Santa Monica to Chicago. My wife and I have made the trip a few times following the old highway as closely as possible. We've lived in Southern California, New Mexico, and Illinois within walking distance of the highway.

My San Francisco great grandparents had a small second home on Route 66 Santa Monica Blvd., Southern California, long before that was any big deal, a place from which my great grandfather could pursue his grand schemes of 20th century dairy, movie, and aeronautical business. Unfortunately for the family wealth my great grandfather knew exactly what the future looked like with factory farms, movies, and aircraft, but he leveraged everything he had and bet on all the wrong players. And then his daughters, my grandma included, fled stuffy San Francisco and went wild in Hollywood, making Route 66 in Santa Monica their home base.

I once had a girlfriend who lived in Santa Monica. I'd been doing some field work out in the desert not far from Route 66 and I was at least two weeks desert filthy when I decided to visit her on a break. I drove to her house "Radar Love" style.



But when I got there I thought maybe we were not that close that I should presume to wake her up before sunrise, so I decided to park on the street and sleep in my car. The Santa Monica Police saw me as some worthless homeless guy and woke me up by throwing me out of my car and smashing my face against the pavement. I was totally Clarke Kent about it so then they realized maybe I was something different, and white, so they picked me up, brushed me off, and were somewhat apologetic, a kinder gentler version of asshole.

That begins with spouses and lovers, parents and children, friends and community.

We must empower people to reject gun fetishes.

"Honey we love you, but it's us or the guns..."

"No, you don't get to see the grandchildren until you get rid of the guns..."

"Guns. Eeeeewwwww. Bad date. Blocked number."

"Dude, that's fucked up..."

Three-quarters of us can't be bothered to own gun. Most gun owners have one or two they don't think about much, the guns are locked up and come to think of it they haven't been hunting with uncle Joe and the cousins for a few years now. Forty year old guys who wouldn't buy a gun porn magazine at the liquor store any sooner than they'd buy a "just eighteen" porn magazine.

Most new guns are sold to the fetishists, just as most beer is sold to the alcoholics. That's the problem population, that's the gun culture that psychopaths are attracted to, those are the people who keep guns carelessly for burglars to steal or sell their guns to sketchy buyers who let them trickle down into the illegal gun trade.

Gun love is disgusting.

Three quarters of us can't be bothered with owning a gun. Most gun owners have one or two locked away somewhere and don't think about them much. Most of us with family hunting traditions can't be bothered to hunt even when we have easy access to the necessary tools. (Frankly I'd rather go to Disneyland. If I'm visiting the forest I'll bring a camera, not a gun.)

The gun industry sells most new guns and ammunition to the fetishists, just as the alcohol industry sells most of its booze to alcoholics, something close to 90% of it.

Gun fetishes are disgusting and a public health hazard. We have to empower family, friends, and community to reject gun fetishes, just as drunk driving and smoking in the workplace were rejected.

The first sign that anybody might be a little "off" is that they want to buy guns for anything other than utilitarian purposes.

Gun fetishes need to be denormalized.

Gun fetishists have much in common with the folks who defend cigarette smoking and drunk driving.

There's no reason to be polite.

The second amendment is bullshit. It has no place in the 21st century.

It's directly comparable to the Three-Fifths Clause of the United States Constitution.

Street drugs are easy, or if you've got money, scam providers are easy too. Witness Rush Limbaugh living, or Michael Jackson dead...

How do we reduce harm?

It's not working in the U.S.A. because we usually regard addiction as a moral failing not a medical problem.

In the U.S.A. it seems "hitting bottom" has to be a death or near death experience, whereas in more civilized nations it's just a crappy room, supervision and therapy, and whatever it takes to get you through the day, methadone, a few beers, whatever.

We'd be a much more humane society if we accepted the fact that some people are going to be living at very minimal levels of social functionality, years even, before they can move on to better lives, and that a very small minority will never overcome their addictions, but that it's no reason to wish any hell upon them.

By virtue of our humanity, we all deserve a safe place to simply exist.

Nah, not kill them, unless you are a lion or an elephant or other trophy animal. Trophy animals ought to be privileged with no-limit trophy hunter hunting.

As humans we'd be allowed to hit trophy hunters with tranquilizer darts and tag their ears or something, and post their photos on the internet, as trophies.

Rather like the catch-and-release-unbarbed-hooks requirements for fishing in some places. You get to catch the fish, take the photo and brag about it, but then you release them. You can't eat them, you can't stuff them and hang them on your wall..

Nobody wants to eat trophy hunters anyways. They taste like Viagra. And their heads mounted on the wall would be damned ugly.

... not so much for household wiring. Aluminum wiring works for large scale projects maintained by professionals, but it proved dangerous in homes, causing many fires. It's possible that modern material sciences, electronics (such as arc-fault circuit interuptors), and low energy LED lighting and other electrical appliances, could make aluminum household wiring viable, but there's a tremendously bad reputation to overcome, along with an expectation that ordinary wall outlets will deliver at least 1.5 kilowatts.

Copper is used in cars too. There's about 150 pounds of copper in pure electric cars like the Tesla, three or four times more copper than a modern fuel powered car uses. Older fuel powered cars used a lot of copper too. They had copper radiators and heater cores, etc..

Modern renewable energy systems tend to use a lot of copper too, requiring more copper per kilowatt hour than conventional power plants.

The sad thing about this U.S. copper mine is that it might be much less destructive to the natural environment than copper mines in places with very few or no environmental regulations.

I often think about what it would take to provide every human on earth with safe comfortable housing. Providing everyone with a big suburban house with copper plumbing and wiring, an electric car in the driveway, and wind turbines on the hill would do unimaginable damage to the earth.

... it's the best thing about this religion.

My great grandfather's house in San Francisco, the one my grandma and her sister were born in, is also owned now by foreign investors.

My grandma's childhood bedroom is now a full apartment. I talked to someone living there a few years ago and he couldn't believe the entire house once belonged to a single family, or that the luxury apartment of the house was once the home of a much abused Irish housekeeper/cook/maid, spinster queen of the big kitchen, and child of St. Ignatius Parish.

My great grandma sold the house in the Great Depression. Don't cry, she had others. My great grandfather was a dreamer who knew the future belonged to Hollywood motion pictures and the aircraft industry, but he bet everything he had on the wrong players and then he died.

I've no inherited wealth, and just a little white privilege, and I won't be happy if my parent's don't spend it all on things that make them happy.

If I don't inherit a big flaming pile of shit with debt collectors calling me so I can mock them, I will not be happy.

Or maybe it was no bomb at all. Maybe they were pumping nuclear waste into the deep earth like your friendly neighborhood Oklahoma frackers.

The last thing Russia, China, and South Korea want is a destabilized North Korea. Millions of starving and severely disoriented refugees flooding across the border is a bad day in international relations. You can't shoot them.

Years ago I was joking here that maybe someone should give North Korea a bomb just to shut them up, make them wear the big boy pants.

Now I'm a little worried someone else with an actual bomb agreed.

Possibly we are witnessing great brilliance in foreign policy. If a big boy hydrogen bomb destroyed all of North Korea's bomb testing tunnels and a larger portion of their testing technology, then maybe it was worth it.