Tinkering with the Machinery of Death
The Supreme Court has denied a stay of execution to Troy Davis. He is being executed by the state of Georgia as I type this.
‘This Is a Time and Place When the Carrying Out of Official “Justice” Is Barbaric, and That Only by Defying It Can One Claim Civility’
So why is Davis likely to be executed tonight? The answer is a combination of institutional stubbornness and structural racism. The State of Georgia has been insisting for so long that Troy Davis is the murderer that to backtrack after 20 years would throw public credibility out the window, not just in regards to this specific case but also in regard’s to the state’s criminal justice system as a whole. So they would rather dig in their heels, stick to their story, and let an innocent man die.
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Some state representatives have recently called upon the prison staff that is tasked with executing Troy Davis to go on strike. It is the hope of every decent person that they do so. This is a time and place when the carrying out of official ‘justice’ is barbaric, and that only by defying it can one claim civility.
In These Times on the execution of Troy Davis. Via Facebook.
Still Wednesday!
* Troy Davis’s former warden has signed a letter asking corrections officers not to participate in his execution. Twitter has confirmed for me that Obama cannot intervene—not that I believe he would—which makes the situation look pretty hopeless. (UPDATE: Still getting conflicting information on this; apparently DoJ could intervene on a civil rights basis.) UPDATE: The Georgia Supreme Court has just rejected Davis’s request for a stay.
* Noam Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux.
* The headline reads, “How the US Planned to Destroy Britain Just a Few Years Before World War II.” Via Bitter Laughter.
* Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know.
* Making the worst day of someone’s life just a little worse: Miscarriage No Longer Considered “Emergency” For Medicaid Patients In Washington State. If you plan to miscarry, please, make an appointment.
* A news story scientifically calibrated to give you the most mixed feelings possible: Highland Park, Il.-based nonprofit software testing company Aspiritech is pioneering a new business model in the United States that champions the unique concentration and detail-oriented strengths of its 15 employees, all of whom have been diagnosed with disorders on the autism spectrum.
* AIDS Puzzle Solved By Computer Gamers.
* And an Elizabeth Warren video on class warfare has gone viral. Warren ’16?
Tuesday Night Links
* With Troy Davis denied clemency despite ample doubt about his guilt, it’s worth remembering that according to Antonin Scalia even “actual innocence” isn’t sufficient to keep the state from executing you.
* “Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project… where are the white heroes?’” he told the press during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film. Danny Glover is having trouble getting funding for a film on Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint-Louverture.
* If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna species worldwide could become extinct. Scientists … discovered that the proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80% of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms, according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Amazon.
* Peak Oil: 1979? Via Kevin Drum.
* Global Energy Use To Jump 53 Percent By 2035.
* UCSD’s Tom Murphy rediscovers Limits to Growth.
* And then there’s Germany: A mysterious “forest boy” presented himself at Berlin City Hall two weeks ago. The first words he spoke were English: “I’m alone in the world. I don’t know who I am. Please help me.” He believed to be 17, and to have spent the last five years sleeping on the ground in a forest. His identity is a mystery.
‘Senior Administrators Now Officially Outnumber Faculty at the UC’
But we all know the budget cuts have been tough. Even an administration striving to preserve the education and research missions of the University by directing as many of the cuts as possible at administrative overhead might have to make painful cuts to the employees responsible for education and research in such an environment. The cuts to senior administrators must be even steeper, right? At least as steep?
Somehow the ranks of managers have continued to grow right through this difficult period – up 4.2% between April, 2009 and April, 2011. In fact, the dismal prediction of our 2009 post has now come to pass: UC now has more senior managers (8,822 FTE) than ladder rank faculty (8,669 FTE).
Race and ‘Mad Men’
It’s been accepted more or less as a truism that black people didn’t work on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. But facts are stubborn things. There were black people in advertising even then, some (a few) in high places. Contrary to the popular assumption, blacks in that era met with success and challenges on Madison Avenue, like everywhere else.
‘Our Goal Is Nothing Less Than to Survive the Apocalypse to Come in Comfort and Luxury’
The headline reads, “LA Porn Studio Begins Construction On ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ Underground Bunker.” Via zunguzungu’s Sunday Reading. The Dollhouse is real.
‘We’re Building Things Based on a Hydrological Lie’
The headline reads, “World’s Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions.”
Other Game of the Night
An oldie but a goodie: Hatetris. My best is 5 lines; Neil claims he got 7.
