Shocking information is now available connecting gun ownership with violence.  First, John Hopkins reports that domestic violence homicides are three fold greater in homes where there is a gun.  Second, Harvard reports that suicides are much higher among gun owners and this is confirmed by NPR.  Finally, Wikipedia reports 67% of homicides involved a gun.

So it would seem that there is futility in attempting to prevent crazy people from owning a gun when in fact they are the ones with the guns already.

If  you had a Supreme Court that had a rational majority you could modify the Second Amendment to meet the needs and realities of today’s society rather than those from a time when a firearm was six feet long and took three minutes to load one shot.  Secondly, one thinks of the original Star Wars film when a Jedi knight says who is the bigger fool, the fool or the one following the fool?  Today it is who is crazier the crazy gun owners or the Republicans that follow them blindly?  That makes legislation improbable.

The only way to change this is through education much the same way it was used successfully against tobacco use aiming it at America’s young people who are far more progressive than older Americans so that gun ownership is eventually diminished to zero.

I once had an experience so horrible I just wanted to run as far away from it as I could.  I was on a subway platform when a man rolled down the stairs onto the platform and onto the tracks.  I heard all of this, but did not see it only the sound of his tumble, the screams of onlookers and the oncoming train.  They did manage to get the man off the tracks in time.

I had the same sensation when I saw the photograph of the Connecticut elementary school children fleeing the school in a line with arms on shoulders of each other.  I said again I did not ever want to see that ever again.  Hence my shout out to GET RID OF ALL GUNS, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

My wife and I have a Ying Yang relationship and so she added to my reasoning by saying that it is not enough, that we must address the underlying problem in our society that was causing these actions and that was that mentally ill people were going untreated in many instances.

And her thoughts were supported on two fronts.  First health insurance companies have now reduced covered psychiatric visits from one hour down to a half hour.

Secondly, was my reading of Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy where we learn that Queen Victoria was shot at or attacked seven or eight times and as far as I have read so far her assailants had all been mentally ill and untreated.  So the British had our problem, which by the way included easy access to guns, in the 1800s.  And like them most of our mass murderers of late have been mentally ill and untreated.

Today Britain has expansive health care and gun access is difficult and they have none of the gun madness we have.  So we must pull ourselves out of this shooting mentality first and foremost by providing mental health care to all who need it starting today so that tomorrow the culture of violence ends.

Nobel Prize winning Chinese author Mo Yan in his novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out depicts modern China as a universe parallel to and in contrast to Buddhism with a series of deaths and rebirths symbolizing movement between eternal suffering and peace.

Mo Yan writes about the madness of revolution and especially the Cultural Revolution unconstrained by his government and in direct challenge to charges against China made by Neo Cons seeking a new foe for their war machine.

Neo Cons turn a blind eye toward books by Mo Yan a writer who can be compared, by any student of literature, to French author Victor Hugo and his own descriptions of revolution in Les Miserables.

Bu Mo Yan writes not in the fashion of outraged emotion in reaction to revolutionary fervor but in a humorous yet powerful way that recalls the writing of Joseph Heller in Catch 22 and perhaps this is what disarms Chinese authorities when it comes to Mo Yan.  The stupidity of violence is too funny to believe.

This is a far cry from the cardboard Neo Con portrait of the Chinese people and their life under the often invoked yoke of communist brutality.  For instance, in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out one learns of the deep hatred and mistrust of capitalism in mid Twentieth Century China but is amused and humored by it knowing that in the end capitalism triumphed so greatly in China.  This leads one to wonder why China draws the ire of Neo Cons when after all they have adopted the West’s economic system so completely.  Could it be that the Chinese are so good at it that this ire is nothing more than Neo Con envy?

Yes, China has a long way to go in the way of democratic reforms but it can be said that this ship has entered her harbor and only needs to dock.  When that happens, will the Neo Cons still train their war cry on this giant of the East, this 5,000 year culmination of human endeavor?

I recently took a DNA test through ancestry.com and I learned that I was not 100% Armenian but rather 36% European Jewish and 61% Turkish/Persian/Caucuses in origin.  My DNA crossed three great people – the Jews, Christians and Muslims providing unique perspectives.  Inspired I ordered the PBS Heritage Series, Civilization and the Jews.

What I learned in part was that with the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arab World, Jew and Muslim came together in peace and harmony devoted to art and learning.

Nowhere was this balance greater than in southern Spain under Moorish rule.  Here Muslim and Jewish peoples worked together even returning Western Civilization to European Christians then in the throes of the Dark Ages.

A focal point for this Moorish civilization of tolerance was at the Alhambra palace complex in Granada.  It is at this location that I would like to suggest that Jewish and Muslim people put aside their differences and recall their tolerant heritage and come together in a summit dedicated to peace and understanding.

The beauty of this setting and its enlightened history will release the dove of peace and restore both peoples to their once peaceful existence together working again as friends for the benefit of humanity.

I have this recurring vision that political cartoonist Thomas Nast is still alive and he portrays the head of Goldman Sachs as a crouching beast with a serpent’s tail, devil horns and a long wet snake tongue.

Why my anger?  Well because of CBS’s Scot Pelley's interview with the Goldman Sachs head and Paul Krugman’s piece in today’s New York Times exposing his plan to go after Social Security I am completely terrified even after the good guys won the election.

Is the Goldman head doing this because he is a right wing goon?  No, he has right wing goons doing his bidding.

My time as a corporate executive provides me with the answer to this question about the guys who gorged on the trillion dollar bailout.  You see it is a case of who spilled the coffee.  The first thing you learn as an executive is that a salesman who is doing poorly right away points his finger at another salesman and says he is doing a bad job I can do it better than him with that sales territory.

Well that is what Goldman and others named in the Krugman piece are up to.  Something must be wrong with their businesses and they want to improve their lot by making Social Security so weak that it must be privatized providing Wall Street with the mother of all golden goose eggs the mother lode of a pot filled with gold at the end of the rainbow.  Americans should not fall for this money grab at their expense.  In the company I worked for we ran a bad salesman out of town and that is what we should do to the head of Goldman Sachs.

I have this recurring vision that political cartoonist Thomas Nast is still alive and he portrays the head of Goldman Sachs as a crouching beast with a serpent’s tail, devil horns and a long wet snake tongue.

Why my anger?  Well because of CBS’s Scot Pelley's interview with the Goldman Sachs head and Paul Krugman’s piece in today’s New York Times exposing his plan to go after Social Security I am completely terrified even after the good guys won the election.

Is the Goldman head doing this because he is a right wing goon?  No, he has right wing goons doing his bidding.

My time as a corporate executive provides me with the answer to this question about the guys who gorged on the trillion dollar bailout.  You see it is a case of who spilled the coffee.  The first thing you learn as an executive is that a salesman who is doing poorly right away points his finger at another salesman and says he is doing a bad job I can do it better than him with that sales territory.

Well that is what Goldman and others named in the Krugman piece are up to.  Something must be wrong with their businesses and they want to improve their lot by making Social Security so weak that it must be privatized providing Wall Street with the mother of all golden goose eggs the mother lode of a pot filled with gold at the end of the rainbow.  Americans should not fall for this money grab at their expense.  In the company I worked for we ran a bad salesman out of town and that is what we should do to the head of Goldman Sachs.

My tendency of late to draw comparisons between the Ancient Romans and modern America has drawn criticism from some quarters with these critics saying that both peoples are different, distinct and separated from each other by two millennia and therefore using Roman actions as a guide to implementing American policy is inapplicable.

We could debate this issue but I believe that by focusing on the legal systems of both civilizations we can see that they are indeed entwined with one another.

Roman law has influenced American law and this can be seen transparently in the common and extensive use of Latin terms, like res judicata or pro se, in American law.  We also break up our body of law Roman style as can been seen in the separate studies of contracts, property, wills, trusts and criminal law.

During American slavery many of the property notions dealing with slaves were without doubt drawn from Roman slave law.  Romans treated three groups differently under the law and they were people who were born free, people who had been freed and slaves.

Some might say that this is still not conclusive.  Well then you can turn to the online Berkeley Law Library where you will find an 1805 New York case called Pierson v. Post (3 Cai R 175) which cites directly to Roman law (Just. Inst., lib. 2 tit. 1, sec. 13).  By the way this case is studied in many first year law school property classes.

This case has also been discussed in many law review articles.  (See, 55 Duke L. 1089 (2006); 27 Law & Hist. Rev. 189 (2009); and 18 JL Econ. 39 (2002))

But most importantly Pierson has been cited in modern American state and federal cases.  New York attorney Scott Howard has reported as such and has discovered that the case has even been cited in a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court case (Douglas v. Seacoast, 97 S.Ct. 1740 at 1753) meaning that it is still good law and the Roman influence strong even today.

Therefore Roman law lives in modern American law making Roman policy precedents applicable to modern American policy making and this should be considered a strong basis against re-inventing the wheel when it comes to contemporary policy matters.

In the 1950s and 60s Americans became fascinated by the freedom of cross county travel inspired by Jack Kerouac books like On the Road and Dharma Bums.  But today many Americans feel that these are bygone days.  This is absolutely untrue.  There is a new generation of Dharma Bums who just don’t travel the U.S. but the entire world.

They are people who teach English as a Second Language or ESL teachers if you will.  They land jobs at home and abroad working for a summer, a few months or even a year or two before moving on to the next country carrying little more than a couple of changes of clothes, a laptop and a smart phone.

There is a great demand for ESL teachers and jobs are plentiful even in this poor economy.  To these traveling educators the world is their oyster, different cultures their nourishment.  They rarely put down roots and they are of all ages, races, creeds, national origins, sexual orientation and education levels.  They are like rolling stones carrying the English language to the far corners of the globe.

There is an ongoing dispute in the United States between bar associations, the legal profession and politicians as to how to select judges.  Should they be appointed by politicians or boards or elected after going through a political process.  None of these choices seems appropriate.

Perhaps the best way to select judges is to do this the way it is done in China and that is through civil service exam.  China has a long tradition of civil service examinations going back to Confucius but so does the United States going back to Theodore Roosevelt and in fact some jurisdictions already require an exam for say hearing officers.

Attorneys in China point out that Chinese judges tend to be young and inexperienced while American judges are older and more experienced

The way around this experience obstacle is to place a requirement on those sitting for a judicial exam that they have practice law for five to ten years.  Such requirements are already in place in some states and ensure that experienced judges reach the bench and that politics and lack of legal knowledge are kept out of the entire process.

Senator John McCain’s repeated attacks on President Obama over the years shows the senator for what he is, a bitter frustrated old man whose legacy as a self proclaimed “maverick” is a thin veneer over a partisan right wing fanatic.

If McCain had his way we would still be fighting the Vietnam War irrespective of how many young Americans were killed.  The loss of one or two million Americans means nothing to a man who would not blink an eye at dropping napalm from a jet fighter burning the skin off innocent Vietnamese children.

Today he wants to wage an eternal war in Afghanistan against 300 Taliban fighting over barren soil and rock impervious to plant growth without care to the cost to America’s fighting heroes or our national treasure.

Now McCain seeks to lynch his rival, President Obama, for actions in Libya another place where this mad white man would fight endless war as he would fight endless wars elsewhere around the world for no other reason than to satisfy his own personal rage.

I think I speak for many people in war weary America and around the world when I ponder the benefit of locking him in a cage and mailing him back to the Viet Cong.

Everyone agrees immigration reform should be on President Obama’s second term agenda.  Such reform if done correctly could super charge the economy, strengthen the military and add new diverse ideas to the American mindset.

The question is where to begin?  Fortunately a model for reform exists in the immigration policies of Ancient Rome an empire that lasted over a thousand years.

Embedded in Roman law were provisions and imperial orders that opened Rome to immigration allowing Rome to grow geometrically, become quite wealthy and to build a vast military system whereas the Mediterranean Sea was called by Romans, “Our Sea.”

Rome was very liberal with its immigration and citizenship policies going far beyond what is known in modern America.  At one point an emperor extended citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire.  This would be like the United States offering citizenship to the entire free world.  And as an aside Rome was a proto capitalist socialist nation offering free goods and foods to its people.

Of course there were Roman conservatives who opposed immigration and were xenophobic in respect to Ancient Greek learning like today’s conservatives who want to arrest immigrants while pooh poohing the ways of Europe.

Fortunately the Romans who controlled the levers of power followed the road of open immigration, citizenship and Greek learning and were in fact blind to those of other nationalities whereas in fact a few emperors were from Africa and many, like Constantine and Hadrian, not of Roman origin either.

Because of all of this Rome lasted a thousand years and even longer if you consider that the Eastern Empire outlived the Western Empire and though we consider the Eastern Empire to be Byzantium they themselves considered themselves true Romans and lasted another thousand years until the 1400s far longer than the 200 some odd year history of the U.S.A. leading one to believe that we have nothing to fear from immigration gaining only peace and prosperity for the long term future from it.

Remember when Republicans were cool?  I do.  I think back fondly to Halloween 1993 a few days before the New York City mayoral election rocking out with Rudy Giuliani, Senator Roy Goodman and hundreds of Young Republicans from around the country to pulsating neo disco music and gyrating transvestite pole dancers at Webster Hall in Manhattan.

What the hell happened to these guys?  Now Republicans are a bunch of right wing extremists who like gangsters knocked down an American president before he could get his sea legs toppling the world economy in the process while turning their backs on millions who are without jobs.

There are two kinds of good guys in the American mindset.  The Avengers who are comic book good guys opposing comic book bad guys and then there are Rock of Ages good guys who are imperfect but loveable musicians facing off against bad guys who are really just another shade of gray.  I think most of us would go with the rock n rollers and let music undo all the bad out there.

That was how it was when Rudy and his team took the city, they were rock n rollers and they turned the Big Apple around before anyone name Boehner, McConnell or Romney took the national Republican spotlight vomiting out their goon politics at the American people and the world.  Yes, there will always be the memories of the Webster Hall Republicans even in this dark and desperate time for the GOP, the nation and the planet.

Watching CNN late at night makes your realize how correct the New York Times is in reporting that the news network’s ratings are in the toilet as you watch these blasé talking heads blindly regurgitate poisonous Republican claims that the situation with the dissident in China is a humiliation to President Obama.

This nonsense comes direct from the people who brought you torture, indefinite detention, the death of an American city, the destruction of the social safety net, the crash of the world economy, rabid homophobia, feverish misogyny, an unprovoked war that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and a botched war effort in Afghanistan along with a corrupt privatized war machine that went with it. 

Yes, these are the degenerates who dare speak with flowing crocodile tears of human rights in China as they sit behind closed doors gleefully wishing for war with China so that they and their minions can make billions of dollars off another unwanted war at an untold cost in human lives along with the devastation that goes with such acts of madness.

500 years before the Declaration of Independence and 700 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a group of British freedom fighters in 1215 A.D. forced a King to sign the Magna Carta a document that was a cornerstone of Western Democracy and that among other things created the right of Habeus Corpus a right that was torn to shreds in the early 2000s by an imbecile president put in place by mad dog neo conservatives and their adherents bent on the implementation of an alien and extremist ideology on the world’s greatest democracy at a time when the country was truly vulnerable.

And these same maniacs now push America and China to the brink of war in an effort to topple our president.  Conservatism is a cancer that has ruined civilizations and it now threatens the well being of America and the world.  NYU professor Norman F. Cantor in his book Antiquity goes so far as to accuse conservatism of toppling the mighty thousand year old Roman Empire saying that its fall was due to, “…in general, a conservative backward looking frame of mind hostile to critical…innovation…widening the gap between…elites and the…masses,” much like the differences today between the all powerful greed driven and war hungry one percent and the disenfranchised impoverished 99%.

It is time for Americans to wake up from this screaming nightmare and push these fanatics into the sea drowning them on the beaches of reason thereby invoking an age of peace and prosperity unheralded in world history.  Republicans calling for human rights is indeed a laughable folly.

The time is right for an E.U. style union in Asia.  The sluggish global economy makes it a good time for building economic unions because political leaders are apt to be open minded to possibilities that will improve their economies.

The first step in such a union would be the coming together of China, Japan, North and South Korea and Taiwan.  This initial union can be informal and gradually develop into a more formal arrangement over time approaching what we now know as the E.U.

During this transition from informal to formal the union can open up membership to include Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and other countries.

Naturally there will be some suspicion at first among the partners but this will dissipate over time.  The union will bring greater prosperity to the region along with lasting peace as any perceived threat among the partners become neutralized by the union’s very existence.

This may seem like a major development but it is actually just another step toward a unified world where all nations maintain their respective identities while joining together in peace and prosperity.