Society's ChildS


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Naked man jumps into lion enclosure in crazed suicide bid

man mauled by lions
A 20-year-old man took off his clothes and broke into a lion enclosure at Santiago zoo, where he was mauled by lions.
A naked man who jumped into the big cat enclosure at a Chilean zoo in a desperate 'suicide bid' survived - but only after the lions attacking him were shot dead.

Santiago authorities confirmed the two beasts were killed as they mauled the 20-year-old who had broken into their compound early on Saturday.

The man, who has not been named, was accidently hit with a tranquiliser as zookeepers frantically tried to put the lions to sleep.

He taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and was said to be in a "grave" condition.

Stormtrooper

Death in a shopping aisle: One man's fatal encounter with K-Mart

Jonathan Sorensen
At Carlisle and Indian School NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico, different worlds, borders and seemingly even dimensions collide, clash and literally intersect. On one side of Carlisle upscale shoppers peruse the selection of pricey delicacies at a Whole Foods store, while working-class families pulling in across the road still find meals for less than ten bucks at a Burger King.

A short jaunt up Carlisle the boulevard passes over Interstate 40 and its roaring, cement stomping big rigs, the modern mug of old Route 66 that linked the Midwestern heartland with the West Coast wonderland. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels and the Duke City offices of the New Mexico State Police sprinkle the zone. Here hungry passerby can find breakfast tacos alongside Southern-style barbeque or All-American hamburgers sprinkled with classic New Mexico green chile.

Darting in and out of traffic and stationing themselves on a median, homeless folk hold signs telling sad stories and begging for food and money. Perched on high ground, almost lording over the landscape, stands a branch of Kmart, an outpost of the once-thriving department store chain with an iconic USA logo that is now owned by Sears Holdings and experiencing hard times.

Handcuffs

Police state: Woman arrested, jailed and shackled for letting her 11 y.o. son drive a golf cart

Arrest of Julie Mall
Arrest of Julie Mall
A family's dream vacation would quickly morph into a nightmare after they crossed paths with police in North Carolina. For allowing her son to drive a golf cart, a woman was brutalized, arrested, shackled, and charged with child abuse. Part of the incident was caught on film.

Julie Mall and her family look forward every year to their vacation at the luxury resort on Bald Head Island. However, thanks to police in North Carolina, the Mall family has changed their annual destination.

The incident began last July as the family was returning from the beach to their $1,000 a night cottage and Mall's 11-year-old son asked to drive the golf cart. Seeing no harm in doing so, Julie and her husband Scott let their child have the wheel.

Cell Phone

Nanny State: New York cops will be allowed to search cell phones using a 'textalyzer'

texting and driving
© Christian Science Monitor/Getty
As government continues to expand, finding ever more ways to feed itself through taxation, it seeks to justify this burgeoning existence. Enter the Nanny State.

New York is a leader in developing laws and regulations to protect us from ourselves, perhaps most famously with the Big Apple's attempt to ban-large size sugary drinks. The Empire State has the highest cigarette taxes in the nation, which fuels a black market, and it places heavy restrictions on other "sins."

No one doubts that cigarettes and an excess of sugary drinks are bad for the health, but it is not the state's responsibility to manage this behavior. The issue becomes trickier when bad behavior puts other people's lives in danger.

Eye 1

Life in the surveillance state: Trading freedom for safety while becoming slaves

Surveillance against citizens
The nefarious brilliance of the surveillance state rests, at least in part, in the fact that it conveys omniscience without the necessity of omnipresence. Since even its verifiable actions are clandestine and shadowy, revealed not through admission but by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Jeremy Hammond, its gaze can feel utterly infinite. To modify an old phrase, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you—especially given that you now have proof. But if you never know precisely when they're watching or exactly what they're looking for, can you ever be paranoid enough?

This is, to some degree, the concern of many Americans, according to a new study from Oxford University. The Washington Post reports researcher Jonathon Penney found that Snowden's leaks about government surveillance had a "chilling effect" on American adults' internet habits. Penney looked at Wikipedia searches conducted after June 2013, when news of NSA spying programs so thoroughly dominated headlines that 87 percent of Americans became aware of them. In the wake of the story, he found "a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' 'car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" The traffic for those pages dropped precipitously after the Snowden files came to light, and continued to slide over the next year, suggesting a "longer-term impact from the revelations."

"This is measuring regular people who are being spooked by the idea of government surveillance online," Penney told the Post. "You want to have informed citizens. If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

Comment: Further reading: Mission Accomplished? Snowden 'NSA Leak' had 'chilling effect' that scared people away from learning truth about terrorism


Attention

Illusion of choice - How technology hijacks people's minds

Performing Magic
© Medium.comThat’s me performing sleight of hand magic at my mother’s birthday party.
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as Google's Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.

When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.

Where does technology exploit our minds' weaknesses?

I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it.

Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.

And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.

I want to show you how they do it.

Handcuffs

Police beat, tase and set a K-9 on a man for dancing in a freight yard

Tukwila officers
A Washington man was just granted $100,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit after police were seen on dashcam, repeatedly punching him, repeatedly tasering him, and allowing their K9 to maul him continuously in spite of appearing unconscious.

On Aug. 22, 2014, the victim, Linson Tara was found dancing in a freight yard. Tara was not violent, and when police arrived, the dashcam shows him standing there with one hand on his hip and another in the air.

As police attempt to walk Tara over to the vehicle, they quickly become violent. At most, Tara had merely pulled his arm away from the officer before he was placed in a headlock, slammed to the hood of the patrol car and beaten.

Whistle

Military women who speak out about sexual assault are unfairly discharged with a "personality disorder"

sexual harassment
© Human Rights WatchEmily Vorland, discharged after reporting sexual harassment.
Noxious stereotypes about women being nuts and liars are being used to silence military women who report rape.

As all too many rape victims discover when they speak out, many react by just wishing the victim would shut up and go away.

Most rapists attack someone they know, which means that holding them accountable means tearing apart whatever community — school, work, friend group — that the accused and accuser belong in. Often, it feels just easier to pressure the accuser to shut up and go away so everything can return to normal, even though that often requires ignoring that there's a sexual predator in your midst.

Comment: This article is another example of the disgusting rape culture in America. In addition to how the system protects the rapists and fails the victims. If there is any doubt it is now confirmed - Rape is rampant in the US military:


Bizarro Earth

Bizarro world: Think Progress editor argues that males can menstruate and get pregnant

zach ford
© twitterZach Ford
The fight between basic biology that most little kids learned in elementary school versus the bizarre progressive politically correct agenda that would see anyone using any public bathroom for any reason and no such thing as distinction between a man and a woman has just taken a train to crazy land.

It's one thing to "gender identify" with a specific gender (although many would argue that it is actually gender dysphoria, defined as "the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one's biological sex").

But this is just going way too far.

Comment: Society has become so warped and people are so enamored of their feelings that actual reality cannot penetrate.

Policing of speech: NYC to fine businesses for not using the correct gender pronoun


Black Magic

Bayer Monsanto merger: A match made in hell

Big Ag, monsanto
In a world infected with a plethora of immoral multinational corporations, it is hard to think of two corporations who have more nefarious histories than Bayer AG and Monsanto. Considering this, it is a harrowing prospect that the two corporations could potentially strike a deal in the near future.

As Bloomberg reported earlier this month, Bayer AG - the German pharmaceutical and chemical corporation - is reportedly considering a bid for the agrochemical and biotechnology corporation, Monsanto. This comes two months after Monsanto showed some interest in acquiring Bayer Crop Sciences, a branch of Bayer AG.

Founded in 1863, Bayer may be familiar to many readers as the first company to widely sell and trademark Aspirin in the late nineteenth century. But there is a far more sinister history to this company that is often omitted.

Comment: Further reading: