is compensating for the weight of the gun and shying away from the recoil (I wanted to add “like a goddamned nancy-boy” after that last sentence, but chose not to because it is common for first time shooters to shy from the recoil because of all the urban legends that they’ve heard about “kicking like a mule” and so forth, so I realized that wasn’t entirely fair). 

Just for a little background, this is called “chick lean” because, as offensive as the term may be, it is a shooting tendency that is usually reserved for first-time female shooters for two reasons:

1.      The gun is heavy, and so they are leaning back away from it to try and balance themselves against the weight of the gun;

2.      They are apprehensive about the recoil and so are shying away from it.

A far better long-gun stance is to have your feet shoulder width apart, turned slightly, and either stand straight or lean forward a bit to brace against the recoil.  Like a shock absorber in a car, this actually reduces felt recoil because it allows you to “give” a little, whereas in a case of “chick lean” you’ve already given all you can, so the recoil is usually worse with this poor stance. 

Also, add in the fact that you are accommodating your body to the gun instead of the other way around, and it becomes harder to aim, harder to hold steady, and harder not to allow the trigger pull to affect your aim point – so the typical shooter affected by a case of “chick lean” is also usually not that accurate. 

This is not the only mechanical issue with stance and grip that I can see in this picture, and that, coupled with the “chick lean” factor leads me to conclude (with pretty good evidence) that this is probably the first time that President Obama has ever fired a gun – and I’m sorry, folks, but that makes him ignorant about them, and as a result, makes him the wrong guy to be coming up with good gun policy.  Kind of like that New York Times article the other day that labeled the front sling swivel on an AR-15 as a “grenade launcher mount.”  If you don’t know what you’re talking about, then shut the hell up and let the adults talk.