Atomic Nerds

What with the ever-more-famed divisiveness of this election and supposed increasing polarization of the country in general- not to mention my own dissatisfaction with our available choices this year, which makes it difficult for me to imagine becoming unhinged enough to defend the person I’m going to vote for with actual vigor and bile rather than a brief sick expression and a limp “slightly less awful than the other guy”- I’ve been thinking.

It’s often lamented that America is a two-party system, so that our two choices are usually boilerplate moderate liberal versus boilerplate moderate conservative, Frankensteinian political constructs designed to please the minimum amount of each infighting party faction necessary to achieve a nomination, and then further tweaked to please the center enough to win in a general. Not very exciting stuff- we constantly lament that candidates don’t run on the issues, but that’s partly because by the time the party apparatus has gotten through achieving a nominee that is essentially that party’s version of Coca-cola (with the other side being more-or-less Pepsi), their differences on issues are usually only interesting to the policy wonks who already had a numbered, alphabetized, and byzantinely cross-indexed list of who they considered acceptable or unacceptable to vote for two years before the actual election year.

However, there’s a slight problem with all of America’s third parties thus far: they’re all completely fringe. In terms of my political philosophy I consider myself libertarian, but there’s no way in HELL I would honestly wish for the repeal of all government environmental regulations, repeal of all protections against the worst predations of capitalism, or complete military isolationism- all Libertarian party planks, which is actually a much better platform this year than I’ve seen out of them yet. The Green party? Well, there’s a reason their platform is so massive it requires a byzantine index system- it includes a separate subsection for every single aggrieved identity group it could pin down and a good thousand words on how they’ll use the government to right each and every wrong against them, as well as a declaration of a universal human right to food, housing, medical care, and a job deemed acceptably renumerative- which the government will then provide. And these are the two most “mainstream” third parties in America; the Constitution Party is the Libertarian party for social conservatives that don’t favor freedom for abortion or gay people, the Reform party is mostly dedicated to sticking a thumb in the eye of the Democrats and Republicans, and the less said about America First, the American Nazis, or the American Communists, the better.

In trying to come up with a party structured around an ideal that all Americans get behind, I briefly entertained the idea of the Beer and Pizza Party, but the visions that swam before my eyes of schisms on the subject of toppings alone, let alone domestic versus imported versus microbrew, quickly led me to step on the idea before it bred. It would make the wars between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea look like a friendly afternoon of tiddlywinks.

Then, in the course of wasting my life on various wikis, I ran across a reminder of an old term: the “yellow dog Democrat”, which one described a Southern Democrat so loyal to the party that they’d “vote for a yellow dog before a Republican”. (This was largely before the Democratic Party discovered it was for civil rights for black people, and after the Republicans’ first president gained his place in history by beating the bejesus out of the South when it tried to leave over that very subject.) Although the phrase originated to describe Democrat loyalists, anybody who hasn’t been living in a cave on Mars for their natural life up to this very date knows that it applies equally well to Republican party faithfuls. Most of us have a party we vote for most if not all the time, but few of us have this kind of sheer devotion to the tribe.

Then, it struck me: well, what about that yellow dog? I find the idea of a sitting President guaranteed to do virtually nothing while in office and consistently refuse to sign bills into law quite attractive. America loves dogs, to the point where Bill Clinton became the first President in quite awhile not to have one. (Until, being the natural weathervane he was, he did.) We spend billions a year on our dogs, and there’s not many other family members we would forgive for shitting on the floor or licking their genitals in public.

But more than that, dogs are unfailingly honest, tremendously loyal even to owners- or a voting public- that may not always deserve it, friendly, fair, and one hundred percent authentic and genuine at all times. Dogs know no elitism; everybody is the same with his head in a toilet bowl (or plastic cone). They have a massive history of service, both in the public and private sectors; we have dogs that sniff drugs, detect bombs, rescue the lost and the trapped, help the disabled, soothe the sick and the elderly, guard national and private property, help America’s hunters, farmers, and ranchers, and most of all the unsung family dog of the everyman that just keeps the kids entertained and sees to it they grow up well-adjusted.

“Yellow dog” need not be a literal phrase; as the primitive and natural “breeds” the New Guinea Singing Dog, the dingo, and the Carolina Dog show, yellow is most likely the default most common coat color of the species in general. All dogs may said to be yellow dogs under the fur. What real difference between a black Lab and a yellow Lab? As any Labrador person will tell you- nothing! This is a lesson that America could take to heart.

Don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. Vote for a candidate America can love wholeheartedly for himself or herself. Vote for the Yellow Dog.

Will a beautiful big-breasted woman fall naked from the sky? (Hint: The answer is almost certainly “no.”)

…

What, it’s not going to work twice? Oh well, can’t blame me for trying. So early this afternoon we packed up our redneckmobile and trudged up the mountain to see if we could find something among the “getting ready to pack up and leave soon” crowd at the gun show. Like I said yesterday, I’ve been scrounging around for a stripped AR receiver so I can start finally building my own evil rifle from the ground up the way I want it. On the way home, LabRat and I counted up and figured this search has been going on for roughly three years. Sure, I could’ve just ordered one and used a local FFL, and at one point I even tried to do so. The company I was dealing with was, however, less than competent and the deal fell through. Rather roughly. The company lost my FFL’s paperwork, twice, misrepresented things, and generally sucked golfballs through garden hoses. The good news is I dodged a bullet by that deal failing, because apparently the lowers they were cranking out were about as in-spec as if they’d been machined with dremels. Either way, after that one fubar’d “Just order the damn thing” attempt, life stayed in the way and it was more a matter of just keeping an eye open when hitting gun shows. The downside is that New Mexico is more hunting oriented than tacticlol, so prices were more than a little inflated. Last year there was an assembled lower (with no stock) for $250 as the best deal. I passed.

Anyway, it was day two of the show, and we figured all the really good stuff (which we couldn’t currently afford anyway) would be either bought or packed up. Making the loop (y’all spoiled folks with regular sized gun shows, or the really spoiled folks with thinks like the Indy500 don’t get the size here, I suspect - we’re talking 25-30 tables, tops) there wasn’t a whole lot of interesting stuff. One of the dealers I’ve done business with before was still trying, for about the third or fourth show I’ve seen him at, to move a severely bubba’d Swedish m94 complete with a pickup bedliner coated stock. And nickel plating. One of these days if I win the lottery I’m going to buy that thing from him at a fair price and burn it. Finally we came upon the AR-centric table, and lo and behold, they had an actual bare receiver. No parts kits already installed, no stock, just the basic paperweight version of the firearm. A nice forged Rock River with a $160 price tag. We moved off and discussed. The discussion essentially wound up being “If we can afford it, buy the damn thing. You’ve been after one for three years and I’m tired of wandering around these shows with nothing to show for it.” I told y’all I married a good one.

“Will you folks take $150 for that lower?”
“Only if you’ll tell me where you got that shirt.”
Information was exchanged, I did the BATFE dance and swore on the 4473 I’d never had an impure thought in my life, and now I am the proud owner of a federally regulated paperweight which will slowly and eventually be transformed into a rifle.

If this is my karma for babysitting yesterday without throwing the kid into the path of a taxiing jet, I might have to show a little patience more often.

Having been called upon again to help shuffle cars and generally hot-shoe for the day to help fill a hot-rod/Corvette display, I wound up in Santa Fe for the annual airshow. What I didn’t know is that I would also be called upon to babysit.

After arriving at the airport and setting up the cars, I settled in to engage in some people-watching before I made a tour of the static displays and the aerobatics started. The Kid, meanwhile, decided that since I was the only other person under the age of dirt (to his eyes, I suspect), that I was the coolest thing around and that I was his new best friend. Even better, he was the grandson of one of the, let’s say “more loquacious” members, and hoo-boy does that streak run in the family. I’m not sure how old the kid was. Somewhere north of language skills and somewhere south of a driver’s license. Short and vocal about covers it though.

“Are you bored? You look bored.”
“No, I’m good for now. Might get bored later though.”
{two minutes pass}
“You still look bored. I have a book you can read!”
“I appreciate the offer, but I brought one too. I’m just watching for now. Thanks though.”

And so on. I could’ve lived with the minute-by-minute checks on the status of my entertainment levels. The Kid wasn’t helping my headache, but it was tolerable if unpleasant. The pisser came when Gramps decided to wander off, probably looking for somewhere to smoke for a while.

“My grandpa’s been gone for a long time now, and I’m not supposed to go too far from the car without an adult. Will you help me find him?”

When the fuck did I qualify as adult supervision? I’m doing well if I can go three or four sentences in a conversation without saying something obscene, immoral, illegal, dangerous, or all of the above at once and now I’m supposed to tow around a less-helpful, unaccented Short-Round in “Dacta Stingray And Quest For Grandpa”?

The Quest for Grandpa went about as well as you could expect. I think I done good, since I was able to get the little brat to remember to say “thank you” when getting schwag from the various displays and such without a reminder by the end of the loop, and I didn’t run into any resistance when I told him to take his hat off for the national anthem.

The quest, of course, was not without a healty dose of WTF here and there.
“Do you like video games?” inquired my diminutive captor.
“Yeah, they’re pretty fun.”
“What one is your favorite?”
“Well, Mass Effect was pretty good.”
“What kind of game do you usually like? Bloody? Gory? Funny?”
“….I usually prefer funny.”
“Me too! I’ve got Grand Theft Auto ($latest) and it’s hilarious! You can shoot someone in the head! That’s really funny!”

I debated between just keeping a closer eye on him (and him firmly in front of me by a few feet) and having a nice friendly chat with the state troopers providing security.

Anyway, kid aside, the airshow was pretty good. I managed a few decent pictures, though not many since I had been tasked with instructions from my mother to “get some good footage of the aerobatics” with her new camcorder. If any of it comes out decently it may show up here later, but given it was my first time holding a video camera in well over 15 years, it probably came out shaky and wobbly enough to make the guys who shot “The Blair Witch Project” get queasy.

The following images may be clicked upon in order to bring up a larger version for closer scrutiny.
Remember last car show, I forgot to get a picture of the inside hood of one of my favorite ‘vettes? Well, she showed up here too and I finally fixed the problem. Pardon the glare from the supercharger.

Most of the Vette area:

It wasn’t all fiberglass from Bowling Green though:

A nice little reconnaissance ride:

With local flavor on the wingtips:

But when I saw the nose art, I knew that had to hit the blog.

And now, I’m off to find something to soothe my sunburn, because in addition to being dumb enough to haul a very talkative kid not my own around an airshow, I forgot my sunscreen. See? We’re all geniuses here in Los Alamos! Really!

Tomorrow we hit the Los Alamos Gun Show, truly glorious in its grandeur, almost filling an undersized high school gym! There we will once more try to answer the question “Can Stingray find a stripped AR lower at a price that does not qualify as highway robbery?” (Hint: The answer is almost certainly “no.”)

You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (81% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also : The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Yeah, I don’t expect anyone is surprised. I’m certainly not.

Courtesy of the somewhat NWS Theo Spark, we find a telling? frightening? intriguing? Cautionary? Well, whatever the hell it is, it’s coming out of Australia. To whit, one of their bars is offering free drinks to women without underwear.

I’ll give you all a minute or two to recover from the sheer shock of using sex to sell alcohol. This radically new tactic stunned me into silence for literally nanoseconds. Moving along we find predictable objections. Oh no, sex and intoxication in a bar, how horrible. Then the article took a turn into left field for me.

The ‘No Undie Sundie’ event is not the first time The Saint has landed itself in hot water. In June another promotion, featuring a semi-naked dwarf pouring free alcohol down the throats of drinkers, was also withdrawn after it provoked outrage. The complainants appeared less concerned about the presence of the half naked dwarf in the ad than the danger that it might promote binge drinking.

Emphasis mine. Now first off, show me the bar with the half-naked dwarf passing out free booze. I’m there. Second, quit knocking the binge drinking folks. If Rob Hulls and Bill Healey got their way and successfully cut out all this irresponsible behavior, who would they lord their superior morals over while making tut-tut noises? At least they didn’t go after the dwarf, who presumably took the job voluntarily. I don’t think I’ve seen much in the news about the fabled sexy alcohol distribution dwarf slavery rings lately.

So again we’re back to excessive drinking. Y’know, in a bar. Where I go for my tofu enema and jazzercise class. Because drinking too much in a bar is morally wrong, kinda like how shooting buckets full of tannerite or doing mag-dumps at the range is violent. I can see, at least in theory, how being around a bunch of horny drunk people where the women lack certain garments could be unpleasant (I said “in theory”), but I’m a bit curious as to why it’s so hard to just avoid the bar if you don’t like it (leaving drunk driving as a separate matter)? Sure, it’s boorish, in bad taste, tacky, tut-tutable and so forth. So don’t go. It’s not like you have to go through the bar to reach the library or petting zoo.

Besides, everybody knows that civilized people get ripped in the privacy of their own homes, and use their tongues as the razor-edged acid-tipped instruments of biting wit against those we disapprove of as they’re meant to be rather than for licking. Although, some still object to that use.

Yeah, I know she’s a shock comic, but… um… warning Sarah Palin not to come to Washington lest she be gang-raped by black people is… achieving escape velocity from the boundary between “angry and partisan” and “genuinely creepy”.

I know Newsbusters is not exactly an objective source, so here’s the Theater J blog about it, which seems to approve.

There comes a point at which I stop clinically going “Hmm, I see the Left has let its Id off the chain and we get to see some sexism and racism, and they wonder why they keep losing” and go “….This isn’t hypocrisy, it’s pathology”. Seeing someone wishing for large black men to gang-rape conservative women- and others approving it as a brave political message- is mine.

If anybody can show me a member of the federal government that knows that “laissez faire” is not a carnival in France, the drinks are on me.

In case you haven’t noticed, except for the one issue the feminist Left dropped into my lap with a pretty bow, I’ve been pretty goddamn stumped for anything like real content. I’m starting to get to that point in watching the election that’s a lot like that point halfway through the Halloween candy where it’s stopped being fun and you know if you keep going it’ll eventually make you sick, but you keep going anyway just because you’ve got momentum and hey, it’s a special occasion. So in lieu of well-thought-out content, you get me speculating out my ass instead.

In any case I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal noting that, for the first time in more than fifteen years, this year’s Republican National Convention featured no gay-bashing at all. The only person to even allude to gays at all was Mike Huckabee, who only mentioned in passing that John McCain does not support same-sex marriage. (As no one on either ticket does, and no candidate on a major-party presidential ticket ever has, to my knowledge.)

This got me to musing on a couple of other factors, one of them being that Mr. Huckabee himself was the only remotely competitive Republican in the primaries this year that was a religious conservative of the sort genuinely acceptable to the Religious Right, and he wasn’t one of the final contenders, either. That was John McCain, who was regarded at the time as being very weak on social conservative issues, and Mitt Romney, ditto- and one of the weaknesses of both men, as regarded by the conservative commentariat, was the fact that McCain opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment and gay marriage became law in Massachusetts during Romney’s watch. (In fairness to- or for that matter against- Romney, he’s an opponent of it and a lot of what made him objectionable to social conservatives were simply his efforts to remain governor in the overwhelmingly liberal state he governed.) And yet, the fabled fire-breathing tiger of the GOP, the Religious Right, failed to even get close to getting their man the nomination.

We’ve heard a lot from the Left about the scary RR pro-life bonafides of McCain and Palin, but as I have pointed out previously, Palin hasn’t got a scrap of political track record to match her evangelical beliefs; in her time as governor, she appeared to avoid controversial social issues and concentrate on economic ones. Evangelicals love her for living her beliefs personally, but she passed on making her base’s concerns about legal abortion, abstinence-only sex education, and intelligent design in schools her concerns, at least in practice. Likewise McCain has always said he’s against abortion, but despite having twenty years in the Senate to do it in, most of his actual votes have been pretty tepid; the most pro-life cred he has was in banning partial-birth abortion, which wasn’t exactly a radical’s stand.

So at the convention we had little enough attempt to rally the religious right except for a generic “and here’s my running mate, she’s a Christian and doesn’t she have a nice family?”, no attempt to use gays the way they have been ever since the eighties- the same way bait dogs are used to fire up pit bulls- and neither candidate on the ticket has a record of legislative God-bothering. It may have looked red-meaty enough from a liberal perspective, but trust me, after an era in which Dubya’s daddy once famously tried to gin up that same demographic by saying atheists aren’t real American citizens, it’s really goddamn tepid. What’s going on?

As got my attention in 2000 when I was still one of the more obnoxious stripes of atheist that sees a theocracy lurking behind every cross-shaped lapel pin, the Religious Right was instrumental in George W. Bush’s victory in the Republican party primaries that year, and they were quite helpful in assorted ways of destroying McCain’s own chances that year with vicious rumormongering that his adopted daughter was actually a child he had sired out of wedlock. McCain was not amused, and actually blasted the Religious Right specifically for being “agents of intolerance” and even “un-American”.

So what happened when the President the Religious Right used their famous party muscle to usher into office got there? After some half-hearted messing around with the Faith-Based Initiative, the first of what became a steady stream of whining from “power players” Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson began, to the point that it was more or less received wisdom in less religiously-centered elements of the party in 2004 that Bush knew damn good and well the Federal Marriage Amendment was never going anywhere, and that it was a bone thrown to the increasingly desperate dogs of the Religious Right. To my recollection, they have been threatening to take their ball and go home ever since Bush was insufficiently tough on gays, sluts, and sex, right up until the primaries this year. I’m not sure anyone was actually surprised when Dobson “graciously” agreed to lend his endorsement to McCain- as virtually everyone else was thinking, what the hell was he going to do, tell evangelicals to vote Democrat? That worked out for them so well with Jimmy Carter, whom evangelicals turned out to vote for in 1976 and were so horrified by that the Republicans have been stuck with them ever since.

What ELSE happened? Oh yeah, the candidate the Religious Right decided to throw its weight behind for eight years spent like a liberal while he was moralizing like a conservative and disaffected a great many other traditional Republican party elements- namely individualists, fiscal conservatives, and small-government conservatives- and did no small amount of damage to the Republican “brand” in the course of his leadership, leading many to declare that the only possible way for a Republican to win this election was for the Democrat to either be caught with a dead hooker or a live boy. (To the surprise of basically everyone, Barack Obama may yet- metaphorically- manage this.)

Is it possible the GOP big tent is reevaluating how much influence the Religious Right actually has or should have- or, given that they accomplished none of their major goals ever since declaring the libertine liberals Served and the Culture War to be On- that perhaps they never did? There is more than a little hope-hope-it’s-true for me in speculating about this, because I’ve long thought conservatism would be far better off with much less of their influence, but then again one of the other conclusions I’ve reached this year is that the libertarian influence within the party is also much weaker than I’d hoped. (See: Ron Paul. If I have to go beyond that, there’s a good chance we’re not going to reach much agreement…) Huckabee himself is a good example- aside from his evangelism and noxiously pushy insistence on blurring political principles and religious ones, fiscal and hawkish conservatives took one look at his populist nanny-stateism, economic ideas, and isolationism, and rejected him as a slightly more muscular version of Jimmy Carter.

Other than a willingness to stick by some abstract idea of “traditionalism” and an absolute horror at voting for Democrats (at least in that party’s current state- perhaps more on that later), the Religious Right- not necessarily the same thing as religious conservatives- brings a lot of unpopular ideas, a weakness for big government, and a- well, religious devotion to showing up to work the phones and burn their shoeleather for candidates. If this trend continues- particularly if conservatives can muster some intellectual and philosophical renewal of purpose, which both sides of the aisle badly need right now- they may no longer even be considered as absolutely necessary for that purpose, either.

Main Entry:
pa·tri·ot·ism
Pronunciation:
ˈpā-trē-ə-ˌti-zəm, chiefly British ˈpa-
Function: noun
Date: circa 1726

: love for or devotion to one’s country

I do not see any mention of “eager to part with honestly earned resources” for whatever purpose, be it national defense or social entitlement programs.

Come to think of it, I could swear there was some kerfluffle in 1776 about having to fork over unfair chunks of honestly earned income for the benefit of a government and its programs.

From the blogroll, A Short and Inaccurate History of the Left And Right (in America, Because That’s Where It Matters).

I just choked on my drink and I’m not even close to done with it. Teaser quote:

I mean the Enlightenment was a lot like the Furby craze. Everyone wanted to get in on the act, and half of them were arguing with the other half and then the halves divided and quarters were arguing with each other, and the words they used got progressively bigger and for a while geeks were cool.

It was a w e s o m e.

Than the French Revolution rolled around and fucked it up for everyone.
Stupid French.