Rain pattering down here this morning on California’s northern coast with a forecast scheduling thunderstorms and cold winds — same as yesterday, but here at the edge of the Pacific, Monday turned out clear, sunny and kind of warm.
The rain today is expected to be heavy at times, even with some hail thrown-in for good measure, and the occasional lightening.
Although we haven’t really encountered much total rain this season (yet), down south it’s not like that: The same trend is true in San Francisco, where 132 percent more rain than normal has fallen since July. A rain gauge in Santa Rosa has collected 10 times more than it did at this time last year and is well ahead of normal.
The weather is increasingly befuddled and half-crazed — way similar to just about all of humanity.
(Illustration of Salvador Dali’s ‘Portrait of Freud‘ found here).
And crazy it be: After hearing rain patter the windows and flutter around on the roof-gutters, I stepped out onto the patio for a smoke and behold, stars could be seen twinkling in the sky.
Odd like nowadays.
Surfing the news sites earlier, I was quickly shocked and then more-quickly un-shocked: NBC News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and members of his network production team were freed from captors in Syria after a firefight at a checkpoint on Monday, five days after they were taken prisoner, NBC News said early Tuesday.
So secret the episode, no one knew about it until it was all over.
The news network reported Engel and his crew are unharmed and are now safely out of the country.
While residing in south California for a goodly time, I didn’t have cable TV and could only pick up three channels — NBC, PBS and the Fox entertainment outlet — and watched Engel jostle about Iraq for years and always worried about the boy.
You need to go home for awhile, kid,and maintain a low profile — freakin’ glad he’s safe.
Meanwhile, four days after Sandy Hook, there’s still a lot of bullshit about guns.
Complete asshole-hypocrite James Dobson drags society into the blame game, similar to this asshole/hypocrite and on par with known asshole/hypocrite Mike Huckabee’s earlier bullshit.
One suicidal proposal came from fruit-punch, bowl-head Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast — during mass shooting incidents, she would …encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide…
Yeah, right.
And four days later, the asshole/hypocrite NRA — the gun-toting-right to shoot crowd — has remained way-quiet, dead silent.
From USAToday:
The NRA’s Facebook page, which had registered 1.7 million “likes,” was taken down Friday morning.
Repeated requests for interviews with NRA leaders went unanswered.
…
NRA silence is typical in the immediate days after highly publicized shootings.
“When there is a large-scale mass shooting like this, the NRA plays duck and cover,” says Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York-Cortland and author of The Politics of Gun Control.
The NRA, he says, stayed largely quiet in the aftermath of the shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., this summer that left 12 dead and dozens wounded.
“They are waiting for the storm to subside,” Spitzer says.
“They know that, historically, what happens is great public outrage (after mass shootings) until the political storm passes.
And once that happens, then they resume standard procedures.
They will work to defeat any proposed laws.”
Supposedly, these so-called laws is in the hands of President Obama, but he poses a good mourn and not much else.
NBC has a list of Obama’s eloquence after mass gun killings starting in 2008 and ending last Sunday via Sandy Hook.
Soothing talk at the time without any action later.
Same on the screaming, harpies ‘fiscal cliff’ crisis, though, it’s been reported Obama and John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner have reached some kind of deal.
Some have said Sandy Hook took the punch out of those talks, but in reality, it was a shot in the face for the US public.
Ezra Klein at the Washington Post has some details, but adds this: On stimulus, unemployment insurance will be extended, as will the refundable tax credits. Some amount of infrastructure spending is likely. Perversely, the payroll tax cut, one of the most stimulative policies in the fiscal cliff, will likely be allowed to lapse, which will deal a big blow to the economy.
Who cares — duh!
Catching it correctly, this Canadian letter writer to the Montreal Gazette:
It makes me sick to my stomach to see another massacre. Before the government introduces gun control south of the border, there will be many more incidents.
There should be a citizens’ movement where everybody who owns a gun goes to the nearest police station to turn in. Then each town should hold an open destruction ceremony on the lawn of city hall and anybody who has not turned in their gun can throw it into the pit and then blow it all up.
New laws should be made that everybody has to turn in their guns.
In the meantime, people should do this voluntarily.
In the U.S., people are very patriotic and once a wave like that starts it will run like wildfire.
This is much more important than the fiscal cliff, the economy or anything else that needs fixing in the United States.
Border security is at its highest alert, while they can’t control their own security inside the country.
Nobody should be allowed to have a gun except the police and army.
The National Rifle Association should be outlawed.
Make an amendment to the constitution.
Impose huge fines for anybody who does not comply, this thing has to stop right now.
Crude, but true.
A set of cliff notes if you will.