I have watched both the Republican and Democrat primary debates.

I have noticed something.

When Republicans talk about their enemies, they talk about ISIS, Terrorists, Radical Islam, Mexican Drug Cartels, North Korea, and Russia.

When Democrats talk about their enemies, they talk about Republicans, Gun Owners and the NRA, Wall Street, Millionaire and Billionaire Businessmen, and people who question anthropogenic climate change.

If I new absolutely nothing else about the candidates and their policies, I think that would be enough for me to decided who to vote for in November.

States United to Prevent Gun Violence/Ceasefire USA is an extremist gun control group.  I say extremist because the tactics they use constitute emotional torture.  They were the group that pulled the “Guns with History” stunt, in which they opened a fake gun store in NYC in which each of the guns “for sale” had been used in a murder or accidental shooting.

Not to be outdone by that grotesqueitude, they engaged in another act of psychological terrorism.  They created a fake movie theater and ambushed people, not with a crappy PSA, but with actual security cam footage of real people being murdered.  Yes, they are attempting to generate support for gun control by showing people a snuff film.

You have been warned:

This is beyond the pale.

First of all, to do this to unsuspecting people is egregious.  They were trying to make the point that guns in real life are not romantic like they are in the movies.

This is morally tantamount to not liking BDSM so inviting people to see a fake theater to watch 50 Shades of Gray, then showing them security camera footage of a violent rape.

Watching a fictional story is entertaining.  The overwhelming majority of people can love the movie Taken or Man on Fire and still know that murder is wrong and not go out the next day and kill people.  It has been proven over and over again that mentally healthy people do not become violent because of violent media.

But this kind of shock tactic is what extremists do.

Reality is much more complex.  Not all gun use is bad.  Gun play can be fun.  There are some pretty bad-ass videos on line of people enjoying shooting and not killing people.  Even with respect to using a gun to kill, sometimes a person needs to defend themselves.

So I will respond in kind with this video from New Jersey.  A woman was beaten in a home invasion.  The attack was captured by nanny cam.  She begged the invader not to hurt her child.  She was at the mercy of her attacker, and it is a miracle she survived.

Could she have prevented that attack with a gun.  I don’t know.  There are no guarantees in life.  But compare the beating the woman in New Jersey suffered to the experience of this Oklahoma woman who shot an killed a home invader before he could land a finger on her.

Context matters.

Also, Ceasefire USA are assholes.

A man who kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered a woman named Ingrid Lyne in Renton, Washington, a suburb near Seattle, has been identified as John Robert Charlton.  Parts of Lyne’s body was found in recycling bins in Seattle.

In 2006, Carlton had a restraining order placed against him by his parents due to a history of drug use, threats, and violence.  He also served 21 months for robbery and carjacking.  As such, he was prohibited from owning a gun.  The cause of death has not been released, but none of the news sources I’ve read said that she was shot.  So I believe that it is safe to assume she did not die from gun violence.  So I doubt that you will hear a peep out of Everytown or MDA, despite the horrific nature of this crime.  You don’t have to pass a background check to buy a pruning saw.

Charlton has a reputation of being “a mean drunk” and “not a normal person.”  I believe that last sentiment is obvious.  Anybody from the Pacific Northwest knows that human remains are not recyclable.  Dismembered bodies are compostable.

I thought that the condescending and offensive article that Everytown planted in Cosmopolitan magazine was the end of their “Gunsplainer” idiocy.  The article was published a little over two months ago and the comments left on it were excoriating and unforgiving.  Finally, Everytown had come up with a campaign that was so unpalatable it couldn’t gain traction: “if your beau has a gun, break up with him because he’ll beat you and kill you.”

I was wrong.

Everytown now has a whole website dedicated to this crap.

“Lax gun laws put single women at risk.”

Of course they do.  True that 77.4% of homicide victims are men, but that’s not a convenient fact for scaring the Beyonce and Taylor Swift crowd over to your side.

The big focus of the site is the “boyfriend loophole.”  What is that you might ask.  Well, it’s the way that Everytown reads between the lines of the Lautenberg Amendment.  The way the ATF defines a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, which is a prohibiting offence for gun ownership, is:

1. is a misdemeanor under Federal, State, or Tribal law;

2. has, as an element, the use or attempted use of physical force, or the threatened use of a deadly weapon; and

3. was committed by a current or former spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabiting with or has cohabited with the victim as a spouse, parent, or guardian, or by a person similarly situated to a spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim.

According to Everytown, this mean that it is a legal loophole for a guy to beat his girlfriend and still own guns.  When you put it like that, why should a guy every get married, right fellas?  Why buy the cow when you can beat her for free?

Except that this is complete crap.  I did a lot of legal research into the Lautenberg Amendment for this post, including reading legal journal reviews and reports to Congress.

First of all, the Lautenberg Amendment is the ONLY misdemeanor that I can find that statutorily removes someone’s civil rights.  It is a lifetime ban.  According to the ATF:

The definition of misdemeanor crime of domestic violence in the Gun Control Act (GCA) includes any offense classified as a “misdemeanor” under Federal, State or Tribal law. In States that do not classify offenses as misdemeanors, the definition includes any State or local offense punishable by imprisonment for a term of 1 year or less or punishable by a fine.

Which means, that you can be banned for life for owning a gun for committing an act that the courts have decided is only punishable by a fine.  This is legally tantamount to losing your gun rights for reckless driving.  The Lautenberg Amendment seems to have been written on the conservative side because of this unprecedented misdemeanor-causing-a-lifetime-revocation-of-civil-rights situation.  The justification for the Lautenberg Amendment, which has been upheld by the courts, is that it exists to prevent escalation of domestic violence to murder.

Although I have to legal proof of this, my belief is that the limitations to “current or former spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabiting with or has cohabited with the victim as a spouse, parent, or guardian, or by a person similarly situated to a spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim” exists because it is in these situations that a person who is the victim of domestic violence cannot readily escape from it.  This is what allows the violence to occur repeatedly and escalate.  The victim has to return to the scene of and the presence of her abuse and abuser.  If a man beats his wife, it is hard, logistically, for her just to walk away.  She shares a home with him.  Even if the man is arrested, when he is released from custody he returns to that home.

Between strangers or even in a non-cohabiting relationship, the victim can more easily avoid his/her attacker.  If the guy you’ve gone on three dates with hits you, charge him with assault and never see him again outside of a court room.  The cohabitation dynamic does not assert itself in this situation.   Without that, any act of misdemeanor (simple) assault becomes a prohibiting offense.

Sure, I can agree to the statement “well, maybe people with a history of violence shouldn’t be able to have guns.”  Except that if you look at the statues for misdemeanor assault, the standard can be shockingly low.

In Montana, simple assault can be: (d) purposely or knowingly causes reasonable apprehension of bodily injury in another.

In Washington state: No person may intentionally use, or threaten to use by purposeful words or acts, unlawful physical force against the person of another.

In Florida: An “assault” is an intentional, unlawful threat by word or act to do violence to the person of another, coupled with an apparent ability to do so, and doing some act which creates a well-founded fear in such other person that such violence is imminent.

I’m not a lawyer.  But the way I read this is: a guy and girl have been dating for a couple of weeks.  They don’t live together.  They have a fight and break up.  If the girl claims that at any time during the fight the guy made her feel frightened that she was about to be hurt, even if no violence occurred, than the guy maybe found guilty of assault.  If the “boyfriend loophole” is repealed, than CONGRATS, he’s just been banned from owning guns for life.

That doesn’t seem like a law that can be abused at all.  We know that women never lie about being the victims of violence.

Now, if the Lautenberg Amendment were to be changed simply recognize a state DV conviction, since most states (e.g. Florida) definition of domestic violence, to include non-married cohabitating couples, which might be more representative of society, I could accept that.  Because the same cohabitation dynamic exists in an engaged couple living together as a married couple living together.

But the standard put forth by Everytown is just too low.  A second date ends in yelling and now the guy can’t ever own guns again?  That’s not going to fly.

And if you want any more proof just how bad Everytown is on this, this is the image that you see when you go to that site.

Wow, that is the most unfriendly face I’ve ever seen.  She just looks like a bitch that is out to ruin your day.  She is going to shut you and your “gunsplaining” down with the type of self righteous, obnoxious behavior, that only a Social Justice Warrior an muster.  Or… somebody let off a sauerkraut and beer cheese soup fart in the studio just before the photo was captured.

So I’m doing research for a longer post when I came across a couple of articles in Vox about just how great Sweden, Denmark, and the Scandinavian countries are compared to the USA, and why the USA sucks so much.

I’m an American living in Sweden. Here’s why I came to embrace the higher taxes.

I live in Denmark. Bernie Sanders’s Nordic dream is worth fighting for, even if he loses.

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture.

The gist of these articles is “I love these countries because gimme, gimme, gimme…”  The authors praise free college, free healthcare, heavily subsidies (often free) public transportation, months of paid vacation and maternity leave.

Here’s an excerpt:

“High taxes give me more choices and freedoms… Guys like Brooks seem to be proud that tax revenues in the US are only 26 percent of GDPwhile in Sweden they are 43 percent.  But tax dollars are not burned — they are used to provide collective goods that are beyond the reach of any individual and that benefit everyone. These collective goods give the middle class more choices, not fewer… Our public transportation system. Betty and I used to live the village of Lodi, about 25 miles from Madison. This being America, I was free to travel to Madison however and whenever I wanted, as long as it was by private automobile. There was (and is) no bus service to Madison. Even though railroad tracks run right through the village, there is no commuter rail service either. If this were a suburb of Stockholm or any other European city of 250,000, there would be train service and bus service several times an hour. These are the choices Europeans have that we don’t, because they devote more of their income to collective goods. If we value freedom, those of us who drive cars should pay higher gas taxes so that those who are old, infirm, too poor to have a car, or want to reduce their environmental impact can have fast and efficient bus and train service.”

According to Vox, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.  Owning is car is wrong an a unnecessary amount of personal freedom, and you should pay more so that everybody can take a turn riding in a bus on a time table set by the government.

But let’s pretend for a moment that everything these  people say is correct.  Democratic socialism is wonderful.  Sweden is a paradise.  Europe is better.

Lets crunch some numbers.  Sweden has a population of 9.8 million and a GDP of about $470 billion (US).  To put that in perspective, the population of the Chicago metropolitan statistical area (Chicagoland) is 9.5 million with a GDP of $560 billion.  Chicagoland is the 3rd largest MSA in the US.  Sweden has an economy about the size of the Dallas MSA at $460 billion, produced by a population of only 7.1 million people, and is the 4th largest MSA in the US.

Denmark has a population of 5.7 million and a GDP of $260 billion (US).  This puts it about halfway between Atlanta (9th) and Boston (10th) in terms of size with an economy in between Miami (12th) and Detroit (13th).

Switzerland has a population of 8.2 million and a GDP of $480 billion.  This gives it a population of about 1 million more people than Dallas (4th) with an economy the size of the Washington DC MSA (6th).

All of Scandinavia combined has an economy of $1.3 Trillion (US) and a population of 25 million people.  The largest MSA in the US is the NYC MSA with a population of 20 million people and an economy of $1.5 Trillion.

What does all of this mean?

Well… those beloved countries are just big American cities.  And if you go to one (I used to live in Chicagoland), they have much of the same public transportation access and other perks of these countries.  Where don’t you find these benefits?  Rural Wisconsin.

Therein lies the rub of transporting Scandinavian socialism to the US.  The people of NYC, LA, Boston, Chicago, and others will be paying for buses that won’t be used in Iowa and Nebraska.  We’re just too big and too spread out.  What works in a densely populated are won’t work in farm country.

The math just doesn’t work out.

Also note, that in every example I showed above, every American city had a larger GDP than the European country of the same size.  Every. Time.

Why do these European countries enjoy such wonders?  Because we Americans work for it.  NATO.  The Marshall Plan.  Europeans can take 6 weeks of vacation a year ONLY because Americans take 6  days of Vacation per year.

But none of this reality matters to these people.  The gimme is strong in them.  An understanding of economics, not so much.

Some GOP Hoosier delegates are tired Donald Trump an the 2016 primary shenanigans.  When pressed by a reporter from Politico over the phone, one Delegate announced “I’m supporting Tom Selleck!” and hung up.

Based on that, I here by announce that the candidate that I support for 2016 is Matthew Quigley; modest, entrepreneurial, and a believer in both  gun and minority rights.  He’s just the kind of president that we need.

In the summer of 2006, a European Brown Bear identified by scientists as Bear JJ1, was  observed in the German Alps.  Bear JJ1 was, by any measure, the first European Brown Bear observed in Germany for 170 years.  Scientists studied Bear JJ1 as he wandered around the German and Austrian Alps feeding over the course of the summer.  The media dubbed Bear JJ1 “Bruno” and printed regular updates of the exploits of Bruno the Bear.

During his travels, Bruno the Bear killed more than 30 sheep, goats, chickens, and domesticated rabbits, breaking into several livestock pens and injuring many more animals that had to be put down.  Bruno engaged in a predatory behavior known as surplus killing, in which an alpha predator kills far more than prey than it can eat.  This behavior is considered, in human terms, killing for fun.  The carnage that Bruno wrought on Bavarian farms, and the proximity of Bruno’s killing to humans caused the German government to call Bruno a “problem bear.”  It was feared that Bruno would become a danger to humans.  The German government attempted   to have Bruno darted and captured, but Bruno proved to be somewhat elusive.  Finally the decision was made to have Bruno killed.  A group of professional Finnish bear hunters tracked him down and shot him.  His body was then put on display in the Munich Museum of Man and Nature.

For most people this story is pretty straight forward:

• An endangered European Brown Bear is spotted in the Bavarian Alps
• Bear is followed by scientists
• Bear does what bears do and has several bad interactions with people and property
• Government tries to capture and relocate bear
• That fails, bear is deemed to dangerous and is killed, despite endangered status, to protect the local population.

For a few people, there is a little more to the story of Bear JJ1, than that.  Enter the social sciences:

Queer Beasts: Ursine Punctures in Domesticity.  Environmental Communication, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 2014.

Abstract:

“In 2006, Bruno the bear wandered onto German soil—the first brown bear in 170 years—where he was shot, killed, taxidermied, and put on display (his presence recently resurfaced due to the 2010 Wikileaks). Bruno served as a queer beast in the anthropogenic landscape where he challenged boundaries of what is permissible, and normal. By refusing to honor borders and cultural norms, he disrupted our human sense of control of the landscape. In response to Bruno’s unruly presence, humans in turn appropriated him, fixed him as a cipher to fill with their own constructs of wildness and animality, and then deployed those cultural articulations. Performing a critical visual analysis, this paper explores how the anxiety Bruno evoked fixed his queer, hirsute frame as a taxidermied cipher representing discipline, fetishization, and a critique of power. Bruno became an imaginary wild whose presence rhetorically queered the geographical and political landscape.”

I read that.  The first sentence made sense.  After that… What. The. F**K!?!

My wife (who was an English Education major) looked over my shoulder while I was writing this and asked “how did they know the bear was gay?”

Because I like to also gawk at car crashes and train wrecks, I decided to read the whole paper.  I know what all the individual words in the article mean.  Put together in the order that the author did, I have no idea what the thought was that she was trying to convey.  The Germans killed Bear JJ1 because racism and homophobia?

The author acknowledges that the bear was killing livestock.  Then says about this:

“Once queered, the landscape can never be made completely straight.”

I’m confused.  I thought the bear just killed and ate the sheep?  What is going on here?

*On a side note.  What is with Social Justice types and the use of the term bodies?  This paper uses that phrase several times. “Animal bodies performed (and still perform) for humans in circuses…” “When animal bodies leap from the stars or off the pages of a fairytale…”  “Disciplining unruly bodies.” Etc.  This was something I notices often in the #BLM campaign.  Activists never talked about people but bodies.  “[Guarantee football games] only continue a history, literally and symbolically, of exploiting black bodies for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful while increasing the potential for legal liability among the colleges least able to afford it.“

The implication is that the body or bodies in question have no agency.  They are not aware or in control of their own actions.  Reading the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, it seems the author doesn’t believe that football doesn’t exploit black people because black athletes aren’t people with the ability to think or rationalize for themselves, but are just inanimate objects to be used by white administrators.  This of course is about as offensive to black athletes as a statement can be.  And it is coming from someone who is supposed to be arguing on their behalf.  There are of course many more examples of this that seems to imply that black people are not cognizant of their own lives.  It is Social Justice that is dehumanizing minorities.

But back to Bruno.  This word compost (word salad plus bullshit) was so egregious that by the time I got to the end I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t being taken by another Sokal affair.  There was no way a human being with enough firing neurons to have that substantive a vocabulary could come up with something so illogical.  I double checked my sources… and it turns out this is a legitimate paper, written by a Dr. Natasha Seegert, an assistant professor at the University of Utah.  All of her work is like this.  I pity the poor Utah students who have to sit through her classes getting dumber by the word.

George Orwell once said “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”  Dr. Seedert seems to have proven Orwell right then proceeded to jump his shark with rocket powered ski’s like Wil-E-Coyote.  This woman managed to take a (somewhat tragic) story of an endangerd animal being culled to protect people and livestock and turn it into a nonsensical diatribe about racism and homophobia in Western Civilization and gay circus animals.  (Yes, I just typed those words; yes, I feel bad about it.)

In 1997, Congress used the power of the purse to restrict the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for funding and performing studies on gun violence.  This act of Congress has been a thorn in liberal sides since then, particularly due to the influence the NRA had in the decision by Congress.  Left-wing griping about the lack of CDC research into gun violence has reached histrionic levels, with just a dash of conspiracy theory thrown in for flavor.

President Obama’s Surgeon General wants the CDC to study gun control.  I want Social Justice types like Dr. Seedert and her ilk to be the people responsible for this type of hard hitting sociological research.  Yes, I know that it would be a waste of taxpayer money, but it’s money that is going to get wasted anyway.  I just think any anything they produce will be so bat-shit-off-the-wall illogical, that anybody who hears a quote from that study – and who is not already a SocJus true believer – will dismiss it for being unintelligibly nuts.

This is will, in effect, poison the left with their own medicine.