Monday Miscellany, 8/5/24

The Office of Military Commissions wrote this to the families of the 9/11 victims:  “In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.”

UPDATE:  Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austen revoked the plea deal.  He also revoked the authority of the officer who agreed to it.

I suspect that this was done because a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two would bring into the public record information the Pentagon does not want to disclose, such as details about how they have been treated by U.S. forces.  Waterboarding may have been the mildest of what they had undergone during their interrogations in those days.  Is evidence gained under torture admissible in a court of law?  If not, what other evidence do they have?

The question arises, though, why have they not been tried already?  They have been locked away for 23 years without a trial.  I’m seeing quite a few violations of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution here:  “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”  Not that the terrorists are entitled to those protections. They committed acts of war, which is why their case is being handled by the military.  But a speedy trial is not only a right for an individual, it is also a requirement of justice, both for the sake of deterring similar crimes and giving closure to the victims or their families.

I further suspect that the plea deal was offered because prosecutors worried that a good lawyer could invoke the Sixth Amendment in such a way that the case would have to be dismissed altogether, with the terrorists going free.

Another question arises:  If the murder of 2,976 people doesn’t deserve the death penalty, what does?

Abortion Makes Men “More Free”

On the “White Dudes for Harris” campaign call, a fundraising rally on Zoom attended by some 190,000 white dudes, the cringe-worthy exercise in identity politics included Pete Buttigieg lauding abortion.  It isn’t just a matter of “women’s freedom,” he said:

Men are also more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care. Men are more free when the leader of the free world and the leader of this country supports access to birth control and to IVF.

Comments Jordan Boyd:

The so-called “freedom” Buttigieg references here is the ability of unmarried men to have recreational sex with whomever they want but avoid becoming tied to the results of that degeneracy thanks to the proliferation of birth control and abortion.

When abortifacients abound, men who don’t want the responsibilities that come with being a loving husband and involved father don’t have to shoulder them. They simply have to pay for Plan B, mail-order mifepristone, or pressure their one-night stand down to pay a visit to the local Planned Parenthood.

This brutal baby-killing cycle carries a myriad of soul-crushing consequences for everyone involved. Even men, who don’t endure the physical turmoil wrought on female bodies after a baby is forcibly removed via dismemberment or evicted with a drug regime that starves the child to death, can suffer the emotional consequences of losing their offspring to abortion.

Buttigieg is gay, so he added this:  “And certainly men like me, and my husband, are more free when we have a president who supports our freedom to get married to who we love.”  Men in same-sex “marriages” are especially invested in IVF [in vitro fertilization] and artificial insemination, which allows them to engender babies by using their sperm and hiring a surrogate mother, regardless of how many embryos are discarded.

Good News on the Environment

“Over the past 20 years,” says Bjorn Lomborg, “climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming.”  He then gives examples of predicted bad effects that have not happened, for which we should all be grateful.

Lomborg has written an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions [behind a paywall], with the deck, “Activists’ tales of doom never pan out, but they leave us poorly informed and feed bad policy.”

He cites the example of polar bears.  The Washington Post in 2004 warned that they would become extinct, and Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth plucked at our heart strings with  a sad cartoon polar bear drifting away on an ice floe to its death.  But over the last few decades the population of polar bears has more than doubled, from 12,000 in the 1960s to some 26,000 today.  Whatever effects climate change might have had on the bears, he says, is more than offset by policies that restrict their being hunted.

Nature documentaries have long lamented the death of the coral of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures.  But over the last three years, says Lomborg, the Great Barrier Reef has had a record amount of coral cover.

Some islands in the Pacific were supposed to be underwater due to rising ocean levels.  But it turns out that whereas higher tides have caused erosion, they also deposit more sand, which has built up the islands to more than they were formerly.

During this hot summer, President Biden claimed that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”  Actually, no.  Though some 6,000 Americans die from extreme heat, cold kills 152,000!  Temperature-related deaths have actually declined over the years, due to more and more people around the world getting air conditioning and heating technology.

Lomberg does believe in man-man climate change, but he argues that what we need are ways to mitigate and live with that change, rather than sacrificing our economies to prevent it.  For example, addressing the problem of people dying from temperature extremes, whether of heat or cold, requires more and cheaper electricity, so that even poor people, the main victims, can have air conditioning and heating.  And yet climate policies, fueled by the doomsayers, are often obstacles to energy production.