Cuz We Said So

A specious argument by Warner?

Yahoo! News:

A convict on death row condemned to die in one day's time was granted a last-minute request for clemency by Virginia Governor Mark Warner.

Robin Lovitt, a convicted murder, had been expected to become the 1,000 person put to death under the southern state's capital punishment laws in the prison of Jarratt, Virginia.

However, Warner issued his eleventh-hour reprieve Tuesday deciding that Lovitt should instead spend the rest of his life in jail with no eligibility for parole.

"The Commonwealth (of Virginia) is legally obligated to maintain physical evidence until a defendant has exhausted every legal post-trial remedy in the case.

"However, evidence in Mr Lovitt's trial was destroyed by a court employee before that process could be completed," the governor said, in a statement explaining his clemency decision.

"After a thorough review, it is my decision that Robin Lovitt should spend the rest of his life in prison with no eligibility for parole," Warner said.

What?  Regardless of how one feels about the death penalty, how can this make sense?

If Virginia’s failure to maintain physical evidence until Lovitt’s appeals were exhausted casts reasonable doubt on his guilt, in Warner’s opinion, then Lovitt was wrongly convicted.  Why is he being left to rot in prison?  Warner should have pardoned him and set him free.  Indeed, as some who argue against the death penalty claim, “life in prison is a worse punishment,” Warner has traded one injustice for a greater one.

If, on the other hand, Virginia’s failure to maintain physical evidence does not cast reasonable doubt on Lovitt guilt in Warner’s opinion, the destruction of evidence has no material bearing on the justice of his conviction.  Warner should have let the findings of the jury and the appeals judges stand.

Either way, Warner’s stated rationale feels like a red herring.

Face Time

Yahoo! News:

Doctors have performed the world's first partial face transplant, grafting a nose, lips and chin onto a patient disfigured by a dog bite, two French hospitals said Wednesday.

Yet strangely, it’s more than just partially creepy.

Buzz Words

Buzz Words:

Driving home from the salt mine the other day we tuned into our local AM powerhouse just in time to hear the following words: "And there are other reasons business people speak this goobly-gook jargon." Oh, we were hooked.

The station was playing its daily blurb from the syndicated "Something You Should Know" program, this one on "The Lunacy of Business Jargon." The host interviewed Brian Fugere, co-author of the book, "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots". Fugere said there are three reasons otherwise-sane business people rely on nonsensical buzzwords: "One is because you don't know what you're talking about. One is because you're actually trying to evade and another is that you're not willing to commit."

The following day on the next segment, Fugere continued: "You use 50-cent words to make a 5-cent point because you think, somehow that will make you look more intelligent....Companies that are full of bull don't perform as well. I've been consulting for 23 years and when I go in to a company and I look at the way they speak. I know right away how easy or difficult my job is going to be. If you're not talking straight, you're not an efficient company."

Scary what that says about some consulting companies, isn’t it?  I love the name of the book, by the way.  Talk doesn’t get much straighter than that.

Plan B for Saddam

Drudge has this as if it’s big news, but I’m not sure why.

WHITE HOUSE PLAN IF SADDAM FOUND 'NOT GUILTY'

Senior Bush administration officials have considered the unthinkable: What if Saddam Hussein is found not guilty in his trial?

"There will be more charges filed against him, and more charges after that, if needed... he has committed tremendous crimes," a top Bush source explained last week from Washington.

Is this unusual?  There’s no double-jeapordy; they wouldn’t be trying him for any one crime more than once.  If you’re accused of multiple crimes, it seems perfectly legitimate, if perhaps inefficient, to try you for each one individually.  What am I missing?

Airborne Cold Remedy. Anything to it?

Airborne cold remedy.  Is there anything to it?  A family member just recommended it; I hadn’t heard of it before.  I am skeptical, as I am about most new claims of medical miracle-hood, so I looked it up.  I found this summary online, courtesy of Google Answers.  The results are inconclusive:  And here’s a related article from valleyadvocate.com, which sums it up:  “Alas, if supporting literature is to be found, I can't find it.”  Hmmm.

Tis the Season to be Shopping

The local newsradio announcer this morning:  “If you thought the mall was busy on Friday, wait until you see the Internet today.”  Reuters says US online holiday sales should hit close to $20 billion this year.  Plus, bonus: you're less likely to get mugged by another shopper trying to score an XBox 360.

By the way?

Gamers Pay up to $10,600 for Xbox

Really?  Suckers.

Ethiopians protest near Bush's ranch

AFP:

Ethiopians protest near Bush's ranch

Curiously, whoever wrote the headline forgot to include “pro-Bush” or “pro-war” in the headline.

Scores of Ethiopian protesters marched through this Texas hamlet, chanting "God bless America" and urging President George W. Bush to end support for the government in Addis Ababa.

…"We are from Texas, Oklahoma and Washington, DC, and we are very, very happy that he (Bush) is from Texas. He is our brother. And now he must help us bring peace and democracy to Ethiopia," Tassu told AFP as the group passed under Crawford's only traffic light.

…Bush "is the only one with the power to stop it," said Tassu, as the demonstrators chanted "God bless America. We need your help America." and "No more Meles, no more tyranny, no more bloodshed."

Personally, I’m with them.

"Holiday Classics" my a...

Loews too?  From Cinematical:

Once again, Loews is presenting a month of themed freebies. Though December's grouping is officially called "Holiday Classics," I've chosen to call a spade and spade and out them all as Christmas movies.  I mean, really - as if anyone is going to see the phrase "White Christmas" and think "Hmm. Is that the Kwanzaa flick?" And if the Grinch ever stole Chanukah, it was in a totally different book.

This whole trend toward search-and-replacing the word Christmas out of public life has become ridiculous.  As with many things in the wonderful world of political correctness, it starts out as what sounds like a reasonable premise--we want to avoid offending people--then takes it to a ridiculous extreme, offending even more people. 

I mean, look at this example.  People than wishing each other happy holidays as well as Merry Christmas for years, so I don't know of this is in a long-standing appellation on Loews' part, or another instance of the red action trend we've been seeing in recent years.  Still, to use it as an example, since it's been brought to my attention, it seems to me that if any of the films being shown were a Ramadan film, or a Hanukkah film, or in fact, a non-Christmas holiday film, it would make sense to call them "holiday" classics.  But all four of them are Christmas movies.  The only one that doesn't have the word Christmas right in the title has an angel in it.

The problem, it seems to me, is that mere claims of offense are given greater credence than reasonability requires.  When someone says, "I'm offended by this", the first questions we should ask in reply are, "Why?" and "Should you be?"  Some people are unreasonable, and people are unreasonably offended by things all the time.  The appropriate responses to nod sympathetically then unflinchingly ignore further complaint. 

Curiously, though, you may have to find some of the complaining people, which may be challenging.  In listening to this debate, I've heard a lot from company representatives explaining that their motivation is to avoid offending people with different cultural backgrounds.  But I can't recall hearing anything from people with different cultural backgrounds who were offended to begin with, who might explain the basis for their offense.  Perhaps I’m just not listening in the right places.

Black Friday

The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S.   True or False?

PETA Stunt Fans Bird Flu Fears

Hey, I was only kidding about the vegetarian thing, but apparently some people aren’t kidding. 

I’m a fan of the vegetarian philosophy, and largely vegetarian myself, but it seems to me that stunts like this blunt the force of more serious argument.  Moreover, I don’t think PETA’s going to like the outcome if people come to perceive birds as a threat, which will be to not eat the birds, but to kill them all anyway.  You can tell they’re hippies, though: any excuse to protest naked.