Books Lying Open
¤ The Mammoth Book of The Best New Horror, #14, edited by Stephen Jones
¤ The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown
¤ A Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Hawaiian shirts and the occasions that require them as part of a uniform.

Question of the Day:
¤ Why sleep now?

Curse of the Day:
¤ May a lack of content actually increase your website's traffic.

¤ One thing that continues to surprise me is how drunk drivers are punished so lightly. If they hit and kill someone they get some punishment, but never enough, and if they drive so drunk that it's just chance if they don't actually run into someone/something, they get next to nothing, unless it's about their fourth repeat offense. I suppose it's of the same logic that makes attempted murder a much lesser offense than successful murder, but it's sort of weird how people are rewarded for doing something spectacularly awful, and failing at it.

He was sentenced to three and a half years. With time already served, he will spend two years in prison -- a sentence that disappointed the Fortin family.

The Crown attorney says he is satisfied with the verdict.

"The gravity of what he did justified that he should be imprisoned," explained prosecutor Vincent Martinbeault.

Obviously the jail for murder won't bring the dead person back, but it's all about prevention. I'm not usually a big fan of jail as a preventive factor, mostly since criminals aren't committing their crimes with a thought that they'll be caught. The whole point is to get away with it, murder included, which is why the death penalty almost never does anything to prevent murder. Like a gang-banger is thinking, "I'd cap that G if I could get away with just life in prison, but since they'll kill me, I better not."  Murder is irrational and hot headed and committed by people who think they'll get away with it.

Drunk driving isn't such an emotional issue. People do it since they don't think it's a big deal, or they think they can get away with it, and they think that even if they do get caught, it won't be a big deal.  And you know what? They're right. At least about the last part. As this guy getting just 3.5 years in prison for murdering an 18 year old proves.

Yet another wood chipper fatality.

TAMPA In the hours before the accident, the tree trimmer loaded branch after branch into the mouth of the wood chipper.

By 5 p.m. Thursday, after a full day of work in the heat and humidity, the machine clogged, jamming on a large bundle of branches.

Using his hands for support, the man climbed into the chipper and kicked the branches through.

In an instant, the machine pulled half his body through its blades, killing him before he could cry for help, said Hillsborough County sheriff's Lt. Fred Asteasuainzarra, who described the accident Thursday evening.

The accident is the third in the area involving wood chippers in recent years.

In January 1999, a 22-year- old man died in Valrico when he used his foot to free a branch stuck in a chipper. Joshua Avery of Dover worked for Farrens Tree Surgeons. 

In March 2003, a 24-year-old woman died in a similar accident. Roziland Jennifer Mowell, whose husband owned Ashbranch Tree Service, died in Lakeland when she became caught in a chipping machine.

What part of "Keep your goddamned body parts away from these deadly spinning blades!" are people just not understanding? Also, how much leg could a wood chipper chip, if a wood chipper could chip leg? Lastly, how do they get the last guy out of the machine? He's ground up to the waist and the machine's stuck on his pelvis. Can they reverse it and shoot him out like a party favor? Can they raise up the blades and pull him out in ribbons? Do they saw him in half and bury him in a very short casket? Or do they just turn it back on and stomp on his head until the blades finish the job?

Yes, that was in pretty poor taste. But don't worry, it's only going to get worse.

Worse, because the second Darwinian story of the day is about a true American hero, football player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman. If you've been living under a rock or outside of the US, you might not have heard that an ex-NFL player was recently killed in a shoot out in Iraq. The guy, Pat Tillman, was a mediocre defensive back, but good enough to have a 3 year, $3.6 million dollar contract offered to him by the perpetually awful Arizona Cardinals franchise several years ago. He turned it down, deciding instead to join the Army Rangers with his little brother after getting patriotism fever after the 9/11 events. At least that's the official story; I've never read any sort of interview with him where he explained his motivations. I wonder if he'd have been so eager to get out if he'd been on a decent team, or a bigger star player?

Anyway, it's a noble gesture, I suppose. Turning down all of that money to go into the Rambo branch of the armed forces, wanting to "make a difference" and shoot guns and crawl around in camouflage and drive a real Hummer and all that. However, it is rather Darwinian, if we go by the strict definition of the term. I.E. Tillman did something stupid and unnecessary that led directly to his death.

Was he as dumb as those 16 y/o's who car surf with a friend video taping it and fall off and split their heads open doing a second pass to get a better camera angle? No, of course not. But he didn't have to join the Rangers and put himself into danger, and he did anyway, so on some level, you can't deny that he got what he was asking for. He was certainly patriotic and heroic and brave, but then again there's always a lot of overlap between those things, and good old fashioned "dumb". And lest you believe otherwise, dumb is not at all a drawback in a soldier. In fact, it's an almost essential trait. After all, the whole purpose of a soldier, from a commander's point of view, is to go into a dangerous place to do a dangerous job without thought of personal safety. Too much intelligence and thinking is a huge drawback when it comes to following orders that might well send you to your death, for what someone else thinks is the greater good.

Still, I wouldn't have posted about Pat Tillman, since you could in theory apply the Darwinian thing to virtually everyone who joins the military, any military, and dies in the line of duty, in a war that wasn't strictly defensive and unavoidable. Even in wars that are more like invasions, or even foreign excursions (define the current US into Iraq conflict however you see fit), it's hard to single out individual soldiers for Darwinian deaths, if they're following orders and not doing something particularly stupid. If a soldier drops his lucky helmet and runs back out into fire to get it, he's Darwinian. The rest of the time, he's just unlucky or in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Something to ponder; are suicide bombers Darwinian deaths? It's debatable; they are killing themselves like idiots, mostly for causes they don't understand, mostly being talked and manipulated into it by evil leaders who would never have the sauce to go blow themselves up. But at the same time, they are dying while doing what they want to do, more or less voluntarily, and their deaths frequently do much to kill their chosen enemies, or advance their chosen causes. ("Advance" being open to interpretation, in much the same way one can argue just how "successful" the latest Israeli killing of a known HAMAS leader is, since all those killings do is further inflame the conflict.)

Anyway, I don't know of suicide bombers are Darwinian or not, and I'm not going to argue it too deeply today. The question just popped into my mind.

What I was talking about was Pat Tillman, and whether or not he was Darwinian. Sadly, I don't even really have an opinion on that. I guess I have to give props to him for not just being a war blogger/chickenhawk, sitting at home and talking about how great the military is while doing nothing more dangerous than eating too many Cheetos. Also, Pat wasn't a general, he was just a highly-trained grunt, who went where they sent him. He didn't get to pick and choose (I don't think?) where he served, or what he did once he was serving. Tillman might have had great philosophical objections to the Iraq Attack, hated Bush for all of the WMD lies he told to get us into the war, and wanted desperately to get back to hunting the real 9/11 terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But we'll likely never know, now that he's dead and has been largely sainted.

In fact, the only reason I'm really posting about this at all is that some grad student at the University of Massachusetts wrote an editorial pointing out what I thought was obvious; that Pat Tillman more or less got what he was asking for. The guy's writing is pretty crap, and he's long on conjecture and very short on facts. True, that's SOP for flaming editorial writers, and people like Ann Coulter have made very successful careers with it, but the idea is to improve upon the mediocrity of poor writers. Not join them in wallowing in it.

Anyway, here's a quote from the guy's editorial, taken from a right wing blog entry about it. Read the comments there for an amazingly and depressing display of the lockstep ideological agreement that so characterizes most modern political discussion.

Much of the rest of the editorial is just junk though. There's a good joke to be made about Pat Tillman's impossibly square-jawed, thick-necked, scowling face, but this editorial fails to make it. The editorial also fails completely to capture what he now says was his point, that Tillman was lionized and glorified mostly because he was a jock celebrity, while the Pentagon basically hides the names and faces of everyone else who dies in Iraq.

Still, my reaction to it was much like my reaction to the comments by that one Dixie Chick, back in 2003 when they got into trouble for saying they were ashamed that Dubya was from Texas. Conservatives got all worked up into a boycotting lather back then, but I could never clearly discern what the Dixie Chick had said that anyone so objected to. It was much like this Pat Tillman interview, where right leaning citizens chose to become upset by the perceived insults or slights, rather than actually listening to what was said, and forming their own opinions about it. They heard Rush and others of his ilk say it was horrible, and they agreed without giving it a thought on their own. I'm sure the guy who wrote this U Mass editorial about Tillman will have to go into hiding for a month or two until it blows over; he'll be getting so many death threats.

Talk radio isn't the real problem in America. It's the way so many of the uninformed, ignorant listeners just accept whatever they hear, and go with it. Rush sez it, so they believe it and take action on it, and whether or not what Rush said was true or fair is entirely irrelevant. It's a clever tactic; rather than spelling out exactly what horrible things you want your audience to do or think, you play it somewhat straight, lead your flock right up to the edge of whatever you want them to think, but stop just short.  This allows you to appear objective and intelligent, and gives you deniability if any of your kook fans actually does something illegal (like murder), but still gets your point across. This is certainly a popular tactic online, where for every bomb throwing maniac like Ann Coulter, there are several popular blogs (LGF, for instance) that report nothing but biased, slanted, ideologically-misleading news items, excerpt the most inflammatory aspects of them, and then leave it to their commenters to post the ranting death threats.

I'm sure there's a term for that sort of tactic, and I'd like to know it, but I don't. 

It's clever too. Like if some other site stole my site's content and graphics, and I posted about it, talked about how angry it made me and how I just wanted to shut down my entire site, and wondered aloud what would happen if someone were to hack the other person's site and run over their dog. And then when someone did hack their site, and did turn their dog into a road waffle, I could say, "Oh, well I certainly don't approve of that! I never asked anyone to do it."  Having cake and eating it too is our friend.

While I'm talking about Iraq (yes, I realize I strayed from that topic several paragraphs ago) here's the latest Tom Toles cartoon. It amused me, while making a pretty damned ironically-good point, which is, of course, the whole point of a political cartoon.

As Toles points out, the situation in Iraq is deteriorating towards anarchy and civil war, and the only way to curb the decline is with swift, decisive, cruel military force. Just the sort of thing Saddam specialized in.  Perhaps they should thaw him out and put him back in charge?  Just for a few months, until the rebellions are all quashed, of course.

Yes, I'm joking.

To really wrap things up, let's just look at a picture of a cute, furry kitty belly, and give Jinxie some rubbin's and wipe away all of the unhappy thoughts of war and death from our heads.