The Divine Mr. M

July 6th, 2022

The Human Race is riding a runaway train to hell [aka Accelerating Climate Change] while we argue about Profits and Pronouns, about when Life legally begins, about Borders and National Identity, most of us willfully ignoring the looming doom of our species.

I'll be seventy years old in a month and a half. My goal is to outlive our cats and my wife. Then I'll be free to punch my ticket if so moved. *shrugs* Not much else I can do really...

...and so it is.

~I was just in the kitchen making coffee and the breeze coming in the window was cold. I guess summer is, more or less, over, though around here it will remain in the 80's and 90's during the day for a while. Honestly, I didn't even realize it was the Labor Day Weekend until mid-afternoon yesterday.

Now that it is cooling off, it is time to face my face and go get my rotten teeth extracted. If I want to live to a ripe old age, I need to deal with asap....

...and that's all I'll say about that for now.

In Every Single Narrative regarding the Ukraine Crisis I have read and/or heard, there is a Single Fundamental Flaw that runs through all of them; the need to advance a moral and philosophical justification for the side the various authors support. In other words, to portray one side as the 'good guys' and the other as the 'bad guys'.

But here's the problem, kids; there are NO Good Guys here. They're ALL Bad Guys. The regimes in Moscow and Kyiv are both post-Soviet kleptocracies, brutal, greedy and criminal in nature. The thugs in the Eastern Ukraine 'people's republics' are no better and probably worse.

The Ukraine Crisis is really a 'turf war' between political gangs. All the rhetoric about 'self determination' and/or 'national sovereignty' is pure propaganda. Those supporting or opposing one side or the other are either being deluded or are merely using this debacle to grind their own tangentially related axes.

This is The Bloodlands. There are no good guys here. Just gangsters and warlords of various flavors [ideological, nationalistic, etc] and the poor bastards caught in the middle. And no, there is not a fucking thing you can do about that.

...I was going to post this on Gun Control: Calls For Tougher Regulations Stir Little Support, but it was too long...

"The death toll in Aurora is equal to the average weekend death toll in Chicago's gang war, though nobody gives a damn about that because those are nearly all young black males getting shot in the inner city.

Said gangs are part and parcel of The War on [Some] Drugs, which is of course the result of Prohibition, which has been shown over and over again to not only NOT solve the problem, but make it far worse. And the way gun control has made things worse is by disarming the average citizen.

Spree killers pick locations where they know their targets will be unarmed and defenseless. They want a shooting gallery, not a firefight. And our strict gun control laws provide vast numbers of what the military calls 'target rich environments'.

Now the standard response to this is that if several of the location's occupants had guns and started shooting back there would be bullets flying all over the place and that would be worse. That is a partially valid argument, though it assumes that all gun owners would go 'cowboy', which is not valid, especially in this last event where many of the theater goers were active duty military personnel.

And the argument is besides the point. The point is Deterrence. If a locale is known to allow gun owners to carry, then criminals and most spree killers will avoid said locale. I mean who but an idiot tries to rob a cop bar?

As for suicidal spree killers, they're looking for a date with the SWAT team and probably don't want to merely get wounded by a citizen with only moderate shooting skills.

I know this won't change the minds of the anti-gun zealots. For them I have a mathematical conundrum. There are over ninety million gun owners in this country and we collectively posses over a quarter of a billion guns. [yes, that's a 'B'] Even the entire US military cannot disarm us, nor would they try because most of them were raised with guns themselves.

Now instead of more pointless squawking about More Gun Control, how about making a serious effort about a building a better mental health system so people like Mr. Holmes can find help [or get flagged] before they end up needing to be killed."