Sunday, October 23rd, 2016
Brian Dolinar, - truthout
Stephan: Here is some good news about the new American slavery in the gulag. Prison phone service is an exploitive corporate activity so nakedly and immorally greedy it can hardly be believed. Citizen outrage and action is pushing back with some good results, as this report describes. Like the GMO story I ran a few days back, collective citizen intention following the 8 Laws can transform social policy to a more life-affirming end.
Illinois State Rep. Carol Ammons (D-Urbana) — the politician who championed HB 6200, a bill that caps all calls from Illinois prisons to seven cents a minute — attended the signing of the bill into law with Wandjell Harvey-Robinson (right), whose parents were incarcerated when she was in the third grade.
Credit: Brian Dolinar
The Justice Department’s recent recommendation to end the use of private facilities for US citizens in federal prisons has been hailed as a victory by reformers, but the widespread privatization of everyday services in prison, like hygiene products, food, laundry and phone calls continues unchecked. Simple phone calls, something most of us take for granted — when made by an incarcerated person and often paid for by […]
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2016
Cristina Silva, - International Business Times/The Raw Story
Stephan: This report illustrates what deliberate misinformation propagated for theological or ideological reasons leads to. This is the gobsmacking student ignorance occurring even at the college level. That this incident occurred in Texas does not surprise me. Texas Louisiana, and Alabama are the leading edge of Red value ignorance.
A group of white students walked out of a college classroom Tuesday after an anthropology professor said all humans were descended from Africa. As they left, other students in the class began chanting, “Black lives matter,” in recognition of the social justice movement protesting racial injustice across the United States. Other students who stayed in the classroom told the professor they were offended and began arguing with their classmates, according to media reports.
“My Professor just said all living ppl are descendants from Africa and ppl got up and walked out and now their arguing,” a student tweeted during the walk-out.
R. Jon McGee, the professor at Texas State University, focuses on Latin American cultures. “I have worked with the Lacandon Maya since 1980, studying Maya religion, language, and culture. My research work has focused on the Maya, anthropology of religion, culture, theory, and field research methods,” his web page reads.
Students said McGee began his lesson by telling students to pay attention because they were about to have a discussion on race. He then charted the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement, which protests police brutality, and concluded his lesson by noting that […]
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2016
Lauren Griffin, Manager of the Journal of Public Interest Communications, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida - The Conversation
Stephan: The issue of education being shaped to purvey deliberate misinformation has many consequences. For instance willful ignorance is a major reason why the United States is unprepared for climate change which most Red value value voters don't even believe exists. But from a cynical political point of view it is desirable -- ignorant people with rigid theological beliefs skew heavily Republican.
People like to stick together and share beliefs commonly held within their group. Credit: Shutterstock
Much has been made about the predictable partisan split between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on issues of science and public policy. But what about their supporters? Can Americans really be that far apart in terms of science?
That liberals and conservatives have different opinions toward science is taken as a given. Typically, conservatives are painted as anti-science, with some studies suggesting their mistrust of science is increasing. Liberals, on the other hand, are usually assumed to be more receptive to science in general and more supportive of using science to shape policy.
Noting that party affiliation is different than political ideology – not everyone who identifies as liberal is a Democrat and not everyone who identifies as conservative is a Republican – these characterizations certainly seem to be true when we look at major leaders of […]
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2016
Nika Knight, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: The corruption of U.S. regulatory agencies and their extreme bias towards industry instead of the American people -- a product of the revolving door policy that dominates most of these agencies -- has reached an almost surreal level. Here's an example of what I mean.
Terry Tempest Williams holds her bidder card at a BLM land lease auction in Utah in February 2016.
Credit: Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on Wednesday rejected land leases purchased at public auction in February by climate activist and author Terry Tempest Williams, refunding William’s payment and revoking the leases because the environmentalist publicly vowed to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
“We are disappointed in the agency’s decision to hold us to a different standard than other lessees,” Williams and her husband, Brooke Williams, responded to the BLM’s decision in a statement. “The agency claims that it cannot issue the leases because we did not commit to developing them. The BLM has never demanded that a lease applicant promise to develop the lease before it was issued. In fact, a great many lessees maintain their leases undeveloped for […]
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2016
Alec Luhn, - Wired/Climate Desk
Stephan: Yet another report of changes being wrought in cities by climate change. The next ten years this is all going to become very dramatic.
A man walks past a Soviet era housing block near the Nurd Kamal mosque in the arctic Russian city of Norilsk.
Credit: Roger Bacon/REUTERS/Alamy
At first, Yury Scherbakov thought the cracks appearing in a wall he had installed in his two-room flat were caused by shoddy workmanship. But then other walls started cracking, and then the floor started to incline. “We sat on the couch and could feel it tilt,” says his wife, Nadezhda, as they carry furniture out of the flat.
Yury wasn’t a poor craftsman, and Nadezhda wasn’t crazy: One corner of their five-story building at 59 Talnakhskaya Street in the northern Russian city of Norilsk was sinking as the permafrost underneath it thawed and the foundation slowly disintegrated. In March 2015, local authorities posted notices in the stairwells that the building was condemned.
Cracking and collapsing structures are a growing problem in cities like Norilsk—a nickel-producing centre of 177,000 people located […]
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