Realitista

Wow, this college doesn’t fuck around when they make a...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:21:05 -0500

Wow, this college doesn’t fuck around when they make a commercial.

"The Welfare State didn't destroy our innercities, the War on Drugs did - welfare spending on families remained flat until the War started, at which point it exploded and rose in lockstep with our disproportionately black male prison population."

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:24:05 -0500

"The Welfare State didn't destroy our innercities, the War on Drugs did - welfare spending on families remained flat until the War started, at which point it exploded and rose in lockstep with our disproportionately black male prison population." :

In 1971 President Nixon officially began the War on Drugs, which fully hit its stride in ’73 with the passage of the draconian Rockefeller Drugs Laws, and very quickly a distinct trend in the American prison population emerged:

If the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the Welfare State and the destruction of the American black family, why did welfare aid to families spike in lockstep with our prison population right as that War started? Well, if you’re familiar American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller Drug Laws in the years after its passage were minorities.

Wasp covered in dew

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:36:05 -0500

Wasp covered in dew

Obama's War on Pot

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:48:05 -0500

Obama's War on Pot:

One thing that both the Democrats and Republicans agree on , you’ve got to keep feeding people in to the prison for profit machine.

Back when he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he vowed, promising an end to the Bush administration’s high-profile raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

But over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multiagency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana.

With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. “There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.” The federal crackdown imperils the medical care of the estimated 730,000 patients nationwide – many of them seriously ill or dying – who rely on state-sanctioned marijuana recommended by their doctors. In addition, drug experts warn, the White House’s war on law-abiding providers of medical marijuana will only drum up business for real criminals. “The administration is going after legal dispensaries and state and local authorities in ways that are going to push this stuff back underground again,” says Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a former Republican senator who has urged the DEA to legalize medical marijuana, pulls no punches in describing the state of affairs produced by Obama’s efforts to circumvent state law: “Utter chaos.”

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? — discovermagazine.com — Readability

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:20:05 -0500

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? — discovermagazine.com — Readability:

John Hawks is in the middle of explaining his research on human evolution when he drops a bombshell. Running down a list of changes that have occurred in our skeleton and skull since the Stone Age, the University of Wisconsin anthropologist nonchalantly adds, “And it’s also clear the brain has been shrinking.”

“Shrinking?” I ask. “I thought it was getting larger.” The whole ascent-of-man thing.

“That was true for 2 million years of our evolution,” Hawks says. “But there has been a reversal.”

He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.”

If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. Possibly owing to said shrinkage, it takes me a while to catch on. “Are you saying we’re getting dumber?” I ask.

Numerous phone calls later, it dawns on me that the world’s foremost experts do not really know why our organ of intellect has been vanishing. But after long ignoring the issue, some of them have at least decided the matter is of sufficient importance to warrant a formal inquiry. They have even drawn some bold, albeit preliminary, conclusions.

An Effective Tax Rate of -40.7%

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:27:05 -0500

An Effective Tax Rate of -40.7%

HAHA!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:36:06 -0500

HAHA!

The Pirate Bay Founder Describes How a Corrupt Industry Used Their Political Influence to Force a Conviction

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:48:05 -0500

The Pirate Bay Founder Describes How a Corrupt Industry Used Their Political Influence to Force a Conviction:

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn’t guilty of “main” crimes — at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever).

But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn’t get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB — only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers. When we found out he’d been hired (by him changing his employer from “Polisen” to “Warner Bros” on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from “witness” to “suspect” a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

Read the rest here

iOS ‘86. I like this concept. (more here)

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:21:05 -0500

iOS ‘86. I like this concept.

(more here)

The Myth of Class Mobility in the USA

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:24:05 -0500

The Myth of Class Mobility in the USA:

When Americans express indifference about the problem of unequal incomes, it’s usually because they see the United States as a land of boundless opportunity. Sure, you’ll hear it said, our country has pretty big income disparities compared with Western Europe. And sure, those disparities have been widening in recent decades. But stark economic inequality is the price we pay for living in a dynamic economy with avenues to advancement that the class-bound Old World can only dream about. We may have less equality of economic outcomes, but we have a lot more equality of economic opportunity.

The problem is, this isn’t true. Most of Western Europe today is both more equal in incomes and more economically mobile than the United States. And it isn’t just Western Europe. Countries as varied as Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan all have higher degrees of income mobility than we do. A nation that prides itself on its lack of class rigidity has, in short, become significantly more economically rigid than many other developed countries. How did our perception of ourselves end up so far out of sync with reality?

Find out how here

Mean.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:36:06 -0500

Australia's Scientologist Child Labor Camp

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:48:05 -0500

Australia's Scientologist Child Labor Camp :

Right in the middle of a quiet suburb is a place where children are separated from their parents, and forced to work full time for no pay, and live in squalid conditions. Those who’ve survived this place say they were brainwashed into believing they could not leave, and that they deserved the shocking treatment dished out.

A young man who escaped the place with the help of his father, Shane Kelsey says “I lived in that garage for about a year and a half, maybe two years.”

Until just over a year ago he had never used the internet, watched television or followed the media. “You’re not allowed to read any books other than scientology books, you can’t read newspapers, no radio, no movies, nothing,” Shane said.

Shane says he was held captive and groomed to see all of us on the outside as pathetic, useless and stupid. More stories from reporter Bryan Seymour “So I lived in a garage until that got flooded by a storm, and my mum got really pissed off and said ‘what the hell’ and so I got moved into a closet. It is a closet under the stairs - maybe two metres long and a metre wide,” Shane said.

More here

Since 1997, A Man Has Been Digging Out His Basement Using Only R/C Scale-Model Construction Equipment

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:20:00 -0500

Since 1997, A Man Has Been Digging Out His Basement Using Only R/C Scale-Model Construction Equipment:

Wow, I wish I had this kind of time on my hands. But I wouldn’t spend it doing this.

A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment… since 1997. Yes, you read that right — he’s been digging out his basement for 15 years — with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.

At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.

Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.

Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.

Man faces 23 years of prison in the USA for 5 minute video critical of US foreign policy

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:24:06 -0500

Man faces 23 years of prison in the USA for 5 minute video critical of US foreign policy:

Well, we weren’t so deluded as to think everyone in the USA had freedom of speech, were we?

Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).

What is the “material support” he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit — “a number of terrorist logos.” That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video … is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.” The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders. One can dislike this legal fact. One can wish it were different. But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

(via xkcd: Wake Up Sheeple!!)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:36:05 -0500

(via xkcd: Wake Up Sheeple!!)

Five Questions for Jill Stein of the Green Party - NYTimes.com

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:48:05 -0500

Five Questions for Jill Stein of the Green Party - NYTimes.com:

Q. Why are you running for president?

A. We are in crisis and people are losing their jobs and their homes and their health care and affordable higher education and civil liberties. You name it, they are losing it. We have got a 1 percent that’s rolling in dough as much as ever and the political establishment is not fixing it. The establishment got us into this mess, in both parties. And that’s clear as day. Over 10 years, I have been a recalcitrant political challenger, a recurrent alternative that would not go away.

Q. Is there a difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties?

A. You might look at one party as a rapidly sinking ship and say we’re going to vote for the other guy because the ship’s not going down so fast. We don’t like him but he’s not sinking the ship so fast. But the real question is, if both of those ships are heading for the bottom of the ocean, do you want to be on either of them? No. There’s no question about where those ships are heading if you are looking at the economy.

Read the rest here

God I'm Thirst-WAARGBLBLBLLLBL

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:21:06 -0500

Tax exemptions

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:24:05 -0500

Tax exemptions

Great, now I can never go in a revolving glass door again

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:03:05 -0500

Homeland Security

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:00:05 -0500

Homeland Security