Der Spiegel rounds up press commentary from the other side of the pond (via TMV).

And David Frum takes on some of these predictable assessments in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that No policy can outwit the Grim Reaper. I fear he's right.

As everyone is weighing in on this, I sort of feel compelled to give my take on this whole affair. While grieving for the dead and their families and friends, I think it is important to try and curb overreactions and mass hysteria and Jesse Walker’s post about the shooting’s aftermath at Reason is a very good starting point.

To be frank, we should avoid a counterproductive discussion about guns as it has the potential to lead to policies and measures that will simply not address the core of the problem. And that is, I think, the propensity of societies to create such deep feelings of alienation and resentment that from time to time it produces unguided monsters like Cho Seung-hui. And this is by no means just a western or capitalist phenomenon, communist or authoritarian regimes have also had their share of mass murderers, although I have no firm numbers to suggest they appear in equal numbers across the globe.

Wherever such resentment and anger translates into violence, there will be tools available, I can think of quite a number of ways to massacre innocents in a society without guns. So while there is no solution, the keys to avoiding these disasters are proper safety measures – and the jury is out on how this was all handled by Virginia Tech – and developing ways in which we can spot and prevent disturbed loners from acting out their violent fantasies. The latter will be difficult too and a witch hunt for potentially dangerous loners or sociopaths will be prove to be just as elusive a goal as outlawing guns, but at the very least it will give us some alternate tools in preventing the carnage we witnessed yesterday.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey's post here indicates that Cho had been on the radar screen as a potential candidate for counseling and that that very knowledge should at the very least have prompted a different repsonse from Virginia Tech authorities. So it comes down to proper information sharing - once more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this post by Ross Douthat too.

This weekend the Dorsmans ventured out into the downtown area for some Christmas lights event, preceded by the obligatory visit to one of our favorite Chinese restaurants. The décor is rather basic to say the least, but the food is spectacular and especially the casserole of Stewed Eggplant with Minced Pork in a Spicy Chili Sauce is not to be missed during the cold winter days.

We were sitting towards the back of the restaurant and had polished off most of the plates when a terrible noise erupted at the front of the restaurant. And not just noise, some chairs were repurposed as projectiles by dodgy looking characters who for some reason had entered the restaurant. We’ve never been in a situation like this with the kids, nor were we able to really understand what was going one but our instincts worked extremely well. Like most other patrons with young ones we grabbed the kids and immediately seized up the situation, assessed the likelihood it would come close to our table and scoped a way out which in this case would have been through the kitchen out the back. The fight between the two men moved further into the restaurant, but somehow ended as soon as it had erupted and the restaurant staff managed to ease them out while alerting the police who arrived in no time. The spectacle of some Chinese chefs solving the situation with their sharpened chopping knives did not materialize which, with the kids present, was probably for the better.

It turned out that a homeless man had gotten into a debate with someone who aggressively rejected his call for spare change, attacked him and followed him into the restaurant which was probably the most immediate place for refuge. By the time the police arrived both were gone. What struck me about the incident – other than that Vancouver has quite a bit of work to do to get the streets clean for the 2010 Olympics – was that all parents reacted similarly and rapidly. The brain signals that conflict avoidance and escape are best, but it also appears to be not fast enough to assess the exact nature of the danger while offering up a worst case scenario. Knife wielding thugs making their way towards our table was the one that popped up in my mind.

Anyway, it all ended as quickly as it ended with no one hurt, but I just thought it was an interesting story. And, a useful learning experience for a six and four year old for whom the concepts of aggression and homelessness were totally alien. They confirmed they weren’t scared, but I can’t escape the feeling that they’re still deeply puzzled about the recesses of city life. And in a way, I am too.

Here is what I wrote about the media and OJ Simpson a year ago:

Ten years have passed. Simpson still hasn’t completed his mission to find the real killers and instead he has reappeared in California this week to market his celebrity, which amazingly is still intact for some. The failure to produce a just verdict will continue to cast a dark shadow of embarrassment and regret that even the civil trial couldn’t eradicate. And the media? They’re probably more sensation and celebrity driven than ever before, but it’s doubtful if the mindless celebration of popularity would ever embrace an icon like Simpson again.

Well, the state of the media is such that some didn't even hesitate to try and blatantly resurrect Simpson himself. It must have been another period of grief and anguish for the Goldman and Brown families, in what News Corp. now admits was an ill-considered project.

Andrew Sullivan notes the tension between markets and integrity:

With free markets comes great freedom but also some responsibility: to publish books worth publishing, to air TV shows actually worth airing, to care about content as well as ratings and sales. Those criteria are distinguishable from what the market will reward. That distinction has been lost in many places. It is not a criticism of the market; it is merely a reminder that markets also require integrity among those who work in them. That point deserves recovering.

There are no signs that the mindless celebration of stardom and the pursuit to make money off it have ended with this affair. The market continues to be too rewarding a place for this sort of work, but it is nevertheless good to see that a pre-market moral test still exists although Fox needed some outside pressure to diss Judith Regan's tasteless project.

Like many others I am relieved to see an arrest in the JonBenet Ramsey case and like many others I too believed that it was the parents who either murdered her or clumsily covered up a domestic accident. Not true as it appears now.

Still, there continues to be a stain of guilt that will be attached to the Ramseys forever, no matter how compelling the evidence that has now been uncovered. Parents who showcase their six-year old daughter in beauty pageants and who feel it completely appropriate to dress her up like a tart set themselves up for some fierce moral condemnation and quite possibly deliver an open invitation to commit the sort of horrendous crime that ended JonBenet’s short life. It’s odd that out of all the press and media reactions today, very few focused on this crucial and rather disgusting aspect of the entire affair. And no, there can be no exonerating explanation by the family as to JonBenet’s consent of being part of beauty pageants for kids. Six year olds generally do not have the mental bandwidth to understand that these events border on a form of child exploitation that have somehow achieved a bizarre measure of acceptability in American culture.

UPDATE: The details remain fishy, so it doesn't look like this case is closed at all. Think about it, even if DNA evidence is conclusive, how would that exonerate the Ramseys involvement given that the murder took place in the basement of their own house? More doubts here.

A little late, sure, but here is my link to Cato's new blog, Cato@Liberty. Recommended piece from their initial offering is Radley Balko's Politics of Pain where the strange case of Rush Limbaugh is contrasted with the sad story of Richard Paey. Common thread: painkillers.

It’s not been a focus for Peaktalk at all, but given the Dutch angle I always kept one eye on the Natalee Holloway case. If you’re interested and your knowledge base is as slim as mine, then I would recommend the Bryan Burrough piece in Vanity Fair as a good primer. In it Burrough makes it clear that the Aruban police force wasn’t the most effective one to solve this crime, a situation exacerbated by the Twitty-Holloway family whose demeanor made them probably equally unsuited to find a body and above all, enough evidence to nail the likely suspect.

Well, an arrest has been made outside the circle of the initial suspects in this case. This is an amazing development if you take into account the time and effort that have gone into this investigation in combination with the size of the island of Aruba. As it was to Natalee’s mother, Beth Twitty:

VAN SUSTEREN: Beth, you scoured that island all last summer and into the fall. Ever come upon his name before or hear anything about him?

TWITTY: No. You know, there's no part of him that we have, you know, heard about or discussed or anything. So you know, it's just a totally new person that, you know, has shown up. So just don't know.

The blog of record for this affair is Riehl World Review which has been all over this case from the beginning.

David Milgaard spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. His mother spent the entire time fighting for his release. The Milgaard case was bungled from the beginning, and everyone seemed to have known it.

Milgaard become the subject of a great Tragically Hip song, "Wheat Kings", which included the line

'..late breaking story on the CBC.
A nation whispers we always knew that he'd go free'

I don't know what that would do to me emotionally, but I'm willing to give David the benefit of the doubt. More to the point, I think we can safely say that rather than owing a debt to society, society owes a debt to him.

So why is he being forced to testify at an inquiry into his own wrongful conviction?

I don't know anything about Milgaard's health, and I don't care. How can we possibly compel him in this case? If you read the justice's comments, you'd think Milgaard was still the criminal in his eyes.

And the interests of public interest? Please.

How much is he really going to add here? How is his testimony going to shed light on the actions of the Crown?

James Na dispels some myths and argues for a more rational approach to curb gun violence.

Today is exactly ten years ago that some of my former American colleagues apologized or otherwise expressed their deep embarrassment over the not guilty verdict in the OJ Simpson trial.

Well, they didn’t need to in my opinion. The result of the trial was not reflective of some inherent malfunctioning of the American justice system, although it revealed in a painful fashion what could possibly go wrong. And in the Simpson case almost everything did. The DA’s prosecutors were – no matter how well prepared and committed – no match for the defense team which was, like it or not, a superb assembly of talent. So talented, that they blatantly and ruthlessly were able to reframe the question of guilt into one of race and police tactics. Hard as it was to get someone convicted under these circumstances, it would at least have had a chance of being accomplished if not for the clueless and inept judge who presided over the trial.

But most of the momentum for Simpson was handed to him free of charge by the media that eagerly embraced a celebrity defendant. From the freeway chase leading up to his arrest, to the short-lived and absurd notion that pay-TV interviews would reinstate Simpson’s media stardom and fortunes, it was a depressing journey through the abyss of ignored murder victims. And the verdict wasn’t even related to the butchered victims as CNN pointedly reminded us hours after the trial ended as “the jury had thrown the book at the LAPD”. It was the humanity of Fred Goldman that kept some of the victim’s memory alive – the Brown family being a less than credible entity to do so – but even Goldman had to be careful about some of his media interactions. The trial was never about Nicole Brown or Ron Goldman, it was about Simpson and that in essence made a conviction impossible.

Ten years have passed. Simpson still hasn’t completed his mission to find the real killers and instead he has reappeared in California this week to market his celebrity, which amazingly is still intact for some. The failure to produce a just verdict will continue to cast a dark shadow of embarrassment and regret that even the civil trial couldn’t eradicate. And the media? They’re probably more sensation and celebrity driven than ever before, but it’s doubtful if the mindless celebration of popularity would ever embrace an icon like Simpson again.

OTHERS BLOGGING:
Patterico
Tammy Bruce
Protein Wisdom

The latest from France:

Middle-class Frenchwomen are to be given incentives to have a third child under a scheme to maintain the country’s population and keep younger parents at work. In the latest in 60 years of state measures to promote more births the Government of Dominique de Villepin is to pay €750 (£507) (= US$914 ed.) a month to a parent who stops work for a year to care for a third child. In addition to £177 a month child allowance, M de Villepin also doubled the tax credit for couples who employ home help for children under six.

And from China:

The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. "At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot," says the 23-year-old. "Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore." Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials--from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China's eastern Shandong province--dunked the infant's body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed.

It’s interesting to see that the nation with a lofty economic growth scenario continues to be uncertain over its ability to feed an ever growing population, whereas a mature and wealthy democracy is willing to risk budget deficits just to allow its own population to replace itself. Do note that the French policy is targeting the wealthier middle-class ie. the indigenous French:

Statistics involving ethnic origin are taboo in France’s officially colour-blind state, but it is accepted that poorer families of Arab and African origin have fertility rates well above those of white French couples.

The statistics may be taboo but the French are not afraid to act on them. While the Chinese approach is of course reprehensible, it remains to be seen whether the French incentives will yield the desired results.

NOTE: Matt Rosenberg argues China should be taken to task for these horrors in the court of public opinion and I agree with him, but it will not happen. As Chris Patten so eloquently described in East and West, the lure of business opportunities and trade deals, not to mention geo-political considerations, have left most of the thinking and supposedly ethical west in a permanent state of “kowtowing” to Beijing’s leadership. Not only does it allow China to get away with murder – in this case literally - it also signals to the Chinese that it can become a member of the modern world entirely on its own terms.

While we can pretty much rest assured that your average burglar or dope dealer is safely locked away, in some countries the more dangerous elements appear to have a free pass. The man responsible for Canada's 'Little Columbine' walked away from a halfway house the other day, and in Holland the more severe cases spend their days in TBS-clinics (literally meaning 'at the disposal of the government) which have an equally dangerous open-door policy. And beware the critics, the head of one of the clinics lashed out at some politicians who dared to openly question the lax policies that enabled some of the countries most dangerous elements to escape:

In response to the concerns expressed by MPs, Jos Poelmann, director of the TBS clinic in Pompekliniek in Nijmegen, warned of the danger of over-reacting.

"There are 90 cases of escapes by TBS patients annually. By agreement, this information was made public. But if MPs react like this every time and call on the minister to face up to his responsibilities, we will no longer be able to do our work," Poelmann said.

The reason why Poelmann reacted so vigorously can be explained. Society at large considers those convicted with a TBS-sentence as criminals, whereas the professionals that run these outfits view their clients primarily as patients, sure to be cured at some point in time. Problem: if they walk away prematurely they have a habit of doing what they were locked up for in the first place: killing people.

NOTE: One infamous TBS-convict was discussed earlier on these pages, here.

UPDATE: Here's a sad story from British Columbia where an escapee from a halfway house butchered an innocent retiree who happened to be living in the proximity of the facilty that housed "low-risk" inmates.

The Jackson case is really too bizarre to pay any serious attention too but this warrants some further investigation, I think:

The mother of a boy who alleged Michael Jackson molested him in 1993 testified Monday that she allowed her son to start spending nights alone with the pop star after a sobbing Jackson pleaded with her to let them sleep together.

Her son was 13 at the time. Time to bring criminal charges against the mother?

It’s a good weekend to catch up on reading and watching some DVDs that have piled up over recent months. Yesterday we saw The Clearing, a 2004 movie with Helen Mirren and Robert Redford. It was worthwhile watching especially since we saw it through completely different eyes as probably any of the reviewers that I subsequently looked up online.

The reason is - and it’s not mentioned on the DVD or hardly in any of the reviews – that the story is based on a real life kidnapping that took place in Holland in 1987 where the cold-blooded kidnapper killed his victim on day one. He was subsequently able to not only convince the surviving family that his victim was still alive, but also extract a multi-million dollar ransom from them. About six months later he was caught after too easily forking out crisp (and marked) new guilder bills in a local super market, a fact also used in The Clearing. If you’re not familiar with the underlying story and more importantly its timeline, the film is unlikely to make as strong an impression on you as it should. You’re likely to be sidetracked by the focus on the relationship between the characters Redford and Mirren play in this movie which is a shame.

The gruesome real-life story by the way had a devastating outcome for those looking for justice. The killer – an unemployed but far from brainless engineer, played in the movie by the inimitable Willem Dafoe – got a sentence of twenty years combined with TBS, the latter meaning that the end of your incarceration is determined by psychiatric evaluations which in theory means that they can keep you locked up forever. In Holland, this is as severe as it gets in terms of sentencing, but if you’re on good behavior, take advantage of early parole conditions and are shrewd enough to manipulate the TBS process you can be out in 13 years. That’s exactly what happened in 2001 when the deranged unemployed engineer walked out of prison as a free man with a generous retroactive welfare pay-out. Justice, Dutch style. Bear it in mind if you watch this otherwise reasonably good film.

Jackie points us to the Forgiveness Project, an initiative sponsored by a number of British celebrities (Helen Mirren, Anita Roddick, Emma Thompson to name a few) which is centered around the idea to assist victims of crime to help them replace feelings of hate with forgiveness in order to find reconciliation and move on. When I read the post and checked out the website it reminded me of two things. Firstly when I studied law the criminal law classes were dominated by a group of academics that adhered to the theory of Abolitionism and that strain of thought represented the idea that the entire penal system as we know it in the Western world should be abolished for something more creative and helpful to both the perpetrator and the victim of the crime. Abolitionism has lost some of its momentum in recent years, but the impact of those who wanted to decriminalize the criminal can be felt to this day in a number of countries that generally adopt fairly light and sometimes absurd sentencing. That brings me to my second point, the so-called healing circles that are used to resolve conflicts in native Indian communities in North America. In a number of cases regular judges have referred certain cases to these circles, even in situations where the violent nature of the crime would have warranted a more traditional approach by the courts. Both the ideas of the abolitionists and healing circles are well meant attempts to address issues that the criminal justice system as we know it can’t fix. But they are ideologically driven, too naïve and can not under any circumstance be applied to crimes where victims suffer violence, irreparable damage or death. The reason: they are an easy way out for the offender.

The Forgiveness Project builds on the principles of abolitionism and healing and applies it to the most serious of crimes, comfortably forgetting that in murder cases the only person with a right to forgive is no longer present to do so. The next step, if we take the example of the dialogue taking place between he 14-year old girl who was abducted and assaulted and the man who spent 25 years in prison for it, is to say: if such a dialogue can take place between the abductor and his victim after 25 years, why can we not strive to achieve that earlier? That goes to the heart of abolitionism: no real penalty, no protection of society at large, urge the victim to co-operate in rehabilitating the criminal. It hasn’t worked and it will never work. The rights of the victim and well-being of society should always be paramount and any measure of forgiveness should be entirely at the discretion of the survivor of a crime and that is not what the Forgiveness Project is about. They're too close to the Abolitionist tradition and that is why this project is on a very slippery slope.

Unwittingly, I discussed the problem of honour killings as well as the topic of crime and integration within the space of one week. These issues are of course intertwined and Shanti over at Dancing with Dogs reminded me of that by highlighting that all too often immigrants tend to hang on to the culture of their native country in order to sustain the traditions and life that they were used to. This is a very valid point but I also argued that in many cases a validation of these cultural practices can be found back home and in the latter case will overrule the laws and customs of the new country. That mechanism has resulted in the recent increased occurence of honour killings in Europe and North America.

Frum does make one very interesting point. Crime rates in Canada are not nearly as low as some claim (Michael Moore anyone?) but are rapidly increasing and he points to Eli Lehrer who has been diligent in making the point that European and Canadian crime rates are catching up fast with the US and are in fact in some cases exceeding them. Now there’s no more controversial an area than comparing numbers relating to crime as each country has a different way of collecting data, and of course, many crimes go unreported. So each statistical comparison has drawbacks but real-life observations somehow corroborate some of Lehrer’s numbers. I have always been shocked by the increase in both crimes against property and violent crime back in Europe over the past 20 years and without checking any scientific data it is not that hard to see that crime is on the increase, significantly, in the old country. Lehrer concludes:

Americans should not take too much satisfaction in our becoming a safer nation. While crime in America has declined rather spectacularly, it still stands well above the level of civic peace our grandparents enjoyed. But America has moved in the right direction while Europe has moved in the wrong one. The combination of engaged, community-oriented police and ample investment in incarceration is turning the United States into the safest large Western country. Europeans may want to emulate American policies--God forbid!--if they hope to win their own wars against crime.

Lehrer’s two points - community policing and tough sentencing – are well taken. Only yesterday did I discuss the pathetically low sentences handed out to those that commit “honour killings”. Overly liberal attitudes, condoning deviant behaviour and an unwillingness to implement zero-tolerance policies have rendered many a city in Europe unsafe to walk. The same phenomenon will come to pay a visit to Canada, soon.

“Honour killings” are back in the news. Iain Murray points to a tragic case in Britain and this week a similar case emerged in The Netherlands where a Turkish schoolgirl was killed by her father during a vacation back in Turkey. The ultimate irony however is that the father faces a life sentence in Turkey, but had he faced the courts in the Netherlands he would probably have been able to get away with a fairly light sentence, something like 10 years. The Danes are much tougher and they will lock someone up for up to 14 years for the premeditated murder of a family member. It appears that continental European courts fail completely in meting out sentences that are appropriate in these cases, and it may be the case that the absence of a deterrent combined with complete disrespect for basic human values and Western mores facilitate the practice. Some argue that assimilation, which could help eradicate a deadly practice like this, may not be working. Yet even if assimilation works, I would doubt that such deep rooted practices will completely disappear when they are condoned and encouraged back in the motherland.

What makes this phenomenon truly sickening is the savage and brutal way in which most of these killings are carried out. This case in Jordan will ruin your appetite for the rest of the day and makes you wonder if this depraved practice is not some sort of mechanism by which disturbed and psychotic men unleash pent-up sexual frustrations and related violent urges. In some way it probably is and many Muslim societies condone this Hannibal Lecter like behaviour, no matter what pan-Arab babe Queen Rania says when she has the attention of the Western media. Whatever the West has on its 'to do list' for the Middle East, a forceful campaign to help restore women's rights and end this despicable practice should be ranked as a top priority. And let no one argue that we are intefering in the domestic affairs of other countries, the fact that "honour killings" are now a regular occurence in the West should be ample justification for action. Maybe Queen Rania has a few pointers for us.