If I had to give up everything on the internets except one thing; that one thing would be the New York Times. Not so much for its front page news which is pretty interchangeable with alot of other sites – the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera,  and The Christian Sciense Monitor, are my favorites – but for all the stuff that is one level down.

One thing that is one level down is a daily column on what is happening  today -  minus one hundred and fifty years – in the Civil War. I really do not know the Civil War very well. I know General Grant pretty well but not what else was happening at the same time, but in a different place. Reading this everyday in the New York Times is fascinating. Everything seems to be happening so slowly and quickly at the same time. It is not at the pace of a history book, it is at the pace of life. Life with lots of different people – with lots of different agendas – doing different things at the same time. Even if you are not interested in the Civil War, check it out.

I read that Jared Loughner is insane. Duh. To try to kill somebody – to kill people who you don't even know – should be one of the definitions of insane. It seems to me that healthy, ,sane, people don't kill other people.   This jerk-off seems so insane that he is still smirking.

I have always been troubled by insanity as a defense because it presumes that somebody can kill and be sane. That -somehow – taking another person life; that thinking one has the right to take another person's life; seems, to me, insanity in its self. My belief is that his guy is insane and … so what. He didn't know what he was doing, or he couldn't control himself … so what. 

People are dead – most of them just randomly killed – more people have had their lives changed forever. Changed probably for the worse. It is so sad, it is just a goddamn shame.  

Three days ago, I had never heard of Salman Taseer but I had heard of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and how some Christian woman was going to be executed over them.For reasons that I have not spent a whole lot of time working on, stuff like that just sends me around the bend with rage.

The whole blasphemy thing just seems – to me – to be truly insane. 

Then this asshole kills a governor over it. And then smirks when he is arrested. He is a true believer. A real zealot; a nutcase. And then a group of imams says the killer is a Muslim hero and then – and this goes against all I thought I knew about Pakistan – a bunch of lawyers strew roses in front of him as he walked into court.  

All of a sudden, John Boehner seems reasonable. And he doesn't have nuclear weapons.

A year ago, I said Happy New Decade because it was the end of a decade if you started counting when 1999 turned into 2000. And we all did. But, even though it was the end of the oughts, somehow, this seems like the real end of the decade. 

I, for one, am glad the year is over, but not as glad as Dodai over at Jezebel. It started with a massive earthquake in Haiti,  sort of peaked with the gulf oil spill, and pseudo-ended with the republicans riding back into town yelling Hold on, we will save you from Obama.

To paraphrase somebody I am glad to see this year end in  the way a man, at the bottom of a pit, is glad to see a ladder¹.

So, Happy New Decade and Happy New Year.

¹. I have been trying to figure out how to use that quote since April.

or, as far as that goes, Kesha.