Are We Expected To Feel Pity?

I read stories like this and I shake my head. I happen to be a proponent of the death penalty. Others disagree with that position - that's fine, we can discuss the issues, agree to disagree, whatever. But I read about a "study" where certain absolute conclusions are made - with a blatant agenda driving the "conclusions" and wonder how to respond. So let's give it a try.

The drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States sometimes fail to work as planned, causing slow and painful deaths that probably violate constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment, a new medical review of dozens of executions concludes.

Even when administered properly, the three-drug lethal injection method appears to have caused some inmates to suffocate while they were conscious and unable to move, instead of having their hearts stopped while they were sedated, scientists said in a report published Monday by the online journal PLoS Medicine.

No scientific groups have ever validated that lethal injection is humane, the authors write. Medical ethics bar doctors and other health professionals from taking part in executions.

The study concluded that the typical "one-size-fits-all" doses of anesthetic do not take into account an inmate's weight and other key factors. Some inmates got too little, and in some cases, the anesthetic wore off before the execution was complete, the authors found.

"You wouldn't be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami" without more proof that it worked as intended, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist there who led the study.

The journal's editors call for abolishing the death penalty, writing: "There is no humane way of forcibly killing someone."

Lethal injection has been adopted by 37 states as a cheaper and more humane alternative to electrocution, gas chambers and other execution methods.

We can all assume we know what the framers meant by the term "Cruel and unusual". I rather suspect, since they had no objection whatsoever to execution by hanging that they were talking about things like this as being cruel and unusual.

Until 1870, the full punishment for the crime was to be "hanged, drawn, and quartered" in that the convict would be

   1. Dragged on a hurdle (a wooden frame) to the place of execution. (This is one possible meaning of drawn.)
   2. Hanged by the neck for a short time or until almost dead. (hanged).
   3. Disembowelled, and the genitalia and entrails burned before the condemned's eyes (This is another meaning of drawn. It is often used   in cookbooks to denote the disembowelment of chicken or rabbit carcasses before cooking).[1]
   4. Beheaded and the body divided into four parts (quartered).

Typically, the resulting five parts (i.e. the four quarters of the body and the head) were gibbeted (put on public display) in different parts of the city, town, or, in famous cases, country, to deter would-be traitors. Gibbeting was abolished in England in 1843.

But let's even put this aside for a moment. Let's consider how cruel it was to execute this man :

Clark and accomplice James Richard Brown found teenagers Shari Catherine Crews and Jesus Garza at Clear Creek north of Denton. Both Clark and Brown were released from prison less than two weeks earlier. They had a rifle and a shotgun they had stolen from vehicles, and they were looking for someone to rob that night. DNA evidence showed Clark raped Crews several times before shooting her in the back of the head with a shotgun and pushing her body into the creek. He put the shotgun under Garza’s chin and fired, then tossed his body into the creek. The bodies were discovered the next day after Clark and Brown showed up at a convenience store covered in sand, and Brown with a shotgun wound to his leg. Both eventually admitted being at Clear Creek, blaming the other for the murders. The stock of the murder weapon and ammunition was found in Clark's home. Accomplice Brown was also tried for capital murder but a jury convicted him of robbery and sentenced him to 20 years.

Or this man :

Police received a call from the Days Inn that a five-year-old boy was abandoned at the motel. Upon arrival, the child was identified as Zachary Swift and explained that his father left him at the motel the night before after killing the boy’s mother and grandmother. Police went to Swift's home and found the body of his pregnant wife, Amy Amel Sabeh-Swift on the floor of the trailer. The body of Sandy Sabeh was found in the kitchen of her Lake Dallas home. A trace of Swift’s electronic debit card use led authorities to Swift’s hideout at a motel in Dallas. During the five-hour interrogation that followed his arrest, Swift stated that he choked both women, then drove his son, Zachary, to a motel room. His marriage had gotten off to a rocky start. Four days after their wedding, he started a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to assaulting a Texas state trooper in 1996 and a Denton County woman in 1997. Swift waived all appeals.

Remember the killer's victims. Then explain why pity is warranted. 

Canaries? We Don’t Need No Stinking Canaries.

We have an entire rainforest. A coal mine in Illinois is the unlikely home of a complete rainforest. And not just any rainforest. This one is 300 million years old .

Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mine’s ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.

That’s when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

"It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface,” Falcon-Lang said. “The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.”

Forest snapshot

Here’s what the miners and other scientists saw underground: Relatively narrow passageways wind through the “cave,” marked off with stout 100-foot-wide pillars to ensure the roof doesn’t collapse.

“It’s like in some bizarre Roman temple with tons of Corinthian pillars that are 100 feet across and only six feet tall,” Elrick told LiveScience. “As you’re walking down these passageways you see these pillars of coal on either side of you and above you—imagine an artist’s canvas painted a flat grey and that is sort of what the grey shale above the coal looks like.”

The largest ever found, the fossil forest covers an area of about 40 square miles, or nearly the size of San Francisco. This ancient assemblage of flora is thought to be one of the first rainforests on Earth, emerging during the Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, time period that extended from about 310 million to 290 million years ago.

A reconstruction of the ancient forest showed that like today’s rainforests, it had a layered structure with a mix of plants now extinct: Abundant club mosses stood more than 130-feet high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns and an assortment of shrubs and tree-sized horsetails that looked like giant asparagus.

Flash freeze

The scientists think a major earthquake about 300 million years ago caused the region to drop below sea level where it was buried in mud. They estimate that within a period of months the forest was buried, preserving it “forever.” 

Unfortunately, the journal article is not available online. Nor is the mine identified, so I can't give a link to any good pictures of all this. (That's a hint to the folks at the Geology journal.) If anyone has any links to photos, list them in the comments, please.  

Land-Eating Rabbits And Carnivorous Mice

Rabbits are busy eating the sub-antarctic Macquarie Island. Ok, they're actually eating all the vegetation, which is causing the island to fall apart, with erosion and landslides now common. Meanwhile, the folks from the World Wide Fund for Nature are worried that the mice on the island might suddenly decide to become carnivorous and start eating the birds. (We can't make this stuff up).

The conservation group is calling on the government to implement a 25 million dollar (21 million US) strategy to eradicate rabbits, rats and mice on the sub-Antarctic territory.

WWF spokesman Andreas Glanznig said it was possible that mice, which have been shown to become carnivorous on an island in the Atlantic, could evolve enough to threaten endangered bird species on the remote scrap of land.

"It's a scary scenario but it's not outside the realm of possibility," he said. But he added that rabbits posed the more immediate threat.

"The rabbits are changing the whole ecosystem. The ecosystem is literally falling apart," Glanznig told AFP. "The whole island has been trashed."

Glanznig called on Canberra to take control of the island from the Tasmanian government to put an end to the plague.

The article mentions that until recently, the cat population had kept the rabbit and rodent population down. But that suddenly changed. What happened to the cats? By the way, that massive amount of money they want to spend on eradication? It's to spread poison bait.

Unheeded Warnings

Doug Schoen, who was one of Bill Clinton's advisers during the budget shutdown in the mid-1990s has a little bit of expertise in the field of presidential-congressional confrontations. And he is trying his very best to warn the current congressional leadership that they are heading for a train wreck.

But the GOP had misread the polls. Theoretical reductions in federal spending were one thing — of course the public supported that — but real cuts in spending on Medicare, education, and the environment were quite another. I advised the president in August 1995 that he couldn't lose by rejecting the GOP approach. But even he had a hard time believing that he would pay no political price for defying a newly elected Congress.

"Poll it again," Clinton said. But the numbers always came back the same. Americans said they would blame the Republicans if the government was shut down. Congress was being overly aggressive and confrontational. Standing firm would shore up Clinton's standing as a strong and principled leader. The key, though, was to project strength, not obstinacy. So Clinton made it clear that he was reasonable, repeatedly inviting Republicans to meet to resolve the impasse. Foolishly, they dismissed these overtures.

Today, history is repeating itself — with the parties reversed. This time a Republican president is offering talks to recalcitrant Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can justify going to Syria to talk with President Bashar Assad; however, she cannot justify rebuffing an overture to talk to President Bush, as she and Senate majority leader Harry Reid appeared to do last week before hurriedly (and wisely) changing course.

Democrats should not be misled by polls showing that most Americans support the idea of cutting off funding for the war unless benchmarks of success are reached. Of course they do, in the abstract. But Bush's counterargument — that Democrats are prepared to undermine troops in the field — will be a powerful one, in part because it is far more concrete than Democrats' complex, poll-tested plan.

I have said all along that the Democrats were not given a mandate to lose a war. Regardless of what the poll numbers show on a theoretical question, Americans do not like to lose. Schoen is trying to get that point across to Reid and Pelosi. But it does not appear to be getting through. Reid had to backpedal - hard - on his "this war is lost" comment. And he still does not get it.

WASHINGTON - Defying a fresh veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass legislation within days requiring the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday.

I think the train is about to jump the tracks and both Reid and Pelosi will end up being reviled by Democrats for sending the party into the wilderness.

Stick To Singing

Sheryl Crow should really just stick to what she does best - singing. Because her astoundingly shallow and completely unhygienic advice for saving the planet exposes her to much ridicule. Deservedly so.

She urges people to use detachable "dining sleeves" instead of paper napkins, proposes a reality show in which contestants compete to see who lives the "greenest life" and calls for for a radical shift in bathroom habits:

I propose a limitation be put on how many sqares [sic] of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting.  Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit,  except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required. When presenting this idea to my younger brother, who's judgement [sic] I trust implicitly, he proposed taking it one step further. I believe his quote was, "how bout just washing the one square out."

Do read the comments over there - Crow is being thumped soundly. This happens over and over again with celebrities. They become famous for acting or singing then somehow think their opinions have additional weight because of who they are. They're famous, don't you know. The opinions aren't usually all that great, many are idiotic.

UPDATE: Via Hot Air, the Smoking Gun managed to get hold of Sheryl Crow's concert rider. She demands parking (close to the venue, but not where the fans can see) for three tractor trailers, four buses and six cars. That is one big tour and one hell of a large carbon footprint. Apparently her demands that others cut their energy usage is a case of do as Sheryl says. She'll wave from the limo.

The Most Famous Words Never Spoken

University of East London academic John Radford has written a book that details quite a few thing which everybody knows are true - except they aren't. The book challenges quite a few myths that are repeated by people virtually every day. Some of the items Radford has debunked:

Beam me up, Scotty

Fact:"Beam us up, Mr Scott, was the closest James T Kirk of Star Trek ever came to saying the immortal words wrongly attributed to him.

There's a sucker born every minute

Fact:American showman Phineus T Barnum didn't say this. It was business rival David Hannum.

Let them eat cake!

Fact: There is no evidence that Queen Marie Antoinette actually said it in response to reports that starving French peasants were clamouring for bread. It was recorded as being said by at least one other person many years before.

Nice guys finish last:

Fact:This remark is said to have been made by Leo Durocher, manager of the New York Giants baseball team, in 1946. What he really said was: "The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.

Ya dirty rat!

Fact: James Cagney never said this. The closest he came was "Mmm, that dirty, double-crossin' rat!; in 1931 film Blonde Crazy.

There are a number of other ones in the linked article. Including the fact that druids had nothing whatsoever to do with the building of Stonehenge. His book, Don't You Believe It: Some Things Everybody Knows That Actually Ain't So, isn't listed on Amazon yet.

What They Want

so their eyes are growing hazy
'cos they wanna turn it on
so their minds are soft and lazy
well, hey, give 'em what they want

if lust and hate is the candy
if blood and love tastes so sweet
then we give 'em what they want
(Natalie Merchant, Candy Everybody Wants)

Lionel Shriver writes in today's Washington Post about what he dreads - and is pretty sure is coming - as a result of the relentless media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Because, ultimately, the media attention for monsters like Cho and his predecessors - and those who will surely follow - are really what the whole thing is about.

Even more than these gruesomely gratuitous incidents themselves, I have come to dread the campus shooting's ritual media aftermath — a secondary wave of atrocity, all conducted under the guise of grief, soul-searching concern and an ostensible determination to ensure that no demented loner ever opens fire on his classmates again. Yet the bloated photographs on front pages, the repeating loops of interviews on cable news, the postings of warped creative writing assignments on the Web, and perhaps above all the airing of Cho's self-pitying, quasi-messianic video clips on every network all help ensure that similar incidents will indeed recur — and soon.

When researching a depressingly copious array of real-life campus massacres for a fictional variation on those macabre melees in my last novel, "We Need to Talk About Kevin," I grew to appreciate that every school shooter has his own sorry story. Yet the one motivation that seems to tie all these misguided characters together is a yearning for media recognition. In an era that has lost touch with the distinction between fame and infamy, so driving is the need to be noticed — for any reason — that even posthumous attention will do. Much like those fun-fair photo booths in which one can push one's face through a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can be sure that more than one American kid has already mentally snipped out the zomboid face on those front pages and poked his own mug through the newsprint instead. Cho's video "manifestos" may stir revulsion in most, but they will stir envy in a dangerous few.

Moreover, Cho has deliberately upped the ante; exceeding Dylan Klebold's and Eric Harris's body count by more than a factor of two on the eighth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, nearly to the day, was surely calculated. So how many victims will our next shooter figure he has to claim in order to merit the same delicious scale of coverage? Sixty-four?

Despite all the searching-for-an-answer hand-wringing we have been subjected to this last week, the most obvious ounce of prevention would be to stop allowing the likes of Cho to play the media like a piano. As it is, we gave him everything he would have wished for. In so doing, journalists who claim only to be helping us to "understand," the better to prevent future rampages, are hypocritical. Ask any Skinnerian psychologist: Reward behavior, and it rises.

I don't agree with everything he writes, but I think his basic point here is quite correct. The rush by politicians and officials to do something - anything - will inevitably lead to a lot of bad decisions. Questionable things will be done at college campuses across the nation to offer up an illusion of safety. And, sadly, that will be all that is accomplished. An illusion. Because there really are madmen in this world and they will always find a way to act out their madness. But the relentless waves of media coverage will certainly not escape the notice of some of the mad or the marginal longing for the same attention. They are quick learners.