Clear and a bit chilly this early Tuesday morning along California’s northern coast as 2013 continues to move at a fairly-rapid pace into a new year.
History is right now.

Just a side note on Aaron Swartz — he was facing decades in prison: It should be noted that Swartz faced such a stiff sentence because prosecutors charged him with multiple federal crimes arising out of his efforts to download and distribute academic papers. Similarly, a person who robbed a bank, sold a slave, and then rounded out their day by breaking Justice Scalia’s nose would also risk spending the next 50 years in prison, just like Aaron Swartz did.
What’s wrong with that fuckin’ picture?

(Illustration found here).

Modern life is so full of bullshit it’s hard to tell which portion of the shit stinks so much — it would depend greatly who’s doing the smelling, but a lot of shit is shit because…it’s shit.
So crazed modern life it’s contradictory, so terrifyingly, dumb-ass crazy.
From blogs.forward.com and one kid from Sandy Hook:

Then, unprompted by me, Veronique described what she saw: “We all saw how beautiful he was. He had thick, shiny hair, beautiful long eyelashes that rested on his cheeks. He looked like he was sleeping.
But the reality of it was under the cloth he had covering his mouth there was no mouth left.
His jaw was blown away. I just want people to know the ugliness of it so we don’t talk about it abstractly, like these little angels just went to heaven.
No.
They were butchered.
They were brutalized.
And that is what haunts me at night.”

Remember, there were 20 of those.
And also remember there’s other people out there willing to let shit like Sandy Hook continue if they so deranged-like want to, and not much will change in that respect or not:

The National Rifle Association will produce a nightly one-hour cable talk show called “Cam & Company” for the Sportsman Channel that is due to premiere on Tuesday, the same day Vice President Joe Biden is expected to present national gun control proposals to the White House.
NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre said on Friday in a statement from the Sportsman Channel that the program “comes at a critical time in the history of preserving our Second Amendment.”

Sandy Hook has become more than just a place: The nonprofit group, Sandy Hook Promise, is vowing to honor victims of the school massacre by looking for “common sense” solutions to prevent future mass killings and to ensure that Newtown is known as a catalyst for change rather than a site of horror.

And why do the bat-shit crazy hate Obamacare so freakin’ much?
In a worldly perspective, we Americans suck at health care — and we’re at the affluent bottom.
From Care2:

Americans are in poorer health and die younger than people in other high-income countries, according to a report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing to come out of the report is that this is true for all Americans — including those with health insurance, high incomes, college educations, and a healthy lifestyle — and despite the fact that the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other nation.
“Americans are dying and suffering at rates that we know are unnecessary because people in other high-income countries are living longer lives and enjoying better health.
What concerns our panel is why, for decades, we have been slipping behind,” said Steven H. Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and chair of the panel that wrote the report.
…
Sadly, children and teenagers are disproportionately affected.
The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate of any high-income country, and it also ranks poorly on premature birth and the proportion of children who live to age five.
…
Almost two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the U.S. and these other countries is due to death before age 50.
The growing mortality rate for Americans under age 50 has resulted in a serious generation gap.
“I don’t think most parents know that, on average, infants, children, and adolescents in the U.S. die younger and have greater rates of illness and injury than youth in other countries,” Woolf said.

And why oh fucking why?
Today the US House is to vote on the ass-delayed bill for Hurricane Sandy relief, but it won’t be easy: House conservatives opposed to more deficit spending tried Monday to chip away at the $50.7 billion Superstorm Sandy aid package by requiring offsetting spending cuts to pay for recovery efforts and by stripping money for projects they say are unrelated to the Oct. 29 storm or not urgently needed.
Compassion is absent in a lot of this shit.

Time is slowly ticking away toward…

The hands of the infamous “Doomsday Clock” will remain firmly in their place at five minutes to midnight — symbolizing humans’ destruction — for the year 2013, scientists announced today (Jan. 14).
Keeping their outlook for the future of humanity quite dim, the group of scientists also wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to partner with other global leaders to act on climate change.
…
The Doomsday Clock came into being in 1947 as a way for atomic scientists to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons.
That year, the Bulletin set the time at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing humanity’s destruction. By 1949, it was at three minutes to midnight as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated.
In 1953, after the first test of the hydrogen bomb, the doomsday clock ticked to two minutes until midnight.
The Bulletin was at its most optimistic in 1991, when the Cold War thawed and the United States and Russia began cutting their arsenals.
That year, the clock was set at 17 minutes to midnight.
From then until 2010, however, it was a gradual creep back toward destruction, as hopes of total nuclear disarmament vanished and threats of nuclear terrorism and climate change reared their heads.
In 2010, the Bulletin found some hope in arms reduction treaties and international climate talks and bumped the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back to six minutes from midnight from its previous post at five to midnight.
But by 2012, the clock was pushed forward another minute.

Krazy, huh?