http://democracynow.org – Between 2009 and 2011, Shane Bauer spent nearly two years locked up in an Iranian prison as one of the jailed American hikers. Last year, he went back to jail—this time as an undercover journalist working as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. In a stunning new exposé for Mother Jones, Bauer chronicles the four months he spent undercover last year as a guard at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Facility. Winn is the oldest privately operated medium-security prison in the country and sits in the state that holds the distinction as having the world’s highest incarceration rate—more than 800 prisoners per 100,000 residents. During Bauer’s investigation, Winn was run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator. Bauer’s story offers a never-before-seen look at the for-profit prison industry, exposing conditions that include violence among inmates, poor medical and mental healthcare for even the sickest prisoners, mismanagement and lack of training for staff.
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: http://democracynow.org
Report Finds Two-Thirds of Private Prison Contracts Include “Lockup Quotas”
Loaded on July 31, 2015by Joe Watson published in Prison Legal News August, 2015, page 42
Report Finds Two-Thirds of Private Prison Contracts Include “Lockup Quotas”
by Joe Watson
An analysis of private prison contracts from across the United States reveals that state and local governments commonly enter into agreements that require them to keep prisons filled or pay for unused, empty beds. Prison Legal News
BUSINESS
Prison Quotas Push Lawmakers To Fill Beds, Derail Reform
09/19/2013 11:54 am ET | Updated Sep 20, 2013
After three violent inmates escaped from an Arizona private prison in July 2010, prompting a two-week, multi-state manhunt, state corrections officials demanded improvements and stopped sending new inmates to what they called a “dysfunctional” 3,300-bed facility.
Less than a year later, the company that runs the prison, Management & Training Corp., threatened to sue the state. A line in their contract guaranteed that the prison would remain 97 percent full. They argued they had lost nearly $10 million from the reduced inmate population.
State officials renegotiated the contract, but ended up paying $3 million for empty beds as the company continued to address problems, according to state documents and local news accounts.
As awareness of the idea of the Threefold Social Order (as developed by Rudolf Steiner) increases, it becomes more and more necessary to not lose sight of the fact that this idea owes its existence to a particular way of thinking. The ordinary internal dialogue with its cause and effect, or analytically oriented, thinking, which human beings possess as a result of their given conditions of consciousness and the type of education normally received in modern civilization, this inherited way of thinking is not the same kind of cognitive process as gave birth to Steiner’s idea.
This presents us with a peculiar dilemma. Can we truly understand this idea without first reproducing the same cognitive process in our own consciousness? If we can understand it without this, can we yet work with it (the idea) well enough to apply it in practice? These are the main questions (there are others), but it will be enough at this point to at least appreciate the need for a certain type of preliminary work, a kind of philosophical (epistemological) reflection. Read further, more info:
Festo SmartInversion — Schwebende Gliederkette mit Inversionsantrieb
SmartInversion ist ein mit Helium gefülltes Flugobjekt, das sich durch seine eigene Umstülpung fortbewegt. Die endlose, rhythmisch pulsierende Umstülpbewegung wird Inversion genannt und verleiht dem Flugmodell seinen Namen.
Although diabolically brilliant Machiavelli’s root assumption failure, that man is inherently evil, was proven incorrect by a need for an inquisition. The spirit of destruction, chaos and confusion we see in our global leadership today, stems from the teachings of this, call him what you will and up holds the pillars of satanism.
4 pillars of satanism per Passio
self preservation is the highest ideal
there is no right or wrong; the closest thing is right is what’s good for you wrong is what’s bad for you; and you can make up these rules based on your whims (moral relativism)
social darwinism – a ruling class gets to direct the herd b/c they’re more intellecutla or whatever
eugenics
*some people who are satanists don’t know they’re satanists *satanism isn’t about dressing all in black or listening to certain kinds of music;
WASHINGTON, DC, June 7, 2016 – Yesterday, the U.S. EPA quietly issued proposals to allow radioactive contamination in drinking water at concentrations vastly greater than allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The new guidance would permit radiation exposures equivalent to 250 chest X-rays a year. Today, environmental groups called the proposal “shocking” and “egregious.”
The EPA proposed Protective Action Guides (PAGs) would allow the general population to drink water hundreds to thousands of times more radioactive than is now legal. For example, radioactive iodine-131 has a current limit of 3 pico-curies per liter (pCi/L), in water but the new guidance would allow 10,350 (pCi/L), 3,450 times higher. For strontium-90, which causes leukemia, the current limit is 8 pCi/L; the new proposed value is 7,400 pCi/L, a 925-fold increase.
“Clean Water is essential for health. Just like lead, radiation when ingested in small amounts is very hazardous to our health. It is inconceivable that EPA could now quietly propose allowing enormous increases in radioactive contamination with no action to protect the public, even if concentrations are a thousand times higher than under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” said Dr. Catherine Thomasson, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The Bush Administration in its last days unsuccessfully tried to put forward similar proposals, which the incoming Obama Administration pulled back. Now, in the waning months of the Obama Administration, EPA’s radiation office is trying again.
“These levels are even higher than those proposed by the Bush Administration—really unprecedented and shocking,” said Diane D’Arrigo, Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
The Bush Administration proposal for strontium 90 was 6,650 pCi/L; the new proposal is 7,400 pCi/L. For iodine-131, the Bush proposal was 8,490 pCi/L; the new proposal is 10,350 pCi/L. For cesium-137, the proposal was for 13,600 pCi/L; Obama “beats” Bush with a value of 16,570 pCi/L.
All radionuclides can cause cancer and other health and reproductive problems; there is no completely safe level. Strontium causes bone cancer and leukemia. Babies, children, and females are at even greater risk than adult males.
PAGs apply not just to emergencies such as “dirty bombs,” and Fukushima-type nuclear power meltdowns but also to any radiological release for which a protective action may be considered – even a radiopharmaceutical transport spill. The proposed drinking water PAG would apply not to the immediate phase after a release, but rather to the intermediate phase, after the release has been stabilized, and lasting up to several years thereafter.
“All of this is extraordinary, since EPA has recently accepted the National Academy of Sciences’ most current risk estimates for radiation, indicating radiation is considerably more dangerous per unit dose than previously believed,” said D’Arrigo. “Pushing allowable concentrations of radioactivity in drinking water up orders of magnitude above the longstanding Safe Drinking Water Act levels goes in exactly the opposite direction than the official radiation risk estimates go.”
“Under these proposals, people would be forced to get the radiation equivalent of a chest X-ray 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, for up to several years, with no medical benefit or informed consent, just from drinking water. This is immoral,” said D’Arrigo. The public has 45 days from when it is published in the Federal Register to comment to the EPA on the PAG-Protective Action Guides.
“These proposed changes are a particularly egregious gift to the energy industry, which would essentially be given a free pass whenever nuclear or fracking waste enters our water supply,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the new book, Frackopoly. “The EPA under President Obama has also whitewashed the impact of fracking on drinking water. This is more of the same when it comes to his EPA’s pro-industry, hands-off regulation of toxic practices that can harm public health.”
There have been five great die-offs in history. This time, the cataclysm is us.
Of the many species that have existed on earth—estimates run as high as fifty billion—more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
Records of the missing can be found everywhere in the world, often in forms that are difficult to overlook. And yet extinction has been a much contested concept. Throughout the eighteenth century, even as extraordinary fossils were being unearthed and put on exhibit, the prevailing view was that species were fixed, created by God for all eternity. If the bones of a strange creature were found, it must mean that that creature was out there somewhere.
“Such is the economy of nature,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.
The French naturalist Georges Cuvier was more skeptical. In 1812, he published an essay on the “Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe,” in which he asked, “How can we believe that the immense mastodons, the gigantic megatheriums, whose bones have been found in the earth in the two Americas, still live on this continent?” Cuvier had conducted studies of the fossils found in gypsum mines in Paris, and was convinced that many organisms once common to the area no longer existed. These he referred to as espèces perdues, or lost species. Cuvier had no way of knowing how much time had elapsed in forming the fossil record. But, as the record indicated that Paris had, at various points, been under water, he concluded that the espèces perdues had been swept away by sudden cataclysms.
In his theory of natural selection, Darwin embraced extinction; it was, he realized, essential that some species should die out as new ones were created. But he believed that this happened only slowly. Indeed, he claimed that it took place more gradually even than speciation: “The complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production.” In “On the Origin of Species,” published in the fall of 1859, Darwin heaped scorn on the catastrophist approach:
So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we
hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause,
we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world.
By the start of the twentieth century, this view had become dominant, and to be a scientist meant to see extinction as Darwin did. But Darwin, it turns out, was wrong.
The city of Ammon, Idaho is building the Internet network of the future. Households and businesses can instantly change Internet service providers using a specially-designed innovative portal. This short 20 minute video highlights how the network is saving money, creating competition for broadband services, and creating powerful new public safety applications.
We talk with Ammon’s Mayor, local residents, private businesses, and the city’s technology director to understand why a small conservative city decided to build its own network and then open it to the entire community. We explain how they financed it and even scratch the surface of how software-defined networking brought the future of Internet services to Ammon before any larger metro regions.
Ammon’s network has already won awards, including a National Institute of Justice Challenge for Best Ultra-High Speed Application, and spurred economic development. But perhaps most important is that most communities can replicate this model and bring these benefits to their communities.
Read ongoing stories about these networks at ILSR’s site devoted to Community Broadband Networks. You can also subscribe to a once-per-week email with stories about community broadband networks.
MuniNetworks.org works with communities across the United States to create the policies needed to ensure telecommunications networks serve the community rather than a community serving the network. We publish original news, reports, multimedia, and fact sheets.
Christopher Mitchell, the director of our Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance works on telecommunications issues — helping communities ensure the networks upon which they depend are accountable to the community. He has consulted the White House and FCC on publicly owned networks speaks at conferences across the United States on the subject, occasionally to directly debate opponents of public ownership.
We believe we make better and more informed policies when those who design those policies are those who feel their impact.
ILSR works with citizens, activists, policymakers and entrepreneurs to provide them with innovative strategies and working models that support environmentally sound and equitable economic policies and community development. Since 1974, ILSR has championed local self-reliance, a strategy that underscores the need for humanly scaled institutions and economies and the widest possible distribution of ownership.
Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse Of Global Transformation / The August Forecast & Review comes on The Big Picture. When most people think about the possibility of a dystopian future – they think of a world run by communism or fascism. But what if the real danger threat to democracy came from alliance between an organization devoted to world peace – the United Nations – and environmentalists? More on this conspiracy theory…
The Choice:
Everyday, all day long, we choose.
Science, Technocracy, and Social Control – Jerry Day on The Corbett Report
Science is a method to help us answer questions about the physical world…but in this age of military/university partnerships, government grants and industry-funded research, who’s asking the questions? Jerry Day of FreedomTaker.com joins us today to discuss the new technocratic overlords and how the tool of science can be wielded as a weapon of social control.
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on fourclassifiedGCHQdocuments presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
How The Government Can Destroy Your Reputation (Report)
*The National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart (GCHQ) are “attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction,” according to a new report by Glenn Greenwald.*Having published numerous stories gleaned from the cache of documents obtained by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden, Greenwald declared on his new website, the Interceptor, that it was time that this aspect of the tale were told. The disturbing online activities carried out by the GCHQ, and presented to the rest of the intelligence agencies in the English-speaking “Five Eyes Alliance” for their consideration, were described in a document produced by the formerly super secret department of the GCHQ known as JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group)…* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:
Other tactics aimed at individuals are listed here, under the revealing title “discredit a target”:
Then there are the tactics used to destroy companies the agency targets:
GCHQ describes the purpose of JTRIG in starkly clear terms: “using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world,” including “information ops (influence or disruption).”
Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.
The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
If the root of our economic problem is the tendency toward centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the EU and the WTO and the IMF and the World Bank) why does anyone believe the solution will be centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the BRICS Bank and the EEU and the AIIB)? Today we look at a truly paradigm-shattering civilization-wide change taking place right now that has the potential to undermine the status quo: the peer-to-peer economy.
Gore Vidal famously said, “We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank. They have no history.”
Police from various departments stand guard on Aug. 18, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., just days after a grand jury decision not to indict the white police officer who had shot and killed an 18-year-old African-American sparked protests. (Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)
The past few years in the United States has been characterized by many as a period of unrest in the black community. Media coverage of demonstrations like the 2014 Ferguson protests often refer to rage by African-Americans towards police shootings.
In her new book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Carol Anderson offers an entirely different explanation for racial tension in America. She claims the recent violence in protests and civil unrest is not a product of black rage, but rather white rage towards black empowerment. Read further at the Current
Tariq Nasheed Discusses Hidden Colors 4 On The Keiser Report
