Author: Kim du Toit

Government Efficiency

Crime, Gummint, Psychos

It’s a well-known fact that given any job to do, Government will do it a.) badly,  b.) expensively, c.) slowly and d.) with all sorts of unforeseen consequences thereafter.

And so it is with this sorry little tale:

The attorneys for Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike said Tuesday that Pike is awake and speaking to her medical team after last week’s failed execution attempt, marking a development the attorneys described as “unprecedented.”

The attorneys said Pike is still handcuffed and that her prognosis is still unclear, according to NBC News. The development comes after Pike was on a ventilator last week after she survived two rounds of injections of the lethal drug pentobarbital.

Pike, who was convicted of killing former classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995 when she was just 18 years old, was initially scheduled to be executed last week, but it was delayed after an appeals court stayed the execution. The Supreme Court later ruled the execution could move forward if it was carried out before midnight.

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has halted a third execution attempt in light of the botched injections and has ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” The next attempt will not take place this year.

Anyone who has a brain could have told you that it was only a question of time before Gummint screwed up the only thing it’s supposed to do quickly and efficiently, and instead made a complete dog’s breakfast of a simple act, that of executing a cold-blooded murderer.

Most of this stems from the fact that public opinion has changed from “Hang ’em high!” to “Well, if you must kill them, do it as humanely as possible”, as though executing someone isn’t inhumane enough.

So in the old days, we did it through hanging (for centuries, despite even this being botched on several occasions), through decapitation, first with an axe or sword and when this was also cocked up, with the guillotine — which at least worked properly.

But oooh no, these were all too messy and bloody and stuff (albeit true), so we became more civilized and went on to the gas chamber (and cocked that up), and finally to lethal injections (ending up with the Christa Pike Situation).

What we should have done was follow the example of the military.

Now I know that the military itself has a long and storied history of inefficiency and stupidity [25,278 examples redacted], but the one thing they know something about is killing people — it’s kinda the entire reason for their existence, after all.

So:  firing squads.  Quick, simple, cheap, and very much deadly.  Proof?

Reviewing cases from 1890 through 2010, the Death Penalty Information Center found that lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions: about 7 percent, compared to 5 percent for lethal gas, 3 percent for hanging, and 2 percent for electrocution. The rate for firing squads was 0 percent.

And just in case people may quail at the brutality of shooting a woman, let us review what this particular woman did that earned her a part in our discussion:

Pike, along with her friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, and boyfriend Shipp, enticed Colleen Slemmer to an abandoned steam mill on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus, deep in the woods.

Once out in the secluded spot, Pike made her true intentions known. While Peterson acted as a lookout, she and Shipp subjected their classmate to unthinkable torture using a meat cleaver and a box cutter. More than 100 injuries were inflicted in just 30 minutes.

Colleen’s throat was repeatedly slashed, and she was still alive when a pentagram was carved on her bare chest by Shipp. All the while, she pleaded for her life, as the attackers taunted her.

Tennessee Attorney General’s Office court documents state: “When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her stomach with the box cutter. … As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her in the face. Pike then cut Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy.”

Pike would later tell of how they’d forced Colleen to remove her blouse and bra, to stop her running away, and that she’d tied a rag taken from her around Colleen’s mouth to stop her from speaking. She said: “It was harder to hurt somebody when they’re talking to you.”

Court records also show how Pike had asked a barely-conscious victim, “Colleen, do you know who’s doing this to you?” By this point, she was too severely injured to respond.

Colleen made one last desperate escape attempt, at which point Pike dealt the final fatal blow to the back of her victim’s head with a large piece of asphalt, smashing her skull. The trio then walked away from the scene.

By the time two UT physical plant employees discovered Colleen’s partially clothed body the following morning, the damage was so extensive that they initially believed they were looking at an animal’s corpse.

So now, somebody explain to me why this foul woman should be allowed to live.  Good luck.

As soon as she recovers from the earlier execution attempt — which seems likely(!) — she should be dragged out of hospital, tied to a chair and shot to death by a firing squad.  A military firing squad.  (I’m pretty sure they’ll find no shortage of volunteers [sic]  in the Tennessee National Guard.)

Here’s one example of how this works.  I bet they won’t screw this one up.

End of story.

Nowhere To Go

Morons & Idiots, Traitors / Fifth Columnists

One has to wonder how this tool thought it might end:

A former CIA officer admitted in a plea deal Tuesday that he disclosed details about a secret U.S. intelligence source to a foreign official and embezzled nearly $200 million from the federal government.

David Rush pleaded guilty in Virginia federal court to one count of wire fraud after an FBI raid on his home in May uncovered 298 gold bars worth $46 million, $2.1 million in cash and dozens of luxury items. 

Justice Department officials said Rush embezzled $194 million from the federal government, using his position at the intelligence agency to create an elaborate scheme designed to facilitate his “maximum self-enrichment at the expense of the United States.”

At some point, you have to wonder how this traitorous asshole thought he was going to spend all that moolah without someone eventually saying, “How did he get to buy all that shit, on a government salary?”

Well, obviously he couldn’t, so all he could do was sit on his pile of gold and look at his Rolex collection or whatever.

Pathetic.

If you’re going to do this embezzlement thing on a large scale, or get paid large sums by a foreign government, the least you could do is insist on being paid with bearer bonds;  because the nice thing about bearer bonds is that they don’t weigh anything (relative to gold, for sure), and you can fold them up, travel to — I don’t know, Liechtenstein or Monaco, for example — and use that money to fund a vacation of your dreams.

Live for today, in other words, because at some point, you are going to be discovered and have the dogs sicc’d onto you, and instead of memories of having hot and cold running women catering to your every perverted need in a 5-star hotel room, all you’ll have left is the memory of a pile of gold ingots.

As you’re walking up the steps to the gallows.

(In any just world, that is.  What’s really going to happen is that he’ll go to jail for a few years, then get an early release — because that’s what happens nowadays — and make a fortune by writing a book and getting a job as a “security consultant” on one of the Commie TV networks.)

Don’t get me started.

Sorry, this post should have appeared earlier, but I messed up the time stamp.

 

A Matter Of Survival

Books & Movies, History

When it comes to WWII-era Germans, I have rather a callous attitude towards tales of their suffering at the hands of the Allies — Russians, Brits, Americans, whoever — because it’s easy to say, “They started it.”

But I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic over the past week or so, and especially since I read the appalling fates of the German women in captured Berlin at the hands of the  barbarians  Russian soldiers who were the first into the capital.  Specifically, I refer here to the anonymous diary kept by one such woman, published under the title A Woman In Berlin.  (The movie version can be viewed or purchased through Amazon Prime;  I remember watching it several years ago, and be warned:  it is seriously intense and violent.)

The text, though, is all the more remarkable because of the woman’s clear, almost dry depiction of the plight of all the women, and not just herself.  (That does not in any way diminish the horror, by the way;  I lost count of the times she was raped over the eight weeks of the story.)

Remember that there were very few men in Berlin at that stage of the war:  they were all off fighting the Allied troops.  So the women were largely unprotected against the marauding Soviet soldiers, and believe me, they took full advantage.  Yet even then, there were some interesting asides:  almost to a man, for instance, the soldiers wouldn’t rape a pregnant woman, or one with small children, or the very old women (although of course there were exceptions).

Now I know that women were very much supporters of Nazism — Orwell’s comment still resonates:  “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”  Indeed, I have no doubt that most of the women of Berlin were little different, in the 1930s and early -40s.  And our storyteller also points out, with wry amusement, just how many of them suddenly claimed to have been opposed to the Nazi Party all along.

Still, that didn’t ameliorate their predicament at all.

The amazing thing about it all was how they survived, against all the odds.  Our heroine, for example, very soon made the decision (after several rapes and narrow escapes) that if she was to escape being raped daily by multiple men, she could only survive by hooking up with a Soviet officer and becoming his girlfriend — still a precarious situation, but appallingly cold-blooded all the same.  (She did it not just once, but several times, as officers were posted away or simply disappeared.)

Which brings me to the interesting part of all this.

When the dust had settled and the bullets no longer whistled through the streets, the Germans made a conscious decision to collectively forget all about their conquest and the conditions thereof.  It was a societal repression of memory, a “Don’t talk about it” mentality that was, I suppose, one way of getting away from it.  (It worked only too well, by the way, as an entire generation of Germans born after WWII were in large part ignorant of what had transpired, as the recent history had all but disappeared from German-language history books in primary- and secondary schools.)

The real hero of the story, by the way, is the publisher of A Woman In Berlin, who went to extraordinary lengths to validate that the diary wasn’t some concoction of fictional storytelling, and somehow managed to keep the woman’s identity a secret — despite German journalists of the time, who made a concerted effort to find it out so that they could denigrate her character and discredit the story.  All of this was because the Germans wanted to airbrush the atrocities and more importantly, deny how the conquered women had come to terms with their situation.  (Imagine the indignant:  “No German woman would behave that way!  Das ist unmöglich! “)   It was seen as besmirching the female character, and was part of the head-in-the-sand approach to the events of 1945.

Despite all that, I have to admit to becoming impressed with the women — not just the author, but all the women — simply because in the absence of the men, they started to clean up and rebuild the huge, demolished city, starting with their bombed-out houses and apartments, cleaning the floors and walls, fixing doors and removing the rubble.  There was little complaining, by the way, because they had the very German attitude that there was work to be done, and therefore they had to do it.  (One can only wonder how today’s pampered princesses would cope, or rather not cope under the same circumstances.)  And the author nicknamed herself the “Twelve Mile Woman” because that was how far she had to walk each day through the ruined city to work, just to earn the food ration book that would keep her from starving.

Anyway, the book is well worth the time — more so, I think, than the movie — and I recommend it unreservedly.

One Small Step

Surveillance Society

…and about time, too:

A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a law enforcement officer violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching her vehicle’s history through Flock Safety’s license-plate reader network without obtaining a warrant first.

The decision, which was issued by U.S. District Judge Sara Hill, marks one of the most significant legal challenges to Flock’s expanding surveillance system. 

The ruling does not establish a nationwide legal precedent, but it could give momentum to growing concerns over how police departments use automated license-plate databases to track people’s movements.

The case began when a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy searched Flock’s database for a California-registered vehicle. 

According to the court, the deputy had no clear investigative justification for running the plate other than the fact that the vehicle was from California.

Yeah, let’s just sniff around under any number of rocks to see what we can find.  Asshole.

You know, when a cop whacks a choirboy / Commie or arrests a pedophile, I’m almost always on the side of the police.  But when they start snooping around in a person’s private life, my position changes 180 degrees, also almost every time.

I’m just glad this little anti-Flock step has been taken.  Let’s hope there are more, much more until the whole fucking shitshow crumbles into dust.