TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL?

The final chapter to this long twisted story played out in the courts this week and highlights all the reasons why I have had to revise my attitude and views on capital punishment. Someone like Ted Bundy is dispatched to the great (or not so great) beyond and honestly, I'm not all bent out of shape about it. I have always believed that the death penalty may not deter others but at least one bad guy wouldn't be around to slit my throat.
But what do we do about guys like Henry McCollum and Leon Brown? How many have there been in similar situations that didn't get an 11th hour reprieve? The question looms large; how many innocent men and possibly women have been put to death in the US over the years? One is too many for me to continue to support a barbaric system rife with corruption and prejudice.
See Henry McCollum, now 50 and his now 46 year old half brother Leon Brown were convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 11 year old Sabrina Buie in Robeson County, NC back in 1983 when they were 19 and 15 respectively. Both initially received the death penalty but while McCollum's sentence held, Brown's sentence was commuted to life. For over 30 years these two brothers have grown old in prison FOR A CRIME THEY DID NOT COMMIT!
This notorious case has been hard fought for 30 years in the courts, blocking McCollum's execution time and again and good thing because if it had not blocked, he would have received his exonration posthumously.
Recent analysis of a cigarette butt, miraculously preserved all these years, found near Sabrina's body in the field where she died showed the DNA of another man who lived near the killing field, and who is currently serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder he committed less than a month after Buie's murder!
The defense has long held that these two very scared teens were coerced in to confessing to the crime EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE LINKING THEM TO THE CRIME!  The brothers finally walked free this week after the judge dismissed all charges.
So now, can you see my dilemma? Can I really believe ever again that justice has been served by the death of a convicted inmate or will the faces of these two brothers, free at last, haunt my thoughts when another conviction makes the news in North Carolina.

Some thoughts on prejudice

 Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

 -Phil Collins-

What is an observation without a frame of reference?  We like to think we can observe facts and make rational deductions, but we can't.  Anyone with training in psychology as it pertains to law enforcement  is likely to tell you that eye witness accounts of the same occurrence will vary markedly and it's been clearly demonstrated that observers concentrating on one thing will be completely unaware of  important people and objects in their direct view.

When I read about an unarmed African American "child" kneeling with his hands up being shot multiple times, I was truly irate, I was ready to write off reports of his just having perpetrated a class B felony and his having charged a policeman who had ordered him to stop as racism. It fits with my habitual beliefs about the police and racism.  I may well have been totally wrong and it may not be the first time, but if it turns out that the 6 foot 4 200 pound "Child" did in fact charge the officer, things might just be other than I was primed to believe.

You might relate it to the halo effect: the tendency to have a view of people and things because of, in this case, his being a member of a traditionally disadvantaged class We do after all read about all sorts of injustice based on race and racism seems to explain a lot. But sometimes, of course we're wrong. Sometimes we fail to see things through the eyes of people who run stores and gas stations in "bad" areas whose lives are in danger every day.  Is it too easy for me  to condemn it from the safety of my gated community and the comfort of my air conditioned office? It depends on your viewpoint, your frame of reference, the things you associate with other things because your human and you have a memory.

For most of my life, I was firmly convinced that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were framed.  I galled me that they were Jews and their trial and execution would reflect on me.  I found it easy to find detailed opinions as to their having been innocent. There were lots of people who agreed, lots of signs and protests from lots of convinced people. People I despised were convinced of their guilt. I was ready to see the whole sad affair as yet another example of the persecution of liberals and most of all Jews.  In fact I was passionate about it. I was wrong.

But we see connections between things, relationships, reminders and all the things that lumped together are called bias and prejudice.  Watching the endless coverage of the gruesome and heartbreaking killing of Stephen Sotloff -- the tall dark man with the knife condemning Obama, blaming Obama for what he was about to do and threatening to do it again and again, in the name of peace and freedom  My rage and loathing must surely have been augmented by the years and years of hearing similar rhetoric from Republicans of all sorts, from Fox News to barber shop conversations. It's going to be hard to temper my rage at the endless Obama bashing and ceaseless hatred of human values. These things are inexorably linked in my mind.

And what do we think of Vlad the Invader?  Putin is an arrogant, dishonest, power hungry autocrat, contmptuous of  Democracy, decency, human rights and Liberty. Contemptuous of us. Have you been listening to how Fox and its followers have been praising him as the kind of bold, confident leader American needs?  If you're a Republican you will have forgotten this instantly, but you'll still be contemptuous of Obama and blame him for being weak, for not waving our nuclear penis around. I still remember though and every time I hear you barking about strength, I will associate it with your fascination with tyrants. Evey time you call Obama a tyrant I will remember. Every time I hear you call him weak and indecisiveness, I will associate it with your praise of ruthless aggression.  I will never, ever trust you to tell us the time of day even if my watch confirms it. I know who you are and what you've done and it's all been a pack of lies.

So, yes, I'm human.  Yes, I know there is wisdom and enlightenment in trying to see things through other eyes, but there is discomfort in equal amounts from remembering, from associating or correlating one thing with another. I suffer from rage and closed mindedness and prejudice like everyone else does, so when I see bloody handed monsters I will think of Republicans. When I hear the word "conservative" I think of hate, of tyranny, of  arrogance -- of evil.  the camera can't show it, but I know that face behind the black mask and I see him everywhere.

Aux Etats Sunnis

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Let us recall this quote from the film classic, Lawrence of Arabia:

“So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be 

a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel …”

Arabs or Americans ... sometimes I wonder which of the two are the little people, the silly people. If anything, Americans are a meddlesome people - provincial, opinionated, arrogant, yet exceptionally ignorant of Middle Eastern culture and history.

How many Americans recall the coup that overthrew Mohammed Moseddegh, the first democratically elected leader of Iran? In 1953, our own CIA aided and abetted the British in toppling a nascent democracy over access to Persian oil. “A cruel and imperialistic country” stealing from a “needy and naked people” were the words spoken by Mosaddegh at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. These words have informed Middle Eastern attitudes for more than half a century.

Does terrorism represent the face of Islam? Not according to the highest religious authority of Saudi Arabia, who said: “Extremist and militant ideas and terrorism which spread decay on Earth, destroying human civilisation, are not in any way part of Islam, but are enemy number one of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims” (The Grand Mufti Sheik Abdulaziz Al al-Sheik).

Not according to the highest religious authority of Egypt, who said: “An extremist and bloody group such as this poses a danger to Islam and Muslims, tarnishing its image as well as shedding blood and spreading corruption” (The Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam).

Not according to the Egyptian military, which overthrew the government of Mohamed Morsi and banned the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Nor the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which purged and banished al-Qaeda - whose affiliated groups now operate in remote regions of Yemen and North Africa. Yet, how many Americans pay attention?

Consider the impact of successive Western interventions in the Middle East over time - over oil. European colonialism is partly to blame. As colonial empires crumbled in the aftermath of WWI, European powers gave little thought to the historical schism between the Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam. Britain drew borders around rival ethnic enclaves and formed the modern nation state of Iraq - thus creating a recipe for future volatility.

Failing to take these historical antecedents into account, America blundered into an occupation of Iraq that worsened an already unstable situation. In short order, the American regency of Paul Bremer swept away a long established order. Regime change brought in a new Shiite government that promptly disenfranchised the formerly dominant Sunnis. Thus began a cycle of sectarian conflict and civil war – rife with insurgencies, ethnic militias, car bombings, kidnappings, massacres, and more. Thus, the American misadventure started a sequence of events leading directly to the rise of ISIS.

A headline de jour fails to capture the broader perspectives of history. What our news media never told us: Every bungled misadventure by a Western power has upset the status quo and upped the ante on radicalism and savagery.

We broke it. Now our defense and diplomatic establishments exhort us to fix it. How ironic! Ethnic and religious divisions of the Middle East mirror our partisan divisions at home, as the current state of the debate in Washington demonstrates:

A war-weary American public says: “No boots on the ground.” Neo-Cons in Congress demand military action. 

Iraqi President al-Maliki disenfranchises the Sunnis and creates a window of opportunity for ISIS. The Cringe Fringe blames the crisis on the president. 

Al-Malady refuses to sign a Residual Force Agreement; The Cringe Fringe blames the president. 

Our military says ISIS cannot be defeated without a Syrian incursion. Last year, Congress failed to reach agreement on a similar authorization.

Follow the trail of duplicity amongst our allies in the region: ISIS trades Syrian oil for money and arms in Turkey, our NATO ally. Our military maintains vital strategic strike capabilities at al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates even as the wealthy citizens of Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE underwrite radical jihadi groups throughout the Middle East – from al-Qaeda to ISIS.

How can the enemy of your enemy be your friend when you can no longer distinguish enemies from friends?

Meanwhile, partisans in Congress criticize the President over an honest admission: “We don't have a strategy yet” for dealing with the "existential threat" of ISIS. Perhaps the time is long overdue to rethink the complexities, duplicities and past failures - to avoid yet another national repetition compulsion - before we leap again into the Middle Eastern abyss.

I have seen the future

Or the selfie of the future, that is.

Selfie of the day, selfies of the week -- we can hardly breathe with the effort of working selfie into every page, every story, every moment of news.

6 uses of the word in a 15 second news spot and it's hardly unique. They're trending on Twitter and I effort to litter every page with SELFIES!

How did we ever get along without that word in those dull, crepuscular days without hashtags when only birds would tweet and that picture you took of yourself was a picture you took of yourself?  No,  selfie is here to stay and there is a future to come when old men in tattered backwards hats sit on park benches sharing shaky-handed selfies and  blowing farts through their boxers, belts around ankles and tweeting about efforting their bowel movements. Tattooed nonagenarians with Titanium hip replacements and gold-rimmed bifocal Google Glass, sharing selfies.

I have seen the future. Androgynous naked teens, covered in genetically engineered cat fur, brains wired together by the web, trending. They hide in the trees, laughing and taking selfies for their friends on the moon.

The Conundrum of Memory

Sometimes I get to wondering, sometimes I get confused about what our conservative brethren are trying to tell us.  I was reminded recently that my former Republican congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) amongst others,  vociferously  threatened to impeach the president for having provided air traffic control for the UN incursions into Libya; for having exceeded his constitutional authority by arming Syrian rebels.  Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) back in June of 2013 threatened to impeach President Obama if any U.S. troops are killed in Syria.  Is there a relationship between rhetorical amplitude and political passion and the shortness of it's half-life? 


I ask because currently the same party is chastising him for not having gone into Syria thus allowing ISIS a breeding ground. We need those airstrikes -- why didn't he make those airstrikes?  We need airstrikes, says John McCain, in his time-worn tradition of  damning Obama if he does or if he doesn't.  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to commit ground troops. This is all

 "due to our total inaction. And it's going to be one of the more shameful chapters in American history," says John McCain

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said the President's limited foreign policy is no longer acceptable. I have no idea whether that refers to the hundred airstrikes the Obama administration has unilaterally launched into Northern Iraq to help the hopelessly rickety and incompetent government Republicans bragged about setting up not long ago, but we can be assured of at least one thing: Republicans will damn him for doing it and damn him for not stepping in earlier back when they were trying to impeach him for it.

What happened was. . .

It's been said so often we might as well attribute it to everyone: "we don't see things the way they are, we see them the way we are." So much in life hinges on tiny details. Things nearly identical can be seen in such enormously different fashion and we rarely seem to ask ourselves what the difference is. Sometimes the only difference is the way we are.

In a small Texas town yesterday, the Sheriff pulled 24-year-old Joshua Manuel Lopez's car over in a suburban neighborhood. Lopez had an outstanding warrant for graffiti. There was a scuffle, Sheriff Michael Pimentel was fatally shot.

What we think happened has so much to do with who we are. Much has to do with how the story is presented to us and this time, for some reason, CNN only gave us the bare bones facts, no a priori conclusions were jumped to. But there were so many ways of presenting this and as the metaphorical butterfly can set off a hurricane, it's the minute subtleties of our perception and the writer's perception that determine whether we sigh and go on to the next story, whether we feel bad for the officer, whether we see it as police brutality -- whether we talk about the way police treat minorities, write headlines about an innocent murdered for a misdemeanor or about those probably illegal Hispanics ruining America. There is far more than beauty in the eye of the beholder.

I doubt that the president will show up at the funeral or that the streets of Elmendorf, Texas will see loud and violent protest and I have to ask just how different is this case from other cases. Might it have been different if the ethnicity had been different, if the presumption of malice had been inserted in the coverage, if the trajectory of the bullet had varied by an inch or two? But my perception is meaningless, it's what the public thinks that matters. This is not an art museum and whether the painting is a Picasso or a Pissarro is not determined by the frame. It's determined by you and with whom you choose to side; by what causes you identify with, what party you belong to and what news you listen to. Perhaps the Buddhists are right and it's all an illusion, a great emptiness we fill with ourselves.

Will someone accuse me of racism here? of being unsympathetic? It doesn't matter and the "I" who wrote this is the you who are reading it. Nothing is true, all things are permitted.

Anonymous: An Assassin Among Us

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Let’s face it.  There are times when the blogosphere resembles a war zone.  Anonymous trolls, predators, stalkers, and comment assassins – they pop up sight unseen like whack-a-moles.  Some merely argue in bad faith; some rise to the level of road rage; others leave behind taunts and menacing comments. Some incidents are more memorable – meaning more disturbed and disturbing – than others. For over a year, a persistent predator has been stalking this community.

Years ago, I recall, another predatory troll visited my email box early one morning on Christmas Day. On a holiday celebrated by millions of families, here was one lone predator with malice on his mind.  How strange (and troubling), I thought.  After reporting this incident - among others - to law enforcement, the stalking ceased.

What are the signs and symptoms of a truly disturbed personality behind the anonymous moniker? Momentary outbursts of bad temper do not qualify as disturbed behavior. At various times, all of us have strong viewpoints and our moments.

The signature trait of disturbed behavior is simply this:  a pervasive, pernicious, and long-term pattern of predatory behaviors that rise to the level of obsession.  The predator who stalks this community meets these criteria. Consider the frequency and level of vitriol in comments received within the last 24 hours alone (edited for brevity):

6:59 PM, August 18, 2014:  “Not with all the Jew haters on here, smells like shit, group shit” 

7:48 PM, August 19, 2014:  “You are no liberal defender of civil rights when you help protect and hide antisemitism. You censer those ideas differ from yours and claim it was the troll aspects, or insults that you objected to, yet you allow your buddies to call names to anyone who differs from your thinking, and then you all have a good laugh. What a hypocritical jackass.” 

7:51 PM, August 19, 2014:  “I've seen Octo on the blogs for years. He is one of the biggest trolls and intentional instigators of blog disruption I've ever read. What a fucking hypocrite he is.” 

7:58 PM, August 19, 2014:  “To bad you have to lie to make your false points, but it does show your shit character, just as protecting your antisemite buddy does. Yes, your antisemite buddy, documented as such on Shaw's blog, yet you both protect him. Fuck you asshole”

For over a year, my Spam Box has filled with messages like these, presumably from the same anonymous commenter who stalks one of our readers across Cyberspace and accuses him of anti-Semitism.

Is subject reader, in the crosshairs of subject troll, really an anti-Semite?  The accusations are delusional and irrational – as manifest in all obsessive-compulsive behaviors of this type:

Recurrent and persistent thoughts and impulses that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and cause marked anxiety or distress;

Thoughts, impulses, or images are not simply excessive worries about real-life problems;

With poor insight: For most of the time, the person does not recognize that the obsessions and compulsions are excessive or unreasonable.

In these email missives, the anonymous stalker never offers a single citation -  no links, no quotes, not one shred of evidence, nothing!

The Internet should never be used as a medium for character assassination or as a venue for holding Kangaroo Court.  Even more offensive is when a nameless, faceless person levels unfounded accusations while hiding behind a mask as an anonymous stalker. When the accused never even has a chance to face his accuser, this is the most gutless, cowardly, and unethical act of all.

Rush to Judgement

Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love.

-Aeschylus: Agamemnon- 

We hear on the TV that most arrests in Ferguson Missouri are of  African Americans but we don't ask if the percentage given relates to the percentage of African Americans living there.  I don't know the answer, but I'll bet few people bothered to ask themselves because it complicates things and we're looking for "proof" of something we know a priori. Most of us would be very disappointed at anything in the way of opinion or conjecture or documented proof that things aren't the way we thought and perhaps not the way we hoped.  We want that cop to be guilty and his whole department complicit. It's plausible after all and that's enough for most of us.  Thank god for the law and the courts or we'd become what we think we oppose.

It's well documented by many scientific studies that people will believe a simple, plausible story with few selected supporting facts, or even fallacies for that matter, before they will take the trouble to sort through all the verifiable facts and analyze how they relate to our chosen opinion. Occam's razor cuts both ways and after all, our brains have evolved as machines for jumping to conclusions, not as calculators or statistical tabulators.  Hell, I suspect most people simply latch on to the opinions of the mobs they belong to, or aspire to belong to.  Far more witches have been burned than have been burned by witches.

I think there's great wisdom that comes with self doubt -- the ability to ask oneself  "what if everything I believe is wrong or absurd, or not worth consideration." What if the case is far more complex and the certainties for less clear? If we're lucky we have one of those epiphanic moments when it becomes obvious that we were wrong and we learn from it. We find out someone we were sure was guilty is innocent or vice versa. We find out we're not who we thought we were, that something we believed without question is demonstrably false, that someone or something we had confidence in didn't merit it. We find we've misjudged someone and we're forced, to go out and rage in the storm like Lear.  We suffer into truth and the truth is that if justice is to be served, we wait for the evidence and we look at all of it without prejudice. It's not easy.

The simple plausible truth behind the acquittal of O.J. Simpson was that he was the victim of racism. He's black, the LAPD has a history of  brutality against minorities,  one of the investigators was once heard using the N word and so when his defense attorney told the jury they had to send a message to "the Man"  all the endlessly damning evidence was forgotten.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, so many of us, so well aware of  racism in small town police departments instantly assumed that a "child" was murdered by some racist intent upon hunting innocent black children and were appalled by the jury's decision, because after all it was impossible that the innocent child jumped out of hiding in the dark at a "creepy guy" 4 inches shorter than him. Teenaged boys never do impulsive things, do they?  Impossible because we don't want to consider anything but black and white both in a real and metaphorical sense. We wanted to tie it to our mistrust of guns and laws that had no part in the trial and so we did rightly or wrongly, guilty or innocent -- case closed, minds closed.

When we heard some "child" was shot in Missouri. We saw the inevitable graduation picture wearing a mortarboard hat.  It was just so obviously a racially motivated murder to consider otherwise and of course if we want to pause and wait for more than confused and conflicting eye-witness reports we display endless anecdotes about racism in Ferguson.  So just as we as good liberals shouted "rush to judgement" at the lengthy Simpson trial, we turned about and rushed to judgement even before any investigation in those other two affairs.  Who wants to suffer? Who wants to be seen as a racist?

For those of course, of a different political persuasion, quite the opposite is true and Timothy McVeigh is a hero but Dr. King is not.  But enough about Fox News.  Enough too about questioning the need for the National Guard to stem the violence -- it's necessary because we think the situation is obvious and we are sure that nothing will be done if we don't demonstrate and exhibit our credentials as racism fighters before we really know what happened.  We don't.  We've just assumed and just decided what's obvious.  We get angry because we assume a cop assumed and because we assumed that cops always assume and we make sure that everyone knows every thing that might be construed as evidence  of racism so that we don't pause to reflect that sometimes we're wrong when lives hinge on our being right.

Nos it's absolutely certain that someone reading this will call me a racist or apologist for racism because I'm attempting to temper your crowd-sourced certainty.  If you do, you're not a liberal nor a defender of human rights or of justice but a prejudiced partisan a long way from wisdom.

Madness

Browse around the web and you'd think the world was going crazy and no, I'm not talking about Ferguson, MO.  Perhaps it is and perhaps we're all crazy too, but within a couple of minutes looking for stories other than about Ferguson, I found out far more than I wanted to know about a morgue attendant indicted for having sex with a hundred corpses of crime victims. Good thing I skipped lunch today.  But on any particular day you'll get demented Christian leaders telling us that public nursing causes people to become gay. Maybe all those baby Jesus pictures in churches do the same thing or maybe they cause people to become psychotic like this guy, but who knows?  It's a mad, mad, mad world and it's all Obama's fault for playing favorites with his black cronies.  

Larry Klayman, who is not a racist, is surprised that Obama isn't calling it the black House yet, but no, he's not a racist and Florida Governor Rick Scott whose company stole hundreds of millions from Medicare and who  takes personal credit for the economic recovery he had nothing to do with blames his opponent, former governor Charlie Christ for the recession. You know, the one that ended under Obama.

Think he's embarrassed by a campaign endorsement from a convicted slave trader or taking money from a contractor Florida employs to run prisons?  Nah and nobody else cares because Obama is on vacation while there are so many crises going on!  Really, and even though Obama had cut it short to be in Washington the other night, I broke off a long friendship with someone who didn't think it was fair mentioning the all time presidential vacation record holders, Reagan and Bush.  Bush took 879 Vs. Obama's 150 of course and I seem to recall a few crises during the Bush years. 2 1/2 years of vacation time but never mind -- Obama is just Obama and facts don't matter.

Of course there are crises galore in Ukraine and Africa and Iraq and Obama is being blamed for all of them by people who essentially don't give a damn about any problem but the one that suits their agenda and so it's hard to feel too much sympathy for anyone, crazy or sane.  Yes, it's a crazy world, a self obsessed and heartless and insane world with enough pain and suffering and grief  to fill a hundred worlds for a million years, but to most of us, it's our problem and it's who we can blame it on that matters. It's how much we can hide behind the smoke screen of bogus outrage that matters, because if blame were assigned fairly -- well we can't have that, can we?

You'd think we'd find a way to do something about it, but really, how many sane people are there other than you and I and besides, that damned Obama is on vacation.

"But it's OK! He was a thug!"

You've probably heard that there's a little bit of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. It's right outside of St Louis, and there seem to be some unhappy people there.

See, according to eyewitnesses, a cop confronted the teen, then shot him. The details are a little sketchy, but according to eyewitnesses, the cop told the teens to "get the fuck off the street," started to drive off, and then came back, shouting something to the effect of "What'd you say?!?" And then Michael Brown was shot.

Like I said, the details are sketchy, because, obviously, the cop had a different story than the three eyewitnesses. A lot of the people watching this story from a distance were thrilled when the police released video showing somebody who looked kind of like Michael Brown stealing a box of cheap cigars (Swisher Sweets, if you're curious), because, obviously, Brown was a "thug," and the cop was a hero.

(That's something else: why is it that black teens are now "thugs," if they might be linked to any type of crime, even a misdemeanor? I don't see that word applied to a lot of white kids. Is this like people calling Obama "arrogant" for doing his job as president? Since they aren't saying "uppity," that makes it OK, right?)

There's just one problem with that narrative: the cop in question, Darren Wilson, didn't know that Brown was allegedly involved with any crime other than jaywalking. The police chief has admitted it.

So, the question remains: is it OK for the police to shoot unarmed teens, as long as they can tie them to a crime later?

I can't see any way that might be abused.