Why are Second Amendment absolutists so brazen, and First Amendment absolutists so damn timid?

So some 20-year-old jerk, who has plenty of other outlets, is choosing to sue Dicks Sporting and Walmart because they wouldn't sell him a gun. They've raised the minimum age they'll sell to, to 21. He's accusing them of age discrimination. "If they say they sell guns, and guns are a legal, constitutionally protected product, then they have to sell to me." It's a weird mirror-universe argument about bakers and cakes for gay weddings: "If you've put out a shingle and say you sell something, you have to sell it to everyone who can legally buy it."

If he prevails, every teenager who's ever ended up on the sex offender rolls because he or she sent a consensual nude selfie to a peer should have their record expunged immediately.

A gun is a constutitionally protected product. So is speech. So is speech in the form of, "Hey, look at my naked body." The constitution sets age limits— two of them, in fact, the age at which you can vote, and the age at which you can become president. The writers of the constitution were aware of age limitations. The omission of age limitations from the First and Second Amendements basically says that there's no age limit at which your right to engage in free specch, or your right to join a militia, is abridged. Kids who end up on the offender rolls for consensual sextingt were just doing what that 20-year-old was doing, and if he prevails, so too should they.

I can't imagine the kind of mental disfigurement someone must have to support the notion that anyone, of any age, can have a gun, regardless of the circumstances, and yet at the same time argue that some people shouldn't have a sexuality at the very time that their sexual development is at its most fierce and confused. It's repulsive beyond words that gun fanatics can shout their fierce pride in the second amendment without shame— can even shame others into silence— yet fans of sexual speech have be circumspect, careful, and "delicate" in their first amendment defense.

Not Now, John

John Carlson and his associate had a lovely talk this morning on Carlson's radio show, and the other fellow (whose name I didn't get) was reading an editorial about violent video games, and said he basically agreed with the premise that, as the games get more and more realistic, "there has to be some de-sensitizing going on there."

Carlson replied, "You want to hear my profound observation? My profound observation is that there's no disturbance going on in there if the kid isn't already disturbed."

Here's my equally profound observation: Australia, Germany, France, England, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands have access to the exact same video games. It's an international industry. And yet they don't have the violence we do. They don't have kids killing each other the way we do.

Now, why is that, John?

(Title Explained: Not Now, John, by Pink Floyd)

We're all gonna be old someday, so stop slut-shaming the elderly.

On MSNBC this morning Joe Scarborough shuddered in horror at the idea that Stormy Daniels might have one or more "dick pics" sent to her by Donald Trump. I know, I know, you really don't want to think about Donald Trump's penis. But bear with me for a moment, because there are two competing impulses here, and one of them is fair and one of them is wrong.

The fair one is the idea of Donald Trump humping away at anyone. From what we know of his habits— his germophobia, his discomfort with his own body, his self-centered inability to care about other people— sex with Trump basically reduces you to an onahole.

But the other one is reacting with distaste to the idea of an elderly man having sex. And that one's not fair at all.

If you're not familiar with LemonParty, it was a shock site and the game was to trick people into visiting it and watching their reaction when they did. It was a short looping gif of three elderly men having sex. It was prominent about a decade ago, when I was in my early 40s, and I did not have the reaction most people did; my reaction was "Yeah, go for it dudes, life is short and I hope I'm still going at it like that when I'm in my 70s too!"

Which was not the reaction people expected. (Then again, I have more or less the same reaction to Goatse as Marten Reed's mom, so my calibration is way, way off.) Nobody wants to talk about elderly sex; they'd rather go to Carousel than think about what sex will be like when they're 70. But many of us are going to get to 70, and it's damned unfair to say "Oh, old people, they shouldn't have the pleasures the rest of us enjoy." Sure they should, to the best of their ability.

Even Donald Trump.

We have a more profound idea of what breathing is than Buddha. Does that change how we meditate?

"You must know what the breath is," the Buddha said. But what the breath is, is very different in our century than it was in his.

Buddhist meditation begins with learning how to breathe. Apparently, old Siddhartha Buddha could do this readily and without effort, but most people have to spend some time paying attention to all the little things that go into breathing, all the sensations that we've learned to take for granted, to ignore, to accept as mere signs that we're still breathing.

Breathing is one of the most remarkable of all our biological systems. It has to be fast; one breath is barely in our lungs for half a second, and in that time we have to swap out the oxygen for carbon dioxide just to keep living. It's under our control when we want, and it goes on automatically when we're not paying attention to it. Regulating it gives us expressive power in speech and the capability to dive deep underwater. Buddhism wants you to pay attention to its sensations while not trying to exert control over it— a fairly difficult exercise that can take weeks or months for most meditation practioners to master.

But in the Buddha's time, all that was known about breathing was about its sensations and our impressions of them. Prior to the discipline of microbiology, all we knew about breathing was the animal understanding we had of its necessity, our limited control over it, and that if we stopped bad things happened. It's that centrality to our lives, and the sheer amount of brain structure turned over to managing the demands of our bodies' oxygen levels while at the same time letting us control it to swim and speak, that makes breathing exercises and meditating on breathing so effective.

When I meditate, I have to avoid the mantra "Know what the breath is" because if I do that my hyperactive brain goes down a rabbithole of biology and neurology, because breathing "is" all these extra things we understand now about the low-level processes.