What Are You Saying Here, Neal?

Quothe the Talkmaster, a.k.a. Atlanta’s favorite son Neal Boortz, in his program notes this morning:

Yesterday, the jury in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing phase of the trial reached a verdict: Moussaoui would be given a life sentence. No death penalty. In case you’re wondering who Moussaoui is, he’s the only person to be tried in the attacks of 9/11. He was supposed to have been one of the hijackers…flying a plane into the White House. It didn’t work out and he was arrested instead.

So the jury passed on death. Instead of sending this scumbag to meet Mohammed, he’ll be enjoying the next several decades in prison. Free room and board…all paid for by the taxpayers of the nation he attacked. So why didn’t he get death, as he deserved?

Three of the jurors said he only had limited knowledge of what was going to happen on 9/11. Only “limited” knowledge. What does it take for him to be responsible? Are we supposed to spare his life because he didn’t golf with Mohammed Atta on the weekends? Three other jurors offered as their excuse that Moussaoui only had a minor role in 9/11. A minor role.

OK … full disclosure here. As I’ve said on the air, if I was on that jury I might have a difficult time voting for the death penalty myself. He didn’t participate, he didn’t plan. There’s just the argument that he knew about it. Do we really want to start executing people because they knew a crime was going to be committed, and didn’t tell someone?

Something to think about.

Uh…yeah. Yeah, we do. I don’t see the problem.

Look, I think we can all agree the paramount issue is the possibility of executing a guy who shouldn’t be executed. When we beat that horse to death, though, what we’re really talking about, is a wholly different issue: Deciding legal consequences based on feelings instead of by rational thought. That is the real issue.

Well, the fact of the matter is that a huge chunk among our population consists of people who are self-programmed to decide everything based on feelings instead of thought. A lot of these people, wonderful people as they may be, are simply incapable of pronouncing the more stringent consequence upon a defendant, even if the evidence concretely supports that this is what they should do. They simply can’t do it. The principles of our jury system being left in place to have a consistent influence on ensuing events, the logical thing to happen would be that these people be automatically excused. Of course, that isn’t done. So they serve. And they decide things based on feelings.

Trouble is, while everybody “loses sleep” over convicting a man who may be innocent — nobody loses a wink over letting a guilty guy go. I saw it when I served on a jury. We got a lot of people out there who can review the evidence and the rules of conduct for jurors, and see that every scintilla of material before them leaves them no reasonable option but to convict — and before they cast that vote, they “feel” bad. So they have to change the vote. They can’t explain why. It just doesn’t feel right.

My comments about “12 Angry Men” (1957) sum this problem up, I think.

The question that drives the movie is whether the jurors have properly awarded the defendant the benefit of any reasonable doubt, and as the climax approaches, the attention given to this reaches a fevered pitch. Left behind in the dust, is the equally critical question of whether the defendant is really guilty. There’s a scene early on when Jack Warden, the juror who just wants to get the voting over with so he can watch a ball game, meets Henry Fonda in the washroom. The last two lines in that scene discuss the possibility that the boy may be acquitted, even though he is guilty. Fonda says something to the effect of “that very well may be” or some such, and to my recollection this is the last time this possibility is even considered.

The jury may have released a murderer onto the streets. You can make the argument that with the presence of reasonable doubt, this was their job. I agree. But as Henry Fonda walks down the courthouse steps to resume his everyday life as an architect, would it really then be fitting to have the happy “a wrong has been righted” swelling-orchestra music, as our hero walks proudly among his fellow citizens with his head held high? Doubt or no, conviction or no, this kind of peace-of-mind is not lying in wait for you after your last day on a real jury. There are jurors who want it anyway, and because of that, will not convict anyone. They have seen this movie, and want to be Henry Fonda. I’ve served with them. It’s a pretty serious problem.

There you have it in a nutshell. People think they’re weighing both sides of the issue, but the issue of public safety too often is left, as I said, “in the dust.” Ever since Henry Fonda taught us how to be “disturbed” by the evidence that “proves” a guy’s guilt, everybody wants to be Henry Fonda. Everybody wants to be Juror #8.

Now I’ll grant you, LWOP (life without possibility of parole) is not being released “onto the streets.” In Moussaoui’s case, that’s an important distinction because there really is no substantial reason to think he will ever be on the streets.

But he might as well be, propaganda wise, and what is the War on Terror, to the terrorists, if it is not a propaganda campaign?

Zacarias Moussaoui said “God save Osama bin Laden” as a judge prepared to sentence him to life in prison for conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We will come back another day,” Moussaoui said in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, a day after a jury spared him from the death penalty for the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

“God curse America, God save Osama in Laden, you will never get him,” Moussaoui said. “I fight for my beliefs. You think that you own the world and I will prove that you are wrong.”

Moussaoui, and all who sympathize with him, think we’re just a bunch of pansies and our country’s time on this planet is coming to an end. Why in the world shouldn’t they? In all of human history, continuing survival has never been inextricably linked with refusal to punish the guilty. And yet that refusal to punish the guilty, infests America like a thick plague.

So I dunno. I have not reviewed the evidence the way a jury would have, and I have an open mind. But I need to hear something better. I need to hear something that does not begin with the words “do we really want to start executing…” Because speaking for myself, I’m a little surprised by the suggestion we have not started executing co-conspirators just because their fingers weren’t actually on the triggers. I thought we could already do that.

Update: You can review the official jury poll form for yourself, here.

This Kind Of Diversity We Don’t Need

di�verse
Function: adjective
1 : differing from one another : UNLIKE
2 : composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities

Diversity is, simply, the quality that multiple things have when they are diverse. Trouble is, the locomotive of orthodox cultural use has left the track of dictionary definition. In this case, when we talk about diversity we usually refer to some kind of cultural value; something you can celebrate. This is irreconcilably incompatible with the two definitions above, both of which seek to describe a purely mathematical attribute. Let us, then, call this definition #3. Specifically, it’s the absence of prejudice and bigotry. If pinheadedness prevailed, everyone within a given set of privileged individuals, would look alike. But this use of the word exchanges one flavor of pinheadedness for another kind, for the assumptions that demand uncompromising allegiance are 1) diversity (defs. #1 and #2) can’t co-exist with even a trace of prejudice, so even a little of the former proves that the latter has been fully driven out; and 2) should diversity (defs. #1 and #2) be lacking in any way, this is concrete evidence that some unacceptable, residual level of prejudice must still be in place.

Both of those assumptions are suspect. No sane man would bet his left testicle on either one of them.

Gary Larson has yet another definition. He says: “One of the goals of diversity is that we co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.” Mr. Larson is a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Corrections, which has just gone through a little bit of a flap about diversity.

A “diversity calendar” published by the state Department of Corrections that lists the birthdays of several controversial historical figures, including the Japanese commander who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, has angered at least one employee and Sen. Jim Honeyford, who called it a “personal affront to veterans.”

Honeyford, R-Sunnyside, wrote Corrections Director Harold Clarke requesting an explanation for why the April and May calendars recognize Isoroku Yamamoto, Lenin, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh.

“A Washington state agency supported by taxpayer funds has absolutely no place painting these individuals as worthy of the support of the state and its employees in the name of ‘diversity,’ especially when their birthdays are given exactly the same weight as Veterans’ Day,” Honeyford wrote in a letter sent earlier this week.

The monthly calendars are a part of the department’s “workplace diversity program” and are sent to agency employees only. Many state agencies have diversity programs to promote tolerance and understanding of different races, cultures, religions and ethnicities.

Honeyford said in a telephone interview Friday that copies of the calendars were sent to his office.

“I opened it up and looked at it and was shocked,” he said. “To me, if you’re going to represent diversity, it should be someone worthy of honor, and I have a great deal of difficulty with these bloodthirsty people who killed a lot of people.”

Gary Larson, a spokesman for Corrections, said the calendars are not celebrations of individuals.

“Basically, the purpose of this calendar was meant to be an instructional tool that just lists people who had an impact on the world and provoke thought. The intent was certainly not to be offensive to veterans or anyone else,” he said. “One of the goals of diversity is that we co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.”

The monthly calendars are distributed by e-mail and larger, printed versions are posted around the agency. Larson said the cost is “nominal.”

Now for what it’s worth, I can see Mr. Larson’s point. It’s just that he’s using yet another definition of the word “diversity,” a definition that, like the meaningful one above, isn’t documented anywhere. Let us call this definition #4. He’s talking about a values-neutral form of diversity. Good guys, bad guys, let’s “celebrate” ’em all.

Of course what nobody’s going to talk about, is this kind of diversity has strong appeal to the moral relativists who insist there is no good and there is no bad. Lookee, a calendar that celebrates them all in an equal light, just the way the moral relativists and nihilists like it. If veterans are offended by that…well, you know what? They have every right to be. Some of them were inducted into their service, by means of a draft — but are proud of that service. Others of them volunteered for service, something you simply can’t do if you don’t believe that things matter. Supporting the nihilist viewpoint, or doing something that can be reasonably seen as supporting it, has to be an intellectual insult to these people.

And this creates another problem. When the “suits” start talking about definition #3, waxing eloquently about “valuing diversity,” this necessarily has to have a substantially different meaning than the definition #4 the spokesman is talking about. Simply put, you don’t “value” something that is antithetical to any and all sense of “value.” Values are cherished, or else they’re not.

This is a problem. Definitions #3 and #4 have very, very little in common, since one of them upholds ideals as a primary purpose of the definition exercise, and the other definition seeks to abstain from upholding anything. The only thing the two definitions have in common, is an intrinsic hostility to “traditional” values and the “traditional” elite classes. The “we gotta have more diversity” definition insists that the six-foot-tall white-anglo-saxon-protestants be blocked from promotion until someone else has a shot, barred from acceptance at prestigious universities, perhaps fired. The nihilistic definition, simply says the “good guys” aren’t any better than anyone else; Prince John is just as worthy a person as Robin Hood.

This is fascinating to me. We live in a time when you ask for “coffee” and anyone positioned to fulfill your order, is paralyzed from any real action until umptyfratz-many implied ambiguities in your request are cleared up on the spot. Decaf? Latte? Mocha? Cold or hot? Americano Machiatto? Room for cream? Soy or milk? And yet when you use the word “diversity,” even very cursory exploration of the definition is tantamount to yelling that the Emperor has no clothes, and is thus not done. But you may, easily, be using one of two directly opposite definitions. The two definitions are not listed in the dictionary, nor do they adequately resemble anything you will find there. And the two definitions have nothing, absolutely nothing in common — except an ingrained hostility to the traditional six-foot-tall chestnut-haired clean-shaven straight white guy.

Where Mr. Larson’s first statement illuminates this unworkable discrepancy, by contradicting itself, his second statement is not nearly so complicated. It’s just flat-out wrong: “We co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.” In order to adhere to that principle, historical figures from World War II, or any other armed conflict, would have to be left out of this calendar. War, you see, is a funny thing; it doesn’t involve a lot of defining core principles, but one of the things it holds absolutely sacred is that we should not co-exist with people we disagree with. Some would say, that’s the best way to define what war is.

And I can’t think of a more vivid demonstration of that, than planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This Is Good III

The website is called Pass The Ammo. Pretty good stuff. Funny. Some of it a little on the tasteless side. I’ll make a point of checking on it frequently.

Earth in the Balance?

Friday, I noted that Josef Stalin said “It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes,” and to this, I added an update: “It isn’t what news channels are biased, it is who gets to say they are biased. Or more to the point, who gets to say what bias is.”

I got a third one-liner, along the same lines: It isn’t what you prove, it’s how you go about proving it.

Does anybody else see something pretty peculiar in this Eleanor Clift column?

A movie about Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation about global warming doesn�t sound all that exciting, but if you liked “March of the Penguins,” you�ll love “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore is as relentless in his travels to save the planet and faces almost as many obstacles as those penguins making their way across the tundra.

Getting the country to face up to global warming is his life�s mission, and it could be his ticket to the presidency.
:
Gore has become the darling of the left, yet global warming is not, or shouldn�t be, a partisan issue. The days when the first President Bush mocked Gore as “Ozone Man” are over, relegated to the dustbin of history. Conservative evangelical Christians see themselves as stewards of the earth. When asked at a screening of his film in Washington this week what he would say to Bush�s claim that global warming needs further study, Gore quipped, “I hope he finds the real killer,” adding quickly, “I shouldn�t have said that.”

Let us assume, for just a second or two, that my third clever one-liner does not hold. Let us presume that the way you prove something doesn’t matter at all…what you end up proving, is all that counts. Let us presume, further, that “Ozone Man is relegated to the dustbin of history” and it is now an accepted, indisputable fact that man-made global warming threatens to doom us all. Let us award the benefit of any doubt, also, to those who apprehensively intone that we are entering our final days of potentially doing something effective to prevent it.

Now, do these presumptions not make Clift’s epistle seem all the more strange? For now, what we are presuming is that “An Inconvenient Truth” is, after all, true. Our ecosystem is in danger. We’re doing it to ourselves. The policies that are trashing the environment, will be left in place for another three years, because our current President is waiting to find “the real killer.”

So little angst about our final few days before ecological armageddon; so much exuberance about this “darling of the left” and his “ticket to the White House.”

If you really did think we were slowly killing ourselves by eighty-sixing our own environment, would it matter worth a hill of beans what darling Chicken Little Superstar was standing on the cusp of being swept into the White House?

This is the kind of thing that makes me believe the environment has nothing, not one damn thing, to do with anything. This article is all celebration, almost as if Gore has already won the Presidency. Hope springs eternal, I suppose — but where is the suspense? Where is the attitude of “Oh my God, I hope he gets in there in time to reverse these horrible policies and save our planet!”

Any change in our reckoning of global warming, should it lead to a change in our policies toward it, would have something to do with our continuing global survival. If that is presumed to be the case, the fawning over a 57-year-old future presidential candidate, even one deemed more worthy of having a shot than he had six years ago, seems strangely irrelevant. But it’s not irrelevant to Clift, and people who write articles like hers. The breathless anticipation of the electoral process that takes place quadrennially, amongst the apelike creatures that happen to infest this doomed ecosystem, is all that matters. The doomed ecosystem itself, merits mention only insofar as how the oncoming doomsday may influence the quadrennial election process.

So I don’t think this whole issue is about ecological doom, in other words, “what is proven.” I think what it’s all about, is that huge toothpaste tube full of the baby-killin’, soldier-slandering, unionized, mediocrity-promoting liberal mish-mash we’ll have shoved down our throats after Al Gore, or whoever, gets in there. And, it’s all about how you go about proving things…making people believe there is no God, simply because an elitist layer told them they should believe that. Making people believe the world is coming to an end unless something is done, because the elitist layer told them they should believe that. Making people believe Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, because Bill Clinton’s friends tell them to believe that.

We’re in a dangerous time right now. By giving us precise instructions on what to believe, the know-it-alls are “proving” to us things they can’t prove; in fact, some things no one could ever prove. And if we show the slightest bit of reluctance to swallow what they’re feeding us, head-to-tail and every piece of fin and gut in between, we’re showing “hostility” to what is now being called “science.” Throughout history, science has been synonymous with a healthy skepticism to the prevailing viewpoint. What is called epistemology, has always been an important ingredient of it. Today, science has become the prevailing viewpoint, having nothing whatsoever to do with epistemology, and a healthy skepticism toward it has been re-defined as the know-nothing, knuckle-dragging, slope-foreheaded province of uneducated rednecks.

Since the real issue isn’t the environment, I think it’s captured by what’s written above. Science By Decree. Listen to the High Priests to find out what’s true. Who ya gonna believe, the council of wise village elders, or your lyin’ eyes?

Those who wisely counsel us about our impending self-destruction, are quite agitated about it…with glee, because their guy might get into the White House over it. Just before the world is supposed to go boom, according to their own arguments. Nevermind. The White House is the most important thing…on this doomed planet.

This is surreal. But not unusual. Not in the least.

Non-Assimilation

Continuing with the “Yin and Yang” theme articulated below. People tend to go through life laboring under a premise that everyone is destined to live in close proximity with everybody else, has the skills to live thusly, and should work at cultivating the diplomatic aptitudes necessary to bringing it about. But in the recesses of their minds, everyone has darker thoughts culminating from millenia of tribal living. Everything for the tribe. A decent education for the next generation, a higher standard-of-living for all, paying the bills on time, world peace — all of these goals in life, are secondary to bringing victory to the tribe. The tribe must prevail. Everyone else should either go away, or learn to do everything the way they do, the way my tribe does them.

Today is “Day Without An Immigrant” day. There are supposed to be demonstrations against immigration laws — not against those laws being in existence, per se, quite so much as those laws being enforced.

This strikes me as nothing short of amazing. Go ahead and keep this law in place that I broke by coming here, sayeth the protesters. Just don’t increase the penalties on breaking it. Not that I intend to break it some more, mind you…but I’m really going to bust my ass to make sure you don’t make it a felony. Because, well, you know, it shouldn’t be.

I’m told the protesters want “the right to come here.” So far as I know, nobody’s protesting to make illegal immigration outright-legal, so no, I don’t think they want the right to come here. “Illegal” means you don’t have the right to do something. It would be far more accurate, to say they’re demonstrating for the privilege of getting away, without consequence, with doing things they know they don’t have the “right” to do.

Well let’s just table that debate about semantics for now.

Once the illegal aliens are here, what do they want to do? Assimilate? Peacefully adapt into the culture of the place into which they’ve trespassed? Or make some big wins for the tribe? Displace the indigenous people? Or, perhaps, convert them? A combination of both? Make everybody they see, within their line-of-sight, exactly like them?

Here’s a clue. It’s from “Rossputin,” the blog of some guy named Ross G. Kaminsky. Seems to be a decent fellow, maybe I’ll send him some e-mail. Geez, his wife is hot. Anyway, he got ahold of that goofy Mexicana Airlines magazine editorial: “With All Due Respect, Los Angeles Is Ours.” Cheery sentiment, huh?

Waiters, waitresses, chamber maids, babysitters and farmhands are instigating a cultural reconquest in cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, New York, Denver; Spanish is their language, the Virgin of Guadalupe is their religious idol and chili peppers and tortillas their staple diet. here, Candlemas Day and the 5th of May are celebrated with enthusiasm. But these Mexicans immigrants [sic] are also spearheading a social movement. Together with refugees of other nationalities, they are demanding health insurance and pensions, benefits that they often manage to obtain.

I’m told the illegal aliens want to come over here to live peacefully, provide for their families, and follow the law. That is true, if and only if 1) one is naturally inclined to break laws, so that one can live out the remainder of his existence following other laws — which may or may not be as sensible as the one he broke; and 2) the opinion of the author of this editorial is far, far in the minority.

Both of those presuppositions strike me as a tad far-fetched.