The ominous trend hidden in mass shootings

I don't need to remind everyone of the Orlando shooting. Everyone is shocked over the sheer number of casualties, and surprised about the targeting of the LGBT community by an undoubted Islamic terrorist. Those two things will make this atrocity linger in the public mind. The tragedy is taking us through another tour of the well-worn debate over the availability of military-grade guns under the Second Amendment. Never mind these are weapons that could kill fifty people in five minutes, argument always ends the same way. The gun lobbying and PR kills any action. Yet, both the shock of the massacre and the familiarity the aftermath ritual obscure a disturbing trend in mass shootings, one that should be getting more attention.

(Continued after the break.)

If you're writing in Bernie Sanders

As a Bernie Sanders supporter from the very first, I'm disappointed that he's not going to get the nomination unless there's a violent coup in the Democratic Party. Violent coups are not recommended, nor expected. However, now that question of nominee is basically settled, I've voting for Hillary Clinton.

I've heard a lot of complaining from the left, people who say that they'll write in Bernie's name, or just won't vote, or (saving throw) are voting for Donald Trump just to prove their wishes can't be ignored any longer.

If you're in that camp, I dare you to try this: wake up every day from now until the election, and say aloud, "President Trump." Then when you walk into the voting booth, say to yourself, "President Trump, for four years." Then think of some of the things he's promised: deportations, the Mexican wall, and reneging on US debt, etc.

If you can still write in Bernie Sanders, who you know can't win, when you also know you're asking for your consolation prize to be Donald Trump instead, then you will have proved you're a person of conviction, and you're not just thoughtlessly making the world much worse.

No, you're making it much worse with a purpose. And that purpose is [fill in the blank].

If you can fill in that blank with anything that makes sense to you, then ought to vote for Donald Trump.

I dare you to try it.

Vote. Please Vote

The Republican Party has shown by their obstructionism in Congress and their outrageous laws in the States that it shouldn't be a political party. Never mind that the base is now taking it apart. I have to admit the 2010 and 2014 elections were two of the most shocking I've ever seen. How can a party that's as irrational, anti-science, anti-education, obstructionist, who actually closed down the government, win majorities?

Their latest insult to rights, morality and intelligence is the defunding of Planned Parenthood for no reason whatsoever. The Center for Medical Progress's videos have been refuted, the people who made them are up on charges, and they'll probably have to stand charges of defamation as well.

This is the very same tactic Republicans pulled on ACORN, which also turned to be nothing.

It's apparent that among their other foibles, Republicans believe in government as a bully. It's odd the party of small government and no regulation would harass Planned Parenthood with arbitrary regulations. But they absolutely believe in that as a role for government.

A second state, Ohio has now defunded Planned Parenthood. Governor Kasich, that moderate, has signed the bill.

I'm beginning to get that same feeling helpless distressed feeling I had under George W. Bush. If you're a Liberal, Progressive or Socialist, please remember to vote.  

Things will continue to deteriorate until we fire these people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8

The truth is . . .

This has little to do with the article. I'm just plugging Colbert.

There's a lot I could write about with the primary process underway, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton locking horns, and the Republican field being culled. (I like how Stephen Colbert has called the process the "Hunger for Power Games.") For the record, I would be very disappointed if Bernie Sanders didn't get the Democratic nomination. I think we're about equally Left. However, I don't feel that there's much for me to discuss about the candidates that isn't covered quite well elsewhere, sans the real issues.

I prefer to look at the underpinning issues that determine how somebody will vote. I friend of mine has said that you could predict whether someone is conservative or liberal by their answer to one question: how complicated is life?  If they say it's simple, they're conservative. If they say it's complicated, they're liberal. However, I haven't been able to find any research confirming that.

That's true of philosophical matters, like the truth, not just something you say that's true, or logically true, but the Higher Truth. I got into a discussion on Facebook that where a woman argued that the Higher Truth isn't relative. Higher Truth, like complete perfection, a myth, but those are two categories that believers, especially of the conservative stripe, think their religion answers. Simplistic? You betcha.

This was my answer:

Really? First, the term when applied to the entirety of existence is over-broad, like the number 42, if you get the reference. Second, the universe works by probabilistic laws at the quantum level. So, chance and luck are intrinsic to existence. Third, from the smallest scale to the largest, the universe is a chaotic system. Our minds function to find order, or truth, but outside of that niche, they are very poor. (Hit the enter button early. I hate that.) Fourth, even if there is something called "the truth" our senses and our minds are too limited to perceive it, in fact. We are adapted to survive, regardless of the truth. So, what you're saying is mostly false.

A caveat: "the truth" should not be conflated or confused with the word "true," which is always provisional. The former should not be given the inarguable, mathematically sound status of the latter.

And her rebuttal was she didn't believe anything of what I said. Do you think she votes conservative, that she insists that her higher truth includes "knowing" a fetus is an unborn baby, and just sacrifice her and other women's reproductive rights without having to prove anything? You betcha. People who "know" there's a higher truth usually feel very entitled due to their knowledge. Even if that entitlement makes their life worse.

It isn't so much that some people believe that there's a higher truth. It's the entitlement it gives them, and the fact that this belief looks very much like plain ignorance compounded with error. That people even cast a argument as higher truth vs. relativism shows that they don't know what they're talking about. Evolutionists have run into this problem with Creationists: how do you argue against something when the premises buried beneath touch on reality only in the most distorted way? I suppose closing your eyes and groping is a simpler process than actually opening your eyes and looking. Aw, but I'm too parallel.  

Mass shootings are for white Christians only

Looks like the old American tradition of racism is finally going beginning to crack the gun regime. It's taken a couple of brown Muslims doing mass murder for conservatives to see it jus' ain't right that anybody can buy a gun, almost no questions asked. Since racism created the NRA to begin with, that's what Abraham Lincoln would call fitting and proper.

Personally, I was surprised that a couple of Muslims were able to put together such an arsenal and not draw more attention, if not from law enforcement, just from neighbors. It goes to show me that the Right to Keep and Bear (if not open carry) is a lot more colorblind than I thought. It's apparent that the two San Bernadino terrorists thought they get away with it. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms means that Middle East terrorists don't necessarily have to commit suicide nor fool with huge amounts of explosives. Much safer to just buy assault rifles.

I'm still waiting for one of these shootings to be thwarted. The problem with that is a matter of response time. It will take ten seconds for the would be hero to come out shock and begin to respond. By the time he pulls his gun, there's maybe fifteen to twenty seconds. A guy with a semi-automatic can empty his clip and be reloaded before then. By that time, five people are down, and he's aiming at our hero.

You could see from this that it's far better the killer doesn't have such a capable weapon in the first place.

Rights of fathers and the biology of fatherhood

The contribution of the mother and father to a baby at birth, seen to scale

Sadly, any woman saying anything bold and controversial on the Internet is like flypaper for misogynists and MRAs, who are usually the same people. If the woman happens to be good-looking, the boys take out the heavy artillery.

I was bored, so I watched Laci Green's sex-positive video about condom use. I'm far out of that demographic, but I like watching Laci Green no matter what she's saying. 

Only an ex-Mormon can have a smile bigger than those glasses.

 From there, the subject was sidetracked to tangent issues. One of those were the issues of fathers' rights. One guy wrote this:

"Women don't create life, they carry it like an incubator.
Men make the life,sperm is the cell that carries all the information."


--A. I. Natsumi

This was either an extreme case of ignorance or a troll. But it gave me an opportunity to write my thoughts on fathers' rights.

Most men aren't this ignorant, but most also presume the child is biologically fifty percent theirs because they provided fifty percent of the genetic material. This is what they were taught in high school biology. This is also simplistic to the point of being incorrect.

While it's true that males provide half the nuclear DNA, the nucleus is not the only DNA in a human cell. All the mitochondrial DNA is the mother's. And that's the great majority of the DNA in the cell. The mother also provides all of the cellular machinery, all of those organelles that make a cell function.

Also, all the bacteria that is vital to the baby surviving comes from the mother. It's been determined that there are many more symbiotic bacterial cells in and on a person then there are human cells. (Bacterial cells, however, are much smaller.)

So, if you look at design and material provided, the male is a minority partner in creating the child.

I'm not saying we should take our cues from nature in this matter, because nature is terribly immoral and unethical.  I'm saying that fathers can't justify their custody rights based on nature either. At birth, the father's contribution compared to the mother's is not half-and-half. 

Of course the father is essential in starting the pregnancy. IMHO, this matters if the parents started the pregnancy deliberately, but wouldn't be a factor in an unplanned birth.  

With MRA's and misogynists, there's never been a truer statement than "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics."



BTW, visit Laci Green's Youtube channel sometime:

Conspiracy theories

The Oregon tragedy seems to have died without making any changes. Nothing about guns is going to be reformed until the gun industry is investigated and its propaganda-marketing apparatus exposed and/or prosecuted.

Some may wonder why guns have this kind power. Remember, that industry has a foot in the military-industrial-intelligence complex. This means the industry has undue political pull over Congress from several different sources. The National Riflery Association is now part of the gun industry's marketing arm. Most of its funding comes from the gun industry.  Yes, it has citizen membership, but it's an example of a grass roots organization captured by an industry. The grass roots have been removed and it's all astroturf now.

I'm not a conspiracy buff. There are conspiracies that absolutely can't happen, there are conspiracies that are unlikely, but there are ones that both can and do happen. There are certain ways of separating out the unlikely (or can't-happen) conspiracies from those that could be happening. Leonard Mlodonov's book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. He talks about conspiracy theories and gives some hints about likely and unlikely ones. 


Any conspiracy with size and reach runs on money. The reason why the CIA was able to grow into the menace it became was because in its early days, it got its funding by skimming off the Marshall Plan.

The gun industry has plenty of money. It has guerrilla marketers to spread rumors of conspiracies to take away guns. These are bloggers, writers, editors for gun publications.

It is creepy, though, how consistently corporations behave in the same way. The tobacco industry had similar riches and used it to buy politicians, suppress data about the harm of tobacco, and put out its own propaganda and marketing. It convinced people that smoking was part of their freedom. The gun industry is pretty much doing the same thing. But many industries pit themselves against the interests of their clients, and the interests of the public at large, so they can continue to enjoy profits.

Look at the fossil fuel industry and Global Warming. Or not, because it's so depressing. Whatever we conjure up when we form for-profit corporations, it doesn't act like a human being with a conscience, never mind what the Supreme Court said.

PS. I've taken a large dose of Melotonin. I'm not sure if this entry came out right at all. I'll have to check it when I have time.