born live love die

Sunday School that day was consolidated and we had a guest speaker.  He talked about evolution and how it was that it was impossible for evolution to have happened.  God created everything and he had a compelling story to tell.  As he talked, my mind wandered a bit.  I have always had a wandering mind.  While sitting in the main auditorium there at Immanuel Church in Holland, Michigan, I would sometimes count the tiles in the ceiling, or count the squares in the wooden lattice that covered the loudspeaker ports.  The loudspeakers were in small rooms flanking the choir loft, just under the eaves in this auditorium.  The grills were about four feet by eight feet and the lattice covering was squares within squares.  It was a challenge to count them all and get it right.  These mind exercises often happened when the sermon got boring. (more…)

Paul Krugman calls like he sees it.  And like Jeremiah in the Old Testament, he catalogs the ills of letting this economic malaise fester.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.  First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.  Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained.

Krugman goes on in depth about Hungary, and you should read it.

Read it here.

I was reading this list of remembrances in the NY Times and I was reminded of the goodness of the American spirit.

I was an Army combat correspondent with the First Air Cavalry Division in 1965-66.  One day in December 1966 I accompanied a group of Army doctors and dentists to a remote hamlet in Binh Dinh Province. As we approached the village we took sniper fire, but nobody was hit. In this hamlet we held a sick call, passed out soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, Band-Aids and antibiotic gel. We treated minor cuts, scrapes and infections and filled or pulled several teeth. In the process we found about 30y boys and men with cleft palates. These individuals were all related to each other; one doctor thought the condition might be genetic. A few weeks later we returned, set up a large tent and turned it into a sterile operating theater. I scrubbed in and used a waterproof camera that I immersed in an antibacterial solution. The doctors repaired every cleft palate, and returned twice for followups. They took sniper fire every time. The patient in this photo was the village headman.

America isn’t a perfect place, and we aren’t perfect.  But we should remember the legacy we bear.

If you ever wondered why it was that France sent a Statue of Liberty to America, read this column in the New York Times.  It is part of Disunion, a live blogging of the Civil War, live + 150 years.  This article describes how the US Civil War was interpreted in France.  Here is the wrap up:

In this quiet academic, John Bigelow found a resonating French voice for the American cause of Union and liberty. And in “la question amércaine,” Laboulaye and French liberals found a way of reawakening the debate over the future of democracy in France, America and the rest of the world.

Read it.

I read this story and I am even more opposed to the death penalty than I was before.

It’s 1944, and police escort a 14-year-old boy into the death chamber. He stands just 5’1 and weighs a mere 95 pounds. He is so small in stature that dictionaries need to be stacked on the seat of the electric chair so that when he sits in it his head reaches the height of the electrodes. His chains are loose around his narrow ankles.

This young boy is about to be the youngest person ever to be executed in the history of the United States. Before there was a Troy Davis there was George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the state of South Carolina electrocuted him.

Stinney was accused of murdering two young white girls. They were eleven year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. The two girls went missing one day after they were riding their bikes while looking for flowers on the wrong side of the tracks in a small working class town of Alcolu, South Carolina where whites and blacks were separated by railroad tracks. The girls went missing and were later found dead in a ditch, murdered with a railroad spike.

If a state wants to have a death penalty, let them pass a law such that the executioner is drawn, by lot, from the lists used to make jury pools.  Make it a citizenship duty.  Put that on the ballot and if that is what the People want, I will go along with it.

In the past, my position has always been that societies have always had a threshold for crimes, that some crimes so grievously violate the norms of society that the perpetrators deserve to be permanently removed from the society and earth.  In debates about the death penalty, I would always point out that the Bible’s “eye for and eye” clause was a restriction of capital punishment to those crimes where a life was lost, not a license to exact revenge.

It was fairly easy to find the circular logic in claims of capital punishment being immoral, because they too often consisted of “Capital punishment is immoral!  So there!” kinds of arguments.  Not that it is easy to find an argument to state that capital punishment is moral, it is just easy to obviate the reverse.

Until now.

It is immoral to execute people for crimes when the criminal justice system rests on a failed system of equivalent advocacy.  The criminal justice system as it is currently composed does not exist to find the truth.  The premise is that the two parties are equal before the bar, that the rights of the accused are protected and that the prosecution works in the best interest of the People to redress wrongs.  And this is not true.

Aeschylus wrote in the Oresteia that the move from a system of clan based vengeance to a system of laws is one of the things that marked societal advancement.  But we have not given up capital punishment, this vestige of tribal revenge based justice.  Furthermore, it is clear that we seem incapable of administering it without mistake.

It has been clear for a long time that the criminal justice system tilts against the poor.  Perhaps the poor commit more crimes, I don’t know.  But it is clear that once a poor man has an encounter with the criminal justice system, the outcome is usually more convictions and stiffer sentences.  There are those that say that the criminal justice system is biased against people of color.  It is not clear that the data supports that position.  But it is a national tragedy that such a large percentage of certain ethnic groups has a much higher felony conviction rate than others and that should be addressed.

In discussing capital punishment, I would point out serious problems with the system as it currently exists.

• The criminal justice system doesn’t have a national standard for evidence.
• Capital cases before the bar are many times driven by the political aspirations of the prosecutor.
• Capital punishment is not pursued evenly.

The standard for evidence is scattered through case law, code law and textbooks.  Investigating officers sometimes take notes, sometimes video tape, sometimes reconstruct conversations.  Witnesses can be coerced and it never enters the body of evidence.  ”Tough on crime”.  There is a sitting congressman who claims to have been the man who brought the Green River Killer to justice.  This is not true, but he got a lot of media attention and used it as a springboard for his political aspirations.  The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, preyed on prostitues.  He is believed to have killed 71 women.  He may have killed more.  But he is still alive, having bartered knowledge of his crimes in exchange for a release from the death penalty.

It is patently clear that Texas executed an innocent man in Cameron Todd Willingham.  The  legal system did not protect the accused in this case, but bent the system to seek a conviction and execution.  The governor impeded the investigation into the case and his handling of it, and there were no repercussions.  In fact, in a focus group, one of his political supporters said, “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

In the past, I have not associated myself with capital punishment opponents in part because there were a lot of people in that camp who were against anything that the government did that was not in their particular world view.  They were vocal, impractical, too willing to try to win arguments by volume and repetition, not rational thought.  I try to keep distance between myself and people of that ilk.

Troy Davis was executed last night and he should not have been.

Enough.  I have had enough.  I am now firmly in the anti-capital punishment camp along with all the unlearned vituperative types who also rant against a broad spectrum of wrongs, as they imagine them.

Capital punishment is wrong, it is immoral as it is currently practiced.

We should stop it and try to recover the moral position that we imagine ourselves to hold.

I have been seeing bumper stickers saying “Jesus is___________” with a web address in small print.  I was puzzled because the viewer can fill in the blank in ways unintended by the author of this public relations campaign.

And this is a public relations campaign.  But I don’t know what the goals are.  Remind people of religion?  Win new converts?  I don’t know.  Do you remember “WWJD”?  What would Jesus do?  That was a public relations campaign intended to establish the belief in Jesus as an aid to a moral life.  It gave wearers a touchstone facsimile for making moral decisions.  It identified wearers to each other as if they were part of a club.

There are those who say that organized religion is an unregulated tax-exempt business providing counseling and advice to an insular group.  I am not among them.  Most of those words could be easily defended, but I have known people for whom religion was the only thing that kept them from sliding into a life of bad choices, principally substance abuse.  I won’t disparage religion because if it helps one person stay on a good path and helps them be a responsible parent to their children, I’m okay with it.

But public relations campaigns by churches tend to get my attention.  A couple of years ago, it was the Catholics with “Catholics Come Home“.  Most people could see the Catholic Church as a welcoming place, it was just that uncle with the wandering hands who was a problem.  The Catholic Church did not do enough to dispel the spectre of centuries of sexual and other abuse at the hands of church officials.  Quite frankly, how could they?  They had painted themselves into a corner with the doctrine of church infallibility.  Since that campaign rolled out, there have been more reports of historical abuse in Ireland, which is practically a theocracy.  But I digress.

Jesus is what?  Fill in the blank.  I was riding with Bookzilla and pointed out the bumper sticker.  I told her that I wished I had a silver sharpie so I could write in “smokin’ hot”.  She cracked up, and laughed about as hard as I have ever seen her laugh.  A couple of days later, we were in back of a car bearing a “Jesus is” bumper sticker and the driver couldn’t seem to decide which direction to go.  After dodging right and left a few times, the driver pulled off the street.  ”Jesus is a bad driver” got a laugh from Bookzilla.

If Christians want to communicate something about Jesus, let it be by example, not by public relations.

I wrote a post on 9/11 being fetishized and checked to see if it was cross posted to Facebook.  It was.  The next thing in my stream was this

9/11 Memorial app for iPad and iPhone is a free download today

Oh, stop already.  This digusts me.

In the ten  years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the event has been fetishized.  It was right to mourn the victims, but the event is treated as more than it was: the act of a few individuals committed to an irrational agenda.

The attacks could have been prevented if the Bush Administration had been focused on information readily available to them, rather than committed to a broad goal of revisiting the Cold War.  They never took responsibility for their actions and deployed the addage of “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter accusations”.  If the attacks of 9/11 were such a seminal event, the victims deserved better than that.  If the attacks were not a seminal event, then why the big fuss about them?

Fetishizing the attacks of 9/11 make them into more than they were and elevates the people who attacked us.  We should treat the attackers for what they were: little narcissistic people bent on hurting people they don’t know or understand.  The correct response to the attacks of 9/11 was, “You call that an attack?  Never touched me.”  It was not a deep and grievous wound.  It did not harm us that much.  We are still here.  That should have been the message: You can’t hurt us because you don’t understand us and the principles we represent.

Ah, yes, principles.  Those were too easily discarded by Cheney et Co.  Torture became a modus operandi of first resort.  We should focus on the divisions in our society uncovered by these attacks.  It is troubling that a sizable portion of the society thinks that torture is acceptable.  It is despicable that some of them already hold high office and think they are suited for the highest office in the land.

We should also focus on the way that elections no longer work in their current formulation.  The central axiom of a representative democracy such as ours is that elected officials face an accounting on their actions via the ballot box.  In truth, Congressional districts are massaged to better ensure incumbents are re-elected, voter suppression is a primary electoral strategy by one party, and public relations wars are waged to keep people in office.  The central axiom is false, and should be addressed.

The attacks of 9/11 have significance, we are just not noticing it.

I like John Amato.  His site, Crooks and Liars, has a lot of good stuff.  But I think he gets this one wrong.  It seems that he is attempting to tar Tim Pawlenty with the company that Pawlenty keeps.  His brush?  A guy named Ray Shakir.  There is video at that link and a list of the things that Shakir has said that mark him as a person who seems to have a tenuous grasp on reality.  But the thing that Amato focuses on misses.

In response to a special education official who said there was “no such thing as an uneducatable person,” Shakir told a gym full of citizens: “I would dispute that fact. There are certainly individuals that are uneducateable. I am simply suggesting to you and everybody else that there should be a line drawn where the taxpayer is responsible to educate certain people.”

I watched the video and I think Shakir has a point.  We should be having a discussion about this.

1. Is the school system the place and method for dealing with those people who are so learning disabled that they may need care for the rest of their lives?
2. Who should pay for it?
3. What is the responsibility of society in this case?

I don’t know the answers for these questions, but we should be asking them and trying to answer them.  Shakir’s interlocutor/interrogator says the following in response.

You are physically making me sick. What you are saying, Mr. Shakir, is immoral, unethical, and illegal.

The guy was telling Shakir how he felt.  Why?  Why was that important.  You are sick?  Then puke.  Oh, you aren’t puking?  You are exaggerating?  Why?  Why exaggerate?  The guy then goes into statements that can not be true.  Immoral?  Why was it immoral?  Shakir was talking about public policy and it is a matter of discussion.  Unethical?  There was no talk of rights and responsibilities.  Only the statements meant to shame Shakir.  I don’t thing the guy in the vest really know anything about ethics.  I think he thinks he knows, but that does not convey knowledge.  Illegal?  I doubt it.

To be clear, Shakir has some weird ideas, but this clip is not the damning evidence that Amato thinks it is.