Random thoughts do the trick on a wet Spring day.

It sounds much better than News Briefs which could be some kinda underwear

There are 196 countries in the United Nations. In 195 of them, they’ve banned the sentencing of children to life in prison. The US Supreme Court just granted American states the right to do this to our kids.

It’s all about the justice, right? Lots of kids make bad decisions, are over-emotional with poor impulse control. A life sentence at 15 or 16 is a huge expense and a huge consequence for a kid that does something dumb

This is yet another reason we should not grant Supreme Court justices (or any federal judge) lifetime tenure on their jobs. And it’s well past time that we consider what kind of country we want America to be because it has a lot of deficiencies. Seriously bad ones that stand out from what the rest of the world does, in an awful way that serves no useful purpose.

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Billions of dollars flow to the IRS online securely every year. More billions than that are used to buy things on the internet, just like the hundreds of billions traded online in stock markets and financial exchanges.

Some politicians pretend voting online can’t be done securely. They should put their mouths where the money is.

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By the time I graduated high school, I’d been taught several times that one should take care in picking their battles. Otherwise one can easily waste a lot of effort and time fighting about piddly shit and miss entirely the important ones.

I wish more people were so advised. I can only roll my eyes so many times before they fall out.

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International diplomacy too often has been a contortionist’s wet dream. I can think of few examples to match all the decades of handwringing there’s been about whether to acknowledge that the Armenian genocide was a genocide.

Nobody wanted to piss off the leadership of Turkey by suggesting a former Turkish leader practiced extermination. This past week, President Biden stated clearly that the genocide happened. More than 30 other countries have previously done so.

Now I wonder if US history classes will provide some clues about who Talaat Pasha was. It’s a name that should carry the same instinctive revulsion that normal people associate with Adolf Hitler.

I much appreciate President Biden’s honesty in tackling this. Diplomacy isn’t a good thing when used to help an ally cover up major horrors like this.

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And with that mention of a long coverup, it’s always worth mentioning a more recent one, that Sarah Jones just brought up again, the ongoing effort to whitewash the atrocious acts committed by George W. Bush and his pseudo-daddy, Dick Cheney.

Former House Speaker John Boehner has been impressing the talk show hosts lately with his comments denigrating Ted Cruz but his comments about Dubya remain aligned with the denial common to modern politics.

Bush is guilty of war crimes but will never be tried or convicted. And Congressional leaders still willing to overlook or excuse those leaders or their henchmen will not be able to regain their cred should they choose that path. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Addison, Yoo deserve a special place in a dank dark cell, for attacking Iraq, encouraging and defending torture and for all that’s occurred from the spinoffs since like the War in Syria and the masses of refugees that have added big problems for other countries.

None in that group should be working in foreign policy think tanks or at prestigious universities either. That not only delegitimizes their policy errors and encourages repeated foreign policy atrocities.

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It looks like the Justice Department plans to pursue more than 500 people in the Capitol Building riot and insurrection effort. But less than 100 are likely to face the more serious charges of engaging actively in a conspiracy intend to block the operation of our existing government or physically attacking others.

>> Court documents show that those charged come from nearly every state, with Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas topping the list in number of residents arrested. Roughly 90 percent of the total charged were men, and their average age was 40, according to figures compiled by the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. <<

Should this become another wrist-slap effort, that will only embolden others to repeat these crimes, especially criminally minded presidents.

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Later today, the US Census Bureau will release its data which is expected to grant more congressional districts to Texas, Florida, California, Oregon, Colorado and other southern and western states, while mostly northern states will lose some.

I hope the numbers draw thorough scrutiny from researchers as the info-gathering was fraught with complications caused by the pandemic and a Census Bureau leadership too ready to take shortcuts at the insistence of a president.

Unlike the November 2020 general election, this is the place where a decade-long ‘steal the vote’ effort could occur without that extra scrutiny.

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Finally, in an effort to demonstrate what a surreal 16 months we’ve been through and how far removed I’ve become from standard popular culture fare, the Academy Awards occurred last night. I discovered this today.

Apparently some movies were made last year. (I kid, I knew that much at least).

Typically, I try to see 8 or 10 movies a year at the theaters, most of them Oscar contenders. But movie theater attendance is a social event for me, with one or more friends joining in. Sometimes it’s accompanied by dinner and we always share our thoughts about what we’ve seen.

The pandemic, the election, several great personal losses, insomnia and other delights robbed my attention span away from all the fun stuff over the past 13 months especially, so I can’t even add trenchant commentary about a single movie. I’ve seen none of them. I don’t even care about them. I just emerge each day into the sunlight, blink a little and try to find common ground with other survivors.

It’s kinda weird for a knee-jerk optimist like myself becoming so deeply cynical about the world today.

Is it better to be a survivor when there’s a chance that we’ve just seen the beginning of much worse to come? I just can’t shake that feeling yet.