I took a friend to the dermatologist for something at this "upscale" office in Beverly Hills the other day.  Anyway, while waiting I was flipping through all these ritzy mags.  This one, called "Riviera" was a giant 5 pound glossy mag dedicated to the OC (Laguna/Newport) socialite psuedo plasticized celebrity crowd.  It was packed with ads for Rolex, power speed boats, new Trump condos, photos of the whos who at various parties, etc.  It was fabulous, glitzy, perhaps a little envious....

Anyway, hooray for them, I am not against that, I live nicely myself and am not opposed to nice things.  But then I got to the real estate section.  I saw some 2-5 million dollar beach front spreads.....they were nice, I looked at the pics.....no judgement....Heck, I would move in one tomorrow if someone gave it to me, or if I had the $$ (although I might turn the one that was on an acre into a mini ashram)...I would at least do all solar, plant native plants and make it a green home to the max if I could live in it.

But then I got to some that turned me ill.  A 35 million dollar estate (with so many rooms that anyone would get lost for days, A 75 million dollar estate.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!....this house had a three story grotto pool with slides and waterfalls, 12 master bedrooms, one was over 2,000sqft, space for an auto museum, a giant theater and a stocked/staffed mini mall with cafe and shops so the lady of the house could shop and get the mall experience without leaving and being around all those nasty common people in the real world.  A Vegas style mini mall, within the house!

So, that is where I get all commie and say, come on, that should not be allowed.  Not when there is so much hunger, pollution, death and poverty.  It goes beyond whether those people think they owe anything to society or not.  That goes beyond having a great house and enjoying ones wealth to just flat out ego "look at me and what I have" and screw the rest.

At the very least, if say, I was boss, I would make sure that the $750,000 in proprety tax every year went to refurbeshing, or helping a school, or added to a park acquistition trust, help a homeless or runaway shelter, and I would make it law that such a house had to be all/mostly solar powered, have native, low water landscaping, etc.

So, I keep hearing all this stuff about it not being real, that the science is not good - that we are in a natural cycle of Planet warming.  There have been epochs in the past where the planet has been very warm and swampy and epochs where it has been really cold and icy.  My belief with what we know now is that the planet is in a natural cycle of warming that we are speeding up too fast for mother nature to adapt to.

Are we the main cause of the warming? Have you argued with someone who is not a believer in the theory?  And what if we had an ice age coming on....would we then want to warm it???  If you saw that mile high ice sheet coming toward NYC, would you think, gee lets heat things up a bit?

 Whatever, here is how to SHUT THEM UP....let them win....say "OK, there is not global warming, you are right"......but, there IS more and more coal soot, toxic mercury and heavy metals output, asthma, premature breathing deaths, fine particulates increasing, and they are all making us sick and hurting the ecosysems, so there, global warming or not, we are fowling our air and making the planet ill whether or not we are affecting the temperature.

What can anyone say to that?  That part of it is not a theory, that is a fact that millions can see on the horizon and smell every day, that is fact that we test in the fats of animals and oursleves (methyl mercury, etc). 

If they do not care if it gets hot, or if most of Greenland melts, then maybe they will care that the above things will possibly have more of an immediate impact on their health and that of their childred than a few degrees rise in temperature!!!

But if things get really bad, maybe the big oil and auto execs will spend some of their 600 million dollar bonuses on some research to help out....and at the end of the day, it is arrogant from both and any and all sides.....that we think we are the deciding factor in what happens in the natural world.  We may all be just one big conscious universe, but that one big conscious universe could super nova or asteroid us back into little scattered photons before we knew/know what hit us.

There is hot debate on the gun issue these days.  To have or have not.  To be able to legally carry them around - to defend ourselves from confused souls who also carry them around.

I try to empathize with both sides.  On one side, wouldnt it be nice if there were no guns, on the other, wouldnt it be nice to know you could have the choice to defend yourself against  the person trying to kill you.  But still, at the end of the day, I think guns are not something we should all be owning and carrying around.  I grew up with guns, I hunted, I slept with one under the bed (at a house I grew up in out on a lonely highway that was prone to robberies).

If all the students and teachers at that school were armed and someone started shooting, I think there would be just as much panic.  Having a gun in your backpack would not have made you feel calm and in control.  I could see dozens of students rushing to pull out guns, or frantically looking for their guns and unlocking them and then randomly shooting in all directions.  If everyone was armed, I think there would actually have been more causalities.  If you have a gun tucked away on you, snapped in and with the saftey lock on, the time fighting (while stressed and freaking out) needed to get to it might just be your death...it might just take away those precious seconds to get out, to duck, to play dead.  On the other hand, someone could have shot him after he killed only a few?  Saving dozens of others perhaps.  A blog by rocker Ted Nugent that was on MSN was in favor of everyone carrying guns, that that would prevent people like Cho from going in shooting sprees.

We have this illusion that we are free to protect ourselves...it was written into the constitution so that we can protect ourselves from the government.  The government is not afraid that we arm ourselves with rifles an pistols.  They can  burn up and disperse an angry crowd, mob or protest with their new microwave radiation weapons.  They can nuke or "daisy cutter" bomb any rioting city, or group in a flash. 

With everyone wanting and allowed to carry guns I think we will see more murders of passion and accidental murders.  People who get caught up in road rage, a heated fight at a bar or with a spouse and then the frantic, low brain takes over and people start getting shot.  No longer just some nasty exchange of words, but actually killing people and then when its over that big "oh my God, what have I done."

There are stories about those who have stopped others rampages with their own guns and perhaps saved many.  But in the end, you have to ask yourself.....would you really want to live in this country and be out and about all the time knowing everyone had guns packed away?  I think it would make us more nervous, more suspiscious, more paranoid than we already are.  It is not a country I would want to live in. 

These events are still rare.  Hundreds of thousands are killed by cars, fast food, soot in the air, etc.....do not be comsumed by one fear.  That same day that 32 died, hundreds died of hospital acquired infections, doctor erros, stabbings with steak knives, maybe a few snake bites!!!, etc. 

We must really think things through and look at the big picture of what our true risks are before we jump on the pro gun wagon, or any for that matter..I know this site is naturally anti gun but we have to do more than just grumble about it, we have to understand why our culture is this way and we have to be the ones to gently spread an alternative....and it is happening...the "alternative", yoga and spirituality movement is growing and it is changing people, even in dark red states.