I smirked as much on this blog, and was contacted by a distributor for Ron de Jeremy rum, offering to “make sure [I] get a sample”. I thought that was cool, and generous, and took him up on it. It’s only fair to report my impressions, and to admit where I was wrong.

My first mistake was underestimating Ron and his company. When I was offered a “sample,” I expected a little airline bottle or something. Two days later, I checked my mail to find a full 750ml bottle of Ron de Jeremy Spiced Rum as a gift from the “Ron de Jeremy rum crew”! Yep – they sent me a full fifth of rum for free, just to let me make up my mind about a product I had already joked about! Class move, guys.

It showed a lot of confidence, too, and I soon realized they had earned it. As Robert German, of the “crew,” pointed out, the rum has done better than well in competitive tastings against other quality rums, and has won good reviews and a number of awards. It’s a serious product. And apparently Ron Jeremy is serious about marketing it. They don’t downplay that his name brings it a kind of titillating brand recognition, but at bottom it’s a good product and he can be proud of being associated with it.

Another thing I misunderstood is the name. Ron Jeremy (the man, not the rum) proudly proclaims that “Ron means rum!,” which at first I thought was a schlocky advertising slogan. Not only was I being ungenerous, I was being ignorant, too. “Ron” is in fact the Spanish word for “rum,” which I did not know. “Ron de Jeremy” not only incorporates Ron’s name, but it literally means “rum of Jeremy” – which it is! That’s clever, and I was an idiot.

So I owe Ron and the crew an apology for being snobby. They’re serious about their rum and they have a real rum to be serious about. How could I have ever doubted them (other than the fact that it has a porn star’s face on the bottle – which, in Ron’s world, is not a drawback)? I’m sorry to have talked down your product, and thanks to you all for being cool about it.

But how good is the rum? That’s the real question. And when Ron and the crew find out that they express-shipped an expensive bottle of quality rum for evaluation by a non-drinker, they’re going to be pissed. But I felt I owed it to them – and to you, our loyal readers – to get around enough of the bottle to be able to offer an informed opinion. Conscious of my duty, I bit the bullet and have been drinking as much award-winning rum as I could, for free, for you. You’re welcome.

And the bottom line is – it’s good! I’m no expert on this, but real experts have given it awards, which is a good clue. As to my own impression, I liked it more than I expected, and more in fact than I normally like flavored drinks.

Ron de Jeremy Spiced Rum is smooth and tasty. It has a pronounced vanilla odor and flavor, with a spicy aftertaste. At 94 Proof, it’s got enough of a bite to make itself known, but it’s a mild sipping rum, not in the least harsh, complex enough to be interesting. Other than the vanilla, the spices are clearly evident but not aggressive; I don’t know enough to identify them by name. Let’s say a sharp cinnamony taste and a tiny kick that stays on the tongue but no real fire. It goes down very smoothly when drunk neat, and is pleasant and tasty with mixers.

Oh, hell, if you like spiced rum, or mixed drinks of whatever kind, just wrap your lips around The Hedgehog’s best and settle in for a good time. I can guarantee satisfaction!

(By the way, they’re also marketing an aged “Ron de Jeremy Adult Rum” – not spiced. I’m sure it’s just as high quality, but I can’t really know without having tasted it . . .)

Special Note: Just today news came through that Ron Jeremy was hospitalized with a serious aneurysm. Reportedly he came through surgery and was in an ICU. Best wishes to him and those close to him.

Just . . . no.

Like its namesake, Ron de Jeremy Spiced is full of flavor. It is artfully blended with spices and all natural ingredients. The rich and deep color supports the well-rounded and complex aroma, with hints of vanilla and spices. The long and smooth finish is extremely pleasing. Ron de Jeremy Spiced is an exceptionally good mixer with cola and juices, but also great straight up.

Ron Jeremy loves his rum and is highly involved and active in promoting it; “Ron de Jeremy is great- the taste is long and full, and the finish is smooth, which suits me perfectly! And I love the idea. Ron means Rum! I am very proud of my Ron and I hope my many friends all over the world will have a chance to try it.”

What I really love is that they pass it off as some sort of artisanal product of the legendary Cuban rum-making craft:

Ron de Jeremy Rum is hand crafted by another legend, 72-year old Cuban Master Distiller Francisco “Don Pancho” Fernandez. Don Pancho is one of the most experienced and renowned Master Distillers in the rum industry today. His skills have been directly responsible for the success of countless rum brands. Don Pancho inspected his best barrels to hand pick the ones worthy of becoming Ron de Jeremy.

So drink up! You’re getting the good stuff. Don Pancho himself ensured it is “worthy of becoming Ron de Jeremy”. I can’t bring myself to imagine how.

UPDATE: I have to admit, the distributors’ response was cool (see Comments). And apparently the drink is getting good reviews at professional tastings. So I’ll give it a try and report back!

There possibly is no clearer measure of the difference between the U.S. Right and Left than the way we react to bad news. Righties immediately scream that the whatever-they-don’t-like is a lie, because it doesn’t fit what they think reality is supposed to be. And they blame somebody else, usually news media, or Democrats, or anybody but them. The whatever-it-is is never their fault.

Lefties accept the reality, sometimes perceiving the reality as even worse than it is. Then we blame ourselves (or at least each other), and form circular firing squads.

Nothing more to say. Go read the whole thing.

“Vox Day” – normally the amusingly stupid kind – today manages to be so stupid as to defy categorization. It’s just kind of depressing.

He’s a snotty gleeful wingnut of the Limbaugh variety – spouts off on anything he comes across in the most deliberately offensive way possible, because it amuses him. Apparently he’s also a creationist, which is hardly surprising. Today, he notes research reports that estimate a degradation half-life for DNA in dead animal tissue of 521 years (that is, DNA samples in the natural environment slowly breakddown at an exponential rate, with a half-life of 521 years). The researchers estimate that even under ideal conditions an ancient DNA sample would be essentially unreadable after about 1.5 million years, and completely degraded after less than 7 million years. This is perfectly in keeping with what everybody already believed, but this is apparently the best hard-number estimate of rate anybody has gotten yet. It has absolutely nothing to do with evolution theory as such, but being randomly crazy is not a barrier to anything on the right wing. In that tradition, here’s Vox’s voice on this burning issue:

About five years ago, I publicly predicted that genetic science will eventually rule out the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection.  Now, it would appear that we have a potential mechanism for doing precisely that. . . . [C]loning a dinosaur or other ancient species from theoretically nonexistent DNA would not be a directly conclusive debunking of evolution, but would be a sufficiently devastating blow to the evolutionary timelines as to render it every bit as temporally dubious as it appeared when its earliest advocates were worrying about how the time-consuming process could have taken place in only 6,000 years. . . . I would be interested to hear from those who seriously subscribe to the theory of evolution and learn if, given this announcement of a 521-year DNA half-life, the successful cloning of a dinosaur known to be from a historical epoch well before the 2-million year readability limit would be enough to cause them to abandon their belief in the theory.

He appears to be completely serious. It’s hard to know what he’s talking about, although, after reading it several times, I recognize that it’s actually pretty straightforward – it’s just so staggeringly stupid that it can’t mean what it obviously appears to mean.

He honestly seems to think that the fact that DNA material can’t (except perhaps in extraordinary circumstances) typically survive more than 1-2 million years in the natural environment threatens the entire fabric of evolution theory, apparently by threatening the fact that the earth is very old, because reproducing supposedly ancient species from preserved DNA specimens would prove that those species couldn’t have been millions of years old (or the DNA would have degraded). In other words, he apparently seriously believes that if “Jurassic Park” comes true, that will disprove evolution, and that possibility is a serious challenge to the theory. The presumptive refusal of non-crazy people to take this seriously proves that evolution theory is not scientific. (The comment thread is equally staggering.)

Nowhere in the post (or the comments) is there any acknowledgment that you can’t, in fact, clone dinosaurs from ancient DNA! I really can’t understand what he thinks he is accomplishing here. “If fiction were true, then the actually true things that determine that it is only fiction would not be true!” Yeah, OK, but is there perhaps some salient fact in there that indicates those true things aren’t actually in danger?

There seem to be two things happening here, both characteristic of the bizarre thinking that drives wingnuts desperately committed to anti-science: the first is the frantic search for anything that seems to contradict their comic-book-level understanding of what science is, and the immediate presumption that even the most trivial or tangential such issues completely derail entire swaths of well-established scientific theory; the second is the pervasive assumption that science is in some way a conspiracy or a cult, and that the tiniest crack in the facade exposes an entire structure of lies and dishonesty.

So, the imaginary possibility of cloning dinosaurs is real scientific evidence (because anything’s possible! – scientists can’t prove you can’t clone dinosaurs, so they have to admit that you can!), and has to be taken on an equal footing with actual laboratory data which indicate that DNA doesn’t survive long enough to clone dinosaurs; this proves that the claim that dinosaurs lived long ago is false, because we know both that their DNA couldn’t have survived that long and that that contradicts the idea of cloning them from their DNA, and both of those are proven scientific concepts one of which just happens to be imaginary! Furthermore, not admitting that this would – if it were accomplished, notwithstanding that it won’t be – utterly disprove all of evolution theory, or suggesting that an average rate of decay doesn’t mean that every sample in existence would degrade, or that theories can be revised to accommodate new data rather than thrown out entirely, makes you dishonest and part of the conspiracy, because obviously God exists and all of evolution if false if there is any single unexplained aspect of imaginary evolution theory that is not just what religious nuts claim it is in their comic-book versions of science.

Neither of those thought processes is new, or unusual on the right wing. This particular example catches the attention just because it’s so weird. Is there really anyone that stupid? Does he really believe that things that don’t actually happen disprove the facts that explain why they don’t happen?

It’s hard to set a limit to how dumb the anti-science religious right can be. But this is a new kind of low.

This one caught my attention:

Anonymous asked: yo, some of my friends are having a 1950s themed party, so I told them I’d hang out outside to preserve historical accuracy. they said I was being a “wet blanket.” am I being whack or are they being racist?

DEAR RACISTS: PLEASE STOP BEING ALL SURPRISED WHEN PEOPLE GET OFFENDED WHEN YOU GLORIFY RACIST-ASS TIME PERIODS.

This takes me back instantly to Louis CK’s standup bit about white privilege – among other things, white people can use time machines, because there is no time in history they could visit and not still be privileged. “I could get in a time machine and go to any time and it would be fuckin’ awesome when I get there. That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines. A black guy in a time machine is like ‘Hey, anything before 1980, no thank you, I don’t want to go!’.”

One of the most pervasive aspects of white privilege is the way in which its effect on others is completely invisible to those wielding it. Whiteness is not just a position of dominance, but a default expectation for almost every social phenomenon or event: in the same way that the word “man” is used to include, but really exclude, women, there is an unspoken label “White” on almost everything that happens in our society that defines part of that society as invisible. All that takes place in society is seen from the perspective of, interpreted through, and built around the white experience, which whites assume means the only experience. That there are others is simply not imagined; that the default perspective excludes part of what it takes in is not comprehensible.

This phenomenon is found everywhere, subtly and more obviously. From the all-white faces in advertising to whites’ confident assumption that there is no place they will not be welcome to the 90%-white membership of the GOP and the overt racism of its supremacist supporters like Pat Buchanan, whiteness as both chosen and assumed default is everywhere, and yet manages to go unnoticed and unremarked. Sometimes, ignoring the eyeball-stabbing obviousness of what is really going on requires a degree of bad faith that is hard to fathom. (Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are cases in point. Ethnic sports mascots are another. This list is not exhaustive.)

One of the most relentless programs of “white”washing that allows white people to remain smug about their own culture is the erasure of truth about race from every aspect of history. It is overt in textbooks and official propaganda, but it is an unacknowledged part of every reference to our past, in every context. The view of history taken as the default by white culture – and thus by US culture in all its official and “mainstream” guises – is virtually devoid of minorities, and entirely innocent of any suspicion that the history we all inherited was both (a) different and (b) worse for those minorities as they lived it. This view is not just false, it is manufactured – but it is taken as a natural phenomenon, “just true”, by those who benefit from it being true and have never been forced to imagine otherwise.

It’s a hard lesson to get, because it strikes right to the guilt and defensiveness that so often arises in response to progressive criticism of history or culture. Pointing out that things were bad for some people, and, worse, that others benefited from that, is immediately taken to be an accusation against people in the current generation (who often do continue to benefit from that legacy, but don’t want to think so). You get the standard denialist reactions: “Feminists just have no sense of humor!” “Well, I didn’t own any slaves!” Asking people to grapple consciously with both the fact of minority suffering and their own resultant privilege is threatening, because having unfair privilege seems to invoke guilt, and because acknowledging that you have it makes it impossible not to admit you should work against it.

Thus the bad faith about US history. White people can imagine that most of that history was enjoyable and beneficial, because for them it was, and because they have removed everyone else from the picture. Older white people love the 1950s, completely ignoring that it was a time of virulent, open, and legal racial discrimination and segregation, “massive resistance” to civil rights, the lynching of Emmet Till, virtual legal invisibility for women, and the pervasive exclusion of minorities and women from education and job opportunities. They hate the 1960s as a time of violence and unrest, ignoring the reasons for it and the changes it brought about, while still extolling the technological and economic boom that again left most minorities and women behind. Every time period in history gets the same treatment: whatever was good about it almost undoubtedly wasn’t good, or good in nearly equitable degree, for non-whites and women (to say nothing of ethnic and religious minorities, gays, and anyone else who didn’t conform to the default profile), but it’s the good parts that are taken as definitive of, and in fact constitutive of, those times, and the people who benefited from them (white men) as constitutive of the population living through them.

The good times weren’t that good. Let’s just take it as read that everything before the 13th Amendment is a complete write-off, race-wise. Segregation and Jim Crow persisted for close to another 100 years after that, while women had to fight piece by piece for basic legal rights, and didn’t reach anything like equity in education or the workforce until the closing years of the 20th Century. To be clear, I’m not saying that things didn’t get better for women and minorities; they certainly did, but even so, if some of your greatest cultural achievements as a nation are “finally ended slavery”, “finally ended segregation”, “fewer lynchings”, and “gave women the vote 140 years late”, you, as a nation, are fucked up.

Just as Louis CK says, being any random white person at any random period in US history always put you well above vast groups of other people on the citizenship totem pole. (He overstates a bit: it wasn’t necessarily “awesome” – you could be, and at certain times were very likely to be, poor, downtrodden, and sickly – but it still beat the shit out of being black.) That means that blindly celebrating any period in US history, without at least acknowledging that it wasn’t all tailfins and goldfish swallowing, means celebrating the oppression of millions of citizens targeted only for who they were – or at the very least declaring that that fact isn’t a reason not to celebrate.

Whites don’t get that, either, and I have to admit that I understand that. Before I became enlightened, I didn’t get it – I had feminist friends who were always pointing out the women who had participated in historical events but were not mentioned when the stories were told, I heard blacks complaining about underrepresentation in every case and corner, I saw people marching for every imaginable cause (this was the 70s, in the San Francisco Bay Area), and I just thought of them as tedious and self-absorbed. (Because when you’re not a liberal, you’re an asshole like that.) It didn’t seem important to me to be constantly injecting all that peripheral stuff.

Everybody knew that Lewis and Clark were the real heroes of the Northwest expedition; who cares that a native woman showed them the way? Yeah, the Tuskegee Airmen were pretty cool, but why do you have to keep bringing up old stuff? Maybe it wasn’t fair that white men got to do all the good stuff, but they were the ones who did it; constantly insisting that tens of millions of non-whites, and the female majority, were actually part of all those events was some kind of revisionism. And harping on oppression was just pessimistic; it makes it sound like American history was actually bad for some people.

Fortunately, I got hipped at a young age and never looked back. But it was still not an easy process becoming comfortable with the idea that you could never be complacent – that whatever you were talking about, whatever event or time period was under discussion, there was somebody who was getting the short end of the stick and if you were a white middle-class male like me that somebody wasn’t you and whoever that somebody was was likely to be pissed about it and they had a point.

Knowing that makes it hard to view any part of history with equanimity. I understand now why those who were conscious before I became conscious were so constantly focused on filling in the gaps. For those who were female, or non-white, it is an act of self-preservation – an attempt to keep from becoming so invisible they sink back to having no place at all, again. For progressives of privilege but at least a dose of honesty, it is a necessary step in allying themselves with people and movements that demand acknowledgment. And it is tedious, and it is so infuriatingly pervasively necessary that you can never let it go.

Which makes things like 50s parties, Civil War re-enactments, and debutante balls a real challenge. It’s easy to grant that they are not intended maliciously, and perhaps in a (very dubious) way they celebrate parts of a given culture that are not themselves objectionable. But you can’t present them as neutral reflections of their times, as if it’s OK to pick out the parts of that time that were most congenial to the most privileged and simply ignore the rest. What is a black person going to do at a 50s party? Wear a letterman sweater and dance the Lindy? Blacks were excluded from virtually all colleges at that time, and a black man dancing with a white woman in public would be taking his life in his hands. Cotillion? Just think what the black women would have been doing in that ballroom. (Yes, there were black colleges and black debutantes, but they were a minority that only throws the larger scene into relief.) You can think of this as a chance for the excluded groups to get in on what they were previously denied, but they can only do that by pretending to be the dominant group – a farce of bad consciousness. (Hi, Condoleeza!)

Asking someone from an excluded group to play along with the circumstances of their exclusion just throws in their face how vile the thing is that you’re celebrating. Not understanding why they’re being a “wet blanket” about it just proves how much you don’t care. And for those whites who think it’s OK to go ahead and throw a party their black friends wouldn’t have been allowed to attend back in the day, because they don’t actually have any black friends, the fact that you’re not insulting someone to their face doesn’t absolve you of celebrating the insult to begin with.

So, yeah, there’s really no way to do this that isn’t offensive. Throwing a sock hop isn’t the same as staging a Klan rally, but they are both events that exist in, and largely because of, a deliberate oppressive exclusion that kept one group up and one group down, and which celebrate the group that was up. If you’re cool with that, well, you’re not cool.

UPDATE: Here’s another take on the time machine question.

A couple of months ago  I received a review copy of  a recent book on US gun culture, and have finally gotten a chance to go through the volume and see what it had to say. American Shooter: A Personal History of Gun Culture in the United States, by Gerry Souter, is an interesting and highly informative book that conveys a vast range of historical and technical information about the development of firearms usage and attitudes toward guns in the US. It’s especially timely as the gun wars rage and another electoral season is on us. Its unique contribution arises from the perspective of its author – an outspoken liberal who is openly suspicious of the NRA and the fearful and fantastical paranoia of the “self-defense”/militia crowd, but who is also a lifelong shooter who has a great deal of experience with guns and not only supports responsible gun use but encourages it as a tool for social cohesion and self-development.

The book is organized roughly chronologically, and surveys the development of firearms technology from before the American Revolution through to today, the evolution of military doctrine for combat with light weapons, and the history of public attitudes and public policy regarding guns in the US. An interesting theme in the book is the ways in which the first two factors – changes in technology and the military use of firearms – directly influenced public involvement in, and attitudes toward, shooting in the civilian environment. (Briefly: military necessity drove many of the technical developments that are common even in non-military arms today, while the need for, and lack of, accurate shooting skills among military recruits led to the development of weapons with increasingly high rates of fire – to overwhelm the enemy with “suppressive fire” rather than aiming for an accuracy that was beyond troops’ abilities – and also civilian shooting training programs intended to increase basic skills among potential inductees but which also recruited civilians to shooting sports in large numbers. The result was, to different degrees at different times, a public that was interested in and familiar with military weapons, while those weapons became increasingly powerful and deadly.) The author sketches out the ways that the US’s wars familiarized generations of citizens with rifle use and also flooded the civilian environment with surplus weapons by the millions – or, more recently, created a vast market for military-style knockoffs intended specifically for civilians. He parallels these developments with stories of his own experiences with guns, including youth competitions, hunting with his father, working as a security guard with a borrowed pistol so old it fell to pieces when he took it out of the holster, working as a news photographer in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and his current plans for a National Shooting Sports League to interest the public in the safe use of guns. The book is fascinating, informative, and often funny, though it suffers from some very clunky structure and repetitious text. (My Amazon review of the same book touches on its content and organization, and its flaws, in more detail.) I recommend it as an excellent general information source about the history of guns in the United States, and as a thoughtful pro-gun liberal’s perspective on a responsible approach to firearms usage and policy.

What matters in all this, of course, is the question of how guns fit into the social environment of the United States at this point in our history. Souter does a good job reviewing how our long background of war, expansion, conquest, and fear of violence have driven the use of guns, and shaped public attitudes toward them. Gun policy in the 21st Century has to be built on the foundation of the public’s received attitudes and beliefs (often hugely false) about guns and our own history with guns, as well as the staggering volume of guns currently swamping our society (and continuing to flood into it at increasing rates). The fact that that history has changed dramatically – few people now hunt for subsistence, the days of pioneers and the open range are both long gone, and we have a full-time professional military, equipped with specialized weapons, that far exceeds our needs for self-defense – is relevant but not decisive; it is the myths about gun culture, both in the past and today, that determine public beliefs and attitudes and thus the ongoing development of gun culture and gun policy. In that regard, Souter presents a picture of the peaceful and beneficial use of guns to contrast with the deliberately-stoked fears and myths that create the market for para-military “self-defense” weaponry and preparation.

As a life-long gun user, Souter appreciates the role of guns – particularly non-military rifles and shotguns – as tools for sport, relaxation, and the development of discipline. He supports hunting and target shooting, and is convinced that reviving public participation in shooting contests would teach self-control and self-esteem to youth, and create a culture of responsible gun use among adults. His NSSL proposal is intended to make shooting a televised spectator sport that would replace images of violence and social unrest as the immediate association of guns in the public’s mind. Whether or not that is a realistic prospect, these are the sorts of things that anyone ought to be able to support, even liberals who have learned to be squeamish about guns from the wild-eyed whackos who have hijacked an entire technological milieu in service of their self-created paranoid fantasies.

Souter takes a more jaundiced view of handguns. Though he acknowledges their place in hunting and for target competition and casual shooting (and describes the fun he and his wife both have in pursuing those activities), he is critical of the practice of concealed carry for personal defense. His concerns are several-fold, and he has an insightful perspective on that contentious issue. He notes that defensive shootings are much rarer than the gun nuts like to pretend, and that the statistics used to scare people into buying guns are grossly manipulated (he also notes that the same can be said of statistics used to support the opposite point of view). He attributes the upsurge in demand for concealed carry privileges and looser restrictions on licensing to a scare campaign conducted by gun manufacturers faced with declining sales, and right-wing gun advocacy groups, most especially the NRA. His citations of NRA policy papers and advertising campaigns document how insidiously, and dishonestly, they inflamed the issue for self-serving purposes. (From an actual NRA pamphlet: “You’re a woman. Someone’s going to rape you. You’d better buy a handgun.”) (Souter frequently details aspects of the NRA’s history; though they were not always the largest gun advocacy group, and only recently became the reactionary political juggernaut they now are, they have often played key roles in civilian firearms training, competition shooting, and promotion of both gun use and hunting, and thus have an outsized importance in the history of US gun culture from around the time of the Civil War. Souter offers both praise and criticism for the NRA, in different contexts.) Most significantly, he identifies the issue of the defensive use of guns as fundamentally one of social character rather than simple utility. He says more than once that “carrying a handgun as a daily accessory represents a failure of American society”. He stresses the fear that drives gun sales and gun carry laws, and the myriad ways that fear creeps into and takes over people’s lives, deliberately magnified and manipulated by pro-gun vested interests (as well as the way anti-gun forces have their own fears and fear-driven campaign tactics).

It’s hard to know how to reconcile these two aspects of gun culture. It’s especially disheartening that the most divisive and destructive side is the one actively stoked and inflamed by the gun interests. (This is largely, though not openly, for financial reasons: sales of long guns have plateaued as hunting culture dwindles and rifle competition has fallen from public interest; handgun sales have been the financial savior of the firearms industry, and there is nothing they will not do to keep that trend rising. Handgun sales continue to skyrocket even as the actual crime rate has plummeted for over 20 years and is now lower than it was 40 years ago; encouraging delusional fears of crime is a primary sales tactic of gun makers and gun-rights advocates.) Even without that pernicious campaign of social destruction, the existence of close to 300 million civilian firearms, over a third of them handguns, makes any practical program of limiting the prevalence of deadly hardware in society an almost impossible goal. For this reason, Souter’s proposal to change gun culture by changing people’s appreciation of guns, rather than shifting the balance of pro/anti sentiment, may make sense.

In broader perspective, the idea of a liberal embrace of guns in sane ways may be an important tactic for changing and ameliorating the harmful effects of guns hoarded out of fear or hostility. If guns themselves were seen in a more neutral light, the focus of gun policy could be turned to more practical issues related to their design, regulation, and use. More significantly, public attitudes could be influenced to accept guns but reject the paranoid and violent rhetoric of the extremist community, which has become the only refuge for some pro-gun citizens who are not themselves anti-social but perceive only hostility from non-gunners. (Perhaps a pipe dream: if liberals came to appreciate safe uses of guns in larger numbers, they might someday form a voting bloc in the NRA that could help take that organization back from the real whackos who run it today.) That might also reduce the perceived need for concealed carry, and put the hostile or paranoid attitudes that drive that practice in a clearer light.

One mistake that anti-gun liberals make is to lump all guns and uses of guns together as part of the real social problem they are reacting to, which is the ready availability of handguns used for destructive purposes (deliberately, accidentally, or in momentary passion). Civilian assault rifles are an idiotic indulgence but don’t actually cause all that much harm. Long guns of all types are involved in a small percentage of gun-related deaths. Limiting some categories of weapons doesn’t require limiting all of them. Liberals have failed to make these distinctions (aided in large part by gun nuts who insisted on defending assault rifles and large-capacity magazines as being both necessary and the simple equivalent of Revolutionary War muskets, while working every devious angle they could concoct to eliminate or evade any regulations of firearms whatsoever). More-rational rhetoric from the more-rational side of the debate might help expose the sheer lunacy of the other side (or not: right-wingers do love their epistemic closure).

That possibility, and Souter’s sense of the social cost of irrational attitudes toward guns from both right and left, is one of the attractions of American Shooter. (Its wealth of historical and technical information is another, especially for readers new to gun issues. And the book is genuinely funny in many places.) It may be doomed by making too much sense. (For Souter’s own protection, I have not quoted him where, in several places, he comes dangerously close to saying the same things that made long time gun professional Jim Zumbo the target of a lynch mob composed of his own fellow enthusiasts.) But if any progress is to be made on these issues, and especially if they are to be resolved other than by unremitting hostility between opposed and often equally factually challenged camps, his is a voice that deserves to be heard.

UPDATE: While still writing this, but before posting it, sixteen more people were shot overnight in Chicago. One died.

UPDATE: Removed broken footnote marker.

The modern GOP has turned into Wayne Manor: It’s a billionaire’s mansion perched atop a massive pile of batshit.

Too perfect. And too perfectly Romney.

Several years ago, Rice attended the Masters at Augusta and published a breathtakingly fatuous article about how much she loved the club, managing to completely avoid any mention of segregation (other than to note that “the faces at Augusta are changing”, without ever mentioning how, or why they hadn’t before, or the fact that she belonged to two categories of people whose presence at the club had been specifically banned for years). I wrote about that at the time:

Just as she did so often as Bush’s beard, Rice makes herself an apology for racist, sexist old white men’s anxieties, and determinedly forces herself not to notice either what’s going on around her or how she herself is contributing. She even goes out of her way to write about the fact that she spent an entire day at Augusta, knows it’s segregated, and hasn’t got anything to say about that.

So it’s impossible not to have mixed feelings about this. Augusta – finally – has agreed to stop their falling-behind-the-times clock at about negative-100 years and maybe try to keep pace from now on. Rice, who earned her groundbreaking membership with a world-class sucking-up job (“the people are very kind”), gets a sweet golfer’s perk and opens the door, presumably, to a few – a carefully-regulated few – more women who don’t happen to be former Secretaries of State. Augusta gets to congratulate itself on its progressivism and also claim that they never backed down: fully 10 years after mass protests at the Masters drew attention to their gender segregation, they’ve chosen to de-segregate “voluntarily”, and even went and got themselves a two-fer – a woman who is also black! So it’s not like those feminists had a point or anything.**

But it’s a welcome change, and more significantly, an inevitable one. So much of conservatism is simply a dedication to being wrong for as long as possible. Eventually they can’t help coming around – on slavery, segregation, voting rights, women’s rights, now gay rights, right-wingers have been forced into acceptance of progress against which they had once declared war (and in every case then claim that defeat as evidence of their own moral superiority). Augusta was founded by a man who blustered that “As long as I’m alive, all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.” Hootie Johnson, the absurd blowhard who staked his life’s reputation on keeping women out, declared that he would defend segregation “at the point of a bayonet” while simultaneously claiming himself to have been a major supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. Johnson was so wedded to segregation and his own sense of entitlement that he rescinded $10 million in advertising fees in 2002 so he could say the advertisers hadn’t technically honored the boycott of his tournament. His replacement, Bill Payne, brought the Olympics to Atlanta but they rejected allowing an Olympic competition in golf specifically because he wanted to hold it at the segregated club – in his role as Olympics organizing chair, he abandoned golf rather than abandon segregation. On becoming the new club chair, just three years after the segregation protests under Johnson, he announced “Hootie did a wonderful job as chairman, and I will endeavor to maintain the customs and traditions of our club”. Being chair of a club that practices sex segregation doesn’t stand in the way of sexual judgmentalism, however: two years ago, Payne held a press conference to criticize black Masters champion Tiger Woods for having sex that he (Payne) didn’t approve of; two years after that, he was still refusing to publicly discuss the segregation issue.

Now the club has finally done what the club was often asked to do and said it never would, thus establishing a timeline for how long those particular conservatives chose to be wrong (for the club, 79 years; for Billy Payne, 6 years in office; Hootie Johnson, by all accounts, remains an asshole). The club can claim it won by dictating the terms of its own surrender, but there’s no question this is Martha Burke’s day: she pointed out a wrong and started a conversation that never ended until, today, they did what she asked, while all the club managed to do was continue to be wrong for 10 more years. Condoleeza Rice can now claim to be a pioneer for de-segregating a club she didn’t think needed it, but she’s no Jackie Robinson; given how much water she carried for Augusta while it defended discrimination, she ought to be considered its last black caddy.

And so another conservative institution comes unwillingly forward from its place in the past, and demands praise for agreeing not to be wrong after fighting to be so for more than a lifetime. It’s tedious, but it’s the only way they learn, so I guess we should be glad.

UPDATE: Rice has now been quoted, on the occasion of her breaking the 79-year ban on women at Augusta, as saying, I swear to God: ““I have long admired the important role Augusta National has played in the traditions and history of golf.” And the club, predictably, is taking a victory lap: the Chair who, just 4 months ago, refused to extend the traditional invitation to the CEO of IBM (a woman this year, for the first time), and refused to discuss it as well, now declares, on admitting two women after years of agitation, “This is a joyous occasion”. Man, they really don’t listen to themselves, do they?

UPDATE: David Zirin at The Nation goes upside Condi’s head today, refusing to let her role in this segregation farce obscure her history of both war crimes and abandonment of women’s interests. (“In a sane world, Rice would be awaiting trial at the Hague.”) He also digs up this jaw-dropper: the other woman named to the golf club along with Rice, local billionaire Darla Moore, lives on an honest-to-God antebellum plantation, and when her name was raised as a potential member of the club during the first round of segregation protests years ago she stated “I’m as progressive as they come. But some things ought not to be messed with.” She has a reputation as a fierce business negotiator, and claims “I’ve harassed guys all my life” – but she was “too much of a friend” of Hootie Johnson to actually ask him to let women into his guy sanctum. Man, they sure know how to pick ‘em.

* Caddies at August had all been black, by specific club rule, until 1983. They allowed white caddies 7 years before they allowed black players. Here’s an interesting article noting that blacks started to get cut out of caddying when golf purses got so large that caddying became a lucrative job (the caddy gets a percentage of the golfer’s winnings); the field is almost entirely white now. In the same way, most of the female coaches of women’s college basketball teams lost their jobs to men when the NCAA began promoting women’s sports. So for the most segregated sports in the world, de-segregation was just another way to keep blacks and women down.

** “Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord.” (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

“Hey, White Guys! . . . It’s true, we don’t get a pass from despair and hard luck. Nobody is exempt from a crap bath. It’s just that we start at third base when everyone else is still lining up for an at-bat.”

I’m a sports fan, and I “collect” stadiums (stadia?). Especially major league baseball, NFL football, and NHL hockey. My goal, before I die, is to see a baseball game in the home stadium of every MLB team. It would be an added bonus if I could do the NHL and NFL venues, but right now, I’m focusing primarily on baseball.

Problem is, I keep forgetting where I’ve been, and losing count. Therefore, mostly for my own reference (and because I expect few others to be interested), I’m posting a list of venues attended below the fold. I’ve ordered them in roughly the order in which I first visited them, to the best of my ability to recall.

However, if you have comments concerning favorite (or least favorite) venues, feel free to leave them.

MLB: (30 venues in 23 cities for 25 home teams [one since moved, four parks since demolished]; 24 of current 30 teams, 80% complete; 24 of current 30 ball parks, 80% complete)

1. Milwaukee County Stadium, Milwaukee Brewers (Defunct)
2. New Comiskey Park, Chicago White Sox, guessing 16 Apr. 1997 — White Sox 9, Orioles 3; it snowed
3. Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati Reds (Defunct), guessing Sep. 1997; Pete Rose Jr. appeared in the game
4. Bank One Ballpark, Arizona Diamondbacks, Best guess: 17 May 1998, Diamondbacks 8, Pirates 2
5. Olympic Stadium, Montreal (Defunct), 12 June 1999 — Devil Rays 5, Expos 3
6. Miller Park, Milwaukee Brewers, 8 Apr. 2001 — Brewers 8, Reds 4
7. Wrigley Field, Chicago Cubs, guessing spring 2001 — rain-delayed game
8. Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati Reds, 11 May 2003 — Reds 7, Brewers 5
9. Coors Field, Colorado Rockies, 23 May 2003 — Rockies 10, Giants 7
10. (Old) Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals (Defunct), 1 Jul. 2005 — Cardinals 6, Rockies 0
11. Tropicana Field, Tampa Bay Devil Rays (Shithole), 13 Sep. 2005 — Yankees 17, Devil Rays 3
12. Ameriquest Field, Texas Rangers, 3 Jul. 2006 — Rangers 6, Blue Jays 1
13. (New) Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals, 29 Sep 2006 — Cardinals 10, Brewers 5
14. AT&T Park, San Francisco Giants, 6 May 2007 — Phillies 8, Giants 5
15. McAfee Coliseum, Oakland A’s, 11 May 2007 — A’s 8, Indians 2
16. Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia Phillies, 17 May 2007 — Brewers 3, Phillies 2
17. Kaufman Stadium, Kansas City Royals, 26 Apr. 2008 — Royals 2, Blue Jays 1
18. Fenway Park, Boston Red Sox, 20 Jun. 2008 — Cardinals 5, Red Sox 4
19. Yankees Stadium, New York (Bronx) Yankees, 22 Jun. 2008 — Yankees 4, Reds 1
20. Shea Stadium, New York (Flushing) Mets, 23 Jun. 2008 — Mariners 5, Mets 2 (AL Pitcher Grand Slam game)
21. Turner Field, Atlanta Braves, 25 Jun. 2010 — Braves 3, Tigers 1
22. Minute Maid Park, Houston Astros, 31 Jul. 2010 — Astros 6, Brewers 0
23. Safeco Field, Seattle Mariners, 15 Jul. 2011 — Rangers 4, Mariners 0
24. Nationals Park, Washington Nationals, 20 Aug. 2011 — Phillies 5, Nationals 0
25. Citi Field, New York Mets, 21 Aug. 2011 — Brewers 6, Mets 2
26. Angels Stadium, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Thu., 19 Apr. 2012 — A’s 4, Angels 2
27. Petco Park, San Diego Padres, Fri., 20 Apr. 2012 — Phillies 4, Padres 1
28. Dodgers Stadium, Los Angeles Dodgers, Wed., 24 Apr. 2012 — Braves 4, Dodgers 2
29. Progressive Field, Cleveland Indians, Sat., 5 May 2012 — Rangers 5, Indians 2
30. (New) Yankee Stadium, New York Yankees, Sat., 28 Jul 2012 — Red Sox 8, Yankess 6

NHL: (7 venues in 7 cities, 7 home teams, 23% complete)

1. The Arena, Carolina Hurricanes, 18 Dec. 1999 — Hurricanes 4, Thrashers 2
2. Fleet Center, Boston Bruins, 2 Nov. 2000 — Bruins 5, Blackhawks 4
3. United Center, Chicago Blackhawks, 25 Feb. 2001 — Blackhawks 6, Maple Leafs 4
4. Gaylord Entertainment Center, Nashville Predators, 4 Feb. 2006 — Predators 6, Blackhawks 0
5. Air Canada Centre, Toronto Maple Leafs, 2 Jan. 2006 — Maple Leafs 3, Penguins 2 (OT) — Sydney Crosby’s Canadian Debut
6. HP Pavilion, San Jose Sharks, 8 May 2007 — Red Wings 2, Sharks 0 (Playoff game)
7. Rogers Arena, Vancouver Canucks, 26 Feb 2011 — Bruins 3, Canucks 1

NFL: (7 venues in 6 cities, 5 home teams)

1. Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans Saints (Pre-season), Sat., 20 Aug. 1994 — Packers 13, Saints 10
2. Milwaukee County Stadium, Green Bay Packers (Defunct), 11 Sep. 1994 — Dolphins 24, Packers 14
3. Tampa Stadium, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Defunct), 10 Dec. 1995 — Buccaneers 13, Packers 10 (OT)
4. Lambeau Field, Green Bay Packers, Mon, 9 Sep. 1996 — Packers 39, Eagles 13
5. Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati Bengals (Defunct), 20 Sep. 1998 — Packers 13, Bengals 6
6. Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinnati Bengals (Pre-season), Sat., 24 Aug. 2002 — Saints 31, Bengals 23
7. Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City Chiefs, 14 Dec. 2008 — Chargers 22, Chiefs 21

NBA: (2 venues in 2 cities, 2 home teams, 7% complete)

1. Bradley Center, Milwaukee Bucks — Guessing 1993; they played the Lakers when Vlade Divac was there
2. Fedex Forum, Memphis Grizzlies, 11 Feb. 2011 — Grizzlies 89, Bucks 86

IHL/AHL: (2 venues in 2 cities)

1. Bradley Center, Milwaukee Admirals
2. Riverfront Coliseum, Cincinnati Cyclones, 31 Dec. 1999 — Admirals 3, Cyclones 2 (SO)

Pacific Coast League (AAA): (1 venue)

1. Autozone Park, Memphis Redbirds

International League (AAA): (1 venue)

1. McCoy Stadium, Pawtucket Red Sox, Fri., 11 May 2012 — PawSox 5, Clippers 1

Southern League (AA): (4 venues in 4 cities)

1. Joe Davis Stadium, Huntsville Stars, 19 Jul. 2008 — Stars 4, Smokies 2
2. Pringles Park, West Tenn Diamond Jaxx (Southern League North Division playoffs), 3 Sep. 2008 — Mudcats 7, Diamond Jaxx 1
3. Trustmark Park, Mississippi Braves, 24 Jun. 2010 — Braves 2, Bay Bears 1
4. AT&T Field, Chattanooga Lookouts, 26 Jun. 2010 — Lookouts 4, Barons 2

NCAAF Div 1: (1 venue, 0 home teams)

1. Liberty Bowl, 31 Dec. 2003, Utah 17, Southern Miss 0; 31 Dec. 2004, Louisville 44, Boise State 40

NCAAF Div 3: (1 venue, 1 home team)

1. Van Male Field, Carroll Pioneers

Champ Car World Series (defunct, 2 tracks)

1. Molson Indy Vancouver, Vancouver, BC, 26 Jul. 2003 (qualifying only)
2. Gran Premio Tecate, Mexico City, Mexico, 11 Nov. 2007 — Bourdais, Power, Servia

American Le Mans Series (1 track)

1. Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, 10 June 2001, Conagra US Road Racing Classic

IZOD IndyCar Series (1 track)

1. Kansas Motor Speedway, 27 Apr 2008

Previous Updates:

1. 20 May 2007: Add Philadelphia Phillies
2. 27 April 2008: Add Kansas City Royals
3. 25 June 2008: Add Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and New York Mets
4. 23 July 2008: Add Huntsville Stars (AA)
5. 2 Sep 2008: Add West Tenn Diamond Jaxx (AA)
6. 16 Dec 2008: Add KC Chiefs (NFL), and add dates and scores
7. 31 Jul 2009: Added some more dates and scores
8. 25 June 2010: Add Trustmark Park (Jackson, MS AA)
9. 27 June 2010: Add Turner Field, AT&T Field (Chattanooga AA)
10. 2 August 2010: Add Minute Maid Park
11. 20 June 2011: Add Rogers Arena, Fedex Forum; added scores & dates
12. 21 June 2011: Linked box scores for MLB games (Thank you baseball-reference.com!); added Kansas Motor Speedway
13. 6 July 2011: Corrected score for 1996 Packers-Eagles game, thanks to commenter W. Block, and added link to box score.
14. 1 August 2011: Added Safeco Field (Mariners)
15. 22 August 2011: Added Nationals Park (Nationals), Citi Field (Mets)
16. 15 May 2012: Added Angels Stadium, Petco Park (Padres), Dodgers Stadium, Progressive Field (Indians), and McCoy Stadium (AAA – Pawtucket Red Sox)