Salt City Sinner

posted 4/7/2013 by the Salt City Sinner In a previous   post  about creative right-wing lies about the Violence Against Women Act and why it's totally not a psychotic fringe opinion or symptom of mental illness to oppose it, I mentioned the term rightwashing, which I defined as "a sub-type of spin; it is the art and science of taking reactionary, right-wing stances and attempting to render them more palatable through misdirection and, often, outright lies." In addition to opposition to VAWA, a second example of rightwashing is busily churning away right now, and in a state both proximate to Utah and near and dear to my heart -- Colorado! Colorado, you see, has recently come down with a bad case of common sense. The once proudly red Centennial State has in the last few years legalized weed ("Rocky mountain high," as they say) and gay marriage and contributed its electoral votes to the Democrat Usurper In Chief. Colorado can now add a reasonable, effe...

posted 7/20/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Early this morning at the opening of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, a bloodthirsty lunatic named James Eagan Holmes threw tear gas grenades into the theater and then opened fire , killing twelve and injuring more than 40 people. Eagan was apprehended in the parking lot of the theater; he brought a gas mask, bulletproof vest, rifle, shotgun, and two pistols to his private murder party. His actions were abominable and Aurora is still in shock from today's tragedy. That hasn't stopped a few ghoulish individuals from attempting to make ideological gold from lead, however. One friend of mine on Facebook barely waited for the blood to dry before swooping in on the wings of a vulture: Current TV didn't waste any time either: One commenter on Current TV's Facebook hit the nail on the head, in my opinion: Elderly Caucasian plutocrat and nanny-stater Michael Bloomberg (declared Mayor of New York ...

I don't often (ever) write about it, but at times I have a pretty spectacular dream life. I like to think it's my subconscious' way of making up for drab, everyday life - except that about one in three dreams I have are so incredibly disturbing and vivid that they linger like diesel fumes or the stench of pesticide. Carl Jung wrote that "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." Some people dream of loved ones, some dream of monsters - I usually dream of places. I call them "limbic spaces," because they are defined by my memories of various atmospheres in which I have lived, worked, loved, etc. and because they are transitory - not quite Salt Lake City, a few pieces of Arkansas, a recurring dream-space that appears to be a vast, dank and endless public men's room that I call the lavatoryinth. Carl Jung Last night, for reasons I have long learned not to look into too closely, I had a particularly vivid and intense dream...

Three stories making the rounds on liberal blogs lately have set my teeth on edge. First, we had the Glock raffle/Giffords story : The Pima County Republican Party is raffling off a Glock 23 handgun to raise money for get-out-the-vote efforts in the district where a Glock was used last winter to kill six people and wound Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (Ariz.). Arizona has a strong gun culture — Giffords herself owns a Glock and told The New York Times last year that she was a "pretty good shot." First off, yes, that is tacky and pretty silly of the Pima County GOP - however, reports by liberal blog The Raw Story fail to mention the fact that Giffords herself owns and shoots a Glock, as I do, and as many firearms enthusiasts do. There's also no mention of the fact that AZ's GOP spokesperson said that while gun raffles themselves are fine, the timing of this one was inappropriate. Glock makes great guns. This kind of lefty entrail-reading is like trying to dra...

I've said before that I think that Utah's conceal-carry laws are far, far too lenient (arguably, they're the loosest in the United States of America, which would put them in the running for least restrictive worldwide, or at least in the Western world). It is entirely possible for someone who has never even held a gun, let alone fired one, to pass a CCW course and obtain a permit here. I love my CCW, and I conceal carry at my own discretion. I tried many different guns before I settled on the one I love and own, which is designed for concealed carry. This morning, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a headline that threw a scare into me for a moment: " Utah revokes record number of concealed gun permits. " Yikes! But, it turns out, not only is this new gun regulation sensible and completely reasonable, it actually doesn't go far enough (in my opinion). Quoth the Trib: For the first six months of this year, the agency revoked 539 permits. For all last year, the agency re...

I've been reading C. J. Chivers' The Gun , which is about as fascinating a book as I've read. Chivers' book is a history of the AK-47; it's relatively nonjudgmental from a political point of view, and traces the emergence of the AK-47, first as an Eastern Bloc weapon, and then as the world's go-to weapon for criminals, revolutionaries and terrorists. One excerpt I find particularly interesting: Any distillation that treats the AK-47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his workbench, misses the very nature of its origins as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively, the culmination of work by many people over many years, and the result of a process in which Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov was near the center in the mid and late 1940s. This process was driven not by entrepreneurship or by quirky Russian innovation and pluck, but by the internal desires and bureaucracy of the socialist state. The ...

Since most of my political leanings can be roughly categorized as "left" (even if they are of varying degrees of leftitude), many people are surprised to learn that I am a gun owner and advocate for greater gun rights and less gun "control." I throw scare quotes around "control" there because few laws put forward by gun control advocates really do much of anything at all to "control" gun traffic in the United States. As with most prohibition practices - whether the dangerous activity or item banned is an automatic weapon or a fat sack of reefer - a ban or strict control does very little to limit access to said naughty activity or item, and quite a bit to drive trade into a grey or black market where any regulations at all, even the less restrictive and sensible ones I might support, are rendered meaningless. This is the first leg of my three-legged gun rights stool. Leg number two: also as with most prohibition practices, the advocates of greater...

Last night I had the good fortune to take a concealed-carry permit class from a gentleman who will remain nameless, primarily because I don't want to hurt his business. He's an Iraq veteran, a pretty cool guy, and such an upstanding citizen that even the most PG-13 gun/sex puns from our group of students made him blush like the Bishop of Boston. Now as our concealed-carry instructor was a gun enthusiast and veteran, I expected a certain amount of the politics that I would look down my long, elitist nose at, being the arugala-snarfing, wine-quaffing elitist that I am, but there was very little about his presentation that was political, actually. I did notice one thing, however, and I am not accusing Anonymous Instructor of any type of bias in any way. I am quite sure this was a subconscious phenomenon (although a lot of his rhetoric feeds into a post I'm working on regarding the so-called "Bad Guy" mythos). Of the Goofus and Gallant video clips that he showed, one ...