Cowboy Confessional

Possessing an insane depth of knowledge concerning gun control, as evidenced by any years of publishing the Gun Facts e-book, I’m alerted (often against my will) to the words and misdeeds of gun control advocates and other people of limited IQ.

An instance of this occurred last week when a gentleman named Zach Marks posted a piece on the now intellectually suspect Huffington Post.  I don’t know Zach, but suspect he comes from a good family and is otherwise devoid of unsavory behaviors.  In his blog he attributed the drop in violent crime during the 1990s to Brady Law and the lapsed assault weapons ban (which Zach mistakenly amalgamated into one piece of legislation).  I can’t blame Zach for coming to this conclusion because cum hoc ergo propter hoc errors are common when research is lacking.  Thus I have no bone with Zach, for even elected officials and other criminals are suspect to this logic trap.

My accusation lies with the scoundrels within the editorial bowls of the Huffington Post.

When I read Zach post, I added a couple of paragraphs to the comments section detailing the actual causes for the 1990s drop in violent crime (economics, get-tough legislation, and demographics).  I mentioned my Gun Facts e-book and provided a link for the convenience of anyone who wanted more in-depth info.  The post was polite and succinct.

And it remains unpublished, though others have followed me:

* Several people’s comments have been posted after mine.

* Many are antagonistic and impolite.

* Some have links.

So I can find no excuse for Huffington to not include my post, aside from keeping people from achieving a deeper and more informed understanding of the issue, and one that goes against the political agenda of Huffington’s management.  In other words they hand-pick comments that amplify their beliefs, or prevent people from learning contradictory data.

Intellectual fraud at best, corruption of conscious at least.

Bookmark to:

Irony is the ultimate entertainment, and today the Chinese government has outdone even itself.  In effect the Godless Communists have proclaimed themselves God.

In an effort to culturally castrate Tibet, Chinese Communist Party Hacks (forgive the quadruple redundancy) have laid their heavy police state hands on Tibetan social systems, transportation, immigration, and even religious practices.  Not content to control Tibetan temporal transactions, China’s chief thugs are now targeting the afterlife.

Buddhists — Tibetan and otherwise — believe in reincarnation, that they will be born again into this world, which stands as the most complete form of auto-masochism ever conceived.  They are particularly fond of hunting down the deceased lamas and upon their reentry into this world, give them immediate employment again as … a lama (imagine holding the same job for a couple of thousand years).

This causes China’s Chief Chumps no end of angst as any garden variety lama will outlive every member of the Central Committee, the Communist Party, and China itself.  Tibetans are a patient lot, and willing to wait for instructions from their lamas even if it requires waiting for them to be born, and born, and born …

So the Chinese government is now regulating reincarnation. The Administration for Religious Affairs will specify “the procedures by which one is to reincarnate.” It will be verboten “to identify the child reincarnation of the Dalai Lama” without the approval of Chinese authorities.  Seems the Dali lama might wish to be reincarnated outside of China, which would prevent the Central Committee from controlling him in the future, and thus controlling the will of pious Tibetans.  Thus the Chinese government will undoubtedly pick some random newborn whelped within Tibetan borders to be the “official” Dali Lama.

And the Tibetan people will ignore him.

In my short life time, I have never seen a human — much less a committee — challenge God.  I fear this may well be the one thing that ticks off the Old Man, and he may well rain a little Hell Fire down on Beijing.  This would be an overall Good Thing.  Not only would it kill off a few communist (which is always the right and proper course of action) but it would also demonstrate that God does exist and he has limited patience.  That would make Richard Dawkins piss himself, which would be almost as entertaining as a meeting the the Chinese Central Committee.

Bookmark to:

Communion between politicians and other junkies recently reached a new high in San Francisco, demonstrating how unrestrained bad behavior corrupts both.Ashen intellectual elements within The City have for 15 years encouraged the self-destructive life style of intravenous drugs users by supplying addicts with the tools of their demise. Via high-minded but bereft strategies to reduce infectious disease among hopheads, abused taxpayers have supplied drug abusers with 2.4 million new syringes annually, of which about 800,000 never find their way back to “exchange” depots, appearing instead in parks, citizen’s yards, and protruding from children’s bodies. Rumor has it that a monument is being erected in the AIDS Memorial Grove built entirely from infected needles accumulating there.

What is surprising is that people are surprised. Drug use in general, and drug addiction in particular are dangerous behaviors. These behaviors are adopted despite decades of warnings posted at the trailhead of addiction and the minor amount of common sense necessary to avoid dependency. Societies toss barriers between potential druggies and dope, starting with parental threats and terminating with dopers watching acquaintances croak. Mankind attempts to dissuade bad behavior, except in San Francisco where it is actively encouraged. So thorough is this encouragement of expanded addiction that our junkies are one incentive away from running for Mayor.

The City’s reaction to millions of missing government needles is to expand the program that lost them. One suggestion seeks to decorate parks and street corners with bio-hazard drop boxes that heroin hopper allegedly will seek and use, providing they can first stand upright. Since these boxes are an unappealing tourism billboard, another notion was proffered — “better educating users about needle safety.” Perhaps the point was missed by politicians, but junkies don’t care about their own safety much less the safety of the general population, making education of the strung-out instantly hopeless. Lastly, the city might spend seven times the current needle “exchange” budget for high-tech syringes with retractable needles. They will still cover grassy plains in Golden Gate Park but will not jab strolling couples, joggers, or campaigning politicians seeking dramatic photo ops.

True to their nature, politicos failed to ponder the core problem, and in groping for headlines exacerbated the situation. One aspect of human nature is that those who display bad behavior will continue to do so in the absence of any penalty. Criminological surveys of felons show they will not assault or rob someone they believe to be armed, understanding that the penalty for this bad behavior is instant death. Likewise junior needle jockeys will continue to slam heroin unless a price for this behavior is extracted. Supplying unused syringes removed the both an expense and a grave element of danger, thus encouraging continued bad behavior.

Voters do the same thing. Abundant are laws designed to discourage behaviors destructive to the community. San Francisco has its set of vagrancy laws, and rules against littering that supposedly cover needles casually tossed into playgrounds. Despite a near absence of enforcement of these rules toward civil conduct, voters elect and re-elect the same caste of philosophical philistines who spritz deodorant over the cesspool then claim the “stench problem” to be resolved.

Inattention to the core of difficulties echoes throughout City Hall. A recent increase in street crime and homicides between gangs resulted in city fathers and mothers requiring non-criminal citizens to keep home-bound firearms locked or boxed. Given the behavioral gulf between the average home owner and the average thug, one would anticipate this regulation of private affairs would have no effect on street violence. Indeed, in a rare display of political honesty one supervisor admitted “I don’t think we’re getting to the heart of why San Francisco is experiencing this unabated gun violence citywide.”

Thankfully, an election comes soon, providing San Francisco voters the opportunity to apply a penalty for bad political behavior.

Bookmark to:

I loath conflict, though not in my personal life. Just in my writing.

Get any group of fiction writers (as opposed to a random group of reprobates) together and the discussion will eventually get around to the subject of conflict or tension. Conflict drives every plot of every story. The story can be comedy, drama, or the internal dialog of a drug addled psychotic freak, be they a Congressman or Senator.

A lot of fiction lacks the construction of conflict. Sometimes the conflict is too mild and thus not a convincing driver for action of the characters. Sometimes there is not enough variety of conflict, and thus the work becomes monotonous. Other times the type of conflict is beyond the scope of the reader - something they never experienced, and to which they cannot relate. Any constrained conflict is deadly.

I believe this is what keeps many good writers from becoming great writers, and many bad writers from ever receiving a royalty check. They do not think-through a variety or conflicts and do not pick those that an average reader would respond. This is why basic conflicts — mainly love and violence — are the nauseatingly recurrent foundation of most Hollywood drivel. You can’t go wrong with passion, be it the passion to ravage a gorgeous woman (or to be ravaged by a hunky man) or to kill someone who damn well deserves it. Everyone member of the audience can connect with primal emotions and the conflict therein.

There are exceptions. Take Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The book is marvelously well written, with Fitgerlad’s humor carrying the burden of the story. For most of the book the conflicts are petty and would be forgettable aside from the Paris Hilton-like voyeuristic look into the lives of well heeled drunks. Fitzgerald takes a long time to get to the big conflict, though in this instance the payoff is worth it.

In a novella I’m starting to shop, I take conflict many steps further. The protagonist has one major conflict throughout the book — he died in a car crash, his wife survived, and his love for her keeps him from finishing his transition into death. But in each chapter I introduce another conflict with a series of antagonists. Some conflicts, like his undying love (pun intended) are internal. Some are external in his dealing with other ghosts and the living. And in a style I favor, I foreshadow the next conflict at the end of each chapter so the reader is compelled to keep reading.

Of internal and external conflicts, external are the easiest to craft. We all experience external conflicts and they all grown in the same garden. We have spats with lovers, unrequited love, fights with neighbors/bosses/police, etc. Such conflicts are relatively easy to create and fictionalize because they are well understood and need only interesting tweaks and appropriate tension to make them real.

Internal conflicts are tricky, and this is the downfall of introspective writers, who are a notoriously conflicted bunch. What tortures one man internally may be completely foreign to everyone else on the planet. The more obscure the conflict, the more it needs to be explained and illustrated, and the more weary the process becomes on the reader. So if you have an internal conflict from your childhood that you are aching to put to paper, think about your audience and ask if they give a damn. If they don’t, and you cannot in a couple of pages make them give a damn, then drop it as a viable conflict.

There is a way around even this problem, though you better be a skilled writer before attempting such. If the conflict is central to the character and is obscure, then unravel the conflict over the course of the entire plot. Make the conflict real by exposing the nuances through many chapters. This makes the conflict understandable to the reader, because they are experiencing the complexities through the “reality” of your character. The reader is in a sense becoming the character through a shared experience.

Needless to say this is not easy, and requires considerable thought in the plot outlining (and if you are writing fiction without outlining, you may well be doomed from the start). But don’t let that scare you. After all, Fitzgerald didn’t seem to have much of an outline and he did the same to Gatsby.

Bookmark to:

American behaviour will, in the long run, make friends of enemies.

One of the rarest commodities on earth is justice.  It is in such short supply, that outside of a few republics, it is virtually unknown or at best achieved through vigilantism.  To most of the world’s people, the thought that powerful men and nations would unilaterally provide justice, much less by punishing their own, is absurd.

Which is why America stands a good change of changing the middle east by simply being present.  Well enough are the endless stories about how nearly every member of our military interact peacefully and helpfully with Iraqis, performing labor and losing life on their behalf.  This alone changes minds about the nature of Americans and by proxy America.

But giving a bad soldier 110 years in the slammer should seal the deal.

Seems that Private Spielman was the lookout during a rape and murder party involving a couple of other thugs in uniform.  This tiny portion of the U.S. military - and an obvious exception to rule — was identified by Americans, arrested by Americans, prosecuted by American, convicted by Americans and will now spend a long time under the shotgun of Americans.  We policed our own in a humble attempt to right an unrightable wrong.

Under Sadam, this was unthinkable.  Baathists were largely enabled to commit all forms of crime against the public.  Only when they erred and pillaged one of the Sadam elite or family thereof was their a constraining action (typically instant death without due process).

The case of Private Spielman, if properly communicated, will demonstrate to the fledgling democracy in Iraq that there is a higher law than that of the jungle.  We show in society, when done right, evils can be contained if not actually corrected.  That as a people, America tries to do what is right and often succeeds.

Contrast this image of helpful and self-correcting Americans with jihadists blowing up school children.

War is about “will.”  They who have the will win.  The Iraqi people must have the will necessary to form their own more perfect union.  When given the alternatives presented, they will adopt the American posture and reject jihad.

Unless Harry Reid loses the war and destroys their will.

Bookmark to: