Teenagers really are over Facebook. In a deep report published on Tuesday, Pew Research explains that teenagers departing the social network’s blue confines are looking for something more… authentic. Which, ironically, was the initial draw of Facebook, and has become something of a calling card for Tumblr and Twitter. Somewhere, Marissa Mayer is smiling.
“Question for the government of Ireland: Do you really want your country to be known as an offshore tax haven? Indeed, at a time when your citizens are dealing with the pain of an austerity program, how can you justify allowing Apple to pay virtually no taxes on a subsidiary established solely to avoid taxes in the United States? Just wondering.” — Joe Nocera, “Here Comes the Sun”
In Colorado, Blacks Make Up 4 Percent Of The Population And 100 Percent Of Death Row -
In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooperto commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:
- All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American,Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
- All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
- All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.
- Two law professors who studied Colorado’s application of the death penalty concluded it was unconstitutional, after finding that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in less than one percent of the cases where it is an option, and that the state failed to set “clear statutory standards for distinguishing between the few who are executed and the many who commit murder.”
“It appears that race, geography and youth largely determines who gets the death penalty in Colorado,” wrote a group of NAACP leaders in a letter urging Gov. Hickenlooper to grant clemency. They note that not a single black juror served on the panel that sentenced Dunlap to death.
In addition to the injustices that define the Colorado system, a group of former Colorado judges also point out that Dunlap’s bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies were not even mentioned at trial. In fact, according to their letter, Dunlap’s lawyer told the jury that there was no explanation for his violence.
The judges add that “no clear evidence exists that the death penalty deters violent crime. What it does in our current system, as in this case, is to drain our judicial system of millions of dollars as mandatory appeals drag on for decades.” Studies have shown that the death penalty does not lower the homicide rate. In fact, the murder rate is lower in states without the death penalty. Hickenlooper says he continues to wrestle with the death penalty, and whether to commute Dunlap’s sentence.
(Source: so-treu, via robot-heart-politics)
How a Ghost Army of American artists helped defeat Hitler
If you’ve never heard of the Ghost Army, you’re in good company. The unit was a classified secret until 1996 — it’s still partially classified — and Rick Beyer, the director of The Ghost Army, only found out about the covert troop of artist-warriors by chance, in a Boston-area cafe, from the niece of one of the unit’s veterans.
Armies have been using subterfuge to fool enemy forces for eons, but the Ghost Army was unusually audacious, and especially good at its job: Designing and deploying inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery, plus sound effects and other illusion-spinning tactics to convince the German army that the Allied forces were stronger and more omnipresent than they were.
Great question. Of course Hollywood will probably give it to Will Smith instead, with Jayden playing the young Mandela.
What more needs to be said?
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Liberalism’s original sin lies in its lack of a dynamic theory of power. Much of its discourse is still fixated on an eighteenth-century Enlightenment fantasy of the “Republic of Letters,” which paints politics as a salon discussion between polite people with competing ideas. The best program, when well argued by the wise and well-intentioned, is assumed to prevail in the end. Political action is disconnected, in this worldview, from the bloody entanglement of interests and passions that mark our lived existence.
Barack Obama’s inclination to sit the health insurance companies down at the table rather than confront them head-on is a useful example of this def iciency at work. You didn’t have to be a Marxist to realize this was a doomed strategy; plenty within the liberal ranks knew it at the time. Liberalism has evolved and incorporated views of politics that were traditionally associated with the socialist movement. But this development happened only under the influence of the left, and now the dominant currents in the liberal movement, especially in the Democratic Party, are forgetting lessons learned from radicals in the past.
Drudge translation: Kerry hates Israel.
“Todo chileno desde que nace es mirado como un consumidor en potencia y no como un ciudadano con derechos.” — “Every Chilean from birth is looked at as a potential consumer and not as a citizen with rights.” A comment on Lili Loofbourow’s article, “No to Profit: Fighting Privatization in Chile” (Boston Review, May/June 2013)