Justice – Page 9 – kimi blog

20151011

Google advertisers can target you by interests in your emails – so opt out!

Google has a new way of exploiting your privacy. It picks out the interests that are expressed in your email correspondence and charges advertisers to serve ads to you based on interests you express in them. Fortunately, you can opt-out of this intrusion by clicking the off button at https://www.google.com/settings/ads.

Here are step-by-step instructions:

Log into your Google account.
Visit https://www.google.com/settings/ads.
Look for the toggle button next to https://www.google.com/settings/ads.
Turn it off. read more

20151011

Big banks force FBI to take down warning about chip’d credit cards

The FBI wanted America to know that the new chip-enabled credit cards are open to security vulnerabilities and should routinely be used with a PIN, which is a pretty safe method of protection against fraud. PINS probably provide greater user safety than signatures do.

They posted a advisory online but the next day, the advisory had vanished. The American Bankers Association had objected to the FBI posting it, because its member banks prefer signatures to be used instead of PINs.

This is your American shopping dollars at work: being used by Big Money against you and your interests. read more

2015101120151011

Would you believe ‘prison consultant’ is a career?

prison consulting course ad — From jailtimeconsulting.com

I was intrigued by the article title in my LinkedIn feed: Why use a Personal Crisis Manager / Prison Consultant? It never occurred to me that some people would be making a living helping others cope with life behind bars but a search on ‘prison consultant’ turned up plenty of results.

I guess with between 1% of the United States population living behind bars and privatized prisons getting 95% occupancy guarantees from state governments … this new career track kind of makes sense. In a very strange way. read more

2015101120151011

1% of US population in prison and they have 70-100% occupancy guarantees

This is totally bizarre and should be unbelievable: about 1% (1 in 100) of the US population is in prison at any given time these days … and a growing number of prisons have contracts with state governments guaranteeing them occupancy rates as high as 100%. When inmate populations drop below the contracted rate, private prison contractors get their money by threatening to sue. Huffpost explains:

Arizona’s contractually obligated promise to fill prison beds is a common provision in a majority of America’s private prison contracts, according to a public records analysis released today by the advocacy group In the Public Interest. The group reviewed more than 60 contracts between private prison companies and state and local governments across the country, and found language mentioning quotas for prisoners in nearly two-thirds of those analyzed. read more

20151004

In 1 minute, dozens of celebrities make the case: no more gun violence

Umpqua College should be the last school where students are killed by gun violence. This can’t be part of the education process.

Brought to you by DemandaPlan.org, a project of Every Town for Gun Safety.

2015100320151003

SCOTUS to hear free speech case of Paterson PO demoted over political sign

first amendment for everyone — Art courtesy of My First Freedoms website

Paterson Police Officer Jeffrey Heffernan’s discipline case is going to the Supreme Court. The 1st Amendment provides for employees to support the political candidates of their choosing, but lower courts found that Heffernan couldn’t invoke this legal protection because he had no intention of participating in a campaign when he picked up a fallen sign that his mother wanted. He also isn’t a Paterson resident.

But still, Heffernan was demoted because city officials perceived him to be engaged in “overt involvement in a political election”. So, the heart of this matter remains free speech rights. NorthJersey.com reports: read more

2015100220151128

Don’t let the door smack you too hard on the way out, Traitor Duncan

Arne Duncan cartoon — Caricature Credit: DonkeyHotey

Good news today for people who care about students and the state of public education in America. As HuffPost put it: Arne Duncan Resigns Amid Legacy-Threatening Student Debt Crisis. And this summer, the Center for Media and Democracy wrote this about Duncan’s failed initiative to replace public schools with charters: Charter Program Expansion Looms Despite Probes into Mismanagement and Closed Schools.

Developer-owned charter schools are publicly funded but managed privately, without the obligation to provide any public accountability for either their teaching methods or financial expenditures. Not surprising that they’re a virtual breeding ground for a level of corruption so exaggerated that it turned GW Bush’s former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, into one of the country’s leading public education advocates. read more

2015091720150917

Kafkaesque police capture boy & grill him for not saying his clock is a bomb

Ahmed and his clock — Photo composite courtesy wtvr.com

In a Kafka novel, a man is accused by the police of a crime that’s too top-secret for them to discuss or reveal which government department has brought charges against him – and that’s the whole novel. In a similar circumstance, 14 year old Ahmed Mohammed from Irving, Texas brings a home-made clock to school to show his engineering teacher and she accused him of making a bomb to threaten her. The police arrive to handcuff, arrest and then grill him for hours because Ahmed wouldn’t say that his clock was something other than a clock. Because it’s a clock. read more

2015091220221207

Join the #PeoplesClimateMovement in demanding #climateaction

#PeoplesClimateMovement in demanding #climateactionI’m joining the #PeoplesClimate Movement on Oct 14 to demand bold #climateaction from our leaders. Will you join me?

#PeoplesClimateMovement
#climateaction

2015091020150908

Expert framing of Jorge Ramos’ challenge to Donald Trump

Glenn Greenwald frames Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos’ challenge to Trump better than anything else I’ve come across:

Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Yesterday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to “sit down,” then told him: “Go back to Univision.” When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: “This is personal. … He’s talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies.” read more

20150908

Bush started us on path to Nazi-ism. Trump goes much farther.

So, I’m reading this article shared by Truthout editor William Rivers Pitt about Trump’s extremist stand on deporting immigrants and his incessant hatemongering. And, I recently read a corroboration of Bernie Sander’s statement that Hitler was elected to govern Germany. All of a sudden that light-bulb goes on in my head: Trump could actually be a modern version of Hitler.

Trump’s fascist authoritarianism was thrown into stark relief by the courageous act of journalism “committed” by Mexican immigrant and Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos and Trump’s heavy-handed, dismissive treatment of him at a recent press conference. Ramos is one of the US Latino community’s most influential voices … Glenn Greenwald writes about the Ramos challenge: read more

20150908

The cost of “tough on crime” is $1B each year of your taxpayer money

vlogbrothers has created a sobering video about the “massive $75 BILLION per year failed experiment” we’re living in – which is what it costs American taxpayers each year to keep almost 1% of our neighbors in prison.

The video’s done in a light-hearted animation style and is under 4 minutes long, but pay attention to the scary statistics:

By age 23, 41% of our country’s juveniles and young adults have been arrested.
Our prisons violate international standards.
Solitary confinement is considered torture under international law but in the United States it is a not governed or monitored by anyone except prison officials.
This massive system costs taxpayers $75 Billion dollars each year.
Private prison contractors have occupancy guarantees that mandate their prisons remain between 80 and 90 percent full.

Video brought to you courtesy of Natalie Hussein Wells‘ link to attn:‘s informative article. And remember, if you don’t want to support and pay for this crazy system, vote for politicians that favor reducing our incarceration rate, like 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. read more

2015090220150831

US Colonel: slavery was the SINGLE reason for the Civil War (video)

Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, sets the record state on the question of what the reason was for the United States Civil War. In this interesting short video Col. Seidule makes the case that the single reason was slavery. Does a good job with it, too.

Here are some highlights:

The buzz term “States’ Rights” was coined by Southern state residents and referred to the right they believed they possessed, to continue slavery. read more

20150831

Gotta watch video of Sanders dressing Alan Greenspan right down

Bernie Sanders vigorously confronted Alan Greenspan on his flawed economic policies in 2003, 5 years before the Great Recession set in and Greenspan admitted to the Congressional Oversight Committee that he had been wrong for 40 years in his perceptions and the policies he had informed during his tenancy as Federal Reserve Chair.

Sanders told Greenspan that because he spent his social time in country clubs and cocktail parties, Greenspan had become so far removed from the lives of average citizens that he had no idea what their concerns and needs are. Women for Bernie Sanders offers the comment, “Bernie knew all along that it was a flawed ideology.” read more