Whatever and Ever, Amen

Here we go again. To be fair, it is a Saturday, which means "white power mass shooting" nowadays. Unlike the asshole last week at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, who at least had the common courtesy to take himself out after gunning down three people (including a six-year-old), today's asshole was taken alive. So, not a black guy holding his phone in a threatening manner. Oh, and there's an 8chan manifesto where the shooter claims inspiration from the Christchurch massacre. There's a shocker.

Obviously this won't change anything as far as gun policy. Look, if gunning down a classroom full of second-graders didn't do it, and gunning down hundreds of concert-goers from a high-rise casino didn't do it, this won't do it either. But we might at least start taking a serious look at the pattern of enablement under this administration, the wink-and-a-nod "fine people on both sides" stance that is baked into the rhetoric.

He tweets out the useless "tots 'n' pears" crap they all do when these things happen, and then turns around at the next rally or the next tweet-storm and indulges the baser instincts of his audience. He used asylum seekers as scapegoats for the midterms, and hasn't let up. This has been going full steam for months, aided and abetted by the Murdoch agitprop machine. It should not be surprising that marginal doofuses with access to firepower are getting motivated and acting up.

It's an interesting coincidence that Elijah Cummings had an attempted home invasion the same week Fatboy decided to make him a target for the shitposts. Also interesting that there's an uptick in "go back where you came from" sentiments. It's almost as if the chief executive has influence over his supporters -- even more so when the group behavior more closely resembles that of a cult.

They hang on his every word. They genuinely believe he is divinely ordained, this ridiculous pig who's cheated on every woman he's been with, fucks porn actresses, doesn't pay taxes, screws over small business just for the fun of it, tells flat-out lies the way most people draw breath. Funny how Gawwwd always seems to pick  the most unworthy vessels for his big plans, with plenty of true believers waiting around for their chance to help out.

They try to pretend it's just about the ever-lovin' spite of pissin' off libturds, but they are devoted to this clown, they believe his transparent lies, the more ridiculous the lie the more they love it. Windmills cause cancer and we're bailing out the Midwest farmers with China's money. You can't buy that kind of gullibility at any price. These mouth-breathing slapdicks would jump off a bridge if he told them to. That's less of an exaggeration than we'd like to think.

Clearly, the main thing is that no one is made to feel like a racist, they just happen to support someone who tweets bigoted sentiments practically on a daily basis. Fine, whatever. Stop arguing with them, stop interviewing them. We know what they're going to say before they say it. They'll have an excuse for this shooting and that racist tweet, just like the last one, just like the next hundred.

This Land Is Your Land

Is there really anything to say about school shootings anymore? Since everyone on both sides understands full well that nothing at all will ever be done about any of it, the whole thing has turned into a sad, repetitive kabuki.

Gun-control advocates will cite the usual litany of statistics and call for more background checks and mental health screenings, all well and good but completely useless in preventing a sick kid from taking daddy's legally-obtained gun. You want to make a dent in this thing, start figuring out a way to require liability insurance on firearms. We all have to have insurance to drive our automobiles (the other quintessentially 'murkin item, in that we are conditioned for life to self-actualize through our driving choices).

So it doesn't seem too onerous to propose that, say, if your son is caught outside the fucking White House with a bunch of weapons that are confiscated and handed back to you -- with an admonition not to give them back to your mentally-ill son -- and you give the weapons back to your son anyway, and he shoots up a Waffle House, well, not only are you a flaming dipshit, but you deserve to spend the rest of your miserable life making restitution to the families of those your son slaughtered. Any decent society would shun such an individual. He is morally responsible for the deaths of those people, even if, through some shameful quirks of the gun laws of his state, he isn't legally responsible.

I promise you, if we hold people financially responsible for the damage caused by their weapons, they'll be a lot more goddamned careful about locking them up and lending them out. But no one seems to be talking about that, not at the level you hear the other stuff anyway.

The gun-humpers, of course, are infinitely worse. Christ, are these people fucking tedious. You know what they're going to say before they say it. It's now just a perverse wager, the over-under on how many hours will elapse before:

• Someone will accuse the survivors of being "crisis actors" paid by George Soros, who apparently writes checks to strangers like most people draw breath.
• Someone will attempt to draw a tenuous political motivation (within minutes of the shooter being identified, someone literally started a Facebook page in his name, complete with photo-shopped pics of him wearing a Hillary cap and Antifa gear.
• Someone will show up at the school where kids were just murdered, the bodies not even cold yet, armed and stupid and ready to scribble some incoherent manifesto.

That last person is especially execrable, a piece of fucking shit. I am not exaggerating when I say that I hope he goes home, thinks about his choices and actions, maybe has one last cheeseburger and jerks a final wad into his favorite gym sock, and takes his sidearm and parks one in the bag of fevered worms that passes for his brain. Fuck that guy right in the medulla oblongata. He's a goddamned waste of oxygen, and there are already plenty of those in this world.

We've got some real decisions to make here, folks. Either you're tired of this shit, tired enough to vote for any sort of change at all to this country's bizarre mania for guns, or you're not. We can talk about NRA money or Koch money or whatever money goes to which candidate, but either people are sentient enough to pay attention and not be bought off by some stupid political ads, or they aren't.

And if they aren't aware enough to watch the ads and still understand what their rational self-interest really is, then we're done anyway. The body just hasn't fallen to the ground yet.

Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

Gee, you'd think that if they really wanted Mike Pence to feel safe at the convention of the gun manufacturers' lobby, they'd just post a bunch of armed schoolteachers. I hope the NRA fleeces these dipshits out of every loose dime they have.

It's a Start

It appears that Laura Ingraham's endless supply of snide comments has finally gotten her ass in a wringer. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person, and it's hilarious to watch how quickly she took to groveling soon as she realized her bullshit was finally going to cost her money.

Which is really all that's important to any of these useless idiots, Alex Jones and such like. Never forget that at the end of the day, it's all a fucking scam. The only thing these cock-smokers sincerely believe in is getting paid. Everything else is just filler between ads for catheters and pills and ambulance chasers "helping" you with your legal claims for mesothelioma or displaced vaginal mesh.

And what David Hogg initiated with his tweet is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. Again, these young people are reminding us all that we don't have to take their shit -- really, we never did need to take their shit. He's reminding this smug smartass that it's not a joke, that his friends were murdered and for people like Ingraham and Loesch and the rest of the Jugend to crack wise about it is not going to fly anymore. Somebody had to do it.

The MSM are collectively cowed by "tradition" and "process" and "expectations" and "norms," while faithfully stenographing the comings and goings of an administration that is completely unencumbered by those things. They'll keep showing up to the "press briefings" for Baghdad Barb's daily sack o' lies, right up to the bitter end, whining in mock horror every time she, y'know, fucking lies about everything. Great. That and eight bucks will get me a nice artisanal mochachino.

It's vital to remember that, like her cult hero, Laura Ingraham is merely a symptom, not the disease. Considering she labors in the typhoid factory, she's little more than a voluntary carrier, spreading the pandemic around as much as possible, blowing her nose into the sandwiches and soups she sells to unwitting customers.

Like Facebook users, Fox viewers are not the customers -- they are the product. These tiresome fist-shaking codgers cling bitterly to the vestiges of life long after the thrill of living is gone, as their bodies and minds betray them full-tilt. Many of them have already collected more from Social Security than they paid in, and will tell you right away that they are entitled to all of it and more, even if they spend the next twenty years marinating in their own filth and decrepitude, watching lifelong losers like Geraldo Rivera spew lies at them non-stop.

So Ingraham sucks, but let's not forget Tucker Carlson, let's not forget that fatheaded turd Hannity, who actually has some sort of informal advisory role with one F. Von Clownstick, aka King Shit of Turd Hill.

Imagine that for a hard second -- it is well-known fact that a person unjustly thrust into perhaps the most important job on the planet spends his mornings poop-transcribing Fox and Friends on his Twitter account, then has dinner with Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro (who makes Ingraham look like Oprah Winfrey in comparison) on a regular basis. He solicits advice and counsel from these weasels.

Seriously, 'murka:  your domestic and foreign policy is literally being affected by Steve Doocy, who doesn't have three brain cells to rub together. We can all duly note, in the classic style of Yakov Smirnoff, that in Russia the leader controls state teevee -- but here in America, it's the other way around.

There's always the argument that "free speech" is being coercively squelched by reactive boycotts like this. But people like Jones and Hannity and Ingraham are impervious to the rigors of normal debate and argument. They are not interested in mustering facts or exchanging ideas. Upton Sinclair would recognize this nonsense for exactly what it is, people whose careers depend on them pissing and shitting into the well of public discourse.

Ordinarily you might say they are heedless or reckless in their disregard for what they're doing, and what effects their lies have on people and events, but you would be very wrong. They know exactly what they're doing. It's in their job description.

All of which means that maybe it's time to go after the big guns -- the Murdochs and their vile media empire. Maybe it's time to boycott the regular Fox network as well; I'm tired of football and Family Guy anyway. Truly, the old man is the worst sort of scum, and his sons are about as much of a "moderating influence" as Clownstick's awful brood. I wish them all long lives -- as poor, broke, miserable bastards. It would be nice at least once in this lifetime to see privileged scumbags held accountable for what they've done.

The Kids Are Alright

Maybe instead of getting annoyed with Sanctimonium Santorum trolling high school students with his sage "take CPR in case aderanged shooter drops in with an AR-15" advice, maybe we should ask CNN why they keep having in on to spout nonsense. The fact that he was once a You Ass Senator only means that Pennsyltuckians have a knuckle-dragger contingent like every other state in the union.

Look, this is an industry, and CNN has no problem selling the nutritional equivalent of deep-fried twinkies, under the usual guise of "let's hear both sides." Again, when the issue is how can we stop or at least reduce the frequency of school shootings?, recommending CPR classes and posting five-gallon buckets at strategic locations is not a fucking "side," it's inexcusably stupid and borderline deranged.

So you might say to yourself, "Self, I wonder why the supposedly librul lamestream media keep having liars and morons peddle nonsense and cheap invective? I wonder why the nation's leading newspapers keep making bi-weekly pilgrimages out to talk to handfuls of fist-shaking codgers in dilapidated diners in decrepit towns?"

The mediots are dedicated first and foremost to peddling clickbait, things that will infuriate all the usual people and get them squawking. They are marketing a product, just as surely as Frito-Lay or Smirnoff or Applebee's or Tampax is marketing a product.

It is our collective decision whether we wish to consume the media product -- and more importantly, the products of their sponsors -- or not. It's also our decision whether or not we wish to take note that the person who runs CNN is the same person who ran NBC when Fuckface Von Clownstick had his stupid fake-tycoon celebritard fuckfest, and if that's all just a big coincidence.

The Parkland students have managed a formidable accomplishment, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of cities around the world, with just a month to organize things, with the right-wing propaganda machine and its various scumbags and dogsbodies [paid crisis actors!] focused squarely on them. Obviously the ultimate outcome of the marches remains to be seen, but the students have already demonstrated one very important principle that everyone can take note of:  you don't have to take shit from these people. At all.

These young people have had hideous, hateful nonsense hurled at them, in social media and on the teevee and probably in their local communities, death threats and invective from people they don't know, and therefore have no idea if they're "real" or just outrage trolling. And they've shrugged it off completely, refusing to acknowledge the assholes, calling out politicians at every level.

There are really only two ways to make the vile scumbags pay attention:  the ballot box and the wallet. And people can and should use both of those things, and not be afraid to dig deep. The Parkland students were effective in that arena as well, without really even trying; once the NRA rushed to show just how monstrous they truly are, it didn't take long for their corporate sponsors to distance themselves.

So who are the sponsors of the CNN show that had that dipshit Santorum on to burble his abusive nonsense? Maybe they need a friendly reminder about where their advertising dollars ultimately come from. That's what got that fuckhead O'Reilly banished to podcasting out of the den in his empty house. The gun-humpers have no compunction about pissing all over the First Amendment in order to "protect" their fevered vision of the Second Amendment. Maybe it's time to show that everyone can play that game.

Or, to dig a bit deeper, remember who produced the aforementioned fake-tycoon celebritard fuckfest? I've said it before and I'll say it again:  social media and reality teevee have wrecked this country, and the foremost purveyor of the latter form of televised diarrhea is that limey turd Mark Burnett, who also produces Survivor, which seems like it oughta be years past its sell-by date even for the inert gastropods who still watch that dreck (in between Bachelor marathons and intravenous mayonnaise feedings).

So who sponsors Survivor, and can they (and CBS, of course) be leaned on? Personally, I can't boycott something I've never watched, but they don't know that. This is what it's come to, because this is what they've insisted on. It's long past time now to give it back with both barrels. And we've all just been given a crash course in how to do that.

Both Sides Now

I don't really have much to offer on the subject of MSM concern trolling of "liberals" and "leftists" as those definitions even still exist as we might have understood them ten or twenty years ago, because whether it's coming out of James Bennet's troll farm or from the soi-disant conservative end, the results are the same, and you shall know their sloppy thinking by their works. Their crapulence should be self-evident enough that you don't need some random numbskull such as yours truly to connect the dots.

But the opening example from the above-linked AmCon essay deserves attention:

Earlier this March, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors David Hogg and Cameron Kasky appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Kasky used the opportunity to respond to those like NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch who he feels have used the activists’ young age as an excuse to say they don’t know what they are talking about. Kasky boldly declared: “We’ve been locked in a classroom. We have seen our friends text their parents goodbye. We are the experts. We know exactly what we’re talking about. How dare you tell us we don’t know?” Having endured a horrific and traumatizing experience, it’s understandable that Kasky would answer critics with emotion.

The bigger problem is that such emotional arguments have become the norm in our society. As Charles C.W. Cooke recently argued in National Review, it is wrong and belittling to dismiss Hogg and the other activists from Parkland simply because they are young, just as it is wrong to say that they should be immune from criticism on account of their age. If these students want to chime in on a national debate, it is their right to speak their minds and enter the scrum. Accordingly, their ideas should be criticized and praised under the same criteria as anyone else’s. In that spirit, it is rather difficult to accept Kasky’s claim to expertise solely by his being present at the scene of a horrific crime.

This is disingenuous enough to give a bad name to concern trolling, which is saying something. Let's break down the operational phrase "NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch," shall we? The NRA lobbies on behalf of gun manufacturers, not gun owners. It's a crucial difference between customer and product -- gun owners are the product that the NRA brings to their customers, by pushing booga-booga nonsense about so-and-so coming to take your arsenal, which you totally need in case you have to fight off the eeevil gubmint you claim to revere. Something like that; it becomes increasingly difficult to parse their self-contradictory jabber.

Anyhoo, Dana Loesch is the (urp!) spokesmodel peddling said paranoid jabber to old white men who buy into such guff, and regard her as eye candy. Loesch regards herself as eye candy as well, as she has also tried to pitch a sitcom idea for herself to star in as a "hot young mom." Um, okay. Can't believe they passed on that one.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that not only is Dana Loesch delusional, she is a carny peddling gun paranoia to Dale Gribble burger-militia types between "jobs" out in BFE. Loesch's thinly veiled threats of armed insurrection may give the Cletii a chub, but the main thing is that she is making nakedly emotional appeals to the rubes she's selling to the gun manufacturers.

You see, it turns out that orange is not the new black after all -- since Fuckface Von Clownstick slithered into orifice, gun sales have tumbled, and Remington has filed for bankruptcy. The reasons have a cultural component, but it's mostly just math -- most people purchasing a gun these days already have one, or ten, or fifty, and so are not incentivized to buy more without something tickling their prostateparanoia gland. Enter Dana Loesch. [giggity]

So this glib chuckler walking past Loesch's role in all this really is not only inexcusable, it's the crux of the biscuit in this here argument. True, Cameron Kasky's role as victim/bystander in a tragic mass murder does not automatically confer upon him the role of "expert" in determining Second Amendment policy. His arguments can and should be scrutinized and contested where they might be flawed, just like anyone else.

But Dana Loesch is no expert either. She's a paid shill for a group that by its own inflated estimation accounts for maybe 5 million people, which is not peanuts, but is also a drop in a bucket of 320 million citizens. The NRA wraps themselves in the fucking flag and claims to represent all Americans, when in fact they represent weapons manufacturers, and count (probably falsely at that) a thin sliver of Americans as paid members. It's actually a pretty impressive racket when you think about it.

I'm not sure what the ultimate intent or endgame of the Parkland survivors will be; it's possible they don't even know for sure yet. They're probably still in "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore" mode, and they should be. So far what they've done is impressive, and I hope they are able to accomplish more. Even if I end up disagreeing with the specifics of this or that policy proposal, I respect the fact that they've organized and mobilized and made it clear that they're not taking shit from any of these scumbags. Because that is exactly what Loesch and Wayne LaPierre and all the politicians they rent really are. Their gun fetish and the money it brings in are much more important to them than the safety of schoolchildren, every time.

We should be disgusted that not only is this the only nation on the planet that has these events occur, much less with regularity, but also that when they happen, there is always a claque of paid actors (such as Loesch, whom you can be sure does not work pro bono) who will scuttle out of the woodwork and claim that the survivors are paid actors.

Forget the false equivalences and the harrumphed pronunciamentos about arguing from emotion instead of reason: the real problem here is that when these tragedies occur, equal time and footing is given to horrible people, who are not yoked to any moral compass, who have no sense of shame or common decency, who are comfortable arguing from bad faith, peddling lies and hypocrisy.

And then you have the professional commentariat trotting out with their same tired-ass chin-stroking both-sider template. We'll see how creative they get when Loesch's calls for armed rebellion turn into bouts of domestic terrorism, because that's really the demographic she's been stoking all along, trying to gin up gun sales in a down market.

Let's cut the shit here, folks: what we've been watching here is a bunch of high-schoolers taking on one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country, as well as all of those rented political weasels. There's no fucking equal footing here; no one is paying any of these kids to stick their necks out on this, but every single one of the talking heads pitted against them is paid quite well, count on it.

Fuck those people, every last one of them. At this point, I don't care if gun-control advocates do start wanting full confiscation, as improbable as that might be, as impossible as it would be to carry out. Because no matter which party is power anymore, I want to see these motherfuckers lose, every time, from here on out. If they order a hot pastrami sandwich from a deli, I want them to get shit on a shingle.

Enough is enough. This nation has been held hostage by a handful of fetishists for far too long, and they need either to accept some very reasonable and modest checks on their "inalienable right," or we need to start revisiting the whole concept. The other 315 million people who are not NRA members do not owe that 1.56% sliver a goddamned thing.

Social Justice Worriers

A thorough post-mortem analysis of the 2016 election will include the inevitable effects of reactionary sentiments, especially against putatively "progressive" causes that made the rounds in that year and the couple years preceding it. Some of this reactionarism certainly had its roots in racism, as the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement (insofar as it even qualifies as such) can attest.

Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.

Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.

In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.

It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.

There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:

• the piss-colored rosacea golem squatting in the people's house, profiteering illegally with impunity, sending his dipshit progeny to conduct sensitive high-level negotiations that hold countless lives in the balance;
• the steadily mounting evidence that a hostile foreign nation affected a US presidential election with the complicity of the victor and his campaign staff;
• a stolen SCOTUS seat;
• the Republican Party's rapid devolution into a proto-fascist enabling regime;
• the Democratic Party's typically dickless response -- these fuckers stole a Supreme Court seat and the election, and the only thing you assholes grandstand about is the so-called Dreamers?;
• the various cabinet ministers whose respective missions amount to killing off the agencies they have been appointed to oversee;
• the sizable minority that still supports such nonsense, directly counter to their own rational self-interest and that of the country they self-righteously claim to revere.

It is no exaggeration to say that it may take another full generation to come back from these things. Any and all of them are so much worse than whatever esoteric jabber some humanities major is concocting in their Wednesday empowerment group.

I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.

The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.

What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.

No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.

What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.

Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.

I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.

The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.

The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.

It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.

But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.

When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.

But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.

In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.

But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.

Fuck You, Emperor Snowflake

Looks like in spite of their complete inability to cobble together a coherent proactive message, or unify around any sort of figure to move them collectively forward, Democratic candidates swept the field in a variety of races on all levels all over the country. The message is clear, and hopefully gains momentum as Mueller keeps flipping the Russian rats, and more people simply get tired of Preznit YouTube Comments Thread.

What makes it even more hilarious is that Snowflake, balls deep in monkey-fucking our Asian trade arrangements, couldn't help but take a moment and bury Special Ed Gillespie in his (at the time of this post) nine-point loss to Ralph Northam.

As the Post article spells out, this is the sort of thing that will end up being Snowflake's undoing. Unlike Luther Strange, Ed Gillespie openly embraced the scaremongering and fear-jabber that has endeared Von Clownstick to his rube base. It didn't work (no, make that it really didn't work), and Snowflake unnecessarily went out of his way to piss on Gillespie's electoral grave. (Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, sez I.)

So he doesn't help electorally, and is disloyal to a fault, even when he doesn't need to be. The Republicans still running their anti-freeze lemonade stand maintain the delusion that their dementia-addled fake tycoon can get them across the finish line on those fucking tax cuts (for people who hide their money in Bermuda in the first place). They are as monomaniacal in their obsession as the emperor is in his.

The contest will become one concerning which faction is more beholden to their respective obsession -- the McConnell-Ryan faction to their damned tax cuts for people who don't need them, or Fuckface Von Clownstick's unshakeable self-regard. Tonight's electoral debacle will rattle the so-called GOPe weasels, but not quite enough to stop pushing for their donors. They'll keep going until it gets snapped off in their asses in the midterms.

Edroso also has a nice take on it from the "cultural" angle. In the wake of the second major mass shooting in less than five weeks, the rightard scriveners' claque may have gone to the "thoughts and prayers" well once too often for too many people. Only a complete dipshit would seriously think that "leftists" are mocking prayer in and of itself by ironically spitting the trope back at them.

Listen close, assholes, just so there's no confusion, real or otherwise:  Faith without works, according to the New Testament, is dead. Empty prayers aren't changing full coffins -- this time, in the case of Sutherland Springs, including more than a dozen children, including a fourteen-month infant. That's not to insist on confiscating all guns or some such; rather, it is a challenge to the empty-prayer folks to either do something, anything, or just shut the fuck up.

Only a full-on certifiable halfwit would be anything but repulsed by the sight of two disgusting people opining on how church is the best place to be shot. As the saying goes, that's a special kind of stupid, but it's also pretty fucking revolting. It would be one thing for them to go through the usual routine of shoulder-shrugging "whaddaya want us to do?" plaints about how the shooter got his guns legally, yada yada. But it's intolerable to decent people to watch these scumbags use the lives of slaughtered children to created twisted rhetoric for the sole purpose of impugning the folks who are simply wondering how many more times?

I've always taken some measure of pride in being a cynical bastid, but seeing the crude gestures of conservatard lowlifes from David French to Ainsley Earhardt, clearly I have some catching up to do.

Twilight of Hot Take Nation

I don't have any pithy thoughts on What Happened In Las Vegas. It's tragic, but not unexpected; as mentioned here countless times, we have become inured to the mayhem, accustomed to thinking of these events as the cost of doing business. So this is the cost, an annual blood sacrifice of several dozen innocent lives, so that the oppressive state doesn't impose too harshly on the rights of lawful gun users.

It would be no surprise at all to find that Stephen Paddock had no political agenda whatsoever, that he was neither a Clownstick hater nor supporter, just a lone nut with lots of legally obtained firearms. This is the inadvertently nasty trick the founding fathers played on later generations, the blank insistence that any citizen has an absolute right to any sort of weapon they desire, no test for qualification or competence.

There are, I believe some exculpatory perspectives on the absolutism of the Second Amendment. The main one is that, in societies with real gun control, there is an overt emphasis on the "monopoly of force" that is to be the prerogative of the state. Technically, if the state apparatus is popularly elected and supported, then said force should represent a willful and lawful majority of the citizens, versus the accumulated stockpiles of regional warlords and assorted cranks. Still, the view is at odds with the actual history and culture of the United States.

Second to that is the hoary but still true analogy that we don't take everyone's cars away when some dipshit careens through a farmers' market and takes out a dozen pedestrians. (Of course, we do test for driver competence, but go out on any given road for, say, fifteen minutes, and try to keep count of how many morons you encounter.)

People can and do go back and forth on all the facets of this issue, with the usual results. Whatever else you may hear over the coming week, however cynical or political or naively idealistic, the bottom line is this:  the cost of not changing is not yet greater than the cost of changing. This is the operative axiom for any major (or even moderate) societal change, period. It is as universal a law as gravity.

Tragically, in a geographically secure nation of 320 million people, you probably never reach that point of equilibrium where gun control laws would be implemented across the nation. There is too much invested in the rhetoric of "states' rights" and "tradition" and that sort of thing. Even standardizing basic background checks and waiting periods would be impossible.

If the Sandy Hook massacre -- a crazy asshole using his mommy's Bushmaster rifle to murder a classroom full of first-graders -- didn't change anything, you unfortunately have to start considering the moral calculus at work here. It's a ghoulish exercise in reverse engineering:  what would it take to get meaningful gun control laws across the country, 100, 200, 500 people? What is the benchmark, the casualty count at which enough people say, "Okay. Fuck this."? Seriously, try to conjure up a suitable number and setting for yourself.

The really strange thing about all this is that Americans are notoriously willing -- eager, in fact -- to embrace any manner of intrusions for the illusion of security. We'll stand in line for hours on end to be randomly searched and probed by TSA schmucks so's we can fly to Hawaii; we've passively accepted the mass surveillance of our emails and online communiques; we routinely let overzealous Barney Fife types push us around at traffic stops. Considering the statistical facts that fewer individuals own more guns, it's weird that the majority of 'murkins seem to be fine with this absolutism when it comes to gun rights.

So this is all old, well-trod ground. We've been hashing this bullshit out for as long as I care to remember, while the NRA continued -- and still does -- to build political influence on the bodies of the slain, fear-mongering to the fearful and paranoid.

What's more interesting (to me, anyway) is the meta aspect of it all -- the collective commentary on the event, then the secondary commentary on the initial commentary, etc. Something like this:  The Gateway Pundit retard posts a bullshit item about the shooting, it gets carried on Facebook because Zuckerberg gives less than a quarter of a fuck about anything besides raking in dough, and lowly bloggerses futilely attempt to clear up the facts as they are known. And nothing results from any of it, ever.

This dynamic has become at best a collective catharsis, a tacit acknowledgement that we are well and truly screwed, and can't do jack shit about it but complain and hope that the benevolent aliens hear us. And then we're all right back at square one for the next one, like it'll turn out any different. This is a classic death spiral; if you had a cousin like this, you'd get together with family and hold an intervention, if only to register your concerns before it was "too late."

I think it's too late, in many respects. When it comes to the daily concern of how to manage the mad emperor, I have a reasonable level of competence that Bob Mueller has unearthed at least enough evidence to shame and disempower him, if not remove him from power outright.

But that does fuck-all about the disease of which Snowflake is but a nasty symptom -- it brings no jobs back, it doesn't lessen the causes or effects of ongoing climate change, it doesn't get opposing cadres of 'murkins out of each others' collective asses, stoked by the ministrations of the orange insect overlord.

The commentariat --- and hell, I'll even throw myself in as a barnacle on the hull of internets discussion -- is as bad as the "conventional" mediots at this point. We can all poke fun at the media monkeys dancing to the corporate tune, penned in at a rally, having to contend with barely ambulatory morons screaming at them and flipping them off, and dutifully transcribing the proceedings like a bunch of assholes. But we bloggerses are much the same, meta-commenting and snarking and such like, but not really affecting anything meaningful. Yes, so-and-so is a certifiable, provable asshole, but the proof means nothing when said asshole just got elected, because enough of your fellow countrymen are toxic douchebags.

Maybe this is what a dying post-industrial empire looks like:  everyone endlessly commenting on everyone else and nobody listening, just shoveling shit into an entropic void.

Fire in the Hole

Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts And Prayers. THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS YOU GUYS!

According to police, Stephen J. Brumby, 14, and his dad, William C. Brumby, 64, were practicing in a shooting lane against a wall when the accident took place.

"After firing a round, the spent shell casing struck the wall causing it to deflect and fall into the back of (the elder) Mr. Brumby's shirt. Brumby then used his right hand, which was holding the handgun, in an attempt to remove the casing. While doing so, he inadvertently pointed the firearm directly behind him and accidently fired," a police statement reads.

....

No charges have been filed.

[emphasis mine]

Nothing could have been done, you see, nothing at all. Accidents happen, right? The idea that an old dumbass using a loaded gun basically as a fucking back-scratcher is, for lack of a better word, STUPID, does not enter the discussion. It's funny how guns are the only implement where criminal negligence not only goes completely unpunished, but seems not to exist at all.

Stay Classy

So a psychopath murders and injures dozens of people at a nightclub, and the first thing this asshole can think of is you people got what was coming. (Apparently Patrick posts a bible verse every Sunday morning on his Twitter account, so it is actually possible that this wasn't specifically in response to Orlando, but it's hard to buy that his office needs to plan ahead three days in advance for a bible verse tweet. Come on.)

More importantly, this is the sort of thing that Clownstick lies in wait for, to beat his dead "radical Islam" horse. Never mind that the killer was a US citizen, and that his support for ISIS is a rumor so far, and is likely one-way anyway. Clownstick seems to think his willingness to say the phrase is a badge of honor, and Democrats' supposed unwillingness to use the phrase is a sign of cowardice, rather than more ecumenically based.

(It should also be noted that a massacre, planned to take place at today's Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles, was averted by good police work. The would-be killer was -- get this -- an angry white asshole from Indiana. If we could only ban those motherfuckers.)

It's a predictable routine now, in the wake of tragedies like this; all the political opportunists come out of the woodwork. We're not banning guns or Muslims, so both sides will be disappointed. But between this incident and another one in Florida just the night before, where some stalker creep piece of shit walked up and murdered a singer after a concert, maybe it's time states asked themselves what they are or should be doing to keep the ability to murder dozens of people in a matter of minutes out of the hands of psychopaths.

Talladega Nights

I have less of an issue with an 11-year-old being left alone with a 9mm handgun with which to defend himself, than the fact that he's such a lousy fucking shot.

Shotenfreude

If it's wrong that I literally laughed out loud when I read this story, then I don't ever want to be right. Does it even need to be said that it happened in Florida? This fucking dingbat is too stupid to even be allowed to drive a car, much less own a gun.

More seriously, it will be no surprise at all when she recuperates and goes right back to spewing her dangerously moronic nonsense, without considering how lucky she was that the kid didn't shoot himself, or a passing car. Sooner or later he will, you know, and it will be labeled an "accident" or a "tragedy" and no charges will be filed. That's how these things always go.

Dropping the Hammer

Looks like the militia finally got regulated. After giving these clowns a month to work out their toy army siege fantasies, it all came crashing to an end, ignominiously, on a snowy road to nowhere. Say this much for noted wearer of cowboy hats and tarps LaVoy Finicum -- he meant what he said about how he'd rather die than go to jail.

If anyone was going to get taken down in this, it was Finicum; while Ammon Bundy at least made the effort to present a calm, rational demeanor in his irrational endeavor, Finicum seemed to relish the opportunity to play up the Yosemite Sam stereotype.

It's too bad that someone had to die before something actually got done about this nonsense, but it's not like we didn't all see something like this coming up the road. Perhaps the only real surprise in all this is just how few of them there were -- twenty on all, counting Finicum, the eight that were arrested, and the eleven that remained afterward, most of whom have already been rolled up.

It will be interesting to see if the "movement" sees those low numbers and is disheartened by their measly turnout, or emboldened to step up the internuts recruitment efforts. This is the very essence of what fuels the various 5GW terrorist cells overseas, up to and including more notorious groups like al Qaeda and ISIS. The ease and flexibility of social media enables this sort of thing.

What sets the American domestic terror cells apart strategically is their lack of anonymity. They are so steeped in the bizarre connection between early Mormon land-poaching in the American West and a unique interpretation of certain Constitutional clauses, they just assume everyone's on their side because they're right. And they're not; just like cults inflicting their personal interpretations of Biblical or Quranic text on everyone else, they're simply re-reading the supreme law of the land to suit their personal purposes.

This is not some dopey "urban vs. rural" contretemps of condescension, this is simply a matter of what the appropriate avenues for protest are against laws we disagree with. To attempt to incite insurrection and subvert the Constitution is, not to put too fine a point on it, dangerous by definition, and in the hands of driven zealots, a singularly dangerous proposition. I may kvetch about the corrupted gubmint we live under, and the elites who run it for themselves and their dogsbodies in the media, but I have no illusions about what life would be like for any non-Bundy types in Bundystan.

Widening Impunity

In the latest volley fired by the freeloading peckerwoods who illegally took over a federal building, and have yet to be brought to justice for it, some asshole drove all the way from New Mexico to Oregon to make a point that exists mostly in his fevered cranium:

A rancher from New Mexico renounced his U.S. Forest Service grazing contract at an event held Saturday by an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge in Oregon to protest federal land use policies.

Adrian Sewell of Grant County, New Mexico, took the action at the event attended by about 120 people at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. A group led by Ammon Bundy began occupying the refuge in eastern Oregon on Jan. 2. The group plans to open the 300-square-mile refuge for cattle this spring.

Bundy has said the federal government has no authority to enforce federal grazing contracts with ranchers.

As a contract analyst for a local government agency, I can tell you definitively what you already know -- first, you don't cancel a contract with the government by symbolically ripping it up and proclaiming "I renounce thee, uncouth parchment!" three times; secondly, cancellation of any contract does not then magically entitle you to then use for free that which you were previously contracted to pay for.

These people disgust me, in a very deep and visceral way. Part of it is their obnoxious, overweening sense of entitlement, that because they raise beef cattle, they must (not should, must) be allowed to use as much public lands as they want, for as many cattle as they want, and not pay if they don't feel like it.

Let's not kid ourselves about this, folks -- this is an insurrection in the making, populated by dangerous, deranged, volatile people with a lot of high-powered weapons, and a righteous cause to use them for. Their goal is to spread the insurrection as far and wide as possible, to defy the gubmint to do anything about any of it, to provoke a violent confrontation.

The ironic part of all this is that you can bet that each and every one of these insurrectionists and their supporters were outraged at all the urban riots over the past year or so, local residents expressing their frustration extra-legally over the treatment they were receiving from their local law enforcement personnel. You can bet that not a single one of them gets the irony.

Again, we all get why the feebs don't want to dance with these shitbirds, but either the law means something or it doesn't; either we are all part of this nation and its laws or we are not. It's like being a little bit pregnant -- no such thing.

This has gone on for almost a full month now. The residents of Harney County have repeatedly asked these dickheads to leave. But the time for them being allowed to leave is over with; these fuckers need to go to jail, the sooner the better. What does the federal government of the United States of America plan to do to enforce its federal statutes, and prevent future instances from occurring? How many more decades will king of the deadbeat ranchers Cliven Bundy be allowed to owe millions of dollars, when reg'lar folks get collection notices and interest tacked on when they owe the IRS a few hundred bucks?

These traitors keep asking whose country this is. I'm wondering the same thing. Pretend they're black, if that's what it takes to get motivated to actually do something about this.

This Week In "Stupid People With Guns"

We've already heard about Track Palin and his Obama-induced PTSD. But here's another one that won't surprise you in the least:

RENTON, Wash. - A 40-year-old woman was seriously injured Thursday when she was shot in the chest inside a Renton movie theater, police said.

The shooting happened at around 8 p.m. at a movie theater at the The Landing in Renton during a showing of the film "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi."

"It got about 15-20 minutes into the film and I believe the lady in front of us that got shot was actually talking to her husband or significant other and that's when we heard the loud pop," said one witness, who did not want to be identified. He was sitting 3 or 4 rows behind the man when the gun went off.
....
Just as witnesses realized it was a shooting, they saw the man make his way toward a nearby exit.
"We saw the lady, she was laying on the bench with a shot in her upper chest," a witness said.
Renton police believe the shooter may have been intoxicated at the time.
....
Police say the shooter's father called 911 Thursday night from his Newcastle home and told dispatchers his son was distraught and told him that he dropped his gun at a Renton movie theater and it discharged.
....
The 29-year-old suspect, who has not been identified, was booked into the King County jail on charges of investigation of felony assault.

Or this one:

A 27-year-old was in jail charged with murder Saturday after he allegedly shot and killed a Good Samaritan who tried to help him when he was stuck in the snow in North Carolina, police said.

Catawba County Sheriff Coy Reid said the suspect's car slid off the road and got stuck in snow outside Charlotte, on Friday.

Some people who were passing by stopped to help. Reid said that the group believed there was something wrong with the man, so they said they were going to call the police.

The suspect, identified as Marvin Lee, then jumped out of the car with a pistol and allegedly opened fire, Reid said.

"He shoots and hits one of them," Reid said, adding that the victim fell to the ground.

After that "he walks over and fires multiple shots into him," Reid added.

Here's how all three of these instances will go down:

1. Track Palin will get out of jail and promise to clean up his act, and be allowed to keep his gun(s).
2. The movie theater idiot in Washington will get his felony dropped to a misdemeanor because it was an "accident," and he might get a month in jail and some probation time, but be allowed to keep his gun(s).
3. The North Carolina asshole will plead insanity, and probably not get away with it. However, at no point will anyone ask how a supposedly insane person got a gun so easily.

I have no proposals or suggestions. I do not know how to solve this problem. I simply think that when some fool misuses a firearm, it needs to be put out there as a reminder. The Second Amendment's biggest flaw is not its ambiguous wording, nor the intellectually dishonest interpretations of it. It's that it assumes equal competence and good intention of everyone, and people who live in the real world know that that just isn't true.

[Update 1/24/16 1:30 PST:  Here's a fun bonus story, courtesy of Mississippi, in which a gun-shop owner and his 17-year-old son were murdered in the shop by a father-son pair of angry customers (who were both wounded as well). Apparently this was all over a $25 service charge (probably a deposit toward the total, as is customary with most repair shops) for a firearm that had not yet been repaired. Assuming they survive, the killers can contemplate the cost-benefit analysis as they fend off their cellmates for the next twenty years or so.]

Welcome to the Bungle

Let's start off the new year right, and take a look at several shootings around the country from the past week:

• A Florida woman "accidentally" shot and killed her daughter, thinking she was an intruder.

“The homeowner’s story is consistent with the physical evidence and the witness’ statement,” the release states. “At this time, the incident appears to be an accidental shooting; however, the investigation is ongoing and it is considered to be an ‘open investigation.'”

The St. Cloud Police Department asked that media outlets not publish the names of the shooter and her husband, because the man is a police officer who has previously worked undercover. The victim’s mother works as an Osceola County Sheriff’s Office 911 dispatcher, the release states.

A 911 call captured the aftermath of the shooting, which was apparently confusing for those at the scene. In the call, a man can be heard telling a dispatcher that the victim “passed out,” saying she has a pacemaker and a heart problem. A woman later gets on the phone, and struggles to relay information to the dispatcher.

So the homeowners are a cop and a dispatcher, two people who are (even in Florida) presumably trained to observe and to handle stressful situations as they arise. Yet the "man" -- the police officer, mind you -- said nothing about shots being fired, he in fact lied and said she passed out because of her pacemaker. Oh, and we mustn't know the names of these lying morons, because they're cops.

Fire in the Hole

From the Season's Bleedings file comes this Christmas heartwarmer:

COLTON, Ore. -- A 2-year-old girl was accidentally shot in the cheek Christmas morning by a family member that was cleaning a .45 caliber handgun, the Colton Fire Department said.

The toddler is in stable condition and is expected to survive, the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office said.

According to the sheriff's office, the child's 24-year-old uncle was cleaning his gun when it went off. The bullet went out the other side of the girl's cheek, officials said.

The shooting appears to be accidental, and Sergeant Don Boone said he expects no charges will be filed.

Okay, someone needs to explain to me why no charges are being filed. Obviously it was unintentional, but there is criminal negligence here, in that this guy is a fucking moron who shouldn't be allowed to have a goddamned gun in the first place.

Sgt. Boone added that one of the cardinal rules of gun cleaning is you always unload your gun, and always assume that it's loaded.

Gee, ya think so, Deputy Fife? Jesus H. Bushmaster Christ, it seems that pretty much everyone except the fucktard who shot his two-year-old niece through the cheek KNOWS THAT. This is pathetic. I personally know full-on gun nuts who would want this asshole strung up by the balls, just for being a complete idiot. It's people like that who make responsible gun owners look bad.

I really don't understand, will never understand, why there are never any charges when these "accidents" occur. This was unintentional, but it's no accident, anymore than it's an accident when a little kid goes over to Grampa's house and finds his loaded Desert Eagle under the bed. Everyone has a sad and no consequences are pursued over the completely unnecessary, completely preventable death.

It's really galling to think that this is somehow the grisly price we've collectively agreed to pay in order to have an infinite supply of guns. Gun rights folks are consistent in saying that existing laws should be enforced, rather than devising new ways to hinder responsible ownership. Very well then, let us take them at their word. Prosecute these dumb motherfuckers already. Stop letting them off the hook. A person who leaves a loaded gun around where a little kid can find it, or who farts around with a gun while a little kid is in the room, is not a responsible owner. They might as well leave a can of gasoline and a lighter sitting in the middle of a preschool playroom. It's time they were treated as such.

The Family That Preys Together

Right now just about everything you're reading and hearing about the massacre in San Bernardino is speculation, whether it's the usual "completely pulled outta my ass" type that clutters the internets, or the perhaps more pernicious sort that takes known facts as they drip out to the public, and conflates them with long-held assumptions and prejudices.

So it's no surprise that when the name of the main gunman is found to be Syed Farook, it's only a matter of time before someone says "ISIS". It's as predictable as the sun rising in the east, or Charlie Sheen having every sexually transmittable disease known to man, and probably more than a few that were previously confined to livestock.

What can we observe about ISIS' terrorist efforts so far, or the efforts of al Qaeda or Islamic terrorist attacks in general? When they attack targets in the West, what sort of targets do they tend to be? Densely populated areas of cities that everyone in the world has heard of -- New York, Paris, London, Madrid. There are pretty obvious reasons for choosing such targets.

Have you ever been to San Bernardino? As a kid, I lived for several years just a half-hour up the I-10 from it. I know it very well. There is nothing distinguishing about it; it is basically one of the last few cities of any appreciable size on the way to Vegas from LA. I'd bet that a good number of Americans outside of California don't know where it is, and certainly nobody outside the country would know of it unless they've been or have people there.

Put it this way:  San Bernardino is not a place for a fanatic representing an internationally-based religious terrorist group to Make A Statement. That doesn't mean that it's impossible that it's ISIS, just unlikely. Added to that the other known fact that as of this hour, the shooting occurred at a holiday party of county employees, and Farook was a fellow employee, and you have a far more mundane -- and almost uniquely American -- dynamic, that of the disgruntled psycho.

Get ready for the usual idle speculation and fabulism all the same, since a good chunk of us have collectively decided that "facts" and "knowledge" and "evidence" have no value, and are merely quaint notions that our ancestors were forced to deal with in simpler times. Now you can just make shit up, put it on the internets, get people to like it and share it, no problem. Hell, you can be full of shit and proud of it, and run for president.

When tragedies like this occur, another dopey (but harmless) custom in the online era is to Show Your Support by taking a couple seconds and typing "prayers to the families" or some such. Coming from random strangers across the ether, it's a nice enough thought, if easy and essentially without real power or lasting impact. Je suis Charlie and all that.

But when those anodyne electro-homilies emanate from the pulpits of the various hyper-christians vying for the Grand Deacon spot, and every one of said godly men promise to do everything they can to retain the current status quo that has resulted in more than one mass shooting every day this year, the words not only ring hollow, they sting a little. We know that none of these men would do anything at all to curb lunatics from acquiring as many assault rifles and banana clips as they can carry. That's not speculation; they are not at all shy about telling you this fact as a selling point.

So really the only surprise in this sordid narrative so far is that a fairly well-known publication has actually stepped up and said in response to those men, "Your prayers mean jack shit." That is a rare thing. This nation's political and speechifying discourse is rotten with pointless benedictions and catch-phrases, and we're all just supposed sit and listen quietly and pretend to be respectful, knowing full well that they don't respect anyone who believes differently from them.

Can you imagine the outcry if the sekrit mooooslin in the White House failed to end a speech with "God bless America"? The people who will tell you till they're blue in the face that Obama is a traitor who has irreparably fucked up this country are the exact same ones who will yammer on and on about being gawwwd's most favrit nation. Okay, well, if He likes us so danged much, then why did he saddle us with Black Hitler for eight years, hunh, hmm? They don't seem to have an answer for that one, they just continue jabbering in their Idiocracy patois of barely decipherable grunts and squawks. Seriously, pick any ten random comments from the Breitbart link. These morons make YouTube commenters look like Rhodes scholars.

It needed to be said, and it's a good thing that someone finally said it out loud. Again, prayers and kind thoughts from strangers are nice, if essentially without a practical function. Coming from politicians who can actually affect policies that would in turn affect or even prevent future incidents like this, which have become alarmingly routine, it's at best an empty sentiment, at worst a flat-out insult. I'm not necessarily convinced that any or all proposed gun control measures would work -- again, we don't have very many facts at all right now -- but I can definitely tell you one thing that will not bring any of the slaughtered back, nor prevent the next inevitable incident.

And the Home of Depraved, Part Three: Season's Bleedings

Here's a feel-good holiday fable involving a gun being used at a Waco Wal-Mart. Talk about coals to Newcastle.

A woman who fired a pistol as a suspect fled in a purse-snatching incident Friday outside a Wal-Mart store in Bellmead appeared at the police station late Friday afternoon to identify herself.

No charges have been filed against her, Bellmead police said Saturday.

Police plan to sit down with the woman for a more in-depth interview in the upcoming week, Bellmead police Detective Kory Martin said.

He said it appears, at least initially, that the woman fired into the air, not at the man.

Even for Texas, this is fucking nuts. Is this what we've fallen to, gunning down petty thieves in the street? Worse yet, she's just goddamned lucky she didn't hit one of the pursuers, an innocent bystander, a kid sitting in a car across the street, etc. This is a busy area in a downtown commercial district. Anything could have happened.

This is a textbook case of "the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" thinking -- except, of course, this bad guy had no weapon at all, and while he's obviously a failed turd of a human being if he's purse-snatching little old ladies a couple days before Thanksgiving, again we do not have the death penalty for such crimes. [Ed. -- Yet.]

So what you have is some dingbat trying to be the hero of whatever revenge-porn narrative is on a loop in her head, a fever-dream mishmash of Making A Difference and Stopping A Criminal. The worst part of it is that she probably has no clue that life turns on a dime, an inch here or there, a second earlier or later, and that it is just the purest of luck that she didn't hurt or kill someone with erh incredible incompetence and negligence. This is not Starsky & Hutch, you stupid twat, this is real life, and people get killed when untrained, unqualified morons go around thinking they're Yosemite Sam or some shit.

That, not to mention most of the comments in the article, is bad enough. There's an interesting cherry on this particular cake:

The man accused of attempting to steal a purse from a shopping cart, Andre Dawson, 27, remained in jail with a $10,000 bond late Saturday under a misdemeanor charge of theft of property and a felony charge of credit or debit card abuse. Martin said if the purse contained a credit or debit card, it would have triggered the credit card charge.

Now that's just a perfect example of how the law has been perverted to become more absurdly cruel, to the point where people are up for charges on crimes they very clearly did not commit. Dawson didn't get away with the purse, so not only did he not have a chance to use the debit and credit cards, he never even found out such things were in the purse.

Again, it's hard to feel sorry for someone who picks on octogenarians, but such measures are clearly in place for no other reason than to give a hardliner judge an additional mechanism to completely shit-hammer a perp he just doesn't like. And if Dawson had physically harmed somebody, anybody -- the old lady, a bystander, a child, a stray cat -- it would make more sense. But he's a fucking dumbass who got caught in the commission of a particularly stupid crime, though not especially lurid in the overall scheme of things.

In the end, it won't matter -- this is Texas, after all, so Dawson will get tagged with a felony charge for a crime he had no chance to commit, while the shoot-'em-up dunce who will never know how close she might have come to killing someone over a fucking purse won't get charged with anything at all. This should be unacceptable, but hell, she'll probably still pack heat to the damned Wal-Mart, even though by all accounts she does not have a license to carry a concealed handgun.

It's no small indicator of what this nation has sunk to, when a nation of people whose great-grandparents came here fleeing various forms of violence and persecution, are much more concerned about Syrian orphans fleeing a government that drops barrel bombs on their houses, than the day-to-day dangers lurking in plain sight. I would be much more concerned about the fat fuck trying to make some bizarre "point" by taking his AR-15 to Target to buy Oreos, or the Helpy Helperton suburban dipshit indiscriminately shooting up a crowded parking lot over a relatively minor property crime, than some "durka durka Mohammed jihad" shenanigans. But try telling that to the yahoos in the comments section, who inexplicably feel safer knowing that there are armed idiots in the supermarkets just itching for an excuse.