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February 11, 2003

'JAG' RE-ENACTS FRIENDLY-FIRE DEATH OF CANADIANS IN AFGHANISTAN

Although thinly disguising the case by making Brits, rather than Canadians, the victims of the friendly fire, the facts in tonight's show were extremely close to those of last year's tragedy, which in real life resulted in guilty verdicts for the U.S. airmen, despite the fact they were forced into taking government-issue amphetamines to 'enhance their performance' just before their error.

In the JAG version, the airmen were exonerated, thanks to a TV deus ex machina (electromagnetic spark that 'could have' been mistaken for high-level ground fire, an invention added for the TV show presumably to allow a different verdict).

If that obfuscation of the important real issues in this case weren't enough, the show featured a fictionalized editorial by real-life wacko Bill O'Reilly urging that American troops not be made scapegoats for the 'errors of incompetent allies'. Even in drama this obnoxious jerk manages to be offensive. Should have shown him with the weeping victims' families and shouting at them to 'shut up, shut up, cut the mic!'

For those not following the real case, the grieving Canadian families are split over the verdicts and what the airmen's punishment should be. On the one hand, there seems little doubt that the airmen exercised bad judgement, but on the other, that judgement was compromised by drugs that you can be jailed for driving under the influence of, by what appears to be inadequate training, and by incompetent intelligence procedures, all of which are the responsibility of higher-ups who, as usual, are getting off Scott free.

Ironically, David James Elliot, the judge in the fictionalized case who had to confess to bias in favour of the defence, is in real life a Canadian . It would be interesting to hear what he thought of this script, and what he would say if he now met the families of the victims of the real tragedy.

9:15:39 PM  trackback [] comment []

STATE CAN MAKE INMATE SANE ENOUGH TO EXECUTE
From the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/national/11DEAT.html?th):
The federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled yesterday that officials in Arkansas can force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medication to make him sane enough to execute. Without the drugs, the prisoner, Charles Laverne Singleton, could not be put to death under a United States Supreme Court decision that prohibits the execution of the insane...[Judge Wollman, writing for the majority wrote] "Eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the medication."
That's kind of like excusing murder on the basis its only unwanted consequence is death.
Loved Playing With My Food's comment on this (http://blogs.salon.com/0001444/2003/02/11.html):
But can Arkansas make sane people crazy enough to live there?
8:39:56 PM  trackback [] comment []

HOW WE CAN ALL GET THROUGH THIS AND BE BETTER FOR IT
Excerpt from T. H. White's The Once and Future King (thanks to TLT Group (http://www.tltgroup.org/) for reminding me of this wonderful quote:
[Merlyn, responsible for raising the boy who is destined to become the king of England, is an unusual teacher. Here, he tries to help young Wart/Arthur cope with frustration and sadness.]

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough."
3:29:16 PM  trackback [] comment []

VOLUNTARY HUMAN SHIELDS - THE NEW PACIFISM?
A group of 50 Western anti-war protesters has been granted visas to enter Iraq (they're currently in Turkey, travelling by land convoy) where they plan to take up positions in Baghdad and other civilian areas of Iraq as voluntary human shields to discourage the coming attack by the U.S. ( Reuters)
Not surprisingly, Bush has accused them of 'playing into the hands of Saddam', though so far neither he nor any of his mouthpieces has called them traitors. But I'll bet we haven't heard the last of this by a mile. Wait for the rhetoric, possibly from both sides. I wish I had the courage of this small Ghandiesque band.
1:49:28 PM  trackback [] comment []

GREENSPAN WAFFLES AND GETS AWAY WITH IT
I guess there aren't many economist bloggers, since postings are really light on Greenspan's semi-annual report to Congress, the first since Bush announced his ruinous deficit-laden budget. As usual, the mainstream press led with the easy non-critical stuff - his comments about the 'unsettling' impact of the coming Iraq war on the economy (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/030211/6/rrmw.html). But even though Greenspan did waffle in his wording, enough to get the real meat buried on page 27 and ignored by investors (the market actually rose when he said the following), he did get around to saying this:
"There should be little disagreement about the need to re-establish budget discipline."
"Short of a major increase in immigration, economic growth cannot be safely counted upon to eliminate deficits and the difficult choices that will be required to restore fiscal discipline."
"At the present time, there seems to be a large and growing constituency for holding down the deficit, but I sense less appetite to do what is required to achieve that outcome."
I guess now, when the economy goes into free fall and decades of austerity are needed to fix the mess, Greenspan can say 'I told you so'. But what a weasely way to say it!
1:35:03 PM  trackback [] comment []