Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Gov. Devlin On The West Wing? So I'm watching the beginning of the West Wing series premiere - when I realize I recognize a face in a crowd of advisors around John Goodman, the temporary Republican president. Or something. Anyway - it's your man and mine Zeljko Ivanek, the most conniving-looking man alive. Nothing more interesting than that, just wanted to point it out. =)
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Gov Romney Wants To Kill! Kill! KILL!!! Massachusetts gets a little Texas, a little Utah. Massachusetts governor has new plan to get death penalty re-introduced. Romney claims that his science is so tight that guilt will be irrefutable. It's an interesting angle to take to change legislation. I do, however, wonder how science can irrefutably detect crooked cops. [MetaFilter] First of all - if Romney gets his way and the death penalty is reinstated in Massachusetts, I'll very, very seriously consider moving to at least Vermont, if not just out of the country altogether. I have enough problems with knowing that my tax money is used to execute people on the federal level - I couldn't accept it at all on the state level. Now why is it that the only argument the wanna-be revenge killers even kind of accept for opposing the death penalty is killing innocents? Putting aside the question of whether it's cruel and unusual punishment to KILL someone (uh...sounds pretty freakin' cruel to ME!) there are plenty of other questions... Financial - at best, killing a prisoner costs the same as life without parole. Most of the time, it costs significantly more. Considering the economic situation Massachusetts is in these days and our killer budget problems, switching to spending MORE on prisoners (and more of it up front, too!) doesn't seem like good fiscal policy to me. Crime prevention - is there ANY evidence that having the death penalty keeps people from commiting crimes? I've heard as much evidence suggesting that the death penalty INCREASES certain crimes because a criminal knows he's gone past the point of no return as I have evidence that it DOES cut crime. Not enough potential value here, I think. Moral - IT'S JUST JUDICIALLY SANCTIONED MURDER. There's no way around this, and it's completely unavoidable - the death penalty is murder. It's wrong to kill. Therefore the damned STATE shouldn't do it any more than any private citizen. The death penalty is just an excuse for revenge killing and I find it beyond abhorrent. The idea of it coming back in MA is sickening. If you live in the state, write letters to your reps and state senators. I've already got mine in the mail.

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Well, that was fun - we were off the Internet for something like 3 hours. The first hour or two we were totally hosed - couldn't even get at a system the next cubicle over. For the last part, we were just unable to get at anything outside our campus...but we're back up now. Some problem with Verizon, it sounds like.
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A Little More On Baseball New Face Brings Yankees a Familiar Title. New York celebrated its sixth straight American League East title after first-year starter José Contreras allowed four hits and struck out nine Chicago batters. By Tyler Kepner. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] More interestingly - it isn't just the Yankees who are in the same position in the AL East for the sixth straight year. It's EVERYONE in the AL East. As long as Tampa Bay has been in the league, the division has gone Yankees, Red Sox, Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa Bay...that's just amazing.

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Cubs Fan Confused By Success Shit. Cubs up a game. I'm not trying to jinx them, but what the hell are the Cubs doing in first in September? Jesus. How... [Daily Kos] They're getting ready to make it the World Series, where they'll lose to the Red Sox. Duh. =)
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Quicksilver Annotation Wiki Neal Stephenson launches a Wiki to explain his new novel [bOing bOing] The Wiki itself is here. Wikis are publicly edittable pages - basically, a community-build-and-maintained information source. Neal Stephenson has contributed the first couple entries, but anyone can add more. This should be very, very helpful - if there ever was a book in need of annotations, it's Quicksilver.

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From a Salon column ridiculing Safire's conspiracy theory ravings about Clark and Hillary: This is such a doozy that the next time I pass by the corner of West 43rd Street in Times Square, I fully expect to see that Safire has staked out a piece of pavement down the block from the Black Israelites to alert passersby to the Clintons' evil scheme. (The LaRouche people have already claimed Union Square.)

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