Trying to reason with hurricane season

Hurricane season is almost upon us, time to stock up on bottled water, non-perishable food, MREs if you can get them, batteries, flashlights, prescription medications, pet food, bleach, etc.

And if you live in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, you'll need your papers.

Hurricane season starts June 1. In the event of a hurricane in the region, emergency officials predict more than 130,000 evacuees will leave the Valley by school bus. They will be checked for identification and citizenship before they can board.


Anyone who is not a citizen or is not a legal resident will be held in specially designed areas in the Valley that are “made to withstand hurricanes,” said Dan Doty, a Border Patrol spokesperson for the Valley sector.

Because some people just need killing

Grits for Breakdast, on the death penalty: The missus thinks I'm going to "get in trouble" for writing this, but I think, as a practical matter, I'd prefer a death penalty privatized on a case by case basis at the discretion of 12 jurors than operated by the government itself. What do you think?

Me, I'm a native of the Lone Star state, now a long-time resident of the East Coast version of the Wild West, and I confess to a great deal of sympathy for this view of murderers and their victims:

The truth is that Texas's propensity for killing its citizens, and its leniency with some murderers, are both expressions of the a single principle. Texas doesn't execute murderers to show its regard for the value of life; it does so because some people (as the parable says) need killing. Sometimes the guy who -- in the eyes of Texas -- needs killing is the accused, and sometimes he's the complainant.

"He needed killin', and my guy was the guy to do it" has long been a viable defense in some Texas murder cases. These are cases in which the State often couldn't secure convictions despite being technically murder; it'll be even less able to secure convictions in the future from juries that know that, if they convict, prison will be the only option.

On the whole though, I'm opposed to anything that smacks of vigilanteism. I don't want to live in a place where people are allowed to, or feel compelled to, take the law into their own hands. But the reality is that some people do kill in self-defense and those people, unless they later get it into their heads that a bullet is the way to deal with everyone who irritates them, are not going to be a danger to me. Turn 'em loose on probation.

Besides, I just plain dislike killin' be it state-sponsored or not. The death penalty, like torture, ought to just be one of those unquestioned and unquestionable taboos that requires no further philosophical justification beyond Dude, we don't do that kind of thing here.

I double-dog dare you!

Back when I was a 10-year-old child, of average-to-middling mischieviosity, in the Texas school system, the worst thing they did to you was make you stay in at recess and write sentences on the board. Ask me how I know this.

Nowadays, you get arrested and sent to court.


I have questions.

• Why are we arresting children?


• Do we really need teachers who can't control 10-year-olds?


• Why aren't we training police officers to refuse to arrest children?


• Why are we prosecuting children for momentary fits of mischief?


• A school official actually set off the alarm. Why are all the adults in this case getting away with blaming a child?

from Objective - Justice