Clear and windy right now this early Saturday on California’s north coast — we’re in the midst of hostile weather with high winds, gusts up to 45, and supposedly some heavy rain, maybe a bit of hail tossed into the mix.
According to the Lost Coast Outpost last evening, the environment will be fit for perhaps a tornado, ‘weather permitting‘ — hope not, I grew in tornado country, and they’re not funny. All this shit is expected to last through tonight and on-into tomorrow — sunshine by Monday, perchance.

A howling wind, an apt description of not only outside my apartment, but apparently for a wailing, doleful dead giveaway of modern life in modern America.
In my post yesterday, I touched upon a certain sense of a prevailing madness seemingly illustrated by murder-suicides and hatchet-attacks, but apparently finished my thingy too early — two horrible cases-in-point exploded in the afternoon.

(Illustration: Salvador Dali, ‘Alice’s Evidence,’ found here).

A Friday news dump of the worse kind.
First was report of another school shooting, this one at a high school near Seattle, a 14-year-old kid shoots dead a girl, wounds a couple more kids, and then kills himself; and the second was an “incredibly dangerous” escapade near Sacramento, in which this guy and his girl friend went on a rumble-for-two, killing two county cops in the process, critically wounding a couple more people before being cornered and arrested.

Should be expected, I guess — mass shootings are increasing in the US, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Via SFGate:

The FBI’s study on “active shooter incidents” documented 160 cases between 2000 and 2013, and the bulk of them occurred during the latter half of the period: About 16 shootings took place annually over the past seven years, compared to 6.4 annually over the previous seven.
…
The study found that mass shootings often unfold often quickly.
In cases where the duration of shootings could be determined, nearly 70 percent were over within five minutes.
More than half of the sprees ended at the shooter’s discretion — when he fled or took his own life — while unarmed civilians stepped in and took down gunmen 13 percent of the time.
“Even when law enforcement was present or able to respond within minutes, civilians often had to make life and death decisions, and, therefore, should be engaged in training and discussions on decisions they may face,” the report’s authors wrote.

Guns are the factor. Making these murder-suicides more easily obtained. In a piece on mass shootings at Vox, was this about offing oneself:

Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn’t typically planned and thought through extensively in advance.
It’s impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide.
And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means.
They didn’t make a considered choice and seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky.
Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker’s Tad Friend that as he was falling, he “instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.”

Or pulled the trigger.

And later yesterday afternoon, to seemingly keep the horror news flowing, Kevin Drum, noted-longtime political blogger at Mother Jones, revealed he has multiple myeloma, a cancer of blood plasma cells.

If we could just blast cancer cells, or the Ebola strain with a round from a Glock G30 45 caliber handgun, a lot of this shit would come to an abrupt end.