The Warden

One possible answer is that Gosnell might be particularly depraved. On his own, he came up with the idea that murdering a fetus near the moment of birth was morally permissible, at least if the mother asked him to do it. That’s comforting. It lets us console ourselves with the thought that such brutality is a fluke and not likely to be repeated.

But that’s probably not the right answer. While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there’s one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.

[…]

It could be that the teaching power of abortion law is eroding more than the moral sense of doctors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infant homicide is shockingly common. Its most recent 2002 report suggests that the day a person is born is, by far, the most likely day for them to be killed.

[…]

A far better choice exists. As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb. We should admit that our system of abortion law is dehumanizing. The better course is to protect even small voiceless human beings from more powerful people who would rather see them dead, whether that killing happens inside or outside the womb.

Over the last 12 months, piracy off the Horn of Africa has nearly disappeared. In the first 16 weeks of 2013, there have been no vessel hijackings reported (pdf) to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. And according to the UN, the last vessel to be commandeered by militants was the Greek tanker MV Smyrni on May 10, 2012, almost a year ago.

(via Taegan Goddard)

I quote these passages not to suggest in any literal way that Ariel Casto’s evil is ingested by anyone who reads about his story, but to point out the idea that for all the scrupulous reporting what happened to the three women in Cleveland we are left with an excess of obscenity and cruelty that cannot be neatly stowed away inside a news story. I can’t help asking, for whom, and for what purpose, were these details publicized? Why do I need to know what I now know?

(via Dave Pell)

Law enforcement has successfully captured Dzhokar Tsarnaev, and DOJ has announced that Tsarnaev is being interrogated without first being read his Miranda rights because the DOJ thinks that the public safety exception to Miranda applies. Back in 2010, I blogged a lot about Miranda in this setting. Here are a few reminders about the law here:

The answer to this question is pretty much 1986 (whether that’s a matter of “courage” or not), when automatic weapons — i.e., machineguns — were largely banned. There is an exception for pre-1986 automatic weapons, of which there are relatively few, since they have been heavily taxed since the 1930s. As a result, automatic weapons are very expensive, hard to get legally, and banned outright in many jurisdictions. Those grandfathered weapons are almost never used in violent crime.

Like many decisions that seem arbitrary at first, hurricane naming has unexpected practical consequences.  In the mid-1980s, Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin showed that people like their initials more than they like other letters in the alphabet.  For example, in one study Nuttin found that Europeans who spoke 12 different languages were 50% more likely to identify their own name letters among their top six favorite letters of the alphabet.

In a more recent twist on Nuttin’s basic result, psychologist Jesse Chandler and his colleagues found that people donate significantly more money to hurricanes that share their initials.  So Roberts, Ralphs and Roses donated on average 260% more to the Hurricane Rita relief fund than did people without R initials.  Also in 2005, people with K initials donated 150% more to the Katrina relief fund, and in 2004 people with I initials donated 100% more to the Ivan relief fund.

It’s impossible to tell exactly how many lives the program has saved, though Secretary of State John Kerry recently claimed that 5 million people are alive today because of it. That’s probably as good an estimate as any.

Throughout the conversations Dan expressed a sincere interest in my life, wanting to get to know me on a personal level. He wanted to know about where I grew up, my faith, my family, even my husband, Tommy. In return, I learned about his wife and kids and gained an appreciation for his devout belief in Jesus Christ and his commitment to being “a follower of Christ” more than a “Christian.” Dan expressed regret and genuine sadness when he heard of people being treated unkindly in the name of Chick-fil-a — but he offered no apologies for his genuine beliefs about marriage.

Instead of responding to a new kind of virtual competitor with better products and services, however, the highly-regulated taxi and limousine companies in every city Uber has entered have instead gone the route of trying to ban Uber’s existence.

As I have explained elsewhere, I am not opposed to the draft under all conceivable conditions. If, for example, having a draft were the only way to avoid getting conquered by an enemy that would impose a totalitarian state on us, I would support it. The draft is a great evil. Still, there can potentially be situations where it is the only way to stave off an even greater one. But the arguments advanced by Rangel and other modern draft supporters don’t even come close to meeting the burden of proof needed to justify such massive coercion.