The Mediasphere

Larry Doyle  Author, ‘I Love You, Beth Cooper,’ ‘Go Mutants!’ and ‘Deliriously Happy’

It’s time to take a good hard look at Rick Santorum’s faith.

Many of you will be shocked to learn what our possible future president believes, who he answers to, the bloody jihads his so-called church has carried on for centuries, and its current role as the tactical arm of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

As a former member of same sect (an Irish-Catholic, the worst kind), I have read the texts, participated in the rites, and even seen behind the curtain, as it were, as a one-time altar boy, so help me. I managed to escape, but then, Santorum is in much deeper than I ever was.

Unlike Christians, Santorum and his fellow Roman Catholics participate in a barbaric ritual dating back two millennia, a “mass” in which a black-robed cleric casts a spell over some bread and wine, transfiguring it into the actual living flesh and blood of their Christ. Followers then line up to eat the Jesus meat and drink his holy blood in a cannibalistic reverie not often seen outside Cinemax.

Roman Catholics like Santorum take their orders from “the Pope,” a high priest who, they believe, chats with God. Santorum has made no secret of his plans to implement his leader’s dicta on allowed uses of vaginas and anuses, but has said little about what additional dogma he will be compelled to obey. Will child killers and terrorists go unexecuted on the Pope’s say-so? Will we be able to conduct our wars as we see fit, or only the “just” ones? If Santorum is a good Catholic, and he appears to be among the very best, our real president will be Benedict XVI (a “former” Nazi, by the way).

Santorum has also remained silent on his religious organization’s various reigns of terror, in which good protestants and others were tortured and killed in imaginatively grisly ways. Even more chilling is a possible connection between the Roman Catholic Church pedophile program and NAMBLA, which I discovered after conducting some research on the internet.

Ordinarily I would be loathe to discuss all this, feeling that issues of faith and religion should be kept out of politics. But it’s far too late for that, and I have an obligation to expose this phony theology that threatens to supplant Christianity as our official national religion.

Need I remind you that only once in our great history has a Roman Catholic been elected president, and how tragically it ended?

By Vicky Pelaez

Global Research, March 10, 2008

El Diario-La Prensa, New York

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?

“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP

According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:

. Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams - 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.

. The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.

. Longer sentences.

. The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.

. A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.

. More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.

HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.

During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. “Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex,” comments the Left Business Observer.

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).”

PRIVATE PRISONS

The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton’s program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.

Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, “the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners.” The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for “good behavior,” but for any infraction, they get 30 days added - which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost “good behavior time” at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.

IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES

Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state’s governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.

After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 - ending court supervision and decisions - caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering “rent-a-cell” services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.

STATISTICS

Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.

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By Brandon Keim 

February 27, 2012 | 4:12 pm |  

As an individual’s wealth and status rise, so does their tendency to be unethical, concludes a new study of the relationship between socioeconomics and ethics.

The study included seven different experiments that spanned real-world and laboratory settings, from rude San Francisco drivers to test subjects given a chance to take candy from children.

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

The findings, announced Feb. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come at a moment when historical tensions over wealth and class have reached a fever pitch: Is greed good, and extreme wealth a sign of virtue? Does wealth corrupt, and should a society strive to be egalitarian in income as well as principles?

In the next experiment, the researchers tested 105 Berkeley undergraduates on realistic ethical scenarios, such as what they’d do when given change for $20 after paying with a $10 bill. Lower-SES participants tended to be more honest.

The fourth experiment probed the underlying dynamics. Test-takers were asked to imagine themselves being very rich or poor, then given an opportunity to take candy from a jar that would next be delivered to children in another lab. Students who’d pretended to be rich took more candy, suggesting that “the experience of higher social class has a causal relationship to unethical decision-making and behavior,” wrote Piff’s team.

If that test had a certain tongue-in-cheek humor, however, the next was more poignant: 108 adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labor service were asked play the role of managers negotiating with a hypothetical job applicant. The applicant wanted security, they were told, and would take less money in exchange for a two-year contract — but, unbeknownst to applicants, the job would only last six months, and managers could get a bonus for negotiating a low salary.

On the X-axis, the vehicle status of cars from low (left) to high (right). On the Y-axis, the percentage of drivers who cut off pedestrians at a San Francisco crosswalk. Image: Piff et al./PNAS

The higher the manager’s real-world income, and the more positively they described greed in a survey, the more likely they were to lie about the job’s duration.

“Upper-SES people were way less likely to say they’d be honest, and that effect was driven by their more-favorable attitudes towards greed,” said Piff. “We believe that competition, self-interest and prioritization of one’s own welfare explains their tendencies to withhold.”

In the next experiment, 195 adults were recruited via a Craigslist advertisement. After being quizzed on their backgrounds, they were presented with what appeared to be a game of chance in which a computer program randomly rolled five dice. The higher the score, the greater their chance of winning a $50 gift certificate. Test-takers reported the scores themselves, but didn’t know the program was rigged to always generate a score of 12. High-SES people cheated the most, routinely claiming scores of 15 or higher.

The final study tested how participants would respond to ethically challenging scenarios — laying off employees while taking a higher personal bonus, or pulling a bait-and-switch on customers — after being “primed” by telling neutral stories about their day, or talking about the benefits of greed.

After the neutral prime, upper-SES people were more likely to behave unethically, but a greed prime reversed the roles. “Upper- and lower-class individuals do not necessarily differ in terms of their capacity for unethical behavior,” wrote Piff’s team, “but rather in terms of their default tendencies toward it.”

“This work is important because it suggests that people often act unethically not because they are desperate and in the dumps, but because they feel entitled and want to get ahead,” said evolutionary psychologist and consumer researcher Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the work. “I am especially impressed that the findings are consistent across seven different studies with varied methodologies. This work is not just good science, but it is shows deeper insight into the reasons why people lie, cheat, and steal.”

According to Piff, unethical behavior in the study was driven both by greed, which makes people less empathic, and the nature of wealth in a highly stratified society. It insulates people from the consequences of their actions, reduces their need for social connections and fuels feelings of entitlement, all of which become self-reinforcing cultural norms.

“When pursuit of self-interest is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to socially pernicious outcomes,” said Piff, who noted that the findings are not politically partisan. “The same rules apply to liberals and conservatives. We always control for political persuasion,” he said.

Image: The Consumerist/Flickr

Citation: “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” By Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 109 No. 9, Feb. 28, 2012.

Solicitation calls for camps to be ready for occupancy within 72 hours

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 27, 2012

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is looking for contractors to construct temporary emergency camps inside the United States which can be ready for occupancy within a 72 hour time period and used to house emergency responders as well as “displaced citizens”.

The National Responder Support Camp contract, posted on the Federal Business Opportunities ^[1] website, calls on contractors to “provide all necessary supervision, professional staff, labor support, material, supplies and equipment as necessary to make a RSC within a disaster-impacted area anywhere within the CONUS (Continental United States) within 72 hours after notification.”

The camps are primarily designed to house emergency responders, but will also be utilized to shelter “displaced citizens,” who will be “given the first opportunities for employment within the camp,” according to the solicitation. The camps will be able to service up to 2,000 people at one time.

As well as natural disasters, the 72-hour camps are designed to deal with terrorist attacks, National Response Framework activities of federal agencies, National Special Security Events, “or any other situation where FEMA or an agency working through FEMA needs a RSC.”

The camps will be secured with fencing and barricades that will also serve to create areas that are “off limits” to certain occupants. Entry to the camp will be controlled through a photo ID system for all occupants and visitors.

Medical treatment facilities, dining facilities, mobile showers and “morale welfare and recreation” facilities are all required as part of the contract.

FEMA’s latest efforts to satisfy the demand for emergency camps represents a continuation of preparations on behalf of the federal government to prepare for civil emergencies and potential social disorder.

Last December, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano directed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States ^[2], calling for the plan to deal with the “shelter” and “processing” of large numbers of people.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

In 2006, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root was contracted by Homeland Security ^[3] to build detention centers designed to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S,” or the rapid development of unspecified “new programs” that would require large numbers of people to be interned.

Last year we received a leaked memo ^[4] from a state government employee detailing KBR’s efforts to hire subcontractors to provide services required for temporary “emergency environment” camps located in five regions of the United States, indicating that many of the camps have now been constructed and are ready for use.

The construction of new detention camps inside the United States has provoked fears that the facilities could also be used to intern American citizens in the aftermath of a national emergency.

Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984 ^[5], was established under the pretext of a “mass exodus” of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican/US border, the same pretense used in the language of the KBR request for services.

During the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, however, it was revealed that the program was a secretive “scenario and drill” developed by the federal government to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, assign military commanders to take over state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens determined by the government to be “national security threats.”

A provision within the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Obama on New Years Eve, hands the government power to have American citizens arrested and detained without trial ^[6].

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com ^[7]. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Article printed from Prison Planet.com: http://www.prisonplanet.com

URL to article: http://www.prisonplanet.com/fema-puts-out-contract-for-emergency-camps-to-house-displaced-citizens.html

URLs in this post:

[1] Federal Business Opportunities: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=819eacc8d2df71ec82f7fa594f33ce57&tab=core&_cview=1

[2] prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States: http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/25222?c=disaster_preparedness_emergency_response

[3] was contracted by Homeland Security: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/kbr-awarded-homeland-security-contract-worth-up-to-385m

[4] Last year we received a leaked memo: http://infowars.com/exclusive-government-activating-fema-camps-across-u-s/

[5] Readiness Exercise 1984: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3010

[6] arrested and detained without trial: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/with-reservations-obama-signs-act-to-allow-detention-of-citizens/

[7] Prison Planet.com: http://prisonplanet.com/

February 20, 2012, 3:37 PM

By Kevin Fogarty

The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content.

For 2012 the primary author of those bills has switched to a fallback tactic: using child porn as an excuse to create a vast surveillance network from which the government can demand data on every email sent, site visited or link clicked on by all but a fraction of one percent of the U.S. population.

Internet anti-censorship advocates including Anonymous are calling for the ouster of Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who is following his co-sponsorship of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a bill critics call “Big Brother” disguised as an effort to curb child porn and sexual abuse.

Last May Smith, a Texas Republican credited as primary author of both SOPA and PIPA, the Senate version, also introducedH.R. 1981, a bill called the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″ (PCFIPA).

The anti-child-porn provisions in the bill are a “fig leaf for its true purpose: A sweeping data retention requirement meant to turn Internet Service Providers and online companies into surrogate snoops for the government’s convenience,” according to Julian Sanchez, Internet privacy and censorship researcherat the center-right Cato Institute.

Smoke and mirrors concealing observers watching you from behind the smoky mirrors

The bill amends existing laws empowering the U.S. Marshals Service to issue subpoenas and chase fugitives.

The amendments expand the Marshals’ ability to issue subpoenas and adds online pornographers to their list of top targets.

The important, though administrivia-looking part of the bill is this: “A provider of an electronic communication service… shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account… records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code…” – FCPIFA, H.R. 1981

ISPs are already required to keep some customers’ activity records for 180 days, so this doesn’t look like a big change.

Except, PCFIPA, HR 1981, requires ISPs keep track of every single IP address they assign (except to wireless users) and all the activity flowing across that link.

It doesn’t limit itself to just ISPs, either. By addressing the bill to cover any company providing “electronic communications” or “remote computing” services, the bill effectively covers any site offering services online.

PCFIPA, HR 1981, reverses that point of view (as did PIPA and SOPA), to create a vast database of every action of ever American online – a deep pool of data on the activity of millions of Internet users, through whose private activity they can sift at will until they find something that looks like evidence of a crime.

That’s exactly the opposite of the intent of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment prevents police from searching, questioning, holding or otherwise harassing suspects unless a judge agrees there’s a good reason to investigate a specific person for a specific crime.

Accusations that PCFIPA is a universal surveillance bill in disguise cite two specific problems with the bill:

• the customer’s name address, phone number and IP address;
• a list of all local and long distance phone calls;
• a list of all electronic communications;
• means of payment – all credit-card, bank account or other method the customer used to pay;
• silence – ISPs under warrant or subpoena to give up private records aren’t allowed to alert the customer.

By addressing “unregistered sex offenders,” Lamar Smith’s PCFIPA expands its powers of comprehensive surveillance over everyone in the U.S. who has not already been convicted of a sex crime.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Map of Registered Sex Offenders (PDF) there are about 748,000 registered sex offenders in the United States and territories.

That’s an average of 238 offenders per 100,000 who are not sex offenders – approximately .238 percent of the total U.S. population.

Since it is empowering U.S. Marshals to investigate people who have not yet been convicted, under PCFIPA, the only thing required to get a valid subpoena to examine all the online activity 99.762 percent of the U.S. population, is an investigating officer willing to say the subpoena has something to do with investigation of online child porn.

They don’t even have to accuse a specific person or limit themselves to a specific geographic area. Geographically surveillance targets have to be within 500 miles of a specific target of investigation.

Online the bill allows for usage connections – anyone you called, who called you, any sites you may have visited or spammers who might have sent you email.

The requirement that ISPs and essentially every site on the Internet keep 18 months worth of records on every visitor would create a complete record of every site visited, every email sent, every link clicked on by every resident of the U.S. and its territories – a vast and comprehensive database of everything any American does online, into which curious cops can dip almost at will, whether they have a good reason to do so or not.

“The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American,” according to Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans’ expressive activities is simply un-American.”

“The bill is mislabeled,” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) told CNET in July, when PCFIPA went through brief review in the House judicial committee. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Smith argued in committee that the bill involved investigation only of those suspected of the sexual abuse of children.

No so, countered the ACLU, which argued it would actually impact “hundreds of millions of individuals who have no connection to the sexual exploitation of children whatsoever. ..There is nothing in the bill that would limit the use of these records to child exploitation cases,” countered the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent a letter carrying protests from it and 29 other civil rights groups to Smith last summer, without result.

“In fact, the records would involve all internet users everywhere and they would be available to law enforcement for any purpose. This new mandate is a direct assault on the privacy of internet users,” the letter said.

There is no conclusion to this story yet.

PCFIPA, H.R. 1981, is on the House legislative calendar to be debated, changed, approved or denied sometime during the coming year.

Oddsmakers rate its chances as good, considering it sailed through committee by a vote of 19 to 10.

SOPA and PIPA had similarly good odds before being brought down in flames.

PCFIPA, HR 1981, should have much worse chances, considering that powers it grants are much more sweeping than those of either Internet censorship bill and that it adds a huge burden to both ISPs and anyone providing content or software services across the web.

Together the constituency opposing PCFIPA should be at least as large as that opposing SOPA and PIPA.

Opposing those two bills took a lot of effort and unity among independent-minded Internet users.

Both unity and the ability to project opposition appear to have dissipated in the weeks since.

Especially given the effort of Lamar Smith and his backers to conceal unconstitutional powers of surveillance and censorship behind child pornographer straw men, it’s entirely possible HR 1981 will come up for a vote without nearly as much outcry for the ‘net.

If that happens, all the complaining about privacy done by anyone online until now will be moot. PCFIPA requires your ISP to keep track of what you do when it can see you and requires other sites to keep records of what you do when it can’t.

By comparison, losing your email password to a keylogger or having your iPhone give away your location data are small potatoes.

Lamar Smith wants to know more than a password or location. He wants to know what sites you click on, what spam you get, what sites you visit that you delete from your history cache so no one else can see them.

Lamar Smith wants to know who you email, who you text and what links you click on in blogs complaining about his irrational, insatiable need to spy on Americans who have done nothing wrong and nothing to arouse suspicion that they have.

Lamar Smith doesn’t believe in innocent until proven guilty. Lamar Smith doesn’t believe in innocent at all.

He only believes in “unregistered offenders” – meaning “those who haven’t been caught yet.

Give Lamar Smith his way and every site on the Internet will have to keep records to turn over to Lamar and his cronies, so people who don’t like you can sift through everything you do, looking for something you’ve done wrong.

Putting unconstitutional limits on the freedom of 99.7 percent of Americans is a fair exchange for a law that might give cops a slightly greater advantage in chasing the .238 percent of Americans who may actually be involved in child pornography.

Isn’t it?

Read more of Kevin Fogarty’s CoreIT blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Kevin on Twitter at@KevinFogarty. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

http://www.itworld.com/security/251584/sopa-replacement-uses-child-porn-excuse-spy-997-percent-americans

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ASTRONOMY

BY ALASDAIR WILKINS

They might be microscopic, but as far as molecules go, buckyballs are absolutely gigantic. These soccer ball shaped molecules are made of 60 carbon molecules each, and new data from the Spitzer Telescope suggest they are everywhere in the universe.

Buckyballs, a shortened form of the more technical but no less awesome name Buckminsterfullerene, are so named because they resemble the geodesic domes of legendary architect Buckminster Fuller. The structure of a buckyball is made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom found at each vertex. These carbon buckyballs aren’t the only type of fullerene, but they are by far the most common, particularly since it occurs naturally in soot.

Their unique structures makes these giant molecules useful in everything from superconductors to water purification, and we’re still exploring the full scope of their possible electrical and chemical application. Scientists are also still trying to figure out just how buckyballs fit into the spread of carbon throughout the universe. Of course, carbon is the basis of all organic compounds - and, by extension, all life - on Earth, and a structure that can carry sixty all-important carbon atoms in every molecule could be vitally important to the development of life in the universe.

That’s why the latest discovery of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which is charged with studying infrared wavelengths, is so exciting. Spitzer detected specks of solid buckyballs around the binary star system XX Ophiuchi, located 6,500 light-years away. The buckyballs are all stacked together in particles “like oranges in a crate”, according to lead author Nye Evans, and all these particles added together could fill a volume equivalent to 10,000 times that of Mount Everest.

We’ve seen buckyballs in space before, but this is the first time we’ve spotted them as a solid - all previous observations were of them in their gaseous state. Finding them in the form of solid is even more exciting, as it means there must be large enough quantities of the molecule around stars for them to link up into particles in the first place. This suggests they are even more widespread throughout space than we thought, and it increases the possibility that these huge molecules had a vital role to play in the emergence of life on Earth - and possibly elsewhere in the cosmos.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society via NASA/JPL. Image by NASA/JPL.

Huffington Post

Posted: 02/22/2012 10:50 am

Last week, I went on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and I brought a prop — a weird-shaped lightbulb from Firefly LED Lighting, an Austin-based green tech company. The lightbulb, by taking an approach that dissipates heat through metal sidings instead of concentrating it in the bulb itself, has dramatically increased efficiency.

It’s an experiment, backed by a pilot project, data, and a small amount of seed funding. And if we’re going to save America, it’s going to be experiments like those I’ve seen in Austin and elsewhere that will lead us there.

For the past three years, I’ve been talking about the politics of Washington, D.C., and the financing conventional wisdom from New York City. My eyes were opened to the realities of the system in 2008, when I saw the bailouts up close as an anchor on CNBC. It’s depressing, closed, and difficult to see the gears of America chew up human potential.

But now I’ve found myself more enthusiastic than I’ve been in years, as I’ve shifted my attention from D.C./NYC to cities burgeoning both with ideas and with the excruciating pain that Washington and New York have inflicted on them. What’s become apparent to me is that the rate of change on this planet, due to technological, ecological, and financial mechanisms, is the highest it’s ever been. That means that our rate of adaptation must also be high, that we must adapt our communities, companies, and selves to what is quickly becoming a new and different world.

We must experiment, or die.

And as we experiment, with new communities, new technologies, and new financing structures, we must do so with an eye for quality and for learning. I want to inspire all of us to experiment with our lives, the way that America itself is an experiment in forming a more perfect union. Here’s what we’re going to have to do to restore this entrepreneurial spirit.

1) We must get over our abject and irrational fear of failure. One of my heroes, Salman Khan, has built a learning model that uses the Internet and in person teaching, and the goal is mastery. The method is failure. Do the problem set again and again, until you get it all correct. It doesn’t matter if you fail, it only matters if you don’t try again.

2) We must build a capital market that can make investments of between 30 thousand and 3 million dollars, which is what most experiments cost. The old model is broken — Facebook will have a $100 billion valuation and raise billions in its IPO, but this is so the original investors can cash out, not to fund innovation. By contrast, Firefly LED had a seed round of $325k in 2010. That’s the kind of capital that builds innovation, and we should have more opportunity to get it.

3) We must deal with the student debt problem, which is a direct incentive to not experiment. When you are young, you are in the most experimental part of your life. Don’t burden our young with unpayable debt, it’s guaranteed stasis. And stasis in a rapidly changing world that demands adaptation, as we know, means cultural death.

4) We must get rid of the employer based health care system. If experimenting means you can’t see a doctor when you are sick, then you aren’t going to experiment. That’s bad. We need to find a new way to deliver care, so we can thrive as a society.

5) We must deal with the upside down housing market. The main store of wealth for the middle class, who should be a seat of innovation, is home equity. Without writing down debt and restoring a healthy housing market, this store of wealth will gradually be destroyed and rendered unusable. People won’t be able to move or tap lines of credit if we don’t fix the housing finance system. We must restore our distribution mechanism for financing the way we live, and we haven’t yet done so.

More than all of these, though, we need a culture that values innovation. We need to experiment in our own lives, with ourselves, our business endeavors, our government, and our surroundings. With a million high quality experiments, we’ll learn so much that we will see a new Renaissance in how we deal with the rapidity of change we are currently experiencing. And if there were ever a time we need such a Renaissance, it’s now.

My pledge to you is that I will be exploring America the experimental. I will challenge myself, and everyone I meet, and I will use all the resources at my disposal, to encourage the cultural shift we know we need.

MORE: Dylan visits Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about the 30 Million Jobs tour and creating a culture of experimentation:

Follow Dylan Ratigan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DylanRatigan

MAUREEN MACKEY, The Fiscal Times February 16, 2012

Once, white Americans across all classes shared a common culture when it came to “the basics”– marriage, work, religion and law-abidingness, argues political scientist Charles Murray in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. That’s all changed in the past five decades.

“The white working class has deteriorated substantially on those dimensions. It’s fallen away from some central cultural institutions that have been crucial to what used to be called the American way of life,” he told The Fiscal Times this week. “Meanwhile, a new upper class has developed a distinctive culture in their delayed marriage and childbearing; in child-rearing practices; at work; in their comparatively sparse exposure to mainstream film and television products; and in their increasing geographic isolation. They’re increasingly ignorant of how the rest of America lives.”
 
RELATED:  The ‘One Percent Workforce’ Threatens U.S. Growth

With those at the top and bottom barely interacting, Murray argues that American culture is not just coming apart at the seams – it’s already there. “It’s a bad thing for people who have a great deal of influence not to know what kind of country they’re governing,” he says. The solution? “America’s new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different,” he states in his book. 

To avoid the controversy about race and IQ that surrounded his earlier and probably best-known book, The Bell Curve, Murray focused solely on white America this time around. He wanted “to get rid of distractions. If I’d included everybody, readers could reasonably wonder much of the problems are grounded in America’s racial and ethnic history. [This way], those explanations are out the window.”

Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of other books that include Losing Ground and What It Means to Be a Libertarian. Edited excerpts from our interview:

The Fiscal Times (TFT): American social and economic mobility is not dead, you say. How so, given your thesis?
Charles Murray (CM): If you’re a talented youth, especially academically, with good grades and good test scores, it doesn’t make any difference where you’re from or what your background is. And if you’re really academically talented, the elite colleges have gotten very good at identifying you and paying you to be there. So the way up has never been more open for the talented.

They [the white upper class] are passing down to their children not just money, but talent. After awhile, you get more of a layer cake kind of society, instead of how it was in the early days, when talent was located throughout society.

TFT: How about mobility for others? 
CM: The ways in which it’s not as good are a consequence of what happens in a meritocracy over generations. It used to be shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations: One man makes the money; his children spend some of it but not all of it; then the third generation spends all of it and has to go back to work again. But that was when the guy making the money was marrying the girl next door, or marrying the girl he meets at the country club. So probably they’re pretty average in ability. These days, among the really successful, the male lawyer from Harvard Law School who’s a partner in a big New York law firm tends to marry the woman he’s met during litigation who’s from Yale Law School and is also really smart. They’re passing down to their children not just money, but talent. After awhile, you tend to get more of a layer cake kind of society, than in the early days – when huge amounts of talent were located throughout society, without regard to socioeconomic status.

TFT: You don’t discuss the causes of this. Why not?
CM: There’s a reason for that. The causes are very contentious. I’m on record in Losing Ground as saying that the reforms of the 1960s were a major contributing factor to problems with out-of-wedlock births, to problems with men dropping out of the labor market, with crime and so forth – and I continue to believe that. Now, there are people who, if I tried to make that case in this book, would throw the book against the wall and not read it. I really think these problems transcend political ideology. We need to have people on both the left and the right talking about the nature of the problem. So I didn’t talk about causes. Until there’s a serious appreciation of the nature of the problem – it’s way too premature to talk about solutions.

American community has been very vital. It’s been the exceptional characteristic of our country, much more so than in other parts of the world… And the people available for that kind of work generally are married people. 

TFT: On marriage, you say that among working class whites, only 48 percent were married in 2010, compared to a much higher number years ago, and that this changes everything. Why?  
CM: It changes the social capital of our country. American community has been very vital. It’s been the exceptional characteristic of the U.S., much more so than in other parts of the world. American communities have solved their problems in both formal and informal ways over the years. And when you look at community activists, the people who are available for that kind of work generally are married people. The example I use is this:  Married males are a really good resource for Little League teams. Unmarried fathers aren’t. That’s just a fact.

TFT: So you’re not casting aspersions.
CM: I’m saying it doesn’t mean that people who are not engaged in these activities are bad people. It just means America’s civic culture has depended on there being a lot of those people. Another reason marriage is so important: Married men do a lot better in the labor market than unmarried men. It’s not just because women marry men who are likely to do better – though scholars have documented that. Marriage civilizes men. That’s something men have known for a long time, as women have. When you have a large number of not only unmarried males but never married males running around, you have a potential for social disorganization and collapse that’s really great – particularly when a lot of these unmarried men are not in the labor market. Guess how they’re getting along? By living off their girlfriends, or their sisters, who are able to get welfare. Or they’re on the move, avoiding debt collectors, child support collectors, or the police. They put a lot of pressure on community life.
 
TFT: You grew up in Newton, Iowa, a small Midwestern town, which you say was helpful to you. How so?
CM: I bring to my adulthood all sorts of experiences with the rest of America. But once you’re in [the elite upper class], you don’t know anything except the bubble. A lot of times you’re unaware you’re even in a bubble. It’s a bad thing for people of influence not to know what kind of country they’re governing.

College Education: The Next Big Bubble
TFT: You say the new elite is founded on brains. But if a college education is the next big bubble to burst – and you believe firmly that it is – what happens then? 
CM: Basically we have an inflated market for college education. We have a piece of paper called the BA which has become meaningless, effectively.
 
TFT: Why is it meaningless? 
CM: If all I tell you about a person is that he has a BA, and I don’t tell you what school he went to or what his major was, you know nothing about him, except about a certain amount of perseverance. Yet the BA is held up as the standard for getting a job interview, for all kinds of jobs that shouldn’t require a BA.  And colleges are so overpricing this meaningless product that I think we’re looking at the same thing that happened with houses that were overpriced. At some point people are going to say, “I know they keep telling me that I’ve got to get a BA to be a success in life, but do I really want to be $100,000 in debt when I’m 22 years old?” So – yeah, I think it’s a bubble. And I hope it collapses, and I hope it collapses soon. The BA has become a pernicious force in American life.

TFT: What would this collapse look like? 
CM: People won’t go to college anymore. Now, it’s not going to affect the Harvards and Yales. Harvard and Yale could charge $250,000 in tuition and they’d still have people lined up at the door waiting to pay it. But most colleges are not competitive; most colleges are scrambling to fill their classrooms. And those are the ones who are suddenly going to find that nobody’s willing to enrollfor what they’re charging.That’s going to affect a whole lot more colleges and their ilk.

TFT: Including even the state schools now, to follow your line of thought.   
CM: Even they are going to dry up too. People will say, “Do I really want to spend this much money to go to Montana State Teachers College?”

TFT: If this comes to pass, how would young people position themselves for the labor market? 
CM: What I think will trigger the bubble: Employers may say, “Look, I can’t tell what this BA means. What are your certifications? I want something equivalent to the certified public accountant exam, the CPA exam. And if an applicant walks into my office with a good score on that test, it’s clear he knows some accounting. I can be absolutely confident of that.” You could do the same thing – and people have – with many other kinds of specialties. As that movement gains strength, all of a sudden the BA becomes less important as evidence that the applicant actually knows something of what the employer is looking for.

TFT: Why do you say this book is your “final and best statement” on issues that have been important to you for a long time?
CM: If you go back to The Bell Curve, you’ll see a lot of the worries expressed there about where we were headed. But now I’m saying, this is not where we’re headed – it’s where we already are. We need to all talk again about why America is exceptional and why it’s important that our country remains exceptional.

heic1204 - Science Release 21 February 2012

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Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

An international team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b.

“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” Berta said. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA’s David Charbonneau, discovered GJ 1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometres, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ 1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ 1214b’s atmosphere.

Berta and his co-authors, who include Derek Homeier of ENS Lyon, France, used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study GJ 1214b when it crossed in front of its host star. During such a transit, the star’s light is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, giving clues to the mix of gases.

“We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared colour of sunset on this world,” Berta explained.

Hazes are more transparent to infrared light than to visible light, so the Hubble observations help to tell the difference between a steamy and a hazy atmosphere.

They found the spectrum of GJ 1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths, or colours. The atmospheric model most consistent with the Hubble data is a dense atmosphere of water vapour.

“The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favour of a steamy atmosphere,” Berta said.

Since the planet’s mass and size are known, astronomers can calculate the density, of only about 2 grams per cubic centimetre. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimetre, while Earth’s average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre. This suggests that GJ 1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock.

As a result, the internal structure of GJ 1214b would be extraordinarily different from that of our world.

“The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’, substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta said.

Theorists expect that GJ 1214b formed further out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system’s history. In the process, it would have passed through the star’s habitable zone, where surface temperatures would be similar to Earth’s. How long it lingered there is unknown.

GJ 1214b is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer), and just 40 light-years from Earth. Therefore, it’s a prime candidate for study by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch later this decade.

A paper reporting these results has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of Z. K. Berta (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy, USA), D. Charbonneau (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy, USA), J.-M. Desert (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy, USA), E. M.-R. Kempton (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), P. R. McCullough (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA and Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory, USA), C. J. Burke (SETI Institute/NASA Ames Research Center), J. J. Fortney (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), J. Irwin (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy, USA), P. Nutzman (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), D.  Homeier (CRAL Lyon/ENS Lyon, France and Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany)

The calibration of the WFC3 slitless spectroscopy modes was undertaken by the Space Telescope European Co-ordinating Facility as part of ESA’s contribution to the Hubble Space Telescope project.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

• Research paper
• NASA release
• Images of Hubble

Zachory Berta
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, USA
Tel: +1-617-495-4484
Email: zberta@cfa.harvard.edu

Derek Homeier
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon and Georg-August University of Göttingen
France and Germany
Tel: +49-176-4859 4910
Email: dhomeie@gwdg‍.‍de‌

Oli Usher
Hubble/ESA
Garching, Germany
Tel: +49-89-3200-6855
Email: ousher@eso.org

David Aguilar
arvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, USA
Tel: +1-617-495-7462
Email: daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu

Christine Pulliam
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, USA
Tel: +1-617-495-7463
Email: cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu