#mike nugent

[dead-loch]

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

🤣

[randgugotur-6]

May 13, 1977

On this day 47 years ago Ted Nugent released his third album, “Cat Scratch Fever”. The album would peak at number seventeen on the Billboard chart and go on to sell over 3 million copies.

What are your favorite songs on this album?

[hauntedppgpaints]

Hottest Alternate on Each Team Poll Results!!

GOOOOOOOOOD EVENING HOCKEYBLR!

I've got the piping hot results of the poll I posted this week, served fresh and ready to be read! The final count was 623 votes!

TOP 10 ACROSS THE LEAGUE:

Leon Draisaitl, 537

Ryan O'Reilly, 521

Travis Konecny, 520

Claude Giroux, 519

Brendan Gallagher, 504

Nick Schmaltz, 496

Kris Letang & Victor Hedman, 464

Mark Scheifele, 461

Marcus Foligno, 445

Matthew Tkachuk, 443

BOTTOM 10 ACROSS THE LEAGUE:

Corey Perry, 7

John Carlson, 11

Jakob Silfverberg, 14

Lawson Crouse, 19

Sam Reinhart, 22

Jaden Schwartz, 28

Darnell Nurse, 29

Connor Murphy, 31

Cam Fowler, 37

Jonathan Huberdeau & MacKenzie Weegar , 40

Detailed tallies, pie charts, and fun facts are below the cut! Sorry about how the teams are paired together, there's a 30 image limit on posts :(

Ducks:

Adam Henrique, 338

Troy Terry, 130

Mason McTavish, 104

Cam Fowler, 37

Jakob Silfverberg, 14

Coyotes:

Nick Schmaltz, 496

Clayton Keller, 108

Lawson Crouse, 19

Bruins:

David Pastrnak, 398

Charlie McAvoy, 225

Sabres:

Rasmus Dahlin, 390

Zemgus Girgensons, 233

Flames:

Elias Lindholm, 300

Rasmus Andersson, 138

Chris Tanev, 105

Jonathan Huberdeau, 40

MacKenzie Weegar, 40

Hurricanes:

Sebastian Aho, 310

Jordan Martinook, 170

Jaccob Slavin, 143

Blackhawks:

Seth Jones, 268

Jason Dickinson, 173

Nick Foligno, 144

Connor Murphy, 31

Corey Perry, 7

Avalanche:

Mikko Rantanen, 292

Nathan MacKinnon, 231

Cale Makar, 100

Blue Jackets:

Zach Werenski, 376

Sean Kuraly, 182

Erik Gudbranson, 65

Stars:

Tyler Seguin, 426

Miro Heiskanen, 100

Joe Pavelski, 56

Esa Lindell, 41

Red Wings:

Ben Chiarot, 324

Andrew Copp, 199

David Perron, 100

Oilers:

Leon Draisaitl, 537

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, 57

Darnell Nurse, 29

Panthers:

Matthew Tkachuk, 443

Aaron Ekblad, 158

Sam Reinhart, 22

Kings:

Phillip Danault, 433

Drew Doughty, 190

Wild:

Marcus Foligno, 445

Kirill Kaprizov, 114

Joel Eriksson Ek, 64

Canadiens:

Brendan Gallagher, 504

Mike Matheson, 119

Predators:

Ryan O'Reilly, 521

Ryan McDonagh, 102

Devils:

Jack Hughes, 327

Erik Haula, 171

Ondrej Palat, 81

Jesper Bratt, 44

Islanders:

Cal Clutterbuck, 329

Scott Mayfield, 120

Brock Nelson, 105

Jean-Gabriel Pageau, 69

Rangers:

Mika Zibanejad, 240

Adam Fox, 207

Chris Kreider, 71

Artemi Panarin, 59

Barclay Goodrow, 46

Senators:

Claude Giroux, 519

Thomas Chabot, 104

Flyers:

Travis Konecny, 520

Scott Laughton, 103

Penguins:

Kris Letang, 464

Evgeni Malkin, 159

Sharks:

Luke Kunin, 288

Mario Ferraro, 188

Mikael Granlund, 88

Tomas Hertl, 59

Kraken:

Jordan Eberle, 258

Adam Larsson, 201

Yanni Gourde, 136

Jaden Schwartz, 28

Blues:

Colton Parayko, 225

Justin Faulk, 202

Robert Thomas, 196

Lightning:

Victor Hedman, 464

Nikita Kucherov, 159

Maple Leafs:

Mitch Marner, 310

Auston Matthews, 188

Morgan Rielly, 125

Canucks:

J. T. Miller, 407

Elias Pettersson, 216

Golden Knights:

William Karlsson, 235

Jonathan Marchessault, 168

Alex Pietrangelo, 118

Jack Eichel, 102

Capitals:

Tom Wilson, 289

T. J. Oshie, 240

Nicklas Backstrom, 83

John Carlson, 11

Jets:

Mark Scheifele, 461

Josh Morrissey, 162

[ireton]

Ted Nugent - The biggest scam since Barak Obama married his boyfriend Mike (Big Mike).

Ted Nugent is the poster child of a true PATRIOT.

[zepuckinghockey]

It's NHL wedding season! I'm aware of 10 NHLers who got married over the July 7-8, 2023 weekend as well as two related weddings. As best as I can, I've listed them out including as many verified player guests as I could find. Shoutout to the server for helping me ID a lot of generic looking faces. I've got some teams listed for context.

Feel free to let me know of people I've missed! This list has been edited on September 9th. I'm pretty sure wedding season is over, but feel free to message me with someone I missed.

June 16th, 2023 Weddings:

Kyle Clague - Sabres Notable Guests: Nolan Patrick

July 4th, 2023 Weddings:

Colin Blackwell - Hawks Notable Guests: Alex Kerfoot

July 6th, 2023 Weddings:

Tyler Bertuzzi - Red Wings Notable Guests: Michael Rasumussen, Zach Nastasiuk

July 7th, 2023 Weddings:

Alex Nedeljkovic - currently Penguins (previously Canes, Red Wings) Notable Attendees: Scott Wedgewood

Jordan Binnington - Blues Notable Attendees: Jordan Kyrou, Marco Scandella, Sammy Blais, Faulk, Perron, Logan Brown, Joshua Leivo, Vince Dunn, Robby Fabbri, Joel Edmundson, Robert Thomas, Oskar Sundqvist, Colton Parayko, Jake Walman

July 8th, 2023 Weddings:

Tyson Barrie - currently on the Preds (previously: Oilers, Leafs, Avs) Notable Attendees: everyone. Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Mitch Marner, Zach Hyman, Connor McDavid, Alex Kerfoot, John Tavares, Jack Campbell, Justin Holl, Evander Kane, Darnell Nurse, Mike Smith, Bayne Pettinger, Tyler Ennis, Colin Wilson, Michael Hutchinson, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Cody Ceci, Evan Bouchard, Luke Schenn, Devin Shore, Gabe Landeskog

Vinni Lettieri - currently on the Wild (previously Ducks) Notable Attendees: Trevor Zegras, Jake Bischoff, Tony DeAngelo, Jimmy Vesey, Kevin Hayes, Brady Skjei, Kevin Shattenkirk, John Gibson, Zach Bogosian, Sam Carrick, Jake Gardiner, James van Riemsdyk

Sam Reinhart - currently on the Panthers (previously Sabres) Notable Attendees: Mason Marchment, Brandon Montour, Owen Tippett

Chandler Stephenson - currently on the Knights (previously Caps) Notable Attendees: Will Carrier, Reilley Smith, Mark Stone, Cody Eakin, Jack Eichel, Alex Tuch

Sam Girard - currently on the Avs (previously Preds) Notable Attendees: Nicolas Aube-Kubel, Ryan Graves

Dylan Gambrell - currently on the Leafs (previously Sharks, Sens) Notable Attendees: Mathieu Joseph, Austin Watson (thanks anon!)

Gustav Forsling - currently on the Panthers Notable Attendees: Alex Wennberg, Marcus Hogberg, Patric Hornquist, Lucas Carlsson, Erik Gustafsson

Tyler Motte - (Rangers, Blue Jackets, Blackhawks, Senators, Canucks) Notable Attendees: Brock Boesser

Brett Richie - (Yotes, Flames)

Emerance Maschmeyer & Genevieve Lacasse - WoHo Olympic gold medalists Notable Attendees: Sarah Nurse, Erin Ambrose, Laura Stacey, Marie-Philip Poulin, Haley Irwin, just like all the big woho names

Dominik Tiffels - German hockey player Notable Attendees: Leon Draisaitl

Frankie Borrelli - Barstool Sports and Fore Play Golf Notable Attendees: Brock Nelson, Matt Martin, Adam Pelech, Scott Mayfield, Josh Bailey - info thanks to @barzyblogbabe

Morgan Reilly - Leafs Notable Attendees: his wife Tessa Virtue

July 13th, 2023 Weddings:

Dryden Hunt - Rangers Notable Guests: Kyle Burroughs

July 15th, 2023 Weddings:

Tyler Seguin - Stars (Bruins) Notable Guests: Jamie Benn, John Klingberg, Scott Wedgewood, Jesse Blacker, Mason Marchment, Ty Dellandrea, Justin Dowling

Luke Kunin - (Sharks, Wild) Notable Attendees: Colton Sissons, Matthew Tkachuk, Brady Tkachuk, (Taryn Tkachuk)

AJ Greer - Bruins (Avs, Devils) Notable Attendees: Scott Kosmachuk

Andy Andreoff - (Kings, Flyers, Islanders) Notable Attendees: Sean Couturier, Scott Laughton, Shayne Gostibehere, Erik Gudbranson, Milan Lucic

Juuso Valimaki - Coyotes

July 16, 2023 Weddings:

Kevin Hayes - Blues (Flyers, Rangers, Jets) Notable Attendees: Johnny Gaudreau, Tony DeAngelo, Brady Skjei, Jimmy Vesey

July 20th, 2023 Weddings:

Lawson Crouse - Coyotes Notable Attendees: Phil Kessel, Shayne Gostibehere, Liam O'Brien, Nick Schmaltz, Darcy Kuemper, Taylor Hall, Jacob Bryson, Travis Konecny

July 21st, 2023 Weddings:

Nicolas Aube-Kubel - Caps (Avs) Notable Attendees: Anthony Mantha, Julien Gauthier

Brady Tkachuk - Sens Notable Attendees: Matthew Tkachuk, Josh Norris, Thomas Chabot, Mark Stone, Mathieu Joseph, Luke Kunin, Christian Fischer, Ryan Donato, Robert Thomas, Alex Debrincat, Cam Talbot, Nick Holden, Quinn Hughes, Jack Hughes, Luke Hughes, Jake Sanderson, Shane Pinto, Dylan Gambrell, Colin White, Jacob Chychrun, Kevin Hayes

Juuse Saros - Predators Notable Attendees: Eeli Tolvanen, Kevin Lankinen

Tanner Jeannot - Lightning Notable Attendees: Brett Howden, Noah Gregor, Jayden Halbgewachs, Jeremy Lauzon, Alex Carrier

July 22nd, 2023 Weddings:

Alex Kerfoot - Coyotes (Maple Leafs) Notable Attendees: Justin Holl, Colin Blackwell, John Tavares, Morgan Reilly, Michael Bunting, Mitch Marner, Jake Muzzin

Nick Paul - Lightning (Senators) Notable Attendees: Chris Driedger, Drake Batherson, Thomas Chabot, Anthony Cirelli, Alex Killorn

Keith Kinkaid - (Devils, Canadiens, Rangers, Bruins, Avs)

July 24th, 2023 Weddings:

Anthony Mantha - Capitals Notable Guests: Nicholas Aube-Kubel, Julien Gauthier, Nick Jensen, Jonathan Benier

July 27th, 2023 Weddings:

Pavel Zacha - Bruins (Devils) Notable Attendees: Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt

July 28th, 2023 Weddings:

Karson Kuhlman - Islanders (Kraken, Jets) Notable Guests: Kasimir Kaskiskuo

July 29th, 2023 Weddings:

Connor Murphy - Blackhawks (Coyotes) Notable Attendees: Sean Kuraly, Anthony Duclair, Dylan Strome, Jonathan Toews, Alex Debrincat, Taylor Raddysh, Mackenzie Entwistle, Brandon Hagel

Mitch Marner - Leafs Notable Attendees: Best Boy Zeus 🐶, Matt Martin, James Van Riemsdyk, Jake Gardiner, Tyler Bozak, Connor Brown, Justin Holl, Nazem Kadri, Willy Nylander, Zach Bogosian, Kyle Clifford, Jake Muzzin, Auston Matthews, Alex Kerfoot, Michael Bunting, Freddie Anderson, Rasmus Sandin, Morgan Reilly, Tyson Barrie, Connor Carrick, Joe Thorton, Patrick Marleau, Zach Hyman, Jack Campbell, TJ Brodie, Tyler Ennis, John Tavares, Timothy Liljegren

Ethan Bear - Canucks (Oilers, Hurricanes) Notable Attendees: Mat Barzal, Caleb Jones, Jujhar Khaira, Riley Stillman, Thatcher Demko, Austin Strand

Boone Jenner - Blue Jackets Notable Attendees: Zach Werenski, Seth Jones, Nick Blankenburg, Cole Sillinger, David Savard, Andrew Peeke, Scott Laughton, Elvis Merzlikins, Erik Gubranson

July 30th, 2023 Weddings:

Ryan Donato - Blackhawks (Kraken, Bruins) Notable Attendees: Jared McCann, Yanni Gourde, Matty Beniers, Adam Fox

August 3rd, 2023 Weddings:

Kevin Lankinen - Predators Notable Guests: Eeli Tolvanen

August 4th, 2023 Weddings:

Taylor Raddysh - Blackhawks (Lightning) Notable Guests: Dylan Strome, Connor Murphy, Anthony Cirelli

Kevin Hayes (2.0) - still Blues (Flyers, Rangers, Jets) Notable Guests: Keith Yandle, Scott Laughton, Shayne Gostibhere, Travis Sanheim, James van Riemsdyk, Brady Tkachuk, Matthew Tkachuk, Johnny Gaudreau, JT Miller, Zach Sanford, Tony DeAngelo, Brian Dumoulin, Brady Skjei, Paul Carey

August 5th, 2023 Weddings:

Conor Garland - Canucks (Coyotes) Notable Guests: Ryan Donato, Jakob Chychrun, Clayton Keller

Brendan Dillon - Jets (Capitals) Notable Guests: Tom Wilson, TJ Oshie, Jordie Benn, Jamie Benn, Trevor van Riemsdyke, Nic Dowd, Nick Jensen

Charlie McAvoy - Bruins Notable Guests: Hampus Lindholm, AJ Greer, Connor Clifton, Noel Acciari, Taylor Hall, Conor Sheary, Brad Marchand, Jake Debrusk, Matt Gryzeleyk, Derek Forbort, Brandon Carlo, David Krejci, Tuukka Rask, Jeremy Swayman, Charlie Coyle, Krug Torey, Matthew Tkachuk, Casey Fitzgerald, Colin White, Patrice Bergeron

Austin Watson - Senators Notable Guests: Cam Talbot, Anton Forsberg, Jarred Tinordi, Nick Paul, DJ Smith, Dylan Gambrell, Nick Holden, Thomas Chabot

Gage Quinney - Knights Notable Guests: Zach Whitecloud, Nicolas Roy, Jake Bischoff

Micke Rosell - player agent Notable Guests: William Nylander, Alex Nylander, Sam Ersson, Marcus Bjork

Joonas Johansson - Avs

August 6th, 2023 Weddings:

Dylan Larkin - Red Wings Notable Guests: Sam Gagner, Tyler Bertuzzi, Trevor Zegras, Kyle Connor, Troy Stecher, Marc Staal, Jeff Petry, Darren Helm, Zach Werenski, Mitchell Stephens, Riley Sheahan, Cole Caufield, Jack Hughes

August 11th, 2023 Weddings:

Shea Theodore - Knights Notable Guests: Ryan Reaves, Marc-Andre Fleury, Nick Holden, Mark Stone, Chandler Stephenson, Alex Tuch, Dylan Strome, Erik Haula, Jaycob Megna, Will Carrier, Jack Eichel, Alex Pietrangelo

Ryan Hartman - Wild Notable Guests: Matt Dumba, Marcus Foligno, Jared Spurgeon, Cam Talbot, Kirill Kaprizov, Jordan Greenway, Jon Merrill, Alex Goligoski, Jake Middleton, Mason Shaw, Calen Addison, Nick Schmalt, Matthew Boldy, Brandon Duhaime, Connor Dewar, Luke Kunin

August 12th, 2023 Weddings:

Chris Kreider - Rangers Notable Guests: Mika Zibanejad

[jungle-angel]

Random Sentry Headcannons That Have Been Brewing in The Cauldron Of My Brain (Robert Reynolds/Sentry x Reader)

Tagging: @floydsmuse @withahappyrefrain @callmemana

Warnings : SMUT!!!!! Ya'll know the rules for this, minors will be yeeted from the treehouse!!!!

When you first met Robert Reynolds, it was totally not what you expected

You and a friend were out for drinks one night and some pervert started hitting on you. It got out of hand really fast but stopped the minute you saw two guys walk up from the other end of the bar and surrounded him

Robert very gently guided you away and left Steve Rogers to deal with him. Turns out Steve was more than eager to deal with him since he had been hitting on Beth, Steve's girlfriend who worked at the local Starbucks up the street. Steve may be very calm, cool and collected but damn if the Fighting Irish ain't strong with this one

You got to talking to Robert after Steve had dealt with the pervy creep (turns out two of his buddies in the NYPD were off duty and saw the whole thing and arrested the idiot thereafter). Robert had it pretty rough before he had joined the Avengers

Finding his niche in the group hadn't been easy either. It took Tony, Thor, Bruce and Steve at least three tries to convince Robert to stay with everybody in Avengers Tower

You couldn't stop smiling when Robert asked for your number and the way his face turned red

The first time he called was when you got off work. You two must have talked on the phone for a good two and a half hours

Your first date was spent at the local movie theater which was doing a reshowing of all those cheesy 80s fantasy movies. You guys kept making dirty jokes about the snacks and popcorn

Which led to you two annoying the hell out of an obnoxious, entitled couple in the row in front of you. Robert stuck the big chug of soda you two had been sharing between his legs and it looked like you were giving him a blowjob complete with slurpy noises and everything

Needless to say after the second date which included an awesome dinner at one of the local places, you and Robert were.......shall we say......becoming well acquainted with each other 🤭🤭🤭🤭

Oh yeah, you guys were waiting for a ride back to Avengers Tower and started making out on the side of the building. Robert started sucking and biting at your neck, making you moan and not giving a single shit as to who saw, even as he pinned you against the wall. The ride never showed by the time you were done but Robert had a much better idea

He picked you up bridal style and literally flew you back to the tower

But when he got you in his bedroom there?? BOW CHICKA WOW WOW!!!!!!

Robert LOVES to fuck you so, so slowly. He loves hearing you moan and the feeling of sliding his cock in and out of you

He's packin too!!! You caught him dancin in his shorts in front of the mirror the morning after and you were all 👀👀👀👀

You and Robert have had a "sex off" with everybody and their wives/girlfriends because they were bein too loud on the other side of the wall

During said sex-off, serious shenangians ensued. Both Thor and Jane and Bruce and Betty almost punched holes in the wall from how hard they were goin at it. That was also the first time you guys heard Steve drop an F-Bomb, after he and Beth had accidentally rolled off the bed. Carol Danvers and Mike Rossi however, was due to Goose the cat, thinking that Mike was attacking his owner. You and Robert will literally ask F.R.I.D.A.Y to play "Cat Scratch Fever" by Ted Nugent every time he walks into the room.

You moved into Avengers Tower after you and Robert decided that living together was the best thing for you both

And because he had grown to love you so, so deeply

Your gentle little touches and kisses meant everything to him. He craved them so badly during the day and when you would get home from work, he'd kiss you to the point where he'd be in tears

So one night after about a year and a half of dating, Robert took you to a little spot on Bow Bridge in Central Park. The leaves had already started falling and it was a chilly autumn evening

You absolutely cried when you saw the ring and he popped the question. Thor and Jane had done some summer traveling back to Asgard and he personally asked the dwarves to make the ring. It was a silver and diamond replica of Galadriel's ring from Lord Of The Rings and the diamonds looked like a flower but it glowed whenever Robert was nearby

You guys got married that summer with everybody in attendance. Carol, Jane, Natasha, Betty, Beth, Pepper, Wanda and Laura Barton were all your bridesmaids and even little Miss Morgan Stark took her role as your flower girl very, very seriously

Tony let you guys have full run of the Malibu house and you and Robert made sure that you thoroughly christened the house. You even left a note for Tony that said "sorry we fucked in the pool last night"

You and Robert have had your days, both good and bad together

But for the most part your married life has been peaceful and happy

A common saying in Avengers Tower, "never saw one without the other did you?"

And for the most part it's true

[beardedmrbean]

Hmm I was watching this video https://youtu.be/DHF8LdiFhW8?si=U3QcuoufihSLEONt

And in the comments they pointed out that parents of the 50’s were children on the Great Depression. Which got me thinking

As you know a lot of people who came from poverty goes crazy when they get famous or successful. The…black community is like that as we can barely comprehend so much wealth at once. Not all as many are slick enough to start their own record labels, clothing, etc.

But that comment got me thinking about the great generation. I can only imagine how crazy they went with the fact they grew up in the Great Depression and then boom the USA is on top of the world. Then they sent their kids to college who got brained that Kinsey studies was good for society.

Yes I know the previous generations prior to boomers had libidos, I mean look at Walt’s and his colleagues/competitors works when the female body got more defined in cartoons.

But we really need to look into the boomers upbringings and their parents prior to prevent another one.

I wish this was the stawman it looks like but I've seen this all before on here.

Wonder if they'd be terribly shocked at how much "GAY" was ignored in the 50's and beyond.

Couple of teachers at the Christian (ND but Pentecostal run) school I went to, ladies that had a duplex they rented next to each other and always had neither one married or dated that anyone knew of and they were just "really good friends" and had been forever. Both taught 5th grade too.

Didn't even click for me what was likely going on till I was in my 20's and they drifted into my head for some reason, but ya that was in the 80's that was going on.

The arguments about divorce and women not having their own bank accounts honestly hold a lot more water.

The…black community is like that as we can barely comprehend so much wealth at once. Not all as many are slick enough to start their own record labels, clothing, etc.

Herb from "Peaches and Herb" was working well here

"Once again, Fame returned to law enforcement and joined the U.S. Marshals Service in 1986 as a deputized court security officer at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims."

Big part of that I think was him getting shafted on royalties, but initial payouts still should have kept him comfortably middle class for life after the 3rd peaches.

Then we have MC Hammer and Mike Tyson, though being shit with handling money and the fame that comes with it isn't exclusive to any one group regardless of the demographic they're in.

Thankfully the lawyers and accountants are getting better at convincing people to knock it the fuck off so we don't wind up with.

To be fair to Willie his accountants had screwed him and there were some bad investments, oversight of accountants is also part of the bit above this with the getting them to knock it the fuck off part.

Ted Nugent ran into similar, but the accountants had made some really bad investments instead of just flat out not paying his taxes for years.

But ya guys like Dre, Jay Z, Beyonce, and Rhianna from that end of the spectrum have done very well, Michael Jackson for all his eccentricity made some great investments that should be enough to keep his grandkids doing wonderfully even. (as long as they still have half the Beatles catalouge at least)

As for libidos, we been horny since the dawn of horns it got played down some round WW1 or so and people started to reset their memories, there's some nasty stuff out there from the Victorian to Edwardian ages.

[buffyfan145]

So I saw some AEW/ROH fans getting confused about how Kevin Von Erich's sons are not using Rush's "Tom Sawyer" as their entrance music but they actually are using their dad's solo music as he used Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold" for his solo matches. Each of the Von Erich brothers had different solo music expect Kerry as he still used "Tom Sawyer" (though his first was "Call Me" by Blondie) but they all used that one when they wrestled as a tag team. You can hear their music in some YT videos that fans have uploaded, as on Peacock they aren't allowed to since they didn't have the copyright approval back then. David's solo music was first "Fire and Ice" by Pat Benatar then "La Grange" by ZZ Top, Mike's was "Warriors" by Thin Lizzy, and even the fake "cousin" Lance used "Hurts so Good" by John Mellencamp and "Tough Enough" by the Fabolous Thunderbirds. Couldn't find Chris' music though but he didn't wrestle that much. Really great choices though not just them but the other WCCW wrestlers, similar to how the WWE wrestlers used actual songs back in the early 80s too before getting custom made ones by the 90s. Though I'm happy now it's much easier for wrestlers to use whatever music they want now too again as it makes it even more fun as a fan.

[sergeifyodorov]

if mo punched their GOALIE ? we would get a LINE BRAWL

i think this is like... specifically an Event tbh. like... okay, it's 2018. january, some western league guy their age is a calder favourite. oilers and leafs playing each other for the first time this season, mcdavid's won his first hart. willy does one of his classic Willy Rushes and stops right next to mike smith, a notoriously foul-tempered bastard -- in our universe, mike smith won't become an oiler for another few years. in this one, they trade for him now. it is one of their better decisions (that, as oiler decisions often are, will become worse later.)

smith hisses something at willy that makes him clench his jaw and skate away. he is composed. he is trying to be composed.

you see, up until now, the oilers and leafs have been civil. not very civil, but civil -- an extra slashing or roughing call a game, an extra couple of chirps, an uptick in hits, but it's two games a year so people don't notice. but the players do. and the players all know why.

(or, a select few of them know why. ryan nugent-hopkins asks to take faceoffs against stromer whenever he can. connor cannot tell him how much this both helps and hurts.)

the leafs get a power play soon, nothing too spectacular. offensive zone trip, not malicious, they just happen. bit of a dive from naz, but that's kind of his specialty. the power play is different, though, the leafs' clean, almost too-perfect setup made a mess by the oilers' pkers, and the leafs play harder and harder until all nine skaters and smith end up in the crease. mike gives willy a shove, a gentle movement out of the crease

(--slightly less than gentle, but this is hockey--)

and morgan, who will not abide, just snaps. goes for him. he's been patient, he thinks, in the split second between his glove coming off his hand and his hand connecting with smith's unmasked, unprotected cheek. he's waited to see if the guys will let this calm down on their own, but it is left to rot and there is nothing we can do but turn the log over and expose what is underneath.

the line brawl lasts twenty minutes. morgan is suspended, clay keller loses a fang. there's an image, almost famous, of leon, the sole face turned towards the camera as oilers and leafs alike surround the net, with his lip split and a perfect, blood-red stream bisecting his chin, dripping onto his jersey. there is another smear of blood on his forehead. it is obviously not his.

[randgugotur-6]

July 1, 1978

On this day 46 years ago the first Texxas Jam was held in Dallas, Tx and included Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Heart, Journey, Van Halen and others. The Aerosmith performance would be released on home video in 1989.

If you could go back in time which one performance would you want to see from that day in person?

[dustedmagazine]

Liam Grant — Amoskeag (Carbon/Feeding Tube)

The dedication on the back of Amoskeag reads, “For those who can no longer tell the old stories.” It suggests an attitude towards the past that manifests on each of the album’s six tunes. If Liam Grant had something to say about mid-20th century literary criticism, he might suggest that you take your copy of The Anxiety Of Influence and use it to stop a door that needs to stay open. He’s not paralyzed by the notion that all of the good ideas have already been stated. No, works of the past animate him, and he’s keen to return them the favor.

Amoskeag offers raga-inspired fantasias and old time-steeped invitations to kick up your hoofs, balancing winding reverie with convivial celebration. Which is not to say that Grant is a strict revivalist. Admittedly, Grant’s antecedents are easy to name. If you have spent some time tuned into the Takoma School guitar resurgence of the aughts, you’ll know that he’s working with a tumbler full of Jack Rose poured over the rocks of Glenn Jones, with some of their inspirations and successors stirred in to make a brew that is pungent, familiar and satisfying. The opener, “Stratton-Eustis,” has the same light out for parts unknown vibe as “Cross The North Fork,” and “Last Night On Dead River” sounds like a half-remembered rendition of “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” laid over “Sundogs.”

Not only does Amoskeag echo the sounds that Jack Rose drew from wood and wire, half the LP features the playing of Mike Gangloff, who played with Rose in Pelt and Black Twig Pickers. But Rose is over a decade gone, and there’s still a big hole that needs filling, so if Grant does that job for a while, let’s just say that he does a good job. And since he’s in his early 20s, it’s possible that the what he sounds like now is not where he’ll end up; consider how far Cian Nugent and Daniel Bachman have traveled from their first efforts. He might find some more personal stories of his own to add to the ones he recounts so well.

Bill Meyer

[mariacallous]

For nearly thirty years, whenever gun-rights activists have reached for data to defend their arguments, they’ve cited the work of the economist John R. Lott, Jr., who has argued that guns make Americans safer and that restrictions put them at risk. “He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true,” Mike Spies details in a riveting and rigorously researched story, published in partnership with The Trace. “But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.” That influence has extended far beyond supplying talking points to the likes of Senator Ted Cruz or the pro-gun musician Ted Nugent: last year, when a federal-court judge overturned California’s ban on semi-automatic AR-style rifles, he referred specifically to sworn testimony offered by Lott, who said that there was no credible evidence that such bans “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.” Through meticulous reporting, Spies examines the dangerous flaws in Lott’s research and reveals just how intertwined his arguments have become with those of the pro-gun lobby.

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.

In 1957, the small-arms manufacturer Armalite created the AR-15—short for Armalite Rifle—at the invitation of the U.S. Army, which was seeking an effective lightweight combat weapon. When the Department of Defense reviewed a version of the rifle in 1962, during the early stages of the Vietnam War, its report stated that the gun’s “lethality” and “reliability” were “particularly impressive.” From forty-nine feet away, it noted, an Army Ranger fired a round into a Vietcong soldier’s head and “took it completely off.”

In recent years, gun companies have aggressively marketed semi-automatic AR-style rifles to civilians. Manufacturers now produce as many as two and a half million such firearms per year, and they routinely show up in the country’s deadliest and most horrifying acts of mass violence, such as the rampages that occurred, less than two weeks apart, in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in May.

Last year, a federal court addressed the question of whether California could ban such guns. The state was one of eight, along with the District of Columbia, that had a prohibition in place. Multiple plaintiffs, including a handful of gun-rights groups, argued that the California statute was useless, relying on the statistical expertise of an economist named John R. Lott, Jr. Lott, who is sixty-four, with wispy gray hair, authoritatively delivers blizzards of empirical conclusions in an unthreatening Midwestern monotone. In a sworn statement to the court, Lott summarized his research on assault-weapon bans, writing that there is “no credible evidence” that such laws “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.”

After a brief bench trial, the judge reached his decision in June, 2021. He overturned California’s ban, and quoted Lott’s assessment verbatim. Afterward, Lott published an op-ed in The Hill. The ruling “primarily concentrated on public safety,” he wrote, and “the judge relied on my research.”

For almost thirty years, Lott, who has a doctorate in economics from U.C.L.A., has provided the empirical backbone for the gun-rights movement. Virtually every statistical argument against regulation—made by lobbyists, Republican lawmakers, and National Rifle Association members alike—is based on his research, which reaches two conclusions: guns make Americans safer, and gun restrictions place them in danger. He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true. But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.

Lott’s first and most famous book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, one of the country’s most prestigious academic publishers. The book has been republished multiple times, and offers one seemingly irrefutable statistic after another. It specifies that when states relaxed laws restricting the concealed carrying of handguns, counties saw a roughly eight-per-cent drop in murders, a five-per-cent reduction in rapes, and a seven-per-cent decrease in aggravated assaults. The text is the basis for arguments blaming “gun-free zones” for mass shootings, and the notion, popularized by the N.R.A., that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. “Overall,” Lott writes, “my conclusion is that criminals as a group tend to behave rationally—when crime becomes more difficult, less crime is committed.”

Eight books have followed “More Guns, Less Crime,” including “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” and “Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, the Media, and Botched ‘Studies’ Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control.” Lott has also produced a steady stream of scholarly articles published in academic periodicals, along with op-eds that appear in regional newspapers and the Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has had appointments at Ivy League schools, and his work is touted by leading Republican politicians, including Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. “What makes him so invaluable,” Cruz has written of Lott, “is his ability to go beyond philosophical arguments and to engage opponents of gun ownership on the facts.”

Lott’s findings and methods have generated scathing criticism from prominent academics, who have questioned his veracity and exposed flaws in his work. But the critiques have not diminished his stature. Instead, they have fed the conspiracy-oriented mentality of the gun-rights movement. In the eyes of its adherents, and in the messaging of the gun lobby and trade groups, attempts to discredit Lott are really attempts to suppress the truth.

In 2013, Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit to support his research. He takes pains to stress his and the organization’s independence. In his statement in the California case, Lott wrote that the C.P.R.C. “does not accept donations from gun ammunition makers or organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) or any other organizations involved in the gun control debate on either side of the issue.” The same language also appears in his books, on his Web site, and in other legal filings.

Yet Lott is a mainstay at the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, where he typically conducts multiple seminars on his research and hosts a table on the tradeshow floor. In 2015, during the group’s convention in Nashville, Tennessee, he held one of the C.P.R.C.’s first fund-raisers at a hotel around the corner. One of the speakers, a conservative celebrity author and radio host named Dana Loesch, would soon be a face of the N.R.A., alongside its leader, Wayne LaPierre. At the C.P.R.C. fund-raiser, she said, of Lott, “We don’t have anybody else on our side that does what he does.”

Lott did not grow up in a family with a fondness for guns. “I know my grandparents and stuff would be shocked to see how my research has changed my views over time,” he said in a deposition taken during the California case. Lott was born in Detroit, and his family later moved to Florida, where he attended a Catholic high school. His mother and father were churchgoers, and he was close to his maternal grandparents, who were Democrats. Lott now owns two shotguns, a semi-automatic rifle, and two semi-automatic handguns—a Smith & Wesson M&P .40-calibre, and a Ruger 9-millimetre. He has a concealed-handgun permit because, he has said, “I didn’t think that it was proper for me to go and be telling people about these benefits if I didn’t actually kind of walk the walk myself on it.”

Lott received his bachelor’s degree in economics from U.C.L.A. in 1980, and then spent another four years at the school earning his master’s and Ph.D. in the same subject. According to a former classmate, Jon Karpoff, Lott did not stand out in “unusual or unique ways” at U.C.L.A.

Starting in 1988, Lott served for eighteen months as the chief economist on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which helped inform his views on firearms restrictions. During his deposition, he claimed that the “very people that supply illegal drugs are the same ones that sell illegal guns,” and if the U.S. can’t stop the flow of drugs, then prohibiting firearms would be useless, too. When asked if he had an empirical basis for his assessment, he said that, at the commission, he read through “hundreds of cases,” and was “convinced” that “these guys not only have weapons but they’re entrepreneurs.”

“Would you present yourself as an expert in criminology?” Lott was asked at one point.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Lott—who has never been granted tenure at a university—returned to U.C.L.A. for another temporary teaching appointment before being hired, in 1991, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. He kept in touch with Karpoff, who was at the University of Washington, and in 1993 the two co-authored a paper on corporate fraud. “He really was one of the best economists that I knew,” Karpoff said. “He was very thorough, creative in how to test—genuinely test—rather than just seek to confirm ideas.”

Lott says that he was teaching a class on white-collar crime at Wharton when his students asked him if he might turn his attention to gun policy. He agreed, and began to “read through a number of papers,” Lott said in his deposition. “And I would have to say I was pretty shocked how poorly done the existing research was.”

In 1994, Lott arrived at the University of Chicago, where he eventually became a fellow at the law school. The country was in the early stages of a significant shift. Historically, local and state authorities decided whether to issue permits to people who wanted to carry concealed handguns. But between 1987 and 1991, eight states had enacted “shall-issue” laws that allowed applicants who could legally purchase a firearm to automatically receive a concealed-carry license, as long as they paid a fee and completed a rudimentary training course. Lott and a doctoral student named David Mustard, who is now an economics professor at the University of Georgia, collected and analyzed fifteen years of data from some three thousand counties. In January, 1997, they published their findings in the Journal of Legal Studies, concluding that the new laws had caused violent crime to drop precipitously in the states that adopted them. The study provided the empirical support for the “shall-issue” statute—and justified its continued expansion to other states.

The study was extensively covered in the media, and featured in a congressional hearing on guns. Within a year, multiple statehouses held debates on concealed-carry permits, with Lott serving as the lead witness in four of them. But scientists soon challenged his conclusions. One paper, published in the American Journal of Public Health, warned that “the flaws” in Lott’s article were “so substantial, and the findings so at odds with criminological theory and research, that any conclusions about the effects of “shall-issue” laws based on this study are dubious at best.” David Hemenway, ​​an economist and a professor of health policy at Harvard University, said that Lott’s paper “created a cottage industry of scholars analyzing the same data sources and largely refuting” its results.

The next year, Lott published “More Guns, Less Crime.” The Wall Street Journal called the book “compelling,” and said it was filled “with enough hard evidence that even politicians may have to stop and pay attention.”

In the beginning of 1999, Otis Dudley Duncan, who is regarded as one of history’s most important quantitative sociologists, wrote the first of a number of letters to Lott. He was especially skeptical of a sentence in Lott’s book that stated, “If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” Lott had not specified which surveys, but, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published around the time of the book, he attributed the figure to polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates. The number, he wrote, was a percentage of the “at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year.”

Duncan determined that Lott’s assertion was simply wrong. In May, Duncan informed Lott he was writing an article about what he would call the “rogue number,” and later that month sent him a draft. One sentence summarized his assessment: “The ‘98 percent’ is either a figment of Lott’s imagination or an artifact of careless computation or proofreading.”

Tallies of defensive gun use are inherently problematic. They depend on surveys that rely on a respondent’s memory and perception of threat, as well as one’s willingness to tell the truth, all of which can be influenced by politics, world view, and other biases. The Department of Justice attempts to track defensive gun uses through a twice-yearly survey that tries to mitigate some of the issues. For instance, participants only answer questions about self-defense if they first state that they were a victim of a certain crime, such as burglary or larceny. As a result, the government finds that there are around seventy thousand defensive gun uses per year, making them much rarer events.

The government’s figures seemed to undermine Lott’s argument. If Americans were rarely using a firearm to protect themselves from criminal acts, how could more guns equal less crime? And if Lott’s surveys really did present a more accurate picture, why were such incidents so seldom documented? Lott said that “brandishing” addressed both questions. “The media understandably play up graphic gun attacks by outlaws,” he explained in The American Enterprise. “They can’t easily show us the vastly more common cases—numbering in the hundreds of thousands to millions each year—where law-abiding citizens brandish a gun and cause criminals to flee.”

After Lott received a draft of Duncan’s article, he sent him a letter. He now said that the brandishing number was based not on the polling data but “upon survey evidence that I have put together involving a large nationwide telephone survey conducted over a three month period during 1997.”

In the second edition of his book, published in 2000, Lott attributed the brandishing claim to this three-month study. That year, in a piece for The Criminologist, Duncan had laid out his concerns. Lott, who was now in a temporary research position at Yale, responded in the same journal, providing some new specifics and an explanation for the confusion. “The survey that I oversaw interviewed 2,424 people from across the United States,” he said. “I had planned on including a discussion of it in my book, but did not do so because an unfortunate computer crash lost my hard disk right before the final draft of the book had to be turned in.”

In September, 2002, James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University who has a Ph.D. in quantitative sociology, offered to examine the matter. Lott told Lindgren that the calls for the survey were made by University of Chicago undergraduates, who volunteered for the work and used their own phones. Lott did not have phone records, but the students could confirm whether the survey was conducted in the first place. When Lindgren asked for the students’ names, however, Lott said that he did not remember. Later, he explained that he was “horrible at names.” Lindgren told me, “After all these years, no one has come forward to say they worked on the survey.” Two people, however, claim that they were respondents; one of these, David Gross, is a former N.R.A. board member.

Lindgren also harbored grave doubts about the math. Lott’s figures, Lindgren noted in a report, implied that twenty-five or twenty-six survey respondents had reported defensive gun uses. Lott had said that of the two per cent of respondents who had fired their weapons, three-quarters dispatched warning shots, while only a quarter attempted to hit another person. “If these figures were accurate,” Lindgren explained, “only 1/2 of a person (2% of 25 people) reported firing a gun—and that 1/2 of a person breaks down further into 3/8 of a person firing warning shots and 1/8 of a person firing at someone.” Lott said that he had “always acknowledged” that the samples were small.

In September, 2001, Lott became a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C, where he worked on a new book, titled “The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong.” When it came out, in 2003, it included details of a follow-up survey on defensive gun use, with results that more or less aligned with his earlier conclusions. This time around, the numbers indicated that “brandishing a gun stops crimes 95 percent of the time.”

To prove that the survey was real, Lott made his data publicly available. But the figures showed that there were only a thousand and fifteen respondents, and reported thirteen incidents of self-defense gun use, only one of which involved firing a weapon. David Hemenway, the Harvard economist, wrote at the time that the survey was “not nearly large enough to provide precise estimates of the percentage of self-defense gun users who merely brandish a firearm.” For another thing, the thirteen defensive episodes were confined to just seven people; four of these said that they used their firearm twice, and a fifth person claimed to have used it three times. In his own surveys on defensive gun use, Hemenway had asked participants to tell the story of what transpired when they used a firearm for self-protection. The respondents often described using their guns in an aggressive manner. “It turned out they were actually using their guns illegally,” Hemenway told me.

Lott’s emphasis on brandishing has not diminished. In a recent interview, he said, “People have the perception” that guns are not used in self-defense. Lott suggested that the media ignore such stories. “So you’re missing almost all the cases that are out there.”

On February 1, 2003, the day “The Bias Against Guns” was published, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics.” A staffer at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, had become suspicious of Mary Rosh, a woman who regularly showed up on Web sites to defend Lott from his critics. In one post, she described herself as one of his former Ph.D. students at Wharton, and said he was “the best professor that I ever had.” She added, “There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught.” Rosh even explained why it made sense for her to carry a gun. “If a woman is being attacked by a 200 pound man, is she just supposed to wait until the police arrive?” she asked. “I am 114 lbs. and 5’6”. What should I do in that situation?”

The Cato staffer tracked Rosh’s I.P. address to Lott, who admitted that he was behind it. “I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” he told the Post.

In the California deposition, Lott said the purpose of the pseudonym was to “keep people from being obnoxious and threatening.” Lott also contended that he was not the sole author of Rosh’s comments. One relative had “begged” him to “protect them from the firestorm that was occurring at the time.”

The episode damaged Lott’s reputation, which was further harmed in 2005, when the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released a book-length report called “Firearms and Violence.” One chapter assessed Lott’s finding that relaxing concealed-carry laws had caused a decrease in crime. The N.R.C. had tried to replicate Lott’s model, concluding that “it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link” between the two events.

By that point, Lott’s research had been influencing legislation for nearly a decade; a majority of states now had “shall-issue” laws, a number that would grow to nearly forty by the following year.

For half a decade, Lott was confined to the margins. He briefly held a teaching position at Binghamton University, and then spent two years as a researcher at the University of Maryland, his last stint at an academic institution. He wrote for the Washington Times and Fox News’ Web site.

In 2012, a national tragedy presented a new opportunity. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed watchman in a Florida neighborhood, stalked and then fatally shot an unarmed Black teen-ager named Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was not arrested for weeks, a delay that drew attention to the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows citizens who fear for their lives to use deadly force anywhere they have a right to be. (In 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder.)

The following year, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on Stand Your Ground laws. The model statute, created by an N.R.A. lobbyist, was less than a decade old, and until Martin’s death few Americans were familiar with it. Lott was called to serve as an expert witness. “These laws help allow individuals to defend themselves,” Lott told the lawmakers. “This is particularly important in high-crime areas.” He went on, “In the third edition of my book ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ I provided the first published peer-reviewed study examining Stand Your Ground laws using national data. I found that they lowered murder rates by about nine per cent and that overall violent crime rates also declined.”

Lott’s prepared testimony was not subjected to deep scrutiny. It contained footnotes, and the one concerning Lott’s study simply cited the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime,” without any page numbers. But the book does not mention Stand Your Ground.

When I questioned Lott about the discrepancy, he referred me to a section of his book that deals with Castle Doctrine laws, which, he said, “are a type of Stand Your Ground law.” Lott told me that the section accounts “for the full spectrum of Stand Your Ground Laws,” even though “those words are not used in the book.” But the Castle Doctrine is different from Stand Your Ground. Lott correctly defined the former in his book. “This is the first study to look at the Castle Doctrine,” the text reads, “which eliminates the requirement that people in their own home have to retreat as far as possible before defending themselves.” Stand Your Ground, on the other hand, removed the duty to retreat in public.

The Castle study’s sample period ends in 2005, the year Florida enacted the N.R.A.’s model Stand Your Ground statute. The law largely spread to states across the country from there. Those include Ohio, where in 2021 Mike DeWine, the state’s Republican governor, initially indicated that he would veto the bill, urging the legislature to instead take up a package of gun-safety reforms. He then abruptly reversed course, with his press secretary stating that the decision relied on one of Lott’s op-eds, which argued that such laws reduced murders. This year, a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Network Open found that Stand Your Ground was associated with up to an eleven-per-cent increase in monthly gun-homicide rates.

Almost a year after Trayvon Martin was killed, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, galvanized gun-control advocates. For the first time since the early nineties, tighter federal-gun regulations, including universal background checks, were in play.

The Sandy Hook-inspired proposals failed to get through Congress, but they served as an effective fund-raising tool. Lott launched his nonprofit, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which received its tax-exempt status in August, 2013. The C.P.R.C. has studied gun-free zones and rates of mass shootings across the world, and it publishes an annual report—extensively covered by conservative media—on the number of concealed-handgun-permit holders in America. According to Lott’s research, the number now exceeds twenty-one million.

The C.P.R.C. never takes in more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and Lott has always drawn a salary of less than a hundred thousand dollars. He frequently emphasizes that his research is untainted by the gun industry or by special-interest money, and points to the C.P.R.C.’s policy of refusing donations from all manufacturers or groups that have a stake in the gun-control debate.

But, during Lott’s deposition, when asked if the C.P.R.C. receives contributions from individuals who may be affiliated with the gun industry, he admitted, “I’m sure we probably get some donations from people that are in those things. But I don’t go and screen them.” He went on, “I draw the line in terms of banning an individual with their own money.”

Lott said that the C.P.R.C.’s integrity was further guaranteed by the group’s academic advisory board. “I think we’re a relatively unique organization in terms of having people with strong views—or views on different sides of the issue about what’s right or not. The reason why we do that is, like with any good academic-type organization, you need to have critical people who disagree with you to give you comments before you put out research.” He added, “You want to make sure it’s right.”

Lott named several of the C.P.R.C.’s advisers who hold either neutral or supportive views on gun control. One was Scott Masten, a business-economics professor at the University of Michigan, and another was Karpoff, his U.C.L.A. classmate. When I asked Masten about his role at the C.P.R.C., he said, “The sum total of everything I did with respect to the center was agree to be an adviser.” When I asked Karpoff what he did, he said, “Literally nothing.”

On April 10, 2015, Lott held the C.P.R.C.’s fund-raiser at a Hilton Hotel in Nashville, during the N.R.A.’s annual meeting there. In addition to Dana Loesch, who was on her way to becoming one of the N.R.A.’s most recognizable names, several other right-wing celebrities spoke, including the musician and gun activist Ted Nugent, who was both an N.R.A. and C.P.R.C. board member until 2018. Dressed in a camouflage shirt and a cowboy hat, he advocated for the extrajudicial killing of criminals and told the crowd that the C.P.R.C.’s work was just as important as the N.R.A.’s. “John works his ass off,” Nugent said, “and he needs to be paid more.” For the movement to succeed, he declared, Lott’s “almost Mr. Rogers-like delivery” was a necessity. He explained, “the juxtaposition between Ted Nugent the Second Amendment guy and John Lott the Second Amendment guy is dynamic. And we need both.”

As if to underscore the point, Lott delivered a fifteen-minute slide presentation with charts and graphs. Without the C.P.R.C., he said, the public would be exposed only to a “tidal wave” of research that was dishonest, overwhelmingly biased against firearms, and funded by President Barack Obama’s Administration and such insidious billionaire philanthropists as George Soros. Less than two weeks later, Lott pressed the same case on the conspiracy show Infowars, during a period when its founder and host, Alex Jones, was telling his listeners that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged by the government in order to justify new gun regulations. “He didn’t raise the claim while I was on [the] show,” Lott told me, by e-mail. “If he had, I would have corrected him.”

Around this time, Donald Trump was launching his Presidential campaign. He spoke at the N.R.A.’s convention, and, as the election drew closer, Lott began to campaign for Trump in numerous op-eds and radio interviews.

A month after Trump took office, Lott began corresponding with a top official at the Department of Justice named Ryan Newman, who now serves as general counsel to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In an e-mail in February, 2017, Lott wrote, “There were a number of ideas that I hope can be dealt with by the D.O.J.” He brought up the D.O.J.’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which, he said, “gun control advocates use” to “claim that guns are rarely used for self defense.” He asserted that “it needs to be fixed by changing a couple survey questions,” such as the poll’s screener about being a crime victim, which, by reducing subjectivity, weeds out potentially millions of unreliable responses.

Eventually, Lott compiled his recommendations into a document titled “A Partial List of John R. Lott, Jr.’s Ideas on Empirical Work That Could Be Done by the Department of Justice.” He circulated the list on multiple occasions to Newman, and, under a slightly altered title, to another D.O.J. official named Gary Barnett. In an e-mail to Barnett, he wrote, “As we discussed, we need new research to advance the Trump agenda and pull indefensible studies done during the Obama administration.”

After Trump took office, one policy that was on the table in Congress was “reciprocity,” which would require states to recognize one another’s concealed-handgun-permit holders, allowing individuals to carry their weapons anywhere in the country. Lott wrote, “Everyone knows the types of claims that will be made during congressional debates about how dangerous permit holders are, so before the various reciprocity bills come up, it is extremely important that [the D.O.J.] do a study on this issue.” He clarified, “It is one thing for myself to do studies on how law-abiding concealed handgun permit holders are. It is something entirely different for the Department of Justice to do it.”

In cities around the country, police chiefs were critical of licensed gun carriers who were driving into metropolitan areas and leaving firearms in their parked cars. Thieves, the police said, were breaking into the vehicles, stealing the guns, and distributing them through the illegal market. Lott wanted this narrative put to rest. “There is one item that I could use your help quickly on [getting] some data before the reciprocity debate that is coming up in September,” he wrote to Newman. “The claim coming out from gun control advocates is that concealed handgun[s] are being stolen from permit holders and then being used in crime.” Lott then appears to ask Newman to do something illegal. “As I suspect you already know, there is a database for this information,” he said, “but unfortunately only law enforcement are allowed access to it.” Lott was referring to the National Criminal Information Center, which is strictly off limits to the public; a violation of the policy can be prosecuted as a federal crime. A week later, he followed up with Newman: “Just so you know, I believe that I was able to get a hold of the data that I had asked about.”

When I asked Lott about these e-mails, he wrote, “I have no memory of anyone ever mentioning anything to me about the data not being accessible to the public.” He went on, “In any case, while I was waiting to hear back from Newman, I talked to a Congressman about my interest in getting that data, and he offered to get the data for me. So that is how I got it.”

This summer, John Donohue, an empirical researcher and Stanford law professor who also testified in the California case, published a study in the National Bureau of Economic Research examining “shall-issue” laws in forty-seven U.S. cities over a forty-year period, from 1979 to 2019. The statutes, the study found, were linked to a twenty-nine-per-cent increase in violent gun crime. One of the driving factors: a thirty-five-per-cent jump in firearm theft.

In late 2019, John Dillon, the plaintiffs’ attorney in the California assault-weapons case, asked Lott to join his team as an expert witness. During Lott’s deposition, he said, “I have a rule that I won’t take a case if I’m going to be paid by anybody who is involved in the gun industry or the N.R.A. or somebody else who has a dog in the fight.”

It was a strange answer, given that multiple gun-rights organizations were listed as plaintiffs in the case. When asked if he was aware of their involvement, Lott said, “I have no doubt that that’s true. I have no connection with them, and have had no contact with them about it.” The attorney pressed him further. “Do you know which particular organizations are plaintiffs in this case?” he asked. “I haven’t tried to look that up,” Lott said. “It isn’t relevant to me.”

One of the plaintiffs was the Second Amendment Foundation, a group that focusses on litigation to expand gun rights. The month Lott joined the case, the organization held a conference in Phoenix. Dillon, the plaintiffs’ attorney, was one of the speakers, and he discussed the case on a panel. Another speaker was Lott, who delivered a lecture at the event, and was named Scholar of the Year. He told me, “When the case was in process, I never talked to anyone at the Second Amendment Foundation about it. I didn’t even know that they were involved.”

I asked Lott if he was paid for his work on the California case. He replied, “I was not paid by the plaintiffs.” During his deposition, he had disclosed that he was earning four hundred and fifty dollars an hour to serve as an expert. When I followed up, he wrote, “I was paid by a private individual who doesn’t work in the firearms industry and does not run nor hold a position of any type in any self-defense oriented organization.” He added, “I will not go into further detail out of respect for their privacy.”

In June, 2020, under the direction of the Trump White House, the D.O.J. offered Lott a job, pending a background check. It was an exciting time for him. Lott was moving to Missoula, Montana, after David Strom, a seventy-nine-year-old who had recently died, left him money and a two-bedroom house with a view of the mountains. Strom was a veteran, a police officer, a gun enthusiast, and a lifetime N.R.A. member; according to an obituary, he supported organizations that “defended the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Before his death, records show, Strom had made Lott a beneficiary of his trust, which held the home. It is unclear how Lott and Strom were connected. But Lott once told Karpoff, his former classmate, that he had received the house from a fan. Lott has never publicly acknowledged Strom, but, according to court documents, he sued the trustee for more cash. “There was ten thousand dollars in the trust,” Lott wrote me, “and as soon as the trustee disbursed the cash in accordance with the will, the lawsuit was dropped.”

It can take months to clear a government background check, and, by the time the D.O.J. was finished looking into Lott, the Trump Administration was near its end. Before taking his position as a senior adviser, ethics rules required him to relinquish his role at the C.P.R.C. On October 9, 2020, the organization put out a press release announcing Lott’s replacement, Robert F. Turner, a national-security specialist in his late seventies who was a law professor at the University of Virginia for more than thirty years.

Lott started at the D.O.J. on October 20, 2020. Two days later, one of the most prominent national-security think tanks in the country, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released a report titled “The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States.” Its key finding was not surprising: “White supremacists and other like-minded extremists conducted two-thirds of the terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in 2020.” Turner said that “Dr. Lott was anxious to have me respond” to the study. “It was my understanding,” he told me, that the C.P.R.C. “wanted me to write something challenging or refuting” it. Turner did not know why, and declined to do so. “I did not want my name associated with anything that might imply that I was other than outraged by such monstrous behavior,” he said.

In a matter of weeks, Turner, a cancer survivor who was struggling to write op-eds—one of his core responsibilities as president of the C.P.R.C.—left the organization. Lott does not dispute Turner’s recollection of the report, but said that Turner’s departure was not related to it, and instead pointed to his lack of productivity.

Lott’s three-month stint at the D.O.J. was unremarkable. He compiled data relating to the background-check system, and reviewed F.B.I. reports he found problematic. Lott left the day before Joe Biden was sworn into office.

In June, 2021, after the judge struck down California’s assault-weapon ban, Lott turned his attention to other matters. In the past few years, a flurry of states have passed laws abolishing their concealed-carry permit systems. Known among gun-rights advocates as Constitutional Carry, the new statutes allow anyone who can legally purchase a firearm to carry a concealed handgun in public, with no license required. It is the logical evolution of the “shall-issue” concept, and Lott has embraced it. In December, he co-wrote an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel arguing in favor of the law with Anthony Sabatini, a Republican state representative in Florida who was sponsoring a Constitutional Carry bill there and had the first byline. A month later, Lott co-wrote an op-ed in the Omaha World-Herald with Tom Brewer, a Republican state senator in Nebraska who was sponsoring Constitutional Carry legislation in his state. The column’s language was virtually identical to that of Lott and Sabatini’s op-ed in the Sentinel. In February, the column was published again, in Yellowhammer News, an outlet in Alabama. Lott’s co-writer was Shane Stringer, a Republican representative who was sponsoring the Constitutional Carry bill there. Finally, Lott published the op-ed on his own in March, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, replacing the names of the other states with Georgia, which was considering similar legislation. The bills in Florida and Nebraska stalled, but passed in Alabama and Georgia. Half of all states now have a Constitutional Carry law in place.

Brewer’s office said that it had asked Lott for help with the senator’s bill, and that Lott had suggested he could either co-author or ghostwrite an op-ed. After the office agreed to a shared byline, Lott e-mailed text, which Brewer’s staff accepted without making any changes. Lott, the office said, did not disclose that he was publishing the same language with legislators in other states. None of the other lawmakers who supposedly co-authored those op-eds responded to requests for comment. “What I told any of the newspapers or others such as Brewer’s office was that I wouldn’t submit a similar piece to any other newspapers in that state,” Lott wrote to me. “State newspapers only require exclusivity within their state.”

Recently, in an interview after the Uvalde shooting, Senator Ted Cruz cited Lott’s research to argue that such incidents are rare in the United States relative to the rest of the world. Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, had closely inspected Lott’s data, and discovered that Lott had inflated the world’s figures by including “attacks by terrorist organizations, genocidal militias, armed rebel groups, and paramilitary fighters.” The data even contained a slaughter directed by the President of Nigeria, in which soldiers killed as many as two hundred civilians. These were not comparable acts of violence to Uvalde, Buffalo, or, say, the 2017 music-festival shooting in Las Vegas. Lott disagrees. “We do not exclude incidents of public mass shooting just because we think we know the motivation of the shooter or shooters,” he and a co-author wrote in Econ Journal Watch.

Without Lott, there would be no counter-narrative for those who have come to need one. Gun rights represent a way of life, an identity tied to ideas about individualism that, for many Americans, fill a void. Republicans like Cruz recognize the potency of the issue, and use it to mobilize voters, reinforcing the notion that they are protecting society by arming themselves—a noble calling. During the pandemic, Americans have bought more firearms than ever before, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun homicides have surpassed their previous all-time peak, reached in 1993. In Philadelphia, the number of permits issued rose from seventy-four hundred, in 2020, to fifty-two thousand, in 2021. Last year, there were five hundred and sixty-one murders in the city—the highest number ever recorded there. The violence has been normalized. In October, a fifteen-year-old boy shot to death four adults and a teen-ager in a middle-class neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event hardly registered. ♦

[tik4tatthetat]

A few of conservative media outlets and individuals that have been known to support Donald Trump's political agenda

Here is a list of conservative media outlets that have been known to support Donald Trump's political agenda and may be critical of VP Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz: *Websites:* 1. Breitbart News 2. Fox News (online) 3. The Daily Caller 4. The Federalist 5. National Review 6. The Gateway Pundit 7. Infowars 8. WorldNetDaily (WND) 9. Townhall 10. American Thinker *TV Channels:* 1. Fox News Channel 2. One America News Network (OANN) 3. Newsmax TV *Radio Shows:* 1. The Rush Limbaugh Show 2. The Sean Hannity Show 3. The Michael Savage Show 4. The Mark Levin Show 5. The Laura Ingraham Show *Print Media:* 1. The Wall Street Journal (opinion section) 2. National Review magazine 3. The Weekly Standard (now online-only) *Social Media Influencers:* 1. Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA) 2. Candace Owens (activist) 3. Ben Shapiro (The Daily Wire) 4. Mark Dice (YouTuber) 5. Diamond and Silk (pro-Trump activists) *Celebrities/Entertainer 1. Roseanne Barr - Actress and comedian 2. James Woods - Actor 3. Dennis Quaid - Actor 4. Jon Voight - Actor 5. Kid Rock - Musician 6. Mike Tyson - Former professional boxer 7. Dennis Rodman - Former professional basketball player 8. Stephen Baldwin - Actor 9. Brett Favre - Former NFL quarterback 10. Dana White - President of the UFC 11. Ted Nugent (musician) 12. Scott Baio (actor) 13. Robert Davi (actor) 14. Lou Ferrigno (actor) 15. Hulk Hogan (wrestler) 16. Charlie Daniels (musician) 17. Gene Simmons (KISS bassist) 18. Antonio Sabato Jr. (actor) 19. Isaiah Washington (actor) 20. lil Wayne (rapper) *Note:* This list is not exhaustive and is subject to change. Celebrities' political views can evolve, and some may choose not to publicly disclose their support. Additionally, some celebrities may support specific policies or initiatives without endorsing a particular candidate.       tik4tat research team Read the full article

[borntomecassidy78]

Just realizing I've never plugged my Grateful Dead podcast

For the last two and a half years, I've been co-hosting the Help on the Way podcast. Every week, we get a random Grateful Dead show (totally random, some weeks it's May 77, some weeks it's July 95), and we comment on the show. It's kinda Mystery Science Theatre 3000 for Deadheads.

Over the last year or so, we started having on really cool guests, so I want to especially highlight those episodes :

Betty Cantor-Jackson:

Jay Blakesberg:

Charlie Miller:

Mike from Guess the Year:

Zach Nugent:

David Gans:

Anyway, enjoy! Getting to say "I interviewed Betty Cantor-Jackson" is one of the wildest things to have happened to me in the last year.

[denimbex1986]

'Netflix's "Ripley" has arrived. The eight-episode series premiered Thursday on Netflix and is a fresh take on Patricia Highsmith's chameleon-like conman, who the world was first introduced to in her 1955 novel, "The Talented Mr. Ripley."...

Like Anthony Minghella's 1999 sun-dappled adaptation, which starred Matt Damon in the central role, and the French take on the story "Purple Noon" released in 1960, "Ripley" follows the titular grifter (Andrew Scott) as he ingratiates himself into the life of two wealthy Americans living la dolce vita on a never-ending vacation in Italy.

Critics have praised the series, citing its striking film noir visuals and compelling cast performances. But for some, the pacing of the show is an issue; the slow, almost languid nature of the episodes (the longest of which clocks in at 76 minutes) means it's not necessarily one you could — or should — sit down and binge in one go.

As many critics have pointed out, "Ripley" indulges in every minute of its almost eight-hour run time. It may take a few episodes to engross audience members, but it's well worth the ride.

The Financial Times' Dan Einav noted that the series "takes its time to establish each location with a scene-setting collage of images," pointing out "wonderful details like the liver-spotted hand of a bus driver shifting gear to climb up towards Dickie's village and the bubbles of champagne in Ripley's glass as he acclimatises to a new life."

"The careful mapping of Tom's every move, whether in furtherance of his deceit or the covering up of his crimes, allows the tension to mount exquisitely," Lucy Mangan wrote for The Guardian.

"This kind of meticulous artistry deserves equally attentive viewing," Lena Wilson argued for IGN, adding: "Despite streaming in full on Netflix, 'Ripley' works best when watched in moderation."

However, Aramide Tinubu, writing for Variety, disagreed, arguing that "the episodes are painfully overlong and full of dead space."

"'Ripley' unfolds too slowly — as the trail of events attracts the attention of an Italian detective (Maurizio Lombardi) — while creating the risk that some people will bail out before the series reaches the good stuff," CNN's critic Brian Lowry stated.

In her review of the series for BBC, Caryn James wrote that Andrew Scott "brings a hum of sinister energy to the role of Tom Ripley."

The New York Times's Mike Hale said the Irish actor "does a meticulous job of portraying Ripley's transition from shifty timidity to insolent confidence, from lost boy to aesthete, through subtle shifts of expression and posture."

"Charismatic and scary in equal measure, Scott has never been better, and he's aided in his exceptional cause by Zaillian, whose writing is razor-sharp and his direction just as assured," the Daily Beast's Nick Schager said in his review.

But, as Daniel Fienberg wrote in his review for The Hollywood Reporter, Scott is "too old" to play the fledgling sociopath.

"It's one thing for Tom Ripley to be an unformed if still protean grifter at 21 or 22, but another thing still to be scraping by without an identity at 35," he argued...

"In an era where huge TV budgets often equate to cheap-looking visuals, Ripley is staggeringly, starkly beautiful," John Nugent wrote for Empire.

Cary Darling, writing for The Houston Chronicle, said that Elswit's monochrome palette is "almost a character of its own, one that throws the story into a sharp, film-noir relief."

Writing for Collider, Remus Noronha stated: "Every shot in 'Ripley' is perfectly composed, worthy of being showcased in a gallery as high art."

Ultimately, "Ripley" feels like it has been cut from an entirely different cloth to that of the 1999 film version of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," which is the best-known adaptation. Most reviewers agree that distinction is a good thing.

"The story may revolve around imitation, but 'Ripley' is a show determined to do its own thing," Einav wrote in his review for the Financial Times.

"'The Talented Mr. Ripley' has often been adapted in a way that felt sweaty, hot, and impassioned — this one is ice cold, drained of color and most human emotion. The choice really serves the reading of Ripley as an amoral creature, someone who doesn't cross boundaries of right and wrong as much as he never even considers them," reads the RogerEbert.com critic Brian Tallerico's review of the series.

As many reviewers pointed out, Zaillian's main point of reference for the series may have been the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the filmmaker best known for "Psycho," "The Birds," and "Strangers on a Train" (the last of which was adapted from another of Highsmith's novels).

"'Ripley' plays as if it were a Hitchcock series Hitchcock never made," reads the BBC review.

Rolling Stone's Alan Sepinwall called it "a masterpiece of Hitchcock-style suspense."...'