New Year's Eve Update

(Wow.  New Year's Eve.  Unless this is all a huge figment of my imagination, most of us made it safely through 2012, Mayan calendar notwithstanding.  To all you preppers out there who are still struggling to overcome your deep depression that the world didn't end and you're going to have to pay off all those bills you rang up installing and stocking those underground shelters, all I can say is bwaaahahahaha.  By the way, I understand you can pick up your new Mayan calendar at Bi-Mart.  I told you they just wanted us to buy a new one.  But I digress ... )

• There was plenty of weird stuff to go around this past year, and one of the things that contributed to the apocalyptic feeling, along with the end of the Mayan calendar, was the depressing press release that Hostess was ceasing production of Twinkies.  Oh, the horror.  People flocked to convenience stores all over America and bought up every last Twinkie they could find.  Only in our worst nightmares can one imagine what will happen to mankind when the last Twinkie is devoured by some thoughtless overweight couch potato.  Mark Morford dares to tell us that it'll be no big deal.  Read more.
• And who can forget the election year nonsense between President Obama and Mitt Romney?  Who would like to?  I know, I know, me too.  But here's just one more jab at the Romney family who apparently have a hard time spelling their own name. Or do they ...?  See picture above.
• The hottest selling item in America this Christmas was the assault rifle.  Seems like everyone has to have one, for some reason or another.  Apparently people are buying these military-style weapons to protect themselves from other people with similar military-style weapons.  And there's actual serious NRA talk of arming teachers in the classrooms.  We would carry that idea one step farther and ask why not just arm all the children?  (meet me in the street in front of the saloon at high noon and we'll discuss this further.)  Gawdhelpusall.
• As this year ends, the idiots in the District of Columbia are telling us to be very very afraid of "the fiscal cliff."  While this whole scenario sounds like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, this "horrible catastrophe" was evidently caused by the idiots in D.C. themselves.  Remember this next time you vote:  Even if these people serve only one term, they receive a pension for the rest of their lives.  Kinda makes you woosie, don't it?
• On a happier note out of Washington, The evil Tea Party had its worse year ever.  After practically destroying the Republican Party with ultra-extremist ideas, and gloating responsibility for placing John (ala orange') Boehner as Speaker of the House, the Tea Party flag has been retired and its members have gone into hiding.  Good riddance.  The ignorance and hate fueled blatant bigotry of this movement was America's shame.
• One of my favorite all-time writers in the world is Dave Barry.  Click here to read Dave's "Year in Review," with thoughts like this:  "...we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which, in terms of intellectual content, makes “Jersey Shore” look like “Hamlet.”
• And to all faithful readers of Bad Hat, we here at Headquarters wish you a very Happy New Year.  Behave yourselves tonight, please. 

Hurtling Toward the Apocalypse

(Here we are just one more full weekend away from Christmas, and we as a nation have just endured the most gut-wrenching weekend in many years.  But, as they say, life goes on, so we're going to attempt at this time to shoulder our way to the front of our emotions and get back to as near as normal as possible.  On a personal note, my steady march toward infirmity was aided this last week with the extraction of 4 of my teeth.  Three of them had broken off at some point or another, and the fourth one was cracked and painful.  Now I'm in the midst of my retirement I no longer have dental insurance, so I've informed the family that Christmas will be a bit tight this year.  This news was met with stony silence.  Oh well, at least the pain meds were good.  The weather report for western Oregon and Lane County this morning calls for lowering freezing levels for the rest of the day, with the snow level to reach 500 feet tomorrow morning.  That should put those of us up here in the hills at about 6 inches of white stuff.  I'll be stocking the larder with wood stove pellets and brandy today.  Batten the hatches!  But I digress ...)

• If you depend on the Mayan calendar and not the one with the cute pictures of dogs hanging on your refrigerator, you're probably aware that the apocalypse is scheduled for this coming Friday.  So what's this apocalypse going to be like?  Zombies?  Cataclysmic earthquakes, floods, hurricanes?  Meteors?  Christian Raptures?  Mark Morford says we have it all wrong.  He also says it's not going to be some sort of New Age Grand Awakening.  "Bad news, Marin county: We are not on the cusp of some sort of collective consciousness shift, whereby those who are already vibrating at some higher-pitched thrum are somehow 'ready' to transcend this ugly plane and plop over into another happier, shinier dimension with better coffee and longer orgasms, and then sigh a patronizing sigh back at the rest of us because they were 'enlightened' enough to have the right kind of crystals and the right meditation apps on their iPhone." Read more.
• Word on the street this morning is that President Obama has decided to nominate Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State to replace Hillary Clinton, who is stepping down.  We think it's a good choice.  Kerry has come a long way since he was a Vietnam War protester in the early 70's.
• Here's a depressing statistic: Approximately 700 homeless people die every year due to exposure to the elements.  The solution, one would think, is simple.  If you're homeless and the weather is life threatening, get yourself to a shelter.  But there's apparently a problem with that.  Here's 10 reasons Why Homeless People Sleep in the Cold - and Die, by Piper Hoffman.
• Former Governor, current FOX commentator, and creepy Jesus-Freak Mike Huckabee said of the recent news:   "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"  But somehow Mike received a sign from his aforementioned God, and now he's trying to back-pedal on that ridiculous remark.  Read more.
• The Pulitzer Prize-winning falsehood fact-checkers over at PolitiFact.com put their famed Truth-O-Meter™ to work to root out the biggest untruths of the year, and invited its readers to weigh in.  So what was the biggest political lie of 2012?  We were rooting for our favorite big fat liar Rush Limbaugh, who said "Obamacare is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world."  But alas, he only came close.  So here's the winner.

The News From Connecticut

On an otherwise routine Friday morning, in a quiet New England town in Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year-old young man walked calmly into an elementary school with several loaded guns.  By the time he was finished with his horrific mission, 26 human beings were dead, including 20 children between the ages of 5 and 10. As has become all to common in these cases, the gunman allegedly killed himself as authorities were closing in on him.  Days later we now are coming to the frightening realization that there will be no making sense of this.  Easy access to guns?  Passive mental health treatment?  Seasonal depression?  We'll probably never know for sure.  In the mean time, we grieve.

Our good Bad Hat friend Alex lives but 30 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where the shooting took place.  Alex and his beautiful wife have two children of their own, one of who's picture graces the heading of this blog as the Face of Bad Hat.  When I heard where this had happened I was immediately concerned for Alex and his family, but he quickly contacted me and assured me they were okay. He has graciously allowed me to share his thoughts with all of you.  The following is the combination of two E-mails, the first part on Saturday, when confusion and misinformation reigned, and the latter came this morning, when more facts have come clearer.
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So, from what I understand, the news you are getting is probably better than the news we are getting. Lots of media mistakes and "made up" facts being shot around. CNN and a host of others stated the name of the brother of the shooter as the actual shooter. The poor guy was at his work in New Jersey, but had received a text message from a friend saying he had shot up the school and wtf. He apparently announced on his Facebook that he was in NJ and on his way home to figure out what was happening.. then the police picked him up. That's gotta suck.

The school is about 30 miles from where we live.. roughly ten miles west and twenty miles north. Sandy Hook and the Newtown area are on the comfortable middle end of the rich upper crust neighborhoods. The poorest people in the area are probably the teachers, since I'm sure the maids and gardeners earn easily two to three times an educational salary in tips and sex favors alone.

The shooter himself is 20 years old.. said to be somewhere on the functional end of the autism spectrum. Functional enough to load and use a gun. Depending on the news source, he had two or four guns of various types, all legally owned by his mother, the Kindergarten teacher at the school. He obtained access to the school because he is a family member of the teacher - otherwise, all doors to the school would have been locked or otherwise secured, which is how Maisie's school works. The school did everything right in this case. It would have been no different from if I had shown up at Maisie's school to visit her teacher or take her out of school early.

My understanding is that this was a family matter gone bad. The kid had some beef with his mom and decided it was better to end it all. She obviously wasn't a firm believer in gun safes or in securing her weaponry. He got access to the school, shot up the office staff.. took a bunch of kids and teachers out.. depending on the news, you get a different story. Some even said he had hostages at some point. One said he committed suicide. Another said he was taken out by a SWAT officer. I'm sure we'll get a better picture as the reporters actually listen to what the police and survivors have to tell them.

There was one touching story I heard which stood out in my mind - after seeing his kindergarten teacher shot down (which may have been the shooter's mother), one of the kindergarten students bravely grabbed a couple of his friends and they all marched out a door to get outside. The gunner ignored them as they left.

We have a few problems with the local media out here. Recently, there was an auto accident involving friends of my neighbor. Three women died in the car. Of the local media coverage, one news channel, being denied comments from the surviving family, decided to put a camera up to their living room window to get video of the family mourning so they had something to play on the air. A second news channel broadcast the names and addresses of the victims. Neither of them were FOX affiliates. I hate to think what FOX must have done. The media frenzy is blinding and annoying, so I'm sure most of what I say here is faulty in some way.

It is close to home.. only thirty miles. It's somewhat between our home town and Tina's school, which caters to wealthy families. Due to the area of the shooting, I'm certain many of the students who were shot would have eventually transferred to Tina's school and become students of hers. No doubt their siblings will transfer to Tina's school in years to come.

Tina and I haven't had a lot of chance to talk about it, since she's been at work and then had a work-related holiday party to attend this evening. One thing we did discuss, though, is that this could have happened anywhere. Not just in the US, but… it seems since this was a family affair gone bad and the shooter took it out on the entire school… well, what if she worked at a mall or a movie theatre? It just happened to be a school.. and happened to be a grade school. Sucks. Shit happens.

Just a few thoughts.

And my deep thought for the evening - Lack of universal access to mental health care kills people.

 

Love, Alexander

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On reviewing the most recent news on what happened.. I'm not certain universal mental health care would have helped in this situation. The mother was a volunteer, not a teacher. Her ex-husband is a VP at a big corp and she got $10,000 a month in alimony. In the divorce hearings, the judge ordered them all to seek mental health care... And they appear to have ignored this. Given they had the money, plenty of available doctors in the region and a court order, I doubt having universal access would have helped at all.. Like donating a dollar bill to a billionaire banker during the bailout. They don't want filthy paper money.

I'm not certain I see the paranoia here, but it is no doubt due to our east coast differences. The class divisions between upper, middle and lower class are much stronger here. On the west coast, I found it difficult to see the differences on the street. Public schools taught basically the same standards as private schools. Most people, despite economic levels, shopped in the same stores and went to the same entertainment venues. Here in Conn, you can really tell just by looking. There is a readily visible difference in the education standards taught in rich towns, be they public or private schools, as compared to poor towns. The rich and poor live in entirely different worlds and very rarely cross paths, utilizing different stores, restaurants and entertainment sites. Only the working middle class cross lines and see both worlds.

The upshot of this is that, rich or poor, they are all at the very basic level whiny complaining bastards. It's that tough working middle class of skilled survivors who push on and carry the weight of the whole. For instance, after Sandy hit and the power outages shocked the nation, it was the rich and poor towns who complained, whined, egged repair trucks and blamed each other for causing the repair delays. It was the tough working middle class who did what had to be done to survive the power outages and repair the damage.

Overall, though.. And getting back to my point.. I don't see the paranoia here. People still go out and do things. Sure, the day of the shooting I saw a couple of families pulling their kids out of school early - but it is important to note that this was happening while I and other parents were dropping their kids off for afternoon kindergarten sessions. Maisie is in a small class, but it is very diverse. She is half Chinese. There is an Indian kid. There is a Muslim kid. There is a Japanese kid and a Filipino kid. And, ya, a couple of white bread Christian kids too. Everyone in her class was in attendance despite the shooting.

Maybe it's because we live in a middle class town, well removed from the Bridgeport slums and pristine neighborhoods of Greenwich. (Although the New Haven slums hang over us and police reports constantly remind us how close they are.) We love our kids, but we also think its ridiculous to close a school just because the power is out or some mentally ill person in another county went apeshit.

I still stand by my words - it coulda happened anywhere. The mother was a privileged woman who volunteered at the school. She could just as easily been volunteering at the library or a hospital or working at the mall to embellish her $10k/mo. A shooting like this could happen anywhere, anytime.. Including in our own living room. It just happened to have been a grade school this time.

I highly doubt tougher gun laws would have helped. I also highly doubt having armed teachers or staff members would have helped. Had they actually sought mental health care, that might have helped. Had the mother been a responsible gun owner and secured the weapons legally bound to her, that might have helped.

Love, Alexander
 

Letter to the NRA

Arthur just sent the NRA a couple of suggestions. If you have some things you'd like to tell them, now might be a good time to do so:  (Click Here)

Dear NRA Leadership,

I grew up in Oregon, where having guns around was an everyday thing. They were grand-dad's old revolver, a .22, a deer rifle that my sister's husband used, and so on.

These were guns, not cult objects, not playthings for those who had fantasies of being in Seal Team Six, or to defend our nation against the threat of Islam, or Mormons, or Chinese frogmen.

No one in my family needed a military-style weapon.

I know that running the NRA is a lot of fun, having a huge Association jet aircraft probably feels really, really wonderful, but your blind knee-jerk advocacy of every kind of weapon possible has become Loony Tunes. As it happens I am personally acquainted with the woman who had taken her neighbor's daughter down to see their Congress-lady in Tucson, only to be shot herself and to have the young girl be shot, and killed, by a total nut bag. We are a good and caring people, but there will always be mentally ill among us, some of them who aren't just miserable and disabled, but who seek some deranged kind of "fame" or "meaning" by shooting up a lot of other Americans.

Call me old-fashioned, if a person can't shoot a deer, a moose or an elk with six slugs, they need to go back to marksmanship class. The sale and legality of crazy large magazines seems like some kind of fetish, maybe something that someone who thought their penis was too short would buy in compensation.

Is that what this is all about? Are all of your afraid your dicks are too small, so you need to act all macho to compensate for your feeling that your manhood doesn't measure up? Have you considered getting some counseling?

In the meantime, whatever your reasoning is, our nation is fed up with these grotesque "publicity stunts" that leave dozens of innocent people dead and wounded.

Enough.

YOU MUST STOP BLINDLY SUPPORTING WEAPONS.

Yours, with a wish that your plane be grounded, your huge salaries get cut, and that your sense of morality be awakened,

Arthur