Day: March 21, 2005

Prosecute the torturers

Andrew McCarthy’s article in The National Review yesterday details an answer to the Terri Schiavo case that does NOT involve federal intrusion and does seem to answer the pressing need. He cites a Florida law that forbids (and prescribes punushment for) abuse of disabled persons, including torture of those who, like Terri evidences in contemporaneous videos, are NOT vegetative but simply profoundly incapacitated. He then goes on to ask,

Where does it say, under Florida law, that a judge has the power to authorize the commission of felony violations of the law? A judge manifestly had no power to tell Michael Schiavo and the hospice that they could feel free to shoot or hang or over-medicate Terri to death. Why in the world do we think he had the cognate power to permit a torture?

OK. So lynching is out. *sigh* But jailing the judge who ordered Terri Schiavo to be tortured tio death ought to happen. Now. Where are the handcuffs. No bread and water. And why not remove the judge’s “feeding tube”? An “eye for an eye” seems fair. No food or water foras long as Terri’s been (or is) without—for the judge and every single person who weighed in on the side of killing Terri Schiavo by torture.

What would be wrong with that?

Free Fiona Apple!

Disclaimer: I do not find Fiona Apple’s voice or vocal style at all appealing. That said, I do still very much like her music, especially what I’ve listened to so far of “Extraordinary Machine,” the album Sony has shelved—refused to relase—because it’s “not commercial” enough, but which neverhteless has found a huge audience among radio listeners and internet downloaders.

Huh? Yep. Seems a DJ got hold of a copy of the songs and has been playing them regularly and a whole movement to “Free Fiona Apple” has sprung up, attempting to get Sony to press the album and allow folks to buy it. Here’s a site where you can download very high quality mp3s of all the songs on the album, if you wish (I did). And here’s

Other observations? Glad you asked. (You did ask, didn’t you? 🙂 OK, in one sense Sony is right. The music on “Extraordinary Machine” is definitely not the sort of manufactured commercial crap Sony has been majoring in recently. It’s rather complex and involving music, instead. Not the sort of thing that Sony’s market is aimed at—tone-deaf, subliterate, “prison for kids”-manufactured doofs. OK, I can see where Sony would say, “We don’t know anyone who would buy this stuff,” because Sony execs apparently are tone-deaf, subliterate doofs ,themselves.

This stuff is good, in spite of all apple does to ruin it with her annoying voice. Just plain good stuff!

Now, I’m conflicted. If Sony succombs to pressure to release it, against all their “over-manufactured commercial crap for idiots sells” instincts and Fiona fans buy the albu in large numbers, who benefits?

Sony.

*sigh*

Would this encourage Sony execs to look more carefully at the quality of the music they publish (and who would care, since they obviously can’t tell good music from bad, anyway)? Or would it just reward their three-year shelving of this album? Wouldn’t a better solution be to download the songs anywhere one can get them for free and send Fiona Apple a buck or so a song (far more than the buck or so an album she’d get from Sony–if she’s lucky)?

I’d much rather send her some money directly than give Sony a dime.

But that’s me. I’ll always prefer that the artist (and in this case, again in spite of her annoying voice, Fiona is that rare thing: and artist) get the lion’s share, rather than some philistine in a suit.

Thx to Glenn Reynolds for tipping me off to the fact that the songs were available—somewhere *heh*—on the web.)

Update:

Epic (a subsidiary of Sony) now says ” …Fiona has not yet delivered her next album to Epic, but we join music lovers everywhere in eagerly anticipating her next release.”

So, what is it? Apple fans have supposedly been besieging Sony for more than a year asking for the album’s release, and now Epic says she hasn’t delivered? I suspect the truth is that she has but Epic demanded changes to make it more “marketable”—changes Apple is probably right to resist, given the other offerings coming from the Sony Borg.

Addendum:

Janis Ian has some trenchant observations about artistic expression, music, the music industry, and the internet at her web site. Good reading. (Oh, and she has some of her music for download there. Remember “At Seventeen”?)

And this whole idea of artists marketing directly to those who appreciate their work, bypassing much of the cumbersome and overly expensive vampires (well many of them are) has other thinking advocates. Jim Baen, a book publisher with a genuinely forward-looking viewpoint, has given server space and publicity to those authors who want to give away some of their books… and both baen Books and the individual authors have noticed significant gains in their bottom line as a result. I know that after Holly Lisle pointed me to the Baen Free Library I bought a number of her books… since the library offered me an opportunity to download and read one of her books and I discovered I liked her writing. (Our local lil library here in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢ does the best it can, but its fiction selection is scarcely larger than my pre-purge collection was. And much of that selection is… not worth reading, anyway—a matter of catering to the clientele, as much as anything else. *heh*) Other authors—Eric Flint (the prime mover behind the Baen Free Library ), John Ringo and several others’ books have been purchases I would probably not otherwise have made, had not the library introduced them to me.

And Baen Books also sells e-books of all their titles very inexpensively, with a larger share of the ebook price going to the author than does from print books (economy of production passed on to the artist–Baen’s a White Hat, I think.).

Federalsim? We don’t need no steenking federalsim. But we do need prayer in (and for) our courts…

First: the Terry Schiavo case reveals the moral bankruptcy of our society. That government is no longer FIRST tasked to prevent the taking of innocent (of crime) life but is instead simply determining when it’s permissbile to take the life of a person who has been conviceted of no crime is indicative of a deep, deep failure of our society. That the perpetrators of this abortion of justice have not been taken out and strung up by angry mobs of locals rebelling against immoral government/courts is an even sadder commentary on the moral fiber of what was once a republic.

That said, it’s none of the feds business to what depths of moral depravity Florida’s so-called judicial system falls in becoming a witting participant in the murder of a woman whose only “crime” is that she is severely disabled. It turns on its head completely the idea that we have a republic of States, as devised by the Founders (but then, that concept was already terminally poisoned by the Great Unitarian-Baptist Shootout**, when the Baptists lost to the ungodly Unitarians… *sigh*). Piggybacking on the illegitimate expansion of so-called federal power in other areas in order to do good in this one is just one more case of republicans (small “r”) surrendering to the mob tearing at the tatters of the Constitution.

But then, a large part of the problem is acceptance of government involvement in too much of our personal lives–involvement by all levels of government in all too many parts of our personal lives. That Schiavo’s putative “husband” (who now lives with another woman with whom he has fathered children) is allowed by a court to have any say whatever concerning the life of the woman whom he has deserted, to whom he has denied care settlement monies were earmarked for, is appalling–especially since there are people ready, willing and able to take care of her themselves.

No, the Florida judge says, kill her. But not only “kill her” but do so in a way that would have any one of us jailed for doing it to our dogs. (If you have the stomach for it and are morally depraved enough, try starving your dog to death, denying it water. The worst of dog-hating neighbors would report you and you’d be jailed. Would that some hater of the disabled would have the moral fiber to have the judge who condemned Terry Schiavo to a tortured death jailed… at least.)

That’s too much, and I can certainly understand the moral outrage that would lead congresscritters to intervene with an attempt to make a federal case out of it. But they, too, are wrong. (Whereas the proper response by our congresscritters ought probably to be… see above re: lynching.)

*sigh* There seems to be no right solution except… perhaps as I have heard suggested, praying that God would intervene and grant terry Schiavo the ability to swallow again.

So, pray.

(**”Great Unitarian-Baptist Shootout: also known by disingenuous historical propogandists as the American Civil War. Another example of good intentions—the abolition of chattel slavery—hitching a ride with bad—imperialists, robber baron industrialists and economic slaveholders.)