So last night turned into another of those sessions where reporters tap dance and anchors repeat what we already know and they interview random experts who don’t know anything, while we wait to find out what the hell happened this time.
As I write this, we still don’t know anything except that some guy went into a King Soopers and shot up the place and 10 people are dead.
Which is all that really matters.
Michael Ramirez (AMS) offers grief, but is pretty firmly on the record supporting the Second Amendment, so, yes, we’re all sad, but some of us are also getting pissed.
Adam Zyglis (Cagle) got this one in, I think, just before all Hell broke loose in Boulder, and I’m sure it’s about Atlanta, but, hey, you can just keep throwing them out there and you’re likely to have good timing pretty often these days.
Having lived there, I’d suggest that Boulder is not a place you’d go to shoot minorities and King Soopers is not a place you’d go to pay for sex, so we may have to simply go with the mental illness factor on this one.
Which wisecrack doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tackle anti-Asian bigotry and misogyny and the things poor immigrants are forced to do for money.
But, as noted the other day, a point in every direction is the same as no point at all, and Colorado is certainly a good place to talk about crazy people with guns.
If you had a baby the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School, you could have taken that 12-year-old to the Batman opening in Aurora, but, assuming you didn’t, your kid would now be a 21-year-old watching the coverage and wondering what we could do about it.
I happened to be in Denver during the Aurora shootings and the entire region was horrified, but about all it produced as a result was this extraordinarily unintentional foolishness from Antonin Scalia, who, in dissenting in a case about firearms, accidentally described the shooter in the Aurora mass murder.
Who had purchased his guns legally, including the after-market extended ammo clip. Whether you should be able to buy 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet being secondary to the fact that you can.
Rep. Lauren Boebert was among prominent Coloradans who expressed grief at the Boulder shootings.
Here’s a screenshot of Boebert, who has four sons, 16, 14, 12 and 9, which might not be old enough to crack the combination on a gun safe but they’re all old enough to reach a shelf.
Not to worry: I’m sure they’ve been taught that random public shootings and senseless acts of violence are never okay.
And that removing the clip doesn’t mean there isn’t a round in the chamber.
The NRA responded to the shootings by pointing out that they’re bankrupt and their leadership is facing charges for pocketing contributions, so why bother with thoughts and prayers?
Again again I say to thee that the Second Amendment is as obsolete as the Third, and that as soon as the War of 1812 ended, the President ordered a re-organization of the army to eliminate reliance on militias and avoid the debacles seen at Queenstown Heights, Sackets Harbor and Bladensburg.
And that the NRA was once a respected hunter safety group — I earned several of their badges as a youngster — but was taken over in a 1974 coup by ammosexuals and anarchists.
They’ll not only disagree with the analysis but even with the history, because we live in a world of alternative facts punctuated by random public shootings and senseless acts of violence.
Which are never okay, but which we have no intention of stopping.
Might as well change the subject:
Juxtaposition of the Day
China has been flexing its muscles lately, against a pair of Canadians but mostly against its own people, which should really surprise nobody.
The Yughers, after all, are Muslims from out in the same part of the country as Tibet and Tibet’s status is another example, while the notion that Beijing would tolerate Hong Kong’s Western ways indefinitely seemed pretty naive right from the start.
And Tiannamen Square looked really promising for a while, until it turned into a reminder that, in the immortal words of Dennis Green, “they are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook.”
Popular pre-handover cartoon Lily Wong saw it coming, if nobody else did.
It’s not anti-Asian to distrust the Chinese government, by the way, because it should mean championing the people in Hong Kong and the western regions as well as dissidents throughout the country and everybody in the bordering nations.
However, boycotting Chinese goods is problematic.
There was a thing going around some years ago about how no two nations that each had McDonald’s had ever gone to war against each other, which sounds almost utopian but really is about the entanglements of international trade.
Boycotting China was a lot easier before we traded with them at all, obviously, but, if all we’d done was trade goods with them, you could still pull it off.
Norma Rae was a fun movie and the real life story was inspiring and, even before that, we had boycotted JP Stevens.
But Crystal Lee Sutton won the battle and lost the war: The plant closed, 350 jobs were lost and your towels today are made in overseas sweatshops.
Not because of the unions but because of greed.
So the answer is “Buy American” only there’s not a lot left to buy.
Bob Gorrell (Creators) worries about Biden’s China policy, but the gist of his concern is in a mistaken interpretation of Khruschev’s 1956 famous statement.
He wasn’t threatening war but, rather, citing a proverb that means “We’ll still be here when you’re gone.”
And Biden isn’t the one who had patriotic ballcaps made by cheap Chinese labor.
So, if Gorrell is right, it will be like blaming the placekicker for missing a last minute field goal.
How’s about you blame the entire team for not building a lead in other 59 minutes of the game?
Never mind.
Maybe it’s time to hunt up that Whole Earth Catalog and check out the Dome blueprints.
Mike,
Uighurs, not Yughurs.
A million ways to transliterate that one and it varies by source. But I’ll confess that I almost said the NRA was shanghaied in 1974 and caught myself.
Saw a cartoon where someone complained that something was a jip. A case where I don’t think changing the spelling will save you.
For a long time I got most of my news coverage over the radio, and NPR never spells out names for you. So it was a bit of a surprise the first time I stopped to read a print story about the Uighurs, and eventually realized these must be the “Weegers” I had learned about on the radio.
I thought the word was spelled “gyp” and had a different, though still offensive, origin.
Hey there, Blinky!
Yes, the traditional spelling has been “gyp” and it probably does have the history you are referring to, which makes it offensive. (Luckily, we are on the “mention” side of the “use / mention divide”..)
But in Mike’s comment, I feel sure he’s aware of the traditional spelling, and was remarking that a cartoon *use* that he saw with an alternate spelling was not avoiding offense by the change of spelling.
I worked with a woman who was Roma and we’re still Facebook friends. She’s very sensitive about “gypsy” references, mostly when they refer to dishonest tradesmen, though I’m sure all the crystal ball jokes are also offensive. (Bearing in mind that Hitler killed perhaps half a million Roma.)
Mind you, a lot of the dishonest tradesmen are not Roma but Irish travelers, though very few speak up for them. However, as with the Roma, it’s an issue of bad apples spoiling the barrel.
Perhaps we should compile a list of offensive words and terms, like “welshing” on a bet or being an “Indian giver” or “jewing” someone down on a price. Some we know are offensive but others are deeply embedded in the language.
After all, innocent as “welshing” on a bet seems, generations of kids in England were raised on
Taffy was a Welshman
Taffy was a thief
Taffy came to my house
And stole a piece of beef.
We changed Eeny-meeny-miney-mo to “catch a tiger by the toe,” but it’s a much more complicated issue.
I laughed loud when Alley Oop chose a button to press by saying “Eeny meeny miney mo / Cracky feeny finey foe / Ama nooja, papa tooja / Rick bick, ban dough!” when I was about six. It was a graceful sidestep.