Here is the Drudge headline: Yelling "Fire" or Opening "Fire" - Choice for politicians?

I am not as smart as James Holmes based on academic records.

I only achieved a BA and do not have a masters.

I am a student of politics and the body politic.

I am a student of technology,

Can we allow ourselves to find a good from this horror?

Yes. Everytime a plane crashes for reasons not immediately apparent and hundreds of lives are lost, much time and effort is put into finding the cause and repairing the technology, changing the flight rules or the business policies. Those subsequent changes are "Good". They will and do prevent future loss of life and pain.

There is a value there that I believe cuts across political spectrums.
The extremes of conservatives and liberals know this value
The extremes of those who say yes and those who say know
The extremes of those who for us and against usThere are restrictions on the 1st Amendment.

One cannot yell "Fire" when there is no danger, in a crowded movie theatre.

This is a "Good" thing

The founding fathers should have written this out. They knew of theatres.

There probably were horrorific fires in crowded early American theaters.

But they didn't write it in the constitution or even as an amendment.

So is this relevant?

There have changes in the body politic and laws made from such events.

100 years ago changes to the body politic and law were starting due to the sinking of the Titanic - 1500 lives were lost.
The changes made were considered irrelevant because the body politic did not make a decision about the reasonablness of "Unsinkable"

New Jersey made changes for Megan Kanka - or known as Megan's Law.

The changes made were considered irrelevant because the body politic did not make a decision about how to treat sex offenders.

This sequence or horror then law does not have to be a status quo.

There is a common-sense about the illogic of waste.
Waste is defined in terms of time, energy, money lives lives to name a few.
I want to ask the question why can't we find a method of body politic change and law change to think in advance?

Unfortunately I have known the answer - it is the refusal to compromise.
We all know it and it happens on both sides of all political spectrums.

It stems from a fear of the unknown. Change is the nexus of "before" and "after".

There is also a common-sense about fixing things that are not broken - don't do it.

The only salve for the tension that comes with change is the common-sense about the reversal the change - going back to the way things were.

They say Thomas Edison didn't fail many times to invent the light bulb.

The folktale is that he found 2000 ways NOT to make a light bulb - in addition to the one that worked.

They say that it takes 10,000 hours of practice and literally anyone can be a virtuoso musician,

Is there a number of hours or a number of political choices to make a virtuoso American citizen?
We have video-gamers that are doing this very kind of thing in virtual worlds.

Perhaps James Holmes enabled evil to cross from a virtual or movie realm into a common-sense reality.

Perhaps society enabled James Holmes at different stages of his life - it only seems possibly. Remember, I'm not an expert on much.
Perhaps society can do more to enable good things to cross over from virtual or movie realms into common-sense reality.

Is there some kind of combination of historical sequence, technology, blogs, political talk, radio opinions, laws and common behaviors that can be developed such that it allows 2nd Amendment but prevents James Holmes.

Is this something we are going to leave to our politicians and political pundits to resolve?

There are tools, method and technology that are developing. Voter centered decision support is one concept among many. Only if the body politic allows itself to visualise the future can it learn from the past. Only if the body politic allows itself to learn from the past, decide when it is time to change, can it visualise the future.

Remember, we are the country that put Armstrong on the moon, invented the internet.

American politics needs an inventive mindset in approaching thoughts and discussions of James Holmes and firearm

A opportunity to look for understanding between right and left

The decision by the Supreme Court on ObamaCare is an opportunity for both the right and left to find out how to think like the other side. It may sound stupid. The value in such an excercise is to look for a way to share political power rather than gain a monopoly in political power.

This right/left split is getting very boring and predictable. While no one may have expected Justice Roberts to have been the swing vote, it is possible that he felt it was in the best interest of the court and the nation that such a split decision break on his opinion rather than one of the associate justices.

Justice Roberts decision suggests to this slightly educated but observant student of politics that he sought a middle ground as much as anything.

The hypocrisy that comes from this desire for monopolistic political power is blinding the body politic. In listening to the rants about "deception" by the administration on the issue of a tax versus a mandate, made those on the left think about deception by another administration on the issue of war.

The cry for war by the right is once again growing. This will leave the left in the position of needing to use the same tactics as the right so as to maintain a balance or worse yet pursue a political power at all cost, thus continuing the cycle.

We need a political and economic middle class to absorb or blunt the shots given/taken by both sides of the political spectrum.

The kind of social order that both sides enjoy in the same period of history does not grow in the grinding heat. It can only blossom in a Spring/Fall like kind of political temps.

The body politic enjoy's it's tech - perhaps tools can be built to create an ointment to easy the chaffing.

Caught a couple of segments of  Part 1 of 4 of the Frontline series:Money, Power and Wall Street It was preceeded by a presentation of the "American Experience" on the particulars of the '29 crash and the lead up to the great depression. It is a thought provoking set of programs. It is actually painful to be a citizen who worked for a large Bank's operations that had manipulations and accounting of the products mentioned in the piece. Credit Default Swaps and Direvatives were small parts of my job. I was not a executive, just a software engineer that built tools for management.

As a culture, we learned absolutely nothing from the "Greatest Generation" that we let it happen and that we have allowed ourselves to be so divided that to fix it will require things different that great plans. It will require some form of submission on one side and/or an acceptance of those submitting. Loosely analogous to the civil war reconstruction, or loosely analogous to the pattern of Christ and the Roman Empire. Perhaps that of the acceptance of Neo of the virus from Agent Smith in the final Matrix: Revolutions or better yet that of Washington's farewell to the troops and leaving the Presidency.

We need to be a whole again. The Red and Blue states need to let the purple bruising of coming together to heal.

The Price of Gas!!!!

It truly pains me. It hurts my head for any political or financial analyst to explain what goes into the price of gas. Recently I heard that 22% is due to speculation. Another portion is due to refinery's seasonal change in the blends. Others allocate an undefined portion to a lack of drilling.

But when the price of gas jumps 10 cents in less than 2 minutes, live on the evening News - something is wrong! This is not a function of supply and demand.

It is a strain to believe that there are simplistic or small set of reasons. The national AVERAGE rose some 3 cents over night!

Is it possible that there are too many layers of different kinds of market driven forces? Perhaps it is along the lines of a several bubbles, within a one of several larger bubbles? And these larger bubbles are in a still larger bubble.

And yet there is one undeniable, irrevocable constant to the economic of the price of gas. The Supply of Gas will run out! The timeframe we are talking about is not in terms of epoc's. Even if it is a 200 years, it will run out!

Even if we drill baby drill - and then drill some more - the wells will run dry!

What is also insulting is that those who lived throught the gas-lines of the late 70's are expected to believe the non-sense about gas prices, as if something has changed!

Something was either broken then, or it is broken now. Logic suggests that it cannot be the same thing both times. There is logical disonance when I relive that period in my mind as the gas pump poking my car stops at 75 dollars because they have not been programmed for higher totals.

The issue is not Republican or Democrat. It is a national security issue, only because there is not even a cabal of business or corporate executive that are control it. The market forces are outstripping the corporation/citizen ability to cope - they can only profit - regardless of the supply.

I am missing something - there is something wrong with the picture at the pump - and God-dammit - I WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S WRONG!!!!

Keep the prices high
- just tell me an explanation of the price of gas that is more concrete than an explanation about UFO's!

Hell, jack the price up another nickle if the explanation can allow the individual to research and understand the true costs of a gallon of 1970's gas compared against 2012 gas. It is not simple inflation.

Why?! Why not??