Teaching Terrorists. The media have made much of an accident that caused a traffic mess in Oakland, California (where one of my nieces lives). A gasoline tanker truck slammed into a support under a highway ramp. The resulting intense fire collapsed a section of the overpass onto another major roadway. The traffic snarl that ensued will make commuters' lives difficult for months. The more important issue, however, is that any terrorist watching may have learned a valuable lesson about how to cripple an entire region, a point made explicitly across the Bay:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said the accident showed how fragile the Bay Area's transportation network is, whether to an earthquake or terrorist attack.

"It's another giant wake-up call," Newsom said.

Terrorists presumably already knew to identify complexes of interchanges like the "MacArthur Maze" where the Oakland accident occurred, but the attention given to this ramp collapse doubtless has some thinking about such interchanges with renewed interest. They know that there are many such complexes, and now they know they don't need to plant explosives, at considerable risk of being stopped by law enforcement officers, but need merely hijack a gasoline tanker truck and slam it into a pier near exposed steel supports for a major roadway, and thus collapse it onto others. Do this in several places in a single metropolis, and you can keep rescue services from reaching victims of other terrorist acts and prevent the military from moving forces thru an entire region.
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I guess there's nothing one can do about terrorist planning. What we need to do is devise countermeasures, first to prevent attacks and second to recover quickly and find alternative ways to get around if key roads are closed. Of course, the larger question is how to defuse the rage that produces terrorism. But we don't want to think about that.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,351 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:10 PM

 
Seeking an Antidote to Toxic Media. The FCC has announced that it believes Congress can act to curb excessive violence in televised entertainment. The usual suspects have expressed alarm that our 'right' to be psychologically poisoned is being threatened. But some surprising ad-hoc coalitions may emerge.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he will file legislation that may incorporate some of the commission's recommendations.

Let's be clear on what the First Amendment does and does not cover. Read the text. This is the entire First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those 45 words are the only protections of "expression" in the U.S. Constitution. They include religious worship, speech, the press, assembly, and petition. That's it. It does not cover art or entertainment. Period. It just plain does not cover the arts, of any kind. It does not cover images: not statues, not paintings, not fotos, not videos. It does not protect graphic depictions of violence and death as entertainment. It just doesn't.
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The visual and nonspeaking parts of video, TV, film, and the Internet are not technological extensions of speech but of visual arts known to the Framers of the Constitution: drawing, painting, caricature, cartooning, sculpture; dance; music. Art is not protected by the First Amendment. If you doubt it, just read the 45 words that comprise the entire text of that Amendment. There is no mention of "art", nor of music, nor dance, nor anything else of any kind but (1) religion, (2) speech, (3) the press, (4) assembly, and (5) petition.
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All other "expression" is outside the Constitution and is NOT protected by the First Amendment. Technologies not known by the Framers must be judged in terms of whether they are reasonable extensions of the protected forms of expression, or NOT.
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A bullhorn and other forms of sound amplification, and broadcasting of speech, may be regarded as extensions of speech. But freedom of speech does not mean the right to blast the entire vicinity or world with oppressive sound, nor to shout down less powerful voices. So government may properly restrict the scope of amplification to protect people from imposition.
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"Speech" in the First Amendment actually means what it seems to mean: words said aloud by one individual human being to others within earshot. Constitutional protection of speech was afforded to keep people from being oppressed merely for speaking their mind among friends and family, to keep what later came to be known as Big Brother from listening in and punishing people for disapproved thoughts. It really relates fundamentally (a) to private conversations and (b) to public policy discussions.
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In the first case, the First Amendment forbids Government to intrude on private conversations.
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In the second, it forbids Government from acting to stifle political discussion and action to rally democratic opposition to Government behavior, or to replace the members of elected bodies.
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The First Amendment was basically intended to protect privacy and dissent, and in regard to speech that reaches many people, to protect political expression, not storytelling or other frivolous entertainments.
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Realize that the Constitution was written at a time when the largest possible number of people a single person's voice might reach was on the order of 2,000 in a theater or amphitheater of the best acoustical construction. Might the Framers have written a different text for the First Amendment if they had understood that technology would make it possible for a single person to reach hundreds of millions with an intemperate utterance?
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(The era in which the Framers lived was also a time when the most dangerous weapon an individual might carry was a musket that could fire only once every minute or two. Might the Second Amendment have been written differently if the Framers understood that we would one day create guns that, in the hands of a lunatic, could fire 170 bullets into dozens of college students before police could arrive? I suspect it would.)
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What is a reasonable technological extension of "the press"? Well, what is the nature of the press? It is a passive medium. You have to go out of your way to find a newspaper or book, then devote time and effort to read its words, in order to derive any information or experience any emotional reaction to what is contained in the press. Not so television, which invades the most private parts of our personal world and slaps us in the face with graphic violence even when we are just channel-surfing or sitting thru commercials. So, television and film in the home — one admittedly does have to seek out a first-run movie in a theater, but one does not necessarily know what s/he will see on first entering the theater — are qualitatively different, in a hugely meaningful way, from "the press".
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They are not by any fair-minded evaluation the exact equivalent of a book. A book has covers. A newspaper has multiple pages, most of which are hidden at any given time. To make any sense of a book, newspaper, or magazine, one has to actively read the print. Not so, graphic images. Note that canvases and statues are not in any way even implicitly protected by the First Amendment. The Framers knew about art. They were cultured men. When the First Amendment was written, they did not include art as a protected category of "expression", and in fact the First Amendment does NOT protect just any and every conceivable form of "expression". It protects religion, speech, the press, assembly, and petition. That is all.
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(Among the many other things it does not protect are teeshirts, rude gestures, tattoos, piercings, nudity, and other forms of marginally or flagrantly antisocial behavior. Read the text of the First Amendment. I defy you to find even an implied right of giving the finger to TV cameras or assaulting the world with nudity, enormous tattoos visible to the general public, or piercings that disgust the bulk of the population.)
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Hyperviolent television and film is NOT Constitutionally protected, not by any stretch of the imagination of reasonable and honest people. Blood-spattered windows and disemboweled bodies, cars tossed in the air by explosions, and the whole panoply of psychotic, sado-masochistic violence that fills television and film are NOT protected by the First Amendment.
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And it's not just children who need to be protected from sociopathic sado-masochists in media. There is no "erase" button on the human memory. What sears itself into your brain stays in your brain, possibly for life. Many World War II veterans have experienced nitemares and flashbacks 50 and more years after they left the battlefield, and may indeed have suffered those appalling recollections to the very last instant of their lives, dying from a heart attack triggered by memories of terrible things they saw when young men, that scarred them for life. How many people remember vividly, decades later, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 shocker, Psycho? key scenes from Jaws (1975)? How long will it take for the images of the collapsing World Trade Center towers to leave our memories? Will those visions ever leave our heads?
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It's one thing to face reality, unpleasant, indeed horrifying, tho it might be, in news reports. It's quite another to allow some degenerate loser with sociopathic sado-masochistic obsessions to inflict his (or, less commonly, her) nitemarish fantasies upon millions in the name of "entertainment". I've said it before and will say it again, much of today's output of "dramas" on television and film is entertainment for Nazis, the kind of thing SS guards at Auschwitz would have loved.
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Violence as entertainment is not Constitutionally protected speech. It's not speech at all. Pictures are not speech. Visual sequences on film or video are not speech. Speech is speech. And everybody knows it.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,346 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Republican Slime, Democratic Scum. Rudolph Giuliani has, scandalously, asserted that if a Democrat is elected President, the United States will suffer another devastating terrorist attack, because only a Republican can protect us. Mind you, the 9/11 attack that raised that piddling nobody to the ranks of Presidential contenders occurred on a Republican's watch!
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It amazes me that Republicans dare to say that they alone can keep us safe, when the worst terrorist attack on our territory in the entire history of the Republic happened on a Republican President's watch! It just goes to show how absolutely right Adolf Hitler was when he said that "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."*
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That is so because the reasoning of the people who hear an outrageous lie is that no one would dare say something so seemingly preposterous if it weren't true. Even if most people who hear a brazen lie should discount part of what they hear, most will nonetheless believe some of it. (That's why, for instance, a cloud may hang over the three Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, even tho they did nothing.)
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So even if the claim is wholly false, some of it will be believed. And partial belief is almost as good as total belief.
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Mitt Romney joined in Giuliani's attack, agreeing that only a Republican can protect us against terrorism. Romney has now consigned himself to the trash heap of history, a footnote as the first Mormon candidate for President.** He has revealed himself as a person — I won't use the honorific "man" for him — of absolutely no decency. He had earlier revealed himself as a person of no integrity, in recasting himself as something he has never been, be it a Radical Rightwinger or a "lifelong hunter".
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Beauty is indeed only skin deep. Mitt Romney is a strikingly handsome man, but the mask of skin that appears on the front of his head hides a devious, evil mind. He cannot be trusted by anyone, Right or Left.
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At least Giuliani is, for the most part, a consistent beast, tho he has tried to downplay his socially liberal stances for conservative audiences. I had the misfortune of living in New York City during most of Giuliani's tenure, tho I escaped to New Jersey in June 2000, well before that petty tyrant became a national hero for simply doing his job when his city was hit by terrorism. Outsiders don't know about Giuliani's dictatorial tendencies. Perhaps they now have a clue as to his totalitarian mindset, which represents anyone who opposes him as a danger to society. Giuliani presents himself as The Man on the White Horse who will save us. From what? From everything, including the need to vote.
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I came to call him "Mussoliani". As Mayor of the City of New York, he could do only so much harm, because the Government of the State of New York and the Federal Government were in place to restrain him. But if he were, by some monstrous misstep of the Nation's electorate, to become President? Who then would stop him from becoming dictator? Bush, a nothing as against Giuliani intellectually and as regards force of personality, went very far toward abolishing American democracy and imposing dictatorship, with high-handed measures he managed to entrench in law and custom. He instituted the so-called "Patriot Act" and Guantanamo, to which at least one U.S. citizen was sent after seizure here at home. Mussoliani would need far more than one Guantanamo. GUantanamo, GUlag. What an interesting linGUistic coincidence.
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Alas, American voters may have no one better to vote for on the Democratic side than the odious Giuliani and perfidious Romney on the Republican side.
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I saw part of the Democratic candidates' debate on MSNBC last nite. I turned off when the subject turned to abortion and the Democrats turned into a baby-lynch mob. Another handsome man, John Edwards (more like beautiful, indeed, than even "handsome" would cover), spouted kill-the-kid bile to pander to the feminist vote, so I shut the TV off in indignation and disgust.
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The Democratic Party has got to stop being the party of childslaughter.
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Democrats are supposed to watch out for the little guy. Who is littler than an unborn baby? Who is more powerless, more voiceless, more helpless against the mighty? No one, that's who.
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I am a homosexual man. I automatically, as a necessary first impulse, side with the powerless. Nowadays we hear 'conservatives' at once acknowledging that homosexuality may have a biological base AND suggesting that maybe 'intervention' while a child is in the womb can 'fix' (defective) gay babies — or society can save itself from rampant homosexuality by aborting gay babies.
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I am well more than 62 years beyond the point where I could be aborted to 'save' my parents the 'shame' and 'tragedy' of having a gay son, but that does not for an instant make me callous to the danger that future gay men face in the first months of life. In a contest between a 'mother' who does not deserve that honorific and an unborn baby who cannot appeal for mercy or even scream for help, let there be no mistake: the woman is the powerful one, the baby the helpless one. Women are not entitled to play the 'damsel in distress' card to kill a child on the theory that they are somehow 'victims'. No, women who seek to kill their baby are victimizers, not victims. The baby is the victim, or potential victim, and to protect the baby from murder, society has the moral right and indeed imperative to intervene.
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There is no biological ambiguity in abortion. A child is a child, whether it has been born or has just been conceived. It is biologically distinct from both of its parents, sharing only half its DNA with either. It is not part of the mother — and we have never needed any fancy proofs of that, inasmuch as more than half of all babies are boys, and no boy could be part of a woman's body — so control over "her own body" has absolutely no relevance. "Controlling one's own body" is a fatuously phony issue. The time to control your own body is before you let a ... how can we put this delicately? d*k into it.
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Even before that, if a woman doesn't want to risk pregnancy, be it from consensual sex or rape, she can perfectly well have her tubes tied. Indeed, this planet is so overcrowded that Government should volunteer to pay the costs of tubal ligation (an operation to tie the fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy) for any woman who does not want to become pregnant. Many such operations are reversible, so if a woman who has been voluntarily sterilized should decide later that she wants to have a child after all, she can pay for reversal surgery herself, and repay the Government for the money it spent to tie her tubes in the first place.
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But no! Modern women want the right to screw around AND assert virginal purity. We all know what it takes to get pregnant. For women to at once go out and get themselves f*kt AND pretend to be innocents is bullsh*t. You get f*kt, you're not innocent, so don't pretend to be daddy's little girl who needs to be protected from the fully foreseeable consequences of her own lascivious acts.
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Let us also stop pretending that murder is not murder. When a person's life is taken without moral justification, that person's killing is murder, period. No fetus has ever attacked anyone, so killing it is not justifiable homicide. Justification is the distinction between murder, a crime, and happenstantial homicide, a tragedy.
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Life begins at conception. How do we know that? Because we can create embryos in a petrie dish thousands of miles from either parent, from frozen sperm and/or a frozen egg. That embryo can then be implanted in a woman who has absolutely no genetic connection to the embryo whatsoever. It might even be implantable into another species, closely related or not, be it monkey, chimp, cow, or sow.
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Every single one of us was once an embryo, then a fetus. Would you gladly consent to have been killed by your mother/parents before birth? I wouldn't. I'm glad I was born. I'm glad I was conceived. I'm glad my parents didn't feel that a fifth child was 'not opportune', so they would just kill that one and let a different fifth child be born at some later, more convenient time.
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It is, sadly, fitting, that the major parties of the United States are controlled by slime and scum, because the human race is a miserable excuse for a "human" race. I cannot say whether the evil among us are the majority or just a very large minority, nor whether the evil that people do is a function of innate evil or just stupidity: they just don't know any better.
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The premise behind democracy is that even if most individuals aren't very smart, collectively they can make wise choices as to who should control government, and even, as in ballot questions, make wise policy decisions by majority vote. It's almost as tho we believe that a collective mind, a sort of electoral "Borg",*** can, by combining the minuscule computing capacity of each of millions of individuals, produce a mental giant. It's the theory behind supercomputers formed from many not-so-super computers linked together.
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But moral questions are not mathematical problems or weather simulations. They entail a moral dimension and moral standards that confuse the issue.

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Problem: Planet Earth is much too crowded with human beings. The behavior of this vast human population is wreaking havoc on other species and the environment.
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Solution: Reduce the population.
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Means: Kill X number of people.

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Elegant in its simplicity, but utterly wrong morally.
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Morality requires a more nuanced solution, or multiple solutions. For instance, kill off the criminal class but protect the decent; sterilize people who would be happy not to be bothered with children; sterilize as well people who are unfit to reproduce as would litter the future with mental defectives, cripples, dwarfs, and the like. Limit extraordinary medical measures to people whose lives have extraordinary significance, or save lesser specimens only on the condition that they consent to be sterilized. Genetically select for smaller rather than larger individuals, as to reduce food requirements. And on, and on.
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We have done no such computations in lite of moral and public-policy considerations. We have leaped to take the bizarre stance that it is better to kill innocent babies than murderers and other career criminals. We have selected for (in favor of) criminality and against decency. We have announced a moral preference for murderers over babies, and militantly marched to save killers and kill babies. Astounding. What a feeble-minded bunch of evil losers the human race is.
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So who will be the next President? Who will dominate the next Congress? Good people? Or bad? I don't like the odds.
____________________

* Wikipedia's article on the Big Lie technique provides this interesting information worth comparing to the behavior of our present Republican leadership:

[Hitler's] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

And as for whether a counterattack from Islamists we have attacked would be terrorism, consider this:

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

** Yesterday I was approached on the street by two Mormon missionaries walking thru my neighborhood (Vailsburg, in western Newark). The one who spoke to me (I was standing still while taking pictures for my Newark fotoblog at the time) asked if I was familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said, sure. He pressed a bit, and I said it was founded by Joseph Smith; Brigham Young moved the church to Utah; I have been to Salt Lake City and taken pictures of the Tabernacle. (I did not mention that while I was at Temple Square, someone asked me for directions.) He persisted in trying to interest me in the Book of Mormon. I said I had considered getting a copy but don't have time to read. He persisted. I said I'm not religious and not interested. Then he accepted defeat, and said something like 'have a good day'. He and his cohort moved on, walking toward East Orange on Sanford Avenue. I didn't think to ask to take a picture of the two itinerant missionaries when they were close, but got this picture of them receding into the distance.

*** A reference to an intergalactic villain in later generations of the Star Trek sci-fi dynasty.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,335 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:10 AM

 
(1) Fatheads. The permissivists among us would have society bear the burden of the morbidly obese, treating those fat, gluttonous beasts as 'victims' of a 'disease'. We are to pay them Social Security Disability benefits and pay higher medical insurance premiums to cover their fat asses. And woe be to an employer who wants to refuse to hire a fat-ass or fire someone who gets so fat that s/he can't perform the job's essential tasks, stinks up the workplace or wets down seats with excess perspiration, takes excessive amounts of time off — which forces other people to do their job, at no extra pay —, suffers excess rates of injury, and costs the employer, every member of the employer's workforce, and society more generally, by inflating medical costs to take care of self-inflicted injuries. This crap has got to stop. And maybe the courts are finally stopping it.
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An Associated Press article hilited on AOL today says:

Overweight workers cost their bosses more in injury claims than their lean colleagues, suggests a study that found the heaviest employees had twice the rate of workers' compensation claims as their fit co-workers.

Researchers found that the heaviest workers had 13 times more lost workdays due to work-related injuries, and medical claims for such injuries that were seven times higher than those of lean co-workers.

Obesity experts said they hope the study will convince employers to invest in programs to help fight obesity. One employment attorney warned companies that treating fat workers differently could lead to discrimination complaints.

The courts might not find in favor of fat-asses, but the costs of frivolous lawsuits could be onerous. Who pays the costs of such litigiousness? Just the particular employer? How does that employer recoup the expense? Higher prices to customers? Lower wages for employees? Lower tax payments to governments? Cutting costs by exporting jobs to places where workers (a) make almost nothing and (b) have neither the right nor the power to level outrageous lawsuits?
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There are two obvious remedies to such frivolous litigation. One is for the courts to award attorney's fees to employers wrongfully sued by fat slobs. The other is for legislatures (Congress and state lawmakers) to state plainly that obesity is not a disability, so there is no legal basis for a lawsuit on that ground. Current law is unclear.
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Last September, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found against one slob:

The EEOC had brought suit on behalf of a worker who claimed he had been fired because of his morbid obesity (he weighed up to 450 pounds). The Sixth Circuit held that the worker did not have a "disability" for purposes of the ADA, because he did not show that his obesity had a "physiological cause" and therefore qualified as a "physiological disorder." Although the EEOC had shown that the worker's weight was more than 100% greater than the norm (sufficient for a diagnosis of morbid obesity under the traditional definition), they failed to show that the weight was "the result of a physiological condition."

The commentator at the Disability Law Blog quoted above criticized that decision by saying that:

All of our behavior has some physiological cause, if only from hormones and brain activity.

What a jerk. So we have the right to stuff our mouths with food 18 hours a day and blow up to hundreds of pounds over a safe weight, and claim that that aberrant behavior is physiologically based, and thus society has to pay? I don't think so.
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My best friend for over a decade was "morbidly obese". The word "morbid" is part of that term for good reason. He had adult-onset diabetes, which happens when someone eats more than his body can provide for; and heart problems; and problems catching his breath on stairs. He refused to change his eating habits, on the rationale "I'm going to be dead a lot longer than I am alive." And he is dead now. He died shortly before his 49th birthday. I miss him, and will never stop being mad at him. So don't ask indulgence of the morbidly obese. You "enable" their self-destructive behavior.
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Another friend lost 200 pounds in the past year or so. He was over 400 pounds and waddled, his arms flinging back and forth in an arc as he walked. He finally got tired of that, stopped eating so much, hired a trainer, and did the hard work of losing a huge amount of weight. He unfortunately still has some 15 pounds of loose skin that needs to be surgically removed because it might never be reabsorbed. But then he's going to go to the beach for the first time in years. He lives in New Jersey, which has one of the world's great Shores, but he did not want to be seen in a bathing suit for years.
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I have another friend who lost a lot of weight due to life-threatening illness, not exercise, and felt better when he was able to gain back that weight, and perhaps a bit more. Because not being fat meant to him not "slender" (healthy) but "thin" (sick). I hope he can get over that and trim down to a healthier weight.
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But gluttons who eat vastly more than they are entitled to, in a world of starvation, should be stopped. The very least that should be done is that the weight of social condemnation lands hard on them and they are cut off from all outside support in their self-destructive, sinful gluttony. Fotos of starving children in the Third World should be placed on the door to their refrigerator, pantry, and kitchen cabinets, and some or all of the money they used to spend on food that was killing them should instead be sent to feed Third World children.
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Society should very seriously consider outlawing morbid obesity, as a crime against society, arrest people fatter than a seriously dangerous weight (sliding scale for weight and health, but well beyond normal levels of human variation), confine them in jail cells, and put them on a strict but well-balanced diet and compel them to do appropriate exercise to force the weight off. They should be given dietary guidance and psychological counseling to get at the root of why they have to shove food into their mouth long beyond the point where they could remotely need it. Only after their weight has stabilized at a starkly lower level should they be released.
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If they blow up again, they should be jailed and simply starved. Forget about well-balanced diet. Just starve the bastards. Give them vitamin pills and dietary supplements with water, period, but no calories whatsoever. And make them fear that a third offense will result in their expulsion from society to a foodless wasteland where they will be left to starve to death. After all, millions of people, mostly children, die of starvation on this planet every year. Most of them never had the pleasure of a full stomach even once in their brief lives. I'll save my sympathy for them.
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No way in hell should fat people be given Social Security Disability or welfare payments to empower them to sit around on their fat ass, getting closer and closer to death at public expense. If we're going to kill them, let's just do it with a gunshot to the head or by exiling them from human society on some arctic island. They're out of their minds. Let them be out of sight, too. We don't need to be disgusted by mountains of fat.
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(2) Alec Baldwin Is Right! I finally listened to the 'infamous' telephone message left by actor Alec Baldwin for his 11-year-old dauter in which he berates her for repeatedly refusing to take his pre-scheduled calls. The indignation of some people in media about his frank talk is outrageous. When did this country go nuts? Fathers have rights, among which is the right to tell a selfish little bitch that she is behaving outrageously and it's got to stop. The female judge who suspended his visitation rights should be removed from the bench. Parents have an absolute right to tell a spoiled child that s/he is spoiled and try to snap him or her out of wrongful behavior. Indeed, that's a large part of the job of parents: to teach kids the difference between right and wrong, and what their obligations are to other people.
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(3) Stop "the Wave" on Headline News! In recent weeks, CNN Headline News — which is headlines only (a shrinking) part of the day now, so should be required to change its name to CNN2 or some such — has been hiliting live footage with an extremely distracting and annoying "wave" of the letters in words like "HAPPENING NOW". It works like the "audience wave" in sports stadiums in which the crowd stands and sits in sequence across the stands to give the impression of a wave rushing across the stands. Do we really have to be hit in the face over and over again by animated lettering to tell us that what is on view now is live? Doesn't the RED BAND behind the lettering and the words "HAPPENING NOW" or "LIVE" say all we need to know? What kind of inconsiderate fools have taken over CNN? Do they think that irritating people builds audience?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,333 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:03 PM

 
Uncle Boris Dies. I was shocked and profoundly saddened today to read of the death of a great hero of Western civilization. Boris Yeltsin, the man who destroyed the Soviet Union, has died at age 76. He had been in very bad health for many years, so his death should not have come as a surprise, but it hit me hard anyway.
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I have long felt a special connection to Russia even tho I am not the slitest Russian myself. All my ancestors are from Western and North Central Europe. But when I visited Russia briefly (5 days in 1984), not only did I feel very comfortable but I was also taken for Russian. I think people asked me directions, and I could merely say, slowly, "Ya nye gavarit pa-Russki" (I don't speak Russian). I get asked directions a lot, in places I've never been till minutes before.
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I have long been very indignant that the West has been so nasty and unhelpful to the Russian people in their struggle to adapt to democracy and the free market. It's as tho we are punishing them for the crimes of their Soviet masters. A transition that could have been eased and could have succeeded fully by now if we had rushed 100,000 technical advisers, Peace Corps volunteers, and educators, has instead been a nitemare of failure and hardship. Some Russians have actually frozen to death, or starved to death, because the West refused to help. Madness.
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Now we have a Russian President who is even more indignant than I am about the bad treatment the West has heaped upon the geographically largest country on Earth, and who is both in position and inclined to hurt us. Serves us right. Because it's not just the leadership of the United States but, unfortunately, also the people who have let old prejudices from the Cold War era cause us to stand aside and watch Russians suffer, as tho "it serves the Russki, Commie bastards right!"
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We dared to criticize Russian authorities for attacking Islamist Chechnyans and retaliating for the terrorism they brought to the capital of the nation, seizing hundreds of theatergoers in Moscow, and killing hundreds of schoolchildren, as tho it happened on a distant planet and had nothing to do with us. We didn't even express sympathy for Russians' loss, even tho these attacks may well have been planned and aided by al-Qaeda. Small wonder, then, that Vladimir Putin's heart has turned cold against us.
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Tho much diminished, Russian power is great enuf to cause us real problems. For one thing, Russia has a veto in the United Nations Security Council. If it chooses, it can prevent the U.S. from acting legally against Iran. That does not, of course, mean that the Bush Administration will not attack Iran illegally. Legalities didn't stop the attack nor occupation of Iraq. And I'm frankly a bit surprised that there have not already been attacks on Iran, since Israel plainly wants the U.S. to fite its war against Iran just as it ordered the U.S. to fite Israel's war against Iraq.
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What it does mean, however, is that if Russia decides it is more than a little tired of the contempt and condescension it receives at the hands of American policymakers, it can cause us a whole lotta trouble. It can help Iran with nuclear weapons. It can supply Taliban and other Afghan rebels with arms, ammunition, and training, to turn the tables on our aid during the Soviet occupation that so humbled the Russian leadership as to shake the regime to its foundation. Make no mistake: Taliban and al-Qaeda forces will take Russian aid if it's offered. The atheists of the Soviet era have been replaced by the pious Orthodox Christians of modern Russia, so their aid would be less objectionable on religious grounds. But even if top officers in the Russian military were still atheists, al-Qaeda would still accept their help, on the basis that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". Of course, al-Qaeda doesn't really have friends, because to have friends you must be a friend, and al-Qaeda is no one's friend. But "Politics makes strange bedfellows", and "War is a continuation of policy by other means", so al-Qaeda, as a matter of policy, would accept any assistance Russia might offer, openly or covertly, be it to act in Afghanistan or Iraq. The Russian military, and a goodly portion of the Russian populace, would love to see the U.S. humiliated in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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When I visited Russia I realized that there is nothing "Eastern" about it except the name of the communion to which the Russian Orthodox Church belongs, the Eastern Orthodox Church . But the "East" in "Eastern Orthodox" is the Eastern Roman Empire, not the Orient. Some Russians do bear some Oriental/Mongoloid genes due to the presence for hundreds of years of the Golden Horde, a division of Jenghis Khan's Mongol army, and the presence in Siberia of nomadic Mongoloid peoples. But Mongoloid people are not numerous in today's Russia, and the Golden Horde's contributions to Russian culture were trivial.
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Russian is written in an alphabet derived from Greek, the language of Constantinople. Russians have historically seen Moscow (or Russia as a whole) as "the Third Rome" (or, in the case of the whole nation, the third Roman Empire) after the fall of the Second, the Byzantine Empire, to the Turks in 1453. The name of the Russian emperor, tsar or czar, means "Caesar". That would be Julius Caesar, the man who ended the Roman Republic and gave his name to the first Roman Emperors.
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Bizarrely, then, the division in Western civilization that Roman Emperor Diocletian made, in 292 A.D., when he divided the Roman Empire into two sub-empires, East and West, remains to this day. The United States is the heir to the Western Empire; Russia, to the Eastern. The two parts are unequal and barely speak to each other. We even use two different alphabets, ours the Roman, theirs the Greek.
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History means much more to Europeans than to Americans, so whereas Americans might think this all just idle play with the past, a meaningless, romantic nostalgia for 'the good old days', it means much more to Russians, and much more to a few Russians. We can't know how many people in positions of power see Russia as the True Rome, keeper of the True Religion, and us in the West as pretenders and heretics. Our Capitol is plainly a Roman building, and the Church of Rome is the communion for all Western churches, which either continue the Apostolic Succession as it is seen from the City of Rome or rebelled against the Catholic Church in some particulars while continuing to cleave to its core tenets. Protestants did not return to the first principles as held out by Eastern Orthodoxy.
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Serbians too once regarded themselves as the New Rome, and Serbian attacks upon Bosnian Moslems and then Moslem Kosovars were an attempt to avenge the humiliation of Christian Europe at the hands of the Turks. Ever in mind, if unspoken, in Serbia's attacks was the hope of retaking Constantinople from the Turks.
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Altho "realists" in the West may dismiss such a hope as preposterous, stranger things have happened. The Jewish reconquest of Palestine springs to mind.
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Is it really preposterous to think that the concept of "Christendom" could rebound and latter-day Crusaders retake Constantinople just as the Jews retook Jerusalem? Plainly not. Usama bin Laden and other spokesmen for al-Qaeda call us "Crusaders". They fear such a resurgence.
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The Jewish conquest of Jerusalem, which has been a catastrophe for world peace, need be no more permanent than the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. And plainly the powers of the West are more than capable of ripping the Christian "Holy Land" from the Jews and Constantinople from the Turks anytime they might choose.
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Would a Christian reconquest of Constantinople and Jerusalem spur world religious war, or end it, by imposing modern, multiethnic and multireligious tolerance upon that fractious region?
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Indeed, aren't we already in a world religious war, in which Islamists are on the offensive and face nothing more than limitations on their aggressions? What if we raised the stakes? "You attack us, we retake Constantinople and Jerusalem and both allow and encourage Moslems to convert to Christianity. Hell, we can nuke Mecca if we want." Might such a threat cause Islamists to scale back their aspirations for fear of catastrophic destruction of all Islam?
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Instead of aspiring to unity with the West and assistance in its struggles against Islamic terrorism, Russia has been tempted in the opposite direction: away from its Western roots into a closer relationship with China, Central and South Asia, and Iran. And the U.S. is to blame.
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Past cruelty and present ignorement and condescension by American policymakers have pushed Moscow into relationships with genuine Oriental societies that could be very dangerous to U.S. interests and, indeed, to world peace.

Though the declaration on the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation contained a statement that it "is not an alliance directed against other states and regions and it adheres to the principle of openness", many observers believe that one of the original purposes of the SCO was to serve as a counterbalance to NATO and the United States and in particular to avoid conflicts that would allow the United States to intervene in areas near both Russia and China. Some observers also believe that the organization was formed as a direct response to the threat of missile defense systems by the United States, after the United States reversed course in its nuclear policy and began promoting National Missile Defense.

The United States has applied for observer status to SCO and was rejected.

Russian behavior may embolden Iran to step up its cooperation with the Taliban in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq. Russian arms and disinclination to interfere may embolden Communist China to attempt to conquer Taiwan.
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The Putin government again this very day openly warned the U.S. that creating a missile defense shield for European members of NATO, even if intended as defense against Iranian missiles, could spark a new arms race with Russia.
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That's not the new relationship with Russia we should have forged after Uncle Boris destroyed the Soviet Union. There's still time to bring Russia back into the Western family. World peace may well require that reunion.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,324 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:17 PM

 
Billionaire Thief. Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, wants to charge motorists $8 to enter the most congested parts of Manhattan. That is, he wants to steal public property from the public and hand it over to the rich alone. He should be stopped by whatever means necessary, up to and including impeachment, recall, or vigilantism. A bullet thru the head would stop that attempted mass theft handily.
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Bloomberg has a personal fortune of $5.5 billion. He can easily afford to spend $8 for each trip into Midtown or Downtown (as tho he'd be required to while Mayor). How many others can? There are already tolls on several routes in, $6 during peak hours at the Hudson River crossings from New Jersey, $4.50 at two East River tunnels from other parts of New York City. Parking costs a fortune. $40 a day, or more, is not at all unusual, and even parking at the relatively inexpensive Port Authority Bus Terminal costs $22 for 12 hours. Thus, there is already a very hefty price restraint on people's bringing a private vehicle into Manhattan. Still, for some people, there is little choice. A family of 4 children and 2 adults will pay a fortune on public transportation, and having to haul children around on crowded buses and on subways whose doors may close and separate child from parent is very risky. Rich families can of course afford $8 more. But less affluent families will be victimized by yet another cost to go to anything in Manhattan.
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If a congestion fee can be imposed on vehicles, why not on pedestrians? Make people pay for the right to walk on public streets.
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Bloomberg is trying to justify his proposed theft on the basis of reducing greenhouse gases. Oh? Cars may emit greenhouse gases, but so do pedestrians. People breathe out carbon dioxide, right? Why shouldn't they have to pay for the right to breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide?
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Where does it stop?
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The streets of Manhattan were built and are maintained by taxes taken from everyone. They are public property. They must not be stolen by the rich. What else can be taken from the people? Public parks? Streetliting? Everyone who walks down a street at nite has to pay a fee to have a streetlite shine? How about traffic lites? Pedestrians who want to cross the street have to pay for a "Walk" signal in their direction. And why is the Staten Island Ferry now free? Charge $4.50 a person for that! Put tolls on the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges. I'm sure Bloomie can come up with all sorts of inventive measures to penalize the poor and make life more comfortable for the rich. Clear the streets of the riffraff so that the rich can enjoy the good life without having to share public space with their 'inferiors'.
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Michael Bloomberg should be beaten down in this outrageous attempt to steal invaluable public property from the public. What is the proper penalty for stealing from millions? Well, let's figure it out. If each person robbed by this plan were given one punch to Bloomberg's gut, what would happen to Bloomberg? He would die. That seems right. Let's kill him and everyone else who steals from millions.
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Public streets belong to the public. You don't pay for the privilege of using your own property.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,323 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:29 PM

 
Land of the Free, and Home of the Dead. The solution to gun violence is more guns. That is the lesson of the "Virginia Tech massacre", as it is now referred to, according to the Radical Right. Or is it the Always Wrong?
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Had bunches of Virginia Tech students been packing heat, say the pundits of the Lunatic Right, they could have stopped the "shooter" before he had killed so many. Sure they could, unless of course he saw them reach for their gun and shot them dead first, then taken their gun, with its ammo, to add to his firepower.
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I chanced to see the mayor of my city, Newark, NJ (the only Newark that counts) on MSNBC, speaking about illegal guns. But the problem is more than just illegally purchased guns. My older sister had a legally purchased gun that she learned to use well. She was a single woman living in a marginal area of Los Angeles, and felt the need for personal protection. But she kept her gun at home. One nite, when she was at work, someone broke into her house and stole, among other things, her gun. So a legal gun became an illegal gun. And if it were used in a crime, the name that would have attached to that gun's purchase would have been my sister's. The advocates of liberal gun laws forget, or trivialize, the fact that legal guns can turn into illegal guns in a matter of seconds. So why do so many Radical Rightists advocate absolutely unfettered access to firearms?
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Guns give stupid people a feeling of invulnerability. "Nothing can hurt me! I've got a gun!" Oh? That's what the other guy with a gun thinks too. You can't both be right, tho you can both be "Right".
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Media coverage of the VT tragedy has been at once too much and too little. Too much emphasis upon the human tragedy; too little emphasis on the public-policy aspects, tho such considerations are now, fortunately, asserting themselves. We have decried for decades the emotional toll caused by bullying in schoolyards and such, but done almost nothing about it. We rationalize away our inaction by assuring ourselves that dealing with bullies toughens our kids to "the real world", and teaches them to defend themselves, to fite back. Sure it does.
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In fact, most of us do stand up for ourselves, either by fiting back ourselves or appealing for protection from people who owe children a duty of defense against dangers of all kinds. But machismo and an insane social stigma against "snitching" have caused extreme distress to victims of bullying. Very few will buy a Glock and blow their enemies away. But many will suffer psychological damage that can impair their functioning in all aspects of life, for life.
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Indignation against giving the VT mass-murderer the media coverage his videos and pictures have recently received are stupid. Why mince words? We NEED as a society to understand why some people go nuts and kill people. We NEED to examine cases like Cho Seung-Hui's to see if there are signs we can detect in other people to keep them from doing the same. You don't want to listen? Turn to something else.
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Only the insane laws of the United States regarding firearms empowered that madman to kill so many people. Had he been unable to get guns, his rampage could not have been so deadly. A knife-wielding lunatic could be run from or fought. A chair thrown at him by one person trying to evade death could disable him at least momentarily. A dozen chairs, two dozen chairs thrown at him from every direction would have ended his rampage and permitted his capture before he had killed anyone, even himself. But no, we must have guns. This is Amurrika, and we love guns. The Founding Fathers intended us to be up to our eyeballs in guns. Why else would they have written the Second Amendment to the Bill of RIGHTS?
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Well, the Founding Fathers of this Republic were only human. They made mistakes. Three were doozies. One was corrected. The other two are causing us extreme damage even to this day, over 220 years later.
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The group known as the Framers of the Constitution included a substantial number of brilliant men (yes, that was "men", not today's obligatory "men and women" or, worse, "women and men"). But they made some terrible mistakes. One was corrected. The original Constitution, before amendments, provided that the person who receives the highest number of votes cast for President becomes President, and the person who receives the second-highest number becomes Vice President. Astounding in its stupidity, no?
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Had we kept that provision, George Bush would be President and John Kerry, Vice President, "a heartbeat away" from the Presidency. How many assassinations would we have had if that provision had remained in the Constitution? Fortunately, that error was realized pretty quickly, and amended away in 1804. The other two horrendous errors have remained with us for centuries.
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The Second Amendment is tied for first among the most horrendous and enduring of the Framers' mistakes. The other is their not having made plain the role of the courts in merely applying the generalities of the law to the specifics of a case. Since the Framers of the Constitution did not forbid the courts to void laws duly passed according to the procedure set out in the Constitution, the courts simply grabbed the power to say what the Constitution does and does not mean. Nowhere is that power granted to them by the Constitution itself. And the way the Constitution works is that any power not expressly granted is expressly denied — forbidden.
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Alas, neither the Congress nor the President has had the guts to say, "No way in the world do you have the right to void a law that Congress and the President have passed in full accord with the Constitution! Unhand that power. It was not granted to you by the Constitution, so you do not have it. And if you so much as attempt to void a law properly passed, you are in insurrection against the duly constituted legal authority of the United States and thus guilty of treason. The penalty for such insurrectionary treason is death." And then hang the bastards.
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The Supreme Court has done this country horrendous harm, even greater than the harm done by the lunatics who think that owning and using guns is a constitutionally protected right. Gun owners, after all, kill only some 30,000 people a year in this country. Abortionists unleashed by the Supreme Court kill well over a million each and every year.

[Despite a downturn in recent years] Using AGI [Planned Parenthood] figures through 2003, estimating 1,287,000 abortions for [each year] 2004-06, and factoring in the possible 3% undercount AGI estimates for its own figures, the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. since 1973 equals 48,589,993.

Horrendous but true. The enormity of that moral catastrophe is concealed by the fact that these deaths are invisible. Unborn children are pureed into shapeless slurpies flushed down sewage lines, or discarded in trash cans labeled "medical waste". Given the invisibility of our society's institutionalized mass murder, we can pretend to be decent people even as we make Hitler look like an amateurish incompetent when it comes to industrial murder.
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I don't think we even have a term for murder on the scale of abortion today. Hitler managed to kill 6 million Jews and a total of perhaps 11 or 13 million enemies of the New Order — Communists, gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Russians, democrats, mental defectives, cripples, etc., etc. But Hitler didn't kill healthy German babies. No, Hitler targeted enemies of his perfect Aryan state. We kill our own. Hitler's mass murder was targeted; ours, blind. We kill the brilliant and fit as readily as the retarded and physically defective, without distinction. We are equal-opportunity killers. That, of course, makes us much better than Hitler. And much more efficient. Hitler was an inefficient piker compared to us. We could teach him a thing or three about genocide. We're experts. And we wear clean white lab coats when slaughtering the defenseless.
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The Supreme Court relented this week in its campaign of mass slaughter of innocents. It found that Congress does have the right to outlaw "partial birth abortion". Of course, it had no right even to rule on the issue, because the courts do NOT have the right to void laws. Read the Constitution. You will find no such power.
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Congress can, in fact, pass laws that say, expressly, "No court may review this law as to rule on its constitutionality", and the courts have to back off. That provision should be made a pro-forma part of every act of legislation Congress enacts. In actuality, it is an extremely unusual feature of legislation, reserved to only the tiniest number of bills, including, however, gay marriage (or some gay issue; I forget exactly which).
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Some way must be found to rein in the courts. We can as a society decide to permit the courts a say on the constitutionality of a given piece of legislation but also provide that Congress and/or the President can override any such decision, just as Congress can override a Presential veto. Such a measure, written into the Constitution, would complete the system of "checks and balances" that keeps one branch's aspirations to dictatorship under control. Today, we have no restraint upon judicial dictatorship, and suffer grievously for that.
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Such a change would not, however, address the other supremely stupid mistake of the Framers of the Constitution — well, of the amendments to the Constitution collectively known as the Bill of Rights: the infamous Second Amendment. As the Harvard University Gazette reports:

Every year, more than 30,000 people are shot to death in murders, suicides, and accidents. Another 65,000 suffer from gun injuries.

That appears to be a price we are willing to pay, because we allow the National Rifle Association (which is of course also the 'Unregulated Handgun Association') to buy the allegiance of gutless members of Congress and turn a blind eye to mass death from guns all across this country. They will pretend that the part of the Second Amendment that matters is this:

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Never mind that something appears before those words, namely,

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

That's just filler, excess verbiage of no meaning and no conceivable importance. It shouldn't even be there. The Framers were just whiling away the time by inserting meaningless phrases into the Bill of Rights.
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No sirree bob, the passage is not meaningless. It means something extremely important: members of a "well-regulated militia" have the right to keep and bear arms in the service of "the security of a free State". Not in the service of personal interests, nor settling a score, nor even defending their personal property against a thief, but in serving "the security of a free State".
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Every honest American knows that the introductory language at the beginning of the Second Amendment limits the right set out at the end. But gun nuts are not honest, and not American. They are not members of a well-regulated militia nor of a well-ordered society, but laws unto themselves who do not acknowledge that society has the right to limit their rights in any regard. They are antisocial, indeed, sociopathic. They are enemies of society and should be treated as such. They are Cho Seung-Hui writ large.
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When I first came up with the title for today's entry, I checked the Internet to see if it was already an established phrase, and found but a single reference, to a singer/group called "Carentin", whom I had never heard of and about whom I find no information but lyrics. Consider these lines from a song called "Character Charisma". Oddly, two entirely different sets of lyrics come up. The phrase "home of the dead", however, appears only in this one (typos corrected).

* * * Shall we try to search for an answer to the bounding questions
of our age
If only the Government expelled some more funds,
We could stop this rage
Instead they give to other countries
Just to impress
And use blatant cutbacks for the Homeward catastrophes
They should address
The Military Spawns on a foreign lawn
While people in the city, sleep on the corner
Or drink down their liquor, while unzipping their fly
So another baby can be born, and will be destined to die
Dying of starvation, or a drop on the head
In the Land of the free, and the home of the dead

Another raining Friday night
Little Wesley waits at home for his dad
Who is late because he lost another job
Michael greets his son at the broken door
gives his son a belt across the face....
Simply, because he's too damn drunk to love the boy
goes in, and rapes his wife
three bullets in the chamber
takes all their lives
In the richest of lands
Crime and Chaos trickle down from the melting pot
Politicians couldn't care until their terms are almost up
Then with a wink and a false smile
You're special and important, with all the meaningful words you
said
In the land of the free, and the home of the dead.

Hm.
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In my last post, I mentioned how my state seemed central or just off the center of many news stories of late. The tale continues. Of the 32 murdered students at Virginia Tech, two were from New Jersey, one from my hometown, Middletown. She attended Middletown North High School, which is the newer name for what was only Middletown Township High School when I attended. (We are due to have our 45th anniversary this year. I don't know about any reunion, however.)
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The gunman sent materials of explanation and rage to NBC News, which aired them on the Nightly News. NBC Nightly News is hosted by Brian Williams, from Middletown, New Jersey.
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Water Over the Bridge. The coverage of the VT massacre was over-the-top. The major broadcast networks expanded their evening news shows to an hour for the event. Shouldn't national news be devoted to things we can DO something about? not things we can do NOTHING about?
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Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show (who is from Lawrenceville, New Jersey; and a "Giant Head of Brian Williams" (from Middletown) is sometimes seen over Stewart's left shoulder in the show's new set) interviewed Ali Allawi soon after the VT tragedy, on a day when nearly 200 Iraqis were killed in multiple bombings. Stewart said that we as a Nation (of 300 million) were devastated emotionally, and were in mourning over (a scant) 33 deaths. He then asked, how can Iraqis deal with the endless tragedy and mass death they suffer every day? Remember, folks, that Iraq is 1/12th our population. 198 Iraqis dead in a single day is equivalent to 2,376 Americans dead in a single day. 2,376, not 33.
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We had a nor'easter several days ago, in which over 7 inches of rain fell. I had rivulets running thru my basement to the drain in the corner. News footage of swollen local rivers showed water pouring over bridges. When I was a child, I conflated two expressions, "Water over the dam" and "Water under the bridge" into "Water over the bridge". Well, we had that this past week.
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We also had roaring white water pouring over the Great Falls of the Passaic in Paterson, where the Industrial Revolution in the United States began, powered by the Passaic. I have seen the Falls, 70 feet high, albeit at a lower water level. I should try to get there before the high water has subsided. If I do, I may post a foto or two here.
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But I have other things to do first. Today, 42,000 schoolchildren in my city are being let out of school early to clean up and beautify the city for the day. They aspire to plant a MILLION flowers, in one day. They also want to pick up litter all over the city, and create a new mindset of a clean Newark, and engage adults as well as children in making and keeping Newark clean. The name of the project is "Beautiful Newark". Outsiders will be surprised to learn that much of Newark is already beautiful, so the project speaks of making this an "even more Beautiful Newark". The media kickoff is in Branch Brook Park, which is the site of our Cherry Blossom Festival, now in full swing. It was delayed by unusually cold weather, but today is expected to be in the upper 60s, so blossoms heretofore delayed should pop today. I have a Newark fotoblog for which I want to take pix of this event, so must get to sleep now to be up on time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,315 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:53 AM

 
Death and Taxes, as Seen from the Center of the World. I've been too busy and depressed to write for this blog in the past few days. There is some kind of horrendous illness in my house that kills kittens, and I have been trying to save them, with very limited success. The news outside my house has been little better.
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The enemies of free speech have triumphed in the Imus case. That is deplorable and in itself depressing. I was going to write a brief comment, titled, "Fired but Forgiven", about how "our girls", the Rutgers women's basketball team, have decided to accept Don Imus's apology — a day late and hundreds of thousands of dollars short. You see, I live in New Jersey, which of late has become central to a number of stories in the national news. Rutgers is the State University of New Jersey, and it is a comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team by Imus out of a New York City studio that cost him his job. Our Governor, Jon Corzine, was then almost killed in an accident on the Garden State Parkway, on his way to the meeting between Imus and the Rutgers women in the Governor's Mansion in Princeton. Some hotdog aggressive driver, a young male, apparently pulled in too close in front of someone, who then swerved into the Governor's SUV, causing it to go off the highway at high speed. As The New York Times reported today,

Mr. Corzine, 60, has been in critical condition and on heavy doses of pain medication since Thursday evening, when he broke his left femur, 12 ribs, a lower vertebra and his breastbone and collarbone in a crash on [the] Garden State Parkway.

(Oddly, Corzine is the third New Jersey governor in a row to break a leg!)
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New Jersey doesn't have a Lieutenant Governor (an oddity that may be addressed by a state constitutional amendment), but we did have uninterrupted executive authority, because the President of the State Senate, Richard Codey (from West Orange, six miles from my house, in my county, Essex) instantly resumed the post of Acting Governor that he occupied when Governor McGreevey resigned after announcing that he is a "Gay American". Codey's wife Mary Jo is spokeswoman for at least two excellent commercials showing on TV here, about postpartum depression. I saw her at the opening of an exhibition at the Newark Public Library a few weeks ago, tho I didn't get a chance to thank her for those public-service announcements. I don't know if these are seen anywhere but New Jersey, but they should be.
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I sort of met Corzine once, when the law firm I was working for at the time opened expansion space on the same floor of the building as Corzine, then a U.S. Senator, had his office on, and he participated in a meet-and-greet in our conference room. It was 2004, and Corzine was head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I asked him what Democrats were doing to head off Republican efforts to implement "bankruptcy reform" that would make it very difficult for the little guy to declare bankruptcy. He jokingly admired my bald head and full beard (like his), then went on to say he was very hopeful the Democrats would win enuf seats in the Senate to prevent that "reform". As it turned out, he was wrong. The Democrats refused to raise the issues of bankruptcy or debt or usury, and went down in flames, both Presidentially and Congressionally. I tried to warn them, but they didn't want to hear it. They knew better. So now we have effectively abolished bankruptcy for everyone but corporations, which can not only still declare bankruptcy but also use the bankruptcy laws to void labor contracts and escape pension obligations!
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Then Corzine, a mega-millionaire, ran for Governor; Codey (who had been a brilliant Acting Governor) dropped out of the race because he couldn't match Corzine's resources; and Corzine bought his way into the Governor's Mansion. He proceeded to do a number of bad things, such as promote the slaughter of babies in order to chop them up for parts (embryonic stem-cell research). My city, Newark, won grants for ADULT stem-cell research, I'm pleased to say.
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So, as you might now appreciate, I have mixed feelings about Corzine's present difficulties. As the Times article says, "He’s not out of the woods yet," but "remains at risk of developing life-threatening complications like pneumonia or infection". We may yet get to chop HIM up for parts — assuming that such a public-spirited citizen dedicated to medical progress has signed the back of his driver's license to authorize donation of his organs if he should die.
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As the Imus controversy wound down, the Duke lacrosse players' case popped up. Not only did the State of North Carolina dismiss all charges, but the state's Attorney General also, most unusually, declared the accused innocent. Thus New Jersey, and more particularly Essex County, was in the news again, because Reade Seligmann, one of the innocent accused, is from Essex Fells, 10 miles from me. A webpage I found that was put up at the time of the initial accusation lists the entire roster of the Duke lacrosse team, then second in the Nation. Seven players were from New Jersey, including one of the three indicted defendants. That page (I won't dignify it by a hyperlink) pretty much prejudged and convicted them. Something like 70 members of Duke's own faculty did the same. I wondered. The case sounded so wrong, and so familiar — Tawana Brawley all over again. And so it was.
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The white man Don Imus was fired from an extremely lucrative job for a single indiscreet utterance of 12 words. (Would you believe there is now (or was, briefly) an "I love nappy-headed hos" teeshirt!? (That is to say there was a few hours ago, but the same site now does not show it but a somewhat different teeshirt about "Silken Haired Damsels".) I found that site when checking for the exact number of words in Imus's remark. Is this an amazing country, or what?) The black woman who filed false charges against three young white men (more like boys, really) faced no penalty, and thus lost nothing, whatsoever. The state prosecutor who relieved the Durham County prosecutor of his duties in regard to the Duke lacrosse case decided that altho the stripper had made damning accusations without any justification whatsoever, he would not prosecute her for filing a false police report because her mental state was so confused that she might actually have believed what she charged. Never mind that she was not a nun or schoolmarm but a stripper and that semen from several men — none of them on the Duke lacrosse team — was found inside her. She was still to be presumed an innocent taken advantage of by white kids of privilege.
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So white kids were persecuted for nothing, a white man was fired for trivia, and blacks got to pose as victims while actually being persecutors, victimizers. And white people won't fite back!
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Major media said of the truly innocent white boys accused of rape that this ordeal not only oppressed them for a year and drove some of them out of Duke, perhaps even out of college altogether, but might remain with them for the rest of their lives. Considering that they were just college kids, that meant that this scurrilous accusation could oppress them for 70 years! But the bitch — yes, you heard that right: bitch — who 'laid' those charges is not to be punished. The worst the media could think to do is to name her, repeatedly: Crystal Gail Mangum. Wikipedia put up a page about her, complete with foto. Will that suffice?
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Some media have compared the situation of the Durham three with that of Ray Donovan, U.S. Secretary of Labor under Ronald Reagan, who was acquitted of wrongdoing in a criminal prosecution over corruption. Immediately after the trial, in the courthouse, he famously asked (approximate quote, because I have seen different versions of his exact words but this one more closely accords with my recollection of news footage): "Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Ray Donovan was also from New Jersey (Bayonne, about 11 miles from me).
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Then, this past weekend, we had a nor'easter. Torrential downpours dropped over 7 inches of rain in parts of the region, and New Jersey was again in the heart of the story.
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Tonite, Jay Leno said in his monolog that it has happened again: a 31-year-old Newark schoolteacher has been accused of having sex with a 13-year-old male student. My city, but I hadn't heard that before he mentioned it.
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Thus might you see why some of us do see New Jersey as the center of the universe. Actually, of course, anywhere I am is, as far as I can see, the center of the universe. New Jersey is the English version of "Nova Caesarea", the "New Land of Caesar". Or is it the "Land of the New Caesar"? In either case, New Jersey — don't you dare call it "Jersey", which is properly used only in a few combined forms, like "North Jersey" and "Jersey Shore", in both of which I have lived — is far more central to the United States than most people appreciate. For one thing, the speech of educated New Jerseyans (NOT "New Jerseyites", a term that exists only in dictionaries, not in New Jersey) is the best English in the world. We use all 42 phonemes of American English (lacking only the peculiar half-AU-sound of British English found in the London pronunciation of "not" or "dissolve"), without pretentious clipping of diphthongs.
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The image outsiders have of New Jersey bears very little relation to the reality, be it of my own, grossly misunderstood city, Newark, or of places like Princeton, Mount Laurel, Cape May, or the undisturbed forests of the northwestern Highlands region.
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During the rainfall that kept most New Jerseyans indoors the past couple of days, I was channel-surfing and came across an episode of the black sitcom Girlfriends, which is in general a really good show, despite having originated on "the WB" network, now "the CW" (for CBS and Time Warner, the joint owners). In that episode, one of the main characters, speaking to another, refers to a woman of their mutual acquaintance as, and I do indeed quote, a "nappy-headed heifer". Not "ho", but "nappy-headed". As it happens, the bulk of the Rutgers women's basketball team — all black except for one white player who stands out like a neon sign in the group picture — have processed (straightened) hair, not nappy, that is, kinky (in the nonsexual sense). Would it be nappy if it weren't processed? Probably. But in point of fact, it was not nappy during the Tennessee-Rutgers NCAA final. So Imus was factually wrong, as tho that matters.
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In any case, the Rutgers women had the terrible catastrophe of having a bit of the sheen from their moment of glory as the Nation's No. 2 women's basketball team taken away by Imus's comment. Big, friggin' deal. The real catastrophe was that the Rutgers women got to the finals but lost. The whole state felt that loss, but we didn't feel the need to blame someone. (We're from New Jersey. We've got New York City, the greatest city of the Western world, on our northeast, and Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, on our southwest. We are used to being second-best.) Imus had nothing to do with that, but some Rutgers women — the coach? — felt the need to displace onto someone else the tumultuous feelings of disappointment and anger she/they had from having gotten so close to a national title but then lost.
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Imus apologized. The Rutgers team, like the good girls they are (we grow 'em nice in New Jersey, a state filled with well-mannered boys and girls of all races), forgave. That should have been the end of it. But Imus had already been fired. So much for freedom of speech in the New America.
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I prefer the Old America. To quote from Stewart H., a Jewish supervisor on the evening shift of a word-processing center I used to work at in Downtown Manhattan,

"The great thing about this country is that everybody has something bad to say about everybody else."

Not any longer. Now everybody has to hold in the things they want to say. So instead of being the most frequently uttered epithet in the United States, "nigger" is the most frequently THOUGHT epithet. And its utterances-in-silence are growing by leaps and bounds the more that white people feel that their rights are being taken away by blacks.
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How long can this go on before things explode? We have seen in Lebanon not so long ago, in Rwanda after that, in Yugoslavia after that, in Kosovo after that, in Iraq and Darfur now, what can happen when intergroup resentment builds up. Is it really impossible that things like that could happen here?
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And what do we do about the censors who would gag us, and the bigots and reverse-bigots who would convict people upon the mere utterance of an accusation? Comedy Central's Daily Show regaled us with clips from CNN's odious Nancy Grace, in which, time after time, no matter how many weaknesses in the case against the Duke lacrosse players asserted themselves, that dirty damned bitch insisted that the players were guilty anyway. Will Nancy Grace, that vile piece of sh*t, lose her job? Don't count on it. She's a woman, you see, another protected class entitled, like blacks, to attack others without fear of consequences.
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That is the New America. I look forward to a Post-New America, like Post-Modern Architecture, in which we rise above the trendy groupthink of the present to return to a more measured and balanced approach to the world, in which we value honesty and openness, and condemn both censorship and prejudice in its strictest sense: pre-judging without trial or even evidence.
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Barack Obama, that evil, hypocritical piece of sh*t, chose to side with the censors who think that no one should have the right to say things they disapprove of — even tho Obama himself appeared on the Imus in the Morning Show! It's now official: I HATE Barack Obama and would gladly deport him to his father's homeland, Kenya. He does not belong here, if he does not hold the essence of the First Amendment dear.
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Imus was, to borrow from Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings, victim of "a high-tech lynching" in which the rope was the nonstop repetition of his 12 silly words by 24-hour news media and worthless nobodies like Al Sharpton who somehow achieved media clout despite having been disgraced in, for instance, the Tawana Brawley affair. So perhaps the kids from Duke, including one from my county, will emerge from this momentary taint to become powerhouses in media and society.
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Meanwhile, as someone (Jay Leno, I think) observed after I had come to the same conclusion, the Republicans in Washington were delited to have someone take the heat off them, even if for only a few days. They could continue to dodge hard issues like the horror they unleashed in Iraq and the ruination of scores of millions of Americans by debt made worse by usury and "bankruptcy reform" that trap them in debt for life. Democrats too are spared the glare of public focus on why they won't undo the Republican tax cuts for the rich that have produced a massive redistribution of wealth from poor and middle class to rich, nor undo the plutocrats' bankruptcy "reform", nor pass a national usury law, nor provide any form of debt relief for people now losing their homes in record numbers of foreclosures.
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I and 250 million-plus other Americans of modest means will pay higher taxes than we should because the major parties are controlled by rich people who haven't a clue about how the rest of us live. And do not for an instant care.
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On Comedy Central's Daily Show tonite, Andy Card, former White House chief of staff for Dumbya, conceded that everyone in the White House is cut off from the reality of the Nation by virtue of working so very long and very hard within the White House environment, which is sealed off from distractions. They work from very early in the morning to very late at nite, and have no time to kick back and sit in front of the television set or talk to their neighbors, so haven't a clue as to how the rest of the world lives, nor what really concerns ordinary Americans. He said that even White House staffers don't have automatic access to the President, because the Chief of Staff has to protect the President from excessive interruption by dissonant voices (he didn't put it quite that way, but that was the sense). The Chief of Staff is the gatekeeper who determines what the President does and does not hear directly from people, by controlling which people get to talk to him. And everyone in the highest levels of the Administration is so busy working within their own area that they haven't any time, nor inclination, to check their perceptions against the reality outside the office.
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I have a suggestion. Hire more staff! Instead of 300 people working 16-hour days, have 600 people work 8-hour days, so they can spend 8 hours outside the office, watching TV, listening to radio, talking to their neighbors, walking the sidewalks and beaches, and absorbing thru personal interactions what it is that life in this country is all about.
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I have, of course — as regular readers know full well — much more to say about these and other issues, but I have taxes to file, and a beautiful blond kitten to bury.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,308 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Comparability. My colleague in Northern England raised some interesting questions for which I don't have really good answers. If you have, let me know (XPUS@aol.com) and I'll share them with other readers. This is the email I got today, titled "Looking at globalization from another angle - disparity in the cost of living".

Isn't the uncompetitiveness of manufacturing industry in the developed world essentially an exchange rate problem?

The reason why the likes of China and India can afford to pay such low money wages is in part because workers there have a lower quality of life, but mainly because the cost of essential goods (food, housing etc) is so much cheaper in those countries. Can the West do anything to equalize the cost of living with the Third World, so that money wages only differ to the extent that they reflect actual differences in the standard of living?

Have Western countries brought this on themselves by allowing inflation to get out of control? Cheap imported consumer goods may have made the problem worse by disguising the true extent of inflation as it really matters (ie increases in the prices of the bare necessities)?

And here's my reply.

Valid points, but I can't see anyone in the world financial order demanding that currencies reflect the realities within societies rather than perceived inequalities between societies. That is, if it takes 25,000 currency units to live an ordinary life in a First World country but only 2,000 of the same unit to live a comparable life in China or India, I do not think the powers that be are going to require equalization, multiplying the exchange rate of China/India by 12.5 so workers there get the same relative amount of pay as a worker doing comparable labor in a First World country. That would indeed eliminate the cost advantage of offshoring production, but nobody in international finance is going to go for it, least of all China/India.
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But raising wages and standard of living is indeed a goal of, for instance, U.S. labor unions active abroad, not just for the benefit to foreign workers but precisely to cut the arbitrary exchange-rate-based disparity in wages that is destroying jobs for people in the First World who work with their hands. I think, by the way, that "work with their hands" is a good way to think of most of the jobs that are most affected by offshore competition. That includes some types of back-office operations such as data entry done (with their hands) by keyboard operators who don't have to think much about what they do, but just type.
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Equalizing wage rates would also give people the chance to work in their own culture without having to either emigrate or 'internally emigrate', as to work in, for instance, a call center or software-development office that works in a different language on things largely alien to one's own culture.
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In Expansionism, there would be a total elimination of artificial exchange rate differences, because all parts of the Union would use the U.S. dollar. But the local currency would have to be traded in at an initial exchange/trade-in rate that would almost never be 1:1, except for, say, Canada (whose dollar is now worth $0.88). We would presumably convert currencies in bank accounts and swap coins and bills at something like the existing international exchange rate on the date of accession to the Union, with perhaps some modest bonus in consideration of people's trading in their separate sovereignty for joint sovereignty. In the case of Britain, for instance, if the exchange rate is $1.9749 per pound, we could round up to $2 per pound or even $2.25, or some mutually agreed point. But what do you do about a currency like the Chinese yuan, now exchanging at 7.7310 / $? How do you even calculate what it "should" be? The CIA World Factbook has a feature called "purchasing power parity" or PPP. For China, it shows a per capita income, PPP, of $7,600. I have no idea how that is computed. On a PPP basis, China's economy is shown at $10T; the U.S., at $12.98T. Chinese labor force, 798M; U.S., 151M. For India, the figures are economy, $4T; per cap, $3,700; labor force, 509M.
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How do we compute comparability of living standards? Do we count washing machines? How about dryers? Do Indians in the deserts of Rajasthan need clothes dryers if all they have to do is put the clothes out on a line or toss them over a bush or wicker chair and they're dry in 16 minutes? -- indeed, some litewate fabrics might be dry almost before being put up with clothespins! (Are these still called "pegs" in Britain?)
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Do people need TV if there's nothing they want to watch? Or do they have to have access to foreign programs and thus either satellite dishes or cable to be regarded as living equally well as Westerners? We in the U.S. don't watch much foreign TV, just a Britcom now and again or a wildlife documentary from here or there. What if life doesn't revolve around TV, (cell)phone or home computer in another culture? Does the absence of a TV in every common room or a computer in every house get counted as a mark of poverty or a difference in culture? Who needs a car if you live in a village, walk to the fields and back home, and pick up everything you need from a local market each day, as you need it? Who needs a big, multistory house if you don't entertain at home but most entertainments take place on the porch or in public facilities or on benches round the village square? Who needs a well-insulated house, furnace, and oil heat in the tropics? Speaking of walking to and from work, that was also the pattern in much of the First World for a very long time, especially for factory workers in company towns. When people lived and worked in the same town, walking or taking a short hop on a local bus sufficed. Now we face commutes hours in duration round-trip, and inadequate public transportation may force people to own a car, with all its attendant expenses. That need, however, is an artifact of a cultural shift in living/working patterns. Having a car we have to have is not a luxury or, necessarily, an improvement in standard of living. You see the problem. Do you have solutions?
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I don't understand inflation. Why should something that cost $1 in 1950 cost $7 now? And why do some things cost wildly more (healthcare, college education) while others increase in price at only modest rates or actually drop in cost in constant dollars? Makes no sense to me. But even less sensible is the distortion in costs. A family of four could live reasonably comfortably on the income of one wage-earner in 1950. Not today. Were we fooling ourselves in 1950, and people really had to scrimp to get by on one income? Were our needs simpler, such that we did not feel we "needed" so many consumer goods to live well? Many people, even in the lower middle class, could afford, indeed, to have a cleaning woman in once or twice a week to help with the housework. Now, even with two incomes, families feel they can't afford 'help', so have to do everything themselves. How did this happen? Where did all the money go? Did wages drop as more women entered the workforce, increasing labor supply more than demand?
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Some things, like long-distance telephone calls and, some say, gasoline, got cheaper in real dollars.
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But there seem so many more demands on our finances nowadays that most people feel hard-pressed. Why is that? And, more importantly, what can we do about it? Usurious interest rates plainly play a role. I'm pretty sure we pay much higher rates now than in the Fifties, perhaps by a multiple, not an increment.
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Some people call for reining in the commuting culture to relocalize life, and not just as a fuel-saving measure, tho that matters. Most people in 'advanced' countries -- in colder climates, at least -- are isolated within their household rather than fully involved in "the community". Most of us don't know more than a tiny proportion of our neighbors, even on sight, much less by first name, even less by full name. New communities that require all houses to have a front porch and separate pedestrian traffic from vehicular traffic are being built in some places.
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Which costs more? Each member of a family/household sitting in a room to oneself, watching TV, listening to music, or chatting/working at the computer -- all of which require lites and their own electric power -- or living a more communal life in one room or out on the porch chatting, singing, dancing, telling jokes and sharing stories, or just watching the world go by, whittling, carving, or knitting while it does? In economic terms, the 'family' scattered across most of the rooms of the house, lites ablaze and electronic devices in use, is 'enjoying' a higher standard of living, and paying for it. That does not equate, however, with a better quality of life. So what exactly does "standard of living" mean?
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Between 'worlds' (First and Third), is going by oxcart or horsedrawn wagon from point A to point B worse than using a car? Might people feel more connection to their ox or horse than to a hulking piece of metal? Imagine the outcry, however, if you were to suggest that an oxcart is the economic equivalent of an SUV, and valued them at par!

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,294 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:12 PM

 
Killing Women and Children.
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What Awaits Female Suicide Bombers in Paradise? CNN Headline News today reports that a female suicide bomber detonated a bomb that killed her and 16 other people in Iraq. What do extremists use to lure young women to kill themselves? 72 (female) virgins in Paradise wouldn't seem very appealing to any woman, not even a 'lesbian', and I rather doubt militant Islam is encouraging lesbianism, unless of course it wants lesbians to kill themselves. 72 male virgins would hold no appeal for the bulk of women either, especially religiously devout women, since no major religion encourages nymphomania. So how do the loons of Islamism lure stupid young women into committing mass murder and suicide? Darned if I know.
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One of the stated goals of some Islamists, recreating the Caliphate, might actually be a good thing, if the Caliphate were a spiritual rather than temporal domain, and IF the Caliph, as supreme head of the faith, were to denounce suicide and murder as utterly inconsistent with the religious precepts of Islam, and thus steer Islam away from the current madness of some splinter groups back to the advanced, civilizing mission of its origins. Islam, in short, needs a Pope, who, like Benedict XVI in his Easter message two days ago, denounced the war in Iraq. Catholicism has the Pope; Anglicanism, the Archbishop of Canterbury; Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama;* Protestantism, the World Council of Churches. All those voices tend to align on the most generous and humane principles. Who speaks for Islam?
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Would a religious but not temporal Caliph align with those other voices of moderation and grace, who see the mission of religion as being to provide moral guidance and the reinforcement in each person of our best impulses, by ascribing noble impulses to the divine spirit, breathing goodness into us and animating our lives to do God's will? It is very hard for me to conceive of a Caliph seized with the madness of an Usama bin Laden. Besides, Islam has a long history of killing Caliphs, so deposing a Caliph gone bad wouldn't be too hard. (The question then is how a spiritual but nongovernmental Caliph would be selected. Would it be akin to an Islamic College of Cardinals electing a new Caliph in private conclave?)
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While a given Caliph lives, the rest of the world can know with certitude what Islam really does stand for, as to know whether there can be peace between the rest of the world and Islam or if there really does have to be total war to eradicate Islam from human history. I suspect the wisest of Moslems can count people and nukes, so will not embark on jihad against the entire planet, but will measure their words and adjust their theology to planetary realities. After all, why do you think other religions preach tolerance and peace? Because they know the "human" capacity for violence and aggression, and understand that inciting violence causes violence to echo back from the walls that surround us and keep us confined to this one big ball of dirt. We can fite to the death in an unending cage match or help each other, mutually and generously, to live well on this finite planet. The wise, of all faiths and secular moralities, have made a conscious and rational decision that peace is the better way.
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European High Murder. I was appalled to read today of a court decision that shows the utter lack of morality in Europe:

A British woman left infertile after being treated for ovarian cancer has no right to frozen embryos against the wishes of her former fiance, who provided the sperm, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday.

The court's Grand Chamber, a panel of 17 European judges, confirmed a lower court ruling upholding a British law that stipulates consent from both parents is needed at every stage of the in vitro fertilization process.

Tuesday's verdict cannot be appealed, and the frozen embryos will be destroyed.

I have a better idea: let's destroy the judges, every last one. Chop up those who can be used for spare parts; burn the rest. While alive. Oh, and kill the father too, for good measure. Chop him up for parts for decent people.
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The idea that a would-be father has the right to order the death of his children is straight out of the middle ages. Europeans have never known right from wrong, have they? The history of Europe is a history of fratricidal violence and mass death, from the earliest annals we have to the carnage in the Balkans in the last decade and on into today's decision to kill babies according to the law!
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The obvious moral solution to the issue posed would have been to give the woman who wants these children the right to them, in order to save their lives, or at least such of them that survive to term, and forbid legal claims of any kind against the father, ever. Instead, Europeans chose to kill babies. Maybe it's a good thing after all that Europe is being invaded by millions of Moslems. Maybe we should look forward to vast civil war and carnage in Europe to kill off a European "civilization" that has strayed so very, very far from the first principles of Western civilization.
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This is not a new moral quandary, just a very old one with a new, technological twist. Remember the Old Testament story of King Solomon (fl. c. 950 B.C.) and the baby claimed by two women? (1 Kings 3) He offered to cut the child in half and give one (dead) half to each, whereupon one woman said no, he must not kill the child! Give the boy to the other woman if he must, but don't kill him. The other woman was perfectly content to have the child chopped in half rather than see the baby live with another woman. Solomon decided that the child truly belonged to (or at least with) the woman who wanted its life spared. The European Court of Human Rights has instead sided with the woman who wants the child dead. Have we learned nothing in 3,000 years?
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All the world should prevent incidents like this from recurring, by forbidding all in vitro creation of embryos that are not ALL immediately placed into a willing recipient's uterus. Indeed, given the grotesque overcrowding on this planet, no fertility treatments of any kind should be given to anyone but geniuses, superlative athletes or performers, or other people of extraordinary genetic gifts that should be preserved. We should regard sterility as a blessing upon the planet, to be valued, not voided.
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But murder should always be punished, and I don't care how many people co-conspire in murder. They all deserve to die. Every single one of those 17 judges should be killed, by the most painful method of execution known to man. Slaughtering babies is inexcusable barbarism, and deserves barbarous retaliation. If judges don't know right from wrong, we need new judges.
____________________

* The Caliphate and then the Ottoman Sultanate united 'church' and state, but we need to remember that the Pope was head of both church and state in the Papal States, the King of England was the Head of the Church of England (and "Defender of the Faith", then Catholicism) for many years, and the Dalai Lama was the head of the Tibetan state for centuries. All of these joint religious and temporal leaders' positions were subdivided over time. Secular leaders took over governments, leaving the Pope and Dalai Lama only religious leaders; and the King of England was supplanted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the religious area, altho two Kings (Henry II and Henry VIII) had one Archbishop (St. Thomas à Becket) and one Lord Chancellor (Thomas More) killed for refusing the King's authority over the church). We must ever be mindful that for long periods, religious and governmental powers have been united in a single office in cultures all over the world, not just the Caliphate. But we evolved to separate offices for religious and government heads, even in the Moslem world. Reuniting spiritual Islam does not require reuniting 'church' and state in one supreme leader.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,292 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM