Archive for January, 2011
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »I Don’t Hate Guns, I Just Feel Better When They’re Not Around
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 16, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, January 16th, 2011With Over 190 million guns in America, they’re not going away any time soon. Maybe if we called it “gun approval” legislation instead of “gun control” legislation, the typical gun owner would get less up in arms about registering their weapons.
 Do you really feel safe knowing guys like this have unrestricted access to guns? |
For most of my life I’ve held the belief that the world would be a better place without guns. I’m enough of a realist that I don’t have any hope of that being the case in my lifetime, but the topic is still of some concern to me, because while I have little interest in having one in my own hands, I have even less interest in having one around if it’s in someone else’s hands. Before I go on, I should point out that as a youngster growing up on a farm, I had the opportunity to handle a variety of guns, including rifles, shotguns, and even a couple of revolvers. I also had the chance to shoot an Uzi once, and can tell you from firsthand experience that it’s quite an amazing little machine. The opportunity to handle and shoot guns in a responsible fashion like this is in fact why I don’t believe we need them around. My use of the word “believe” is quite pertinent to the topic; I think it safe to say that the pro and anti gun debate will stew for quite some time, largely because the logic behind most arguments on either side is usually based on sentiment, not objective fact. I would feel a lot more comfortable with most gun advocates, for example, if they were just more honest about their motives for gun ownership. The most commonly cited reason for owning a gun is self-defense. Which is a bit ludicrous, in my view; self-defense against a gun would be wearing Kevlar Long Johns. Firing a gun in “self defense” is actually hostile retaliation if the attacker shoots first, and flat out hostility if they don’t. Just explore the Han Shot First debate if you don’t get what I mean. If gun owners could actually just come clean and say they enjoy the feeling of power a gun gives them, I’d feel a lot more comfortable, because at least then I’d know the person in control of this tool of violence and destruction was not self-deluded. A soldier, for instance, knows why he has a gun – if called to action, he’s going to use it to injure or kill someone, and he’s trained accordingly. And the hunting argument feels a little feeble to me too. The food supply we have via commercial animal slaughter provides more than enough meat for everyone, and shooting Bambi’s mom or dad from a few hundred yards away is hardly what I’d call “sportsmanship”. Sportsmanship would be stalking the prey and taking it down with a buck knife. On the other side of the debate, I think there’s a general failure of reason; with over 190 million guns in the United States and a highly profitable industry producing more than 4 million more annually, they’re not going away any time soon. And the fact that it’s a typical gun owner’s belief that it’s a God-given right to own one suggests that firearm restrictions and prohibitions would have effects similar to prohibitions of mind-altering substances; i.e.: the problems would persist and perhaps evolve into even more complex problems. And while I find myself a bit awkwardly aligning with many gun advocates regarding the logic behind our constitutional right to bear arms, I’d hasten to point out that if civil unrest reached a level where we were violently resisting our own government, the authority of the constitution itself would reasonably be in question, and I might be first in line at the armory to preserve our freedoms. But in my opinion, the main problem with gun ownership in America is that there are so many cultural problems underlying the gun problem that legislation will remain an emotional, divisive, highly politicized issue for some time to come. Having lots of guns around doesn’t intrinsically mean high crime rates; Switzerland is commonly held up as proof of this fact. However, Switzerland has neither the poor standard of living nor the complex cultural diversity we have in America. But the comparison is useful in one way; the politicized language of “gun control” instantly evokes a dissonant chord for a gun owner, because power and control are intrinsic to their desire to own a gun. Maybe if we called it “gun approval” legislation instead of “gun control” legislation, the idea of registering firearms would be more palatable to those who want to own them. I certainly don’t want to take your gun away; although it’s clear to me that a gun has no purpose other than death or destruction, it’s not guns that kill people, it’s people. The guns just make it a lot easier, as Eddie Izzard points out below. Read the rest of this entry »
Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas To Win Back Your Ex-Girlfriend
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 15, 2011 by admin in Holidays
Saturday, January 15th, 2011Five Valentine gift ideas that may help you rekindle the fire of love. Because boyfriends are easy to come by, but girlfriends have to be earned. Strangely, most of these gifts are for yourself.
  Wherein we finally explain why pink roses were chosen to express unrequited love. |
For many of us, Valentine’s Day is a time for candlelight dinners, champagne, and romantic gifts to express our undying passion for our loved ones. But for some of us, Valentine’s Day is a time of composing and re-composing bizarre love letters to people who had no idea we were stalking them, or obsessing about the one who left us over a year ago, by pounding a 12 pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon while playing video games with our dorky friends who are still virgins at twenty-six. We’ve previously shared lots of off the wall Valentine’s Day gift ideas, but this year, we thought we’d take a look at the still suffering love-a-holic, and offer suggestions for how to win back that ex-girlfriend who was probably your last hope for any kind of healthy connection with humanity and a normal social life. First up, if you want to keep it classy and send roses, don’t send red or white ones. The traditional color for “unrequited love” is pink. I think I finally figured out the reason for this tradition. First of all, although roses are a beautiful flower, pink ones are somehow just, I don’t know, PINK. Their beauty pales in comparison to a bold red or crisp white. Pink was probably established for this purpose for two reasons. First, they prove that a guy really means it. Unless you’re a classic romantic, buying pink flowers are a sure sign that you’re GAY. And second, the second rate beauty of a pink roses makes it MUCH easier for a woman to chuck over a hundred dollars’ worth of flowers in the wastebin, which is almost certainly where the majority of pink roses end up. So you’ll probably want to skip the whole “unrequited love” thing. It’s pricey, and probably ineffective. Below are a few gift ideas to really help you win back that lost love. Strangely, most of them are gifts for you, because probably the only way you’ll win her back is by being the man you aren’t. Read the rest of this entry »
How I Ended Up Living In Brazil
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 14, 2011 by admin in Politics
Friday, January 14th, 2011The thing I love most about America’s slow slide into a totalitarian police state is that it means I get to live in one of my favorite 80′s movies.
BP Makes Ugly Oil Spill Stains Disappear With Magical Corexit
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on January 13, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green
Thursday, January 13th, 2011No one knows the long-term effects of Corexit, the toxic dispersant used to clean up the Deepwater Oil Spill, but one short-term effect seems to be invisibility in the media.
 This is part two of our Gulf Oil Spill Weather Report . The forecast still calls for widely scattered blamestorming, with high-pressure greenwashing continuing through 2050. |
After spending about an hour looking for information on the long-term effects of Corexit, the dispersant used during the BP Deepwater oil spill in the gulf last year, I’m convinced that it not only does a great job of making oil disappear from sight, it also magically leaves few traces of itself in the media. The unfortunate thing about the fact that it does such a great job of making oil disappear from sight is that it apparently accomplishes this by just shoving it underwater, making it nearly impossible to ascertain its effects on human or sea life. Which in my view, makes it more of a public relations tool than an oil cleanup tool. I’ve been perplexed for some time about why – after being told to stop by the EPA to stop using it – that BP chose to dump over a million gallons of a substance known to be horrifically toxic into the gulf, especially when there were more effective, less toxic options available. Well, the fact that the company that makes Corexit was started by Exxon, meaning the shareholders of both the energy company that caused the spill and the company tasked with cleaning it up would profit certainly explains part of it. But another critical part of why BP was probably so emphatic about using it was simple PR. No one seems know what the long-term effects of Corexit are, nor do they seem to know what the long term effects of oil on the ocean bottom are. I guess we’ll be finding out in the coming years, because that’s where a lot of it remains. I can’t imagine oil on the ocean bottom is a good thing; last I knew, the bottom of the ocean was still directly connected to the top of it by a bunch of water. Part of Corexit’s disappearing act was made possible by the fact that Nalco, the company that makes it, was way ahead in the PR game, plucking the best of DC’s revolving door lobbyist talent way back in June. And it’s interesting to note that one of the key points in the government’s Oil Spill Commission report on the disaster highlights one very significant fact – not only do the agencies assigned to regulating oil drilling lack the teeth to enforce any useful safeguards, they’re out-gunned and out-financed by an industry that is magnitudes ahead of them in technology and knowledge as well. The first video production from the commission’s report is below; it views a bit like a damage control piece for US regulatory agencies. Read the rest of this entry »
Habitrails For Inhumanity
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 12, 2011 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011For about a hundred grand, you can train for combat or engage in misanthropic virtual reality gaming in the Virtusphere “human hamster ball”. Or, you could go analog and Zorb in a Mega Ball for just a few hundred bucks.
If the time you spend Facebooking, watching Keyboard Cat on YouTube, and buying real estate on Second Life haven’t satisfied your need to completely isolate yourself from humanity, fear not – technological innovation will continually bring you new methods to embrace your inner misanthrope. The Virtusphere isn’t all that “new” in tech industry terms; it was first broadly featured in 2009 (see a Reuters video here), and received more exposure at last years’ tech shows. But somehow, it hasn’t grabbed as much press as one might expect. We suspect this is a result of an elaborate stealth marketing campaign the company has put together, using Zhu Zhu Pets
