For the LOLZ

I'm going to make you click some links.  Trust me, it'll be worth it.

Writers will squeal "That's me!" and non-writers will gain great insight into the writer's mind from The 4 Stages of Writing.  (via @NPalmby)

I endorse SMBC's proposal: Screw "Real Life Applications".  Want Kids to Learn Science?  Put This In Every Textbook.  (via about 5 billion people on Twitter, who promptly got buried under a flood of #scio11 tweets and are now beyond my ability to excavate.)

And lastly, this isn't an LOL, except LOLing in delight: a new science aggregator has launched!  Please do visit ScienceSeeker.org.  If you're a science blogger, submit! 

Do enjoy, my darlings!

Celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Click the link for his "The Other America" Speech.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Don't go silent.  

On this day, we remember the power of dreams.  We remember the power of a great many good people all coming together for a just cause.  And we remember that the right words, symbolic actions, and a refusal to back down from demands for justice can remake the world.

Thank you, Dr. King. 

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The Tree of Liberty

There has long been a horrible concern in the back of my mind: that this country, founded on violence, couldn’t get away from violence.  How do you reconcile a country born in revolutionary war to governance by peaceful means?

When our Founders fought the Revolution, it was because they had no alternative.  They didn’t have representation.  They weren’t allowed to be part of England’s political life.  They were simply exploited and used.  They weren’t allowed a peaceful solution.  They couldn’t say these things they hated were the will of the country.  They couldn’t lose an honest political fight because they weren’t allowed a political solution.  So they fought.

I still question the wisdom of going to war, sometimes.  A country born in violence can find it hard to escape future violence.  But I can understand why our Founders felt driven to it.  They had tried and failed to obtain representation.  They had no other way to take their destiny into their own hands.

We don’t have that excuse now.  We have a democratic system, however imperfect, and we have a ballot box.  If the majority of your fellow citizens can’t be brought around to your views, it’s not a license to pick up a gun and achieve by violence what you couldn’t achieve by democracy.  This is not a dictatorship.  We are not ruled by a tyrant.  We’re ruled by a duly-elected government, and if we don’t like it, we can vote in a different one.  If we don’t manage that, well, too fucking bad.  Just because we have the right to vote doesn’t mean we’ll win.

Just because we don’t win doesn’t mean we get to turn to assassination.

And the right doesn’t understand that.

No, they take Thomas Jefferson a little too seriously.  They use his "tree of liberty" remarks as a blank check, a license to preach all the violence they want.  It's too bad we can't dig Jefferson out of the ground, bring him back to life, bring him up to speed, and ask if inciting unstable people to gun down senior citizens and children is what he had in mind when he wrote, "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?"  I'm not sure that this sort of blood is what he had in mind for his tree.

We have extreme gun violence in this country.  And yet we have a Constitution that we're assured won't allow us to control guns.  But what if that's not true?  Jerry Coyne voiced an important thought:

Right-wingers, gun advocates, and the NRA use the Second Amendment as justification for Americans owning all sorts of guns, including automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And that’s the way the courts have interpreted it, too.  That Amendment says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well, we have a militia now—it’s called the military.  How can anyone, even an originalist, say that this Amendment justifies untrammeled access to weapons by everyone? It’s about a militia!  And a “well-regulated” militia, not a bunch of unorganized Americans with rifles.  And if you respond that without guns, ordinary Americans couldn’t overthrow the government and the military like our ancestors overthrew the British, well, I’ll take that risk.

How did we go from "well-regulated militia" to "let the deranged have all the semiautomatics they want"?  How do we pull back from that brink?


I wonder if the Founders' attitudes would be a little more nuanced in this age of hate radio, propaganda television, and weapons whose destructive power they couldn't have imagined?  I hope this isn't what they wanted for this country.

But I think it's time for us to admit that, if we had the power to free slaves and give them rights as full human beings even though the Constitution originally didn't, we surely could do something to end the right to bear Glocks.  If we fail in that, we at least need to find a way to push the eliminationist rhetoric that gives deranged people with Glocks an idea for a mission to the fringes where it belongs.

And we need to remind our fellow citizens on the right that failure to impose their will on the country by convincing the majority they're right does not then give them license to impose it by force.

Cantina Quote o' The Week: William Blake

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."

-William Blake

Of course, Blake was a visionary, a poet and artist who saw art as life and science as death, so his truth can't be understood as scientific truth.  Still, an excellent and useful quote, especially when it comes to dickish arguments.

If you're a metal fan, you really mustn't miss Bruce Dickinson's The Chemical Wedding, which is not only superb metal but injects Blake right through the soundstream into your brain, which isn't a bad way at all to spend an evening.

Los Links Addendum

I'm behind on my normal rounds and almost missed this post by Dan McShane: A Cautionary Chapter in Washington State Public Power.  If you read no other post on the Giffords shooting, read this one.  Dan does an amazing job illustrating the consequences of violent rhetoric:

The lies told about John Goldmark in that campaign combined with toxic rhetoric regarding issues in the 1980s and led to the murder of his son Charles, Charles' wife and children more than 20 years later. Neither John Goldmark or his son Charles had ever been communists, but the lies that had been spread in the Okanogan Valley funded by a corporation opposed to public power for monetary reasons had confused a member of an anticommunist group years after the fact to commit a senseless murder. The rabid rhetoric of that group further inflamed the killer.

There are consequences, and there are precedents, something all too many would like us to conveniently forget.

And the most chilling lesson is that our insane political discourse may continue to inspire violence decades down the road.

Los Links 1/14

This week, there's going to be a rather heavier focus on politics than usual, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  

Meanwhile, major bits of Queensland are underwater.  Information on the disaster is available at the Australian Red Cross site, and you can donate there or at the Queensland government's Flood Relief Appeal site.  In light of what's happening in Queensland, I'm putting Anne Jefferson's post on flooding front and center:

A flood is a disaster when people are in the way: "So while our hearts go out to those who are losing lives and property in Australia, let us not forget that there is a flood tragedy still unfolding in Pakistan, largely out of the media spotlight. Let us also remember that when we see increases in the human impacts of meteorological and geological phenomena, it’s usually not changes to the size or frequency of the phenomenon that drives the trend, but the increasing number of people in nature’s way." (Highly Allochthonous)

Politics:

Who is responsible for the murder?:  "Mohammed Hanif asks who is responsible for the murder of Salman Taseer? (And who is responsible for the multiple deaths and critical injuries in Arizona? Who is responsible for the attempted assassination of a Congressional representative and the successful assassination of a federal judge outside a Safeway in Tucson? The questions are related. It’s not just a single assassin in either case – it’s also a society, a culture, a discourse, a world view, a rhetoric, a climate, a mindset, and the people who help to create them.)" (Butterflies and Wheels)

Beware Compulsive Centrists and ISlate-esque Contrarians Bearing False Equivalencies: "Because a diary, out of hundreds posted every day, on a blog site is just like the political ads created by a former governor and vice-presidential candidate who has a potential audience of millions. Bai has to know enough about the internet to understand how diaries work (and that most probably aren't even seen by regular visitors to the site). But this narrative is part of the Village's Compulsive Centrist Disorder." (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Gabrielle Giffords' brain surgery: Decompressive hemicraniectomy: This surgery is known as a decompressive hemicraniectomy. I've published research with people who have had this procedure, blogged about that work, talked about it a TEDxBerkeley last year, and even got picked up by Mind Hacks and Wired for it.  (Oscillatory Thought)

The Absence of Civility Is Not the Problem: Lying and Inaccuracy Are the Problems: "We're now seeing all of the civility trolls coming out of the woodwork. If by civility, one means 'not engaging in violent eliminationist rhetoric', well, then I'm all for it. But what I'm concerned about is that honest criticism will be silenced. While I'm not as sanguine about political rhetoric as, let's say, Jack Shafer, the fact is a lot of people in political life are habitually...counterfactual. That is, they're liars. Others are ideologically blinkered, while yet others, sadly, are either just kinda dim or else stone-cold ignorant. (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Tea party in the Sonora:  "But there is, in fact, one place where the results of Tea Party governance has already been tested: Arizona, where the Tea Party is arguably the ruling party. Less driven by issues of national security, on the one hand, or moral values on the other, Arizonan conservatives are largely obsessed with taxes and immigration—also the twin fixations of Tea Partiers, who, like Arizonans, are disproportionately white and older. So it comes as little surprise that top Republican elected officials in Arizona eagerly seek the Tea Party’s support and make time to speak at the group’s rallies. Should the Republicans succeed in retaking power nationwide over the next four years, the country might start to resemble the right-wing desert that Arizona has become." (Harper's Magazine)

“Don't politicize this tragedy!”:  "Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation. The people who are complaining are a mix of lefty marshmallows whose first reaction to the fulfillment of right-wing fantasies by a lunatic is to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness for thinking ill of people who paint bullseyes on their political opponents, and right wing cowards who are racing to their usual tactic of attacking their critics to shame them into silence. This is NOT the time to back down and suddenly find it embarrassing to point out that right-wing pundits make a living as professional goads to insanity." (Pharyngula)

Who Profits from Violent Rhetoric? Can We Reduce The Profit?:  "KSFO/ABC/Disney/Citadel, as employers, can tell their hosts not to talk about killing people on the air as a condition of their employment, just like they can tell them not to swear. Management doesn’t like swearing because swearing earns them fines up to $500,000. However saying:

'We’ll trace you back, run you down and kill you like a mad dog.' (audio link)

–Lee Rodgers about a Ron Paul supporter

Had no instant effect on Lee Rodgers’ finances. Rodgers eventually was fired. Part of the reason was he wasn’t generating as much revenue via advertising as he had in the past — before my advertiser alerts." (Firedoglake)

Tucson Heroes: Unarmed People Who Stopped the Armed from More Killing: "The unarmed kept the armed from killing more people. Deal with it, America." (Firedoglake)

Being Wyatt Earp: "And you don't have to be an expert to understand this without having to have it acted out on the streets of Arizona. It's obvious to anyone with a brain that people wading into gunfire with a gun will just be adding more bullets to the chaos. This rationale for arming everyone to the teeth has been nonsensical and absurd from the beginning and the fact that anyone has ever taken it seriously is a sad comment on our culture." (Hullabaloo)

Wednesday's Mini-Report: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), reflecting on Saturday's shooting, said, "I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person." (There was -- the man holding that gun very nearly shot an innocent man.) (Washington Monthly)

The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy: "Extremist shouters didn't program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did." (Slate)

Arguing Tucson: "In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous." (Interesting Times via Kevin Drum)

Since When Do Conservatives Believe Words Don’t Have Consequences?: "The same wingnuts who are insisting today that there’s absolutely no connection at all between speech and actions have spent an awful lot of time over the past several decades saying exactly the opposite." (Firedoglake)

Mental illness expert: We should be asking whether political climate helped trigger shooting: "A leading expert in mental illness tells me that asking whether the Arizona shooter's violent behavior might have been partly triggered by the nation's political climate is a wholly appropriate line of inquiry -- even if the shooter is found to be insane." (The Plum Line)

Sarah Palin and the Blood Libel:  "She’s trying to avoid taking any responsibility for the shooting. That’s
fine – she isn’t responsible for the shooting. But the way that she’s doing it is by falsely presenting herself as the victim in this situation. And to make matters worse, she’s doing that by cluelessly presenting herself as the victim of a historic anti-semitic slur that falsely accuses Jews of being murderers. She’s trying to distance herself from the attempted murder of a Jewish woman by presenting herself as the victim of an anti-Jewish slur." (Good Math, Bad Math)

Required Reading: "Wouldn't it be nice if national tragedies inspired everyone to band together to take an unflinching look at the causes and to determine what each of us can contribute to keep them from happening again? Yes, DrugMonkey, I am a dreamer. Still, it is important to recognize that how we react determines where we go from here, and a number of people are finding the public reactions to the Tucson shooting sadly wanting." (Almost Diamonds)

Science:

The Slippery Slope of Anti-Vaccine Complacency: "What if a family decided that they didn’t want to confine their baby in a car seat? The baby cries whenever they strap him into it, and besides, accidents are rare. They’ve done their research, and they feel the baby is safe enough in the mother’s arms. Would my friend be as sanguine about that decision?"  (Musings of a Dinosaur) (h/t)

I’ve Been Selected for the Open Lab 2010 Anthology of Science Blogging: "I am pleased to announce that I’ve been selected as one of the 50 finalists for the Open Lab 2010 compendium of science blogging. I’m absolutely thrilled to be included in this group of talented and enthusiastic communicators of science. Below is the post that will appear in the volume (to be published in a few months)." (Clastic Detritus)

Experimental vs. historical science, and environmentalism:  "Experiments inform our understanding of nature, but nature comes first. Parts of our understanding may be decoded in a lab setting (e.g., isotopic dating, strain ellipse analysis, or groundwater chemistry), but the data are collected outside and must then be processed indoors. In geology, the big experiment has been run: its result is the planet we see before us. As archaeologists, cosmologists, and crime scene investigators must do, geologists use subtle clues to interpret the past."  (Mountain Beltway)

More on Wakefield’s descent: money, money, money!: "The BMJ has just published Part 2: how Wakefield stood to make not just millions, not just tens of millions, but actually hundreds of millions of dollars by promoting the false link between the MMR vaccine with autism and Crohn’s disease."  (Bad Astronomy)  [Editor's note: can I just say I love it when Phil's being a dick!]

Meteorites and Geology: big holes in the ground: "Putting it another way, on average over the last 542 million years, over 700 big asteroids would have hit a part of the earth with a subsiding basin covered by a shallow sea. This is rather cool, I suggest, particularly the idea that many of these craters may already have been surveyed, but the seismic data has yet to be appropriately analysed. It’s a nice thought that most examples of what happens when something very big falls out of the sky are to be found deep underground."  (Earth Science Erratics)

On scientism: BioLogos‘s big meeting, in which Francis Collins embarrasses himself and the NIH: "As for the rest of the phenomena, 'beauty' (an evolved neural response), 'love' (probably a neural and chemical condition evolved to facilitate bonding), 'friendship' (ditto), and 'justice' (a byproduct of morality, which we’re working on, and social organization), the statement fails to show why religion provides a 'source of knowledge', especially because different religions have different—and mutually exclusive—solutions.  All they can say is 'God made them.'” (Why Evolution is True)

A rant on the evolution of religion: "To the people of Iron Age northern Europe, garotting members of their community and dumping their bodies in the bog probably seemed like a damned fine idea. No doubt it appealed to a host of human mental biases. It also seems to have been successful in building communities (at least, in relative terms) - after all, the culture survived for millennia.

"And yet, it's an approach to life that most people would frown upon today."  Epiphenom (h/t)

Building a Better World: Ice Caves

Welcome to the first installment in what promises to be a very nearly endless series.  I'll be bringing you the fruits of my research as I build Xtalea from the core up.  We'll be exploring everything from geology to biology to all sorts of interesting tidbits that come up.

Before we get to ice caves, I suppose we should break some ice.  Those of you who've become Wise Readers and follow my writing blog already have a general idea of what I'm up to, but the rest of you all are probably a bit lost.  For two decades now (no, that is not an exaggeration or typo), I've been working on a series of SF novels that span many worlds and thousands of years of time.  We begin sixteen thousand years ago, on Xtalea, which is the world I'm building now.  And since the world itself will end up being a major theme throughout the series, it's got to be done right.  The world itself is something of a character.

It will be an Earth-like planet, so I can take several cues from our very own world.  This is fortunate.  It makes the research a lot easier.  PZ's going to hate it, because it's essential to the ultimate plot-line for it to be quite similar to Earth.  But aside from tetchy biologists who want their aliens more alien, everyone else should be relatively satisfied, and that's all that ultimately matters.

Right, then.  We should all be on the same page, or at least in the same book.  So let's start building a world, shall we?  Get your spelunking gear on and descend.  There will be much science and lovely photos!

Oregon Geology Parte the Third: Hug Yer Geology North

Seems like only last year I was promising you I'd get to the next installment of Oregon Geology anydaynow.  Heh heh heh whoops.  Well, better late than never, right?

For those of you just joining or wanting to refresh yourselves on the series to date, Parte the First 'tis here and Parte the Second 'tis there.  When we left off, we'd just watched the Columbia River flood basalts hit the ocean, and things had got a bit steamy.  Were this metaphor to be extended, Hug Point would have to be rated as XXX geology.  Here, basalts and sediments got really intimate.

Hug Point, viewed from Austin Point

There's something for everyone here.  You want sedimentary rocks?  Gots 'em.  Basalts?  Yup.  Fault?  Even so!  Hydrology, check.  Coastal wave processes, oh check.  And if you're with non-geo types, you can distract them with the pretty scenery, the nice historical wagon road to the north, and the tide pools, while you go get your rocks on.

I can't do this place the justice it deserves.  It's so rich geologically that an amateur like myself can merely stutter over some of its more outstanding features.  But I've got a ton of pretty pictures - so many, in fact, we're going to have to split proceedings into a North Hug and a South Hug.  So come feast your eyes and feed your soul.

Enough With the False Equivalence!

When Jerry Coyne said,

While it does seem that this kind of violence is whipped up more by conservatives than liberals (viz. abortion-doctor killings), conservatives too can be the targets of gun-equipped crazies. (Remember John Hinkley, who tried to kill Ronald Reagan just to get the attention of Jodie Foster?)

I realized it's time for a handy guide to determining if the left is equivalent to the right in terms of inciting violence.  So here we go:

1.  Is the violence recent?  

Incident less than ten years old - provisionally equivalent.  You may proceed to the next question.

Incident more than ten years old - NOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

2.  Did the violence take place in a pervasive atmosphere of eliminationist rhetoric spewed by liberal political leaders, media outlets including network news channels, and activist groups embraced by elected leaders?

Yes - provisionally equivalent.  You may proceed to the next question.

No -  NOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

3.  Is there more than one example of such violence?

Yes - you managed a miracle.  Please provide evidence to back up your assertion, because no one else has been able to find any.

No - NOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

Perhaps someone with some time and more skill with graphics than I've got could whip us up an easy-to-use reference chart.

Outside of the false-equivalence quibble, which in this case was weak tea anyway, and the over-reliance on the "but he was ker-azy!" trope, the rest of Jerry's post is wonderful and thought-provoking and definitely worth reading in full.  I shall be returning to it later in the week, in fact.

Dana's Dojo: Imodium for the Verbal Diarrhea

Today in the Dojo: Preventing your tales from being buried under steaming, stinking piles of unnecessary description.

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A long, long time ago in a Death thread far, far away, Glynis posted the following question:

 I wonder if there is a way to stop before doing in cases of over description?

And I said I'd write a column on the subject someday.  I keep my promises.  Eventually. 

I've been thinking about it for a few months now, and the reason I hadn't put fingers to keyboard is simply this: I'm not sure.  My first drafts tend for the most part to be fairly Spartan, sometimes to the point where Wise Readers yell at me for not describing things thoroughly enough (which is a problem when you're writing SF and supposed to be describing things beyond mortal ken).  This wasn't always the case.  My early writing suffered from the verbal diarrhea: long-winded descriptions of buildings, ships, trees or what have you that stopped the story cold; inventories of characters' appearance, flowery landscapes....  Let's just put it this way.  When it annoys even the writer, it's too much.

Being the offspring of an Indiana farm boy, I don't get mad, I get even.  I spent a couple of years reading every book on writing I could get my hands on.  I practiced varied techniques: describe the character/leave it up to the reader, remove every other adjective, etc., until I found my happy medium between too much and too little.  My first drafts got leaner and meaner.  I don't have to do as much slash-and-burn in the revisions.  I find myself editing as I go, automatically, as if there's an alarm that goes off when the description creeps up to dangerous levels and the narrative auto-corrects.  Usually.  When I'm lucky, anyway.  No matter how good you get at this, description will probably never be easy.

That said, I'll attempt to give you some pointers on hooking up the Over-Description Warning System, and keep it running smoothly as you're in the throes of prose writing.

Why We Should Not Let a Semblance of Normalcy Silence Us

My mind's still on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's near-assassination.  It's hard to focus on anything else.  This has been one of the moments when the world changed, and a thin bright line separates before from after.

Life will return to a semblance of normalcy once again, for us.  Not for the families of the victims.  Not for the parents of a 9 year-old girl who won't ever have the chance to live her dreams.  Not for the wounded, who will not only have the physical scars and possible disabilities to remind them, but emotional scars that are just as real.  Even if they heal completely, even if the shooting makes them stronger emotionally, they will never be the same.  There will always be a chasm separating then from now.  Walking into a grocery store will never again be a simple act for them.  The world has changed.  Same for the witnesses, who will probably never go through the ordinary motions of life without consciously or subconsciously waiting for gunfire.

Life will return to a semblance of normalcy, but we can't forget.  We can't ignore.  We can't pretend this was a random act without further meaning.

We can't pretend that it was just one lone crazy who acted out.  Vaughan Bell knows this:

For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.

I encourage you to read his whole post.   It makes it that much harder to lay everything at the feet of insanity and be done with it.  And here's a little more food for thought - what looks insane on the surface isn't, always.  So don't be comforted by notions that this was just some lunatic, that no one had any control over his actions, that no one could've predicted.  None of that is the whole truth.

Context has meaning.  Here's an unbalanced man in a state where "There are guns everywhere here. The state government has made laws that make owning a gun as easy as buying a stick of chewing gum. People open carry into family restaurants here."  In a state where hatred has metastasized. 

Not too long ago I was driving back from Phoenix, by myself, at night. I turned on AM radio to keep myself awake. There was nothing but right wing hate on. I listened for a while. I was sleepy. I have never heard anything like it before in my life. Most of it was local. Shock-jocks from Phoenix spewing conspiracy and hate. Guns, guns, guns. No taxes, no taxes, no taxes. Obama’s a muslim, Obama’s a socialist, Obama’s a terrorist. I wanted to vomit. I turned it off. I wasn’t that sleepy after all.

Juniorprof lives in Arizona, but the state he's describing only vaguely resembles the one I grew up in.  It's gotten so much worse.  And just lately, the right's gone wild there: we all remember Arizona's noxious immigration law, quickly followed by discrimination against teachers and the purging of ethnic studies, neo-Nazis turning Cinco de Mayo into a hate-fest... and on and on, until we reach the point where Jan Brewer finds it perfectly acceptable to slash funding for transplant patients.  Meanwhile, the NRA's been going absolutely wild, screaming for MORE GUNS EVERYWHERE! on the same day over a dozen people were being gunned down in front of a Safeway:

As if it's not bad enough the NRA lobbyist is quoted endorsing more guns in more public places, the merchants of blood and death want confiscated arms and bullets back in circulation instead of being destroyed, and getting more weapons on school campuses. I don't get the sense the NRA is at all interested in pausing and reflecting on the death and carnage in Tucson, even if the Arizona Republic were to delay its story and take into account new facts that came to light after the story was submitted.

And, just like Republicans believe the answer to any economic woe is more tax cuts, I have the sneaking suspicion the NRA's answer to this mayhem will be more guns.

Incidentally, the gun Loughner used would have been illegal under Clinton era laws, but since the assault weapons ban passed, mentally unstable individuals who believe violence is the answer are now able to buy high-capacity clips so as to maximize the death and destruction they wreak, and it is legal.

And any time sensible gun laws are proposed, the right wing goes apeshit.  And the rhetoric gets yet more violent, yet more extreme, yet more paranoid. 

Then those who have been spewing the violent rhetoric, dehumanizing opponents to previously unimaginable degrees, who have painted targets on those they disagree with politically and talked about "Second Amendment remedies" and piously recited Thomas Jefferson's line about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants after calling democratically-elected officials tyrants, then those people say, when someone takes them seriously, "This was a crazy person.  You can't blame us for what a crazy person does."

Because they didn't put the gun in his hand?  (Although they might as well have done - they defanged any gun law that might have kept a weapon that destructive out of his hands.)  Because they didn't literally tell him to go and shoot this Congresswoman and as many innocent bystanders as he could manage?  (Even though they paint crosshairs on their opponents, talk about them being "enemies of humanity" and hold up signs saying "WE CAME UNARMED THIS TIME" with the implicit threat that next time, the guns will come out.)  They can't see the connection.  And before this happened, even with the warnings given by so many, maybe that's understandable.  We can't always predict what impact our words will have.  But to deny any responsibility now, to refuse any soul-searching, to have created an environment in which a Republican who wants to discuss these things honestly feels he or she has to do so anonymously, that's reprehensible and irresponsible. 

How disconnected from reality do you have to be to say this:

"It is a very tragic event. Even more tragic is to blame Sarah Palin and the Tea Party."

 Lockwood responded the only way someone can respond to such blindness:

These things are "even MORE tragic" than the simple fact of Christina Taylor Green's cold, dead body? Not to mention the 18 other injuries and deaths? MORE fucking tragic?

And this is exactly the point. I'm sure the commenter didn't even think about what she was saying. She was on autopilot. She has been conditioned by Palin, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Boehner, Brewer, and on, and on and on, that merely impugning the wonderfulness of "people like them" is more tragic, a greater crime, a worse humanitarian crisis, than hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from lack of health care, than millions of children who are mal- or undernourished every day, than tens of thousands of homeless veterans for whom it's well worth shelling out for showy car magnets, but not worth a nickel to actually get them shelter. I'm sure she is quite right that neither she nor her party's leaders "endorse" democrats or other undesirables being murdered outright. However, she has been well-trained to understand that when, God forbid, such a thing happens, the appropriate response is to defend the righteous, stay calm, put it out of your mind, and walk cheerfully forward into the the world that is being re-shaped for the right people.

And that mindset is so far developed that, on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, comments critical of Palin were removed within minutes.  But this comment was left intact:

a commenter posted the following at 18:12:

"it's ok christina taylor green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. hey, as 'they' say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill hitler as a kid? exactly."

even worse, further negative comments about palin were immediately scrubbed within a minute, but this comment was still left live on the facebook page.

Just for a moment, pause and consider what a warped worldview it takes to find criticism of Sarah Palin unacceptable, but the equating of a murdered nine year-old with Hitler, justifying her murder, fine to leave intact.

Maybe they're just blindly following the steps.  A certain blindness is required to not see what's wrong with a comment like that.

No, instead of soul-searching, too many are busy building walls.  Making excuses.  Pretending gunsights aren't gunsights.  Attacking the sheriff who had the courage to speak out:



Too many on the right don't want to have this conversation, face the fact that when your most powerful political leaders, your media stars, your respected allies are all dehumanizing, demonizing and implicitly calling for the murder of those who oppose you, you must bear some responsibility for the target a disturbed young man chose.  Look to the right.  Some have been courageous enough to speak out against the violence and the eliminationist rhetoric, but far too many are busy trying to paint the assassin as either a deranged lunatic who engaged in a random act of violence or as one of the hated and inhuman gay leftist commies.  Those in the middle of those extremes are busy howling that we shouldn't politicize this.  But it is political.  There is no escaping that fact:

Shootings of political figures are by definition "political." That's how the target came to public notice; it is why we say "assassination" rather than plain murder.

[snip]

That's the further political ramification here. We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did. If he is like Sirhan, we'll never "understand." But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery, including SarahPac's famous bulls-eye map of 20 Congressional targets to be removed -- including Rep. Giffords. It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload." 

I wish that last bit were true, but I'm afraid it's not.  I've seen little evidence that those responsible for the bulk of the eliminationist rhetoric see anything at all wrong with what they've done.  They'll continue to do it.  And it's doubtful the media will do anything to prevent them, or call them on it, or imply in any way that such things are unacceptable in public discourse.

So it's up to us.

Digby quoted Bill Clinton's speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, and a bit of it particularly struck me as all the more relevant to today:

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

Life, for the rest of us, will return to some semblance of normalcy.  But we can't let that prevent us from discharging our duty.  The work will be long, and it will be hard, and we will suffer defeats, but we must make this country a place where eliminationist rhetoric once again has no place in public discourse.  We must work for gun laws that will prevent people bent on massacre from obtaining their weapons so easily.  We must work for a health care system that identifies and treats people with mental illness before they become such a danger to self and others.  And we must work to make sure that this country does not ever become familiar with political assassination.

Otherwise, what happened yesterday will not have been a wake-up call, but merely a prelude.

What Did You Think Would Happen?

In my home state of Arizona, a man loaded a gun, picked up a knife, and went to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's first Congress on Your Corner.  While she met with constituents at the local Safeway, he walked up behind her and put a bullet through her head.  He then proceeded to kill as many people as he could.

John M. Roll.  Gabriel Zimmerman. Dorwin Stoddard.  Christina-Taylor Green.  Dorthy Murray.  Phyllis Schneck.

Thirteen others he shot, and he had the bullets for dozens more.  But two people at the event tackled him.  They put themselves at risk to save others.  Everyday heroes, doing what had to be done, saving who knows how many people.

It should never have been necessary.

Intern Daniel Hernandez, who had been working for Rep. Giffords for just five days, ran toward the gunfire.  He checked the wounded and dying, applied what first aid he could to Rep. Giffords (likely saving her life in the process), gave instructions to those who were trying to assist the injured, and stayed by Giffords' side until they reached the hospital.  Later, he said, "Of course you're afraid, you just kind of have to do what you can....  It was probably not the best idea to run toward the gunshots, but people needed help."

It should never have been necessary.

Rep. Giffords is still alive, and has a chance to recover.  She had some of the finest trauma surgeons in the country there to save her life.

It should never have been necessary.

There are already far too many people ready and eager to attribute this assassination attempt to a lone nut, a deranged individual, a mentally-ill freak.  He may be those things.  We don't know much about him yet - we know that he displayed some pretty fantastic paranoia about the government, but he had enough wits about him to plan for this.  We know he targeted a Democrat in a Republican-rich environment.  And he had plenty of people to egg him on.

Sarah Palin, who scrubbed this from her website today:

And who tweeted this:

What did you think would happen, Sarah?

Giffords's opponent in the November elections, Jesse Kelly, held a little event over the summer:

What did you think would happen, Jesse?

Sharron Angle said, "... if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?"

What did you think would happen, Sharron?

I could go on.  But some of the insanity's been neatly gathered in one place here, and there's just too much of it to keep up with.  If you've paid any attention to politics in the last two years, you already know what I'm talking about.  The eliminationist rhetoric, spewed by political leaders on the right, parroted and amplified by Faux News and hate radio and right-wing blogs.  We're swimming in a sea of hate.  The vast majority of the Republicans have been winding their base up, associating with people who should be anathema in American politics, even trying to hire right-wing hate radio hosts who said,

“I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. This is the standoff. When I say I’ll put my microphone down on November 2nd if we haven’t achieved substantial victory, I mean it. Because if at that point I’m going to up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m going to go out into the Midwest, I’m going to go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

They will stand before you tomorrow, and the day after, and as long as it takes them to remember that a man put a bullet in Gabrielle Giffords's head, and tell you how tragic, how unexpected, how utterly awful this was.  But they had just spent years telling their followers that bullets were the answer.

So I ask them again:

What did you think would happen?

Because this is what you told Americans you wanted.  And some Americans are mentally unstable enough to believe you, and to act.  They aren't lone nuts.  They aren't simply crazed individuals.  They have Republican politicians and Fox News and right-wing hate radio, Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, whispering and shouting and screaming in their ear that liberals are killing America, that our President is a crypto-Muslim socialist who will bring fascism and death panels and FEMA camps to this country. 

And the unbalanced few decide to act.  What else did you expect?

What did you think would happen?

There's a responsibility that comes with free speech, with being a political leader or media figure.  There's a responsibility to realize that if you create a rhetorical climate in which all liberals are enemies worthy of death and destruction, if you wind up fear to a fever pitch, if you convince people that America is on the brink of total destruction if something is not done right now, if you literally paint targets on your political opponents, you are creating the conditions necessary for someone to act out the violence you suggest.  You are, in part, responsible for their acts.

You make it necessary for people to tackle gunmen, run into gunfire to save as many as possible, for trauma surgeons to do their best to save the lives you've helped destroy.

You helped kill a nine year-old girl today.  A federal judge.  A social worker.  A pastor.  Two old women who were just going to the grocery store.

You tried to kill a Congresswoman.  And even if she comes out of this with her life, even if by luck and by quick-thinking interns and incredibly skilled trauma surgeons she survives with minimal permanent brain injury, she will always bear scars. 

Sixteen other people will bear scars with her.  Some of those scars won't be visible, but they will always be there.

You, on the right, you helped make this happen.  You.  The left has nothing like you.  The leaders on the left do not go around casually talking bloody revolution and assassination.  You do.

And a man did your bidding today.

Are you proud?

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Epicurus

It is vain to ask of the gods what a man is capable of supplying for himself.

-Epicurus

No, Epicurus wasn't an atheist.  No, he wasn't a hedonist.  But he believed in living a pleasant life, thought the gods couldn't be bothered with humans, and enjoyed evidence-based thinking.  In a culture where women were usually shut away in their houses and kept from education, he allowed women into his school, along with slaves.  All in all, the kind of philosopher with ideas worth considering.

From the above quote, one gets the impression he would have agreed with the sentiment, "Wish in one hand and shit in the other..."

Sunsets

It's been a week for sunsets.  Seems the only thing to do is to share the beauty.

Two Ton Green Blog: Two

Guilleabramson: Bariloche sunset (click for image) (h/t)

BadAstronomer: Boulder sunset

Two Ton Green Blog: Rutabaga Sunset

Enjoy!