Guest (3:49), you obviously haven't "left the Cat"and playing "my favorite atrocity is worse than yours" is senseless. Killed with guns or improvised bombs, murdered outright instilled with fear and forever changed both physically and mentally--it's ALL evil. Each separate individual hell isn't easier to live with than any others.

And it will keep on happening until we at least LOOK for solutions that are based on reality and not political ideology.

Jim and Keith, do you ever consider NOT wrecking threads with your personal issues?

NOT HERE--NOT THIS TIME

I wish you would consider not ruining threads for your own personal turn-on, but that's pointless. Neither of you (nor a tiny number of others) is capable of thinking about the greater good or even whether you make yourselves look completely ballistic.

And GUEST,# is right when it comes to "the crap fed to us by the media" and everything else he said. I can't speak to anywhere else but the USA, but it feels like we're being conditioned to feel hopeless. We have the news-story-du-jour that's hammered 24/7 by networks that aren't, for the most part, about news. Our TV shows are about crime, cops, forensics, inane 'reality shows', or they're re-boots of some semi-successful series, because creativity is (it seems) frowned upon. Just about the best, most honest news we can get is from Jon Stewart, a comedian. Misinformation and complete bullshit is propagated by formerly reliable sources because (I assume) it's more interesting and so gets better ratings than spin-free reporting. And meanwhile, Republicans cut spending on education, food stamps, women's programs, they try to harm voting rights, any attempts to prevent psycos from getting guns, all the progress unions have made, and... oh, there's the whole killing-the-planet thing.

I don't know if the devaluation of life and the popularity of highly reported murder is a cause or an effect, but I think we need to focus on what we can do something about.