12.31.12
HNY: Pasadena 2012 Blues
Rock. Play loud. I mean it.
An idiosyncratic slow mo and photo look at my corner of the town, on any given sunny day in the year that’s almost gone.
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Making good use of words “sociopath” and “lunatic”
Don’t forget to enjoy the growing WhiteManistan photo collection.
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12.30.12
The holiday season when white men bought the nation out of assault rifles
One slaughter, one ambush, and a nationwide surge in AR-15 sales and ammunition for them.
Christmas giving may have been off by a percentage point but sales of weapons boomed. Never mind the parties, the Tournament of Roses or the bowl games. All you’ll remember about 2012 was a horrendous slaughter which immediately acted as an economic stimulus for weapons manufacturers, brought on by a part of the right white male demographic no one likes to think about. Because its unified group hysteria intimidates everyone and has become an obvious symptom of a merciless national decline and corruption in the heart.
Dickens could not have described a more bleak social environment.
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.???4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency’s funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC’s website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence …
In 2011, Florida’s legislature passed and Governor Scott signed HB 155, which subjects the state’s health care practitioners to possible sanctions, including loss of license, if they discuss or record information about firearm safety that a medical board later determines was not “relevant??? or was “unnecessarily harassing.??? A US district judge has since issued a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of this law, but the matter is still in litigation. Similar bills have been proposed in 7 other states.
From a Worcester, MA, newspaper today:
It is perhaps a testament to the pall of shock and sorrow that fell upon the nation after the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary that the tragedy has prompted an urgent run on military-style guns …
Local gun shop owners report they quickly sold out of whatever stock they had on hand and have not been able to order more because manufacturers have no remaining inventory to ship …
Ware Gun Shop owner Michael Weisser sold the nine military-style rifles he had in his store in three days …
He considers the panic buying an overreaction, one largely fueled by speculation in conservative media and dire warnings from the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest gun rights lobbying group.
“There’s all this talk about banning guns that gets around. People come in and say to me, ‘I better get a gun. Obama is going to take away all the guns.’ They don’t really know what they’re talking about, but it’s what they’re hearing and repeating,??? Mr. Weisser said.
Calling assault rifle panic buying a testament to the “pall of shock and sorrow” that resulted from the Newtown slaughter is the most perverse lead off sentence I’ve seen this season.
White male middle class sociopaths with little concern for anything but their own fears buy guns en masse and a reporter at a small newspaper, in an attempt to be literary, calls it a testament to a national pall of sorrow. Of course, this is not what journalist Thomas Caywood really meant. Nobody would.
But I guess “Assault rifle sales soared during the Christmas season in a nationally perverse response to the biggest gun massacre in recent history” wouldn’t do.
From the bottom of the barrel in WhiteManistan, comments on YouTube about the above:
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12.29.12
Living Like John McAfee
Nauseating picture of the day. Get the Tums.
Says he’s going to move to England because the US is shite and won’t let him have his two hooker/girlfriends.
Quote: I eat Marmite every day and love Tetley tea and treacle with custard.
One could just see John McAfee buying Marmite, first thing, in South Beach or the midwest or wherever he’s telling people he is now. Yeah.
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12.27.12
NEJM weighs in on the Cult of AR-15
The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has published an essay on controlling access to guns.
It is particularly heartening because as one of the big three peer-reviewed publications in medicine (including The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association) it is beyond retaliation by the National Rifle Association or the rabid ferrets of the Republican Party.
In 2012, for the first time, there will probably be more firearm-related homicides and suicides than motor vehicle traffic fatalities.
The United States has become an extreme example of what could well be termed “global gunning.??? With less than 5% of the world’s population, we own more than 40% of all the firearms that are in civilians’ hands: 250 million to 300 million weapons, nearly as many as we have people, and they are not going away anytime soon. We have made social and policy decisions that, with some important exceptions, provide the widest possible array of firearms to the widest possible array of people, for use under the widest possible array of conditions.
The most egregious policies have been enacted at the state level — “Stand Your Ground??? laws, for instance, which have been used to legitimize what many people still call murder. Justice Louis Brandeis rightly praised the states as the laboratories of our democracy, but in some of them, experimentation with firearm policy has taken a frightening turn.
We are paying the price of those decisions. Too often, our children and grandchildren are paying it for us. Payments will continue.
The essay’s author, Garen J. Wintemute, M.D., believes something can be done. And that something is to institute background checks on ALL gun buys, including private party sales which the essay points out currently make up 40 percent of the whole.
Secondly, the doctor recommends national expanded denial criteria. This works, he maintains:
We know that comprehensive background checks and expanded denial criteria are feasible and effective, because they are in place in many states and have been evaluated. California, for example, requires a background check on all firearm purchases and denies purchases by persons who have committed violent misdemeanors. Yet some 600,000 firearms were sold there in 2011, and the firearms industry continues to consider California a “lucrative??? market. The denial policy reduced the risk of violent and firearm-related crime by 23% among those whose purchases were denied.[4]
Wintemute also says state-by-state handling is not enough because gun sales flow around more restrictive local laws.
California, he writes, is another example of this:
At gun shows in California, where direct private-party sales are illegal, such sales are almost nonexistent. At shows just across the border in Reno, Nevada, where private-party sales are legal, dozens occur, and a third of the cars in the parking lot are from California.
Such proposals, he writes, “enjoy broad support.”
“And the icy hands of the firearm lobby may be losing their grip on the political process,” he continues. Similarly to here, last week: “The NRA is simply not able to drive election results as it has been thought to do.”
“The interventions proposed here will not end firearm violence in the United States, but they will reduce it, and that’s a goal worth fighting for,” he concludes.
Again, at the NEJM, here.
Meanwhile, AR-15 sales continue to skyrocket in White, Fearful & Crazy Town across the USA, driven by people with the same dreadfully familiar rant: “They’re going to take our guns!”
What should be a national response to such? Shunning? The implication that people rushing to buy AR-15s in the wake of a slaughter are in no way fit company in a civilized society is certainly worth pursuing. The rest of the civilized world has no problem with considering these people to be f—– in the head.
While holiday shopping was down from last year, the Newtown massacre acted as windfall stimulus for gun manufacturers and salesmen. And if the thought of it at this time of year doesn’t make you uncomfortable with the sporting hobby of some of your white and obsessed countrymen, nothing will.
In Delaware, the usual evidence of the insurrectionists:
Charles Steele, owner of Steele’s Gun Shop on Route 9 in Lewes, said gun sales have soared since President Barack Obama was reelected. He said customers are afraid Obama will place restrictions on firearms, preventing people from purchasing guns.
“It’s been high for the last four years,??? he said. “The day after the election, we were swamped.???
Riding’s store and others are completely out of ARs. Just weeks ago, her shop offered several models.
John Buchan, co-owner of Sarasota’s High Noon Guns, has only three ARs left for sale, and several hundred backordered.
“Our sales have increased 200 percent or more,??? he said.
Buchan spends most of his days online looking for rifles, or goading his distributors for information.
John Krotec, owner of Environeers, an adventure and travel store that also sells guns, checked with five distributors one week before the Connecticut shooting and saw 700 to 800 ARs available online.
The Monday after the tragedy, the rifles were all gone.
In College Station, Texas:
“We’ve never seen anything like this, not even close” said Mike Stulce, co-owner of Champion Firearms. (Merry Xmas, click the link.)
Typically there are 1,500 types of firearms in stock at Champion, Stulce said. Now, there are 400. Shelves in half of the store stand empty. The other side of the store is only about half-full, he said. Signs on the wall alert customers of the rifles and high-capacity magazines that are out of stock.
“If Romney was in office, this wouldn’t be happening,” Stulce said.
If only Mitt Romney were president … This is a good tune, click it.
Corporate America Hates You. Period.
PBS posted an unintentionally funny question and answer with an employment expert, aka “a headhunter.”
One of the questions, or rather assertions from the crowd:
Online job search is a waste of time. Once you have given up as I have, how is one expected to go out and try to put on a positive face when all one faces is no positive direction? Everything in the United States is a scam.
For many, it’s a very accurate observation. Much of daily life is filled with scams from corporate America and to survive everyone must go about the task of trying to always avoid the tricks and traps. And the past four years have made it abundantly clear that no will exists anywhere in the country — except maybe in the writings of Paul Krugman — to lessen unemployment, decrease inequality, and raise the pay and declining living standards of average Americans. In fact, these are things that are vigorously opposed in the current system.
Of course, the headhunter couldn’t admit this was so. But he couldn’t actually lie in front of everyone, either, so he had to talk in a circle:
No, everything is not a scam. There are a lot of companies that are hiring, but there are more that are nervous about investing in more personnel in a volatile economy. It’s understandable: So much is in flux today that companies hesitate to spend money, and they over-compensate by insisting on “perfect hires” …
First, we already know that applying for jobs online is largely a waste of time … Your challenge is to help employers meet you outside of that numskull system. Help them see what you can do for them.
Second, we know that employers tend to hire through personal contacts. So you must face that reality and learn how to apply for jobs through people a company knows and trusts. This is awkward for most, but it’s a skill that’s as important as any work skill. Rather than search the job postings, devote yourself to meeting people who do business …
Third, there is no way to pursue hundreds or even dozens of jobs through personal contacts …
No, everything was not a scam. But online job application is. No, not everything is a scam. You need to make personal contacts. But nobody can make enough personal contacts.
And after one has been unemployed for a while — as is the case with most people in this country — you have no personal contacts. Just a few people who don’t want to hear from you.
It’s all here. One of the questioners is named “John Galt.”
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12.26.12
Come together in poverty and rituals for the odious
If you work for Starbucks in Pasadena, you’re not earning a living in southern California. Consider the plight of the wait staff, compiled to hand out bullshit “Come Together” cups, in hopes that the fiscal cliff will be avoided or that white guys with AR-15s will stop mass shootings for a week. Or something:
In the spirit of the Holiday season and the Starbucks tradition of bringing people together, we have a unique opportunity to unite and take action on an incredibly important topic. As many of you know, our elected officials in Washington D.C. have been unable to come together and compromise to solve the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt. You can learn more about this impending crisis at www.fixthedebt.org.
Rather than be bystanders, we have an opportunity—and I believe a responsibility—to use our company’s scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials to come together and reach common ground on this important issue. This week through December 28, partners in our Washington D.C. area stores are writing “Come Together??? on customers’ cups.
I don’t drink coffee, I’ve always hated Starbucks, and there are way too many of them Pasadena. People who patronize the place are middle class shit, the firm’s the KFC of the brown stuff.
And the wealthy-beyond-reason CEO wants his minimum wage workers to help us all think about “fixing the debt,” something his serfs have absolutely no stake in. Because going over the cliff or not, nothing will change. They still won’t be able to make ends meet in LA County.
More scary stories from WhiteManistan
Viagra for the NRA crowd is what Frank at Pine View Farm calls WhiteManistan’s Cult of AR-15.
It’s what it boils down to. The last two weeks destroyed all the NRA’s about the goodness of being more heavily armed. Just the opposite — the more heavily armed a certain minority white part of the populace is, one with problems ranging from insecurity over virility, paranoia about the non-white guy living in the White House (and everyone else) and an increasingly toxic ideology in which they see themselves as the last patriots to defend the country, the more certainty there will be slaughters in the future.
The selling and “panic buying??? of Bushmasters has been height of morally reprehensible and irresponsible behavior during the holiday season.
There was a killing in Portland, the big one in Newtown, and the one the day before Christmas in Webster, New York, all employing the same assault rifle. And what happened? Sales of it and huge ammo clips went through the roof because the right-to-be-heavily-armed crowd was most concerned about not having them, not the substantial problem they, the National Rifle Association and manufactures of civilian assault rifles have created for everyone else.
And we know that since the incidence of violent behavior and mental illness is not zero in this gun buying white male part of the populace, somewhere, in the future, perhaps not soon, one or two or perhaps three of the weapons bought in the current surge of “panic buying” will turn up in another mass killing.
Fewer Americans want guns, according to researchers at the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey.
Yet gun sales are sky-high. How can that be? The explanation apparently is that the minority who are gun owners buy ever-more weapons, creating arsenals.
Strangely, some owners think the firepower makes them more manly.
The Duluth News Tribune Reports that Duluth-area firearm dealers are seeing a high demand for Armalite, or “ARs.???
“Every time Obama opens his mouth, I sell more of them,??? said Scott Van Valkenburg, owner of Fisherman’s Corner in Pike Lake, Minn., in a News Tribune article “It’s getting hard to find them, but we still have a few on the shelf. … I know a few distributors who can still get them for me, at least for now. The more they talk about banning them, the more they sell and the harder they get to find.???
Allen said that almost every five minutes his store receives a call about AR-15s. The AR-15 is a common assault weapon, and the federal government has discussed the possibility of banning such weapons and enforcing stricter gun laws. Since the recent attack, the demand for AR-15s have been high across the nation, according to Allen. FMJ does not expect to get anymore in, due to the country’s high demand for them.
Allen does not think that stricter gun laws will have an affect on decreasing gun violence.
“Most crimes are done with illegally obtained guns.??? said Allen. “And if the government takes away guns, people will have no way to defend themselves,
Southern Shooters on New Hutchinson Mill Road has sold about 100 guns since Newtown’s massacre, up drastically from the normal eight to ten guns sold per week. Southern Shooters had sold the last of their five AR-15s between the Dec. 14 attack and last Tuesday.
There’s been a run on AR-15s at gun stores, too.
“I normally sell about 15-20 a month. I’ve sold about 30 in the last three days,” said Rick Friedman, who owns RTSP in Randolph, N.J.
Fifteen or twenty a month, alone, would strike many as a glaring symptom of a lethal for others group mental disease.
Welcome to the United States of Mean
We’ll equip you now with an AR-15
If you’re into slaughters and lethal devices
America’s the best of choices
Welcome to the United States of Pain
Our national color is a bloodstain
But if your check, your money’s — green
Hey, no problem, have an AR-15!
We do dances, brand new dances
For the glory and gun romances
Groans, moans, many grave stones
Plus we got lots of crazy people …
[Guest vocal, Ted]: Suck on my machine guns!
Welcome to the United States of Hate
Buy your assault gun, don’t be late!
If you like shootings and tragedy
America’s the best, wait, you’ll see.
We do dances, brand new dances
For the glory and gun romances
Groans, moans, many grave stones
Plus we got lots of crazy people …
[Guest vocal, Ted]: Suck on my machine guns!
Welcome to the United States of Shit
If you’re looking for heart, we ain’t got one bit.
In this country, life is cheap
But it comes with all the creeps.
[Guest vocal, Ted]: Suck on my machine guns!
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12.25.12
For Christmas, many were heartless
Best modern American folk tune, ever.
Hours before Christmas, WhiteManistan in California showed its kindly soul:
Concern that tighter gun laws might be on the way is causing already brisk Sacramento-area gun sales to spike.
Within a handful of hours of Christmas, a steady stream of shoppers arrived at Just Guns on Auburn Boulevard and left with bullets and shells by the boxes, pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns and stun guns.
What they weren’t carrying out were AR-15 semi-automatic rifles – akin to the weapon used in the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school – and high-capacity clips.
The store didn’t have them in stock, but people were still asking. And store owner Josh Deaser said the tragedy is causing gun consumers to buy up varieties of firearms they feel might be subject to restrictions.
Closer to downtown Sacramento, Broadway Bait Rod and Gun is being inundated with calls about high-capacity rifles.
“It’s been crazy. Every third call is about AR-15s.”
Put on layaway in Sheboygan, the article read.
Many got rides on Xmas eve in Webster, New York, presumably because not enough people had guns to take out the bad guy during a gun ambush/battle, even though the police and a SWAT weren’t sufficient.
Welcome to the United States of Hate; Buy your assault gun, don’t be late.
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12.24.12
Massacre as economic stimulus: The Insurrectionists
WhiteManistan, beyond comment:
Calls for stricter weapons laws after the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school have gun enthusiasts scrambling to buy firearms before they’re potentially restricted or banned outright.
Brownells Inc., which claims to be the world’s largest supplier of firearms accessories and gunsmithing tools, said it has sold 3 1/2 years worth of ammunition magazines in three days …
From Duluth, just one of many, the day before Christmas:
Northland gun dealers are reporting a spike in military-style gun sales.
Superior Shooters Supply is out of semi-automatic rifles due to people “panic buying,” owner Pat Kukull said. Some buyers are afraid of possible changes the federal government could make to gun laws.
Other guns are selling fast as well and she’s never seen anything like it in her 35 years in business, Kukull said.
Glen’s Army Navy Store in Grand Rapids ran out of the semi-automatic rifles by Thursday morning and operators aren’t sure when more will arrive.
Scott Van Valkenburg, owner of Fisherman’s Corner in Pike Lake outside Duluth, said that semi-automatic rifles are usually about 5 percent of his thriving gun business — but last week those rifles were nearly half his total gun sales.
Panic buying.
Eau Claire:
Many local stores have seen gun sales sky-rocketing. Store owners say people are trying to get their hands on anything they think might be banned.
“We sold a lot of gun accessories. We had over 200 of these PMAGs, which are top of the line magazines. They are all gone now. These are your basic GI version magazines that are used in the military. We went through almost 500 of those,??? said the sales associate at the C&C Pawnbrokers in Eau Claire, Luis Arenas.
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