Pathetic Earthlings

Trainspotting

An American bird travels across the Atlantic to the delight of English birdwatchers, only to be devoured by a resident sparrowhawk.

Naomi Wolf, Predator

Iowahawk reveals all.

California, Here It Comes

A Democrat state senator here in California wants to give 16 year olds a half-vote and 14 year olds a quarter-vote apparently as some sort of civics lesson.

Augury

John Kerry has declared that he is not only right but, in fact, a precog:

“I refuse ever to accept the notion that anything I’ve suggested with respect to Iraq was nuanced. It was clear. It was precise. It was, in fact, prescient. It was ahead of the curve about what the difficulties were. And that is precisely what a President is supposed to be. I think I was right, 100% correct, about how you should have done Iraq.”

Bush knew? To hell with that. Kerry knows.

Who the hell are these Perfect Nav jerks?

All of sudden, half the links I use regularly are now going to some damned thing called "Perfect Nav" -- what the hell is with that?

Chappelle Hartridge, One Angry Man

Does this sound like a man who has impartially weighed the evidence:

The one juror who spoke publicly Friday about how the jury made up its mind in the Martha Stewart trial called the guilty verdict a victory for "the average guy."

Chappell Hartridge, a 47-year-old computer technician at an insurance company, said he hopes the verdict sends a message to corporations that "they have to abide by the rules and no one's above the law."

"Maybe it's a victory for the little guy who loses money in the markets because of these types of transactions, the people who lose money in 401(k) plans," Hartridge said.

"Maybe it might give the average guy a little more confident feeling that (he) can invest in the market and everything will be on the up and up."

Not to me. This guy didn't determine the facts. This guy did not do his job. This guy 'sent a message.' But whether the accused is an appropriate vehicle to bear a message is not, as far as I know, the legal standard for guilt.

* * *

Most trials don't create a media buzz. I have a friend who was foreman on a particularly brutal and senseless double murder. My brother was an important witness in a kidnap-murder more than fifteen years ago. And neither of them ever received a phone call about it from the media and neither of them felt answerable to anything but their own conscience. I think my Mom was a juror on a murder case when I was about 11 but I'm not quite sure because she doesn't talk about it.

But when you line up the celebrity-industrial complex with the criminal justice system, the sensibility about the need for that kind of integrity seems to quickly ablate. Instead of jurors -- who often devote large fractions of their lives to these high profile trials -- participating in the trial as a black box, the media has set the expectation, both general and specific, that jurors can and should talk to the media after the fact. And that, I think, is a genuine threat to the integrity of the process.

Now, I'm perfectly aware that, without the psionic guardians of truth and morality, you cannot probe the minds of every juror, nor could you even avoid seating every juror who is supsect. Yet, with the expectation that jurors can -- or should -- talk to the media, those jurors who cannot separate the mediastorm from their duty as jurors, the marginal juror is going to keep their duties to the media in mind as they move through deliberations. Did I send a message? What will my friends think of me? How will it sound in the other juror's book if I don't bring up OJ's harsh upbringing or Martha's antique button collection?

Are all jurors susceptable to this? I doubt even most are. But the marginal juror certainly is, and the remedy isn't difficult. This guy walked out of the jury box and into the sychophantic embrace of temporrary media reliance. OJ jurors were selling their books the next day. Jurors in the Scott Peterson trial -- who will be stuck in that thing for months -- will feel a need to tell jurors -- and the media does nothing to dissaude them of that. And they ought to shut the hell up.

What's the solution? Jurors can't talk to the media during the trial, and judges ought to retain discretion to gag the jury for another thirty or sixty days after the trial. While you'd want to toll any timing to coincide with the jury blackout period, forcing all jurors to live under a temporary media blackout would probably go a long way to keeping the view, however remote, of media scrutiny out of the jury room.

Junior Birdman

Just ran across a great profile in the Sacramento News & Review, the local left-leaning free weekly, of a Sacramento based company run by 41-year old John Powell, which means to get to space on the cheap. It's not quite orbital flight, and it's not quite X-Prize stuff. But JP Aerospace means to build a balloon to take him 50 miles up. Dark-sky stations, if you will. From which you can hang in low, low space . . .forever.

My favorite William Gibson short story, Red Star, Winter Orbit ends as a group of squatters move in to the almost-abandonded Russian space station -- and are surprised to run into Yuri Korolev, the first man on Mars.

"We've come to live here," said the woman, drifting closer.

"We're from the balloons. Squatters, I guess you could say. Heard the place was empty. You know the orbit's decaying on this thing?" The man executed a clumsy midair somersault, the tools clattering on his belt. "This free fall's outrageous."

"God," said the woman, "I just can't get used to it. It's like skydiving, but there's no wind."

Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering carless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth. "But you don't have a launchpad," he said.

"Launchpad?" theman said, laughing. "What we do, we haul these surplus booster engines up the cables to the balloon, drop 'em, and fire 'em midair."

"That's insane," Korolev said.

"Got us here, didn't it?"

Yet again, reality and science fiction xeno happily along...

Temporary Blog

Okay, race fans, I've set up this temporary TypePad blog so I can keep things moving while I try to get Pathetic Earthlings back on its feet. The problem I have has been characterized as "interesting" meaning "bad", but since I can't solicit help without a live blog, here this is.