A life for a life

summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu

-Code of Hammurabi-

If a man has destroyed the sight of another man's son, they shall poke out his eye.

It's no secret that I think the execution of criminals is not a power that should be given a government. Reenacting a murder, repeating the act of violence whether quietly with a needle or loudly with a squad of rifles serves no purpose other than to dignify anger, hatred and blood lust.

The State of Missouri killed serial killer and white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin yesterday, in a little room and in front of witnesses. It took the mechanism of institutional homicide over 30 years to exhaust all appeals and procedures and last minute delays before strapping him to a table and running phenobarbital into his veins. 

Franklin has been convicted of 8 racially motivated murders and has confessed to a dozen more. He is thought to have committed over 20 in Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Ohio. He has confessed to shooting publisher Larry Flynt, paralyzing him permanently and to wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan.  Using a 'deer rifle' he killed two young cousins Dante Brown and Darrell Lane in Cincinnati because they were African American and fully 18 years later was given a life sentence for it, but of course that was moot since he had already been given a death sentence for the similar sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977. He fired 5 shots into a group of Jewish worshipers, killing Gordon and wounding two others.  God gave him this mission, he said.

So I'm not in mourning for Franklin.  Given the chance to stop his 'divine' calling to kill Blacks and Jews, I would not have hesitated to use lethal force, nor chastised anyone else for doing so,  but of course his mission was long over when they killed him.  Larry Flynt will never walk again nor will those  killed be restored to life. The lives diminished by grief  will not likely be restored to happiness. 

"I hate him for destroying my life, for taking away something precious to me, a life that I brought into this world,"

 said  Abbie Evans Clark, Dante Brown's mother. I hate him too and it wasn't my son he killed. She will likely always hate him.

 "It's devastating. It's a void. You never get over it."

 I'm sure she's right. She feels no forgiveness, she says, and although she knows it won't bring the two boys back,

 "It lets you know that justice will be done for the senseless murders of two innocent boys."

Justice.  One has to ask: what is justice if it's not the undoing of wrong? What is justice if it changes nothing, restores nothing?  

If a man dieth -- doth he revive?

-Job 14:14- 

What is justice if it's inspired by hate and why then is it called justice if hate itself is not justice?  Children are not fungible, not property that can be replaced, like money that can be repaid, like debits and credits on a balance sheet. The death of a murderer does not repay a mother for the loss of her son nor can his life be restored to him. Even El could not restore Job's murdered family to him but only a substitute. Those he once loved are gone forever.


Lex Talionis is what we often call reciprocal punishment. In it's favor, we can say that it determines the limits of punishment -- only one eye for one eye. We talk about repayment, but some crimes cannot be payed back  nor is the victim's sight restored when someone else's is taken away.  Indeed can we talk about justice at all when we admit we want someone dead or worse that God wants someone dead and we need to fulfill his divine will?

I'm glad Joseph Paul Franklin is dead.  I hate him down to the bottom of my soul, but I do not love my hatred. I do not ennoble it. I do not justify it or try to reconcile it with my reverence for life. I feel no better and am no better now that he's dead. I don't think we are safer. I don't think we are any closer to fulfilling that longing for harmony in all things we've likely had since our beginning. I don't think we reach it in our various faiths -- neither in the laws of Missouri or the law codes of Ur-Nammu or Hammurabi or edicts of Telepinu or the Hebrew Halacha.

Some things cannot be made right nor losses recovered and when we act out of hate, when we justify hatred,  perhaps only hate itself is served or preserved.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Hysteria...

for a reality check.

As much as the clown-mouths in the punditry claim the roll-out of the A.C.A. is the end of President Obama's Everything, as much as the sand-brained ninnyhammers hope for the total destruction of the Obama Universe and all of his messiah-worshipping minions, we have news for them:

Na Ga Happen.

Was this a blow to the implementation of the A.C.A.?

Yes.

Could the roll out have been done better?

Yes.

Is it like Katrina?  The Iraq War?  Watergate? Monicagate?

No.  No.  No.  And NO!

The TeaPublicans have lost their reason as they pray for the End Times of the Obama Administration. As certain as Radical Redneck will steal or morph into another blog identity,  the TeaPublicans will at some point wake up and realize that this is only the end of the first year of President Obama's second term.  The American people have very short memories.  This bungled kick-off will be forgotten.  The A.C.A. will enroll the number of people it needs to enroll.  The TeaPublicans will continue to obstruct, sabotage, and tell their followers that THIS IS IT FOR OBAMA!  And they'll zombie-follow that narrative as though it were true, until reality hits them between their beady little eyes. Because we know those benighted folks tend to live in an alternate reality where merely wishing for fantasies makes them so.

So for those of us who understand how politics works and how the TeaPublicans will always overestimate their predictions of utter failure and collapse for the opposition, just remember what the estimable Douglas Adams said:

Turn off the noise.  Don't listen to what the flying monkeys are howling about on the teevee; and fer gawdsake stay away from the blogs where the best they can come up with is telling the world that the FLOTUS has a large posterior.  That passes for intelligent political discussion on that side.  No. Really.  What are you worrying about if that's the level of discourse there?  

Stay Calm and Sign Up for the A.C.A. 

Washington Post editor Bob Woodward has spoken a small bit of reality and on Fox News Sunday, no less. The pundits are all wrong. ObamaCare isn’t Obama’s Katrina or his Iraq, or even his Watergate (notice these are all Republican scandals that Republicans are dying to falsely equivocate onto a Democrat. 

Nope. 

 According to Woodward, Obama is incompetent (of course), but he had good intentions. “What this is, it’s a mess clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the President’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance. 

So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”




Yes, we can admit this was incompetence.  Now name a two-term president who didn't run into trouble in his second term.  This isn't like President Ronald Reagan's criminal Iran-Contra scandal where actual laws were broken and where dozens of people in his administration were criminally indicted.  This isn't the sort of incompetency that President George W. Bush presided over where thousands of people died; and this isn't a juicy sex scandal ala President Bill Clinton, either.

Mr. Obama will get through this.  His motives are admirable even if his aides failed him, and he took the blame for it.

It's up to those of us who believe that universal health care is a right not a privilege to counter the unrelenting harpies whose only contribution to helping millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans is to hope for President Obama's health care plan to fail.

We're better than that.  

Much better.


Check this out:


Six Things the Media Doesn't Understand About Obamacare

Liberterrorism?

The notion that the Government is cracking down on freedom in general and preparing to freeze our accounts and restrict movement of money because of that elusive financial apocalypse the right wing has been predicting since Obama was elected, is the bread and butter of such opinion sources as the Daily Paul,  Natural News, and Alex Jones' Infowars.com  who amongst too many others to count are celebrating the false report that Chase Bank is limiting cash withdrawals and outgoing international wire transfers.  The story lacks only truth to be shocking. You can read a more honest appraisal at Forbes.  True, Chase is upping fees on certain kinds of business checking accounts, but pace the Liberterrorists, no one in Government is forcing them to do it and what we're seeing is Capitalism at work. Chase simply wants to make more money. Don't we all?

According to an e-mail from PT Shamrock.com, a Libertarian organization dedicated to misleading people about the need to get their money out of the country before the Liberals confiscate it and give it to "the takers," Chase customers have received the following letter:

Dear Business Customer,

Starting November 17, 2013:
- You will no longer be able to send international wire transfers. 

You will still be able to send domestic wires and receive
both domestic and international wires. We'll cancel any international
wire transfers, including reccurring [sic] ones, you scheduled to be sent
after this date.

- Your cash activity limit for these accounts(s) will be $50,000 per
statement cycle, per account. Cash activity is the combined total
of cash deposits made at branches, night drops and ATMs and cash
withdrawals made at branches (including purchases of money orders)
and ATMs.

These changes will help us more effectively manage the risks involved
with these types of transactions. 

No they haven't.  Unfortunately devotees of Paul and Jones and all the other panic profiteers will take it at face value without taking a moment to check the facts. Some won't even notice the misspelling and poor wording, the urge to believe being as strong as it is.  The confusion between the artifacts of free market capitalism and  Federal authoritarianism  continues to be the medium in which the fungus of  Right Wing politics is grown -- and grown in the dark, of course.

SOME DEMS NEED TO FIND THEIR SPINES

I'm pretty pissed off right now at spineless Democrats who can't wait to throw our President and the new ACA initiative under the bus in an effort to get re-elected.
Actually, I'm just pretty pissed off at my crappy work week so far so I'm spoiling for a good rant but even if I wasn't having a bad week I'd be angry anyway.
I was really hot that a Democratic controlled senate and house couldn't give us a more sweeping national program that probably would have eliminated most of the problems we are struggling with today.
Nothing this big is going to seamlessly and smoothly roll into the American landscape without some hills to climb. Not all of the legislation is great and some of it may need to eventually be eliminated as not workable. But ACA is a work in progress.
The President has offered a fix that will at least get us by another year when hopefully everyone will have a better idea how the system is going to work.
The insurance companies, no doubt encouraged and supported by the GOP and Tea Baggers cancelled policies in order to stir up the populace and create a panic.
So now the President has them in an awkward position as with his fix they can reinstate these people for another year. It will be interesting to hear their reaction.
As for those Dems that are joining "the sky is falling" parade, you piss me off for being spineless, self-serving twits with no more concern for the people of this country than the Repungetans. This waffling will NOT save your seat, it just accentuates your idiocy.
Thank goodness we have some Dems left with enough sense to take this one step at a time instead of trying to throw MORE legislation at the wall to see what sticks, like some of their more dimwitted constituents.
I expect the talking globs of the GOP to spout all the gloom and doom, it's their job - what excuse do Democrats who voted for ACA have?

Richard Cohen's Washington Post Column Made Me Gag

What Richard Cohen wrote:




"Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all."

So what's Cohen trying to write here?  That the Tea Party is not racist but a bi-racial couple triggers a gag-reflex in the deepest part of their "conventional" and unhappy souls?  Why would a perfectly normal couple cause a gag reflex in anyone, except racists?  He contradicted himself in two sentences, while exposing his ick factor at the same time.

And why the "used to be a lesbian?" dig?  Didn't he make his point about his miscengenation revulsion without having to pile on his homophobia as well?  

At a time in this country when we have a bi-racial president and a bi-racial first couple of the largest city in America, how could anyone, let alone a newspaper columnist in a top U.S. publication, write something as ignorantly reactionary as Cohen did?  What cave has he been living in that caused him to think bi-racial marriages were anything but conventional?

Cohen is stuck somewhere in the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s where that family of actors, a fantasy of Hollywood teevee executives, existed in the lives of very few "conventional" families of actual Americans.

I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom to let a guy, who also writes opinion columns for a prominent newspaper, expose himself for the wanker that he is.

In Cold Blood

It happens all the time.  It happened in my small town this Summer as the police questioned a man parked behind a restaurant after closing time.  Whether confused or inebriated, the man didn't get out of his car and it began to roll. The policeman stood his ground instead of stepping aside and emptied his pistol into him.  A grand jury decided against charging him and  like so many other stories involving citizens being shot by police for such things as asking for help or going out to their driveways to get a pack of cigarettes from their car, we will hear no more of it. No matter what a citizen is or is not guilty of, instant and abject obedience or summary execution is the law on the street.

I still remember a TV news story from back in the 1980s because the victim drove the same 1985 Pontiac Fiero GT I did at the time. The video, shot by a bystander, showed a police officer copying down the front plate number while the driver sat in his car parked at the curb. The nervous driver let his foot slip off the brake and the car rolled ever so slightly forward.  Instead of stepping to the side the officer drew his Beretta service pistol and emptied a magazine into the driver at point blank range.  That report was the last attention the media payed to the incident, but as I said, it happens all the time and it happened again in Ames Iowa on the university campus to a young, unarmed driver sitting in his van with the motor running.

Tyler Comstock and his father were working together as landscapers and when the elder Comstock refused to give his son a cigarette his teenage son got in the company truck to go out to buy  some. The father decided to "teach him a lesson" and reported it stolen. A police officer pursued him despite the dispatcher's telling him to back off. . There was a crash.  The officer's car was hit. Tyler didn't shut the engine off as directed and so the officer opened fire, killing the 19 year old.  Yet another senseless killing by someone either in a panic or in a fit of indignation at someone not obeying orders quickly enough. It happens all the time.  An officer fears for his life, feels his authority is being threatened or disrespected, mistakes a gesture sees a pack of cigarettes or a wallet as a weapon, a moving vehicle as a deadly attack -- pulls a gun, makes an excuse. . .

Sorry for this Recommendation....

I read plenty of articles that bash President Obama, but I am rarely affected or feel the need to share. Tonight's front page article on Yahoo! really hit a string. Obama makes a quick remark in which he says he is sorry.

The end of the year is my favorite. I enjoy the holiday season. The end of the year is busy in preparation for the following new year. Recently, we had our annual insurance plan meeting. I was shocked to learn that my insurance plan rose a little over twice as much the amount I am currently paying. I was very upset. By the way, I had 48 hours to make my decision, another unfortunate finding.  Needless to say, there is no pay raise with that raise. After reading the following article, I was reminded that I kept my insurance plan; even though, I am now going to pay more than twice as much for it. Sorry does not cut it. I am sorry I have to pay more; yet, I am paying more. I feel like I have been pushed off a cliff and my aggressor is yelling sorry as I am falling. The man who a month ago would not budge on negotiations regarding the Affordable Health Care Act is now sorry? With that, take a look, and off to bed I go.

http://news.yahoo.com/president-obama-he%E2%80%99s-sorry-for-americans-losing-insurance-plans-233753421.html




Aurora

Something is happening here

What the hell is going on with the rampage shootings?  Sometimes what's obvious isn't what's true, but hate mongering is now the American Passtime.  Even Baseball doesn't get round the clock coverage even during the World Series while anti-government rants and raves have more opinion shouters on more stations than I can count.  And then there's Fox News.  Is it any wonder the loose cannons of America are aimed at authority.

Who likes the TSA?   They've made traveling by air so unpleasant, I avoid it when at all possible, but apparently, some take it more seriously. Paul Anthony Ciancia took it with all the deadly seriousness only a madman can muster.  How he could walk into an airport with a rifle under his arm, like someone on a hunting trip, I don't know. Airports in Europe that I've been in have armed commandos in plain view, but apparently LAX does not and it seems almost miraculous that more people were not shot yesterday morning. At  this point I don't know who was responsible for wounding him multiple times, but fortunately he was captured before his suicide-by-cop plan came to fruition.

Ciancia was obviously deranged and apparently suicidal according to family members who called LAPD. At this point, I don't know who was responsible for wounding him multiple times, but fortunately he was captured before his suicide by cop plan came to fruition. We shall see, but at this point, the usual sources have been, since the original reports, concentrating on the military appearance of his "high powered" rifle as though that mattered in this day of handguns with 30 round magazines.  If  experience teaches anything, I'll bet that the choreographed media response will concentrate on repeating failed approaches and avoid any discussion of how people like Ciancia can buy any kind of weapon, how anyone can carry a rifle into an airport unopposed and how the anti-government hate mongers can act appalled while they continue to tell the idiots and madmen of America that the government is out to rob them of their freedom and property and put them in death camps.

It seems as though the TSA at LAX has been confiscating a frightening number of handguns, most loaded, at security checkpoints. We should be concerned.  We should wonder why
Because something is happening here. 
But you don't know what it is.  
Do you, Mister Jones?

12 Years A Slave

This is no "sentimental Gone With The Wind kitsch" as David Denby of the New Yorker Magazine observed, but a stark and powerful story of slavery in the pre-Civil War South and how it brutalized not only the slaves but the people who owned them.

The story is based on the book written by Solomon Northup, a free man from Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into bondage and endured the dehumanizing effects of slavery for 12 years.

I had recently read Frederick Douglass's memoirs and recognized much of what he suffered as a slave in Northup's story. Although Douglass was born into slavery and escaped to freedom, unlike Northup, who was born a free man and was forced into slavery, both men's stories of unimaginable suffering and humiliation remind us of this country's horrific original sin and how the South was unwilling to give up its barbaric addiction to a culture that forced its people to dehumanize their slaves so they could justify keeping them in unspeakably cruel and brutish conditions.

David Denby called 12 Years A Slave "...easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery."

After having seen Django Unchained and The Butler, I have to agree.  This is a radical film that challenges the viewer to confront the stark reality of "America's primal wound," and refuses to sentimentalize the savagery that was practiced in the pre-Civil War South.  And it is presented with elegance and historic clarity I rarely see in Hollywood films of this kind.

Do yourself a favor and go see this.  And take your children. This is real American history and all its bloody truth in the lash and the chain, brought to the screen by British director, Steve McQueen.

British Shakespearean actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Northup, is outstanding.


New York Times Review:

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.

(O)CT(O)PUS Will Be Off Grid

I have a family milestone to attend and will be away until next Wednesday.  Meanwhile, I am sure Captain Fogg and the fabled critters of this realm will keep you enlightened and entertained.

My last post until I return, here is a short video that caught my fancy (for reasons that will become obvious to you).  Enjoy.

Musicotherapie from Beakus on Vimeo.

A short film created by Clément Picon, Manu Javelle and Beakus director Amael Isnard when graduating from France's prestigious school Supinfocom. In a mental hospital for animals, four patients start making music with every object they can find. Featuring music by Tambour Battant the film was shown at Pictoplasma, OneDotZero, Anima Bruxelles, NYCFF New York, and Animafest Zagreb, picking up several awards along the way.