Society's ChildS


Newspaper

Denied the right to assemble, South Korean protesters resort to using holograms

Haeryun Kang
NPR
Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:09 UTC
ghost protest
© Lee Jin-man/APHolograms of human figures are displayed during a "ghost protest" against South Korea's president in front of the Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul on Wednesday. Amnesty International in Korea said it decided to use the holograms after protesters were denied permission to march.
On the eve of South Korean President Park Geun-hye's third anniversary in office, protesters gathered in Seoul on Wednesday to condemn the administration's increasing crackdown on free speech. These protesters were unlike any others Seoul has seen. They were holograms.

The life-size hologram "ghosts" marched across a transparent screen facing an old palace gate at Gwanghwamun Square, a historic center in Seoul.

"Promise us democracy! Promise us freedom of assembly!" the holographic figures chanted for 30 minutes, as a real crowd of more than 100 — mostly journalists and organizers — watched.
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Dollars

Why you should prepare for a cashless society

Joshua Krause
Ready Nutrition
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 15:00 UTC
no cash symbol
Earlier this month, the European Central Bank suggested that the 500 Euro note needs to be eliminated. Not long after, academics and policy makers in the US started to call for the elimination of the $100 bill. This isn't something that the average person really thinks about on a regular basis, or even cares about. The vast majority of our purchases are done through digital channels these days. Unless you're about to buy a used car on Craigslist, you probably won't be needing the hundred-dollar bill. For most people, eliminating it would be an inconvenience at best.

So what gives? Why is anyone even considering the elimination of these bills? It seems like there is simply no need for it.

The truth is there are a lot of reasons why governments and banks want to eliminate these high denomination notes, and none of them are good. It should go without saying that the people who are pushing this are not going to give you a straight answer. You're going to hear them give the same excuse over and over again for the foreseeable future: Large denominations are indispensable for black market transactions. They enable drug dealers, tax evaders, corruption, and terrorism.

Comment: Why are the powers that be pushing for a cashless society?
The central banks are ... planning drastic restrictions on cash itself. They see moving to electronic money will first eliminate the underground economy, but secondly, they believe it will even prevent a banking crisis. This idea of eliminating cash was first floated as the normal trial balloon to see how the people take it. It was first launched by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup. Their claims have been widely hailed and their papers are now the foundation for the new age of Economic Totalitarianism that confronts us. Rogoff and Buiter have laid the ground work for the end of much of our freedom and will one day will be considered the new Marx with hindsight. They sit in their lofty offices but do not have real world practical experience beyond theory. Considerations of their arguments have shown how governments can seize all economic power are destroy cash in the process eliminating all rights. Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates for if they become too great, people will simply withdraw their funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, paper currency allows for bank runs. Eliminate paper currency and what you end up with is the elimination of the ability to demand to withdraw funds from a bank.


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Blue Planet

National Parks, for the people, or maybe not?

Stephen Correy
CounterPunch
Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
yosemite national park sign
As we warm up for the 2016 centenary of the National Park Service it's interesting to search "national park" in the ubiquitous, though flawed, Wikipedia. It claims there is a single common thread underpinning the definition, "the conservation of wild nature." But it's wrong: In fact, there are two entirely contradictory approaches to national parks and protected areas, and one version has nothing to do with "wild."

Sadly, the other one has. It is based on a flawed concept of "wilderness" and was developed in the United States starting 150 years ago in Yosemite. Since its inception, this model has required the removal of those who live on and from the land. It was this version that was applied in the Belgian Congo in 1925 creating the first national park in Africa, now called Virunga, and that has been the blueprint for many protected areas throughout Africa and Asia. At least five million people have seen their land and livelihoods stolen as a result (upper estimates are in excess of 14 million), entire peoples have been destroyed, and innumerable human rights abuses have been perpetrated in its name. This remains the model widely exported around the world, perhaps because the most powerful conservation organizations are American. The results are both tragic and criminal.

Comment: Also see:


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TV

Electoral dysfunction and media destraction


Dan Sanchez
Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
Electoral dysfunction

The Regularly Scheduled Dumbing Down of American Discourse

America's moral compass was performing surprisingly well until a few months ago. Citizen journalism and social media were driving the news cycle and framing the narratives. The mainstream media can try to spin atrocity, but they can't completely control the stories that emerge from war zones and urban occupations, much less how the public conscience responds to those stories. This is especially true now that every individual with a smartphone is potential photojournalist, and any affecting image or alternative news story can go viral through social media.

The recent movement against predatory police was not part of the program. The general public was not supposed to see Eric Garner choked out by NYPD cops while pleading "I can't breathe," Michael Brown's corpse left for hours to bake on the hot asphalt in Ferguson, or a platoon of militarized cops besieging an American community.

Also not part of the program was the turn of American public opinion against Israel following the 51 Day War on Gaza. The general public was not supposed to see the shattered bodies of little boys sprawled out in the sand after they were bombed by the IDF while playing soccer on a beach in Gaza. They were not supposed to see a video of a little girl under siege begging the viewer to believe that she is not a terrorist and that she just wants to live.
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Alarm Clock

Disgraceful! High school students chant 'Trump' to racially-diverse basketball team

Amanda Girard
U.S. Uncut
Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
Trump make America great again
Black and Latino high school basketball players in Iowa had to endure white crowds chanting Donald Trump's name at them as a form of taunting.

Unlike the rest of Iowa, Perry High School's student population is 48 percent people of color, and its boys basketball team consists of African American, Latino, and Native American players. During a recent game against conference opponent Dallas Center-Grimes, those players walked into a gymnasium filled with white faces chanting, "TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!" in an effort to psych them out.

"It's honestly disrespectful. That's how I take it. I hear it during the game, on and off the court. Everywhere I go," senior Shammond Ivory told WHO-TV.

Perry High student section leader Kevin Lopez called the Dallas Center-Grimes crowd out for its racist behavior. "We are all aware of racism, it's alive and well in small portions but it's alive and well, and it's just hurtful to see that's what they resort to," Lopez said.

Comment: This is flat out disgraceful! When a public figure such as Trump who it is looking to be the Republican candidate for President says what he does and it is not shunned outright by major portions of the media and a major section of the American people is it any wonder that it would spread and be given expression by the populace?

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Nuke

More US soldiers killed by Halliburton than by Iraqis

David Swanson
Peoples Voice
Fri, 26 Feb 2016 22:32 UTC
dick cheney
How is Darth Cheney going to handle how far left the corporate culture of his old company has become ?
The U.S. government, from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, told blatant lies about the Iraqi government creating chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in 2002, despite having been informed of the fact that Iraq was doing no such thing. U.S. leaders lied about ties between Iraq and terrorists that they also knew did not exist.

Then the U.S. military attacked and invaded Iraq, in the process heavily bombing old sites of Iraqi chemical weapons from the 1980s, many of those weapons having been provided by the United States. In large part because of the U.S. origin of the old Iraqi chemical weapons, the U.S. kept quiet about them during the new war. Another reason for the official silence was that, during the 2003 U.S. destruction of Iraq, many of those old weapons were seized by fledgling terrorist groups. The war had done exactly what it had been justified as being needed to prevent; it had given WMDs to terrorists.
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Arrow Down

Intentionally starving poor people on food stamps

Hamilton Nolan
Gawker
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 17:35 UTC
Food Aid
© Associated Press
At the end of March, 22 states will begin imposing work requirements on people who want food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose their food aid.

The Wall Street Journal reports that starting on April 1, all of those states plan to reinstate a rule that had been set aside after the financial crisis led to mass unemployment: that adults with no dependents or disabilities are limited to "three months of food stamps in any three-year period—unless they work at least 80 hours a month, or meet education and training or volunteer benchmarks."

Food stamps, by the way, are a government program that works extremely well.

If people are unable to find a job, it is cruel to force them to starve, and it is foolish to make a poor, unemployed, hungry person sit through classes that will not directly lead to a job, or spend their time volunteering, for no income, simply so they can have food to eat, but no money or free time to obtain it. The likely outcome of reinstating these rules:
"The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 500,000 to one million people will lose access to food stamps this year, citing the experience in states where work requirements already returned."
This is the human cost of all of those years of right-wing rhetoric about fairy tale "welfare queens" ripping off the system. That rhetoric was used only for momentary political gain. But it engendered a deep belief in certain parts of the public that even food is too gracious of a gift for our poorest citizens. So now, hundreds of thousands of people will go hungry, so that some other, smaller number of better-off people can believe that they are not being ripped off by people they do not know and will never see.

Congratulations.
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Attention

Lawsuit: Sexual abuse of women allowed to flourish in New York prisons


RT
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 03:49 UTC
female prisoners
© Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
Multiple cases of male corrections officers sexual abusing female prisoners were brought to light in a class action suit filed against the New York Department of Corrections, which alleges a "culture of indifference" has allowed sexual abuse to flourish.

"Staff sexual abuse is a serious problem in New York's women's prisons," said Veronica Vela, staff attorney with The Legal Aid Society's Prisoners' Rights Project, in a released statement.

The lawsuit describes cases of alleged sexual intercourse, harassment, and abuse in the three all-women's prisons operated by the department: the Bedford Hills, Taconic and Albion correctional facilities.
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Heart - Black

Insane Idaho State Rep.: "If women get pregnant after rape, that means they must have enjoyed it"

Lea Vat Kens
Politicalo.com
Fri, 26 Feb 2016 20:37 UTC
Idaho State Rep
© Unknown
Another Republican lawmaker suggested women and girls are unlikely to become pregnant from rape or incest. Idaho State Rep. Pete Nielson (R-Mountain Home) spoke up during a legislative hearing Thursday to decide whether abortion providers should be required to give patients a list of facilities that offer free ultrasounds, reported The Spokesman-Review. Nielson expressed his doubts that post-rape pregnancies were medically possible.

"Now, I'm of the understanding that in many cases of rape it does not involve any pregnancy because of the trauma of the incident," Nielson said. "Therefore, it is a logical conclusion that any woman who got pregnant after such a despicable and gruesome act must have, in fact, enjoyed it even on a small scale, which eventually led to the obvious consequences. Now, I don't have a problem with women who make a mistake and then regret it, but I do mind when people let something happen, pretend that it's disgusting, and then it turns out they lied."

Comment: That's obviously, medically, scientifically inaccurate. Where the heck did he get his education, and how did he get in the position to make laws?

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Quenelle

Protesting war crimes: Kurdish women march against Erdogan in France


Sputnik
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 20:34 UTC
kurdish women protest in france
© AFP 2016/ MIGUEL MEDINA
Kurdish women continue to protest Ankara's ongoing atrocities against Kurds in the mainly-Kurdish town of Cizre in Turkey's southeast and elsewhere in the region.

Kurdish women will continue to hold protest rallies in Strasbourg against Ankara's ongoing atrocities against Kurds living in the mainly Kurdish town of Cizre in southeastern Turkey's Sirnak province, according to Nursel Kilic, a representative of the Kurdish Women's Movement in Europe.

In an interview with Sputnik, Nursel Kilic, who represents the Kurdish Women's Movement in Europe, said that the protests are being held in front of the buildings of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights.

She recalled that in addition to Cizre, the violence shows no sign of abating in other towns throughout southeastern Turkey, where Turkish irregular troops have stepped up their activity.

Comment: Erdogan continues to demonstrate his totalitarianism and relentless pursuit for power by murdering innocent Kurds. He and Netanyahu are clearly exchanging notes. See more:

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