One more time, let's review this

The best way to respond to extreme idiocy is probably to ignore it.  You can also try combatting it with facts and logic, if you're in the mood to beat your head against the wall repeatedly.

What you do not do, unless you want to prove the point that you are a shitty human being, is condone sexual violence against the person who has offended you:

Now, I can read that just fine, but Imma quote it for you in case you can't; I did have to zoom out to get the whole thing in the screen shot.  Mr. Resh here said "I bet you her mind will change in .0 seconds when she's about to unwillingly ride the train in an alley while her man is stuck like a pig bleeding Layin (sic) on the ground."  And he was proud to say that publicly.

Nor was he the only one:

That fine fellow, it is worth noting, has produced a son.  One can only hope Junior has a wee bit more sense.

I'm sure there are others, but I am honestly not going to dig through the cesspool of comments on the photo to share them with you.

Let me make it clear: I think the sentiment expressed in the graphic is, at best, stupidly naïve.  It is utter bullshit to challenge a man's masculinity over a weapon.  But you know what?  At least half the dudes in the comments are doing the same goddamned thing:

Y'all, I didn't cut and paste.  Those were all three in a row.  The right rebuttal to "Real men don't carry guns" is not, I repeat is not "YA THEY DO I'M A MAN 'CAUSE I HAVE GUNS AND I WANT TO FUCK THEM."

(Do I really need to tell you there were plenty of "that's gay" and "get in the kitchen and make me a sammich" comments too?  No?  Well, I did anyway.)

Just goes to show there are violent dumbfucks on both sides of this conversation.  Let's shut ours up, okay?

Just because I can

This is one of my favorite Waylon Jennings songs (as I told my husband back when he was barely my boyfriend, my favorite-favorite Waylon song is "whichever one is currently playing"):



This is one of those songs I always liked as a child but never really knew the name of.

Hearing this song and looking for a video of it on YouTube reminded me of a post I made earlier this year.  The photo in this post certainly did its job ("And yet, there is so much ambient testosterone in that picture that just looking at it while typing this post up practically guarantees that my unborn child will be male.")

So, if you're aiming to have a son, apparently looking at Waylon & Johnny Cash together is a great idea.  

*facepalm*

One of my dumber liberal Facebook friends just posted this:

I'm guessing she's never been on a military base.  I have been on quite a few, more times than I can count, and so the lies are obvious to me.  (And yes, I pointed them out.)

Even without that experience though, the fact that this is--to put it nicely--inaccurate as fuck should be obvious to anyone who remembers how to breathe.  I realize it happened over three years ago, and maybe Progressives have memories that are just that short, but damn.  Hasan shot up a room full of unarmed people, and as always was stopped by someone with a gun.

This is what we're up against.  Willful ignorance and stupidity, coupled with an utter lack of critical thinking skills.  I'm not certain if the chick who shared this (who is, for the record, the gal who started blathering about Obamacare when I pointed out the fallacy of Obama's purported support of gay marriage) is really so stupid that she thinks Hasan shot at armed people and they all stood around picking their asses or she just doesn't think, but neither reflects well upon her.

Oh yeah, *that* makes me feel better

NEISD (the school district the girls are now in, for those of you outside of SA) is quite fond of sending letters via e-mail for pretty much everything.  We got this one Friday:

That big paragraph, in case you can't read it:

This is a stark reminder of the importance of our safety procedures and our check-in and screening processes for all visitors to campuses.  NEISD has a secure protocol with solid procedures in place to handle situations of this nature.  I emphasize the importance, however, that they must be followed--it takes us all working together to help keep our campuses safe.

Well, golly gee, I feel better now!  If only that school in Connecticut had had a "secure protocol" instead of a big sign out front saying WELCOME CRAZED GUNMEN; EASY TARGETS!

Wait, what?  It didn't? The hell you say.

For obvious reasons, I am not going to go into detail about my daughters' school safety procedures and campus layout.  Suffice to say the school office is well-hidden even from visitors trying to do the whole "report to the office first" thing, and that anyone will ill intent could probably murder his way through half the school while the other half remained unaware.  It is not a secure campus in the slightest, for all the pretty (?) fences and gates.  I have seen absolutely zero evidence that any other school in this city--NEISD or not--is any more secure, if we are speaking in terms of actual might-help security.  Even Douglass elementary, which my girls attended when we lived on the East Side and which was locked with a door buzzer, wasn't secure.  All you had to do there was press a button and they'd unlock the door.  Weapons of most sorts are fairly easily concealed, and it's not like they asked questions of visitors or that someone couldn't easily lie their way inside.  (If you say something along the lines of "I'm here to pick up Mike Gonzalez" in this city, you have a better than 50/50 chance of being right, and you never even had to get that detailed.)

So, really, what's the point of this sort of thing?  I would like to think Dr. Gottardy isn't really so stupid as to believe his own words here.  The alternative is that he is telling parents what he knows is most likely to reassure them, and I can actually get behind that.

What I can't get behind is parents actually believing it.  And yet, I know they do.  Facebook this weekend was host to a few posts about parents checking with their kids to be sure they knew the drill for this sort of things, and being happy that they did.  I suppose it's tempting to lie to yourself that hiding will make things better but it won't, and it is stupid and dangerous to pretend otherwise.  Instead of advocating for changes which might actually make a difference, far too many parents are crawling right back into their previous hole of stupidity.  Thank God this sort of thing is uncommon, but with the way the media blathers on and lets would-be copycats know they too can become (in)famous, it might not stay that way.

Armed Bad Guy meets armed Good Guy; loses

Courtesy WOAI:

Police detectives and sheriff's investigators say the incident started in the China Garden Restaurant on Southwest Military Drive about 9 PM Sunday, when an employee of the restaurant walked in looking for a woman.

When the woman, who officials say is also a restaurant employee, wasn't there, the man pulled a gun and attempted to open fire in the restaurant but his weapon jammed.

"It started at the restaurant and then went into the parking lot and then into the movie theater," Deputy Lou Antu told 1200 WOAI news.

Investigators say some of the terrified restaurant patrons poured into the movie theater, and the gunman followed.   

He opened fire, shooting one man in the chest, before Antu says an off duty sheriff's deputy who was working security at the theater shot him once.

 Now, I realize this is an Only One, so some folks would think this justifies not allowing folks to carry in a certain place, and other folks wouldn't want to give her credit.

Nevertheless, it again proves the old adage that the only thing capable of stopping an armed bad guy is an armed good guy.

(And in case you're wondering how the guy managed to stampede folks in by-God Texas: Democrats.)

I suppose it's easier

It's easier to blame the tools than to look at our own society and find our failings.  Such is always the case.

RobertaX laid out the psychological underpinnings of what happened; one aspect of it at least.  There's really nothing more I can add to that part of it.  I was honestly unable to turn off the news coverage, so I'm a part of the problem there.  It was certainly a lesson in everything that is wrong with such event coverage.  Listening to the talking heads (for the record, I was listening to the stream of WSB radio, as is my wont on weekdays) churn through every rumor and pontificate on it as though it had been handed down to Moses was frustrating as hell.  There were initial rumors that a .223 had been used; the reporter averred that this had to be an AR-15.  When later it was said that the weapons were "only" handguns, the same man said there must have been extended magazines used.

It might be worth noting that they also said, early in their coverage, that this wall-to-wall yapping about it they were doing had been shown to encourage similar attacks and then they went right on talking.

Liberals, of course, didn't let the bodies cool before calling for gun bans.  Not just "sensible" gun control, but outright bans.  We horrible conservatives love our guns more than the little children.

Now that many people have, rightly, pointed out that mental health is still the relevant issue, we're still at fault.  Because we oppose Obamacare.  Nevermind that the law isn't actually going to do much of anything to improve matters.  (I actually read several articles other than the one linked; they all say that Obamacare will improve access to mental health services, but only for poor people--and these shooters are never impoverished.)

We need improved mental health care in this country.  Improved is not analogous to expanded.  Giving three million people the same shitty mental health care we've been offering isn't going to do a single damned thing.  And make no mistake here--Psychology is dominated by liberals.  Bless their hearts, they mean well.  But they marry themselves to a given theory when very young and seldom let reality intrude thereupon.  (This is how psychoanalysis dominated for so very long.)  And so care has degraded and insurance companies have been rightly skeptical of treatments which have little to no research to back them up.

And that has spiraled outward and now we sit here today, where parents with autistic children might as well just give them high doses of vitamins 'cause that shows as much efficacy as anything else, and an idiotic number of people who don't know anyone affected by it think the mental illness would disappear if parents simply beat their children more often.  So these kids aren't being taught how to function in the real world, and parents aren't getting help to control the occasional rages, and once in a blue moon we have shit like this and hey--GUNS!

Update: Read this.  All of it.  It's not something we can safely turn away from because of politics.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

 She's not the only one living with stuff like this.  Not even close.  I know several moms who have had to damn near hang themselves to get their kid accepted for in-patient mental treatment.  Thank community-based mental health care, y'all.  I've bitched about it before.  It's stupid, and it's deadly.

You know what's neat?

Little man here, who at this point isn't much more than a sentient digestive system, has all the information encoded in his little brain to eventually be able to sit up on his own, and then crawl, and then walk and talk.  There is pretty much nothing that will stop this progression of events, and little needed to help it along.

Whether you believe in God or not, you've got to admit humans are amazing creatures.  I don't know whether it was (to borrow a phrase from an old song) the Spirit in the Sky who made him this way, or millions of years of evolution--or both--but I do know the end result is awe-inspiring.

Google doesn't know me as well as it thinks

This was the ad in my Gmail a few minutes ago:

Yeah...

Way to advertise something absolutely useless to me, Google.  I, ah, haven't been a size 16 since I lived in Hawaii.

More to the point, when the average American woman is supposedly a size 14, how many people do you think see this ad and say "Finally, a source for my size 00 clothes!"