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the Helluva Boss Mission shorts, all coming out between Apology Tour and Ghostfuckers, serve multiple purposes. Obviously they bring much needed levity back to the show during a very emotionally heavy story arc, allowing the audience and the characters time to breathe. They also bring I.M.P.'s daily life back on screen, allowing the creators and audience to experience a little bit of that original concept of the show that the creators pivoted away from to follow the more plot and character heavy story they settled on. AND they give us a sense of time passing as we see Blitz go through the aftermath of The Breakup.

All of these are things I've seen other people talk about.

What I want to talk about is the fourth thing:

All three Mission Shorts are a reflection of how Blitz used to see Stolas.

An aggressive dangerous group of birds who say derogatory things to him and WILL kill him if he's not good enough at sex.

An obsessed fan who is impervious to all harm, talks down to him, uses pet names for him, fetishizes him, and only cares about the FANTASY of Blitz while not listening to or caring about him as a person at all.

Being trapped and treated like a source of entertainment, treated like less than a person, commodified for being violent by a duplicitous man surrounded by small horned pets who he infantilizes but who can be reasoned with.

All three of these shorts are throwing Blitz's own baggage around Stolas back into his face in weird subtle ways, and Blitz has to grapple with the fact that none of these ACTUALLY feel like Stolas to him. For as much as Stolas contributed to the situation they're now in, so did Blitz. Because Blitz has been reading him wrong this whole time.

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Millie, no ...

We were shown in Helluva Boss s2e4 "Western Energy" that "wrathian" is the second-worst ethnic insult that other demons have for imps, the second-most despised species in hell, only barely more polite than calling one a "fire toad."

So when we saw young Millie, in a flashback (in yesterday's episode, s2e10 "Ghostf*ckers"), call herself "just a wrathian," it made my heart hurt. No wonder she's grateful that Blitz taught her self-respect.

Helluva Boss isn't just a raunchy comedy with a quota of two songs and half a dozen sex jokes per episode.

It's a raunchy comedy with quota of two songs and half a dozen sex jokes per episode that means something.

It's a raunchy comedy with a quota of two songs and half a dozen sex jokes per episode about people trapped in a world that's at least as racist as ours some of whom, at the bottom and the top of that racial hierarchy, are willing to risk getting badly hurt if that's what it takes to show other demons that racism is bullshit.

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100% this. I've studied politics since the damned first Nixon administration and I feel crazy like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but I'm convinced that I actually do understand the real difference between the left and the right, what is consistent about that division across all countries since the late 1700s.

If you believe that the people with wealth and power got there through virtue, genius, and hard work, your overarching concern is with protecting the deserving few from the jealousy and greed of the undeserving many, and if so, you sit with the other people who think that, on the right.

If you believe that the people with wealth and power got there through luck or crime, your overarching concern is with protecting the helpless oppressed many from the corruptly powerful few, and you sit with the other people who think that, on the left.

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I Voted

I voted Monday morning the week before the election (Halloween week, as you can see from the selfie), Got there 10 minutes before the polls opened, got out 50 minutes later, no troubles except my usual complaint about mediocre disability accommodation.

I meant to vote 6-7 days ago. As soon as I made up my mind to do so, my anxiety disorder reared up, hard; I haven't slept more than 3 hours at a stretch for over a week. My nervous system is doing everything it can to keep me from leaving the apartment at all.

Some of this happens every year the first time it drops below 35F at night and stays that way until well after the last time in the spring. I have a nearly lifelong phobia of freezing temperatures. But this year is worse.

Almost every election day I bribe myself to vote by hitting the breakfast restaurant closest to the polling place, treating myself to a nice big breakfast that I don't have to cook or clean up after. This time my early-voting location was a city library branch a couple miles north of here. The bus route between us is reliable and frequent, and almost half the old diesel buses have been replaced quieter, better smelling, more reliable electrics and got me there fine.

Before voting, I was having a nice breakfast in a kinda-hipster restaurant neighborhood that's very popular with the nearest university, lots of kids between classes having a nice brunch. The street between us has finally had its final redesign announced with construction starting next year; by the next election, thanks to our progressive-majority city council and nominally progressive mayor, we'll have a roughly 8 mile protected bike lane with bump-outs at every intersection to stop speeders from speeding in the parking lane, the number one source of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in that stretch.

Yeah, the parties are both trying to fill me with dread but I haven't seen or heard a single campaign ad from either party in years; I don't listen to broadcasts and uBlock Origin is that good.

So why the ambient dread? Why the thrice-nightly nightmares? Why does it feel like a friend of mine used to describe the movie Cabaret: "long, dull, and full of nazis"?

I thought about it over breakfast and while walking from there to the polls, and my only guess is that it's because of what didn't happen after January 20th, 2021. There's nothing new about the center right party in the US being taken over by crazies who drove it off of a cliff. That's why the original Democratic Party is still here but the center-right party is on its third name. But all three times before, when the treason was revealed, there was so much revulsion that most of the traitors were primaried by moderates, when the moderates and surviving crazies ran in the general they were trounced as the suddenly horrified voters and eventually most of the moderates defected to the Democratic Party for at least an election cycle or two.

What horrifies me is that January 6th, 2021 wasn't a bridge too far. That they looked away, that they erased it from their memories, that they justified it and they're not shy at all why: no matter how awful the revived America First movement is, no matter how increasingly overtly fascist it is again? They hate the Democrats that much more than they hate the nazis.

Which whether they win or lose is still a problem. It's like the analogy of the pizza party: three of your friends vote for ham, you and one other friend vote for sausage, and two of your friends vote to kill and eat you personally. No matter how that vote turned out, you have a problem!

Like that Carsie Blanton song I reblogged a month or so ago said. In pursuit of energizing their base with fear, political consultants have persuaded our country that there are only two kinds of Americans. Not two kinds of politicians, not two kinds of parties, but two kinds of Americans: dumb whiny rednecks with tiny dicks in the exurbs and remaining rural towns, and ugly nasty commie bitches in the cities and inner ring suburbs, and the two tribes are at war, and whether you like it or not, you're one or the other.

Gods, I wish the culture war would end. We have bigger fish to fry and that more urgently, no time left to fight each other. And I know I'm not the only one being driven literally crazy by it.

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Richard Simmons (Holy Shit)

The Maintenance Phase podcast is halfway through a two-parter where Aubrey, using his autobiography and fact-checking and expanding on it from other available reporting, is telling the story of (arguably) the first modern weight-loss influencer, Richard Simmons. Yeah, you know, the curly-haired aerobics twink from back in the day.

And holy cow did that story turn dark in a hurry. My most important-seeming takeaway so far is ...

How Richard Simmons told you to get skinny and stay skinny: love yourself, reduce your portion sizes, but most of all exercise.

How Richard Simmons got skinny and stayed skinny, himself: meth, anorexia, and bulimia.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the fitness industry for you.

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How did nobody tell me that there IS going to be a season 3 of People Watching?

How did it take me more than three months to find out?

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Somebody other than me cares!

For only the second time in the last decade or more, my personal obsession is in the news and I'm incredibly excited. "Below the fold," in old newspaper jargon, but at least somebody's trying to do something and some newspapers noticed. When you're as starved for validation as I am, it only takes that much attention to excite me.

Amudalat Ajasa and Carolyn Van Houten, "Lead paint upended this boy’s life. Now the EPA is trying to eliminate the threat. The Environmental Protection Agency is about to issue strict limits on lead dust, which poses a threat to millions of children across the United States," Washington Post. Oct 19, 2024 (non-paywall link)

Lead was used as a paint additive from Victorian times up until the late 1970s for a couple of reasons. It made a bright white pigment that didn't fade quickly, it was shiny, and most importantly to the Victorians, it tolerated harsh cleaning chemicals well, which they thought was important to reducing the spread of disease.

(On a local note for here in St. Louis MO USA, it also almost single-handedly propped up the local economy in this town for that whole century, thanks to the huge lead mines south of town and our ability to export products to the whole world via our port on the Mississippi river. Almost all of the abandoned factory and warehouse buildings down here in South St. Louis are contaminated former lead-paint businesses.)

Lead paint though has an even bigger problem than lead pipes, though: over time, it starts shedding lead dust, and children are incredibly vulnerable to lead dust, breathing it in and/or swallowing it. And it takes very little lead dust to permanently damage a growing mind, destroying the parts of the brain that control impulses and the ones that down-regulate emotions.

This is why lead paint was outlawed in the late 1970s. But there was no law requiring it to be removed from (frankly, nearly all) surfaces. Instead, there was a voluntary lead abatement program, and even it only applied to residential property. Homeowners and apartment owners could borrow money from the nearest S&L, pay contractors to rip out and replace all the lead-dust tainted windows, carpets, plaster walls, and so forth and replace them with clean new vinyl-clad or latex-painted bits. They could then submit the receipts with their taxes and get a 100% refundable tax credit.

But they weren't able to make it mandatory because of intense lobbying by openly-racist slumlords, who didn't want to lead abate their properties even it was free because that's telling them what to do with their property, who didn't think their black tenants "deserved" refurbished apartments. That's also why it's illegal to disclose, in sales or in rental contracts, that your property has been through lead abatement; doing so is "unfair" to those '70s slumlords.

And besides, Reagan canceled the whole program halfway though his first term. To bend over backwards to be fair to Reagan, they weren't still getting many applications; everybody who was going to do so voluntarily already had. (Free money for home improvements has that effect.)

About a decade ago, a Reuters reporter used FOIA to demand state health departments turn over their records on childhood lead testing. Almost half of them don't keep any. Most only track it at the state level or maybe county level. Missouri's one of the only states that tracks it to the census-tract level, tracks where kids who are lead poisoned live to within a couple of blocks. And the map of apartments that didn't go through lead abatement, here in Missouri, perfectly maps onto the homicide data.

As someone who was pretty badly lead poisoned as a teenager myself, and as someone who's spent most of his life living in or near lead-poisoned apartments, I'm obsessed with this and ever since the Reuters article came out I've been begging every politician or candidate I interact with to bring back the late '70s lead abatement tax credit and this time make it mandatory to test before selling or leasing a home. Even when St. Louis, with its nominally, mostly progressive mayor got huge uncommitted funds dumped on her, from ARPA and from the Rams-relocation-fraud settlement, I couldn't get any politician to care about this. Their constituents weren't demanding it, so it couldn't be done.

The Washington Post reported, today, that the US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a rule to do just that. No tax credit provision, so they're being fought tooth and nail by people who don't want to make property sellers and landlords pay for it out of pocket, but the proposed rule is on the docket, potentially to take effect mid next year. Somebody other than me noticed. Somebody other than me cares.

If you are like the average person (to my distress) the main thing you want to know is "what can I do to protect myself or my kids?"

This is a shitty way to think because let me tell you, if your kid grows up on the same block as a lead-poisoned kid, your kid is going to grow up with C-PTSD from the resulting violence. Your kids aren't safe until everybody's kids are safe.

I didn't convince you? You've given up on keeping everybody else's kids safe, too?

If you have a painted surface anywhere on your property that existed prior to 1976, you should assume that there is lead paint on it. Older chain-link fences almost certainly. Wooden single-pane windows, 100% likely. If you have plaster, instead of drywall, interior walls in your house, then neither the walls nor the floorboards nor the carpets are safe. They will tell you these surfaces can be rendered safe by painting over them with latex paint; anybody who tells you this is whistling past the graveyard.

Do not have or raise kids in a house or apartment like that. Either abate the lead or move. Yes, even if it's more expensive; the alternative is to raise a child who may never work and has a high likelihood of spending most of their life in and out of jail.

If it's too late for that, and your child is already lead poisoned, don't give up hope entirely, but understand that the interventions that show promise for such kids are hard to find and aren't 100% reliable.

The most important thing you can do is investigate the concept of "trauma-informed schools," and demand, as part of your child's IEP, that his teacher and any associated staff get trauma-informed schooling trained. (Your kid will not be the only one who benefits.)

Children with profoundly impaired impulse control and/or profoundly impaired emotional down-regulation skills can be taught to do better, but that requires that they be given the extra time it will take them to do so, and the privacy, and the calm quiet space, especially when they're very young and just learning. Their brains don't do this naturally, so they don't do them quickly; hold them to the same standard of behavior as everybody else but until they spend a decade or more practicing and grow up more, after you remind them, give them enough time to obey.

But believe me when I tell you this: lead abatement and behavioral education are cheaper and better than prison.

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If this is not what you want vote for Kamala

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It's not just that, Erik Wemple

The Washington Post just published another of those self-serving articles asking why politicians don't sit down with mainstream journalists (like themselves) for long one-on-one interviews any more, "Opinion: Why 'Call Her Daddy' got more time with Kamala Harris than CNN.'" (subscription-free link)

His main thesis is more generous than most. He mostly-debunks the right-wing complaint (projection) that candidates want friendly softball interviews so they only grant real interviews to friendly journalists.

He says no, and quotes on-background campaign officials as telling him that what it really comes down to, especially this late in the campaign, is that politicians are trying to reach people who haven't made up their minds yet and if people were watching or reading mainstream media, they would have already made up their minds by now. There just aren't enough persuadable voters left on CNN or MSNBC or Fox, on WaPo or the NYT.

But as someone who's subscribed to two daily newspapers and at least one weekly news magazine for my whole life, I don't think that's all of it.

For a lot of years, Greg Palast was one of the most famous investigative journalists in Britain. He specialized in breaking all-original stories about corporate crime at the highest levels. And when he retired from that beat he wrote a book (highly entertaining and you should absolutely read it!) called Vulture's Picnic about his life reporting on money laundering, securities fraud, and other high-level corporate crime, and he attributes nearly all of his success to one rule:

He flatly refused to hire anyone with a journalism degree. He only hired subject-matter experts, because it was easier to explain journalism to a subject-matter expert than to explain subject matter to a journalist. His own degree was in economics. Other than a retired combat photographer who tagged along, the other three people on his reporting team were two retired forensic accountants and a retired corporate lawyer.

Modern day journalists don't read subject matter experts, let alone interview them; they read each other on Twitter. They follow each other in packs, asking each candidate or other person in the news the exact same questions every other journalist asked them. Because to a first approximation, none of them know shit. Story's got to be done in an hour; ain't nobody got time to learn things.

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Let me add a podcast link to a Marketplace series that covered some of this in lovely detail, "How We Survive."

Masterpost: Reasons I firmly believe we will beat climate change

Posts are in reverse chronological order (by post date, not article date), mostly taken from my "climate change tag," which I went through all the way back to the literal beginning of my blog. Will update periodically.

Especially big deal articles/posts are in bold.

Big picture:

Mature trees offer hope in world of rising emissions (x)

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (x)

Good news: Tiny urban green spaces can cool cities and save lives (x)

Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected (x)

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world (x)

Sun Machines: Solar, an energy that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge (x)

Wealthy nations finally deliver promised climate aid, as calls for more equitable funding for poor countries grow (x)

For Earth Day 2024, experts are spreading optimism – not doom. Here's why. (x)

Opinion: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (x)

The World’s Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think (x)

‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief (x)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (x)

Young Forests Capture Carbon Quicker than Previously Thought (x)

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how. (x)

Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows (x)

The global treaty to save the ozone layer has also slowed Arctic ice melt (x)

The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past (x)

Scientists Find Methane is Actually Offsetting 30% of its Own Heating Effect on Planet (x)

Are debt-for-climate swaps finally taking off? (x)

High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN (x)

How Could Positive ‘Tipping Points’ Accelerate Climate Action? (x)

Specific examples:

Environmental Campaigners Celebrate As Labour Ends Tory Ban On New Onshore Wind Projects (x)

Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa (x)

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution (x)

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds [Scotland] (x)

The American Climate Corps take flight, with most jobs based in the West (x)

Waste Heat Generated from Electronics to Warm Finnish City in Winter Thanks to Groundbreaking Thermal Energy Project (x)

Climate protection is now a human right — and lawsuits will follow [European Union] (x)

A new EU ecocide law ‘marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals’ (x)

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII [United States] (x)

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren. [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study (x)

Chart: Wind and solar are closing in on fossil fuels in the EU (x)

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (x)

Countries That Generate 100% Renewable Energy Electricity (x)

Indigenous advocacy leads to largest dam removal project in US history [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world (x)

China is set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early, new report finds (x)

‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis (x)

Largest-ever data set collection shows how coral reefs can survive climate change (x)

The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What Does It DO? [United States] (x)

Good Climate News: Headline Roundup April 1st through April 15th, 2023 (x)

How agroforestry can restore degraded lands and provide income in the Amazon (x) [Brazil]

Loss of Climate-Crucial Mangrove Forests Has Slowed to Near-Negligable Amount Worldwide, Report Hails (x)

Agroecology schools help communities restore degraded land in Guatemala (x)

Climate adaptation:

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives' (x)

‘Sponge’ Cities Combat Urban Flooding by Letting Nature Do the Work [China] (x)

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala (x)

A green roof or rooftop solar? You can combine them in a biosolar roof — boosting both biodiversity and power output (x)

Global death tolls from natural disasters have actually plummeted over the last century (x)

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be (x)

This city turns sewage into drinking water in 24 hours. The concept is catching on [Namibia] (x)

Plants teach their offspring how to adapt to climate change, scientists find (x)

Resurrecting Climate-Resilient Rice in India (x)

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No on Missouri amendments 2 and 5

There are two initiatives on Missouri's November 2024 statewide ballot that would expand the reach of casino gambling:

Amendment two would legalize and tax sports betting statewide, including over the Internet. And ...

Amendment five would license a "riverboat casino" on the Lake of the Ozarks.

I will be voting against both measures, and if you're a Missouri voter, I'd like to ask you to vote against them as well. Because the deep-rooted mathematical design of casino gambling is that it's a Poor Tax because The House Always Wins, and too few of us learn that growing up.

After the first time you win, you "know that it's possible to win." So once you inevitably catch up with the law of large numbers, once it reverts to the mean, you can't walk away until you come up at least even in a game that is designed to make it impossible to come up even over time.

But you can't walk away from all those losses, all those sunk costs, without admitting you were suckered, and nobody wants to think of themselves as easily deceived, everybody thinks that they're hard to lie to. And besides you "know" that it's possible to win, you did once!

And if you're really lucky you figure this out before you bankrupt yourself and your whole family, get caught stealing (and promising yourself you'll pay it back "once I win"), before you kill your family and yourself.

If this is what it means to be human (and it is) then why do I call it a poor tax? Because anyone upper middle class or rich has a long enough runway that they might have a chance of learning to walk away before they lose everything, but poor people don't have that luxury. The closer they get to losing everything, the more addicted they get, because they can't stop until they get that money back. And it's literally impossible to get that money back. But they have to try.

I got nothing against a friendly wager between friends in small-dollar amounts where the determination to stay friends means that gambling debts are easily forgivable. Gambling against a huge shareholder-owned (and therefore by definition conscience-less) corporation is a scheme to take away everything you have and then nudge you to kill yourself once there's no more to take from you.

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You know something that I'm going to die mad about, mad at the Don Trumps and Ron DeathSentences and the Shady Vances and the Jay Ascrofts and the Franklin Grahams of the world?

The cynical politicization of the word "groomer." Because this, the video below from the singer who brought us the Jeffrey Epstein epic "I Know Victoria's Secret," is what it cost us. And that makes it a bitterly expensive political ploy.

Some years ago, educators and criminologists interviewed both child abusers and survivors of childhood sexual abuse to learn exactly how children are persuaded to, not just go along with it, but think it's their own idea, and they were startled by how little variety there was in the grown adults who fuck children when it comes to that.

"You're special, you're amazing. Like I told your parents, you could go so far with one-on-one coaching and education. You're so grown up, you're so mature, you're 13 going on 35. It's so unfair to you that your fellow adults don't see that about you, so unfair to you that they want to keep you trapped in a childhood you outgrew."

So they designed a simple and effective safety education program for young kids, in age-appropriate language for kids who, gods help us all, are going through puberty way too early to be ready for the way creepy grown adults are going to treat them. They started telling kids what the convicted abusers told them about how to recognize this kind of predator. And to make it specific and memorable, they coined a name for them: groomers. They told kids how to recognize a groomer and a series of steps to get themselves to safety and then make sure that responsible adults intervene. And it was working.

And then the absolute creepiest of the social conservatives said, "Nice public safety campaign you have there. We'll be taking it from you." They dedicated a couple of months' worth of conservative programming and content to reaching out to people before they can hear what a groomer actually is, redefined it to mean age-appropriate comprehensive sex ed and then when the actual safety campaigners said "that's not what it means" they said "it is what it means, look at the liberals trying to redefine a word." Got away with it clean, now; that campaign is dead.

Because you know what the actually creepiest social conservatives call a 35 year old who rapes a 12 year old with the doesn't-matter "consent" of the 12 year old kid they groomed, gets her pregnant, and then convinces her parents to help make her marry him? "Traditional family values."

And I am absolutely going to die mad about it.

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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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ALERT: @wilwheaton has answered the call!!

RSVP for free: https://geeks.forharris.org/

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Welcome back to Newtown, USA

Holly Bailey, et al, "Georgia students and teachers killed in deadliest school shooting this year," Washington Post, 4 Sep 2024:

Police identified the suspect as ... a student who attracted the attention of federal investigators more than a year ago, when they began receiving anonymous tips about someone threatening a school shooting. The FBI referred the reports to local authorities, whose investigations led them to interview [the shooter] and his father. The father told police that he had hunting guns in the house, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them.

The Newtown shooter's mom was warned, at least months before his rampage, that he was a danger to himself and others but his mom was more afraid her son might get shot by (non-existent) looters than that he would carry out his threat to shoot her, then shoot up a school, and then kill himself, which is what he did, with a gun that she made sure he still had.

Earlier in the article, it's reported that ...

Officers arrested the lone suspect after a brief confrontation and said he would be charged with murder and tried as an adult.

I don't believe in charging 14 year olds as adults, because they don't make adult decisions, any more than I wish that the 13 and 14 year olds who tried to kill me with clubs 50 years ago had been charged as adults.

Children aren't adults. The things that children do, however awful? Are things they learned from the adults around them. Guns don't kill children. American children kill other children, with guns. Other countries have privately owned guns. Only a handful of equally sick societies have spree killers, and fewer than that have spree-killer children.

Somebody told that kid that shooting people was an appropriate thing to do when, whatever happened, whenever you feel slighted or wronged or angry or whatever. Probably the same someone who left a rapid-fire semi-automatic rifle where a 14 year old could get it. Charge the actual adult(s) with multiple counts of accessory in advance to murder.

Shutting down the pipeline that provides guns to suicidal and/or homicidal pre-teens and teenagers seems to me like the least controversial, lowest hanging fruit in the whole "gun debate." And yet, here we are.

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I'm Proud to be a YIMBY for Harris/Walz