G. Frink's

When you read my novel "The Four," you will understand why I greeted with a flash of rage the U.S. Supreme Court decision today banning the death penalty for child rape.

Yet rage, I believe, is no basis for justice. So I refocused emotion's energy on constructive reason.

Although there is within me the impulse to tear child rapists limb from limb, that impulse is quieted by the knowledge that our justice is too often unjust.

We have in this country a dismaying, recent history of hysterical child sex crime allegations that were later proved false, of death-penalty murder convictions that
DNA evidence proved wrong and of otherwise punishing the innocent in capital cases.

This is not a defense of the majority legal argument. In my view child rape does grave and lasting damage to the child, inflicting psychological harm whose pain may increase with age until it becomes unendurable. I see no hope for a punishment to fit that crime.

Instead, I find myself in agreement with Louisiana-born Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote in "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions:"

Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?

We few North Carolinia voters made Mary Fant Donnan the Democratic labor commissioner nominee yesterday.

Expecting turnout would be low, I was still unaccountably sad to find just one other voter at my Wylie School (Raleigh, N.C.) voting place Tuesday morning.

Just 44 voters had preceded me to the digital ballot box in an area where I could count almost half that many Mary Fant Donnan signs in well-manicured front yards, and had yet to see a John Brooks sign.

      Lonely Wylie School (Raleigh, N.C.) voting place, Tuesday.

Photo by George Frink | (c)

It was the same everywhere.

Less than two percent of the registered voters went to the polls in North Carolina yesterday.

Donnan won by a landslide 68% to her opponent John Brooks' 32%.

Donnan will face incumbent Republican Cherie Berry in November, and I went to Fletcher Park where the flowers are blooming and more people walked with me in the warm sun than had gathered with me at the polling place four blocks away. Mothers with babies in strollers smiled at me as I made pictures of the flowers.

      Fletcher Park flower.

Photo by George Frink | (c)

Triple espresso, black and leaded, please.

No sugar or other abominations, thank you.

Yes. I'm addicted.

The addiction may lengthen my life, according to findings published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, or by the lights of those studies, at least do me no harm.

After watching two sets of deeply beloved grandparents miserably endure decaffeinated coffee, I decided to drink it the way I like it, and the way they liked it, and die when undenatured coffee kills me. If it does.

Only perchance, then, does strong coffee bring me Alzheimer's prevention and IQ preservation, some protection against the Frink family vulnerability to diabetes, a little insurance against liver cancer and perhaps other benefits.

My coffee obstinacy is one of the reasons my sons Jack and George Rankin are fond of muttering darkly, "Dad's never going to change," although I have given coffeeless life one dreary, sleepy go after another at their behest.

I succeeded each time, always feeling as though I had betrayed my grandparents. You see, my grandparents gained nothing at all from their misery. The New England Journal of Medicine reported years ago that the coronary heart disease and/or stroke their misery was prescribed to curtail was unaffected by their sacrifice. In a widely-cited, October 11, 1990, article the NEJM reported:

These findings do not support the hypothesis that coffee or caffeine consumption increases the risk of coronary heart disease or stroke.

The sense of betrayal and associated memories are really what turned me back to the pleasures of the dark brew as soon as I bumped into new evidence that my espresso stream might be good for me. Not the science.

Recollections how much my Grandfather George Frink enjoyed making a fine pot of boiled coffee over a hunting camp fire would come flooding back. Like a waking dream song I would see the joy my Grandfather B.L. Hinnant took in his marvel of a glass-pot percolator and feel again the satisfaction grandmothers Elvy Frink and Ruth Hinnant found in a fresh-made afternoon cup of coffee.

They drank coffee and we talked, the way Southern writers and their kin have talked for generations, creating together what I eventually understood as a family intellectual life.

The memories of our conversations amid the smells of their coffee were always with me, yet I was slow to understand how preparing and drinking coffee is for me a celebration of the best nurturing, sustaining aspects of my birth family.

Unintentionally, my sons led me to this understanding and so in this one thing they are exactly right about me.

Dad is not going to change away from the celebration of family which attends his daily brewing of coffee.

Southern Baptist arbiter dicta says women should not be ordained as pastors, but the SBC may have it upside down and backward. @blogbarger offers the top ten reasons why men should not be ordained.

Eugene E. Cho hits the The Ultimate Fighting Jesus right in the nose.

More people are in slavery than at any other time in history.

Slavery may be the fastest growing criminal enterprise, one the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released this month, plainly says requires more intensive enforcement effort.

Or the problem will continue to grow worse.

Rapidly shrinking enterprises, like the Southern Baptist Convention, are not required to die.

They prefer death to adaptation.

Like the SBC, they often rush to embrace death by refusing to effectively apply easy-to-use, cost-effective technologies and services which speak directly to the markets which are their life's blood.

Technologies like wireless communication and services like Twitter, which was at last poorly employed at the SBC convention in Indianapolis.

Why Twitter? asked pastor Joe Thorn, a Saint Charles, IL-based Baptist blogger whom I see as an SBC technology leader.

His answer offered practical applications of Twitter, without noting that Twitter and other wireless-dominated services can speak directly to cellphone-communication-fixated youth the SBC must reach and convert in order to forestall an almost 50% decline in church numbers forecast for 2030 by Frank Page, past president of the SBC.

"The reality is it's our fault," Page said earlier this year.

Yes, and that means the problem of decline is one Baptist leaders can solve by altering course to seriously apply effective new solutions.

Yet solutions that work for comparable organizations are left on the shelf, or when one like Twitter is taken down and used, merely tasted. Toyed with really, although Ed Stetzer of Lifeway's "tasting" was almost a game try at tweeting the Indianapolis convention.

Game, but unsuccessful. Stetzer's twitterstream did almost nothing to help his followers understand the direction, real import and impact of events. Even Thorn gently derided Sitzer's effort as keeping "people informed about who’s wearing what at the SBC."

Worthwhile application of available wireless technology at the SBC convention in Indianapolis would have seen application of Twitter, not as though it were a toy, but in ways that made it possible to follow the content events. Well, follow the content of events as understood by the Southern Baptist twitterati (an elite which currently has no members).

BrightKite would have been put to work mapping attendee travels so that everyone could follow those in whom they were interested, often literally from room to room.

There would have been proliferation of individual audio and video streams via Qik, Sesmic and their competitors to provide remote audiences with sights and sounds as they occurred and from a wonderfully enriching variety of perspectives.

An entrancing, enlightening, audience-recruiting measure of virtual attendance and participation would have been the result.

Instead of the SBC's continued embrace of inflexibility and decline toward death.

When I was a child, the Lumbee earned my enduring admiration by vanquishing the Ku Klux Klan with war whoops and gunfire at the Battle of Hayes Pond, thus successfully defending their reputation for both ferocity and integrity.

It was disappointing to hear that just-elected Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt, a Lumbee Indian, came equipped with a padded resume.

Hunt's advanced degrees are variously honorary or issued by what the Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily calls "diploma mills."

My disappointment grew when I learned that, looking back, Hunt's personal resume isn't the only one to consider here. Robert Parham, executive editor of Ethics Daily, wrote:

One of Hunt's own "sons in the ministry" was forced to resign from the prominent First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, Fla., in part because of his diploma mill degrees.
Highly recommended to the church by Hunt, Steven Flockhart was forced out "over a controversy involving fabricated education credentials," reported Baptist Press, which noted that the Palm Beach Post had discovered that Flockhart had obtained correspondence degrees from Covington Theological Seminary, "a Georgia school not accredited by any recognized accrediting agency."

Can a man who presumes the title "Dr." as though he had a valid academic Phd., and fails to accurately assess his own key staff, lead his denomination out of the land of memebership "free fall"?

A majority of those voting at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Indianapolis said "yes," and it is faintly conceivable that he will prove to be something of respite from hard-line conservatism which is grinding the SBC down. We will see, but today I am moved to give thanks for being a Presbyterian.

Fayetteville Observer photo editor and well-known amateur astronomer Johnny Horn set the professional standard for images of extraterrestrials. Although he isn't responsible for any of the grainy, out-of-focus stills and footage you may have seen, he knows what good photojournalism requires: "Get the names of the aliens. They've come a long way, and we owe it to them to get their names right."

Denver resident Jeff Peckman failed to meet that standard last week, and thus far has permitted only a select few dozen people to view his video of the alleged visitation by an identified star traveler.

Second-hand accounts are available, however. A Rocky Mountain News blogger who viewed the video on Friday wrote that it showed:

A classic E.T.-like creature, about 4 feet tall, with a narrow chin, a broad forehead and almond eyes. ... Audience members wanted to know why the creature traveled all those light years just to peep in a window.

Peckman said he had a public purpose for his showing. As ABC news reported:

Jeff Peckman, a Denver resident and believer in alien life, has begun the work of putting a ballot initiative to the city's voters that would, if passed, establish an "extraterrestrial affairs commission" made up of 18 members appointed by the mayor to ensure public safety in the event that aliens -- or their vehicles, according to the ballot language -- were to arrive in the Mile High City.

All of this to promote formation of another commission of distinguished personages? Convinced? For those of us who after that explanation are still puzzled by Peckman's no-live-transmissions, no-recordings, by-invitation-only showing of his video, Peckman expained that "the general public will have to wait to see it because it's being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek."

We are invited to believe, then, that unimaginably obsessive voyeurs of extrasolar origin are lending themselves to the creation of yet another profitable if inconclusive "the extraterrestrials have come" documentary, and in our earth-bound rudeness we still have not bestirred ourselves to properly identify them. Or him/her.

Of our bad manners, I am so ashamed.

British-born human rights organization Reprieve has detailed evidence that extraordinary rendition continues and may involve use of prison ships -- a practice that would have infuriated the Founding Fathers.

The Founding Fathers had not forgotten that more Patriots died under horrible conditions in 16 or more British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor than in all of the Revolutionary War battles combined.

Those floating Revolutionary War hell holes were an expedient adopted when land-based prisons overflowed, whereas to would appear that Bush's prison ships, like the system of secret prisons Bush claimed to have shut down in late 2006, is secrecy.

Although the charges come forward amid the din of other news, they will not be readily dismised and forgotten. Reprieve, founded in 1999 by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, makes the charges by way carefully documented reports, which offer evidence that prison ships have been used and are in use within and outside of the territorial waters of Diego Garcia. That Indian Ocean atoll is a British territory. As a result, the reports have added fire to debate over possible complicity by British officials.

Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, argues that:

The US administration chooses ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers.

Bush administration behavior thus far, and Republican failures to press him on his misleading statements, suggests that we aren't likely to learn the full truth until a new, Democratic president is securely installed in the White House.