Atomic Nerds

One or two of you may recognize advice columnist Dan Savage’s old standard hail, which he abandoned after some years with the conclusion that “faggot” was about as reclaimed a word as it was going to get and using it still was pointless and maybe even counterproductive.

I try not to write stuff too often that’s mostly just “hey, right on” to other people’s pieces, but this post from Slate writer June Thomas is both right on and something I think I can maybe add a little bit to, so here we are.

The purpose of Thomas’s post is to call out both Savage and John Stewart for using their political bully pulpits to do something the left- even left like Savage who have made large parts of their career on advocating for gay rights and normalizing homosexuality- really loves to do: use homosexuality as a bludgeon against right-wing figures. In this case, what both Savage and Stewart are doing is making fun of Marcus Bachmann, Michelle Bachmann’s husband, for being gay based on the way his voice sounds and, apparently, the way he dresses. Each of them wrings a good several minutes of extended mockery and vocal imitation on how faggy Bachmann apparently is.

Now, it probably goes without saying that I have every bit as much sympathy for Marcus Bachmann as I have for a man-eating alligator in a Gucci factory. He and his wife have both said some extremely venomous things about gay people (as well as other Americans that don’t happen to suit their vision of a god-fearin’ decent citizen), and Marcus is part of the ex-gay movement that tries a combination of prayer and various “therapies” to somehow de-gay people. I think such things really hurt real people, as Stewart points out.

The difference is that they think the fact that Marcus Bachmann is a bad man who’s done, or at least wants to do, bad things to innocent people makes their attacks justifiable. The same logic is used for outing- the sport of catching right-wing politicians or religious figures in homosexual dalliances or relationships. It’s funny because they’re hypocrites, it’s justifiable because they’re homophobic hypocrites. That they’re using American squeamishness about homosexuality and gender roles specifically as a weapon to wound personally and politically in the same way it’s used against themselves and their allies is, apparently, a nonissue. They think it’s justified because the targets deserve to be “bullied back”; I think it’s not because it feeds the beast.

The problem, and the reason it’s not funny and makes massive hypocrites of the people involved, is that the entire premise of their tactics and their satire is sheer homophobia. If a joke falls apart if the listener doesn’t accept the premise that being effeminate automatically equates to being gay, that being a straight man requires you adhere strictly to a very rigid set of arbitrary gender markers (including bullying and humiliation of more effeminate men), or that being effeminate or gay is inherently ridiculous and therefore hilarious, then the damn joke is homophobic.

It’s the entire premise of the attack, and nothing Bachmann himself did changes that. At least Bachmann is entirely sincere when he thinks that homosexuality is inherently wrong and sick and that’s why he thinks gay people should get therapy to de-gay them; he’s not doing anything in the least hypocritical by not living up to a rigid manly-man model. Savage and Stewart are first in insinuating having a mild lisp equates to being gay, and second that being gay is something the entire country should have a good mocking laugh at.

I differ from Thompson in thinking Savage deserves any slack here in someone who normally does good work advocating both for gay rights and specifically in advocating for kids who are targets of exactly this brand of bullying. He’s demonstrated repeatedly that he thinks homophobia and misogyny are great as long as they’re being used against people he finds politically unacceptable. He should know better, and he very loudly and pointedly does not.

I know a lot of leftists who think this stuff is just fine because of who the targets are, but I’m also far enough outside that paradigm to know what it looks like from the outside. People who don’t share all the same premises as they do don’t look at it and go “Ha, it’s hilariously ironic because he’s a right-wing homophobe that homophobia should be his undoing”, they go “He thought being gay was terrible and shameful and clearly he was right- even you think so”.

You don’t have to have any sympathy at all for Marcus Bachmann, or George Rekers, or Ted Haggard. You don’t have to think they deserve any compassion. I don’t. But you should be really damn watchful of the real message you’re sending- and the nature of what you’re drawing from to give it teeth.

But not that way, though when your sense of exploration peters out at how there are so many smurfs with just one smurfette* with a thick cloud of funny smoke around you and the tv in college, one can see where the confusion might stem from.

Which means that at one point there were a bunch of people flying hamsters with tiny erections to exotic locations in the name of science. Which I think is just proof that scientists are high all the time.

Look you mentally inadequate little shit, take your pick. We can a) freeze in the dark because OMG SCIENCE HARD, which I know is the default position given how easy it is to freak the shitballs out of people by bringing in any math harder than fucking 2+2, or b) we can try to figure shit out.

If, being only sometimes up to the task of balancing a checkbook, you would like those of us of stiffer mental discipline to figure said shit out for you, we will need to test things. In the course of this, there’s a couple options. We can either test things on non-humans and wind up with stuff that looks oddball and freaky, or we can just jump straight in to “Hey Cletus, wanna make a dollar?” and get villified for torturing people oh god the humanity, how could you that’s evil stop it you monster. As for what we’re figuring out, we can either stare with fixed monomania until a solution presents itself via fucking magic, or we can figure out every last goddamn thing we can and use the results from the latter to find the magic necessary for the former.

Guess which way works better.

And just to head off one popular line of stammering borderline-anencephalic attempt at pearl-clutching rebuttal, no, they have not yet cured cancer, aids, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, so yes there are “better” things they could be working on. But let’s just keep in mind that even the viagra in the jetlagged hamster study was not originally intended as a cock pill but instead for blood pressure and cardiac angina, and now we’ve got more ways for people to get boners than we have to treat diabetes, so if you want to stick with “Eureka!” instead of “Huh, that’s not what I was expecting” as your primary model of scientific discovery, congratulations you are now entitled to use technology roughly as advanced as a brick. Give or take.

Want to double down on this case-in-point? First Pfizer noticed that their blood pressure patients weren’t doing that much better but were getting a lot more stiffies, leading to unintentional ED treatment. After that, they found out that this little blue cash cow is good for severe altitude sickness and can prevent and treat pulmonary edema, which as an actual life-threatening condition, means “Why’s this guy hard all the time?” has gone on to have a second “Huh, that’s weird” which has actually saved human lives. The fact that any lives saved, given standard samples of humanity, are probably too stupid to appreciate it and will spend the rest of their extended stay making jokes about how their dick got so big it scared off all the tiny bad men making their heart splodey-splodey, while irritating, does not detract from the fact that the odds approach one that someone was looking at the study in early phases and saying “Lol, that’s stupid and you’re stupid for studying it.”

So yeah, I’ll take the team that’s actually curious and just wants to figure shit out over the pretentious skidmark who expects greatness from simply putting on a labcoat and stroking his or her beard dramatically.

Tracing back to its roots, the original Mesopotamian word for science translated literally becomes “Hey Ingkot, check this weird shit out!” So yes, science is frequently weird, and involves weird shit like jetlagging hamsters and giving them viagra. Granted, science can also be a bit impenetrable at times since there’s at least one of you nodding and thinking “That sounds right, I bet he even looked that up,” about the translation thing, but honestly, what were you expecting it to be? How the fuck do you expect to figure something new out if you just stick to being amazed at the bean-in-a-cup you did in Kindergarten? Actually, given the nontrivial percentage of the population for whom that damn near counts as magic, never mind. Don’t answer that.

So fuck off, go enjoy chanting “ha ha, that test is stupid you’re stupid” in your cold frozen fireless cave, and let the big boys who actually can nut up and do something drag you all kicking and screaming into a world with ipods and viagra that you’d shit your collective pants so hard we could achieve light speed if it was announced that such would no longer exist. Don’t say “thank you” for these things either, because fuck you that’s not what the goal is. We want to figure shit out because figuring shit out is fucking awesome. If you dense overgrown coathanger-targets get some benefit out of that, good for you but kindly get the fuck out of our way while you’re drooling in rapture over last month’s “Huh” moment.

(h/t Peter)

*And then you didn’t even run that ball far enough to argue whether or not the smurfs are mammals, you fucking philistine.

Man Dies In Bondage Scene

Exactly what it says on the tin, though as typical the story is reported as more of a lurid man-bites-dog sort of thing than “man dies in tragic unnecessary accident”.

If there’s anything I’ve learned as an adult, it’s first that way more of the people you know are having a lot more and a lot weirder sex than you’d ever have expected, and second that talking about it is the Worst Thing In The World outside the few spaces it’s frankly discussed in. So let’s have a little talk for the benefit of what I am quite sure is a larger subsection of my readerbase than I or the vanilla folks reading would suspect.

I generally approve of pretty much anything that goes on in the bedroom between any number of consenting adults, so long as it follows the “safe, sane, consensual” mantra that the BDSM community likes to chant, but not everything can be done safely or sanely no matter how hard the idea turns your key. One of these things is tying someone up and leaving them alone: no matter how simple and nonthreatening it may seem to play with those boundaries just by leaving the room and leaving the person helpless, all sorts of things can happen to a bound person that will threaten life and limb that the person tying them up has no way to foresee or prevent. Whether it’s cut off blood flow, a heart attack, or in this case an airway compromise, it is entirely possible to accidentally kill someone by restraining them if you’re not there to immediately take care of any problem. This is Don’t Go There, This Is Not A Simulation territory, period. Not every fantasy is possible to fulfill without unethical behavior on someone’s part, and it becomes unethical when there’s a real risk of accidentally killing your partner.

Or, there’s one other possibility in this scenario that the article doesn’t mention that is also “don’t go there” territory, and that’s that he was never left alone at all and his partner accidentally choked him to death as part of a breath play scene, then fled because she or he had just, you know, committed manslaughter in a way that would get no sympathy whatsoever from a jury. Breath play- or choking if we’re going to be franker- is another surprisingly common fantasy that is really, really flat-ass dangerous to execute; if you won’t take it from me, take it from someone who knows, in detail, just why. This isn’t a thing that’s only dangerous if you’re “extreme” about it and choke someone until they pass out and turn purple, this is a thing where their heart can stop on you seemingly at random. Dying from asphyxiation because you’re using oxygen debt to enhance an orgasm doesn’t just happen to people hanging from their belt in the closet, it can happen even if the person cutting off the air has the recipient fully hooked up to hospital equipment.

Always stay with a bound person. Breath play isn’t just play, it can kill you out of the blue. Avoid these two poor choices as well as the equally poor choice of keeping exotic predators, and you can avoid becoming the subject of the headline “Owner of Killer Bear Chokes To Death On Sex Toy”. Nobody sets out with that in their life plan.

I’ve ranted before about people who are apparently under the impression that minority interest groups are doing something wrong or subversive to America merely in being a minority interest group, as opposed to doing basically what’s been done by anyone with any interests at all in America since its inception.

A very similar and certainly related issue that’s been itching at me lately is people who apparently believe that not only is the act of being a minority interest group, with interests you’d like to see accomplished, subversive, but that when such groups are achieving some degree of success in influencing the culture at large, this is both sinister and somehow a violation of their right to be seen as being in the right and to occupy a position of social comfort with their convictions.

If I were to not pussyfoot around what, exactly, has been getting my attention lately, it may well be the spectacle of people who can, with no sense of irony whatsoever, cheer the success of the second-amendments rights vanguard in normalizing both gun ownership and carry of said arms by force of activism and cultural osmosis and react to the success of the gay rights vanguard in culturally normalizing same-sex couples by force of activism and cultural osmosis as evidence that the latter is a sinister lavender-shaded fifth column brainwashing the American people. It’s one thing to think that the former cause is a good and just one and the latter cause a destructive one, which contrary to popular hysteria is not about to become illegal anytime soon, and quite another to treat the exact same process as somehow unfair or evidence of the untrustworthiness of the causes’s holders when it’s done by a minority interest you dislike.

It’s not about the freedom to hold unpopular opinions. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of festering jerks with strongly held opinions the vast majority of us would regard as completely despicable, walking free, and generally findable within the time it takes to type out a Google string. Despite “Nazi” being a nearly synonymous term with “evil” in 21st century America, the American Nazi Party still has meetings and public rallies and flyers. (Really. Look it up. I’m not about to link to them.) So does the Ku Klux Klan. Grotesque racism, sexism, and every other flavor of bigotry is a Google string away, to the degree that might make the Klan and the American Nazis stand back a pace and say “Oh, I say, that’s a bit far”. They only find themselves in legal trouble when they break laws that are for everyone- such as assault and the sort of speech that’s more a direct call for violence than it is an expression of opinion. (And even then it has to be a pretty damn clear threat to be prosecuted.)

Have there existed and is there a theoretical possibility of onerous and broad-based “hate speech” laws which might act to enforce the grievances of a minority you dislike*? Yes, but as I spent the previous post hammering, that doesn’t actually qualify as a good reason to oppose the goals of minority groups on principle just in case they demand, and might get, something truly unreasonable and oppressive somewhere down the line. It hasn’t happened yet with any other major cultural change about what opinions about who are considered socially acceptable, so claiming it’s an obvious grease-and-ice-lined slope straight to the pit of concentration camps for Archie Bunker is a bit far-fetched. Likewise arguing that the obvious next step is government regulation of church doctrine to the point of forcing churches to accept the government’s idea of civil rights- that slope’s not only not slippery, there’s a 140-year-old mountain sitting in the way.

What it is about is the freedom to hold your opinions and be affirmed for them, or at least not disapproved of particularly vocally. Culture marches on, and it may march without you- majority opinions in themselves have no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of your belief, but having your views seen by others as normal or acceptable is not something anyone has any sort of right to. That privilege is earned or lost by winning or losing the culture at large, and trying to do so is the definition of activism. Activism isn’t cheating, it’s what anyone who sees a problem with society and wants to fix it does.

Want your side to win? Come up with the better argument than the other side, and try to present it with a decent signal to noise ratio, hopefully with a minimum of “my inchoate fear and resentment should give me the right to control others, so that I feel more comfortable”. It’s worked awfully well for the gun owners, after all.

Whoever your “they” is, “they don’t want to just be tolerated, they want to be accepted!” is also true of you just in feeling the need to make the statement. It’s not an unreasonable desire in either case, it’s a pure and simple statement of participation.

*As opposed to ones you like, which is an equal theoretical possibility. No one actually in favor of such laws ever seems to stop and consider that people who loathe them and their tribe might be in the position of enforcing the thing.

So, a while back Dennis over at Dragon Leatherworks asked me if I’d review his newest offering, the Talon holster aimed at the 1911 platform.

If you’re like me and lazy about clicking links to older stuff, the short version was “This is a pretty slick holster,” and “damn it’s tight though,” and “now I need a 1911 I’m not sentimental about.” The first point stands, the latter two have been fixed.

The shown 1911-specific Talon has been seeing a fair bit more use than just one weekend. For reasons I’ll move on to in a moment, I’ve picked up a nice Springfield, and have been toting that around for the last two months, give or take a little. It seemed only fair to revisit this and note that over that time, yes it did loosen up to much more acceptable levels without giving up significant retention. It’s still snug enough that the angles and leverages of drawing from an OWB holster hitch up my pants some, but the wedgie-tastic Chippendale yank is gone and done with. The belt loops also loosened up enough to where I can just slide it around for adjustment just like any other holster.

Wear and finish, I’ll let the above image speak. I’m not a particularly graceful individual, and so far the Talon has taken whatever I’ve dished out without starting to look rode-hard and put up wet.

Now, as I said this was something of a swap going to a 1911 OWB instead of my trusty CZ-75 (mostly) IWB. That’s because since I’m corrosive, said CZ is off living with our pet gunsmith for a refinish and a few other touches. Since the gun is going to come back looking actually pretty, instead of like a europellet-spewing boat anchor, and I was pleased with the original Talon, I decided it might be a nice thing to have a holster that actually looks good to go with the gun. I asked Dennis if it would be possible to do a Talon for the CZ, and in a demonstration of awesome for a small businessman with overhead to watch and similar, he said “Sure!” and went and added a whole new gun’s worth of configuration to his holster line just ’cause I asked nice.

Pardon my French since I’m trying to be vaguely professional here, but that’s fuckin’ awesome.

Anyway, since the goal here again is to actually look good rather than get super-ninja ¡XEWATER! tactical, and since the 1911 model hadn’t been worn quite long enough to loosen the belt loops yet, I opted to trick it out a little.

How could I of all people resist a stingray inlay? This one came just about perfect out of the box. The retention was just where it needed to be, but this time I didn’t have to do any steam-it-in-the-shower tricks to make it let go of my gun without a fight. The belt tunnels instead of just the plain slit are also a huge improvement, and help add a good bit of extra stability, as if the original was somehow lacking in that department. The stitching is, again, excellent, and even now I remain impressed with how stiff and sturdy this holster is for such thin leather. I was hoping to have a nice glamor shot with the refinished CZ in this spiff piece of slickness, but apparently some idiot poured blueing solution into the nickel tank, so a bit of delay has occured. Either way, my opinion is that the holster is good looking enough even without being filled, and if you want an attractive dress holster that works exactly like a holster should, this is it.

Why are you still here? Go buy your own. And I guess he has other styles too if you’re a weirdo or something, but just go buy one.

In the vein of Blunt Object’s post on irrational articles about diet and health that focus on macronutrients as though they were inherently bad or good for you without considering that what makes for a “healthy meal” is largely contextual, here we have an article about somebody who managed to overdose on 5-hour Energy displaying the same kind of fundamental issue.

What’s really striking about the article is that it focuses on the fact that 5-hour Energy has caffeine in it and gives the story a frame of caffeine addicts looking for their next hit, including a quote from a nutritionist saying that the energy in energy drinks comes from caffeine, with the B-complex vitamin cocktail being “purely for glitz”.

This would not be remarkable if it had been the caffeine that put the subject of the story in the hospital, but it wasn’t- it was the niacin, also known as vitamin B3. Normally it’s very difficult to overdose on B vitamins because they’re water-soluble and leave with urine, but front-load enough niacin by main-lining energy drinks as though they were coffee and you’ll box your liver good and hard, as this woman did. The article acknowledges that her actual problem was niacin overdose, which makes the overall caffeine-junkies message of the article as strange as it is.

The underlying reason both for why it would pass as normal to be written that way, and for the woman in question to think it would be okay to knock back that much “energy drink”, is the same issue as Blunt is talking about in talking about fat or sugar as though they were evil; caffeine is a thing that is “bad for us”, and vitamins are “good for us”, regardless of whether the caffeine is in high enough doses to actually hurt us or if vitamins can kill us in their overdose as well as their lack. We need vitamin A for proper vision and gene transcription, among other things, but in excess it will break your bones and is a teratogen for developing fetuses*. Selenium is an essential trace element, but ingesting it in milligrams rather than micrograms will kill you very dead.

The more you examine the pattern, the less sense it makes. Sodium is an essential substances for nerve transmission we need plenty of and will die without, but it’s on the “bad for you” list in media narrative. Potassium is involved in exactly the same biochemical process as sodium is and will shut down your kidneys and potentially stop your heart in excess, but it’s on the blanket “good for you” list and the possibility and dangers of hyperkalemia are rarely mentioned if you’re not a medical student. This particular example has a simple enough explanation- we use sodium chloride to flavor our food, not potassium chloride, so it’s much easier to ingest in amounts exceeding “enough”- but it still doesn’t really explain why either substance is normally discussed and thought about as entirely bad for you or entirely good for you, especially as the effects of not enough sodium can be felt by anyone who spends several hours working outside in the heat with water alone to sustain them- not exactly a rare scenario. One man invented an industry on the problem by putting lemon juice and sugar in what was essentially a bottle of Ringer’s solution, a lightly modified version of which you will find hanging from IV stands in hospitals, used for rehydration.

Perhaps the only real take-home message here, besides “healthy is contextual, not an innate quality”: if you’re a caffeine addict needing more, stick with coffee. They put all kinds of other crap in energy drinks your body isn’t as able to cope with in excess, like vitamins.

*Vitamin A toxicity is more hazardous because it’s fat-soluble. Researchers attempted to solve this problem by making a water-soluble version, which suffered from the drawback of being ten times more toxic in that form.

I will cop to being at LEAST this vengeful when playing. Evidently I’m not the only one either.

Y’know how sometimes a chef or craftsman will focus exclusively on one aspect of the dish or subject at hand? Beermakers go for huge hits of hops. Laphroaig goes for insane levels of smokiness. Chocolatiers can strive for a richness that causes diabetes at 50 paces. Recoil junkies pack the .700 nitro express into a pistol. It doesn’t always work.

Sometimes, it’s perfect.

I fucking salute this profane fucking work of fuckart, and agree completely that the douchey fuckpilgrims of Harvard responsible for the aborted ganglia conducting the fuck-addled “study” can get fucked upside down with a ninety pound dictionary containing entries only for “fuck you” and “confirmation bias” and “worthless fucking fuckweasel” followed by a thorough plugging of the now bloodsoggy fuckhole with a copy of “Common Sense.”

(H/T Kevin)

Courtesy Spear, whose kitchen table we were appropriating for internet during the exile and who arranged us a safe and pet-friendly place to land within the four minutes previously stated. This was his solution to bedraggled and cranky refugees.

Burning Manhattan Project

As much rye whiskey as you judge necessary to de-crankify the drinker, 1-3 shots. Beam was more than adequate to the task.

6-8 drops Fee Bros. cherry bitters

1 glug sweet vermouth

Ice

Combine. He used a cocktail shaker, a spoon in a glass would be fine.

Very simple and straightforward, scales just fine with a bigger or smaller dose of the hard stuff, and frankly I liked it more than most of the proper Manhattans I’ve had with better rye. We will be adding a bottle of the cherry bitters to our little bar.

- Apparently, all I need to do to get the cat to lie down and chill or go to sleep over the course of a long-distance car trip, in lieu of screaming until his lungs and my ears bleed, is to play death metal very loudly. Given that the original ideal was simply to drown him out, a very acceptable outcome.

- The National Guard has sworn to ensure that no looting happens in Los Alamos during the fire the way it did in New Orleans during Katrina. If they claim credit for this failing to happen, it will be only somewhat less audacious than the Army Corps of Engineers claiming credit for Los Alamos also having failed to flood.

- Painted on the White Rock white rock, unofficial community graffiti post: “We <3 LAFD”

- Town meeting #1. State of emergency, among those present are the state governor, fire chief and assorted senior regional wildfire officers. Tensions and stakes are high. First question from the floor, from a worried community:

“How can I donate to the Red Cross?”

- A compressor bearing in one of our two vehicles is on the verge of blowing, therefore I dared not run the air conditioning. As a result I have a rather distinctive left-sided sunburn.

- Town meeting #2, same cast of characters. Middle of question and answer time. Upon explanation that regardless of how bad the smoke down in White Rock is (at the moment, not that bad), it is five times worse in Los Alamos, questioner refuses to stand down until he receives an answer to “How smoky?” stated in parts per million.

- The cool, wild, vegetal smell of a thunderstorm in the high desert is such a relief from hot, heavy smoke that it is worth keeping the windows down as you drive along even if you are getting wet. At least until the apocalyptic hailstorm starts.

- Seen somewhere along the highway in southern CO: roadkilled but very intact dead badger. Request to pull over and harvest the skull and hide submitted and denied due to being too bloated.

- Seen directly next to a dirt road near $landing zone: four mule bucks in velvet ranging from “spike” to “monster with a chandelier on its head”. Rocks thrown, bucks reluctantly mosey away. Odds all four will develop advanced ninjitsu skills and possibly Army Ranger-level technology and tactics by November first: one.

- Leaving guardian-breed dogs locked in a mudroom with a window to the outside when four seasonally stupid bucks are in the area is a bad idea. Let the guard dogs be with the family and everything will be much more peaceful. Aside: Home Depot is surprisingly unfriendly to carrying replacement parts for modular homes these days.

- Seen somewhere along the highway near the CO-NM border: freshly roadkilled, not bloated, bear. Request to harvest the skull and hide denied due to lack of winch or come-along on the truck, plus traffic.

- Whiz-bang smartphone with reasonable plan purchased with an eye to coordination in just such events: obtained and running before evac. Whiz-bang smartphone: signal-less and dead by 100 miles outside of $landing zone due to phone plan’s assumption of urban-ish and relatively mountain-free residence. New nickname for phone: Fucking Useless Toy, or FUT.