Mindhunters | 2014 May

Paying Attention to the Deniers

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker On May 14, 2014 · 9 Comments

Grace McDonnell & Senator James M. Inhofe

Last month, in a column entitled, “Some Ramblings on the Fringe,” we compared the Amanda Knox-Raffaele Sollecito “guilters” and Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr. – the white supremacist who opened fire outside two Jewish community facilities in Kansas – to the Holocaust deniers. We got some criticism for that, particularly from those who disagree with us about who killed Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. The white supremacists, not surprisingly, didn’t bother to respond. We wonder if many of them can even read.

But while we don’t take either of these groups too seriously as intellectual threats, we do take their comments extremely seriously, particularly in this age of Internet ubiquity. And two new incidents this week will help demonstrate why.

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Affirmative Action or Confirmative Bias?

By Mark Olshaker On May 12, 2014 · 5 Comments

2 Ivy League Rejects

There has been a fair amount of discussion lately, from the Supreme Court on down, about the necessity and appropriateness in this day and age of preferential admissions treatment for various minorities at highly selective universities. And while those discussions are a necessary part of the social and legal conversation, I happen to think they miss a major point.

Because no one is talking about what I call the “Ivy League Racket.”

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Challenging the Constitution in Virginia

By Mark Olshaker On May 7, 2014 · Add Comment

Fairfax County, Virginia

From the state that gave us the slave-owning author of “all men are created equal,” that crafted the concept of “massive resistance” to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and lately tried to foist medically meaningless transvaginal ultrasounds on women seeking legal abortions, comes a new assault on both the Constitution and common sense.

In a professed effort to deal with “complaints from residents regarding frequent large gatherings at neighborhood homes [that can] create parking, noise and other concerns for the neighborhood,” Fairfax County, Virginia is attempting to institute a statute decreeing in private homes that “any group assembly exceeding forty-nine (49) people in one day shall not occur more frequently than three (3) times in any forty (40) day period.”

In other words, Pay no attention to that pesky First Amendment.

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The Death Penalty: Justice or Murder?

By Mark Olshaker On May 5, 2014 · 7 Comments

Clayton Lockett

Last Thursday, May 1, Eugene Robinson published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post entitled, “There’s no humane way to carry out the death penalty.” It concerned the horribly botched execution by lethal injection of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, then expanded out to a discussion of the wrongness of the death penalty in general. Robinson is a fine and sensitive writer whom I greatly respect and read regularly with interest, so I thought it was worth responding to this column on a subject to which John Douglas and I have devoted considerable research and thought.

Upon reflection, I think Mr. Robinson got it right on several issues and wrong on a critically important one.

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I Said What???

By Mark Olshaker On May 2, 2014 · 7 Comments

Public Minister Giuliano Mignini

The Motivation Document released this week in the re-conviction of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of Meredith Kercher is just one more example of the inexplicable disregard for facts, evidence and logic that has plagued this case from the beginning. But what makes the case such an important cautionary tale and object lesson is the disregard for truth, and this also goes back to the very beginning.

Herewith, one example.

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