First, a couple more notes about Virginia Tech, reactions to the reactions I guess. The National Rifle Association was on top of it immediately, of course. Above all the noise from individuals about getting rid of guns, the NRA could be heard with its organized and well financed message about blaming anybody or anything but the gun, just as it always does on occasions like this. It seems morbid, but the people of the NRA are just doing their jobs, and it’s true that the shooter bears the blame, not the hardware in his hand. It’s also true, however, that in places where there aren’t too many guns around, a lot fewer people meet their demise that way. There’s something a lot less personal, and thus easier, about killing someone with a gun than the methods available to you if you don’t happen to be packing the heat.

I have to part company with the gun crowd, however, when they try to tell me that most of the carnage would have been prevented if the people in the classrooms had been packing. I think that idea is left over from the brief period in history which we call The Old West. Before things like government and cops moved west, every man carried a gun, and shooting each other was just ordinary day-to-day business. Most of the men didn’t live to see age 30. Writers and filmmakers glamorized that time for entertainment and profit by suggesting that the good guy always shoots the bad guy in the end. These days, it’s usually the other way around, and I’m pretty sure the same was true in the old west. Everybody’s packing in Iraq, a lot of people are getting killed, and there’s some difference of opinion about just who the good guy is. A lot of guys with those NRA emblems in the back window of their pickup trucks still believe those old western movies. They long to return to a time when disputes were settled with powder and lead.

The other lingering thought is about the way the news got out. Some people are calling it a revolutionary merging of traditional journalism with regular people who happen to have sophisticated electronic devices. Kind of a one sided revolution. The corporate media has mostly ignored the Internet, except to tell us about the information they post. The Internet emerged from this story with new legitimacy while the mainstream media looked exactly like the dinosaur it is. People now have devices in their pockets which can make and take phone calls, send and receive letters, shoot pictures and movies and send them anywhere almost instantly, keep your schedule straight, calculate the gross national product, find your exact location on the planet and probably make you a cup of coffee. Who needs a TV or a newspaper when everyone is a reporter, everyone is a publisher, and the information goes anywhere and everywhere in just a few seconds. The Virginia Tech story was reported by people on their cell phones with traditional journalists following them around like puppy dogs.

Just a couple of decades ago, most of us were naive enough to believe that we could believe the stuff we were told by the networks and the newshounds. We got older and wiser, but now the task of being informed is a lot harder than just looking past the interests of the advertisers. Any information you might want is there for the taking. Unfortunately, it comes along with a lot you don’t want, and the tried and true law of averages tells you that when anyone can say anything, most of what’s said won’t be true. Not so long ago, if you said, "I heard it on NPR news," or "I read it in the New York Times," there was a presumption that it was likely to be true. If you say, "It’s true. I saw it on The Internet," you’re building your reputation as either a comedian or a colossal fool. I’ll take the free flow of information anytime, but the cost is the free flow of fantasies, delusions, nonsense, malicious attacks, advertising and other lies.

Information isn’t flowing entirely free, of course. Internet content is censored in some places in the world, and here in the US, a lot of people aren’t too comfortable with the idea that their children can’t be sheltered from some types of information. That instinct, too, comes from a wide range of opinions, but it looks very much like the electronic horse already has escaped from the bar. There was a dust up in a Bay Area school district recently over the assignment of an award winning novel as required reading because it included one scene with homosexual content. This week, we’ve got the story of a high school newspaper advisor in Indiana who has been suspended for allowing her students to publish an article calling for tolerance toward homosexual people. Their kids are surfing the triple W, and these people are still trying to censor the printed word. Pathetic.

Here’s the legislative report about some of the latest attacks on we used to proudly call our freedom. Most important is the move in Washington to quietly put every plant and product that anyone thinks might have medicinal qualities under the control of the Food and Drug Administration. That translates to prescription or extinction for everything from aloe vera to zinc, vitamins, herbs, massage, maybe even raw fruit juice. You think I’m exaggerating but the proposed regulation actually includes a description of the circumstances under which fruit juice might be regulated. This thing is called Docket #206D-0480, and we have just four more days to register our protests to the FDA.

The bill making it a crime not to spay or neuter your dog, and the bill providing for a statewide ban on incandescent light bulbs each was successful in committees of the state Assembly.

Ever since the current administration captured the White House, people have speculated aloud that Bush is just a puppet and Dick Cheney is the real president. A couple of thoughts on that after living six years in this particular version of a fascist state. I concur that Cheney probably makes all the important decisions, if any important decisions actually are made at the White House, but I’m sure he answers to those in the muddy waters of the corporate world. In the past, no matter who gave him money and no matter what compromises he made to get elected, the president always developed an independent streak. He’d just wake up one day and say, "Wait a minute. I’m the president. I can do this if I want to." Bush is the perfect president because he lacks the initiative to be independent. He’s a cinch to do whatever he’s told until the end.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich must believe that Cheney’s in charge. He’s introducing articles of impeachment in The House, and he’s not talking about the President; he wants to impeach Cheney. Apparently Kucinich doesn’t mind having Dub in the Oval Office if he can just get Cheney out.

And you about Governor Arnold’s new death chamber at San Quentin. The Legislature is mad because Arnold tried to quietly build it without telling anyone in the Legislature. After the word got out, the governor’s Secretary of Corrections told the press, "He is very concerned about maintaining good communications with the Legislature."