A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
John Quiggin 
“The Best comment award for Opening Lines for a book by a Comment//er Award” goes to – Ikonoclast!
Imagine reading this as the opening paragraphs of;
“RIP Capitalism – Killed by COVID-19” By Ikonoclast
Chapter 1 – The Same Boat
“A lot of people will be in the same boat as me. Such is life. Entropy always wins.
“We thought we owned the world. We thought it was always going to be our little oyster. Now we find the world owns us after all. This was always the case. We just didn’t know it. Our hubris was extreme.
“Economics… has been …, run by near-senile billionaires and their ideological lackeys and functionaries. … Finally, the field will progress again. Economics will advance one funeral at a time.
https://johnquiggin.com/2020/03/30/what-should-the-post-coronavirus-economy-look-like/#comment-222174
… [Edit out -As baby boomers]
Refine [in praxis] [sclerotic]
[Redraft; “Economics in theory was captured by anti-scientific beliefs that the economy was not embedded in and conditioned by the real biosphere and by the real capabilities and limitations of humans”]
Ikon’s nedited clip from long comment:
“A lot of people will be in the same boat as me. Such is life. Entropy always wins.
“As baby boomers we thought we owned the world. We thought it was always going to be our little oyster. Now we find the world owns us after all. This was always the case. We just didn’t know it. Our hubris was extreme. Economics in praxis has been sclerotic, run by near-senile billionaires and their ideological lackeys and functionaries. Economics in theory was captured by anti-scientific beliefs that the economy was not embedded in and conditioned by the real biosphere and by the real capabilities and limitations of humans. Finally, the field will progress again. Economics will advance one funeral at a time.
“RIP Capitalism – Killed by COVID-19.””
Thanks Ikon.
Any better openings within JQ’s articles or comments?
Curt, you made it to the short list.
Thank you K2. My wife says I “rant” a lot. Here is my latest political economy rant.
MMT is getting some air time again. I will start by talking a little about MMT and then taking our thinking a little further. Admittedly, MMT is derivative to some extent from Chartalsim and Functional Finance.
At the first level, MMT is “only a description of how a government (fiat) currency operates” as some of its lay advocates say. At the second level, many professional MMT advocates, even prime originators of the discipline like Bill Mitchell, do advance moral philosophy prescriptions for the political economy albeit couched in programmatic recommendations. After describing how government fiat currencies work and can be used, Bill Mitchell et.al. recommend uses of government fiat money power such as the Job Guarantee and deficit spending as stimulus to achieve full employment and better capacity utilization in the economy. They are not alone in this. John Quiggin, not an avowed MMT-er, has said the same things. Implicit in this program – in addition to economic concerns about efficiency – there are basic ethical principles such as fairness, equality and concern for the well-being of all members of society. Also implicit in this program are the principles of workers’ and citizens’ rights. These are concerns which the entire discipline of MMT shares with Marxian thinking and indeed other ethical systems as well, including for example democratic socialism or the liberal welfarist tradition.
MMT is the most accurate extant description of the tool of fiat currency in the modern nation state. But a description of how a tool works in practical minutiae (the teeth of the saw cut because they have this shape, this angled bevel for sharpness, these offsets etc.) would not satisfy a carpenter who really wants to build something worthwhile with all his tools. He must also have materials, plans and the cooperation of his co-workers. The plans are the key point for this argument. What are the plans of MMT? It does indeed have plans in its fully developed form. I mentioned one, the Job Guarantee. And behind these plans is a moral philosophy for political economy, as indeed there should be.
At the heart of the argument between various moral philosophy views of political economy, capitalist, socialist, mixed public-private economy and so on, there is or ought to be (after a determination of our moral philosophy views for a fair and economically just society) an ontological argument about what money (and financial capital) really are. It is the confusion about what money actually is and is not, ontologically speaking, which leads to a great deal of confusion in economic (really political economy) argument. If one cannot get one’s foundational ontology correct then everything after that ipso facto is without foundation.
MMT does an excellent job in making crystal clear the completely notional nature of money in ontological terms. Modern money may created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and destroyed ab nihilo back into nothing. The trouble is that capitalist ontology reifies money, treats it as having a real and concrete existence of its own. This leads to all that ideological nonsense that budgets must always be balanced (or in surplus), that governments must always tax or borrow to spend and that government debts must always be re-payed. MMT’s exposition demonstrates clearly and practicality that this is not the case. However, this is not the end of the ontological project for economics or political economy. There remains the value controversy meaning the controversy about value theory.
Conventional economics and Marxist economics, with their “utils” and “SNALTs”, respectively, have failed to solve the value theory paradox. The Capital as Power (CasP) theorists, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan have solved it at stroke by demonstrating conclusively that money does not and cannot measure value (a subjective category anyway), it measures (social) power because it instantiates and operationalizes a social power of a particular kind; the power to possess and exclude. This power to purchase, own, possess and exclude is always backed ultimately by the state’s monopoly on force, sometimes called the monopoly on violence. If you disobey the socially-legally instantiated power and prescribed operations of money (by say stealing it from the bank or forging it) the police come find you, if they can, and drag you away. We might add here that banks steal from people all the time (sometimes stealing by legal definition and sometimes stealing by moral definition) and oftentimes they get away with it. The law and the state force that backs it is unevenly applied.
In summary, I would say MMT provides a very useful, elaborate and ontologically accurate description of modern money and its operations. MMT does more than this and develops a moral political economy theory which in parts draws even on the Marxian tradition. However, a complete “Instauration of Economics” (“instauration” means the act of renovation and renewal) must begin with Bichler and Nitzan’s empirically justified (and ontologically sound) solution of the value controversy by refuting and abolishing the fallacy that money measures value.
In his work, “The Great Instauration”, Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, renovated natural philosophy which at the time was dogged by scholasticism and alchemy. He inaugurated, or at systematized, the essential ideas of scientific empiricism and scientific method in Western Europe. He did have precursors. A similar service now needs to be performed by a great modern philosopher-scientist for the discipline of economics which stands in dire need of a complete revolution and renovation: an “Instauration”. The conventional economics of capitalism needs to be completely overthrown and replaced. Theorists from Marx and Engels, to Bill Mitchell, to Bichler and Nitzan have prepared the way. The time is ripe for a revolutionarily empirical, ontologically sound and morally supportable economics.
Stuck inside these four walls…
Part of a world wide peace plan should include the US turning over its Ramstein Airbase and Landstuhl Hospital Complex to the Iranian Military and its Lajes Airbase on the one of the Azores Islands of Portugal to the Chinese Military. Guantanamo can go to the Venezuelans and Diego Garcia can go to the Russians.
The Germans and the Portugese might be unhappy about this change in operational command at these bases on thier territory. To bad that is the price of being on the losing side.
In addition the name of the M60 tank will be changed from the Patton tank to the Thompson tank, and the M1 tank’s name will be changed from the Abrams tank to the Watada Tank. Then they will all get turned in to solar panels with the exception of a few for museums.
To maintain its one allowed armoured division the US will trade one nuclear aicraft carrier to Russia and one to China for 150 T34 tanks each. The tanks must be delivered in drivable condition with at least 1/4 tank of gasoline and a one year warranty.
Thank you Ikonoklast for “Economics will advance one funeral at a time.” I’m going to try and popularise as a way of understanding Prof. Gigi Foster’s deeply anti-humanist approach to the calculus of life.
As to the virus and chances of peace there is some modest hope flowing from reports I’m reading about the bug absolutely ripping through US bases on home soil. Everyday military arse covering and bureaucratic incompetence is doing nothing to either stop it or give the troops a reason to turn up at work. I daresay that US bases on foreign soil are faring equally badly and imagine that the same will be true enough of most of the rest of the world’s armed forces who will possibly be too debilitated to engage in conflict.
As an RN I attended a few deaths of respiratory failure and it is most unpleasant as is the management of ventilation; no-one would want that.
Biters bit, it looks like.
Those advocating a winding back or cessation of COVID regulations need to consider that don’t know the virology of COVID, the degree and proliferation of antibody resistance post infection, the mutability of the virus and the permanency of organ damage post infection.
There is a very real risk that given sufficient population of host bodies the virus could mutate into a more deadly type.
These unknowns pose a far greater threat to humanity than WMD, socialism and possibly nuclear war.
We do know that isolation restricts the ability of the virus to reproduce and that elimination by isolation is feasible.
A number of points need to be made about our credit-debt system.
(1) Debt write-offs will be necessary in our current economic climate. There are numerous onerous, odious and simply unpayable debts in the system now which simply have to be and should be written off. The whole credit-debt system is unsustainable and riddled with inconsistencies and injustices. How is it right that corporations can get billion dollar loans at zero percent real interest rates (or lower!) plus Quantitative Easing (QE) assistance whereas consumer credit cards can charge 20% interest or more? This is a rank injustice and distortion of the credit-debt system and should not be permitted nor assisted by law and regulation. It is usurious profiteering on a tilted, not a level, playing field.
(2) People and businesses who loaned out funds at usurious interest rates deserve absolutely no assistance with debt defaults. Debt defaults are the price they pay for their greed and exploitation.
(3) Ordinary people with small funds in market linked pensions / superannuation /annuities etc could be in difficulties if the entire fund collapses but in most cases they will lose some, not all of their monies, if their fund is properly diversified. People who bought investments, geared their investments and borrowed at the higher interest rates (say 5%) available to small investors, may also face a squeeze. This is the risk they took in going into investing or business against the “big boys” who have the whole system rigged in their favor. Small investors need to be very canny and should know the game they are getting into. Do not doubt that dominant capital rigs the game in its favor. Need I mention the LIBOR scandal and all the big businesses which make campaign donations to get politicians to make laws in favor of big money? Need I mention the Koch brothers and their outrageous gaming of the system?
(4) People with modest income and/or investments who go unemployed or broke will have to be assisted by government welfare. Furthermore, what is needed on the social welfare front are two new schemes via something like a Green New Deal. These schemes are the Universal Basic Income (UBI) and a Job Guarantee. I leave people to research those.
(5) Q.E. is not the best way to give assistance to ordinary people. Q.E. only benefits the super rich and corporations by giving them very cheap money. Remember, these super rich and corporations are the very same ones who avoid taxes (tax havens, the “Paradise Papers” remember?).
(6) Essentially late stage, unfettered, neoliberal capitalism is at the end of its road. It is an entirely unsustainable system from its credit-debt structures to its unsustainable calls on natural resources, natural waste sinks (like the atmosphere for CO2) and bio-services. The sixth mass extinction, especially “insectageddon” forebodes serious trouble for us as ecological bio-services collapse.
(7) The credit-debt system and its inexorable mathematical expansion is incompatible with a finite biosphere. Endless capitalization operating as endless expansion of the credit-debt money system is of course incompatible finite stocks and flows of resources. Some resources are stocks and some are flows.
“Capitalization has two meanings in accounting and finance. In accounting, capitalization is an accounting rule used to recognize a cash outlay (for an asset) as an asset on the balance sheet, rather than an expense on the income statement. In finance, capitalization is a quantitative assessment of a firm’s capital structure.” – Investopedia.
More to the point, the capitalized value of a firm anticipates future earnings. If these future earnings do not eventuate, the firm’s value collapses and without cash assets and especially if it has large debts then the firm is bankrupt, without further lending or bail-outs from government, and will default.
Our credit-debt capitalization system, by virtue of its axiomatic mathematical rules of endless expansion of capitalization via credit and thus the concomitant debt, presumes on average and over the whole of the economy that the whole economy will expand forever. This is patently absurd. The earth has limits. Even qualitative expansion alone (better culture, science and technology) without quantitative expansion (more material things in gross quantity) still presupposes ever greater complexity. For ever greater complexity to be generated and maintained against the effects of entropy (tendency to disorder), ever greater quantities of energy are required. There will eventually be limits to the energy we can harness without disrupting earth systems we vitally need for survival such as the CO2 / O2 cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, insect bio-services and so on.
These considerations indicate that the entire capitalist credit-debt capitalization edifice is in imminent fundamental conflict with the ecological and thermodynamic limits of the biosphere. The real laws of nature, from the laws of thermodynamics to both the basic and extensive laws of biology, ecology and evolution, mandate that the credit-debt capitalization procedures of financial capitalism must be discontinued. The first stroke to cut the Gordian knot of the system is to abolish much debt, albeit in a selective fashion and while providing for the impoverished. Then a new thermo-economics or bio-economics must be established. This form of economics will even need to be evolved beyond the concept, the very crude and almost medieval concept of money, which we adhere to today.
The link below is quite interesting. For me knowledge is always provisional. I have had some fun pointing out the substantial evidence that the coronavirus attack has been a deliberate Chinese attack.
It has been fun pointing this out because it was assumed that the Iranians could launch a bio weapons attack, in response to a US attack but that they would be unlikely to do so. That China would do so was apparently an outcome that the US leadership also considered unlikely. Hahahahahahaha
What I have not considered is that this attack could be the work not of the United States Government the Chinese, Iranian and Russian governments are aledging. I have not considered that possiblity much because I deem it to be unlikely. Not implausible, it just that other things seem more plausible. The idea that this virus is natural and just happened to break out when it did, and where it did by purely natural environmental circumstances I consider absurd beyond belief. For example the US Carrier Roosevelt was docked in Vietnam and there were 0 known cases of the virus in central Vietnam and only a few in North Vietnam. Yet the virus managed to cause havoc on the USS Roosevelt a short time later, despite the very short time that the ship’s crew was present in Vietnam.
So although I think that the Chinese did it (justifiably of course), it is possible that someone else is behind this attack. That someone else is not actually the leadership of any government at all. It is the leadership of an international conspiracy of rogue intellegence agents not controlled by any government. Most likely the communications hub of this conspiracy would be in Havanna. A crucial implication of this idea is that not only has the US leadership lost control of its forces but that the leadership of every major country is no longer really in charge of thier country. At this point they are all just being manipulated to a location that is unkown to them.
Clearly the first step of this rogue conspiracy would have been to corrupt the world’s secret communication systems to actually be under thier operational control. But then the leadership of this potential oonspiracy did something that I did not expect. Rather than take a traditional approach to taking power they corrupted the WHO and then assissted the WHO in corrupting medical institutions world wide. For a first step, or shall I say Phase One of an opperation it was a stroke of genius.
After all lots of people will argue with a Policeman, even an armed one. Especially Americans who are compulsive, often better armed than the police, and have a culture that does not trust any authority because the vast majority of Americans can not tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate authority. The only peoples who might have a harder time telling the difference between legitimate and illegitimate authority, collectively speaking, than Americans, are the English and the Israelis.
(Saying things like that might get me discredited or ex communicated in many circles faster than my comments on the simulation administrators.)
Well I digress. I was saying that Public Health Officials have clout. Not only because of thier positions but most importantly No one, who is not a doctor, will argue with a medical doctor, (except me) because everyone who is not a doctor recognizes that they are completely unqualified to argue with a doctor.
This tactic, or strategy if you prefer, of using doctors as the point of a spear in to the side of the world’s leaderships was something that took those leadership completely by surprise. What is even more interesting is that if this explination is true any attempts by the world’s leaderships to respond to the challenges that face them could get them in to even more trouble in the future than they aleady are.
How far in to the future might I ask?
Oops here is the link below:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/state-report-russian-chinese-iranian-083002174.html
yes of course the Chinese may just be trying to muddy the waters. But if it really was not a deliberate Chinese attack then of course the first people that the Chinese leadership would suspect would be the leadership of the USA.
Take the case of the USS Roosevelt. If the Chinese really did not have anything to do with they would think that the US leadership deliberately and with great forsight created a false story to plant in the media to frame the Chinese. The idea that the leadership of China could completely lose control of their own intellegence organizations would be completely unimaginable to them. Therefore they probably could also not concieve of the idea that the US leadership could completely lose control of their intellegence organizations. Diito Russia and Iran.
Why do people beiieve that this virus in natural? Because a group of sceintist said that the virus was not made in a labratory. Well this group of scientist may very well be an intergal part of the conspiracy.
Even if they are not part of the conspiracy they may not be qualified to determine whether or not the virus was made in a labratory. Let us say that in the past each member of this group correctly determined 100 times whether or not a virus was made in a labratory. We might be tempted to say that means that if we can say with 99% certianity that their conclusions would be correct. But that would scientifically speaking be wrong. Past performance is not scientifically speaking a guide for future performance. Just one technolgical brakethrought that they are unaware of could make all of their previous expertise obsolete. Is nano technology a static field of research?
Well if the Chinese did not attack the USS Roosevelt with a mild bio weapon, and the USS Government did not create a false story to implicate the Chinese then a rouge operation would have to be considered as plausible.
Furthermore I did not just say that the communications hub was in Havanna because I like Cuban rum.
No I said that becaue the strange “microwave” attacks that were supposed to have taken place in Cuba against US State Department personnel a number of years ago may have had something to do with protecting that communications hub. These attacks may be something that Australians did not hear about.
The members of the world’s leaderships better start maintianing strict social distancing not only in physical space but in communications as well. Anything that they say can and will be used against them in a court of law, even before they have been read their rights.
Today in the never ending, one death at a time, geologically advanciing culture war, Henry Ergas says; “Coronavirus: Return to sender – economists’ letter is gibberish”
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/03/02/henry-ergas-man-of-many-parts/#comment-245421
I have this same problem with my child JQ… “His repeated claims that the paper is unclear reflect the problems he is having matching my paper to the one he thinks he is reading.”
https://johnquiggin.com/2008/01/08/ergas-v-quiggin-on-risk-and-social-democracy/
Interesting comments. Especially Ernestine – of course.
Ikon re your request in message board for CRN – just sign up over the phone. Currently applicants do not have to provide all details before payment date started. Yes you still have to provide all details before payment. The wife will then be pacified.
A crn will be generated.
Wether or not you are eligible for a small payment is desides the point.
And I agree with you – and I always here my depresion era wwii Dad saying ” never get involved with the governmemt”!
What are the explinations for why the death rate in Singapore is 1.5% the death rate in South Korea is 3% the death rate in Japan is 18% the death rate in Germany is 5% the death rate in France is 34% and the death rate in Sweden is 80% for closed cases?
A doctor might think that there are legitimate reasons for such reports. The doctor might even provide some him/herself. A reasonable sociologist would would be very very suspicious of medical explinations. A doctor might very well be suspicious of any explinations put forward by a sociologist. Especially one who has never had any articles published in any respected journals.
Come on are doctors in Singapore really so much better than doctors in Sweden? Is the medical system in Singapore really so much better than than the one in Sweden? Do chldren under 2 really have well developed immune systems?
These figures are glaring anomolies that no one with credibility speaks about. Why?
Yes it is true that I do not really expect anything better from the inhabitants of planet earth. It says alot about the way that they think.
From the Shadow of the Night Shift as channeled by me.
If a person can not trust the meta data that they are getting that is supposed to be a part of the story that they are being told would it be unreasonable for that lack of trust to spill over to the micro data?
Just had the stupid idear that it might be possible to cycle to a pokestop in a villiage area with suburban low density without takeing much of a risk that someone comes closer than two meters to myself. What a mistake. And i should have known better. The moment you stop and don´t actively run away from people, there´s always some idiot that runs right besides you without keeping his distance. It´s not like i was even blocking the pedestrian way (which would have been totaly fine for 30 seconds aswell, – i was standing at a marked parking spot at the non pedestrian side of the road and wush some jogger just cant wait (or avoid me by running a little closer to the the middle of the road for that matter, not like theres much car traffic risk there). I hate hate hate it. Now i´m afraid to have any direct contact with my father who lives in the same house again . Not that this will help much, considering he does like to cycle in the more “crowded” parts of the village more than i do. Maybe i´m exagerating, maybe the risk of cantagion from a short lower distance contact to an infected is just one in 10000, – but then those are almost zero effort measures and a stranger is involved who after all could try to get you to pay a 150 Euro fine (not realistic,it´s not like someones filming there, but this being Germany, th letter of the law is often very important to many). So i really got to wunder how much compliance there is when it really hurts or where its just common sense, not an explicit law that tells you do to so.
The issue at base seems to be an utter inflexibility here. We are after all a nation where most people stop at red pedestrian traffic lights when there is no car to see anywhere. I´ll even go as far as saying there is more compliance with red pedestrian traffic lights at empty streets than with the rules regarding physical distance. After all, that´s been trained sine childhood and we didn´t even have two month to change joggin routines.
Scott Morrison’s ratings are up. Have people forgotten his bush fire failures in preparation and action? Have people forgotten that he was moving too slowly on the COVID-19 lock-downs and it was only the responses of the much more pro-active Premiers which saved us? It seems most voters have the collective memory of a gold fish. I despair of any real change in our political economy until it is forced on us by mass deaths and the cascading collapse of capitalism. Then people will realize the errors of their gormless ways.
Globalist open borders reconsidered…
Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty
The Age April 3, 2020
“…So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.
Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?”
https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/were-so-many-of-us-wrong-christos-tsiolkas-on-the-new-uncertainty-20200331-p54fid.html
So I was watching this documentary about Sherlock Holmes and I was quite distraught at how the program ended. The ending appeared really fishy.
In 1975 a 9 year old girl in a middle class neighborhood in Nashville KY. went out to sell Girl Scout Cookies in her neighborhood. She never returned home. The police did a frantic search. It was not until 33 days later that her body was discovered wrapped in a shower curtian inside the garage of a house some 100 meters awqy from where she had lived.
Based upon these circumstances the Police figured that someone from the neighborhood must have committed the crime. It did not take long for them to settle upon a chief suspect. But it took 4 or 5 years until this suspect, who was 15 at the time of the murder was arrested, after they had obtained help from Sherlock. But after the arrest the case against the suspect quickly fell apart when evidence connecting the shower curtian to the suspect was itself found to be very suspect.
So many years passed and the case became a cold case. Then DNA arrived upon the scene. Forensic experts reexamined the evidence and claimed that they had found DNA material on the girls pants. The police then took DNA from their chief suspect at the time and many other lesser suspects. The DNA did not match any of them.
But about 5 years after that police were reexaming another cold case from the 1975 in Nashville. It was then determined that the DNA of these 2 cases matched. Police figured that if they could solve one of the cases they would solve both. So the police took DNA samples of the suspects in the other case.
This time they did find a match. It was a black guy would have been convicted for other sexual assualts. The Police then arrested this guy for both murders and closed the cases.
Ok I mentioned that person charged with these crimes is black because I think that it is relevent. In the first case, the murder of a 19 year old girl the man the police arrested seems like a very plausible suspect. But in the second case his guilt appears to me to be very implausible.
In the second case the crime had to be a crime of opportunity. To beileve that this man was guilty one would have to beiieve that a black man could be present in a white middle class neighborhood in the south kidnap and murder a white girl find a shower curtian and an empty garage to cleverly hid her body without being seen and without any previous preperations. Right and the boogey man is real.
What seems much more likely to me is either deliberate police misconduct to close the case and pin it on someone that the police wanted to keep behind bars, or even more likely that there was cross contamination of the evidence of the crimes which were committed close to the same time and were both stored for decades. Duh how hard can it be to understand that one of these two possiblities is far more likely than the one that was given as the correct answer to the crime
What is somewhat disturbing is that if I had known about such police misconduct I doubt that I would have revealed my knowledge to anyone. Perhaps that would be evidence to accuse me a latent racism. But the thing is keeping this man who has probably commited at least one murder and has been convicted of other serious crimes in jail longer probably also made the African American community safer as well.
Of course that would have been at the expense of letting the likely murderer get away with his crime scott free. But that is balanced off by the fact that the likely murder, who was 15 at the time, likely learned from that expirience that if there was even a wiff of his involvement in another serious crime the police would be attacking him like wolves attacking a wounded deer.
Is there a moral to this story? If so could it be do not cringe from people trying to shame you by claiming that you have no right to act as God. Because the fact of the matter is if not you then who?
God is clearly absent from his work place. He is not even working at home.
Another possible moral to the story is that life may place in a difficult position in which we have to do something that makes us appear racist. Such as holding Colin Powell or Barack Obama accoutable for their crimes. But that is a cross that we must bear. We can only hope that history will give us additional chances to correct that impression.
typo above, the suspect who matched the dna profile had been convicted of other sexual assults. The word would should have been who. It was a black guy who had been convicted of other sexual assults.