Rest in Peace

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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu May 18, 2017 11:53 am

.

He fears no more.
He pains no more.
Take solace that he has risen to the [black hole] sun.




Whatsoever I've feared has
Come to life
Whatsoever I've fought off
Became my life
Just when everyday
Seemed to greet
Me with a smile
Sunspots have faded
And now I'm doing time
Cause I fell on
Black days

Whomsoever I've cured
I've sickened now
Whomsoever I've cradled
I've put you down
I'm a search light soul
They say but I can't
See it in the night
I'm only faking
When I get it right
Cause I fell on
Black days
How would I know
That this could be my fate

So what you wanted to
See good has made you blind
And what you wanted to
Be yours has made it
Mine
So don't you lock up
Something that you
Wanted to see fly
Hands are for shaking
No not tying

I sure don't
Mind a change
But I fell on black
Days
How would I know
That this could be
My fate


Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Thu May 18, 2017 2:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Gashweir » Thu May 18, 2017 1:44 pm

I'm really bummed out about Chris Cornell passing. In college back in the early 90's, SG was THE BAND for me, and I was lucky enough to see SG play at a few small venues in Santa Cruz, and even got to meet Chris Cornell after a few of the shows. Really, really sad day.

I especially feel bad for his children. I can't imagine how awful that must be for them.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Fri May 19, 2017 7:55 am

It caught his bandmates by surprise as they had thought the show there had been a great success. I hope he is at peace now.
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Grizzly » Fri May 19, 2017 8:08 am

fuck...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat May 27, 2017 10:38 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Elvis » Thu Jun 01, 2017 9:01 am

Gina

2002 - 2017

GINA_II_-_1.jpg


Gina the cat passed away Wednesday afternoon. We lived together for 15 years, from the time she was a kitten. She brought smiles to many faces and liked everybody. Except other cats. I feel fortunate that I was with her when she passed, it was very hard for me but I'm glad she didn't die alone.

Accompanied by some friends, I buried her body on a high garden terrace out back, under a great maple tree, along with her little stuffed toys which she like to keep collected together where she could account for them. She will be greatly missed.


GINA 2015 - 05.jpg


GINA 2015 - 09.jpg
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Jun 01, 2017 9:49 am

^^ My heartfelt condolences, E.
Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Cordelia » Thu Jun 01, 2017 3:09 pm

^^^
RIP Gina.

She looked like a healthy, well cared for cat who lived a long life.
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:06 pm

Very sorry and saddened to learn of you loss, Elvis. The love we have for our furry or feathered companions is incredibly strong.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby chump » Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:39 pm

C'est la Vie

Image


My condolences.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby km artlu » Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:52 pm

Ain't no cure for love, Elvis, or for the grief it makes us bear. It takes courage to love a creature almost sure to die while we will live on.

Gina had the look of a wise old kitty; bless her.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Elvis » Thu Jun 01, 2017 8:07 pm

Thanks everyone. First day without her, will take some getting used to.

Love the Wilbur story, Chump, thanks.

:basicsmile
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby PufPuf93 » Wed Jun 07, 2017 2:02 am

Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms merchant and world-class playboy, dies

By Brian Murphy June 6 at 4:55 PM

Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman-for-hire who amas­sed huge wealth and influence peddling everything from American weapons to favors for Riyadh’s rulers and CIA spymasters, only to see his fortunes collapse amid the Iran-contra affair and other scandals, died June 6 at a hospital in London. He was 81, by most accounts.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, the family said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.

Mr. Khashoggi’s name may have lost its luster since his peak in the 1970s and 1980s, but not so the list of misdeeds and abuses that remain defining events of the time. Though never convicted, the U.S.-educated Mr. Khashoggi was linked, as a money-mover and five-star fixer, with some of the era’s most infamous figures and schemes.

Long and interesting obit at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ob ... ab33dd882f
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby PufPuf93 » Wed Jun 07, 2017 2:05 am

Elvis » Thu Jun 01, 2017 5:07 pm wrote:Thanks everyone. First day without her, will take some getting used to.

Love the Wilbur story, Chump, thanks.

:basicsmile


Sorry you have lost your long time friend Elvis. Fifteen years together is awesome.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby identity » Thu Jul 13, 2017 8:49 pm

A remarkable woman! Truly a great loss. Way too young, at 70, to move on, but maybe her diet, "surviving on KFC fried chicken, coffee, cigarettes, and jug wine," was to blame.

We Saw Monsters. She Saw Humans.
Scharlette Holdman, pioneering foe of the death penalty, dies at 70.
By MAURICE CHAMMAH

angel.png


Scharlette Holdman, whose pioneering work with defense lawyers contributed to the decline of the death penalty nationwide, and whose clients included Ted Kaczynski, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, died Wednesday. She was 70. In the tight-knit world of defense lawyers who focus on the death penalty, Holdman was a revered figure, a non-lawyer responsible for the development of mitigating evidence, aimed at convincing jurors to spare the lives of men and women whose crimes, at first blush, only elicited disgust. It is now common practice for capital defense lawyers to hire “mitigation specialists,” and in recent years such evidence has often convinced district attorneys not to seek the death penalty in the first place.

“Her enthusiasm and strength of personality inspired hundreds of young people to join the struggle against the death penalty,” said Judy Clarke, the criminal defense attorney, who worked with Holdman on several high-profile cases. Holdman grew up in Memphis, Tenn., the daughter of a landlord who described collecting rent and evicting his poor black tenants as “going niggering,” according to the journalist David Von Drehle, who profiled Holdman in his book Among the Lowest of the Dead. She rebelled, studying anthropology and working among civil rights activists before running chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s. During those years, the Supreme Court struck down the country’s death penalty laws and state legislatures raced to rewrite them. When the court restored capital punishment in 1976, it declared that those who sentence people to death must be able to consider “compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind.”

As the number of death row prisoners grew, Holdman ran the Florida Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, where she tried to find lawyers for the men as their execution dates approached.“She was like a medic performing triage at a train wreck,” Von Drehle wrote. “The first job was to determine who was closest to dying.” She was famous for her skill in cajoling lawyers over the phone into taking on appeals. She worked round the clock for $600 per month while raising two kids, surviving on KFC fried chicken, coffee, cigarettes, and jug wine, all the while gaining a nickname in the press: “Mistress of Delay.” In such grim circumstances, a macabre sense of humor flourished. On the anniversary of an execution, she sent Florida attorney general Jim Smith a “deathday cake” with black candles. In another case, while trying to show a court that a mentally ill man was not “competent” to be executed, she encountered a state-hired psychiatrist who said the man had beaten her at tic-tac-toe, thus proving his mental acuity. Holdman remembered that as a child she’d seen a chicken at a fair that could play tic-tac-toe, and she tried to get such a chicken admitted as a witness. The judge “felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the court,” Holdman later told This American Life. “I thought that the dignity of the court was degraded by executing a mentally retarded, mentally ill person.”

Holdman later worked in California and Louisiana, and shifted from appeals to investigations before trial. Her training in anthropology allowed her to develop a deep understanding of her clients and their backgrounds. “What she saw is that killers are not just born,” said lawyer George Kendall, who represents death row inmates. “They have had unbelievably abused and neglectful lives, and that history is relevant. You become your client’s biographer, you speak to the 60 most important people in that person’s life — friend and foe.” Many clients had suffered sexual abuse and other traumas, and trust was key. “How do you get people to talk about the worst family secrets? None of that comes easily,” said James Lohman, a lawyer who worked with her in Florida. “She figured it out, and then trained people how to do it.” Many of the mitigation specialists who followed in her footsteps are journalists and social workers. “It’s the antithesis of being a lawyer; it’s all about human feeling and connection.”In recent years, Holdman worked with the lawyer Judy Clarke on the cases of Jared Loughner, who pled guilty to the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson in which U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was injured, and Eric Rudolph, responsible for the 1996 bombing at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

She was famous for her devotion to her clients, and they often grew attached to her; after Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was sentenced to life in prison for a series of bombings, he asked that Holdman be given his Montana cabin. (According to The New Yorker, the government did not let her keep it.) Her final client was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of planning the 9/11 attacks. She studied Islam while preparing for his military trial. She received a Muslim burial Thursday, according to a colleague.


:lovehearts: edited to add this: :lovehearts:

For 35 years, Scharlette Holdman has worked with defense teams on death penalty cases, including some very high profile cases. But she hasn't given an interview to the press in decades, ever since an incident where she had a few drinks with a reporter and said some things that she was unhappy to see in print.

Scharlette Holdman
It was so embarrassing. And I thought, well, I either have to quit drinking or quit doing interviews. And I wasn't ready to quit drinking yet, so I quit doing interviews. So this interview is a very rare event for me. I haven't done any kind of interviews with the media since '85.

Ira Glass
And you are ending the moratorium, in this one instance, for this story. Why?

Scharlette Holdman
Well, a fluffy, red-combed leghorn deserves his moment in the sun. I mean just the image-- and I'm not talking about any chicken. I'm talking about-- you can just picture it-- this beautiful leghorn, his tail perked up, and that red comb sitting at kind of a rakish angle on his head, and his head kind of cocked to the side, and he looks at you with his little eyes. That's what this story is about.

[...]

Ira Glass
So Scharlette Holdman didn't just get the idea of calling a chicken as a witness in a murder case out of the blue. She was working on this case-- and we're going to call this guy Harry-- and there was no question that the guy had killed somebody. This wasn't about whether he'd done it. It was just about what sentence he would get. He had sat on death row at San Quentin for 10 years. But Scharlette says he was schizophrenic with an IQ of 58 and just out of touch with reality.

Scharlette Holdman
And one of the things he did-- he wrote messages and symbols on little pieces of toilet paper and rolled them up in a ball. And he'd done this for years on death row-- rolled the little secret messages up in a ball and then rolled them in feces, his own feces, and then into little, tiny, bead-sized balls and put those into the braids in his hair.

Ira Glass
Oh my.

Scharlette Holdman
So that they dangled around his forehead.

Ira Glass
And the things he was putting in his hair-- from his point of view, were they communicating some information, the little messages?

Scharlette Holdman
Exactly. But he couldn't tell me what the messages were because they were secret. When I would talk to him about his mother, he would tell me she lived in a Coca-Cola can.

Ira Glass
It's against the law to execute somebody who is so crazy he doesn't understand why he's being executed. And Scharlette said that was true for this guy.

Scharlette Holdman
When I would say, do you know what's going to happen on the 12th of June, he was kind of befuddled and, with pressure, he would finally say, well yeah, he thought he was going to be reupholstered.

Ira Glass
The state of California did not agree with Scharlette about this guy. They wanted to execute him in 30 days. Scharlette's team was making a last-ditch appeal to stay this execution. Meanwhile, the state was gathering its evidence.

Scharlette Holdman
San Quentin sent in a prison psychiatrist to determine-- was he competent to be executed? Did he know he was going to be executed? And did he know why he was going to be executed? So the psychiatrist goes and interviews Harry. And then this psychiatrist testified in court that not only was Harry aware that he was going to be executed, she was so certain of this because she had played Tic-tac-toe with him and Harry had beat her.

Well, it was so absurd and so outside of any normal experience in a courtroom. And this is after 30 years of being in death penalty cases in the South, around the world, and-- I really couldn't believe she had said it. But at the same time, the only image that came to me-- I'm from the South, obviously. And growing up, we always went to the Mid-South Fair. And they had a chicken that played Tic-tac-toe that absolutely mesmerized me. And it was pretty clear to me-- OK, we've got to find a chicken who can play Tic-tac-toe.

Ira Glass
Scharlette thought-- and this is not a joke. It's not an exaggeration. She thought that a chicken like that could save this man's life. Jurors, after all, tend to believe the state and its witnesses. And a chicken like that could totally undermine the psychiatrist's testimony by proving that playing Tic-tac-toe doesn't mean that you understand things like why you're being executed.

Scharlette Holdman
I just knew a chicken would work. It's a sad state. But I think a chicken has more credibility than the defense team did. And I think it would have brought the jury over to seeing us as people rather than as these obstructionists who were interfering with an execution.

And who can doubt a chicken? You can't. Chickens aren't going to lie. Chickens have integrity.

I had this image of the psychiatrist being on the stand. And I would quietly enter through the wood doors as they opened with this beautiful leghorn under my arm, right, and a comb at a rakish angle. And as I walked into the courtroom, not saying a word, and quietly took a seat on the front row, the psychiatrist-- who we knew, because we'd investigated her background-- was from New York City, would see a person with a chicken and think, why is that-- oh my god, no. And that psychiatrist would slowly realize that she was going to have to play Tic-tac-toe with a chicken.

Ira Glass
So you're trying to psych out-- you were trying to get inside the psychiatrist's head and--

Scharlette Holdman
Exactly. Exactly.

Ira Glass
--And make the psychiatrist unravel even before you pull your stunt.

Scharlette Holdman
The jury's eyes, as awareness overcame her. So it wouldn't work with a frazzled chicken. I didn't want a splotchy, beat-up, tired, exhausted chicken. I wanted a chicken that could capture the audience's attention, in this case the audience was the jury.

Ira Glass
Right. You'd need a chicken like in a cartoon.

Scharlette Holdman
Look, I had to have a chicken that could take on a psychiatrist. It had to be a stand-up chicken.

Ira Glass
Noted.

Scharlette Holdman
So we began to hunt for this stand-up chicken.

Ira Glass
Well, this task fell to the legal interns. The man was scheduled to die, at that point, in less than two weeks. And they needed a chicken. And they searched the places that you find Tic-tac-toe-playing chickens, namely county fairs, carnivals. And really, within hours, they found a Tic-tac-toe-playing goose in Montana. But, of course, Scharlette says, that was totally unacceptable.

Scharlette Holdman
Geese are nasty. They bite you. I didn't want a goose running around the courtroom chasing someone.

Ira Glass
Next was a guy at a roadside stand in Wyoming who did have a chicken, and it did play Tic-tac-toe, but he said that flying or driving it to California for the trial would probably upset it so much that he could not guarantee that it would win the game of Tic-tac-toe, so he was out. Finally, they found a fellow in Arkansas who trains chickens to play Tic-tac-toe. And he had a whole list of chickens that he had trained around the country. And he sent the legal team to one of those birds in San Francisco. That turned out to be a dead end. San Francisco had actually passed an ordinance banning the playing of Tic-tac-toe by chickens as animal cruelty.

Fortunately, another chicken on the list was not far from there-- at the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. They had their chicken.

Scharlette Holdman
So the next step was to convince the court to let us bring the chicken to court as a witness, as demonstrative evidence, to introduce the chicken and let the chicken play Tic-tac-toe. Now of course, I wanted the chicken to play Tic-tac-toe with the psychiatrist. But I realized--

Ira Glass
[LAUGHTER]

Scharlette Holdman
--yeah-- that most likely, no one was going to let us get away with that. But I did think that any of us-- we have a healthy group of interns. They know how to play Tic-tac-toe so that we could demonstrate to the jury that playing Tic-tac-toe did not mean that you were aware of the consequences of your actions.

Ira Glass
Why wouldn't you be allowed to make the psychiatrist play Tic-tac-toe with the chicken? I understand why the psychiatrist would not want to do it. But from a legal point of view, what line does that cross?

Scharlette Holdman
Well, evidently-- I agree with you-- but the court felt-- it never addressed the issue of having to play the psychiatrist. But the court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play Tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the court. I thought that the dignity of the court was degraded by executing a mentally retarded, mentally ill person.

So the court denied our motion and said we could not bring the chicken into the courtroom for demonstrative evidence. It ruled against us.

Ira Glass
They weren't even allowed to show the jury a video of the chicken playing Tic-tac-toe. And without a chicken on the stand, without a video of a chicken, the jury found the psychiatrist credible and ruled to execute Scharlette's client. His life was saved later, on appeal. And in the years since then, in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that a person at his level of mental retardation cannot be executed.

For Scharlette, though, this story stays with her, this story of the chicken. Because in decades of doing these capital trials, bringing hundreds of witnesses, it is the greatest courtroom move she ever invented, bringing in the chicken. And she never got to try it. She invented this thing. She never got to try it. It was snatched away from her. Something like that sticks in your craw.

Scharlette Holdman
Well, yeah, because I didn't get to do it. But it's also because of the nature and quality of a chicken. When you do this kind of work, when you're down in the worst part-- when you're trying to work for the folks that, literally, the community wants to kill, it can be pretty discouraging. But this nice, fluffy leghorn brightens up your day and you forge on. And all of this, all of this is not to make light of death as punishment, of people with mental retardation, of people who are mentally ill, or of chickens.

Ira Glass
Thank you for saying that.

Scharlette Holdman
No, it's really not. I actually am a member of PETA.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/452/poultry-slam-2011
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It would be even worse if we allowed scientific orthodoxy to become the Inquisition.

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in a published letter to Nature
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