For the performer physical media - vinyl, then cassettes, then CDs - was a good thing because it represented a revenue stream.

Yep.

Sure. I think that is what we are doing.

Years ago when I was touring I was driving east on I-10 (or was it US 90?) the first week of January. I was going from Pascagoula to Gainesville. These cars full of hooligans kept passing me honking and hollering. I noticed that they all had Mississippi plates. So odd. I get to the motel and later turned the TV on, and Michigan and Mississippi were playing in a bowl game in Gainesville. No wonder they were honking - they saw my Michigan plates. Mystery solved.

You have a bunch of things jumbled together there. Drug abuse is rampant in rural areas, and suicide rates are considerably higher than they are in urban areas. I doubt very much that there are more guns on your street than in my farming county. The percentage of fatherless homes is increasing everywhere, including rural areas. As with most social ills, it hits the poor and minority communities first and the hardest, and as with most social ills it is caused by outside forces, not personal individual failings.

"A substantial body of empirical research has examined implications of a father’s absence on a child’s well-being, indicating evidence to support the following conclusions: (1) contact with a child does not necessarily have positive benefits; (2) economic contributions to a child have positive benefits; (3) interparental cooperation has positive benefits; (4) positive emotional involvement with a child has positive benefits; and (5) an authoritative (rather than either authoritarian, permissive, or uninvolved) parenting style has positive benefits."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/progress-notes/202004/the-effects-absent-fathering-childrens-well-being

Back in the day 40 years ago when I lived in an urban AA neighborhood "everyone knew everyone and would protect themselves and family" and that was a deterrent. That is not just a rural thing, and in many rural areas community and family are breaking down as a consequence of outside forces. Here, the immigrant farm worker families and communities are much stronger than the rural white families and communities, by the way.

I have no idea what you think "fundamentalist Christians" have to do with anything. The entire fundamentalist ad Evangelical movement has become so politicized that it is hard to even see it as having anything to do with Christianity. Meanwhile, the churches are much more central to AA community life than is the case in the larger population, yet those communities are politically on the other side of the divide from the white churches. Obviously, the divide cannot be about Christianity.

On the recidivism and bail reform issue, contrary to the notion that dangerous people are being thrown back on the street we have the opposite problem and it is a shameful abomination. More than 400,000 people in the U.S. are currently being detained pretrial - mostly poor people and often or petty offenses. Those are people who have not been convicted of a crime yet are languishing in horrific conditions for weeks, months and even years.

Who gets let out again and again? Who escapes consequences for their behavior? Who preys on us? Who does the most damage to society? White collar criminals, that's who.

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law

As true today as it was in the 1700's.

Thanks. That's almost a ten bark.

I do try to make it pretty - find the best example, include some of the surroundings for context, add light, compose the frame, etc.

Back in 1988 when Sony came out with their digital tape recorder that changed everything. Before that the big reel to reel audio tapes were expensive and only ran for about 15 minutes. The machine was expensive and fussy. The with R-DAT we could record for hours on a 6 dollar tape with no distortion ad then "look" at it and edit it on a computer screen. That was exciting. A good room, a good mic and an R-DAT deck and you had a studio. It was heaven.

Of course there is more crime where there are more people. Alabama fares better than the other southern states, by the way.

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-least-and-most-crime/

In regards to "woke media," crime is dramatically down across the country over the last 4 decades, but hair on fire coverage of crime in the media is dramatically up. So much for "woke media." The news is driven by profit, not ideology. Keeping us at each others throats and scared half to death drives engagement and that drives revenue. Don't fall for it.

I have fond memories of Alabama. I also have some fond memories of the Michigan football team's victory over the Tide this year.

I guess I am one of those who documents rather than creates.

You make an excellent point about the "general dissatisfaction with accumulation of stuff that societies have bought as the secret to happiness." So much of the stuff sold now is shoddy and throwaway.

I documented some Seersucker sedge in bloom today, so I'm happy. It comes and goes so quickly that I always miss it in bloom.

I had a good friend, now deceased, who built musical instruments with hand tools. He did beautiful work.

Where there are more people there will be more of everything. That doesn't mean there is more per capita.

Yes, it depends on the area and some areas are worse than others. It also depends upon your age, race and wealth.

"A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/28/red-states-have-higher-gun-death-rates-than-blue-states-heres-why/?sh=5e66e4b1f812

"Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees"

"Studies show that states with higher murder rates are those that vote red even as conservatives stoke fear about crime."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/30/murder-rates-democrat-republican-states-gun-control

Rural communities are experiencing high rates of gun violence

• From 2016 to 2020, the two U.S. counties to experience the most gun homicides per capita were rural:* (see Figure 1)

Phillips County, Arkansas: 55.45 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000 people

Lowndes County, Alabama: 48.36 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000 people

• From 2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural: (see Figure 1)
80 percent of these 20 counties are in states that received an “F” grade for their weak gun laws, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2021 annual state scorecard rankings.

• In 2020, the total gun death rate for rural communities—when age-adjusted per 100,000 people—was 40 percent higher than it was for large metropolitan areas.

Media attention on large cities misrepresents the reality of gun violence in the United States

• Despite negative media attention, many large cities are proportionately safer from gun violence than their rural counterparts:

Chicago is within Cook County, which ranks 79th for firearm homicide rates.

Philadelphia County ranks 38th for firearm homicide rates.

The five counties that encompass New York City rank between 360th and 521st for firearm homicide rates:
New York County (Manhattan) ranks 521st.
Kings County (Brooklyn) ranks 404th.
Bronx County (Bronx) ranks 360th.
Richmond County (Staten Island) ranks 488th.
Queens County (Queens) ranks 502nd.
Los Angeles County ranks 316th for firearm homicide rates.

Southern and Midwestern states with loose gun laws and large rural populations have contributed to a rise in gun homicides

• Southern and Midwestern states—such as Arizona, Arkansas, and Missouri—have drastically contributed to the more than 100-fold relative increase in gun homicide rates from 2014 to 2019:

Rural areas in Arizona and North Carolina have outpaced their large metropolitan counterparts; in fact, gun homicide rates in rural Arizona were 14 percent higher than they were in the state’s large metropolitan areas from 2016 to 2020.

Gun homicide rates in rural North Carolina were 76 percent higher than they were in large North Carolina metropolitan areas from 2016 to 2020.

Gun violence continues to damage the lives of citizens across the nation, but our political leaders have the ability to prevent the senseless losses of lives. Unfortunately, pro-gun political leaders have failed to enact commonsense gun violence prevention measures that can save lives and have actively made it easier for guns to fall into the wrong hands. It is easy for these same leaders and the media to criticize urban, Democrat-led counties, but the truth is that rural communities within several Republican-led states have experienced a level of gun homicides that matches or outpaces that of their urban neighbors. It is time for political leaders to show their constituents that their lives matter and push for commonsense gun laws.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun-violence-in-rural-america/

Gun Violence Isn’t Just a City Problem

"Between 2011 and 2021, the overall firearm death rate in rural counties was nearly 40 percent higher than in urban counterparts. Politicians and news media coverage have fueled a widespread belief that gun violence primarily affects urban communities. But researchers are urging the public to understand that shootings are a universal issue — and that many rural Americans experience higher rates of gun death than their big-city counterparts."

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/05/gun-death-rate-america-urban-rural/

Granted, this topic is a political football.

This is from a pretty even-handed article. What was it Mark Twain said? "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"For the past two years, several think tanks on opposite sides of the political divide have waged war over whether 'red' or 'blue' America has a worse crime problem. Commentators on the left have pointed out that red states have higher homicide rates than blue states, while those on the right have noted that the relationship is more nuanced and can easily flip at a more local level: red-state crime problems are often concentrated in blue cities, and red counties have lower murder rates than blue counties."

"It seems to us that it would be far more productive to spend that time and effort debating the merits of actual policies, as opposed to measuring the effect of partisan leanings in the population. Democrats say that lax Republican gun laws drive up murder; Republicans say that Democratic mishandling of policing and prosecution is what really matters. Though our cross-sectional data are not suited to studying these hypotheses—for one thing, police staffing and gun ownership can change in response to crime, in addition to whatever effect they have on crime—there are large and important academic literatures on both topics."

"Let’s have those discussions, rather than interminably going back and forth over whose constituents are more violent. The U.S. certainly has more than enough murders to go around."

https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate-and-the-limits-of-empirical-social-science

Ha! Very good. You got me. I'd never seen the word and was too lazy to look it up.

Elitist? Wow. I will take that as a compliment.

That is pretty much how I see it, too.

I am not a "proponent of total gun abolishment." It is "abolition," not "abolishment," by the way, so long as we are correcting other people's usage. You are barking up the wrong tree there.

I don't think there are many calling for the abolition of gun ownership. There are many who make the slippery slope argument, saying that any regulations will inevitably lead to gun confiscation and that those advocating or regulations are secretly promoting a gun confiscation agenda.

"Who is taking a absolutist position on the Second Amendment?" you ask. Well, there is the National Association for Gun Rights, for example.

"Accepting NO COMPROMISE on the issue of gun control, NAGR works tirelessly to hold politicians accountable for their anti-gun views, and has made great strides in protecting and preserving the Second Amendment."

https://www.nationalgunrights.org/about-us/key-issues/