'Right to keep and bear arms' doesn't mean with no 'inconvenience'

If there's one thing certain in this life, it's that every time another lunatic loser breaks loose and kills other Americans, the Amen Chorus of the gun nuts will be all over the media standing up for their rights.

So a shooter (fill in name here) killed some (fill in number here) people in an American city or town (fill in place here), and wounded a number (fill in number here) of others before reportedly taking his own life (usually). The only thing shocking about this is that no one is shocked anymore. It happens at least two or three times a week.

We literally expect things like this to happen from time to time, and we also expect the loons of the far right to ignore all the statistics and say that guns don't kill people.

Michael Moore nailed it when he said "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."

Sadly, no matter what happens anymore, nothing gets done. A large majority of Americans think there should be tougher gun laws, but there aren't many of them who make gun control the single issue on which they cast their vote.

What possible reason can there be for still having states?

In our toxic political century, we've been hearing a lot about the original intent of the founding fathers, who we now just call the founders (even though they were all men).

Original intent is important to conservatives, who seem to believe that such wonderful things happened in the late 18th century that we should do our best to live exactly the way the founders did.

That's about as goofy as it gets, but they need to believe that because if they don't, all they're doing is looting the federal Treasury with tax cuts for the rich.

The fact is, their original intent was to do what they had to do to get 13 very different states to agree on enough things to surrender some of their sovereignty to form a central government.

That's why slavery was legal and why slaves were counted as only three-fifths of a person for population counts.

Media's problem isn't ideology, it's an obsession with non-news news

"The people have a right to know everything about everyone all the time."
-- RICHARD THORNBURG, "Die Hard 2"

 There are very few moments in the first two "Die Hard" movies more viscerally satisfying to the audience than when Bonnie Bedelia cuts loose on the media character played by William Atherton.

In the first movie, he gets punched in the mouth. In the second, he's tasered. Both times, the audience just loves it.

There are few people in the world more annoying these days than the self-righteous, blow-tried television reporters blathering about the public's "right to know."

We're getting closer to a time when there will be no newspapers

"It's too much for me. I just can't understand it anymore, so I just try not to think about it."
-- Allen Drury, PRESERVE AND PROTECT

If you have ever read Drury's six-book series that started with the Pulitzer Prize winning "Advise and Consent" in the late '50s and ended with nuclear war in the mid '70s, you probably will remember that by the second half of the series, the media had become a favorite target of the author.

The above quote, from the fourth book in the series, says almost all that needs to be said about why the media have become so powerful.

Average people just don't have the time, the energy or for the most part the education to keep up.

It doesn't say why the media have become so bad. That's a much sadder and stranger story. There are villains, but no heroes, and the story says a great deal about why so many things in our society are declining, not least of them the understanding of average Americans of how life works in the 21st century.

I need to state my prejudice in this right now. I love newspapers and have subscribed to at least one daily newspaper for almost my entire adult life. I have always believed that if you want to know what's happening and why, and if you don't have the time to investigate for yourself, the only real way to be knowledgeable is to read newspapers.

Let's get really serious about eliminating the public debt

Let's get rid of the national debt.

Whatever it is -- $18 trillion, $19 trillion -- let's just make up our mind right now that we're going to get rid of it.

My guess is we could do it within 20 years, maybe less, but not with these namby-pamby little spending freezes we've been talking about.

We only need to be bold. Here goes:

If food runs low ...

1. No more cost of living increases for Social Security. In fact, until the national debt is paid off, let's cut Social Security benefits by 50 percent. Old people have to bear their share of the burden too; a hell of a lot of them voted to support a lot of the wasteful spending that has been happening.

2. Medicare? Gone until we straighten things out. You stay healthy, you get to live. You get sick, we'll make sure there's a free clinic in your town. You need surgery that you can't pay for, tough luck.

3. Medicaid? Same deal. Oh, and forget Bush's prescription drug benefit. We can't afford it.

4. Defense spending? No more new weapons systems until all the old ones are paid for. The defense budget can be salaries and support for active-duty military and the occasional purchase of bullets. No more military-industrial complex. Let them bake cake. One exception. A dozen or so pork bombs, with a warning to radical Muslims that if they screw with us, the first one gets dropped on Mecca. No real damage, but buildings, vehicles and people get covered with pork remnants.

If you want to be happy from now on, do what you can for others

"... to dance beneath the diamond sky with one arm waving free."
-- BOB DYLAN

I was walking on a hiking trail in Lost Maples State Natural Area in South Texas some years back when I tweaked my knee and decided to sit down for a while.

Lost Maples

The atmosphere was incredible, and the sky was so clear I could see the half moon in the western sky at 10 a.m. I sat on a rock, pulled out my little notebook and started jotting down thoughts about happiness.

One thing I realized almost instantly is that unless you allow it, there isn't anyone in the world who can prevent you from being happy.

But along those same lines, the most useless piece of advice you can give anyone is to "try and be happy." The more any of us "try to be happy," the more elusive happiness becomes.

Living in our modern society has become a very difficult matter

This is a very tough world for an idealist. particularly one of the political variety.

My friend Mick has what he considers a perfectly consistent philosophy. He is opposed to big labor, big business and big government. In his eyes, any of the three gaining the upper hand results in a dysfunctional society.

I've got four words that I think put the lie to his ideal:

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

Two of the most opposite systems of government would appear to be communism and libertarianism, and neither is workable in the real world on anything more than a very small scale.

Communism's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can work in a small community where everyone knows everyone else and has chosen to be there.

But if you live in Indiana and are making shoes for people in New Mexico, it's difficult to maintain incentive. There's no real incentive to work any harder than necessary.

Libertarianism has a very different problem. Without a government to regulate economic transactions, the only possibility of the system providing the greatest good for the greatest number is if everyone is essentially moral.