The Maggots Gather On The Rotting Corpses

...of the dead at VT. The Brady Bunch and their followers couldn't let the bodies cool before they started in with their faked up statistics and fear mongering. BushCo immediately rushed to the scene and got his photo op. The Libertarian nuts started banging away on a gun in every house to cure social ills. Goddam what a sick bunch of bastards.

Look here, a nut did something nuts and people who should not have, died. It's not about guns, it's not about having them or not having them, it's about a nut. I'll bet you'd like a softer more "correct" description of this person. Fine - loon. There is an entire world of difference between moody, eccentric, quiet loner and a psychotic murderer and some people were making warning noises but our polite nice society let him cook in his own juices. Then a whole raft of people want to take advantage of that failure to make their own agendas look good.

Gun control freaks - do you have any idea what carnage a sword wielded by a maniac in close quarters would wreak? Things do not commit mayhem, but a lot of them are darned useful for it.

Gun nuts - just how many people do you think could exceed the abysmal hit rate of police in combat situations?

George W Bush - NOTHING you can say is going to make you look better or more concerned for our citizenry.

I can not begin to tell you how offended I am for the parents and participants in that tragedy by this piling on of people with agendas - including the commercial interests of the media. There is only one lesson here, pay attention to your fellows, care about them, care about how they're doing, care about what they might do. Just plain humanity would do for a start.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Alexander Litvenenko lived a strange and dangerous life as an investigator for FSB and died even more strangely of radiation poisoning, an as yet unsolved murder in Britain. He had investigated the attempted assasination of post-Soviet oligarch Boris Berezovsky and organized crime. He had, while in Russia, accused the agency of being used for criminal purposes. Lately in England he had been investigating the assasination of journalist journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Putin.

In October of 2000 after fleeing Russia he attempted to get help from the US embassy in Ankera, Turkey and nobody wanted to deal with the renegade FSB colonel. At about this point in time there was heightened law enforcement interest in the Russian Mafia. After he received official asylum in Britain the French, British, and Americans were apparently disinterested. It seems curious nobody cared.

It seems difficult to question the current Russian slide into authoritarianism or the bad effects of Russian organized crime internationally and yet nobody seemed very interested in Litvenenko. It is true that by now his hands on information was aged and it is certainly possible that he was not the stellar example of whistle-blower integrity, but that has not been publicly or authoritatively asserted. What is known are that radiation traces of the poison are all over the place, that it is increasingly dangerous to be a critic of the Russian government, and that Russia is looking like much less of a friend to the US, despite GWB having looked into Putin's eyes. I can't connect the dots, but Alice sure had it right, "Curiouser and curiouser."