Saturday, January 2, 2010

A nation of sheep.

A nation of poor dumbass sheep led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and George Noory.  Note: This post has been updated since the original date of posting. 


Click for more charts and info.





SAFER.
"guns, God, and gold"  and the Reagan Revolution.

 The Republican war on the middle classOn a related note ...  Apple joins Fox News boycott.

Rasmussen poll. July 26, 2010. 43% Say Marijuana Should Be Legalized,  and 42% Disagree.  "While half of Democrats (51%) support legalizing marijuana, 62% of Republicans are opposed. Voters not affiliated with either major political party lean toward legalization by a 48% to 35% margin." For drug reform vote Democrat, independent, or not at all. Only a non-Republican President, administration, and Congress were able to get these enacted:


Nancy & Ronald Reagan. Info.
Yearly U.S. spending. Info.
Featured anniversary. 30 years since Reagan's election:
November 1980-2010. The Reagan Revolution; Just Say No; massive U.S. incarceration increase; U.S.-aided, government-sanctioned, drug-war death squads in Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, etc.. See Wikipedia: Ronald Wilson Reagan and War on Drugs. See image category: commons: Category: Just Say No.

Reaganomics 101: Tax the poor and middle class. Spend exorbitant amounts on "freedom" (doublespeak for prisons/jails).
With less than 5% of world population the USA has over 2.4 million of 9.8 million world prisoners. The majority of U.S. inmates are in due to the drug war. The number of inmates in the USA has increased almost 5 times over since 1980.

Click images to enlarge.



 
Bring back Art Bell more often to Coast to Coast AM. George Noory is too much of a "guns, God, and gold" Reagan Revolution true believer.

Pat Robertson: Haiti had a pact with the Devil. YouTube link. These talk show hosts are so uninformed and xenophobic in some areas. Wikipedia: Haiti and West African Vodun and Haitian Vodou. Religion is training wheels for your own personal, leaderless, syncretic spirituality and extra-dimensional physics. 


 

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. "An emotionally ferocious documentary about 1994's Rwandan genocide, which left 800,000 dead." Go to the first link to see the full documentary for free. If you have problems viewing it with the Firefox browser, try using the MS Internet Explorer browser.
 
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Bush's Crusade.
"The most recent evidence comes from autopsies of 44 prisoners who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in U.S. custody. Most died under circumstances that suggest torture. The reports use words like 'strangulation,' 'asphyxiation' and 'blunt force injuries.' ...  A few months before the [Abu Ghraib] scandal broke [spring 2004], Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations." -Newsweek, Nov. 14, 2005, page 36.

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A nation of sheep. Led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the NRA true-believer George Noory, and a law-and-order, echo chamber of lock-em-up fundamentalists, cops, bail bondsman lobbyists, prison guard unions, and militia survivalists grumbling around the talk-radio bonfire. The guests and callers often spout off their codeword bigotry, xenophobia, and hatred of anything "foreign" like universal healthcare. Usually with clueless certainty. Many true believers often use the word "absolutely." The hosts agree through silence, and rarely allow progressive guests or callers to vigorously disagree with conservatives. Rush just cuts people off, and/or interrupts people. George Noory uses smiley-face censorship, and changes the subject. Noory frequently does not follow up on interesting points. Instead he oftentimes fishes for the "good/evil," Republican, "divine creator" angle in order to please the Republican bosses at Clear Channel who own his radio syndication. George Knapp is a much better Coast to Coast AM show host, and asks better followup questions.

Most Republican leaders and their talk-show supporters oppose cheap universal healthcare. They prefer to support health insurance companies. 45,000 uninsured Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance.

Chart info, data, sources. 
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You can help: Commons:Create charts and graphs online. See this charts index for a list of links to some chart pages. See also: Category:Charts and graphs at the Cannabis Wiki.



Follow the prisoners. The NRA/Halliburton Prison-Industrial Complex.
Total U.S. incarcerated population:

USA and territories. 2,424,279 inmates in 2008.
Above chart is in the public domain. Click here for more info. With less than 5% of world population the USA has over 2.4 million of 9.8 million world prisoners. This table is from a December 2009 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report called Prisoners in 2008 (NCJ 228417). Table 9 is from page 8 of the PDF file

"Land of the free." It costs around $23,000 a year per inmate. The majority of inmates are incarcerated due to the drug war. See also: Category:Charts and graphs

Chart for U.S. correctional population. USA: 7.2 million people incarcerated, or on probation or parole at yearend 2006. 3.2% of the U.S. adult population, or 1 in every 31 adults. Sources, larger chart, and latest data

Larger chart with sources. Latest data.


One of the most important things you can do is to find or create charts. Especially, free charts that anybody can use. Upload free charts to the Wikimedia Commons. See also: Info on reusing free images.

Follow the money. Follow the hunger. 

In November 2009 the USDA reported 49 million people going hungry in the USA, the largest number since the government began keeping track.

Remember the 2008 U.S. election, and how Republican John McCain's proposals most favored the very rich. McCain: More taxes on the middle class for war and prisons (see below). Obama: Tax cuts for 95% of working people. Proposed federal tax changes. Yellow is for the largest tax cut in each income bracket.
McCain Obama
Income $ Average tax bill $ Average tax bill $
Over 2.900,000 -269,364 +701,885
603,000 and up -45,361 +115,974
227,000- 603,000 -7,871 +12
161,000- 227,000 -4,380 -2,789
112,000- 161,000 -2,614 -2,204
66,000- 112,000 -1,009 -1,290
38,000- 66,000 -319 -1,042
19,000- 38,000 -113 -892
Under 19,000 -19 -567
Sources: CNN, Tax Policy Center, BarackObama.com, JohnMcCain.com
 
Rich and poor.


Follow the blood.

Follow the crusading fundamentalists on all sides. Halliburton Military-Industrial Complex.


Egypt, Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

They all make second-class citizens of people with non-majority religious views. Why is U.S. blood and money supporting religious oppression? The more religiously-tolerant European Economic Union (EU) is a better regional model for both religious and economic cooperation. We should only support governments willing to join a similar Middle-East Economic Union. In the meantime the USA should begin withdrawing from the Middle East, and stop sending money to nations that insult the USA, such as Israel.
  
Iraq:

"Peace"
(in Arabic
and Hebrew).

Table 5. Recent U.S. aid to Israel. From a January 2, 2008 Congressional Research Service report for Congress titled "U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel." Click chart for larger version and more info.

And should NATO or American troops be scattered around huge mountainous Afghanistan in isolated outposts? Target practice for Afghan hill tribes? See video: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2hnXgrnlUQ - Combat Outpost - Afghanistan. Fish in a barrel.

From Wikipedia featured article summary:
Ngo Dinh Diem
The Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia from 2 to 9 September 1957 was an official visit by the first President of the Republic of Vietnam. It was part of a year of traveling for Diem, who made official visits to the United States and other anti-communist countries. As with his American trip, Diem was warmly and lavishly received during the height of the Cold War, garnering bipartisan praise from both the Liberal Party of Australia of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the opposition Australian Labor Party. He was universally extolled by the media, which praised him for what they perceived to be a successful, charismatic, democratic and righteous rule in South Vietnam, overlooking his authoritarianism, election fraud and other corrupt practices. Diem's visit was a highmark in relations between Australia and South Vietnam. Over time, Diem became unpopular with his foreign allies, who began to criticise his autocratic style and religious bias. By the time of his assassination, he had little support. (more...)

Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia:
The Australian Catholic leadership and media were particularly glowing towards the South Vietnamese head of state. A member of Vietnam's Catholic minority and the brother of Vietnam's leading archbishop, Diem had pursued policies in Vietnam favoring his co-religionists. He exempted the Catholic Church from land redistribution, gave them more aid and job promotions, and allowed Catholic paramilitaries to attack Buddhists, who formed the religious majority.

Vietnam War. Diem era:
As a measure of the level of political repression, about 12,000 suspected opponents of Diem were killed in the years 1955–1957 and by the end of 1958 an estimated 40,000 political prisoners had been jailed.


U.S. Phoenix Program in Vietnam:

"The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherf**ker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people."
--end of Wikipedia excerpts.


Follow the racism.
Incarceration Nation: "On June 30, 2006, an estimated 4.8% of black men were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9% of Hispanic men and 0.7% of white men. More than 11% of black males age 25 to 34 were incarcerated. Black women were incarcerated in prison or jail at nearly 4 times the rate of white women and more than twice the rate of Hispanic women." - United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.




Chart info, data, sources.

Follow the drug war, and the NRA Brownshirts.
The majority of U.S. prisoners are incarcerated due to the drug war! The National Rifle Association is largely responsible due to its state-by-state lobbying for mandatory minimum sentencing, also known as "Truth in Sentencing." According to the New York Times, mandatory minimums are the cause of the huge U.S. inmate population and incarceration rate that dwarfs all other nations. And there is no benefit in reduced crime rates compared to other nations with much lower incarceration rates. Wikipedia: Brownshirts and their youth wing, the Hitler Youth.
Don't forget the Boy Scout Explorers and the NRA youth programs. The Hitler Youth of the Republican Party. "In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout."

The National Rifle Association is also partly responsible for the high U.S. murder rate. The NRA is out of its collective hive mind concerning the Second Amendment and handguns. What about the right to bear a rocket-propelled grenade launcher? Or a mortar. Or a boxcutter in an airplane. Same for handguns. All are unnecessary for the average citizen. Europe bans almost all handguns. Handguns serve little purpose except to increase the already-high U.S. murder rate. Rifles and shotguns are enough for the second amendment, and for protecting homes and liberty. "That rifle on the wall of the laborer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there!" -- George Orwell (a democratic socialist). January 8, 1941 in an article for the London Evening Standard. More info here.


Chart info, data, sources.

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Global Marijuana March. Sign up!
This site supports the Global Marijuana March (GMM). Around 600 different cities worldwide have signed up since 1999. This event occurs yearly on or around the first Saturday in May in over 250 cities.  Basic GMM city lists by year: *1999. 2000. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 2010. ... Browse the lists to find the years for which a city signed up. Or search them. Add the city name to the search.

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Follow the glacier water. See photos.
Follow global warming, overpopulation, crowded cities, less land.  

When more and more of Florida floods due to hurricane storm surges, tsunamis, glaciers melting, Arctic melting, Antarctica melting, and global sea-level rise, then it won't be mainly blacks who are uprooted or die (as in New Orleans in 2005).

Many white Republican sheeple will also die in the flooding. The rest will have to move inland.

Hurricane storm surges alone could flood wide areas of Florida. Tsunamis could be even worse. Global warming can increase the strength and size of hurricanes. It doesn't matter much if carbon dioxide is or is not the main cause of global warming. It is still in everybody's interest to slow the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic. We need to safeguard the fresh-water supplies locked up in glaciers. We need to lower consumption of petroleum. Remember five-dollar gas in the summer of 2008, and Exxon's record profits.

Follow the rising gas prices.
Rush Limbaugh and George Noory are salesmen for Exxon.


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