[wisconsin_cur]

I use an avatar showing a solar system. It would have -never- come to my mind to use a bloody kitchen knife as an avatar.
I do believe that some people here are hoping(!) for a doomer scenario, when they have wet dreams of becoming a kind of war lord in their neighbourhood with all their guns and stored food.

I think it's a macho guy thing. It's really an easy copout for men to see destructive solution to peakoil fears rather than constructive ones. It's just easier to buy a gun and hoard rations in the basement than to actually risk looking "ghey" and plant a garden and talk to your neighbors.

Some of us get paid to constructively end problems through talking... and end physical fights once they do start and before no one gets hurt and in our free time plant gardens.

I think it is a fundamentalist things to see things in black and white and it doesn't matter if you are a fundamentalist liberal who thinks violence is always avoidable or if you are a fundamentalist macho who thinks every problem has a violent solution. Both fundamentalisms are wrong and distort reality inorder to fit their dogma.

[Tanada]

I'm sure someone will post that dropping capital punishment was the blame, yet the US still has the death penalty and sees rampant crime.

Speaking of Capital Punishment there is recent news I think is very relevant to the debate.

Alabama modifies execution chamber for gas executions involving asphyxiation method

Alabama is actively modifying its execution chamber to kill condemned prisoners via nitrogen hypoxia, an untested method that would asphyxiate the condemned through a gas chamber or gas mask.

A federal judge last month ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to provide information about the hypoxia protocol in an ongoing lawsuit filed by a man petitioning the court to have his spiritual advisor present at his execution.

"The ADOC is nearing completion of the initial physical build for the nitrogen hypoxia system and its safety measures. Once the build is completed, a safety expert will make a site visit to evaluate the system and look for any points of concern that need to be addressed," Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a Tuesday court filing.

ADOC on Wednesday declined to answer a number of questions regarding the "physical build" referenced in court documents, including whether it intends to use a gas chamber or a gas mask to administer an execution method that has yet to be tested on human beings.

"The ADOC’s nitrogen hypoxia execution protocol is still under development, and the physical building modifications to the execution chamber are still in process," the department said in a Wednesday statement. "Due to the fact those two items are not yet in a finalized state and potential security concerns exist, that is all we are able to share at this time."

Alabama passed nitrogen hypoxia legislation in 2018, one of only three states to legalize the method of execution. In theory, a condemned person would inhale pure nitrogen, which would asphyxiate them.

The legislation, which proponents argued offered a more humane method of execution, effectively ended an ongoing lawsuit over lethal injection in Alabama. The legislation provided people incarcerated on death row a short window in 2018 to opt in to the method.

But the new law codified a largely hypothetical method of execution. The method has never been tested on humans, and much of the scientific record on the subject comes from veterinary science or hazard investigations, where humans accidentally died in industrial accidents or similar situations.

In Oklahoma, nitrogen hypoxia executions have technically been legal since 2015, but last year the state said it would revert to lethal injections. In 2019, The Oklahoman reported multiple manufacturers declined to be involved in the execution process, with at least seven companies declining to sell the necessary "gas delivery device."

"The big issue with nitrogen hypoxia is it is experimental," said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "We just have no idea whether it's going to work the way its proponents say it will. If it does, then there may be a viable alternative to lethal injection. If it doesn't, it may be just another method that was advertised as being humane that turns out not to be. It's completely unethical to experimentally kill someone, so we won't know. ... Nobody knows, nobody has indicated how its going to be carried out, though I suspect the death mask is more likely than a gas chamber. There was never any indication that Oklahoma intended to construct a gas chamber."

Multiple pharmaceutical companies have blocked purchases of lethal injection drugs in recent years amid growing opposition to the death penalty, leading some states to revert to alternate methods. New legislation in South Carolina resurrected the firing squad, though the state hasn't killed a prisoner in a decade, according the NPR.

A Guardian investigation found Arizona recently purchased materials to kill condemned prisoners with cyanide gas, the same method used at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Arizona has "refurbished" an old gas chamber for the executions. Like Alabama, Arizona prisoners can choose between lethal injection or the gas chamber, though executions have been halted in the state for nearly a decade after a botched injection attempt.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser

Our View: Execution delays continue; Shouldn’t Arizona consider nitrogen an obvious solution?

Arizona faces another delay in resuming executions of convicted murderers and the ongoing challenges make it clear the state better figure out some alternatives.

Executions were to resume in the coming months after a 7-year hiatus but a court order brought on by looming expiration dates of drugs used in lethal injections brought the process to a halt for now.

Problems with lethal injections — from the types of drugs used to the difficulties in obtaining the drugs from reputable manufacturers — have forced many states to at least consider other ways to carry out the death penalty.

Arizona still has a gas chamber option. Recent reports about the possibility of using it again revisited past problems with the state’s gas executions and evoked similarities to the gas used in Nazi extermination camps.

Regardless of one’s feeling about capital punishment, no one wants to see decades-long waits on death row as courts deal with execution issues. Likewise, the public’s tolerance for state execution rises and fall with perceptions of how clean and painlessly the punishment is imposed.

Firing squads are quick but too bloody. Cyanide gas can produce a traumatic reaction. Hanging is long out of favor.

Some states have considered inert gases, mostly nitrogen, which makes up 78 percent of the atmosphere. It kills painlessly in concentrated doses by diluting the oxygen to unacceptable levels and a person fall unconscious.

Nitrogen is a favored method of suicide and is readily available. The stumbling blocks to its use in executions is in the protocols, both in assuring the condemned don’t hold their breath and in assuring the safety of those nearby.

Arizona has a gas chamber, newly checked out to be safe enough to use cyanide gas. It should work on nitrogen as well.

When the Legislature returns to session, it should make execution by nitrogen or other inert gas a legal method in the state.

— Today’s News-Herald

Nitrogen solves cruel, unusual dilemma

I am 100% opposed to the death penalty, but, I’m even more opposed to painful and prolonged methods of execution.

Instead of experimenting with unproven drugs or bringing back the electric chair, hanging or firing squad, a very inexpensive, easy-to-source and painless alternative exists: nitrogen gas.

When a sealed area has its oxygen removed and replaced with nitrogen, the body cannot tell the difference. There is no odor, taste or gasping for air. Breathing continues normally and comfortably, while the brain is quickly deprived of oxygen.

Before the person knows it, they are unconscious and soon dead. Nitrogen is a modern solution for this medieval practice.

Brad Stephan

Whether you are pro or con on the issue of Capitol Punishment vs life in prison at taxpayer expense logic dictates that falling asleep and death without pain or stress is hard to describe as cruel. Most of the victims of these crimes died in terror and pain which is glossed over as unimportant by many folks. The whole controversy over botched executions from prisons using smaller than needed doses of chemical methods are to put it mildly a strange position to take. Nitrogen asphyxia is painless and leaves the body nearly unchanged. Selective asphyxia with gas has even been used as a drug free method of rendering patients unconscious for surgery by reducing the oxygen content below the threshold of consciousness. In effect the earliest methods like Ether are selective asphyxia as the chemical vapors reduce the oxygen content of the blood below the level of consciousness without hopefully killing the patient.

Using a pure N2 atmosphere means the prisoner will be rendered painlessly unconscious in moments and within 5 minutes the brain will shut down. The method has been used as a humane euthanasia method for pets and for some livestock as modern folks become ever more squeamish. See this article from the Canadian Humane Society on using Nitrogen Asphyxia for surplus pets from 1988. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 41/?page=1

If you really want to make death for prisoners quick and painless the easy option would be to inject a large dose of any opiate drug, Morphine, Heroin or so on which stops respiration instantly while rendering the recipient euphoric and rapidly unconscious. I shall never understand why using the same cocktail of drugs used to euthanize pets was chosen when a much faster and more certain single drug method was available but then again many government decisions do not make sense to me.

[Plantagenet]

Whether you are pro or con on the issue of Capitol Punishment vs life in prison at taxpayer expense logic dictates that falling asleep and death without pain or stress is hard to describe as cruel. Most of the victims of these crimes died in terror and pain which is glossed over as unimportant by many folks. The whole controversy over botched executions from prisons using smaller than needed doses of chemical methods are to put it mildly a strange position to take. Nitrogen asphyxia is painless and leaves the body nearly unchanged. Selective asphyxia with gas has even been used as a drug free method of rendering patients unconscious for surgery by reducing the oxygen content below the threshold of consciousness. In effect the earliest methods like Ether are selective asphyxia as the chemical vapors reduce the oxygen content of the blood below the level of consciousness without hopefully killing the patient.

Using a pure N2 atmosphere means the prisoner will be rendered painlessly unconscious in moments and within 5 minutes the brain will shut down. The method has been used as a humane euthanasia method for pets and for some livestock as modern folks become ever more squeamish. See this article from the Canadian Humane Society on using Nitrogen Asphyxia for surplus pets from 1988. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 41/?page=1

If you really want to make death for prisoners quick and painless the easy option would be to inject a large dose of any opiate drug, Morphine, Heroin or so on which stops respiration instantly while rendering the recipient euphoric and rapidly unconscious. I shall never understand why using the same cocktail of drugs used to euthanize pets was chosen when a much faster and more certain single drug method was available but then again many government decisions do not make sense to me.

There are well funded liberal interest groups that don't like the death penalty and will litigate against any change to the death penalty. I doubt your idea of using morphine or heroin could pass a legal challenge, since they are illegal drugs.


However, using N2 is a great idea. If its good enough for putting down animals, it should be good enough for putting down animalistic killers.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

If you really want to make death for prisoners quick and painless the easy option would be to inject a large dose of any opiate drug, Morphine, Heroin or so on which stops respiration instantly while rendering the recipient euphoric and rapidly unconscious. I shall never understand why using the same cocktail of drugs used to euthanize pets was chosen when a much faster and more certain single drug method was available but then again many government decisions do not make sense to me.

There are well funded liberal interest groups that don't like the death penalty and will litigate against any change to the death penalty. I doubt your idea of using morphine or heroin could pass a legal challenge, since they are illegal drugs.


However, using N2 is a great idea. If its good enough for putting down animals, it should be good enough for putting down animalistic killers.

Cheers!

Come let us reason together! Opiate drugs are controlled substances that are routinely prescribed in hospitals as post operative painkillers. They are also prescribed to patients with chronic pain as analgesics. The only context in which they are illegal is the same as any other controlled substance when they are used without a prescription for purposes outside the scope of pain suppression.

I would argue that as the prison physician would be prescribing the high dose treatment it is completely within the definition of legal usage. Of course all that logic aside the anti death penalty faction would do their best to challenge such actions in court.

[Outcast_Searcher]

If you really want to make death for prisoners quick and painless the easy option would be to inject a large dose of any opiate drug, Morphine, Heroin or so on which stops respiration instantly while rendering the recipient euphoric and rapidly unconscious. I shall never understand why using the same cocktail of drugs used to euthanize pets was chosen when a much faster and more certain single drug method was available but then again many government decisions do not make sense to me.

Sounds great to me (should be backed up by adequate testing and monitoring of actual prisoner behavior while dying, IMO).

To me, the ENTIRE moral question, whether it is food animals or people on death row, found guilty of heinous crimes, it's about minimizing suffering. If animals are well treated and terminated compassionately with minimal suffering (if any), then much of the "moral outrage" argument of vegans goes away, in my opinion.

Same thing for criminals: If a multiple or serial axe murderer, etc. is put to death without suffering, then the whole "revenge" theory goes out the window, IMO. (Making it cost effective by stopping the vast majority of endless court cases taking decades to resolve is another issue).

In fact, as someone who is approaching being a senior citizen, I wish ***I*** has the right to choose painless or nearly painless assisted suicide in a legally acceptable manner (re societal rules), when I get some terrible disease, and don't want to put myself OR loved ones through the emotional ordeal (and lots of pain for me) of dying over months or years. Not to mention the horrendous expense to society, presuming there are LOTS of societal "good" that could be done through various OTHER government programs (if insurance funds are used on me, against my wishes, that's still funds that can't be used on someone else, say a sick person with a good
prognosis).

To me, the height of immorality, re rights of people of their own deaths from disease, is from the state, who let me minimize the suffering of all the family cats, once it was hopeless or the family judged that the quality of life for the cat was BAD and getting worse, but won't let people make the same call FOR THEMSELVES, while they're still healthy enough not to be mentally debilitated by their disease.

If you think that's ludicrous. Fine. Try having a disease causing significant intermittent pain, which doctors are helpless to truly diagnose, much less effectively treat, for four decades or more (so I have an idea of what the horror of true unending pain as one approaches death might be like, vs. a very abstract concept), and THEN judge me harshly for my opinions re people having the right to CHOOSE for themselves. (NOT dictate what anyone else should do).

I blame religion and religious tradition for a lot of the needless suffering. Given that modern science eliminates the need for "magical sky people" to make reality "work" for educated or rational people, it's past time we moved by that nonsense (again, letting EACH person make their own choices, whether it's going to church, or how they die).

Oh, and sorry if you're say, a serial murderer or lifelong child molester, but at SOME point, personal responsibility needs to be "a thing", again, IMO. So if society decides it would rather execute you and spend a LOT of money saved on helping people -- in an imperfect world, I vote for society.

[Subjectivist]

If you really want to make death for prisoners quick and painless the easy option would be to inject a large dose of any opiate drug, Morphine, Heroin or so on which stops respiration instantly while rendering the recipient euphoric and rapidly unconscious. I shall never understand why using the same cocktail of drugs used to euthanize pets was chosen when a much faster and more certain single drug method was available but then again many government decisions do not make sense to me.

Sounds great to me (should be backed up by adequate testing and monitoring of actual prisoner behavior while dying, IMO).

To me, the ENTIRE moral question, whether it is food animals or people on death row, found guilty of heinous crimes, it's about minimizing suffering. If animals are well treated and terminated compassionately with minimal suffering (if any), then much of the "moral outrage" argument of vegans goes away, in my opinion.

Same thing for criminals: If a multiple or serial axe murderer, etc. is put to death without suffering, then the whole "revenge" theory goes out the window, IMO. (Making it cost effective by stopping the vast majority of endless court cases taking decades to resolve is another issue).

In fact, as someone who is approaching being a senior citizen, I wish ***I*** has the right to choose painless or nearly painless assisted suicide in a legally acceptable manner (re societal rules), when I get some terrible disease, and don't want to put myself OR loved ones through the emotional ordeal (and lots of pain for me) of dying over months or years. Not to mention the horrendous expense to society, presuming there are LOTS of societal "good" that could be done through various OTHER government programs (if insurance funds are used on me, against my wishes, that's still funds that can't be used on someone else, say a sick person with a good
prognosis).

To me, the height of immorality, re rights of people of their own deaths from disease, is from the state, who let me minimize the suffering of all the family cats, once it was hopeless or the family judged that the quality of life for the cat was BAD and getting worse, but won't let people make the same call FOR THEMSELVES, while they're still healthy enough not to be mentally debilitated by their disease.

If you think that's ludicrous. Fine. Try having a disease causing significant intermittent pain, which doctors are helpless to truly diagnose, much less effectively treat, for four decades or more (so I have an idea of what the horror of true unending pain as one approaches death might be like, vs. a very abstract concept), and THEN judge me harshly for my opinions re people having the right to CHOOSE for themselves. (NOT dictate what anyone else should do).

I blame religion and religious tradition for a lot of the needless suffering. Given that modern science eliminates the need for "magical sky people" to make reality "work" for educated or rational people, it's past time we moved by that nonsense (again, letting EACH person make their own choices, whether it's going to church, or how they die).

Oh, and sorry if you're say, a serial murderer or lifelong child molester, but at SOME point, personal responsibility needs to be "a thing", again, IMO. So if society decides it would rather execute you and spend a LOT of money saved on helping people -- in an imperfect world, I vote for society.

I do not strongly disagree with anything you wrote. I feel obligated to point out that many religions accept self termination as a perfectly reasonable act if you are suffering or your death will protect others from harm. Even the early Christian chirch recognised that "Greater love hath no one than he who gives his life for another". If the other is your family who are being forced to suffer watching your struggle to cope with life's burden I think God would forgive you choosing to check out and lessen their burden. Unfortunately the Catholic Church decided that self termination was disruptive of the social structure because mistreated slaves or serfs would sometimes choose to escape their brutaliser through death. After all the church was teaching all good Christians would enter heaven with a perfect body instead of the raped/broken/beaten/brutalised body you might be forced to endure as a slave or serf.

The sadistic members of the society hated it when their victims chose death suffering, and they paid the bulk of tithes to the church so their desires became church doctrine.

Just something to mull over before you condemn all religion or the faults of any denomination for the faults of others. Heck Shinto and Islam both teach that killing yourself to further the needs of your community is a road to rewards in the afterlife.

[JuanP]

The guillotine is a very fast, painless, efficient, foolproof, and cost effective wat to kill people sentenced to death. We could also sedate and/or drug people before chopping their heads off. Just put some sedatives on their food or drink to put them to sleep and then chop their heads off. Today's lethal injection, electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad seem extremely violent and primitive to me, almost like a form of torture.

I fully support euthanasia, suicide, and assisted suicide, and I strongly believe in the right of any person to die in peace with dignity if they so choose.

[AdamB]

Got solar panels on your roof? Well you better learn to use weapons to defend them. Because when the lights go out, somebody in your area willing to use weapons is going to come to get your solar panels.

(Or you're water/food/seed etc. . . )

Matt
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

I miss Matt and his unemployed ambulance chaser end of the world predictions. The trolls we get nowadays can't hold a candle to his serious consideration of the dumbest ideas and incompetent technical analysis. To this day I wonder if he believed the claptrap he was selling, or just liked the money generated from getting his followers to buy his Amazon store stuff. Solar ovens for everyone!

I do thank him though for going out in a blaze of glory and revealing to the world what he really thought about the LATOC gang he created.

[Tanada]

The guillotine is a very fast, painless, efficient, foolproof, and cost effective wat to kill people sentenced to death. We could also sedate and/or drug people before chopping their heads off. Just put some sedatives on their food or drink to put them to sleep and then chop their heads off. Today's lethal injection, electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad seem extremely violent and primitive to me, almost like a form of torture.

I fully support euthanasia, suicide, and assisted suicide, and I strongly believe in the right of any person to die in peace with dignity if they so choose.

A guillotine is messy and looks scary as all get out. Nitrogen asphyxia just looks like going to sleep and drifting off to whatever happens next be that an afterlife or be that worm food depending on your personal beliefs. Whatever comes next even those of deep faith do not know until it comes upon them what comes next.