Missouri kills an innocent man
When DNA testing came out, a professor in Chicago turned his students loose on the 19 people on Illinois' Death Row, and said, use the new DNA testing to review these cases. It took a while, and the number of people on Death Row changed over the years. But within a few years
13 of them had been proven innocent.
This points out a big problem with our justice system. The jurors do the best they can; so do the police; everyone does their jobs. But big people at the top, who are often elected, have a vested interest in securing "justice" by making sure someone dies for every murder. If these 13 didn't kill the people they were charged with killing, who did? Well, somebody else, obviously, and it appears they got away with it.
It is pretty easy to force a confession. You just make someone suffer enough, and you make them believe thier life will be over
now if they don't say what you want. You can even make them believe that their life is as good as over already, if they don't say what you want. So they said it. You got it on tape. And their life is as good as over.
That doesn't make it right. We're talking about poor, defenseless black men here for the most part, people who don't necessarily know at the moment that their defense attorney is worthless and not on their side. Or, they're unable to
do anything about it.
Let's talk about Khalifah for just a minute. It didn't help that he became Muslim; that adds to the suspicion that what they really wanted to do was kill a Muslim. But he was a typical case in some ways. There was no credible evidence to convict him, outside of a forced confession. When the facts came in, his blood and DNA weren't on the scene. Everyone admitted that the defense attorney was worthless and/or not on his side. Even the families of the victims had asked that he not be killed. But high-up political people needed to prove they were tough. It doesn't matter that no evidence shows that capital punishment deters crime, either. It's posing.
So they kill an innocent man. They are no better than the people they rail on against in their campaigns.
Sad story
Now that I've made public my new cochlear implants, I've had an outpouring of good wishes but also curiosity: what went wrong? How can we avert this? How could good hearing go down the drain? This is my story. I'll leave the details of the cochlear implants themselves for later.
In my opinion there are several possible culprits, and there's no rejecting the idea that it could be a combination of them. I'll list them out. 1) altitude/pressure issues. 2) six cups of coffee a day for forty years. 3) meds that disrupt the balance, or that I'm allergic to (very possible given my allergenic history).
My first dizzy spell was in Texas; that rules out altitude but not pressure entirely. In New Mexico, however, dizzy spells came on fast and furiously. I knew I needed an EMT; one was in Las Cruces (~130 mi. of desert, 7 mo. wait); one was in Roswell (130 miles of even more barren country, 5 mo. wait). I took Roswell. When I got there he said 1) it's Maniere's disease, which is really more of a condition, a condition of ruined hearing from inner ears full of fluid (and possibly other things). 2) Your inner ear is an organ, like your kidney, extremely complex, and its entire job is to separate out sodium and potassium from a stream that comes through it. Obviously it's malfunctioning. Too much sodium can make it malfunction. 3) What we do is prescribe a diuretic (prevents your body from retaining water) and a strict low-sodium diet. We do that because it works.
when he talked about retaining water, I thought of the coffee, and he said yes, there is a correspondence between too much coffee and Maniere's. It is also indisputable that pressure/altitude can play a role. He was less sure about the med thing but didn't discount it. When I got home I found one of my meds actually was sodium axoproponapthaminapramisol (last part made up) and I rejected it. It was
made of sodium. Since then, since doing what he wanted (it took a while to get the hang of low-sodium), it has been better - fewer dizzy spells. Several meds, I noticed, tended to cause dizzy spells. When I cut back on coffee I needed something for ADD: dizzy spells from those meds. I eventually quit all meds except the diuretic itself, and just live with ADD; I have three cups of coffee a day, and I'm retired. But in general, fewer dizzy spells.
The dizzy spells were in a sense a symptom of full inner ears. Why were they full? It could be a combination of things. Going from 9000 to 3300 feet every day certainly didn't help. I never really had a sodium-rich diet but all diets are sodium-rich until you make a conscious effert to make them low sodium. Severe cutback on fried, processed, salty food has really helped. The diuretic has helped but it has its own consequences.
Why do I say I'm not sorry? You can say
you never should have moved to 9000 feet but it was fantastic, wonderful being up there in the clouds and I am not sorry I did it. You can say
you should never have taken all those meds but we generally have faith in meds and it's a rare case when people are allergic to them or they do what they could have done to me. I will say this though. When there is a "possible side effect" of dizzy spells that meand
someone somewhere reported that as a side effect, yet no clinical trials have verified it. Well, if someone can have dizzy spells as a result of meds, everyone can. It's a reason to be vigilant, not to reject meds altogether.
Finally there's the coffee. Keep in mind that
that's how I treated my ADD for all those years. No coffee, I would have been on the street, Iswear. So don't tell me
you shouldn't have drunk all that coffee...of course I shouldn't have, but it's over now, and I can't undrink it.
As I look back a key would have been vigilance. From the first dizzy spell if someone had said 1) watch out; 2) way less sodium; or 3) get thee to online ENT,things might have been different. Nowadays when all this information is on the surface, we hardly imagine a world where I just sat and waited for an ENT, not knowing what elseto do. That was my downfall. If I knew the above I'd-a-been vigilant from the first turn and that's why I recommend: study up, see how delicate things are. Your hearing is your natural inheritance and you don't want to go through what I went through.
Another debate bites the dust
OK, during the debate I was door-dashing. It was a wild night out on the dash but that's another story. The main reason I don't watch the debates is because it makes me feel like when the guy who raped your daughter tries to sell you a Bible. You say, someone keep me from popping this guy one, or I'll end up in jail. I don't want to break the things around me in anger that they even let him speak or run for office.
Look at the bright side: half of the US will take better care of their pets. I think it's shameless to be such a fear-monger but basically when white America sees their towns become browner they become more afraid, and that's what's happening. Demographics are changing and people feel powerless about it. I'm convinced that that's what's behind the illegalization of abortion too, although that affects all races and is a little more indirect. White Americans are afraid. That's his base. Last time he called all the Mexican immigrants rapists, and
actually won the election, in some sense. He was the only rapist in the room.
The other good thing is that if the US can clearly see the choice they can clearly make the choice. Seeing exactly what we've got here has got to be good, and we have to have faith that people can choose wisely. There is no more important time than now.
Rainy Night in Georgia
The blood is barely dry on the Georgia school shooting, and now that I've read about it, I find myself not saying "how horrible" (though it is horrible), but rather, "how typical." It's just a usual family who gives their son an AR-15 for Christmas.
I'm sure they didn't say
"oh by the way don't shoot up the school with this, or, "
don't ever use this on people, especially not people you know" Rather, they didn't say anything but "Merry Christmas!" and deep down they felt that the kid's unhappiness which they knew only all too well would be alleviated somewhat by the feeling of power one gets when one takes an AR-15 out or around or in the back yard, and waves it around, and notices that if one were to fire it all range of things in its path would be killed.
It's a somewhat subtle way of encouraging a school shooting, since it wouldn't be polite to say,
"just go shoot up that school if they start mistreating you," or, "this gun is to fix whatever problems you're having at that damn place", which is probably what they really wanted to say, if only subconsciously. I know I am putting thoughts in their heads; I absolutely don't know them. But one thing I noticed from subbing in gun-country high schools was that the
parents had tons of unresolved issues around school's simply giving them the tools they needed to survive in this world, and many of these issues, surprise surprise, came right out in their kids' behavior or lack thereof. Kids sometimes through their violence or even non-action expressed a hostility that was thinly veiled when you actually talked to the parents, and which surely came out one way or the other in the daily grind of getting kids dressed and down to the building at least some of the time.
Nowadays those of us who still put our kids in public schools are playing a kind of roulette. Sure it may only be a couple-thousand-to-one these days, with the actual chances your kids' school will be shot up pretty slim in the big picture. But school shootings are
commonplace, everyday, usual methods for sick kids to express their frustration these days. They've all played Call of Duty, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, etc.; some have played them hours at a time, or all summer, or in blocks of four, eight, ten hours at a time with occasional breaks for food. They have practice firing guns, the electronic kinds. They've worked on their aim and they've normalized expressing their hostility through shooting some random little electronic creature. They've been shot and killed and come right back for a few more hours of it.
It's because it's totally part of the overall fabric of our world that it seems so normal. I have three kids afflicted with mental illness. Two swore to me up and down they would never confuse a video game with reality and then lo and behold,
both confused video games with reality. They make video games very well these days; they're easy to confuse with reality, and mental illness in their case was something they brought into the picture. Fortunately violent tendencies were
not part of the picture. But the third kid confused life and Grand Theft Auto - he couldn't tell them apart. Stole our car three times and wrecked it each time. We were lucky no one was killed. He sure as
heck didn't know what he was doing. He had maybe two or three hundred hours of GTA under his belt, and not a single minute of driving practice. That I realize is entirely my fault. or our fault. It's the way it worked out. We were lucky not only that no one got hurt, but also that he didn't end up dead or in jail himself for various other things done on impulse and irresponsibility. He was a kid.
This is all very personal, and shoudln't be. Innocent people are dying. And that's because the basic framework of our country is built around gun ownership and gun possession. I set out to be a Quaker and it saved my life, the life of my kids, the life of countless people around them, who are the victims when things like this happen. In this case I happened to be connected to one of the victims - a friend out in Utah happened to know someone, who was related to the guy who got shot in the foot
and the hip, but who mirculously survived. He was maybe a math teacher too? I was a math teacher. I have special sympathy for those math teachers. They are the saints of this world. And we should not just turn away and say, "whatever!"
Grothendieck and his work
Hoad, Phil. (2024, Aug. 31). ‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?
The Guardian. Online:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/31/alexander-grothendieck-huawei-ai-artificial-intelligence
An article about the work of Alexander Grothendieck, whose papers are only now coming to light and beginning to be explored. I am always on the watch for people who think outside the box, who for example don't believe that mathematics have to be restricted by our old thoughts of mathematics, or absolute laws like "you can't divide by zero." Grothendieck is like the Picasso of matrhematics; he can see things from all angles at once. But according to the article he spent almsot a decade consumed by the idea of evil and Satan's influence on the universe and in particular the people who loved him. In the minds of many, this disqualified him. That and the fact that he stopped communicating with other mathematicians, or considering their ideas. Now they are supposed to consider his?
I love the
Guardian because you can count on it to reveal not only others' frustrations with him, but also the genuine possibility that he's like Einstein, the carrier of great wisdom into the modern world. Since Einstein, we've all been aware that Einstein was probably right, yet we weren't quite prepared to redo our entire way of thinking. So ok, no time is better than the present. If we have to do it, let's get this ball rolling. Maybe a good start is to unravel everything this guy wrote.
The Draft Dodger Speaks
Let's face it, he's a
draft dodger. His buddy JD was a correspondent, but that counts right? That's like, well, at least he was in the same
area as the people who risked their lives.
So they can't follow the rules of Arlington Cemetery. The Cemetery says, no campaign photographs, etc. but this is the king, right? He doesn't have to worry about rules. He can't be prosecuted because the SUPREME COURT said he can't.
And he wants to point out that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy? He had four years to withdraw as he promised, and he
never did it. Same with Obama; both promised to get out. We wanted out for over ten years. People were dying; nothing was happening. So remind us that it was messy. But I'll remember how you dithered and you were unable to do it yourself. Just get out - Biden at least did it.
So you want to make a big deal out of military service.
Draft dodger - what was it, you had a problem with your foot? A rich doctor said you had a problem with your foot? Or was it your ankle? Or maybe one of your toes? And now you want us to notice what, that you can do whatever you want?
Sorry, I'm getting a little tired of this already.
Prairie Leveretts
A plains pioneer biographyBr>
James Walker Leverett (1830-1916) was born in 1830 and came out to Illinois on a stagecoach with his parents as a boy of four. He grew up on a farm near Quincy, but ended up moving out the prairie three times, once trying to homestead in southeast Nebraska Territory. This story tells about his life. I was interested in it for several reasons; one, the period of time is fascinating. Two, I also had many children and bounced around the prairie. Three, a lot of people claim him as a descendant and it's interesting to map out how we're related and make the connection. The story is interesting for more than the Leverett family, though. He's a guy who was totally in his period, knowing how to build and join wood to make houses, and he has a lot of wisdom to share with the modern generation.
Kindle version
here.
Paperback version in review.
Hardback coming! (maybe ACX?)
