Here I go, here I go again...

 Ironically blogging again on my Blogspot address. 

Hello. It is 8:16 am ET on January 21 in the year of our Lord 2022. The news today is bad. The news is bad every day. It has been bad for two years now. 

Meat Loaf died. He was 74. Mr. Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) collaborated with Jim Steinman to bring young Boomers and Gen Xers an operatic vision of doing it in the car. 

He also showed us rock stars didn't need to look a certain way. They could sound like tenors meant for Wagnerian godhood but look like a guy from Texas named Marvin and the world would not wobble from orbit and perish in the embrace of the Sun.

The Russians might invade Ukraine. They might not. But they probably will. 

It is very cold where I live. 

A billionaire with personal issues wants to tap into our actual brains. 

Elon Musk's Neuralink fascinates me. I wish it didn't, because overall the whole device "implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look and feel totally normal" thing he's proposing is as dystopian as awaiting trial for an unknown crime while dressed in a cockroach suit and being guarded by sentient, fascist barnyard animals. At the same time, it points toward something that will happen. The question I have is just how comprehensive such an implant might be. Could someone upload from their mind as well as receiving input? There are things I'd like to get rid of. And if human consciousness could be located in a specific way in the brain, could we simply upload that once our bodies give out? Maybe grow a new self (clone) and download into that? Scary and intriguing. Mostly scary. 

Here ends another random ironic Blogspot entry. I will return later. In a day or six months, not sure. 

Don't call it a crime blog

Last night I decided to do more news/crime blogging to stay sharp. A Twitter friend with sterling opinions on this kind of thing, Anthony De Rosa, recommended I simply use my name, not create a new space.

I like Blogger as a writing space; the casual feel of Tumblr has never seemed quite right to me for anything longer than 500 words. I also decided some time ago that most of what someone might call 'personal' blogging kind of bores me. Which is not to say I won't write about health and fitness issues anymore, or even say something personal--I consider this space ripe for whatever I want to put here. I'm just more interested as a writer in news stories, right now (and good fiction--but that's a separate thing).

Years ago I established myself mostly covering crime and recently it hit me that even though I'd backed away from intense coverage of various crime stories in the news, I think about them as much as I ever did. Also, I don't have any kind of regular blogging 'gig' right now, as I had covering a variety of subjects for the New York Observer for the last year or so. So I need to stay frosty, I guess.

A mistake I've made before is giving in to what I think readers want or what might give me a big traffic bump. With a new direction in what I post here I am going to avoid that as much as possible and only write about what interests me, when I want to write it.

So here goes.

Gabrielle Giffords' Alleged Shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, Was Just As Crazy As You'd Think

The video below comes from the Youtube account of classitup10, aka Jared Lee Loughner: YouTube - Classitup10's Channel. Loughner is the man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords today in Arizona. The Democratic Rep. is in critical condition after surgery: as many as 6 others were killed.



Loughner introduces himself above and something he calls "conscience dreaming," which is "the greatest inspiration for my political business information."

Loughner may have been politically motivated, yes, but he was also just plain crazy, based on a look at his videos. This is a still from the video above that should handily illustrate that:

(Loughner's name was given out as "Laughner" by some members of the press.)

EDIT:

This is a screencap from Loughner's Youtube page, which lists among other things his favorite books: "Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno."

Loughner's perfectly normal book selections will doubtless be ignored due to his also listing Hitler's Mein Kampf.

I'm still looking at his Youtube account and may update this post as I go.

It's inevitable that Loughner's act will be politicized--has already been politicized. I assumed he might be an especially insane right-winger. It's just as likely, the more I think about it, that he was more crazy than anything, and his politics could be defined as "fringe" for the left or the right. Swing far enough around the political spectrum on either side, you eventually collide in crazy land.

As an (attempted) assassin and mass murderer, this may put Loughner more in league with past killers like John Hinckley, who shot Reagan, and Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who killed a number of victims from a campus bell tower at a Texas university in the late 1960s. Whitman's behavior may have been influenced by a brain tumor that caused him to behave erratically.