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the winter doldrumz. snow, cold -- post holiday blues. time to plan the winter va-ca.. Please, not fla. again! Perhaps the islands this year...

Some things never change. We exchanged gifts from under the tree on this rare (for our part of the country) non-white Christmas. I gave the kids the usual latest smart phones, i-pads, non-violent video games. It was their gifts to me that I found most touching. The three children ranging in age from 13 to 22 gave me hand-made cards with expressive wishes. The first was for the banning of the NRA and all like-minded gun-nut groups. The second was the heartfelt prayer that all the children at Newtown, CT, and all the victims in general of gun violence in the last hundred years be welcomed into heaven by God if they had no violent, mortal sins over-riding on their souls. The third, from the youngest, is for all the guns in the US to be turned in to authorities to be destroyed. These hand-made cards with heartfelt sentiments meant more to me than any material thing and seemed more salient to me this year than any other with the timing. The NRA came out with a statement two days ago that was deemed "semi-insane". Not my description. I would have said "Fully, certifiably insane." What were those words? "We need to have a privately armed guard in every school on every school day." They did not address the question of what to do when there are groups of two or more armed assailants hell-bent on killing our children. Obviously they haven't thought it all out. If the "bad guys" have three, then the NRA "good guys" need 5. If the bad guys have five, then we need 10. If the bad guys have 25 and tanks and artillery then the NRA needs multiple ground units and air cavalry. If they have fuel charged air-launched bombs then the NRA needs nukes. Does anybody seriously doubt the deeply-rooted insanity of the NRA and the gun nuts? They would start speaking of acceptable levels of "collateral damage"... My kids gave me wonderful presents this year. They are our hope and future. The fear-laced visages of the NRA gun-nuts are quickly falling into the minority, fallback after fallback... Merry Christmas everybody. While it may not seem like the best Christmas ever, there are reasons for hope in the immediate future.

Was our collective loss of innocence in the wake of Adam Lanza's evil intention. He caused the number of guns owned by private individuals within the US alone to squeeze upwards of another 1,000,000 pieces.. Perhaps the end of the world as we know it was the recognition that over 200,000,000 guns exist in the hands of private citizens and that gun violence in the form of mass shootings will continue for at least the next one hundred years, no matter what we do. The horror is the recognition that the genie is out of the bottle for good. Sleep tight America, the only industrialized nation with no effective gun control...

With a quart of cinnamon eggnog spiked with a quarter pint of blackberry brandy and a sprig if mistletoe. Mwahhhh!

And "He" has caused the end-of-the-world. But wait, all the guns were legally bought and owned by Adam Lanza's (the Anti-Christ's) mother, who took both her sons out target shooting and then conveniently forgot to lock the the things up in such a way her mentally disturbed child could get a hold of them. So perhaps she is the Anti-Christess. Perhaps the Mayan thing was cumulative, starting out with the Norwegian nut who conditioned himself to violence through video games so he could model himself a Knights Templar in defense of the Christians who are being invaded by the Muslims to the tune of possibly (just possibly) becoming 11% of Europe's population some time in the next ten years. So he went to an island youth camp and slaughtered 79 teens. And since we all know Muslims are responsible for mass attacks on white people it has to in the end be guns and Muslims behind the end of the world as we know it. One thing for sure is that we will continue to endure the silent scream of Edvard Maunch as his screamer confronts the future which from 12/14/12 has perceptibly changed our landscape forever without our political will to do something about it. And when you come right down to it, that is what separates us from Scotland and England and Ireland and France and Norway and Germany and Canada. We'll never admit it, just gladly continue to fight each other as the denizens and guardians of hell. And the screamer continues to scream into a blood-red sky in stark alienation. Welcome to the end of the Mayan calender. Have a great first day of the rest of your life....

some cary the sword for others in silence.Love.

Is always looked forward to: Merry Christmas to all -- May friends and family bless your day with good cheer. The Grateful Dead love you!

"happiness IS a warm gun". as a child, i lived in a house and a neighborhood that was saturated with shotguns, rifles, revolvers and semi-automatics. all owned by loving, caring people who wouldn't even entertain the thought of pointing a weapon at someone else unless in a life or death emergency. some owned guns for collection, some owned guns for hunting, but everyone owned handguns for "protection". between the time i was 7 and 13 years old, three young adults in this same neighborhood - children of those same loving,caring parents - took their parent's handguns - the ones that were owned for "protection" - and commited suicide. i can clearly remember all three incidents to this day. those families were destroyed and the parents never recovered. my father, a vietnam veteran, still owns guns to this day and i can proudly say that this is one father-son tradition that dies with me! i refuse to contribute to the gun lunacy which surrounds us. oddly enough, with almost $1 billion in profits this year alone, the gun industry doesn't even really need to advertise, it only needs our sense of fear and paranoia for sales. pretty slick sales gimmick if you ask me. cue "ship of fools" please

The NRA held a press conference today; here's the short version of what they had to say: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Here's a link to the full text: http://home.nra.org/classic.aspx/blog/345

The US Constitution holds that "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Gun violence is a first world problem. Here's an excerpt from a recent interview with David Hemenway, who is a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and the author of the 2006 book Private Guns, Public Health: "I think the most shocking thing is to compare ourselves to the other developed countries. People think we have a violence problem in the United States, but we really don’t. We’re an average country in terms of all the violence measures you can think of, in terms of crime. But where we’re very different is guns. We have lots more guns than anybody else, particularly handguns. A lot of countries have hunting rifles, but we have these handguns, and then we have these assault weapons. Secondly, we have by far the most permissive gun control laws, the weakest gun policies of any country. It’s not even close. Not surprisingly, we have more gun crime and more gun homicide. "We compared the United States to the other First World countries. We looked at both genders and all ages, but here are the statistics for 5- to 14-year-olds. A child in the United States compared to a child in Finland or France or New Zealand is not 20 percent more likely to be killed in a gun homicide, or 50 percent more likely, or twice as likely, or five times as likely. It’s 13 times higher. "Our gun suicide rate for these children is eight times higher. Our non-gun suicide rate is average. For unintentional gun deaths, we have 10 times the likelihood of death [compared with other developed countries]. These children are at risk. When you do surveys across states or cities or regions, you find that where there are more guns and more permissive gun laws, people are dying. "We can do so much better. Other countries have done so much better." From http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/12/looking-for-lessons-in-ne…