Water. Everywhere.

Now I hate the death penalty and think its existence in the face of human fallibility is the mark of the very sort of hubris that will one day blessedly give the world back to the birds and beasts and fishes. It seems very likely that Troy Davis, just executed in Georgia, was indeed innocent, although I put it to you that hanging opposition to murder on the moral status of the person being killed is a bit of a you'llpardontheexpression cop-out; it is not the persistent execution of the innocent that should trouble your conscience but the mere fact of executions; it is not that people are put to death in error, but that people are put to death.  But I think it is also worth noting that we are doing this every day, every hour, that while your friends whine about, say, Rick Perry's record of executions and carve it as a mark of special barbarism on his image, Barack Obama and his robot army are raining death across the world, and insofar as any randomly selected Republican governor compares poorly to this or any sitting president, it is because of the grossly inferior scale of their monstrousness, crimes standing in rickety place for enormities.

Well, I am sure that President Perry will avail himself of all the tools and Terminators at his disposal and do his damnedest to catch up to his predecessor, and when he does, we'll hear endless amateur psychoanalysis, i.e. psychoanalysis, about how his swift resort to the gibbet predisposed him to invade French Guyana and Tuvalu, but I say that our violent society isn't the well from which we draw our militarism; rather, the opposite--conquest is the well from which we draw our drinking blood, and our whole society is built around it.