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Entries for 'Carter Wrenn'
Carter Wrenn posted on August 30, 2010 10:05
Over in Afghanistan, according to the newspaper, 25-year-old Khayyam and 19-year-old Siddiqa fell in love;---now Khayyam already had a wife but that wasn’t a hurdle because in Afghanistan men can have four wives; instead the hurdle was his family turned thumbs down on the marriage, plus Siddiqa was already engaged to a relative of Khayyam’s who she didn’t want to marry.
Khayyam and Siddiqa eloped.
A few months later their families found them hiding in a distant province and promised if they’d come home all would be forgiven. But the day they returned home they were seized by the Taliban which convened a court of Mullahs and convicted them. Next they were taken outside into the bazaar, surrounded by 200 villagers and stoned.
Siddiqa in her burqa was killed first.
Then Khayyam.
Khayyam’s father and brother and Siddiqa’s brother participated in the stoning.
Afterwards a local farmer, Nader Khan, told a Kabul reporter, “People were very happy seeing this,” adding the crowd was festive and cheered during the stoning. The couple, he concluded, “did a bad thing.”
A spokesman for the Taliban speaking by cell phone also explained to the reporter it all was handled quite properly according to Shariah Law which he claimed is “based on Islamic Law,” at least the way the Taliban sees it.
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Posted in: General, Issues
Carter Wrenn posted on August 26, 2010 17:26
Well, Gary, you’re back and I’m glad we’ve got a little controversy on our hands (about the Mosque in Manhattan) and I suspect before we finish debating we may be disagreeing on more than just politics.
Let me ask – gingerly – three questions. Are all religions are equal? Should all religions be treated equally? Is there a tie between Islam and terrorism?
Are all religions equal? Most people I think would answer this question no. Moslems don’t believe Christ is the Messiah so in their view Christians are making a mistake by worshiping a false God. Most Christians, of course, look at it exactly the other way around. The point is one of these religions has to be right and the other is wrong – so it’s hard to see how they’re equal. Do we disagree?
Should all religions be treated equally? In America today we’ve already crossed that bridge and, I suspect, most people would answer this question yes. But that does tend to lead to awkward conflicts and the mosque is an example. To put it delicately, even if a fellow favors freedom of religion, if he has qualms about Islam’s ties to terrorism he may naturally wince at the prospect of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero.
And that brings us face to face with the million dollar question. Is there a tie between Islam and terrorism? Perhaps you know the answer to that. I don’t. But, naturally, ignorance breeds doubt and doubt leads to suspicion.
For instance, I look around at the followers of other religions – for example, Hindus or Buddhists – and I wonder if they are as likely to commit acts of terrorism as Muslims. And a brief, unscientific glance at who’s murdering who these days doesn’t reveal a lot of Hindu terrorists. Of course, that doesn’t prove a link exists between Islam and terrorism. Osama bin Laden could be attacking the United States for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with Islam. But I suspect the plumb line in the debate about the mosque boils down to the answer to the question of the ties between Islam and terrorism.
I may be completely mischaracterizing your view (and I am sure if I am you’ll correct me) but it seems to me pro-mosque building folks answer that question one of two ways. They say: There’re good people and there’re bad people and Osama bin Laden is a bad person and his religion has nothing to do with it. He’d still be a bad person (and a murderer) if he was a Christian.
Or, alternatively, they reason: There are ‘bad Christians’ but that doesn’t prove Christianity is bad. So the fact there are ‘bad Muslims’ doesn’t prove Islam is bad. Therefore, the two religions should be treated equally.
That sounds fair and logical and open-minded but, of course, there is the possibility the first statement is true and the second false. After all, I think we’d agree a Christian blowing up 3,000 innocent people would be acting contrary to the teachings of Christ. But I guess it’s possible a Muslim doing the same thing might be acting in accord with the teachings of The Prophet.
So here is the question I suspect may take us far beyond politics: What do you think? Like many people who don’t know a great deal about Islam I wonder, Is there something about Islam that leads to the creation of terrorists like Osama bin Laden?
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Posted in: General, Issues
Carter Wrenn posted on August 23, 2010 12:18
For twenty years the state ‘crime lab,’ the News and Observer reports, has been withholding evidence and misleading juries at trials and sending innocent people to prison – but no one has been fired, which makes the fate of Eszter Vajda (another state employee who did lose her job last week after the firestorm over her documentary about the cyanide buried around Alcoa’s old aluminum smelter in Stanly County) seem, well, odd.
After months of shuffling through environmental reports and reading lawsuits and interviewing widows of Alcoa employees who’d died of cancer, Vajda was not only shocked – she’d figured out those old files were telling a story she’d never imagined. But part way through her documentary she ran head on into a hurdle: Her researcher, Martin Sansone, had to go home to England and her employer UNC-TV wouldn’t pay to fly him back to finish the film.
Most sensible young women (and anyone with more common sense than stubbornness) would have given up on making a full length documentary when they couldn’t afford to buy an airplane ticket. But whatever Eszter Vajda’s vices fear wasn’t one of them. She had her teeth into a story and to be stopped by an airline ticket was insufferable – so she and Sansone asked a group of Republicans, who’re on the other side of the fight from Alcoa down in Stanly County, to pay Sansone’s expenses.
Taking money from folks opposing Alcoa when you’re making a film about Alcoa wasn’t going to look good, but for years UNC-TV had been taking money from people to make films about them (say, for the Golden Leaf Foundation) so, perhaps, Vajda just looked at what UNC-TV had done in the past and figured, How is this any different?
Sansone flew back to Raleigh and Vajda charged ahead and then ran head on into another hurdle: Most journalists thrive on controversy because it sells newspapers. But the managers of UNC-TV, in addition to being journalists, are level-headed government employees. They don’t need to air controversial programs (which makes people mad at them) to make money so it’s just plain common sense for them to avoid controversy like the plague. (Two of the features on UNC-TV’s website this morning were “Share Your Favorite Baseball Memory” and “A Tour of the Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies” with station manager Tom Howe.)
When her superiors at UNC-TV told Vajda they didn’t want to air her hour-long documentary she cajoled and appealed but got nowhere – then she lit into them.
Raleigh’s no longer a small town but word does still get around and pretty soon ears down at the legislature picked up on the rumblings between Vajda and her bosses and that landed UNC-TV in an odd place: In the middle of a tug of war between Alcoa’s lobbyists (who were trying to kill a bill Alcoa didn’t like) and a handful of local state legislators trying to pass the bill. The legislators figured, even if they hadn’t seen her film, it couldn’t hurt if Vajda told the story of, for example, Alcoa suing the Health Department to stop it from posting signs along Badin Lake, by its smelter, warning pregnant women not to eat the fish because they were contaminated with PCBs that can cause cancer.
But even when the old bull-moose of the Senate, Marc Basnight, weighed in UNC-TV wouldn’t give Vajda what she wanted. In the end she could only talk the station into airing three short segments – so most of her documentary was headed for the elephant’s graveyard of unfinished documentaries when something even more unexpected happened: Senator Fletcher Hartsell sent a pair of subpoenas to UNC-TV and Vajda, personally, telling her to bring the full hour long version of her documentary over to his Senate Committee so Senators could look at it.
That didn’t trouble anyone much except Vajda’s fellow journalists who saw the idea of subpoenaing a journalist as a kind of heresy and let out a howl of outrage that would have made a tub-thumping Baptist preacher proud. Hard bitten reporters who’d been publishing public records to embarrass governors for years roared subpoenaing a reporter was unconstitutional and UNC-TV ought to tell Senator Hartsell to stick his subpoena in his ear
Trapped between lobbyists, State Senators, and a mob of howling journalists UNC-TV had more controversy on its hands than it had ever dreamed of and when the Attorney General’s office told them there was no legal way to look a judge in the eye and argue a public record created by a journalist (who worked for state government) was exempt from the same laws governors have to abide by they stuck the flag.
Vajda trooped over to the legislature and played a rough cut of her documentary to a room packed full of Senators and Alcoa lobbyists and for the first time folks got to see The Alcoa Story and it was a doozy: Right at the start of her film Vajda launched into a list of toxic chemicals that are waste from aluminum smelting – cyanide, arsenic and PCBs – then moved right on into how Alcoa had been dumping them in Stanly County since it opened its smelter in World War I, then moved on into local cancer rates and groundwater contamination and ended up by asking a question it’s kind of amazing no one asked before: Why doesn’t the state do a study to find out if what Alcoa’s been doing down in Stanly County since World War I is a public health threat?
Vajda’s documentary sent a shock wave through the legislature and then another odd thing happened: Out of a clear blue sky UNC-TV started sending letters to people who’d posted her film on the Internet ordering them to take it down because it violated their copyright. In other words, UNC-TV was saying Vajda’s documentary was a public record but no one could show it to anyone else because it was copywrited.
If, a year ago, Governor Easley had told the News and Observer, Sure my emails are public records. And sure you can see them. But you can’t publish them. They’re copywrited – the press would have had apoplexy. But, this time, not one journalist complained.
Instead several of Vajda’s fellow journalists tore into her over Sansone’s travels and never mentioned copyrighting public records or PCBs; -- then UNC-TV issued a terse statement saying Vajda was no longer employed by the station.
Finally, when the smoke cleared, one local paper – Yes, Weekly – did ask Alcoa the million dollar question – and it’s about all the vindication Vajda is likely to get.
What, the paper asked, did Alcoa claim was biased about Vajda’s film?
Well, it wasn’t true, Alcoa spokesman Mike Bellwood said, that Alcoa is a trillion dollar corporation like Ms. Vajda reported. Then he added that Vajda was also wrong when she reported Alcoa’s Yadkin Dams could be ‘recaptured’ by Congress for $16 million. (In fairness to Vajda, in her documentary she actually said Alcoa had told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ‘recapture’ would cost $24 million.)
As Yes, Weekly pointed out Alcoa didn’t dispute a word Vajda had reported about the cyanide buried around its smelter.
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 16, 2010 16:48
Now, Gary, about that mosque in Manhattan you disagree with me about: It is fine and noble to talk about “freedom” and “tolerance” and “openness” but Charles Krauthamner asked a pretty fair question of his own about this mosque in the newspaper last week: ‘What makes a place sacred?’
He gave three examples of what makes a patch of earth hallowed ground: A miracle (Lourdes), a noble sacrifice (Gettysburg), or the blood of martyrs and suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).
He continued, ‘When we speak of… hallowed ground, what we mean is it belongs to those who suffered and died there – and such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated’…that’s why while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up on Pearl Harbor would be offensive… and why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz… he was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place.’
The Governor of New York offered to find the ‘good Muslims’ you describe in New York another place for their mosque. They refused. What more needs to be said?
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 16, 2010 16:36
Sometimes something will just float in out of the Internet that’s just plain funny.
This one came with the subject: A-Bomb or Welfare. Click Here to read it.
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Posted in: General, Issues
Carter Wrenn posted on August 16, 2010 13:28
Seven hundred fire breathing Democrats gathered in Fayetteville for their convention and just about came to blows over reading the riot act to three Democratic Congressmen who had the sheer audacity to vote against Obama-care.
What saved the poor Congressmen from humiliation (or perhaps mutilation) was one of their more adroit supporters standing up and telling his fellow Democrats: Look. Wait a minute. We ought not to have litmus tests for ideological purity. That’s what the Tea Party does.
As angry as the Democrats were at the Congressmen apparently they liked being compared to the Tea Party even less so they dropped the whole idea.
But here’s an odd anomaly: Not one of the up-in-arms-over-Obama-care Democrats paid the least bit of attention to what’s going on with Perdue-care right here in North Carolina.
Up in Washington President Obama just provided healthcare to some 30 odd million Americans – but here in North Carolina Governor Perdue is cutting care to the old and infirm and poor left and right.
The state’s so-called mental hospitals – if you read the newspapers – are 21st century throwbacks to Bedlam (the notorious 19th century London insane asylum). In North Carolina’s 21st century mental hospitals patients have been killed by other patients, beaten by orderlies, and raped.
Of course (and maybe this is a blessing in disguise) for the poor getting into one of the state’s ‘mental hospitals’ is just about impossible – because there are too few beds. As a result, the newspapers report, under Perdue-care psychotics (if they are violent) spend days handcuffed to beds in Emergency Rooms or being ‘warehoused’ in rest homes that were meant to treat the elderly.
And the problems aren’t limited to mental hospitals.
In May, an 88-year-old woman – a severe diabetic and double amputee – applied to the state for in-home care so she could stay out of a nursing home. Three months later she’s still waiting to hear from the state.
Another woman applied for care in April. It took the state two months to respond. By then she was in the hospital.
Another elderly woman applied for care in April. Her care was approved in July. Unfortunately, she died in June.
A patient’s rights group got so upset about how the state’s treating mental patients it sued and after the Obama Administration found out what the state is doing it joined in the suit – against Governor Perdue.
In another lawsuit a judge ruled Perdue’s Department of Health and Human Services was trying to cut care to elderly patients on Medicaid without bothering to physically examine the patients first to determine if they needed care.
Meantime, at the same time she’s cutting medical care to the poor Governor Perdue is proposing to give a new tax break to movie stars who earn over $1 million – so they’ll make movies in North Carolina.
No wonder the latest Civitas Institute poll shows Governor Perdue’s popularity, which had already plummeted among Republicans and Independents, just plummeted among Democrats too – by 15 points.
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 13, 2010 10:34
As House Democratic Leader Joe Hackney and House Republican Leader ‘Skip’ Stam watched beaming, Governor Perdue signed the states latest ‘Ethics Law.’
Hackney then said it was wonderful that Democrats were cleaning up the mess in state government, and Stam said it was a shame the Democrats had created the mess in the first place.
However, truth be told, the laws legislators left out of the bill are more important than the ones they put in.
For example: They left out a law that would have made candidates personally liable for the fines when if their campaigns violate state elections laws. Legislators killed that law in a New York minute.
And they left out another law that would have limited how much money government contractors can give to the politicians granting their contracts. Legislators said that might make it harder for companies that already had contracts to get more state work – because somehow, they reasoned, it would give companies without contracts a competitive advantage.
At least there’s no doubt that’s true – in North Carolina nothing gets a government contract like a contribution.
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 13, 2010 09:00
Federal judges have turned out to be President Obama’s worst nightmare; first a Clinton judge in Phoenix threw out Arizona’s immigration law and landed Obama in the middle of a political war over the next to last issue he wanted to fight over; then a judge in California landed him in an even worse fight – one over gay marriage.
How much trouble could this cause Obama?
Even Democrats (or, at least, a lot of Democrats) disagree with him over giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, and even California – which is running nose to nose with Massachusetts for the crown of most liberated and open-minded state – voted almost two to one against gay marriage.
President Obama spent a trillion dollars, the recession deepened, and he lost the support of Independents. In the Democratic primaries he ran to Hillary’s left as a peace candidate, then after the election you couldn’t slip a sheet of paper between his policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and George Bush’s – which has made the peace wing of his own party restless. Now, when he least needs bad news, he now has to fight battles on two issues that will send conservatives to the polls in droves.
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 12, 2010 21:27
Over in Davie County a dentist tells the District Attorney his wife stabbed him with a spear, then he stabbed her back with his pocket knife, and she died; the DA calls in the SBI’s Chief ‘Blood Splatter’ expert to figure out exactly what did happen; two investigators stare at the bloodstains on the husband’s tee-shirt, focus on one odd stain, and come to a startling conclusion: The husband’s not telling the truth. He killed the wife, wiped his bloody knife on his tee-shirt, then stabbed himself in the thigh with the spear.
Next the Chief ‘Blood Splatter’ expert, Duane Deaver, and an aide run a ‘scientific’ test to prove his theory: They take a pocket-knife, dip it in blood and wipe it on a tee-shirt to see if it matches the odd stain on the husband’s tee-shirt.
Only there’s a problem: It doesn’t.
So Deaver, following the highly scientific theory ‘if at first you don’t succeed try, try again,’ repeats the experiment and this time has better luck: The stains match – so he’s proved it is possible the husband murdered his wife and then wiped the knife on his tee-shirt but, of course, it’s also possible that one odd stain could have gotten on the tee-shirt in any one of a dozen different ways and Deaver hasn’t eliminated any of them.
But that little hole in Deaver’s ‘scientific’ theory gets left out of the report his office sends the DA – instead the report says the state’s ‘Blood Splatter’ experts have proved ‘scientifically’ and irrefutably the husband is lying and killed the wife – so the DA charges the husband with murder.
Two years later, the case lands in an expose in a newspaper a hundred miles away, along with two other cases where ‘Blood Splatter’ expert Deaver tested stains on a man’s boot and on a car bumper. Deaver’s tests showed the stains might have been blood but, later, testifying in court, Deaver said that using the latest scientific knowledge he’d proved absolutely, irrefutably the stains were blood. In other words, he didn’t tell the truth.
Now what on earth is going on here?
How can it be possible (for over twenty years – because the three cases happened 20 years apart) an official state ‘investigator’ have been giving false testimony to send people to jail?
And, for that matter, why didn’t the DA in Davie County tell Deaver, If you’re saying wiping a bloody knife twice on a tee-shirt is irrefutable, scientific evidence I’m a monkey’s uncle – which is what the foreman of the jury in the dentists case more or less told the newspaper, saying, “Politically, socially, religiously, I’m conservative; I’m a law-and-order man. But I don’t know what other word to use but a fraud.”
Awhile back my friend Joe – who’s a defense lawyer – and I had a disagreement over some aspect of the criminal justice system in North Carolina. I can’t even remember what it was now. But, whatever it was, Joe, I apologize. It’s clear there’ve been shenanigans going on in the SBI and the courts and DA’s offices that are just plain crazy.
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Carter Wrenn posted on August 11, 2010 08:08
Not long after we took up the burden (or had it forced on us) of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we decided ‘Democracy Building’ (wherever our army went) sounded like a noble idea.
And no doubt it was noble but nearly nine years later we’ve had an education and learned not everyone agrees.
Even the most stout hearted democracy builder has given up on the idea of converting the warlords in Afghanistan to our idea of how they ought to elect leaders and over in Iraq with the government in crisis no one’s taking wagers democracy will survive the last American soldier in Baghdad stepping onto the transport for home.
Back in the days when he was a candidate for President it looked like a safe bet Obama was going to get us out of both wars. He said Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time fought for the wrong reasons. He didn’t put it quite so bluntly about Afghanistan but it was easy to get the idea if he didn’t see much to be gained fighting in the deserts of Iraq, he probably didn’t see much future in fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan where the Russians, British and Macedonians all came to a bitter ends.
Candidate Obama turned thumbs down the surge in Iraq and promised to get us out of the war but after he was elected President Obama had a change of heart, continued George Bush’s policy in Iraq and launched his own surge in Afghanistan – which now has the distinction of being the longest war in all of American history.
We defeated the German Empire (twice), the Japanese Empire, the British Empire and the Spanish Empire in less time than we’ve been fighting the nomad tribesmen in Afghanistan.
You might expect the President to be focused like a laser beam on that one incongruous fact. But if it has occurred to anyone in Washington it’s odd that it’s taking us three times longer to defeat the Taliban then it did to crush Hitler’s panzers, no one’s saying so.
Instead, Washington has a new ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy to win the war sounds a lot like one of President Obama’s ‘Stimulus Plans.’ The government (the United States government) is borrowing money to build roads, schools and sewer systems – so the Afghanistan’s will love the government.
Is it working?
“There is nothing more tragic than watching beautiful theories being assaulted by gangs of ugly facts,” one former Pentagon analyst said recently.
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