“Bang!” The Ban

Before I start this post, let me explain the title.  I wrote a bit about the plastic grocery bag bans sweeping California towns, and in the process discovered an excellent website that accumulates resources for the opposition; it’s called bag the ban.  I doubt any of my readers came across the website.  So why did I choose a title referencing a website my readers know nothing about?  Because I’m crazy, that’s why!

Which brings me to this.  Leslie Eastman noted that in California, the state uses its power to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens using the most tenuous mental health reasons (spending money we don’t have in the process):

Just last week, the California Senate approved a $24 million funding bill to expedite the process of collecting guns from owners in the state who legally acquired them but have since become disqualified due to felony convictions or mental illness.

Such was recently the case for one woman, who had been in the hospital voluntarily for mental illness last year that she says was due to medication she was taking. Lynette Phillips of Upland, Calif., told TheBlaze in a phone interview Monday she had purchased a gun years ago for her husband, David, as a present. That gun, as well as two others registered to her law-abiding husband (who does not have a history of felonies or mental illness), were seized last Tuesday.

“My husband is upset that they took the right from us that should never have been taken, Phillips told TheBlaze.

But according to the state of California, that doesn’t matter.

“The prohibited person can’t have access to a firearm” regardless of who the registered owner is, Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, told to Bloomberg News.

What’s “crazy” anyway?  In the 90s, the lawyer for the Unibomber was talking about the insanity defense.  In the Soviet Union, dissidents were shipped off to mental wards.  The GOP, I hear, can use less “nutters”.

The perpetrator of the Sydney Hook massacre, the massacre that caused the latest round of anti-gun hysteria, is said to have had Asperger’s.  Maybe he could had been diagnosed with something else, or perhaps he’s just evil, but arguably, Asperger’s is a form of normal male behavior, often revered throughout history — Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, for instance, was probably modeled on a person with autistic traits.  Today, 1 in 54 boys is diagnosed with autism, most of them have mild symptoms, and quite a few will outgrow their diagnosis.  How many “crazies” (and their relations) are we prepared to disarm?

A politically insane individual like myself is weary of denying the “crazy” their Second Amendment rights.  Sure, there are people out there, very obviously scary people, like the perpetrator of the Aurora mass shooting, who should not had been able to have access to firearms.  The problem with people like him is larger than possession of weapons.  The man should have been involuntarily hospitalized, and we do need to have laws for that.  In his case, a mental health checks to buy a gun would be like putting a band aid on a wound that cuts to the bone.  It does not address the underlying problem, and does not prevent him from, say, picking up a hammer and cracking a few people’s heads.  Furthermore, many people obviously in need of mandatory psychiatric treatment (take a walk in downtown San Francisco) are not violent or at least not capable of actually getting themselves to a sporting goods store and not freaking out the clerk.  What would gun checks do for them?

It’s very much possible that the Sandy Hook murderer would slip through the cracks and not be hospitalized.  But no system is perfect and life is full of unpredictability and danger.  And yet, despite the impression we get from the evening news, mass shootings are rare.  Parents of the Sandy Hook first graders can be consoled by the fact that their beautiful children died in an extraordinarily rare event, but it was an extraordinary rare event.

Lets look at the mass shooting in perspective.  The same people that are rallying against the Second Amendment are typically environmentalists, also rallying for grocery bag bans.  In San Francisco such ban is linked to a 46% increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses.   According to CDC estimates, 3000 people died of foodborne diseases across the United States in 2011.  If we are to implement a similar plastic bag ban on federal level, we should for 1380 dirty bag deaths — and I hope the turtles are worth it.  Sixteen mass shootings were perpetrated in the US in 2012, leaving 88 people dead, meaning that grocery bag bans are quite likely to be nearly 16 times deadlier than mass shootings.

“Oh, that’s just mass shootings,” my readers may say.  “But what about the murders committed with ‘assault’ rifles?”  Actually my readers would never ask a question that stupid.  They know that according to the FBI, in 2011 323 people were shot to death with rifles.   This means that grocery bag bans are probably more than 4 times deadlier than bad guys with rifles.

Clearly, some residents of “reality-based community” need to have their priorities straightened out.  Or else, their political convictions are more about identity, about sticking it to the bitter clingers, and not so much about saving life.  Or else they prefer to return to “natural” pre-industrial living, the one characterized by high birth rate and low life expectancy.  That’s totally sane.  And get this, if we actually subsidize birth control and stop breading, the Earth will be returned to the animals.  In this case nobody will be shooting those AR-15s.

So, dear friends, support life and liberty, our Second Amendment rights and oppose government’s intrusion into personal matters!  (Crazy, I know.)

UPDATE: Related: anti-vaxxers kill. (Via Instapundit.)

Vegas, Baby

Returning from the annual Vegas trip, yours truly is happy to report that the Second Amendment in Sin City is alive and well.  DH’s uncle who lives in the area told us (and I’m not going to bother to fact check him because a) he’s reliable when it comes to Nevada news, and b) I’m lazy) that the trend for the casinos had long been to diversify, and that they now derive 60% of their profits from shopping and dining.  When DH had his bachelor party in Vegas some years ago, his friends took him to target-shoot machine guns.  The following year we noticed an ad for the range that they visited at the airport.  Now we see ads for gun entertainment everywhere.  Either our memories are wrong, or machine guns are the new big thing.

We usually try to do something that can count for culture on that side of the Rockies.  Since we’ve already seen Cirque du Soleil and we’ve seen Penn and Teller, we decided to move on to museums.  And, boy, are the museums in NV different!  Last January we went to National Atomic Testing Museum, an outfit somehow affiliated with the Smithsonian.  I’m not sure why the Smithsonian wants to have anything to do with said museum because the story of the atomic testing is told from [gasp!] the American perspective.  They do give voice to the hippies, as they should, because hippies made “anti-nuclear proliferation” their cause, becoming a minor part of the Cold War history.  The bulk of the exhibit tells the story of patriotic people who developed and tested nuclear weapons (or watched them tested).  The last room showcases the pictures drawn by schoolchildren after museum tours.  To my amazement, there was little pacifism on display.  Some kids even drew “peace through superior firepower” symbols.

This year we went to The Mob Museum, now located in the old courthouse downtown where some of the mob hearings where held.  (On the way to the museum we passed El Cortez casino that proudly  advertizes  that they accept EBT.  In the buffet, presumably?  I hope.  I should have snapped a picture of their marquee.  Note to self: when in doubt, photograph.)  I was surprised by the breadth of information covered by the The Mob Museum exhibits.  The artifacts, from the St. Valentine’s Day massacre wall to Tony Soprano’s wardrobe, were neat.  A Tommy gun, the mafia weapon of choice in the 1920s, was on display, and so were the late 20th century assault weapons, like fish hooks and blades.  An entire room was dedicated to mafia and the Kennedys, and the mafia-unions connection was likewise explored.  For the most part The Mob Museum presented real, honest history, although some exhibits were purely tangential.  For instance, is it at all relevant that there were black people at Las Vegas’s founding?  Including black gangs would make much more sense.

Needless to say, neither The Mob Museum nor National Atomic Testing Museum could exist in the Bay Area.  I guess there is hope for this country.

Speaking of the Bay Area, starting New Year’s Day, our municipality instituted a dignity tax.  What’s dignity tax, you ask?  It’s the 10 cent surcharge on every bag a store gives to a customer.  Plastic grocery bags are now banned.  Upon its enactment, the new law generated a lively discussion in the letter section of the one local paper that can still tolerate me reading their pages.  (The cherry on top was an unrelated letter from girl scouts chastising smokers.)  Some locals warned that for health reasons residents should be invest into canvas totes and duffel bags, and washing said bags after each use.  Like I’m going to haul bags to the store every time I buy $150 worth of groceries, and, after spending an hour shopping, commit another hour to doing a load of laundry.  Still, because reusable grocery bags pose a threat of cross-contamination and infectious disease outbreak, like the recent norovirus outbreak in a girl soccer team everyone likes to cite, I propose creating a national registry parents who, because of their narcissistic irresponsible behavior, expose their children to danger of reusable grocery bags.

Manhattan Infidel has some environmentalism news from the other side of the continent.

When we heard that the California Teachers retirement fund is divesting from firearms (you mean, that’s what they were invested in, up until now?), we bought some gun stock.  Meanwhile, from Legal Insurrection post of the day link we learn about an amazing 15-year-old who defended himself and his sister with dad’s AR-15.  Yep, there is hope for this country.

Professor Jacobson had a lot of fantastic posts on the Sandy Hook aftermath.  Among them is the story of the non-prosecution of David Gregory and putting pressure on Gannett corporate, the parent company of Journal News, to take position on the paper’s outing of individuals who own guns.  Holding corporate parent companies responsible is something the right needs to learn to do.  Leslie Eastman warns that California is targeted for enhanced gun control activism.  Seems like a good place to start, if you are an anti-gun nut.  If you for some reason don’t read Legal Insurrection, you should.

I’ve never understood how a feminist can be anti-gun.  After all, a gun is a great equalizer.  Men are superior to women in pure physical strength, but civilization gave us weaponry that makes us more or less equal in street combat.  On this point, see images at Bluebird of Bitterness and Maggie’s Notebook.

Speaking of pictures, after rare winter storms, Israel was covered with snow.  I loved Ann’s Opinions photo essay, and found some other great photographs.

Trendy photography from the IDF Twitter feed

The good news is that Russia is going wobbly.  Russians are floating proposals to give a NC18 rating to the beloved animation series Nu Pogodi (thanks to Harrison for forwarding this one to me).  Like all Russian kids of my generation, I grew up watching the series, which featured a lovable anti-hero and plenty of violence, including gun violence, though no gore.  All of you interested in Russian culture, do click on the link.  By the way, while my generation didn’t know gun ownership, we also didn’t know the “guns are icky” mentality either.  Our popular culture was replete with gun imagery, and all boys played with toy guns.  In high school we shot AK-47 blanks to fulfill our initial combat preparedness requirements.

King Shamus is having some fun at the expense of Obama voters.  It’s a soft target, I suppose.  This time the schmucks found out that their paycheck shrunk, which, evidently, was not on the list of goodies they expected from O.

I know why Armenians make good shoes — they’ve been practicing the longest.  In the Soviet days, Russian ladies bought Armenian shoes because they were well made.  (Take note, Anthropologie.)  And Russian ladies are always on the lookout for a good pair.

To buy or not to buy… It’s not like I need another pair of boots, but the price is right, and I’m sure they present a formidable challenge for Lena Duhnam

When I started blogging, I thought that it was better to write a few short posts than a single long one.  And now, mostly due to lack of time, I take so long to compose a link post, that whatever I set out to write keeps expending until… OK, I’ll shut up.

Russian-Style Guacamole

I hate to be the blogger who announces that I’m not going to blog much in the nearest future only to, you know, keep blogging as usual.  I’ve been relatively busy since Ivan the Terrible Threes dropped his nap, but, I guess, not too busy.  We are however, leaving for SoCal this Friday, so I doubt I’ll be online much — unless something highly bloggable happens.

Yelena the Fabulous Fives illustrates our forthcoming trip.

Our trip has nothing to do with Russian style guacamole, but I noticed that kids who don’t like the avocado texture gobble up this one.  I learned it from my grandmother who found it in a health food section of a Russian American paper.  Not to complicate things for the seniors trying to master English, it was called “avocado salad”.  You will need:

One large avocado;

One hard-boiled egg;

One small ripe tomato, cut in small pieces;

Salt, mayo and sour cream to taste.

Mush up your egg.  Add avocado, mush it up together with slat, mayo and sour cream.  Add tomato, and you are done.

I highly recommend adding hard-boiled egg to your tuna sandwich as well.  My proportions are one egg for two cans of Trader Joe’s tuna.  Finely chopped white onion is another nice touch.

Welfare to Blog

Via Just a Conservative Girl comes the new Romney ad on BO gutting of welfare reform:

Last month Breitbart reported that under the Obama Administration guidelines activities such as “[p]ersonal care [...], massage, exercise, journaling, motivational reading, smoking cessation, weight loss promotion, participation in parent teacher meetings, or helping friends or family with household tasks and errands” will now count as “work”, enabling individuals to qualify for the federal government handouts.

Journaling?  Is that a word?  Probably a neologism that’s yet to make its way to dictionary.com.  I surmise it probably means keeping a journal.  But what about keeping a journal in electronic format, commonly referred to as blogging?  Can bloggers go on welfare?  I doubt mommy bloggers like me will make the cut, given that we have gainfully employed husbands.  Married women are a Republican demographic, so it’s unlikely that the new policy was meant to benefit us.  But the liberal PuffHo bloggers are a different breed.  They had long been complaining that the employer doesn’t pay them.  Perhaps now they can get their checks from Uncle Sam and move out of the parents basement…  Or quit panhandling.

You know who doesn’t panhandle?  Hispanics.  Ted Cruz, the Senate hopeful from Taxes said:

“The Hispanic community, the values that resonate in our community, are fundamentally conservative,” Cruz said on “Fox News Sunday.” ”They are faith, family, patriotism. Do you know the rate of military enlistment among Hispanics is higher than any demographic in this country? And they are also hard work and responsibility.”

“A friend of mine, a Hispanic entrepreneur, asked me a question some time ago. He said, ‘When is the last time you saw an Hispanic panhandler?’
I think it’s a great question. I’ll tell you, in my life, I never once have seen an Hispanic panhandler because in our community; it would be viewed as shameful to be out on the street begging.”

It’s true.  I see lots of Mexicans (presumably) asking for work, but never for money.  (I don’t see very many Asian homeless either.  Russians around here admire the fact that Asians know how to take care of their mentally ill.)  Unfortunately, a few generations down the road immigrant children acquire enough schooling necessary for full time blogging.  That condition is known as funemployment, and that’s when the federal government steps in.

UPDATE:And oh, in the duel of Presidential campaign ads it turned out that the woman, whose death Mitt Romney caused by taking away her health insurance, was actually insured.

Iranian Metalheads

Yesterday the Internet was abuzz with stories of hackers spamming Iranian computers serving their nuclear site with Thunderstruck by AC/DC.  The thing is, the Persian masses would probably enjoy the song.  Metal is big there, and Iranian Black/Death metal is big in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Actually, Black Metal from all of the Middle East is popular here, and they make it everywhere in the region, including such unlikely places as Saudi Arabia.  (Disclaimer: I only know about such things second hand.  It’s not like I have time to go to metal shows in my old age.)

Since Folk Metal (well, all rock-n-roll) draws on pagan music and is very agro, it can get pretty creepy, depending on who is playing it.  Neo-Nazis do metal, for instance, because they like pagan marshal stuff.  And what am I supposed to make of some band that sings in Arabic and has the word Jihad in a song title?  Needless to say, locals eat it up without translation.

Iranian bands are known to express opposition to the ayatollahs, draw inspiration from pre-Islamic antiquity and wave Middle eastern melodies into their riffs and roars.  Here is Arsames with Cyrus the Great:

And here is a translation for accuracy of which I can’t vouch, obviously, but judging from the video Arsames can be expected to be forward-thinking individuals:

Unsuccessful guys in capturing our land
unsuccessful guys in capturing our blood
coming with fear and hesitation
carrying hill of presents on their shoulders

they’re staring with protruded eyes
looking at the sun but they see nothing

unsuccessful folks in capturing our bravery
unsuccessful folks in capturing our glory
coming with fear and hesitation
carrying hill of presents on their shoulders

their souls have shrunk in their corpses
their minds have been torn in pieces
defeating all their aces
we had on our feet their kisses

our Cyrus gave them culture
no pain no sigh no torture
to live in peace is our nature
not killing like a vulture

this is the first kingdom of the world (Persian empire)
the state on the earth as wide as the sun

unsuccessful guys in capturing our land
unsuccessful guys in capturing our blood
coming with fear and hesitation
carrying hill of presents on their shoulders

they’re staring with protruded eyes
looking at the sun but they see nothing.

And here is Aliaj with Mah-e kaghazi, whatever that means:

I don’t know what they sing about, but I approve of the claymation.

Whoever decides to hack Iranians with metal next, should consider this video of the Israeli band Black Landscapes performing Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem:

In keeping with the Israeli Balck Metal theme, here is Salem with Coming End of Reason.  It doesn’t look like the official video, but I have a feeling the band doesn’t disapprove.  It’s nice to see unapologetic Zionists doing something arty:

In a related news, I got a troll today.  I don’t get very many of them around here, so I take each and every one of them as a reminder that I must be doing something right.  This one is from around the Norther Italian city of Genoa, and possibly found my blog googling “National Bolshevism”.  Funny he should use Google, since the founders are Jewish and all.  Anyhow, the troll goes by Suleiman Kahani, doesn’t like Wall Street bankers and appears to be a fan of Hitler, Stalin *and* A’jad.  I hope he stayed here long enough to enjoy this post.

UPDATE 7/26/2012: The fan of Stalin, Hitler and A’jad in the paragraph above might actually be from Serbia.  What do you know?

UPDATE 7/29/2012: Temple of Mut links and posts a cool Persian music video plus summary of Mitt’s visit to Israel.

Envy Is Their State of Mind

While our President zips from one battleground state to another delivering speeches that belittle success, some leftie bloggers show just how much they hate success.  A few months ago, The Lonely Conservative won Circle of Moms Top 25 Political Moms Contest.  She’s been enduring non-stop harassment since:

Since then I’ve amassed nearly one hundred pages of disgusting, hateful and threatening messages. They’ve said that I (and all of you conservative readers) have no place in this world. They’ve told me to slit my own throat. They’ve called me every foul name you can think of. They’ve insulted my husband, accused me of molesting my children and threatened to report me to my local school board. They impersonated my husband and contacted a local divorce attorney. They tried to have pornographic sex toys catalogues sent to my home. They have sent emails on my behalf to my elected representatives advocating for policies I disagree with completely. They’ve signed me up for more email spam than anyone could possibly do in his or her spare time. (As of this moment I have 1630 emails in my spam folder.) They’ve called my home using Caller ID spoofing software or websites. They’ve let me know they know where I live. There isn’t time to list everything, but you get the gist of it.

Oddly enough, as soon as I started covering the whole Brett Kimberlin saga, the harassment stopped. But the lull only lasted a week or so and then it got worse.  The only thing they haven’t done is SWAT my house. (Even if they did they probably wouldn’t produce the desired effect because I’ve already made local law enforcement aware of the situation. The computer system now has our address and phone number flagged in the event they receive any calls reporting violence at our home. I have been assured that the police will proceed with extreme caution if that were to happen.)

There is more.  As it turns out, whoever is stalking her is probably learning from… Brett Kimberlin.

Zilla, who is sick with advanced late-stage Lyme Disease, has also experienced harassment and identity theft.  Please answer her roll call. From what I recall, as the Top 25 contest was going on, trolls were impersonating Linda.  Game On: the related Wombat-socho post.  For more information see The Conservatory and Maggie’s Notebook among others.

Envy rots your soul.

UPDADTE: Zilla writes about harassment she experienced, including mocking her health problems.

Legal Insurrection Behind Enemy Lines?

Professor Jacobson and his wife were in San Francisco today, and I had the pleasure to meet them.

I was very interested to learn that in the ’80s they visited refuseniks in the Soviet Union.  My uncle was one, and it was very important for us to know that people outside the iron curtain cared.  The solidarity we were shown was one of the high points of Jewish history.