As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, a uniquely stupid chapter in the story of the American legal system is drawing nearer to a close. The Georgia Supreme Court on Friday ordered the release of Genarlow Wilson, the Douglas County man who has been serving a controversial 10-year sentence for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old…
Category: Justice
Hate Crime Anyone?
A while back in NYC there was a nasty crime. A group of white young men wanted money for drugs and decided to lure a gay black man out and rob him. They lured him using on-line chat and beat and then ran him in front of a car killing him. So, the prosecution went…
SFWA, Scribd.com and ePiracy and why its important
Over the Labor Day weekend there blew up a weird story that involved the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and the website scribd.com. For those not in the know (like me), scribd.com allows users to upload text files and share them with users in a collaborative format (not unlike Flikr). Now the problem arose…
First Post, but something important none the less
First off, I want to thank Marc for inviting me to post as an author here at Black Shards. Marc and I have been moving buddies now for four years and thanks to the Internet we have stayed in touch even though we live relatively far apart. In thinking about what to write I pondered…
Judgment
As I’ve written about before, there is something profoundly lacking in the world today – namely men and women with the courage of their convictions and the will to act on them. Sometime in the last century it went out of fashion for men to act on their own independent judgment. Group-think is in and…
Spring Victim’s Suicide
David Ritcheson, the young man from my former home town who was brutalized by a pair of Nazi wannabes last year, has killed himself. According to Fox News: Ritcheson, a small and quiet youth, once lamented being known as “that kid” who survived the party attack. He rarely discussed his feelings and declined to get…
Freedoms
A while back George Will wrote a column titled “Valuing Speech” that is apropos for Independence Day, I think, and another discussion about the relative correctness of liberalism, conservatism, and constructionism. Will says: Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime. At…
Too Few Prison Guards? Or Too Many Laws?
According to the Waco Tribune, Texas is short on prison guards to the tune of nearly 3200 officers. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that Texas plans to build three additional prisons in the near future. The Trib blames this shortage on the growing Texas economy that has been drawing workers from other states here….
Hate Crime Laws are Anti-American
The Ayn Rand Institute says that the federal hate crimes law that the House recently voted to expand should be done away with rather than being broadened. I concur. From the article: “The government’s job is to punish criminals for initiating force against other citizens; objective laws that ban the use of force and fraud…
Don "Who?" Imus, Duke, and the Race Card
Maybe I’m just a right-wing Christian square, but I’d never even heard of Don Imus before he made an ass of himself by called in the Rutgers women’s basketball team nappy-headed hos. Whoever the heck he is I wish he wasn’t white and I wish he hadn’t said that. Why? Lots of reasons. Why a…