DISQUS

I lived three years in Japan without a car and loved it. The whole family - all four of us - would walk 200 meters to the grocery store and carry back all the food we could carry.

Now I live in the middle of the San Francisco Bay Area's urban jungle. It is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the nearest grocery store, but usually we go 7 or 8 miles. Jobs are typically 10 to 50 miles away in thousands of different locations which largely precludes both mass transit and sharing cars.

I should have taken a picture of the local high school parking lot before the year ended. About a quarter to a third of the kids drive cars to school creating one of the most concentrated zones of aggressive, poorly experienced drivers on the planet!

I can think of a few instances of two generations of adults living under the same roof, but never three. We won't talk about what they do to old folk here in the US!
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I very much appreciate the interaction too.
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There is one more thing that bothers me here: If we accept the notion that there are a large number of erroneous death penalty convictions, is it acceptable simply to change them to life in prison? It seems to me that the standard of conviction should be the same, regardless of the sentence. This reasoning went to a silly limit here in California where psycho killers were quickly out on the streets again, so we came up with the "three strikes" rule to take the decision making away from the judges.

The judicial system has to concern itself with what is true or false, right or wrong, certain or uncertain. When people start paying to corrupt the decisions, we rightly are offended. My sense is that political correctness and lawyerisms corrupt the system in a way that is just as bad as a rich person paying off the judge.
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Sadly, the ideas of this open letter won't be persuasive, because of the western liberal mindset. Most importantly, the western liberal makes a distinction between religion on the one hand, and theology/ethics on the other. For them, religion is like choosing a football team to be a fan of. There may be some distinct songs, clothing and rituals, but it is a meaningless choice because all religions are alike and lead to god, salvation, comfort, whatever ... Thus, they will never accept that the violence that is correlated with Islam is related through cause and effect. Instead, they will insist that it is the result of people "hijacking religion", like the recent murder of an abortionist in Kansas. They will insist that there is nothing inherently violent in Islam, but instead, everything can be cured by proper ethics education.
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This topic is certainly a mess. The problem begins with the fact that US courts routinely disallow evidence that is certain, but was acquired by methods deemed unconstitutional or dismissed based on other legal technicalities. The result is that it is always plausible that something important was not presented to a jury.

The next problem is that the cost of a single death penalty case is upwards of $16 million (so I have heard), which is the cost of lawyers haggling over the evidence - even if the crime was committed in front of a large group of witnesses. The incentive for the lawyers is to drag the case on as long as possible, confuse the evidence, but make it impossible to either clearly convict or clearly exonerate the accused. Thus, a young lawyer can begin a career with a young killer as his client, and expect to retire 40 years later after a lifetime of litigation - paid for by the taxpayer - with his client still filing appeals.

Throw in activists and a media who want to publicly argue that 99% of the death row inmates are innocent ... Yes, the death penalty is a mess in the US.

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Wow! I did spend a few months working in the west of England in Devonshire. A family took me around and showed me one village which was the only one that wasn't tampered with by the planning agencies and had preserved the original look. Such a lovely place!

What do you think of the guy dumping her after 17 years? Half of me says the guy was a jerk. The other half of me says that the lady already had a husband ... the house!

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They are studying to get a good grade on the final, but don't want anyone to see.

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Hmmm. Sounds like a great argument for the bureaucratic procedure of allocating management jobs - and raises - to those who didn't make any waves during the previous decade?!

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I fell in love with train travel living in Japan, but I bet it is much different from India of the 1960's - or even today.

Locally, the California environmentalists insist we should have trains, but then fight to have no more than two story construction within several kilometers of the train station, because that would spoil the view!

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I promise not to send you any more subliminal messages.

My aunt died many years ago when my uncle was 70-something. A decade later, he married a girl he knew from high school, so I guess they were roughly the same age.

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If he had a Ph.d., he could teach philosophy at the university level.

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It does seem that Obama is doing much better than I would have expected. Longer term, the conversion to socialism along with politically correct notions about everything will probably force the US to drop out of the game. May God be merciful.

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I like that. "You're a maverick, I'm a maverick, let's get married!"

It is sad how much misery there is out there in dysfunctional families these days.

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I have only been married 27 years ... newlyweds?

Ramana, was your marriage an arranged one? Or one of those western ones founded on *love*? ;-)

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I am in general agreement with the two articles, but with one difference: The attempts to distinguish between radical Islam and moderate Islam both seem to me related to current western notions that religions have no content, hence, only the branding counts. It does seem to me that Islam actually does teach something.

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I must say that - being a blond - I have heard a lot of dumb blond stuff over the years. Somehow it never crossed my mind that this would become a discussion in India. As for whether or not blonds have more fun, well, I have been too busy enjoying myself and am not intellectually capable of reflecting on the subject. ;-)

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Can't be too old - you still have energy to go to the doctor!

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Nice, but is that really about growing old? Or retirement?

Regarding when earrings got started, I can't say. There is, however, a command in the beginning of the Bible from perhaps 1,400BC by Moses that if someone wants to be a slave of another, there should be a public ceremony with the slave's ear being pierced for an earring. I wonder if feminist with earrings would be happy with the imagery?

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The politicians have recently been talking about the "light at the end of the tunnel" regarding the economic mess. I can now understand what they are really saying!

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Thanks for pointing that item out. I read the news a lot, but don't recall ever seeing such a thing.

I was in Germany when the Berlin wall went down and a year later when the re-unification celebrations happened. That was a time of excitement.

We have many Russian immigrants around, so I decided to get a Russian piano teacher for my kids. Most of the Russians I have encountered have pretty strong personalities, but they also have been kind hearted people.

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Rummuser, thanks for that wonderful note. Is the disease of political correctness afflicting the India? Or is it just an American/European thing?

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I am a bit doubtful about "the experts". If a beloved brother marries a slothful wife, there is some upset among the siblings, but not too great. If, however, a beloved sister marries a deadbeat husband, who can set a limit on the distress?

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May God comfort you and your family.

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