I’d like to relate the story of an unfortunate encounter I had yesterday afternoon while I was taking a walk around my neighborhood, but before I do, I need to fill you in on the details of a far more unfortunate story. Shortly after 2:30 on Friday morning, a 70 year old man named Barry Mason drove his Lincoln Continental into 19 year old Jamil Burton, throwing Burton from his bicycle. Mason got out of his car and shot Burton 5 or 6 times in the head and chest. Why did he do this? Mason claims it was because Mr. Burton ripped a necklace from Mason’s neck. The shooting occurred in Kahn Park, which sits on the Northwest corner of the intersection of Pine and 11th streets, about half a block from my home. Here’s a picture of the stuffed animal memorial which was left at the spot of the shooting.

Now on to my story. Yesterday afternoon I was taking a stroll around the neighborhood and stopped by the park to have a look at the memorial. As I approached I noticed a well dressed older man with bright white hair and beard, leaning on his cane while attempting to write something on the white piece of paper you see in the foreground of the picture. I attempted to have a look at what he was writing, assuming it was some expression of sympathy for the dead man. He quickly straightened up, gave me a wide smile and said “this was the last time that ingrate will ever rob somebody.” He was not there to express sympathy, but rather to rejoice in an execution. He mocked the teddy bears for a moment and ambled off with a bright smile on his face.

Now I’m not given to confronting people on the street, but I was a bit stunned by this blood thirsty old man and felt like asking a few questions. I began walking with him and peppering him with questions. I asked him if he felt that public execution was the proper punishment for petty crime. He said that it was. I asked him if he was happy the man was dead. He said he was overjoyed. He referred to the murderer as the victim. As we made our way down Pine street, he began to sense that I was not his friend and began to talk about his own gun and how much he’d like to use it. A curious turn in the discussion, to be sure. I asked if he thought that I should be shot for holding the view that people shouldn’t be executed in the street. He declined to answer. I asked if he felt I should be killed for holding him in utter contempt. He again declined to answer. He instead asked me what charities I contribute to. When I answered that my charitable contributions didn’t seem to be relevant to the discussion, he laughed and called me pathetic and a hypocrite. I asked him to elaborate, but he could not or would not. He wrongly assumed this would shut me up. I asked him again if it was appropriate to run down somebody biking on the sidewalk and shoot him 5 times in the head. Getting more defensive, he began to tell me that wasn’t the story at all and that my head is full of lies. I asked if there was any crime which doesn’t warrant public execution, and I asked what it was like to be full of blood lust and utterly depraved. No more answers. We’d made it a few blocks and he refused to speak to me any longer. An odd encounter, to be sure.

There is something very peculiar in the air and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I keep coming across this sort of thing, but I’m not bright enough to pull it together into a coherent observation. It’s easiest to find on the internet, but apparently you can find it wandering around on the street. Take, for instance, some of the comments left on a recent Philadelphia Daily News story about prison overcrowding. There are over 12 pages of comments and they’re filled with calls for public execution and pysical brutality. Here’s a particularly brutal one.

That is it!!! I have had it with these morons who believe that prisoners should be entitled to decent conditions. PRISONERS ARE THE SCUM OF THE EARTH!!!! I DO NOT CARE WHAT THEY ARE INCARCERATED FOR!!!!! THEY ARE THERE FOR A CLEAR REASON, YOU IDIOTS!!!! And to top it off, this degenerate professor at Penn suing the city for “prisoner mistreatment”. Just wait until he’s a victim of crime. I’ll bet while he’s in some hospital ER getting fixed up, he’ll be more worried about the scumbag who attacked him and whether they’ll have a nice cot to sleep on.

Here’s the solution to prison overcrowding: Get rid of all prisons. Instead, put two in the head of ALL the criminals. No long sentences, no appeals; straight to execution. I don’t care what color, race, religion or creed the loser is. Plain and simple: commit a violent crime/hurt someone, you gotta go. BANG!! I guarantee you that would be the greatest crime deterrent known to man. Plus, it eases the burden of us taxpayers. I would personally sign up to be an executioner. I can’t think of a better way to help serve my community.

I expect to see that sort of thing posted on The Free Republic or in Jeff Goldstein’s comment section, but this stuff is bubbling up on a mainstream newspaper’s web page. We have a sizable segment of society that feels execution or torture is always justified and they aren’t illiterate street thugs or gang members. Instead, they’re members of respectable society. We have a government that routinely breaks the law, violates constitutional rights and engages in torture and we have a sizable portion of society begging for more of the same. So what is going on here? Is this just a normal dynamic that I’m just noticing for the first time? Any thoughts?

At Ellen’s request I’ve removed all of her posts from the website. Nothing to do with the content, but she’s dealing with a truly bizarre and unsettling situation involving the campaign staff of a gubernatorial candidate and would like to lower her profile until everything has calmed down. I’ll hold off on the details until the legal questions are settled and it’s a little closer to the November election. It will be more fun then anyway.

For the time being, I’m not going to post anything here either, but I will continue posting on the front page of Booman Tribune. I’ll probably crosspost a little just to keep the cobwebs off.

How do we know that people really believe what they say they believe, rather than just say they believe what they wish people to believe they believe? There are also potential problems in situations where when two or more principles contradict each other: how to know which principle is more deeply held? There is a lot of ambiguity, and many opportunities for error.

Fortunately for us, The Editors set up an experiment in 2002, wherein he transferred all federal power to a single party. For the purposes of the experiment, that party increased the size of the federal budget by record amounts and ceded nearly unprecedented powers to the executive, at the expense of already docile legislative and judiciary branches. That executive expanded his endless war on a tactic to a place where that tactic was largely absent, justifying it to the public with a nearly endless stream of falsehoods. For the purposes of the experiment, the executive authorized the use of torture, indefinite detainment without trial, secret prisons and warentless wiretaps among other massive expansions of the police and military powers of the state, all justified by a poorly defined war on a tactic. All the while, the party’s voter base demanded more and more power for the government and branded any press coverage of the government’s policies, not loaded with accolades and striped of detail, as an act of treason.

The question is, what will the small government libertarians do in the 2006 midterm elections? It should be an interesting conclusion to the experiment. I’m just glad The Editors is on the case, and doubly glad that the last four years have been part of a well thought out clinical experiment, rather than the gut wrenching madness I’d assumed.

Now do yourselves a favor and read the whole post, as it’s lovely through and through. My little summary here can’t even begin to do it justice and I may well be too thick to understand it fully, so feel free to make rude comments about me. Regardless of my own comprehension, some time in the next two weeks, I’ll be testing each and every one of you at length and without notes, just to be sure that you’ve done exactly as I’ve asked.

Originally posted here

Once I get over my latest bout of “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about,” things should get back to normal.

I’ve written a few things Booman recently that haven’t seemed right for cross posting here. That’s probably the right direction. It should be out of context, right? Anyway, here are some links

• I Want to Bore You to Death
• Please Don’t Read This
• My Thin Skin
• Floating in a Sea of Lukewarm Vaseline
• It’s Never Too Late for Bullshit
• Don’t Read This
• Know Your Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators
• Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing
• Safety For Lies

There is quite a bit more, but those are the ones I could find that I didn’t cross post and that I don’t mind all that much. You can follow this link for recent posts and this link for old ones. I want to try to start writing here again and in a context that makes sense for this site. I’m sure Ellen wouldn’t mind a hand. I just have to gaze at my navel a little longer and I’ll straighten this all out. Have a good night and don’t let the data miners bite you square on the ass.

Mary admired the two little girls I’d brought, mixed them in with her own children, sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn’t like me or didn’t like something about the night. She was polite but chilly.

“It’s a nice cozy house you have here,” I said, and it really was.

“I’ve fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O’Hare couldn’t drink the hard stuff since the war.

So we sat down. O’Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it was about me that could burn up Mary so. I was a family man. I’d been married only once. I wasn’t a drunk. I hadn’t done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn’t sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off anger.

I asked O’Hare what I’d said or done to make her act that way.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.

So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I’d brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O’Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow. It wasn’t much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.

That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war — like the ones upstairs!”

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“I — I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: “Mary,” I said, “I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

“I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’ ”

She was my friend after that.

This was taped while Davis was recording one of his collaborations with Gil Evans. On You Tube, the broadcast date is given 1958, which would mean that it was recorded during the production of Porgy and Bess. To my ear, however, John Coltrane’s solo sounds like one he would play in late 1959 or early 1960, rather than one he would play in at any time in 1958. Not so small a distinction as you might think. My guess is that this was recorded during the production of Sketches of Spain. The guys standing around with horns doing nothing are members of the Gil Evans Orchestra. I’m sure the actual date of the taping is quite easy to find with 30 seconds of research, but I prefer to engage in wild speculation in order to provide ample ammunition for irate commenters.

For comparison, listen to this version of So What recorded in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22, 1960, and this version recorded during the second set of the same concert. Coltrane’s solo on the is so good it nearly ruined my life, and the second is so good it would have done the same had the first not been around. Whatever. I’ve already cried that river.

You were expecting pandas, weren’t you?

Originaly posted in a rather unpleasant shade of green

Chris Cillizza had an interesting post on his blog earlier this afternoon, dealing with a little verbal jousting that took place between Bill Clinton and Guy T. Saperstein at a Democracy Alliance event last weekend. Clinton apparently sent Saperstein a letter of apology afterwards and Cillizza posts Sperstein’s reply, some of which I find quite compelling. Here’s a little, and I’ll put the whole letter after the jump.

I am not suggesting we should judge anyone solely on one vote, but this was the single most important vote anyone currently in Congress ever made and we all will be paying for it for many years, maybe our entire lifetimes. The war has diverted America’s attention from the real war—the fight on terrorism. Who knows what this diversion of our attention and resources ultimately will cost us? It has cost us alliances and caused America’s standing in the world to plummet. It has weakened America’s ability to respond to real national security threats, such as Iran and North Korea—the U.S. and Britain have become, in the words of The Economist, “The Axis of Feeble.” It has depleted our financial resources and made it difficult, if not impossible, in the foreseeable future to address any of America’s serious infrastructure needs—even if Democrats take control of Congress in 2006 and/or the Presidency in 2008. In short, the war has been catastrophic on many fronts. Are voters supposed to forget how we got into this mess, its long-term costs, or not measure leadership by who got it wrong?

No, they aren’t and let’s hope they don’t. The judgement of any elected official who voted in favor of the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq is highly suspect, to say the least. Indeed, their judgement should be mocked and ridiculed at every opportunity and all of their positions on Iraq, or any other matter of importance, should be considered questionable until proven otherwise. I include the ones who are really very sorry and weepy about their decision and have come to their senses a few years too late. If their decision to support the resolution was in any way influenced by some ass backwards political calculous, dreamt up by morons who thought that authorizing a war would somehow get that very same war off the table prior to the 2002 mid term elections, they don’t belong in public office. If they were too stupid to realize that the resolution would lead war, and that the war it would lead to would be an unmitigated disaster, then they should probably go back to pre-school.

I know I’m throwing a lot of babies out with the bath water, but how a member of Congress voted on that resolution should be at the forefront of any discussion about their reelection, or their desire for a higher office. I do think that vote is a relevant gauge of any politician who participated. We should look at what happened when he or she was presented with a clear choice, whether or not they chose to make one of the worst decisions in modern American history. For a more reasoned argument, have a look at Mr. Saperstein’s letter after the jump.

(more…)

“I’d like to congratulate Pat Murphy on his nomination.”

“The voters now have a clear choice between Pat Murphy, a ‘cut and run’ liberal and me, Mike Fitzpatrick, a proven independent leader who knows we need a new plan for success in Iraq – and calls for an independent commission to develop it – but who won’t risk our families’ security by cutting and running.”

“While I have the deepest respect for Pat’s military service, the conclusion he has drawn from that service is dangerously mistaken. Pat’s youthful call for a precipitous withdrawal is even more extreme than anything called for by Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. We all know that mistakes have been made in this war. But it would be folly to cut and run, and make Iraq a giant terrorist base, allied with Iran, potentially paving the way for a nuclear 9/11. We cannot allow that to happen.”

What a class act. Jean must be proud. Jane thinks that Fitzpatrick sounds like a scared rabbit. That sounds about right, though I’d probably add bed wetter and asshole to the mix as well.

Due to an experimental psychotropic agent added to the water in the Philadelphia area which causes ordinary people to give up on productive activities and become political bloggers at an alarming rate of nearly 200 per day, you’ll likely be reading about this race for months to come, whether you care to or not. We should all be thankful that Fitzpatrick is a tool, because it will be that much more fun to watch him lose, even if you live somwhere with normal water.

(Via Howard)

Originally posted in a nasty shade of green.

As a side note, did I ever mention that Pat Robertson is a fucking loon and an asshole? No. Well he is, but you already knew that. Now that’s all the high minded political analysis I can muster this evening, so have a good night. I’m supposed to be doing this somewhere else anyway.

How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.