Sometimes I Hate Having My Worst Opinions Confirmed

This one, for example.

Per The Guardian:

The state of Oklahoma botched one execution and was forced to call off another on Tuesday when a disputed cocktail of drugs failed to kill a condemned prisoner who was left writhing on the gurney.

After the failure of a 20-minute attempt to execute him, Clayton Lockett was left to die of a heart attack in the execution chamber at the Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester. A lawyer said Lockett had effectively been "tortured to death."

No, I did not predict -- nor could I have reasonably predicted -- this particular outcome with respect to this particular victim at this particular time.

But such outcomes are inherent in allowing the state to not just kill people, but to do so a) under the protection of secrecy laws relating to personnel, purchases, procurement, etc., and b) using methods that approximate Junkie Russian Roulette in terms of concoction.

Oklahoma's governor has called for an "independent review" where "independent" means "conducted by people who work for me."

I think a different approach is in order -- the next execution protocol the governor signs off on should first undergo human trials. Let her and her cabinet draw straws for the honor of participation in said trials. If they think they've got it right before the whole executive branch is pushing up daisies, the remaining members, including the governor or her successor, can pass the ball to the legislature for expanded trials, maybe five or ten politicians at a time. Just to be sure, you know.

People who want the state to kill people should be willing to put some skin in the game.

I'm not always a big fan of Rachel Maddow, but she definitely covered the issue in detail tonight. If the embed works, you can watch it yourself in 3, 2, 1 ...

I'm Pregnant!

So I'm going to open this blog post with some completely irrelevant text for the sole purpose of getting it past any "first few characters analysis" algorithms, because that's what this post is really about.

As you're probably aware, no, I'm not (that thing in the title).

Just seeing if I can fool You Know Who into thinking I am. Presumably that will be reflected in the ads I start seeing online.

If you're still confused, this.

[Update: It's been a couple of hours and I'm still not seeing any sign of a bite despite this blog post, emails to a couple of friends, visits to Babies R Us's registry, Google searches for prenatal care in Gainesville, etc. ... if the spirit moves, please feel to congratulate me on the coming family addition or whatever on the social networks and such. The whole idea here is to find out if this kind of thing is easy to convincingly spoofed and if so how long and how much activity it takes - TLK]

There's No "Could Become" About It

Israel is an apartheid state, complete with different sets of laws for Jews and Arabs in Israel proper and fake "homelands" in Gaza and the West Bank, theoretically governed by their own inhabitants but in actuality governed militarily from Tel Aviv. That's just a fact of reality.

Do I understand the reasons why Israel finds itself painted into an apartheid corner? Sure -- 50 years seeking a Jewish homeland, six million dead in the Holocaust, a bloody war for independence and "national survival," subsequent bloody wars (some more, some less for that same "national survival") tend to create a fortress "us versus them, eternally" mentality.

But it is what it is, and to blame US Secretary of State John Kerry (who has many actually blame-worthy qualities) for saying the same thing that Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, said in 1967, that former prime minister Ehud Barak said in 2010, and that pretty much everyone recognizes as either accomplished or impending fact, is ... well, stupid (so is pretending that Israel is an "ally" of the US rather than just a very demanding welfare client with a powerful political lobby; so US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is two for two on today's Stupidity Meter -- along with Kerry himself, who is now backing down in public from what he thought he was saying in relative private).

The Israeli and US governments both claim to want a "two-state solution" -- Israel co-existing with an Arab Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. But they're not serious about it. Any time the Palestinian Arabs start getting their act together for statehood, Israel throws a temper tantrum and the US government pronounces itself "disappointed" at the Arabs' gall and temerity. The only "second state" Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to accept is one which allows Israel to run its foreign and military policy and unilaterally set (and re-set at will) its borders. Which, of course, is not a "state" at all, or even a believable masquerade costume of one.

Israel claims to not want a "one-state" solution, but that is what it has -- an apartheid one-state solution in which Jews are "more equal" than Arabs in Israel proper and Gaza and the West Bank live under military occupation with, among other outrages, Israeli "settlers" stealing their land at will.

As an anarchist, I prefer a "no-state" solution, but I'm not optimistic about that happening any time soon. And no, I don't have any grand plans to offer for how Israel might get itself out of this bad situation. But restoring the 1967 borders and butting out of what happens on the other side of those borders, as every US president since at least as far back as Nixon has urged, might be a good place to start.