No funny title for this one.

We Americans are barbarians, merciless rogues of the worst variety. Yesterday, the state of Georgia murdered a man named Troy Davis. They would claim that he was executed because he shot and killed an off-duty police officer one night in 1989, yet there was no confession and no physical evidence. The case hinged on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, seven of whom have since recanted. Even if the vast majority of witnesses had NOT recanted, it would hardly matter. We’re increasingly aware that the eyewitness testimony of strangers is so unreliable as to be virtually useless. The fact that this crime occurred at night – when it’s hard to see – and involved a gun – which tends to distract witnesses – only made matters worse. Additionally, at least one person submitted a signed affidavit after the trial claiming that another man has since confessed to having been the shooter.

Essentially, the police bungled this case. They and the prosecutors set their sights on Troy Davis, and molded the evidence to fit their vision. The point here isn’t that Davis was unequivocally innocent; he and a number of other people were absolutely present when the crime occurred. The issue is doubt. While not a supporter of capital punishment, I don’t lose sleep over the execution of people who are most assuredly guilty, but in the presence of uncertainty, execution becomes murder.

Of course, guilt isn’t even the only mitigating factor. All available evidence suggests that race plays a major and inappropriate role in determining who is sentenced to life and who is sentenced to death. Indeed just last week, the Supreme Court rightly halted the execution of a black man named Duane Buck whose race had been given as a compelling reason why he should be put to death; a psychologist testified at his trial that, as a black man, he was likely to re-offend and would therefore pose a permanent threat to society. In short, a white man in his shoes would have been jailed for life. Buck was to be killed for being black.

There are also criminals whose mental capacity is a concern. During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, oversaw the execution of a man named Ricky Ray Rector. While Rector was unquestionably guilty, a botched suicide attempt just prior to his capture left him effectively lobotomized. He had no understanding of the court proceedings, nor of his sentence; he is said to have left to the side a piece of pecan pie from his final meal, telling the prison officials leading him to the death chamber that he was saving it for later.

That an innocent man may have been killed last night is unconscionable. The time has come to reign in our baser instincts, and join the civilized world.

I'm looking for someplace comfy to plant my ass!

Now that mega-rich dickholes – and their dimwitted proxies in the Republican Party – are shouting “class warfare,” it’s time to dust off the guillotines.

A little background: Despite having a household income more than 1.5 times the national median (!), my partner and I relax on $50 chairs in an apartment lit with $10 Christmas tree lights. That’s apparently what passes for a comfortable, middle-class existence these days. Now I assure you I’m not complaining. We have a place to live, a place to sit, and (eco-friendly) lights to guide our way. In short, we’re so fortunate it makes me blush. But consider the fact that NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg, resents the notion that he should pay more taxes, yet owns a million dollar couch. Makes you kind of sick, right?

I mean, really, give it a moment’s thought. A MILLION dollars! That’s completely fucking insane. You can get a really terrific couch for $1,000, a well-built, comfortable sofa that will last for years and look great in your home. It might even massage you or pull out into a bed. I can’t imagine Michael Bloomberg’s couch is 1000 times better – does it offer happy endings? – but it’s 1000 times more precious. In what universe is that kind of expense justifiable? For that kind of money he could send a half dozen poor kids to Harvard; he could pay for an uninsured cancer patient’s medical treatments; he could buy some bungalows for a few families facing foreclosure. Or he could acquire something to put his ass on. Disgusting.

This is just further evidence of what all right-thinking people already know, namely that the rich are out of control and no longer in touch with reality. Sadly, they seem adept at portraying themselves as victims and lots of people seem to buy it. I’m not talking about people whose net worth is a million dollars, although they too could stand to pony up a little more. I’m talking about people who own a single item – with the possible exception of a house – for which they paid a million dollars. There’s just no good reason for anyone to be that rich, especially when there are working people out there who can’t afford a pot to piss in. Why defend these people from the tyranny of taxes? The government taking some of their money to fund programs that ensure old people and babies don’t starve is not class warfare. Buying a million dollar couch is.

Which brings me back to my original point. They deserve to see real class warfare through the lens of a guillotine. Who’s with me?

Making Larry the Cable Guy look good

I have a theory that the History Channel’s programming decisions are made by barnyard animals. There’s really no other way to explain the travesty that is “Ancient Aliens.” “How bad could this show possibly be?” you ask. Well, it’s so bad that it makes another History Channel show, “Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy,” look positively trenchant. Larry the Cable Guy, in case you were wondering, is apparently some sort of redneck comedian who manages to make poop jokes – POOP JOKES – unfunny. You probably didn’t think such a thing was possible. It is.

Anyway, “Ancient Aliens” is so incomprehensibly stupid, so completely fucking insane, that it’s hard to look away. “Ancient Aliens” is in fact about ancient aliens. Not their civilizations – although that would be another wildly speculative show the History Channel could add to its roster – but their (alleged) interactions with ancient earthlings. Perhaps you’ve heard it said that historians and archaeologists are not sure how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, and this may be true. Such an undertaking would have required incredibly complex engineering that, according to our present understanding of their level of advancement, might have been beyond the ancients’ capabilities.

Of course the rational explanation is that we don’t know that much about the ancient world, because it was a very long time ago indeed. They may well have had knowledge and skills we tend to attribute only to much more recent civilizations. The Romans had plumbing for Christ’s sake. They even brought it to the Britons, who forgot all about it after Rome fell, and didn’t rediscover it until 1976. Shit happens. Gaps in knowledge exist. Our best recourse is to keep on investigating, accepting that there are some things we may never know.

This view is not shared by the talking heads on “Ancient Aliens.” These maniacs, who prefer to be called ancient astronaut theorists, think the answers lie in outer space; take a gap in our knowledge of the ancient world, and insert extra-terrestrials. We don’t know how the Egyptians built the pyramids, so aliens must have done it. Their motivation? Well some ancient astronaut theorists speculate that the aliens needed gold for their spaceships, and came to earth to mine it. Some further speculate that humans were in fact created through a series of genetic experiments performed by these greedy spacemen on existing terrestrial species, with the intent of producing a race of workers who would do the mining for them. I speculate that ancient astronaut theorists are psychopaths.

Said psychopaths are also charmingly clueless when it comes to mythology. You see, a myth is by definition untrue; were it based on fact, it would not be a myth. This is of little concern to ancient astronaut theorists, who are not members of the reality-based community. They’re laboring under the misapprehension that ancient myths are historical fact, and therefore require explanation. If the ancient peoples of Peru believed that the sun god descended from the heavens, straddling a dragon with something shiny in his hand, this is evidence that Peruvians from olden times were visited by an alien – misidentified as the sun god by the credulous ancients – riding a spacecraft – misidentified as a dragon – holding a technological device of some sort – unidentifiable not only to the backward Peruvians thousands of years ago, but evidently to modern ancient astronaut theorists as well.

One particular ancient astronaut theorist on “Ancient Aliens” has really captured my heart, a gentleman by the name of Giorgio Tsoukalos. He generally sports a velvet smoking jacket and defiantly wears his hair in a style that brings to mind Ace Ventura. According to wikipedia his credentials consist of an undergraduate degree from Ithaca College – smugly known as “IK” among students at neighboring Cornell University – in the field of Sports Information Communications. Mr. Tsoukalos is precisely the breed of lunatic you’d expect to be dreaming up conspiracy theories in his garage, and to know that he really is doing just that is almost comforting. It means that all is right with the world. Anyway, he’s a real gem, and worth the price of admission (or cable).

When it comes right down to it, I really can’t recommend this program enough. If you like to scream obscenities at your TV, “Ancient Aliens” is most definitely the show for you.