There is more good evidence of an El Nino forming in the Pacific– warming water is increasing typhoons, on both sides of the Equator. In addition, there are westerly winds forming which push the warm water in the Pacific towards South America. Normally there is a cold water current there, along the coast of Peru. If enough subsurface warm water is pushed from the eastern Pacific to Peru, the cold water current will be interrupted. Reversal of the normal cold flow can reinforce the el Nino effect.
There has been a record warmth in the central Pacific, and typhoon activity has been three times normal. There are indications that this el Nino event may be one of the strongest on record. El Nino will push temperatures up and shift rainfall patterns worldwide. There is hope that el Nino will end the drought in the Southwest. The drought has also set records, now running at a shortfall of rain not seen in over a thousand years. The last time drought was this severe, the Anasazi were forced out of their cliff houses and abandoned the Southwest.
At any rate, there is an early indication that there will be rain coming to California and the rest of the Southwest. There have been severe rainfall events in Texas already. The weather in the San Joaquin Valley is unusually cool for this time of year. There are clouds with water in them all around, including thunderstorms in the Sierra Nevada. There is at last optimism that the drought will break.
This post was drafted a month ago and forgotten, but here it is before it’s too late:
An article in the New York Times that may have escaped your notice reveals that the Chinese are not enforcing their drug laws in relation to online sales of bulk quantities of drugs. Not only the end products, but the compounds used to manufacture them, are available without any apparent restrictions; Mexican cartels are turning to Chinese suppliers for precursor chemicals in order to manufacture methamphetamine in particular. Most other countries have developed, and enforce, restrictions on specific chemicals that are needed to manufacture illicit drugs, but China has been extremely lax. Here is a large quote that explains the situation:
“They just didn’t see what was in it for them to look into their own industries exporting these chemicals,” said Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican ambassador to China.
China’s chemical factories and drug traffickers have exploited this opportunity, turning the nation into a leading producer and exporter of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, as well as the compounds used to manufacture them, according to seizure and trafficking route data compiled by American and international law enforcement agencies.
China is now the source of a majority of the ingredients needed to manufacture methamphetamine by Mexican drug traffickers, who produce 90 percent of the meth consumed in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
As governments around the world have stepped up regulation of these so-called precursor chemicals, the Mexican cartels have increasingly turned to Chinese chemical factories.
Mr. Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador from 2007 to 2013, said his efforts to persuade Chinese authorities to restrict the export of these chemicals, which are banned in Mexico, came to naught. Instead, he said, Chinese officials said the problem was best handled by Mexican customs agents or claimed that Mexico’s written requests for assistance had used the incorrect typeface or were improperly translated into Chinese.
“In all my time there, the Chinese never showed any willingness to cooperate on stemming the flow of precursors into Mexico,” he said in a telephone interview.
via In China, Illegal Drugs Are Sold Online in an Unbridled Market – The New York Times.
The latest thing is to not just let your underarm hair grow out, but to dye it. This results in a dramatic effect which is rather charming when done in shocking pink or other eye-catching colors.
I’d show you a picture if I had one. If you want to see pictures, check it out here: axilla (the New York Times.)
The practice of shaving your pits was recorded in ancient Rome by Seneca, who criticized the opposite practices of shaving all hair, including the legs, and leaving all hair alone, including the axilla. According to Wikipedia, shaving underarms became widespread among women around 1915 in the US and Canada, but not in Europe until after WW II.
Muhammad recommended that both sexes shave their underarm hair and that has become standard practice for most Muslims since then. Competitive swimmers, mostly male, shave all their body hair, including the axilla, to reduce friction in the water.
The Straight Dope points out an article from 1982 in the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture” that reveals an ulterior motive. Ms. Hope states that women shaving their underarm hair began as a widespread practice only after a marketing campaign that started in 1915 in Harper’s magazine, simultaneously with the fashion of wearing sleeveless dresses in summer. Shaving one’s legs, in this view, was also associated with the appearance of short skirts and sheer stockings. See the article, linked here, for more details.
Since the 1960’s, a reaction to this trend occurred among the “hippie” culture, and American women began to leave their axillary hair unshorn, along with burning their bras. Now, having underarm hair isn’t shocking enough, and dull people are saying it’s ugly. So dying it pink is a new option. You have to use caution, though, because the skin there is sensitive; you can’t use full strength peroxide to bleach it, only half-strength.
I think it’s kind of cute.
Quotes From John Stuart Mill
I stumbled across another site today. This one is called Wikiquotes, and it contains great quotations. I was looking up the expression, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” which was claimed to have come from John Stuart Mill. Well, in fact, it did, and so did many other wonderful quotes, such as,
“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”
This comes from the page, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill as do many other piquant statements. This JS Mill guy must have been a genius.
Here is a quote that must have been written in relation to the Civil War as it was put down in 1862:
- War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
- “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862); later published in Dissertations and Discussions (1868), vol.1 p. 26
Here’s one more, from a speech given in 1867, that is often paraphrased:
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
Finally, the quote I was looking for was actually stated in this way:
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
It was spoken in Parliamentary debate in response to a Conservative MP in 1866.
Comment of the Day
Chris Koz
Portland, OR. November 17, 2014
I love my country, I hate what it has become, and I mourn, perhaps selfishly, that I live in a time where we justify unnecessary suffering for 10s of millions of Americans for no viably argued reason. We spend two billion dollars+ a day on defense but we cannot defend our teachers or house the homeless? We give Corp. like Boeing, GE, Walmart, and Exxon billions in incentives & subsidies only because they have purchased our Democracy. For some bizarre, inexplicable reason, many of our citizens cheer for the wealthiest who have such vast wealth they can never, not even generationally, spend it. Six Walton members are worth more than 42% of our nation combined… http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/walmart-heirs-waltons-wealth-income-inequality)…
Even more unthinkable, add the three Koch Brothers to this list, just nine humans no better than you or me, worth $241,000,000,000.00. Only our inhumanity should find this okay and those who justify this inequality are not humane no matter how hard they try to hide behind a philosophy, an ideology, or the stench of a willful ignorance so deep that ‘they’ are willing to commit themselves & others to vast suffering in support of that which they will never be. What cowardice.
This life we are given is a precious gift filled with wonderment & it is very short. That we mask the beauty of life with such inequality (e.g. hardship) & squander our time to justify it disgusts me.
We have lost our way & it is not okay. Something must be done.
Crib Death: A Guest Post by Mary Molina
Mary’s story about the infant that died
By Mary Molina, as dictated to Conrad Seitz
Monday, July 6, 2015.
I was 21 years old in 1972, when my son Marshall was 2 years old and my daughter Kristi was 5. I was working, picking strawberries.
Kristina had gotten pregnant again, and she wound up living with us, but I don’t know why except that we took her in, at the urging of my husband. She was 18. She had two children, one of which she gave to her mother, and the other one she gave away to someone else, I don’t know who. Kristina moved in with us after the baby was born.
We all lived in a new house provided by the owner of the dairy where my husband Junior worked. There were three bedrooms and when the baby was born, six people including him; he lived to be 30 days old. He never had a name.
When we went to pick Kristina up at the hospital after the baby was born, I could already tell that she wasn’t going to bond with him. She never said anything to me about the baby. I was too busy with picking strawberries all day and then coming home to feed my husband and two children, cleaning house, then getting everything ready for the next day. I wasn’t prepared to even think about what we would have to do to take care of the baby.
Kristina never told us about taking the baby for a two-week checkup, and we were so busy that it didn’t occur to us. We wouldn’t have had transportation or time anyway; we couldn’t take off work in the busy season to take her to the doctor even if she had told us. She just didn’t seem to care about anything. She sat around the house all day, watching TV.
One day when the baby was about three weeks old, the mother told me that he had a cold and I said that she needed to take him to the doctor. She immediately gave me the little boy and said “You can have him.” Junior had already told her that, if she didn’t want the baby, we would take him. Kristina couldn’t provide milk or baby clothes; she had no friends, no car, and no relatives nearby– we lived in Laton, and the nearest were in Mendota, 50 or 60 miles away
I knew that we could barely feed our kids and I would never have taken someone in that way, but my husband had already decided for me and it was too late. In remembering, I think it was George, my brother, who brought her to our mother’s house, and it was there and then that Junior offered her a place to stay and adoption of the baby. George is another story altogether.
I had to take care of him from the day we picked him up from the hospital; he was fine at that time. When he cried, Kristina never picked him up; I would go and see what he needed, if he was wet or hungry. My children liked him and were very curious about him. I was working picking strawberries all day, and Kristina was at home watching Marshall, who was only two; Kristi was in kindergarten already. Kristina told me, “I’m not going to take care of the baby, but I’ll watch Marshall.”
Kristina was a fat girl, and she never intended to go to work at any time. She was used to being on welfare because she had lived with her mother, who was on welfare; she was the oldest of four children. When she was at home, she never did any housework and I didn’t ask her to; I just wanted to make sure she fed the baby. I had to be away at work for eight hours, and I was worried about the baby being fed.
The baby was always crying; I think he sensed that his mother didn’t love him. I would sometimes take him to bed with me because I was so tired, I wanted him to have somebody holding him, but I was too tired to stay up while I was holding him. He had been in the crib all day except for one feeding.
When I came home, I fed him, walked around with him for a while until he fell asleep, and then I went to bed. The sleeping arrangements were this: Kristina slept on the floor in one room with the baby in a crib, I slept in a second bedroom with Junior, and Marshall and Kristi shared the third bedroom. I put the baby in his crib and went to bed in the other room with Junior.
Junior and I were talking in bed, and I said, “I don’t know why you offered to take the baby– we barely enough to eat on own and we have to feed Kristina and the baby now.”
As we were talking in bed, he really didn’t have anything to say because he knew I was right, but there was nothing we could do about it. Kristina didn’t have any documents of the baby’s birth, although she had her own Medi-Cal card. I don’t know how we were going to adopt him without any papers.
Kristina had told me, just that day, that she wouldn’t take care of her own baby during the day when I was gone. I was shocked, and said, “You’ll take care of Marshall, but you won’t take care of your own baby? What do you stay home for?”
She said, “OK, I’ll take care of the baby.” But she still didn’t sweep the floor or wash dishes; I usually kept everything very clean anyway, as I felt that someone had to do it, and I was very conscientious about housekeeping.
After a week of having a clear runny nose, he developed a cough and green mucus discharge from his nose. I knew I had to take the baby to the doctor, but I needed to get a day off to do so. In the meantime, he continued to eat and wasn’t fussy. On the night he died, I put him to bed at eight o’clock as usual; I was exhausted, and I went to bed right afterwards.
During the night, I heard him crying, and since I knew Kristina wasn’t taking care of the baby, I got up. But then I heard footsteps on the bare wood floor, and after that, the baby stopped crying. I went back to sleep. I assumed that she got up and gave him a bottle or picked him up, because he had stopped crying.
Actually, she didn’t go to check on the baby until the morning; her blankets were still on the floor where she had slept. She came into our room and said, “Mary, there’s something wrong with the baby.” She sounded scared. So I got up, hurried into her bedroom, and started looking for the baby in the blankets on the floor. She said, “The baby’s in the crib.” I said, “You mean you didn’t pick him up last night when you got up?” She said, “No, I just got up to get a drink of water.” I had a premonition that the baby was dead already.
I went over to the crib to look at the baby and he was already cold and hard. His eyes were closed. I picked him up in my arms and my husband drove us to the hospital; it was about twelve miles away, in Selma. We got there about seven thirty in the morning; there was no-one around and it was quiet in the hallways of the hospital. The baby didn’t move at all, and he felt stiff in my arms.
I sat down in the emergency room with the baby on my lap. I didn’t want to look at him because I felt guilty, as if it was my fault that he had died. The nurse took him and put him on the gurney and put an oxygen mask on him. The doctors were examining him and then they took him behind a curtain. They asked me about the history and I told them that the mother slept in the same room with him. He had had a cold for a few days, but never had a fever. I had heard him crying for a little while that night and I heard the mother’s footsteps; I had assumed that she had picked the baby up. The next morning, I had started looking for the baby among the blankets on the floor because I had assumed the mother had taken him to sleep with her.
The doctor told me that the baby had died of “crib death.” He said it was partly due to the “upper respiratory infection” and perhaps that the baby had been lying on his stomach. I felt heartbroken and guilty at the same time: Kristina hadn’t taken care of the baby, and I hadn’t stepped in to take over, even though I knew something was wrong.
I felt like I was dead myself. All I could think about for weeks afterwards was the dead baby. I just walked around like a zombie. No-one came to investigate; at the hospital, they all assumed that the baby had died of pneumonia and “crib death”, whatever that was.
I was the only one who knew that Kristina didn’t want her baby and didn’t bother to try to take care of him. She had no interest in being a mother and no feelings for the child. I just couldn’t understand how a woman could have no affection for her own child and I wished she had just let the baby be adopted out immediately. She was so unconcerned that she didn’t bother to retain the birth certificate or any of the baby’s documents.
I felt horrible because I had bonded with the baby, even though his own mother hadn’t. I felt as if my own baby had died, and I felt responsible because I let Kristina take care of him that night, even though I knew she didn’t care. I was so tired that, when the baby stopped crying, I just assumed that Kristina had picked him up and checked on him.
Kristina continued to live with us for a month or so after the baby died; then she found somewhere else to live, I think with my brother George. I didn’t see her again for six years. Then I saw her at the clinic where I had begun working as a medical assistant. She had two more children, twins, from another guy. This time she kept the children because the guy stayed with her.
Partly because of this, I went back to school and eventually became a physician’s assistant. I have never forgotten this baby and I have never forgiven myself for not getting up in the middle of the night to go see what Kristina was doing with him.
Comment of the Day
GMoney America 2 hours ago
the northern united states have had an enemy state on it’s southern border for 150 years. taking advantage of the kindness and generosity of the north, with malice toward none, with charity for all, the south viewed this gesture as weakness and continued to express their fundamental assumption of racism and white supremacy through the sabotage of reconstruction, jim crow, separate but equal, state’s rights, lost cause myths, and a false narrative of heritage and tradition. the removal of this powerful symbol of southern confederate mythology is an enormous step in ridding the country of this cancer. look at how desperately not only hard core southerners but even elected officials are resisting this decision. i didn’t forsee this when the nine church members were gunned down but the situation has taken on a life of it’s own and the momentum is sweeping through areas not anticipated when the first calls for the removal of the flag were made, such as cemeteries, gift shops, and even nascar. the systemic ugliness of this mentality has been exposed and the view is shocking. it’s as if the country has been awakened from a dream or a trance and suddenly the question is “how could this have been allowed to exist?”. it has been 150 years. time to rid the country of all traces of this poison in our body politic.
via Republicans Yield as Confederate Flag Issue Roils Congress – The New York Times.
This comment appeared on an article about a bill that would have allowed Confederate flags at National Cemeteries. Clearly this bill is not politically appropriate at a time when the South Carolina Legislature approved by a two thirds margin the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the Capitol, and the governor signed the bill immediately. This was seen as a reacation to the shooting of nine black church members by Dylan Roof, who walked in to a church Bible study meeting, sat there for an hour, and then stood up and opened fire on the group, killing several pastors and a member of the State Legislature.
The situation is reminiscent of what happened in Germany after WW II– the display of the Nazi swastika was outlawed everywhere– even in movies or posters. Why was the Confederate flag allowed after the Civil War? Why was it resurrected at the time of the Civil Rights movement? Because there are a lot of unreconstructed racists in this country, and a lot of people who look back on slavery with nostalgia.
Here is the abstract to a new piece of research that has revolutionary implications, if it can be confirmed.
“Internal action models (IAMs) are brain templates for sensory-motor coordination underlying diverse behaviors [ 1 ]. An emerging theory suggests that impaired IAMs are a common theme in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [ 2–4 ]. However, whether impaired IAMs occur across sensory systems and how they relate to the major phenotype of ASD, namely impaired social communication [ 5 ], remains unclear. Olfaction relies on an IAM known as the sniff response, where sniff magnitude is automatically modulated to account for odor valence [ 6–12 ]. To test the failed IAM theory in olfaction, we precisely measured the non-verbal non-task-dependent sniff response concurrent with pleasant and unpleasant odors in 36 children—18 with ASD and 18 matched typically developing (TD) controls. We found that whereas TD children generated a typical adult-like sniff response within 305 ms of odor onset, ASD children had a profoundly altered sniff response, sniffing equally regardless of odor valance. This difference persisted despite equal reported odor perception and allowed for 81% correct ASD classification based on the sniff response alone (binomial, p < 0.001). Moreover, increasingly aberrant sniffing was associated with increasingly severe ASD (r = −0.75, p < 0.001), specifically with social (r = −0.72, p < 0.001), but not motor (r < −0.38, p > 0.18), impairment. These results uncover a novel ASD marker implying a mechanistic link between the underpinnings of olfaction and ASD and directly linking an impaired IAM with impaired social abilities.”
From Current Biology: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00651-X
The research appears to show that autistic children do not respond to offensive odors normally. Usually, a child who senses an unpleasant odor will stop sniffing. Autistic children appear to continue to sniff for the same length of time, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the smell is; the persistence of sniffing appears to correlate with the severity of the autism, specifically social abnormalities. This is a small study, only eighteen children and eighteen controls, but despite that, it shows a very strong correlation between autism and continued sniffing of unpleasant odors. There should be no difficulty repeating this experiment, both formally and informally, with many more subjects, as it is a simple test which takes inexpensive equipment and only a couple of hours for each subject, with little likelihood of disturbing the experimental subjects; thus, experimental ethics review committees should have no qualms about allowing almost any subject to participate.
The dramatic findings and the need for a good test for autism that is nonverbal and requires no voluntary responses (that is, the subject merely watches a cartoon while spontaneously inhaling odors through a plastic nasal cannula that simultaneously measures depth and duration of inspiration) make it imperative and highly likely that this experiment will be replicated soon. Informal replication could take only a few weeks in almost any child development laboratory.
If it works, this test will revolutionize the diagnosis of autism and pave the way for further advances in treatment and understanding of this serious and growing threat to child development.
An article in today’s New York Times (NYT) online describes losses in the Chinese stock markets: the main stock index has fallen dramatically in the last month, and the bull market that started a year ago has crashed. Prices rose from June 2014 to a peak on June 12 of this year and have fallen back, so far, to the levels of January 2015. One of the smaller exchanges has had a bull market since 2012, but has fallen off just as suddenly as the rest of the market. The government has instituted aggressive measures to try to stem the selling.
One of the market’s problems is margin buying, the leverage of which enhances booms as well as busts. Trying to reduce margin buying in China is difficult because some people borrow money on a shadow market which is mostly hidden from the government and charges high interest rates, resembling the loan-sharking business here in the US.
Since the introduction of a relatively free stock market in China, share prices have as much as quintupled in the last five years. This has been encouraged by the practice of borrowing money to buy on margin. Now panic selling has gripped the market and each day, a quarter of stocks have trading suspended because their prices have dropped more than ten percent. Up to half of stocks in the first two days of this week have had their trading suspended.
The government has been aggressively responding to the sell-off, and one of the biggest brokerage houses established a 20 billion dollar stabilization fund this week. Both banks and brokerage houses are threatened by margin buying, which is estimated to account for $550 billion in stock purchases, although accurate estimates are impossible because of hidden borrowing in the shadow banking sector, for which numbers are unavailable.
One difference from the US and European markets as well as the Japanese market is that the government of China has begun to implement aggressive measures, and is likely to be much more aggressive than other governments in trying to prevent a serious crash that could cost many people their life savings and destabilize the society. China’s government is obsessed with the country’s stability and will do anything to prevent discontent that could lead to protests and uncooperative behavior. China has a long past history of unstable, weak governments and disastrous public discontent, from walking off the job to rioting to mass migrations, resulting in famines and revolutions, and its leaders are fully aware of the consequences of loss of control.
So, unlike the government inaction that followed the stock market crash of 1929, it is likely that the Chinese government will take concerted, prolonged action to prevent the negative consequences of its experiment with free-market ideas like stocks and bank loans. Weak consumer demand and a slumping economy, while still rapidly expanding by world standards, has already resulted in government responses and is likely to lead to more if initial reactions do not have the desired effect.
The apparent trade-off that the Chinese government has made has been, and continues to be, is to obtain stability at the cost of individual freedoms and the development of an upper class that has all the power and most of the money. All levels of government are highly secretive and have been controlled by a small, insular group. Recent pronouncements by government figures show that the plan continues to be to maintain an oligarchy and to do everything possible to control public opinion through censorship and imprisonment of dissenters. Low-level dissent is punished by harassment from secret police, who can do anything they deem necessary to discourage individuals from expressing disagreement with government policies. Potentially disturbing news is quickly suppressed; censorship of electronic and print media is pervasive. Those who are trying to live within the government’s limits have learned self-censorship for survival’s sake, but upward mobility is limited by the need to have personal connections to obtain permission to undertake projects that have profit-making potential.
China has, since the accession of Chairman Mao, had an obsession with stability and growth. Mao’s disastrous personal projects such as the Cultural Revolution have been abandoned by his successors, sacrificed to the all-consuming need for stability to attain food and personal comforts for all the population. The Chinese public is willing to tolerate authoritarian rule to achieve personal sufficiency and even personal luxury, like a car for every family.
Once the people have achieved a sense of personal adequacy and are no longer haunted by the memories of starvation, still echoing since the 1930’s through the 1950’s and even into the 1960’s, they may develop additional aspirations that are familiar to us, such as a desire to speak out and to be informed objectively. The Chinese may even find a taste for real democracy and a disgust for plutocracy and the US practice of paying lip service to free speech while quietly but brutally suppressing genuine dissenters like the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
In the meantime, the Chinese government is a powerful competitor to the US government and may even be considered an enemy of sorts. Certainly, the actions of Chinese government hackers who stole all of the personal information for all of the US government’s confidential workforce after stealing huge quantities of industrial secrets, are unfriendly to the US and could be used to damage our economy.
It is essential that US government negotiators try to obtain concessions from the Chinese, after taking steps to reassure them that we do not intend to take military action to upset the balance of power in Asia. The Chinese government is anxious to be seen as a world power, equal to the US if not superior in manpower and armaments. The US is still the most armed country in the world and spends more on its military than most all other countries combined, but China is number two and is trying harder.
Recently, I posted a piece about the wrongful death penalty given to Rodericus Crawford, who was convicted of smothering his son when he discovered the infant to be dead on awakening in the morning. The infant actually died of pneumonia and sepsis during the night, but the district attorney ran with an erroneous autopsy report that ignored the evidence of pneumonia and cerebral edema in reaching its conclusion of “homicide by smothering” and “chronic child abuse” in February 2012.
Yesterday, I saw the name of the district attorney again in a news report about a man who had been released, exonerated, after over twenty-nine years on death row. The man had died of lung cancer only sixteen months after his release. He was sixty-five years old, and his name was Glenn Ford. The news article described how Mr. Ford was released due to “newly discovered and credible exculpatory evidence” provided by a confidential informant to Dale G. Cox. Mr. Cox was first assistant district attorney in 2013, when he received the confidential informant’s story, at Caddo Parish, Shreveport, Louisiana. Mr. Cox was the prosecuting attorney responsible for railroading Rodericus Crawford, who was convicted in November 2013 and sentenced to death.
By coincidence, the information came to Mr. Cox while he was investigating a murder and interviewing a confidential informant; he said that he was unable to reveal the identity of his source but that it was credible and he now believed that the murder was committed by two other men. Mr. Ford’s involvement was limited to receiving stolen goods from the victim’s pawn shop and selling them; he had no prior knowledge of the murder, nor any direct knowledge about the two who had committed the murder and robbery.
The original trial in which Mr. Ford was convicted featured testimony from the girlfriend of one of the other two men, who admitted that she had lied before, and testimony that the murder was committed by a left-handed man, which was suspicious because Mr. Ford was left-handed.
The story, in the New York Times, included this quote from the lead prosecutor in the case in which Mr. Ford was convicted:
“In March [2015], A. M. Stroud III, lead prosecutor at trial, wrote a remorseful article in The Shreveport Times, declaring, “Glenn Ford was an innocent man,” taking responsibility for a rush to judgment and arguing for the abolition of the death penalty.”
The murder for which Mr. Ford was convicted occurred in November 1983. Ironically, according to the New Yorker article about the new case, Mr. Cox had been opposed to the death penalty when he was young. He was Catholic and attended a Jesuit school. He had worked in the district attorney’s office for six years in 1983 when he resigned, saying that he didn’t feel comfortable pursuing death penalty cases. (According to Catholic doctrine, the death penalty is wrong.) However, by the time he returned to the district attorney’s office full time in 2011, he had changed his mind. He now says that he believes the death penalty should be applied more, not less, as revenge, because it does not work as a deterrent.
Dale G. Cox is a sick man. He is responsible for the wrongful application of the death penalty in more than one case. His action in allowing Mr. Ford to be released was an aberration, and it is not clear to me why he did so. It may have been forced upon him by other members of the district attorney’s team, such as Mr. Stroud, because he stated that he believed Mr. Ford was at least partly responsible for the robbery and murder which resulted in his being sent to death row. He thought that Mr. Ford’s actions in fencing the stolen goods were certainly culpable.
On the other hand, exonerating Mr. Ford of the crime of murdering Isadore Rozeman, 58, the owner of a small jewelry shop, allows him to prosecute two other men, who clearly committed the crime and are already in jail for other violent crimes. Perhaps he thinks he can get the death penalty on them both.
