May 27, 2014

Open letter to Wayne LaPierre

Open letter to Mr. Wayne LaPierre

I take note that Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, stated in a open letter to the parents of the victims of the Isla Vista shooting last week that "Your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights."

He is wrong. It's time to change this discussion.

Once upon a time, the NRA supported the concept of background checks. Since you came on the scene, the NRA has become an extremist organization bereft of common sense. Criminals having guns and lunatics shooting up schools, churches or movie theaters is not a reasonable price to pay for the freedom to own a gun. Period.

What's that you're saying, Mr. LaPierre? The only thing that stops a bod guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? That is an argument so stupid only a high-priced attorney could think of it. That argument would sound a lot better if it didn't come from some jackass who called federal agents "jackbooted government thugs" following a standoff with an armed cult whose leader thought he had a god-given right to fuck any twelve or fourteen-year-old girl who made his prick stiff. You clearly don't know the difference between a good guy and a bad guy.

We have allowed people like you and Mr. Wurzelbacher and other gun worshipers to frame the conversation about Waco for too long. Federal agents on the scene may have botched the operation and made it end far worse than it should have, but they had every right and good cause to be there. They were the good guys with guns. Some of them were killed or wounded by armed cult members. I don't know if a background check would have been helpful in this particular situation, but it couldn't have hurt.

Oh, you have something else to say, Mr. LaPierre? The Supreme Court has ruled that the right to bear arms is an individual right? So they have. They have also ruled that corporations are people and money is speech. That is the Supreme Court you're talking about, isn't it? The Roberts Court is bought and paid for, just like Congress, just like the Justice Department, just like the Pentagon, just like any other department or agency of the executive branch whose regulators come from the industry that they regulate and then return to it after gutting the regulations, spending billions on hardware that the military doesn't need or want, or failing to prosecute crooked businessmen. We know the federal government is corrupt. We also know that it is you and people like you who have corrupted it and still don't think it can ever be corrupt enough.

It makes absolutely no sense to promote a freedom that destroys so much. I've raised two children. Although neither is any longer a child, if anybody who belongs in prison or a state hospital with a gun did something to either of them that might have been prevented with a simple background check, I would react just as Richard Martinez has. You, Mr, LaPierre, and the "rudderless politicians" of whom Mr. Martinez speaks have worked in concert to deprive too many parents of their children. The blood of those children is on your hands and those politicians' hands. The least you and they can do is sit down and shut up while more public spirited people, humanists rather than corporatists, set things right and pass reasonable measures to prevent a criminal or a mentally ill person from possessing a gun.

/s/

Jack Rabbit

May 10, 2014

Playing the fascist card will only run into a wall of moral equivalency

The most obvious feature of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is a former empire is attempting to reassert authority over what was once a subject nation under that empire. Naturally, the former subject nation is resisting.

That is a recipe to bring ultranationalist thugs out from under the rocks. So we have Russian ultranationalist thugs going into Ukraine and demanding Ukrainians get "on their knees" and Ukrainian ultranationalist thugs burning the Russian ultranationalists out of occupied government buildings. Is anybody surprised? If one side tries to play victim to the other side's fascists then the other side will points to the other side's fascists and proclaims "we are the victims of your fascists." That kind of dialogue only serves the interests of those who benefit from conflict.

This isn't a B-western. Stop looking at it like one. It's a Dostoyevsky novel.

May 8, 2014

Cosmos, episode 7: Submitted for the discussion of political implications

Am I the only one here who doubts that all, or even most, climate change deniers really think that climate science is a hoax?

The pattern of the dissemination of the climate-science-is-a-hoax hoax fits the pattern of other corporate fights against science in the past. Does any one think that tobacco company executives really believed that there was no linkage between cigarette smoking and heart or respiratory disease? They may have sent their lawyers to argue that in court, but that was part of a long term strategy aimed at delaying government regulations to discourage tobacco use.

In Episode 7 of Cosmos, Dr. Niel deGrasse Tyson takes his viewers through the petroleum industry's fight against scientists researching environmental harm from use of lead in gasoline.

Part 1:

Part 2:


Part 3:


I invite you to watch episode 7 and consider the similarities between this and corporate sponsored war on climate science. There's a reason that climate change deniers are funded by environmental polluters who manufacture fossil fuel.

On a video in this forum several weeks ago, a thoroughly brainwashed right wing caller got hold of Sam Seder for a general discussion of the world according to the Koch brothers. The caller warned that people should not trust scientists from the US government or the United Nations, but should rely on information from "private scientists." Does he mean the scientists who work for the industries who push the products being studied and found to be harmful by government scientists. Surely, that man was joking.