Society's ChildS


Red Flag

The American bureaucrat's descent into madness

Sean Kerrigan
Activist Post
Sat, 23 Apr 2016 20:28 UTC
Bureaucratic insanity
In the United States today, a child can be charged with battery simply for throwing a piece of candy at a friend. Students can even be locked in solitary confinement for skipping school. Adults aren't much better off. The Supreme Court decided in 2011 that anyone arrested, even for an offense as minor as an unpaid traffic ticket, can be strip searched at the discretion of police. These authoritarian and merciless acts of force are just the tip of the iceberg in our authoritarian society, still cruelly nicknamed "the land of the free."

The number of rules and laws we are subjected to is comedically excessive. But what makes it so unbearable is that they are often enforced with a kind of insatiable, self-righteous venom. Increasingly, modern American bureaucrats - whether they be police, teachers, or government paper-pushers - are obsessed with conforming to rules and mercilessly punishing those who fail to comply.

Comment: Another name for these micro-managing rule enforcers is authoritarian follower. Since they have no moral exoskeleton of their own they need strict rules to keep themselves in line and force their worldview onto others.
It becomes clear why such people - with intense moral concerns combined with a reliance on external moral structures to keep one's own forbidden impulses in check - would support a state that enforces moral rules and a social culture that stigmatizes those who violate those rules. It really is a threat to them - a threat to their own inner moral order - when the society around them fails to be clear in its rules and strict in its enforcement. ...

It is their dependence on the strength and integrity of the external moral order that drives many "exo-skeletons" to crusade to make the whole world around them conform to the moral system to which they themselves are striving to adhere. The unspoken - and generally unacknowledged - need is: please, society, be morally strict enough to keep me on the straight-and-narrow path."


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Brick Wall

The school-to-prison pipeline: It's time to get cops out of schools

Karen Dolan
Truthout
Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:18 UTC
school prisons
© studentrightsalliance.org
I'm still shaking from watching the recently released video of a white, uniformed police officer violently body-slamming a 12-year-old Latina girl face-first into a brick walkway. You can hear a "crack" when her face slams into the brick.

The child was reportedly talking with another student when other kids gathered to see if there was an argument brewing. Officer Joshua Kehm apparently didn't want to wait to see if the middle schoolers would indeed start arguing.

Kehm was fired after the video was released, but it's the school-to-prison pipeline he represents that most deserves to be indicted. Officers like Kehm send thousands of children into the legal system each year for petty misbehavior at school - or, often, for no misbehavior at all.

Comment: Police state education - cops called every 2.6 seconds
According to figures released by the U.S. Department of Justice, 76% of all high schools in the country have police officers working on the campus all day, and teachers are calling them in for the most trivial disciplinary problems. According to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Education and published by NBC News, in the 2011-2012 school year, teachers called the cops on students a total of 31,961 times in the state of California alone, leading to 6,341 arrests.

With 175 8-hour-long school days, that means that every 2.6 seconds a cop is called!


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Arrow Down

Kuwait to DNA test and tag all tourists

Thinus Ferreira
Traveller24
Sat, 23 Apr 2016 11:00 UTC
DNA Testing
© 92 News HD
All visitors and tourists to Kuwait will now have to submit to a DNA test and be DNA tagged before they're allowed to enter the Persian Gulf state.

In a world first, Kuwait wants to DNA "tag" everybody in, as well as entering the country with the new DNA legislation that will become law this year.

The Kuwait government says the forced DNA testing won't affect people's personal freedom and privacy but will be done to keep track of people and to help if they commit crimes.

Tourists and visitors to Kuwait will get their DNA taken through specimens of saliva or a few drops of blood done at a special DNA testing facility at the airport.

The DNA collection will be done at a special testing centre at Kuwait International Airport and there will be "consequences of rejecting its procedures" for visitors who refuse the mandatory test.

Citizens will be DNA tested by using mobile testing centres that will move through the state and residents will have their DNA captured when they apply for the issuing or renewing of residency visas during medical examinations.

According to The Kuwait Times, the DNA testing law is "aimed at creating an integrated security database". The law - the first of its kind in the world - and the DNA tagging will only be used for "criminal security purposes" according to Kuwait officials.

"Kuwait will have a database including DBA fingerprints of all citizens, residents and visitors. This law is the first of its kind in the world and Kuwait is the first country worldwide to apply the system," notes the publication.
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Green Light

New report states police forces are preparing for riots on a national scale

Claire Bernish
The Anti Media
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 19:11 UTC
police state america
Fascism doesn't often sweep in overnight and take over some hapless nation's government; rather, it gradually seeps into the cultural fabric — as is quietly taking place all around the globe, evidenced by an upsurge in sales of riot equipment that has gone largely unnoticed.

A new report from analysts with industry research group, Sandler Research, forecasts the Global Riot Control System Market for the next four years — but beyond a burgeoning market to parallel the expanding global police state, it appears world governments are also keenly aware of civilian discontent. Sandler predicts the market will have an annual growth of 3.5 percent, and makes a telling juxtaposition, emphases added, involving the United States:
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Cowboy Hat

Deteriorating culture: Majority of Americans believe manners and behavior have declined


Phys.org
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
manners, civility, courtesy
A recent survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 74 percent of Americans think manners and behavior have deteriorated in the United States over the past several decades. A large majority of Americans believe that politicians should be held to a higher standard than the general public, but few think they are living up to that expectation. The Republican campaign is viewed as rude and disrespectful by nearly twice as many Americans as those who characterize the fight for the Democratic nomination in that way (78 percent vs. 41 percent).

The study finds that people are generally in agreement about what sort of behavior is unacceptable. Behavior ranging from use of cell phones in restaurants to swearing in public or online is universally considered to be ill-mannered, but differences in these opinions, and the likelihood of an individual personally engaging in such behavior, emerge based on age and gender. Remarks or jokes based on race, gender, or sexuality, however, are considered inappropriate by 8 in 10 Americans, and only a small percentage of Americans admit to doing so themselves.

Comment: What is occurring in the U.S. is the natural outcome of a society that has become saturated with psychopaths in positions of power, and subsequently infecting the culture with their pathological behavior. As with previous civilizations that succumb to the process of ponerization, the U.S. is likely headed for collapse, and it's time to begin to consider alternative ways of structuring society that work for the common good of humanity.

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Better Earth

March for Water: Thousands Protest Corporate Greed in Guatemala


TeleSUR
Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:29 UTC
ear
Thousands of Indigenous and campesino protesters have flooded Guatemala City, bringing the demands of their 11-day march for water to the country's highest decision makers and breaking up months of calm in the streets and squares of the capital after the winding down of last year's mass mobilizations, which pressured former President Otto Perez Molina to resign.

The March for Water, Mother Earth, Territory, and Life brought together Indigenous groups from across Guatemala, unified around demands for a guarantee to the right to water and dignified livelihoods in the face industrial agriculture and exploitive mining projects that threaten to contaminate and siphon off water resources from remote and vulnerable communities.
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Health

47 percent of Americans cannot cover $400 emergency room visit

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 17:12 UTC
Money
If you had to make a sudden visit to the emergency room, would you have enough money to pay for it without selling something or borrowing the funds from somewhere? Most Americans may not realize this, but this is something that the Federal Reserve has actually been tracking for several years now. And according to the Fed, an astounding 47 percent of all Americans could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency room visit without borrowing it or selling something.

Various surveys that I have talked about in the past have found that more than 60 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck, but I didn't realize that things were quite this bad for about half the country. If you can't even come up with $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit, then you are just surviving from month to month by the skin of your teeth. Unfortunately, about half of us are currently in that situation.
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Laptop

Understanding Libya 5 years after NATO destruction: An interview with Alexandra Valiente (Part 1)

Hugo Turner
Anti-Imperialist U
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 16:14 UTC
libya green resistance
In 2011 Libya, the most prosperous democracy in Africa, was targeted for destruction. Terrorist death squads were unleashed upon the nation. A NATO bombing campaign destroyed the country and plunged it into chaos. NATO's death squads seized control of most of the oil-rich territory, although 5 years later, the Libyan people continue to resist. After the 2011 NATO assault, accurate information about what has been going on in the country is very rare. Thus I decided to turn for help to Alexandra Valiente, one of the few in the west who continues to follow events closely and who has contacts inside the country. She is the editor of the Jamahiriya News Agency and Viva Libya websites which cover events in Libya. She is also the editor of Libya 360 (devoted to news and resistance movements in Africa and Latin America), Syria 360 and Revolutionary Strategic Studies. You can follow her on twitter @libya360 and @jamahiriyanews. She generously agreed to do an interview with me on the current situation in Libya and so below I present the first part of our conversation.
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Eye 1

New Yale Law School report: 'Trapped in a Black Box: Growing Terrorist Watchlisting in Everyday Policing'

Derrick Broze
Activist Post
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
Terrorist Watchlisting

Comment: Since the synthetic terror of 911, the national security surveillance state has slowly but assuredly seen to it that more and more U.S. citizens "fit" the profile of terrorists. With this one label, a perception has been promulgated by the pathocrats that, for all intents and purposes, considers an ever larger section of the general public 'terrorist material' - and ought to be treated as such. Taking these developments to their logical end, we can eventually expect that many more individuals will be added to these lists and at some point incarcerated on the very flimsiest of reasons. We already saw this during WWII. But this time promises to be much worse.


A new report highlights the lack of oversight and exponential growth in the number of Americans placed on domestic intelligence watchlists.

A new analysis from the American Civil Liberties Union and a clinic at the Yale Law School is calling attention to the hundreds of thousands of individuals who have been placed on a variety of domestic terror watchlists. The report, "Trapped in a Black Box: Growing Terrorist Watchlisting in Everyday Policing," details how the ACLU and the clinic at Yale Law School view this expansion of domestic watchlists as a potential threat to privacy and liberty.

The researchers reviewed 13,000 pages of information, including pages released from the Federal Bureau of Investigations via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit by the ACLU and the Civil Liberties and the Civil Liberties and National Security Clinic at the law school. The team also studied information obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the government's Watchlisting Guidance.

They found that there were less than 10,000 entries in 2003 as part of the Violent Gangs and Terrorist Organizations File, but by 2008 that number grown to 272,198 individuals under a successor category, the Known or Suspected Terrorist File. The report states that the KST list, "is part of a vast system of domestic surveillance of people whom law enforcement labels suspect based on vague and loose criteria, with serious constitutional and privacy implications for those who are included in the file."
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Gold Coins

Ecuador: President Correa to tax the rich to salvage the poor to pay for earthquake damage


Sputnik
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 01:28 UTC
Ecuador road
© www.adventistreview.orgShattered city street from the April 16 earthquake.
On Saturday night a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Ecuador, killing over 525 people and leaving the resourced-strapped country scrambling to conduct adequate search, rescue and relief efforts.

"It's the worst tragedy in 60 years," said Defense Minister Ricardo Patino. "We're facing the most difficult phase right now, which is rescuing victims and recovering bodies."

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa must now manage a tremendously difficult recovery and rebuilding effort, at a time when the OPEC nation's oil revenues have greatly diminished. The government estimates that the damage from the earthquake exceeds $3 billion, and are reducing GDP expectations by 3 percentage points, in the wake of the incident.

To meet the resource shortfall created by the tragic earthquake and exacerbated by a flat oil market, the President Correa on Thursday announced a one-time tax on the rich to pay for relief and reconstruction efforts. Any individual with assets in excess of $1 million will be required to contribute 0.9% of their wealth, while lower earners must hand over a day's salary for every $1000 of their monthly income, up to $5000.

In addition to the one-time tax on the wealthy, President Correa has expressed a willingness to sell off state assets to ensure resources get to earthquake victims struggling to survive in destroyed communities.

Despite heroic rescue efforts and attempts by Ecuador's government to rally the necessary funds to address the catastrophe, residents in rural sectors of the disaster zone say they have yet to receive food, water, or emergency medical aid. Ecuadorian officials quickly moved supplies into populated areas impacted by the earthquake, but damaged and impassable roads continue to limit aid convoys seeking to reach to remote areas.

Comment: Unfortunately, major earthquakes do not wait for good economic times to occur. No matter what kind of solution is found to rebuild Ecuador, the suffering and devastation has to be addressed. Taxing the rich one time--if it is truly one time, and subsidizing the poor--if that actually happens, would be a start. But, knowing how greedy governments and corporations are, what are the chances this is a one time tax and that the funds will be applied as stated? Hope for the best, but wait and see for the outcome.

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