Fadingpain

Drug addicted street walkers from Pensacola, FL. That's pretty much dead rock bottom, if you were looking to zero out your humanity barometer.

There are wildfires every year in a certain part of California and as far as I know, the state is still there, more or less operating as normal. Does make for some dramatic photography though.

She is that sort of woman who comes across as a complete non-sexual entity. There are a lot of women like that in the world.

Shame about all those tattoos, but regardless, OH HELL YES. Every day of the week and twice on Sunday! Notice that huge rock on her ring finger....

Always hated the look of those uniforms, despite that they seem to be widely liked. I've never been a fan of blue, white, and gold. It's a cheesy look IMO. When we went to black it was a big improvement, minus the goat head. That color scheme with a great logo would have been great. I'm glad the best team this organization ever iced was wearing black though. (2006).

What's everyone watching? Clemson just scored a TD to take the lead against BC. Notre Dame beating up on FSU 25-6. Texas and Tex. Tech pretty even so far at 10-7 Texas. Auburn vs. Georgia and Miami vs. Ga Tech on too! Lots of football right now.

Something which merits study and discussion is why this happens almost every day in the USA now, but happens rarely in Canada. I mention Canada specifically because they also have a huge number of guns in their society. Something like 10 million guns up there, or 1 for every 3 people. Especially compared to Western Europe, that's a lot of guns. Michael Moore attempted to address this in Bowling for Columbine, but he didn't do a very good job of it and never really reached any conclusion. You can ask the same question about serial killers! You would think they would occur all over the world at some type of rate consistent with population size. But no, the good old USA has given the world @ 67% of the known serial killers on record. We don't make up 67% of the world's population! I suppose you could argue sophisticated, first world nations would have greater reports of serial killers due to better criminal justice systems, but still! Any civilized first world nation should have roughly the same # of serial killers as any other, adjusted for population.

The baggage doesn't bother me at all. He's too good and too proven. Don't think he will be available until he is no longer worth having, however.

I love Marty, but he is so hard to listen to I wish they would move on from him. That entire face-off play was so perfectly executed and showed off so much skill from both guys I was honestly stunned for a moment watching it. I greatly enjoyed that game. It occurred to me that the team is now good enough that it can impress with raw talent in a way that I do not think has been possible for like the last 6+ years. I don't know how it happened, but the team seems to have rounded some type of momentous corner and is FINALLY on the rise. I think we have a genuine shot to make the playoffs this year, and that's something I didn't think would happen during the pre-season.

So the shooter is a white guy named David Long. 28 years old. He had a single firearm: a Glock .45 with extended mags. Earlier when this was all breaking news, one eyewitness who was there described him as being "Middle Eastern" looking. Early reports also said he had an Uzi. Some said he had a "large hand gun". I always find this fascinating. The eye witness accounts of things like this are almost always wrong and in general, this type of information is extremely unreliable. The early version of what happened with big breaking news stories is almost always wrong. I remember on 9/11 it was reported for a while that there more explosions and stuff going on on the National Mall near the Capitol Building....which of course never happened.

I'm interested in military history and this country is now engaged in the ongoing business of waging war, almost perpetually. There is a LOT of stuff out there to be consumed by someone like me, from documentaries, television shows, non-fiction written by veterans, raw combat footage on Youtube, etc. I've recently come to the conclusion that almost anyone who is exposed to combat likely has PTSD to some degree. Some have it very badly, but no one seems to be entirely immune from it. Even those who think they are OK are not OK in my opinion. It seems almost impossible to escape if a human is involved in some serious #*&$# as you say. It seems like we are just starting to tune into this stuff as a society.

Our laws place all kinds of restrictions on individual freedom all the time. I think something could be done in terms of making it almost impossible, legally, to own a firearm if you have some type of documented mental health issue. But as I mentioned, that doesn't stop illegal firearm use, nor does it stop someone who is nuts, but has slipped through the cracks and isn't documented as being nuts, from legally owning a gun either. You'll never eliminate this sort of thing but maybe you can try to reduce the number of these. The best way, of course, is to not have a society swimming in firearms. But we already have that and there is no way to make firearms go away, so to a large extent, we are just screwed.

I'm seeing a lot of commercials on TV for this game now!

Is this the thing that pops up in the lower right hand corner saying "Do you want to talk with someone?" or whatever? They're terrible. Just clutter to be closed out before I can start to access the page. Some websites have so much crap on them, pop-ups, etc., that if it takes too long to get that crap out of the way so I can actually use the site, I just close it and move on...which is probably not good for your business/site.

PTSD is nothing new! It's gone on as long as war has gone on. In WWI it was called "Shell shock." In WWII it was called "Combat fatigue." Now it's called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Doesn't matter what you call it, it doesn't change. Why do some with it commit acts of violence but most do not? I don't know. Was the PTSD related to this killing or was that not a factor? I'm not sure. As RaoulDuke79 asks, why does this stuff seem to be super common now but it seems to have been rare in decades past? I'm not sure again. It's a difficult issue to try and tackle, but we do see one consistent theme with these shootings: the shooters have guns, and they are nuts with documented histories of mental illness. It might not hurt to make it damned near impossible for anyone with a documented history of mental illness to own a firearm. That wouldn't stop the guy who wants to go buy one illegally from a criminal, but at least that would probably cut down the raw number of these types of shootings. I don't know.