Yearly Archives: 2006

Punishing Sex Offendors: A Modest Proposal

This entry was posted in Law on by

Five states now have laws that allow the death penalty for perpetrators of multiple sex crimes agains children. The age limit of the children varies from 11 to 14. The death penalty has been determined to be unconstitutional in the case of mutlple rapes of adult women.
According to this NYT article there does not appear to be a strong consensus on the potential value of the death penalty in these cases. Here are some examples:

Mark Sanford, a Republican, said in a statement that the law would “be an incredibly powerful deterrent to offenders that have already been released.”

But Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that opposes capital punishment, said the new laws were largely symbolic, would impose disproportionate punishment and were probably unconstitutional.

There are more arguments both ways in the article.
As heinous as these crimes are the disproportionality argument seems correct. But what to do? We do not want repeat offendors and I’m not partial to paying to keep them locked up forever though this may be required if there is not something that will help assure a significantly reduced recidivism.
Which there is. A straight forward part of the solution should be castration. I do not mean chemical castration I mean snip off their testicals! This seems reasonably proportional and given the nature of the crimes there is nothing cruel about it and if done regularly it won’t be unusual. Oh yea, no reason to allow these perps to store sperm.

It isn’t 100% perfect and some effects can be overcome with testosterone treatments but as part of a comprehensive program for dealing with repeat sex offenders it seems like a reasonable part of the minimum package.

Functional Design

This entry was posted in Engineering Humor on by

Taking a lesson from nature Des Moines city engineers and consultants designed and built an efficient detention system:

The nearly four-acre basin was constructed about two years ago and “took some of the load off of the pipe downstream” and helps prevent flooding…

You decide for yourself if this is a functional design.
Some may consider this NWS or in poor taste.

Via Maru.

Friday Ark #90

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Invertebrate Blogging Pet Blogging Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

We will add your post to the list if you do one of the following:

  • Leave a comment (moderated) or trackback (may be broken) to this post (Don’t panic if you get back an “internal server error” message. Haven’t been able to figure out why this is happening but comments still seem to post.).
  • Use the Carnival Submission Form,
  • Use the Blog Carnival Submission Form,
  • Email Modulator or
  • Our extensive staff finds it during our weekly search of the web

Of course, if our staff goes on strike then we will link only those posts someone tells us about. Time permitting we will continue boardings until the Carnival of the Cats goes up on Sunday.

Do link to the Friday Ark whether you use trackbacks or not.

Visit each border and come back regularly Friday-Sunday to visit new boarders.

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map. (61 shouts as of 06/08)

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 115th edition, 6/4, is up at TacJammer. The 116th edition will be hosted by Gigolo Kitty on 6/11. There are more weekly cats at eatstuff’s Weekend Cat Blogging which has many participants who may not be familiar to Ark or Carnival participants. Do go shout out at The Catbloggers Frappr Map.

Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. The 25th edition is up and hosted by Rob’s Idaho Perspective. The 26th edition will be hosted on 6/22 by The Hawk Owls’ Nest.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The ninth edition is up at Burning Silo. The 10th edition will be hosted at the end of june by, well, …stay tuned.

Arkive editions of the Friday Ark.
Cats

DogsBirdsOther VertebratesInvertebratesIn Memoriam

  • The Hair Ball: In Loving Memory: Blackie died May 12, 2006

Didn’t Make ItExceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page, The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival

Note for Haloscan Users: Haloscan started (the end of July) rejecting trackbacks if they were submitted “too rapidly” by the same host. I don’t know what the timer is but it is long enough so that it was very difficult to ping everyone that is using Haloscan for trackbacks. I’m sure that they are doing this to try to hold back the tide of trackback spam but it makes the service pretty useless for carnival type posts. Perhaps you can contact them and urge some different solution. Update: Typepad appears to be doing the same thing. Everytime I update the Ark it appears the timers are reset and the long list of MT autogenerated pings fail. Yecchhhh….