20 million people were sentenced as criminals between 1935-1941 in the USSR. Half of those were executed. The other half were sent to labor camps and rehabilitation camps where most of them died. The gulag system provided a free work-force of millions in mining and timber industries in Siberia. All farmers were collectivized into labor units and told what to grow and were shot if they were caught stealing. By the blood of millions of people the USSR catapulted from a third world agrarian culture to an economic power. But all the agriculture and industry was taken by the state, and exports just made a few communist bureaucrats wealthy.

It seems that it really doesn’t matter what the system is. One thing is clear, and that is that from time immemorial there is always a gang of thieves who obtain the power necessary with which they can control most of the resources of a nation. Politics is the same in every country no matter what kind of system of control. It tries to dictate what is acceptable and how to be acceptable through propaganda, while politicians debate one another in fixed forums. With their henchman like Rupert Murdoch they dream of questions to address the answers they have already formulated and then circulate them on the evening news entertainment shows.

All state history boils down to coalitions that strive to gain power over the state’s assets. A state’s net worth is its natural resources and the ability of its workforce to create assets. It doesn’t matter if it’s communism or capitalism. They are opposite sides of the same objective, to hold power in order to gain can control of the nation’s assets. It’s why regulations that would benefit everyone, and that everyone obviously would agree to, are not even discussed in the so-called elected congress. People must have healthcare, drugs, utilities, banking services. But if a group of people can control the assets of any of these industries they obviously can get extraordinarily wealthy.

We have a modern equivalent of the boom and bust economic measures taken by Stalin in the 1930s and the American capitalist equivalent of the 1920s lacking the interest in developing resources and industry in America, and willing to use its power over the Congress and the President to pass laws not only making it legal to fire its labor force and profit from cheap labor, but in an added measure of outrageous audacity allows these companies tax breaks for doing so. Governments are pretty much the same. They hide behind quantitative figures, ignoring the individual elements that make up the totality behind the methods utilized to achieve success.

The horrific crime shocked a nation. Three young boys, cub scouts, were tied up, murdered and their naked bodies dumped in a drainage ditch.

As a Deep South community bayed for justice, attention focused on a group of misfit teenagers, heavy metal fans accused of killing the children in a Satanic ritual. The case became a sensation at a time when a ‘Satanic panic’ over cults was gripping 1990s America. All three were found guilty. Jason Baldwin, then 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17, got life sentences. Damien Echols, 18, was put on death row, where he remains.

Now evidence, including DNA samples, has emerged to suggest the real killers are still at large and that three innocent men have been behind bars for almost 15 years. ‘No reasonable juror would convict… knowing what we know today,’ said defence lawyer Dennis Riordan.

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It was 1970, Summer. I was 5 years old. Washington, D.C. I was sitting on the little cement wall in front of the White House. Next to me and also sitting on the wall was a black family, and further down were scores of others sitting on the wall. I was talking to my brother. Suddenly, I heard a loud bellow “Get down from there.”

Startled, I turned to see a big black Washington D.C. cop glowering at me. Surely, he couldn’t be talking to me.

“I said get down from there,” he screamed.

I looked over at the black family, none of whom moved off the wall. I’m sure my face showed my confusion.
“Don’t you hear?” the ignorant pig hissed. “I said get down from there.”
I did.
“And don’t let me catch you back up there again.”
“Stupid white kid,” I heard one of the blacks say.

That is my earliest recollection of what racism in America is all about.

A video was recently released of College basketball legend Bobby Knight, in hunters’ gear, spouting the stupid mouthy horseshit which he is so famous for, after his careless use of a firearm resulted in a harmless bystander being sprayed with pellets on their own property. When confronted, Knight used the extremely cowardly and lame excuse that he would’ve moved if the person filming him hadn’t used abusive language. But he wasn’t inclined to do so because HE had been insulted.

Now, millions of us are used to this stupid selfish moron justifying his own idiotic behavior. Let’s analyze this with some sense of reality. There is no sane person who is not going to be upset over being shot at. Knight carelessly discharged a firearm in a populated area. A woman was shot. Knight is so absorbed in his own senseless reality he felt his indignation justified regardless of the fact he had just carelessly shot another human being. Evidently, in Texas this is acceptable. But we must also remember it was Texas that welcomed this pig with open arms when the rest of the country had grown weary of his blowhard bullying and denounced him for being the pariah he is.

In Michigan he most definitely would be cited, and depending on where he was, would’ve more than likely had his head introduced to his heart via his anus. Of course, this coward knows that, and it is why he spent a lifetime bullying and slapping kids around. Men would never put up with his behavior. It is also easy to stand tall when holding a gun. It takes a man to meet people face to face on their own level. Publicly, Bobby Knight doesn’t exhibit this basic quality of manhood. Women with good men all over America can at least be secure in the knowledge that their men aren’t Bobby Knights.

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
-Joseph Stalin

“While timorous knowledge stands considering, audacious ignorance has done the deed.”
-Samuel Daniel(16th Century English Poet)

I can think of no statement more apt than this to describe to the world the state of our polarized, corrupt political system in America, and why America’s position as a cultural power and voice of integrity has been all but destroyed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering because, as technology has changed, a growing amount of foreign communications passes through U.S.-based channels.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a FISA court order between 2001 and 2007.

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The horrific crime shocked a nation. Three young boys, cub scouts, were tied up, murdered and their naked bodies dumped in a drainage ditch.

As a Deep South community bayed for justice, attention focused on a group of misfit teenagers, heavy metal fans accused of killing the children in a Satanic ritual. The case became a sensation at a time when a ‘Satanic panic’ over cults was gripping 1990s America. All three were found guilty. Jason Baldwin, then 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17, got life sentences. Damien Echols, 18, was put on death row, where he remains.

Now evidence, including DNA samples, has emerged to suggest the real killers are still at large and that three innocent men have been behind bars for almost 15 years. ‘No reasonable juror would convict… knowing what we know today,’ said defence lawyer Dennis Riordan.

Click here to read full article

I used to worry that the US was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax - the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses - but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatised disaster services, we’re getting the Rapture right here on earth.

Just look at what is happening in southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn’t the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group - but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Members of the company’s Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the fires, the “mobile units”, racing around in firetrucks, even extinguished fires for their clients.

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In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are identified as witches and beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s rubble-strewn capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families - often a rationale for not having to feed or care for them.

The authorities in one northern Angolan town identified 432 street children who had been abandoned or abused as suspected witches. A report last year by the government’s National Institute for the Child and the United Nations Children’s Fund described the number of children deemed to be witches as “massive.”

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