GUN LAWS

There was a discussion on Up with Chris Hayes Saturday morning on gun control.   A reporter that attended the recent NRA convention in St Louis commented that most of those in attendance were old white men; and from conversations he overheard the consistent theme seemed to be that these men needed to be armed because at some time in the future they would have to defend themselves from some imaginary threat.   The liberal consensus on the program seemed to be that the people at the convention were afraid of the rise of minorities and saw that as a threat to their way of life. 

I don’t necessarily agree with that.   I have known many men who rode around with NRA stickers on the back window of their trucks.   None of them were afraid – but all of them entertained a fantasy of Armageddon: a time of a breakdown of law and order when they could emerge, regardless of their age or lack of physical prowess, with their guns blazing to become the hero and powerful leaders of their imagination.  In this scenario they all see themselves as the gun slinger that young girls would cling to (note: in their fantasies they do not liberate the old ladies in the rest home, but the young girls in the college dorms.)

Many of the people that go into police work are of the same ilk.   In high school  they were the prey of the alphas and as marginal students were lost in the back of the room; but with a badge of authority and a gun on their hip they achieve the longed for identity of macho.  The permission to carry a gun and the authority to shoot transforms the sexually insecure male into an alpha want-to-be.

Now, here we intersect with the Concealed Carry and Stand Your Ground Law.   Thousands of would-be alphas are walking around armed looking for a chance to live out their fantasy of being feared and admired because of their ability and readiness to kill with a firearm. 

In the old 1950 novel Battleground when a recruit would call his rifle a gun the DI would make him grab his crotch with his left hand and hold out his rifle with his right hand and repeat “This is my rifle and this is my gun – this is for fighting and this is for fun.”  I truly believe that gun mania is a substitute for lack of sexual prowess.

  

In the military I was on the station pistol team and qualified to compete at All Navy competition, but could not attend because of deployment schedule.  I was awarded both expert rifle and expert pistol ribbons.   I do not have a concealed carry license and do not need one.  I know the difference between my rifle and my gun and don’t need to carry one to compensate for the other. 

the Ol-Buzzard

A BUZZARD EGG OMELET #11

Happy Easter

All right, I get it.   A twelve year old girl was impregnated by…..  and had a baby that three hundred years later was declared a god at the Council of Nicaeae.    The religion that formed from this following venerates human sacrifice and proudly displays the icons of the event (a human being cruelly tortured to death through crucifixion) as its logo.   Even more disturbing, to me, is that some sects of this religion practice ritual cannibalism, claiming to actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of this two thousand year old dead individual during their communion.  

All of this I have grown up with and, though bizarre, have come to accept as part of the culture.  

But the thing that I don’t understand is the egg laying rabbits.

Really – egg laying rabbits?

   

I’m just asking?

The Ol’Buzzard

SEX EDUCATION IN SCHOOL

I am a staunch proponent of teaching Sex Ed in school (Sunday Schools.)  

I offer this clip for education and enlightenment. 

 

Wanda Sykes could be arrested in fourteen states.

and I could also.

the Ol'Buzzard

STATE SPONSORED RAPE OF WOMEN

STATE RAPE

The Republican Party of the state of Virginia is about to pass a law requiring all women applying for legal abortion service to undergo, even against their will, an invasive vaginal ultrasound probe, which is medically unnecessary.

Any woman who is coerced into vaginal penetration against her will is experiencing rape.  

The Republican Party of the state of Virginia is legislating state rape.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?  

the Ol'Buzzard 

AXE GRINDING

I am sick and tired of the demeaning commercials that run constantly on TV displaying older people as stupid, demented cripples with false teeth, pissing their pants, needing catheters, unable to comprehend technology, riding in motorized chairs, needing Viagra and ready to buy into schemes like reverse mortgages. 

 I have no problem with advertising the prows and cons of a product for people with specific needs; but the present selection of actors and the way these ads are presented to the general public I find objectionable.   

I feel that these ad agencies are probably staffed by thirty-something young people that actually view older people as pabulum eating, incompetent, regressing relics sliding into dementia – and that’s the way they present them on TV. 

I despise the commercial with the older woman in her hover-chair riding around in circles in her kitchen, waving her hand in the air and appearing to holler ‘wee wee wee!’ like the pig on the GEICO commercial.

I am seventy-two.   I retired from the military at forty-two.  I received my Bachelor Degree at forty-six and my Masters at fifty.  I spent eleven years teaching in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska – retiring at sixty-seven.    I am married to a young woman and have great sex (without Viagra.)  I made my first solo parachute jump at seventy and plan to jump again this summer.  I ride a motorcycle in the summer, and in the winter I heat my house with firewood.  I work out at the gym twice a week and bowl twice a week – and, I am not unusual.

I hope that if the time comes that I require special products for age disability I can deal with a company that will approach me an intelligent adult. 

The Ol’Buzzard 

THE COST OF WAR

THE RATIONAL OF WAR IS: IF YOU CAN KILL MORE OF THEM THAN THEY CAN KILL OF YOU - THEN YOU WIN.

When I was in Vietnam my military pay was $1,600 a month; plus, I was making a fantastic $75.00 a month extra for hazardous duty combat pay.   After the war was over I read that the war had actually cost $32,000 per enemy killed.  The cost in American lives in Vietnam was:  58,178 killed, 153,452 wounded and 1,711 missing in action.  

Today I read that, not including the actual cost of the war being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is spending $80,000,000,000 (eighty billion dollars) a year on counter terrorism efforts.   Admiral Dennis Blair (Ret.) who served as director of national intelligence for the Obama administration estimates that there are between 3,000 to 5,000 actual al-Qaeda members.   This means that we are spending between $16,000,000 and $27,000,000 (sixteen to twenty-seven million dollars) per year on each  al-Qaeda suspect.

My question is, why don’t we just contract out the wars?  We should hire mercenaries and pay them per head.  Hell, for a sixteen million dollar bounty you could count me in on the hunt. 

the Ol'Buzzard 

ATHEISM

Last Friday Bill Maher was prodding a Christian conservative on his program with the fact the Christians can be and have been as violent as Muslim fundamentalist. The panelist had obviously rehearsed her response before being a on his show: her answer to his taunt was that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia were atheistic countries that basked in blood baths.




I am always agog at the simplistic, head in the sand bull shit these morons use to defend the violence of religion.



Again (earlier blog,) she was trying to invoking a negative: Atheism is not a religion or an organized movement with tenants to adhere to and believe in, so you can’t really identify anything as being atheist. It is simply that atheist can’t bring themselves to believe the fantastic lunacy that you are required to believe in as a member of an organized religion - a tenet of beliefs that the religious wish to inflict on all others.



Conservative arguments are usually summed up with ten second catch phrases; so I have an atheistic one for the Christian conservatives that pretty much explains atheism:

God and Jesus!
Are you nuts?


thanks to the blog Dumb Perignon for the link to the above clip.

the Ol'Buzzard

WARNING - R-RATED

I recently saw a bumper sticker in a grocery store parking lot that read “WORKING MEN VOTE REPUBLICAN.” I felt that there should have been a second sticker explaining the first - that would either read: “BECAUSE I MAKE OVER TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR” or, “BECAUSE I AM A MORON”.



The Republicans took the House in the last election with a promise to create jobs. Since they have been in power the only thing they have done is pass tax cuts that favor the wealthy, try to kill the health care bill, propose ideological cuts to discretionary spending and attempt to legislate restrictive abortions laws against women.

The abortion issue is Republicans hypocrisy. They love a fetus. From conception to birth is holy for Republicans; but after a child is born they don’t give a damn.

Some of the cuts the Republican Congress are pushing for are to defund prenatal care, cuts to wellness programs and cuts to WIC (Women Infants and Children) which provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk.

They wish to cut Food Stamps; Aid to Dependent Children; Head Start; the school milk program and the school lunch and breakfast programs. They plan to repeal the Health Care Law; to cut student aide for college.

They can’t wait until the child is old enough to go into the military and be sent into unnecessary wars. They celebrate the dead and wounded soldiers while at the same time proposing cuts to VA Hospital funding.

If you are out of work – tough: they would like to do away with the minimum wage, unions and unemployment benefits. They plan to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. They do, of course, want to remove estate taxes so if you are mega-wealthy you can pass along your estate, tax free.

Republicans pretend that tax cuts don’t affect the national debt. They tell you that tax cuts are not the same as spending. In reality taxes are income. A tax cut reduces the nation’s income. A three percent tax cut for me amounts to about two hundred and fifty dollars – a three percent tax cut for a billionaire is another yacht.

Republicans openly support huge expensive tax breaks for the wealthiest one-percent of the nation and giant subsidies for Mega-Oil Companies which increases the national debt by decreasing revenue. They are fine with placing the burden on the working middle-class.

Working Men Vote Republican…….Why?