The case of the 17-year old who shot three people at Westfield Valley Fair Mall, in San Jose, is bringing renewed attention to California’s juvenile justice system. Under current state law, the shooter cannot be charged as an adult, even though he committed a violent crime involving a gun. The most severe sentence the 17-year old can receive is five years in a juvenile detention center.

I heard a lady comment at a Police Commission hearing that OPD “needs to be overseen because they can’t oversee themselves. It’s not because of something that happened twenty years ago. It’s because of things that are still happening today.”

Rightwing or anti-left politics are on the rise in Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Germany and, beyond Europe, even in Canada and much of Central and South America. In the Muslim world, which encompasses ¼ of the Earth’s population, we see a neo-fascist rejection of what we used to call “Western values.” In Russia and China, with their crypto-autocratic regimes, it’s hard to tell if these countries are left or right, but what they are not, in either case, is liberal. Centrist or center-left liberal politics such as are embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party are not being embraced by the world’s electorates. Here in America, where Donald Trump is currently president, he’s terribly unpopular, of course, but this should not be confused with a repudiation of his policies, but rather, to his own repellent, reptilian personality. The rightwing policies he amplified remain popular.

I asked Google AI “How will we know anything is true in the future?” It responded, “In the future, determining truth will rely heavily on a combination of advanced technology, critical thinking, and institutional collaboration, as AI blurs the lines between authentic and fabricated content. There will be no single answer, but rather a multi-faceted approach.”

I trust that everyone is belching and shitting placidly this morning after the Big Food Orgy of yesterday. I, myself, had for dinner a plateful of pork and vegetable dumplings, purchased frozen at Koreana Plaza, where I once paid a perfect stranger, a good-looking young Korean lad, $10 to explain to me what all the odd-sounding foods (“bulgogi”) were. I was alone last night, you see, the first time in my life I was not at someone else’s home participating in a Big Food Orgy of Thanksgiving.