Clear and cold again on a early Wednesday along California’s northern coast and the news cycle this morning looks like it’s eating shit for breakfast.

Gun-play at two schools yesterday, and this the continuing sad refrain from all these tragedies: “There were no witnesses in the buildings,” Greiner said. “Of course, it’s a tragedy and they still can’t believe it would happen on our campus.”

(Illustration found here).

Thinking/saying such things as that ‘can’t happen here‘ is waste of air.
Last night, the above incident at Hazard Community and Technical College in Hazard, Kentucky, about 90 miles southeast of Lexington — two killed, one wounded there (the two dead were from a  nearby town called, ‘Happy’) : Hazard Police Chief Minor Allen said the shooting “could be related to a domestic-type situation” that was “not related to the school in any way.”
And Tuesday afternoon, a part-time student at Stevens Institute of Business & Arts in St. Louis, MO, shot and wounded a school administrator, before shooting himself — both survived, but required surgery: Police Chief Sam Dotson: “This did not appear to be random,” Dotson said. “It appeared to be targeted.”

Not school related, yet here we are.

And reportedly, here today President Obama is expected to announce his new gun-control proposals, which is to include a new federal ban on assault weapons and background checks of all gun buyers, and most-mightily, banning high-capacity magazines, like the 30-round magazines used in the Sandy Hook incident.
Despite all that, Americans it seems won’t be bullet proof.
From the New York Times yesterday:

American civilians have 250 million to 300 million firearms, said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
“Those firearms are not going to go away anytime soon,” he said.
More serious steps — like those taken by Australia, which reacted to a 1996 mass shooting by banning the sale, importation and possession of semiautomatic rifles and by removing 700,000 guns from circulation — are seen as politically untenable.
In the 18 years before the new gun laws, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and in the decade afterward, there were none, according to a 2006 article in Injury Prevention, a journal.

WTF does ‘politically untenable‘ actually mean?

One good example is the National Climate Assessment, a draft of which was released on Friday — this report comes off the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which required a national climate assessment to be conducted every four years.
Oh, really?
From Time magazine:

This is the point at which you’re probably wondering why, if a 1990 law mandated that a national climate assessment be produced every four years, we’re only getting around to releasing the third one in 2013, or 23 years after the original legislation was passed.
That’s in part because of the usual slow workings of the federal bureaucracy — complicated by the fact that the report is complied by an inter-governmental body involving 13 separate federal agencies and departments — but also because conservatives have repeatedly attacked the assessment for supposedly exaggerating the effects of climate change.
No climate assessment was published during former President George W. Bush’s administration, and though the schedule is back in order under President Obama, the difficult history of the U.S. Global Change Research Program is another reminder of just how politicized this subject has become.

Armed to the teeth to resist extreme weather, rising seas and eventual extinction.
Good fucking’ morning, America.