Glob-a-log

(Lake left by Toba eruption)

You know that old Mark Twain jibe, of course, ‘Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’

Well, I just read a very interesting article about some new genetic research into the early movements of homo sapiens – and this one paragraph struck me:

‘We can also see that just before humans left Africa, about 70,000 years ago, mankind was brought to the brink of extinction when Mount Toba, in Sumatra, erupted,’ said Wells. ‘It was the most powerful volcanic eruption for two million years and dropped thick ash and killed vegetation across the globe. Our research now shows Homo sapiens numbers dropped alarmingly at this time and we only just hung on as a species.’

It’s both a sobering and, ultimately, a comforting thought: That, as a species, we came close to being (near) non-starters and that we still, somehow, muddled through.

I’m not suggesting this means that there is some benign Force or angel, sitting on humanity’s collective shoulder, that will always save us from our own stupid insistence to put our finger in every electric socket that we come upon – but it does show that life is stubborn and can take a lot of abuse that’s thrown at it by uncaring fate. Our species is a testament to that, and the old Mount Toba story is just another example of it.

Anyway, I know that it’s always been fashionable with humans to predict that the end is neigh. All throughout history, at certain moments in time, the human population has been gripped by Apocalypse fever.

So, occasionally, I do wonder if much of the Global Warming panic (or enthusiasm) is just another instance of people doing what people have always done so well: Running around in circles, flapping their arms and shouting – almost gleefully, “We’re doomed! We’re all doomed!”

I’m not saying that is so, necessarily. The threats of Global Warming may be as serious as its most fanatic prophets promise their disciples & detractors that it will be but us humans do tend to overreact, from time to time. That’s just one of the side effects of having evolved such marvellously complex and fertile brains, I’m afraid.

Getting back to evolution though, and to that article I just read. It’s another fascinating story – and isn’t it amazing what our scientists can do when they are not busy developing ever more clever weapon systems or age-defying facial creams?

So, I’ll shut up now and give you a few more samples from that article. Go and use the link to that whole story, when you’re through reading this, though. Unlike a certain beauty product company we all know, it’s worth it:

Sixty thousand years ago, a small group of African men and women took to the Red Sea in tiny boats and crossed the Mandab Strait to Asia. Their journey - of less than 20 miles - marked the moment Homo sapiens left its home continent. The motive for our ancestors’ African exodus is not known, though scientists suspect food shortages, triggered by climate change, were involved.

Now scientists are completing a massive study of DNA samples from a quarter of a million volunteers in different continents in order to create the most precise map yet of mankind’s great diaspora. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, they outlined their most recent results. ‘As the ultimate ancestor begat son, who begat son and so on, they picked up mutations in their DNA that we can now pinpoint by gene analysis,’ said project leader Dr Spencer Wells. ‘When we look at these markers’ distributions we can see how our ancestors moved about.’

(Private James “We’re doomed” Frazer)

(Body snatcher Michael Mastromarino)

Now, here’s an interesting story for you – but first, let me digress a bit and tell you a dark tale from England’s Victorian England, from around the time Jack the Ripper’s footsteps could be heard in some very dark and bloody alley and neighbours complained about the endless coughing of Sherlock Holmes’ pipe in the middle of the night. (Well, Scotland really, not England but the sound of a pipe can carry a long way when the rest of the world is trying to sleep.)

Anyway, without even more garrulous ado, let me give you the notorious messires Burke and Hare:

Before 1832, an insufficient supply of legitimate cadavers was available for the study and teaching of anatomy in British medical schools. As medical science began to flourish in the early 19th century, demand rose sharply, but at the same time, the only legal supply of cadavers - the bodies of executed criminals - was falling due to a sharp reduction in the execution rate in the early 19th century, as compared with the 18th century. This situation attracted criminal elements who were willing to obtain specimens by any means. The activities of body-snatchers (also called resurrectionists) gave rise to particular public fear and revulsion.

The Burke and Hare murders were perpetrated in Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828 primarily by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses of their 17 victims to the Edinburgh Medical College for dissection.

Okay, let’s say goodbye to the 19th century, Sherlock Holmes’ pipe and all those grisly old tales about serial murderers and body snatchers and move to present day Philadelphia, where things like that simply don’t happen.

You’re not buying that, are you?

Very wise. Times may change but human nature does not – and if you can make a fast buck digging up and selling on the bodies of your fellow man, well, business is business, and even people who don’t believe in old-fashioned ghosts will be willing to admit that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

So, here’s the story of Michael Mastromarino, a latter day Hare - or resurrected Burke:

A man who made millions of dollars by plundering hundreds of bodies sent to funeral homes and selling their often-diseased parts and tissues to medical companies pleaded guilty Friday to a raft of charges that could send him to prison for life. Michael Mastromarino, 44, of Fort Lee, N.J., pleaded guilty. The bodies were sold around the country for dental implants, knee and hip replacements and other procedures. About 10,000 people received tissue supplied by Mastromarino’s company, New Jersey’s Biomedical Tissue Services.

Mastromarino went into business with James McCafferty and brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone because they collectively owned a crematorium. He paid them $245,000 for at least 244 cadavers between February 2004 and October 2005. Mastromarino would then send a “cutting” crew, led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

Okay, I know it’s very wrong of me but I must confess I do find stories like this irresistibly funny – though even I have to admit there are a few serious lessons to be learnt from this story.

Obviously, Mastromarino and his associates are despicable bottom feeders who probably deserve whatever the mighty state will throw at them. Still, there is that huge market out there for all those body parts – and that is both silly and, in fact, almost criminal in itself.

Because medical science has evolved so much, we can do, in theory, ever more to relieve the suffering of so many of the living. Problem is, for some of those treatments we still need human tissue and human (spare) body parts – and there are never enough of those around when we need them, because they are rotting away in funeral parlours and crematories. All these useful bits are put in stupidly expensive garbage cans and buried, or burnt and put in much smaller (but still quite expensive) containers.

Which is a bloody waste, really.

Of course, people and their relatives should have the right to dispose of their dead bodies as they see fit and I’m not suggesting that any state should, as it were, nationalise these dead assets but surely it would make sense to change the laws to some extent, so that we don’t waste all these body parts for no good, private reason.

Right now, in most countries in the West at least, people have to state that they allow their bodies to be used after their death before they actually die. This means that almost nobody does this. People are people and they don’t like to dwell on what will happen to them after they die – Hell, they don’t even want to acknowledge that they will actually die at some point in the future. It’s the one thing we know that will happen to us and most of us don’t want to know. Which is why there are so few body donors, of course.

So, why not change the law and make it okay for your and my dead bodies to be used unless we state that we don’t want this? It would mean that people would not have to deal with the actual business of signing their body parts away – and I’m sure that many people who are not official donors now, wouldn’t mind if other people would find some use for these body parts when they, the previous owners, have no further use for them.

Forget about the broader issue for the moment. If you (yes, you!) have read this far, would you mind if your body would be used to help other people after your death – and, if you don’t mind, are you a donor already, or is that something you never got around to sign up for, thus far…?

Anyway, the argument against such a ‘default use’ law is that it might mean that people who don’t want their bodies to be used after their death, would somehow find themselves in that unwished for position. So, the argument goes that we shouldn’t change the law, in case some conscientious objectors might not have heard of this law or hadn’t come around to officially signing up as neigh-sayers. The other argument being that if other people are willing to donate their bodies after death, surely they could find the time to do so while they are alive.

I’ve already dealt with that second argument. Certainly, some people do become donors but most people just don’t want to think too much about their own mortality and all the things that come with it.

The first argument is, I think, quite specious. People who really do object to this proposal (and other forms of bodily interventions) will know about any law that deals with the subject and will most forcibly object to it, if they have that legal opportunity. I have heard of no case where a Jehovah’s Witness complained about not knowing about blood transfusions & vaccinations and/or taking a principled stance whenever one was offered.

In other words, right now we have a situation where millions of potential useful bodies go to waste for no good reason whatsoever – and I would argue that that’s just because our societies and we as persons are too morally lazy and squeamish to deal with this issue in a grown up manner.

I’m not saying that makes all of us as bad as the haplessly greedy Michael Mastromarino but isn’t the needless waste of all those potentially life enhancing and life saving body parts at least a moral crime?

I’ve got a new hero – it’s called ‘The Langum Charitable Trust’:

An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it “will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates”. Random House dropped Jones’s novel, about the child bride of Muhammad, after it was warned that it posed a security risk akin to the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. A spokeman for the Langum Charitable Trust said:

“That form of cowardice will only lead to more and more of this form of self-censorship and is an attack on the integrity of literary publication. We must stand up to it, in whatever ways are available to us. The form that was available to our small foundation was to put Random House out of the running for our prizes.”

Brilliant.

I know that Random House won’t exactly go broke, because it now won’t win any of those $1,000 prizes but they won’t like this kind of publicity at all.

Of course, they will tell themselves that this story will go away and that it’s lots safer to be cowardly than principled anyway but it will, nevertheless, hurt their precious self-image – and that’s something.

Plus, others in the award-giving industry might follow this lead, and Random House would be in big trouble if they did.

Me, I’m an avid reader and even I hadn’t heard of the  Langum Charitable Trust. Still, there are literary prizes that can turn almost any book into a bestseller – and Random House is big and publishes lots of books in many categories of fiction. If all the big prize organisations would boycot Random House, this would be very bad news for this weasely publisher.

It would easily lead to direct yearly losses of millions of dollars, when none of their books would get the kind of publicity that comes with winning, let’s say, a Hugo, a Silver dagger or Edgar Allan Poe, a Booker or Whitbread etcetera, etcerera.

What’s more, if this boycot would continue it would also mean that both literary agents and non-represented authors would hesitate to send new manuscripts to Random House. If you are an agent and you felt some manuscript had huge potential, would you send it to a publishing house that was boycotted by the literature prize industry?

So, let’s hope the rest of the prize industry will follow  where The Langum Charitable Trust has lead – and wouldn’t it be great if book reviewers would also start a boycot of the cowards at Random House? No more Random book reviews in newspapers like The New York Times, or England’s Guardian, or in any of the specialist organisations like Kirkus, Tor and all the others?

That would really teach Random House not to kowtow to the psychopathic Islamist crowds. If the non-sociopathic reading world would boycot Random House, I somehow doubt that they’d make up for those financial losses by selling bomb making instructions and Kill-those-who-insult-Allah brochures to the book burning masses.

(Don’t buy this label!)

Isn’t it fun to know that all over the world all city councils are filled with absolute, useless wankers?

Take a look at this story, for instance:

“The Mayor of Venice defended a controversial new bridge over the Grand Canal as Italy’s “most important contemporary architectural achievement of recent decades” yesterday despite complaints that it was unnecessary, unsuitable and four times over budget. Critics also noted that it lacked access for the disabled.”

Of course, leave it to the PR department of any proven-to-be-useless council to come up with a brilliant public statement that explains things…

… only managing to add charges of imbecility and/or cynism to the evidence of these councils’ overall incompetence:

“The absence of facilities for the physically handicapped could be traced to the beginning of the project, when planners had assumed the disabled would use the existing ferryboat across the canal. A lift for the disabled would be installed but this would take several months.”

You can almost sympathise with the poor sods at City Hall who had to come with some explanation for this rather glaring oversight. Any explanation, really…

… but this one is rather pathetic.

It is obvious that no-one had given the problem any thought and that this ferryboat spiel is a rather desperate attempt yo conceal this fact. Stil, saying that you thought the disabled might prefer a boat over a bridge truly is a fun proposition.

You know how your average city council is obsessed with health and safety bullshit and loves to put up notices that say things like ‘This balcony is not on the ground floor.’ So, it’s really comical to hear some council spokesnitwit suggest, like captain Blackbeard, that the disabled walk the plank.

Every able-bodied person who’s not really into boating knows that it can be quite iffy, at times, to get on and off boats. Boats are seldom on the same level as the bit of land to which they are tied and they can be as fidgety and unpredictable in their movements as puppies on crack.

So, yes, small canal ferries must be any wheelchair bound’s favourite mode of transport by far…

Bloody imbeciles.

Oh, one last point about this stupid bridge. It is made of steel and glass, and is lovingly known by its few demented fans as the “carpet of light”. It also has glass steps.

Nice touch, right?

Wrong.

Do you know how dirty your average city window gets in a year, if you never clean it? Indeed. Now, take that window that’s just been gathering dust and the occasional bit of bird shit while standing up and take it down to street level and let it lie there for a bit. Not getting any cleaner this way, no?

So, now, as a finishing touch, go and place it where millions of tourists will walk to and fro each year, in a city that’s a sea gulls’ paradise – and come back in a year and see what’s happened to your bloody carpet of light.

Now, here’s a strange story for you:

Chip fat-powered rally driver Andy Pag was cock-a-hoop as he steered his sticker-covered car into the forecourt of a sleepy Greek taverna just over the border from Albania. “Today we have successfully completed our mission,” he declared, punching the air with delight. “We have arrived in Greece, powered by nothing but grease!”

Nine days after leaving a “greasy spoon” cafe in North London, he and his team of adventurers had achieved their ambition to traverse Europe without using fossil fuels. Instead of filling up at petrol stations, they have been pulling into restaurants and charming often bemused chefs and owners into donating their waste cooking oil. He has travelled more than 2,000 miles (3,200km), using about 45 gallons (200 litres) of chip fat. His car has been doing more than 40 miles to the gallon, which he claims is better than normal diesel. And he has also saved more than 350 euros (£300) in petrol station bills.

It’s quite something, don’t you think? No more worries about rising oil prices. Who cares how much a gallon costs when you can fill your car at the chip shop, while stuffing your face with some fish and chips?

Yes, I can see the future – and it ain’t orange. How many miles a gallon do you think you’d get from a bloody orange? Those snooty fitness fruits are way too busy packing vitamin C to be of any real use. No, if you want to go places, think greasy cafs and chippies.

So, it’s goodbye petrol station, and goodbye and good riddance to any road side restaurant that can’t produce a decent, old-fashioned fry-up.

It’s a great way of recycling too: to feed our cars with the stuff that was used to feed us. Granted, we might all put on a bit of weight, if we will have to eat enough greasy food to keep our cars going – but the sight of all those happy motorists clogging up the roads, breathing in car exhaust that still smells vaguely of fried batter, fish and chips, is well worth any number of our own clogged up arteries.

Anyway, back to the proud inventor of the fish and chips car. You might think he’d be resting on his laurels now, taking out patents and buying up stock in chipshop blue chips and what have you but you would be very much mistaken!

Andy Pag’s not done yet. Why stop at reinventing (the greasing of) the wheel when there are so many other modes of transport left that could do with a touch of your genius, and greasy spoon?

So, here’s what he will doing next:

“Next year Andy plans to circumnavigate the globe with a mixture of cars, boats and planes. And the aircraft, he says, will be powered by aviation fuel made from plastic bags.”

How marvellous – and just like that old Sinatra song…:

“Come fry with me, let’s fry let’s fry away
If you can use, some exotic booze
There’s a bar in far Bombay
Come fry with me, we’ll fry we’ll fry away”

I love cartoons, especially political cartoons – and I think the Brits are still the world’s number one when it comes to making them.

What makes the political cartoon such a perfect medium is that it can deliver quite complex stories and ideas within one frame.

Take the one that opened this column, about the Democratic convention. You could easily write three or four full editorial articles, or blog posts or traditional columns about that one cartoon. More to the point though, it’s the cartoon that distills its loud and clear (and very funny) message from a wealth of other sources – and I would say it does it better than most journalists and commentators will ever do.

What helps the cartoonist, of course, is that he or she is not limited to the rules and mores of strict journalism. There is, for instance, no way in Hell you could deliver the following message within the confines of a, let’s say, Washington Post editorial, or London Times obituary - but a cartoonist will be happy enough to present his or her case in the following manner:

It’s not just the stories that take up most of the daily newspapers that are translated into cartoons. Sometimes, a cartoon can present you with the abstract kind of story that philosophers and moralists turn into lengthy (and mostly dusty) tombs.

Again, you would have to write a lot of columns in order to translate the following cartoon into prose:

There’s that old saying about the pen being mightier than the sword. Those translators and publishers of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses who were killed by Islamist imbeciles might not quite agree with that sentiment but it’s certainly true that words are often seen as very potent weapons in any ideological war.

No wonder that cartoons, which can be worth a thousand editorials, are often the cause for such disapproval and, these days, also the cause of global unrest and rioting.

So, the following cartoon won’t be the last one to deal with both Islam and the overreaction and hypocrisy of a rather large number of its more demented followers but it will do for this column:

Cartoons love to deal with global issues, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are quite a few of them that deal with global warming. Most of these cartoons don’t really work, since the whole subject matter inspires too much dogmatic belief on both sides of the argument.

The biggest risk that any political cartoonist runs is to turn into a humourless zealot and this infliction has made for many a leaden text balloon. So, there are definitely a large number of decidedly unfunny global warming cartoons.

I love the following one, though, since it’s nicely irreverent on all kinds of levels:

As I said before, cartoons can be incredibly good at telling very complex stories about all kinds of political issues. The following cartoon is a perfect example of this. It deals, on an intelligent and human level, with the despair of Lebanon – and also shows us the larger and quite sinister ramifications.

It is obviously not laugh-out-loud funny but then it wasn’t intended to be. Some of the best cartoons often are not funny in that way. What they give us comes closest to what is sometimes described as ‘Merlin’s laughter.’

The famed magician, supposedly, once laughed out loud when he saw a beggar, sitting next to a rubbish heap. Merlin laughed because he was the only one who knew that below the rubbish a priceless piece of jewelry was hidden.

There can be a lot of Merlin’s laughter in cartoons, like this lebanon cartoon shows:

I love the next one. You need to know a bit about modern political history to appreciate it but if you know the background story (I think) this one is priceless – but I’m sure you remember how Bush looked deep in Putin’s eyes and immediately knew he could trust the soul that lived inside the leader (and how McCain joked that when he looked in Putin’s eyes all he saw were the lettters K,G & B.)

This one is about that story – but I like to think it’s also about the vanity of many of humanity’s, mostly short-lived fancies and wishful thinking. To my mind the cartoon also says a lot about the kind of hubris that gives us book titles like ‘The end of history’ – but, much more to the point, it’s also a very funny cartoon:

More of Merlin’s laughter in this following cartoon. Again, it only needs this one picture to tell us a Hell of a lot about the sad, and bloody, and quite probably doomed story of Zimbabwe, its psychopathic leader and its despicable South-African neighbour Mbeki.

It’s decidedly as unfunny as a cartoon can get – but it is also very good:

I saw the following cartoon on a Dutch site, surprisingly enough. I think all of our political cartoonists are inferior to (most of) their American counterparts – and the Americans can’t really come close to their British colleagues. So, I was rather surprised to see the following cartoon.

It’s not the most original one about China, Tibet and the Olympic games but it’s still quite good, so I’ll include it here. The title of the cartoon reads ‘The Olympic spirit’ and the text balloon shows Baron de Coubertin’s, ‘Partaking is more important than winning:’

I suppose you can’t do a piece about (contemporary) political cartoons and not do something about the Iraq war.

So, here’s an old one, from January 30 2003, when, in theory, history as we know it now was not yet written. In reality, it most probably already was – but that’s not something that would surprise your average cartoonist, or those of us who’ve been following the news and reading the cartoons for quite a bit longer than Bush and his poodle tried to fit the world to their idea of that famous new world order.

Anyway, here’s the tenth and final cartoon of this column. Hope you enjoyed them:

(Infinity welcomes careful drivers)

I hate travelling.

I love seeing new places, occasionally; it’s just the going from point A to point B that I can’t stand - and that’s before you even start to throw in all those stupid security procedures that we have today, which haven’t made any of us really much safer but which have proved to be a sheer lethal attraction to every crypto-fascist who ever wanted to put on a uniform and make other people’s lives a bureaucratic misery.

In fact, I don’t like anything that reminds me that it isn’t possible just to close my eyes and be wherever the Hell I want to be the next moment. A kind of ‘Beam me up, Scottie’ device, without the need for space crafts, the company of William Shatner or those bloody awful-looking costumes.

I don’t like travel shows much, which just serve to remind me that I am as good with a suitcase as a dinosaur is on roller skates – and I get very nervous whenever I see a map.

It’s just too easy to imagine myself shrinking like Alice, till I’m no bigger than the smallest microdot, lost in that myriad of oddly coloured lines, not even trying to find my way out of there, till I, somehow, will have reached any of the four sides of the map and fall, kicking and screaming, from the edge of that flat, paper world, falling forever towards whatever doom awaits me.

So, as I said, I’m not much for travelling but I have to admit that the following bit of news is quite something else – with the added benefit that nobody will really expect me to grab some bags and actually try to go out there, ready (or boldly) or not.

Anyway, Google Earth, eat your heart out!

For eight years astronomers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have scanned the heavens to discover the nature of the universe. Richard Gray reveals their extraordinary findings For any traveller venturing into unfamiliar territory, a map is an essential aid. Now those exploring the final frontier are to enjoy the same kind of help, with the completion of the largest map of the universe ever produced.

After more than eight years of relentlessly scanning the heavens and recording every chink of visible light, astronomers have finally finished the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, producing a three-dimensional colour map that covers a quarter of the night sky. It has determined the exact position and classification of more than 200 million celestial bodies, including a million galaxies and 100,000 quasars.

Why are people so fucking sentimental about certain things? Take the following story:

FORMER Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is so badly affected by dementia that she forgets husband Denis is dead. In a poignant account, her daughter Carol describes how she has to keep reminding Mrs T he is no longer around.

Yeah, very poignant indeed.

God help us but I was around during the eighties when the master and mistress of greed walked the earth: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. People love to blame the Sixties for all our current ills. The age of permissiveness and all of that.

Which would be very funny, if it wasn’t so achingly sad. Reagan and Thatcher were the ones who were really into permissiveness. They cried havoc and let slip the dogs of capitalism.

There would have been no Enron scandal; no Halliburton raping the American tax payer and the Iraqis in one go; no Savings & Loans obscenity; and probably no sub-prime bullshit either.

No, this is not an argument for socialism. Most of the times, the private sector will be much more efficient, more productive and, in the end, cheaper than any state run company or institution.

Yet, unfettered capitalism is Hell on earth for the vast majority of the people – and that’s what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher stood for. That’s what they and others of their ilk created, or permitted. That’s why millions of Americans lost their pensions and the Enron bosses walked away with billions of dollars, almost all of them without even a slap on the wrist.

That’s how the super rich inherited the earth, with the connivance of all the smaller political fishes who swam in the wake of these two big sharks, who are now so lovingly remembered.

Which is why I’m truly pissed off when I read some fucking sob story about Thatcher’s dementia – or the sentimental shit we used to hear about Ronald and Nancy.

It also explains why my first thought upon reading the headline of this news story was:

“Wow, how amazing! The old bat is actually improving with age. So, now she just forgets that her husband is dead? Hey, when she was in power she forgot that 99% of the people were alive.”

So, I’m sorry but fuck her.

(Convicted attorney Marjorie Knoller)

I don’t have a law degree but I think the judge’s verdict in the following case is wrong:

A judge reinstated a San Francisco attorney’s murder conviction Friday for her dog’s fatal mauling of her neighbor in an apartment building hallway in 2001 and ordered her jailed immediately while she awaits a prison sentence of 15 years to life. Marjorie Knoller, 53, sat quietly in the courtroom while Superior Court Judge Charlotte Woolard discounted her testimony at her 2002 trial and said Knoller had known her dog was potentially lethal when she took the animal out of her apartment without a muzzle.

The 140-pound Presa Canario, Bane, bolted away from Knoller and attacked Diane Whipple, 33, who bled to death from at least 77 wounds. The dog’s 100-pound mate, Hera, charged out of Knoller’s apartment and may have joined in the attack. Knoller “knew her conduct endangered life” and thus was guilty of murder, not merely manslaughter, Woolard said in rejecting a defense request for a new trial.

It must have been a truly horrific thing. Imagine being attacked by one (and maybe two) large and feral dog. Imagine being a friend or relative of the victim and hearing she bled to death from at least 77 wounds. Well, I can’t really imagine any of that – and I can understand that those friends and relatives want to see the owner of the dog(s) punished to the fullest extent of the law.

However, private grief and private rage should never be allowed to rule in court. The law is there to make sure that justice can be done without personal feelings interfering with due process. The law isn’t perfect but it’s all we have as a society, to redress mostly private wrongs and wrong-doings in a formal setting.

Sometimes, it seems, emotions also get the better of our judges – as it looks to have done in this particular case. There’s something reassuringly ‘common sensical’ about the judge’s statement that because the defendant “knew her conduct endangered life, she was guilty of murder, not merely manslaughter.”

This, of course, may sound like common sense but it is still a nonsense and not just because there is a real difference between knowing things COULD go wrong and the certainty that they WILL, even if the judge seems to imply there isn’t.

Anyway, this was, as I already said, a horrible incident – and I’m sure Marjorie Knoller was guilty of gross and, quite probably, criminal negligence but that does not make her a murderer. Let’s look a bit more closely at the term ‘murder’ and how it is defined in the American legal system:

The precise definition of murder varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Under the common law, or law made by courts, murder was the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. The term malice aforethought did not necessarily mean that the killer planned or premeditated on the killing, or that the killer felt malice toward the victim. Generally, malice aforethought referred to a level of intent or recklessness that separated murder from other killings and warranted stiffer punishment.

California has retained the malice aforethought definition of murder (Cal. Penal Code § 187 [West 1996]). California also maintains a statute that defines the term malice. Under section 188 of the California Penal Code, malice is divided into two types: express and implied. Express malice exists “when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature.” Malice may be implied by a judge or jury “when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.”

Strangely enough, this Californian judge seems to favour the more general interpretation of ‘malice’ over the Californian statute itself.

Be that as it may, in that more general sense, it is still the case that for murder you need intent, or extreme recklessness. We may assume that the judge based his verdict on the latter: If the defendant had been (on trial for) sicking a dangerous dog on someone, there would not be any need for discussion – then the dog would simply have become the weapon of choice in a clear case of murder.

However, if we are saying that what Marjorie Knoller did constituted a form of recklessness that would leave her open to the accusation of murder, then we are truly making some very strange legal history here.

So, yes, we know that a certain type of dog may attack and even kill people, if it is not on a proper leash, but we also know that cars can kill people, that guns can kill people, that an overdose of certain types of proscribed medicine can kill people, etcetera – and any dog owner, car driver, gun owner and those who take certain medicines know that there are laws concerning the use and ownership of all these articles.

However, if you break a traffic law, like not checking all your mirrors before you turn a corner, and someone get killed, does that make you a murderer? If you don’t lock away your gun or your medicine bottle properly and your kid has a fatal accident, does that constitute murder? In all these cases there will have been a level of carelessness, or, as the law calls it, ‘recklessness.’

If, according to this judge’s ruling, walking your dog without a leash can lead to a murder trial, then why not any or all of those fatal incidents mentioned above? For it seems that the judge believes that whenever you break the law and do something that is potentially harmful, you will be seen as having acted with malice aforethought if something does go fatally wrong because of your actions.

I’m not sure this is a healthy, or even a sane legal route to take. Yes, individuals need to take responsibility for their actions – and the law should deal with them if they endanger and kill others through negligent and plain stupid behaviour. So, yes, dog owners, car owner, gun owners and those who have potentially poisonous substances in the house, should ‘operate’ with due care, and, obviously, within the law.

That is one reason that the crime ‘manslaughter’ is on the books. However imprecise the term ‘recklessness’ is in the definition of murder, there still is a clear difference between what is intended and what is, however horrific, accidental – and accidents should not be treated as murder.

You may make the case (and I would agree) that this changes when a person who causes a deadly accident (be it with a gun, or a car, or a dog) is under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs. In that case you could state that by deciding while still sober to make yourself incapable to handle a potential lethal situation you know you will get into at some later point, you are not dealing with an accident anymore. In these cases a judge could (and I think should) use the ‘recklessness’ clause, to turn what would otherwise have been a manslaughter case into a murder trial.

Again, to the relatives and friends of the victim, Marjorie Knoller will always be the person who “murdered” their loved one. I am sure I would have felt the same way if I were in their shoes. That’s why we have the law, though: to do what we could never do individually – which is to deal with matters in an objective and level-headed manner.

Judges are also human, of course – and sometimes they fail to be as impartial and clear-headed as they should be. In this particular case I think the judge was ruled by emotion more than he served the law.

(Adnan “Yahya” Oktar)

Let me start with confessing that I am not a big fan of Richard Dawkins. As an agnost I find his brand of aggressive atheism as alluring as a Jehovah’s Witness visit on an early Sunday morning.

I have to admit though that I can see how he, over the years, turned into the exasperated, grim loudmouth that we’ve come to know so well. If I had had to put up with as many warped cuckoo clocks as he has had the displeasure to engage with, I would not have ended up as a cranky, wild-eyed but still relatively sane old geezer.

Me, I would have ended up on top of the highest tower in town, with a couple of guns and plenty of ammunition, foaming round the mouth and cackling like a triplet of mad Macbeth type witches.

What’s more, when you’re Richard Dawkins, it just never, ever bloody well stops. Snotty journalists and columnists (and silly bloggers like me) take their potshots at you. Every now and then, some arsewipe politician or publicity-whoring professor joins the fray – and, of course, there are all those Christians out there, be they Protestant or Roman Catholic, who all want a piece of you: preferably presented to them in bloody shreds.

Still, as the Roman emperor said to the circus lions, “It’s all in a day’s work.”

Or, at least, that would have been true for Richard Dawkins too, right up to the moment that he read the following article:

Richard Dawkins is used to being provoked by loony American evangelical creationists. But his latest challenge comes from a strange Turkish figure called Harun Yahya whose lavishly produced (and frankly preposterous) four-volume tome The Atlas of Creation caused a stir last year when it was sent to thousands of academics across Europe.

Yahya (real name Adnan Oktar) has invited Dawkins to debate Darwin’s theory of evolution with him publicly. Yahya believes the theory “has lately suffered a global collapse”.

As if our proselytising atheist didn’t have enough on his plate already.

Right now, Dawkins is probably wondering why, if there is no God, he’s still being punished in this unholy fashion. You can almost hear him think, ‘What next? Hell-raising Hindi? Rabid rabbis? Barking Buddhists perhaps?’

There is of course – and excuséz le mot – no way in Hell that Dawkins will pick up this particularly ghastly gauntlet. He’s already on record as saying that he doesn’t believe in giving precious (air) time and free publicity to the Darwin deniers.

So, I’m afraid Dawkins is as likely to take up Yahya’s kind offer as an orthodox rabbi would be to take his shul to the cinema, on the Sabbath, to go see ‘Ilsa, she wolf of the SS’.