A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department.
Of those, 2,193,798 were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year.
read the whole story…
Do we live in a land full of criminals? Seems like we might. The drug war is a losing battle and I know that it would account for a large majority of these numbers.
Frustrated by Bush administration inaction on global warming, states and environmentalists urged the Supreme Court Wednesday to declare greenhouse gases to be air pollutants that the government must regulate.
For me, the global warming issue is a perfect example of the blinders that we as humans (and especially us americans) have managed to strap over our eyes. Scientists have been making noise about this issue for a long time now, but it’s primarily a future peril, it’s a slippery little issue that is fairly easy to tuck out of sight and mind because the consequences are not readily apparent.
It’s a nice thing, every once in awhile, to be reminded that no matter how tuned in you think you are, that there’s a whole lot of interesting stuff going on outside your notice. That’s my way of excusing myself for not realizing that Bob Dylan was in the process of writing a three-volume set of memoirs. Chronicles: Volume One actually came out in 2004; I heard about it on Sunday, picked it up yesterday and finished reading it this afternoon.
Ok, i concede. They have won. Now what are they going to do with it now that they have it? Fix it or break it? I will affect a Jester’s pose and giggle as i watch.
Financial insecurity is one of the staples of American life, and fuel for our nation’s politics as well as cable TV shows. Once the elderly worried endlessly about money matters, athough now people over 65 count as the wealthiest group of Americans. Rather, today the biggest worriers about what’s euphemistically called our “financial future” are the young, and especially people under 25 years old.
To: Conservatives and Republicans
I, and my fellow signatories, hereby make these promises to you:
1. We will always respect you for your conservative beliefs. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.
2. We will let you marry whomever you want, even when some of us consider your behavior to be “different” or “immoral.” Who you marry is none of our business. Love and be in love — it’s a wonderful gift.
Ok, fair warning first: Having previously thought that Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves was the strangest form of book I’d ever held in my hand, I have since been shown the error of my ways. Hands down, Only Revolutions takes the cake. From concept to execution, this is a very interesting artifact.
i’m a dreamer; and a very lazy man
been meaning to write this post for weeks now
My entire life is sitting on the back-burner,
i’ve fallen into a rabbit-hole of sudden ability
to entertain my apathy,
and i’ve succumbed to the sensation
whole-heartedly.
Time passes as a series of pipe-dreams,
passion bursting into ephemeral flame
to paint moments rich in meaning,
so far away, and fading
as i trace their shape into memory
to be preserved with all the other artifacts
of dreams untested.
sometimes there is nothing but trouble to be found in the exercise of rational thought, sometimes it’s a terrible idea to go to the bar
you find yourself tangled in the decaying tendrils of the hard-won hope that there is enough inherent intelligence and good-will in the human species to undertake the admittedly difficult tasks of seeing to the sustainability of this human experiment
Check out the new batch of bumper stickers! Great stuff for only $10 a piece.
This is pretty cool. Gives great insight into politics.
# The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 AD.
# The dataset consists of over 360 documents downloaded from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com.
# Once the documents have been dated and converted to plain-text, my tag-cloud-generation script goes through every text chronologically and makes a list of all the unique words that have been used and counts how many times each word is used.
Why don’t we do it in the road? And on the bed, and the couch, and the bathroom and the…
In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare persons of comparable circumstances, age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards.
