February 2, 2013
Fuck technology

I was reminded today of why I am something of a Luddite at heart. Not too many years ago, before everything could be found via Google, I used to have a lot of fun making a mockery of newspapers.


One of my favorite things to do was write letters to the editors of very liberal papers, like my hometown San Francisco Chronicle. No bragging intended, but I’m a very good writer and can put together a pithy political missive like no one else. When I was writing a lot I was getting several letters published every week (not just the Chronicle but everything from the LA Times to the New York Times) under various pen names.

My letters to the editor were never intended to make a convincing argument…I knew that no one who reads letters to the editor is going to change his or her mind. Instead, I liked to say things that would piss people off and I’d hide messages in the letters.

My favorite trick was to come up with a name that sounded like a real name but was in fact a foreign word (preferably a naughty word). I’d write a letter about some benign topic and sign it “Moe Tzetzet”, for example. Some guy named Moe, right? Actually, Motzetzet is Hebrew for a blowjob (well, it’s literally a pacifier, but it’s slang for a blow job).

None of this changed the world but it definitely made me feel like I was mocking the all powerful liberal media, which was at least a bit of comfort.

I was reminded of this phase in my life when I had to come up with a name for a corporation I was forming this afternoon. I started to go through all the weird pen names I used for the letters to the editors and stopped to laugh at the most infamous one.

I won’t tell you the name right now, but it’s in the letters to the SF Chronicle published online at this link. It was the last time I got away with this and the editors had a feeling something was up with the letter.

They called the number I gave when I sent the letter in and I had the entire letters to the editor staff on a speakerphone asking me questions about the name. I told them that it was Estonian and very common in the Baltic region generally. They wanted to hear me pronounce it, which I did, and I pretended to speak Estonian for them (I was actually speaking pig latin very quickly and they never caught on).

The truth is that the name is Polish slang. A friend who is a native Polish speaker loved “Team America” and always repeated this line from the movie. I asked him how to say it in Polish and thought that it was such a cool sounding set of words that I immediately wrote a letter using it as the pen name.

And that, dear editors of the SF Chronicle, is why you have “Surprise Cockfag” in Polish in your letter archives.

8:51pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wdH3vZx
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January 18, 2013
Dear @toddglass and @pftompkins - @jenkirkman is the NRA

Ok, I’m pretty sure she’s not a member of the NRA and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even own a gun, but you’ll get my point if you continue reading.

On his most recent podcast, Todd Glass made a random thought/observation that the NRA, and the people who are members of it (and who support gun rights generally) are people who “are tired of all change…from interracial marriage to…gay marriage….” and most people in the NRA are basically intolerant. There was also discussion of how people who want guns to protect themselves from the government are paranoid (this was Paul Tompkins talking) and allusions to how ridiculous it is to worry about the second coming of the third reich.

Let me start by pointing out that gun rights are a civil rights issue. Todd may not care about it, but the right to own a weapon is as fundamental as the right to speak your mind, practice (or not practice) a religion and gather with those you want to be around. So I find it odd that someone would state that a person who wants to protect one civil right from government attack would somehow be antagonistic towards those who are protecting a different civil right from government attack.

More to the point, I guess Todd has never heard of any of the various gun rights groups that are also gay rights groups. For example, Pink Pistols is a gun rights advocacy group made up of LGBT individuals. They have 60 chapters in 30+ states and 3 countries and they are quite active in my local area (San Francisco). I know many Pink Pistol members, we shoot together at the local gun ranges and hunt together and many of the straight members of the local shooting community (including me) march with the Pink Pistols members in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade. 

It’s not an isolated thing, either. Gays don’t want to be helpless victims anymore than anyone else and a large number of people in the LGBT community own firearms for protection.

Without a doubt, there are people in the NRA, and gun owners generally, who are the dumbfuck backwards redneck types that Todd and Paul presumes all of us are, but they are certainly not the majority. 

To claim, as Todd (and Paul, to an extent) did, that the NRA is populated by people who are homophobic is as ignorant as the claims by religious lunatics that the gay rights movement is an attempt to indoctrinate kids so they become homosexuals. 

More troubling to me, though, was Paul’s dismissal of people who keep arms to protect against the next third reich.

I’m the son of a Holocaust survivor. My mom was born in Czechoslovakia in 1933. Her family was “Sudeten”, meaning that though they were Czechs, they came from a region that was historically German and they considered themselves more German than Czech. They spoke German in the house and always identified to be Germans first, Czechs second, Jews third.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave Adolf Hitler the go ahead to invade Czechoslovakia and take the Sudeten lands. He thought that appeasing Hitler would stop further aggression.  

My mom’s family actually liked the idea of Germany taking back the part of Czechoslovakia where they lived, since they were Germans at heart and culture. They moved to Prague shortly after Chamberlain appeased Hitler and watched Hitler’s tanks roll into Prague. Not long after that, they started to see the signs that Hitler was not benevolent.

My mom’s family always thought that despite the rumors that Hitler planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe there was no way it would happen because they were Germans and Germans would not hurt other Germans.

Then one day in 1940 SS men kicked in the door to my great grandparent’s apartment in Prague (where my mother and grandparents were living) and dragged everyone into the street with the rest of the Jews of Prague.

Oh, this was after Hitler had confiscated all privately owned weapons held by Jews.

The Nazis didn’t care that my mom’s family was German. They murdered some of her family and their neighbors in the street and took the rest of them off to concentration camps. My mom’s last vivid memory of life in Europe was of Nazi soldiers forcing her to play with corpses as they laughed. She was 8 years old.

Luckily, my mother, and her parents survived, but they were the only ones in their family. Every else was slaughtered. And to the end, they couldn’t believe that Germans would do such a thing to other Germans.

And it’s not the only time in history that a government has turned against its Jewish population. From the Pogroms (that slaughtered parts of my father’s family in the Ukraine, before the Nazis did the same a few years later) to the Inquisition all the way back to the Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzar II, Jewish history is dominated by instances of government slaughtering Jews.

So do I worry about the next third reich? 

I do.

I don’t think it’s imminent, I don’t think it’s likely. But I do think it’s possible. I’d be an idiot to ignore what happened to my own mother and her family. Just as they thought that Germans would never kill other Germans simply because of religion, I don’t think that my American citizenship would protect me from an American government bent on my destruction.

And I’m astounded and frightened that there are adults today who don’t know the basic outlines of world history.

That’s you, Paul Tompkins, in case you were too busy chortling about paranoid gun nuts to figure it out. 

I am armed, I am a member of the NRA, I am vigilant because I know world history and my family’s history. 

It’s not that I have any plans to try to overthrow the government or start a revolution. But I definitely have plans to make sure that if history repeats itself during my lifetime, I will defend myself and my people. 

Anyone who trusts a government to do that is an idiot. 

Jen Kirkman made an excellent point during the podcast about the propensity of all government, whether the Bush administration or otherwise, to attack its own people.

Bullseye, Jen (yes, intentional pun). 

I am a huge fan of Jen Kirkman. A lot of my gun loving friends are as well. I’d go so far as to say that I agree with Jen more than I agree with any politician. And I’m pretty typical of gun owners. So, Todd, how do you square that with your observation that the NRA and its members are a bunch of intolerant angry people?

Look, if you don’t like guns, don’t own them. Just like if you don’t like abortions, don’t have one…or if you don’t like gay sex, don’t engage in it.

But encouraging the government to dictate what guns people can have (if they can have them at all) or vilifying gun owners and implying that they are not worthy of the same civil rights protections as those with who you agree will do nothing more than provide the precedent for the further erosion of all civil rights.

12:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wc3dZK1
January 16, 2013
Prepare to be surprised…

I’m going to do this in real time, so you get to see my initial reaction to President Obama’s attack on the 2nd Amendment. What I’ll do is jot down, in bold text prefaced by “SK”, my reaction to each of the 23 points. 


THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
EMBARGOED UNTIL THE START OF THE PRESIDENT’S REMARKS
January 16, 2013

Gun Violence Reduction Executive Actions
Today, the President is announcing that he and the Administration will:

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

SK I don’t have a problem with this. I actually encourage it. Good idea.


2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

SK I also don’t have a problem with this, and again, I think it’s a good idea.


3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

SK Yet again, no problem with this and it is a smart move. I’m all for a centralized system of background checks to ensure that felons and the mentally ill are kept from owning weapons. This is the right approach as long as it is part of a program to not ban weapons but to keep them out of the hands of people who have demonstrated a likelihood of misuse. I.e., people who are not felons or mentally ill should be able to own whatever weapon they want.


4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

SK This is ok to the extent it doesn’t expand the categories to include virtually everyone. There has to be very distinct lines drawn here. You can’t have something like “anyone who has ever been in a fight is now barred from owning guns”.  I think the right categories are felons and those who are mentally ill with a propensity for violence.


5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

SK This is too vague to comment on. Before I say that this is ok, I want to know what would trigger a right of law enforcement to not return a weapon. Conceptually, I have no problem with this if it is drawn up with very strict time limits and reasons for not returning weapons. But I don’t want a cop to be able to seize my weapons on some pointless pretext and then hold my weapons for years as they run “background checks” that have no real purpose. It should be something like they get 5 days to run a background check, if the check shows that I’m a felon or mentally ill with a propensity for violence the weapons can be held, otherwise, they have to be returned at the end of the 5 day period, and the police will be held accountable if they seize weapons wrongfully.


6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

SK Pointless, but harmless.

7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.

SK Pointless, expensive and a total waste of time and money. But if it makes you feel better to waste money, so be it.


8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).

SK This is a problem because it could be a way to make safes and gun locks so expensive and difficult to obtain that it results in an effective ban on guns. I.e., if you have to have a safe to store your guns and the government requires safes that run $10,000, that’s absolutely unacceptable. And if the government is going to try to say that you always have to have a gun in a safe or locked up, again, this is overstepping the bounds of reasonable regulation. 


9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

SK Fine by me.


10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

SK Pointless, but again, I don’t care about this.


11. Nominate an ATF director.

SK Not sure what this means.


12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.

SK Good idea. I support this.


13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.

SK Way too vague. What does this mean?


14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.

SK Uh….is this just a way of telling the CDC to gin up a report that will be used as the basis for undermining the 2nd amendment? I still have a problem with calling it “gun violence”. That language presupposes that the guns are the problem, and I strongly oppose anything that has this kind of built in bias.


15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.

SK This is the same Attorney General that illegally sent “assault weapons” to Mexican gangs and said that people needed to be brainwashed to hate guns? No fucking way. Keep the AG out of this.


16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.

SK Invasion of privacy. Then again, I don’t really care, because I lie to my doctor all the time.



17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.

SK Good idea. I strongly support this. I am for anything that focuses on stopping individuals who pose a threat. Again, this has to be tied to the proposition that there will be no bans on guns generally.

18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

SK Fine, but pointless and a waste of money.


19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.

SK OK, seems innocuous. 

20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.

SK Great idea.


21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.

SK What does this have to do with the issue of violence?


22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.

SK AMEN! I am very pleased to see the focus on mental health.


23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.

SK I hate the term “national dialogue” but I like that the focus has been on mental health. 

Overall, I will give President Obama credit for being uncharacteristically rational with these proposals. A lot of them are window dressing, but I think that there are a lot of good ideas. 

My bottom line is this: if I’m not a felon, not mentally ill with a propensity to violence and not someone who has been identified as posing a threat to others, I should be able to own whatever gun I want. If there’s also an attempt to ban “assault weapons” or “high capacity magazines”, the proposals above are insincere and I’ll oppose them as a matter of principle. 

11:23am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wbvjxIU
(Notes: 1)
  
January 15, 2013
Setting precedent

Let me preface this post with a very clear pronouncement: I am not in favor of restricting abortions, especially if the restrictions are based on a religious idea of morality.

Pop quiz: Am I about to advocate for government control of reproductive issues? If you answered anything other than “NO”, please re-read the introduction. If you answered “NO”, continue reading.

President Obama is about to introduce a wide ranging plan to expand government restrictions on guns. From what I see today, it looks to be everything from a ban on entire classes of weapons (“assault weapons”) to restrictions on capacity of ammunition magazines to reporting and registration requirements.

I also hear that he’s going to announce the new initiative surrounded by kids who wrote to him about their fear of guns.

If you think that this is a good idea, I hope that you are ready to hand over your autonomy on all sorts of other individual rights.

I know what you’re thinking…”this is to protect children and to stop violence”…”why do you need [type of weapon]”….etc.

Just remember this…there are a lot of people out there, mostly religious, who think the exact same thing about abortion. They think that abortion is murder, that you don’t have a right to kill a baby that God created, that abortion should be banned entirely…to them, whether the baby dies before it is born or after is irrelevant and whether it’s you making the decision to kill or some random person is also irrelevant. It’s murder, pure and simple. 

So you say “but we need to stop the violence and protect our children”. Just like the religious lunatics say when they demand a ban on abortions.

You say “we don’t want a total ban, just reasonable regulation”. Just like the religious lunatics say.

The bottom line is that if you are on board with Obama’s to-be-announced plan, you’re in favor of stripping a fundamental right away from 99.9% of law abiding people just so you can vainly attempt to stop the .1% from engaging in horrific acts.

If that’s your solution to a problem, to ban things that are abused on rare occasion, then when the religious lunatics are in power you’re not going to be able to stop them from using the same precedent Obama is about to set to take away rights that you think are fundamental, like abortion or contraception.

They’re going to say “maybe some abortions are for health reasons, but there are too many innocent babies being killed and we need reasonable regulation”. That reasonable regulation, just like reasonable regulation of firearms, will mean that the right to abortion is essentially at the discretion of governmental whim. No abortions after the first week…no abortions if you’ve already had an abortion in the past 30 years…everyone who has an abortion has to be registered in a government database that is in the public domain… How would you like that?

Even if you hate guns you have to understand that what is about to be proposed by Obama is an unprecedented and dangerous usurpation of individual rights. Every time you hear “reasonable, common sense regulation” of guns tomorrow, think about President Santorum saying that about abortion as he introduces his 2017 Protection of Children Act.

12:30pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wbrAKfZ
January 6, 2013

Silly geese

12:17pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wb7viNr
January 6, 2013

No duck, goose

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January 3, 2013

6:46pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wavbDs5
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: crazy girl when I come home from work. 
December 29, 2012
A political pretext in action.

Around 2001 liberals cared about nothing more than preventing the government from overreacting and abridging anyone’s rights due to the rogue acts of a few.

Around 2012, liberals care about nothing more than using the rogue acts of a few as a pretext to press forward with one of their longstanding goals, the denial of a fundamental right, one enshrined in the Bill of Rights no less.

Of course I’m talking about “gun control” and the recent efforts by leading liberal politicians like Diane Feinstein to introduce legislation that would ban a wide range of firearms and firearms related products.

I won’t bother with the facts of “gun control” and how more laws don’t stop criminals from committing crimes. Either you want to believe that taking away rights is a good thing or you don’t, and facts won’t get in the way.

But let me take a moment of your day to explain what is really going to happen, for those of you who claim that the Feinstein bill is really just “common sense” regulation and not a ban.

The Feinstein legislation (and I include any gun control measure under this definition, whether sponsored by Feinstein or others) is purportedly a reaction to the recent school shooting in Connecticut and the movie theater shooting in Colorado.

The legislation is going to ban a wide range of semi automatic weapons and so-called “high capacity” ammunition magazines.  Those who support the ban will claim that the ban is common sense because the items being banned are “military” items and no civilian needs them, and all they do is cause mass casualties.

Rest assured, though, that even if the Feinstein legislation is enacted, there will be more mass casualty crimes. The shooter won’t use an “assault weapon” or any “high capacity magazines”…he or she will likely use a shotgun and/or several handguns.

The Feinsteins of the political world will forget the fact that they claimed that their prior gun bans were supposed to stop the violence and failed to do so and instead they’ll introduce bans on the weapons that we were told weren’t going to be banned previously.

We’ll be told that even though some people may think they need shotguns and handguns, the risk to society is too great and we need yet more “common sense” gun control.

And in two, maybe three, steps, we’ll go from having a fundamental right to bear arms to having lost the right entirely. All guns will be banned.

And crime, and mass casualty events, will still occur.

This is what they’re up to and this is why I will never give up any of my guns.

I’m the son of a holocaust survivor. I won’t ever be in a position where only the government has the right to defend its interests. In my family, that doesn’t work out so well.

Think about it…as the government disarms the population, the police are being armed with ever more sophisticated weaponry, from REAL assault rifles to drones to high tech surveillance devices.

If the ever increasing civilian gun bans are supposed to make things less violent, what are the police arming themselves for?

I’ll make a deal…I’ll only arm myself with the same types of weapons that the President’s guards and the local cops get since I don’t get escorted around by government security.

Really, what is the government afraid of? And if they’re afraid of me, shouldn’t I be afraid of them?

8:42am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95waSZOKd
(Notes: 1)
  
December 23, 2012

Asking 10 year old the important questions: if Jews had ray guns during ww2 would they have beat the Germans?

10:14pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wa2RA_A
December 23, 2012

A snappy Kyle history quiz

10:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZJs95wa2Pytx
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