Author: Alan Buddug

The parents of a Michigan teenager who killed 4 people and injured many others will be charged with involuntary manslaughter for providing the gun to their son. This is a completely appropriate move on the part of prosecutor Karen McDonald.

Every right we have comes with associated responsibilities, and if you, personally, are exercising a right, then you have personal responsibility regarding how you do it. For example, the right to vote comes with the responsibility of making a sincere effort to understand what you are voting for. The right to free speech comes with the responsibility to speak the truth. In most cases, the law does not force you to perform those related responsibilities, mostly because we’ve decided that it is more important to protect your rights than to enforce responsibilities. Generally, that’s the best choice.

In the case of firearm ownership, what are some responsibilities that we have?

• We have a responsibility to understand how to safely use the weapon.
• We have a responsibility to understand the ethical and legal issues surrounding use of a deadly weapon.
• We have the responsibility to participate in the common defense.
• As with other rights that grant us some kind of power, we have the responsibility to do our best to understand reality so we are not making a mistake when we use that power.
• We have a responsibility to keep that weapon out of the wrong hands.

It’s that last one that comes into play with the story of this Michigan teenager who has damaged and destroyed so many lives. His parents knew that he was troubled and knew he was not legally able to own a gun, yet they purchased one for him and then stored it in an unlocked location that was known to him. Even when he displayed clear homicidal inclination, they did nothing to keep him from that gun. Their story is particularly egregious, but this responsibility to keep your firearms out of the wrong hands is something that American gun owners are failing at every day.

First off, please make sure your guns are either on your person — where you have immediate control of them — or behind two locks. Those two locks are going to be on the door of the building (your house or apartment) and the door of a container (like a gun safe or locker). If you have a gun in your car, and it isn’t under your immediate control, it needs to be in a gun locker that is connected to the car. While only 10 to 15% of guns used in crimes had previously been reported stolen, it would still make a difference. I know a lot of people like to stage guns; as I’ve said before, that needs to change. If you need immediate access to a gun, keep it on your person.

Second, a child should not be granted unsupervised access to a deadly weapon; I mean that not only in terms of a person’s age, but also their maturity. If you’re the person deciding whether someone has access to a gun, you have the responsibility of evaluating that person yourself in terms of whether they can be trusted with the weapon. There’s this recent case in Michigan, but I’m also reminded of the Sandy Hook shooter who had his own gun safe in his bedroom. You’re not keeping the gun out of the wrong hands if that person knows the combination to the safe or knows where the key is.

There are a lot of irritating laws out there. In many cases, though, the stupid law is there because someone was an inconsiderate ass. In Wyoming, it is apparently illegal to wear a hat that obstructs people’s view in a public theater or place of amusement; undoubtedly, that’s because some asshole did just that many, many times. If you are not doing your best — which is all I ever ask — to keep your guns out of the wrong hands, you are the asshole. There’s no ambiguity on this point. It doesn’t matter if nothing ever goes wrong, you’ve still failed to meet the responsibilities that came with firearm ownership.

What we’re going to see happening when there’s a tragedy like this is that prosecutors are going to go after the irresponsible person who either failed to store their gun properly or gave it right to a person who obviously should not have had it. I expect we will also see laws to that effect, and we’re going to hear so much lamentation about these horrible laws as that happens — but the thing is that gun owners deserve it because so many of us have failed. I’d prefer that we all got to make our own decisions about these kinds of things, but people like this killer’s parents have ruined it all for everyone. Now, the government is going to get involved. Irresponsible gun owners really didn’t give them a choice but to get involved.

If you’re sitting there thinking, “How dare you tell me what I do with my guns! I will do what I want!” Well, OK, you will for now, but thanks to people who think like that, the time is coming when you won’t get to do what you want.

The conservative assault on reality continues this week with right-wing parents who believe elementary schools are teaching critical race theory (CRT) adding selective emotional learning (SEL) to the list of things that set them off. Unlike CRT, SEL really is part of elementary school curricula. According to an NBC News article, it is:

…a teaching philosophy popularized in recent years that aims to help children manage their feelings and show empathy for others.

Conservatives are concerned that SEL will…

encourage children to celebrate diversity, sometimes introducing students to conversations about race, gender and sexuality.

It’s easy to dismiss this and other conservative attacks as simply another case of “the cruelty is the point”; however, while it is true that cruelty is part of the point, the main reasons for these kinds of attacks is the conservative management of reality. A rational person experiences reality with their senses and then interprets what they experience to make sense of that reality. The other option would be to decide what reality is first (based on cultural stories you were told by an authority figure), then interpret the information coming from your senses in a way that fits with your pre-determined reality. If what you experience doesn’t fit, you would then make up things to confirm your pre-determined reality and “experience” those instead. It’s as if your brain’s imagination center is re-routed directly into the input channels and the effect is a lot like hallucinating, except there’s no organic brain abnormality. This process is culturally induced, and was formalized by the Nazis as “will to power” (they misinterpreted Nietzsche).

The way this applies to both history curricula and SEL is really interesting. The fantasy that conservatives are trying to make real includes things like:
1. The United States as a country and Americans as its citizens are and always have been morally superior.
2. My children will never consider suicide because they were born of and raised by superior people.
3. White people are not and have never been racist. (They accept that “racist” is bad or at least a thing they don’t want people to believe about them.)
4. My children will grow up to be successful, straight and happy and will never do anything that would be self-harmful.
5. My children will not be victims of sexual predators.
6. My children will not only conform to their parents’ culture but become champions of the same.

From the viewpoint of someone who is actively hallucinating, believing a thing or even knowing about it can make it true. To emphasize — from this perspective, the objective realness of a thing is less important than your belief in the realness of that thing. You might recognize this logic from some horror movies, like the Nightmare on Elm Street series, where believing in the monster makes the monster real and allows it to come and get you.

If you apply this dream logic to the six examples I provided above in relation to history curricula and SEL, some interesting things happen:
1. Children can’t learn about the moral failings of their country or its citizens, because that would make those failings real.
2. Children can’t learn that suicide exists, because then they will kill themselves. (This is specifically mentioned by a protester in the NBC News piece.)
3. Children can’t learn that many white people are racist, because then white people will be racist. (Systemic racism’s tenacity is explained largely by the fact that participants pretend it isn’t happening.)
4. Children who learn about failure, homosexuality, and sadness will become sad, gay failures. If they learn about drugs, they will take drugs; if they learn about sexuality, they will have sex. They will become trans if they learn what that is.
5. Children who learn about sexual predators will be victimized by sexual predators.
6. Children who learn about other cultures will reject the culture they came from.

Obviously, the conservatives are choosing to be extremely irrational, but I think there are valid reasons for conservatives to be concerned. Conservativism really thrives in an environment without any empathy where strict, traditional hierarchies are held sacred and anyone who goes against that is a deviant that must be forced to comply if not snuffed out. If we start developing empathy for people who are nonconforming, then the conservative worldview cannot survive. Empathy is quite possibly the biggest threat to conservativism there is. The meme “the facts don’t care about your feelings” is not about facts — conservatives do not care about those — rather, it is primarily a bold rejection of empathy.

The primary problem — as always — is about how to co-exist with people who are choosing to use their brains this way. We want our children to have a complete understanding of their world, to be kind to others, and to survive. Things like an accurate, complete historical curriculum and selective emotional learning help our children achieve all that, but we have to face these constant attacks from conservatives who would rather deny reality than do what is best for their children. It’s complicated, but one thing that is not a solution would be separating our children’s education from their children’s education.

The other problem is that conservatives are materially harming their own children by championing their fantastical view of the world. For example, the suicide rate among teenagers is much higher in conservative parts of the country. That study emphasizes that this might be partially explained by conservative teenagers bullying queer teenagers, but I want to emphasize that in a conservative part of the country, most of the teenagers are going to be conservative regardless of gender or sexual identity. So, a better way to interpret this is conservative teens excising deviance from the community. Conservatives are happy to sacrifice their own children to their ideology at least partially because they have chosen not to believe that their child (specifically) could be a deviant.

I’m choosing the word “deviant” specifically because the laundry list of marginalized groups that Democrats like to use is wholly insufficient. Any kind of deviance might be attacked by conservatives — it doesn’t have to be any of the specific groups of people that Democrats actively try to protect, and it could be very hard to predict the kinds of deviance conservatives will go after. For example, in a conservative, Protestant community (which might not even know it is “Protestant”), a Catholic family that moves into town is likely to become a target. Conservatives tend to link one kind of deviance to another in an effort to villainize, so this hypothetical Catholic family might be labeled as “Satanists” or something else nonsensical.

We have to understand how they think if we’re to have any success at all. I have to wonder if we can induce them to believe things just by suggesting the idea to them. They clearly believe this will work, so it might be worth a try. For example, “COVID was created by Satanists to kill conservatives! And now they are lying about the vaccine so we won’t get vaccinated!” or “The lizard people are going to be out on election day and they’re going to hunt down and eat conservatives who try to vote! Their lower jaws unhinge from their skulls like snakes and they swallow you whole!” See? We might be able to make this work for us.

The following is commentary from November 15, 2021 by Mitch Fryer of Armed Margins and represents the best things we’ve seen so far about the Rittenhouse trial. This trial is really a mess in terms of the complexity of Wisconsin law, the shenanigans of trial participants, and the events of the day in question, but Mitch has a solid understanding of the situation. If you look on the Armed Margins Patreon, you’ll find a lot of other worthwhile material.

Today we will hear the closing arguments in the Rittenhouse trial. I have some comments I want to share, some of which I’m sure will challenge some readers.

First some framing:

Defense is going to argue that Rittenhouse acted in pure self defense, painting the victims of the shootings as violent rioters who maliciously set upon Rittenhouse acting in a manner that threatened deadly consequences, or at least great bodily harm, therefore justifying Rittenhouse’s actions as legal self defense in each separate instance. They will paint Rittenhouse as a wide eyed kid who got in over his head in a nasty circumstance while trying to mitigate harm through helping others.

Prosecution is going to argue that Kyle provoked Rosenbaum into chasing him by pointing a gun at Gorowitz, prompting Rosenbaum to yell “Gun Gun Gun!” and pursue him across the lot until Kyle shoots. They will argue that Rittenhouse’s flight from the Rosenbaum after the simple provocation was not adequate to regaining his innocence and that he did not exhaust all safe avenues of escape before engaging in lethal force, thereby making his self defense imperfect.  They will further argue that the subsequent shootings are part of one continuous event, which occurred as Rittenhouse fled the area of the first shooting and those shootings were provoked by his first criminal provocation and subsequent shooting of Rosenbaum, and is therefore not self defense either.

The prosecution has been an utter disaster, in terms of lawyering, almost from start to finish, save for the last day on winning several jury instruction battles and submitting new evidence (FBI drone footage) on the last day of the trial to *barely* rescue the already thin legal argumentation against a solid self defense claim. Defense has been very sharp and largely benefited from the prosecutions endemic “own goals” throughout the trial.

Personally, I imagine that Rittenhouse will be acquitted of all charges after a few days of jury deliberations.  The most realistic best case scenario for the prosecution IMO is a mistrial due to hung jury on the homicide charge related to Rosenbaum, for which they can try again for a conviction at a later date. I’d be absolutely shocked if Rittenhouse was convicted on any count, but prosecution has at kept an avenue open, however “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a high bar and it only takes one juror to be convinced the other way, which seems a certaintly at this point.

Outside of the court itself, media reporting has been truly abysmal, retreating into what I can only describe as an alternate universe, misrepresenting what self defense law is, making mountains out of barely mentionable occurrences (including routine evidentiary court rulings), and omitting significant material facts throughout the case unfolding. I’ve watch every minute of this trial live and reading articles online was like stepping into the “upside down.” Unhinged from reality. To say that the media has utterly failed to represent this occurrence to the public is a huge understatement.

Most egregious in my mind, is the lack of solid commentary from the anti-racists or antifascists, especially those of us who walk in the world of armed praxis. We’ve reduced our engagement to the playing field of US culture wars, internet narrative battles, and largely limiting our depth to “court judge racist” and “Rittenhouse white supremacist.” Fine enough points to make, but not where we want to end our analysis. What’s missing is a rooted understanding of what self defense law actually is and how self defense court cases actually proceeds. Furthermore, by way of hyper focusing on the court case itself and it’s various flashpoints, we’ve missed broader perspectives, like deeply analyzing how that militia unit came together, how it utilized Facebook to organize, the conspiracy theories it was based upon and reasearch on both their etimology and distirbution.

We’ve missed hammering on the actions that the militia took to thwart barricades, their statement, goals, and tactics,  along with the many other militias on the ground that night. Along those same lines, little research has been done into what armed com def groups where doing that night in defense of the rebellion.  We’ve further missed the opportunity to articulate how Rittenhouse’s actions tie into the **deep** history of whites and militia’s inserting themselves into rebellions, killing participants, and getting legal cover afterwards. We’ve also missed what rebelling communities have historically done to escape and evade militia’s, confront them, and mitigate their harm, or utilize the law to their advantage, albeit in a much different way.

I fear that through pithy twitter posts and simple narratives, folks interested in armed defense of self/community are being impressed with flatly incorrect information on the law of self defense, it’s principles, and how it should factor into your actions before, during, and after, dynamic defensive encounters. Seems to me that through an “anti-racist vs reactionary” “Kyle guilty vs not guilty” hyperfocus, that folks aren’t even thinking about how understanding the factors around this case can help us understand  how we can modulate tactics and interventions in dealing with armed militias while also minimizing the risk of state retaliation and prosecution. I hope that after the verdict is announced that there is a pivot into a concerted effort by com def folks to deconstruct what happened both in court and on the ground that night, in a way that doesn’t simply feed into culture wars, so we can tease out the lessons that could be of unquestionable value. I know that I will be.

Last, regardless of the outcome in the Rittenhouse verdict, anyone fighting towards societal transformation and anti-authoritarianism will lose. If Kyle is acquitted it’s yet another encouragement to reactionaries to push their actions further and into bolder territories. If Kyle is acquitted, it will be recuperated into the faux persecution, victim narrative of reactionary America, and provoke reactionaries to push their actions further and into bolder territories. The only way through to something valuable out of this whole thing for us is to engage beyond two dimensional culture war’s, tease out the deeper lessons, and use them to our advantage in the next conflict that materializes.

Imagine if someone like Harvey Weinstein presented as his only defense, “Well, at least I’m not Hitler!” Would you take that as a valid argument? Or would you instead dismiss it as absurd because you know Harvey Weinstein is still a bad person, even if he isn’t that bad. Similarly, imagine that we can resurrect Adolph Hitler for a trial and he presented as his defense, “Well, at least I didn’t eat people!” Is that a valid defense? My thinking to both examples is no.

If your only defense is to compare yourself to someone worse, you’re simply not a good person.

Here is something from the New York Times — a much respected mouthpieces of modern neoliberalism — about what Democrats do when they have all the power. They looked at states where Democrats control both state legislatures and the governor’s office and found that they are not complying with their own party platform and are, in fact, fueling American inequality.

We’re not surprised.

PS: Harvey Weinstein was a Democratic voter who supported John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. 

All indications now point to COVID-19 being endemic and though the vaccines improve outcomes, it’s clear that we’re going to need at least a yearly booster shot basically for the rest of our lives. Below, you will find links to various articles that get into some of the details, but the overall conclusion is that we have definitely lost the war against COVID-19 (yes, that’s the fault of conservatives). The scale of this problem is such that we might have to do what our ancestors did a long time ago — that is, evolve our way out of it. Apparently, there’s some indication that a coronavirus pandemic that began 25,000 years ago only ended because the human animal itself changed over the course of 20,000 years.

While I don’t think we should give up hope, we definitely need to dispense with dreams of defeating COVID-19 any time soon and move on to another source of hope. My recommendation is that when we are considering our options, we should preface everything with, “Since COVID-19 will be with us for the rest of our lives,” and then add whatever mitigation strategy we have in mind. The time scale involved probably makes some mitigations untenable; for example, please don’t plan to just stay home alone for the rest of your life. Certainly, we can also hope science will come up with a solution, but we shouldn’t count on it.

Here are some other examples:
Since COVID-19 will be with us for the rest of our lives, we need to determine how to fund booster shots on a permanent basis.
Since COVID-19 will be with us for the rest of our lives, we need to find palatable ways to protect relatively vulnerable Americans, and make those social changes permanent.
Since COVID-19 will be with us for the rest of our lives, we need to support international efforts to get amenable people vaccinated.
Since COVID-19 will be with us for the rest of our lives, we need to stop trying to force hostile people to comply with protective protocols and consider whether society as a whole should pay for costly COVID-19 treatments for individuals who refuse to be vaccinated.

Article Summaries

Highly-vaccinated Vermont has more COVID-19 cases than ever. Why is this happening? by Elizabeth Murray, Burlington Free Press. Murray points to the waning effectiveness of vaccinations in Vermont (which happened relatively early compared to other states) and the delta variant. “Unvaccinated Vermonters are still the people getting sick and being hospitalized at the highest rates. Infection rates among people in their 20s and children have also contributed to the most recent surge”

Immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi speaks on Long COVID and the dangers posed by SARS-CoV-2 by Benjamin Mateus, World Socialist Web Site. This is part 1 of a 2-part series that does a deep dive into the biology of COVID-19 and explains why it isn’t going away. Very technical and hard to read, but not too long and worth the effort.

As Covid recedes in US a new worry emerges: wildlife passing on the virus by Melody Schreiber, The Guardian. Basically, whitetail deer are now a reservoir for COVID-19, which means it isn’t just endemic in humans, but also in a wide variety of animals, and that means that reaching a point where a high percentage of humans are immune is no longer enough to achieve “herd immunity”.

Covid cases are surging in Europe. America is in denial about what lies ahead by Eric Topol, The Guardian, November 12, 2021

One Doctor’s Summary of Our Situation

There’s a great Twitter thread from Dr. Claudia William (a practicing physician in Michigan) that I’m going to reproduce here for your convenience:

We are in trouble. We are seeing a lot of unvaccinated children & young adults [in the hospital]. Scary part is even older vaccinated people coming in very sick. All their tests are negative so no one thinks they have COVID — that’s of the people who agree to test. They have all the COVID symptoms.
Stay vigilant. After just one shift I have a slight stuffy nose and don’t feel great & I’m triple vaxxed. I encourage you to carefully consider what your holiday plans looks like. Please make the right decision to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.
The unvaccinated people are besides themselves bc they can’t seem to understand why they are young & got sick. Most of them ask me “but i didn’t have covid, I never get sick, I’m not getting better and do not feel like myself” Don’t let this be you.
Anyways that’s my update for those who care. Hopefully the news will finally start to report that COVID is no where close to being under control and that we need to be extra vigilant going into the holiday season.
Please don’t come into my replies asking me to explain a virus that has been circulating for more than 20 months. If at this point you still think it’s another virus I can’t help you. It’s not my job to help those in denial.
Also RSV is not taking out a bunch of healthy adults worse than it has any year before…..this is not real.
Sure some people can have RSV but that is not what we are talking about & if it were RSV we wouldn’t see sicker unvaccinated patients than vaccinated patients.

I have to come back to the issue of Alec Baldwin’s negligent discharge that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza because Baldwin recently said something thoroughly stupid that really illustrates his refusal to take responsibility for his own actions. Specifically:

Every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety.

He posted that both on his Twitter and Instagram. There’s a lot to unpack in that single sentence.

First off, “police officer” is not synonymous with “movie set gun expert”; in fact, police officers are not inherently gun experts at all (they’re famously not great at gun safety, either, in fact) and certainly not experts in the context of a movie set. Hiring a police officer to manage gun safety on your movie set is just completely stupid, particularly since there is already a system in place that covers gun safety with a person who is specifically an expert on movie set gun safety. That system works well when it is respected.

Second, we’ve learned a lot about how guns are handled on movie sets since I first posted about this, and though I don’t see anything wrong about my initial post, it is now clear that the people in control of production on the set of Rust were willing to cut corners to save money — and that includes all kinds of safety on set. They created a culture that shrugged off safety. For example, the armorer on the set (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed) claims that her duties were split between managing the weapons and helping the prop department, in clear violation of established movie set safety standards.

Would a whole police officer do a better job than half a movie armorer? Maybe! But when we consider how many other movies have been filmed with guns and didn’t injure anyone, it is clear that the established system for gun safety on movie sets works. In the last 50 years, there have only been approximately 4 injuries from guns on movie sets; many more people have died on movie sets from other causes. Whoever was actually in control of the “Rust” movie set is clearly responsible for the unsafe conditions. They were more concerned about saving a few dollars than human life, which is a common theme in capitalist enterprises; it is the reason why regulation is necessary. The gun safety standards on movie sets are not rules — they are optional; that should change.

Dwayne Johnson has, in the meantime, pledged to stop using real guns on the sets of his movies. This is a reasonable alternative since it eliminates the possibility of human negligence injuring a person on the set, and CGI is now effective enough that this will work. Most gun use in movies is so cartoonish that the detail provided by real firearms is really irrelevant; I think most gun people will agree that you shouldn’t use a gun as a tool if anything else will work instead. CGI is expensive, though, and I’m certain that low-budget projects like Rust will continue to use real guns because they are cheaper — unless they are compelled to stop doing that.

Despite the fact that everyone on the set of Rust was working in a context where human safety was not held to be as important as saving a little money, it is still also true that specific people were negligent, and I don’t know exactly who those people are. We might not ever know. However, it is certainly true that anyone who is handling a gun or even a thing that might be a gun needs to follow the rules of gun safety when doing so. Baldwin absolutely should have checked that gun before pulling the trigger and should have never pointed it at the cinematographer and director. Yes, I realize that he may not have known all that at the time, but he clearly knew it was a gun, and he clearly knew that a gun can kill people.

Liberals have these weird ideas about guns and violence. For example, they think guns are inevitably going to hurt someone just by existing and that there’s just nothing that can be done about it — basically, casting aside any personal responsibility they might have regarding any gun ever. In terms of violence, they seem to actually be afraid of their own capacity for violence, believing that anyone can become so angry that they might “lose control” and injure someone. In this self-infantilizing paradigm that they hold, the obvious solution is to get rid of all the guns, except for those in the possession of a cop, who becomes some kind of weird daddy figure for them.

In truth, guns don’t fire unless someone pulls the trigger, you’re not going to lose control when you get angry (an angry, violent person is typically performing both the anger and the violence — they aren’t out of control), a person who doesn’t generally fly into a violent rage probably never will, and a cop is someone who self-selected to do a job where violence is meted out against people who are less powerful. As taxpayers, we are all responsible for every gun in the possession of a government agent, be they a police officer, a soldier, or any other state-employed shooter.

But back to Alec Baldwin: What is the function of his announcement that he needs a daddy figure on set to take responsibility for the dangerous guns? Alec Baldwin does not want to take personal responsibility for his past negligence with a firearm, and does not want to ever take personal responsibility for a firearm (which really illustrates that he was probably not taking personal responsibility for the gun at the time of the incident). There’s a lot of responsibility for him to bear: Not only was he the person who actually shot two other human beings negligently, but he is also a producer for the movie. While it is unlikely that his executive producer title gave him any kind of managerial control of the set, it did give him the kind of authority that would allow him to insist on better safety standards.

His post also reveals that he didn’t really respect Rust’s armorer (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed). Since a movie armorer is obviously going to be an expert on movie set gun safety whereas a cop is not, there must be something else about the armorer that he thinks is a problem, and my guess is that he just didn’t respect her, and possibly even witnessed other people’s lack of respect for her. His lack of respect for this particular armorer clearly generalizes to a lack of respect for all of them. I’ve read accounts by other movie armorers about how they had to really push back against actors and other authorities on set in order to assure that safety protocols were respected — to the extent that it seems to me like they were risking being fired.

It may be that in a culture that is so disrespectful of armorers (and human safety, generally) that the Rust armorer might have been at a disadvantage due to being relatively new, relatively young, and a woman (to be clear, these are factors that may have made on-set managers believe they didn’t have to respect her, not flaws). She also really needed the producers to be happy with her work (again, because she was relatively new to the profession) so she may not have felt she could push back to the extent required; again, this is more about capitalism and managerial feudalism than her. She also may have fucked up, but this post is about Alec Baldwin, and everything I’m saying about the armorer is speculation related to why he thinks a cop is needed instead of just respecting the armorer.

Before Baldwin’s idiotic post about hiring a police officer, I felt bad for him. I assumed that he was taking personal responsibility for his part in killing a human being and seriously injuring another, but his post makes it clear that he is not. If you are apologizing or asking for forgiveness, the first step is to admit that you have hurt another person. Baldwin has not done this. Instead, his first response was to treat the accident as a completely random, inevitable event, and his second response has been to imply that someone else was to blame. Given that he has killed someone (and needs to obey the advice of his lawyer), I would also have accepted silence as an appropriate response.

Below is a related video by “Lucky Gunner”.

Every year around Halloween, Americans share variations on a very scary story — the story of Tainted Candy! As the story goes, there are evil people out there — probably Satanists — who are placing things inside the Halloween treats. Razorblades in apples, needles in candy bars, perhaps drugs! The machinations of these evil-doers are without bounds! The story of Tainted Candy is quiet ancient at this point (it goes all the way back to the 1950’s!), but nowadays the police are sharing the story on social media with pictures of the evidence that they’ve been given, and the public gobbles it up, hitting share as fast as their fingers can manage.

Who are these evil-doers who would pollute the sacred Halloween candy? My God — this is candy for children! What would possess them to —

Spoiler alert: It’s all bullshit. In the rare case when candy really is found to be tainted, it is the person turning it in to the police (typically, an attention-seeking, narcissistic parent) who did the actual tainting. In a recent case, a narcissistic teen who wanted some attention did the tainting and then reported it to his parents. No child is ever in actual danger, and in fact, there are exactly zero (0) cases of children being harmed by tainted candy from strangers, which brings up an interesting caveat: A case from 1974 where an evil parent gave tainted Halloween to his own child (he killed his son to get the insurance money). I hope you will appreciate how that is very different from the Tainted Candy story.

Have you ever heard of “Munchausen syndrome by proxy“? Unlike Tainted Candy, Munchausen by proxy is real. This is where a bad person uses someone else’s illness as a method to get attention for themselves, sometimes even inducing illness in the other person to make it work. In the case of a parent or other caregiver and a child, this abuse can go on for years and sometimes kills the “proxy” — and all that abuse is just so the bad person can get someone to pay attention to them. This is how motivated by attention these people are. I want to emphasis that Munchausen by proxy is very rare — and yet infinitely more common than tainted candy, because tainted candy never really happens.

While it is obvious that we all should be careful about what strangers are giving our children, we must start pushing back against the latest Satanic panic. The ongoing story of Tainted Candy is one small part of it.

Special fun fact: The guy who murdered his own son was a deacon at the Second Baptist Church in Deer Park, Texas, where he sang in the choir and was in charge of the local bus program. Spooooky!

There are quite a few politically-charged subjects around these days. I’ve done the required digging on three of those subjects, and the truth about each is summarized below.

Ivermectin

While the two wings of mainstream media argue about whether ivermectin is a horse dewormer or a miracle cure for COVID-19, the truth is something quite a bit different. Ivermectin is used as a dewormer, but also bears interesting characteristics regarding viruses. Specifically, some researchers believe that ivermectin may interfere with a virus’s ability to connect to the cells in your body and if it can’t connect, it can’t deliver it’s destructive payload into your cells. At the moment, however, no studies have been able to prove that it works, which means one of two things: Either the researchers were wrong about ivermectin interfering with the viral process or the effect of ivermectin is very small. All this means that at human-safe dosages, ivermectin is safe to use, but probably won’t make a noticeable difference in your COVID-19 illness. At a larger (i.e., large animal) dose, ivermectin can be harmful, particularly to your digestive system, so if you take ivermectin for any reason, you should do so with the guidance of a doctor.

Instead of relying on an experimental application of a drug, you’d be much better off relying on one of the available COVID-19 vaccines which all show strong protective effect on people who receive them. Though you can still catch COVID-19 after vaccination, your illness will be far less severe than if you had not been vaccinated. If you do get a serious case of COVID-19, there are other treatments (like monoclonal antibodies) that have been proven to be effective.

Source: Can Ivermectin be used to treat COVID-19? (content approved by a licensed pharmacist)

The Shipping Crisis

Another current issue that Republicans and Democrats are arguing about is the shipping crisis, with Republicans trying to blame Biden, and Democrats claiming that Biden can fix it. While there are still supply problems directly related to COVID-19 breakouts at factories, the biggest problem in the US is now at our ports and appears to be caused primarily by the pay structure for truckers. Specifically, there’s always been a lot of congestion at our ports and that meant that even before COVID-19, truckers who haul shipping containers in and out of ports were not making a lot of money because they are paid per container rather than hourly. Then, when COVID-19 disrupted the process, the ports became much, much more congested; now, it just isn’t worth it for truckers to pick up those containers.

This speaks to a larger problem in the US which is that corporations simply are not choosing to pay workers enough. Not only are regular employees not paid enough, but many workers (like truckers picking up shipping containers) are contractors who are paid per unit. In both cases, the cost of working is just the tiniest bit less than what they get paid even on the best day. In the case of the port problem, shipping companies are making up financially for the slower movement of goods by simply charging more for shipping rather than paying drivers what they are worth. There’s nothing Biden can do to fix this (outside of something radical, which he would never do), but there’s also no reason to blame him for it.

Republicans are also trying to blame “central planning” but the only central planners who have any power here are those at the major shipping companies who are paying truckers per load rather than a fair hourly wage. It is a matter of fact that every single corporation in the US uses “central planning” and yet Republicans want us to simultaneously never centrally plan anything and also run the government like a corporation. That said, if I were the central planner in charge of fixing this problem, my solution would be to require shipping companies to pay every trucker what they’re worth; is that something either the Democrats or Republicans are willing to do?

Update (November 2, 2021): There’s news today that the city of LA-Long Beach is going to start fining the importers for the containers sitting there. That’s only going to make things worse as it still doesn’t create a way for truckers to make a living off of getting those containers moved out.

Source: I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End (an inside view of the problem from a trucker)

Adrenochrome

Here’s another issue where Democrats and Republicans are at odds with one another. On one side are the Republicans, who say that the Democratic party is controlled by pedophilic Satanists who like to steal children, and then frighten them, which increases the production of adrenochrome in their brains. The pedophilic Satanists then kill the child at the height of fear and harvest the adrenochrome from their brains. This is basically the plot of Monsters, Inc. On the other side are Democrats who say, “Nuh uh!” If only we could tell which side is correct!

Well, it turns out that adrenochrome is a real biological chemical, and that it is formed by the oxidation of adrenaline — so, some points to the Republicans there. However, in real life, it is sometimes used to promote clotting in open wounds, but never as a recreational drug, and if you wanted something to use recreationally that feels like adrenaline, you’d take epinephrine (this would not be safe). You can buy a synthetic form of adrenochrome that works just fine without killing any children, and if you don’t believe me, I suggest that you do just that and report back (please consult with a physician before ingesting any drug).

Where did the confusion come from? Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas references recreational use of adrenochrome, but is probably just bullshit; similarly, the book Legal Highs talks about adrenochrome, but is probably using “adrenochrome” as a cool way to talk about DMT, which is a completely different thing which can only be made through a synthetic process. There’s a long history of people mixing adrenochrome up with hallucinogens like DMT; adrenochrome is not a hallucinogen. As I mentioned before, it is similar to, but far less effective than, epinephrine (a synthetic adrenaline), which is why it is only used occasionally in medicine and only for promotion of clotting in open wounds. Adrenaline/epinephrine is to adrenochrome what coffee is to whatever you call that shit you made out of yesterday’s used coffee grounds today.

Also, the Democrats are not Satanists, and they aren’t pedophiles. It’s true that they are a big problem, but not for either of those two reasons. I’m glad we’ve straightened that out.

Source: The truth about adrenochrome

The results of a recent political poll have been released, and they indicate that 30% of Republicans believe violence may be necessary to solve the problems facing the United States. One in five of the respondents, representing 20% of all Americans or 64 million people, agreed that, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

More than two-thirds of Republicans, or 68 percent, continue to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, compared to 26 percent of independents and just 6 percent of Democrats.

If you are wondering how 6% of Democrats could have thought that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, I’m wondering the same thing. Perhaps they actually asked “stolen for Biden” meaning that those Democrats were saying that it was stolen from Sanders. The details of the poll are not yet available.

While it might be fair to paint the machinations during the Democratic primary as, “theft,” the general election was actually tilted in Trump’s favor thanks to the electoral college and voter suppression by Republican-controlled states, which makes the Republican response to this current poll all the more irrational. It’s clear that Americans are still awash in misinformation. Where is it all coming from? The poll results have that covered:

Among Republicans who trust Fox News above other outlets, 82 percent said they believe the election was stolen from Trump. Ninety-seven percent of those who rely mostly on far-right news sources like Newsmax and One America News (OAN) said the same, compared to less than half, 44 percent, of Republicans who trust mainstream news outlets.

By, “mainstream news outlets,” they of course mean outlets that support the Democratic Party (neoliberalism). Fox News is also a “mainstream” news outlet, so it’s an interesting choice of words.

An important detail is that the quality of these responses — with so many believing that Biden stole the general election and that violence is necessary to return the Presidency to far right control — hasn’t really changed since right after the sacking of the capitol. The pollster had expected people to calm down and get back to reality, but they have not.

Meanwhile, the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse case is doing his best to continue the selective enforcement of laws against violence. Whatever Rittenhouse might have been doing in the moment (it does seem like he was attacked), he was only 17 and was thus illegally open-carrying a rifle in a volatile environment for the stated reason that he wanted to kill people to protect property. In Wisconsin, it is clearly illegal for a 17-year-old to open carry a firearm and it is not legal to kill people to protect property. Ordinarily, an action that is ambiguous (the shooting of a person who attacked him) tends to also become illegal if the accused was clearly in the act of committing another crime. Had he been on the other side, he would be facing at least 3 years in prison.

I mention 3 years specifically because a leftist (anti-fascist medic Daniel Baker) was recently sentenced to 3 years in prison for simply saying that if far-right extremists attacked the US Capitol, they should be met by the armed left. Keep in mind that he didn’t show up anywhere with a gun, and he certainly didn’t shoot anyone like Kyle Rittenhouse did. The crime that Daniel Baker committed, was committed several times by Kyle Rittenhouse, too, yet it isn’t even among the charges that Rittenhouse is facing.

If we broaden our view out to not just Rittenhouse but to include the January 6 sacking of the US capitol, we can see that a leftist can be imprisoned for merely declaring that people should mount an armed defense of the US government, but a fascist cannot be imprisoned for the same thing, or for using deadly force to prevent property crimes, sacking the US capitol, or specifically threatening to execute politicians. This is the essence of selective enforcement, which is just one aspect of systemic fascism.

I know a lot of people love Elon Musk. I realize that the heroic mythology surrounding him really gets some people excited. I get it. I really do. Elon Musk did make something once; it was a pretty shitty website implementing a concept that was good but not novel, and then some really dumb wealthy people gave him a ton of money for it. That website no longer exists. Thereafter, Elon Musk really hasn’t made anything; he’s just jumped from coattails to coattails. He’s even gone so far as to purchase the right to claim that he was a founder of Tesla even though he was not.

Elon Musk doesn’t really have a filter between his internal monologue and his mouth. He basically says whatever pops into his mind at the moment. Most of it is very self-serving. One thing that emerged from his mouth was, “I don’t care about money. I don’t care about possessions.” I think his intent was to make him sound noble, and it sure did work toward fooling some people. Now, though, Elon Musk is whining like a little baby because of this bill that would take a relatively small portion of his money, instead of letting him go without paying taxes. He literally said, “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and they come for you.” Weird that an enlightened man who doesn’t need money is acting like a psychotic dragon guarding his hoard of gold.

Let’s do a little exercise. Subtract your debts from the combined value of all the cash and titled property you own. That’s your net worth. The average family’s net worth in the US is supposedly around $725,000 (seems really high to me). But wait! Let’s figure out what your practical net worth is. Subtract the value of your home and one car each for every working person who lives there; you need that stuff to survive. (If no one in your house is working because, perhaps, you are retired, you still need one car.) What’s your practical net worth now? Probably nothing, but let’s say it is something like $10,000. If you had to pay $10 billion per year in taxes, that would be quite hard on you!

But you don’t. That’s what is proposed for Elon Musk, not you. His practical net worth is $250 billion; he could lose $249 billion of that and it would not affect his lifestyle at all. You may not really appreciate how much $1 billion is. If he pays $10 billion per year over the next 5 years, that’s the same as if the average family had to pay $400 per year. “I pay way more than that already!” you might say. Yes. Exactly.

What if a person with $10,000 in practical net worth stops and gives 0.001% of their money to a homeless person at the on ramp? That’s $10 — which is a pretty good gift! And it wouldn’t affect our hypothetical person at all. But what if Elon Musk does the same thing? That would be $249 million, and he would still have over $250 billion; it literally wouldn’t even affect how we describe his wealth.

Here’s something else interesting: It turns out that just 2% of Elon Musk’s wealth would save 42 million people from starving to death. Again, that’s money that he doesn’t need and really isn’t using for anything. (Yes, I realize stocks.)

Despite Elon Musk’s lie that “they’re going to come for you!” the fact of the matter is that they are just coming for the assholes — not even all the assholes, just the most egregious assholes. Since it is the assholes that control our government, this is a very interesting situation. Will the majority of the assholes turn on the richest 700 assholes in order to keep capitalism functioning? Or will they band together and screw over working people yet again?

In either case, this should be the opportunity Republicans have supposedly been waiting for to finally strike at the heart of the elite conspiracy controlling our government — because those 700 people are literally those conspirators*. Or was that whole argument just a cheap excuse for something more sinister?

Update: The proposed legislation is already dead.

Related:

Elon Musk and the Default Plan

Send Musk to Mars!

Elon Musk is Not Your Friend by Some More News (YouTube)

Elon Musk used government money to build Tesla. But he fears a tax on billionaires

*Note: It isn’t really a conspiracy.