"His goal was the congresswoman"

The lefty pundits will probably try to make out that judge Roll was Loughner's real target; that he was an anti-immigrant Tea Partier who assassinated Roll because of the judge's decision to allow a group of illegal aliens to sue a private rancher.

But the assassin had already talked to Gifford. As his friend twittered today: "He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in '07, asked her a question & he told me she was 'stupid & unintelligent.'"

He was aiming for Gifford; Roll was "collateral damage":

Another chilling twist was the presence of John Roll, a district judge, among the dead. He and his family were given protection in 2009 after he ruled that a lawsuit by illegal immigrants could proceed – a decision that was denounced on conservative talk show radio and brought an estimated 200 death threats.

The shooting took place in a car park outside a Safeway grocery store in a Tucson shopping mall as Miss Giffords was talking to an elderly couple at a "Congress on your Corner" event which she had advertised an hour previously on her Twitter account.

Andrea Gooden, an eyewitness who was working across the road from the shooting, said: "I heard about 15 shots. Then there were people racing across the parking lot."

Steven Rayle, who was on the scene at the time of the shooting and helped to hold the suspect down while waiting for police, told the Gawker website: "The event was very informal. Giffords had set up a table outside the Safeway and about 20 to 30 people were gathered to talk to her. The gunman, who may have come from inside the Safeway, walked up and shot Giffords in the head first."

Alex Villec, 19, a campaign volunteer, was organising the line of constituents when the shooter first approached.

The gunman "said, 'Can I talk to the congresswoman?', or something to that effect," said Mr Villec, who told him to join the queue.

A few minutes later, the man left the back of the line and walked toward Miss Giffords amid a group of 20 to 25 constituents, employees and volunteers.

"He was intent when he came back - a pretty stone-cold glance and glare," Mr Villec said. "I didn't see his gun, but it was clear who he was going for. He was going for the congresswoman. A few staff members were caught in the crossfire...His goal was the congresswoman."

Mr Villec saw him raise his hand and heard gun shots before ducking behind a pillar and later running across the car park to a bank for safety.

The Arizona assassin Jared Loughner

Of course the lefties immediately called 22 year old Jared Loughner a Tea Party nut but he's a radical lefty druggie.

From a friend's Twitter page:

Saying Jared Laughner was the gunman. Really hoping that's not the same guy I went to HS with, really good friend. Freaking out right now!!!
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Official I went to high school & college, & was in a band w/ the gunman. I can't even fathom this right now.
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I went to high school, college, & was in a band with the gunman. This tragedy has just turned to horrific.
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He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in '07, asked her a question & he told me she was "stupid & unintelligent"
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he was a pot head & into rock like Hendrix,The Doors, Anti-Flag. I haven't seen him in person since '07 in a sign language class
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As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.
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he had a lot of friends until he got alcohol poisoning in '06, & dropped out of school. Mainly loner very philosophical.
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more left. I haven't seen him since '07 though. He became very reclusive.
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I haven't seen him since '07. Then, he was left wing.
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it's loughner just checked my year book.

Inner cavemen

I haven't read Sex at Dawn - The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. The authors draw the conclusion that people have been polygamous (or at least non-monogamous) since the dawn of humanity and only recently became monogamous. I'm a firm believer that humans still have "inner cavemen" underneath their civilized exteriors so I don't need to read a pop-psychology book proving that. But just today I read two references to the book that I found interesting.

From a review of the book:

In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote, "Those who have most closely studied the subject [particularly the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan] believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world."

An excerpt from Sex at Dawn:

Looking for an example of the world’s most downtrodden, pathetic, desperately poor “savages,” Malthus cited “the wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” who had been judged by European travelers to be “at the bottom of the scale of human beings.” Just thirty years later Charles Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego, observing these same people. He agreed with Malthus concerning the Fuegians, writing in his journal, “I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.”

As chance would have it, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle— the ship on which Darwin was sailing—had picked up three young Fuegians on an earlier voyage, and brought them back to England to introduce them to the glories of British life and a proper Christian education. Now, after they’d experienced firsthand the superiority of civilized living, FitzRoy was returning them to their own people to serve as missionaries. The plan was for them to show the Fuegians the folly of their “savage” ways and help them join the civilized world.

But just a year after Jemmy, York, and Fuegia had been returned to their people at Woollya cove, near the base of what is now called Mount Darwin, the Beagle and her crew returned to find the huts and gardens the British sailors had built for the three Fuegians deserted and overgrown. Eventually, Jemmy appeared and explained that he and the other Christianized Fuegians had reverted to their former way of living. Darwin, overcome with sadness, wrote in his journal that he’d never seen “so complete & grievous a change” and that “it was painful to behold him.” They brought Jemmy aboard the ship and dressed him for dinner at the captain’s table, much relieved to see that he at least remembered how to use a knife and fork properly.

Captain FitzRoy offered to bring him back to England, but Jemmy declined, saying he had “not the least wish to return to England” as he was “happy and contented” with “plenty fruits,” “plenty fish,” and “plenty birdies.”

What looks like even extreme poverty— “the bottom of the scale of human beings”—may contain unrecognizable forms of wealth. Recall the “starving” Australian Aboriginal people, happily roasting low-fat rats and noshing on juicy grubs as revolted Englishmen looked on, certain they were witnessing the last demented spasms of starvation. When we start detribalizing—peeling away the cultural conditioning that distorts our vision—“wealth” and “poverty” may reveal themselves where we least expect to find them.

Natives of Tierra del Fuego:

Two Brits discuss living in the USA

A gay seaman defends Enterprise officer Honors

Joshua Green:

I was reading about the Navy's lewd videotape scandal when my phone rang. Total serendipity--it was Pete Clark! Longtime readers of this blog will recall that Pete was the profane sailor who'd served under Eric Massa and made a memorable appearance in the item I wrote when Massa tickled and groped his way out of Congress last year ("Eric Massa's Navy Files"). Pete's the guy who introduced "snorkeling" into the political lexicon. "Meat-gazing," too. Pete is to profanity what Mozart is to music. You have to marvel.
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Turns out that in addition to knowing Eric Massa he's good friends with Captain Owen P. Honors of the USS Enterprise, the same guy who made the videotapes that are all over the news and was relieved of his command today. Apparently, Pete is plugged in to every sex scandal in the Navy. He was furious because he felt the media was railroading his friend O.P. [Capt. Honors] and ignoring the other side of the story.
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"I grew up with O.P. in Syracuse," Pete told me. "He was my brother's best friend growing up. I know both of these people very well, Massa and O.P. Honors. I've never met a person that's never not loved the guy [O.P. not Massa], from high school till now. Even the crew."

"Dude, there's a whole story behind the friggin' political correctness and how it's friggin' ruining this country. We're relieving the most beloved aircraft carrier captain I've ever heard of, in my life--and I know a lot of people in the Navy--he's being relieved for a bunch of videos that were misrepresented because they were all cut and spooled together. See, the crew LOVED this guy. Loved him. So if you read any of these people who served with him on Facebook--black, white, female, male, gay, straight--gay people are like, 'He was great, we loved him!' It's unbelievable."

I said I hadn't realized Honors had gay supporters.

"Dude, there's gay people on the support website supporting him! Because it was a joke! It was a spoof! It was a series of tapes over an entire deployment! So then they cut 'em into, like, the funniest parts, which obviously everyone else would think was insane, and someone turned in this video, and it looks bad, but it's not! Not when it's been fully examined. But the bottom line is, he got relieved."
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"Here's a perfect example [of what I'm talking about]. Have you ever seen the movie 'Brokeback Mountain'? It's kind of weird I'm using it as an example, but have you ever seen 'Brokeback Mountain'?"

Actually, no.

"I know you don't want to admit to it, you liberal. You pole-smoker! You can't even say 'pole-smoker' anymore without getting fired! What a fucking joke. Snorkeler! You can't say snorkeler."
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"But here's the deal. In 'Brokeback Mountain,' there's parts of that movie where they're makin' out, and basically gettin' it on with each other--it's very aggressive--and if somebody just took clips of that they would think that that was what the movie was all about, and no one would have seen it. And it's actually about these two guys who are in love with each other, which--whatever. But the thing is, no one would go see the movie if you just took the clips! So that's all they did from these series of [Navy] movies over five or six months. They took these clips, and, you know, it was an ongoing story that they were telling. Ships are a really stressful environment. There's 24/7 around the clock launching of aircraft, bomb-making, fixing the bombs in the ships. On the deck it's completely dangerous. People are stressed out. And the only thing they look forward to is this movie night with the X.O. [executive officer] because before they show the movie, the X.O. usually passes the word about what's going on for the week, and O.P. is genius enough to come up with a way to do it via skits, like water conservation, things of that nature. The crew loved it! Because the previous X.O.s, all they ever did was, like, read off a freaking teleprompter or read their notes. O.P. did these skits that the crew loved! And they got ratted out for it, four years after when he had command of another ship!"
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"Dude, this is the first casualty of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell! You take this political correct bullshit, you take Major Hassan [the Ft. Hood shooter, who Pete believes wasn't stopped because of political correctness], you take a couple other things and it leads to real degradation of the military, it really does."

A few days after Green posted that interview, he added:

I wanted to share this note from a gay sailor who served under Honors aboard the USS Enterprise and wrote in to defend his former captain. (He provided his discharge certificate verifying that he'd served aboard the Enterprise). It's a viewpoint I haven't seen elsewhere and thus is worth reading and thinking about. His letter:

Josh,

My name is Eric, I was a gay sailor that served aboard the USS ENTERPRISE during the '06 and '07 deployments. I'm not sure exactly what information you need other than that I was never once offended by Capt. Honors choice of words of brand of humor. I have been making contact with many of my fellow gay service members that served aboard that time as well, in hopes that we can get the word out there that Capt. Honors never created an anti-gay work environment and that these slanders of calling him a homophobe and gay-basher are unjust.
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I can't help to think about the GEICO commercial during all this. The one with the retired drill sergeant acting as a therapist. In all honesty, do Americans really want a military full of men and women who's first reaction to a harsh word or off-colored joke to go running to mama crying? Do we really want those people as our defense against the ever growing terrorism threat and foreign nationals with a vendetta against America? It seems thats what the media and the higher ups that be wish... Before you know it they'll be administering sensitivity training on the polite and politically correct way of killing the enemy.

If you have anymore questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. And thank you for taking the time to hear this perspective on an issue that should have never made it this far. The moment this hit the media, the military should have stepped in and handled it, and not allowed the media to blow it out of proportion.

Thank you for your time,
Eric Prenger

Chart of the day: imagine whirled peas

It's getting better all the time:

According to a new report from the Human Security Report Project, the number of deaths from armed conflicts around the world continues to fall, even while intercommunal wars have jumped and other conflicts have become increasingly difficult to bring to an end. What wars are fought are less lethal, too. "The average annual battle-death toll per conflict in the 1950s killed almost 10,000 people; in the new millennium the figure is less than 1,000," the report states.

President Boehner?

If Boehner is elected Speaker, he will be next in line after Biden if anything happens to Obama. Boehner may not perfect but he will at least not be Obama or Biden. I'm saying my prayers that Obama and Biden both die of swine flu.

Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices?

James Delingpole:

A. So that even the blind could hate them.

This is one of my favourite jokes from a new book published today called 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy. Modesty forbids me from naming the author but if you buy it in sufficient quantities I can offer you his cast-iron guarantee that not a penny of the proceeds will be spent on anything remotely worthy or eco-friendly.
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Yeah, all right, I admit: the author’s me. The book is written with some feeling because, having reached middle age without ever once having gone through a socialist/bleeding heart phase, I am aware that my entire conscious life has been spent being made to feel I’m a bad person by people on the liberal-left. And now it’s payback time. I want to make liberals – that’s liberals in the US sense of the word (I wrote the book for an American audience not a British one, so if you’re not American save your money for Watermelons) meaning pretty much everyone of a leftist or ecotard hue – to be made to feel as uncomfortable as they have made me. I want to give them a verbal waterboarding.

But not a literal waterboarding. And it’s this which is one of the quintessential differences between liberals and conservatives – as my so-called rival Dan Hannan pointed out in a characteristically acute blog post the other day. In case you missed it, or are not altogether sure who Dan Hannan is (or if he even exists) here’s the relevant bit:

A glance at any online political forum will reveal how much more readily Left-wing posters use phrases like “evil” and “I hate” than conservatives do.
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Like most conservatives, I do not wish any of my liberal enemies dead. I want them alive, the better that I may tease them and laugh at them and expose the idiocy of their ways.

As Margaret Thatcher said: “The facts of life are conservative.” And they are. Never a let a liberal forget this. It’s something liberals hate more than anything in the world: that no matter how hard they try and how much they show they really care, they will always be wrong about everything that matters.

Mozart

The composer once called a lightweight is now celebrated for his hidden depths:

Mozart’s place as the greatest of composers has not always been so secure. We have had a love-hate relationship with his music, and it is not so long since Maria Callas declared that “Mozart’s music is dull” and Glenn Gould complained that “Mozart was a bad composer who died too late rather than too early”. It was probably overexposure to some of the simpler, emptier arias and piano sonatas that provoked those remarks: harder to forgive is Delius’s jibe that “if a man tells me he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician”.

Mozart is the perfect example of popular classical music - mostly crap but with occasional brilliance - unlike Beethoven who is mostly brilliance with occasional crap.

Stranger in a strange land

As a former South African living in America I enjoyed this article written by an American living in South Africa:

My father arrived in America in 1951, after selling the last of everything the family owned to begin new lives in New York.
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They were a gypsy sort of family, roaming from Italy, to Algeria, to Tunisia and, finally, America; first New York, then to California. He was a third-culture kid well before it became part of the global lexicon. I suppose that was partially why my father was never quite clear about his background. He never would readily admit to being Italian, despite our surname, which was a dead giveaway and led straight back to the Sicilian village of Calatafimi.
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Now it's my daughter with the accent. She tells anyone who will listen she's American. Mostly because she knows that's where Mickey Mouse lives and, I suspect, finds it a bit exotic because wherever it is, it takes a really long plane ride to get there.
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Not that she remembers much about America. We've been back in Johannesburg for five years and she's returned only once. She speaks with a South African accent, one that makes her American cousins giggle when she talks to them on Skype.
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[I]f she heads back to the land of her birth, she will be a foreigner in a foreign land just like me. My daughter, despite what her passport says, will be a South African.
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My daughter also has Czech to add to her cultural CV. My husband, who I met in Prague not long after graduating from university, is South African by way of Czech parents. He left his birth country in his young mother's arms on a train in 1970, his father holding on to his six-year-old sister. It was two years after the Prague Spring and his father refused to stay with the communists.
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When I went back to California recently and asked the woman behind the till at a dress shop if she would throw away my cash slip in the "rubbish bin", she smiled (Americans say "trash cans") and asked with a thick Spanish accent, "Where are you from?" I chuckled to myself.

In South Africa I am a foreigner, too.
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South Africa has the most asylum seekers in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And xenophobic hatred simmers from boardrooms to townships. After all, what are all of us foreigners doing here taking South African jobs?

In some ways, South Africa is much like America. Growing up, my friends' parents were from all over -- Armenia, Argentina, Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, France, England -- and immigrants from Central America, Thailand, Korea and Iran were commonplace. Here in South Africa, my two last employers have been foreigners: one a Serbian, the other a Zimbabwean. Our new neighbours are Canadian by way of Bangladesh and my daughter's best friend has a Dutch mother and a South African father from Polokwane.

The other day I met a lawyer from America who has four children, all raised in South Africa; his oldest is now at Columbia University in New York.

Part of being from different places really means you are of none. Your sense of self is fragmented.
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Your memory mixes and fades and your sense of self and attachment to culture, tradition, family and place are a mirage. You reach out for something firm, something to believe in, something that has existed and will always exist and it dissipates as you wave your hand. There is a base -- the constitution of your father and mother that is your very skin -- but different places, different people make for different ideas.

And nothing is certain. Certainly not the weather. Not capitalism. Not democracy, not tradition, not the merging, mixed cultures and ethnicities and religions. Globalisation and third-culture kids are the present and the future; mutts, all of us, borders shifting, allegiances wavering.

X-rated USS Enterprise

For my Andy who served on the Enterprise (the aircraft carrier not the space-ship) - The Captain of the USS Enterprise is in trouble over some videos he made while serving as the ship's Executive Officer:

In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.

They're all part of a series of short movies produced aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Enterprise in 2006 and 2007 and broadcast to its nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines. The man who masterminded and starred in them is Capt. Owen Honors - now the commander of the carrier, which is weeks away from deploying.
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The Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is set to deploy overseas this month.
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A female sailor who was assigned to the Enterprise at the time said she and a number of other women on board were offended by the videos. She said some crew members complained about them, and in fact, Honors acknowledged it on camera. In one movie, he says, "Over the years I've gotten several complaints about inappropriate materials in these videos, never to me personally but, gutlessly, through other channels."

He adds, "This evening, all of you bleeding hearts... why don't just go ahead and hug yourself for the next 20 minutes or so, because there's a really good chance you're gonna be offended."

Then Honors tells his viewers to get ready for something that always pleases: "the F-bomb." The video goes on to show a string of clips edited together in which he uses the expletive.

The next portion is a series of clips displaying Honors and other sailors, including officers, pretending to masturbate. It's set to a song called "Spank."
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After that, the video returns to Honors. "Finally, let's get to my favorite topic - something foreign to the gay kid over there: chicks in the shower," he says.

He gestures to the person next to him - who, through a trick of video, is Honors wearing the blue coveralls of a Navy surface warfare officer, or SWO. SWOs include the officers who crew the ship; they don't include fighter pilots and other aviators. Repeatedly in the videos, Honors, a former Top Gun pilot, draws distinctions between aviators and SWOs and refers to SWOs as "fags."

The video then shows two female sailors pretending to shower together and two male sailors pretending to shower together.
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The videographer said that while he knew the movies weren't appropriate, in some ways he can understand how they happened.

"In his defense, I'll say that sometimes, when you've been out to sea for a while, cut off from everything, you start to think things that you would never normally do are actually a good idea," he said. "You do stupid stuff to stay sane."

Boys will be boys and that goes double for seamen. And, no - my Andy does not glow in the dark.