Okay, here’s the deal.  I am not making this stuff up.

The gun-freaks in Texas have a charming and delightful idea right here before celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace.

Gun rights groups say they will conduct a mock mass shooting this weekend at the University of Texas campus as they try to end gun-free zones.

The Open Carry Walk and Crisis Performance Event will involve actors “shot” by perpetrators armed with cardboard weapons, said Matthew Short, a spokesman for the gun rights groups Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com.

“It’s a fake mass shooting, and we’ll use fake blood,” he said. He said gun noises will be blared from bullhorns.

What could possibly go wrong?  You know, except good guys with a gun showing up and shooting everybody acting the fool.  There’s that. You know, because people on a college campus with guns is a perfectly safe thing to see.

The gun holders will first walk around Austin with fully loaded weapons before heading to campus.  That is called foreplay.

Also, it’s the week before finals so students can’t just stay at home that day.  Stressed out people mixed with wild eyed crazybutt people is gonna make a mess.

These dudes have a Facebook page, but fair warning – your eyes will burn.

Just minutes ago this happened.

A University of Texas spokesman says the planned mock mass shooting demonstration this weekend would be considered criminal trespass if participants do not leave when asked.

Look, I’m not saying this is in bad taste right after San Bernardino and Paris, but … Oh hell,  Holy Damn Crap, this is just raw genuine awful.

The head of the gun nuts asked about this being a tad scary, and he replied, “We love freedom and we’re trying to make more freedom.”

Somebody, please, tell me what the fool tarnation that means?

Thanks to Carol for the first heads up.

by Primo Encarnación

Whither the GOP?

A past of sub rosa bigotry masquerading as pandering to “values” voters has led to a future of subfusc outlook for the Republican Party. Unable to compete in the marketplace of ideas, especially as it pertains to supply-side economics, the GOP has embarked on a race to the electoral bottom, convincing “real” Americans that all their “worser” angels are, in fact, patriots on their right shoulder. The path that got us here is clear and unambiguous. And while a certain amount of schadenfreude has accompanied the current discomfiture of the Republican elite, now that their darker chickens have come home to roost, I actually view with alarm the impending explosion of the Republican Party.

The concept of America functions best when competing ideologies bring solutions for issues to the table and then work out a compromise that leaves no one satisfied but everyone moving forward in roughly the same direction. This concept results in a fits-and-starts progress which, when it works, is maddeningly slow and unsatisfactory.

But it’s better than the alternative, which is what we now face: entrenched ideological opposition to anything but total victory, with legislators living in fear of being found insufficiently radical. So the Jacobins ousted John Boehner and his lieutenants, going so far as to primary Eric Cantor, merely for appearing to compromise. They stood these fellows against the wall, “pour encourager les autres.”

So what comes next? Here is a phrase I have trouble uttering: I don’t know. I have been trying for weeks to put myself into the tasseled loafers of the GOP elite and figure a way out of this mess. All I’ve come up with is that Reince Priebus has to go. His whole raison d’etre – President Scott Walker – is back licking his wounds under a Wisconsin rock. His singular achievement was a report after the last electoral beat down they took investigating why people don’t like the GOP candidates, because they’re all such nice old white guys. This waaahmbulance was promptly ignored, and the nightmare clown-car scenario it sought to avoid now stalks the earth, fanged and frothing.

So that’s all I’ve got. Reince has to go, and needs to be replaced by someone strong but not crazy, with an impeccable Republican resume and the cojones to match, who can call this whole pack of candidates baying at the moon to heel, and build a successful, loyal opposition invested in governing in harness with the next Democratic president for the next 8 years. Who is this avatar of center-rectitude?

I have no idea. Almost anyone of note that you could name is either too old, too weak, or too tainted by radical pandering and/or dark money and/or being in a Bush Administration. Who does that leave? Seriously, I open this discussion up to you folks; I haven’t got a clue how to save them from themselves.

Assuming we want to.

Okay, South Carolina, you’re keeping up your end of the craziness stick.

Rep. Chris Corley, who over the summer was staunchly opposed to the state taking the Confederate flag down from public property following the Charleston massacre, sent out cards showing the South Carolina Statehouse with the flag flying next to it and his family’s name inscribed underneath.

And do you want to know what was inscribed inside?  Of course you don’t but I’m gonna tell you anyway.

“May your Christmas be filled with memories of a happier time when South Carolina’s leaders possessed morals, convictions and the principles to stand for what is right,” the back of the card read. “May you have a blessed Christmas, and may you take this joyous time as an opportunity to ask for forgiveness of all your sins such as betrayal.”

Once the card became a matter of public horror, Corley pretended it was “a joke.”  It should be noted, however, that he pre-filed a bill for the next legislative session asking for a referendum to put the confederate flag back on the state grounds.  Maybe he did that as “a joke,” too.

If you are offended by this, it’s your own damn fault.  As Corley points out —

“If somebody’s feelings are legitimately hurt about that Christmas card, I think that might speak more to their conscience than the content of the card,” Corley said.

Yeah well, that knuckle dragging meathead festering pile of hate filled slime is right about that.  But not in the way I think he meant.

Thanks to Rhea for the heads up.

Donald Trump wants to govern by closing everything.  You know, like America and the internet.

Trump is convinced that the internet is to blame for the organization of Isis.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet,” Trump said. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”

I dunno.  Maybe I am one of those stupid people Trump keeps referring to but I don’t think that Bill Gates can shut down the internet, even by presidential edict.  Believing that would be … well, I hate to say it, but dog dump stupid.  Bill Gates builds computers, not the internet.  That would be like blaming Thomas Edison for Rush Limbaugh.

As I best recall, my stupid history teachers pointed out that there were wars before the internet.  I do not know how Hannibal went over the Alps without Facebook, but he did it.  I do think General Grant probably used Twitter, though.

Yeah, Bill Gates owns the internet.  He also has all those socks you lost in the washing machine.

I do owe America an apology.  I have used my freedom of speech to say foolish things and Donald Trump caught me.  Oh boy, just wait until he sees how I’ve used my freedom of association.  It’s gonna blow his mind.

by Primo Encarnación

According to the world population clock, there are 7.3 billion people. In terms of sand, that’s roughly 7.3 dump trucks full. Imagine all those dump trucks, and all that sand. Imagine walking up to one of them. There is a bumper, with a light spray of sand on it that didn’t quite get into the bed. Brush that sand away with the edge of your hand, gently subdividing the pile, until a few grains remain.   Now you are squatting in front of the bumper: take your fingers, and brush more grains away. There are two grains left. Flick one aside, wet your finger, and pick up the last, single, solitary grain of sand.

Step back. Back up far enough so you can see all 7.3 trucks. Now hold up your finger and regard that one grain of sand stuck there.

That’s you.

That little piece of grit that you’d notice if it was under your eyelid, but that you had to concentrate NOT to brush away with all of the other ones, indistinguishable from all of the other ones.

Insignificant, you.

But, I’m an AMERICAN, you crow! That makes me special! Really? You see that one dump truck that’s only not-quite 1/3 of the way full? Watch it drive off. That’s the US of A. Gone. There’s still 7 entire dump trucks full of sand. Ain’t you bad!

I’m a Christian! That makes me special. Oh yeah? Two dump trucks on the left drive away. There are your Christians. Two dump trucks on the right drive away. There go the Muslims. Three whole entire dump trucks full of sand left.

How special are you now?

You’re nothing.

So where do you get off punching someone who insulted you? Where do you get off telling other people how to live their lives? What allows you to decide that you’re going to buy a gun specifically to wipe other people out, because their set of cosmological fairy tales does not dovetail EXACTLY with your set of cosmological fairy tales.

What unimaginable hubris is at work in your tiny, tiny brain when you buy a box of nails for shrapnel to bomb that church? How incredibly full of yourself are you when you are trying to decide what type of cloth works best as a wick on a Molotov cocktail? How hyper-inflated is your ego as you slide that last round into a magazine, knowing that it will be the first out of the barrel and into the brain of somebody you never met before, or into the brain of your best friend, or into the brain of your wife, because YOU are righteous, and somebody’s done YOU wrong, and somebody’s got to pay!

You’re not righteous. You’re not special. You’re nobody. You’re nothing but a single grain of sand, whose only value is as one of many, many other grains of sand. Together, you can hold back tides. Together, you can stop bullets. Together you can not only change history, you are history.

Do you want to feel special? Do you deserve this, that or the other? Why? Why YOU, and not these others? Why are the two dump trucks full of devotees of middle eastern fairy tales any better, or any worse, or in any way different than the other two dump trucks full of other devotees of other middle eastern fairy tales?

You are only special in so far as the others are special. The only legitimate way to exalt yourself is if all the other grains of sand are exalted in the same way. Doing away with other pieces of sand does not make you special, or rare, or important. It just reduces the meaning of being sand.

Everybody has a right to sleep safe and warm. To eat nutritious food and to drink clean water. To live in an unraped ecosystem. To be unraped themselves. To live free from fear. They have the right to their thoughts, their beliefs, their opinions, and the right to voice them.  They have a right to be with others, or to be alone. They have the right, quite simply, to be.

As long as everyone has those rights, you have those rights. But as soon as you try to take them away from anyone, then yours are no longer safe, either.

If you can kill anyone you want because of some slight, real or imagined. If you can kill anyone you want because you think that’s what your god wants. If you can kill anyone you want because America, dammit! Then anyone can kill you for whatever reason is important to them, too.

He who humbles himself shall be exalted, the fairy tales say. Be sand, people. Be the best grain of sand you can be. Be within yourself. Lift up the other grains around you, that you may be lifted by them.

Those seven point three dump trucks? They are dumping sand into the top of a giant hourglass. You and the 7.3 billion other grains are swirling in a sand maelstrom. Eventually, it will be your single, solitary turn to fall all alone through the opening into…

But that’s the only time in your hourglass that you must be truly alone. At that moment, how does one measure the worth of a grain of sand?

You know how you’ve tumbled butt first into hell?  When Dick Cheney says, “Whoa, dude, that’s too mean.”

That’s how you know.  Darth Cheney thinks you’re being hateful.

Cheney, a decisive conservative himself, said Monday on The Hugh Hewitt Show that the ban “goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”

I am certain he favors waterboarding them but keeping them out of the country — that goes too far.

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press