A row of general population inmates walk in a line at San Quentin State Prison. Credit: AP/Eric Risberg
In recent years, the bipartisan push for criminal justice reform has been fueled in large part by the astronomical price tag that comes with mass incarceration. Locking people up in federal, state, and local correctional facilities costs the government a whopping $80 billion, and taxpayers end up footing the bill. But a Washington University study released in July projects that the price tag touted by advocates of reform is a mere fraction of the actual cost of mass incarceration.
When the financial toll on social welfare is taken into account, the working paper estimated the cost of mass incarceration exceeds $1 trillion.
According to researchers Carrie Pettus-Davis and […]
Credit: Thomas Hawk/Flickr
Urbanist Richard Florida popularized the term “creative class,” describing the millions of workers in fields such as the arts, sciences and technology whose work largely involves coming up with new ideas and innovating on old ones.
The creative class has, for better or worse, primarily been associated with big American cities along the coasts: out of Richard Florida’s top 20 creative-class cities in 2015, only one — Dublin, Ohio — was located in a non-coastal state.
But new data recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests that there’s an awful lot of creativity happening far inland from America’s coastal tech and arts hubs.
Among other things, the NEA worked with the Census to poll residents of all 50 states on their participation in the arts, particularly whether they performed or created works of art in 2014.
Those data reveal a somewhat surprising pattern: America’s Great Creative Divide isn’t between the coasts and the center, but rather between North and South. Take a look.
Republic Governor of Kentucky Matt Bevin speaking at the Values Voters Summit.
Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin may be calling for a violent uprising if Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is elected in November.
After being elected following his unwavering support for anti-equality crusader Kim Davis, Bevin received the Distinguished Christian Statesman award from the D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship on Friday night at the Values Voters Summit. But it was his Saturday speech that is raising eyebrows. Bevin told the ultra-right audience that he thinks America is at a crossroads.
“We don’t have multiple options,” he warned. “We’re going one way or we’re going the other way, politically, spiritually, morally, economically, from a liberty standpoint. We’re going one way or we’re going the other way.”
He continued by telling a story about confronting a professor while he was in college after he claimed the professor mocked Christianity, which he said liberals are known to do frequently.
“They try to silence us,” Bevin said. “They […]
There have been dozens if not hundreds of news articles about Aetna leaving the Affordable Health Care Act’s online marketplaces in 11 states, and whether this signals serious problems for Obamacare down the road.
But none of them have truly explained that what’s happening with Aetna is the consequence of a flaw built into Obamacare from the start: It permits insurance companies to make a profit on the basic health care package Americans are now legally required to purchase.
This makes Obamacare fundamentally different from essentially all systems of universal health care on earth. (There is one tiny exception, the Netherlands, but of the four insurance companies that cover 90 percent of Dutch citizens, just one is for profit.)
Why does this matter? The answer is complicated but extremely important if Obamacare is going to avoid collapsing.
Insurance companies like Aetna complain that fewer young people than anticipated are buying insurance on the exchanges. The Obama administration was aiming at over 38 percent of the exchange pool being between 18 and 35 years old, but right now that number is just 28 percent. That means insurers have to pay more in health […]
The Twin Towers on 9/11
On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the total collapse of three large steel-framed high-rises. Since then, scientists and engineers have been working to understand why and how these unprecedented structural failures occurred.
In August 2002, the U.S. National Institute of Stand ards and Technology (NIST) launched what would become a six-year investigation of the three building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001 (9/11): the well-known collapses of the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers that morning and the lesser-known collapse late that afternoon of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which was not struck by an airplane. NIST conducted its investigation based on the stated premise that the “WTC Towers […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
