GPS leads driver into harbor

Marcus Brigstocke rants:

I know that most religious folk are moderate and nice and reasonable and wear tidy jumpers and eat cheese like real people… But they have to accept that they are the power base for the nutters. Without their passive support the loonies in charge of these faiths would just be loonies safely locked away and medicated, somewhere nice, you know with a view of some trees, where they can claim they have a direct channel to god between sessions making tapestry drinks coasters, watching Teletubbies, and talking about their days in the Hitler youth. The ordinary faithful make these vicious tyrannical thugs what they are… Without the audience to prop it up… fundamentalist religious fanaticism goes away.

Via Mano Singham…

Of course, your kids will greatly enjoy this (via Mano Singham’s reader The Rose) method.

MS Bellows writes:

Meanwhile, Romney appears to have escaped relatively unsinged from the apparently unrelated revelation that he may have committed voter fraud in January 2010, when – despite not owning a house in Massachusetts and having given every appearance of having moved to California – he registered and voted in the Massachusetts special election to replace the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy. Given the GOP’s ongoing use of the “voter fraud” fable to justify modern Jim Crow laws and its highly-publicized persecution of the voter registration group Acorn, an actual case of felony voter fraud committed by the Republican nominee could have been a big story – but Romney was able to tamp down the flames by claiming, not very credibly but also not disprovably, that he and Ann actually were living in their son Tagg’s Belmont, Massachusetts basement in 2010. Without proof that Romney lied about where he lived, there’s no felony – and no big national story.

Thank you Mano Singham…

For a very long time I have been anti-death penalty because I don’t trust our Law and Order system to arrest, convict and execute the right person 100 percent of the time. Given a perfect system, I’ve held up to today, I say execute any criminal that presents a life-long threat to society and save the money of caring for the prisoner.

I’m reading today more about the case of Norway’s Anders Breivik and the concept of Restorative Justice which may influence me to change that long-held position.

Clare Feikert-Ahalt writes:

Whilst my first instinct was that it did not seem very prison like, Dr. Zeldin presented some statistics that indicate the approach that Norway has taken is extremely effective at not only rehabilitating offenders and preventing reoffending, but also at deterring criminal behavior. The prison population is 73 prisoners per 100,000 of the population, whereas in the U.S. it is 763 per 100,000 of the population. The recidivism rate in Norway is also relatively low – 20% in Norway, compared with 52% in the U.S. [Emphasis mine, JH] The contrast in these figures is quite striking, and despite the initial shock at what seems to be the near luxury of the most recently built prison, the statistics show that the Norwegian approach is relatively effective.

Feikert-Ahalt pins the difference, in part, on Norway’s small and fairly homogeneous population.

While I don’t discount that characterization, I just don’t think that societal diversity alone can account for a 945 percent increase. I would look further at economic disparity in the United States vs. that of Norway and how that disparity creates Social Justice crimes. By that I mean those, with a nod to Todd Akin, legitimate, violent crimes committed by sociopaths and those crimes resulting from the widening gap between the 1 percent and the rest of us (and the debilitating sense of hopelessness that disparity creates). In the latter category I would place most drug crimes, sex crimes involving consenting adults, petty theft, minor assault and perhaps a few other broad categories that might be suggested.

I’ll update this story as I read more:

NORWEGIAN CRIMINAL LAW AND THE JULY 22, 2011, MASSACRE

What is restorative justice?

What do you think?

I was too young for 22 November, too old for 28 January, too jaded for 11 September; but I remember 20 July as if it were yesterday. We won’t trouble you any longer Mr. Armstrong.

0838: Visiting Youngstown

0451: Pussy Riot’s jailing: the full story

Just so we’re clear, I’m pro-choice. Always have been.

Having said that, I’ve been wrestling of late with the question of “is it possible to have a conversation on the topic of abortion with a person who opposes the woman’s right to choose on religious grounds?

The core question, for those whose life view stands on a spiritual foundation is when is the fetus more than a mass of cells growing inside the womb? The only way to make that distinction is to ask: “When does the fetus acquire a soul?”

There are only two points where an answer makes any sense: at conception and at birth (maybe first breath, maybe the cutting of the umbilical cord?).

If the former, then abortion is murder of an innocent human. If the later, it is not.

If the person whom you are speaking with takes the first view, how can we ever convince them otherwise without calling into question their most basic beliefs? (And calling those beliefs into question may not be a bad action.)

So, that is my rambling way of saying I’m much more interested in the question of “Is change possible?” than I am in “Is abortion murder?” And, am I just as guilty of intransigence as the people I want to have a conversation with?

How would you answer the question?

And you thought working smarter was the goal? Does this shed a bit of light on why our recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic at best? Do you really think the bosses have the solutions to get Americans back to work? Do you think getting Americans back to work appears anywhere on their list of goals?

Yes? Well you have another think comng.

I first heard this story earlier today while in my car and I confess to a serious skidmark moment.

Writing for The Atlantic, Max Fisher lays out the story and focues on the difference between our system of Retributive Jusice and Norway’s system of Restorative Justice.

He writes:

The American justice system, like most of those in at least the Western world, is built on an idea called retributive justice. In very simplified terms (sorry, I’m not a legal scholar), it defines justice as appropriately punishing someone for an act that’s harmful to society. Our system does include other ideas: incapacitating a criminal from committing other crimes, rehabilitating criminals to rejoin society, and deterring other potential criminals. At its foundation, though, retributive justice is about enforcing both rule of law and more abstract ideas of fairness and morality. Crimes are measured by their damage to society, and it’s society that, working through the court system, metes out in-turn punishment. Justice is treated as valuable and important in itself, not just for its deterrence or incapacitative effects. In a retributive system, the punishment fits the crime, and 21 years in a three-room cell doesn’t come close to fitting Breivik’s 77 premeditated murders.

Norway doesn’t work that way. Although Breivik will likely be in prison permanently — his sentence can be extended — 21 years really is the norm even for very violent crimes. The much-studied Norwegian system is built on something called restorative justice. Proponents of this system might argue that it emphasizes healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal him or herself. Sounds straightforward enough, but you might notice that there’s nothing in there about necessarily punishing the criminal, and in fact even takes his or her needs into account

Before you thank whoever you thank for beng an American, read all of Fisher’s piece and then, if you wish, we can discuss.

Fish meet barrel meet shotgun…

Via Mano Singham…

From Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges:

Dear Sirs:

I am sixty years old. I became an Eagle Scout forty-five years ago at the age of fifteen, having also earned the God and Country Award, attained Brotherhood membership in the Order of the Arrow, and attended the 1967 World Jamboree. As my sons grew up, I served as a Den Leader, Cubmaster, Scoutmaster, and Asst. Scoutmaster at the National Jamboree. Together with our troop parents and Scouts, we re-activated Troop 110 in Portland, Oregon. Both of my sons and nine other Scouts became Eagle Scouts while I was Scoutmaster. I always considered being an Eagle Scout to be one of my key accomplishments in life, on par with attending Stanford University and becoming an emergency physician. I have lived my life by the Scout Law and encouraged the young men of our troop to do so as well.

In 2000, our Troop 110 Committee sent the attached letter to troop parents and unanimously adopted the attached resolution rejecting the BSA’s (until then secret) policy of granting membership only to heterosexuals. Our Troop Committee Chairman and I met with the Cascade Pacific Council Scout Executive at that time and made it clear that we would not follow the discriminatory policies of the BSA and that we were prepared to have our troop charter revoked. It was not.

By your recent re-affirmation that the Boy Scouts of America is a heterosexual-only organization, you have betrayed the ideals of Scouting and relegated the BSA to the extreme fringes of American society. Young people today are respectful of human rights, including those whose biological nature is not heterosexual. This discrimination by the BSA is as repugnant to most of America as a whites-only policy would be. Whatever rationalization you ascribe to this policy cannot mask its true nature: bigotry.

My sons and I have struggled to reconcile our status as Eagle Scouts with the bigoted nature of the BSA. That struggle is over for all of us. It is with both sadness and relief that I and my two sons, Gus Jewell and Cameron Jewell, hereby jointly return our Eagle Scout badges and renounce our affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America. We are proud to declare that we are no longer Eagle Scouts.

In the True Spirit of Scouting and with Relief,

Steven Jewell, MD

OK, Notcrooked, the ball is in your court. (And, oh yeah, Steven Jewel, Gus Jewel, Cameron Jewel and I, like hundreds of our Eagle brothers, are proud to put our names to our stands. You? Not so much.)

[Update @ 0427: Surprise, surprise, not only is Notcrooked too cowardly to actually use a real name, the email address that Notcrooked left was fake.

This is the mail system at host gateway12.websitewelcome.com.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.77.27] said:
550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please
try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or
550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6596 10si8847814oef.11
(in reply to RCPT TO command)

I would expect no less from the a person whose anonymous tag is itself, false.]

Previously…

We are all Homer Simpsons now.

Previously…

1056: Using ‘gaffes’ to evade accountability

A Unified theory of mental pollution…

1032: Fareed Zakaria and the ghost world of punditry

Previously…