Second Thoughts About the Death Penalty After Charlie Kirk's Assassination

Yesterday, my local newspaper ran a story about a 25-year-old man charged with raping a four-year-old girl. According to the news report, the man, who had a history of indecent behavior with juveniles, infected the child with chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease.

What punishment is appropriate for such an offense?

A few months ago, a 45-year-old man shouting "Free Palestine" set Jewish Americans on fire in Boulder, Colorado. An 82-year-old woman died from her injuries. 

What is a just punishment for such a vicious, racially motivated hate crime?

Earlier this week, an assassin killed Charlie Kirk while he was speaking on a university campus in Utah. Kirk, a conservative political activist, was 31 years old with a wife and two small children.

A 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was arrested. If convicted, what should be done with him?

When I was a college student, I took a class in criminology, which included a field trip to the Oklahoma's maximum-security prison. The warden was our tour guide, and he appeared to take pleasure in showing students the prison's death chamber, where the electric chair was displayed. 

I recall the wooden chair was fitted with restraining straps and a metal cap with wires attached. It looked like a medieval torture device.

I also remember a viewing area where seated spectators could watch a prisoner being electrocuted. Over the chair was a large sign stating "Crime Doesn't Pay."

All the students were shocked by the scene. I, however, was overcome by nausea, physically sickened and frightened by what I saw.

From that moment until this week, I've been opposed to the death penalty. Gazing on the electric chair,  I was overcome by the brutality and ugliness of capital  punishment. I felt coursened by the sight of that chair and by the fact that I lived in a society that would kill a man in such a way.

This week, however, I re-examined my stance on capital punishment. I asked myself whether there are some crimes so heinous, so destructive to moral order, that the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment. Does society have the right and even the duty to signal its repugnance to certain violent acts by killing the perpetrator?

This morning, I was prepared to believe that a man who rapes a child deserves the death penalty as does a man who sets people on fire out of racial hatred. And I was certainly prepared to believe that the man who killed Charlie Kirk in cold blood should be executed.

But then I saw an image of  Tyler Robinson, the man who was arrested on the charge of murdering Charlie Kirk. So young, so confused, so obsessed with violence. 

If Robinson is convicted of this killing, he certainly deserves to die, and society has the moral right to execute him. Nevertheless, I hope the state of Utah doesn't inflict the death sentence because killing Tyler Robinson coursens us all.

Rather. I hope he is sentenced to a very long prison sentence, perhaps life in prison. After all. as Pope Francis observed, a life sentence is a death sentence, and that should satisfy society's sense of justice.

Weekend at Lake Mary: Gratitude and Expectations on a Mississippi Autumn Morning

The days I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, those are good days.

Ray Wylie Hubbard

I have suffered from insomnia for at least 65 years. Even as a small child, I had trouble sleeping, and my inability to nod off easily made me perpetually anxious about the coming day.

Perhaps this affliction could be traced to the stories my father told me when I was four years old about his years in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. He often described fellow prisoners who starved themselves to death, committed suicide, or drowned when a prison ship sank and they didn't know how to swim. 

I interpreted my father's stories to be a message that weak people die when confronted by hardship, and I felt certain at age four that I would never be strong enough to survive what my father endured as a Japanese prisoner of war. My father ate bugs and lizards to stay alive, and I could hardly swallow broccoli!

Or perhaps my nighttime anxieties sprang from my encounters with the hell-and-brimstone Protestant religion that my childhood friends practiced and my fantasies about roasting on hot coals for eternity because I was a Methodist and not baptized by immersion like my playmates.

Now I'm in the evening of life and sleep better, especially when I'm home on Lake Mary in southern Mississippi. Last weekend, I slept exceptionally well and awoke refreshed just before 5 AM. I told myself it would be a good day because I planned to mow my property's four-acre woodlot. I would start early and finish my work before the day turned hot.

Some of my family members are early risers and nearly always start the day before me, but I woke up long before dawn that morning. The darkened house was quiet when I walked into the kitchen. I pushed the brew button on Mr. Coffee, which began gurgling benignly, filling the kitchen with the heavenly fragrance of dark-roast Community coffee.

I found a pack of Pillsbury biscuits in the refrigerator and a pound of Wright's thick-cut smoked bacon. I opened the biscuit package, placed eight dough globs on a baking sheet, and slipped them in the oven to cook.

I fried bacon while the biscuits baked, and in a few moments, I had prepared a feast. I buttered the biscuits, smothered them with mayhaw jelly, and made bacon-and-jelly biscuit sandwiches, which I ate with my coffee.

Knox, my family's genial springer spaniel, woke when he heard me stirring. He smelled the bacon and came into the kitchen, subtly letting me know he was joining me for breakfast. 

"No, Knox," I told him, "this bacon isn't for you," but I warmed a hot dog for him in the skillet and poured the warm bacon grease over his dry dog food. Knox seemed satisfied.

It was dark outside, and there was no sign yet of dawn. I sipped my coffee and ate my simple meal silently, pleasantly conscious that I had no morning newspaper to read or email to open. 

Gradually, the sun introduced itself with long shadows creeping over the roof from the east and casting its pale light on Lake Mary. The lake was placid with no wind this morning, and the water looked bluish white in the predawn ambience.

Finally, the morning sun rose high enough to dominate the day, and it was light enough for me to begin mowing the four-acre woodlot with my zero-turn lawnmower. The grass was overlong because the mower broke down the last time I mowed, and it took me several days to get the replacement part I needed to drive the lawnmower blades.

Would my mower start? I asked myself, and suddenly recalled repeatedly pulling the starter rope on my family's Briggs & Stratton push mower when I was a kid. The misery!

Fortunately, my Toro zeo-turn mower has a battery, not a starter rope, and the engine roared to life with one turn of its key. I set the cutting level at three inches, and soon I was off, riding in padded comfort into the woodlot.

I drove slowly and cautiously to keep the long grass and weeds from overwhelming the mower.  As I crept over the field, I stirred up dust and bugs, but I'd smeared insect repellent over me--the good stuff, laced with DEET. The bugs didn't bother me.

I remembered mowing 40-acre fields when I was young, pulling a brush hog behind my father's John Deere tractor hour after hour. I suffered from asthma as a teenager and self-medicated with double doses of Dristan--eight pills a day.

To stay hydrated on mowing days, I'd make a couple of gallons of Nestea instant tea in a plastic jug, sweeten it with copious amounts of sugar, and fill the jug with ice from the old-fashioned ice trays that I'd take from my family's venerable Frigidaire.

I would end every summer day of mowing covered with dust and grit and my face blackened by diesel smoke. Even my teeth would be black.

This day, however, I only had four acres to mow, and if I needed refreshment, I could get a cold beer out of the refrigerator--much better than powered instant tea.

If I cut my grass weekly, the mowing job takes less than three hours. It would take longer on this day because the grass was so long. Nevertheless, I was starting early while the day was still cool, and I would be shaded for much of the time by the lot's many trees--cypresses, red oaks, pecan trees, and sycamores.

And so I traversed my woodlot, moving along slowly and steadily, taking satisfaction from seeing my property slowly transformed into a neatly clipped, tree-shaded lawn.

 I was finished before noon--just in time to watch the New Orleans Saints play the Cardinals. My wife grilled venison burgers from a deer I shot in January.

It was a good day. As Ray Wylie Hubbard might have said, my gratitude exceeded my expectations. I was grateful for my little piece of Mississippi ground, my wife and family, my riding lawnmower, my venison burger, and my cold beer.

 

Illegal Asian Immigrant Assaults Five-Year-Old in Southwestern Mississippi: Assailant Still At Large

 An Asian illegal alien assaulted a five-year-old child at Lake Mary in southwestern Mississippi on Sunday. 

An Asian carp weighing approximately 18 pounds leaped out of the water and struck the child tubing with his father on the remote lake. The family reported the incident to Mississippi wildlife authorities, who were on the scene within minutes.

An anonymous ranger who was not authorized to speak publicly said the carp was a member of an invasive species originating in Eurasia. The ranger added that the carp's gender identity and preferred pronoun are unknown.

President Trump was briefed on the incident over the weekend. In a prepared statement, the President said that large gangs of Asian carp had entered the United States illegally, flown in by NGOs funded by George Soros, and were making their way up the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes. 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that he had deployed National Guard units from six states to Chicago, where the carp is believed to be headed. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker opposed the move, pointing out that Chicago is a sanctuary city where approximately 150 million unhoused Asian carp are residing in the Ritz Carlton.

Krisi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, expressed confidence that the assailant will be captured soon. "Once apprehended," she stated at a hastily arranged press conference, "the carp will be transported to a secure facility at Angola Prison in neighboring Louisiana, which makes Alligator Alley look like Disneyland."

The child, whom I'll call Sunny, experienced a noise bleed but is expected to make a full recovery.

I got hit by a fish that was THIS BIG!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr Testifies Before the Senate Finance Committee: The Democrats Broughgt a Knife to a Gun Fight

A gaggle of U.S. senators questioned HHS Secretary RFK Jr. at a Senate hearing yesterday, and Kennedy's performance was masterful.  

Democratic senators tried to discredit  Kennedy, asking a barrage of zinger questions that Senate staffers had prepared in advance. Unfortunately for Kennedy's inquisitors, the questions were so convoluted that the Senators had to read them, which made their indignant tone seem feigned and insincere.

At times, I felt like I was watching a Jason Statham movie. Kennedy punched, kicked, pirouetted, and bobbed like an action hero set upon by a gang of street thugs.

Kennedy told Senator Maggie Hassan that she was "just making stuff up," and he dismissed Senator Ben Ray Lujan's rambling questions as "gibberish." And he defanged Senator Warren's nasty questions by reminding her she had taken $855,000 from pharmaceutical companies. Warren was so taken aback that all she could do was shriek.

It would be hard to say which Senator was most humiliated at the hearing. My vote goes to Senator Lujan of New Mexico, who was clearly outmatched intellectually by Trump's Health Secretary. Luhan ended his questioning by saying he wouldn't give Kennedy a lapel pin because the Secretary didn't deserve it. Luhan's statement was so bizarre that Kennedy, a masterful public speaker, was briefly speechless.

Public health policy is a complicated topic, particularly as it pertains to the COVID-19 vaccinations. It's easy to get bogged down in obscure and esoteric discussions about what "the science" says. 

Kennedy's detractors sought to frame him as an irrational madman, whose administration of the Department of Health and Human Services would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. But their attacks fell flat.

Kennedy's responses to hostile interrogation were so clear and succinct that most objective observers will conclude he is a knowledgeable and civic-minded public servant dedicated to making Americans healthier. As he has said repeatedly, the United States is the sickest nation in the developed world. No one disagrees with him.

If the Democratic Senators hoped to discredit Kennedy at yesterday's hearings, they failed miserably. Indeed, his "up yours" performance before a band of buffoons endeared him to the American people.  The Dems brought a knife to a gunfight, and RFK Jr. blew them away.

* * *

Note: I found the brilliant image of Kennedy in an adapted Norman Rockwell painting on X. I don't know who to credit, but it is an inspired artistic expression.

What if the Russians Don't Want to End the Ukraine War?

 Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig just loves it. 

 Attributed to George Bernard Shaw

 When Donald Trump was campaigning for president, he promised to end the Ukraine war within two weeks after taking office. I thought he could do it.

After all, the battle front had stabilized with Russia holding Crimea, the Donbas, and other portions of eastern Ukraine--about 12 percent of the country. If Ukraine made modest territorial concessions, surely the Russians would make peace.

Trump gave it the old college try--drawing on all his considerable negotiating skills. He leaned on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, urging him to make territorial concessions. And he leaned on Russian President Putin,  alternating between flattery and veiled threats. The President even arranged a one-on-one meeting with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. 

Pundits and commentators assured Americans that the Russians are paying a heavy price for their invasion--a million casualties, growing unrest in the civilian population, and an economy nearing collapse. Surely, Putin was ready to throw in the towel and stop fighting. 

Yet the carnage continues. 

Perhaps the Russians don't want the war to end. Maybe Putin is content to grind down the Ukrainian national identity, no matter how long it takes.

This is the view of an essayist on Zero Hedge, who goes by the name of Armchair Warlord (AW). AW posits this theory: "[M[aybe the killing itself is the point of all this."

AW argues that the Russians are fully capable of capturing large swaths of Ukrainian territory, but have not done so. Instead, [t]he Russians have . . . consistently forgone breaking the front and taking swaths of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front under the existing attritional combat dynamic."

AW maintains that the Ukrainian army has sustained massive casualties--1.7 million dead, wounded, captured, or missing. This number is far higher than the figures given by the mainstream, pro-Ukrainian news media.

So what is Putin's long-term objective? According to AW:

Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge massive amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had.

Is AW's assessment correct? I don't know. Nevertheless, the mainstream Western media has not reported accurately about what's going on in Ukraine. Contrary to what Americans have been told, the Russian economy is not nearing collapse. In fact, its GNP has grown since the war began, and the Russian ruble has gained in value against the U.S. dollar.

And Ukrainian casualties are surely higher than the Ukrainians are reporting. And let's not forget the millions of Ukrainians who are refugees from the war. 

America's progressive politicians--the Democrats--support continued American involvement in the largest military conflict since World War II. Unlike President Trump, they're not thinking about ways to stop the fighting or the consequences for our country or for Europe if the war drags on for several more years. 

It's time for our political leaders to confront reality, and these are the facts. Either the U.S. and NATO will have to make a long-term investment in propping up Ukraine, or they will be forced to accept the fact that Ukraine is slipping back into the Russian orbit. 

And this much is certain. Russia wants more than Crimea and the Donbas to stop the killing--and that is a chilling realization.

Image credit: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

 

The Texas Congressional Redistricting Battle: Rep. Jasmine Crockett Ain't Goin' Nowhere

 Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is the Democratic politician whom Texas Republicans love to hate. Who can blame them? 

Crockett called President Trump "a piece of shit" and a "wannabe Hitler." She compared Republicans to neo-Nazis and accused the U.S. Supreme Court of bribery.

Crockett's public speeches occasionally skirt the edge of racism. Indeed, Texas Republic Governor Greg Abbott believes she's crossed that line, recently observing, “It would not be a day that ends in the letter Y if Jasmine Crockett didn’t say something racist.” 

Crockett represents the Texas 30th congressional district, where she is wildly popular. District 30 encompasses the South Dallas metropolitan area, where Crockett garnered 85 percent of the vote in the 2024 election.

The Republican-dominated Texas Legislature recently revised the state's  Congressional district boundaries. One might think they would redraw Crockett's district so that she would lose the next election.

But that's not what the Texas Legislature did. District 30's boundaries were adjusted so Crockett's residence is outside the district, but the district is still overwhelmingly Democratic.

 And Crockett is not legally obligated to live inside District 30. She can reside anywhere in Texas and represent her loyal Dallas constituents in Congress. 

So what's going on? As the Texas Tribune explained:  

Republicans have proposed to pack more Democratic voters into districts in the state’s blue urban centers, giving Democrats even bigger margins in districts they already control, such as those represented by Crockett . . . 

In other words, Texas Republicans' scheme to create more Republican-leaning congressional districts may make Representative Jasmine Crockett unbeatable in her congressional district.

Potty-mouthed Crockett is in her forties and serving her second term in Congress. If Republicans think she is insufferable now, what do they think she'll be like when she is in her fifties and in her tenth term?

 

Labor Day at Lake Mary: Serenity in the Midst of Climate Change and the Trump Derangement Syndrome

 My home sits on the banks of Lake Mary in southwestern Mississippi. Shaped like a ten-mile bratwurst sausage, Lake Mary is an oxbow lake formed when the Mississippi River changed course long ago--in the eighteenth century, I've been told.

Unlike my region's recreational lakes and waterways, Lake Mary is undeveloped. Even on Labor Day, when other watery playgrounds are packed with boaters, skiers, and jet ski enthusiasts, Lake Mary is virtually deserted. I saw only three boats pass by all day.

Lake Mary is only 90 minutes from Baton Rouge, a leisurely weekend drive. Why aren't there more lakefront homes here?

Climate change is the primary reason Lake Mary has been passed by, leaving it a Southern Living Brigadoon. In the mid-twentieth century, Lake Mary and nearby Lake Foster were a famous duck hunting paradise, and hunters came from near and far to hunt ducks and geese. A few lodging houses near the lakes catered to these seasonal visitors, but now they are largely devoid of guests.

What happened? Global warming changed the fly routes of migratory birds. Now, ducks are more likely to spend the winter farther north--in Oklahoma or Arkansas. 

Thirty years ago, Lake Mary was a reliable fishing spot where anglers could catch largemouth bass. No longer. Now the lake is stocked with Asian carp, an invasive species that swam into the lake from the Mississippi River. Wildlife officials along the Mississippi drainage system are fighting to keep the carp from extending their range, but Lake Mary lost that battle long ago, and the Asian carp have taken over.

 Alligator gar, a needle-nosed prehistoric-looking species, has also muscled its way into the lake, and together the carp and gar have pushed out the sport fish. Both species are edible, but few people want to eat them.

Another sign that the ecosystem is changing: alligators are moving north, and my family occasionally spots a gator sunning on the lake bank. Swimming in Lake Mary has become less inviting.

Feral hogs have also grown in numbers in southern Mississippi, and climate change may explain this expansion. These beasts roam the woods in large sounders--20 pigs or more-- and compete with the deer for forage.

Given all these disadvantages, why would I want to live on Lake Mary? Several reasons. First, I cherish the serenity and the solitude. 

My neighbors occasionally pass by my homestead on the gravel road that borders my property-- people in 4-wheel drive pickups or all-terrain vehicles. But there are no traffic jams or road rage, no carjackings.

I also love my Mississippi home for the abundant bird life: snowy egrets, great egrets, white ibises, blue herons, tricolored herons, kingfishers, and the occasional stork and bald eagle. Late in life, I've become a hack birdwatcher.

Even so, living on Lake Mary has a significant drawback. My property floods yearly when spring rains flow down from the upper Mississippi Valley, depositing as much as eight feet of water under my house.

Climate change? Many of my neighbors think so. According to the oldtimers, the Mississippi River hardly ever flooded this region until 30 years ago. People speculate that extreme weather events have caused more torrential rainstorms and that the excessive water has triggered soil erosion, silting up the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

No matter. My home sits on steel piers 15 feet above ground level. It would take a flood of biblical proportions to threaten my habitation.

So, as Waylon Jennings put it, "Let the world call me a fool." I'm content to live out my days in a backwater of southern Mississippi, where the sunsets are gorgeous and no one suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.