This is a sort of boring but great video on your rights if cops pull you over and want to search your car or your person. It was made by the ACLU which make it reputable. I really think everyone should watch it. It's sort of long, about 1/2 hour, but you can skip the first 5 minutes but the rest is very informative.
There were 2,131,180 United States citizens in jail last year.
An increase of 2.3 percent over 2003.
The US has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population 7 to 10 times as many as most other democracies.
That's 7 people in jail for every 1,000 in the country.
12.6% of black males in their late twenties were behind bars! Insane.
The comparable rate for Hispanic males was 3.6% and for whites 1.7%
Even though violent crime in the US fell by over 33% from 1994 to 2003
and property crimes fell by 23%.
Yet the prison population has risen at an averate of 3.5% every year since 1995
Why? Because 2 of every 3 prisoners are back behind bars within 3 years of their release.
Which means JAIL DOES NOT WORK. The system is fucked. Non-violent drug offenders should not be in jail.
Plus it costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year.
'In sum, we are an army of dreamers, and therefore invincible. How can we fail to win, with this imagination overturning everything. Or rather, we do not deserve to lose.'
- Subcomandante Marcos
A few weeks ago I posted a link to "Fuck the South" because it is funny and made me feel good about the fact that "we" did not elect W, "they" (the South) did. Plus it made some good points and, really, it's quite funny. But it started this whole blog war (see comments from "Fuck the South" below) and one dilligent Southern commentor (John) posted the following from some other site:
____________________________________________________________
San Francisco constantly struggles with itself to solve the question of how many ***holes it's possible to fit into a square mile. How many cybersissies can you cram into a phone booth? How many Gaia-peddling belly-floppers? How many self-absorbed monkish Nerf balls of ideological irrelevance? How many dayglo lemon-meringue fashion tarantulas? How many gaunt, cellophane-wrapped nipple-tweakers? How many prune-twatted hipster debutantes?
It's a star-lit ballroom full of elitists masquerading as egalitarians. Of snobs pretending to be socialists. Of petty backstabbers who appoint themselves as, moral crusaders These creeps can't get along with the other 99% of the country -- s***, most of their time is spent quarreling among themselves -- yet they try to fist-**** you with Universal Brotherhood. Almost down to the very last shaved anus, San Franciscans are a xenophobic breed, If you don't speak, look, and act like a San Franciscan, their policy is one of Zero Tolerance. They're totalitarian in the sense that they insist on controlling the thoughts and lives of others through forceful statist intervention. In doing so, they align themselves with the establishment which they pretend to be overthrowing. They're a buncha urban supremacists. Unyielding. Humorless. Stuffed to the gills with an unwarranted sense of their own cultural/ moral superiority. I call them "Bay Aryans."
Surely I must be kidding, that I don't mean to compare such twinkle-toed West Coast coolness-mongerers to the TEETH-CHATTERINGLY SINISTER ATROCITIES of the Nazi pork-butchers. After all, Hitler killed six million Jewboys! That's enuff goldurned Heeb-a-ross to fill eight San Franciscos. You may be right, tootsie-pop, but are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments have slaughtered ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE this century? The commies beat Hitler 20- 1. Their unbounded love for "humanity" didn't seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism. Better a Nazi than a commie, I guess. And either one's better than a Bay Aryan. Being born in San Francisco is excusable, provided that you evacuate within 30 days of reaching adulthood. But moving TO the Bay Area is unforgivable under any circumstance. Based on an unfortunate long-term trend of Freak Relocation, the town has become a sort of Kurdish tent village of refugee wierdlings. A once-pretty city with flap-happy seagulls has degenerated into an island of white-breads-in-exile who've all fled from hometown persecution. San Francisco's foggy hills have become America's largest support group, a Jonestown for people who were socially traumatized in high school. Within city limits, I think, San Francisco's fine as a cultural sanctuary for oversocialized misfits. Its danger lies in an apparently insatiable drive to vengefully impose its values on everyone outside the fortress. I think it's good that you people should have your own ghetto. I just think we should build a fence around it. Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the need to know the truth. Rejected by the Uberclique, the Bay Ayrans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other looking for 'scene' status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that 'scene status' is a worthy goal. They howl about 'fighting facism' yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel a part of some 'community' which is the first flash of the facist impulse. You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you start to feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your 'compassion' for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with 'the movement' because you're lost on your own. I don't care about your precious personal lifestyle choices. I really don't. And your entire dingbat philosophy, the whole tectonic plate on which San Francisco rests, is based on the false presumption that people such as me are upset with the manner in which you flap your genitals around. Egads.
It isn't what you do, it's the way you do it. Not the meat, but rather the motion. It's not what you're saying, it's your lousy voice. It isn't your private ****-slurping, it's your public megaphone-mouth. It ain't how you move beneath the sheets, it's the way you wave the picket signs around. The problem isn't your self-consciously "decadent" personal lifestyle, it's your warped social instincts. It has nothing to do with the widespread sidewalk display of ***-rimming ... or the women who look like Lou Costello ... or even the concept of white people who hate the concept of white people. In fact, those are some of the things I LIKE about SF. It's the attitude. The vantage point. Cloistered in a cultural Presidio, the Bay Aryans see fit to cast judgment about the millions of peasants who live out on the Plains. The Bay Aryans prove that they aren't truly compassionare by consistently showing a flagrant hatred for America's white rural limpenproletariat.
Though San Franciscans may mince through the streets in protest of hate speech, they sure as shootin' despise dem trailer trash. Although their hearts are opened like dilated (something to do with the lower alimentary canal) for poster kids halfway around the world, they disowned the homebound hillbillies a long time ago. I wonder what would happen if the hillbillies were to disown the Bay Aryans? Maybe if all the redneck farmers just decided to stop growing crops for a year. Perhaps if all the white-trash truckers agreed to halt delivery of all goods into this hostile enemy area. Maybe if all the EVIL WHITE MALE PIG COPS decided to ease up on Oakland and let black people really express how they feel about their brethren in Frisco and Berkely. That's all it would take. A puff of wind and they'd all fall down. It's a good thing the rest of your country sees your city as a harmless Fruitcake Palace. The rest of America is too busy trying to put food on the table than worrying about your neurotic socio-libidinal peccadilloes. The rest of America could get along fine without San Francisco. The reverse is hardly true. You should thank Goddess that there are a few Nazis in Idaho and a smattering of Klansmen in Kentucky, because what else would you talk about at the weekly gatherings of the collective? Never mind that you all live in a much more AFFLUENT place than Idahoans or Kentuckians do. Personal finances don't often factor into your idea of what constitutes oppression, do they? You claim to identify with the poor and downtrodden, yet you're miraculously able to pay some of the highest rents in America. How do you do it? Maybe if you took the silver spoon out of your mouth, I'd be able to understand what you were rumbling about empowerment.
Modem American Leftoidism, a Volk religion epitomized in places as the evil SF/Berkeley vortex, is almost exclusively the purview of upper-middle-class white kids who've never breathed a fleeting gasp of true oppression in their lives. This must be why the Bay Aryans don't seem nearly as concerned with America's widening class disparities as they are with its fashion mistakes and verbal boorishness.
Though the Bay Aryans fancy themselves as revolutionaries, they're actually little more than a left-wristed inversion of Miss Manners. An area that prides itself on the Free Speech Movement is now gung-ho in favor of legal restrictions on terminology which it doesn't deem proper or sensitive. The Bay area teems with tattletales and stool pigeons and hall monitors and snitches. Since they don't have any REAL problems in their lives, these mushy bananas worry about getting their feelings bruised.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you. but human history is not entirely summarized by the bold struggle for the "right" to poke your (you can guess what) through disco-bathroom glory holes. Not every act is political. Some are just silly and ugly and stinky.
Are you all high on crack? Does some municipal law require you to either have a glass pipe or a **** in your mouth at all times? Who else would seriously try to argue that rape has nothing to do with sex or that racism has nothing to do with economics? The holes in your logic have been stretched wider than your sphincters. Any honest overview of African, Asian, and Hispanic cultures would reveal more sexism, homophobia, and ethnic strife than you could shake a white **** at. Everyone is born corrupt. White males were simply better at it. You can show your sincere opposition to whitemale imperialism by giving your city back to the Injuns. Maybe we could help San Francisco realize its multicultural dreams by immediately shipping a million or so Third World indigents there. Let them take your jobs while you starve for awhile. We could forcibly relocate all the white-hipster undesirables out to Alcatraz, where they'd perform bloody gladitorial feats to the delight of Kenyan tourists on paddleboats.
I'm glad you've all gathered together in one place. Makes it easier to aim the missiles. Aren't you due for another natural disaster or something? Exactly what year are you scheduled to slide into the ocean? I want to take pictures. No offense, but I have a higher opinion of the runny, worm-filled dogs*** I scrape from my boot with a popsicle stick than I do of your fair city. You gave us OJ Simpson, but what have you done lately?
San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris. San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock. San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country. Second to Berkeley, of course. Berkeley's so bad, it's too painful to talk about. Tony Bennett left his heart. I took a dump. I'd tell you all to go to hell, but you already live there.
looking for a glimmer of hope?
The Complacent Organization presents:
An Abbreviated History of trueAmerica
http://www.complacent.org/trueamerica
This web site has contact info for elected officials from federal to local as well as a "Media Guide" with all the local and national media in your area including reporters' names and phone numbers, etc. It has contacts for government agencies. It has copies of bills before congress, vote tallies for bills.
It also has action alerts submitted by various organizations and a soapbox, or you can send email from the site with the option to leave the body of your letter on the site for others to read..
This is a great article from the Christian Science Monitor on the man, the myth, the legend, George Soros. Once a failing traveling sailsman, Soros soon became one of the richest guys alive by estimating currency fluctuations. Now he's a big time philanthropist and runs the Open Society Institute and the Central European University, which I was almost part of till..well...it's a long story. Anyways, he published a journal in and speaks fluent Esperanto! That rocks!
HOW FUCKING BLANTANT DO THEY HAVE TO BE??? Can you believe this isn't in the news?
This is the American Library Association's response. I think librarians rock and feel confidant that they will fight the fight.
"Ashcroft orders public libraries to destroy law books"
The Justice Department is ordering public libraries to destroy certain books it has deemed not "appropriate for external use."
The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.
The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).
This is an AMAZING article on the Columbian situation. Everyone should read it.
"Five Questions with Noam Chomsky" interview from Counterpunch.
The man does not make sound bites easy but here is an attmept:
"I have to admit that I have an irrational dislike of the word "trope," and other postmodern affectations. "
"business was well aware that high-tech industry could not survive in a competitive free enterprise economy, and "government must be the savior," as the business press explained. Such considerations converged on the decision to focus on military rather than social spending. "
Regarding Bush's National Security Strategy:
"Typical was the reaction of Madeleine Albright, also in Foreign Affairs. Like others, she criticized the Bush planners. She added, correctly, that every president has a similar strategy, but doesn't smash people in the face with it, antagonizing even allies. Rather, he keeps it in his back pocket to use when needed. She knew of course that the "Clinton doctrine" was even more extreme than the NSS, declaring that the US would resort to force unilaterally if necessary to ensure access to markets and resources, without even the pretexts of "self-defense" conjured up by Bush propagandists and their acolytes. But Clinton presented the doctrine quietly, and was careful to carry out his crimes, which were many, in ways that would be acceptable to allies and could be justified or concealed by elite opinion, including the media."
"The number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year to reach a new high of nearly 6.9 million, according to a Justice Department report that is being released today. "
"The growth in what the report termed the "correctional population" comes at a time when the crime rate nationwide has been relatively stable for several years. The report does not address why the number of men and women in jail and prison and on probation and parole has continued to increase. But experts say the most likely reason is the cumulative effect of the tougher sentencing laws passed in the 1990s. "
The following is a press release for the latest stunt pulled off by the fabulous Yes Men! I *highly* recommend following the link at the bottom and reading the page it goes to, as it describes who the Heritage Foundation is in greater detail and I really believe that this is the goal and vision of this administration: to shut down the state, just not in the nice happy anarchist way, more in the evil corporate empire way:
May 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PROTESTERS AMBUSH CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK
Speaker applauded for lambasting Bush
At the Heritage Foundation's annual Resource Bank meeting in Chicago last
Friday, protesters masquerading as a right-wing think tank took the stage
and announced that in light of Bush's shortcomings, they were nominating
former Reagan Attorney-General Ed Meese for president.
The audience applauded for nearly ten seconds. Meese, eating at a table
just feet away from the podium where Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men made
the announcement, grimaced and shook his head in surprise.
Heritage is the most influential think tank in Washington, spending over
$25 million annually to influence policy. Just as the wildest anarchists
aim to "smash the state," Heritage hopes that "the liberal welfare state
can be brought to collapse," in the words of its current president.
The Yes Men registered for the Heritage event as "The Society for
Socioeconomic Stability" and spent two days mingling among the 650
participants before approaching the microphone during a lull in the
closing luncheon.
Echoing sentiments expressed by others throughout the event, Bichlbaum
condemned Bush as an inadequate free-markets candidate. But while others
had condemned Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program as "socialistic,"
Bichlbaum focussed on the administration's war in Iraq, calling it "crony
corporate welfare" and "market distortion on a fairly gigantic scale."
"The Iraq war was history's biggest illegal trade subsidy," said Yes Man
Mike Bonanno, who was also in attendance. "One thing we'll be trying to
do in the months ahead is lodge an official complaint about this with the
WTO in Geneva."
"In a free market, companies like Halliburton and Exxon should be funding
their own market expansion projects instead of depending on the Federal
government for it," said Louise Smith, another Yes Man attendee.
Please see http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/bush/heritage.shtml
forpictures and video.
I'm thinking this is christian propaganda to make them feel good about ruling the country right now. But it's scary:
DID YOU KNOW?
As you walk up the steps to the building which houses the U.S. Supreme Court you can see near the top of the building a row of the world's law givers and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view - it is Moses and he is holding the Ten Commandments!
As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on each lower portion of each door.
As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments!
There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, D.C.
James Madison, the fourth president, known as "The Father of Our Constitution" made the following statement "We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self- government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said, It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ".
Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher,whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777.
Fifty-two of the 55 founders of the Constitution were members of the established orthodox churches in the colonies.
Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law would begin making law...an oligarchy....the rule of few over many.
The very first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said, "Americans should select and prefer Christians as their rulers." How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional?
Please forward this to everyone you can. Lets put it around the world and let the world see and remember what this great country was built on.
In God we trust!
National motto of the United States of America
Also, I can check out where people who visit the blog come from, and I have one entry entitled "Crazy-ass Japanese fashion." So ALL these people are coming from Google who were looking for "Japanese Ass." I am considering putting up an Edward Said article on exoticism or a picture of some fat man's ass.
The brand new issue of
World War 3 illustrated
the longest running zine in history
in it 24th year of publication
with multimedia presentations by:
Peter Kuper
Kevin Pyle
Seth Tobocman
Sabrina Jones
Mac Mcgill
Plus late breaking footage from the WTO protest in Cancun and more!
Featuring
Covers by Mirko ILic
and Micah Ian Wright
Art Spiegelman (full color front cover)
Eric Drooker (a full color inside back cover)
articles by
Kate Crane on the Patriot Act
Eric Laursen on Bush's war
and illustration and comics by
Sue Coe
Robbie Conal
Steve Brodner
Tom Tomorrow
Ward Sutton
Seth Tobocman
Kevin Pyle
Pete Friedrich
Ryan Inzana
Susan Willmarth
Christopher Cardinale
Nichole Schulman
Peter Kuper
and many others
_______________________________________________
This is really important to read.
The 1 in ever 37 people in the US is ether in prison or has served time there. This is now the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, no more of this "industrialized world" shenanigans. Yes, we have more people per capita in jail than China and Iran.
If you're a black man, you're chances of going to jail are now 1 in 3, that's up from 1 in 4 the last time I heard. Can you imagine, or do you know personally, the effect this knowledge must have on a boy growing up? If you're a white man, you're changes are only 1 in 17 but this is still amazingly high.
Nearly 1 in 4 of the inmates in federal and state prisons are there because of drug-related offenses, most of them nonviolent. And for women, that's 1 in 3.
They don't give any statistics for blond girls from Connecticut, but I'm guessing we're fairing well comparatively, not that I'm holding down the average...