Does everyone know snopes, the urban legend Web site ? It’s indispensable if you want to fact-check the latest e-mail someone sent you about some deadly new disease, health hazard, crime wave, etc.
Twice in the past month a couple of my friends have sent me an email about a new trend in crime (e.g., fruit-flavored crystal meth to get schoolchildren hooked!) including an assurance that snopes has already verified the facts. If they’d checked snopes before sending out the mass e-mail, both of them would have found snopes did not, in fact, confirm the e-mails.
I suspect we’ll see many more Proven By Snopes e-mails in the years ahead.

“All people are amateurs in the art of life.”—Brett Davidson.

Another weakness in Ron Hart’s argument on the death penalty (blogged about below) is that he’d also favor applying it to rape.

Brutal though rape is, I personally don’t believe in execution for anything but murder. However, my real objection to Hart’s idea is that it’s a guaranteed get out of jail free card for rapists.

Rape isn’t an easy crime to convict someone of. A decade or so ago, a woman was taken out of a Florida bar at knifepoint, raped and stabbed multiple times (she survived). The jury found the defendant not guilty, and the jurors said later that based on the woman’s sexy outfit, she’d obviously gone to the bar looking for sex — presumably meaning that therefore, she had no grounds for complaint if someone decided to sleep with her, even if he had to stab her to do it.

I could rattle off other examples, but the point is, juries are often reluctant to convict under the laws we have now: They may wonder about the woman’s clothing, her lifestyle, did she know the defendant, was it actually consensual, was the victim maybe a little slutty or kinky (some rapists have acknowledged the act, but claimed it was consensual rough sex)? What if the defendant is a respected member of the community, a sports hero or “too handsome to have to rape anyone?” All these things have been known to sway juries. How much worse would rape trials become if juries knew that finding the defendant guilty would send them to the chair (or the gas chamber, or the needle)?

A lot worse, I suspect: Barring the kind of evidence required under Islamic sharia law (where it takes four corroborating eyewitnesses to the act), juries would bend over backwards to avoid a conviction. Instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the effective standard would become “beyond any doubt whatsoever”: The victim’s sexual history, the idea she didn’t fight back “enough,” the rapist’s claim it was all a big misunderstanding (”I swear she gave consent right before she passed out from the gin—I suppose I should have realized how drunk she was, but …”), the belief some people have that guys just can’t help it if a woman turns them on, all those could be factors into the case.

Heck, how many prosecutors would even want to take a rape case faced with those odds?

Hart means well, but the death penalty for rape is a very bad idea.

Monday’s Daily News editorial on various proposed FCC regulations for cable television included a discussion of the idea that cable companies be forced to offer us “a la carte” programming — we pay for the channels we want, and no others — rather than the current system, where taking Turner Classic and SciFi (two that I like) means paying for Golf Channels, ESPN channels and other things that I couldn’t care less about (the Golf Channel seems like something Satan would force the damned to watch).
My employer being a libertarian company, I won’t dispute the argument that government shouldn’t regulate such things, but I’ll sure as heck disagree with the editorial’s conclusion that the a la carte approach is inherently a bad idea.
The editorial’s objections are first, that this regulation assumes “people in offices in Washington, DC, know what consumers want better than consumers.” Second, that “this might lead to less diversity rather than more” because channels that might not have the viewers to survive on their own will sink into oblivion if they’re not bundled together.
In response to the first objection, has the writer found some survey which shows consumers WANT to pay for channels they don’t like, because that’s the only way I can interpret this line of logic. Tell you what, lets have Cox Cable offer us a choice — bundled vs. a la carte — and we’ll see how consumers respond.
As it stands, if cable executives are forcing us to pay for channels we never watch, aren’t they the ones ignoring consumers’ wishes?
As for the less-diversity argument, this ignores that many channels are owned by the cable companies; bundling isn’t some way for starry-eyed entrepreneurs to launch their dream channel, it’s more like a way for cable companies to start or buy low-rated channels, then make people pay for the privilege of not watching them. If they believe the channel is really worthwhile, surely they can work out their own deal for broadcasting their own property?
I admit, I’d hate it if a la carte kept SciFi, for example, from becoming a fixture of my viewing, but I’d take that chance in return for not paying for sports channels, news channels, QVC, Oxygen, and so on. What the Daily News is advocating is the equivalent of Destin Commons forcing me to buy lunch there if I want to shop at Books a Million (”This new restaurant is struggling, you can’t expect it to survive on its own!”) or Publix demanding I buy steak whenever I pick up frozen blueberries.
As I said, I won’t dispute the libertarian principle of non-interference (at least, not in this venue), but I have no patience with the argument that non-interference, in this case, is improving my cable viewing.

There’s nothing that makes me happier to be a liberal than when some conservative announces that things like human rights, respect for the Fourth Amendment and opposition to torture are left-wing positions, as Bill O’Reilly did last month. Yes, O’Reilly seemed to think he was slamming liberals, but if being pro-torture and pro-warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is the right-wing stance, I think that says more about conservative flaws than liberal ones.
Ditto Ron Hart’s column on the previous weekend in which he announces that the possibility of sending someone innocent to the gas chamber is “the cost of doing business” and that using this as an argument against the death penalty is “a liberal knee-jerk reaction.”
So in other words, Ron Hart—allegedly a libertarian—believes that it’s acceptable for government to execute innocent people in order to make the execution of guilty ones more efficient. The rights of that innocent person to life, liberaty and the pursuit of property should be sacrificed to the greater good of society.
The next time Hart claims he’s against giving government too much power, please remember this and laugh at him.
It also mocks his claim that he supports the death penalty because it saves innocent lives. Killing someone who didn’t commit a crime guarantees one life lost, and possibly more, because the real killer is still out there, somewhere and nobody’s going to be looking for him.
Hart goes on to recite the usual arguments of death penalty supporters: Murderers shouldn’t be able to live for years on death row while they work through their appeals, the government shouldn’t have to spend lots of money paying attorneys to defend the indigent and innocent people aren’t going to be convicted anyway: Nobody would be put on trial if there wasn’t “overwhelming evidence,” juries can be trusted to find the truth, and groups opposing the death penalty will knock down any false cases.
In other words, Hart’s position isn’t only that we should have a death penalty—which is a reasonable position—but that we shouldn’t worry about executing innocent people, which is a monstrous position. Like many death penalty supporters, Hart doesn’t just want executions, he wants the execution process sanctified as flawless, moral and devoid of any drawbacks.
The trouble is, his argument is complete hogwash. Innocent people have been convicted, many, many times, and sometimes the only reason they didn’t get the chair is because after 18 or 20 years of sitting on death row, DNA tests or witnesses recanting cleared their name.
There are also multiple examples of prosecutors whose case only looked ironclad because they concealed evidence, hid facts from the defense or accepted perjured testimony. In some cases, even after DNA evidence has cleared a suspect, the prosecutors keep fighting to keep them in jail.
One man on Florida’s death row, for instance, was cleared by DNA testing but the prosecution argued that since the tests took place before state law requiring release in such cases, there was no legal obligation to let the man out.
In some rape-murder cases, when DNA evidence cleared the accused after the trial, prosecutors argued that “Oh, we never mentioned it before, but obviously he had a partner who left the DNA behind, so the accused is still guilty, obviously.”
Funny, aren’t libertarians the ones who distrust government power? Who warn us that officials might exploit their power for their own advantage? And in a high-profile murder case, there are definite advantages to putting someone in jail on dubious evidence (”See! I’m keeping you safe! Vote for me at the next election!”) as long as you don’t get caught.
If Hart thinks killing the innocent is an acceptable cost of doing business, remind me to never, ever, ever go into business with him.

In Saudia Arabia, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape.” A higher court raised that to 200 lashes after her attorney said the one to five year sentences given the six rapists were too lenient.

Quotes on hope:

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”—Vaclav Havel

“Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”—St. Augustine

“Hope is that cuddly, fuzzy thing you take to your bosom, and the next thing you know, its sharp teeth are in your throat, its sharp claws are raking your belly, and your guts are lying in a steaming heap on the floor.”—Dori Koogler

“Despair looks for excuses not to act and always finds them. Hope, it’s opposite, always chooses to act. It’s in for good and whole hog. Even if the odds seem insurmountable and the resources inadequate. If all it has is five loaves and two small fish, or five smooth stones, or a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, it will use whatever it’s got”.—Fred Clark.

“Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control.”—Robert Kennedy.

Two thoughts about the ongoing debate over the use of That Word in FWB High School’s production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
•Rev. Larry Boldin told the Daily News that when the panel he was on voted to cut the word, it wasn’t a “censorship issue” but a matter of cultural sensitivity.
Sorry, Rev. Bolding, cutting the word is censorship, regardless of your motive. And as a motive, sensitivity isn’t that different from most other censors who worry that someone is going to be offended by something.
•A letter in today’s Daily News grumbles that “I hear an entire race of people calling each other by a word that they deem intolerant when used by others … If blacks are going to refer to each other using the N-word, then I want the opportunity to do the same.”
As the writer John Rogers has pointed out, this would be a better argument if every other word were acceptable regardless of who says it and where they say it, but that doesn’t happen to be the case. Many jokes people might tell during a bar crawl, for instance, would horrify them if someone else said them in church.
Likewise, words we’d use with our adult friends we’d avoid saying in front of children. Phrases we’d use to our lovers will get a very different reaction when used on a sexy married coworker. And I’m pretty sure “I hear Lucy’s boyfriend calling her by that word … I want the opportunity to do the same” isn’t an acceptable excuse for sexual harassment.
Is acceptability of language inconsistent? Sure. But it’s not unreasonable, and I don’t think most people have that much trouble figuring it out.

“We are no better than those ancient civilizations that conducted human sacrifice for basically the same reasons we allow abortions.”—letter to Daily News, Wednesday.

If nothing else this has the benefit of novelty. Most right-to-lifers (or forced-birthers, as some people call them) insist abortion is all about godlessness, greed and selfishness; this writer apparently thinks women go for abortions because of some religious motivation. That makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s certainly a different take.