Oh, really? You mean that accusation was serious?

Guess who just got a vaguely threatening Freedom of Information Act request demand? Me!

You may recall that bizarre letter slipped under my door by John Geiger, editor of the right wing campus rag, the North Star. In it, he blithely accused me of stealing a print run of his newspaper because the distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things, and because I’d written a post expressing my contempt for the disgusting racism he exhibited.

I thought it was a joke. But no, he has enlisted something called The Alliance Defending Freedom For Faith For Justice to come after me. They sent a letter. Here’s the relevant part:

Pursuant to Minnesota’s open records law, MINN. STAT. §§ 13.01 to 13.99, we request access to and a COPY of the following documents and data:

1. Video surveillance of all cameras near the following locations on the University of Minnesota Morris campus from 12:00 a.m. on November 22 to 11:59 p.m. on November 23, 2013:

a. In the tunnel between the Science building and the Student Center; and

b. In the Humanities Fine Arts building; and

2. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger; and

3. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger.

Do we even have video surveillance cameras there? I have no idea. Anyway, I was happy to oblige, did an email search for those terms, and came up with all of…about a dozen items. Most were references to the North Star STEM alliance; one was a message to the whole campus from our chancellor deploring the allegations of fascism and racism published by the North Star, and that was actually the only correspondence at all that mentioned Geiger. Other than Geiger’s own letter, of course.

There won’t be any evidence of a conspiracy, or that I stole their dreadful papers, because there wasn’t and I didn’t…but one thing we know, wingnuts love to make noise about dreadful sneaky conspiracies against them and the American Way.

Besides, I have an alibi. I was in Benghazi, extorting money from Bill Clinton’s mistresses to invest in the Whitewater project, and also gathering fake temperature readings for Al Gore to fool everyone into believing climate change is real.

Bill Nye is to creationists as the Catholic Church is to Galileo

At least, that’s what right-wing überlöön (so metal, he deserves a 3-umlaut title) Glenn Beck. Watch his meandering monologue* in which he accuses science and science education of being on the wrong side of history, and literally accuses Nye of persecuting creationists.

*In Beck’s case, that’s redundant.

I get email — gun-fondler edition

So, so tired of the gun-fondlers in my in-box…their arguments are so bad, so stupid, so off, and they don’t see it. It’s like the creationists who write to me with their sloppy reasoning and wacky assumptions — they aren’t persuading me, they’re just convincing me how wrong they are.

Here’s the latest.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I have e mailed you before to present the other side of the issues you talk about on your blog. I would like to try to explain the concept of how firearms prevent crime.

Yeah, he’s mailed me multiple times. Every time I start reading them, go “gaah, what an idiot”, and trash them without reply. Since he’s not going away when I ignore him, time to let everyone else laugh at him.

Let me begin by assuming you have gone into a restaurant or cafe where police officers are eating. Because they are police officers, doesn’t that make you feel more at ease? But not only that, doesn’t the fact they have a gun contribute to that feeling of well being? I would venture to say the chances of the place becoming a crime scene, at least while the police are inside, are close to zero. Another example is that of an armored car. The little “ports” you see on them allow the guys inside to stick their guns out if anyone was to try something. There are also warnings on the vehicle “do not approach”. It is essentially the threat of looking down “the business end” of a gun that is the true deterrent. Wouldn’t you agree that the chances of an attempted robbery are close to zero with an armored car because of guns and the possibility of being shot? Again guns are preventing crime.

Did he just compare trained police officers with responsibilities, a uniform, and a specific role in the community to random jerkwads with a pistol tucked in their pants? That the police dissuade crime is their job; I would not feel more at ease in a restaurant if everyone was sitting there, armed. Quite the contrary.

If most of us are unarmed, relying on a few delegated officials to suppress crime, it’s true, we’re less likely to have crime scenes erupting all over the place. If everyone’s carrying a gun, we’re more likely to have criminal activity that turns into a blazing bloodbath. Not interested. Not convinced at all.

And then he goes on to suggest my daily life would be improved if I were living in the equivalent of a fucking armored car? This guy is nuts.

Now let’s take this a step further to the ordinary citizen. Do you think a criminal is going to try to commit a crime somewhere he might get shot by a law abiding citizen carrying a concealed gun? A criminal, who by definition has no regard for the law, will go and commit crimes in “Gun Free Zones” like churches, schools, hospitals and other places the local authorities deem should be “Gun Free”. Look where mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora took place. Also look at places like Chicago that have a lot of gun violence, because, until recently, law abiding citizens have been unable to carry concealed firearms to defend themselves against criminals. Criminals know where they can commit gun crime without fear of being shot. I’d be willing to go so far as to say that men can be “taught not to rape” if there were the probability of being shot by the woman!

Right. Let’s trade gun-free schools, churches, and hospitals for places where we all walk in fear, just so these obsessed kooks can strut about with weapons. How about instead if we regulate guns more tightly, cut off the killers at the source, and have fewer guns in our communities? That would also reduce the problem. And that’s his solution to rape? Make women carry firearms around and shoot people? Fucking barbarian.

But oh, I forgot — this is all about giving gun-fondlers carte blanche to cling to their object of affection everywhere they go.

Of course there are no statistics on crimes that have not been committed. It is not known exactly how many crimes have been prevented by law abiding citizens carrying concealed guns. The best way to extrapolate how many crimes have been prevented is to look at the crime rate, which has been steadily falling since enactment of concealed carry laws. Just try to “think like a bad guy” with this. Our elected officials can enact all the gun control legislation they want, but that is NOT going to stop criminals one iota.

They do love that fraud, John Lott. Lott is the primary source for this claim that concealed carry laws and an armed populace reduce crime. He’s been exposed as a phony way back in 2002.

Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey — which supposedly found that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack” — that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of “More Guns, Less Crime”. Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, “Mary Rosh,” and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a “false identity for a scholar,” charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud.”

My correspondent is not only making a bad argument, it’s a dishonest one.

You suggest keeping a telephone by your bedside. Fine and well. By the time the police arrived, you could very well be dead. 1500 feet per second is the response time that I advocate in dealing with someone who has broken into my house. Often, just showing the gun to a perpetrator is enough to diffuse the situation.

Oh, god. The 1500 feet per second bullshit. If I’m at the point of having to outrace a goddamn bullet, it’s too late and a gun isn’t going to help. What I have to do in these situations is make it so hanging around isn’t cost effective anymore, and knowing that the police are on the way is a good deterrent.

Besides, the speed of my signal down the fiber optic line to my house is 300,000,000 meters per second. I win on that facile and stupid comparison.

Gun control advocates are quick to blame guns for high murder rates. But let me ask you; when a kid throws a rock through your picture window, do you blame the rock? Or do you blame the kid?

Does he think rational gun control advocates imagine that guns are floating about autonomously blasting away at people? Of course not. We know that the problem is that guns are in the hands of the weapon wankers. When a kid throws a rock through a window, the plan is to tell him to stop throwing rocks.

Also, you know rock throwing isn’t as casually lethal as firing a gun, right? Right? I’m not so sure these guys are that clever.

Expanding from our local communities and states to that of a National level, to namely our Armed Forces, who, with other tools use GUNS to prevent the invasion of foreign powers unfriendly to us. It is the presence of GUNS and the threat of retaliation by us that protects and defends the sovereignty of The United States. It is the presence of the very GUNS you despise that affords you the freedom to be a godless liberal. GUNS also afford you the freedom to post mindless ejaculations on the internet.

Again, this buffoon is trivializing the specific purpose and specific training of police and military forces to equate them to his fellow gun-lovin’ goons. No, I don’t rely on armed guards to be able to post on the internet, you goddamned thimble-witted gun-waving dogma-loving right wing ideologue. Fuck off and stop sending me your feeble parroting of NRA bullshit.

Shut up, Bill Keller

You can’t get much more tone deaf than this: Bill Keller uses Martin Luther King Day to…

Somewhere in all this worthy commemoration we should pause to pay homage to a conservative white Republican named William Moore McCulloch.

McCulloch sounds like a guy who did some good things for civil rights, so no criticism of him…but is this really an appropriate time to say we should take a break from praising that black dude and spend a little more time talking about a conservative white Republican? They get all the attention the other 364 days of the year, a black civil rights hero can’t even get one day to be recognized?

I take it back. David Brooks belongs on the NY Times op-ed pages

He serves the needs of the upper class so well — he’s such a perfect lickspittle. His latest column deplores all this leveler talk of economic inequities: don’t you peons realize that a widening gap has two parts, the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, and the two have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Oh, sure, there are some perverse compensation schemes on Wall Street, but mainly wealth is perpetuated because rich marry rich and pass on their money to their rich kids, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that, so let’s skip over that issue with one sentence and spend the whole column blaming the poor. Let’s focus on poor people! And that doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage, oh no. We have to resist the temptation to reduce everything to simple causes, therefore he proposes that the problem is simply a lack of social mobility. Just fix that. We can close the gap by closing our eyes to the sight of the 1% skittering off rapidly to the right and a world that laughs at obscene wealth and embraces pornographically hardcore wealth, and instead just tell all the poor people to start plodding off in that same direction. That’s how we’ll close the gap!

Shorter David Brooks: If the poor would just stop begging for bread and start eating cake, rather than blaming looters and exploiters and profiteers and that whole infrastructure of privilege, why, everything will be hunky dory in no time at all.

OK, let’s try it. How about giving Naquasia LeGrand a column in the NY Times, too?

[Read more…]

Gun culture in America

Write one post about gun control, and guess what happens? Your inbox fills up with crap from people who love their guns. Just love ’em. It’s everything from calm descriptions of existing gun laws, and aren’t they onerous enough already (no, obviously, they aren’t) to veiled threats to show me how useful concealed handguns are in putting down enemies of Liberty. After reading enough of them, I’ve decided that it is inappropriate and inaccurate for me to always be mentally referring to these people as gun nuts. Sorry, you’re not gun nuts at all, which is unfair to people who are mentally ill; you’re gun assholes, instead.

For example, on Twitter I’ve got this person who is quite insistent about ‘refuting’ me, giving me these lovely anecdotes taken from gun asshole sites to prove how wonderful guns are at helping people.

Tweet Child O’ Mine @EwwMoist
.@pzmyers – Concealed carry permit holder stops mass shooter. bearingarms.com/concealed-carr…

Really? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if now and then in the flurry of flying bullets, someone managed to shoot a bad guy — although I do kind of object to the idea of living in an atmosphere of hurtling chunks of lead — but then I read the story, and it isn’t even an accurate summary.

Police on Sunday afternoon said they believe the gunman went in and started shooting, hitting the three victims. As he was on his way out, somebody at the bar shot him.

The actual story is that a gun asshole, angry at being denied entrance to a “Gentleman’s Club”, shot three innocent people, and then as he was leaving, another gun asshole shot the first gun asshole.

I count that as 4 people getting shot by two gun assholes. No one won. And this is an argument against gun control…how?

The other argument this @Ewwmoist person keeps flinging at me is that there are 300 million guns floating about in this country, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and therefore there’s nothing that can be done. That’s about the dumbest argument for maintaining a state of destructive lawlessness I’ve ever heard.

Hey, the US consumes 300 metric tons of cocaine every year. I guess we should just give up and install vending machines in the public schools. Hey, 7500 gallons of an industrial chemical just tainted the drinking water in West Virginia. Looks like a great argument for less regulation of chemical storage! Hey, we’re pumping almost 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Time to give up! (That last one is actually a serious argument used by many Republicans.)

I don’t know about you, but when I spill toothpaste on my countertop, I don’t enshrine it as a new fixture of my bathroom decor, and I don’t decide to squirt even more on top of the blob. I clean it up. And it looks like we’ve got a very big cleanup job in the US. Thanks, gun assholes!

Meanwhile, what are we liberals doing? We’re basically performing surreal Portlandia skits. That link is to a story about a couple going out to dinner and seeing that someone in a neighboring table has a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants. What to do, what to do? They eventually tell their concerns to their server as they’re leaving (who dithers about not knowing what to do either), and then they write a blog post asking whether their reaction was appropriate.

What the fuck? The restaurant has a sign prohibiting firearms inside. There is no argument, no second guessing, no hesitation. The instant you see a gun asshole carrying in such a place, you go up to the manager, and you say, “I suspect there’s a gun asshole over there with a deadly weapon; I don’t feel safe here, and I expect you to do something about it or I’m leaving.” That’s it. And you don’t freakin’ feel guilty about having a reasonable expectation of safety in a public place.

And that’s gun control in America. The gun assholes orgasm over shootouts in strip clubs, while the liberals tiptoe about, afraid to ask if we can get a little relief from the gun culture at a restaurant.

Die, banks, die

When I got home last night, I saw something ominous. Leaning up against my door was one of those overnight letters from Fed Ex. This:

bankamerica

I thought, uh-oh, who’s suing me now? Because there’s nothing I’m doing that requires the urgency of an overnight letter (it even announced on the back in big bold orange letters “EXTREMELY URGENT!”) right now. Then I saw it was from the Bank of America. They hold my mortgage — which I pay promptly every month, also kicking in a little extra on the principal — so I thought maybe it had to do with something essential about that.

You know where this is going. I opened it, it contained a one page letter offering an appointment to refinance my mortgage. Absolutely nothing urgent about it, and also something I’m absolutely uninterested in doing, since we got in at a good interest rate and already have an affordable payment. This is Morris; we’re buying our house with payments that are two thirds of what we paid in rent for an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb.

But I’m getting annoyed at the persistence and lies. You know this wouldn’t be something to my advantage; the banks aren’t really at all interested in helping me pay them less, and this thing promised me an average reduction of about 20% in my monthly payment. They’re already constantly dunning me with requests to refinance every week in regular mail, requests that get dumped in the trash unopened, but this is a new attention-grabbing low.

I’ll tell you what, Bank of America. You want to save me money and altruistically reduce my payments? Easy. Unilaterally credit me $5/month and stop wasting money sending me these stupid letters. You’ll save more money than that on printing and postage, I’ll have less trash and save a little bit each month, we both win. Alternatively…eat shit and die.

<groan>

A week from Tuesday, UMM will host a distinguished visitor whose anti-war work I respect, but who otherwise is a raving nutcase. And wouldn’t you know it, his talk is specifically centered dead on the topic in which he is an ignoramus: Chris Hedges will be lecturing us on The New Atheists as Secular Fundamentalists. Promising title, yes?

You know, I’ve already heard this same stupid song before, and I didn’t like it then. I suppose I’m going to have to go listen to this product of the Harvard Divinity School rant about it again, and I’m not going to enjoy it.

I would have enjoyed hearing him dissect the war culture in America, but listening to him blame the atheists for both the terror and the war on terror is going to be annoying.

Poor put-upon wingnut flings silly accusations

Last semester, I wrote about our vile, racist, ‘alternative’ campus newspaper, the North Star. I seem to have annoyed its editor, John Geiger, who slipped a complaining letter (pdf) under my door last night. In it, he comically accuses me of stealing their November print run (his evidence? The distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things.), and ploddingly goes through his calculations of how much it was worth, adding things like 20% interest and a 40% “charity tax”, to demand that I immediately pay him $4,017.

Ho hum. Right wing humor.

I suggest that he chalk it all up to the White Man’s Burden that afflicts him so, and just hit up the far right dink-tanks that subsidize these awful papers all across the country. Forward the letter to the Koch brothers, I’m sure they’d respond with sympathy and cash.

From me, though, he demands checks, cash, paypal, debit, credit, bitcoin, appreciating assets (such as real-estate or valuable time-pieces), and tangible assets (like gold and silver). I don’t see eye-rolls or mocking laughter on the list, so I guess he’s out of luck.

America has a disease

A man and his wife are out on a movie date, and before the show starts, he talks to his 3-year-old daughter at home on his cell phone. And apparently he was doing some texting, too. Clearly, our big problem is our dependency on these ubiquitous little telecommunications devices…

Wait, no, that’s not it. The problem is that sitting nearby was Curtis Reeves, 71, a retired police officer, who resented the chatter before his movie came on, and Mr Reeves was carrying a goddamn fucking gun in the theater, and argued with the talkative father and eventually shot him dead and wounded his wife.

The Tampa police seriously “considered if this could be a ‘stand your ground’ case but decided the criteria did not apply.” Obviously not. The victim was white. But holy shitballs, they considered this? An armed asshole guns down a man over some noise during the movie previews and they contemplated letting him go?

Then, minutes after I read that, aghast, I get a little beep, and someone sent me this link.

reddit-rifle

Reddit is selling personalized guns with their logo.

Personal privacy is prized among Redditors, most of whom participate on the site anonymously. A fervent pro-gun constituency among them makes the market opportunity for gun dealers all the more attractive. The primary subreddit on the topic, /r/Guns, currently has more than 154,000 subscribers, and GunsForSale, created in March 2011, has doubled in size in the last year, with more than 7,200 subscribers. Gun dealers using the site indicate that they’ve enjoyed a spike in demand in the past year, after the Sandy Hook massacre ignited a national debate and pro-gun activists whipped up fears about a regulatory crackdown.

Yeah, that’s the big worry with a bunch of dead kids — someone might grow a spine and a brain somewhere and take steps to regulate guns. They needn’t have worried: this is America, we’re aspiring to mutual bloody annihilation among the citizenry.

And christ, reddit.