A surf through the foul scent of the news this morning reveals a machete can be gruesome and the fabled sequester will allow some federal agencies, like the fabled IRS, to be closed tomorrow — a furlough holiday.

And the second-tiered news level sucks even worse.

(Illustration found here).

A short-list of dumb-ass, and/or mean shit.

A most-depressing aspect of living is suicide, now ability appears to be growing. A touch of too much in some odd-ball direction seems a reality of the nowadays:

We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route.
Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death.
In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.
…
This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone.
We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America.
As the CDC noted again this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves.
Somewhere Ralph Nader is smiling, but the takeaway is darkly profound: we’ve become our own greatest danger.

A way-sad situation.

And the apparent ‘problem‘ with females in the US military continues to spawn bullshit. Here’s another totally different asshole:

A sergeant first class and officer in charge of the “health, welfare and discipline” of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point has been accused of videotaping female cadets without their consent, including when the women were showering or otherwise unclothed.
According to the New York Times, Sgt. First Class Michael McClendon is being charged under four articles of the Uniform Code for Military Justice, including indecent acts, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, and actions prejudicial to good order and discipline.

Women in combat ain’t no problem — it’s the shitheads males back in the barracks.

And for climate change, the “canary in the coal mine,” is a frog:

Federal wildlife scientists report Wednesday that frogs, salamanders and toads are dying off at alarming rates nationwide, with the declines most dire among threatened species.
…
“This analysis suggests that amphibian declines may be more widespread and severe than previously realized,” concludes the study.
It finds that overall numbers of frogs and their kin drop 3.7 percent every year, meaning they could disappear in half of the habitats they now occupy nationwide in 26 years.
For 12 threatened species, things are even worse, with their numbers dropping 11.6 percent every year.

And this from ScienceDaily last week:

Amphibians, which are declining throughout the world, play an important role in ecological systems.
They eat small creatures, including mosquitos, and they are food themselves for larger creatures, such as birds and snakes.
Because amphibians are the middle of the food chain — and sensitive to environmental disruption because of their aquatic or semi-aquatic lives — their existence is often used as an indication of ecosystem health.

History can be just that — too far back to remember.
Kids are moving with the times and into the big cities:

Census Bureau data released Thursday show that 48 of the 50 most populous U.S. cities have grown since 2010, compared with only 40 of the top 50 in the first two years after the 2000 Census.
Of the top 100, 93 have grown since 2010, compared with just 72 a decade ago.
Many of the biggest — New York, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and Dallas, among others — are outpacing the nation’s 1.7 percent growth rate since 2010.
“Urban America is recovering faster than more remote, more rural places,” said Robert Lang, a professor of urban affairs at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Lang said urban areas appeal to Millennials (those born from about 1982 to 2001) “in part because they haven’t seen cities in crisis. They missed the riots of the 1960s, the urban decline of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. “If you’re a kid born in 1993 or 1992 and you’re in college now, you’re looking around the country thinking about where you want to move … you’ve seen fairly … tranquil cities, in relative terms to what their history was.”

Government overreach?
And can this be real?
If filmed, yes, indeed — New York City switched parking signs way-too fast:

Cars parked along one side of the street shown in the video are parked legally when the video begins.
But this stretch of road will soon be home to one of NYC’s new bike-share program, meaning there can be no parking in front of the large bike rack to be installed.
And so, as you can see on the video, a city employee comes in and installs a new No Standing Anytime sign.
And within 25 minutes of that sign going up, a parking enforcement officer is swooping in to issue tickets — $115 each — to cars that had been legally parked before the sign was changed.
When contacted by CBS 2, a rep for the Department of Transportation simply said that “any motorist who believes they received a ticket in error can contest it through the Department of Finance, which adjudicates violations.”

The IRS feels the say way.

This I can fully understand — my laptop was stolen in January, and I ended up buying a HP with Windows 8, which really, really, really sucks:

According a report by Examiner, Microsoft’s American customer satisfaction index (ACSI) declined to 74 after the launch of Windows 8, even though everybody expected to see the tech giant improving its overall score in this ranking.
What’s more interesting is that Windows 8 caused a drop almost similar to the one brought to Microsoft by Vista in 2006 after it was launched.
At that time, Microsoft’s index fell to 73, but it was then improved by Windows 7, still the number one operating system in the world.
…
Of course, all eyes are now on the Windows 8.1 update due to this summer that’s expected to focus a bit more on consumer feedback.
As a result, the next Windows release is very likely to fix some of the issues reported in Windows 8, including the lack of a Start button.
What’s more, Microsoft could even include an option to skip the Start Screen and thus let users boot directly to desktop instead of getting the Start Screen every time they turn on their computers.

Windows 8 is ludicrous, overcomplicated and just plain dumb-ass. Wonder if Windows 8.1 will be free for those who think the original really, really, really sucks.

And this weekend is Memorial Day — more depression, more fun ways to hurt yourself.
This is Thursday, though, and a busy-busy one at the liquor store I manage, with a big liquor order due in and a beer delivery.
Plus it’s payday!
Yeah for WTF!

In a somewhat good news, authorities in Oklahoma have dropped the number of deaths from Monday’s tornado to only 24 (though, seven were children) and a terrible clean-up begins. In the midst of all the shit, Grist in a video report had a most  telling headline: “Watching a tornado victim find her lost dog will make you feel at least a little better for at least a minute” — times nowadays make it so.

(Illustration found here).

Meanwhile, back in sweetheart DC, scandal is taking a backseat to something way worse — a national-liberty dysfunction.
President Obama in all his transparency just might might be a secret turd-knocker.
As a former journalist who was involved with investigative reporting — back in the day when such a pursuit was noteworthy — I’m sick of Obama’s self-serving blather about how we need a free and unfettered press. He’s been revealed as a guy who loves secrets and hates those who reveal them.
In the three-ring scandal circus the last couple of weeks, the one with the AP is the most feared and most loathsome. The other two, Benghazi and the IRS bullshit, are political and will fade with time, but the going after reporters is a bad news flash for things to come.
And it did. On Monday, it was reported Obama’s DOJ had investigated Fox News reporter James Rosen in the case against Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contractor, for a story about North Korea’s nuclear program. Kim has been charged with violating the Espionage Act for his contact with Rosen.
This entire bullshit does open an ugly can of worms for one of America’s most-cherished and most-needed wall against government malfeasance — freedom of the press.
Nick Gillespie at the Daily Beast explains:

To make matters worse in terms of press freedom, there are many reasons to assume the Obama administration is secretly spying on many other journalists and organizations).
With Fox’s Rosen, the administration got an actual warrant to read his email and contends that he has committed crimes by pursuing and publishing a story about North Korea, even though the story apparently doesn’t include any classified information per se.
Rosen hasn’t been legally charged as of yet but as Glenn Greenwald notes, the accusations against Rosen parallel government charges against Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange.
“Under U.S. law,” writes Greenwald, “it’s not illegal to publish classified information,” so the Obama administration is claiming that it’s illegal for journalists and publishers to “solicit” such information.
That doesn’t simply fly in the face of the First Amendment and Vietnam-era rulings guaranteeing press freedoms, it declares “ war on journalism” by essentially criminalizing the very act of investigative reporting.

And Dana Milbank at the Washington Post brings up history:

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service.
The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

And this tid-bit from The New Yorker:

In the search warrant for that request, the government described Rosen as “an aider, and abettor, and / or co-conspirator” in violating the Espionage Act, noting that the crime can be punished by ten years in prison.
Rosen was not indicted in the case, but the suggestion in a government document that a reporter could be guilty of espionage for engaging in routine reporting is unprecedented and has alarmed many journalists and civil libertarians.

There’s a good overall read on this media chase-down by Noah Rothman at Mediaite –  a media scorned will jump hard:

These are historic and troubling times.
The unprecedented and brazen efforts by high-ranking elements within the Obama administration to silence whistleblowers and intimidate any reporters that would speak with them have starkly framed the choice the political press now faces.
The administration has thrown the gauntlet down before the media with their display of abject disregard for the watchdog Fourth Estate.
To the White House’s chagrin, the media will respond.
…
Those that withheld judgment about the AP scandal in its earliest days were right to do so.
Attorney General Eric Holder assured the media that the leaker who spoke to the AP, whom the Justice Department was attempting to ferret out, “put the American people at risk.”
Such a grave charge demands caution.
The benefit of the doubt should be extended to the government before it is accused of overreach.
But, in the days that followed, it was discovered that the AP had cooperated with the DOJ to hold off on publishing the details of the story — a successful strike in Yemen which resulted in the death of a terror suspect — and only ran with the story after they were assured by federal officials that publishing the information would not jeopardize American national security.
“Officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of news gathering are already saying to us that they’re a little reluctant to talk to us,” said AP chief Gary Pruitt on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday.
“They fear that they will be monitored by the government.”

And the Rosen angle?

Because Rosen had committed the offense — not the crime — of developing a source within the nation’s diplomatic establishment.
The Justice Department labeled Rosen a “co-conspirator” in their leak investigation — another effort to criminalize reporting practices which is without parallel in the history of the republic.
…
The White House has greatly underestimated the press and their reverence for the sacred function they perform in a healthy democracy.
The political media’s admiration for the president, someone who largely shares their philosophy and pedigree, is a pale shadow in comparison to the esteem with which they hold their own institution.
A storm is coming for the Obama administration.
There is no stronger animosity than the one born of spurned affection.
Now legitimately mistreated and aggrieved, the press is coming for this White House.

This is indeed bad shit.
I don’t think the average Jack-and-Jill on the street has a real knowledge of how the press has operated in the US the last couple hundred years and what the effects are of Obama’s slow noodle on how (and on who) the fingers of government can reach.
And this is way-important and way-new — who would have figured just a few weeks ago, journalists of all stripes would defend a reporter for Fox News?
Only thing to do is use the pen like a big, nasty double-cutting sword.

Yesterday in Oklahoma: The preliminary rating of the tornado that hit Moore at 3:17 p.m. CT (4:17 p.m. ET) was put at EF-4, which means wind speeds from 166 to 200 mph, the National Weather Service said.
Latest reports indicate at least 91 people have died, with a lot of folks still missing — and at least 20 children dead after the twister completely flattened an elementary school.

And The Weather Channel this morning predicts the dangerous-shit weather will continue from Texas to the Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley and into the Great Lakes carrying with it hail, damaging wind gusts and tornadoes.

(Illustration: John Stewart Curry’s ‘Tornado Over Kansas‘ (1929)  found here).

The twister that hit Moore was supposedly more than a mile wide at its base — that’s one big sonofabitch, and one huge destroy arc. In the last 24 hours, there’s been a shitload of videos on the Internet on the tornado, all catching some vital part of the CGI-like funnel cloud groping is destructive path across the landscape. Oddly frightening is the tiny bursts of transformers exploding in the twister’s path.
Reportedly, four different tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma during the onslaught, with others in Iowa, Kansas and western Illinois — big spawned devastation field.
One of the most graphic videos is a time-lapse look at the path of the Moore twister, found via ShortFormBlog — and as stated there, it’s both “…stunning and terrifying..”
And what’s even more terrifying is more of the same is coming down the twisted pike in the near-future, which really is now. In the wake of this a lot of people are scrambling about tying these kinds of weather to climate change, which is the reality of what’s real nowadays.
The folks at Grist  can’t say for certain the Oklahoma twister is attributed to climate change or not, but it doesn’t help:

But the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet.
As Grist’s John Upton reported recently, the number of twisters has been roller-coastering up and down from year to year.
“It certainly feels like one of those boom-bust weather cycles that we expect from climate change.
But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence directly linking the recent tornado cycle to global warming.”
…
Post-Superstorm Sandy, we’ve entered a kind of fugue state when it comes to natural disaster, forgetting that there has been a long history of extreme weather events that sometimes have nothing to do with how much carbon is in our atmosphere.
For as disastrous as Sandy was, be honest: You relished pointing out that climate change connection.
…
We really like to find reason in chaos, though, and we also like to blame things!
At one point today there were several little kids trapped in the rubble of a building in Moore, Oklahoma that earlier today was their elementary school.
If we can’t blame climate change, who can we blame?
Maybe scientists will conclude that this really is the fault of that atmospheric carbon.
Maybe they won’t! For now, at least, the only thing I’ll be blaming for this mess is Sarah Palin.
Because, you know.

Grizzly-head Palin noodled off again: “Global warming my gluteus maximus,” she wrote in a post on her Facebook page, adding a small dose of politics to a picture of her youngest daughter Piper in the snow after graduation. “This is what ‘Grad Blast’ means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace.”
You betcha!

Climate change and individual weather is a complex situation, one even the environmental brainiacs don’t understand, or can conclusively put on notice.
Via ScienceDaily in August 2007:

This information can be derived from the temperatures and humidities predicted by a climate computer model, according to the new study published on August 17 in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.
It predicts that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall.

Less storms, but bigger one when they did form.
And this from Wunderground this past weekend:

So Brooks and others are looking at the ingredients that cause tornadoes.
But even that isn’t simple.
They look at two main factors: moist energy in the atmosphere and wind shear.
Wind shear is the difference between wind at high altitudes and wind near the surface.
The more moist energy and greater the wind shear, the better the chances for tornadoes.
The atmosphere can hold more moisture as it warms, and it will likely be more unstable so that means more moist energy, several experts said.
But wind shear is another matter.
Brooks and Stanford University scientist Noah Diffenbaugh think there will be less of that.
That would suggest fewer tornadoes.
But if there’s more moist energy, that could lead to more tornadoes.
One ingredient has to win out, and Brooks says it’s hard to tell which one will.
Diffenbaugh says recent computer simulations show the moist energy may overcome the reduced shear and produce at least more severe thunderstorms, if not tornadoes.
Given what’s happening lately, Brooks believes there will be fewer days of tornadoes but more twisters on the days when they occur.

One huge problem, however, is not nature — it’s human assholes.
And from the link to the John Stewart Curry artwork above, a comment: Many people from Kansas did not like the painting because they thought this painting made Kansas look like a dangerous place.
Dangerous are Oklahoma’s two US senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe — both are oil men and both climate-change deniers, Inhofe may be the biggest asshole in the Senate, with Coburn breathing hot air down his neck with a balanced budget:

CQ Roll Call reporter Jennifer Scholtes wrote for CQ.com Monday evening that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand offsets for any federal aid that Congress provides.
Coburn added, Scholtes wrote, that it is too early to guess at a damage toll but that he knows for certain he will fight to make sure disaster funding that the federal government contributes is paid for.
It’s a position he has taken repeatedly during his career when Congress debates emergency funding for disaster aid.
Scholtes points out that Coburn was one of 36 Republican senators who voted against disaster funding for Superstorm Sandy in January.

Even as the planet goes to pieces, even more assholes appear.

Little-known off-the-wall factoid: The average respondent in the survey spent 34 minutes moaning on a Monday morning, compared to just 22 minutes during the rest of the week.

Moan right away is my response — get that nasty, pity-is-me feeling into the open air, then you are free to whine about serious stuff.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, this particular day comes every week — rare for a Monday to be absent.
And on this Monday, however, I do feel some wondrous joy, mainly because of this: It’s all about the odds, and one lone ticket in Florida has beaten them all by matching each of the numbers drawn for the highest Powerball jackpot in history at an estimated $590.5 million, lottery officials said Sunday.
What a shitload of dumb-asses and losers. At least for the time being anyway, low-IQ folks won’t be tormenting us at my liquor store for shots at great wealth — the lottery is most-likely the best-formulated swindle around, a scam in full public view.
Especially during times of economic stress, like right about now. Idiots!
Via the Christian Science Monitor:

Last year, the multi-state Mega Millions lottery also hit a record at $656 million.
It, too, lured nongamblers to buy its $1 tickets.
“What’s the harm?” many said.
These record lotteries aren’t a fluke.
States with lotteries have become so addicted to this revenue that they purposely look for new ways to create a gambling addiction among more residents.
The eye-popping jackpots, made even larger as more states pool the winnings into larger sums, somehow bedazzle people to dream of instant wealth on a Donald Trump scale.
Meanwhile, many of these gamblers ignore the very long odds — about 1 in 175 million.
And some get hooked — for years, draining personal savings and upsetting relationships.
…
You can see where this addiction of states is going.
Those who deal with problem or addictive gamblers — who make up 4-6 percent of gamers — are rightly worried.
They cite studies showing the social costs from gambling addiction outweigh the revenue for states.
They also point out that most states now have “instant wins” for lottery consumers.
Last year, more than half of the estimated $68 billion in lottery revenues came from these instant tickets.
Driving more Americans to gamble is a losing game.
Gambling perpetuates the notion of luck as a source of happiness, which isn’t exactly what is needed for an economy in need of people focused on hard work, education, and ingenuity.
Gambling isn’t a productive enterprise.

I don’t look at the lottery as gambling. Sitting, playing five-card stud with friends (or enemies) or even a night at the casino, that’s gambling. The lottery is taking your hard-earned cash and flushing it literally down the shitter.
And like a lot of other stuff,the lottery is just crazy, like for the very Florida town where supposedly the big ticket was purchased: It’s an amount too high for many to imagine. Compare it to the budget for the city of Zephyrhills: This year’s figure is just more than $49 million. The winning Powerball jackpot is 12 times that.
The world sucks like a Monday.

Anyway, onward and maybe downward.
Despite all the scandal shit last week, President Obama hasn’t suffered much in the eyes of beholders, mainly because they’re f*ckin’ brains were maybe on the lottery:

First, here’s CNN’s poll, conducted over May 17-18.
According to their survey, Obama’s approval rating is at 53 percent.
While that’s a two percent rise since early April, the difference is within the margin of error of the survey, so we’ll say that the president’s approval rating here remained steady.
Forty-five percent of Americans, meanwhile, disapprove of the job the president’s doing.
…
While a separate Gallup poll this week found that American attention to the Benghazi and IRS stories this week was actually below average for other news stories they’ve tracked, most Americans (54 percent for IRS and 53 percent for Benghazi) were following the stories either “very” or “somewhat” closely, and most (74 percent and 69 percent, respectively) believe both stories warrant further investigation.

And why does this not warrant further investigation — maybe for threats, or something:

“I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away,” he added.
“I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing.
“That whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all.
On behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.”

How can people get away with saying really-really bad shit like that. And yet on and on drones the idiots.
And a microcosm of the nowadays:

Alex Burgos said he and his wife Ruth were getting coffee Mothers’ Day weekend when their 1-year-old son Thiago needed to be changed.
Ruth took him to the restroom, only to find there was no changing table, so she changed his diaper at their seat at the coffee shop, KUSA-TV, Denver, reported Sunday
Burgos said a Starbucks employee tossed a rag to his wife and spoke to her in a “demeaning” tone.
“He said make sure to wipe the seat when you’re done,” he said.
“They started talking amongst themselves and laughing about it.”
Burgos said he poured his coffee on the floor in response, and the employees called police.
No arrests were made in response to the incident.

My underline for emphasis. A Monday scenario on a weekend — just no moaning.

A shallow magnitude 4.4 earthquake was reported Saturday morning 17 miles from Rio Dell, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The temblor occurred at 6:46 a.m. PDT at a depth of 11.8 miles.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was 21 miles from Fortuna, 34 miles from Eureka and 39 miles from Bayside.
In the past 10 days, there have been two earthquakes magnitude 3 and greater centered nearby (LA Times).

(Illustration: ‘Earthquake,’ by Jakara Art, found here).

The epicenter of that one is about 44 miles south/southwest from where I’m sitting on my ass right now. And just a short while after the 4.4, a 3.8 quake struck in the near vicinity — Ferndale, a few miles north of Rio Dell. Both are on the coast and deep in the land of the shakers.
This whole area up here is shakesville — the area around Ferndale and just south are prime spots for quakes:

This area of northern California is known for its frequent earthquakes as it is near the convergence of three geographical features.
The San Andreas Fault meets the Mendocino Fault and the Cascadia Subduction zone just offshore of Cape Mendocino; locals know it as Triple Junction.
Three tectonic plates meet in this location; the Pacific Plate, the North American Plate and the Gorda plate. Residents of Humboldt County are used to being awakened by movement of these plates.

We don’t feel way-most of them at all. A shitload of 2.0s aren’t going to knock you off your feet — I didn’t feel the 4.4 this morning and didn’t know about until I surfed the news sites.
However, I’m practically sitting on top of what’s called Mad River Fault Zone — a short, but fat little sonofabitch, which has the potential to stir up some nasty shit.
The USGS used to have some neat earthquake maps of the area with little colored circles — red, that day; blue, yesterday; and yellow, last week — to show the latest shakers. However, the USGS streamlined the maps recently and now there’s just this one.
After residing all over the US, California has some weird shit, and the worse is earthquakes. Terrifying as a tornado, but with zero advance warning. In those twisters, at least you have the weather to foretell what could happen, and having been born and raised in south Alabama, tornadoes are fairly easy to handle next to earthquakes.
Three years ago we had a 6.5 just south of Eureka (about 10 miles south of me) and it scared the livin’ crap outta me. I posted about the experience here.
Earthquakes are mind blowers.
Even the noted French writer, historian and philosopher Voltaire got rattled after experiencing the huge earthquake that nearly destroyed Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755:

Approach in crowds, and meditate awhile
Yon shattered walls and view each ruined pile.
Women and children heaped up mountains high,
Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie…

And the craziness of a shaker lingers.
Mike Horn, director of the Imperial County Behavioral Health, commenting after a 7.2 quake struck Baja California on Easter Sunday 2010: “If you were in a 7.2 earthquake, and you’re not anxious for a couple days, there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “Nature put anxiety into us to get us thinking about what our contingency plans are.”
You betcha!
After that 6.5 three years ago, I dashed out and got a big water container, flashlights with plenty of batteries and a short-wave radio. And for days after, felt great anxiety and near-terror in taking a shower — I became near obsessed about a huge earthquake striking while in the shower.  Nearly started taking a ‘whore’s bath.’
Now, I don’t try to think about it.

And on top of the normal ground-shaking patterns, the surging climate change will make it worse — yes, the environment impacts the geology of our earth.
Global warning don’t mean just crazy weather and sea-level rise, but also earthquakes.
Bill McGuire, author of ‘Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes,’ in a piece in the UK’s Guardian in February 2012:

The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane.
How can what happens in the thin envelope of gas that shrouds and protects our world possibly influence the potentially Earth-shattering processes that operate deep beneath the surface?
The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.
…
The huge environmental changes that accompanied the rapid post-glacial warming of our world were not confined to the top and bottom of the planet.
All that meltwater had to go somewhere, and as the ice sheets dwindled, so the oceans grew.
An astounding 52m cubic kilometres of water was sucked from the oceans to form the ice sheets, causing sea levels to plummet by about 130 metres – the height of the Wembley stadium arch.
As the ice sheets melted so this gigantic volume of water was returned, bending the crust around the margins of the ocean basins under the enormous added weight, and provoking volcanoes in the vicinity to erupt and faults to rupture, bringing geological mayhem to regions remote from the ice’s polar fastnesses.
…
The signs are that this is already happening.
In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years.
The reduction in weight on the crust beneath is allowing faults contained therein to slide more easily, promoting increased earthquake activity in recent decades.
The permafrost that helps hold the state’s mountain peaks together is also thawing rapidly, leading to a rise in the number of giant rock and ice avalanches.
In fact, in mountainous areas around the world, landslide activity is on the up; a reaction both to a general ramping-up of global temperatures and to the increasingly frequent summer heatwaves.
…
The bottom line is that through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc at a time when we can most do without it.
Unless there is a dramatic and completely unexpected turnaround in the way in which the human race manages itself and the planet, then long-term prospects for our civilisation look increasingly grim.

All this earthquake talk makes me nervous — at least it’s the weekend and I really don’t need a bath until Monday.

This past month has been dramatic — the Boston bombings, the shoot down of a gun bill, a near-nuclear explosion in Texas, the death of more than a thousand people in efforts to give Americans better shirts, and in the last couple of weeks, President Obama saddled with riding sores.

(Illustration found here).

Always phrased is that as we age, time seems to go faster. And I can say okay to that because as the older I get, time not only appears quicker, but it has the ability now to wrap back around to some person, place of thing from the way long ago — ancient situations far gone, but for some incomprehensible reason, still worry the shit out of me.
Why?
Who knows other than maybe I’ve got a shitload of unknowing regrets over the years and sometimes of those old situations gets hung up in the mental process, and there you have it — I’m way-remorseful for the time I laughed way-out-loud at that girl who farted in fifth-grade class, which started all those other little shits laughing, which in turn embarrassed the little girl to absolute no end. Of course, she wasn’t little in those days — we were all little.

Apparently, there’s something to this — aging freaks out the brain via three concepts:

The first is a phenomenon called “telescopy.”
Telescopy is simply the underestimation of time.
It’s as though you’re looking through a telescope where the details of what you see give you the impression that an object in the distance is much closer than it actually is.
Because of telescopy, our brains recall distant events as if they occurred only yesterday.
…
The second reason that time seems to be going faster as you get older is called the reminiscence effect.
You can think of it as a series of memory bumps in your life.
Emotionally-charged events — your first kiss, going to college, getting married, having your children, having a grandchild or losing someone dear — are recorded in more vivid detail than what we might call “regular events,” which just pass by in a blur.
The problem is that, as time marches on, life may become more routine, more mundane.
Hence, you create fewer memory bumps, which give you the feeling that time is moving very quickly.
…
The third theory is the aging of your brain’s biological clock.
Named the SCN (for suprachiasmatic nucleus), it’s found in a very special gland called the hypothalamus located behind the middle of your forehead.
The hypothalamus is also known as your brain’s brain and controls the release of a number of important, youth-maintaining hormones.
Moreover, this little spot (about the size of a pencil point) sends signals to each and every one of your 30 trillion cells, telling them that either all is well or, conversely, that you’re stressed.
The latter has an aging effect throughout your body, including your genes.
These signals influence the length of your telomeres at the end of your chromosomes.
Telomeres are the caps of your DNA and are exquisitely sensitive to stress.
Think of them as like the tips of a shoelace.
As the lace ages, it becomes frayed, damaged, and shortened.
For you, stress equals shorter telomeres and accelerated aging.
Conversely, less stress equals increased telomere size and a longer life.

In a shitload of ways, a shitload of shoelaces are frayed.
And in the sense of the current Republican slobberings over the so-called Obama scandals, these GOP assholes have no sense of aging, time or even indication of the above-mentioned ‘reminiscence effect’ — cry, and then cry some more.
Speaking of which, John ‘The Boner’ Boehner on the IRS portion of the scandals: “My question is, who’s going to jail over this scandal?”
Or worse – from The Dick and Benghazi: “Well they lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video so they wouldn’t have to admit that it was really all about their incompetence, that the State Department and the White House NSC ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the trap.”
These guys have no past — they can’t even remember a few, short years ago. Dick Cheney needs to peer out from behind bars.
In their crying and anguish at all the problems now festering Obama’s agenda, the GOP most-likely will shoot themselves in the foot, or in The Dick’s case, in the face.
Peter Roff at US News and World Report explains:

As has been previously demonstrated, it is altogether too easy to distract GOP members of Congress with “shiny things.”
The news of one new scandal diverts attention from things already under investigation.
In what amounts to a lack of discipline, members are often left chasing their tails, leaving the truth behind events such as Benghazi to be sorted out in the distant future by historians.
…
The Republicans must, for the good of the country, resist this impulse.
The matters that currently demand the country’s attention are too serious and go too close to the heart of America’s constitutional system of government for the need to chase headlines to be allowed to interfere with an honest effort to get the facts.
It is far too early, for example, for any member of Congress to raise the issue of impeachment, to even refer to the possibility that any or all of the current scandals at the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, within the national security establishment, or elsewhere in government could lead to it.
The facts must come first, and they must be presented in a clear, well defined manner that leaves little doubt that what has been uncovered by congressional investigations constitutes malfeasance and dishonest behavior.
In the American political system there are no shortcuts.
One reason Watergate had such a damaging effect on the Nixon Administration and the Republican Party is that reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stayed on the story day after day after day.
And congressional investigators looking into Nixon’s conduct in office retained their focus and did not go seeking to amplify the case against him with extraneous matters.
In the end, that made it all the more believable that the actions taken against the nation’s 37th president were a matter of justice, not a witch hunt undertaken to turn a political opponent who had just won re-election by carrying 49 of 50 states from office.
In the end, it is not partisan affiliations that matter.
What matters is the truth.
Obama would do much to help himself were he to come clean about all of it rather than pretend the first he heard about any of it was when it was reported on television.
In a 24-hour news cycle, it is difficult to wait until the reality of a given situation catches up with the spin, but both sides of what is clearly an adversarial process need to let the facts take them where they will.

Of course, journalism was different 40 years ago — aging reporters have no feedback from the past.
Time is just too fast, and way-too much shit happens.

And because of last night, I will face the horror before the weekend: A jackpot of $475 million ranks as the second largest in Powerball history and third biggest overall.
No one came up with the winning numbers, so everybody and his idiot brother will be out in force, dreaming of tons of cash and the paradise it will bring. A situation like this brings out the worse form of modern humanity — a delusional quest to make life better. In the public domain, the lootery (sorry, the lottery) creates something so horrible, so repugnant anyone with any form of sane sense is forced to avert their eyes from the carnage.
As manager of a liquor store, we also sell lottery tickets, and assholes of every description will now slither off woodwork and from under rocks to throw away money on the chance an unicorn will shit on their collective faces.

(Illustration found here).

A scandal, I tell you, a scandal — more telling than the reality of DC.
And with the last couple of weeks, in this pathetic nation’s capitol, you might just have to pick a number, or a series of numbers, to figure out what the bullshit is going on — and the jackpot is an empty wallet (like the lottery!).
The months-long, dumb-ass Benghazi hullabaloo of empty promises has been pushed back by two bigger piles of shit — the IRS checking up on Tea Party financial shenanigans, and the US DOJ secretly snagging phone records of Associated Press reporters.
And both of these two newbies has what Benghazi didn’t have — staying power with a public interest.
President Obama’s second term for most-likely for all intend and purposes, is probably over, and the next couple of years will be a shouting match between Democrats and Republicans.
Much the same, but worse, as it’s been the last six years.

Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic claims Obama was already fucked before the new shit hit the pipeline:

Most of what a president can accomplish takes place early in a term.
But as Republican communications pros are fond of reminding reporters, Obama’s second term was already off to a rocky start.
The major reason the Toomey-Manchin bill to expand background checks failed was distrust of the federal government.
That’s not going to change.
The IRS and AP scandals will no doubt worsen distrust of the federal government, especially in circles already prone to such sentiments and make it harder for members of Congress to withstand gun-lobby pressure.
But the important thing to remember is that every major gun proposal before the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate already failed at a time when the political winds were as favorable to such reforms as they have been in more than a decade.
And none of those proposals ever had a shot in the U.S. House.
…
Even in the wake of a decisive reelection and while riding a crest of positive national sentiment, the president was unable to come to a grand bargain on revenues and spending with Republican leaders, and so instead we have the sequester, and no sign that Congress is eager to revisit the issue or reverse it.
Republican willingness to negotiate with the president was always low, and what remained at the end of his first term seemed to evaporate early in the new year—that is, well before the current scandals.
…
But after the successful Republican opposition to the idea of a Susan Rice nomination to the State Department and the GOP’s pre-scandal efforts to thwart or delay the seating of Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary and Gina McCarthy as EPA Administrator, it will be hard to tell the difference if that’s the case.
The appointments process under Obama has been broken since 2009.
As for the matter of whether the AP scandal will lead to calls for Eric Holder’s head, it’s worth recalling that the chairman of the Republican National Committee already called for him to resign in December 2011 over the Fast and Furious program, releasing a web ad accusing him of a “cover-up.”
There may be more calls, but they won’t be the first ones.
…
In short, those who wondered why Obama seemed so singularly unenthusiastic about the prospect of a second term while in the midst of running for it now have their answer. Because it looks like this. Because despite optimistic rhetoric about how the 113th Congress would be different from the 112th, which was the least productive Congress since the 1940s, the likelihood was that it was always going to look like this.

Including in that ugly wad of presidential debris is the Obamacare sideshow coming up and the negative impasse of attempting any form of immigration reform anytime soon — in other words, Obama was in deep, scalding water before the stove was even ignited.
The major problem is the GOP — they’re nasty, lying assholes without a dab of compassion about this country. They’re tied in with big money and the frantic silliness of the Tea Party and no matter what Obama says or does, Republicans will bluster-talk right through it.
Even just plain old stupid, enlarged by a diarrhea mouth, like the asshole, Louie Gohmert.
Via Raw Story:

Gohmert criticized the FBI over its handling of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The congressman alleged the government was more aggressive towards Christian evangelist Franklin Graham than radical Islamic terrorists, and that Americans were more concerned about “being blown up by terrorists” than religious profiling.
But Holder noted Gohmert had no way of knowing how the FBI handled the situation, since he had no access to the FBI files.
“You don’t know what the FBI did,” he said.
“You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians.
You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to.
You simply do not know that.
And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough, or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough.
I know what the FBI did.
You cannot know what I know.
That is all.”
The congressman was not pleased with the rebuke.
Repeatedly clashing with the hearing’s chairman, Gohmert accused Holder of challenging his character.
The congressman insisted everything he said was true.

Despite it being a made-up lie.

A good-read essay on scandals comes from a long-time insider, Suzanne Garment, wife of Leonard Garment, special counsel to Dick Nixon during the Watergate era. She says the ‘scandals’ eating at Obama right now is near child’s play and ain’t nothing like the good, old days — “Come on, people. Get a grip.”
From Reuters and some highlights:

Watergate was about hubris, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the culture wars and the darkest of angers — both within Nixon and against him.
The current agglomeration is about bureaucracies, the zeitgeist and garden variety political calculation.
…
It is tempting to smile condescendingly at the White House reporters who are now coming forward — courageously and righteously, they think — to challenge the administration’s account of the preparation of the talking points.
These young reporters are to the Watergate press corps, at least the press corps once it was liberated by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as ducklings are to tarantulas.
But this is the scandal that has the fingerprints of the White House on it.
It is the one that raises the specter of the White House lying for political advantage.
Moreover, though the people who died at Benghazi were cold by the time the talking points came under discussion, their death haunts this issue.
This scandal, unlike the AP or the IRS scandal, could be fundamentally corrosive.
…
Benghazi, however, remains the central ring of this circus.
It has not yet risen to anything comparable to Watergate.
If the children in the car ask, “Are we almost there yet?” the answer is, “Not even close.”
If the question is, “Are we maybe getting into the neighborhood of almost there yet?” the answer is not so certain.

And if the circus comes to town, hide your loved ones — or just except the piss as rain.

In the flow of the powerful news cycle these days concerns ‘scandal,’ which means fun for one side, shit for the other. President Obama seems swamped by events that offend the moral sensibilities of morons. If the shit continues, his second term could be just a string of quotes from 2008 — the IRS focusing on tea party, right-wing bat-shit crazy groups and the US DOJ secretly snagging mainstream news giant AP’s phone records might push that ultimate, bigger than Watergate, Benghazi, to a back burner, or maybe off the stove all together.

(Illustration found here).

The bigger, wide-effecting scandal is the lack of climate change coverage by the wired-up media — the AP segment hurts its feelings — and despite the planet crossing the 400 ppm last week, TV news people seemed unaware. The MSM has become a major royal pain in the ass.
Via SeattlePI:

But America’s major TV networks have found a hotter story — Prince Harry and Britain’s royal family — according to a new study by the watchdog group MediaMatters.org
During 2012, the warmest year on record in the “lower 48″ — the average temperature, at 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit was 3.2 degrees above the 20th Century average — the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs devoted 12 news segments to climate change, and 92 to the Royals, according to the MediaMatters count.
ABC World News was the worst offender, with 43 reports on the Royals to just one on warming of the Earth that was producing such violent weather as late season hurricanes.
NBC Nightly News featured climate change four times, compared to 38 for their Royal Highnesses.
At CBS Evening News, the ratio was a little closer 11 (the Royals) to seven (climate change).
…
ABC World News and NBC Nightly News last week ignored evidence that CO2, which causes global warming, is building up in the atmosphere . . . even as NBC reported on Prince Harry’s tour of the U.S.
The New York Times, in its Saturday editions, put the 400 parts-per-million CO2 story atop the front page.
On Tuesday, however, the “Gray Lady” was for a time picturing picturing Prince Harry and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie atop the Times’ website as they inspected Hurricane Sandy damage — evidence, many scientists say, of later and more violent hurricanes.
MediaMatters found that ABC and NBC even broadcast more news about Donald Trump during 2011 than on the Earth’s warming climate.
(Global warming is real. Trump’s claims about President Obama’s birthplace became a national joke.)

Climate change is a slow moving news item, of course, but the word, ‘slow,’ is relative.
Quick as yesterday or last week:

After seeing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere surpass a historic threshold last week, the world should brace for the new peak level to soon become the global annual average, the World Meteorological Organization warned Tuesday.
“At the current rate of increase, the global annual average CO2 concentration is set to cross the 400 parts per million threshold in 2015 or 2016,” the UN agency said in a statement.

The way-biggest event/problem facing the planet right now — beyond all doubt — is climate change, but in reality it’s one of the least understood things around. Mainly, because the denial side has more money and a much-bigger mouth.
One cannot grasp that 2015 is less than two years away?
And the nightmare horror to soon follow — the main disturbing aspect with climate change is time.
For instance:

The drastic decline of summer Arctic sea ice is one recent example: In the 2007 report, the IPCC concluded the Arctic would not lose its summer ice before 2070 at the earliest.
But the ice pack has shrunk far faster than any scenario scientists felt policymakers should consider; now researchers say the region could see ice-free summers within 20 years.
Sea-level rise is another.
In its 2001 report, the IPCC predicted an annual sea-level rise of less than 2 millimeters per year.
But from 1993 through 2006, the oceans actually rose 3.3 millimeters per year, more than 50 percent above that projection.

So slow is actually fast — or words to that effect.
And all this means is continual bad news of crazed weather going insane.
Dr. Jeff Masters yesterday:

It’s been a “Topsy-Turvy Temperature Regime for U.S. this May” says underground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt in his latest post.
After record May cold and snows hit the Great Lakes over the weekend, a ferocious May heat wave is in full bloom today.
Several cities are poised to experience their greatest 1-day May temperature swing on record today.
Chicago bottomed out at 36° on Monday morning, and this afternoon’s high is predicted to be 88° — a spectacular 52° change in temperature in just one day.
The all-time record for a one-day warm-up in the Windy City during May is 50°, set May 1, 1992.
A 50°+ temperature swing is also expected in Minneapolis, where the high today is predicted to be 94°, coming on the heels of a 41° low Monday morning.
The most dramatic “Weather Whiplash”, though, came in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where the mercury hit 22° on May 12, then shot up to 92° on May 13 — an astonishing 70° rise in just one day!

And that’s the scandal — we need more of “!” in climate news.

And in DC, the din has become nearly oppressive. President Obama has most-likely shit in his mess kit, even if he doesn’t know it yet. In the wake of the GOP facade-attempt in scandalizing Benghazi, the Obama administration faces more political shit from his own people, and if he can’t herd together the growing gap in ‘truthiness,’ then the next three years ain’t gonna be pretty.

(Illustration found here).

This morning, beyond Angelina Jolie’s startling new revelation, the piecing together of the horror of Cleveland, the unmasking of the New Orleans shooter, and various other nasty bits of ugly, there’s this warped-out story that will give eventually give Obama great grief:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

Of course, the GOP jumped head first — Darrell Issa, head witch-hunter for Benghazi-gate, blubbered: “They had an obligation to look for every other way to get it before they intruded on the freedom of the press.”
Issa is such a nasty wisenheimer.

The Justice Department are watching their words in this newest flak storm:

The US attorney’s office in Washington, which is part of the Justice Department, in a statement sent to AFP, did not specifically mention the AP but stated that it follows specific laws and regulations in seeking records of media organizations.
“Those regulations require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media,” the statement said.
“We must notify the media organization in advance unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.
Because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.”

And, of course, this tid-bit is the second balloon pop for the Obama people — the first the IRS scrutinizing right-wing Tea Party groups. That shit will smell bad for a long time.

(Via) The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized.

On top of all the current shit, from out in the world to down on the homestead, Obama now has three “scandals” he’s got to deal with in the coming weeks, and, he really doesn’t know how to deal with these kinds of stuff. He’s too mild-mannered, or something.
And this ‘stuff’ has a way of interrupting everything — from Reuters:

It happened when the president had to interrupt his news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain to answer questions about the widening investigation into the Benghazi attacks in Libya and the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.
By the end of the day he was facing a third major problem when the Associated Press said the Department of Justice had secretly seized some of its reporters’ phone records last year.
It is all leading to comparisons with the second term of President Bill Clinton, in which his agenda was severely disrupted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Obama, unlike Clinton, has not been accused of personal misconduct.
But his ability to steer the Washington “conversation” could be compromised.
“I think the IRS scandal comes at a very inopportune time for the president and the Democratic agenda,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University scholar of Congress.
“The challenge for Obama and the Democrats in the coming weeks and months will be to keep the public’s attention focused on Obama’s policy goals when Republicans and the media will be focused on scandal.”

Since that’s all the GOP has to go on — scandal — you can bet the shitfire storm will only get worse.
Obama surely must wish Miss Pope was on his cellphone speed-dial.

The good, ole US of A is one messed-up place — Shannon Roberts at Interim LSU Hospital in New Orleans yesterday afternoon: “All innocent bystanders got hit…When I got the call saying they were shot, I wasn’t thinking at all, I was just shivering and crying… just hoping they be all right…Mothers should not have to be crying any day no less Mother Day.”

(Illustration found here).

The lady was attending to three family members who were wounded in a shooting at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans — those among 18 adults, a 10-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, who were struck by bullets in the incident. Fortunately, there were no fatalities, though, reportedly a man and a woman were reported to be in surgery Sunday evening.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas (via): “It appears that these two or three people, for reasons unknown to us, started shooting at, towards or in the crowd,” Serpas said, adding that the incident was over in “just a couple of seconds.”
Police officials were quick to rule out terrorism: “It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans,” New Orleans FBI spokeswoman Mary Beth Romig said Monday.
Just random gun violence, nothing to see here, move along.

This past weekend packed some gun violence nationwide — early yesterday, police stormed a Trenton, NJ., home and ended a 37-hour hostage stand-off, and finding a woman and her 13-year-old son dead, with the perp shot to death.
The mother and son supposedly been dead two weeks.
From CNN:

Police received no response at the door.
Fearing for the safely of the family, authorities made a forced entry into the home and immediately smelled an odor “consistent with a decomposing body,” police said.
The officers also noticed maggots throughout the house, Trenton Police Director Ralph Rivera said.

Another horror show.
The dead shooter was also under an arrest warrant in Pennsylvania for failing to register as a sex offender, and had an extensive record of violence, including convictions for aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy, as well as arrests for robbery, weapons offenses, and child endangerment.
Yet the guy was armed to the teeth — WTF!

Meanwhile, on Saturday night, police found four bodies in a home in south Indiana, all shot to death. Although police suspect it was drug related (meth deal gone bad), but have no official motive.
Stevie Furkin, a relative of one of the victims: Speculating on the nature of the homicide, Furkin said, “It might have been planned, might not have. I wouldn’t have no idea.” But he said he doesn’t worry that there will be more victims: “They’re all dead.”

And still this morning in south Humboldt County — about an hour south of me — police from numerous agencies are still searching for Shane Miller, the guy accused to killing his wife and two small daughters last week over in Shasta County. The manhunt is being conducted in some of the most-heavy-duty wilderness in the country.
In the midst of the search, police also responded to another gunshot victim found in the vicinity, though, that incident was unrelated to the Miller search.
And so it goes…

America is an armed camp — Stanford University law professor John J. Donohue and reality of the attitudes toward firearms:

Since 1965, more than 1.3 million Americans have died in gun-related incidents, though at least half were suicides, Donohue said.
By comparison, 617,000 men and women of this nation died in all of the wars the United States fought throughout the 20th century.
More than 100,000 Americans become shooting victims each year.
Last year, there were 11,101 gun-related homicides in the United States, 19,766 suicides by gun and 851 shooting accidents, according to Donohue’s statistics.
Americans own 270 million of the more than 600 million guns in private hands worldwide, he said.
The United States has far more homicides each year than other countries within the top 25 most affluent nations worldwide, Donohue said.
Oakland also is above average in deaths compared with similar cities throughout the nation, according to Donohue’s research.
…
Despite the NRA’s assertions, Donohue claims that there is no credible evidence that large gun ownership reduces crime.
He rejects studies done by the gun lobby that point to different conclusions.
“Many of the studies are similar to the studies by the Tobacco Institute that said that cigarettes were good for you,” he said.
Widespread gun ownership also has its downside.
More than 1 million guns are stolen from private homes each year and make their way into the black market as stolen weapons.
“You don’t have to worry about enough gun rights,” he said.
“You have to worry about the gun you have because the gun is not only a threat to you but a threat to everybody.”

Smokin’ barrels gone crazy.