This week, I finished a homicide case. The case had been pending for over a year.
Two parents were charged with child abuse resulting in death. They entered pleas of guilty to child neglect resulting in death and to conspiracy. Each was sentenced to a long penitentiary term.
The why’s and wherefore’s of trial preparation and plea negotiations and so forth are things I will never discuss about any case. No matter, that’s not the point this evening.
The victim was, let’s call her, “Baby Jane,” a 22-month-old little girl.
The facts as reported in the press and the public file are disturbingly simple:
Baby Jane was discovered without pulse or respirations at home. The mother was present. The father was at work. The mother called in-laws, who lived nearby, who in turn called 911. The in-laws came to the home before fire and EMS arrived. Grandpa did CPR on his granddaughter.
That is hard duty.
The was no evidence of a traumatic causation nor of immediate medical causation. Subsequent toxicology tests showed that the cause of death was methadone toxicity, in other words, a drug overdose. The test of hair samples showed that the child ingested methadone periodically at least over some few weeks.
The legal case is concluded. There will be no appeals that I know of. I will not discuss any other facts about the defendants. I will not even discuss the ultra-high emotional content of the sentencing hearing.
Today’s discussion is about villains in general and others involved in this one drama. These are the “unindicted co-conspirators,” to borrow a phrase from Watergate.
Some of them are easy to figure out.
Others, we know pretty well – to borrow a line from Pogo, “We have met the enemy and they are us.”
Of course, there are unindicted co-conspirators very close to the chain of causation. These parents – both drug addicts – did not go to the methadone factory and buy the pills. There is a distribution chain. It’s very likely that the first couple of links in the chain were legal. And then the drugs passed into the hands of the drug dealers and drug sellers, a scurvy lot who are an inflamed boil on the buttocks of the body politic.
Some sellers of drugs are themselves addicted, and spread their infection to support their ever-more expensive highs. At some point as we go up the distribution chain, we will find people too smart and too greedy to take the drugs themselves. Naturally, they’re the ones who make the most money. They’re the ones who might whisper to you that they “live the dream.” They are the Pablo Escobar/Tony Soprano wannabes who are “dangerous men.”
(At the higher distribution levels, the great majority of offenders are men.)
Incidentally, these folks mostly are dangerous when they get hopped up and hang around in groups. Individually, they are a bunch of pansies.
At the low-end of the distribution chain, we often find those with legitimate prescriptions who sell off part of their scripts for a little mad money.
And then there are the methadone clinics and buprenorphine (e.g., Suboxone®) clinics. These are medical offices where opiate addicts go to receive controlled, ever-diminishing doses of opiates so that they can quit without going through the holy hell of withdrawal.
One practical consideration is that most of these clinics are strictly “cash & carry.” At $300 cash per ½ hour visit plus the cost of drugs, the last thing some of these outfits want is to create ex-customers. Those taint the clinics which really do try to do some good. These outlaw clinics are basically licensed drug dealers. A lot of the opiates which get into the illegal distribution system start there.
Oh, let’s not forget the drug industry! The companies get paid when the first link in the distribution chain is forged. The more drugs, the more money. They have to be responsive to regulations meant to limit illegal distribution, but they don’t have to like it. When something threatens gross sales, drug companies are quite effective in”lobbying.”
Oh, I’m a cynic – I put “lobbying” in quotation marks because it’s often only half of whisker away from bribery.
Seldom do you and I see the hands of the drug companies in this lobbying. Rather, they set up false “grass-roots” lobbying groups with innocuous names like “Citizens for Fair This” or “People for Good That.” Those do-good groups are funded, of course, by the drug companies.
Last winter, the West Virginia Legislature considered a proposal to make pseudoephedrine a prescription drug. Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in Sudafed®, Claritin®, and many other brands of allergy medicines and decongestants.
Also, with a little dangerous home chemistry, pseudoephedrine can be converted into methamphetamine. Meth is one of our most addictive and destructive illegal drugs. Particularly, it is ravaging rural areas in the United States.
In response to the legislation, drug companies through their false-face proxies ran ads about government restricting the rights of the people. Specifically, the right to cure their own sniffles.
A 2012 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that “up to 35%” of the methamphetamine sold illegally is made from pseudoephedrine medications. Funny, the ‘”citizens” groups’ ads don’t say anything about that.
:::: Sniff ::::
Well, that’s enough miscreants to fill all our reservoirs of self-righteous indignation. The nerve, the gall, and by God somebody needs to do something!
Harrumph!
Hey, you didn’t Harrumph! Harrumph, dammit!
And if that somebody doesn’t do something, knowing full well that these drugs are killing adults, youth and babies, don’t they qualify for their own time in the pillory?
Yes, they do. We do. We the people, friends, me included, are at the edge of the unindicted co-conspirators.
The death of citizen participation has been a theme – or pedantic hobbyhorse – and these Dispatches before.
We have convenient and unrealistic expectations of the justice system as a whole, particularly law enforcement.
It’s convenient because if it is law enforcement’s duty to prevent all crimes, we do not have to participate, and so the failure to prevent crime is not our fault.
It’s unrealistic because law enforcement really doesn’t do very much direct prevention. Law enforcement primarily is reactive. Something bad happens, someone calls the police. Yet we expect every police officer to be the blue-suited Santa Claus, the one who “Knows who’s been bad or good.” And then we hope that the villains will “Be good for goodness’ sake.”
Which belief is part of the continuing triumph of hope over experience.
So if not the police, who?
Take drug dealing, the acts which helped kill baby Jane. Did neighbors or friends know that drug deals were going on? Some of them, probably. Did those who knew or suspected call on law enforcement? Probably not. Would most citizens be willing, voluntary witnesses in a drug case? I haven’t seen very many yet. Why?
We’re back to a formula which comes from my friend Justice Richard Neely. He wrote a book called Take Back Your Neighborhood: Organizing a Citizen's Patrol Force to Fight **, (Ballantine Books, 1991). In it he talks about how citizens have divorced themselves from their personal stake in the safety of communities.
Citizens as a group are disinterested. And lazy. And scared.
Disinterested – It’s not our job. We have better things to do.
Lazy – We're people who whine if we don’t get electric windows in our automobiles. “Minutemen,” hell, we won’t wait a minute for the microwave popcorn.
Scared – Criminals are scary. They posture as really tough people. They depend upon that appearance, that intimidation to keep citizens on the sidelines.
And while most of them are pansies, some individuals are dangerous.
So that threat is brought to us.
I don’t know how to answer the question about how any particular person should respond. I can no more define honor than Congress can create morality by the prestidigitation of statute.
I do know that unless the dynamic changes, all of the Baby Jane’s will just be on their own.
A final word about law enforcement:
It needs noted that we treat police officers like pimps at the church picnic. We bitch in the presence of our children if we get ticketed for stupid driving. We pay them very poorly. We applaud government saving money by defunding pensions, even those of officers still in pension systems which preclude them from Social Security retirement.
Sometimes I wonder why they stay on the job.
I spend more time on the road at out-of-town courthouses these days than I do at the Marion County Courthouse.
I love experiencing the feeling of “home” in many courtrooms of small, real towns.
Most of my work these days is in a small, two-county circuit. This isn’t LA Law, nor is it Boston Legal. This is a place where people from the real world come to Court, real and with all of their blemishes. It’s a place where everyone really does search for the truth, search for solutions and try to learn from one another.
This week, I ran into a couple of fellows and a young woman around the Courts where I work. Each had lessons to learn and lessons to teach.
Many kinds of hearings are “closed,” or non-public. To keep cases rolling, lawyers often go into the Courtroom to wait on their own cases to be called. While they wait, they may listen or work or read.
I was sitting in the jury room at the back of a Courtroom during such a hearing because that’s where the chairs, tables and power outlets are. I only heard a little bit of the content of the hearing that was going on, except that it involved a young man and the hearing was not going well for him.
That hearing ended and some other case was called. The bailiff brought the young man back to the jury room to wait for transportation somewhere, and they left him there with me. His own lawyer was in and out.
I started talking with this young man – I’ll call him Bart – not about his case or the law or anything legal, just a conversation between people – who he is, who I am, were he goes to school and so forth.
From the little I heard from his hearing and from my conversation with him, I wonder if this young fellow ever had been really listened to or really given thoughtful guidance – or even ever given a bit of human respect. I bet that he has largely been ignored throughout his life until his behavior got so out of whack that someone would suddenly flare, give him an order, and chastise him.
Well, there you have two common schools of thought about child rearing in action.
One is to give a child the maximum freedom to develop (often that means to ignore them). Then, you can depend on the youth’s environment – schools, friends, and those who profit by tempting kids – to give them the information and the philosophy (“values”) which they will use in life.
The other is the “wagon boss” school of thought. There, a parent – any adult, really – “outranks” the kid. So when an adult wants some specific behavior from the kid (often something which benefits the adult, not the kid), the adult gives orders. And orders are to be obeyed, dammit, because “I have the power to give orders and you don’t, Bart.”
Neither approach works well. Each is an example of high-contrast thinking – thinking in “black and white.”
There is some attraction to high-contrast thinking. Mainly, it’s really easy. You declare your set of beliefs and filter everything through them rather than straining things through a brain. That eliminates thought and eliminates doubt: “I’m right and you’re wrong.”
Often, the result of either kind of thinking or, especially, using both inconsistently, is what Bart experienced – a trip to Court with unpleasant consequences.
I only had a little while, maybe a half hour or so, to talk with Bart. This may not have been in the least significant to him. We talked about manhood and what honorable men do and believe. I happened to be reading a book on the subject, so I wrote out a quote and gave it to him:
Honorable men refuse to wallow in the small and bitter.
Honorable men refuse to hate life because something once went wrong.
Honorable men don't build monuments to their disappointments, nor do they let others brand them and curse them to their destruction.
Honorable men seek out the highest definition of their lives, the nobler meaning granted by heritage, by their ancestors’ dreams and their parents’ hopes.
Honorable men cry out to God until curses are broken and a grander purpose is achieved.
Honorable men don't settle for lives of regret.
[From Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men, by Stephen Mansfield and Gen. William Boykin (Thomas Nelson, 2013)]
He read this and we talked a bit about it. Then, he folded the page and slipped it into his back pocket.
Was this significant to him?
In and of itself, probably not. Any young person needs a lot of ongoing information and encouragement on responsible behavior, on personal responsibility, on self-reliance, and on cheerful cooperation – and not in the form of orders. Young people need reasoned discussions. Those are not always easy, because young people are naturally hardheaded at times. (Remember your own youth?) It’s a lot easier to ignore them or boss them than it is to engage them in genuine discussion. But ignoring them and bossing them aren’t very useful approaches.
Reasoned discussions may lead – we hope – to young people adopting responsible behaviors and attitudes, not because they were told to but because THEY decided that these make up the right way to live.
Reasoned discussion also recognizes that the perfect person has yet to be born. [I recognize one exception to that, but not all belief systems agree.] And so everybody screws up. It’s what you do with screwups that matters most of all.
We as the older people have a duty to “minister” to the young. Sure, a lot of them will consider our opinions pure bushwah and go try out really stupid stuff. And sometimes, just sometimes, they will try the teachings of others on for size and build their own strong lives.
If we give them that one brick at a time, they have the capacity to build on their own wall of a fulfilling life. But if we don’t give them bricks, the wall will not appear.
When you lament, “What’s wrong with kids today?,” one answer you really need to consider is that “WE are what’s wrong with them. WE have dropped the ball on our responsibilities as elders.”
The concept that “It takes a village” has gotten a bad rap. To some, it has come to represent some sort of collective form of uniformity and intolerance of individuality. But it does take a village, one responsible and individual elder at a time.
On the way out of town after Court, I ran into a young woman. I’ll call her Sarah. Sarah is a pleasant young lady who works at a convenience store counter. As I was going into the store, I met a good friend who is the chief bailiff of the Court.
If Court where a church – and in some ways it is – he would be the Head Deacon, the person who supports the machinery and implements decisions, that all-important, always-ready “utility outfielder.”
When I went to the counter to buy a bottle of milk, Sarah asked, “Who’s that cop you were talking to?” So I explained who he is and what he does and who I am and what I do. It was a pleasant conversation. As she was giving me my change, I commented to her, “Miss, they are police officers, not “cops.” They consider that disrespectful. Everybody’s entitled to respect.” She stood silently for a moment, then in a perky voice replied, “Yeah, you’re right!”
Here again, I do not expect that one encounter will permanently modify any behaviors. It’s just one brick. But that’s all we can give young people on any given day, that one brick. If enough of us do it and do it consistently, then we as a village will have given young people the bricks, the tools and the blueprints to build that wall.
The next day, I went back to the same town for a hearing in Family Court. There, I met a gentleman near my own age. This fellow is one of the Heart of America “Workin' Men.” These are folks who build what we buy, fix what we break and who use the strength of their bodies and the agility of their minds to keep everything going.
I represented this gentleman’s wife in a divorce and he was there without a lawyer. These were very nice people who were making the best of an unfortunate situation. They had made their own agreement, which just needed a tweak and written down. After doing so, we were still outside the Courtroom waiting for our hearing.
This gentleman and I began to talk about life and society and so forth. He had been laid off from a manufacturing job when a plant closed a few months ago. He is looking for work and trying to get by on $200 a week unemployment. He said if he could find a job for $210 per week, he would take it in a heartbeat. I believe him. This is what working people do. They work.
Another bailiff was there also chatting with us. He had a line on jobs in a factory from which he had retired. (Working as a bailiff is his retirement job.) The gentleman in the case said that he was going to drop off an application on his way out of town. I hope he gets that job.
We also talked about the relationship of older workers to younger workers. Older workers are a steadying influence. As a rule, they show up promptly at the beginning of their shift and work steadily all day. Also, older workers seem to work more safely and without taking dangerous shortcuts. Younger workers need these examples.
We also talked about the preference employers seem to give to the young in hiring. A common reason cited is that younger workers have better health, strength and energy as a rule. But this gentleman gave us a reason that I for one had never considered: The older worker is less afraid of the boss, particularly the boss who is abusive or who is prone to seek dangerous shortcuts.
So the mix of workers hired by a company says more about an employer that I ever considered.
Oh, why “Hillbilly Tales”?
That’s a nod to the late Jim Comstock. He was the editor and publisher of “The West Virginia Hillbilly.” That was a weekly (“weakly,” Jim called it) tabloid-size newspaper on events, society, culture and living in West Virginia. On the back page of every edition was Jim’s column. Seldom was it an “editorial.” Usually, it was a pithy and reflective essay on life. Every couple of months, Jim wrote a column called simply “Hitchhiker.”
Comstock frequently picked up hitchhikers as he drove the back roads. He wanted to know new people from every walk of life. When he picked up someone with an interesting story or from whom he learned something or to whom he gave something – sometimes all three with the same person in the same column – he wrote about it.
I learned a lot from these columns.
I still learn a lot from any kind of person.
And I hope I give them something to.
We ARE all in this together.
Prison authorities in Oklahoma botched an execution last week. The Internet is aflame and All Decent People are aghast.
And it’s mostly a load of horseshit.
Mr. Clayton Lockett was found guilty of murder in 2000 for raping, shooting and burying a woman alive. He had a jury trial. He had appeals in both the Oklahoma state court system and the federal system. He presented various challenges through the time-honored – even sacred – writ of habeas corpus.
Lockett lost all those cases.
And so, he was set to die by lethal injection. In Oklahoma, the state uses a series of three drugs, midazolam (sedative; render unconscious), vecuronium chloride (paralytic; stop respiration); and potassium chloride (stops the heart) as its “execution cocktail.” These medications are administered intravenously through a little plastic catheter which is threaded into a vein.
In Lockett’s case,the IV infiltrated or “blew,” that is, rather than going into the vein, a lot of the medication escaped under the skin. The state executioners hadn’t inserted a second IV, which was darn poor planning. The execution was supposed to take less than 10 min. and it actually took around 45 min. Lockett mumbled that something was wrong, tried to rise (“writhed,” according to one witness), and ultimately died of a heart attack.
The news has been full of state officials swearing that they did everything they could to send Mr. Lockett peacefully on his way and lots of other folks who swear that Lockett’s death was equivalent to being drawn and quartered.
(“Drawn and quartered” is a phrase bandied about these days by people who have no idea what it is. In short, it involves slow torture and really gruesome abuse leading to death.)
At the outset, let me say a few words about the death penalty. As a rule, I really don’t like it. Much of the general antipathy to the death penalty is moral in origin, which is fine. Perhaps I’m a lousy Christian, but the moral thing is not what puts me off the most.
There are three reasons I have problems with the death penalty and the first is by far the most prominent:
You cannot trust the courts.
Maybe that makes me a bad lawyer and a bad citizen.
But it’s still true.
Starting in law school and ever since, often I have concocted little hypotheticals in my mind about cases. For death cases, there is a perfect storm that’s possible.
Juries are drawn from that pitiful pool of talent called Humanity. The other players are drawn from even a smaller and more pitiful pool, the members of Humanity who have gone to law school. All of these people are somewhere between brilliant and stupid; humble and arrogant; and compassionate and immensely harsh.
If you get just the wrong mix, you may kill an innocent person. And that’s guaranteed to happen sooner or later. There have been a number of outright exonerations of people on death row when evidence was re-examined using modern science.
In other words, we have officially whacked a few innocent people.
A second thing to consider is that prison often is subjectively worse in the eyes of the convict than a death sentence. Lots of media types and political whores talk about coddling criminals in nice, soft prisons. That’s total bullshit. Prisons are horrible places. Inmates have absolutely zero privacy, near zero protection from harm at the hands of other inmates, lousy low-bidder medical care (much worse than Medicare or Medicaid) and for lifers, virtually no hope of seeing sunlight other than through bars ever again. It’s not at all unusual that a criminal who is given a long prison sentence will commit suicide rather than serve the sentence. Maybe a life sentence is not intended to be cruel, but that’s the effect. We don’t have to bemoan that fact but neither should we ignore it.
Finally, it’s way cheaper to house criminals than to kill them. Executions soak up tons and tons of tax dollars. Governments can keep prisoners housed and secure from the outside world for about $4 an hour. The appointed lawyers who are qualified to work on death cases make something between $60 and $150 an hour. Add to that prosecutors, judges and all the support staffs, and the cost of the death case leaves the cost of prison in the dust.
Now I can hear Bubba the Intellectual saying that we give criminals too many opportunities for appeal. Well, it’s back to Concern #1. Mistakes are certain to happen. It would be immoral and unjust not to have cases completely reviewed.
Nevertheless, I’m still okay with the death penalty being available. Why? That’s entirely personal: I have met a very few defendants who really needed to be totally and permanently excised from the Body of Humanity. I’m just fine with with wishing them luck on their way to the Happy Hunting Ground. I hope that God forgives them and lets them have an eternal life which is better than anything they had on Earth. I’m also totally fine with them being gone from Earth.
A jury and a dozen + judges have agreed that Lockett met the criteria for a trip to execution. It’s possible they were all wrong in this case. But that’s not the way to bet. There is such a thing as a white raven. But there just aren’t too many of them.
John Wayne Gacy? Ted Bundy? Jeffrey Dahmer? Adios, amigos.
So Mr. Lockett took his reluctant walk to the execution chamber. In 45 min., he was dead. I suppose “botched” means that his death was not instantaneous and not totally peaceful.
Our goal in capital cases should be that the death of the convict is quick and limited in pain. There are those who are big on the “eye for an eye” thing but that’s neither just nor justified. Gov. Dukakis’s campaign flamed out when he was asked if he would support execution for someone who killed his wife. He made an academic, even foppish, response. As lots of people later pointed out, a much better response would have been something like, “Hell yes I want him executed. I’ll do it personally and with a dull knife personally. And that’s why we have to have dispassionate and responsible juries and judges so we can be sure that criminal punishment is not based upon inevitable irrationality but upon fixed standards of justice.”
(Just so we don’t blame it all on that, remember that when Gov. Dukakis drove that tank with a silly grin on his face, he made an equally egregious boner.)
But, but, but – there’s another seldom acknowledged reason that people get all lathered up about methods of execution. Is this the Land of the Free? Beats me. It seems it’s getting to be the Home of the Sissies.
Oh, and the moral hypocrites.
Even those who love the death penalty are, by and large, not willing to participate directly. Which is okay. Those are hard things to do and not many people are emotionally qualified. Also, most of the public wants a bit of salve for the collective conscience by making executions not just quick and painless, but sanitary. No blood. No mess. People want a Charles-Foster-Kane-passing-away with “Rosebud” on his lips, the candle gently blown out.
Isn’t reality a bitch?
There are groups among the readers of these Dispatches who know death in some of it’s really gruesome forms. First among them are military combat veterans, most of whom have seen death, injury and destruction up close and personal. 10% of the annual federal budget goes for veterans benefits and programs. I don’t begrudge those folks one dime.
Then there are the public service workers (police/fire/EMS) and the entire medical community. They know this one really hard fact: Death is ugly. Often death is slow. Often death is painful.
I think tonight of some deaths I have attended. There are a lot of those folks who would have traded the hand they were dealt for a “botched” Oklahoma execution in a heartbeat.
The way those people died was not fair to them. They were dealt a bad hand, and it’s just not fair. In life, Lockett likely was dealt a pretty bad hand. Toward the end, he got caught slipping aces out of his sleeve. That he got a short term medically induced death just is not this great tragedy. Those who suggest that he was punished in some way beyond what life, fate and/or random chance punishes most people are living in a fantasy world.
All that being said, there is a better way to execute people. If we as a society want to stick to drugs, there are lots and lots of drugs and drug combinations out there that seem to work well by accident among illegal drug users. Maybe this multi-drug cocktail idea used by governments is mostly smoke and mirrors to make it look all neat, abstract and terribly scientific.
Even so, the way society does executions today still has a lot of macabre ceremony to it, something like the Black Mass. There are optional visits from clergy who provide pastoral but not corporeal support. There is a last meal, the menu always reported breathlessly in the press for death-tittilated voyeurs, like little boys sneaking a look at a skin magazine. There is a solemn march to the death chamber, the insertion of the IV, the reading of the death warrant, the solemn “Do you have any last words?,” and then the prayerful nod of the warden to the people behind the curtain to press the gaily colored switches of Doom.
They might as well shake rattles and chant a little.
Oh, the better way!
There is a German word for a very simple concept, genickschuss. (Ge-NEEK-shooss). It is a simple protocol. The executioner puts a pistol to the base of the convict’s skull with an upward trajectory and pulls the trigger. It doesn’t take a large round, and it doesn’t even necessarily make a whole lot of mess. It is instantaneous, so much so that it is painless.
I doubt we’ll ever get the guts or the honesty to dispatch people in this kind but direct manner. We do so love to fiddle with trivialities.
Portland Oregon:
The Portland city water authorities have decided to dump 38,000,000 gallons of treated water from an open reservoir. Sadly, the water is polluted.
Why, you might ask, is the water polluted?
Because some guy pissed in it.
No, this is not a joke. Someone saw a guy urinating through a fence into the reservoir. So they’re going to empty the reservoir.
Since the pollution standards of the EPA are metric, let’s all get on the same page here. 38,000,000 gallons equals 143,640,000 (or so) liters.
Adults urinate four times a day, about 500 mL at a time, for a total of 2 L a day. So for that guy to put out 0.1% of the amount of liquid in the reservoir, he would have to piss in the reservoir exclusively for 393 years.
The amount of urine put into the reservoir in this one little whiz was one part in 286,000,000, or about 0.0034 mg/l. (milligrams per liter). This assumes that urine has a specific gravity of 1.0. Since Portland threw away 143,640,000 liters of water, I’d say that the specific gravity assumption is indeed “close enough for government work.” (I almost said “pissed away,” but refrained.)
OK, so the fellow who used the reservoir as a pissoir polluted the water to the tune of 0.004 mg/l.
Let’s say he had been pissing benzene. The EPA standard for that is 0.005 mg/L. That’s the same as the standard for carbon tetrachloride.
You can load water up with arsenic to the tune of 0.01 mg/l; barium, 2 mg/l. To really pollute the water, the guy would have had to pee 287 kg of arsenic. Or 143 kg of toluene.
But 0.5 kg of pee? Darn, that guy has some polluted urine.
God bless the Oregonians for keeping the public safe.
Wait a minute - open reservoir. Do they let birds fly over? Oopsie.
Washington, DC:
GM put defective ignition switches in some few million automobiles. The switches may lock up while driving, freezing the steering wheel. There have been numerous accidents, lots of injuries, and some deaths.
GM went bankrupt in 2009. And so it’s asking the Bankruptcy Court to invalidate any injury claims which arose before the bankruptcy. That sounds fairly dirty, but that’s what bankruptcy law is all about.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is one of the politicians all in a lather: “The company should simply do right by these victims and establish a compensation fund that will make them whole.”
Maybe that’s the moral thing to do. This evening, I don’t know.
But one thing I do know is that there is no compensation fund which exists that is going to make these people whole unless it involves a time machine. If someone can go back and un-wreck these people, then maybe they can be made whole. The accidents may have caused money problems and money can fix those. But permanent injuries? Dream on, money doesn’t work.
Other than the fact that the dear Senator has a nonsensical conclusion, I’m not going to throw out any more opinions.
It would just be nice to see anyone in government think clearly.
London, England:
A hair salon in London has posted a photograph of Kim Jong Un, the maximum grand pontiff of North Korea. Okay, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, even though it’s not democratic and not a Republic.
The salon posted a message along with the photo: “Bad hair day? 15% off all gent cuts through the month of April.”
Kim Jong Un’s white sidewalls and fuzzy top represent what is commonly deemed a fairly unattractive haircut.
Okay, moderately funny little joke. I remember when I was a kid driving past a tombstone company. On the sign was a picture of a tombstone with the word “Khrushchev.” I thought that was pretty funny at the time. Now, it would be fairly dull and I’m not sure I’d give the hair salon sign more than a minuscule uptick from one side of my mouth.
On the other hand, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has made a demand of the British Foreign Office to “stop the provocation.”
Now that would be funny if North Korea didn’t have the odd nuke laying around. You have to wonder what the Bad Hair Boy will do if he ever gets a rocket that works.
And amidst all of the idiocy:
One of my buddies e-mailed me today and reminded me that 28 years ago this month, he and I ran an emergency call together. It was a rollover of a fire engine, and a friend of ours was killed, thus widowing another friend of ours.
This was an extremely chaotic scene until we figured out that there was not much we could do. My buddy Tom was chief at the time but he was so close to the victim, Bill Van Gilder, that he passed the scene to me. That wasn’t a big deal - Mostly, I just tried to chase rubberneckers away, including a state police helicopter which insisted on landing on my scene to “help out.”
Bill was a big, strong guy with a big, strong and loving heart. He was a volunteer doing dangerous work for his neighbors.
Why can’t the nitwits in government pay attention to the important rather than the trivial, the stupid or the fluff?
Just wonderin’.
There are a lot of us remembering our brother Bill tonight.
Mizpah.
Okay, that establishes the theme. Maybe I should quit there.
The Crimea is a peninsula which projects into the Black Sea. The only other nation which it abuts is the Ukraine. Both the Crimea and Ukraine were part of the USSR before it self-destructed.
That nimble – and dangerous – old KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin is steering Russia on a course of re-expansion into formerly Soviet areas. He's not being subtle about it. When Russia sees some substantial public opposition to a smaller neighbor’s government, Putin and the Red Army invade with expressions of the friendliest and most humanitarian motives. But still with tanks. And even though Russian provocateurs are responsible for a lot of the initial unrest, Russia is claiming the moral high ground with a straight face.
Well, at least we have to admire Putin’s no-nonsense approach.
The annexation of the Crimea IS in Russia's interest. It gives Russia additional warm water access the Aegean and Mediterranean. Crimea has substantial energy resources. And since no part of the Crimea currently abuts Russia, the annexation gives Putin yet another reason to annex the Ukraine.
There is broad support in Russia for annexing the Ukraine. Many Ukrainians are ethnic Russians/Caucasians. (That's meant in the original sense, people from the Caucasus.) These ethnic Russians were relocated to the Ukraine as part of Stalin’s agricultural & genocide program.
The Ukraine is a lot like Iowa and Kansas, only bigger, Ukraine produces crops on an unparalleled industrial scale. For a nation like Russia with a short growing season owing to high latitude, that's real important.
In response to Russia's annexation/invasion of Crimea, we are aghast. For that matter, moral superiors around the world join the expressions of horror. Yawn. I just heard a stirring speech by the United Nations ambassador from Argentina giving Putin a thorough talking to about maintaining peace. Western nations including the United States have imposed economic sanctions on Russia and are threatening more. The current American Administration swears it has no intent to use military force.
Unimpressed, Putin has told the rest of the world to go to hell.
Protests of peaceful intent notwithstanding, who thinks this administration – or any administration – could resist the urge to show off las enormes bolas by sending in the United States military? Already, the Obama Administration is dropping hints that it is "considering" assistance to the Crimea in the form of military material.
By imposing sanctions, the United States and other western nations have painted themselves into a corner. We are playing chicken with Vladimir Putin. We're in a car. Putin is driving a train.
The sanctions or not insignificant. But the probability of their success is at best questionable. Putin has lots more "face" invested than does the United States right now. That dynamic can change. The United States, by initiating military action, can make this an all-or-nothing test of American power and the future of some American hegemony.
The United States remains a superpower, able to project military force worldwide, even to the Crimea. Doing so is a bad idea. At the very best, United States is at a large geographical disadvantage. The United States is across an ocean plus a huge landmass from the Crimea. For Russia, the Crimea is right down the block.
The inevitable costs to the United States are obvious. The first which often comes to mind is "treasure." (Which is sad. It’s not what should be considered first.) Nevertheless, with anything beyond sanctions, we're going to be spreading around a lot of cash. Compare the cost of the War on Terror with the results. At least part of it has been remarkably cost-ineffective.
We don't seem to discuss the human cost very much, perhaps because it's a limited group of people – the military – which will incur them. Can we rationalize lots of death of young warriors as being "required" by national interests in the Crimea? The cost of wounded warriors is at least as great. I have to wonder who in the American Government decision-making circles actually have familiarized themselves with the reality of war trauma.
There aren’t a lot of scenarios which can play out.
1 - We continue to sanction and pray that sanctions will start working. Right, let's trust hope over experience.
2 - We go away. Ignore the Crimea. The effect of that would be at least partly negative. Those opposing American interests would lay claim to proof of American weakness and undependability. Opponents of the Administration (which has played a part in creating these bad choices) will claim whatever makes the Administration look even worse. And we will listen to endless brave noise from Americans who neither want to pay for aggressive military with their taxes nor incur personal inconvenience.
On the flip side, we’re gone.
3 - We initiate military action at great cost and win, however we would define winning. Then we have yet another conquered area and no idea what to do with it.
4 - We initiate military action at great cost and lose anyway. And “losing” can be local or can even be the Pyrrhic victory of winning a large-theater war.
In any of these options, we are being suckered in to considerable costs and risks which will retard American ability to respond to more urgent needs.
And this for the Crimea and Ukraine. Where the United States has NO objective national interests.
Some see a national moral imperative to punish the wicked and enforce a Pax Americana. So far, that hasn’t been working out.
There are lots of other places where we have at least as good a justification for military intervention.
Think of Mexico – There are areas where the Mexican government is powerless and regional policy is created and enforced by los narcotraficantes. Were we to intervene in Mexico, we would be advancing real national interests right next door to us. Which you know we aren’t going to do.
You don't have to look far for other places that American moral superiority might be a good idea. Who knows, maybe American troops this time around could end the thousand years of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Myanmar could use a good invasion. Afghanistan has a long history as a dangerous focus of unrest. Oh, yeah, we're already there. Who thinks that's working out? China is one of the great human rights violators and a leader in economic oppression and environmental rapine. Nobody seems to talk about invading China. Of course that's where we get our shitty plastic toys and where a foreign government owns 1.3 TRILLION dollars of American national debt. Oh, did I mention the the People’s Liberation Army, etc., has 7+ million members? Almost all volunteer, too.
Leaving the Crimea alone is not going to fix very many American problems. We haven’t found the guts to fix much of anything. We are busy enough creating dilemnas from cultural and societal weaknesses which are discussed ad nauseum and addressed not at all.
By staying out of the Crimea, maybe we can keep one brick from being added to the wall of American stupidity.
On this glorious neo-spring day, the West Virginia Legislature has adopted John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as an official song of the State of West Virginia. This has gotten so much feel-good publicity, a level that we haven’t seen for a while.
Um, OK.
Hey, it’s a good song. Pitched a little lower than written, I can sort of sing it. Nice tune. Mostly understandable lyrics, although the “Mountain mama” part is a little strange.
And the “misty taste of moonshine”? Have you ever tasted REAL moonshine, i.e., liquor made in an outdoor still and aged about 30 minutes? Misty? Nope. Acrid. Choking. Caustic. They don’t call it inTOXICation for nothing.
Oh, and the two geographical features mentioned in the song, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River? Both are almost entirely in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Entirely different state ever since 1863.
West Virginia is beautiful, at least to me. I find it strange when I’m in different sort of terrain and flora. But there is a certain complacency about the “Almost Heaven” that is misleading or, at least, incomplete.
The Gallup-Healthways 2013 State of American Well-being Index placed West Virginia 50th among the states in life evaluation, environmental health, physical health and healthy behaviors and 14th in work environment.
Last year, West Virginia scored 47th in obesity, 49th in smoking and 50th in diabetes.
All the numbers are not bad. In the last five years, the number of children in poverty has gone from 24% to 19%. (That’s still 19% too damn many, and no, “The poor will be with you always” quote from Jesus of Nazareth has nothing to do with saying poverty is ok. That is the most obnoxious and self-serving misinterpretation of the Bible that I know of.)
The cost of living in West Virginia is very favorable. What $100 buys you to live in America on average takes only $86 in West Virginia.
We are 28th in high school dropouts, with a rate of 13.6%. There, too, that’s 13.6% too high - 80% of children who drop out of school will be put in jail or prison during their lives.
OK, the song bill is harmless and evades Judge Gideon Tucker’s curse, "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session."
But there are more important things to do and a whoop-de-doo over something silly like this is embarassing.
In life, in government, in work, we have to keep our eye on the ball.
