Another column from last autumn

If you are so inclined, you can sneak into Wyoming without immediately seeing how beautiful the state is. Crossing the border after traversing Nebraska on I-80 might be a relief after 400 miles of sunflowers and those things so boring they make sunflowers seem interesting, but that entrance is not beautiful. Eventually, you get to the good parts, but I-80 from the east is not it.

But if you leave South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, and head west into Wyoming, you pass through the Black Hills, which is some very nice country, and you’ll have Devil's Tower for an exclamation point that you won't soon forget.

Wander down from Montana, the Little Bighorn Battleground and Custer's error in judgment, past the quiet, comfortable town of Dayton, with high plains on your left and the Bighorn Mountains on the right, and you can take any turn and the beauty is everywhere you go.

Gardiner, Montana is the northern gateway into Yellowstone, and I need say nothing more. If you cannot find beauty in that park, we have nothing to talk about. The town of West Yellowstone points you into the west side of the park, and that's even better. Meander alongside the rapids on the Madison River, past the young forests that are healing the scars left by the fires, and watch for moose in the shallows and eagles in the trees. If you only spot the herds of elk and a few bison on the road, don't feel as if you missed too much.

From Idaho you can hop over Teton Pass or meander through Swan Valley along the Snake River. The Teton Range is just around the corner, and you could spend the rest of your life trying to find finer scenery, and you will fail.

The first time you see these places, you will promise yourself that you will win the lottery, or scheme some way to live there somehow, and so passing through any of these entrances will always feel like coming home. You want to see them in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter, for each season brings new beauty to your senses, and you will anticipate the next trip every single day until you can do it again.

That still leaves I-80 entering the state from the west, and you don’t want to miss this either. Just as you leave Utah, you climb into a pleasant canyon, with lush forest and inviting meadows on one side and a garish display of red sandstone cliffs on the other, with the trucks lugging up the hill in the right lane, and the trains chugging up their tracks alongside on the left, and you smile knowing you aren't in Kansas anymore, or California for that matter. The first time we came in this way was about five years ago, after using all those other entrances for over 40 years. Now we look forward to this one, too.

Eventually the canyon ends and you emerge onto sage covered plain. The horizon is suddenly a long way off, and the first pronghorns appear way out there on the right. In case you cannot tell, the wind reminds you....you are in Wyoming.

We entered the state this way a few weeks ago. Autumn color highlighted the canyon this time. I wanted to explore each and every side canyon, but we had many miles to go and that diversion would have to wait for another time.

A brisk wind pushed us across the high plain as storm clouds scudded across the horizon ahead. Small groups of pronghorns dotted the sage covered ground. We even saw a lone moose out for an afternoon stroll just east of Evanston. We didn’t stop until Rawlins, where pronghorns grazed on lawns and in vacant lots at the edge of town. Collapsing there for the night, we anticipated the morning drive, for it promised even better.

Sunday morning found us groggily sucking down coffee in a friendly local restaurant, where I indulged myself in one of those skillet breakfasts that I would regret later when reacquainting with the scale upon returning to work. Back in the pickup, I found NPR on the satellite radio, and the chatter of the Car Guys entertained us while motoring north. We crossed the Continental Divide twice, dropping into and the climbing out of the Divide Basin. Pastures on both side of the road supported herds of Hereford cattle, and just about every time we turned our gaze left or right, we spotted more groups of pronghorns.

The occasional mountain loomed in the distance, and then numerous rock escarpments took over the scenery. Soon we were in one of those many gorgeous settings that Wyoming offers, with the Pathfinder Reservoir tucked into the valley to our right, with vertical rock walls rising above, and then the North Platte River dipped under our highway, lined by cottonwoods busily changing into their autumn wardrobes, and dotted by those perennial optimists and their flicking fly rods.

North of Casper we entered a vast grassland, preserved now under the name of Thunder Basin. Looking across this plain, I wondered about those many settlers who walked alongside Conestoga wagons through this eternity 150 years ago, putting in ten miles or so every day for months to get this far away from the East. And here we were knocking off 1300 miles in a weekend.

I’ve often referred to Wyoming as a time warp, a place where we can return to an America of thirty years ago, a time I can understand far better than the contradiction we must now endure. The radio talked of some politician’s scheme to raise money for the state by charging the tourists a toll to drive the state’s roads. Said money would be directed to road maintenance, a plot that almost makes sense, even to a passionate tax hater like me. I like Wyoming so much, I’d probably pay it. Wyoming voted it down.

In California, as Herb Cane often observed, we are charged admission to get into San Francisco by the tollbooths on all those bridges leading there. Here we pay road taxes that never go to maintain the roads, but instead disappear into the morass of entitlements and government waste and corruption. We have the worst roads in the nation, and no one even questions this, as this confused state staggers into an uncertain future.

And I sit here thinking about Wyoming every single day, and it is worse now, because in a week we will go there again. I’m having trouble staying patient.

This ran last fall prior to hunting season

The TV commercial is cute as all get out. It is set around an African waterhole, where all the animals have assembled to drink and play. A meerkat, one of those darling bowling pins of the animal world, dives from the head of a giraffe into the cool water, and then goes for a fun ride on a swimming crocodile. The lion and zebra slake their thirst side by side on the beach. Birds flit around a smiling leopard as it watches the elephants spraying water over the wildebeests. Insipid music plays in the background, proclaiming that everyone gets along. And the voiceover asks something about how nice it would be to not have to worry about risk anymore.

In this fantasy wonder world, the cute meerkats don’t need to worry about being eaten by a crocodile. The wildebeests won’t be consumed by that smiling leopard, and the zebra is carefree around a lion that would chase down and kill it in the real world. How heartwarming such an existence would be! This is put up there by an insurance company after all, and they pretend to protect us from all that is bad in life.

This ad runs often enough that the music sometimes pops into my head when I should instead be doing something productive. It’s like some annoying buzzing bug in my ear. Some commercial maker probably got a big bonus after this one, but I’m tired of hearing the thing. I cannot stop feeling bad for the lion, crocodile and that lovely leopard, because in this magical alternative world, all the other animals are safe and happy, but these hunters don’t get to eat. And how much fun is that? Besides, if they have to starve to death in this wonderful land, doesn’t that qualify as risk?

Unlike this commercial, the real world is a messier place, filled with risk, and sometimes unhappy endings. Some people hate this reality, but in the real world, the lion, crocodile, and leopard are not evil because they cannot “get along”. They are merely driven to survive, so they kill and eat other animals. And without their role in culling the population of the animals they consume, those preyed-upon beasts would suffer from overcrowding, disease, and starvation. Predators and prey…it works out.

I have a theory….

In human medicine the docs know that some people perceive pain worse than others. Two folks with the same headache might react totally differently, with one crawling off to bed whimpering and the other off to work to get on with the day. As a veterinarian I see similar behaviors. The poodle with a broken toenail trembles, whines and cries out, while the pitbull doesn’t even notice.

The many dog breeds were developed over the years by mankind, when we wished to attain different behaviors from our little four footed friends. The pitbull was expected to fight without quarter, so it adopted a certain tenacity and the ability to ignore pain. The poodles were expected to nestle in a lap as a recipient of nurturing, babies that never grow up and move away. So I guess they figured out how to tug on human heartstrings.

Selection or creation, choose your poison, also resulted in humans with a wide range of behavioral traits. I read once that those antsy kids who cannot sit still may carry a hunter gene from their ancestors, so they are innately encouraged to wander off seeking something, and are subject to being distracted by all those little incongruities that might catch their eye. For these become useful skills in a successful predator. Those descendants with the farmer gene may really be good at patience, as they can comfortably wait for the corn to grow and the paint to dry. We need both types to make society function, as we also need the warrior gene to motivate linebackers, and the artist’s eye to capture the beauty in a sunset that the rest of us miss.

With all these different types of people, with all the different things that motivate these people to be who they are, it should surprise no one that we often react differently to what life presents us. Sometimes, when one group garners pleasure from something, another group may feel only pain.

Tomorrow I’ll be joining the roughly 50,000 people who will hunt pronghorn in Wyoming this year. And I won’t be joining that other group of people who find this activity so painful to contemplate that they not only wouldn’t do it themselves, but they would find a way to stop me, if they could.

I believe it was Cleveland Amory who once proposed a utopian world for the animals. People would build large fenced enclosures that would hold all of nature’s animals, with the plant eaters in this pasture, and the meat eaters kept away from them over in the other. The carnivorous animals would be fed from the other group as individuals died off from age or disease. No chasing and killing would be allowed, because that was just too painful for Mr. Amory to bear.

Mr. Amory claimed to be an animal lover, but I wonder how he missed the part where these animals don’t want to be locked up safe behind tall fences. He also missed the part where the prey animals benefit from having some predators around. And he missed the part where the predators would be denied the hunt, a most significant part of their lives.

Predators are highly motivated to find, chase down, and kill the animals they eat. Once immobilized behind a fence, like those specimens held in zoos, predators turn into lifeless slugs, and often they pace aimlessly and constantly in a form of neurosis that also afflicts their prey animals when they also are confined too closely. If you ask any of these animals if they would choose to live behind a fence, my guess is they would rather take their chances out there. For they need more in their lives than just safe.

Those folks who are pained by the notion that some animals want to kill and eat other animals are generally distressed when people choose to hunt for their food. Others will concede that animals should be granted their permission to hunt, but they would never be comfortable extending the same right to humans. And of course, some people like to hunt, and they derive pleasure and quality nutrients as a consequence. When these disparate humans interact, debate often follows.

I stumbled upon one such discussion while researching my upcoming hunt on the Net. An opponent of hunting was constructing an argument condemning the practice, and to make a rather long story short, he was demanding that hunters, not defend their participation in the hunt, but rather defend the rape, by humans, of animals. I believe he was suggesting that the ethics of a human hunter were no different from the ethics of some pervert who enjoyed raping animals. And if we could not defend animal rape, how dare we try to defend our desire to hunt?

He is pained by knowing that someone hunts, so he demands everyone cease this activity. And I guess if we don’t, we must be indescribably depraved.

Wow! Not sure how to answer that charge, but I did wonder whether this hunting opponent, with all his research into the question, had found among all the insects, fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals that hunt for a living, even one species that enjoys raping their prey.

And I also wondered how this fellow could disregard all that hunters have done over the decades to preserve and enhance wildlife habitat, and to ensure that wildlife populations continue to thrive in a world that increasing would crowd them out of existence. Instead of fencing them in, hunters far more than theorists like Mr Amory, or this rabidly nasty anti-hunting fellow, put their money where their mouths are.

This piece ran while our president was trying to restructure Egypt to his liking.

I'm a little confused about this whole Egypt thing, and I was hoping someone out there might explain some of this to me. I'm pretty confused about a lot that happens in this world, so me getting a bit flummoxed over one country in the Middle East shouldn't surprise anyone. I have always figured if you draw a north-south line through London (I think somebody already has, and they called it the prime meridian) and you go east until ya get a bit east of Berkeley to draw another line, just about every country included in between these two lines, save New Zeland and perhaps Australia, is kinda nuts. So Egypt going bonkers is no surprise. Because the last time I looked, Egypt is in the Middle East, and that neighborhood is the most whacked of them all. So I guess I should be heading toward a “Who Cares?” moment, but I'm not.

Once upon a time, Egypt was a civilized country. That was a few thousand years ago, and although the definition of civilization was a tad looser then, those folks did build the pyramids and some other really neat stuff when nearly all of the rest of the world was still dragging knuckles. The Egyptians haven't done squat since, but they bask in the reflected glory of their ancestors to this day. And cash the tourist checks when they can. But as civilizations go, they mostly are little more than place holders these days.

Egypt doesn't have huge deposits of oil sitting under their sand, so unlike some of their other Arab brothers, they have nothing to offer the civilized nations of the world. So except for when they are failing at invading Israel, they languish among the “Who Cares” of the world. And they are by no means a civilized nation today. So they blend in pretty well with the rest of the Arab world.

You can argue til the cows come home about how well or poorly our imperfect version of representative government meets the needs of the average citizen, but you can also count on the fingers of, oh heck one or two fingers, the number of countries on this entire earth that house citizens who have significant say in their government. The whole rest of the world, and particularly that bunch of countries between those two lines, pretty much is full of countries that have governments that run themselves with no notice of the folks they govern.

And that would include Egypt. That Mubarak character has been in charge for some thirty years, and he has played the role of leader of an Arab country, which means he leaves rich and his subjects end up with nothing. So after waiting patiently for those thirty years, the people of Egypt finally mentioned that it isn’t going real good, and then all heck breaks loose. And that’s what I’m wondering about.

The thing I’m wondering about is that part where our Media, from the very first moment that the dissent broke out in Cairo, was bound and determined to run Mubarak out of office, and our Media did everything in their power to encourage Egyptian dissent, and to influence our most easily influenced president to encourage the man to quit, and I’m wondering why. Here is a country that will exchange one corrupt leader for another without a moment’s hesitation, and our Media is encouraging that. And don’t you wonder why?

I’ve been around for a while, and occasionally I actually pay attention, and I still don’t remember when the liberals turned against Israel. When I was in college I met a bunch of people. Included in that bunch were those of the Jewish persuasion. Every one, if memory serves, was a liberal. I fit in, cause I was a raving liberal then, too. Pretty much every liberal I met in college was pro Israel. But somewhere along the line since then, the liberals have turned against our ally, and since the bulk of the Media is now very liberal, it has invested considerable effort in the anti-Israel movement.

And now the Media is uniformly aligned against Mubarak. Short history lesson here…. Mubarak actually signed a treaty of peace with Israel, and unlike that entire bunch of Arab countries in the Middle East, he has actually not reneged and attacked Israel for several years. And apparently, that is really annoying to our massed Media. Doesn’t it bother you that our Media wants Mubarak gone, so that his replacement will likely turn on Israel at the very first opportunity? Or should we all believe that the Media really is naïve enough to think that those rioting citizens in Egypt will actually create the very first functional democracy in the history of the Arab world, and therefore they should be encouraging this revolution?

July 31, 2011

Some of the most important lessons are also the hardest lessons. We start with some relatively simple ones, often at an early age, and then progress to the more complicated stuff later. But each lesson taken and passed is generally learned through some pain or embarrassment. 

At some point when we were little kids, we got an allowance from our parents. It wasn’t a massive fortune, something like a buck each week, but it was free money and it showed up every week unless we broke some of the more important rules. And we could spend it on pretty much whatever we wanted. So some candy was purchased, or a coke or two, but we also had to remember to save up some of it for buying birthday and Christmas presents, for with wealth came added responsibility.

We knew other kids who got bigger allowances, and on the surface that didn’t seem fair. But when it was patiently pointed out to us that those kids were expected to shop for their own clothes and a few other things that our parents covered for us, we didn’t have a leg to stand on. My brother would have taken that deal, because he was no fan of the clothes Mom bought for us, being a style conscious individual and all. But not me…I hated to shop for clothes in those days, and come to think of it, I still do.

We were told that if we wanted more money, there was always the option of getting a job. In fact, Mom called around and found jobs for us, which we didn’t even have to volunteer for, cause she kinda suggested we just shut up and go to work. My first job paid 60 cents an hour, which simplified my record keeping. Wow, a whole penny a minute. And this was tax free in those days. I had more money than I possibly needed, being a man of simple needs in those days.

But then I entered high school and my needs expanded. Fortunately, I found a better paying job, and with 75 cents an hour I kept up with my needs. After high school I did much better, 90 cents an hour, but that next job was with a real business, and thus I learned about payroll taxes. And since I was now buying more expensive stuff, and gasoline, I found out about sales and fuel taxes. Suddenly, I learned a new lesson as my comfortable living was slimmed a bit by the take from the government.

With college came rent and food expense, along with books, and more darn clothes. I learned to stretch a paycheck for a month, and how to turn in those empty bottles for the deposit when the month lasted longer than I planned. It’s a hard lesson when you run out of money. And I had to smile when a friend’s kid looked at her mom with that perfect child innocence, and asked, when their month outlived the money, why couldn’t they just cash a check so they could get a pizza. Ah, the pain and embarrassment of an empty bank account. That was a hard lesson.

The laugh came when someone had to explain to one friend why she couldn’t keep writing checks that bounced. Seems she couldn’t understand that just because she had checks left in the checkbook, that didn’t mean she still had money in her account. The threat of legal consequences induced her to figure that one out. That was a painful lesson.

I was always motivated to work harder, in school so I could later make more money in my job, and at the job itself, so I could make more money at my job, so that I could buy all I needed and then some. I did reach a point where I could no longer limitlessly expand my income, for such is reality, and thus I do not own a Ferrari or even that 18000 square foot ranch house in Jackson Hole. But I get by if I match what I make with what I owe. And I still save up for those birthday and Christmas presents, and other silly things, like my retirement.

Now, I know that there are subtle differences between my need to balance a household budget, and the federal government’s teensy problem with its overspending. The experts from the government tell us that governments don’t actually need to balance their budgets. Heck, governments apparently don’t even have to pay off their debts at all, cause they get to make their own rules. Governments are unimpaired by that responsibility stuff that the subjects of said government still must obey.

Governments are allowed a printing press, but they will throw our butts in jail if we were to try that trick. Governments will deliberately create inflation, so that when their bills come due, they can pay some of them with increasingly worthless money, and thus make it look less egregious. And except for all those governments that have been overthrown by their own people, or simply folded because they didn’t or couldn’t pay their bills, I suppose nothing bad ever comes of this.

So I’m not sure what all the fuss is about in Washington these days. The problem can be fixed, but it won’t be. Heck, go ahead and raise the debt ceiling. Raise it next month too. Why stop here? Keep raising it forever. Why argue over whether revenue needs to go up to match spending, or spending go down to match revenue? Nobody has tried to make this equation work in a very long time. 

Trying to Increase revenue won’t net much anyway, for the cow is pretty much milked out already. The middle class has little more to give. Same with small business. Sure, you could go for a value added tax so you can clean out the lower class folks too, but that will just annoy them. Low income voters tend to favor politicians who want to tax those other people in order to give an allowance to them, so having a big tax laid on them won’t sit well. 

Tax the rich until everybody is equal sounds fair to some, but pretty soon you run out of rich people. And that will just make rich folks even more interested in taking charge of the whole mess, which we don’t need. Besides, we are in so deep that if you took every cent from the “rich” it wouldn’t put a dent in the current deficit. 

If I ran out of money I’d have to cut back on spending, because I cannot expand my earning in an unlimited way. This is true in government too, eventually. No choice in the matter. But asking a politician to do something painful but necessary to reduce spending only nets you promises and lies. And if you take away from folks the “free” things that flow down to them from the government, those ingrates will stop voting politicians into office for life. Doing what’s right never got a politician re-elected when so many who might vote want him to keep dishing it out. 

Folks who like free money, and politicians who care far less about the country than they do about getting re-elected, will block any attempt to rein in things. We haven’t learned. And we won’t. 

If you or I wrote rubber checks like this country of our does on a routine basis, we’d get locked up as crazy or crooked. What does that say about our politicians?

This great country is headed to the trash bin because it spends beyond its means. This is not an if, but merely a when. We are finished as a viable nation because of this corruption, if we do not learn the lesson from this painful experience. What a shame.

This column ran shortly before the last national election. Bon appetite.

We recently visited Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park in South Dakota. Wonderful places. I suspect most of you have not heard of these two parks, because they don't receive near the publicity as Yellowstone or Grand Teton. I suppose I should hope that they never attract the hordes of tourists these more famous parks endure, cause that would wreck things. I'm selfish that way. We had both parks pretty much to ourselves, except for the animals, and they were great!

We saw hundreds of wild animals in their original habitat, all acting uninhibited and natural. The grass prairie was peppered with herds of massive bison and thousands of tiny prairie dogs. Margins of the wooded areas revealed grazing mule and whitetail deer, and elk. Pronghorns stood out in the sunlight, highlighted by their vivid colors. And hawks soared above it all on thermals of joy.

No fences kept the animals off the roads or the people off the prairie. And although most of the human visitors were house trained, the animals clearly are not. The roads were conspicuously decorated with bison poop, which can best be described (you aren't eating now, are you?) as five pound plops of soft serve ice cream. Bison weigh in at one to two thousand pounds, and they recycle grass in prodigious amounts.

You can miss some of these road pies while driving around, but the law of averages catches up to everyone, and so you can plan on hosing off the bottom of the car when you get home. Which brings me around to my latest fantasy...

Historically, sitting presidents travel about the country in those last few weeks before elections kissing babies and wrapping their arms around the shoulders of their party's candidates, hoping that something good will rub off to collect a few votes. Popular presidents significantly improve a candidate's poll numbers simply by showing up. But when a disaster president visits, it can be the kiss of death to an election campaign, if some of the horrid performance adheres to the candidate.

Guess what is happening this time around?

It seems that the few candidates our current president will visit in the coming weeks have such large leads that the desperate man hopes to receive a boost for himself, rather than the other way around.

South Dakota sent a young congressperson off to Washington a while ago, hoping for good things from her. Folks in South Dakota have their feet firmly planted on the ground, and if you have ever experienced the wind there, you would understand this. So you can imagine how outraged those honest hard working people became as they watched their young congressperson voting with Nancy Pelosi time after time. Many in South Dakota farm the land, and they recognize bull “bleep” when they see it. The congressperson's re-election campaign is in trouble, and you won't see the current president dropping by to help this young lady, cause he's really not welcome there, or most anywhere anymore.

But I understand that the Democrat party is sending the first lady out on the stump, trying to prop up some failing election campaigns, cause they can still find a few people in this country who don't dislike her. So she just might show up in South Dakota in my fantasy. And of course, she would have to do the obligatory photo op at Mount Rushmore.

Now, I doubt Michelle or her hubby have much use for Mount Rushmore or those four dead white guys on it, cause those men are hardly relevant to the direction they want the country to slide. But they are savvy enough to realize that a few of us old fools still like the monument and what it once stood for, so if they have a chance at conning folks again in this election, they have to keep up the pretense.

So after the usual speeches and interviews in Rapid City, in my fantasy Michelle would enter the long black armored limo, and with the seven black armored Suburbans in line, she would head up the hill to the visitor center to stand before the cameras, and those four faces. And after that staged show, she might also be shuttled around the mountain to visit Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park. Cause this all would look so good on the 6 o'clock news.

And if my fantasy comes true, Michelle steps out of the limo at a particularly scenic spot, and plants her size 13's into a still warm and fragrant, perfectly sculpted plop of bison poop. And she like-totally ruins a brand new pair of Gucci's. She will be DISTRESSED!

This story could end here, with what many would consider a happy ending, but not in my fantasy. No, I'd like to see where this would go given the current climate in Washington. The minions inside the Beltway would swing into action before the last dollop of putrid poop dripped from the toe of Michelle's shoe.  Something must be done to rectify this horrid situation, left over of course, from the Bush administration.

This is a perfect “shovel ready” project. So I have no trouble believing the current administration would come up with this solution:

Diapers. We need diapers, in extra giant size, for each and every bison in those two parks, so that no American will ever again step in bison poop. And we will need to change those diapers, several times daily, on each and every one of those hundreds of bison. Every time a diaper becomes soiled. Lots of diapers.

And rubber gloves. A change of rubber gloves for each diaper. Goggles too. And those heavy duty respirators to guard against the occasional methane leak. Got to keep OSHA happy.

PETA will want baby wipes. Scented ones. With lanolin. Don't want no bison diaper rash.

This problem will require study. Grants must be granted. Audits of course, cause this all must be transparent. And supervisors. Lots of supervisors.

We will need to hire people to change diapers. Lots of em. Three shifts a day, plus replacement workers on weekends and holidays. Overtime. And a union.

But therein lies the beauty of this. Jobs creation. We'd be creating jobs! Good Democrat voting jobs. And they say the president hasn't created jobs. Well eat your words, you skeptics. Bison diapers is a growth industry.

Funding might be a problem, since this will cost millions, if not billions. We will have to make allowance for this crap in Stimulus Three, or is that Four? There are lots of future generations coming along who will need to pay for this, but they don't vote now. The President isn't concerned; he will be retired on Maui, or maybe Indonesia, years before this chicken comes to roost.

There's a lot of bison poop out there, and it needs to be properly disposed. But who knows more about spreading “bleep” than our federal government?

Another old column. This one appeared shortly after the madman shot up Tucson

Remember when Indiana Jones was in Egypt, fighting with the Nazi sergeant next to the flying wing? He hit the guy several times square on the chin, and nothing happened. The guy simply stood there, laughing. Earlier, Indy had been running around the streets of Cairo, chased by all those Egyptians who were paid by the Nazis to be bad guys. He punched a few of those guys, and they each went down right away. And then when that big guy in the robes showed up waving the curved sword, Indy just shrugged, pulled out his revolver, plugged the bad guy once, and down that guy went. This was a movie, and in movies you can stray away just a bit from reality, and nobody notices.

OK, sometimes people notice. Indy's revolver was either a 32 or 38 caliber. Somebody out there will probably tell me, cause there are lots of people around who know more about these things than I. Anyway, revolver bullets from 32 or 38 caliber revolvers probably wouldn't have dropped the guy on the spot. Revolver bullets in 32 or 38 caliber in the 1930's were poorly constructed and traveled relatively slowly, and that bad guy was wearing those thick robes, which would have functioned a bit as armor against attack. If it wasn't a movie, the guy likely would have not cooperated with the writers so nicely. So although that revolver would have served to stop most of those regular bad guys that Indy floored with one punch, like the big Nazi sergeant the sword fighter was a bit tougher, and that revolver would not have been up to the task.

Back in the days when America actually was imperialistic for a bit, and we thought that owning the Philippines was a cool idea, (which you will all remember from your history lessons. Yeah, I had to look it up too. It was around 1896. Don't worry; in the schools today they teach that we are still imperialistic.) we sent in the army and navy to convince the residents of those islands that they really wanted us there. It was an unfortunate time.

Anyway, our army ended up fighting with these guys called Moros. Moros were Muslim natives who turned out to be exceptionally fierce fighters. Not only were they motivated to run off these Americans occupying their land, but they had the old religious thing running through their heads and some potent home grown stimulants running through their veins. They'd show up screaming, and ran directly through withering rifle fire until they could use their long knives to best advantage in hand to hand combat with our soldiers. Wounded many times, they would just keep on fighting as if possessed. It really was a mess. Of course, those 32 and 38 caliber revolvers that our soldiers used when the fighting was up close and personal weren't any more effective at stopping these warriors than Indy's should have been in the movie.

That's when the army decided it liked the 45 caliber pistol better. The model 1911 Colt semi-automatic pistol carried 8 cartridges instead of the 6 in a revolver, so one didn't exhaust the supply as quickly, and the bullet it fired was heavier and larger in diameter than those revolver rounds. This weapon functioned in battle far better than the revolvers. It stopped people right now.

This gun stuff is nasty business, and no one denies this. But since the time when our ancestors first stood on only their hind legs so that they could carry sharpened rocks in their hands as weapons to hunt for food and kill each other with something other than their teeth, people have been inventing better weapons to give themselves the advantage when competing with other people. It's been this way since we stopped calling ourselves monkeys. When I went on line to check on the name Moro, I found something like 8 other wars that were raging around the world at just about that same time. Somehow fighting wars is the thing mankind does the most, if not the best.

There may have been any number of people in history who decided they didn't like weapons and didn't like fighting, so they simply stopped using those and doing that, but they are not around anymore so I cannot ask them if that was the better way. Maybe, when it's time for the Starship Enterprise to come along, people will stop killing each other on this planet, but they will still arm the Enterprise to fight the folks they find out there, cause that's the way it is.

So fast forward to more modern times, the second half of the 20^th century....

Humans of course, were still fighting and killing each other. Some used weapons to attack, and others used them to defend against attack. And over time the weapons got more dangerous. Of course, the old good guy-bad guy conflict is a relative thing, but just for sake of convenience, I'm gonna call us the good guys, and those others that would hurt us we will call the bad guys. And to muddy the waters further, let's make the police and our military the good guys and those criminals and enemies of our nation the bad guys. Not politically correct but there is no time for that here. However, from time to time I will mention the people who think just the opposite of me about this, if it suits my mood.

Two stories follow for illustrative purpose...

Actually they are kinda the same story but one at a time. For years the police mostly armed themselves with 38 caliber revolvers. Six guns, cause they carried six cartridges. Everybody knew that they were not the most effective weapons (see above), but they were inexpensive, which the taxpayers liked, and they were less likely to kill the bad guys.  (?????) (Think Lawyers and The Media) The bad guys didn't worry about these artificial constraints, and they acquired any better weapons they could find (which they used to kill innocent people as well as each other). Some police officers carried the 45 Colt, but they were usually thought to be playing too nasty by the folks who hate violence in any form, and this was discouraged. So as a consequence, lots of cops got killed by the bad guys.

Finally, after several FBI officers were killed by one bad guy with a semi-automatic pistol, even though the officers had shot the bad guy several times with those 38's (before they ran out of ammunition and then got killed), somebody decided to get the cops better weapons, too. The 45 was still considered too effective, and since those more civilized countries we admire so (think Europe) used mostly 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistols, our police started to carry these. Large capacity semi-automatic pistols were just the thing when it came to dealing with criminals armed with the same. It’s what ya call evolution.

Except.... if you had a bad guy hiding in a car, which happens, and you needed to stop him from killing you by killing him, and you had a 38 or 9 millimeter in you hand, you'd get really annoyed when those bullets you fired kept bouncing off the windshield or doors of that car. This happened from time to time, including that time where the FBI guys got killed, and this was considered a bad thing. So somebody invented a steel core, jacketed bullet that would penetrate windshields and car doors, and could be used on these rare occasions, and maybe keep a cop alive. These were essentially similar to amour piercing rounds used by the military. And since they were abrasive to normal handgun barrels and would destroy said costly barrels, they coated the bullets with teflon. Only a few of these rounds were ever made, and they were sold only to police departments, but boy did they create a fuss.

A few of those people who hate violence of any kind live in most countries, and they spend a lot of time complaining, and we have a bunch in this country. Apparently, they think that the best way to get bad guys to stop hurting the good folks is to disarm the good folks. Unlike trickle down economics, which sometimes actually works, trickle down disarmament has never been a big success, but that has never stopped these people from trying it on the rest of us. Since many gun owning folks fail to see the logic to the disarming argument, they need to be re-educated into surrendering their guns. And if stretching the truth makes the re-education process work better (see propaganda), these folks who would disappear the guns don't hesitate to do this.

Do you remember when the Washington Post announced the arrival of the plastic gun that would allegedly evade metal detectors at airports and thus make every airliner a highjack victim? Well, they did announce that, and then demanded the gun be banned. The gun was the Glock, and according to the Post it spelled the end of Western Civilization. Just months later, when the Washington DC police signed up for a new and far better pistol for its officers to carry in the street, the Washington Post announced this as wonderful news. Western Civilization was saved. The pistol was the same Glock! One problem we have with our media....they often don’t have a clue what they talk about and they sometimes bend reality to suit their needs. And if they are gonna re-educated folks, sometimes this is what they choose to do.

Those steel core, teflon coated bullets that were designed to save police officer lives became COP KILLER BULLETS this same way. Somebody came up with the idea that they could claim these bullets might defeat the new body armor that the police were wearing, and therefore they should be banned. Since to these people, the saving of Western Civilization rested with disarming the good guys, a massive campaign to ban cop killer bullets resulted. How’s that work? Well intentioned disarm-the-good-guys people drove the mania about cop killer bullets, the media jumped on board, and they got their compliant legislators to write a law that would ban ANY bullet that could pass through light body armor. This was perfect! That's cause this law banned virtually every bullet used by hunters, too. Double whammy. Pretty soon with no ammunition all the guns would be gone! Surely the bad guys would give up their guns soon after, and peace would rein on earth.

Uh, no… Some of us, those 90 million or so good guys who own guns without using them to rob banks or kill people, objected. We know the benefit of guns, and resent the implication that they are the root of all evil on earth, so we suggested the law banning all ammunition be changed back into a law that would limit the sale of Teflon coated armor piercing ammo only to the police. There is a certain logic to this. It was those nasty degenerates at the National Rifle Association that suggested this revised law, and it was passed because of course the politicians are all afraid of the NRA. Which is why the good guys still can own guns.

To date, despite the media lies, the sum total of cops killed by cop killer bullets is zero. The number of good guys who have defended themselves when attacked by criminals (by using their guns, as if this argument isn't transparent enough) is somewhere in the many thousands. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the media to announce this.

The same arguments surfaced when somebody invented the term assault weapon, and decided to ban them. Since there isn't actually such a thing as an assault weapon, they had to come up with a definition, so why not include a whole bunch of firearms they’d like to ban? Those arguing for a ban could apply the term to most anything they chose. This led to some confusion, cause those of us who own these various firearms don't always know when we became a threat to Western Civilization or just another gun nut. Some stated that if a firearm looks kinda like a military weapon, it must therefore be more dangerous than any other. So we would loosen one screw and remove some extraneous part to alter the appearance of the rifle safely stored in our gun safe, and we made it legal again cause it was less scary looking. Others proposed that magazine capacity or firing mechanism made all the difference, but they still had trouble defining what exactly made one gun more demon-like than another.

It didn't help that with the exception of some gang infested areas in Los Angeles, nobody could find many places where their so-called assault weapons were much of a problem. Most police departments keep statistics on the weapons used in crimes, and few bother to track these weapons, since they are a tiny statistical blip.

None of this stopped the media from helping out. Whenever one of these weapons was actually used in a crime, it made national news, over and over again. It turned into the same feeding frenzy that the media created for pitbulls. By ignoring most incidents caused by other breeds, pitbulls became the Damien dog, even though most people also have trouble actually defining what a pitbull is. And in their quest for opinion bending “news” the large media organizations often bent this truth.

For instance, the reason many people think that assault weapons are fully automatic machine guns just might be because when the television news does a special on assault weapons, the camera always shows a machine gun in action. They did similar things when they deliberately set GM pickup trucks on fire when they could not make them burn in actual accidents. It's visually exciting and certainly persuasive, but it is also totally dishonest. Machine guns have been illegal since 1934, so the assault weapon ban hardly cleared the streets of these. All those “assault weapons” that were banned back in the 90's are still out there, cause the ban only affected the sale of those few that could not be cosmetically altered back to legal, so there are in fact many more “in circulation” now than at the time of the ban. And they still are hardly ever used in crime.

Oh, and remember when Mel Gibson set out to save the world, (before he became the drunken anti-Semite idiot) and he shot through a bulldozer blade with a “COP KILLER BULLET” to eliminate the villain in a silly movie? Mel's a big gun ban fan, and this abuse of the truth I guess is justified by him trying to save us from ourselves. This would be after he made millions for himself shooting up the movie screen.

That horrible crime in Tucson will of course rekindle the same arguments, cause those people who wish they could end violence forever have certainly been re-stimulated. The deranged murderer used a Glock, the plastic gun. It is a large capacity semi-automatic pistol. He used a novelty elongated magazine, which I suppose made it into an “assault weapon”. He set out to kill people, and people died. Oh, and the media has been mentioning it over and over again. (I'm reminded at times like this of the second worst mass murder committed in this country’s history prior to 911. This killer used gasoline, and he killed over 100 people within minutes. This mass murder lasted about a week on the news and did not result in an outcry to ban gasoline.)  (The worst mass murderer used diesel fuel and fertilizer)

A judge in California noticed that this state's new ammunition ban is unconstitutional. So of course a legislator mentioned on TV that this will turn all the criminals loose with cop killer bullets. The call goes out again to ban assault weapons, magazines, semi-auto firing mechanism, anything to “get the guns off the streets”. It's the guns' fault.

Meanwhile, bad guys do bad things. Nothing new here. Well intentioned people blame the good guys, and try to limit their freedoms in order to keep the bad guys in check. And good guys have to defend themselves from those well intentioned people for no good reason. And it keeps coming back to bad guys do bad things. The one thing that will never change in human behavior.

July 24, 2011

This has been a confusing week. Perhaps you’ve noticed. I haven’t begun to grasp all that has happened. The news reports have been incomplete, so none of us really know much of what we should about all that has transpired. Some of my thoughts will perhaps be exposed as total nonsense when more information surfaces. But I won’t mention anything here that doesn’t make a bit of sense in the atmosphere of partial knowledge. And maybe, some of what seems will become some of what is.

The scene was so familiar in the news report. Two transportation department police officers pursued a young man from a train, because he had not paid his fare. And then they shot him down. Because he hadn’t paid his fare. And of course, because of his skin color. The station platform was crowded with people, and each had a cell phone and each captured some of this drama on video. And before anything more was known about this tragedy, the media condemnation of the police officers hit full stride. It was the BART shooting all over again, and boy there better not be a cover up that frees the evil cops like they did last time.

The media was all over this one. And the rowdy people gathered in the streets to wreck things, cause that’s what they do in the face of racial injustice. The neighborhood was rallying in support of their fallen brother. The oppression by the police must be stopped. The cops, simpering wimps that they are, claimed the poor innocent youth was shooting at them, and so they had to shoot back at him. But where was the gun? Cover up, again. 

And then some of the truth came out. Somebody looked at the videos captured at the scene, and there was the gun where the man had tossed it, and somebody was stealing it. Gosh, what a surprise in that neighborhood! Oh, and that poor innocent youth struck down before his prime was already a career criminal, and he was actually being chased by the police because of a parole violation, again, and not because he hadn’t paid his fare. And he had gunshot residue all over his hands, from when he shot at the cops, and from when he shot and killed, himself. And the gun has been recovered and will be tested, and then…some useful information might be forthcoming.

None of this stopped the people from gathering in the street to protest, and when they got too rowdy, they were arrested, and no, they weren’t from around here. They weren’t the neighborhood’s oppressed people. Nope, these folks just wandered in from other places cause they like to protest and wreck things. Because that is what this bunch does for fun. And I missed the part where the media apologized to the police officers for condemning them before the facts were known.

A bomb went off in Oslo, much to the surprise of most. Who bombs Norway? Some wondered if Libya or those Islamic terrorists might not be responsible. And then the information came out that part of the same attack involved the murder of many children. Who could do such a thing?

Some of the deluded folks around here who give Islamic terrorists great praise for their resistance against the oppression by the West were quick to gloat, “I told you so…” when they thought that the Islamic terrorists were defending themselves by killing Norwegians. Grins filled their faces when such justice was done to the oppressors. Nobody much mentioned that the murders of innocent children just might seem a bit over the top, but that’s what ya can always expect with Islamic terrorists.  And so I guess that makes it OK.

And then we found out, long after so many had already spoken their personal philosophies, that one psychopath with a grudge against his own government did all these nasty murders. And the folks who praised the terrorists could no longer smirk, so I guess they will just cry out to ban guns again or some other useless thing.

None of this makes any sense. But I guess that’s life these days. It’s so crazy that ya really gotta hold back your opinions until the dust settles, so you probably shouldn’t pay any attention to me either.