Historiann

Inside the mind of a Second Amendment rights absolutist who believes that the right to “keep and bear arms” empowers Americans to take up arms against the state, among several other charmingly evidence-free beliefs.  I don’t think I’d ever say this in my lifetime, but kudos to Piers Morgan for allowing all of us to see, hear, and smell the crazy.  (And of course, he’s a 9/11 Truther, and just as angry as a Scientologist about psychopharmacology.  You’ve heard of the Full Cleveland?  This is the Full Crazy.)

Something else I’d never thought I’d write:  Alan Dershowitz is right, and good for him for reminding us that not all Americans look like that crazy guy, and that we’re still Americans if read the Second Amendment differently (as in the not-crazy way.)

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The New York Times has a revealing article about the suburban New York newspaper, The Journal News, and its decision a few weeks ago to publish a list of names and addresses as well as an interactive map of all of the people who hold handgun permits in Westchester and Rockland counties.  The print and online edition of the article, “The Gun Owner Next Door:  What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” became a nationwide sensation, and the Times’s summary of the story so far documents an amazing display of narcissism and projection:

Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.

Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).

“As journalists, we are prepared for criticism,” Ms. Hasson said, as she sat in her meticulously tended office and described the ways her 225 employees have been harassed since the article was published. “But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.” She has paid for staff members who do not feel safe in their homes to stay at hotels, offered guards to walk employees to their cars, encouraged employees to change their home telephone numbers and has been coordinating with the local police.

Was The Journal News right or wrong to publish this information in this fashion?  Most unusually, I have had a hard time formulating an opinion on this.  I can see the arguments from both sides:  Continue Reading »

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Well, friends, la famille Historiann has had a very good year and we have a lot to be grateful for, the first thing being that none of us was injured or killed by firearms.  I hope that all of you are happy and safe too, and that if you’re traveling, the winter snows blanketing the Rockies to the midwest aren’t causing you too much trouble or grief.  (We are envious–there were breathless reports of snowsnowsnow!!! coming last Wednesday, but here in Potterville, we got nuthin’ but a little dusting that blew away before noon.)

If you have a few spare (or sleepless) moments over the weekend, here’s a round-up of recent news and views that I thought you might find interesting:

• Thank you, Jeffrey Toobin, for reminding us what a revanchist creep Robert Bork (1927-2012) actually was.  I was growing tired of reading all of the sanitized obituaries and the commentaries by so-called “liberals” who had deep, deep regrets about the way Bork was treated in his confirmation hearing.  You’d think a big, tough conservative guy like Bork would be glad to stand up for his pro-segregation, anti-Civil Rights, antifeminist writings and judicial record, wouldn’t you, and take whatever licking he got as a proud conservative?  According to Toobin, no recent SCOTUS nominee in recent years has so richly deserved a borking as Bork.
• Paging Tenured Radical:  how ’bout a book club on Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), like we did with Terry Castle’s The Professor?  It would be good for your history of modern conservativism courses, and fun for me.
• Fiscal Cliff Notes:  Rutgers University historian Jennifer Mittlestadt writes that although many liberals may be rooting for the military spending cuts that will go into effect if we fall off the “fiscal cliff,” we need to look at the details hidden in the proposal:  “Folded into the current military spending cuts is a neoliberal agenda to privatize and outsource the retirement and health care benefits of military personnel and their families. Americans may consider these proposals of minimal concern, and of interest only to military personnel, veterans, and their families. But their implications reach far wider: they are part of a comprehensive neoliberal plan to privatize virtually all government social welfare programs and entitlements.”
• Deconstructing white manhood:  Bloggers Werner Herzog’s Bear and MPG (“Unofficial thoughts about discrimination, racial sight, and race”) have some interesting contributions to make to a problem that Respectable Negro Chauncey DeVega has tried to highlight this week, too, given the demography of mass-murderers like Adam Lanza.  Continue Reading »

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They’re really great for the gun business.  From today’s Denver Post:

This weekend set a record for all single-day background check submittals in Colorado for potential gun purchases, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials.

The first day after news of one of the worst mass shootings in America, when a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., requests to buy guns in Colorado surged.

A total of 4,154 background checks were submitted on Saturday, said CBI spokeswoman Susan Medina. Those figures topped the previous greatest number of background checks on Black Friday this year, when 4,028 were processed. Continue Reading »

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Over the past few days, I’ve been gratified to see and hear some in the news media start talking specifically about how all of these killers are men–most of them young, overwhelmingly white and also overwhelmingly socially isolated.  Inspired by this comment from Susan, I wondered this morning how many mothers and fathers of hypothetical 20-year old daughters who 1) had problems with school, 2) live at home, 3) don’t go to college and don’t have a job, and 4) are as completely isolated as this murderer appears to have been would not have sought some kind of counseling or mental health evaluation for their child?

I do not mean to engage in victim-blaming here (of the murderer’s mother).  My question is an honest one, and it jibes with a concern I’ve had for a long time about the different standards to which boys and girls are held by their parents.  Recently, it has struck me that daughters are held to much higher standards than sons are–higher behavioral and academic standards–and that this in the end has benefited girls.  This is one reason why I think we see women in the majority among college students and M.A. students in the U.S.  Continue Reading »

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This past weekend was spent gathering ingredients and starting a little holiday baking, so I thought a little cake blogging would be in order this week, which is finals’ week at Baa Ram U.  More cake and baking fun will follow, but today’s post offers a cautionary tale.  Friends, although the people of this great state have voted to decriminalized recreational pot use for people 21 and older, it’s still illegal to feed your classmates and your proffie pot brownies without their full consent:

Two University of Colorado at Boulder students are facing multiple felony charges after they allegedly fed marijuana-laced brownies to their unsuspecting history class — leading to the hospitalization of three people.

The professor of the course was taken to a hospital by paramedics Friday after complaining of dizziness and dropping in and out of consciousness.

.       .       .       .       .

Thomas Ricardo Cunningham, 21, and Mary Elizabeth Essa, 19, baked THC-laced brownies for their class at the Hellems Arts and Sciences Building on Friday, said Ryan Huff, CU police spokesman.

After the professor was taken to the hospital, a student’s mother notified campus police that her daughter, who had been in the professor’s class, was in the hospital after having a panic attack.

Later that day, the parents of another student in the same class took their daughter to a hospital after she told them she felt like she would black out. Continue Reading »

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Thomas Edsall has some interesting thoughts about the Kulturkampf and the jobs crisis–go read.  I don’t agree with everything he writes–for example, I’m sure that he’s wrong to declare victory on behalf of the Left in the culture war, because the beauty of the Kulturkampfen mentality is that there’s always another front to advance to when forced to retreat on other fronts!  But this part of his argument caught my eye:

On a more sobering note for Democrats, a slight majority (51 percent) of voters agreed with the statement “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals” compared to 43 percent saying “Government should do more to solve problems.” This despite the fact that, as The New York Times reported in a Feb. 11, 2012 story, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It”:

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.

The story points out that many people

say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

And yet, of course, no Americans are refusing to cash unemployment or Social Security checks!  Some of them are voting for pols like Mitt Romney and Ayn Ryan, perhaps to assuage their guilt and feelings of failure.  Continue Reading »

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Hilarious unsourced post at the National Review Online:  no names, no actual evidence that any of this is true, but dark warnings about the tidal wave of unemployment that’s about to be unleashed across the country because the so-called “job creators” are pi$$ed off that their candidate didn’t win.  Here’s allegedly one for you:

I explained to [my employees] a month ago that if Obama gets in office that the regulations for Obamacare are gonna hurt our business, and I’m gonna have to make provisions to make sure I have enough money to cover the payroll taxes, the additional health care I’m gonna have to do, and I explained that to them and I said you do what you feel like in your heart you need to do, but I’m just letting you know as a warning this is things I have to think of as a business owner.

Well unfortunately, and most of my employees are Hispanic — I’m not gonna go into what kind of company I have, but I have mostly Hispanic employees — well unfortunately we know what happened and I can’t wait around anymore, I have to be proactive. I had to lay off 22 people today to make sure that my business is gonna thrive and I’m gonna be around for years to come. I have to build up that nest egg now for the taxes and regulations that are coming my way.

Right.  Because a President Romney would magically have been granted the power to issue a retroactive veto for a bill passed 3 years before his inauguration, and none of those “taxes and regulations” would be coming your way, ever, guaranteed. Continue Reading »

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I always thought this was a particularly good one, and not just because I grew up at the intersection of I-75 and the Ohio Turnpike.  I know a lot of you on the East and Best Coasts probably like to make fun of us yokels from Ohio, but like it or not, friends–those yokels will be picking your next president for you!  (And this yokel, now living in another swing state, has already cast her vote by mail, helping to pick your president too.)

It’s interesting to note (based on this trip down memory lane) that President Obama’s insular tendencies–and even his isolationism from powerful people in the Democratic Party–were clearly evident more than four years ago.  I know people don’t like it when I say this, but the President’s isolation, stemming from his refusal to use a great deal of the “soft power” tools of the presidency, is a political problem.  (And doesn’t the debate debacle in Denver earlier this month look different, having re-read that post?) Continue Reading »

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Down, Sandy! Down girl!

I was very sorry to hear about Hurricane Sandy as I know that many of you regular readers and commenters live in the BosWash corridor and so stand to be flooded out, snowed in, and/or suffer damage to your homes (or all of the above!  Fun.)  I’ve been following the news today, and it looks to be one of those agonizingly slow-moving but fierce storms.  Here’s hoping that property is all that’s lost in this storm.

It’s really too bad neither of the major parties was courageous enough to make climate change an issue in the campaign this year.  (Scratch that–climate change was indeed a big issue in the Republican primary–the issue being who could deny the fact of anthropogenic climate change the fastest and promise more drill, baby, drilling!)  Although I had low expectations of President Obama, even I have managed to be disappointed by his inability or unwillingness to exercise leadership on so  many issues that are important to the Democratic base, climate change being just one of them.  I get it that the do-nothing congress has pretty much tied itself to the tracks of history in order to halt any possible Obama achievement for the past two years, but guess what?  That’s why they call it leadership.  You can’t let your political opposition dictate the terms of your agenda, let alone the boundaries of what you’re permitted to talk about.

Here’s hoping that everyone is safe and dry, even if you have to read this blog on your smartphone because you’ve lost your electricity!

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