Several years ago, I changed position and now disapprove of the death penalty, for two primary reasons:

1. If an innocent person is executed, there’s no way to provide recompense.
2. I believe more people would consider a life sentence a worse punishment than the death penalty.

Anti-dp’ers often consider the death penalty particularly cruel. However, it’s logical to believe a person serving a life sentence would live a life of no hope, and would rather end it quickly than live a slow, joyless torture.

Case in point: hundreds of Italian inmates serving life sentences are requesting the death penalty:

[Convicted mobster Carmelo] Musumeci said he was tired of dying a little bit every day.

We want to die just once, he said, and “we are asking for our life sentence to be changed to a death sentence”.

It was a candid letter written by a man who, from within his cell, has tried hard to change his life.

He has passed his high school exams and now has a degree in law. But his sentence, he says, has transformed the light into shadows.

He told the president his future was the same as his past, killing the present and removing every hope.

(Click to zoom in!)
Thanks to a friend for re-invigorating my interest in the North Korean government with this article: Kim Jong Il captures Japanese artists’ imagination.

It would have been nice to buy a T-shirt or something from there. However, I could have lived quite contently without knowing someone had depicted Kim Jong Il in Japanese-style bondage.

In observing the North Korean media, I eventually burned out. My mistake was trying to check the KCNA’s website every flippin’ day trying to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. The fact is that the KCNA’s not a scarce resource; it’s a gushing geyser of information that’s impossible to exhaust in a reasonable amount of time.

Best headlines from today:

• Profound Love and Total Dedication to Socialist Motherland Called for
• Crafty Trick of Japan to Evade Responsibility for Past Crimes Debunked
• Development of Indigenous National Cooking Culture [and they're doing this with what food?]

Of course, it’s entirely possible that he is nuts