Have a nice Apocalypse

Mayor Bloomberg has announced that, in the event of the world ending tomorrow, Alternate Side of the Street regulations  shall be suspended indefinitely.

Anyhow, here's my essay on the End Times.  Click now -- it may be the last thing you ever read:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/revelation-revealed.html

[Update 22 Dec 2012]  A highly entertaining account of how the Apocalypse went down in Bugarach, in the south of France:
http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5366780

On Gun Control (updated)

 

[A repost of an essay from July, in the light -- the in-lit darkness -- of the Connecticut events. Not grinding any axe here, just being blandly analytical.]

"You think Social Security is the third rail of politics, try guns," says one Republican strategist. A number of Democrats have also been skittish on the issue.

-- LA Times, 15 Dec 2012

~

In one respect, legal restrictions proved effective:

Just days before the school shooting, Adam Lanza attempted to purchase a single “long gun” rifle from a local gun store but was turned away because he did not want to wait for the required 14-day background check.

-- id.

Apparently he subsequently stole the murder weapons from his mother -- who, ironically, was herself something of a gun-nut, keeping several semi-automatic weapons around the house -- killing her with her own gun.   She thus literally hoist with her own petard.  Unfortunately  she took a bunch of kids with her.

[Update 16 December 2012]  The print media have done their homework:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/newtown-school-shooters-mother-collected-guns-was-loath-to-let-people-inside-home/2012/12/15/d89c2732-4706-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html?hpid=z3

As for NPR the past 24 hours, it has mostly been just glurge.

Likewise the Los Angeles Times:

In Connecticut, a mother coped silently with a troubled son

Nancy Lanza, who police say was the first victim in her son's shooting rampage, had battled with the school district over him before quitting her job to teach him at home.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-shooter-20121216,0,1022231.story

This woman-as-martyred-victim narrative won’t fly:  “Nancy Lanza divorced in 2009 and was awarded the house and enough money — up to $12,450 a month in alimony, according to local news outlets that reviewed the divorce files — that she didn't have to work.”   And her method of ‘coping’ with her wacko son  was to take him to firing ranges to “improve his aim”.

[Update 17 XII 2012]  In the post below, I identified the latent subtext of the hardcore (assault-rifle) gun-culture  as having nothing to do with "hunting" ('Take that, terror-squirrel!'), and everything to do with [censored] and [redacted].

And so it is  in this case.  The mother (truly the central figure in this affair, and not her pitiful flaky son) was a "prepper":

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/preppers-survivalist-doomsday-obama

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Disclaimer:

Lest anyone imagine that I harbor mean and hurtful thoughts about guns per se,

check out the action at the site of my buddy,

the two-fisted, pistol-packing, wise-cracking pre-Consiliar private eye,

Murphy!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

* * *

[Update 18 XII 2012]   OK, the survivalists who arm themselves against the ZOG and the space aliens and what have you, at least we can see where they're coming from. Likewise the high-schoolers who shoot up their own high-school.  But this new elementary-school fetish is straining the synapses of comprehension:

December 18, 2012

While most Americans spent the weekend in shock and mourning following the shooting deaths of 20 first-graders and six teachers and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., at least a few of our fellow citizens were thinking that killing school kids is a cool idea.

On Sunday, Los Angeles police arrested 24-year-old Kyle Bangayan at his parents’ house in East Hollywood. Bangayan had posted a Facebook message in which he threatened to shoot children at several elementary schools. Police found nine guns in the home.

Also Sunday, far from the tough streets of L.A. in the rural town of Sedro-Wooley, Wash., police arrested 19-year-old Korry Martinson. After praising the Newtown shooter and blaming the government for incidents of mass slaughter, Martinson wrote on his Facebook page, “If this causes our gun laws to be taken away, to the point as to where I cannot own a gun, I will personally get my sawed off double barreled shotgun and my AK-47 and go shoot up every school within a 100 mile radius of my current location.”

Police in Sedro-Wooley did not find any guns in Martinson’s possession, but on Friday, the same day as the shooting in Newtown, police in Cedar Lake, Ind., collected 47 guns at the home of a 60-year-old man, Von Meyer, who they say had threatened to kill his wife and shoot up the elementary school located just 1,000 feet from his home.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-emulate-killer-20121217,0,5881004.story

Interesting factoid:  "With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns." (Washington Post)

 

[Update 20 Dec 2012]  As the French see us:

Ruée sur les armureries à Newtown

Malgré les drames sanglant qui émaillent l'actualité, il est toujours aussi facile de se procurer des armes de guerre aux États-Unis.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/12/19/01003-20121219ARTFIG00591-ruee-sur-les-armureries-a-newtown-et-dans-tout-le-pays.php?m_i=IlHIeIbey3lGZsT9QSn2ockBIRcbp4JX6p3gDR354wvTS33cX

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Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

~ ~ [original post, VII 2012] ~~

[Yeeeeee-IPES !?!!   Is the World of Dr Justice going to tackle that hot-potato?  Why not just come right out and discuss the Abortion of Baby Pandas ??]

Tempers are high.  A man’ll draw his gun to prove a point, quicker than he’ll draw on his logic.

That’s where I come in.

-- Marshall Dillon, “Gunsmoke”.

The recent events in Colorado -- fretted over here -- have inevitably given rise to a certain amount of hand-wringing on the topic of gun control, given that the perp acquired his weapons and ammo legally.  But mostly, on the op-ed pages;  both Presidential candidates are tip-toeing around this.   And even the op-editors [I might have just coined that word, hm] mostly say that (shrug, sigh) nothing will ever happen.  Which is probably true, but which, if that is your opening move, is certainly true.

Nor is it our intention to pronounce one way or the other on the merits of this or that proposed (or potentially proposed) legislative measure, whether at the state level, or (necessarily, to be at all effective in a case like this, where the perp bought on the internet, and planned for months) the federal.   What little we have to say  is in no way political -- nor even a matter of logic,  such as we have previously brought to bear  upon certain other sociopolitical questions.

No -- what we intend  is to do two things:

(1)  To point out a certain elephant in the room.

(2)  To tell you something you don’t already know, since it describes the weapons situation in Yemen.

So.

(1)  First of all, it is quite obvious that the insistence of the gun lobby on access to assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, and armor-piercing bullets, has nothing to do with hunting ducks or deer.   The demand compasses two principal purposes:

    (a)  To overthrow the government, in the event that it should become tyrannical (a point already reaching, according to some, whose hard core includes ZOG-mavens and Christian Identity types);

   (b)  To kill blacks in the event of a race war.

I mean…  this-all is as plain as the nose on your face.

Nor do I mention these taboos with a view to discrediting them or raising a scandal:  I mean, what would you do, in the event of true tyranny, or race war?  I mention these merely in the most pacific and almost indifferent spirit, simply to clear the air.  The debate as it is usually waged  proceeds upon terms so detached from reality  as to be an embarrassment.

 (2)  Now, the thing to know about Yemen is, they have no gun control.  Heck, they have no bomb control.  There have long been free-wheeling open-air weapons markets in the ill-policed rugged North.   There was a widely-read column by a Yemeni political humorist awhile back, imagining such a place, with all manner of smuggled goods on offer, offering bombs “big enough to blow up a five-storey building” and (if that was out of your price-range) more modest, middle-class, family bombs for blowing up three-storey buildings.  Suddenly the alarm is raised -- the army is staging a raid!  Frenzied activity as the merchants hastily … whisk the bras and panties out of side;  the guns are left indifferently in view.

Nor does weaponry concern just a militant fringe. Yemen is a fine, fierce, traditional tribal society.   The people are typically gentle of temperament, but as soon as a male comes of age -- and they come of age early, in Yemen  -- he dons the traditional curved dagger, the jambiyya, worn in an elaborate decorated belt -- right at the front, ready to be drawn in an instant.

Yet what happened during  the uprising that eventually swept away the long-time dictator Ali Abdallah Saleh and his nepotistic crew, was  in that regard  surprising.   We described the developments here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/arms-and-man.html

~

I shall continue to refrain from any commenting on the issue of gun control, pro or con, since you all know as much or more about it than I do; and anyway, minds are mostly pre-set.   But I may ask leave to observe, en tant que logicien, the occasional elephant spewing its peanuts all over the room.

Such a case is the phony foofaraw over “Fast and Furious”.   Set aside detailed matters of fact, such as whether this "gun-walking" tactic began under Obama (as the House Republicans claim) or under Bush (as history claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious); after all, you can check the facts yourselves as well as I.    Consider rather the key contradiction, which is seldom if ever alluded to:  Namely, that this ‘investigation’ is the opposite or inverse  of what it pretends to be.   It is an opportunistic, completely cynical move  to beat the ATF with whatever cudgel happens to lie to hand.   That the Congress has stalled for six years, leaving that Bureau headless, shows their true colors.

On Zombies

(A couple of links  for Halloween)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/opinion/a-zombie-is-a-slave-forever.html?src=me&ref=general

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TiXUF9xbTo

Flash update!  Turns out the US military is already game-planning for a possible zombie apocalypse in the event of a victory by Mitt "the Undead" Romney:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/1031/No-prank-On-Halloween-US-military-forces-train-for-zombie-apocalypse

“Revelation” revealed

My least-favorite book of the Bible -- by far, by far -- is Revelation.  A provocative, well-written article on the subject, by the always-interesting and wide-ranging author Adam Gopnik, can be consulted here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/05/120305crbo_books_gopnik?currentPage=all

Aldaily also links to it today -- but in a very odd way.  Here is their come-on:

Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?...

As a Christian, I am certainly no shill for anti-Christian polemics.  But this aldaily blurb is truly off.   All I’ve read of Pagels so far is The Gnostic Gospels;   scholarly, non-polemical.   The new book, don’t know, though from Gopnik’s summary, more along those same lines.  But the real problem is, these ALD blurbs normally summarize the attitude of the article itself -- in this case, the one in The New Yorker, and not the book that is there mentioned (and indeed, the article is more than just a review).  And Adam Gopnik, in his sympathetic account,  in no way whatever  accuses Pagels of “draining the melodrama” from the Book of Revelation.  -- A revealingly stupid phrasing, btw.  “Draining the drama”, passe encore;  the problem with Revelation is precisely that (to this finite mind at least) it is mostly (mere) melodrama.

[Note:  Although I value Aldaily for its links,  in its blurbs  it does perpetrate stupidities  with more than chance frequency: compare here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-neuroscience-porn.html  ]

~

Well… une précision.

It is certainly possible that Revelation is divinely inspired, but in a way  simply not proportional to our understanding:  like a book in a language  we cannot read.  In that case, it were wise to demote its place in the canon, on the grounds that, ourselves being who we are, it is likely only to work mischief.

As always when in a quandary, I turn to my spiritual advisor, Dr. Massey.  He explains the position of his own denomination thus:

The Orthodox Church does not specifically reject the Apocalypse as uncanonical. It does not, however, include a reading from it in any of her liturgies. The result is that, while the Orthodox technically accept the canon of the wider historical church, the book is virtually uncanonical in the sense that it does not, by definition, have any authority within the church.

~

Pagels’ book apparently contains a lot of scholarly euhemerism;  Gopnik compares “Revelation”, in this regard, to a political cartoon.

Pagels was not the first to notice the historical background  to this or any other book of the Bible; nor is there anything anti-Christian about publishing whatever scholarship can afford.  Thus, in the Catholic Bible de Jérusalem (translated as The Jerusalem Bible, a new and heavily annotated recension), we read, in reference to Rev. 8:2,

The rider on the white horse (symbol of victory) represents the Parthians, identified by the bow, their favourite weapon.  They were the terror of the Roman world in the 1^st. cent.

Make ... my ... day ........

These are the ‘wild beasts’ of v.8 (i.e. victorious pagan nations; cf. Dt 7:22; Ezk 34:28; Jr 15:2-4 …) The Parthian invasion is described in the vision of 9:13f.  One tradition identified the rider with the Messiah, as in 19:11-16.

Thus the wise and clear-eyed comments of the Historical Church.

Parthian, scaring the bejazus out of the Romans

~

The panoply of Christian denominations and currents of thought  can scarcely be reduced to a linear formula.  But it’s fun to try.   Here is an attempted bijection between styles of thought  and books of the Bible.

(1) Old Testament Christians.

These, originally, were the grim, dour Chapel folk who founded America.

In a completely different incarnation, there is the LDS, whose Book of Mormon is reminiscent of nothing so much as the OT.  (Which is rather the problem, for ordinary Christians.  It’s not as though More O.T. -- more tribes and begats -- was what we needed….)

(2a) Gospel Christians

[by this I mean:  those taking inspiration principally from the four gospels]

Sterling examples:  G.K. Chesterton;  St. Francis.

(2b) Pauline Christians

Mainline Protestants, mainstream go-to-Mass Catholics.

(2c)  Book-of-Revelation Christians.

These folks are dangerous.  These are the ones who think it’d be just swell if Israel went off and nuked somebody -- Iran or whoever -- thus touching off Armageddon, a necessary step towards the Rapture, in which every parishoner in the (Paris, Texas) Good-is-Gold Two-Seeds-in-the-Spirit by-gum Holy Jesus Baptist Church (a split-off from the Silver-Spirit three-strikes-and-you’re-out My Messiah Anadunking Chapel), and no one else, is going straight to the good place, and y’all others  straight to the bad place, Aye-MEN.

And so.  Of the true meaning, and the true value, of the Book of Revelation, I know nothing, or less than that.  But verily, verily, I say unto you: it should not be put into the hands of children and Teabaggers.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péchéirrémissible ???

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[Note:  I am fudging a bit, in ascribing (or, rather, merely, matching-up) Chestertonian and Franciscan views -- those I most admire, those closest to my own -- to the Gospels.   The souce of such visions as theirs, I imagine, is not so much Biblical as personal, experiential.   Certainly I myself can cite no chapter-and-verse  to justify such effusions as these:  Ducks; Penguins; Woodchucks.]