In a 5-4 split along predictible lines, the Supreme Court has struck down a sentence of execution for a man convicted of raping his own 8-year old stepdaughter.
Let's be clear: this conduct is reprehensible. Also, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm generally in favor of the death penalty. I have problems with the procedures used to apply it, but I think it's the most just response to egregious homicide.
That said, I'm of two mines about this opinion. I really want to side with the majority in this case, because executing rapists violates eye-for-eye. Outside multiplicative compensatory damages, which are clearly supported in Scripture, outright punishment for personal injury should not exceed the injury intended. If the prosecution cannot prove that a rapist intended to kill his victim. . . I don't think execution should be on the table.
On the other hand, I find Justice Alito's legal argument quite persuasive. The holding and dicta Coker are broad enough that states quite reasonably believed that the Supreme Court would take a dim view of any attempt to execute rapists. I'm not at all convinced that there is a "national consensus" against such executions. And as I don't think the Court is supposed to dictate such consensus, as it seems to be doing here, I think the correct legal result would probably have been to uphold the sentence.
I probably would have filed a concurring opinion. I think the majority's legal reasoning is weak, even though I agree with the result.
I wouldn't normally bring this (C-SPAN RealPlayer stream) to your attention, as it's a lengthy(2:20:00), streaming video of a House subcommittee hearing, but it's where I spent my morning, and George Lucas was there. I organized a field trip for about a dozen FCC interns. You can see me over the left shoulder of Ray Ramsey (starting around 50:00) (I'm not staring off into space, I'm looking up at the screens which enable the audience to see the witnesses' faces). Mr. Lucas testimony begins starts around 55:00. The hearing was interrupted twice for a roll call vote on a motion to adjourn to unsuccessfully prevent the passage of H.R. 4661, a Medicare bill. The Legislature makes the Executive look downright efficient.
The hearing was about proposed reform to the Universal Service Fund, a program created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to promote telephone access for every American household, regardless of location. It's largely been successful, as approximately 95% of the country has a telephone. What you may not know about it is that it constitutes approximately 11% of your telecom bills monthly, which can be pretty steep. The proposed reforms seek to address the fact that the fund is targeted pretty much exclusively to the provision of local voice telephone service, which is now no longer viewed as that big of a deal.
The political debate here is rather unusual. The USF doesn't actually affect most Democratic members of Congress directly, as most of the fund goes towards remote rural areas, almost all of which reliably vote Republican. Yet they are drawn to the issue as many of their key supporters--low-income urbanites--who technically have access to telecom services can't afford them, while relatively affluent rural areas receive substantial subsidies. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans who would in other contexts be avidly pro-market and anti-subsidy find themselves supporting a fairly substantial ($51 billion so far) government initiative. Still, pretty much everyone thinks that the USF 1) is in desperate need of reform, 2) should probably include broadband, and 3) is likely to include wireless service, so a bill which touches on all of those issues has promise.
Last night I had the privilege of watching the National Shakespeare Company perform Julius Caesar. During Mark Antony's famous speech in Act III, scene ii, I was struck that Barack Obama resembles nothing more than Antony delivering his treacherous speech at Caesar's funeral.
Granted, no one has been recently assassinated, but just as Caesar's death left a power vacuum in Rome, so the regular change in the American presidency creates something similar, where rival factions vie for power.
What jumped out at me was just how skillfully Antony manipulated the crowd. "Here is a mourning Rome, a dangerous Rome," and Antony's safety is by no means sure. He takes the platform just vacated by Brutus, whose speech moved the citizens to call for his coronation. If Antony is to survive, let alone succeed in his ambitions, subtlety is required.
And what subtlety is there. He continually refers to Brutus and his cohorts as "honorable men," seven times in all, but so artfully weaves his words that by the time he is finished, "honorable man" has come to mean "traitor." Finally, he claims that
I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; and that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him:
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
before directing the people's wrath directly at Brutus, all the while declaiming his intention to do so:
...but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar, that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
Mutiny there is. Antony this reveals himself as a golden-tongued, deceitful, rabble-rouser.
So is Obama. What are his claims? "Change we can believe in"? "Yes we can"? He who has long decried the influence of money in politics, yea, even to accusing the Republicans of preparing a vicious smear campaign with undisclosed 527 funding, has abandoned his promise to participate in public campaign financing, limiting his spending to the $84.1 million each candidate is eligible to receive. Why? Because he wants to and can spend more than that. That's all. These mysterious 527s? None seem to be in evidence, and the only real smears thus far in the campaign have come from Obama (okay, and Hillary, but she's deservedly and blessedly out). "Yes we can" indeed: apparently what "we" can do is spend more money on a presidential campaign than any candidate in history while simultaneously accusing our opponents of "gaming" a "broken" system in order to spend more money. McCain will be very lucky if his campaign and independent spending combined even approaches what Obama has raised so far.
This is supposed to be a breathtaking new kind of politics? No, I call this for what it is: cynical, manipulative, opportunism. Antony would be proud.
Okay, nothing quite that drastic, but Wired is running a piece on "green heresies," environmentally brilliant moves which are currently anathema to the majority of the environmentalist community. One of these is that old growth forests actually produce more carbon dioxide than they consume.
It seems counterintuitive. The accepted wisdom is that trees suck of CO2 and put out O2. Well, kind of. Trees do use CO2 in their metabolic processes, but they do most of this while they're growing, most of which occurs during the first few decades of their lives. Thinking about it this way, it makes sense. There's a lot more carbon in wood than in the little sugar trees produce to keep themselves running. Once trees age, they start to lose limbs and eventually die, and the process of rotting--or burning--releases all that carbon back into the atmosphere.
The article suggests a brilliant idea: treating forests as carbon reducing crops. Clear cut the old-growth forests, use what lumber is still good, then bury, don't burn, the scrap. Burning forests contributes an incredible amount to the carbon in the atmosphere. Then push to use wood as a construction material, for both structures and household goods. So fewer metal chairs, more wooden ones. Same for floors, walls, etc. Imagine the hippy street cred: "The wooden cabinets, furniture, and paneling in my house aren't an extravagance, they actually represent upwards of a ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere!"
As to the ecological impact... I know for a fact that Pennsylvania could use about a million less deer, so I don't think there's much in the way of risk there, especially if you slowly rotate through acreage. A few acres cut and planted every year and after a decade or two, you've turned a huge swath of forest into productive landscape all while having minimal impact on the ecology of the area due to planting and incremental expansion.
Plus, hardwood floors are cool.
There's a great piece over at The Atlantic (gotta love the new free access!) about the fate of working women these days.
The conclusion? While staunch feminist types think, talk, and write about all the "human flourishing" that women are kept from by staying home,
"[T]he vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have "real" jobs--professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities."
Most people, and not just most women, have fairly inane, repetitive, jobs. They're mostly inside, and a lot of them involve doing unpleasant tasks for other people. Exactly why this is supposed to be more liberating than the tasks that need to be done around the house is beyond me. Personally, I get far more enjoyment out of staying home than going to work, but I still go, because it's the going to work that makes any staying home possible.
The author mentions Sweden, but I think she fails to emphasize a really critical fact about that particular welfare state: Swedes are dying faster than they're being born, and the only reason the population curve isn't negative right now is that there is a slightly positive net migration (1.66 per thousand individuals). Given that the total population growth is only 1.57 per thousand, this indicates that Sweden now has more deaths than births. Despite what environmental whackos may say, this is terrible for society. It's also makes the kind of welfare state they've created completely untenable, but they'll find that out soon enough. So will we, when it comes down to it.
If, like this woman, your idea "college" consists of a philosophy degree at a county community college, you shouldn't have pursued higher education any more than she should have. Why? Because she's now crippled by debt for a degree which hasn't increased her marketability one cent.
There isn't anything wrong with that. If you get a degree, like philosophy, with approximately zero use outside the academy, you should not be surprised when no one outside the academy wants to hire you. Especially if you're at a fourth-tier place like a community college. Community colleges are fine places to get technical degrees, especially two-year associates degrees and training certificates, but anyone who thinks that a community college degree is a good place to start an academic career is lacking certain knowledge that a community college degree won't fix.
All college majors are not created equal. All college degrees aren't either. If I hadn't gone on to law school, I'd be stuck making less than $30k a year, tops. If you get an engineering or nursing degree, yeah, you can get a reasonably well-paying job straight out of college. If you get a degree in the humanities, prepare to go to grad school. And unless your undergraduate degree is worth a damn (read "Not a community college degree), you aren't going to get into any grad schools, and unless your undergraduate degree is actually respectable (read "I went to a college with an average SAT north of 1200), you aren't going to get into any grad schools worth attending.
That's just the way it is, folks. Deal with it. If you can't do college work, you're better off trying for one of the trades that actually does pay something. I think it's absolutely criminal that 1) the higher education industry offers completely useless facsimiles of college degrees to segments of the population that could never earn a real one, and 2) Congress facilitates access to education by allowing debt loads to spiral completely out of control. Even assuming I do get a job upon graduation, I, as a lawyer, wil be paying off debt for years to come.
I went and saw the new Indy movie. It's no Last Crusade, and it isn't even Raiders, but it's still fun. I realized after watching it that the basic message of the previous movies is largely intact: whatever it is that everyone is looking for, they can't handle it.
Spoilers to follow.
Still, I was kind of annoyed that they got the origins of the Maya completely wrong. Everyone who watched Nickelodeon as a kind knows that the Maya weren't taught by aliens, they were the remnant of a lost civilization in the Pacific who fought a nuclear war with Atlantis, and that the cities of gold are nuclear power stations left so that the survivors could rebuild. Sheesh, George, get it right.