I Heart Texas

What's with the Vaseline, you might ask? Coincident.

Haven't written about things happening to me in a while, so here goes... been kinda busy, what with summer session, trying to work through the conveyor belt of my to-do list, going on vacation, and negotiating the terms of my surrender with a rare and lovely bird named Maia from Amarillo, TX.

The vacation part involved going with her down to a wedding in Marfa, TX, which is in the Big Bend portion down by Chihuahua. The drive involved a first leg haul from Amarillo to Ft. Davis, where we camped under the stars. And what stars! I haven't seen the Milky Way since Idaho 1975, and it never fails to impress. We were scheduled to attend a viewing party at the Ft. McDonald observatory Friday night, but we got off to late start, arriving around midnight, and so missed it. Maia and I went up to the observatory the next day. Hiking up to the domes, I mentioned I was strangely short of breath, and Maia pointed out we were a mile above sea level, which mitigated my alarm some...

Here is my obligatory geek shot of the trip and a more normal shot below with the 107 inch telescope dome in the background...

Not my cowboy hat....

"I am here!"

Aferwards, we stopped in Ft. Davis for lunch, where I had one of the better chocolate malts with extra malt I've ever had. Our server was having trouble with our order, and consulted with one of the regular waitresses. I asked what his deal was, was informed he was a foreign exchange student from Poland. He actually turned out to be from Ukraine. I mentioned I spoke Russian once upon a time, and he insisted I try. Surprisingly, I remembered conservational phrases and we actually had a back and forth. I could tell he was tickled with the exchange and left him a big tip. Maia observed our conservation, and said "Oh honey, you absolutely made his day!", but, you know, with that charming twang that I could get so used to.

I'm glad I could make his day!  One of the great things about being human is how so little effort can bring such great joy.

I've always liked the desert, and the high desert of the Trans-Pecos could not have been a better place to be. It's positively springlike with all the flowering plants and tan landscape and purple mountains in every direction. I want to go back and see all the things I didn't see there. Fortunately, rain came through, at one point pounding down like horses' hooves. Fortunately the luxury tent we stayed in at El Cosmico was waterproof.

Rain on tent canvas creaking like a sailing ship, but we were fine.

Then up to the Carlsbad Caverns, an experience which I would suggest was slightly hallucinatory. Those rock formations deep under the surface look nothing like the dry and simple stalagmites and stalactites we learned about in school. They were - to me - monstrous, fleshy, glistening with fat, scaly, gill covered and warty, living things. They were something out of Lovecraft. But the absolutely most bizarre part of the underground adventure was the snack bar. Here is the modern, fluorescent-lit cafeteria in a pitch black chamber, the cave walls barely lit. The bathrooms were equally weird, stainless steel, tile and porcelain surfaces in a cave tunnel. I couldn't help but think about the storied underground cities built for the nation's elite in preparation of the Apocalypse.

All in all, a truly, fantastic magical wonderful time!

Back to reality on this past Wednesday in time to close out the summer session. I was informed I should go visit Glen as his condition was worsening. (I've mentioned Glen in prior essay from a year ago. He had been diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer and several tumors in his brain last May. He underwent chemo and radiation, which bought more than a year, but a month ago he told me he had had enough, and was going into hospice at home. I've tried to make it to the bar with him and the group  from the college when we go out Thursday nights. Normally, this tradition takes a hiatus over the summer, but, considering...

So I was informed his condition was worsening, the brain tumors taking their toll, and should visit him while he was still lucid. My former student aide, soon to be graduate student at Wichita State University in Kansas, Scotty, and I headed over last evening.

We found Glen on a good day, and he, his wife, and his sister had a very fun time. He was active, alert and engaged, and I can only hope this lasts for awhile.

At one point, we were talking about smart phones, and the topic switched to Scotty's thesis. He specualted he might continue the work of his undergrad advisor in sustainable and waste fuels for wood kiln firings. I said "I know what you need to work on, developing tumbleweeds for fuel. They are a nuisance that should be used for something like that".

Glen Reeser and I

Scotty came back with "Other people have smart phones. I have John". Which got a laugh considering how often people use their plastic pocket brains for memory, or use agents like Siri.

Glen quipped "John, call Katie!" (Scotty's girlfriend).

"KATIE!" I mock shouted.

It really was wonderful to see Glen sharp and in the groove for a change.

The Maw and the Spew of the Sneetch Machine

I'm guessing that, maybe twenty to fifty years from now, people will look at the current crop of 3D printers as rather quaint old macguffins that, oh, had their uses I suppose, but were superfluous to the greater vision of Processing. Let me get back to you on that.

3D printers, as they now are, can extrude more than one type of material, and thus already represent a level of sophistication way beyond the cute little x/y plotter with the extruded thermoplastic pooter. Were I to speculate, I would suggest that the end result will be some type of plasmonic surface or plenum that utilizes quantum teleportation to provide material information, building molecule by molecule, or atom by atom.  No doubt it will be hooked up to, not only the internet of things, but a disintegrator that will supply a matter bank that supplies the printer with pure elemental materials. As such it really will grow what it is that you want. And it will range from laptop size to industrial strength, and in a utopian world, possibly be on street corners, and like a version of Mr. Fusion, will be fed garbage and squirt out consumer items.

In any event, I propose that the two ends of the thing be called "the maw" and "the spew". And that the whole be called a Sneetch Machine (after the Star-On and Star-Off machines that Sylvester McMonkey McBean made available to the Sneetches in Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches and Other Stories).



Processing, capitalized, will be what we humans, or post-humans, will be all about.

Remember the old canard about political affiliation, where if you go far enough right you go full circle and end up on the left? Well, that's not true, but I suspect it happens when it comes to increasing biological and civilizational complexity.  Given the quasi-fractal aspects of nature, it seems there is a self-similarity of scale.

And so, when you move up the technological ladder, with increasing leverage and sophistication of control over the surrounding environs, it gets to a point where an advanced civilization looks a lot like a slime-mold, or a multi-cellular organism, and all it is doing is converting available matter and energy into more suitable habitat and more life. Where all you are doing is taking one order of matter, and Processing it into something more to your liking. The original matrix of organization is destroyed in favor of its new matrix.

Of course, with creative destruction, that Maw beckons to the Spew. Just hook up the two ends of the Sneetch Machine, and let her rip!

It's Going To Be Africa For Quite A While, Stupid

Adam on the right.

I went to dinner with a friend of mine last night. My treat. I ate breakfast for dinner, with two dark beers. He ate meatloaf. His name is Adam Bacon, he is thirty-two years old, an Xray technician, six foot eight inches tall, and scheduled for back surgery today. It was an on-the-job accident moving a morbidly obese old decrepit off the gurney what did his back in. He has had difficulty with the healthcare company fulfilling their promises of adequate care. On the other hand, he has been under a number of strictures involving correct behaviors re: maintaining his injuries, and under surveillance to make sure he is not committing fraud.

Meanwhile, the parasitic scumbags who destroyed 40% of the world's economy got bonuses and wrist slaps again this year.

Go figure.

After dinner, with both of us bloated with potatoes and cheese and meat, it was decided we should walk. Since my car was parked back at the college, near the stadium track, we walked on the track. And in walking and conversing, and this mainly to help Adam dispel anxieties about the back surgery, I just kind of ranted and rambled about any and everything to get his mind off things.

We discussed a TV adaptation of Apocalypse Now, set in American suburbia, with the Kurtz family. After a bit, the well-manicured front lawn is littered with body parts and pieces of local pets. It's a comedy, a horror-filled comedy. And in the end, Jack, the neighborhood wants Kurtz dead, but that's who he took his orders from anyway.

I also mentioned how Rob Zombie really screwed the pooch. When he made House of 1,000 Corpses, he really fucked up.  What he should have done was by up the Beverly Hillbillies property, and adapted his Corpses screenplay to a murderous backwoods cannibal family that strikes it rich and moves to Beverly Hills. Sheri Moon Zombie would have made a fantastic psychotic Ellie Mae Clampett. Again, it's a comedy. A blood-soaked, gore-filled, all-American red white 'n blue cement pond comedy.

Sigh.

I talked of another movie I had seen, A Touch of Sin, based upon four real-life events "based upon random acts of violence". Of course, that's the description, but the context behind the movie explains there is nothing random at all. If there is one regime that shits it's bed in fear every night, it's the Central Committee of the Communist party of China. Here they are, trying to deal with the scourge of S. Invictus Anglo-American collapse capitalism they have unleashed upon themselves. True, they've got the police suppression machinery in place, but they are desperate, desperate I tell you, to get the consumerist pacification program thoroughly in place before the lid blows. Even if they have to wreck the countryside to do it.

I talked of a book I read about conditions in India, called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. If you thought income inequality was bad in America, look to India. In fact, if the trend continues, India is probably America's future.

I talked of why Revolution will never come to America.

We are all now just too dumb, fat, slow, sloppy and lazy. People are hobbled by debt. People are threatened with it. Police are slowly becoming better at suppressing the locals, with the equipment and tactics in place. People are sated and hypnotized and coddled with consumerist items, and shinies dangled of either gangsta or hipster cool lifestyles. Not just America. It's the Anglo-America Empire that is like that. (Or Orwell's Oceania, if prefer, and I do).

Ever wondered why the English never had their revolution, in a time when the rest of Europe was in turmoil? Ever wonder why Great Britain managed that? Look to the last paragraph. Carrots and sticks, but mostly sticks. The means of production (though ever so briefly disrupted) always were under the firm of control of capital. And when the unions threatened to take over? They got bought, suborned, bribed, and rewarded.

And if things got a little tense? Just ease up on the reigns a bit, Hoss. If you notice, more than half the energy production and products of Oceania is flushed down the sewer, wasted on nothing. How can we really be in an era of scarcity when we are throwing away more than half of everything, food, product, people, you name it.

In S. Invictus capitalism, Scarcity is an invention, to be bogeyman and coins in the seat cushions.

So, Americans are very, very unlikely, despite the teatard and Occupy tensions, to ever get all Mad Max, because that would mean no more Cheetos and soft drinks, and Hulu, and smart phones, and actually experiencing bodily discomfort and physical exertion, and people shooting back at you.

So, where to look? Because Revolution has left the station, and America is not on that train. Russia? China? India? Brazil? Phhfft!

Once again, friends, It's AFRICA stupid. That's where it is all going to go down. In retrospect, Black Empire was almost prophetic, but the problem was Schuyler relied on a ju-jitsu move using the Anglo-American version of capitalism, and that, we now know, that ain't gonna cut it. Not without the resources of the Solar System to subsidize it all.

Perhaps more like The Girl in The Road, but not. One thing I think Schuyler got right, it will involve religion, either an existing one, or a syncretic new one.

Normal Accidents : A Book Report

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow prefered the term normal accident, in the sense that for complex systems with tightly coupled components, accidents are normal events. Indeed, he has suggested that some areas of technology and human enterprise are error inducing environments. This is rather similar to Edward Tenner's idea of Why Things Bite Back, the unintended consequences of human technology.

Perrow first coined the term "system accident" when this book was released in 1984. Since then, much of the examples and analysis in this book has been turned into a field of study known as Normal Accident Theory.

I'm going to suggest that, though even the public has come to realize that there is rarely a single cause to a catastrophe, the tendency is still there for the blame to descend to the operator's level, while the architects and designers get off scot free. Witness the financial collapse of 2008, as a prime example, and if that isn't a good argument for mandatory capital punishment for white collar crime, I don't what is.

As such, I realize that there are multiple sources for disasters, but still, when it comes down to it, I can't help but shake the feeling that most of them boil down to incompetent management. Incompetent fuckups who think they know what they are doing. When it comes to maritime accidents, one could blame the captains managers, but the error-inducing environment is created and maintained by the owners. These are the people who invariably cut corners to save a buck. And it is not just maritime accidents, it is every single area of human endeavor that involves technology only slightly more advanced than the five simple machines of the ancients.

Couple this incompetence with a willful ignorance to evidentiary facts, and you get a modeling system inside that bony carapace of a skull that almost invariably ignores dangers for a more rosy rainbow unicorn assessment of the situation (and who does a better job of that than clueless executives?):

"Why would a ship in a safe passing situation suddenly turn and be impaled by a cargo ship four times its length? For the same reasons the operators of the TMI plant cut back on high pressure injection and uncovered the core. Confronted with ambiguous signals, the safest reality was constructed".

So, this has been addressed in one form or another in the form of increasingly sophisticated risk assessment methods, but Perrow has suggested that some areas (especially, I would note, those that can be automated), might best be abandoned as human pursuits. Nuclear power and weapons being one of them.

I disagree, one thing I note is that if any area has had more incompetent monkey clusterfuck accidents with more devastating results, it is the area of nuclear weapons. And yet, if the systems for deploying and maintaining nuclear weapons are highly complex and tightly coupled are accidents waiting to happen, then wouldn't the past 70 years suggest the are not a Great Filter?

So, I would quintuple the quality control on bonehead executives, or at least, given their pay has increased some 350% over the past 30 years, subject them to 350 % more scrutiny than they suffered some 30 years ago. Public executives, not so much the problem, as they are already under public scrutiny. It's those private bastards that are going to wreck things for everyone. And so long as they insist on socializing the losses and privatizing the gains, they need to be kept ground under thumb, just to keep the hanky-panky to a minimum.

The other obvious choice is to loosen the coupling on the internal components so many of these systems. Tight coupling makes them more efficient, but it also makes them more brittle. Having a little inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing. As such, the term "slack" comes to mind. Though this is considered an ineffable term within the Church of the SubGenius, I now suggest it be incorporated into every single human design element to the end of time.

Oh, right, and the accidents detailed in the book are highly amusing, and worth the read.

I Swiped A Cow Magnet Across My Skull, And Now I'm All mu

Not to keep on harping on the whole nuclear fission thing, but two weeks ago, I paid a visit to Bomb City, and it was a really cool place. Situated in the Llano Estacado, it's arid high plains country, reliant upon the Ogalalla aquifer for water, and so ultimately doomed, right? Or is it?

Thing is, if global warming follows projections, West Texas and the surrounds become even more arid, looking more like the southern neighbor of Chihuahua, and that's doom, right? I mean, a man would have to be kind of crazy to leave the lush plenty of Chicago to live down there, right?

Well, that's not really what I wanted to talk about.

What I did notice, when I was down there, was I was fed like I was a horse by a lovely desert bird. I mean kind of like a horse. Horses don't eat steak (which of course I had to get seeing as where I was), but I ended getting fed a lot of salads, and fruits, and apples, and carrots, and stuff you give to horses.

And not to get too personal with you, but I gotta tell you my poops were pretty damn healthy and spectacular. Me getting away from all the starches and dairy and proteins, and getting more insoluble fibrous stuff, really seemed to get my gut bacteria all nice and happy.

So, I decided to do a reevaluation of my dietary intake, seeing as, as I age, I have to pay more attention to my body. And most especially to my gut, which is my ally. My ally is going to help me make it through the Bermuda Triangle of male health, which is your fifth decade of life.

I've also decided to look at how I exercise. I'm still exercising like I am seventeen, and I'm not anymore. Some things I won't change. I'm still about strength training, aerobics and running, but I'm starting to include balance and flexibility in the mix.

After my I had my unfortunate loss of my left kidney last year, when it turned from a functioning organ into a useless bag of water, I've not quite been able to get into the same shape I was before that all went down. So, it's time to admit I'm never going to have that flat alligator belly and chimp-like upper body strength I once had. But now that I see my own mortality ahead of me, I'm increasingly aware of staving off morbidity.

I know I'm not immortal, and don't want to be, but being immorbid is quite acceptable.

Radiophobia or Radiophilia? Part 2

Author's Note: Circumstances are conspiring to keep me from finishing this essay. Honestly, the past month, I don't know what the fuck I've gotten done. In any case, clearly I am not going to complete this essay the way I desire, and so, I'm just gonna wing it even more than usual, and let the pieces fall off where they may....



^^^Which set of molecules appears to be running the joint? The RNA based ribosome or the DNA strand?


This particular essay is nothing but rank speculation. Still, the origins of Earth and Life are lacking in a lot of data, subject to a lot of conjecture, so I don't feel too terrible generating what may be well just-so stories.

We deep sea denizens, living at the bottom of an ocean of air, rarely worry about radioactivity. The universe is just a hissing, spitting cat of radioactivity, and, like any playful kitten, loves to kill things just for the fuck of it.

Cute playful kitty has all sorts of different claws to accomplish this: EM radiation from UV on up, into the gamma region, but not beyond due to matter/energy interchange; relatively "harmless" alpha and beta decay from unstable radionuclides, and, of course, cosmic rays - nearly as fast as speed of light particles ranging from protons up to bare naked uranium nuclei (and maybe even, given relativistic time dilation, the occasional ununseptium nucleus). All of these types are usually brought under the rubric of ionizing radiation. Out in space, beyond low Earth orbit, this ionizing radiation sets a limit of perhaps a three months or so of unshielded human exposure before incapacitation or death.

We are sheltered from most space radiation, and a good thing too, but still almost every element beyond hydrogen can be rendered unstable with a good enough whack from a stray neutron, and so we inescapably exist in a ionizing radiation environment. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Let's start at the beginning: 4.537 billion years ago, a proto-Earth formed out of a rapidly accreting disk of dust and gas, orbiting a proto-Sun. About 150 million years later, that proto-Earth, sometimes dubbed Thera, got rear-ended by a Mars-sized object named Theia. It wasn't a big collision, not a t-bone accident, but it was enough to create the Moon. Point being, given we don't have many rocks from the origin of the Earth, Moon rocks - and meteorites - tells us all we know.

(It should be noted that, when you look at depictions of the formation of the solar system, they give the wrong impression, the same way that those bathtub-drain renderings of wormholes and black holes, or those whole-lotta-empty-space depictions of neurons and synapses in the brain give the wrong impression. Wormholes and black holes do not look like water going down a bathtub drain, and neurons are packed cheek-to-jowl in a very crowded brain. And so it was with our solar system at the beginning, context is left out, namely the nebula which held the stellar nursery of hundreds or thousands of stars of which our Sun was but one).

Again, point being the composition of that cold molecular cloud, at the turbulent compressive front of a spiral arm, determines the type and amount of radionuclides we find on early Earth, and thus, Earth today.

And we don't know much about it. We used to think that a supernova must have gone off nearby to collapse the cloud destined to become the solar system. Now, we think not. (Although, to explain the ratio of aluminum 26 to magnesium 26, perhaps a supernova went off within our stellar nursery some half a billion years before the solar system formed).

We thought that we had identified the cluster of stars we came from. We were wrong. The nearby nebula that astronomers considered a candidate would have had to have flung the sun out with such force that all the planets would have been stripped away.

Lately, there is news that perhaps we have found a sibling star from that distant stellar nursery. If so, then the origin point of our cluster of stars could be anywhere, maybe even on the other side of the galaxy. Maybe someday we can create a "galactic genome" map of all stellar origins using elemental and orbital dynamics data, in which case we might find the origin point of the sun's birth, but in the meantime, we have only conjecture.

Regardless, here's what we can suppose about the conditions for life on the early Earth with respect to radiation. So long as the Sun was contained in the stellar cluster, the solar system would have been bombarded with intense ultraviolet radiation from massive hot blue stars. Earth, in turn, received copious amounts of UV from the young Sun as well. Couple this with a massive amount of unstable actinides (heavy elements in the uranium on up range - including naturally occurring plutonium) and you have an extremely hazardous and unlikely environment in which Life formed and thrived. There was, in fact, so much goddamned radioactivity that it's a wonder anything managed to hold together.

But here is something interesting, and not entirely coincidental about damage from ionizing radiation, Life uses the same repair mechanisms to cope with it as it does for oxygenation. Oxygen getting in where it isn't supposed to be create free radicals and superoxides, both types of compounds extremely obnoxious and unsuitable for cellular metabolism. Oxygen is almost as bad as it's next-door neighbors chlorine and fluorine. When cosmic rays, or suitably high energy EM radiation, tears into molecules and cellular structure like microscopic 50 caliber machine guns, it creates conditions similar to oxygen poisoning.

Coincidence? Maybe, but consider that most radionuclides do not form water soluble compounds in a reducing atmosphere as the early Earth supposedly had. But oxygenated water and air, even only locally, sets up ideal conditions for fission reactions to naturally occur.

Oxygen also produces ozone, which cuts back on deadly UV radiation. So, we have competing threats to life, nuclear radiation, and UV radiation. Life came up with a strategy for the latter in the form of melanin, an ancient and honorable molecule. So, what about the strategy for ionizing radiation?

It is interesting to note that some 3.87 billions years ago, DNA became the standard format for information storage. It is hard not to imagine RNA coopting and regulating proteins in the environment before then, but DNA has a fidelity of information transmission that RNA envies. Oh, true, information replication via RNa is quite robust, but the signal to noise ratio is much lower than for the more fragile DNA format.

So, what gives? What made DNA the preferred medium of transmission? My guess is, all the little cellular machineries needed a lot less physical error checking algorithms for DNA than RNA, and that extra metabolic energies could be devoted to other things, and so organisms using DNA got a bump up in the ratings. That's one part of guess...

But! What else happened around 3.87 billion years ago, class? Could it be the Late Heavy Bombardment? Why, yes. Yes it was. But the heavy bombardment may not have been nearly as heavy as planetary scars suggest. And further, the proposed mechanism - the scattering of Kuiper belt objects and a shift of Neptune's orbit further out due to resonance between Jupiter and Saturn - could have been a symptom of something else going on.

My wild speculation is the bombardment, and the migration of planets in our solar system, was the result of the baby Sun finally leaving its birth nebula, perhaps assisted by the passing of a nearby star or stars. Further, those stars that surrounded the early solar system were the older big blue stars that formed first within the nebula. The intense UV radiation flux from these stars is finally gone, and DNA, which readily absorbs UVB radiation, gets a break from that. It still has to deal with ionizing radiation, and the mechanisms for that must wait until sufficient oxygen accumulates for oxygenation coping strategies to develop. Unless... the oxygenation coping strategies are based upon some older metabolic tricks from the Hadean or early Archean lifestyle, in which case we are back to life thriving under very intense radiation conditions.

Well, there you go, not quite the essay I wanted, but it will have to do.

(Oh, the white people are vampires thing from the Part 1 essay? That was a sloppy inference based upon the fact that animals with less pigmentation seem to thrive better in radioactively contaminated environments.)

#onlyagoodguywithagun

Yesterday, I saw a kid, perhaps in his twenties, who wore a t-shirt that said "I like my guns the way Obama likes his voters - Undocumented".

Well, my first impulse was that I wanted to shoot him in the head.

Or at least call him a fucking idiot, but, nah, what would that have accomplished?

In 1975, two friends and my brother went wilderness camping in Idaho. We stopped at a bar/restaurant in Riggins, ID. When we walked in, all heads turned to look at us and talk stopped. It really was like the Wild West, and all that was missing was for a piano player to stop playing. Well, small town, and everyone was probably there for lunch so e=mc squared, strangers in town. They all checked us out, wrote us off as campers and went back to eating.

Interesting thing. We were all long hair and jeans and baseball caps and tennis shoes. And they were all  cowboy boots and cowboy hats, or John Deere caps, and sidearm pistols, all of them what today would be called open carry. 

And we Hoosier boys didn't think much of it, except for that fact that we stood out and probably should get some guns. One thing sure as hell didn't cross our minds was "Are we safe? Is there a spree killer here that's gonna blast us?"

So, what's happened since 1975? I think a lot of it has to do with the increasing militancy of the NRA. And now, they've created a monster. They wanted to look all reasonable and responsible, and instead, every dumbass who pulls this gunplay shit tars them with their own brush. Oh, boo-hoo, and but I don't how they will unpaint themselves out of this corner.

Especially considering their contention that only a good guy with a gun is so laughably proven wrong with each new incident. The tiny-brained dumbasses of the right wing press refuse to acknowledge the fact that most spree killers are either killed or disarmed by professional law enforcement agents, rather than wannabe Batman vigilantes. In fact, soon after the kid with pepper spray took down the Seattle shooter, the dipshits at the squamous skin cell network tried to spin a story of a deputy sheriff taking out some maniac into a #goodguywithagun story. I mean, the perps name was Marx, there on a drug related charge, so he had to be a leftist, correct? Oh, so sorry, right-wingers, he was one of yours. 

In fact, the one armed person at the Gabby Giffords shooting (the shooter by the way disarmed by UNARMED bystanders) was smart enough to not go for his gun, otherwise he would have shot the hero who disarmed the maniac. And yet, dipshits would rather jack-off to a gun fantasy that real life refuses to provide them.

Gee willikers, what if Abe Lincoln had had a gun? Shut the fuck up.

The thing that worries me is now the rhetoric has shifted so that these creeps wish to paint any of their fellow Americans who disagrees with their brittle worldview as not really an American citizen. It's to the point where Rand Paul has to spread his legs for the Texas GOP (proving once again that the Senate, though not the oldest whorehouse in DC, is still the biggest) with a joke that was supposed to be funny, but still reflected an underlying and ongoing message that he (and other creeps) does not recognize certain of his fellow Americans as REAL Americans. 

...and therefore (this coming from a guy who claims to respect the Constitution) do not enjoy the same constitutional rights as REAL Americans, which, you know, means when push comes to shove means Rand will probably shoot them.

But you know what? Fuck Rand Paul and his allegedly unserious divisive comments, I'm thinking now about the Andy Griffith Show. 

Remember how Andy was a sheriff without a gun, and it was Barney Fife with his single bullet who was the object of ridicule? And actually it was only until the show had gone to color and jumped the shark that they brought up the whole sheriff without a gun angle anyway.

Point being that there were firearms in the Mayberry courthouse tucked away in a gun cabinet, and Andy did occasionally pack heat, but for 99% of the problems he encountered, Sheriff Andy Taylor did not need to solve them with a gun! This whole 2A solution bullshit was crazy talk back then.

Hell, he even got shot at by the likes of various mountain folk, and still didn't arm himself or shoot back because "didn't know it was me, and likely didn't mean it none".

Or, as Andy put it in one episode: "When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he's getting might really be fear. So I don't carry a gun, because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they respect me".

Nowadays there are far too many pipsqueak Barney Fifes swaggering around in America, and not enough Andy Taylors.