Deafening Silence

Tuesday Roundup and Apology

First, the apology:

I am well aware that for nearly a month now I have been promising a 'big post,' then backpedalling and making excuses.  For all the good people who show up here to read: I'm terribly sorry.  You make an effort to click on Deafening Silence while you sip your coffee at work or take 5 minutes away from a crazy day at home, and you deserve something to actually READ, not excuses. 

I won't offer a defense, but I will give an explanation: it's been a just plain lousy month (or two) for nasty illnesses and family complications.  Both stresses are still in play, but I'm working hard to put up a new piece by the end of this week.

I thank everyone for their kind patience and remain grateful for every pair of eyes.

Now for some linkage:

The ever thought-provoking Amba has an interesting discussion of the rise of modern anti-semitism going at Ambivablog:

[In Italy], there is an almost effortless conceptual leap from criticising Israel to targeting Jews. [Giancarlo] Desiderati [spokesman for the trade union Flaica-Cub] pointed out that his organisation had already called for a boycott of Israeli goods before taking the logical next step of demanding a boycott of Jewish shops. He said that his union was drawing up a list of Jewish shops, ‘though it might be better to publish a list of streets in which a majority of the shops are Jewish and ask people to avoid those streets when shopping’. [...]

Historically, Denmark has been one of the most enlightened societies in Europe. During the Second World War, it stood out as a country were the Nazis could find virtually nobody willing to collaborate with their anti-Jewish policies. It is sad, therefore, to read reports today about Danish school administrators who recommend that Jewish children should not enrol in their schools. It began last week, when Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense, publicly stated that he would ‘refuse to accept the wishes of Jewish parents’ who wanted to place children at his school, because it might create tension amongst the Muslim children. Other headmasters echoed his refusal to school the children of Jews, claiming that they were putting children’s safety first. Whatever their intentions, these pedagogues were sending the powerful message that, in the interests of ‘health and safety’, the ghettoisation of Jewish children can be an acceptable and even sensible idea.

 

My next post will be relevant to this subject.  I invite Amba's readers to tune in.

 

Isaac Schrodinger links to an amazing video in which a young man shows off his new "bionic arm":

 

"The most amazing thing about it was how quickly I adapted to it. People always ask how it's changed my life, but there's no specific thing. It's the hundreds of everyday things you take for granted, which I can do again, like peeling a potato, catching a ball, holding a bottle of water. I'm incredibly grateful."

Do not miss the video.  It's stunning!

Kelly Sedinger at Byzatium's Shores has lost his mother-in-law.  Please stop by to give your condolences to this sweet man.

Dark Roasted Blend links to the amazing discovery of a long-lost work of ancient science:

For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine.

The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie's Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie's auctioned it off—for two million dollars.

For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Jules Crittendon posts some remarks from a Navy official on blog quality:

Too many seem to be interested in scoring cheap, and anonymous, hits vice engaging in meaningful and professional exchanges. There is also a general lack of reverence for facts and an excess of emotion that, for me, really reduces the value of the blog. Incorrect/inaccurate data and lots of hype may be entertaining for some, but just doesn’t work for me.

I'm quoting this in order to tell a story on myself.  I largely agree with the above statement- it's one reason I don't post as often as many other bloggers- but I found myself hoist on my own petard this week.  I left a comment over at Don Surber sneering about what I saw as the overpaid, juvenile work in a Maureen Dowd column.  Of course, in my self-righteous snit I did not realize that some Surber Surfers might take that as a cue to cruise over here.  And what did they find?  A front page full of brief, less-than-literary posts that were certainly nothing to brag about.

Color me a hypocrite.  An EMBARRASSED hypocrite.

I'll hide behind this nice picture from Rick Lee until my face stops being red.

 

See you later this week!

 

My Next Post

I'm working on a lengthy post that I hope to put up next week.  I'll still try to check in now and then, so drop by if you can.

In the meantime, here's a nice picture from Rick Lee:

Thursday Roundup

It's been a while since I turn a turn through the Deafening Silence blogroll.  Let's take a stroll around the neighborhood and see what's going on:

Isaac Schrodinger marks the anniversary of achieving refugee status in Canada, recounts the legal hearing that decided it, and thanks the Army of Davids in the blogosphere who donated money and helped him to attain it.

Welcome to the West, Mr. Schrodinger- you're our kind of people.

Amy Alkon features an excerpt from a talk by Christina Hoff Sommers, whose views tend to mirror my own:

I am not here to urge you to reject old-fashioned classical feminism of the sort that won women the vote, educational opportunity and many other freedoms. I am a passionate supporter of that style of feminism, which I call equity feminism. An equity feminist wants for women what she wants for everyone---fair treatment, respect, and dignity. Equity feminism promotes harmony and good will between the sexes and it can lead to a much saner, happier and more ethical world.

Equity feminism is not new. It is rooted in the classically liberal political tradition that had its beginnings in the European Enlightenment. It was classical liberalism that inspired the First Wave of feminism in the 19th century, which secured women the vote; it also informed the Second Wave in the sixties and seventies that further enhanced women's freedoms and opportunities.

This is the feminism that women my age were raised with.  We were probably the first generation (I was born in 1963) who grew up with these ideas as a birthright.  It is not, I must sadly admit, the feminism I see practiced now. 

Rebecca Church makes digs up this interesting regret on her own blog:

4.  What food do you refuse to eat?

Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I want to like it — it’s so crispy and golden and it looks so good.  But I got food poisoning at a KFC when I was in 9th grade, and was horribly sick.  I was on a field trip to see an exhibit of Egyptian art in Charlotte, NC, and tried to tough it out because I really, really wanted to see the exhibit.  I wound up in the restroom, throwing up my ankle bones.  Next thing I remember, I was being wheeled on a gurney past a huge sculpture of King Ramses II, with a paramedic telling me that I was going to be OK and that my teacher was calling my parents.  I was really sick for about a week, and never did get to see the exhibit.  To this day, even the smell of KFC makes me feel like throwing up.

I have this same feeling about shrimp scampi.  I once ate shrimp scampi at an Italian restaurant in London, during a trip overseas as a college student.  It was New Year's Eve and by midnight I was sure I was going to either die or cause a horribly embarrassing international incident.

Getting sick in a foreign country is a miserable experience.

Frank Warner blogs about the amazing Hudson River Jet Crash and is the first to confirm my suspicion that the pilot had military experience:

Update: The pilot was Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, a retired Air Force major general. After all the passengers were taken off the sinking plane, Sullenberger went back inside and twice checked all the seats before he left.

Bravo to Sullenberger for his masterful handling of the situation!  Not a soul lost!  Something good to celebrate.

Here's some video:

 

Three cheers for the Tragedy that Wasn't!!!!!

 

 

Oregon Residents Beset By Bomb Threats

While looking for new information about the Woodburn Bank bombing and it's suspects, Joshua and Bruce Turnidge, I discovered that bomb threats seem to be pretty common in Oregon, especially this month and last:

In a truly dippy and offensive bid to throw the cops off his scent, suspect Christopher Wayne Walker used his cell phone to call in a bomb threat to the Wells Fargo Bank in Woodburn- while he was fleeing the police!

Walker and an accomplice, Trualy Ann Dixon, had just robbed the local Dollar Tree.  Dixon was found in possession of Meth.

(Do you ever wonder if Meth was put on earth to weed out the truly dumb criminals?  I do.)

Read the whole sorry thing here.

But that's not all.  According to this story, poor Culver Elementary School has gotten a bomb threat not once, but twice this month:For the second straight day, officers responded to a bomb threat at Culver Elementary School. On Tuesday, it was a note taped to the door threatening that a bomb was in the building and would go off on Friday. Elementary school students were evacuated, but officers cleared the area by about 9:30 a.m. and the students were back in their classrooms.

On Wednesday, what officials found was what was described as a “suspicious container” near the front entrance of the elementary school by a maintenance worker. Due to their proximity to one another, all three Culver schools — elementary, middle and high school — were closed for the day. The OSP bomb squad flew from Salem into the Madras airport and arrived on the scene at about 10 a.m. A bomb-sniffing Department of Homeland Security dog also assisted officers in clearing the area, according to Jefferson County Undersheriff Jim Adkins. Close to an hour later, officials declared the bomb a hoax.

The story linked above says that officials treated the incident as they would a snow day, calling in a school closing announcement to a local radio station.

That's just sad.

But wait- there's more:

Several businesses were evacuated early this morning when a worker found a suspicious object near a dumpster and thought it was a bomb.

...

It turned out to be a harmless soil-sampling pipe, said Jim Wolf, a Tigard Police spokesman.

...

The neighboring businesses evacuated in the incident, which lasted until about 9 a.m., were Bally Total Fitness, and stores associated with Sirius Computer Solutions, AIG insurance and Verizon communications.

...

Wolf said there's a greater public awareness since a bomb killed two people and injured a third at a bank in Woodburn last month.

"I think the community is more in tune and erring on the cautious side," Wolf said.

...

Gee- ya think?

From late December, we have this brief report:

A green metal box found Tuesday afternoon outside a U.S. Bank branch in Canby turned out to be just that: a box.

X-rays taken by bomb technicians from the Portland Police Bureau and Clackamas County Sheriff's Office confirmed the box did not contain explosives or anything else.

"It ended up well," said Lt. Jorge Tro, a Canby Police Department spokesman.

This Boy Who Cried Bomb nonsense is terrible for the people of Oregon, especially those in and near Marion County, where two law officers were killed by the Woodburn Bank bombing.  (Another officer remains in the hospital with severe injuries, including an amputated leg.)

Earlier this month I reported on another bomb threat- this one to the Sterling Bank in Jefferson, Oregon.  It appears no one has been apprehended yet in this incident.

The good people of Oregon don't deserve this kind of harrassment. Dip these fake-threat jerks in honey and throw them to the chihuahuas!

 

Canadian Authorities Arrest Polygamous Leaders in Bountiful

Canadian officials have charged two leaders of the Bountiful community (an offshoot of the FLDs) with polygamy.

According to Daphne Bramham, Canwest News Service:RCMP arrested Winston Blackmore, 52, and James Oler, 44, on Tuesday, Attorney-General Wally Oppal said at a news conference yesterday. Mr. Oler is the bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, while Mr. Blackmore is the former FLDS bishop who was ousted in 2002 after a power struggle with the sect's prophet, Warren Jeffs.

(RCMP refers to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.)

Some brief background on the two men, from the same article:

Mr. Blackmore lost his role as the Bountiful bishop after his disagreement with Mr. Jeffs, the church's prophet, who has been convicted of being an accomplice to the rape of a minor in Utah and is in jail in Arizona...

...Mr. Blackmore now leads a breakaway group that lives in the southeastern corner of B. C. and is the head of the Mormon Hills School Society, which runs a government-funded, independent school.

...Little is known about Mr. Oler, a mechanic. He has never spoken to the media and there are few photos of him. However, people within the community have confirmed that Mr. Oler has at least three wives, several of whom were in their teens when they were assigned to him in placement marriages by Mr. Jeffs.

Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms (see it here) guarantees freedom of religion, but section 293 of Canada's Criminal Code makes polygamy illegal.  It has long been thought that this ambiguity, combined with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, would result in the legalizing of polygamy if the issue should ever be brought before a court.

We may now see a test of this theory.

Charges of sexual exploitation, statutory rape and the trafficking of young girls across international borders for sexual purposes have often been made against both the Bountiful community and FLDs over the years, but this could be the first time that the legality of polygamy itself is tested, quite apart from allegations of abuse.

From an article by Canadian journalist James Keller:

Nancy Mereska, whose Stop Polygamy campaign has long called for charges against Bountiful's leaders, said the community shouldn't be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"Polygamy is not a religious right; polygamy is a crime," said Mereska, who lives in Two Hills, Alta.

"I believe that Canada has all the ammunition it needs to take this process all the way up to the Supreme Court and I believe that the Supreme Court of Canada will uphold the laws against polygamy."

ReligionNewsBlog has posted a nice summary of the situation:

The state of polygamy in Canada

OTTAWA — Some facts about polygamy in Canada:

THE STATE OF CANADA’S POLYGAMY BAN: While polygamy is illegal in Canada and punishable by up to five years in prison, the practice had until Wednesday flourished unchecked in Bountiful, B.C., the home of a colony of adherents to a fundamentalist Mormon sect that teaches men must have at least three wives to achieve eternal salvation.

WHAT THE LAW SAYS: Section 293 of the Criminal Code outlaws “any form of polygamy” or “any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time, whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage.” The ban, contained in Canada’s first Criminal Code in 1892, was designed specifically to combat polygamy among Mormons migrating to Canada.

THE CHARTER CONCERN: The federal Justice Department has repeatedly insisted that the law is sound, but several legal opinions in recent years have stated the polygamy ban wouldn’t withstand a constitutional challenge to the religious freedom guarantees in the Charter of Rights. Others counter that protecting women and children from the harm done by polygamy trumps the need to uphold religious freedom.

POLYGAMY PRACTITIONERS IN CANADA: There are no statistics on polygamist marriages in Canada. While Bountiful is the most public example, polygamy is also secretly practised by an unknown number of Muslims.

PROSECUTING POLYGAMY: The charges laid Wednesday are believed to be the first polygamy prosecutions in Canada in 72 years. In 1937, an Ontario man was charged with polygamy for committing adultery, but he won his case.

- Source: The state of polygamy in Canada, CanWest News Service via The Province, Jan. 7, 2009

 

Charlie Gillis, writing for Maclean's on January 9, had the following observations:

 

 It is true that B.C.’s attorney general has decided to put long-dormant criminal laws to the test by laying charges against Winston Blackmore for running the equivalent of a wife farm in the province’s southeastern corner. And Wally Oppal has a point about keeping laws on the books you never plan to use: “If that section is invalid by virtue of freedom of religion,” he said, “we should let some court decide that.”

...

Even if Section 293 falls—as many fear it will—that in no way points to the end of marriage law as we know it, say other experts. In Canada, marriage will remain legally defined as a union between two people (the gender-neutral phrasing, recall, comes courtesy of court decisions on same-sex marriage). One option for the state, says Annalise Acorn, a constitutional law professor at the University of Alberta, is to forget the Criminal Code and stick by the civil law, ignoring whatever unions the Blackmores of this world consecrate, fighting tooth and nail in the courts to protect the institution as currently defined.

If challenged, the Crown has plenty of legal ammunition with which to protect the law, namely: that polygamy as practised in Bountiful, B.C. and almost anywhere else in the world militates against the notion of gender equality; that children in polygamous communities may be exposed to harm; that allowing it would make common law as it relates to marriage, divorce, child custody, taxation and property impracticable.

...

And therein lies the rub for libertarians and free-thinkers who believe polygamy should be legalized.

Legalizing polygamy could mean institutionalizing inequality.  It would mean a two-tier legal system:

one set of rights and laws for monogamous partners, and another for polygamous partners.

Think about it:

Suppose one wife (of three) wishes to leave a polygamous union with all her children.  Are the other two wives entitled to visitation/custody rights, in addition to the husband?  What if the wife objects to their presence?  What are the rights of the other wives?

Can a man with two wives claim them both as dependents on his tax return?  Is this fair to monogamous couples?  Would it encourage tax fraud by the claiming of multiple wives?

What are a husband or wife's rights to community property in the event of a divorce?  New legal standards would have to be put in place-standards only applicable to one form of marriage.

A man with three wives has the potential to produce three times as many offspring as a man with one wife.  Is it fair to monogamous couples to allow thousands of dollars of extra child tax credits to the polygamous parent? 

Who is permitted power of attorney in cases of emergency?  Which wife can decide whether to refuse 'heroic measures' to the husband- or to the children?  How is this decided?

In these days of skyrocketing medical costs, should insurers be required to offer the same benfits to a family of 4 wives and one husband as they would to families with one husband and one wife?  Statistically speaking, chances are that the polygamous family will use three or four times the coverage as the monogamous one.  Are they going to be charged the same premium, or would there be a surcharge per extra wife, for example?

These are just a few of the questions raised by legalizing polygamy. (I should point out that polyandry and group marriage raise many of the same issues.)

Charges of welfare abuse and open swindling of non-polygamous taxpayers are often levelled at communities like Bountiful.  At first glance, it seems obvious that legalizing- and keeping official records- of all polygamous marriages would end this problem.  Legally married women are entitled to fewer dollar benefits than single mothers.  But the solution of this problem would then open many other problems- those described above about plus many more. 

Those in favor of legalizatin often try to wave these other difficulties away, saying that polygamous families should be left to decide custody, property, and other issues for themselves.  But that simply places polygamous families above the law.  It grants them the right to marry while absolving them of the regulations and responsibilities expected of singles and the monogamous.

Part of the problem is that, beyond a certain point, polygamy is financially untenable without donations from the single and monogamous. Few men can legally provide for 10 wives and 30 children.  At what point is a pluralistic society permitted to say: only this many wives and this many children- after that you are an undue burden on the rest of society? 

There are no easy solutions that I can see.  And many invitations to conflict.

 

Note:  Longtime readers of Deafening Silence might remember that I spoke with a former resident of the Bountiful community.  That online interview can be found here.

 

 

Help! I've fallen under the weather and I can't get up!

I'll start posting again as soon as I can sit up for more than 5 minutes without wheezing and breaking into chills- probably Monday or so. 

'Till then, please excuse me and take a stroll thru the blogroll.  Lots of interesting stuff going on out there.

Another Thought for the Day...

...once again courtesy of The Glittering Eye:

What Do

these three people have in common?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Hugo Chavez
Vladimir Putin

If you said that they were all populist nationalists, you’d be right but that’s not what I’m thinking about.

If you said they were all men who were enemies of liberty, you’d be right but that’s not what I’m thinking about, either.

If you said they were all men who were enemies of the United States, I’m afraid you’d still be right but that’s still not what I’m thinking about.

All three of these men find their grasp on power becomes weaker as long as oil stays below $70 a barrel. Something to think about the next time you fill your tank.

Marion County, site of Woodburn Bombings, Receives New Bank Bomb Threat

This is breaking news with few details:

The Marion County Sheriff's Office is asking for the public's help in identifying a caller who phoned in a bank bomb threat in Jefferson on Monday.

The alleged threat was made shortly after 5 p.m. to the Sterling Bank on Main Street in Jefferson, said Sheriff Lt. Sheila Lorance.

No device was found.  This could easily be a bored copy-catter trying to see what kind of fuss they could kick up.

A few more details here: 

The bank received the threat about 5:45 p.m., said Anne-Marie Penge, fire prevention specialist with the Jefferson Fire Department. She said she has heard several versions of what happened, and none match each other.

Penge said the bank at 113 S. Main St. was evacuated as was the community center and nearby homes and apartments.

Hopefully this was just some idiot calling in a false alarm.  Marion County has had enough drama for a little while.

 

 

Further Details Emerge Re: Aspen Bombing Suspect Blanning

Friends and neighbors have come forward to share more detailed descriptions of James Blanning, the man blamed for planting bombs in downtown Aspen this past New Year's Eve.

Writing in the Rocky Mountain News, Kevin Vaughan puts together a picture of Blanning in his final days:

For seven years Jim Blanning came and went quietly, climbing the green carpeted stairs to his third-floor Denver apartment with a bundle of morning newspapers under his arms that he would distribute to his neighbors.

...

Blanning, 72, was friendly, Sanders said, and never gave Janice Jackson, the apartment manager, any trouble.

"No problems at all — not at all," Jackson said Thursday. "I'm shocked and in a daze. I just can't believe it."

...

Vaughan reports that Blanning's brother sensed that his mental state was deteriorating.  The Rocky Mountain News article points out some possible factors:

 His father was captured on Bataan by the Japanese, held captive for four years, and ultimately died on a prison ship in the waning days of World War II.

His mother, Virginia "Sistie" Blanning, brought Jim and his younger brothers, Bill and Dick, to Aspen after the war ended. For a time, the young widow and her sons lived in the Hotel Jerome.

...

But he did not live a tranquil life. He married and divorced four times, and his son and daughter ultimately were raised by a step-father and had little to do with him over the years.

...

But in 1996, his mining claims and land deals led to a series of criminal charges — racketeering, organized crime, fraud and larceny — and a 14-year prison sentence.

Katherine Sanguinetti, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, said that Blanning entered the prison system on Sept. 13, 1996, and was moved to a community corrections program on Feb. 1, 2001. He was formally paroled on Oct. 18, 2005.

...

It sounds as though Blanning was operating under severe stress- broke and trying to put his life back together after a lengthy prison sentence:

On Christmas Eve, Bill Blanning stopped to visit his brother.

"He said all these people owed him money and he couldn't get any money out of them. He was pretty depressed. I gave him some money."

During the conversation, Bill realized his brother's mental state was deteriorating.

"He was carrying on about how there was going to be riots in the streets and people killing each other and stuff," Blanning said. "I could see it coming."

...

Brent Gardner-Smith, writing for the Aspen Daily News, indicates that Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis might think that Blanning's jail sentence was a little too harsh:

According to the Denver Post, Blanning was sentenced in Rio Blanco District Court in 1996 to 16 years in prison for racketeering and a series of white-collar crimes. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the crimes included forgery of deeds and wills, fraudulent security sales and forged money, the Post reported.

Braudis said that some people felt that Blanning’s conviction for fraudulent sales of mining claims was unduly harsh because he was prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, and his conviction by a jury in Meeker resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of 16 years.

And because Blanning had once also been convicted of indecent exposure — for confronting a group of local elected officials while apparantly wearing only a dildo  — he was also treated as a sexual offender by prison authorities — and other prisoners — when he arrived at Canon City.

...

It occurs to me that, given some of his past antics, Blanning might have been better served by a psychological evaluation and perhaps some time served in a mental treatment facility.  But we are not told whether such an evaluation ever took place.  Maybe it did.

TalkLeft has posted the text of a note found in Blanning's jeep.  Some excerpts:

I came loaded for bear as you will see. I was going to do just as the bomb notes. Could have done some serious damage. Oh — well. Too tired — to the bone. The only bad part is the hurt to some good friends in Denver who you will probably pick up on.

Please don’t let the Gestapo f*ck their lives. It was all me.

Try to find a good author to study my story. The main point of doing the killing was to make a statement and make sure I’m remembered, but it seems I’ve done that.

There’s a cartoon in my office “Too Many People” and I know I had a wonderful life until Mik (sic) Ireland and JE got me. God knows I would love to have cut off Irelands (sic) and Chip McCrory (sic) balls off before skinning them.[Note: Ireland is Aspen's Mayor and a former reporter who angered Blanning; JE is former Judge J.E. DeVilbiss, who sentenced Blanning to 16 years, retired and then served on the Aspen City Council, he died a few months ago; McCory is a former Aspen prosecutor.]

Jeralyn of TalkLeft remarks:

"His actions were hurtful, no question about it. But he wasn't just some ex-con domestic terrorist as some news outlets have portrayed him."

With all due respect to Jeralyn and TalkLeft, I cannot agree.  The quote above makes it clear that, however unbalanced Blanning had become, he definitely saw himself as "..doing the killing... to make a statement," which to me is a terrorist's motive.  He also speaking of skinning his enemies alive- one of whom is a reporter, not a legal official.

Like the previous notes planted by Blanning, this one is vengeful, self-pitying and bloodthirsty.  All of the packages he left behind contained live bombs.  He expresses no remorse or regret for his desire to cause "mass death," as his previous threats put it.  He does not admit to breaking racketeering laws- only to a desire to take revenge on those who sent him to jail.

I recognize that Blanning might have been struggling with mental illness.  But so do hundreds of thousands of other people- and they do not plot violent revenge against strangers. 

Does mental illness excuse Charles Manson?  Does it excuse Theodore Kaczynski?

If hundreds of people are deliberately maimed and murdered, can we really accept the killer's twisted reasoning as some kind of extenuating circumstance?

Does it matter if a ruthless dictator is kind to animals?  Is it important if a serial rapist has no tolerance for foul language?  Is it relevant that a would-be mass murderer has a passion for some untouched wilderness?

I'm sorry, but my answer is No.

Thought for the Day

"Spencer Tracy in a costume drama is always something to be dreaded"

Courtesy of The Glittering Eye, where they are having a discussion about great actors in gosh-awful movies.