Early this morning I felt compelled to write some middle of the road comments on the then still unfolding massacre and manhunt crisis in Paris. In it I expressed my views of different cultures than mine as not only worthwhile and worthy of respect but also long fascinating to me since childhood. I ended by expressing the hope that the mass shooters would be captured alive as I saw and still see little purpose in their being killed. Alas, and I really mean that, they were killed in a standoff of their own making and the news media are already attributing to them the wishes to be martyrs.

I realize my less punitive sentiments towards them is not shared by many and I may very well be in the minority. Keeping in mind that my humble young blog is quite unknown and certainly light years away from being influential, I thought I would dabble in “bloggology” and try to set up through the available handy dandy WordPress widget a poll on this issue. This will go down at least in my mind as the most unscientific poll every conducted since my blog tends to focus on esoteric, arcane subjects like mental illness treatment policy, a psychiatrist’s perspective on cultural and issues of the intellect and the world of “letters” as it used to be called in the days of scholarship. Also this blog appears to far to live up to my expectations and attract a very UNrepresentative of any population sample and is quite self selected comprised of persons with these not so common interests. But anyway here goes.