Your Thanksgiving Turkey in 6 Eye-Popping Charts | Mother Jones.
In honor of todays holiday here in America, I’m passing on this post of interesting information about your Thanksgiving turkey.
Enjoy. 🙂
23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole | Mother Jones.
I just read this article from Josh Harkinson for Mother Jones and I thought it was worth passing along. It’s informing readers of a new report put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org).
In this “land of the free”, we now think it’s just fine and dandy to lock people up for LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE for things like…
POSSESSING a crack pipe!
POSSESSING stolen WRENCHES!!
Shoplifting 2 jerseys from an athletics store!!!
How in the HELL can anyone justify this??? I only listed 3 of the insane things they have been doing to people lately.
Try taking a look at the book: Three Felonies A Day by Harvey Silverglate (http://harveysilverglate.com/Books/ThreeFeloniesaDay.aspx). The list is long and getting longer every day. Piss off a cop and don’t have big bucks for a good lawyer, you ARE going to spend some time in jail! I keep telling people we live in a police state now and no one ever believes me.
Well WTF do YOU call it when they will lock you up for LIFE for something as minor as ‘siphoning gas from a truck’ or OMG ‘making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed to the back of a police car”???
This is where we’re at today. Most of it is because of the war on (some) drugs. Look at the list they provide, TEN out of the 23 listed ‘offenses’ are drug offenses. Six out of those 10 are for simple POSSESSION! I don’t see where simple possession of ANYTHING should be allowed to deprive someone of their liberty for even one second! Much less lock them away for LIFE.
THIS is what the war on (some) drugs has done to our once free country! It has done the same thing that alcohol prohibition started to do, but so much worse since for some odd reason we still haven’t awoken to the brainwashing ‘our’ leaders have subjected us to.
Just like during alcohol prohibition, the drugs of choice of many people were outlawed by moralistic busybodies who had NO authority to do so. Instead of minding their OWN business, they decided they just HAD to run everybody ELSE’S life since they knew SO much better how to do it. (idiots!!!)
Because of the LAW, the drugs people wanted became harder to find. Because they were harder to find, some people (‘criminals’) found ways to supply them (for a profit of course- why take a risk without a reward?). The harder the ‘law’ made it to find their drug of choice, the more profitable it became for people to supply it. Because of the risk of going around the ‘law’, the profits grew.
Profits grew til it was worth it for the REAL criminal gangs to get involved and take over those profits. The only way to settle disputes outside the legal system was to take it to the streets. Thus, the machine gun shootouts where innocent people got killed in the crossfire.
The risk of getting caught with the prohibited items (beer/wine/booze) also caused a change in peoples drinking habits. Because beer was easier for the cops to find (basically because it was stored in bigger bottles), people started switching to hard liquor which was easier to smuggle and keep hidden. This was also why you hear stories of people blinded by ‘bathtub gin’. People had to take risks to get their supply.
The SAME thing is happening now, more people started using cocaine since it was easier to get busted with pot. Cocaine was processed into crack since crack was a less risky (from the perspective of getting caught with it) form of the drug. People started switching to things like meth and now they’ve created ‘krocodile’ , a truly dangerous drug (IF news reports can be believed).
And don’t forget how the spread of mandatory drug testing has caused people to switch from marijuana to harder, more dangerous drugs since pot stays in your system for much longer (even tho it has ZERO effect on you after the first day or so).
The invention of krocodile (and other dangerous drugs) is a DIRECT consequence of the WAR on (some) drugs! All those suffering people rotting from the inside out should place the blame squarely on the pandering power hungry THUGS we call politicians for trying to stop them from getting high every once in a while on a SAFE drug like marijuana and so instead they use dangerous drugs like krocodile!
No, I am NOT trying to say that people have no responsibility for their own actions. Of course they should have it. They should be ALLOWED to have it. They should be ALLOWED to make the proper choices for THEIR lives without force and coercion.
Telling people you are going to make their choices for them, for ‘their own good’ is NOT good for them or for anybody else! And if YOU are making THEIR choices for them, then how in the hell can you say they have any real responsibility?
Of course, throughout this whole ‘experiment’ of government ‘for our own good’, the criminals were making money hand over fist. To make sure they stayed out of jail, they bribed and corrupted anyone susceptible in the system to protect them, to look the other way. Ruining our police, courts and any semblance of justice.
Another way our country was hurt by the ‘laws’ against (some) drugs was the loss of general consensus that the law was worthy of respect. HUGE numbers of people came to understand that the ‘law’ was morally wrong and just plain STUPID in addition to being exceedingly harmful to individuals and society as a whole.
The ONLY difference we are dealing with today is that we are too stupid to learn the lessons we SHOULD have from alcohol prohibition! We somehow allowed ‘our’ leaders to prohibit certain other substances. They didn’t even bother to do it legally this time. They thought they could sneak it by us in congress without any real debate and no constitutional amendment (thus NO AUTHORITY)!
The results are as expected. Worse, since we have let it go on for so long. We have not only locked up more people per capita than any other country on the face of the earth, but we have used the excuse of the war on (some) drugs to completely trash the entire constitution!
The ONLY amendment in the Bill of Rights that we have NOT thrown out the window in order to prosecute the war on (some) drugs is the one about quartering troops in your house.
Thanks to Mother Jones and the ACLU for publicizing this issue. I hope it goes viral. My post here is my attempt to help with that. I REALLY hope people will start looking at the FACTS about drugs (all drugs) and STOP being so gullible to just believe what ‘our’ leaders are spouting out.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, they do NOT have our good in mind, they are only out for themselves! They are NOT authorities, they do NOT have any special knowledge! They are politicians, therefore they are all LIARS!
4 Foods That Could Disappear If New Food Safety Rules Pass | Mother Jones.
Here’s an article from Mother Jones about the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Obama signed it into law in 2011 and I suppose nobody read this one either. If they did, they had to have been paid off by the usual suspects in favor of large scale factory farming.
Obviously, no one wants our food supply to be full of dangerous ingredients. We would all like to be able to buy safe, fresh, affordable, wholesome food. The problem with this law is the same as with every law like this, the ‘law of unintended consequences’. In addition to that problem, some others are already popping up.
For one, this is just one example of how BIG companies use the law to their advantage. They are much more easily able to comply with it, even if it DOES cost them big bucks. They can still manage to get by, especially when it wipes out their competition.
This sort of thing happens all the time in this country and is just one example of how we do NOT have a free market at all. No free market would permit companies to grow as large as we have here. They can only get that way because the laws allow it through special favors and manipulation of the market and the laws themselves. 🙁
Regardless of the name of this law (seems they’re always named the opposite of what they’re REALLY about), it will wind up hurting small farmers, organic farmers, food co-ops, and consumers concerned about healthy, safe food.
The article mentions just a couple of ways this will happen. Again, remember the law of unintended consequences! Those things they mentioned will probably just be the bare minimum of the problems that will develop.
Why do we always insist on the worst possible agency (the government) to take care of our problems? We always seem to think “there ought to be a law”! One size does NOT fit all and we really ought to be able to figure out ways to deal realistically with these things WITHOUT the use of FORCE. It’s especially galling when the use of force (government aid) is applied to the side that is hurting the people in favor of giant corporations.
Food safety is a pretty important subject, even if it’s not one we usually think about much. I hope some of you will think about it a bit. As they mention in the article, the FDA is still accepting comments until November 15. If this is important to you, you still have a chance to at least get the word out and hopefully your comments will be taken into account with the same weighting as someone from Monsanto or Kraft Foods would (yeah riiiiight). I said ‘hopefully’.
Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin? | Mother Jones.
Here’s another article re: the NSA. It goes right along with the one I posted yesterday (and my related rant about it). In case anyone did not realize it, it’s not only the NSA that is spying on us. As this article points out, pretty much EVERYONE is spying on us.
Facebook is just one corporation that is in cahoots with the federal government to suck up our personal information and use it (against us) for their benefit. Apparently Facebook has some kind of deal with the feds to just hand it right on over, no warrant required.
I really don’t like the fact that my information, that I am just hoping certain people to see will be collected by some giant corporation and then sold to the feds. This way the government can get around the constitution (not really- but they hope we’ll fall for it) and steal all our information without going through the bother of obeying the LAW (the constitution) and having something specific enough to look for that they can ask for and get a warrant!
Yeah, I know that when I post to Facebook everybody in the world can look at it if they want. I’m hoping that people that I know, or people with similar interests will stop by my page and join in the conversation. I’m NOT really trying to send it directly to some government goon with nothing better to do than spend his entire career illegally spying on people!
You question my calling it “illegal spying”? I call it that because they do NOT have any probable cause to look at anything I do! They do not have any warrant! ANY time the government looks at ANYTHING to do with you without probable cause and a warrant IS illegal under the constitutions 4th and 5th amendments (and others)!
I just can NOT understand why more people aren’t up in arms over this. People really don’t give a damn about the daily violations and constant erosion of their freedom. WHY? Can anybody explain this total apathy? Have Americans been THAT brainwashed, THAT terrified by their government as to allow anything and everything that same government wants to do as long as they say it’s ‘for our own good’? 🙁
Yeah, I guess Facebook might be classified as a ‘public’ space, but who says the government can sneak up and eavesdrop on a conversation you’re having among friends in the park??
It’s really the same thing.
ALL human beings have a RIGHT to privacy! It’s a basic necessity for any civilized society.
The US government was formed ONLY to PROTECT those rights we already had just because we are human beings! WHEN are people going to realize that the government is NOT doing ANY of this stuff for our own good but only for THEIR own good?
WTF is it going to take to get people to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?????
40 Percent of Your Chicken Nugget Is Meat. The Rest Is… | Mother Jones.
Interesting ‘study’ on just what exactly those chicken nuggets consist of. 🙂
OK, as they admit, it’s only 2 samples (out of billions) so NOT scientific at all. But I seriously doubt if those nuggets are all that much different than the ones they DID pick to study. I mean, it’s not like they somehow knew beforehand just which places would have the bad ones, right?
They didn’t even get into the issue of the breading. What all’s in THAT stuff? I’m pretty sure that’s not good for you either. Probably adds a lot of salt, fat, sugar, GMO, etc to your nugget, on top of all the ‘chicken’.
Do they add the breading to make them taste better? To make them more addictive (salt, sugar, HFCS, etc have been shown to light up the same pleasure centers in the brain as other addictions)? Or to make them LOOK better? all those icky things they throw in there might not look very appetizing.
I admit, I almost never eat chicken nuggets. I can’t remember ever really paying that much attention to them, but now I’m going to have to pick them apart and see if I can tell anything just from looking at them closely. Somehow I doubt it will be that easy to tell what’s really in there. 🙁
CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs | Mother Jones.
Here’s a little update from the CDC on all those antibiotics they’ve been pumping into your food supply for years now. Turns out, they were wrong about how safe all that is. There actually IS a link between overdosing your factory farmed meat animals (cows, pigs, chickens, etc) to the escalation of antibiotic resistant bacteria (and resulting deaths) in humans.
OK, so now we know (for sure). What are they going to do about it??? Turns out, not much. Remember, here in the USA we rely on government to keep us ‘safe’. We could probably do much better if we would get rid of our government protection and create a system that really could and would do a proper job. Read the article, you’ll see what I mean. 🙁
Zombies, Celebrity Sideboobs, and Smart Social Commentary = Web Gold | Mother Jones.
Just found out about this in an email from Mother Jones. 🙂 I used to get Cracked sometimes when I was a kid. I much preferred Mad magazine, but would read Cracked if it was around. I didn’t know it was on the web, never thought to check.
Here it is…www.cracked.com. It looks like its grown up a bit but still looks to be very entertaining. In the MJ interview, they mention they are now ‘one of the webs most popular humor destinations.’
I’ll be checking up on them for sure. I really like their agenda, ‘train yourself to question everything.’ Yeah, definitely my kind of people there. 😉
Man and the Sea: A Longreads Digest | Mother Jones.
Here’s a nice little listing of interesting ‘sea stories’ from Mother Jones. The link is to a page with blurbs from a few (5) different articles. All previously published in places as diverse as the New York Times (A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over the Shrimping Life) to Popular Science (The Quest to Uncover the Secret Life of Sharks).
I think my favorite would have to be “A Sea Story” by William Langewiesche (The Atlantic). Its the story of the sinking of the ferry Estonia where over 850 people died in one of the deadliest maritime disasters of the century. I remember watching a movie, something in a safety class I think. This one would really be worth reading, lessons learned and all that…
Are Weeds Healthier Than Farmed Veggies? | Mother Jones.
My guess would be yes. 🙂
We’ve had an expert on edible plants come out to lead our Campaign for Liberty meetup group on an expedition to hunt down local ‘weeds’. I’ve managed to miss it both times so far. I’d really like to know more about this and hoping I’ll be home the next time he can come to see us. We’re trying to get more involved with natural, organic, non-GMO foods.
I can’t manage a garden very well when I’m offshore most of the time. I’m pretty sure I could manage to grow weeds. In fact, I have a yard full of them already. I just need to know if any of them are good for eating. 😉
Charts: How Big Debt on Campus Is Threatening Higher Ed | Mother Jones.
If you read my earlier post on the college degree arms race (http://captjillsjourneys.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/disarming-the-college-degree-arms-race/), then you might like to read this as a follow up. It’s a little bit different take on the subject from Dave Gilson and Maggie Severns at Mother Jones.
They put out some good information. I’d like to see a chart there about how the amount of government aid correlates to increased prices for a college education. I have seen some work on that before. Maybe it was in a Reason magazine. Nope, I found it, it was in a Cato publication, heres a link to a summary page where you can read the whole thing if you’re so inclined (http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/making-college-more-expensive-unintended-consequences-federal-tuition-aid)
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again 🙁
Why Americans Can’t Die With Dignity | Mother Jones.
I thought this was a really good interview with Katy Butler. Author of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death”. I think its a very important issue that we just keep on avoiding. Even with all the talk about ‘death panels’ in Obamacare, we still don’t really get to the point. We need to have the discussion. We need to really do some deep thinking about how we want to deal with a major injury/sickness and death.
I’ve already been through the ordeal of losing both my parents. I was the one who had to make the decisions at the end for both of them. I do totally agree with Katy that we in America spend WAY too many resources on people who are in the last stage of life. Resources that could be much better spent on helping the quality of life rather than the quantity.
I myself would prefer to die before they put me on the machines, before I don’t know who I am anymore, or recognize my best friends. I don’t even consider that as LIFE! I hope I’m strong enough to just get it over with and off myself if I ever get to that point. I would hate to have to put someone else at risk of going to prison for helping me end my life with some dignity. Yeah, I say that now…
Reading the interview I was reminded of how my father changed his outlook once he found out he had cancer. The doctors at the VA hospital only gave him a few months to live. He had a rare form of cancer and so with a lot of help from friends was able to get treatment at MD Anderson hospital instead. It’s one of the best cancer treatment centers in the world. They did everything they could for him. It added probably a few more months to his life.
But he was sick as hell from the treatments. He was in pain most of the time. He was dying and he knew it but he was also determined to fight til the very end. He did. He died anyway (like we all will).
We were able to get some help for him at the end but it was too little, too late. I was trying to help deal with a lot of medical issues I wasn’t really prepared for (even tho I do have medical PIC- it’s harder to deal with someone you know and love).
Near the end, my father had no idea who I was. It would have been nice if he could have been helped by hospice at home, where he was comfortable and had his friends around. We were finally lucky to be able to put him in a hospice facility in Houston, he died there in only a couple of days.
I have no real idea of what all that cost. I just know it was a LOT and there was no way he could afford it. (And yes, I’m pretty sure those costs were passed on to the general public). No way anybody could afford all that! If he didn’t have that rare form of cancer, I’m sure he would have been ‘allowed’ to die a lot sooner. The hospital thought it was worth keeping him around so they could learn from his case. Hopefully they learned something to help someone else down the road.
I really should have had a discussion with my dad before he got sick. I would have felt better knowing what he really wanted. Not a decision made under that kind of stress. Some states have passed a Death with Dignity Act. I don’t think Texas is one of them. I would support it.
Here Comes the Story of No Hurricanes | Mother Jones.
Here we go again with the global warming… Am I the only one who remembers back in the 70s when we were all supposed to be frozen into ice cubes by now. According to the almost unanimous scientific consensus, we should start shopping for parkas and load up on the firewood! Next it was global warming and now it’s ‘climate change’. Can’t these guys make up their minds?
I actually met one of these so-called experts a couple of years ago. I got off my tuna boat in Kiribati. They were having a meeting where I was staying. Here’s a link to an article written at the time- (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2010/nov/09/kiribati-climate-change-conference-intro). The reporter even asked me what I thought about it for a man in the street’s opinion piece.
I asked a delegate why should I (or anyone else) believe him when the scientists were more in agreement about global freezing back in the 70s than they are about global warming now. I think I pissed him off. I mean, disrespecting his so superior scientific knowledge and all that. REALLY??!! He had NO idea what I was talking about! OK, he was a few years younger than me so he probably doesn’t remember all the hysteria personally like I do, but he’s supposed to be an expert. Can’t we expect the experts to know more than just the ordinary guy in the street???
Back ‘yard’ of the best hotel on Tarawa 2010
One Weird Trick to Fix Farms Forever | Mother Jones.
One weird trick? Seems like this ‘trick’ has been around forever, it’s just our modern factory farming techniques that tend to overlook it.
I don’t really know enough about farming to say with a definite yes or no to any of this stuff. I have been learning more about it lately and I’m coming to find out that contrary to what our government schools are telling us, that no, factory farming is NOT necessary to feed all the people on this planet now.
I always thought that because of the humongous amount of people running around and needing to be fed, that factory farming was the ONLY solution. Now, I’ve been learning, it isn’t. In fact, it is causing a lot of harm. Not only to the animals, but to the water, to the soil, to the plants, to the people involved in the farming, AND to all the rest of us.
Check out the article, read it all the way through and even the comments at the end. If you want some more info, check out this book I read called “Genetic Roulette” on GMOs (they even made a movie out of it). We’re working on showing that one at our local (Campaign for Liberty) meetup groups movie night sometime soon. Or another movie called “Farmaggedon”. There are lots more but those are a couple of good ones that’ll open your eyes and get you started asking questions. I’ve been a fast food junkie my whole life and they did open my eyes to a lot of things. Even tho I’m still eating all the crap food, at least I’m learning 😉
Map: All the Countries John McCain Has Wanted to Attack | Mother Jones.
Personally, I think McCain got some serious brain damage when he was in solitary during the VietNam War and its coming out more and more. Too bad the people can never seem to vote out ANY incumbents, no matter how bad they are 🙁
Check out the article, the comments are especially ‘entertaining’.
Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math | Mother Jones.
Well, this is a different kind of article but I still found it interesting. Remember, I did manage to get a degree in math so it might not be interesting to many of you 😉 I think its interesting since it seems to show that the better you are at math, the more you’ll let your political views skew your outcomes to other problems, even math. I think some of the comments below the actual article come up with some other results. I do think this sort of study could be useful. I definitely think people need to question EVERYTHING they are told by the so-called experts. Especially when those ‘expert’ opinions are going to be used to dictate how the rest of us are going to be able to live our lives. It’s worth paying attention to how they design their studies and so how they get their results.
Tom’s Kitchen: Ratatouille, the Classic Summer Veggie Stew | Mother Jones.
This sounds like it might actually be good. Sounds simple enough to make it.