Posts Tagged ‘Innocence Project’
Weekend Links!
* C21 2015 call for papers: “After Extinction.”
* More 2014 postmortems: The Democrats Have Two Choices Now: Gridlock or Annihilation. And in Michigan: Democrats Get More Votes, Lose Anyway. Davis Campaign Marked by Failed Tactics, Muddled Messages. Stop denying the truth: The Democrats got walloped. What happened to that Democratic turnout machine? Game Change ’14. What Does It Mean for Hillary? Stop Whining About Young Voters, You Jerks. Shockingly, my call to abolish the Constitution altogether has received little traction.
* Thankfully, it’s not all bad news: I was about to hype up a Scott Walker 2016 run. Then I watched his victory speech.
* Elsewhere in the richest, most prosperous society ever to exist in human history: Ninety-year-old man faces jail for giving food to homeless people.
* The 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion.
* It’s Cheaper to Buy a Judge Than a State Senator.
* Uber Is Pushing Drivers Into Subprime Loans. If you want a vision of the future: Amazon Is Beta-Testing Uber to Deliver Packages.
* What I’m not concerned with here is achieving some final and total harmony between the interests of each and the interests of all, or with cleansing humanity of conflict or egotism. I seek the shortest possible step from the society we have now to a society where most productive property is owned in common – not in order to rule out more radical change, but precisely in order to rule it in.
* Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. Flipping Schools: The Hidden Forces Behind New Jersey Education Reform. Massachusetts Committed to Chasing Teachers Away.
* Are We Forgiving Too Much Student-Loan Debt? CHE is ON IT.
* What could possibly go wrong? Obama Vows to Work With Republicans on College Costs.
* Oh, right, that. Banks Urge Investors To Buy For-Profit College Stocks Now That The GOP Is Taking Back Congress.
* Seems like a great bunch of guys: For-Profit Groups Sue to Block Gainful Employment Rules. The estimate is that 65% of for-profit students are enrolled in programs that wouldn’t pass.
* Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
* R0y Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” painting is based on one of my panels from an old DC war comic. Roy got four million dollars for it. I got zero.
* Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con’s Guide To Prison Weaponry.
* How GamerGate Is Influencing MIT Video Game Teachers. I’m wrestling with how much this needs to take over the syllabus of my “Video Game Culture” seminar next semester.
* It’s hard to study Scientology.
* “For those of us born in a post-Reagan America, having operated within this system our whole lives, there can be no doubt that Michel Foucault’s thinking describes our present.”
* In search of oil realism. I’ve just submitted an abstract for a chapter title “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking,” so this is definitely on my mind.
* NYC pastor: Starbucks is flavoured with the semen of sodomites. It’s called pumpkin spice, sir.
* My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the legal industry.
I actually don’t think this sounds terrible. I like the hint of menace I hear in “The Force Awakens,” as if the Force itself could be the enemy in the new trilogy. Who put this unelected energy field in charge of everything, anyway? Abolish the Force.
* Abolish the CW: Physicists determine that being rescued by The Flash is worse than being hit by a car.
* If you want a vision of the future: Disney announces Toy Story 4. More below the hilarity.
* I regret to inform you the ideology at its purest contest has closed. Thank you for your submission, but we have a winner.
* In a era without heroes, his website was our last hope: Meet the Mysterious Creator of Rumor-Debunking Site Snopes.com.
* The original version of Being John Malkovich, which I have fond memories of, would have been almost completely unwatchable.
* The Slow Unveiling of James Tiptree Jr.
* About 200,000 years ago, it was determined that spaceships could be powered by ennui.
* The Innocence Project was the last thing I believed in. Now I’m finally purged of hope.
* And they say this society can no longer achieve great things: Reality TV’s New Extreme: Being ‘Eaten Alive’ by a Giant Anaconda Snake.
Virginia Justice
Virginia knows it has DNA evidence that may prove the innocence of dozens of men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. So why won’t the state say who they are?
Friday Links 3
Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]
* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?
* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.
* More on yesterday’s unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts’s governing judicial philosophy:
The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.
* Mark Penn’s superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.
* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.
* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.
* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran’s system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran’s international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that’s what happened in Ukraine.
* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it’s at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn’t, which is reducing Iran’s isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran’s nuclear program with the rest of the world.
* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn’t change, but the rest of the world does.
* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran’s veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can’t reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that “moderates” and “reformers” can change Iran from within dies forever.
* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What’s the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that’s been shown to be missing on the domestic front.
* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he’s only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran’s nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn’t a front for the West.
Friday Links
Friday links. Jaimee got her wisdom teeth out today and is pretty out of it, so that’s my focus today. But between ice-pack rotation and gauze changes here are a few links:
* Via Srinivas, I see the Supreme Court has ruled in a (what else?) 5-4 decision that inmates do not have the right to DNA tests. Let Justice Stevens tell you why this makes no sense.
“For reasons the state has been unable or unwilling to articulate,” Justice Stevens wrote, “it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”
* Elsewhere in the annals of justice: a Minnesota woman has been ordered to pay the RIAA $1.92 million for illegal filesharing. The 24 songs in question could have been downloaded for $2 each, so we can clearly see how the jury arrives at such a reasonable sum.
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the class of 2013’s summer read at Duke. I just started this last night and I can confirm it’s very good; it’s targeted like a laser at 1990s Jersey nerds.
* Is there any company better at the PR game? ‘Pixar grants girl’s dying wish to see ‘Up.’
* Top Republican Environmental Achievements. Actually not a joke post.
The Myth of Justice
“You give no compensation to none of those guys who were wrongfully incarcerated and proved their innocence?” he said in an interview. “How can you say we believe in justice?”
“A Long Road Back After Exoneration, and Justice Is Slow to Make Amends,” in the New York Times. Thanks for the link to Frinibarf, the first and greatest of the long-missed Three Guys.
I’m not sure what sort of compensation people who have been let out of jail after being wrongly imprisoned for decades should get—I’m inclined to give them a magic credit card that pays all their bills for life, but then I’ve always been a bleeding heart.
I’m certain, however, that giving them nothing is a moral abomination.
After Innocence probably won’t shock you, because if you’ve been paying attention at all you’ve already concluded that this country’s criminal justice system is completely, essentially broken. But it’s absolutely worth seeing, if only to gain some perspective of what these lives are like; in a very real sense regaining freedom is only where their troubles begin.
While you’re waiting for the movie to arrive from Netflix, the Innocence Project has profiles of some of their cases, while exonerate.org has your dose of unhappy statistics.
Gerry Canavan 