Wednesday, February 20th, 2019
JOHANN HARI, - Raw Story/Alternet/Commentary
Stephan: America does not like children. I have written about this at length because the data overwhelmingly confirms this. Oh, sure you love your kids, that's not the point; as a country is the point. As a country we neither like nor value children except as little money cows to be milked. But even I, cynical as I have become on this issue and all the maudlin protestations I read and hear to the contrary, was unprepared for this research. No wonder we have an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Credit: Child Rescue Network
One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. As I got older, I understood why. We had addiction in my family. And as I watched some of my other close relatives become addicts, I asked myself several questions, but one in particular seemed haunting and insistent: why does addiction so often run in families? Why does it seem to pass from mother to daughter, from father to son, as though it were some dark genetic twist?
I went on a long journey to find the answers to these questions – I describe it in my book ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.’ My research was book-ended by two events that remind us why we need to urgently understand this.
On Feb. 11 2012, Whitney Houston was found facedown in a bathtub, with her bloodstream pumped by alcohol, cocaine, and prescription drugs. Almost exactly three years on, her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown was found facedown in a […]
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Wednesday, February 20th, 2019
Jon Schuppe, Contributing Writer - NBC News
Stephan: I consider the American gulag to be one of the principal symptoms of the country's profound social breakdown. I have said this before but it is worth saying again, we have five percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners, and the whole system is glaringly racist.
North Korea, for instance, which media constantly describes as an authoritarian government, and it is, is Double-A ball compared with the United States when their prison systems are compared. Think about that. And then consider that America is in the active business of mass torture. Here is some data; it is beyond despicable. Yes, there are some very bad people in prison, but the social outcome research makes it clear that the way the U.S. treats prisoners is inferior to most other developed nations. Compared with Kim Khardashian, media hardly talks about any of this, and I can't remember the last time a politician commented.
The D-Wing inside the Special Management Unit at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.
Credit: Craig Haney
In February 2015, a Georgia prison inmate mailed a handwritten complaint to the federal court in Macon, saying he’d been held in a windowless cell for nearly 24 hours a day for five years.
The inmate, a convicted rapist named Timothy Gumm, said he’d been put there after a failed escape attempt in January 2010 and was told he’d remain there indefinitely, even after the escape charge was wiped from his disciplinary record. He lost contact with loved ones, dropped 50 pounds and was “deprived of almost any environmental and sensory stimuli and of almost all human contact,” he wrote. He saw no way out.
“I hate that I even have to trouble you and the court with this matter,” Gumm wrote in a cover letter to the court clerk.
That longshot filing, written on 11 pages of loose-leaf paper without a lawyer’s help, persuaded a skeptical judge to listen, […]
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Wednesday, February 20th, 2019
Stephan: Two years ago I did a series of stories on violent computer games and their psychological effects because several readers asked me to look into it, being concerned about the violence in the games. I don't play video games so knew next to nothing about that world and was surprised by what I discovered when I surveyed the literature. Here is an update, and the results are much the same, so I think they are dispositive.
Not for the first time, a new study has shown there is no link between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior in teenagers. The news comes as lawmakers in some states seek to tax violent titles after several high-profile politicians blamed them for causing mass shootings.
Researchers at the UK’s University of Oxford studied 1,000 British teens aged 14 and 15 to look for evidence of violent games’ harmful effects. Rather than relying on information given by the participants—something previous studies (that found a link) have done—the team noted the teens’ behavior and what they were playing as reported by their parents and carers.
The level of violence in the games that were played was classified by the Pan European Game Information (EU) and Entertainment Software Rating Board (US) rating systems, rather than by the players themselves.
The teenagers answered questions about their personalities and gaming habits over the previous month, while the careers noted their recent aggressive behaviors. It was the first study to use the Royal Society’s registered reports approach, in which hypothesis, methods and analysis technique are […]
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Wednesday, February 20th, 2019
IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans have been doing everything in their power to restructure the American judicial system so that it reflects a Neoliberal christofascist world view. They are consciously and literally restructuring the American Republic, and they have been at it for years. I consider Clarence Thomas to be one of the early data points in this program. In my opinion, he should never have been made an Associate Justice. And his wife's activities as a christofascist politicial activist should not be tolerated. I think he should be impeached.
This report describes what having people like Thomas on the court is leading to.
Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Credit: James Leynse/Corbis /Getty
Justice Clarence Thomas published an opinion on Tuesday announcing that he would completely rewrite the law of defamation — potentially to such a degree that journalists could be subject to criminal prosecutions for making truthful claims that embarrass the subjects of their reporting.
Thomas’ opinion concurring in his court’s decision not to hear McKee v. Cosby is an attack on New York Times v. Sullivan, a seminal Supreme Court decision “that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood” unless they can show that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” No other member of the Court joined Thomas’ opinion.
New York Times involved an Alabama lawsuit that tried to impose crippling costs on the venerable newspaper after it published an advertisement seeking support for the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legal defense. The ad contained […]
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2019
Jacob Sugarman, Managing Editor - truthdig
Stephan: Did you pay your taxes last year, will you pay them this year? Amazon didn't and won't. This corporation is the epitome of economic Neoliberalism, which is to say profit is the only social priority. This is so disgusting that it is hard to keep my language civil. Neoliberalism is the reason we have the kind of wealth inequality that we do, and it is literally destroying American society. This is why Neo-feudalism is replacing democracy in the United States, and much of the rest of the world.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon won’t pay a dime in federal taxes this year—just as it didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes the year before.
According to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which examined Amazon’s public filings, the online retailer reported a $129 million federal income tax rebate for 2018—good for a tax rate of negative 1 percent, or 22 percent below the federal corporate income tax rate. Amazon’s profits this year were $11.2 billion versus $5.6 billion in 2017. As of last September, the company was valued at over $1 trillion.
“When Congress in 2017 enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and substantially cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, proponents claimed the rate cut would incentivize better corporate citizenship,” the report reads. “However, the tax law failed to broaden the tax base or close a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits.”
Amazon has also benefited from the Supreme’s […]
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