Whiskey Fire

Sad Freaks of the Nation

Big Dead Dumb Breitbart.

Why Do Gunmen Target Churches And Schools, Not NRA Meetings?

Well, this last guy wanted specifically to shoot black people, so, uh, asked and answered.

Beyond that, I am going to be a teacher for the rest of my career, and fuck me if I'm ever gutless coward enough to walk into a classroom with a fucking gun. I wage civilization, motherfucker.

Conservatives Can't Argue, Because, oh, I Dunno, Syphilis?

God those fucking fish in those fucking barrels are such fucking assholes. Assmonkey:

Liberals Can’t Argue, They Can Only Bully [Updated]

Perhaps the major intellectual failing of the American Right is that they are so awesomely stupid they can't grasp how dumb they are. Hello, assmonkey!

No one expects sensible commentary on firearms from the New Yorker, but this gun control rant is worth noting because it is so typical of modern liberalism. Facts? Who needs facts? Bullying is all that the left aspires to.

The term "bullying" here is of interest. The issue here is a lawsuit brought by the parents of murdered children. Assmonkey is the bullied victim? A million fuck yous for you, John Hinderaker!

Assmonkey does some pointless snide fiskery for a bit -- of note is how assmonkey sneers at and then concedes the fact that gun manufacturers have special dopey laws protecting them -- but then we get this beautiful bit of horseshit:

A “weapon intended only to kill en masse” might be, say, an atomic bomb, certainly not a semiautomatic rifle.

Because the children at Sandy Hook were not killed "en masse." Because smug gun bang bang dicks like John Hinderaker are smug.

There's a lot of savage idiocy throughout the rest of assmonkey's post, but what else do you need but that? He's a nasty little halfwit shit, full stop.

 

 

These Grand Aul Times

Libertarian Fascism.

No one was hurt and no stores were looted. Between 1,000 and 3,000 lawful gun owners showed up openly armed at the state capitol in Olympia, Wash., on Saturday to defy the newly passed gun control law, I-594.

Organizer Gavin Seim made the extraordinary nature of the rally very clear, "This isn’t just a protest. We are here to openly violate the law." Attendees publicly transferred their guns to each other in violation of I-591’s background check provisions, and some even bought and sold guns just a few feet away from law enforcement. A fire pit blazed throughout the rally, and at the conclusion, gun owners lined up to burn their concealed weapons permits. A petition was circulated affirming gun owners’ refusal to follow I-594, which ended with, “We pledge our blood. We will not comply.”

Good for them! Refusing to comply with the law, a contempt for democratic norms, the "blood" thing -- gosh.

Compare, contrast.

Point is, you don't have to like this white dude to note that he had hammers wrapped in plastic in a closed backpack, and these Olympia white dudes were brandishing weapons and openly flouting the law.

Oh, what the hell:

Despite the fact that the participants in the putsch had shot dead four policemen and staged an armed (and in any reasonable terms) treasonable revolt against a legitimately constituted state government, the court sentenced Hitler to a mere five years in prison for high treason.

There are predictable consequences for nations determined to hate their own laws and governments, nations that make a majority fetish of the gun, nations whose minority citizens are deliberately kept simmering at a seething desire for vengeance.

Sell, sell to white folks that savory, deep-felt benign bigotry that always does so swell at the hustings in places like fucking Staten Island. Tell, tell the cops, hey, it's all cool.

Seems an easy enough prognostication: either we have a genuine democracy, or we have spilled blood. I advocate nothing here; it's just how it goes.

 

Death in Bainbridge

The young man who was murdered is the son of a friend and colleague of ours. The older man who got shot is our friend's ex.

A Bainbridge man has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a 26-year-old in a fitness center parking lot Monday.

Derek D. Prindle, 26, of Afton, died after being shot at about 1:30 p.m. outside Peak Fitness on Route 7 in Bainbridge, state police said. His father, 60-year-old Derek S. Prindle of Afton, was also shot and remains hospitalized, Trooper Nathan Riegal said today.

John M. Guzy, 56, of Bainbridge, was taken into custody after the shooting and charged with second-degree murder. He was arraigned in Town of Bainbridge Court and remanded to the Chenango County jail.

Police are still investigating to piece together a motive in the shooting.

"It looks like this was a road rage type of incident," Riegal said. "It doesn't look like they even knew each other ... but their dispute ended up in the parking lot."

The murderer is apparently a former New York City cop.

What exactly happened is not clear, but local reporting is that a tailgating incident turned into a nightmare.

A lot of NYC cops retire to the Southern Tier of NY, or the Northern Tier of PA. Without exception, in my purely anecdotal experience, NYC cops who retire to this part of the world are, generally, to varying degrees, unpleasant, paranoid, gun-nut racists. I will bet anyone a nickel this angry asshole had a Repeal the SAFE Act sign in his front yard.

Scott had a post up the other day about how comparing upstate NY to Alabama is facile. This particular story shows why that's true in a pretty horrible way. If we're ever going to get to grips with our many American nightmares, we have to abandon self-flattering just-so stories about Us and Them, and get down to cases. In upstate NY, the child of a philosophy professor, a young man who loved cinema profoundly and aesthetically, was murdered over nothing by a Big City Yahoo. Riddle me that!

Be that as it may.

The son of a friend and colleague, someone dear to myself and MollyI, has been shot and killed. When it's appropriate I will ask our friend where she might like any donations directed, and then I shall pass that along to youse guys.

This is the second time in my life that I've had some sort of personal connection with a twenty-something murdered by a lunatic with a gun.

I am profoundly unsympathetic to the "let's all have guns" crowd. I am far too sad and angry now to even curse.

Foot Shot

Clearly, the solution to gun violence is more guns.

ISU instructor shoots himself in the foot

An instructor was wounded in the foot after his concealed handgun discharged in a classroom at the Physical Science Complex on the Idaho State University campus at about 4 p.m. Tuesday....

“It's unfortunate,” ISU President Arthur Vailas said. “I'm sure the incident was scary and embarrassing.”

Vailas, who is a gun owner and hunter, said he likes guns but not on campus. He joined other Idaho university professors and chief of police from cities with universities during the last Idaho legislative session in opposition to legislation that now allows concealed carry on campuses in Idaho so long as the person has obtained an enhanced permit. Enhanced permits require additional training.

The new law went into effect on July 1 and Idaho State opted to arm its campus security force for the first time as a result.

Forgive me for remaining unconvinced of the competency of concealed-carry advocates to react responsibly and competently in a tense situation, such as a heavily armed madman shooting up a school. 

For that matter, forgive me for remaining unconvinced of the competency of concealed-carry advocates to react responsibly and competently in a completely calm and ordinary situation, such as just fucking standing around.

The World According to Townhall Dot Com

In the world as it exists in the Townhall Dot Com plane of reality, the most serious international problem as regards Russia is that Russians do not have sufficient access to guns.

I shit thee not.

 

Ripples In The Fabric Of Space-Time

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 286 is Technological. I'm not including any of my own pictures for this one because the science news is more spectacular than anything I could come up with. Here are the SPT and BICEP-2 telescopes in Antarctica:


Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.
...
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

If the above article isn't clear, I'm sure this one will straighten everybody out.


Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Eternal Flame

Just had a brilliant idea: Why not make November 22nd* American Firearms Day? We can each take a few moments to remember the Freedom & Liberty brought to this country by armed crazies wandering the streets while we gloss over the millions murdered, dead or permanently damaged because people like you are trusted w/ firearms in these United Snakes & to remind us all that were it not for guns, we wouldn't need guns!!

Although, in all fairness, to be balanced & objective, no skin off our teeth, so whatevs:

I remember when I was five

We were sittin' in school when the teacher cried

She told everybody that the President died

But that didn't bother me 'cause I was still alive!

Cobbled together from ranted droolings chez moi & a Twit.

Hey Patriots: Let's make 22 Nov. American Firearms Day, to celebrate the Freedom & Liberty guns have brought America. No? How about June 6?

— M. Bouffant (@MBouffant) November 22, 2013

---

*April 14th? Wait, use this list.

Rifle Games for 7-Year-Olds, What a Drag

Christ, another one.

When I think about guns, I think they're stupid. I think guns make people stupid, because they start to think... problem? Well -- guns!

Here is a fascinating Twitter interaction between me and a National Review specimen.

Gosh that's swell.

No government regulation, no restrictions on drugs, prostitution, or guns.

We'd surely be more free in a narco-state hellhole, sure.

 

Yeah Now That's a Drag

The usually high-strung and squawky Charles C. W. Cooke over at NRO says something that approaches reasonable. Lawks.

The call for a muscular governmental response each and every time that something bad happens in America is an unsavory reminder of what can best be described as our dumb first instinct — a hard-coded human reaction that is closely and dishonorably related to the same primeval impulse that leads frightened children to respond to disasters, abominations, and tragedies with a touching, but useless refrain, “make it better, Mommy.” This itch, which our 24/7 media and expansive government only make worse, should be steadfastly and reflexively resisted by those who value reason and liberty, and resisted especially vehemently when the proposed reaction would likely violate rights explicitly protected in the Constitution.

Golly.

One can only salute Mr Cooke for launching this blistering critique on conservative positions regarding capital punishment, the drug war, state sponsored torture, GOP foreign policy in general... it's truly impressive that he's so willing to confront right-wing paranoia and fearmongering -- wait... beg pardon?

Today’s shooting at the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C., is no exception to this rule.

Never mind.

There's a lot of comical gibberish to follow. Universal background checks have always been remarkably popular, and thus didn't fail in Congress because most Americans dislike such measures; there's a silly correlation-not-causation reference to declining overall crime rates and gun nuts remaining nuts about guns.

But most impressive is this:

This is key. Leaving to one side for a moment the constitutionality of gun control, it should be remembered that America is a nation with around 300-million-plus privately owned guns and a much-cherished constitutional amendment protecting the right of the people to keep and to bear arms. It is, in other words, like neither Britain nor Australia, both of which are favorite examples of the (admittedly rare) hard-liners who shy away neither from using the word “ban” nor from arguing that the country would be better off if an outright ban were imposed. In Britain, the 1997 gun ban prompted around 2,000 people to protest; in Australia, critics were a little louder, but they still allowed themselves to be disarmed without much of a fight. In the United States, conversely, it is neither hyperbolic nor unreasonable to predict that any attempt at either confiscation or prohibition of common weapons would start a second civil war.

Ha.

Australia has been happily free of American-style mass shootings since their 1990s mass shooting nightmare.

Thus, America's gun nuts see several gruesome mass murders a year as an acceptable price for them to indulge in adolescent playtime fantasies about Fightin' the Gummint by fetishizing totally unnecessary deadly weapons.

Ahem. Wolverines.