Breaking Bad's a bit better now

Well, okay, I watched a new episode of Breaking Bad last night. It was pretty good. We learn more about Gus's traumatic past and Walt's dual life as mild mannered terminally ill chemistry teacher and evil drug producer gets him into trouble again.

Did I say this before? One fellow on a message board almost predicted the direction the show was going to take. I foolishly scoffed at his prediction, that Walt's now disabled brother-in-law, a DEA agent, would take care of Gus for him. But...it seems things are moving in that direction.

Why would anyone want to be mixed up in that horrible business? And why are drug lords always so rotten? Is it the long prison sentences they're facing? Maybe not----look at bootleggers during prohibition. Back then the penalties for running booze were rather mild and they were monsters.

There were Soviet and now Russian movies about crime in the Soviet era. Soviet criminals back then could be extremely violent. In Moscow in the '60s, there was a petty thief in Moscow who started murdering his victims with an axe. But you look at the crimes they were committing, they generally weren't getting much out of it. The USSR was truly a socialist society. Even highly successful organized crime bosses didn't live much better than ordinary Soviet people. So why were Soviet criminals so violent? There was no logical reason for it.