The obsession in the US with executing people

Two days ago, the state of Alabama used nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Smith by essentially asphyxiating him.

Alabama faced widespread condemnation after the state executed Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday evening using nitrogen gas, the first time the method has been used in the United States to kill someone.

Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8pm local time.

Smith was fitted with a face mask. He used sign language to say “I love you” to witnesses in the viewing room, and in his final statement he said: “Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward.”

After the nitrogen gas began flowing, Smith convulsed on the gurney for several minutes. The state had previously said the nitrogen gas would cause Smith to lose consciousness in seconds and die within minutes, according to the Associated Press.

“I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist who witnessed the execution, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, was in the death chamber when Smith was killed. In a tearful television interview with CNN, he said Smith “popped up on the gurney over and over and over again. He shook the whole gurney.”

“I have never, ever seen anything like that,” he said. “That was torture.”

“I could see the corrections officers that were in there,” he added. “I think they were very surprised that this didn’t go smoother.”

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Trump’s rage and thin skin may hurt him

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has won the first two primary events in the Republican calendar and there is only one person still in the race for the Republican nomination. It is true that his margin of victory over Nikki Haley was only 11% but it is clear that her chances of defeating him are almost zero. So a sensible strategy would be for him to woo the people, both Republicans and independents who voted for her and supported her with donations, so that even though they expressed a preference for her, they would come back into the fold and vote for him in the general election once he gets the nomination.

That is what a sane, sensible candidate would do. But SSAT is a rage-filled narcissist who launches attacks on anyone who does not support him at the present moment. He will attack you until you grovel before him and only then will he be nice to you. The idea of trying to win over potential supporters slowly in the future by being nice to them now just does not seem to register in what passes for his brain. So he has taken to harshly attacking Haley, even calling her a ‘birdbrain’, even if that might turn off some Haley supporters who might very well have supported him once she dropped out.
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Trump ordered to pay Carroll $83 million

The jury in the trial took only about two hours to come back with a verdict that said that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has to pay her $83 million. It consists of $7.3m in compensatory damages, $11m to repair her reputation, and $65m in punitive damages. He has, of course, said that he will appeal.

The punitive damages are to make SSAT shut up.

Even on Fox News, a rightwing network generally supportive of the former president, John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, saw nothing but bad news.

“The whole point of these unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” Yoo said.“You could think of it this way: every time Donald Trump wants to insult [E] Jean Carroll, he’s gonna have to write a $40m check for each sentence. That’s how bad this is.

“I can’t believe his lawyers haven’t succeeded in just telling him, ‘Campaign for president, run for president, make your accusations about a two-tiered justice system. But leave this alone.’”

It looks like the antics of SSAT inside and outside the courtroom that so irritated the judge did not endear him to the jury either. Neither did the obnoxious behavior of his lawyer Alina Habba who seemed to think that her audience was the MAGA cult instead of the nine people in the jury box.

In a recent interview with some MAGA-friendly person, Habba was asked whether she would like to be pretty or smart. She instantly replied that she would like to be pretty because you can fake being smart. Well, maybe some people can fake being smart, but she is clearly not one of them. For example, on Monday, she told the judge that she was feeling unwell and had been exposed to people with Covid and asked that the proceedings for the next day be canceled. It was duly done. But then on Tuesday evening, she was seen at a victory party in New Hampshire following the primary election. Judges do not like lawyers lying to them and she is lucky that he did not reprimand her for that.

Observers were astounded at the level of her incompetence, down to basic knowledge of courtroom proceedings.

After the verdict, Habba sounded off to the media. She is mad because the judge did not allow her to re-litigate the issue of assault that the first jury had already decided.

Carroll’s lawyer nails her description of Trump

In her closing arguments to the jury yesterday, E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan pretty much nailed it in her description of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and why the jury should award her hefty damages.

At the end of her closing, Roberta Kaplan urged jurors to hold Trump accountable – and that the only way to make him follow the law and stop defaming Carroll would be a hefty penalty.

“At the first trial between Ms Carroll and Mr Trump … Donald Trump didn’t even bother to show up,” Kaplan said. But at this trial, where the issue is money, Trump decided to attend, she noted.

“What does that mean? It means that the one thing Donald Trump cares about is money,” she said. “While Donald Trump may not care about the law, while he certainly does not care about the truth, he does care about money.

“The question for you as a jury is this: given Donald Trump’s insistence on continuing to defame Ms Carroll and considering his immense wealth, how much will it take to make him stop?

“He thinks the rules that govern everyone else don’t apply to him,” Kaplan added.

“You actually have the opportunity, maybe even the responsibility, to put an end to this right now with this verdict by requiring Donald Trump to pay an amount of money large enough for him – and I repeat, large enough for him – that it will finally make him stop.

“Now is the time to make him pay for it and now is the time to make him pay for it dearly.”

SSAT views money as a measure of a person’s worth which is why he consistently inflates the amount of his own wealth, as was seen in his other trial for fraud that was brought by New York’s attorney general Letitia James. Taking SSAT’s dubious claims of his own ‘immense wealth’ at face value in order to suggest that a large penalty was necessary to deter him in future was a nice touch by Kaplan.

Book review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins (2022)

It used to be said that the sun never set on the British empire, so widespread was its extent over the globe. This book takes a sweeping look at the practices of that empire and recounts the widespread brutality with which the British ruled its colonies, with massacres, torture, large internment camps, population displacement, starvation, solitary confinement, and other forms of oppression, to subdue the native populations in their many colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and also Ireland.

While the goal of such conquests was rapacious exploitation of the resources and people of the colonies to enrich the British back home, especially the elites, in order to gain public support it was dressed up in the soothing language of ‘liberal imperialism’, that the British were bringing civilization to the benighted people over whom they ruled. This led to the infamous idea of the ‘white mans’s burden’, promulgated by noted English writers and poets, that the British were actually paying a price in order to improve the lot of the people in the countries they ruled. The policy was riddled through and through with racist attitudes towards the colonial peoples, treating them as ‘savages’ who needed the ‘civilizing influence’ of the British to ‘bring them up’ to acceptable standards. These racist attitudes were not just based on color. For example, the people of Ireland were victims as well, violently put down when they tried to gain their independence.
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Who has the time?

The trial in the defamation case brought by E. Jena Carroll against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) resumed today after a two day break because one of the jurors had worried that they had Covid. SSAT is in the courtroom.

I read that last night SSAT had posted 35 times about the trial on his social media site and it made me wonder how he finds the time to do all that. True, a social media post is not that long but his are pretty long. The ones I’ve read sound like stream-of-consciousness ramblings (who knew that SSAT was an aficionado of James Joyce?) that seem to lack any careful thought or even proofreading, so that reduces the time. But still it must have taken several hours.

More interestingly, who reads all of them? Journalists presumably who have drawn the short straw of having to monitor his every utterance. But apart from them, even the most ardent MAGA supporter must get weary of their phones dinging continuously with alerts about his repetitive posts. Do they read all of them?

It appears that SSAT took the stand and his testimony lasted just a few minutes, with Carroll’s attorney asking just two simple questions that elicited ‘Yes’ answers. It may be that she did not want to give SSAT the opportunity to make a speech.

The ‘Nones’ are now the single largest group

There is a new survey out that shows the continuing growth of those people who, when asked about their religious affiliation, reply ‘None’. What is significant in that they are now the single largest self-identified group, beating out Catholics and evangelicals Protestants.

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check ‘none.’

A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They’re more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).

Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew’s new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically.
…

Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.

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Bad day for Trump

The results of yesterday’s New Hampshire primary should be worrying for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). Yes, he defeated Nikki Haley 54.5% to 43.3% and is still on course to win the Republican nomination. But the margin of victory is smaller than I expected and much smaller than I think SSAT would have liked. This is because SSAT is like an incumbent in the Republican party and to have nearly half the voters going against you should be worrying. By contrast, on the Democratic side, Joe Biden, who is an incumbent, won with 67% of the vote, even though he was not on the ballot and people had to actually write in his name. (Why his name was not on the ballot is due to esoteric internal Democratic party rule making.)
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More evidence, if you needed it, that Trump lacks any grace

It has log been obvious that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is a sociopath with no concept of how to treat people as human beings. If you oppose him, he will attack you viciously. If you are nice to him, he will say nice things about you, although he will not do nice things for you. He is purely transactional in his relationships and if you switch from being a rival to a supporter, he will stop saying nasty things and say nice things. There are no principles involved at all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the way he treated his rivals. Although he is not the president, right from the beginning he was like an incumbent when it came to seeking the Republican nomination. and hence he enjoyed a huge lead from the get-go and was never threatened by any of his rivals. He could have just coasted along knowing that they would drop out eventually and endorse him.
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Bye, bye Ron

I can’t say that I was surprised that Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race. Even before he ran, I wrote that he would be foolish to challenge serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and that he would be better served by sitting this one out and campaigning hard for SSAT this time because, whether SSAT won or lost, 2028 would be an open race. He could then reap the rewards of MAGA cult loyalty in that race, rather than alienating them this year.

But my prediction that he would fail was based on strategic reasoning. What I had not anticipated was that he would be such a lousy campaigner, so wooden and anti-charismatic on the stump, and have nothing really to offer. His easy re-election victory for governor of Florida seemed to make him think that being ‘anti-woke’ (whatever the hell that means) was his path to victory on the national stage. While that may have been of a somewhat catchy slogan, in terms of policies, it only translates into some culture war issues, such as banning books and fighting over bathroom access for transgender students that he carried to extremes, that may have excited some people but really did not have relevance to most people. Furthermore, carrying his anti-woke crusade into a fight with the Disney corporation, the state’s biggest employer, tended to alienate the business community.
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