A Caturday Haiku

Cat with teeth and claws

String that clearly deserves both

Poor knee in the way!

Happy Caturday!

What a wonderful tribute to our vets!  This one was my favorite:

And this one just made me bloody bawl.

God bless our soldiers.

I consider myself a reasonable lover of Mother Earth.

Mike and I take public transport to work (though I freely admit it’s more for our convenience than concern over emissions).  We recycle paper, plastic and glass.  I wash out our Smart Balance and salsa containers to save for storage use.  I turn off the faucet while I brush my teeth or scrub my face.  We have plastic insulation sheets tacked up over our sliding doors to conserve heat (although, again, our concerns are more financial than environmental).  We certainly don’t litter; it’s uncouth.  I have reusable fabric bags that I bring to the grocery store each week.

I don’t, however, lie awake at night worrying about ocean pollution.  I have no interest in taking a test to “find out what age I should die at so I don’t use more than my fair share of the Earth’s resources.”  (And nice grammar there, numbnuts.)  I do not cry over dead trees.

And yet . .  and yet . . .

WHY, IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, DOES AN INCH-HIGH FABRIC POUCH REQUIRE A 9 x 9 x 18 BOX FULL OF PLASTIC PACKING???

Why?????

It’s as stupid as wrapping coconuts in plastic.  Dude — they’re COCONUTS. They’re not fragile, and you can’t eat the shell.

Way too much wrapping for some things, and way less-than-enough for others.

I’m sure there’s reasoning behind this, but I’m damned if I can guess what it is.

Thank you, veterans.  Thank you for serving, thank you for protecting, thank you for guarding.  Thank you.

Mike and I are celebrating Veterans’ Day by donating to Project Valour-IT.  How about you?

I used to read the Economist much more diligently than I do today.  Back in college, it was in my mind the “right-leaning” publication I read to keep balanced.  Later on, it was the business-centric publication that I read to keep an eye on foreign affairs.  I let my interest lapse and I haven’t regularly read the magazine (or “newspaper” as they call it) for a few years.

Until this weekend.  I was on the train to my choir dress rehearsal when I realized I’d left my Kindle at home.  (AAUUGGGHHH!  Nightmares!!)  Peeved, but resigned, I stopped by CVS to buy an Economist for rehearsal downtime and the train ride back.

As I read, I was at first amused, then surprised, then astonished by the continuous leftward slant.  The first two sections yielded gems such as:

- “What’s more, the parts of the world where populations are growing fastest are also those most vulnerable to climate change, and a rising population will exacerbate the consequences of global warming — water shortages, mass migration, declining food yields.”

- “Only Chinese-style coercion would bring [population growth] down much below [8.5 billion]; and forcing poor people to have fewer children than they want because the rich consume too many of the world’s resources would be immoral.”

- “Falling fertility may be making poor people’s lives better, but it cannot save the Earth.  That lies in our own hands.”

- “One of the aims of imprisonment is to give miscreants a shove in the right direction, through job-training, Jesus or whatever does the trick.  Allowing prisoners to vote will not magically reconnect them with society, but it will probably do more good than excluding them.”

- “Serving prisoners are not numerous enough to swing many elections.  But once a government uses disenfranchisement as a sanction, it is tempted to take things further.  Consider those American states where the suspension of prisoners’ votes has morphed into a lifelong ban; in Republican-controlled Florida, for instance, nearly a third of black men cannot vote — enough to have swung the 2000 presidential election.”

- (in envisioning a poor farmer industrializing and moving towards greater wealth/lower fertility) “Now imagine you are a bit richer.  You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown.  Schools, markets and factories are within reach.  And suddenly, the incentives change. [snip] Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you.  And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring.”  (Really?  The only way to have retirement wealth is to be pensioned off by the state?  And the only reason you have fewer children is because your wife finally put her foot down and stopped popping them out?)

- “The bad news is that the girls who will give birth to the coming, larger generations have already been born.  The good news is that they will want far fewer children than their mothers or grandmothers did.”  (Thanks.  Thanks so much.)

- “Japan and southern Europe have clung to older ways, discouraging women from working and frowning on single-parent families; there, fertility has stayed low, presumably because women resist what they see as unwelcome social pressure by having fewer children.”  (That is quite a presumption.  Me, I’d assume that having one working parent versus two working parents encourage fewer children because you’re got fewer people earning money to support them.  No, they never provide any sort of reasoning or backup for their statement.)

So what gives, folks?  I used to think The Economist was perfectly middle-of-the-road.  Now, to my eyes, it has a conspicuously leftward slant.

I know that in England even the Right leans Left.  But has this slant increased in the last few years?  Or is it just that I’m looking with new eyes?

And this is in addition to a friend who hasn’t gone shooting for years, and another friend who wants to learn basic firearm handling and safety.  Three guests lined up already — damn shame Lissaville Gun Club only allows one guest per month!

This latest new-shooter-wannabe is my friendly co-volunteer Delta (not her real name), who does meds at the Lissaville Animal Shelter.  We initially broached the topic the Sunday after this summer’s bloggershoot, when she asked me why I was so hopped up and what I’d done the past weekend.  I casually mentioned that I’d gone shooting with some friends, and she was FASCINATED.  Ever since she’s been periodically checking to see how my journey to the LTC was going.

Well, this past Sunday I was able to happily tell her that I had my license.  Her overriding emotion at this point is curiosity.  She asked me why I was interested in shooting — whether it was entertainment or self-defense — and listened closely to my explanation of why it was both.  I did a quick Four Rules rundown on gun safety, and she agreed wholeheartedly that guns could be very dangerous, but it was the intelligence and diligence of the handler (or rather lack thereof), not the weapon itself, that caused danger.  She told me frankly that she’s never held a gun, never seen a gun at close range, and doesn’t know at all how they work, but that all the people she knows who shoot love it.  Finally, when she heard that I was planning on going shopping next weekend, she enthusiastically accepted my invitation to go shooting once I was all set up.

Boo-yah!

So . . . what tips do y’all have for me?  I’ve been reading good stuff here, here, here, and here.  I also tried, and failed, to find Jay G’s ruminations on taking new shooters/female shooters out.  (Jay, why can I never find what I’m looking for on your site???)

My plans so far:

1. Give her an index card with the Four Rules to memorize before we go shooting.  Quiz her in a friendly way to make sure she has them pat before we hit the range.

2. Outdoor range would be better than indoor range.  It’s not as loud and I can have her go plinking with a .22.

3. Cans are good — bean cans, tomato cans, the bigger the better.  Anything that will go “BINK!” and either move or fall over.

4. If weather prohibits the outdoor range, try and pick a slack time of day for the indoor range.  The upside is that we could have the targets as close as we liked, to start off with.

5. If we’re at the indoor range, make sure I have some spatter targets; something that will splat bright orange or green and give her instant gratification when she makes a shot.

6. Concentrate on safety basics; technique can wait until later.  If she gets in the habit of safe handling NOW, chances are she’ll keep those habits.

7. Start on something small.  We’re planning on getting a Sig 239 for my gun and a Sig Mosquito for training purposes; that will give the feeling of handling a real gun but the kick and cheap firing cost of a .22.

8. The outing won’t be about me.  I can go practice anytime I want.  It’s about making sure Delta learns to safely handle guns and has fun while doing it.

What else should I keep in mind?

UPDATE:  Thank you, everyone!  I agree that I’ll need to be rock-solid on my own bangsticks before I let anyone else handle them.  As I wrote in an email earlier, it’s a bit scary and humbling; I feel like anyone being introduced to shooting should be with someone super-knowledgeable, with decades of experience and ten different guns to try.  That being said, since I’m the only gunnie Delta knows, I’ll just have to make sure I do a very safe and good job!

Also, Jay G links.  Thanks!

That’s right.

I am now the (careful, responsible) owner of a Class A Large Capacity License to Carry Firearms.

SQUEE!!! 

I’d like to thank the Academy . . .

No, of course not.  But I would like to thank everyone who encouraged me to step onto this path.  That would be the entire membership of my “Bloggers I’ve Met (!)” blogroll, with particular gratitude to TOTWTYTR and Doubletrouble (and his lovely wife).  Thank you to Breda, Tam and Caleb, who welcomed a baby gunchick into the fold.

Jay G gets his own paragraph of thanks — without the bloggershoots he organized, who knows whether I would have entered the gunnie world?

And last but not least — thank you to my husband Mike.  He was the one to actually schedule the safety course, download the forms, and schedule the appointment with the police.  Without him, I’d probably be sitting here wistfully saying, “Gosh, it’d be nice to have a license . . . “

Happy Monday, everyone!

UPDATE:  Jay G links.  Thanks!

Yes, this is how I buy my shoes. I bought another pair today, in fact.  They’re very comfy.

Money quote:  “While only 38 percent of men own more than seven pairs of shoes, the average woman owns somewhere between “a s***-ton of shoes” and “a number of shoes so f***ing vast it had to wait for scientific notation to be invented to be expressed on paper.”

(Asterisks are mine.  I can only aspire to such heights of comedic swearing as the Cracked folks achieve on a daily basis.)

I could post on any number of lighthearted things right now, but it wouldn’t be right.

A few very random and muddled thoughts:

- Did anyone else close their eyes and whisper “Oh, sh*t” when hearing that the murderer’s name was Nidal Malik Hasan?

- I wish I knew for sure whether Hasan was the shooter or not.  They’re calling him “alleged” for now.

- This post by Sarah floored me.  Military installations are gun-free zones?  Really??

- Yes, really.  “Soldiers at Fort Hood don’t carry weapons unless they are doing training exercises.”

- I suppose, contrary to my initial thoughts, this does continue the long chain of shooting sprees in gun-free zones.

Thirteen people dead.  Thirteen families devastated.

Someone asked me yesterday why I keep referencing the fact that I was a liberal and now I’m not.

Why, she asked, do you need to keep repeating that?  Why continually talk about going over to “the dark side”?

I thought about it.  Why DO I keep referencing my former days as a liberal?  Why not just state what I think NOW, and why, and leave it at that?

I muddled over it and came up with a few explanations:

1) Desire to define myself in opposition. Mike habitually rejects labels like Republican, conservative etc.; he’s more likely to look at the crazier liberal/Democrat initiatives or politicians and say, “Well, I know I’m not THAT.”  Perhaps I’m doing the same.

2) Desire to assure readers that “some of my best friends are liberals.” Only instead of “some of my best friends,” it’s “I was a liberal.”  One of the more common complaints for conservatives/Republicans/anti-statists is that liberals don’t just think we’re wrong, they think we’re evil. Since I held very different views in the past than I hold now, how I can I think that folks who currently hold my prior views are evil?  I don’t, anymore than I was evil for holding those views.  Which leads into. . .

3) Desire to assure readers that I don’t take things too seriously. I have some readers who stop by just for the kitty pix, and who think that all the stuff I write about politics and guns is flat-out wrong, if not plain crazy.  I’m okay with that.  I use the tongue-in-cheek references about going over to the dark side to wryly acknowledge that some folks think I’m nuts.  And who knows?  I might be.  *grin*

4) Desire to make it easier for disagreeing folks to dismiss me. This would be an unhappy tendency, but I think it does exist.  I don’t go seeking out conflict in my real life; the opinions I state in plain black and white here I wouldn’t say out loud in most common gatherings.  When I do end up in political discussions, I usually end up saying to the effect of, ‘Well, I feel differently, I think XYZ, but that’s just me (shrug).”  I have friends who disagree entirely with an anti-statist/conservative/whatever-you-call-it viewpoint, and I don’t want politics to interrupt our friendship; I’d rather laughingly call myself an “evil conservative” and brush it off, then get into a serious discussion of why I think what I do.  (Is this the coward’s way out?  Do I not want to make them uncomfortable, or am I afraid that I couldn’t effectively argue my views?  Hmmm.)

So . . . . I think all the reasons stated above hold true to some extent.  Would my writing be more effective if I left out the “I used to think X” part and just stated “I think Z and here’s why”?

I’d give you a definitive answer, but, well, only half a mug of coffee’s gone down my gullet.  Takes more than that to get a definitive answer from an evil conservative   BWAHAHAHA!!!!!