For the last post of the year, this picture says it all.

See you in a bit.

The headline:

How a Wild West-style standoff turned deadly in South Beach.

Immediately your thoughts go six-shooters blazing, bullets flying everywhere, horses trying to run away and women wearing petticoats hiding with the piano player.  But unless what I read about the “Wild West” has been grossly inaccurate, the incidents of fistacuffs and bar stool tossings at Tombstone pizza parlors were pretty much unheard of.

About the only commonality was one guy getting shot by the Law for refusing to put his gun down upon request. There is always a Curly Bill Broscious trying to be ornery when he shouldn’t.

In case some of you are wondering about comments you posted and did not show immediately, something is happening and a couple of individuals are being sent to the “pending” folder. Linoge must have pissed somebody really bad because he is categorized as Spam and I have to un-spam him.

Don’t worry, I always check and make sure nothing gets sent to Spam Hell. I guess mythical moths do screw things up even in the Interwebs.

CSGV links to an article in Psychology Today:

Disclaimer from the get-go. I distrust Shrinks even more that I distrust Lawyers, Journalists and Used Car Salesmen. While Psychology has some value in certain cases and only when applied by honest and sane professionals, I have seen too many cases where either unscrupulous or deluded doctors have performed more damage on a patient than he or she originally had. Also they are easy to bullshit by somebody who takes the time to peruse over some books and read about mental infirmities. Also, most of them live in insulated worlds which handicaps them from coming up with a real diagnosis and that is dangerous as hell.

If you add politics to the diagnosis, then you have a whole mess of crap. Case in point is the article, Is Aggression Inevitable? by Dario Maestripieri, Ph.D and then some. Ladd quotes his favorite passage from the article:

People with firearms are more likely to kill other people because shooting someone carries far less risk of personal injury than attacking someone with bare hands or a knife. Opponents of gun control in the United States argue that guns don’t kill people; rather, people kill people. The simple fact that the cost of killing people with a gun is lower than the cost of killing them without a gun explains why people with guns are more likely to kill than people without guns: it’s the guns that make the difference.

Here we see clearly the politicization of medicine. It is the old mantra that “aggression is bad” which has enslaved and continue to mentally slave people to this day. What is bad is unwarranted and unnecessary aggression such the one criminals use against innocent people. Aggression is quite the helpful tool when one is being attacked and life or body parts is in danger. The tie-in with guns seals the deal and makes this article Junks Science. Dr. Maestripieri tells us that humans are naturally aggressive beasts and that guns just makes us beasts even more aggressive because the consequences are greatly reduced if we have a gun: “Fighting from a distance is far less costly than direct physical combat and allows individuals to reap the benefits of aggression while minimizing its costs.” and I agree but we are looking at the same thing from a different perspective: If I can keep distance and create damage to an attacker, it is a good thing!

The other great mistake that Dr. Maestripieri makes is to believe that everybody is the same in an aggressive situation when we are obviously are not. A 25 year old buffed ex-con trained in prison by fellow inmates on how to fight dirty has the obvious advantage against a sedentary middle age businessman or a young female college student. His personal risk is minimum on an “even” encounter but the fact that such felon would actually attack his victims from an ambush position gives him an extra advantage. His risk for personal damage is virtually zero.The same felon will think twice if his intended victim was an equally prepared male with no chance for an attack by ambush.

We also see a disconnect from reality when Dr. Maestripieri  states that “Aggression is neither necessary nor inevitable.” He is clearly living a sheltered life and purposely ignoring everyday life. For some reason, Dr. Maestripieri and people like him think that aggression is some sort of psychological virus which one can be immunized against and live a happily ever after life amongst rainbow farting unicorns while Brie cheese falls from the skies and Bordeaux wine flows from the rocks. Aggression is a conscious act that requires a living creature to be performed. It exists every day and most of its application in our modern society is done by criminal individuals seeking a payoff. For them aggression is necessary to achieve their goals, for us aggression is necessary to stop criminals from attempting bodily harm against us. Ignoring this and other obvious realities is why I am so distrustful of this medical branch.

The greatest mistake that Dr. Maestripieri makes is trying to validate the myth of more guns leads to more violence. The United States has close to 300 million firearms in civilian possession and that is half the small arms of the whole world. By Dr. Maestripieri’s inference, we should be awash in murders making us the number one country in Homicides. But the data tell us otherwise and the Good Old USA has a 4.8 per 100,000 people rate of homicide versus Colombia’s 61.1 per 100,000. Our world ranking is below 100 a drop of 51% in Homicides from 1991 to 2010.

The above numbers should be enough to convince even the most fanatical proponent of disarmament about the futility of gun control, but let’s add one more event to the mix: The Rwandan Genocide. In 1994 the Hutu tribe conducted a mass murdering of 800,000 rival tutsis in a 100 days. Now let’s remember that Dr. Maestripieri assured us that ” shooting someone carries far less risk of personal injury than attacking someone with bare hands or a knife.“ Except that the Rwandan Genocide was accomplished with machetes at the rate of 8,000 murders a day or 333 murders an hour or 6 deaths per minute. Not for nothing but I don’t think that the Hutus felt very much threatened by unarmed Tutsis and they got plenty close to hack them to death.

The Intelligentsia likes to avoid the concept of Evil. They ignore it because it screws their Social Engineering plans. They need it not to exist so they can explain with convoluted terms that someone behaves badly because the rest of the world (namely you) has been unkind and uncaring and that selfish world needs to shed some of its liberties in order to obtain a peaceful world, free from aggression. That they plan to institute these social changes from the protection of safe locations and hiding behind heavily armed men should not be taken into notice; they are privileged minds and must be protected from the likes of you.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Unknown

“One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.”
Col. Jeff Cooper.

A possible new Meme via Life in 3D and created by Tam?

Here is what appears to be played the most in my ancient IPOd Mini:

Temptation – Diana Krall
Mr. Zoot Suit – Ingrid Lucia & the Flying Neutrinos.
Go for Baroque – Dixie Dreggs
Tonight is what it means to be young – Fire Inc.
Diavolo en me – Zucchero
Mountain Dance – Dave Gruisin
What a wonderful world – Louis Amstrong
Sweet Home Alabama– Lynard Skynard
Black Betty – Spiderbait
It’s a heartache – Trick Pony
Rockalise – Annie Haslam
Ain’t that a kick in the head – Dean Martin
One for my Baby (and one more for the road) Frank Sinatra
Catherine of Aragon – Rick Wakeman
(Round, Round, Round) Blue Rondo a la Turk – Al Jarreau

Heavy on Female vocalists, or as my wife would say, “how unusual!” But it is good to see that my Prog Rock roots are still showing.

Larry got spammed in Facebook. I just hope Mrs Correia does not use the Samurai night stick on his nogging 🙂