Innocence, bah!

Man to be arrested
for assault, after licking
and kissing woman’s foot.

The case of Troy Davis has brought up what seems to me to be a truly strange question, should it be ruled unconstitutional to execute an innocent man? The first thing that pops into my apparently naïve mind is, why in the world should the Supreme Court even have to rule on such a ridiculous question? It would seem perfectly obvious to me that of course you would never in any circumstances execute an innocent person. Apparently Antonin Scalia and his butt-licking toady, Clarence Thomas, think it would be okay because the Supreme Court has never ruled otherwise. This is a view so patently absurd it could only be held by Supreme Court Justices who need have no connection whatsoever to reality and seem to believe the law is something akin to mathematics, a mode that exists only as a system of abstract rules that can be manipulated merely for fun and games. I have no firm evidence that Troy Davis is innocent, although from what I have seen I strongly suspect he is. But it doesn’t matter to Scalia and Thomas whether he is or not. Such is life in the upper echelons in the land of “liberty and justice for all.”

Another case that has arisen also strikes me as strange in that it seems to me to make enormously complicated something that should not be so complicated. This has to do with gender identification. An African girl, Caster Semenya, pretty dramatically won the women’s 800 meter race at the World Competition in Berlin. Now some are demanding she be tested to prove she is actually a she. Her parents who raised her say she clearly is a female and has always been so. Her roommates who have seen her naked in the shower also testify to her gender. This is not good enough for some who are demanding she be tested for chromosomes. That is, does she have the XX that would clearly identify her as a woman, or might she be XZ that would indicate…well, it would indicate that genetically she might not be so clearly a woman. Okay, fair enough, but I think Ursula Andress, who was just voted the all-time “bikini goddess,” should also be tested. If outward appearances and eyewitness testimony are not enough I should think this would be not only fair but important. Similarly, this brings up for me, questions about the great Babe (Didrikson) Zaharias. As you (most of you anyway) won’t recall, Babe Zaharias was a championship golfer. She also excelled in basketball and track and field. She won two gold medals and a silver at the Los Angeles Olympics. The nickname “Babe” was acquired because she once hit five home runs in a baseball game. She was also a singer, a harmonica player, and a championship seamstress. She was married to a Greek Wrestler, George Zaharias, for a time. With a record like that, how can we be certain she was a female (or at least might have had some slight genetic abnormality). Olympic champions are sometimes stripped of their medals for different reasons. While we’re about these draconian measures, I wonder that no one has called for her exhumation to prove she deserved all her championships. By the same token, how do we know for certain that Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Tiger Woods, and Brett Favre are really male? How can I trust my lying eyes? Obviously the only really safe way would be to test everybody. Perhaps where there are questions a separate category of competitions could be established. Perhaps…oh, to hell with it, it’s just too complicated.

Now it comes out that what many of us suspected all along was true, the so-called color terror alerts were manipulated for political purposes by the Bush/Cheney administration, or so suggests Tom Ridge, the first head of homeland security. I do not find this surprising in the least, nor do I find it surprising that Karl Rove was deeply involved in politicizing the Justice Department, or that Dick Cheney was behind the outing of Valerie Plame, or told the CIA to not inform Congress of his death squads, and on and on and on. Sometimes I believe the utter incompetence of Bush/Cheney, and the dozens upon dozens of scandals they hatched, were done on purpose. Perhaps they figured out that if they screwed up literally everything, lied non-stop about everything, and stonewalled everything, it would all be so complicated no one would ever be able to figure it all out and therefore ever do anything about it. They ran a criminal enterprise for eight years and apparently, having done everything they wished, are going to get away without being held accountable for anything. Democrats refuse to take any action, probably because so many of them were themselves involved in various crimes and immoral acts. It seems there are only two “sort of” parties at the moment, the large and successful corporate criminal party and the much smaller party of the absolutely bonkers.

LKBIQ:
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
Daniel Webster

TILT:
Lake Titicaca, situated between Bolivia and Peru, at 12,500 feet above sea level, is the highest body of water upon which someone has sailed.