I have nothing but sympathy for the survivors and victims of the Newtown massacre.  I cannot even imagine what you must be going through, those who lost children and spouses to one man’s insanity.

I have nothing but contempt for those people who would use such a tragedy for political gain, who offer “solutions” that don’t even address the problems that allowed such a situation to happen.  To the NRA, to the Anti-gun idiots who have been campaigning on the same tired plank they’ve been marching on since 1981, I have to ask, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

I’ll tackle the NRA first, because I’m a conservative, and I find it easier to shoot down pseudo-conservative polemic.  Especially ill-informed bullshit like the crap the NRA has been spewing since December.

Really?  Every school should have teachers on campus trained in armed response?  That’s your “solution”?  Give me a second; I’m rubbing my temples because all of the stupid in that idea has caused a minor blockage in my brain.

Okay, I’m back.  No, wait…okay.  YOU DON’T ARM TEACHERS!  Sorry…sorry…deep breath…okay.  You don’t arm teachers for the same reason you don’t ask your security guard to mop up the vomit in the cafeteria when Suzy Jenkins discovers her stomach can’t handle canned carrots.  It’s not their job, the extra work distracts them from their actual job, and really (with no insult to teachers implied) asking them to do so will just make everything that much worse.  A teachers first and only job is to ensure the education and safety of the children entrusted to him or her.  Period.  In an emergency situation, that means obeying the lockdown rules and ensuring that none of the children for whom the teacher is responsible put themselves in harm’s way in any way.

Think back to your own school days.  Remember how, as soon as Mrs. Castlebaum was outside of the classroom, everything exploded into chaos with at least one student looking out the little window in the door to see what was going on out there (even more, if the reason she left was because of a disruption in the halls).  That is exactly what would happen if an armed-response teacher was required to “defend the school”, only instead of watching Miss Tesselmyer’s meltdown, those kids will make themselves targets for the nutcase roaming the halls.

Never mind the fact that even with training, a teacher can’t spend all day thinking only about the responsible disposition of his or her weapon.  If the fact of the teacher’s emergency responsibilities won’t sway you from the Road to Moron, then bringing up the tragic consequences that will predictably result from three minutes while Mr Cutnell finds out why Jake hasn’t come back from the bathroom yet and forgets that he left his sidearm in his desk draw will have no effect on you at all.

On to the other side, because, while I can’t even think about the NRA’s “plan” without getting a headache, the fact that your argument is so flawed in its bases that only superhuman hubris allows you to present it causes my hands to involuntarily clench into fists.  Feel free to punch yourself in the face every time I mention a redundancy or a flaw in your logic.

“Toughened” laws would not have prevented Newtown.  All three of the guns used were stolen from the perpetrator’s mother, and the one he leaned on the most—the M4 with the expanded magazine—was (and is) illegal to own in the state of Connecticut, anyway.  Federal laws regarding assault weapons and thorough background checks wouldn’t have changed that, or added anything to it.

What people need for hunting (assuming people need or should be allowed to hunt) or for target competition has no place in the argument.  The Second Amendment doesn’t bring up the rights of hunters or the requirements of the local Turkey Shoot.  In words it calls for a regulated militia (that is, citizen army), but in spirit, it states, unequivocally “Government, any government, is a necessary evil, and it must be controlled and kept on its leash by the people, and they must be armed to do so.”  Don’t believe me?  Then you need to read Machiavelli, Jefferson, Adams, any thinker of the time who recognized the struggle between personal liberty and collective safety.

When Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion, he didn’t seize the farmers’ weapons.  Even the Confederates were allowed to take their side- and long-arms home after they’d surrendered.  To paraphrase someone who may have been Machiavelli, but was probably someone else, “An armed citizenry cannot help but be free, a disarmed citizenry cannot but be in fetters.”  That is the entire reason for the Second Amendment, and every “collective safety” argument you bring up, just burns the necessity of the basic reason for the amendment deeper into the brains of those who support it.

In any case, the availability of guns in the US isn’t the problem.  The problem is the pervasive and endemic spread of feelings of hopelessness and impotence in the general populace.  People who feel impotent seek ways of proving their impact on the world around them; people bereft of hope lash out at their perceived oppressors.  Both of these “plans” are an effort to fix a bladder infection by wearing a diaper.  It’s time to look at the real problem, and then to cowboy-up and face the difficulties of the real solution.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you decided to buy an old house in a small town.  We’ll call the town Lincolnville and put it in Monkeybelch County, Texas.  So this house isn’t really much, really just a squat and blocky brownstone on the less attractive side of town, but it was cheap, and you can work on it weekends until you retire or flip it.

While rummaging through the junk-filled attic, you discover a portrait of a man standing beside an open coffin with another man’s corpse in it–weird, but not really unlikely in an old west town.  This piques your interest, however, and you look into the history of your ugly little house.  With the help of a city clerk and a librarian, you discover that the house was where Ron “Pornstache” Lipschulz shot Hezekiah “Hezekiah” Barbar, ending the Monkeybelch Range War and determining the course of the entire Monkeybelch Draw Valley’s history.  Your house is historic!

So the city clerk convinces you to register your squat toad of a house with the National Historic Registry, which causes you to jump through a few hoops to prove provenance and to prove that the end of the Monkeybelch Range War was in some way significant to national history (Monkeybelch county is the nation’s number 7 producer of scorpions embedded in yellow-tinted Lucite that looks kind of like amber).

Only now your weekend project got complicated.  Now that your home is historic, you have to maintain its architectural integrity.  Instead of just repairing the walls, cleaning up the yard and figuring out some way to make the front less glaringly unattractive, you now have to follow specific rules, laws, and guidelines guiding you in every step of repair and upgrades.  Simply bringing the building up to the point where Registry officials won’t fine you for mistreating a National Treasure will cost you twice as much as the building purchase ran in the first place.  You’d have been better off ignoring the place’s historic significance and just bulldozing it to make room for a three-bedroom clapboard ranch.

Or, let’s say you have a pine tree in your yard.  This thing is seventy-five feet tall and weighs upwards of five tons.  And it’s dead.  Between pine beetles and the recent droughts, it just gave up, and now you cringe every time a stiff breeze blows through your neighborhood.  So you call a reputable tree service to take care of it without destroying your house.

The only problem is, while inspecting the tree, they discovered a bird’s nest.  Not just a bird’s nest, but a nest of Shrill Tiny Mud-Colored Annoying Birds.  They’re on the Endangered Species list.  They were put on the list in 1978, when it was discovered that there were only 300 of them in the entire country.  Now, of course, you have to elbow them out of the way just to get down the street, but they remain on the list because development threatens their natural woodland habitat (the six thousand birds that seem happy to live in your neighborhood and crap on your car are considered “aberrations”).  That tree has to stay up, because birds.

Unfortunately for you, when the next big thunderstorm comes through and your dead tree crashes into your house, you’re screwed.  Your insurance company considers your failure to remove a clearly dead tree to be negligence, and they won’t pay out if you act like a dumbass.

These are perverse incentives: times when the effect of government regulations is the opposite of their intent.  The US Code is rife with laws and regulations that punish people for doing the right thing.  My last example probably sounds familiar because it is a popular plot for sitcoms.  Unfortunately, it is also a reality for many people whose lives have been disrupted by the Endangered Species Act.

Believe it or not, encouraging common citizens to ignore or violate the law is not the most common result of perverse incentives.  The most common result, and, in my view, the most harmful, is the manufacturing of narratives.  Last January, I started hearing about the huge drought that Houston was entering this year, which was surprising, because Houston didn’t start lagging behind on rainfall until the middle of February, when the jet stream that gives us dry Decembers reappeared.  As it stands, we’ are about three inches behind average for the first quarter, most of it in February and March.  Of course, we’ve already gotten half our April average in the first week, with more expected.  But the narrative remains that we’re heading for a drought that will be worse than 2011.

It’s hard to see, when you look at a year that may be a little light on rain how these dire predictions of drought are born.  Hard to see until you look up the source of these prediction.  The National Integrated Drought Information System is a division of the National Oceanographic Advisory Administration (NOAA–in turn, an administration of the US Department of Commerce), established to provide information and recommendations regarding drought relief and mediation all over the country.  That seems reasonable, these guys study drought and drought conditions all the time, so they should be trusted to let us know when drought is imminent, so we can be proactive in mediating drought effects instead of just cutting giant crop insurance checks in August.

Except these guys see drought everywhere they go.  If it is not currently raining (and sometimes, even if it is) they shout drought and tell you to stop washing your car and to drink only Red Bull.  They are like your crazy aunt who spends too much time on WebMD and is convinced she has every possible disease including rickets.  Because the climate is so huge and unpredictable, they can’t possibly know how it works or how it’s going to work, so they look at one or two things that maybe were in effect when past droughts happened and shout DROUGHT!

Of course, there’s also the fact that they have jobs because they can show drought as being a credible threat.  Let me put that another way:  Their jobs depend on their ability to present ongoing widespread drought as an imminent danger to American well-being.  It is literally in their best interest to declare Houston to be under “severe” drought conditions, despite the fact that NOAA’s rainfall maps show us not to be in any serious rain debt.

It’s a perverse incentive.  Since their jobs depend on their ability to show that the country has a need for their services, they are always going to find something that supports the narrative.  Any time you hear a dire prediction, whether it’s impending drought, the threat of terrorism, or the dangers of apple fritters, you should be sure to follow the Benjamins.  And do it both ways, because it’s not always Big Business offering scads of bucks to people willing to prove that sucking hot smoke directly into your lungs isn’t harmful, sometimes, it’s someone whose job depends on convincing you that being in the same state as a lit cigarette will give you every disease (including rickets).  It’s not just the people cutting the checks that are culpable for misleading the public, it’s just as often the ones cashing them.

This is the last correction of misinformation in this series, and with the next few blogs I’ll get into more esoteric crap.  Or less, i dunno.  I’ll almost certainly revisit the idea of “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” in the future, because it irritates me that much of our national debate has been corrupted by people changing the language and thrust of debate.  So the last bit of info you may be spitting out if you don’t know any better (or if you do and you’re just a dirty liar) is…

Progressive Socialism is the next step in Human Social Evolution.  Get this straight, There is nothing new or progressive about socialism.  Let me say it again, in case you weren’t listening, There is nothing new or progressive about Socialism.  Okay, one last time for the cheap seats, There is nothing new or progressive about Socialism!  Socialism is not a new idea, and it is the opposite of progressive.  It is, in fact, REgressive.  Socialism is, in fact, the oldest form of socioeconomic government on earth.

When you finish sputtering, I’m sure you’ll remind me that “modern” socialism is no older than the New Deal ( or the October Revolution) and is based entirely on two core concepts:  Government can and must be the driving force of an economy, and an advanced society must care for its less capable citizens.  And you are right, or at least you would be, if those were new ideas.

In the Middle ages that concept was referred to as The Right of Kings and Noblesse Oblige, that is to say, the government had the right to define the economy, and the government had an obligation to assist the needy.  Socialism (without fancy names) goes back at least to Ancient Egypt, where Pharaoh maintained storehouses for grain to be disseminated among the populace in times of shortage.  Imperial Rome was incredibly socialist, with all production being defined and regulated by the Imperial Palace in Rome.  China (as a unified empire) has never not been socialist, to my knowledge (the only real difference between Mao’s communism and Shek’s imperialism was the logo printed on the business cards).

Hitler was a Socialist, and his National Socialist Party had more in common with modern Progressive Socialism than either has with Marxist Communism.  Marxism (which, in its bases is as Utopian as More’s Government of Good Will and Rouseau’s Natural Man) maintains that the people will of their own free will and no need for governing oversight choose to freely distribute the wealth, means and rewards of of production (after a short period of violence to wrest such production from the hands of the wicked and the selfish).  Compare this to the rhetoric against the “One Per cent”.  Now compare that rhetoric to Hitler’s diatribes against Jews.  The fact is, that you can use “Jew” and “One Per Cent” interchangeably in both situations and still have the same, hateful message.

I’m not letting so-called conservatives off the hook, either.  This rush to deregulation of all things (or even to conditional regulation) is just as socialist as ObamaCare.  Pullman’s Company Towns were the model for every Industrial Socialism experiment since.  Henry Ford established company towns around a number of his major plants.  Even Reagan was a bit of a Socialist:  His “trickle-down” economic theories were based on the principle that wealth entering the highest sectors of society would trickle down to the masses—not really a big jump from Noblesse Oblige, is it.

The fact is, that any organization allowed to be overpoweringly large and monopolistic, will form some type of socialism.  And Socialism is the enemy of Democracy.  I’m not just talking about the apocryphal Tytler quote where Democracy dies shortly after the people discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.  Socialism—and the many “Public Welfare” projects that define it—demands an autocratic or oligarchic government with a vast monolithic bureaucracy. You can’t disseminate billions of dollars to the needy without rules and regulations defining who is needy (and deserving, because, let’s be honest, if the wrong kind of needy folks get something, well that’s just stupid).

The Free Market isn’t broken, it’s hobbled.  Democrats have placed unnecessary limits on people’s ability to improve their position and Republicans have opened the gates for massive multinational corporations to feed on the innocent.  Five companies own more than three quarters of the Media.  Five companies supply almost all of the fuel for our cars and trucks (and two of those are foreign-owned monopolies). Most Agricultural Production is owned or controlled by a few “Associations”.

You can’t regulate monopolies; you have to break them apart.  Regulation just leads to more socialism.  It also leads to corruption.  If the friendly cop on the street is vulnerable to turning a blind eye to Mickey the Finn’s game of Three-card Monte because Mickey’s a good guy and always spots the cop a cup of coffee or an after work beer. then how much more vulnerable is the Federal Regulator who daily associates with men who have access to millions of dollars in disposable cash and perks.  If a doughnut makes the cop on the beat near-sighted, then that new Lexus or department “conference” in Aruba must make regulators completely blind.

I have a lot more to say on this subject, and I probably will, in the near future, but I’m digressing from the final fact:  Socialism is not new, and it’s not even a little progressive.  Socialism is Collodi’s “Land of Toys”, enticing us to free license as a means of enslaving us.  It’s the witch’s candy house.  It’s the coin of Caesar.  Where Socialism reigns, Democracy lies broken and molested in the gutter.

Okay, so now we’ve established that not every person who differs from us on one issue can be categorized within great sweeping swathes of philosophical intent, let’s move on to more stupid shit people do and think, shit that is ruining debate and our way of life.  Next up is …

If I see somebody doing something I think is wrong, then it’s my duty as a good Christian/American/Person to make them stop.  Let’s take a second and define terms.  When this statement is used in reference to active physical harm to the person or property of a person who is not an adult human giving informed consent of his or her own free will, then yes, you have a right and a duty to intervene and prevent that harm from occurring, but that’s it. Right or wrong, at the end of the day you have to make different decisions aimed at the welfare of your person and those you want to benefit, if you want to be on a diet and obsess about your figure, it’s fair, you should try the best testosterone booster on the market to achieve that.

It is not your Christian Duty to stop Homosexuals from being so gay.In fact, doing so is the opposite of what both Jesus and Paul laid down as the founding principles of the expanded Christian Church.  Jesus, especially went on at length about how other peoples sins are none of your business.  If you want to use reason to convince them to your way of thinking, you go right ahead, but you don’t get to coerce anyone to act in accordance with your moral code.

Lest I be accused of picking only on the Christians, that idea extends to the idea of health and body.  It’s not your business if I want to eat an entire half gallon of Blue Bell Banana Split ice cream while chain-smoking a pack of Luckies and guzzling a bottle of Whiskey.  Will that sort of behavior kill me?  Almost certainly.  But your duty and your right to help me ends in pointing out the fact that it’s a bad idea and offering help to stop if I want to take it.

I have every right to buy my wife a fur coat by taking my credit card out of my leather wallet and handing it to the girl at the Big Box Fur Store whose face is globbed with animal-tested make-up.  Everyone mentioned in that sentence is an adult acting of their own free will under informed consent.  If you think it’s wrong to wear fur, or to use flexible my best credit transfer card for purchases or to support Big Box Stores, then you feel free to say so, but THAT’s IT.

Don’t pass laws limiting the amount of Jolt Cola (do they still make that?) I can buy at one time.  Don’t tell a gay couple that their long-term committed relationship is less valid then my pregnancy-induced first marriage because both of them have dicks.  It’s not your business, and it’s sure as hell not the government’s.

If you believe that government has a duty to protect people from their own choices, then remember this.  You are almost certainly doing something, probably right now, that someone else considers immoral or unhealthy.  Do you want them to kick open your door and tell you to stop? There are things that we should not necessarily leave in the power of others, but it depends entirely on us, such as exercising, if you feel muscle fatigue you need to try the best sarms, so that you return with strength to your workouts.

Before we get back into the Unca Brett Business or any of that other silliness, let me take a few seconds to correct some misapprehensions people have acquired over the years.  This may take a couple of posts, but we all have the time, so what the hell.  (For the record, if cursing bothers you, this is probably not a blog you should bookmark…I drop enough F-bombs that LiveJournal put me behind an adult wall.)

(Another side note:  If you’re reading this on your tablet or phone while driving, shopping, visiting your grandmother, or any of the million other things people seem to think they can multi-task with dicking around on the phone, stop it.  The world is out there, not in here.  This will still be here when you find a more appropriate time and place.)

Okay, so here are some things that bother me because they are not true.  And when I say not true, I don’t mean they resonate badly with my feelings.  I mean they are factually inaccurate.

Americans are divided among Conservatives, Liberals, and (largely apathetic) Independents.  There is literally no way that could be more wrong; even saying, “Americans are divided among monkeys, kitty-cats, and wombats,” is more accurate.  “Conservative” and “Liberal” don’t really make any sense when viewed as philosophical opposites.  There’s a reason for this.  The actual philosophical opposite of Conservative is Progressive.  What happened was that around about the 1920’s, the Progressives (and the political party of the same name) gave themselves a black eye by being as crazy as a bag of cats.  By the fifties, calling yourself a Progressive was pretty much the same as painting your house with a hammer and sickle, so they started using the less villified term of Liberal.  This worked out well for them, because it allowed them to be associated with true Liberals who were mostly concerned with ensuring the rights of all Americans (for instance, making sure that “a jury of ones peers” meant that an urban black man didn’t have to face twelve white guys from the suburbs).  They were also in favor of relaxing some of the laws that made no sense (and were probably racist in their design).  The opposite of Liberal, by the way, is Authoritarian.

There are a lot of Conservative Liberals and Progressive Authoritarians.  I’m not saying that no Conservative is Authoritarian, or that no Progressive is Liberal; I’m just saying that the concepts do not necessarily coincide.  It does, however, occur to me that Liberal views are best suited to conserving the American Way of Life (whatever that is) and that Authoritarianism is the most efficient means of achieving Progressive goals.  In any case, none of these labels adequately define people, since every one of the 300 million plus Americans has a slightly different view on every issue, even if they don’t think they have an opinion at all.

This problem with painting wide swaths of citizens with the same inadequate brushes has been compunded by the fact that a wide variety of journalists have spent the last forty or so years conflating terms so that most people automatically assume that all Conservatives are Republicans and all Liberals are Democrats.  If it’s inaccurate to pigeonhole human beings into general philiosophies, then its just plain stupid to further pigeonhole them by assuming that they must, perforce, support various political parties.  Colin Powell’s support of Obama’s campaign in 2008 didn’t make him a Democrat or a Liberal.  If anything it simply illustrated and underscored Americans’ fear that a McCain Presidency would have expanded and intensified the power grab and violations against civil liberties that had been perpetrated by the Bush Administration.

Political Parties are not the philosophies they claim to represent.  Political Parties are incorporated organizations designed to acquire money and power through the electorate.  That’s all.  If you want proof that the Republican Party doesn’t speak for conservatives, go review how the party treated Tea Party candidates that defeated their favored sons in the Primaries in 2010 and 2012.  If you want the same kind of proof about the Democratic Party, go review the 2006 Leiberman victory in the Senate.  In both cases, you’ll see astounding examples of a political machine punishing its members for “going off the ranch” by trying to serve their constituents within their own moral and ethical code.

The Parties’ interest is not in achieving philosophical aims.  It is in achieving power and the cash benefits that go with it.  Never kid yourself on that one.  AARP didn’t become the biggest and most influential lobby in Washington by having convincing and reasonable arguments.  They did it by threatening to pull their support (and, by extension, the support of their several million members–although that’s never been tested) and by writing fat checks.

So if you say Conservative when you mean Republican, or Liberal when you mean Democrat, you’re wrong, or you’re lying.  Either way you need to shut the hell up and let the grown-ups talk.