. . . . Then she materializes

.

Thought for the Day --- Omar's Lament

Indeed the idols I have loved so long
     Have done my credit in this world much wrong
Have drowned my honour in a shallow cup
     And sold my reputation for a song
                     
                                           Omar Khayyam

Eliminate the Death Penalty

      People tend to be ambivalent about the death penalty.  The gruesome details of an execution, its ghoulish ritual and antiseptic thoroughness are revolting, yet every time we read about another heinous crime committed with the exquisite cruelty of some hellish monster it is almost impossible not to wish him to be put out of his misery and gone from this earth.

     Regardless of one's emotions either way, there are good reasons to eliminate the death penalty, and it should be remembered  that a criminal does not go free simply because he isn't killed.  Imprisonment for life, being regimented to the last detail as the decades drone on, is hardly a picnic.  Is that not really worse than death?

     The question whether the death penalty acts as a net deterrence to crime will probably always be debated  but one factor which is not always considered throws doubt on it.  As an execution can be delayed almost indefinitely with appeals, writs and whatnot, it does not appear imminent until near the end of the line.  John Wayne Gacy said on the way to his execution that he did not believe it would happen.  He had had so many delays and reprieves that final doom had become unreal.  Probably no one commits a crime with the expectation of being caught and executed.

     The greatest price we pay for the death penalty is the execution of innocent men, and sometimes women. (There is serious doubt to this day about the guilt of Barbara Graham, about whom the movie "I Want to Live" was made).  This is true not simply in some rare instance, but with horrifying frequency.  Not long ago in Illinois alone 13 men were released from death row on the strength of DNA evidence showing their innocence.  Since then that number has increased by seven.  Nationwide, since 1973, about 150 prisoners under the death sentence have been exonerated and released by virtue of DNA proof of innocence. There are probably many more who would be exonerated if the right steps to do so were to be taken.

     But DNA exoneration is not the whole of the matter. How many other innocent men are executed for crimes wherein DNA could neither prove nor disprove guilt?  For example, what would DNA have had to do with the terrible assassination of President Kennedy, when murder was committed with a rifle fired from a substantial distance from the victim?  There are almost certainly many  innocent men on death row who were convicted of crimes with no relevance to DNA.  And the guilty ones remain loose, free to work their murderous horors on new victims.  Just recently a mad man shot and severely wounded a member of Congress in Arizona and at this time she is in a hospital in critical condition, yet DNA would appear to be able to prove nothing in the matter one way or the other.   

     The death penalty certainly does deter the dead convict, but does it deter others who do not expect to be caught and therefore do not consider what might happen to them if they are?  Some statistics appear to show that the death penalty has little or no effect on the crime rate. 

     One effect of the death penalty is the refusal by countries around the world to extradite persons to the United States if they might face the death penalty. They should not be criticized for that.  Just as we have our social and legal policies, they have theirs.  But here, too, as in the cases of wrongful convictions, the guilty go free.

     Execution is brutal and cannot be made into anything less.  It puts life into the hands of sometimes corrupt and excessively ambitious prosecutors and, yes, sometimes even the police themselves, who have been known to withhold or even falsify evidence.  Add to that the defective work of some defense counsel.  When all the pros and cons are sifted out the death penalty should be eliminated

Monday, March 5, 2012

California GIrl decorates the Pacific Coast

The Reason Romney Lost

The Reason Romney Lost 

     Republicans really put forth what they believed was their maximum effort in good faith but the party is so hopelessly divided, despite every effort to appear unified, that it has become difficult if not nearly impossible to conclude that it would not be best for it to split up.  There is precedent for that.  In the 1840s and '50s The Whig Party was in a similar position to that of the GOP now.  On matters of internal growth and Western expansion, which had fueled the party for a long time, there was general agreement, but the issue of slavery had come to dominate everything.  The party leader was Henry Clay of Kentucky, known as the 'great compromiser'.  He was a skillful politician and experienced negotiator, but at the end of the day he could not hold the party together.  Abraham Lincoln had been a loyal Whig but could not compromise with pro-slavery interests or with those who were neutral on letting the states decide the issues.  So they had nowhere to go and Lincoln, together with others, formed the Republican Party.

     This year, 2012, Conservatives really did not want Romney as their candidate.  As a conservative I myself didn't want him.  I wanted Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or even Rick Perry from Texas.  But not Romney.  He is a good man with a lot of ability but he could never have his heart the effort to campaign as a conservative.  The high point was the first debate.  The campaign went down hill from there as Romney then tried to stake out a centrist position; 'hands across the aisle' and all that.  Conservatives gagged, but they had gone along once the race for the nomination had been decided in favor of Romney.  The determination to defeat Obama trumped everything else.  What happened at the end was that Hurricane Sandy diverted the nation's attention from the race for about five days.  When Romney returned he just couldn't put up the front any more.  The fire was gone and he decided to let the clock run out, hoping that he would would win by lying low, avoiding controversy and watching the clock tick the hours away. 

     Even then he might have pulled it off, but then it all fell in when the Republican keynote speaker, Governor Chris Christie of Jersey embraced Obama and seemed to endorse his candidacy.  He did not, but you had to listen very closely to what he said to conclude that.  Then the voters, tired of the race, tired of wind and floods, tired of trying to tough it out with a sick economy, decided that maybe Obama wasn't the indecisive non-leader that they had been told and nearly believed.  It only required a slight shift of votes, just a few more Republicans staying home and a few more fence sitters voting for Obama, and it all fell in --- not by much, but enough.

Freddie's Brother Richard Watches TV --- Prone As Usual

Christian Theology --- Right, Wrong and Command

Christian Theology --- Right, Wrong and Command

     A few years ago I wrote something titled Does God Decree What is Right or is it Right Because God Decrees it?  I deleted it because I thought it said too much, more than my understanding of the subject justified.  Nonetheless I was a bit hasty in abandoning the subject altogether .  What I was tying to establish was that while God creates all things, judgments of Good (right) and Evil (wrong) are not judgments of things; they are, simply, value judgments.  God has created a mind in the human species  which understands what is good and what is not.
     Though philosophers have wrestled with the question whether God decides arbitrarily what is good, and something which He now calls good He might just as well have called bad, or whether something is good simply because it obviously is good.  Can any rational being believe that gratuitous cruelty is 'good' or that kindness and a charitable disposition are 'bad'?  Even if you can argue that under some circumstnce theft may be justified, the concept itself always denotes something which is bad, simply by definition, not because it is a bad thing, but because it is, simply, bad.  Period.
     If gratuitous violence could be rendered a good thing, or at least morally acceptable, because God so decrees, our religion would be based solely on command.  There would be no concepts of honour or decency, kindness or charity, right or wrong, only arbitrary commands.  That is apparently the view of political extremists and jihadists.  However, they are wrong.  God is the Creator and Ruler of the Universe who has given man free will while informing him through the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ that He wants His creatures to conform to the pre-established standard of good.  He is not telling us what is good because we already know that, the knowledge having been built in us, so to speak.  So if we do not do good we "have no excuse" as Paul wrote.  As the ability to understand the difference between good and evil is embedded in the human mind, there is a basis for judging the atrocities of Nazis and radical Moslem jihadist to be evil --- actually evil in fact, not just contrary to someone's commands or whims.  In other words, the Nazis and Jihadist extremists "have no excuse".  In the case of God alone, of course, the good coincides precisely with what we know that God is, so that Christianity is in the fullest sense both a command religions and a faith religion.
     I did not, however, set out to write a library full of words, nor will I attempt it now.  There are many subjects which this analysis does not cover --- definitions, moral dilemas, "what is the good life" and on and on.  I leave that to another time, or to others.

Do You Ever Feel Crowded?

Morning in Paradise

The Breakers

Gift From China

I didn't write it

     I condemn in the strongest possible terms the media for refusing to investigate [the Obamas], as they did President Bush and President Clinton, and for refusing to label them for what they truly are. There is no scenario known to man, whereby a white president and his wife could ignore laws, flaunt their position, and lord it over the people, as these two are permitted to do without challenge out of fear for their color.       /s/ an African-American Reporter

A Defense of Abraham Lincoln

      [To a syndicated columnist]  Sir, I have read your columns for years and have corresponded with you several times before.  I am on your ideological wave length and generally agree with you, finding your columns interesting, informative and well-written, and I have heard some of your broadcasts as a substitute for Rush Limbaugh.

     I do, however, find myself at odds with your evaluation of Abraham Lincoln.  That era, Lincoln's place in it, and the issues leading up to the Civil War, are not only very complex, but raise the great difficulty which a modern person has with any attempt to place himself in the mind-set of a mid-nineteenth Century American.  A fair evaluation of  Lincoln's life and work requires more than space allows here.  Many books have been written about him by such recognized historians as Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the television pundit Bill O'Reilly.  This is a summary of the views of those who, like myself, admire Lincoln. 

     First, Lincoln was opposed to slavery all his life as any reading of his Cooper Union or First Inaugural Address makes clear beyond doubt.  Refer also to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.  Lincoln's anti-slavery position strengthened when he saw the effects of slavery first-hand as a young man working on a barge going from the North to New Orleans.  He had been a loyal Whig until the 1850s, and an ardent admirer of the party leader Henry Clay, but left the Whigs in 1854 to become affiliated with the then recently-formed Republican Party because of his opposition to slavery.  On that opposition there was never any doubt or vacillation or temporizing at all.  He was flatly opposed to slavery as a great moral wrong.  The suggestion that he blew hot and cold on the issue depending on changing political requirements is simply wrong.

     Lincoln believed, however, that slavery could not simply be abolished by an act of Congress because it was recognized as implicit in the Constitution.  He did, however, oppose the extension of slavery into the territories and that was the principal difference he had with Stephen Douglas, who advocated "popular sovereignty", which allowed the territories themselves to decide the issue.  His fear was that if slavery were allowed to spread the South would become a slave empire and then detach from the Union.  If it could be contained, however, he thought it would wither away over time because of economic contingencies.  However, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857, caused the whole issue to become immediate and critical.  Lincoln lost the senatorial election in Illinois to Douglas in 1858 but, of course, won the 1860 presidential election.  The stage was then set for secession and war because eleven Southern states were adamant on secession and Lincoln would not accept the dissolution of the Union.

     No one ever doubted that the Emancipation Proclamation was a Civil War measure.  It allowed Union troops to seize and liberate slaves at will as new lands were conquered.  Where slavery already existed in the border states, however, it was unaffected.   Lincoln believed that he had no right to abolish slavery completely but, aside from that, he was a skillful politician who understood that if he had purported to do so Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland, which were perched on the edge of secession, would have seceded from the Union immediately and the Union would have lost the War.  At the end of the War he insisted on complete abolition by the thirteenth amendment, and that is what the movie Lincoln was about.  With minor exceptions it is historically accurate.     It is admittedly true, however, that he was not interested in social or legal equality with  the "Negro" race, as it was then called.  A Lincoln enthusiast can argue that he was not opposed to social and legal equality but knew that there was no chance at the time that it would be widely accepted.  It is worth noting that Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was among Lincoln's friends and was, in fact, the first African-American to be socially entertained in the White House at Lincoln's invitation.  It is apparent, however, that Lincoln doubted whether social equality would ever be a viable arrangement and it is probable that he did not favor it.  But in fairness it should be remembered that those were very different times, that with few exceptions such as Douglass himself the newly-liberated slaves were uneducated and that it could appear, at that time, that full equality was not practical.  That has obviously not been a defensible position since Lincoln's time and the end of legal segregation in the United States, but people are not perfect and do not always have the gift of prophecy.  Lincoln's heart was always in the right place but his precognitive powers were limited.

     Lincoln was a great man, one of the greatest there ever was in this world.  He was a kind and tolerant man and did not seek harm or disadvantage to anyone.  He was not perfect but that hardly justifies dismissing him as undeserving of the eternal gratitude of Americans.

                                                                                     

     

Three Metaphysical Questions Without Answers (maybe)

Three Metaphysical Questions Without Answers (maybe)

     There are three questions which have vexed me for most of my life.  I am a retlired lawyer, living on Sanibel Island, Florida with my wife of 44 years.  First, I wonder why I am me and you are you and Joe Shmo is Joe Shmo. Consider:  Billions of people have been born in the world, and most have died.  At conception you have two cells merging into one and later dividing to become a person, a bunch of stuff called DNA, chemicals, and all that.  And all this adds up to what I call 'me' and you, you.  But how did this consciousness which I call 'myself' connect with --- reside in --- my brain rather than in one of the other billions of brains in other bodies, now and all the way back in time and all over the world?  All the other billions of bodies and brains belong to others.  How and who decided that this particular brain and body would house this particular mind, soul and consciousness that I call "myself". 

     Second, Am I the same 'me' that I was yesterday, five years ago, 10 years ago?  How do I know?  If we assume continuity of personality, as I do, isn't that a straw in the wind indicating that there is some Great Mind behind all this?  Otherwise I could be a robot remembering the past, not a person who was actually in the past.  I would not think that a brain would require the inhabitation of a continuous personality to serve as an instrument of biological survival.  Why would it?  From the standpoint of evolution, the soul, personality and consciousness would seem to be surplusage.  We could still have memory, as a computer does, but a computer has a kind of memory, but not the kind which fondly and nostalgically recalls  Thanksgiving at Aunt Edna and Uncle Stu's farm.

     Third:  The brain is physical --- a bunch of cells arranged in a complex way.  You can dissect it all you want without finding any person --- any 'me' --- there.  Yet we know that the physical world and the mind are intimately related.  A blow on the head, alcohol, anesthetics , Alzheimers, arteriosclerosis --- all these alter thought and personality.   How do we  explain something which is obviously immaterial and yet altered, even radically, by material, physical events and things?  William James, the philosopher, agreed with materialists that thought is a function of the brain, but he went beyond that to maintain that, yes, thought is a function of the brain but it is more than that. It is a transmitting function, like a radio or TV transmitter and receiver.  In other words, his difference with materialists was that he did not believe that thought is only a function ot the brain.  It is words like 'only' or 'merely'  which separate a materialist philosophy from a spiritual or religious one.  That is how William James believed that he was able to combine the functional physical brain with a limited life and an immaterial soul which may be capable of surviving death.

    

Thirsty? Try catching raindrops.