Dying For Sanity

As we began combing through the news for today's commentary, a news item from CBS from Monday night, floated to the top of our stack of articles. The article notes that, as of Monday evening, a ballot measure in California passed - meaning that Californians will be voting this November on whether their state wants to follow seventeen others in abolishing the death penalty.

The debate on whether or not to keep the death penalty is a debate that seems to be happening in every state from Alaska to Nebraska. Even in countries like Tunisia, people all over the world appear to be taking another look at the death penalty. Many are getting rid of it, or at the least, curbing its use.

Last Friday, in North Carolina, a fairly new law - the Racial Justice Act - was applied by Cumberland County Judge Greg Weeks, who judged that death row inmate Marcus Robinson's case was obviously skewed by racial bias. So Judge Weeks commuted Robinson's sentence from the death penalty to life in prison, as the law allows. In short, the judge thought the previous death penalty sentence was unjust.

That quest for justice is what drove a committee created by the National Research Council to study the question death penalty advocates and opponents have been arguing for years: Is the death penalty actually effective as a deterrent to further crime?

It's a question that's been asked for thousands of years.

Virtually everyone who's studied ancient history knows about the deterrent used by the ancient Roman armies. They would torture and kill criminals who were guilty of serious crimes, and hang their bodies from posts next to the road, with a label telling the world their crime. It was part of what generated the Pax Romana, the period of peace that lasted about two hundred years, when Roman citizens were amazingly safe in the ancient world.

Of course, the practices that brought about that peace were brutal - and often unjust.

Back in our own time, the NRC's Committee of Deterrence and the Death Penalty looked at many studies of the death penalty, both pro and con, from around the world. After looking at all the data, they determined that the effectiveness of the death penalty is simply unclear.

In short, it doesn't work everywhere the same, if it works at all.

The committee did seem to agree that the way most of America currently uses the death penalty, its effectiveness as a deterrent is often minimized by factors like the long, drawn out legal battles we allow. As Miriam Thimm Kelle, the sister of James Thimm, a victim of a long-standing Nebraska death row inmate said recently, the way the system is now, when an inmate is sentenced, the families of the victim are sentenced too. Every time legal proceedings come back up for the death row inmate, the emotional wounds of the families are torn open.

While we understand the emotional anger and hunger for vengeance the families and friends of some victims of serious crime have, we honestly believe there are some punishments worse than death. Those who are creative can even imagine punishments that don't violate Geneva Convention rules, but would likely make the lives of anyone sentenced an unending, living hell.

Good. If someone has done significant evil, they should have to pay the price of their actions. The rest of us - especially the friends and families of the victims - should not also have to pay that price.

We'd love to see the day when the death penalty was abolished, and the only place you might see the Grim Reaper at work is a haunted house or a cheesy movie. Maybe that will happen someday, though we doubt it will be within our lifetimes.

For now, just put our wish for the death penalty on the "Things We'd Like To See" list - right next to our request to be millionaires.

Denial Is Not A River

While you may have missed it yesterday, since virtually none of the major U.S. or World news organizations gave the story anything other than brief mention, Sunday was Earth Day, for 2012.

For forty two years, Earth Day has been a day for many outside of the scientific and politic realms to also stand up, get involved, and take a serious, fact-based look at what mankind has done, and continues to do, to our planet. The science pointing toward climate change is far older than that, going back over a hundred years.

Still, climate change deniers continue to yell that climate change is a hoax, even as the facts add up against them - including things like cold weather animals and plants adapting to warmer weather to survive. Frankly, we'd love to see a polar bear move into their neighborhoods, if we thought it might awaken them to reality.

One of the most important facts is the difference between climate and weather.

Long and short, climate is the average trend of all the weather data, in a specific location, over a long period of time. That location can be as big as the Earth, or as small as your neighborhood. In contrast, weather is simply the atmospheric factors that are or have happened at any one point in the climate record.

There are those people who claim that the current trend of warmer and wetter than usual weather is just a normal adjustment in the natural shifting of the world climate - and those people would be wrong.

Climate scientists have done enough modeling to understand long-term trends in very accurate ways. They've done millions of computer simulations, with climate data from all over the world, taking into account all the actions that mankind has done to the environment over the last 100-150 years. The simulations keep saying the same things: without the heavy influence of mankind, the climate of the world could not have changed as fast as it has, in as short a time as it has. Period.

We're well aware that Earth Day was started by former Democratic Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator, Gaylord Nelson. For many modern Republicans, this automatically puts them on the other side side of the issue, because they seem to think they need to always be on the opposite side of anything anyone in the Democratic Party does. To us, that's a stupid idea.

Climate change is very real, and it is already highly likely to affect things - drastically - like the price of corn, and to drive new technologies, especially with renewable energy sources. That will mean the renewable energy sector will need some help from governments all over the world - including ours. It also means that when governments make investments in private exploratory research companies, and the market makes drastic turns - as it did with the Solyndra company - taxpayers will lose those bets once in a while.

Of course, what's rarely mentioned when right-wingers bring up Solyndra is that it was less than 2% of the U.S. government's investment in clean energy projects. The others were all successful - and in fact, the U.S. solar industry grew 69% during the time Solyndra was in existence.

Even nations like Mexico are now acknowledging that climate change is real, and their governments MUST do something about it. President Obama has done what he can, without Congress' assistance, by raising fuel efficiency standards and promoting climate change and renewable energy bills. Republicans in Congress, unsurprisingly, have not only killed the President's proposals, but also tried to stifle clean energy committees. The Republicans have even killed bills to reduce completely unnecessary subsidies to energy polluters like big oil and big coal.

Even if climate change wasn't real, the further development of clean, renewable, energy will benefit every American, as we can decrease or eliminate our dependence on oil purchased from the Middle East and South America. That's something we think even most climate change deniers could agree on.

We won't hold our breath it will change the minds of the deniers, though.

Maybe we'll just have to wait for their friendly neighborhood polar bear to bite them in the backside, before they wake up and realize the truth about climate change.

Friday Funday: Not Horsemeat Yet

In a week that's seen the deaths of legendary rock n' roll presenter Dick Clark, and legendary rock and roll singer Levon Helm, it seems fitting that tomorrow, Saturday April 21, is International Record Store Day - a real actual holiday, of sorts.

If you've never heard of it before, that may be because International Record Store Day began just five years ago, partially as a grassroots stunt, and partially as as a celebration of small, independent music resellers around the world.

Like cartoons and comic stores, the record store industry has been devastated by the advent and growth of the internet. Digital technologies - like smartphones, music players, and tablet computers - that have come with the growth of the internet have often turned musicians, cartoonists, writers, and photographers into people that major companies, and even our neighbors, tend to think of as "free content generators" - an offensive euphemism most often used by those who want to get our work for free, and sell it for a profit.

Thankfully, much as cartooning is finding new respect online - in part, due to the success of mostly-online cartoonists like Matt Wuerker, who, this week, won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with Politico - the old-fashioned, local, brick-and-mortar music stores are also beginning to find their place in the commercial hierarchy again.

Part of that success may also be because an estimated sixty-five percent of the music buying public continues to buy physical versions of the music they love.

For audiophiles and lovers of vinyl - like our staff member Shawn, who has worked in radio professionally for almost twenty years - International Record Store Day is a day filled with rare releases, and usually some pretty incredible deals, to boot.

For retailers who sell music - even those in the big box stores - Saturday will be more like Christmas, as International Record Store Day, after just five years, is considered one of the highest profit days for retailers of any physical music products. In 2011, according to Billboard magazine, sales of physical music saw a massive spike that retailers attributed almost completely to International Record Store Day,

It's also now considered one of the best and most successful grassroots-based marketing ideas in recent history - and it may indeed be the single biggest force helping to keep the record store industry alive.

There will be hundreds of bands with special releases on CD and vinyl this Saturday, and bands will be performing at local record stores all over the world. The coordinators of International Record Store Day even have their own website, where you can check out where the closest local record store is to you.

International Record Store Day is more than just a way to celebrate physical music. It's a way to celebrate a whole part of our collective human culture: the acquiring and trading of art in a physical form, with other people - something we support wholeheartedly.

We realize, accept, and even enjoy certain facets of modern technology in music that allow us to listen to and even purchase a copy of almost any song sold, from almost anywhere human beings go. Still, with the end of so many things flashing by all of us these days - including the horseracing industry in Nebraska - International Record Store Day is another sign, like Matt Wuerker's Pulitzer Prize, that while some things may change, we're not the only ones who still respect and even enjoy art, in a good, solid, physical form.

If you're looking for us this weekend, you'll likely find our staff members at one of our local music stores, supporting people just like us - artists, who know the value of something real.