Now it's a sin and it ought to be a crime

News Item:  2-Year-Old Accidentally Kills His Mom in Wal-Mart

I was once a proud member of the NRA.

True story.

When I was 12 and had just started hunting, we had subscriptions to "Outdoor Life,""Field and Stream" and Fur, Fish and Game." Thinking that shooting things was cool, and having the newfound ability to do so, I sent away for a free membership when I saw the ads in the magazine.

I got a spiffy membership card and decal for putting on my dad’s bumper, which he did not allow me to do as nothing went on his car bumpers. So I think I put it on my bedroom window.

Now, many view the NRA as crazy, or at least out of touch with reality.

But it seems as thought just as many view the NRA as vitally vigilant in fighting for our 2nd Amendment rights in a Obama-wants-to-take-our-guns- away world.

As much as I could easily side with the latter (given my heritage and background), I tend to fall in the former camp. I see no need for pistols, automatic weapons and other things just are just designed to kill other people. It should be harder to get a gun than to register to vote. Much, much harder.

Go ahead, tell me I am brainwashed and how naive I am, but the last straw was when some on the Right claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged as part of a campaign for more gun control.

The message I receive from these gun nuts and the NRA is that mass shootings are an accepted bit of collateral damage in the fight to preserve their rights.

How sad is that.

I quit hunting deer when I was 13 and small game when I was 16, but I hold no real grudges against those who continue to hunt. In fact, I still sort of miss those Saturdays with my Dad walking though fields in Huntersville, PA (ironic, eh?) in search of rabbits and ringnecks. But I think that is more about long-gone familial bonds that cannot be recaptured than a thirst to kill small animals.

But as for you concealed carriers and those who leave your pistols unattended for kids to get at, keep telling yourself that a well-regulated militia is needed to protect your home and yourselves against the government.

Yeah, simplistic. Maybe

But also sane, at least in my world.

Bones nearly ripped from my back

I wouldn’t necessarily say the towns where I grew up in Northeastern/Central PA were racist per se, but some racial attitudes there were disturbing, to say the least.

For the most part, the only minorities most of these folks, including me and my family, came in contact with were on television.

Lily-white, Christian, all down the line, mostly unaware of the ways of other races, religions, etc.

Which came to light one day in third grade. A couple of weeks before Christmas, Carol Breakstone, who sat across from me, suddenly said, “we don't have Christmas at my house. I don’t believe in Jesus.”

WHAT???? I had never heard anything like this before. I quickly did a Horshack (hand up, “ooh, ooh!”) interrupting the teacher to tell her of this scandalous and unheard of claim. The teacher calmly explained that Jewish people (Jewish? I didn’t know she was Jewish. We didn’t know anyone who was Jewish!!) thought and believed different things – to my memory, it was a well-thought out explanation on the spot.

Which was mostly different from some of the things that were routinely said by friends and family growing up, and I must say, I was complicit in some of the commentary.

I am not proud.

The N word in those parts was common, but no one was safe: Jews, Muslims, Native Americans and Blacks, everybody. Attitudes that were passed down through the years, generation after generation.

Distasteful, for sure. Yet still important to remember.

As for me, my world became more and more color blind, due to maturity and the infusion of soul and blues albums my brother kept bringing into the house; you cannot discount the influence this had on me. Because of him and these records, I knew that Arthur Alexander and Smokey Robinson and Little Richard were heroes to MY heroes, The Beatles. That meant something.

Of course, sports played a huge role in my world view as well. Minorities were unheard of in sports when parents grew up, and they became the majority during my childhood. The likes of Walt Frazier, Homer Jones, Ron Johnson, Earl Monroe and Willis Reed loomed large.

Now, many years later, things have changed back in my hometowns, at least somewhat. How do I know this? When visiting just before the 2008 election, I saw a significant number of Obama yard signs. Maybe a minor thing, but this would been unheard of 30 years ago.

My kids may never quite understand how Nelson Mandela, who died this week, changed the world as a whole.

They may also never know just how far they are from the much smaller world their dad grew up in.

Everywhere you look life ain't got no soul

News Item: Texas executes 500th person since the state resumed the death penalty in 1982

You'll be Comin' Down

"Fat man sits on a little stool, takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you."

Today, election day (or is Election Day?), my thoughts turn to fat men....and karma.

Seemingly unrelated things. Or are they?

One of the fat men in question is Chris Christie, erstwhile governor of New Jersey and likely presidential candidate in 2016.

My views don't square with his politically; not exactly anyway. But I am throwing my weight behind him this early simply because of one thing -- his girth.

Chris Christie -- mirroring America in his Lou Costello pants

America needs a president that is akin to looking in the mirror, and Chris Christie is it. Big, blustery, unhealthy, and destined to make America feel better about itself. And he gets added bonus points for his Springsteen fandom.

None of those Bloomberg health directives will come from this guy, and America will get what it deserves. Not that I think Christie is bad guy, per se.

But you know, what comes around, goes around. You will reap what you sow.

Moral causation. Karma.

In Buddhism, the basic definition of the law of karma is as follows: "For every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful."

I don't know if I believe in karma. I want to, at least when it comes to fat guys and their associates.

Murder Incorporated

With another mass murder in the news, it's time to address my relationship with guns.

I have used guns many times: 22s, a 30-06, a 30-30, a 45-70 (an “elephant gun” in the words of my dad). I have owned several shotguns, the last being a 20 gauge. With these guns, I have killed: crows, squirrels, rabbits, pheasants and a deer.

All of my gun experiences were related to hunting, and I actually enjoyed hunting for a period of time. From the time I was 12 up until I was around 15, my dad and I went deer hunting in season and hunted small game on Saturdays in the Fall. We had a beagle-basset mix, Fred, who dearly loved to go hunting, even if he didn’t know what he was doing. Untrained, he kept his nose to the ground, and if he came across an animal, he was just as likely to chase it away from you as toward you. Still, we knew when a small creature was close by the way when Fred's wobbly gait picked up speed and his WGM (wags per minute) hit 100 rather than the usual 50 or so.

Hunting with my dad was a bonding experience, and those Saturdays, all decked out in Woolrich, hunting boots, orange vests holding shotgun shells, and a goofy fluorescent hat, still brings back warm memories. We would leave early on a crisp Fall day, accompanied by the redolent outdoor “manly” smell of the hunting gear and a crazed Fred pacing in the backseat of our Buick, all in the name of shooting small animals with high-powered weapons.

I loved it, or maybe I should say, I loved the overall “non death-related experiences” of these outings.

But actually killing things, not so much. And what we killed, we cleaned. Also, not so much. And what we cleaned, we ate. I enjoyed that only slightly more, finding only pheasants and venison somewhat edible. That is, until I stopped and actually thought about how they ended up on the plate. And yes, I am carnivorous, but I choose to compartmentalize the deaths of living things I killed as opposed to those who died when another human slit its throat.

My hunting escapades ended one bitterly cold Monday in doe season. While on a watch (other members of my dad’s hunting cabin at this moment were drivers, meaning they walked through forested areas hooting and hollering in an attempt to spook the deer into the sights of the watchers), several scared antlerless deer scurried in front of me. I nervously pulled up my 45-70, sighted in, closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. I thought I missed, but a short time later another hunter from our cabin found a deer a few hundred feet away, writing in pain on the ground. He called me over and asked if this was the one I shot at.

“ I guess so,” I muttered, as all doe basically looked the same to my 15-year-old eyes. Seeing the deer in agony, he placed a 30-06 shell between its ears. The pain for this particular doe ended.

And so did any desire for me to hunt again. Furthering my sudden distaste for the whole scene was the moment that, during the cleaning, a handful of entrails were rubbed into my face by another hunter. Sort of an initiation moment, I guess.

Today, I don’t have a problem with hunting, as long as you use the meat. Sport hunting is another story. As is hunting with a gang who have been up half the night drinking and wake to go out early the next morning with beer and whiskey still on their breath – as was the case with the hunter who fired the death shot into the doe I had wounded.

Still, if hunting is one thing (and in theory it is), gun ownership for other reasons is something else. There is no real need for assault weapons, and to a slightly lesser degree, handguns either. This protecting the 2nd amendment nonsense and the actions of the NRA are disastrous for a civilized society. I will leave it at that.

And as for me, I like to think I have evolved past killing animals, and I am betting that God approves of such evolution.

Well they blew up the chicken, man

7:00 A.M. , March 3, 2011, Fayetteville St., Raleigh, N.C.

Because nothing says "Don't eat at McDonalds" like a statue of a bruised and battered chicken in front of a CVS.

Methinks that if PETA spent as much time worrying about the welfare of people as they do with animals, we'd all be better off.

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny

Or will we?

Someday my kids may be interested in what the climate was like when America began to slip irretrievably over the edge. As I probably won’t be around to tell them, perhaps this column by Tom Friedman of the New York Times, reprinted in full, will give them some clues:

From WikiChina

Tom Friedman, The New York Times

Nov. 30, 2010
While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? I suspect the cable would read like this:

Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.

It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you.

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.

Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.

The Price You Pay

I am amazed at the right’s response to health care reform. I’m not sure how I feel about the bill, except to say that I am happy something is happening and that I am hopeful this is a good first step. Ultimately, I would like some sort of single payer plan (see link under Hit Parade).

But these yahoos claiming passage of this bill is the end of America are stretching it, to say the least. The two main arguments I’ve heard is 1)we can’t afford it and 2) it means two much big government (i.e. socialism).

Those screaming about costs might want to remember this from their president. And Michael Graham on Imus this morning repeated the Fox talking points that free enterprise and not government must solve this problem. Sorry, but free enterprise (and greed) is what got us into the land of the $12,500 MRI that my son had two weeks ago.

Finally, I am reminded of this quote from Ghandi: "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."

Black and white world

Here are some of the opening remarks from Senator Tom Tancredo’s (R-CO) at this weekend’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville: “First, we should have a civics literacy test before people are allowed to vote. Second, people who could not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, whose name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

Are we headed for a Palin/Tancredo ticket in 2012?



These people want to take us back to the 50s. Now I am a big fan of the 50s, but not their version – you know, the one built on fear and hate…

I was reminded of the 50s over the weekend when listening to a radio retrospective on Little Feat and the late, great Lowell George. The host mentioned that George appeared at age six on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, describing that show as the “American Idol of the Eisenhower Years.”

Now, of course, that is accurate, but putting the show’s timeframe in that context makes it seem so, so long ago.

But that show, while corny as hell, represented the innocence of that time well. No cynicism or negativity, and it seems like those virtues disappeared a long time ago as well, as least on television.
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Good on the Saints, but since I didn’t have a dog in the fight, I only watched portions of the game. I really don’t have time to sit down and watch sports indiscriminately any more. And that includes the Super Bowl. So, no Giants, no watch. For the most part.

I did see The Who at halftime, and while they gave it a good try, I have to say it's time to feature some bands who have made relevant music in the past 20 years, if not this decade. And given my thoughts on the current state of music, it pains me to say that.

Townshend was into it, but looked creaky. Daltrey struggled a bit. And The Who is not The Who without Keith Moon anyway.

But after giving is some thought, my best guess for next year's game, in the Cowboy's new stadium is....The Eagles.

You heard it here first.

Yup, more old guys who were pretty good, if not great, back in the day. Don Henley is from Texas. They've never done the game before. Jerry Jones probably thinks they are still cool.

I can only hope the other Eagles, the ones from Philadelphia, are not at the game as well.

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Update on Sledageddon: Things getting better day by day. But what used to take a day or two, now takes more than a week.

Living on the edge of the world

Laurie Garrett, who delivered the goods in The Coming Plague, does it again in the new issue of Newsweek:

“The greatest fall-off in child vaccination, and the strongest proponents of various theoretical dangers associated with vaccines, are all rooted in wealthy, mostly Caucasian communities, located in the rich world. At a time when billions of people living in poorer countries are clamoring for equitable access to life-sparing drugs and vaccines for their families, the college-educated classes of the United States and other rich countries are saying 'no thanks,' even accusing their governments of 'forcing' them to give 'poison' to their children."

Irony much?

When it comes to this issue, my money is on Pulitzer-Prize winner Garrett, rather than Jenny McCarthy.

But the question remains, with science what it is, why are articles like this even necessary? Those who believe the government is trying to poison its own citizens are without hope or reason, but if we look at the tea baggers and their ilk, I fear it’s only going to get worse.

Something is happening here but you don't know what it is

Do you, America?

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?

You know, the one that you used to shoot yourself, and your party, in the foot.

I hate writing about politics. First of all, I never feel well-versed enough to be coherent. And two, it's such a vile cesspool of disgustingness that I worry that I will never get the stench off of my computer keyboard.

But....

The level of discourse in the political realm of today is highly disturbing.

It's not so much that Wilson displayed the boorishness and incivility of this summer's town hall meetings. It's that he doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.

"H.R. 3200: Sec 246 NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States."

Here's more.

I just do not get the stupidity that seems to be inherent in our society. The stupidity that wants to deny a basic right to all citizens -- health care. Every other advanced nation on planet Earth does it, and nearly all of them enjoy far greater health than we do. And they spend less doing so.

It's getting so I don't recognize this country anymore. These tea baggers are suddenly yelling about government spending and the president lying. Have they been under a rock for the last eight years while the former occupant of the white house ("white" being a crucial word for these folks -- see below) poured endless dollars into a war that he started with reasoning that wasn't exactly true? By the way, that's another way of saying he "lied."

It's no wonder the rest of the civilized world is laughing at us.

But it's clear that none of that matters to the segment of the population following Rush, Hannity, Beck, et al. Memo to all of those listeners: You are just going to have to deal with the fact that Obama is Black. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that that fact is behind a great deal of this nonsense.

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Edited to add: Several days after this post, Maureen Dowd weighed in. A few days later, Jimmy Carter also had something to say on this issue.

Come on people now, smile on your brother

Full disclosure: I am far from an expert on either Christianity or the complex intricacies of health care proposals currently being discussed.

But.....

When watching recent town-hall meetings on health care reform, it occurred to me that many attendees would probably identify themselves as Christians.

At least that's my take from the demographic makeup of the images I saw -- mostly white, middle-aged or elderly, and often in rural areas.

As Charles Barkley once said, I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about Jesus. You know, the guy who essentially told his disciples to "heal the sick and feed the poor."
But apparently that's not the take of Christians in our country today -- not all, but some....

So, I ask these vociferous and angry detractors of universal health coverage for everyone -- What Would Jesus Do?