Well, it's a new year and Oakland's homicide rate reset to zero at midnight and is probably at least below five right now, definietly in the single digits. A news article yesturday said there were 113 homicides last year, so it's probably right around there. I imagine if a nunch of people got killed on New Years Eve, it would have been in the paper this morning.

Anyway, I have a solution for this. This isn't one of those "after the revolution" sort of solutions either. I mean, it's very easy for liberals to say that people kill each other because they're stressed and then point at the usual suspects for causing stress. Unemployment, ecenomic stress, lack of health care, etc. Yeah, I could tell you that it's stressful being fearful that you'll lose all your savings and end up being homeless if you get sick, because of lost wages and hospitals bills. And then I could tell you that we really need socialized medicine, so folks wouldn't have to be so worried and so they would have less stress, and if they did get super stressed anyway, they could go to talk to a shrink about it and maybe figure things out and not kill somebody. Yeah, I could sip my latte as a very pious liberal and tell you that. But let's take a hard-nosed, conservative look at things. Paying for everyone to have decent healthcare is expensive. Funerals are expensive too, but a hundred or so a year is a lot cheaper than insuring all of Oakland. Plus, where's the profit motive? Nobody gets rich off of resource equality. Only inequality creates unequal wealth and thus richness. This sort of expensive, liberal, non-punative approach is simply not feasable under our current system. Only after the revolution can we . . .

But I promised a solution that would work now and not be dependant on the armed struggle of the proletariat and I have it. Bring in Jessica Fletcher. Her little town of Cabbot Cove had a tremendous muder rate. More than one a week and a population much smaller than Oakland. It's true that catching those responcible didn't seem to diminish the murder rate in Cabbot Cove, but police in Oakland beleive that some of the same people might be responsible for several homicides, so in Oakland, it might make a difference. At the very least, it would get the murders off the street once they comitted a crime, which is better than nothing. Only a Hollywood solution can solve complex social problems while maintinging the stus quo, spending no money and being entertaining all at the same time. So a Hollywood situation is obviously what we need.