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Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002 - 6:19 p.m. You can always tell when the local farmers are in �full harvest� mode. My allergies kick into overdrive (asthma is acting up, too), there are several fatal collisions involving slow-moving farm vehicles and fast-moving motorist reported on the nightly news, and everything stays dusty, even inside your house. For those who don�t live in a farm-intensive part of the country, let me explain: To remove the crops (mostly corn and soybeans around here) from the fields, farmers sit behind the wheel of these enormous, air-conditioned, cd player equipped, and heated combines. They cost well over $100,000 (depreciated out over 10 years, with help from Uncle Sam), and they gobble up 14 rows (or more) of amber grain and spindly-looking bean stalks at a time. In the process of doing this, they have to separate the grain from the rest of the plant (or �chaff�), Too elementary for ya? O.k., what they do is kick up a tremendous amount of dry matter (both dirt and chaff) out of the backside of the machinery, looking like some kind of bright green, metallic monster eliminating bodily waste. Most of the waste hits the ground. But not the smallest particles. Those are picked up in the steady fall breeze, transporting them for many miles until the somehow settle all over every horizontal surface inside of your home. Or, since we are surrounded by acreage at the storage, all over every flat surface at work. Someone pointed out the layer of dust on the computer (oops- New Slim Client) desk today, asking me when I last cleaned it off. That would be last Friday. The windows have been closed ever since. There was enough dust to write your name on all of the desks. We need a little rain around here�.. I experimented a little with the N.S.C. today. Yesterday, before I left work I sent an email to my home computer. Somehow, it managed to avoid the prying eyes of Big Brother George, the crooked governor of our state, and it made it into my home mailbox. I added the address to my Outlook Express, and in turn I sent an email to my work name. I also included the file attachment for the keep left, er, right sign that I posted here yesterday, just to see if I could. That also worked. Amazing! I spent a few minutes today setting up my personal contacts book, loading a few bills into the old MMI system that piggybacks onto the N.S.C., and working with the version of Word (circa 1997) that is loaded into the system. Just for fun (ha!), I made a very short Word document, inserted into an email, and sent it to my home address. It didn�t work. It wouldn�t allow the actual document to be transferred. Might be a good future to have, now that I am thinking about it. At least this way, if one of Governor George�s crooked cronies tries to send top-secret files , containing his illegal contributions and kick-backs he has received while in office, they can�t. And no, I wasn�t planning on sending any sensitive documents home. I just wanted to see if I could forward ANY document. I can�t. That�s fine with me� I also tried to surf outside of the NDDOT home page. I considered it a challenge. I managed to get only one place NOT associated with NDDOT- the state museum library pages. If I every need to kill a little time, I guess I can read about the history of the Native Americans who settled this part of the country�� Speaking about injustices, our corrupt Gov. has started his clemency hearings for ALL prisoners who are now on death row. Originally, he planed on giving them all either pardons or reducing their individual sentences to life in prison, but the public outcry stopped him from implementing it before he could. Now, before anyone gets all huffy about the death penalty (either for or against), let me throw my thoughts out there for you to chew up and spit on the ground: I don�t think that the death penalty works. I don�t believe in coddling vicious murderers, either. I think that when the evidence proves beyond a doubt that you took another person�s life in a malicious manner, you have given up your rights to walk the streets as a free person, period. The death penalty doesn�t work for several reasons. It is used in a disproportional way , being handed out to non-whites far more often than whites convicted of the same crime(I am white, btw) . Killing the killer doesn�t take away what he did. And the number one reason why I am not all for the death penalty? I think it�s better to leave the total dregs of society in solitary for the rest of their lives. They can�t kill anyone else, they get to spend the rest of their days, dwelling on what they did instead of filling appeal after appeal to get their death sentence overthrown on technicalities. And society doesn�t have to fear their actions anymore. But that�s just the way I feel. It�s called an opinion. (I�m sure I just angered about 95% of the people who have read this far down into today�s entry. Feel free to tell me why I am wrong. I can take other�s opinions) Anyway, about these clemency hearings�.. Juries heard all of the evidence in each of these cases. Some deliberated for days before they reached a verdict. Some of these people have committed the most heinous crimes recorded in our state in the last 30 years. And Gov. George wants to let a review board decide whether they should be pardoned or have their sentences reduced after about one hour of testimony per criminal in an hearing. That kind of trashes the whole �jury of your piers� court system, doesn�t it? A panel of people appointed by the state (the Prisoner Review Board) will hear pros and cons on each case for around an hour each (140 in all), and then make their recommendations to the �honorable� Gov. He has hinted that if even one of these cases shows signs that an innocent person was convicted, he might grant clemency to them all. This whole mess stems from a group of cases where the local prosecutors convicted innocent people for crimes they didn�t commit. They wrongfully convicted were all from the same area of the state, not the whole state. Some of the people he will decide on murdered multiple times. One pair cut the nearly full-term fetus out of the uterus of a former girlfriend, killing her, and then killed her other child for good measure. Why? They did it because he didn�t think he would get to see his future child, now that he had a new girlfriend. This is just one example. There have been several more profiled in the papers recently. The death penalty is a thorny issue, and it divides many people. But for a bribe-taking, corrupt Governor (who�s approval rating was around 17% the last time I heard it reported) to overturn the work of 140 juries and just grant clemency because he can is totally wrong. If you made it this far, thanks for letting me vent. Anybody have anything they would like to say about this issue, feel free to use my guestbook or drop me an email...
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