Waterboarding Camp

You don’t have to look too far around the blogosphere to find people who love torture. According to some, torture is just awesome. Pretty much, conservatives love torture and liberals hate it. This difference of opinion baffled me for a while. I mean, conservatives believe that the government needs to be greatly limited and that government is full of corrupt, self-serving politicians as evidenced by the more than 11,000 pork barrel projects. The government we installed in Iraq is corrupt. The government we installed in Afghanistan is corrupt. Meanwhile, here at home, corruption is so widespread it can’t even be calculated: in Illinois alone, the cost of government corruption to taxpayers is estimated at $500 million a year. I mean, the government can’t even order the president a goddamn helicopter without fucking it up.

That’s why so many conservatives are so dead set against nationalized healthcare. Yeah, it’s true that here in the US we spend more than twice as much as other industrialized nations and yet we suck ass compared to them when you look at major health indicators like life expectancy, infant mortality, and immunization rates. But the mega-corporations now providing us with insurance and medications who care so very much about our well-being are making healthy profits. I mean, consider the fact that former UnitedHealth CEO William McGuire got $1.4 billion in stock options while the company made $30 billion in after-tax profits and spent $32 billion in insurance underwriting and marketing costs. Healthy! Oh, and, by the way, you have a preexisting condition so your claim has been denied. Sorry. Please pay the 87% increase in your premiums over the last six years, though, or you’ll be among the uninsured in less time than it takes to say, “not covered: elective,” loser. Do you know why we didn’t have a bigger outbreak of swine flu? Because we couldn’t afford it. Yeah, it’s true that Obama’s plan would merely be competitive with existing plans, so your health coverage would not change. It’s also true that businesses would benefit because they would no longer have to pay high insurance premiums or carry the administrative overhead for employees that opted into the single-payer program. But still, government is bad! And politicians cannot be trusted!

That’s why I’m kind of surprised by the conservative reaction to torture. I mean, if you don’t trust the government to pay for your fucking prescription, how can you trust it to secretly subject people to torture? I mean, okay, the government has awesome power all the time, but why would you give a government you don’t trust tyrannical power?

I think that, for moral guidance, conservatives often ask themselves what Jesus would do. Regarding torture, many apparently already have. And it turns out that Jesus loves torture! According to a poll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that “the use of torture against suspected terrorists to gain important information” is often or sometimes justified. Only sixteen percent of that group believed that torture is never justified. That number was lower than any other group polled. There was also just as strong a correlation between regular church attendance and support for torture. A similar poll last year offered pretty similar results, finding that 57 percent of white Southern evangelicals believed that torture was often or sometimes justified. Other polls give similar results. And note that the Pew Forum didn’t ask about “Harsh Interrogation Techniques” or any other euphemism for torture. It asked about plain old “torture.” So, Jesus is all over torture. Jesus hearts torture!

But, still, while this explains that some Jesus-loving people love torture, it doesn’t explain why. Then I saw a survey of the best and worst things liberals and conservatives could imagine. It explains a lot.

Source: Frank G. Musket & Harvey H. Temple, The Douchebaggery of the Masses: Political America from Ignoramississippi to Dumbfucklahoma, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1191, 1207 (2009).

Many who are in favor of waterboarding argue that it works. But, really, who gives a shit whether it works or not? I mean, it’s not torture, right? Listen, the so-called “torture” memos released by Obama give all the US law that matters. They all agree about the definition of torture. The most important US law, 18 USCA §§ 2340-2340A, defines torture as an act that inflicts “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Another important US law, 28 USCA § 1350, also discussed in the memos, governs civil suits for torture and its definition is pretty identical: “severe pain or suffering ... whether physical or mental….” That’s a fine definition of torture in my book.

The memos go on to find that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever.” And, since it’s a “controlled acute episode,” it can’t be said to cause any suffering either. In addition, though “waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death,” it causes no “prolonged mental harm.” That’s all from the “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” torture memo of August 1, 2002, written by Jay Bybee, by the way. But all the other memos agree.

So, waterboarding is kind of like riding a roller coaster or something: no physical or mental pain or suffering whatsoever. Just thrills and chills. That’s why it’s not torture and that’s what makes it so awesome. Okay, when the CIA tried waterboarding on their own operatives, the operatives lasted only an average of fourteen seconds. And conservative shockjock Erich Muller only lasted six seconds and afterward he said it was “absolutely torture.” But we all know how sensitive these rightwing radio dudes can be. I mean, the memos — written by lawyers — tell us it’s not even painful! And since when do any of us, conservative or liberal, have any reason to not trust lawyers? It must be as they say, a kind of awesome amusement park ride where you feel panic during it but afterward you laugh and laugh. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that we don’t have detainees begging us to waterboard them. At the very least, if we just explained to the detainees how much fun waterboarding is, we could probably get their consent to waterboard them and then none of this would be an issue.

Jay Bybee, who wrote that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever,” was then Assistant Attorney General under Bush but he is now a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, one step below the Supreme Court. That means that, in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State, waterboarding is perfectly legal as long as Jay Bybee is your judge. It’s also legal in Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, wherever the fuck that is. Oh, and Alaska, too, but you already knew torture was legal there.

And here is the truly awesome thing: I looked up the definition of child abuse in California. And child abuse occurs when someone “causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon, unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering” according to California Penal Code 11165.3. So, instead of “severe,” child abuse is “unjustifiable” physical pain or mental suffering. But that doesn’t matter because, according to the Jay Bybee memo, waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever!” So, you don’t even need to justify waterboarding your kids! In fact, waterboarding is more appealing than spanking as a way to discipline your children. After all, spanking hurts! Even Bybee agrees: he writes that a facial slap “may hurt.” But waterboarding doesn’t hurt at all! No pain and no suffering!

So, I was thinking about this, and about how conservatives and Jesus are all loving torture almost but not quite to death (usually), and I decided that there is a money-making opportunity here. So I’m going to open a summer camp for kids in California. Judge Bybee’s got my back and it looks like Obama won’t prosecute anybody for any of this shit, either. Here is the brochure for stoogepie’s Waterboarding Camp. Please pass it along. And don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Sign your kids up today.

Or you can just click on this link to download the brochure. Hurry. Water won’t be around forever.

That’s all I have to say about torture for right now.

Leave a comment....

Stoogepiety: In The Beginning

There is a Christian in Texas who says that doomsday begins tomorrow, on June 12th.  Set your clocks.  (Just in case that link goes dead due to armageddon, check out this link.)

This got me thinking.  Suppose this dude is right and the beginning of the end is tomorrow?  Would all of you Christians who scoffed at this dude and ignored him and ridiculed him join me poolside in hell?

My bigger question is: why are you Christians so confident that faith leads to anything other than rich televangelists and an ever-growing list of Christian evangelical scandals?

Hey, Jesus was a Jew, right?  And all the most devout Jews around him did not believe he was the messiah.  And don’t tell me that they were doing something wrong.  Jane and Joe Israelite were doing their best, following what we now call the Old Testament, and — just like you — listening to the spiritual guidance of someone who said he had all the answers but who was also always worried about some Expensive Religious Emergency that needed to be paid for before next week’s episode.

And, fuck, even Jesus’s own brothers and sisters did not believe him!  I mean, the three stooges wise men had recognized him on sight, but thirty long goddamn years later after living with Him and who knows how many fucking miracles and mom and dad talking about the virgin birth and King Herod and frankincense and myrrh, his own fucking brothers and sisters were unconvinced!  That had to hurt.

So what makes Christians today think that they will recognize the new messiah when he or she strolls along the next time?  The most devout Jews didn’t recognize him the first time.  Only a handful of people paid any attention at all.  And, I mean, this is a dude who created an army of zombies and was a zombie himself!

Let me change gears here for a moment because I am going somewhere with this.  Like I said, this prophesy about the world ending tomorrow got me thinking, so I decided I would pick up my bible and look it over again.

Anyway, I was reading my bible while waiting for the train today on my way to work when this woman — not a hot woman — who was sitting next to me on the subway platform wants to talk about the bible.

I’m paraphrasing, but that really is pretty much how the conversation went.

All that I’m saying is this: I know that all you supposedly righteous Christians will scoff when my Stoogepiety™ ministry starts up.  But you had better watch out.  Just like happened 2,000 years ago, you just might not recognize Christianity 2.0 or Judaism 3.0 or whatever you want to call it, even as it is damning you to an infernal eternity in the Lake of Boredom.  And you will probably just kill me.  And the difference is that when I come back as a zombie with my army of zombies, we will eat your fucking brains and draw goddamn comics about it.

The time draws nigh.  Yes, nigh.

Anyway, here is a preview of the kind of dogma you can expect from Stoogepiety™: Forget all that other bullshit.  You are meat.  Get used to it.  Thanks for playing.

And here is my very first prophesy: the world will not end tomorrow. 

Stay tuned for miracles.

Leave a comment....

Holy Zombies

I know that, at the end of my last post, I said I would soon write about the difference between porno and real life, and I will get around to that in a post or two, but first I want to clear something up. 

Some people were insulted by my last post about chick flicks and dick flicks for a number of reasons.  I did not mean to insult particular movies, however contrived, formulaic, or overhyped those movies might be.  Nor did I intend to insult the people who enjoy those movies, however idiotically sheep-like and mindlessly stereotypical those people’s reactions to those contrived, formulaic, overhyped movies might be.

I don’t mean to insult anyone.  I just want to make that clear right now.  I love movies.  And I don’t mean only porno movies, although I do love porno.  I mean mainstream movies.  I am especially fond of horror movies and, in fact, I have probably seen every zombie movie ever made, including the many very hot porno zombie movies, like 28 Lays Later and Night of Giving Head.

That is why I have decided to devote this blog entry to an uncontroversial topic that will showcase my knowledge of popular culture while also demonstrating to you, my loyal readers, that I mean to insult no one: Jesus was a zombie.

Now, this is pretty straightforward.  If you look up the definition for zombie in the dictionary, it says, “a dead body that has been brought back to life by a supernatural force.”  Done and done.  That’s pretty clear, huh?  Plainly, Jesus is, by definition, a zombie.  According to Christians, Jesus died and then rose three days later.  Once you have been dead, the only thing you can later be is undead.

But I don’t mean to get all Christian on you.  Here is what I am getting at: when Christians watch zombie movies, why don’t they root for the Zombies?  What would Jesus do?

In some George Romero zombie movies, he uses this line: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk to earth.”  No, George.  Sorry.  You’re wrong.  When there’s no more room in heaven, the dead shall walk to earth.

See, everybody should agree that a world filled with zombies is pretty much the very idea of Christian paradise.  And it’s not like Jesus didn’t start the whole, “eat my body and drink my blood,” thing.  Does he have to knock you over the head with his zombie message for you to get it?

Look at the world around you and maybe you see sin, right?  Fornication?  Death?  Prejudice?  War? 

Think of your best idea of heaven.  It is a world where you wind up after you are dead, but without any of the sin.  You don’t even think any bad thoughts in heaven.  You just sort of mill around doing whatever.  Sounds heavenly, doesn’t it?

Now watch your favorite zombie movie.  If zombies took over the world — after they killed all the people (a.k.a. sinners) — there would be no war, no death, no jealousy, no coveting, no prejudice.  Zombies are never racist, sexist, or homophobes.  You will never see anything like this in a zombie movie.

Zombies feel no pain.  They have no diseases.  They don’t recognize handicaps.  They never argue or bitch or whine.  They only do what God intelligently designed them to do: eat sinners.  And eating a sinner is a transformative process.  After the sinner dies, he turns into a zombie — a perfect, sinless human being — completing the heavenly circle. 

Zombies in most movies don’t even bother with animals.  Animals are free to roam and play.  Zombies don’t eat apples, either.  How much does this sounds like Eden to you?

After Zombies had eradicated all non-zombies, the world would return to a state of nature.  People would all be zombies.  And the world would be a perfect, Christian paradise.  Eden on earth.

So, the next time you see a zombie flick, if you call yourself a Christian, cheer for the zombies.  Ask yourself: what would Jesus, king of the zombies, do?

That’s all I have to say about that.  More porn and cake to come.

Leave a comment....

Humane Capital Punishment

I’ve spent the last week in Miami on business.  I may write more about my trip some other time, but I was unable to post while away because I couldn’t install Photoshop on my work laptop.  I’ll have the IT people at work buy me a brand new copy next week and install it.

Anyway, Florida made me think of the death penalty because they used to do a lot of that down there.  For a while, Florida and Texas were fighting for the number one spot.  Right now Florida is waiting to see what the Supreme Court says before the state can kill anyone else, but Florida is hoping to get started again real soon.  Florida used to use Old Sparky, the electric chair, until enough people caught on fire and cooked alive that they decided to switch to lethal injection.  Lethal injection just doesn’t seem that much better to me.

I worked with death-row inmates for a while and I don’t think the death penalty is humane for a number of reasons.  Among these are the facts that (1) it’s not very nice for people to live knowing that someone will eventually kill them and (2) in practice, the death penalty is neither quick nor painless.  But, after a great deal of thought, I have devised solutions to both of these problems so that we can move a few steps closer to butchering criminals with utterly clean consciences.

The Sentencing White Lie

When you see animal-rights videos of cows or sheep headed to slaughter, they always point out that the poor, reluctant, delicious animals are aware that they are headed to their deaths.  They point this out because, in our hearts, we know that it is wrong to make any creature use its own legs to walk to its inevitable doom, no matter how succulent and delicious that particular creature might be pan-roasted to buttery tenderness and served with truffled polenta.

This is true of people, too, however nasty they taste.  It is wrong to tell someone, “We are going to kill you.  It might take a decade or so for us to get around to it, but then we will whack you good.”  It’s like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the aliens come down with their book, “To Serve Man,” and, just as the dude is about to get into the spaceship for what he believes will be a delightful vacation, that woman yells at him, “It’s a cookbook!”  What a bitch!  He could have had a nice, pleasant flight to the new planet, but she had to ruin it for him.

The solution to this problem is so straightforward that I don’t know why nobody has proposed it before.  We must lie.

It’s okay to sentence people to death as long as we don’t tell them about it.  So, we should devise codes that judges will use when pronouncing a death sentence so that criminals think that they were sentenced only to life imprisonment.  It could be very simple, like giving them a strange sentence: “Mr. Criminal, the jury has recommended death, but I sentence you to 27¼ years plus two weeks of community service at the Manhattan Center for Especially Attractive Homeless People.”  That would really be a death sentence.  Everyone but the prisoner could know.

In theory, since it is inhumane to tell someone that he is going to die, nobody should want to ruin his blissful ignorance for him by letting him in on the secret.  But you know that there will be assholes ready to fuck things up for everyone by revealing the sentence of death.  You know this because those same assholes sat behind you in the theatre the last time you went to see a horror movie.  So, we will need a law that says that, if you reveal a death sentence to an unwitting death row inmate, you get the death sentence yourself.  And we won’t even treat you to the lie.  You will know we are going to kill you and we’ll see how you like it, you fucker who ruined Saw IV for me.

Now, some of you are probably reluctant to have the courts lie to even the worst of criminals.  Maybe you think that, while it is inhumane to force someone to live in death’s shadow, it is also unfair to give them no clue whatsoever that they will die.  Fine.  I propose then that we tell them a white lie.  We don’t let them know that we will kill them, because that is simply cruel.  But we give them a clue that they will die, because that’s considerate.  So, the judge actually giving a death sentence might say something like, “I sentence you to 48 years and a half hour, both sentences to run consecutively.  Oh, and your arteries are really clogged.”

The final impediment to this brilliant system of mine is the appeals system.  We can’t just go killing people.  We need to give them the opportunity to appeal their sentences just in case, for some crazy reason, maybe we should not kill them.  Well, the solution is just that we can appeal their death sentences without them.

Listen, like I said, I used to work with death-row inmates.  The only ones who are actually helpful during their appeals process are the innocent ones.  The rest of them were so drugged up or crazy or mentally retarded or desperate or scarred by years of abuse or whatever when they committed their crime that they thought they were at home beneath the overpass on I-94 waiting for cable to be installed when they were actually sawing some old lady’s head off.  Your average guilty person will think he got off easy with his sentence of 22¾ years plus two years of imprisonment in Second Life, but the innocent ones will still be helpful during their appeals because they will want to appeal even that sentence and will want to see a cardiologist besides.  So the whole appeal thing is nothing to worry about.  Lawyers can appeal on behalf of the guilty ones without their help and can appeal with the help of the innocent ones just as they do now, and we can butcher them all when the time comes with spotless consciences.

So, we have solved the problem of the cruelty of forcing someone to live in the shadow of death.  But how do you humanely kill them?

The Cruelty-Free Slaughter of People

Let’s face it: we all know that injecting someone with toxins or electrocuting them or gassing them or hanging them or blindfolding them before shooting them is simply not humane.  Ask yourself, “how would I like to die?”  Or ask yourself, “How would I like for my significant other to die, assuming I have not been through a bitter, humiliating, prolonged divorce?”  I bet that none of the above choices comes to mind.  Those are not cool ways to die.  Imagine that, in a terrible screw-up, your mom was forcibly strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal doses of anesthetic and paralyzing agents, and maybe a toxin.  Do you hear yourself saying, “Well at least she died peacefully?”

We can do better than that.

In order for death to be painless and humane, it has to be instant.  It’s fine when someone dies in their sleep, but I’m not convinced that they are not always having a horrible nightmare about dying.  I mean, I have had dreams about dying and I did not even wake up later to discover that I really was dead.  People who think it’s peaceful to die while asleep must mean that it’s peaceful for them, because the dead dude may have been having a three-hour-long dream about being eaten by ants as he died.

No, in order to be humane, death has to be so quick that the person dying can’t see it coming and doesn’t have time to feel it at all.  As it turns out, this kind of quick death is pretty damned hard to plan.  I suspect that this happens in real life on occasion.  Bam!  Lights out!  But planning death that way is pretty tough.  For instance, after people have their heads sliced off by guillotine, they still blink and think and stuff.  (See Does the head remain briefly conscious after decapitation? and Dr. Beaurieux’s Report from 1905.)  Now, maybe they merely blink because they have something in their eye.  But still, don’t go blinking at me after you’re dead unless you want for me to assume that you’re still thinking and feeling pain and wondering whether headless is a good look for you.

In order to be sure there can be no pain whatsoever, you need to eliminate the possibility of any neural activity after death.  So, that means you can’t really have a brain.  As it so happens, this is also a good way to ensure that you never come back as a zombie.

This painless death is, as I said, pretty damned hard to ensure, but we have all known how to achieve this sort of demise since before puberty.  The answer is all in cartoons.

In cartoons, they really know how to kill people.  (Well, actually, they know how to kill animals like incredibly well funded coyotes and roosters with southern accents and ingenious cats, but applying those lessons to people is easy.)

What we need is a method of killing people that conforms to our white lie.  So, our death row inmate can’t know that he is about to die or all those years of having everyone lie to him about his strange sentence and his ovarian cancer will have been in vain.  This is another good reason not to use the guillotine.  Not only do we want to avoid that annoying blinking, but it is also hard to get someone to stick his head under an enormous sliding blade designed to chop heads off without him thinking it’s a dangerous and stupid thing to do.  Only the very stupidest of prisoners would fall for the old “Look, somebody dropped a quarter on the other side of that guillotine!” trick.

From cartoons, we learn that flattening somebody completely is one of the most humane way to dispose of them.  There are many ways to achieve this.  We will have to immediately eliminate the slow ones: rolling over someone with a steamroller or squeezing someone through a printing press.  Those methods may work fine in cartoons, but they are too slow and torturous for real-world use.  Even if you run over the prisoner’s head first, he has got to see it coming. 

Similarly, although it has a great deal of promise, we will need to eliminate the method whereby you slam someone into a large object at great speed, usually by means of a cannon or an enormous slingshot.  There are a lot of problems with this method.  Getting an inmate to unwittingly climb into a cannon or stand in the pocket of a tremendous slingshot facing a sheer rock wall is probably even harder than getting him to stick his head voluntarily into a guillotine.  Also, there would be a few seconds of sheer terror while he is headed toward that rock wall. 

This is, incidentally, why we should not even consider death by falling from a great height.  Everyone who has seen any cartoon knows that a person who unwittingly walks over the edge of a cliff takes a few steps in the air past the cliff, but won’t fall until he realizes that he has just walked over the edge of a cliff.  And then he is terrified.  In addition, all too often the person’s body falls but his neck stretches so that his head remains at the height of the top of the cliff for a few seconds longer than his body.  That has got to sting.  It’s the same with propelling someone into a large object.  We want to avoid that terror.

We could always come up with an elaborate ruse, like designing a roller coaster that shoots toward the cliff and, at the last instant, the inmate’s chair ejects into the rock face.  But that’s just mechanically so difficult that there has to be an easier way.  Besides, some people just don’t like roller coasters and I’m sure that holds true for some condemned inmates, too.  After spending years and millions of dollars designing this ingenious deathtrap, it would be very disappointing to tell the inmate, “Johnny, you can ride the roller coaster today!” only to have him roll his eyes in disinterest.

But the slingshot and cannon idea brings us to the next great murderous cartoon innovation: if you can’t shoot Mohammad into the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammad!  Dropping heavy objects onto people is a fast and painless way to flatten them.  Boulders, safes, anvils, and grand pianos are favorites in cartoons.  And you can be pretty sure that if you drop a bank vault on someone’s head, his flattened eyes will not blink at you.

So, dropping really, really heavy things onto people is a very humane way to kill them.  There are only two problems with this idea.  First, what if he looks up just as we release the anvil?  He could jump out of the way.  Second, it is hard to get someone to stand under a grand piano or a boulder suspended by a piece of string.  For both of these reasons, you would probably need to confine the person under the piano because you really only have one shot and you do not want to miss.  But confining someone under an anvil undermines our whole idea that people should not know they are in mortal danger even up to their very last breath.  Moreover, I think we should try to confine our prisoners as little as possible.

I do not want to go into it in this particular blog entry because it is something of a tangent but, if we seek to be humane, we should strive for free-range prisons.  Inmates should be able to wander freely about the confines of the prison without constraint.  To the extent humanly possible, inmates should have unlimited access to the nurturing outdoors, and should be fed natural, simple, additive-free foods without the routine use of chemicals, steroids, or antibiotics.  That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

Unfortunately, tying people up so we can drop extremely heavy objects in order to squish them conflicts with our free-range principle.  We need our inmates humanely pulverized the first time without fail, but it’s hard to achieve that if they are free to dash out of the way at the very last moment, or not to stand under the grand piano in the first place.  So, although this idea holds the most promise of all the ideas so far for implementing humane carnage on behalf of justice, we should utilize it only if we cannot find a better one.

Fortunately, cartoons do offer a better idea: blasting inmates’ heads off.  In a lot of cartoons, cartoon characters will unwittingly accept a cigar that is really a stick of dynamite, only to have their heads blown right off their shoulders.  For some reason, cartoon characters love cigars, even though it is hard for me to recall even one instance in which a cartoon character ever smoked a cigar that was not a stick of dynamite.  In any case, this is a great idea.  If your head has been instantly liquefied by means of explosives, you will not blink at me.

And we needn’t use only cigars because, unlike cartoon characters, some people do not like cigars.  We can use food, too.  Hot dogs and candy bars, for instance, that are really sticks of dynamite.  And if we used C-4 plastic explosives instead of TNT, the possibilities are truly endless!  You could mold it to look like anything!  Think marzipan!  This could give a whole new meaning to the term, “mushroom cloud,” and we could dispense with the last meal at the same time we carried out the death sentence. All we would need to do is detonate the food just as the prisoner bit into it, either manually or automatically through some mechanism that triggers when the explosive is bitten into.  We could also fortify the explosives with essential nutrients.

The only problem we now face is that we would need to isolate a prisoner in order to blow his head off.  Other convicts might get skittish if they see another prisoner’s head explode when he bites into a Charleston Chew.  So, we would need to move our condemned inmate into some confined space away from the other prisoners to blast his skull off, preferably a blast-proof room of some sort.  We could do this through any ruse.  This could simply be done by means of an invitation to a private feast in some isolated area, or we could always have the inmates retire to eat separately for the duration of their incarceration.  Really, I think, “Pssst!  I saw a candy bar in room 412!” would probably work most of the time.  But I also think it’s fine to tell one more white lie in the interest of avoiding cruelty.  “Mr. Inmate, your appeals have paid off and you will soon be free.  We’re just waiting for the final preparations to be completed.  In the meantime, we would like to move you to the presidential suite so you are ready to go when the time comes.  Not only is the presidential suite spacious and comfortable, but there are cigars there filled with both tobacco and marijuana.  For dinner, you can have hot dogs, candy bars, foot-long subs, and all the marzipan you can eat.  It’s our way of saying, ‘goodbye’”  And the best thing about telling this lie is that when the prisoner goes to collect his stuff, he will tell other inmates that he is about to be released so they won’t miss him after we puree his head.

This is a simple, cheap, and cruelty-free method of butchery that requires no elaborate planning.  Just for good measure, we could always have a few dozen anvils strung to the ceiling of our blast-proof room that we release as soon as we hear the explosion, but I hardly think this is necessary.  After the execution, all that would be left to do is clean up the room and prepare it for the next condemned inmate.

There you have it: an essentially foolproof, simple, cost-effective system for humanely butchering condemned inmates.  Lie to them, and then painlessly convert their heads into jam.  This is not rocket science, so I do not know why nobody has thought of it before.  Maybe, for some unknown reason, people like killing other people inhumanely rather than taking the time to implement a compassionate system such as mine.  Whatever the reason, it’s high time we did away with the old system and implemented a more merciful means of exterminating people.  It’s the only civilized thing to do.

Leave a comment....