The Supreme Court

I heard something this morning on Bill Bennett's radio show from his guest, who's name I can't remember, and I thought about it a bit more:

A baby can legally be killed (though it's given the witty title of "abortion"). It has done nothing to the outside world. The only problem it has caused is due to it's own conception, which was caused by two other people. So in short that baby dies because two people decided they didn't want they baby they conceived.

A murderer can be legally killed. He has taken an adult (the witty title of "abortion" is no abandon). A rapist cannot be legally killed. The rapist's crime has no sane justification. A man must be mentally unstable to rape a child, in which case he needs to be removed from society. But as Mr. Bennett pointed out, murder is a somewhat defensible crime, in fact the father of a child who was raped may wish to kill the rapist and we could sympathize with that father.

I find it horrible ironic that the Supreme Court does not see this irony. Rape a child, you can't be killed. Kill a man, you can be killed. Be conceived, you can be killed. The most disgusting crime is punished least severely while the other two sympathetic positions are given death.

I do not agree with the death penalty. I think that in the modern era we have the resources to remove a man from society without killing him. The death penalty can be supported as a last means of protecting society, but society is not in dire need of protection with the types of secure prisons we now have. There are all sorts of consequences with life time jailing, most notably cost, but we cannot let money interfier with what is morally correct, namely not taking the role of chosing who dies and who lives into our own hands, away from God's hands.

A New Twist

I was fortunate to talk with Eric Gravat today. He really is an intriguingly man. He worked with McCoy Tyner and Weather Report back in the day, and became a prison guard after his wife died, so he could support his children. I guess he stopped playing with McCoy after there was no ticket for him at the airport. Eric later found out that the ticket was under the name Grazat. He has reentered the jazz scene at 60 some years old and is playing with McCoy again along with his own group, Source Code.

The man is a wealth of jazz information. He talked about standing outside a club listening to the Coltrane quartet live. He also said that someone recommended him to Miles Davis, but that he never got to play with Miles. And apparently after a Weather Report gig Miles was standing by the soda machines Eric was visiting and Miles said (Eric can do Miles' voice perfectly) "you sounded great Eric. The rest of the band was shit". I was shaking hearing him talk about Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner so casually, as if they were his buds, which they are.

What I liked best was a little twist on a popular story in jazz. Miles says to Coltrane "why do you play so long" and Coltrane responds "once I get going I just don't know how to stop" and (the new twist) Miles retorts "pull the fucking horn out of your mouth".

Long Live Jazz!

Bernstein at Harvard

I loved this video. Bernstein is a genius, but I already knew that anyways.