Wow. I often humorously (at least attempt to be humorous) say, "We aren't afraid enough of the Japanese" with some creepy Japanese video. I think I first heard it from Den Beste.
I don't know how afraid we should be of them, but we surely don't understand them.
If someone had asked me, I would have guessed Japan didn't have the death penalty.
Boy would I have been wrong. They have one and it's about brutal and sadistic. I mean, unbelievably cruel, brutal and sadistic. "These guys would love to be waterboarded 7 times a week" cruel, brutal and sadistic.
Quote
The inmates largely live in solitary confinement, isolated from the outside world. They are allowed two half-hour exercise sessions a week in summer, three in winter. For the rest they are not even allowed to move around in their cells, and are forced to stay sitting down. They are not permitted to watch television or have contact with other prisoners. Visits are infrequent and may be as short as five minutes.

In his book Papillon, he talks about solitary confinement. He says it's horrible and brutal, and he kept himself from dying or going crazy by walking constantly. Back and forth in his cell all day long for however many years he was in that time.
These guys don't get that. And they sit there for decades, Papillon did no more than 3 years in solitary at a stretch (as I recall).
Quote
One case documented in the report is of a prisoner who was convicted first in 1968 and since that time has been undergoing trials, appeals, and finally his period on death row without ever having a date set.”

And while that's torture enough, it's not the worst part. "What could be worse than that?" you ask (you sure ask a lot of questions)
Even the prisoners themselves don’t know when they’re going to be executed.”
...snip...
The policy is to inform prisoners of their execution only on the day they are going to be hanged.

Holy shit! Think of that, all of these poor bastards sitting in their cells for years and every freaking day wondering if tomorrow morning they would come in and tell them today's the day.
They sit in their cells for 167 out of 168 hours a week thinking about that.
How much can you sleep when you can't do anything? So these poor bastards sit there probably 18 hours/day just thinking about whether or not they die tomorrow.

Someone should tell them to say they're terrorists, maybe they could get transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

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And update to the previous post where Rob Sama's comment made me click some links I hadn't.

There's too many things that don't look right in this.
The prosecutor's op ed.
From some a paper called the Corsicana Daily Sun.

First, what the heck is a French newspaper doing writing about a deal in Texas?

This is from the story linked in the previous post
As I note in my story, there is evidence that Willingham hit his wife, even when she was pregnant, but there were no police reports or medical evidence indicating that Willingham had tried to abort or kill his children. And Willingham’s wife insisted during the trial and under interrogation that Willingham had not physically abused the children. She told police, “Our kids were spoiled rotten.”

This is a quote from the original story about this case written in 1992.
the defendant’s wife who testified her children were not afraid of their father, denied her husband beat her or tried to kill the twins while she was pregnant with them by kicking her in the stomach.
Mrs. Willingham said she was not an abused or battered wife...snip...
“Me and Todd argued just like anybody else,” she said. “A lot of times, Todd got more bruises and stuff than I did.”

Okay, but Grann says that we know that he beat her when she was pregnant, yet there she is denying it.

I knew a girl once who was beaten by her father and her boyfriends. Another friend once asked her why she put up with it, she answered, "Because it shows he loves me." We were both creeped out by that answer.
I dated a girl once whose father beat her. One time we were arguing about something and I got really mad and punched the roof of my car (I did that a lot when I was 16-20), she got this weird smile, it was as if she was looking forward to me hitting her. That creeped me out too. (That's where I learned the truth of the statement that guys who beat women are pussies. I was in her house when he started hitting her, I was 16 he was a workingman's 45 or so, I grabbed him and tossed him across the kitchen and when he tried to hit me, it was like a girl/slappy fight. I could have totally kicked his ass, all I did was keep him from hitting me while yelling, "Chill out man". Since then, I've taken every opportunity to humiliate chumps like that. I do everything I can to get them to throw a punch and laugh in their faces when they don't, calling them the pussies they are)

Women who put up with being beaten have weird relationships with their beaters. So I don't know if I would find her testimony credible.

I do have to wonder if this was the deciding factor (Grigson is a psychiatrist)
Grigson testified that a person who had experienced the incidents prosecution witnesses testified Willingham had experienced – including killing a dog by beating in the head with a stick and running it over with an automobile – was a sociopath.

Grigson defined a sociopath as one who does not have a conscious, who manipulates people, who has a disregard for other’s people property and – in its most severe form – has a disregard for other human beings.

Should a sociopath become involved in extremely violent activities before the age of 30, there is virtually no type of medical treatment and no type of medicine that can treat that person, Grigson testified under questioning by Jackson. He also said that such a person would “absolutely” be a continuing threat in the future, a question the jurors must answer when deciding whether to sentence Willingham to death.

So maybe they just decided he needed killin?

I'm not sure how that affects how I feel about this.
On the one hand, we don't need people deciding that someone needs killin for non-death-penalty reasons, on the other hand, this made it through the appeals courts.

I'm more confused, but less sure he's innocent.

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Via the Agitator we find this story about a guy who might have been wrongly executed.

He supposedly set a fire that killed his children. If you follow the links, the guy isn't a choir boy, he was a career criminal, but there are questions about whether the fire was really arson.
That sucks, a lot. If the allegations are true, the fire marshall whose testimony helped convict the guy should be severely punished. Like the same punishment as an equivalent murder.

So the Agitator wants to know, if the guy was innocent, would this change my mind on the death penalty?

Not really, there are instances where it's beyond doubt that the perpetrator is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt (Mumia for instance),

I would be in favor of making sure that it's beyond a shadow of a doubt, like you need witnesses (plural) or like in My Cousin Vinny if they had found the gun, without the gun, I wouldn't have thought that was a death penalty case.

If anybody asked, I would have guessed you need more than just circumstantial evidence to execute.

I am going to have to assume, since they think the fire wasn't set so he's innocent, the case was all circumstantial evidence, I would say you need direct evidence, witnesses, the murder weapon with the suspect's fingerprints or in his possession, fingerprints on the victims neck, stuff like that.

I know taking a person's life is a serious step, but there are certain people where it's worse to leave them alive. How do you control some guy who's in jail for life with no possibility for parole? He can kill in prison (prisoners, guards, visitors, lawyers) with impunity. What are you gonna do? Give him another life sentence?

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The UN can always be counted on to do the exactly wrong thing.

In today's exciting episode, they've decided to honor Evo Morales, budding commie dictator of Bolivia, Castro, "almost dead" commie dictator of Cuba and Nyerere, dead socialist president of Tanzania. (He actually looks pretty benign for an African President for 24 years)

 Morales is officially "the maximum exponent and paradigm of love for Mother Earth." Castro is "World Hero of Solidarity." The late Nyerere is "World Hero of Social Justice."

General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann said, "What we want to do is present these three people to the world and say that they embody virtues and values worth emulation by all of us."

The only good thing I can say about those two paragraphs is that they spelled all the words correctly.
I am surprised that they were that honest in the last sentence, Castro and his wannabes embody the "virtues" most UN assembly members want to emulate.
They're big fans of socialism/communism, repression, muzzling the press, rigged elections and jailing dissidents.


This is a good place to advertise FrnakJ's "Top Ten UN Slogans" T-shirt.
"Bringing peace to our world (actual results may vary"
I get a bunch of dirty looks and "tch"s when I wear one of mine, but I also get  a bunch of people who ask me where I got it.
It's almost as good as my "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" t-shirt for getting responses.

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It's like they have a template.
They talk about the world cooling, "quote" some unnamted "experts"who tell us that recent data means nothing, the world is going to start warming any day now and let us know WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!1!!1!!!.

And they don't mention the Sun or anything to do with its anomalous activity lately.
It's been surprisingly inactive, both in sunspots and even in the solar wind. That's at the lowest it's been in the 50 years they've been studying it and it's around 20% lower than it was in 1995.
We can't really measure it all the time for some reason (I'm not a solar scientist, I know not to stare at it and that's about it, I'm the fool who gets sunburn every time I go to Florida) but we had  good measurements in 1995 because of a probe and got it again recently because of its orbit.

So, the Earth has been cooling now, for some unknown reason, if you only read the first article, but it's gonna warm really soon and WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!! unless we give Al Gore money or something.
I've decided they're counting on sunspots to restart "any day now", just like real scientists have been saying for a year.
How funny would it be if global warmmongers cripple our ability to produce and use energy just as the next ice age is starting?

Funniest End of Civilization Funny.
That's how funny.
And that scares me.
In a funny way.
(My first foray into drunkblogging, and you were there).

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A whole two posts ago I was wondering what the deal was in Poland.
The Poles are commemorating the beginning of WWII.
The US, France and GB aren't going to be there but Russia and Germany is. So "Us" is not there but "Them" is. Weird. But it makes sense, they don't have their feckless allies from WWII (GB, FR) and the current, missile-defensively feckless ally (US) there.
So anyway, now we have Tsar Putin I blaming WWII on, well let's let him tell us
Moscow's deal with Hitler was "immoral," Vladimir Putin wrote... (You can smell the "but" coming, can't you?V) But he also blamed other European nations for leaving the Soviet Union to face Nazi Germany alone.

I've been reading Churchill's history of WWII for about a year or so. I keep putting it down, it's dense.
But he said Stalin said the same thing constantly. Which was pretty funny considering Russia and Germany had a deal on how to split up Poland that kicked off the Phony War, Russia waited until Germany killed the Polish army before invading and sold Germany all kinds of war-related materials like rubber while Churchill and the Brits were fighting for their lives.
Churchill practically begged Stalin to stop but got nowhere.

After Hitler invaded the USSR, Stalin wanted the Brits to invade the next day.
After helping Hitler kick the Brits off and take the whole continent. now it's the USSR who was "fighting alone". Oh woe is me.

Anway.
I do have to agree with this
Without a doubt there are full grounds to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. But after all, a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism," Putin wrote.

Well, except that Stalin wasn't really interested in a "Joint front for the fight against fascism" until Hitler invaded. Before that? Well, encouraging and trading with him and giving him intelligence and screwing Britain kept them kind of too busy to do much jointly fronting.

And the laugher for the night
Yet Putin also struck a conciliatory note with Poland—a former Soviet satellite-turned European Union member—saying that the grief caused by the 1940 murder of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet NKVD struck a cord with the average Soviet citizen, who also suffered under totalitarianism.

Yeah, it was the mean, old commies like the NKVD, not the KGB.
According to wikipedia, he was stationed in East Germany.
Not really a hotbed of espionage and murder and stuff, right? East Germany didn't anything like the Stasi..... oh yeah.

So we have an KGB agent from East Germany (for a good documentary about it, watch Top Secret) explaining how it was the bad commies who did bad things to them, not the nice, new totally non-commie Empire of Tsar Put... errr..uhhhh... The Peaceloving new Russia.

I say we all pinky swear now that whoever gets France and Belgium in this war has to keep them.
Okay?

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