have you seen the curve f(t) = (x y) tranpose = (cos t, sin t) tranpose?

it's a helix, and right now it's in the direction of -t.

as if the day couldn't get any worse, sonia read the morning breakfast news from the financial times. a guy is going to hang in singapore (many people do, but this one just touched me particularly).

i have never seen a man being killed (except in the movies.) indeed, my memory of capital punishment is perhaps a written one from orwell (was it burmese days?) where he described a prisoner being dragged away. (he peed in his pants probably, or did i get that from a channel 8 drama serial?) even way back our teachers (well mine at least, i don't know about yours) were keen to emphasise that capital punishment was morally ambiguous, and even way back we had already learnt that punishment has a retributive (cathartic) and utilitarian (keep undesirables from society) element.

forget proportionality. forget comparing different cultural attitudes towards punishment. there is probably some fallacy somewhere about wanting to make the law correspond to my own ethics. yet something is gravely wrong here? has anyone watched maria full of grace? has it transpired that not every drug dealer or mule is not evil? if i don't know the reality "on the ground" i don't care, does it not occur to you that taking someone's life in this occasion is gravely disproportionate. especially when the masterminds are sipping tequila on a beach somewhere laughing as yet another pawn is sent to the grave. and i just can't help feeling that i'm killing this person because he's being killed to make me safe. because these are OUR laws, meant to protect us.

calculate the statistics (i doubt they even exist anyway) and throw them at me. so, drugs take lives and kill children. social cost = xxx. of course, we could have the price of a human life (and i won't be so inane to claim it's infinite, although i can sense some disgust already). the arithmetic probably fails us when it comes down to singularities, but why are we not keeping them in prison for life? is that insufficient deterrence? or would it just cost us more than we're comfortable to pay? have we tried it? isn't it worth a try? would more people smuggle drugs if it were life instead of death? we don't do ourselves justice keeping on regurgitating formulaic answers. if something important happen, doesn't it warrant a review (even if you do decide in the end what you did was right). is it right we spend so much time debating a casino and its effects on us while we take capital punishment for granted? (especially if it's a foreigner, who likes them anyway?)

i don't need answers like "we need to keep singapore's reputation as a clean city tough on crime" because surely we could think of a way to do that that isn't just convenient, but humane. of course it's easier to err on the harsh side. explain it to me. or is it just because there's some law somewhere that's too difficult to change? what if we're wrong? oh of course complete knowledge is impossible and would probably hinder judgement if we kept waiting for it but it occurs to me we're crossing a line. killing someone is irreversible. i don't want to go into capital punishment for other purposes (ok, to be honest, i have never really felt sorry for a murderer) but i feel really sorry in this case. and guilty . shamed perhaps. at ineptitude.

"now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
are free to drink martinis, and watch the sun rise
while ruben sits like buddha, in a 10 foot cell
an innocent man, in a living hell"
-dylan, "hurricane"

obviously out of context but i think actually thinking in pictures sometimes makes things clearer. and i think its a great crime i haven't been able to be more eloquent in my argument. my mind's messed up now see.