It happened again: another school, another shooting... This time it was much smaller and apparently no one was killed. A student at Taft High School in CA went after his classmates with a shotgun. Besides the impact on the students, it put to rest two "truisms" being promoted by gun advocates. The first one is that armed guards are required to prevent these things at school. It turns out that the school did indeed have an armed guard (watch the gun nuts go after him as being incompetent). The second is that only a good person with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun. In this case, it was a teacher and a school supervisor who simply talked him into surrenduring.
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83 comments (Latest Comment: 01/15/2013 03:53:21 by Raine)

We face a lot of problems in our country. There's poverty, gun violence, racism, a dysfunctional Congress... and a media that breathlessly keeps the pot stirred up. There's a lot of fear because fear sells. Fear of not having enough money, of the shame of not being able to keep up with the neighbors, fear of "the others" with different skin tones or fashion choices or accents, fear of not getting reelected...

As Americans, we (and I am using "we" loosely here) balk at the changes that would help us. The Cold War has so ingrained a distrust of a powerful government, we label anything that helps us which is government-based as "socialism". We want government to leave us alone to live our lives. We value our freedoms to the point of detriment, to the point of nose-spiting-face. We point to the first Amendment to allow verbal bullying, we point to the 10th amendment to disallow federal programs.

And there are some among us that point to the 2nd Amendment to justify possessing as many weapons and of any variety as they desire. As was said on TV last night, they want it, they can afford it, so the government better not keep them from getting it.
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109 comments (Latest Comment: 01/10/2013 05:07:57 by Will in Chicago)

First full week of the New year! What do you have going on?

I'm looking at a few stories, and I swear it's like nothing has changed with this new congress.

Shutting down government, birthrights crap, attacking women, Chuck Hagel is too liberal, evils of John Brennan and other assorted conservative nuttery.
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92 comments (Latest Comment: 01/08/2013 03:51:22 by Will in Chicago)

Good morning!

Well, it was barely advertised here, but for Xmas, Papa TriSec brought us a homebuilt gaming computer. He volunteers at a local senior center in their computer lab, and this poor unit was so corrupt, they were simply going to throw it away. He rescued it, reformatted the hard drive, and stuffed every ounce of memory, video cards, and drivers that he could fit onto it.

It's been great - I've spent the last few days rebuilding my flight simulator fleet, as my frame rates have gone from about 15 (on the lowest graphic settings) to the mid-40s (on the highest quality setting.)

But alas...one of the casualties was iTunes and my podcast library. I haven't listened to anything or anyone since the Friday before Christmas. In other words, I'm feeling like a Fox viewer; completely out of touch with the real world.

So yeah....another open blog. My mission this weekend is to get at least Dr. Maddow and the BBC back on the computer so I can have an idea what the hell is going on around here as we move deeper into the new year.

But then again....listening to jazz and classical at work has certainly been an enjoyable diversion thus far.
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2 comments (Latest Comment: 01/05/2013 19:05:46 by Will in Chicago)

Last night this was reported on Lawrence O'Donnells show, and I believe it is worth mentioning again. Here is some of the transcript:
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112 comments (Latest Comment: 01/04/2013 01:51:24 by TriSec)