Wife.

For the record I would like to state that I love my wife more than guns. A lot more. Like sell a gun to buy my wife a new sectional couch for our basement kind of love. That's the kind of love you could never have for a gun. I'm just sayin'...

Guns.

I love guns. All of my friends know this. I very openly share my affection for them with just about everyone that enters my house (Especially if they are picking up one of my younger sisters for a date). I often invite friends to come shooting with me whether they "believe" in guns or not. It is hard for me to understand my affinity towards guns. Occasionally I simply get overtaken with "gun lust", where I have an overpowering and inexplicable desire to handle, buy, discharge (safely at a designated shooting area), or simply look at a particular gun. I don't actually believe in using them for many of the purposes they are designed for, namely, killing things. I mean, I have very little desire to shoot anything living (other than the occasion stray cat I catch wondering through my back yard) so hunting really isn't something I have any desire to do. I also don't believe that guns are a particular benefit to societal safety. I'm not big on using guns as a home defense mechanism, I keep them unloaded and locked in a safe and rarely actually have any ammo for them anyways. But I readily acknowledge that my fascination with guns largely stems from the sense of power, responsibility, community, alertness and danger that peculate through my body when handling one.

I also have pings of guilt along with everything else as I feel the cold steel in my hands. This guilt stems from the knowledge that this expertly crafted piece of metal in my hand is the cause of so much pain here in the US (not to mention the world). Forget homicides, although if you are a young Black Male living in an urban area you probably can't; suicides account for far more deaths each year. According to the CDC only about 3% of those that attempt suicide by means other than guns are successful. Guns produce a success rate of over 90%. Is it any wonder that suicide deaths are much more prevalent in rural areas where guns are also more prevalent?

But guilt isn't the only conflict gun ownership presents. Gun culture is both appealing and repulsing to me. I like being part of a community, of the camaraderie that accompanies ownership. That part should be easy to understand. What repulses me is the fear-driven narrative that prevails inside these communities: "You need a gun to protect yourself because crime is out of control." Crime is at a 20 year low. "Gun registration is a government ploy to be able to take them away from you in the future" or "buy guns while you still can because Obama is going to take them away". Obama isn't going to touch your guns, no one will, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money on that. Even more recently illegal immigration has been used as a reason to promote gun ownership, which I find insultingly absurd. I don't fault the emphasis on self-reliance or civic duty, if anything I find those reassurances, but I don't accept the gun community's morbidly pessimistic view that you should be ready to kill someone at any moment because everyone is a prospective threat.

That said I will concede that most of the reasons I use to justify my refusal to conceal carry a firearm are equally debunk-able. Firearms don't turn every conflict into a life or death situation, they don't automatically escalate a confrontation to be lethal. More people aren't harmed by concealed carriers than helped, it is quite the reverse. I often tell people that I don't want the responsibility, that I wouldn't want the death of another person on my conscience and that I don't know if I would really be able to kill another human being. The truth is that the responsibility of being a kind of arbiter or protection is part of the appeal of guns, and it is precisely the desire to keep my conscience clear that would make me an effective arbiter. And on the subject being able to kill a person, I am not particularly emotional and given the right situation, gun or no gun I believe I would.

So all this leaves me in my usual state of ambiguity, which is fine because I don't feel any need to align myself one way or another. I am plenty comfortable taking what I like and avoiding what I don't when I can.

I'm glad I'm not on TV.

I have a hypothesis about why it's so easy to make anyone in government (or anyone on TV really) look stupid by compiling sound bites: The human mind was not built to endure the 24 hour news cycle. You expose anyone to cameras/radio/journalists for 24 hours a day and eventually they are going to say something you can use to make them look stupid. I believe this is most likely because none of us are as smart as we think we are. Everyone thinks things that someone else would find stupid a lot more than we'd like to admit. Now, with that said, some people/organizations are more prone to stupidity (or being evil) than others...

Jon Stewart treats the subject in this clip.

A good example.

Okay here is an aside that speaks for itself. I don't have patience to keep up with all the pundits, so I am going to pick on Glenn Beck a lot. This is appropriate because he is very popular here in Utah, and we share a common religion (We both consider ourselves Mormons). Anyhow, on a religious note, tonight Glenn Beck considered why recent poles show nearly a quarter of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Glenn explains why more Americans now believe Obama is a Muslim

After dismissing Bob Schieffer's explanation that polls' results are a due to internet rumors (I received at least one email claiming Obama is a Muslim), Glenn blames Obama's confusing brand of Christianity. He cites Obama's "Apology Tour" as evidence of why Christians are confused about Obama's religious beliefs. Although Obama mentions nothing about his religious affiliation in the clip Glenn plays to support his assertion, Glenn creates a clever implication that the idea that American Arrogance in foreign policy is wrong is an Islamic belief.

Glenn then quotes a line from Obama's Audacity of Hope in which Obama describes himself submitting to gods will as he knelled beneath a cross. Glenn asserts that "Submission to his will, that's Islam.". Really, does Glenn, who so frequently touts his faith, no know that submission to God's will is actually what Christ meant when he encouraged us to be like little children? Or is it Glenn, rather than Bob Schieffer, that thinks you're stupid? He must at least think we're all stupid enough to attribute "submitting to god's will" as an exclusively Islamic teaching.

Seriously though, don't expect any cohesion.

I hope the name of this blog prevents you from thinking that I am going to offer any solutions to fix anything I will undoubtedly complain about. All I want to do is find a way to communicate how I see the world, which I have found to be very difficult. So difficult in fact that I have never really made a concerted effort to do so, and I will likely fail miserably. But the bottom line is this: Reality is complicated. Also this: I miss Walter Cronkite.

I accept the fact that everyone has to somehow make sense of the world they live in. Our ability to perceive our surroundings is traumatically limited. There is a lot going on in the world that we can't see, hear, feel, taste or smell at any one given moment, but that effects us in infinitely different ways, and we have to mentally construct some kind of system that accounts for it all. This is reality, well, your reality. However there is a different kind of reality; what is actually going on. I suppose most people project their reality onto real reality and so it doesn't really matter what real reality is like unless it directly effects them or at least they think it effects them. As a rule of thumb, whatever your reality is, it is much simpler that of actual reality, which isn't necessarily a problem, until you try to apply your reality to a situation that includes a greater degree of complexity than your reality currently comprises. When that occurs a lot of things can happen, but most likely you try to explain the added complexity in terms that already exist in your current reality. Changing your reality is probably not something you do everyday.

Simplifying complex events to fit into our understanding of the world can pose a lot of problems. Usually we take someone else's word for it, or we just look for things we understand and ignore what we don't. When we have to make decisions, often that effect other people, and our view of reality differs from actual reality which also differs from the reality of the people our decision effect, politics happens.

Still with me?

I have never actually watched Walter Cronkite when he was a News Anchor, but I miss the idea of Walter Cronkite. Today information on how the world actually works has never been more readily available. But that isn't necessarily a good thing, because bits and pieces of everyone else's reality make actual reality a lot harder to get to. There used to be, and presumably still are, people that dedicate their lives to filtering the good stuff for the rest of us, they are called journalists. They were not interested in the world as it should be, only in the way it is. Used to be they were the primary outlet for understanding the political world beyond our community. But now, mixed in with the people that had dedicated their lives to constructing a better picture of actual reality is an almost indistinguishable army dedicated to making your reality more like theirs, using what elements of actual reality they want and ignoring the rest. And it makes sense, as reality becomes more complicated, sifting out actual reality is more difficult. It is easier to sell a reality that is pre-constructed that filters out or interprets any contradictory information. These pre-constructed realities are called ideologies. Now my brain is tired.

Glenn and Rauf

Recently, In his newsletter Glenn Beck has been talking a lot about a New York based Muslim Organization wanting to build an Islamic community center and Mosque in New York City a block or two from the 9/11 Ground Zero site. I don't have any real sentiment on the matter, but I am irked by the general fixation on this issue.

I fail to see why Glenn Beck wants to champion this issue, especially when it appears to be fairly straightforward. I don't know New York's municipal building code by heart or anything, but if it passes through the correct venues and gets approved, I don't see why we should care all that much. It isn't on Ground Zero, or even facing it, so I don't see why it would be an issue about sensitivity, and even if it were, it would be unfair to lump the Muslim Organization that is going to run the community center in with the fundamentalist terrorists that carried out the attacks. We wouldn't group the 700 club in with the likes of Timothy McVeigh, would we? Well, at least that would be my first thought. Enter Glenn...

In the linked transcript Glenn takes issue with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam of the prospective community center/Mosque. Specifically Glenn and friends get upset about these statements:

IMAM RAUF: We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non Muslims.

IMAM RAUF: You may remember that the U.S. led sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of over a half a million Iraqi children.

IMAM RAUF: This has been documented by the United Nations.

I haven't done any researching into what Imam Rauf said and the context he said it in, but even if this isn't a cherry-picked sound bite, I wouldn't exactly classify those statements as anti-American. In fact, they shed important insight into how the United States is perceived abroad. From listening to the sound bite it's clear that all of the incriminating statements made by this Imam were in response to questions from an at least partially non-Muslim audience in Australia. Rauf was likely trying to help his audience understand the mindset of the people of countries in which the United States is exerting military influence.

Rauf was not demanding reparations or that the US be brought to Justice or even directly indicting the US of moral responsibility. All of which you would expect a fundamentalist or extremist to do. I believe the point he is making is that it doesn't matter if the blood is actually on Saddam's hands, for the people of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the US stands as an interloper to which they can ascribe their suffering. We are doing the same thing here in the US as we attribute as many problems as we can to illegal immigration. I'm not saying that we were wrong to impose those sanctions, I don't think Rauf was either. I think the bottom line is that we can't assume that just because we see ourselves having the moral high ground, others will see it that way too.

I like Newsletters

I like newsletters from public figures; I feel like I am in touch when I read them. I also like getting my newsletters from contradicting sources. For example: I get an email everyday from Glenn Beck and as a counterbalance I get another email daily from Jon Stewart.

I don't actually read all the newsletters I get. I usually skim over the main points and read the first bit of transcripts from Glenn or watch the first little bits of clips from Stewart. I would not recommend in any way using this method as your primary news source, you would probably develop all kinds of social and mental disorders after a few short days.

I'm doing it... I'm actually going to write a blog post.

Hello world.

I don't believe in blogging, but I need an outlet for thoughts and as tedious and boring as I find blogging I am going to attempt writing some coherent thoughts, mostly concerning current events and politics.