So what happens to the extra money if you make more than $100 million?  You donate it or it is forfeited to the US government.  You get to look like a mensch even if you aren’t one.

My reasoning for this is that pooling resources doesn’t do society any good.  You can’t take it with you when you die, so it should go back into society.  Also, there are ancillary costs to society caused by people in pursuit of lucre.  For example, there are many environmental messes that have been caused by people and corporations, and the mess exists long after the money is gone.

There should also be a cap on net worth of around 10 times the annual cap.  Accumulating wealth that is equivalent to 20,000 times the salary of an average person seems like enough for one life.

Please pardon my delay in responding to you.  I have been busy, and I suppose you have been also.  I hope this finds you in good health.

One of the acknowledged problems with twitter is the 140 character limit, which makes meaningful communication difficult.  I will use this as a way to better answer your questions and respond to your tweets.

We arrived here by my comments with regard to the use of the word ‘sexist’.  I wrote a longer piece about it and sent you a link and you responded with the tweets below.  I didn’t respond to your tweets as they happened, so allow me now.

With regard to your assertion that ‘as a man, you don’t get to be the final arbiter on what is sexist or not”.  My initial reaction to this was going to be, “What are you, a chick?”, but I didn’t post that.  But seriously, you should go down to the store and buy some balls, because someone has ripped yours off.  There is no way that I will agree to your axiomatic statement that being of the male gender abrogates my use of the word.  It is my right to use whatever word I want in my search for communication.  It is my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my ability, that the signifiers I use approximate the signified of the recipient.  (I don’t know if you have read anything in the area of semiotics or ethics, but there are some code words there that you would recognize if you had.)

Somehow, the point was lost that the word being used as a cudgel was ‘sexist’, not ‘lady’.  This persisted after you read my explanation of it in a post titled “On using the word ‘sexist’”.

Your point about humor is well taken.  Context is everything.  Many is the comedian who has made a bad joke soon after some event and had to follow it up with “Oh, too soon?”

Which brings us to your comments with regard to your religion.  You seem to have conflated my responsibility to respect your rights with regard to religious preference with a respect for the religion itself.  Respect for your rights to practice a religion does not equate to respect for the religion you happen to practice.  Lest you think that I am in the habit of mocking religion, let me reassure you that I am not.  Unlike belief or faith in other things not seen or testable, I have seen religion help people live better lives.  Some of these people credit a religion for allowing them to break the hold of addiction, so to me it doesn’t matter if there are thousands of self-righteous hypocrites who are deserving of whatever scorn is heaped on them.  That one who needs religion to not slide into a hell of addiction is reason enough to put down the shovel and walk away from the scorn pile.

But if you want to talk about your religion, I am happy to oblige.  You gave up a Protestant religion to adopt the religion that conforms to a desert patriarchy?  This doesn’t seem to square with your observed tendency  (if I am not mistaken) to support women.  You gave up the New Testament to adopt Old Testamentish doctrine?  There is too much to the New Testament that I can not give up.  Just this week, I encountered a situation that tried me in ways that I did not anticipate.  The words from John 8 comforted me.  ”For he that is among you that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”  I haven’t read extensively in your holy books, but from what I have seen by those who try to be strict adherents of those texts, stoning is the first option.

Perhaps, like comedy, religion is context oriented.  I note from your brief biography that you live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City.  I have never visited there.  I have been to the city on business, but have not had to opportunity to explore.  I subscribe to the New York Times and it affords me a window into the region.  I did read “The Color of Water” and I have wondered why it has not been made into a major motion picture.  I picked it up in the airport at Las Vegas on a business trip.  It kind of stood out among the literary detritus and soft porn in the book store.

From what I understand, the Red Hook neighborhood is not part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and my reference to that very good book is not an example of “they all look alike”.  Since I don’t live in your city, my understanding of it is discrete, not continuous. (yeah, that’s an engineering reference).   But it is also a point in the continuum of trying to understand religion.  I don’t know if you have read the book, but the title is part of an answer to a question by the author.  He had asked his mother, “What color is God?” and she responded, “God is the color of water.”  The story of this woman’s search for love and meaning in life touched me, as did the story of the author who also tried to find that love and meaning in life.

The reference I made earlier, to ethics, was to my use of the words, “rights” and “responsibility”.  Those are the two sides of the ethics balance and we need to evaluate them as we make our way in life.  There are those who seem to think that by merely examining rights can situations be resolved.  Politicians are at the forefront of this method.  They find an appeal to rights wins more attention than an appeal to responsibilities.  One of the weaknesses of our Constitution is that it has a Bill of Rights, but not a countervailing Bill of Responsibilities.  It should be noted that there is one class of citizens that seems to think that things can be settled by examination of rights only.  Toddlers.  Anyone who has parented a toddler is well acquainted with the Toddler Rules of Ownership.  This is one version.

1. If I like it, it’s mine.
2. If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
5. If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
8. If I saw it first, it’s mine.
9. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If it’s broken, it’s yours.
11. If it’s broken, but you are having fun playing with the pieces, it’s mine again.
12. If there is ANY doubt, it’s mine.

I bring this up, because our concept of human rights, in the Western world, does not spring directly from any religion.  To the best of my knowledge, the concept of human rights is not addressed in the Bible.  Being a Muslim, you can answer better for your religion.  It is my position that our concept of human rights derives from the idea of property rights.  In the Western tradition, that is anchored by the Magna Carta which secured property rights and limited the rights of the king.  The line of derivation continues through the Reformation, which broke the power of the Catholic theocracy and led to Locke and “consent of the governed”.  In my readings of commentary on Islam, I don’t see any such parallel.  From my perspective, Islam offers no path to any continuation of our moral betterment.

I do see we pitiful humans as being on a path of moral betterment.  In the world of things that can be measured, that should be our goal.  I have used the word “measure” several times, and I am using in the context of my epistemological journey.  I have started a taxonomy of truth and have identified the two major types of truth: things that are defined to be true and things that are determined to be true.  In the latter, there are things that are determined to be true by measurement.  Religion lives within the realm of things defined to be true.  But in the world of things that are true by measurement, religion can help us toward a goal of moral betterment.

Moral betterment is only possible through a belief in free will.  Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler write in this paper(PDF) that encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.  I have never been comfortable with the expression, “everything happens for a reason”.  That belief precludes random events in the universe and I will not accept that axiomatically.  Accepting that assertion precludes reason.

And that is where I part with religion.  If you rejected being a Baptist as being part of a White culture, I can understand that.  If you note that John Newton was converted and still served on slaving ships, yeah, there seems to be some hypocrisy there.  For my part, if I were to ever return to Christianity, it would be as a Mennonite, if only because of their pacifism.  Baptists gave up pacifism and sided with Oliver Cromwell, but you probably knew that.

I have written before about religion and ethnic divide.  In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, there were extended families in Reformed and Christian Reformed churches.  For those families without two Dutch parents, there were other churches.  The point is this: in a town that was homogeneously white, there were still divisions along clan and family lines.  A cursory look at Islam shows that much of Islam is divided on ethnic lines.  The major division between Sunni and Shia was along ethnic lines.

The story of America is the story of its underclasses.  America has had rich and powerful men, but the dream of America is the dream of betterment, and that dream is most alive in its underclasses.  And the biggest underclass in America are those people of African heritage who have been brought to our shores.   The language that we have adopted accepts this as a characteristic.  The norm is to use the expression, “light skinned Black”, for someone who is nearly as white as the side of my house yet bearing however noticeable Negroid features.  We should weep with joy that there are people of African heritage who would say “I am American” because it is the triumph of an idea over all too observable circumstance.

I was thinking of two guys I knew in the Army in 1973.  Sp4 (later Sgt.) Terry and Sgt. Willie Broadnax.  Sgt. Terry was drafted, served in Vietnam, got out, and came back in.  Sgt. Terry talked about hating the Army and various things that had gone on in Vietnam.  He left he Army and travelled to Africa.  He said that people there told him he smelled funny.  And to my nose, the Black soldiers I knew in the Army did smell different.  I have no doubt that pheromone production, along with appearance, is a matter of genetic expression.  Sgt. Terry went to Africa because he wanted to be African.  But he came back and was wont to say, “Fuck that shit.  I’m an American.”  Sgt. Broadnax liked to say that “Uncle Sam tried to kill my Black ass.  He sent me to Vietnam to get killed, but I fooled him.  He couldn’t kill me, can’t kill me.”  I think Sgt. Broadnax had a lot of issues, probably well founded issues, to work through.  His wife seemed like a gracious woman and his kids seemed well balanced.

And the kids are what it is about.  I was raised to see color of skin.  I have tried to not raise my kids that way.  I remember being in the video store one time in Seattle  and another guy was with his kid.  Bookzilla noted how he and I were a lot alike, not how we were different.  I hope our kids can continue to strive toward that goal of moral betterment.

I remember being on Rainer Avenue, near MLK Way some years ago.  I lived about a mile from there and went down to get gas.  As I was fueling, a guy rode up on his motorcycle.  It was an impressive machine.  It was a Harley, white and turquoise with chrome and gold accents.  I have never been a Harley person, but that was a nice looking bike.  The rider was a Black guy, about my size, 6’4″, 230.  The way he rode up was like out of a movie and he could have been out of Central Casting.  Jeans, boots, vest, beanie helmet; he looked like he was ready for a print advert shoot.  He put his bike on the side stand, got off  and turned around in time to see the Chinese guy following him pop the clutch on his sedan, lurch forward and bump into the prized motorcycle.  And it dumped.  Bang.  The Chinese guy was about 5’4″, 120 lbs.  The rider was pissed.  He could have snapped the Chinese guy in half.  After a bit, the Chinese guy got out to help the owner pick the bike up  by lifting on the rear wheel.  But all he managed to do is unleverage the pivot point and slide the motorcycle along the ground.  The rider motioned for the driver (who didn’t seem to speak much English) to back off and he got the bike up and onto its side stand, and started collecting insurance information.

I tell this story because at no point did the bike rider go ethnic on the car driver.  I drove away thinking that the bike rider was a better man than me.  I would have at least made some comments about the driver’s poor driving skills, probably while staring him down.  I also thought that maybe we were becoming better, bit by bit.

I close with an apology for making a reference to your testicles and going shopping.  That was out of line.  If you have read this far, really, I’m sorry.  But I won’t apologize for looking at two things in your bio: “Astrologer. Thinker.” and saying “Really?  Doesn’t one preclude the other?”  Rationality should preclude belief in things like astrology.  Or vice versa.  You should read the paper I linked to above with regard to believing in Fate.

With warmest regards,

Dan

Many liberals and progressives (overlapping sets, just trying to be inclusive in my labels) derided the speech and asked the rhetorical question about targeted killing of American citizens on American soil, whether it was also justified.  One person on twitter said Holder’s position “wasn’t democracy”.

My response is that it depends on your definition of the word “democracy”.  If you mean “government of the people”, such that it is a government that expresses and puts into action the will of the demos, the people, then yes, I’m pretty sure the Holder position is democracy.  I think that using a drone to strike a person hiding beyond the reach of American courts while planning to cause great mayhem and destruction is pretty much exactly what the American people want the government to do.

If you mean “a system of impartial laws, such that social justice is maintained”,  the answer is a little more problematic.  Detractors of Holder asked rhetorically about targeted killings on American soil because they assume the two are equivalent and asking the question invalidates Holder’s position.  This is an example of trying to win an argument by axiom, in this case, indirect axiom.

Most arguments are won or lost in the axioms agreed to by each side.  By choosing the axioms carefully, you can give strength to your position and weaken the opponents.  Overloading definitions is an easy way to do this.  Another is to stage a false equivalence or linkage.

This is what is being done by Holder’s detractors.  The axiom being asserted and linked is that American citizenship bequeaths a set of rights and that those are inviolable.  And that is true.  The fifth amendment to the Constitution says that “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.  The false linkage comes about in the preceding clause, “when in actual service in time of War or public danger”.  Holder says that these people have given up certain rights by engaging in terrorist activity, while his detractors do not.

I’m with Holder on this one.  American citizens who go abroad and take on the role of state-players, where they actively plan to attack America and Americans, not as ordinary criminals to gain property or wealth, but as a statement of political purpose, these people are liable for what ever measures the American government takes against them.  If the American government can take them into custody such that their actions can be examined in a court of law, so be it.  But if they are beyond the reach of American custody, then America has a right to take such actions as are necessary to protect its citizens.

Democracy requires more than axioms to work.  It also requires reasoning.

I don’t like it.  When I encounter people using it or any other cudgel word, my reaction is often to poke fun of them, a little or a lot, depending on how much I like them.

In the last week, I got into a couple of twitter spats with people using the word ‘sexist’.  The first was a young woman who is in law school, I think.  She said that the word ‘lady’ was sexist.  I don’t use that word a lot.  “Ladies” was a word used by the printed nylon shirt crowd when I was in my 20’s.  (I am not a fan of printed nylon or synthetic shirts.  Woven patterns are okay, but printed shirts seem rather unimaginative.)  I will confess to using “lady” as an epithet for a dithering female driver, and “chowder-head” for a dithering driver of the male gender.  But I digress.

I responded by saying

I was riffing the cluelessness of “Spinal Tap” where David St. Hubbins or Nigel Tufnel confuses sexy with sexist with regard to the album cover of “Smell The Glove”.  The humor was lost as a guy from New York City leapt to her defense.  His bio lists him as a former Baptist minister turned Muslim.  ”Out of the frying pan and into the fire”, as my mother would have said, but that is a whole other issue.  I was roundly denounced by others who asked if I would say that to my mother or daughter.  One woman got so huffy that she blocked me.  Oh well…  In my exchange with the man from NYC, I yanked his chain a little

He said something about it being a different demographic than he was accustomed to.

Later in the week, a woman said that the International Women’s Day was sexist because there was not corresponding International Men’s Day.  My response was “Self loathe much?” and generated a furious back and forth where I questioned her ability to think logically and she defended her academic credentials (which I had derided).  My agita was fueled by her bio which listed her as an “investigative journalist” for the “Big” media combine of the late Andrew Breitbart.  She let slip that she was a stay at home mother.  Just how much “investigative journalism” do you do while caring for your children and staying at home?

We were past the point where I could point out that there was an IWD because women are discriminated against in many parts of the world and it was an attempt to shine a light on that discrimination.  Hell, in some parts of the world, women are treated as little more than possessions.  That pisses me off and it should raise the ire of any thinking person.

Yeah, I’m a prick sometimes.  But don’t call me that, because it is sexist.

I broke the carafe twice.  The first time was when I moved into this house.  A previous owner had installed tile on the kitchen floor, which means that anything glass turns to shards when it touches the floor.  I lost my first carafe just after moving into this house, ten years ago.  I lost the second carafe about six months ago.  I was washing it and bumped the pouring lip into the faucet in the sink.  The lip snapped off and I couldn’t pour from it without spilling.

I purchase the first replacement at a local drug store.  I was surprised to find a replacement there.  When I went back the second time, they no longer carried replacement carafes.  I visited several stores and looked around on line.  I couldn’t find the right carafe.

I used this large Pyrex measuring cup for a while, but there was a problem.  The Braun Aromat has a valve at the bottom of the coffee filter basket.  If the valve isn’t open, it makes a rather unholy mess.  The original carafe was engineered to open the valve was inserted, and close it when the carafe was removed.  This allowed the user to get a cup of coffee before the entire brewing process was complete.  With the large Pyrex cup, I need to carefully place something, I often used a knife underneath the filter basket to prop the valve open.

This was fraught with error.  On more then one occasion, I would come back to the kitchen to find a puddle of coffee on the countertop and floor because the knife had slipped.  I decided to get a new coffeemaker.

I shopped around before Christmas and settled on a sleek beast of a machine.  Caphalon brand, it was.  Brushed stainless steel everywhere.  It had an alarm function, so I could set the machine up to make coffee at 5 am, and the coffe would be waiting for me when I got up.  It had some glitches, but I was mostly okay with the coffee it made.  It wasn’t hot enough, but I could settle.

I almost took the Braun apart to see how it was made.  I had been impressed with the engineering that went into it.  Still functioning properly after 25 years, it was a masterpiece of engineering.  But I didn’t.  Which was a good tin.

I had been thinking about how we put microprocessors in everything because they give us cheap and  rich feature sets.  For $1.5o in chips, you can implement a truck load of features.

And then the new machine stopped working.  I smelled something that was close to burned plastic, so I guess something happened to let the smoke out of one of the capacitors or perhaps a resistor was overloaded.  I don’t know.

I took that machine back, gor a refund, came home and removed the valve from the bottom of the coffee filter basket.

And the Pyrex cup works just fine as a carafe.

We were in the church basement and the soundproofing curtains had been pulled to the sides so that it was one large room.  The guest speaker talked and started to list numbers: stars in the galaxy, galaxies in the universe, etc.  This was 1971, and the Big Bang theory was not well known, at least not in Holland.  The numbers he threw out were supposed to dazzle the audience, numb them with a graphic depiction of the smallness of human existence, and attach that smallness to any ideas Man might have.  But it had the opposite effect on me.

I started to do math with the numbers.  I have always been a person to do math in my head, particularly when I am bored.  I used to do geometry proofs in my head when the sermons got boring.  I was studying probability in class, and I started to work out scale of the numbers he was talking about.  It was such that for life to have spontaneously happened here on Earth, it would be a single event lost in many orders of magnitude.  I started comparing that to the size of the universe, and suddenly it didn’t seem so improbable.  The numbers were not of the same scale, but they were not unreasonable.  Suddenly, his conjecture, that it was not reasonable to conclude that random events could have produced mankind, seemed itself to be unreasonable.

I was scared.  The frame of reference for my existence was in question, and I had nothing to say to refute it.  Over the next couple of weeks, this was not far from my consciousness.  I tried to apply the arguments in which I had been trained, but they didn’t work.  I began to see my religious beliefs as an overlapping set of ideas, where they supported each other but for which there was not an independent basis.  There was a lot of circular logic going on and it was untethered.  I decided to resolve it in a rational fashion.

It seemed clear to me that the proposition that there was a God and its antithesis, that there wasn’t a God were mutually exclusive.  If I assumed the antithesis to be true, and followed it to its logical conclusion, and it proved itself to be false, I would have proved the initial proposition to be true by exclusion.

And it didn’t happen.  One by one, the precepts that I had previously held became undone and I found myself adrift in a new ocean of ideas, all of which needed to be tested.  The milieu for this investigation was my home, my school and my church.  My parents were born again believers.  My father was a man saved by grace.  I think that when he looked at his birth family, he credited being a Christian with changing his life.  I think my mother also saw being a born again Christian with giving her a life different from her family.  I think she probably got satisfaction from the fact that some of my father’s siblings and other relations turned to Christianity to help change their lives.

But an overly religious household is a hard place to hide one’s questioning of everything holy.  Church was not a place to question things either.  Holland, Michigan, is the birthplace of the Christian Reformed denomination.  There is a large enclave of Dutch people in Western Michigan.  But there were towns settled by other ethnic groups.  Reflecting on my time in Holland, I came to the conclusion that religion is a reflection of ethnic and racial underpinnings.  My grand thesis is that people adopt religion as an ethnic identifier, and that racism is extension of instinctive clan based associativity.  In my Sunday School class, the family names were Lorence, Barber, Pittman, Endean, Robinson and Dunlap.  Each of these boys had one Dutch parent and one non-Dutch parent.  When I try to remember the families in that church, I don’t remember many families where both parents were Dutch.  Immanuel Church, despite its liturgical doctrine, was a refuge for families that were ethnically separate from the community.  Most of the churches in town were Reformed or Christian Reformed.  There were a few Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopalian. I have yet to test my thesis with regard to those populations.

School at Hamilton High was steeped in religion.  Most kids went to church and teachers were overtly religious.  I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was thinking there.  And so I kept it to myself.  I told a few friends, but the result was that they wanted to convert me back.  That was unpleasant.  At some point, I decided not to try to convert other people to my way of thinking.  I had been active in church, proselytizing for fundamental Christianity.  My new way of thinking was so individual, so wrenching, that I could not induce other people to follow my path.  It was up to them to find it for themselves.  I have not tried to get other people to believe as I do.

When I could leave, I joined the Army, so I wouldn’t keep taking from my parents while being opposed to just about everything they believed.  I was alone, on my own, and it was hard to take.  Being alone in the world, cut off from family and friends is not anything I would suggest for anyone.  But that is the way I felt.

Over the years, I continued to read, consider and modify my ideas.  I discovered the field of Bible authenticity study and it resonates with me.  Reading Genesis with this in mind is such a clarifying activity.  I evaluated whether or not to call myself an ‘atheist’.  According to the definitions of atheist as someone who denies the possibility for the existence of a deity, and deities being defined as infinite beings, it seems impractical for a finite being such as myself to declare the existence or non-existence of any infinite being.  So I’m not comfortable with the label of atheist.

My daughter, while in pre-school or kindergarten, complained to me about reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase ‘under God’.  I thought she was fishing for a definitive statement from me about it.  She was precocious, highly verbal and probing.  I asked her what she thought about it.  She said that she didn’t believe in the ‘angry old man in the sky’.  I said that it was okay for her not to believe in that because some of those ideas came from a time when there was a lot about the natural world that people didn’t understand and that it was easier to put a name and face on things like lightning.  Science hadn’t happened yet.  People credited to God those things that they couldn’t explain.  She nodded in agreement.  Then I asked her where love comes from.  She was stumped.  I asked her if she felt love, felt loved.  She did.  I said that there were some people who believed that God was where love comes from.  I transitioned the discussion into our need to allow people to find their own understanding for God.

I credit monotheism with setting the stage for the scientific method.  In monotheism, there is an unstated axiom that the world has order, and that the order is knowable.  I think that was crucial to the development of the scientific method.

There are many things that I do not know in this world.  It seems that the more I know, the more the things I don’t know grows.  It seems the latter grows at a rate that is exponential relative to the former.  During my years alone, I evolved the idea of a operational truth.  There are certain things that we define to be true, e.g., 1 + 1 = 2, but there are other things that we treat at true because they are the best understandings we have at the time.  There are two kinds of truth: things we define to be true, and things we determine to be true.  Operational truths are examples of the latter.  One of the smartest people I know, a guy who passed his qualification exams for a doctorate in high energy physics, but decided to write software instead, surprised me when I asked him if he believed in God.  “Of course!  You don’t think all of this just happened, do you?”  I don’t know.  There is insufficient evidence to close the case for happenstance.  My operational truth is that we may not know our origins, but that does not relieve of us of of the responsibility to live moral lives, treat each other with respect and work together to solve world problems.

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 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.

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.

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.