Category Archives: Guns

Hot Air

Just Folks

Just in case you’ve forgotten, Bloomington not long ago was a sleepy, small college town. Even though we have developers coming in here hoping to build more hulking monolithic apartment blocks along the burgeoning mini-canyons on Walnut and College avenues, and even though our pop. is fast approaching 100k, we still retain bits of that endearing, quaint, small-town-ness.

To wit: This past week, both Claire McInerney and John Bailey, reporters for NPR-affiliate WFIU have come into the Book Corner to make purchases. Each used a credit card, affording me the opportunity to see who she and he were. Each time, I reacted with pleasant surprise: Oh, you’re the voice from the radio, or some such thing.

Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 7.51.03 AM

McInerney & Bailey

And both Claire and John reacted with such delight that I felt as though I was in a scene from It’s A Wonderful Life. Claire beamed so broadly I thought the ends of her grin might meet at the back of her head. John thanked me repeatedly as if I’d told him his Pulitzer Prize had arrived in my mailbox by mistake.

See, I come from Chicago and even the minor-est media figures there are well-practiced in either canned gratitude or annoyed harrumphing at being recognized. In the big town, expressing joy when someone says they know you through radio, TV, or the newspapers is tantamount to admitting you’re a rube.

Well, you know what? I dig rubes. At least Bloomington’s brand of rube-ishness. It’s a hell of a lot more likable than studied jadedness. I hope we don’t lose that quality for many years to come.

USNS John Lewis

The US Navy is naming its new oil tanker ship after legendary civil rights activist and US Congressbeing from Georgia, John Lewis.

Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 8.41.18 AM

Lewis Gets His Ship

How cool is that? I bet when that Alabama state trooper was clubbing him to the ground, breaking his skull in the process on Bloody Sunday back in 1965, the last thing on Lewis’s mind was the possibility that his country would name a ship after him.

6a011570ccc0b3970b016300e4c281970d

Lewis Gets His Head Busted

Of course, Lewis has always maintained a sense of optimism about and belief in this bizarre holy land. I envy him his fidelity. My occasional frissons about Murrica’s goodness and exceptionalism are fairly balanced out by glumness. We shoot each other up seemingly on a daily basis, our legislative processes are manipulated by banksters and corporatists, too many of us still fear black- and brown-skinned people, and the gap between the rich and the poor widens by the minute.

Yet Lewis still loves America. He appeared at the Indiana University Auditorium last September, along with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, his collaborators on the March series of graphic novels recounting his activist career. You could sense his ardor for this lovable/detestable land from the moment he opened his mouth.

I don’t believe I possess the strength of character and will to believe that Lewis has. Were I he, I’d hold a grudge against a country that broke my head simply because I wanted my people to be able to vote. I wish I were as strong as John Lewis.

Gun Crazy

So, here’s prima facie evidence that I shouldn’t love and forgive this holy land so readily. In the aftermath of President Obama’s heartfelt, sincere sermon regarding our national love affair with (or sexual fixation on) firearms, Seymour State Representative Jim Lucas — a Republican, duh! — has reintroduced a bill to allow people to carry shootin’ irons on state-supported college campuses. He sez he wants his “wife and daughter to be able to protect themselves especially on dark evenings walking alone.”

His bill aims to end state firearms carry licensing as well as to prevent all state agencies from banning guns on their properties or inside their facilities. The bill specifically mentions colleges and universities.

The-Wild-Bunch

The Wild Bunch Goes To College

With all due respect (read: none), I might suggest Lucas, his wife, and his daughter actually attend a college campus and try things like reading books wherein they might learn about the nature of crowds, the physics of ballistic projectiles passing through bodies and inanimate materials, the effect of panic on people who might be tempted to protect a classroom by blasting away at some intruder, among other fascinating and informative areas of study.

In other words, you are one dumb son of a bitch, Jim. Again, with all due respect.

Hot Air

What Cops Do

Really, calling the cops is white people’s security blanket.

Your home gets burglarized, you call the cops. You do this even though you know they’re not gonna put three shifts on the case to track down your flat screen. Still, you feel better when they show up.

You get into an accident, you call the cops. They come by and take your report — something you could have done simply by driving to the nearest police station. When they show up, you feel as though justice will be served as they haul in the idiot who slammed into your hot rod. Which, of course, they don’t do.

Some lunkheads start pounding each other out on the sidewalk, you call the cops. By the time the squad car rolls up, the lunkheads are gone. The cops tell you they’ll keep a lookout for them. Sure.

The cops are there, mainly, to hold your hand. They make you feel safe. They give you the illusion that the scary, chaotic incident you just witnessed or experienced is really under control, their control — your friends, the men in blue. Now you can go back to sleep.

It’s not that way for people living in black slums. Most residents of tough, poor, inner-city neighborhoods are afraid to open their doors to the cops. This was brought home dramatically Saturday when Chicago police, responded to a call about an emotionally disturbed young man raising hell in his father’s apartment on the city’s West Side. The young man, Quintonio LeGrier, was running down the stairs of the apartment building while carrying a baseball bat when one or more of the responding officers opened fire, hitting the college student with six slugs. A seventh shot took the life of a 55-year-old mother of five, Bettie Jones, who’d opened her apartment door to see what all the fuss was about.

Screen Shot 2015-12-30 at 11.06.33 AM

Bettie Jones

The kid LeGrier had lived a horseshit life. He’d been abandoned by both parents and was the victim of physical abuse. He’d recently lost a close foster brother to a random shooting. He’d also had a very recent history of troubles, allegedly being involved in three separate scuffles at Northern Illinois University where he was studying electrical engineering. He’d experienced alarming mood swings in recent months.

quintonio-legrier-e1451162268771

Quintonio LeGrier

The crisis called for caring professionals with special training in handling emotionally disturbed individuals. Problem was the only people who came to the West Side apartment house were cops carrying loaded firearms, cops whose first impulse was to squeeze their triggers.

What is it that would cause a cop to open fire on an emotionally disturbed young man carrying a baseball bat? Other than his skin color, natch. And it really doesn’t matter if the shooting officers were white or black, the racist culture within the police department of Chicago and pretty much every force around this holy land trumps racial brotherhood. Black cops are just as petrified of crazy niggers as white cops are today. Because, really, that’s all young black men are anymore — to a certain segment of society.

Bettie Jones’s childhood friend Jaqueline Walker had a question for the cops in the aftermath of the shootings: “Why you got to shoot first and ask questions later?”

Quintonio LeGrier’s mother posed her own heart-breaking query about the cops in the wake of her son’s death. “What are they trained for? Just to kill?”

Hot Air

War Birds

Niccolò Machiavelli knew it as far back as the 15th Century, yet today’s leaders, apparently, remain unaware:

Wars begin when you will but they do not end when you please.

Even though marching into the Middle East to kick the living crap out of the various fundamentalist loons like ISIL, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and whoever else believes they’re doing the great work of god seems like a quick and easy answer, it won’t be. Unless the chickenhawks of the Republican Party who blathered the other night about carpet bombing cities, sand glowing in the dark, hunting down and utterly destroying terrorists, and other masturbatorial fantasies want to fight their pretty little wars forever, the smart move right now is to stay the hell out of the morass.

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 11.43.48 AM

Easy Peasy!

I’ve changed my mind since the early days of ISIL. At first I was all for pounding those religio-psychos into the dirt. But it ain’t gonna happen. It can’t happen. War is never simple or easy or even final.

Come to think of it, maybe Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio et al do indeed want everlasting war. It’s becoming clearer by the minute that they and too many other legislators serve, more than any other constituency, their arms-manufacturing, defense-contracting sugar daddies. War is great business.

Sticks And Stones

University of Chicago Press editor Renaldo Migaldi points out a CounterPunch piece from a few years back that utterly belies the assertion that the citizenry needs guns to protect itself from a tyrannical gov’t. Author David Swanson writes:

There is no correlation between personal liberties in a nation and its gun ownership. Campaigns of resistance to tyranny are more likely to succeed, and that success is more likely to be lasting when those campaigns are nonviolent.

And by nonviolent, Swanson means w/o shootin’ irons. Swanson cites the revolts in Serbia and Egypt that toppled rulers without shots being fired. He reminds us that the East Timorians attempted rebellion for years by armed means but did not succeed until they laid down their pieces.

Simple, honest citizens carrying guns flat out don’t win shooting contests against their gov’t overlords. It didn’t happen in the New World English colonies. It didn’t happen in the “War of Northern Aggression” (where the rebels considered the Union an oppressive force). It didn’t happen in Tsarist Russia. It didn’t happen in Cuba. It didn’t happen in Egypt. It didn’t happen anywhere. Any nation where a rebellion occurred successfully, it was either another country or group of countries who came to the aid of the rebels (the French, for instance, in the American Colonies) or the tyrants were simply replaced by an equally bloodthirsty gang of bullies (the Stalinists or the Castro bunch).

Mass street movements endorsed by pretty much all segments of society save the power elite are the only successful revolutionary movements that work. And by work I mean kick out the despotic bastards and replace them with more reasonable bosses. Think Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution. Think Ghandi’s Swaraj.

The government — any government — will be able to outgun you. Thinking you can hold the gov’t off with sidearms and long guns is fairy tale thinking. Now, if the citizenry were able to amass billions of dollars’ worth of armored vehicles, artillery, ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction, maybe there’d be a case for a fair fight. But John Wayne or John Rambo riding in on a horse to save the republic from malevolent bureaucrats is a conceit that works only in movies. Childish movies, I may add.

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 11.36.19 AM

Pick The Winner

The right to bear arms in order to protect against tyranny is a canard cooked up by lobbyists and pimps for gun manufacturers to ensure no one will ever impede their cash flow. So far it’s a strategy that works — at least in this holy land.

Home For The Holidays

The exodus of Indiana University students from our fair megalopolis will be complete after today. We’ll be able to listen to the birds chirp w/o the interfering din of kids using the term like every other word. We’ll walk our fair streets safe in the knowledge that some tinted-glass monster SUV won’t come careening around the corner to flatten us. Christmas break is the most wonderful time of the year. Well, that and spring and summer breaks.

By the time the students return next month, there’ll be changes at The Pencil’s new back office, Hopscotch Coffee. (BTW: Nothing against Bob and Kari Costello’s Soma Coffee House which served admirably as field HQ for this mighty communications colossus from 2009 to this past summer but it was time for a change of scenery.) Jane Kupersmith’s and Jeff Grant’s year-plus-old caffeine station on the B-Line Trail at Dodds St. has been doing such land-office biz since opening its doors that they’ve been forced to take over the storefront next door. Workers are pounding and sawing on the other side of the wall where I sit and type even now (thanks for the headache, boys!) Kupersmith showed me her construction calendar this AM and it looks as though work’ll be finished by Friday, January 8th. Meanwhile, customers will be able to gas up and pound on their keyboards in the original space even as those workers break through the north wall of the place the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Sweet News

Speaking of hot entrepreneurs, how about that Joni McGary and her Lucky Guy Bakery?

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 12.25.01 PM

Better Living Through Chocolate

While I was away from these precincts finishing up the Charlotte Zietlow book, Joni was busy setting up a brownie empire stretching from here to Indy. Pretty much every fashionable food joint and shop in our town is carrying Joni’s goods. She’s been putting mileage on her car peddling her wares in the big city as well as smaller burghs surrounding B-town as well.

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 12.21.42 PM

Walnut Brownies Ready For Packaging

I thoroughly endorse Joni’s brownies, even if my buzz-kill doctor insists I cut down on my intake of sugary substances. What do doctors know anyhow?

 

 

Hot Air

Kill Joy

If anything of value can emerge from the South Carolina church shooting Wednesday, it’s the sheer entertainment we’ve gotten from the Wingnut Right’s reaction to it.

I mean, imagine how flummoxed the Fox News et al crowd has to be over this terrorist attack. Nine blacks (the American equivalent of one-half a 22-year-old suburban blonde) are killed by a white boy gun fondler whose beef against them is they represent the bestial horde that’s raping Cauc. women and “taking over” this holy land. Honestly, in the bizarro world of the Far Right, is this even a crime? Hell, the porcelain dolls who pass for news commentators on Fox and other ultra-conservative media outlets are hammering away at these grievances every day anyway.

So, while the sane among us were decrying this white supremacist attack, the Fox/Far Right people were dithering over its meaning. Golly no, it wasn’t a racial attack, a number of them bleated; it was…, um, er, more of an attack on Christianity — yeah, that’s the ticket! And the little loon who pulled the trigger wasn’t enabled by our devil-may-care gun laws; in fact, some “wits” proffered, the whole shebang wouldn’t even have gone down if the parishioners had been packing heat themselves, as should all god-fearing, Murrica-loving, primarily pale-skinned citizens.

Fox News

For nearly two full days, the Goebbels wing of the know-nothing crowd seemed nauseatingly (albeit explicably) muted about the attack. That is, until this AM when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley finally found a reason to shout about it.

Perhaps it occurred to her as she showered. I know many of my own epiphanies come upon me as I lather up. However it happened, Haley realized she and the state could kill the kid.

How exciting! Haley announced that, goddamn yes, the sovereign state of So. Car. would indeed seek the death penalty when the kid goes on trial.

Haley

A Ray Of Sunshine

See? Now the Fox-ers and their ilk can get all het up over this…, er, um, little incident.

Hot Air

The Police Are A Leftist Tool — Who Knew?

[Just a reminder: The Pencil is on hiatus right now as Big Mike — me — devotes time and energy to a fabulous book project, the details of which will be forthcoming as publishers are sufficiently fawned over and contracts are signed. Stay tuned for news on that front.

Meanwhile, I’ll be putting up little tidbits on occasion, just to keep the circuitry of this communications colossus in working order. I expect to be back telling the world what it ought to do full time within weeks or a couple of months at the most. Try your best to survive without my inerrant pontifications until then, okay? Okay.]

Sometimes I don’t even know what the stereotypes are that we liberals and progressives are supposed to live up to. So, I couldn’t let this pass without comment.

I was enjoying a heated verbal fistfight on social media yesterday, the gist of which was Isn’t it crazy that certain voices on the Right are blaming President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Mayor De Blasio for the assassination of those two police officers in New York Saturday? Natch, Right Wing commenters got all huffy and doubled down on the canard, going so far as to suggest Obama et al secretly want to destroy America, etc. You know, the usual boilerplate demonizations and mad pronouncements.

Anyway, the TKO came when one Conservative guy who’d already seemed ready to pop a vein decided to set everybody straight. Look, he said, we wouldn’t even need the police if it wasn’t for you soft-assed, dependent Lefties! Yeah, because if everybody had a gun there’d be no need for police. But you Libs have to have big daddy government do everything for you, up to and including protect your home and family.

Big Gun

Who Needs The Cops?

So, there it is. Now we’re responsible for the police. Who, BTW, seem to be shooting up everybody and everything on our side of the fence of late. I guess we love punishment.

Hot Air

Black Helicopters Take Out Bambis

So, the White Buffalo outfit whacked some deer Monday night and Tuesday morning — apparently. The City’s being closed-mouth about the operation. Do not enter signs were put up at the last possible moment, I suppose so that culling protesters wouldn’t flock to the Griffy Lake area and perhaps catch an arrow or even a slug in the gluteus maximus.

Griffy Lake

A couple of trucks from the Exotic Feline Rescue Center and the Hoosier Hills Food Bank were seen parked in the vicinity, meaning some big cats and unwealthy humans’ll be dining on venison soonly.

I can report the spread of a conspiracy theory. One woman has publicized a story she got from her nephew that the FBI was involved in the cull and some 150 critters were assassinated. The nephew also told his aunt that each deer was gutted on the spot and the guts were left for coyotes to munch on.

Folks, it ain’t just the wingnut right that’s got its head screwed on backward.

Risky Business

Have you caught the news from So. Korea that the ferry line CEO whose vessel capsized in April, killing 304 people, has been thrown in prison for ten years? Not only that, seven other company officials were given  prison sentences of two to six years. And another couple of guys got suspended sentences for participating in the cover-up.

Sewol Disaster

The Sewol Disaster

The poor bastards. I bet they wished they’d have run their ferry company here in America. In which case, following a similar disaster, at least three of them would have been hired by Fox News as shipping and/or business analysts. The rest would probably have gotten their own reality TV shows.

I guess the South Koreans just don’t understand business.

McKim’s Missives

I don’t know where he finds the time to do it but Monroe County Council member Geoff McKim puts out an absolutely indispensable blog covering the nuts and bolts of local gov’t. His IN53 – MOCOGOV site is a neat example of elected officials at least giving the impression that they give a good goddamn about you and me, the voters.

McKims

Geoff McKim & Brood

For instance, a post this week addresses  $87,575 in proposed spending on a couple of maintenance vehicles for the Monroe County Parks and Recreation Dept. so it can take care of its hiking trails. Admittedly, that’s not anywhere near as sexy a news story as, say, Barack Obama’s birth in Kenya or some Tea Party pol professing that rape babies are god’s gift.

What we fail to recognize all too often is that these are the real issues in government. Spending a few thou here and a few thou there is what council members, representatives, state senators, and other beauty contestant winners argue about and do every day.

This Means War

It’s sort of comforting to know that Phyllis Schlafly is still on the case. The superhero fighter against the Equal Rights Amendment back in the ’70s and, before that, a prime mover in the birth of the neo-conservative movement in this holy land, she’s got some thoughts on Barack Obama’s immigration speech last night.

Even before the Prez issued his exec. order granting temporary amnesty for certain unauthorized aliens to remain here, ol’ Phyll told the World Net Daily folks that he was about to embark on a course of action as shocking and devastating to our sacred republic as the attack on Ft. Sumter or Pearl Harbor.

Man! I munna start digging a bomb shelter in the back yard this very morning.

US Civil War

Amnesty = Unspeakable Slaughter

Schlafly referred, of course, to the opening salvo of the Civil War — and, golly gee, we might be in for another such bloodbath because of Obama and his amnesties:

Schlafly, like fellow conservative luminary Richard Viguerie, speculates that an executive amnesty might touch off a sort of modern-day conflagration.

The truth of the matter is these Right Wing loons are pretty tumescent over the prospect of another Civil War. Witness, for instance, the run on St. Louis-area gun shops in the lead-up the the Michael Brown killing grand jury report.

Y’know, if ever I have questions about the rightness and efficacy of being at least somewhat allied with the Democratic Party, I remember the other party boasts deep thinkers like Schlafly and Viguerie. All of a sudden I say to myself, Hey man, those Dems’ll do.

Hot Air

Revolting

People occasionally bleat, “If we didn’t have guns, we’d still be colonies of England.”

To which I might respond, “So what?”

Tread/Snake

What has become the United Kingdom is a parliamentary, constitutional republic. That’s pretty much what the United States is now, only without a bunch of pretentious, bloated, old, white peers shouting Here, here at each other. In this holy land, we have a bunch of pretentious, bloated, old, white self-proclaimed populists shouting Gimme, gimme at each other.

So yeah, maybe without guns we’d still be subjects of a useless, purposeless crown. How is that worse than being subjects of an obscenely rich plutocracy of transnational corporation CEOs?

The people of Scotland the day before yesterday voted by a healthy margin to remain under the ceremonial thumb of the Queen of England. Prior to the vote, there’d been a loud, seemingly wildly popular movement for independence. Scottish independence has not been, of course, the only mass call for autonomy in this mixed-up world in recent years. There’ve been successful independence movements in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Brunei, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Latvia, Belarus, Slovenia, Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova, Macedonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and even the Federated States of Micronesia, all since the late 1970s.

South Sudan

South Sudanese Soldiers Celebrate Independence

Each of the aforementioned new nations became proudly independent, often at the cost of hundreds of thousands of its citizens’ lives and limbs. Not all newly independent states achieved their autonomy through the use of ammo, but most did. Very often, other, much more powerful nations gleefully assisted those seeking sovereignty if only to weaken or humiliate the countries the rebels were fighting. In fact, we would not be the United States were it not for the help of our friends from France. And the Confederate States of America might be a thing today if only Great Britain and France had pitched in to the Southern cause during the Civil War.

Funny thing is, it’s hard to glean just exactly what each of the proud, new independent nations gained, besides pride, of course, a new flag, and a national cemetery bursting with fresh customers.

In any case, the Scots opted not to fire guns at the Brits. They voted, huzzah. And the independents lost. Generally in such a case, there’d be a wailing and gnashing of teeth from the losing side, followed by the sound of guns and bombs. That’s the way, we’re taught, independence works. You try to talk your way to autonomy and then you blow the other guy’s brains out.

It hasn’t worked that way in Scotland. In fact, here’s what Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish independent movement said after Thursday’s vote:

It is important to say that our referendum was an agreed and consented process and Scotland has by a majority decided not at this stage to become an independent country.

I accept that verdict of the people and I call on all of Scotland to follow suit in accepting the democratic verdict of the people of Scotland.

Salmond

Salmond To The UK: You Win

What the hell kind of revolutionary is that? Salmond resigned his post as Scotland’s First Minister this morning. What a wuss! Why didn’t he go down with guns blazing?

Perhaps it’s because he’s a civilized human being.

One of the very few in this crazy, mixed-up world.

Bloomingfoods Union

If you support the right of workers at Bloomingfoods to at least consider unionizing, here’s a Democracy for America petition for you to sign:

Petition

Click Image To Access Petition

Lotus Fest Saturday

Here’s your Lotus Fest 2104 lineup for tonight:

Venues

  • Buskirk Chumley Theater 114 E. Kirkwood Ave.
  • First United Methodist Church 219 E. 4th St.
  • First Christian Church 205 E. Kirkwood Ave.
  • First Presbyterian Church 221 E. 6th St.
  • Ivy Tech Community College Tent 6th St. between Walnut & College
  • Old National Bank/Soma Tent 4th & Grant streets
  • The Bluebird 216 N. Walnut St.
  • 3rd St. Park 331 S. Washington St.

Saturday, September 20th

● Noon to 5pm: Lotus in the Park 3rd St. Park

∙ 12:15pm: Kaia

∙ 1pm: Banda Magda

Banda Magda

Banda Magda

∙ 1pm: Radha Lakshmi

∙ 1:45pm: Arga Bileg

∙ 2:30pm: Sancocho Music & Dance Collage

∙ 3:15pm: Lotus Dickey Song Workshop

∙ 4pm: The Revelers

● 6:30pm: FullSet Buskirk Chumley Theater

● 6:30pm: Arga Bileg First United Methodist Church

● 7pm: Banda Magda Bluebird

● 7:15pm: Catherine MacLellan First Christian Church

● 7:15pm: Tsuumi Sound System Ivy Tech Community College Tent

● 7:15pm: Las Cafeteras Old National Bank/Soma Tent

● 7:30pm: Nagata Shachu Buskirk Chumley Theater

● 7:50pm: Kaia First United Methodist Church

● 8:50pm: The Revelers Bluebird

● 8:50pm: Vanesa Aibar & Company Buskirk Chumley Theater

● 8:50pm: Derek Gripper First Christian Church

● 8:50pm: Nora Jane Struthers & the Party Line First United Methodist Church

● 8:50pm: Mames Babegenush Ivy Tech Community College Tent

● 8:50pm: Aurelio Old National Bank/Soma Tent

● 10:25pm: Emel Mathlouthi Buskirk Chumley Theater

Mathlouthi

Emel Mathlouthi

● 10:25pm: Singing for the Planets First Christian Church

● 10:25pm: FullSet First United Methodist Church

● 10:25pm: Orkesta Mendoza Ivy Tech Community College Tent

● 10:25pm: Movits! Old National Bank/Soma Tent

Hot Air

Just The Facts, Ma’am

Loyal Pencillistas know I’m a defender of Genetically Modified Organisms, AKA GMOs. That puts me in a distinct minority in this food fetishist town. People here know me as a liberal-bordering-on-radical and so are aghast when they discover I don’t see GMOs as the tools of the devil.

They say: But what about Monsanto? To which I reply: Sure, Monsanto’s about as evil as, say, Halliburton or Academi (the former Blackwater.) Monsanto makes tons of dough on its patented GMO seeds and uses the most bullying tactics possible to make certain every farmer, every gardener, hell, every kid who plays in the dirt buys its product. Plus, Monsanto actively squashes competition, infringes on free speech, impedes investigations, harasses critics, and literally writes laws that legislators on its payroll can then obediently introduce and pass.

Monsanto is, in short, a bad guy.

Newcomb/Reuters

A Monsanto Corn Sprout [photo by Peter Newcomb/Reuters]

The ways Monsanto is forcing GMOs upon the world may be despicable but that that doesn’t mean their new species per se necessarily spell the end of civilization. That’s my position.

That said, it was my good fortune to meet Dr. Martha Crouch, better known as Marti, at the Book Corner Monday. “Hey,” I nearly shouted as I read the name on her credit card, “you’re you!”

“Indeed I am,” she replied, smartly.

Crouch

Marti Crouch, Surrounded By Green, Naturally

I explained how I’ve heard about her through countless folks who’ve taken me to task for defending GMOs. I then asked her to educate me. “I’d be more than happy,” I said, “to change my mind if you’d take the trouble to persuade me — and I buy your argument.”

Marti Crouch is the “real thing” — so sez Pencillista Nancy Hiller. She’s earned herself a national rep. Here, for instance, is a description from a short piece about her appearing in Mother Jones magazine back in 2000:

Martha Crouch, a biology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and once a pioneering biotechnologist, studied her entire life to reach the pinnacle of her profession. She earned a Ph.D. in developmental biology at Yale before landing at Indiana University, where she teaches and once ran a lab dedicated to cutting edge plant research. In 1990, her lab made the cover of The Plant Cell, the leading journal in the field of plant molecular biology. Instead of launching Crouch into professional nirvana, however, the article marked the end of her research career.

Crouch had tenure and was well-known in her field. But she had awakened one day to the realization that her research was being co-opted by corporations which hoped to apply the science for profit. Further, the manner in which those firms used her discoveries was destroying the natural processes that attracted Crouch to the study of biology in the first place.

In the piece, Crouch is quoted as saying, “You are basically treating the agricultural environment as if it was a factory where you are making televisions or VCRs.”

She’s no longer teaching science because she stopped doing research (IU looked askance at her public denigration of the commercial exploitation of her research.) If anyone can sway me, she’ll be the one.

Marti Crouch has sent me the first of what promises to be a long series of info-packed articles and tracts. It’s an excellent introduction to GMOs from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Consider it GMOs 101. Here it is.

UCS

Click Image For Full Article

Even if you think you know all you need to know about GMOs, you should read these pieces. Hey, you may learn something! I know I’m hoping to.

Let the conversation begin.

White Fright

h/t to both Chuck Rogers and Jerry Boyle for this one:

From ValleyWag/Gawker

Click Image For Full Story

Need I even tell you how much this disgusts me?

Wahoo, Drew & Cool Kat

Congrats to Drew Daudelin, the new news reader/producer over at WFIU.

Teller/Daudelin

Daudelin (r) With Teller of Penn & Teller

I met Drew at WFHB where he volunteered five days a week to edit each Daily Local News script. The kid was good, I’m telling’ ya. He brought the writing level up dramatically while he was there.

Now, apparently, he’s making real dough. Good for him.

You may also have caught Kat Carlton reading the news during local breaks on Morning Edition the last few months as well. She, too, prepped at WFHB, in fact writing up news stories right next to me on several occasions. Just watching the way she carried herself, I could tell she was going places.

Carlton/IPM

Carlton

That Alycin Bektesh, WFHB’s redoubtable News Director, she’s got a nose for talent, no? A thought: Maybe WFIU should become a major contributor to WFHB, considering the latter is now the talent pool for the former.

Criminally Cynical

Remember the teenaged girl in Texas who survived the massacre of her family a few weeks ago? The one who gave a heartfelt speech at her family’s memorial? The latest poster child for gun sanity?

Stay Funeral

Cassidy Stay (center) At Her Family’s Funeral

Her name was (and is) Cassidy Stay. The shooter, if you don’t recall, was searching for his ex-wife and held her sister’s family hostage until they told him where she was. They refused to and as a result were executed, Nazi-style, with bullets to the backs of their heads. Cassidy survived the carnage.

At the memorial Cassidy (who played dead during the gunman’s rampage) said:

I really like Harry Potter. In “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” Dumbledore says, “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.” I know that my mom, dad, Bryan, Emily, Becca and Zach are in a much better place and that I’ll be able to see them again one day. Thank you all for coming and for showing support for me and my family. Stay strong.

Gun control advocates, naturally, lauded Cassidy to the skies and asked, for the zillionth time, why we have to endure yet another firearms atrocity.

Just as naturally, gun nuts on the far end of that particular spectrum didn’t look as kindly upon the teen girl and those who hero-ized her. In fact, a certain number of people believe Cassidy never was shot at all and that her family was killed in that old reliable trick of the jack-booted gov’t, the false flag job. Not only that, the gun control crowd, acc’d’g to this train of “thought,” works hand in hand with purported “victims” of gun crimes merely to make money. Want detail? Check this vid out. It just may be the most cynical thing you’ve ever seen or heard:

A reminder, kids: There aren’t two sides to every question.

Hot Air

Changes

A little house wren whispers in my ear that the debate is ongoing over at Indiana University Press regarding whether or not the outfit should cease publishing actual books.

Should the Press decide to quit the paper and ink racket, it would confine itself exclusively to electronic publishing. The bird asks, “Whaddya think?”

“As long as there still are people who grew up with hard copy books, there’ll be a demand for them,” I sez. “As soon as those generations die off, that’ll be the end of the printing press.”

The bird nods and says no more.

People tell me it’ll be a sad day when there are no more actual books. Of course, people probably said 30 years ago, “It’ll be a sad day when my VCR isn’t half the size of a city bus.”

Vintage VCR

Target Practice

NPR reported this AM that Prez Barack H.O. has been making his security forces jittery of late by opting to walk hither and yon in the nation’s capital.

From NPR Morning Edition

Out In The Open

After five and a half years of voluntary incarceration in the White House, Obama, like many another C-in-C before him has grown weary of living in the gilded cage. The report quotes Harry Truman, f’rinstance, as referring to the White House as “the great white jail.”

It was a cute story, characterizing BHO as a bear strolling around in search of food. The first reaction that hit me, though, was less than cute: There are at very least a few hundred Open Carry fanatics and, worse, clandestine gun-toters who right now are walking around in a state of tumescence over the golden opportunities Obama’s idylls are presenting them.

Love Guns

Speaking of this holy land’s erotic fixation on shootin’ irons, my academic historian hero/man-crush Rick Perlstein writes in Salon that the gun industry’s recent triumphs over decency and common sense are more than just a clear and present danger to innocents who wish only to go to a movie, sit in a classroom, or have lunch in a mall food court. The victory of the Wayne LaPierre gang over humanity actually erodes the primacy of law and may actually be an irreparable breakdown of, well, these civilized United States.

To wit: The Cliven Bundy ranch showdown in which the feds backed down in the faced of armed lunatics means that Open Carry and other gun eroticists actually beat the law as well as the entire structure of the nation. He writes, “When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.”

Perlstein finds an unlikely villain in the gun madness that has overtaken Murrica — the Democrats. My own party (and his, he acknowledges) once stood in stark opposition to unfettered access to guns. The Dems represented what I like to think of as a majority opinion that guns should be controlled. And, just prior to the Age of Reagan, it was conventional wisdom that people who dug automatic weapons, called for unlimited access to ammunition, and fantasized strutting around town armed to the teeth were sick in the head.

Once upon a time, Democratic presidential candidates robustly argued for gun control — that, as the party platform put it in 1980 (the year the NRA made its first ever presidential endorsement, of Ronald Reagan), “handguns simplify and intensify violent crime”; Democrats support “enactment of federal legislation to strengthen the presently inadequate regulations over the manufacture, assembly, distribution, and possession of handguns.” Note no mention of machine guns, because back then the notion that there should be no barrier to their ownership would have seemed self-evidently ridiculous to most reasonable observers.

The Dems, though, lost a key election or two and decided to drop the whole gun control idea in hopes of wooing Southern white men. A courtship, BTW, that was never consummated.

Open Carry

He Never Would Be Dem Material

Sometimes, sometimes…, no, most of the time, I feel not happy at all to identify myself as a Dem. Then again, what choice do I have?

Chilling Effect

Sure, George Will made an ass of himself when he bleated that women dig identifying themselves as rape victims. He wrote earlier this month in the Washington Post op-ed page that colleges and universities, essentially, are teaching young women that it’s cool to have been raped and Commie/abortionist Washington is encouraging this brand of thought. Will opined our institutions of higher educ. are making “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges.”

That, my friends, is the reasoning of a jerk.

Will

Jerk

The news came last week that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will no longer carry Will’s screeches from the WashPo syndicate. “The column,” the paper’s eds. wrote, “was offensive and inaccurate.” So, for all intents and purposes, the Po-Dis fired him.

I suppose that’s their right but it makes me uncomfortable when I hear of an opinion columnist losing her/his job for writing something controversial. Even if it is idiotic.

Hot Air

Fresh Meat

Now that the city o’Bloomington has inked a deal with White Buffalo, Inc. to cull the deer pop. around Griffy Lake, I will give the plan The Electron Pencil seal of approval.

That’s because the contract between the wildlife management outfit and our parks board calls for the unlucky critters — up to 100 of them can be whacked from late fall through February 2015 — to be processed for distribution at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. As long as hungry folk are going to be able to make midnight snacks out of deer sausage sandwiches, I’m cool with the whole idea.

White Buffalo, Inc.

White Buffalo Staffers At Work

And this despite the fact that White Buffalo has gussied itself up using ripped off Native American mythical iconography. The company’s website proudly proclaims:

Native American legend tells of the White Buffalo Woman who offered a sacred pipe to a Dakota tribe, explaining that the pipe symbolized that all things were connected. Its purpose, and ours through educational efforts, was to remind people of their tie to nature, what nature gives and what should be done in return.

I suppose a co. would have to dress itself up in quasi-insulting Noble Savage togs if it’s in the biz of assassinating cute little deer. Pretending you’re following in the great tradition of our proto-American predecessors makes the messy business of shooting Bambi in the brain a tad more palatable to the general public.

In any case, nobody would argue the fact that the deer are aggravating the bejesus out of residents around B-town. In fact, some dear friends of this correspondent and The Loved One are aghast that we put out corn and salt licks for deer. They claim the deer eat up all their flowers and vegetables and we are aiding and abetting them in these nefarious acts. I counter that they ought to plant something the deer don’t care for. Problem solved, no?

I’m not terribly eager to see a deer shot down in the prime of life. But as long as its meat feeds those less fortunate than I am, I’m all in.

Guns

Speaking of The Loved One, she brought up a compelling scenario last night during our ride home from downtown B.

“What are they going to say,” she observed, referring to the NRA and other gun fetishists, “when somebody shoots up a gun show?”

You know, I’d never thought of that. Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the folk who cuddle with Glocks always screech whenever some armed psychotic opens fire in a school or a Wendy’s. If more of us carried artillery, they shriek, we’d all feel safer.

In fact, the thankfully-almost-forgotten Joe the Plumber grunted on his website that the father of one of the people killed Friday in the Isla Vista shooting, the one who blamed the NRA and chicken-hearted pols for the spate of shoot-’em-ups these days, was just tragically and ignorantly wrong.

[I bet you didn’t know J the P even had a website. He does and I wish I didn’t know it.]

Asshole

No Real Joe

Joe the Plumber (his name’s not Joe and he’s not a plumber, but what’s a few facts among Me Party-ists?) gurgled and snorted about how it’s a daddy-o’s duty to protect his litter with guns in every pocket as well as an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. The implication being the father of the aforementioned victim was a pussy for not accompanying his son while bandalero’d.

The father, his face distorted by anguish, had cried, “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live?”

Joe the Plumber’s retort? “As harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

My guess? Joe’s nightly ejaculation into his gun barrel was of an extremely copious nature after he wrote that.

Back to T-Lo’s original point. What will Pan troglodytes like J the P say when a sick bastard mows down a few gun enthusiasts at the next NRA convention or any of the countless big gun shows around the nation? It’s going to happen, right? Gun-ophiles obviously count among their number a healthy population of borderline lunatics. And they carry guns. And no one at the convention or any of those shows will think twice when they see a guy walk in with two rifles and a hip belt full of pistols. And then that guy will open fire, dropping a few or even a few dozen gun-ists before someone drops him.

No doubt they’ll crow that the guy’s kill count would have been far greater had they not all been caressing firearms at the moment of his outburst. The fact that the convention hall floor will resemble nothing so much as a meat processing plant will seem to escape their notice.

I’ve got bad news for The Loved One: I think we already know what they’ll say.

%d bloggers like this: