I warned you, but you’re going to click on this link anyway, because you’re too damned curious.   Here’s an excerpt from this NewScientist article:

The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever before.

Did you get that?  This black hole has the mass of 18 BILLION Suns.  That makes you a tiny essentially weightless speck of dust, a photon, by comparison. 

Consider Dan Klarman’s claim that the universe is simply not specified to a human scale.  And consider these graphic size comparisons of the Earth, the sun and other celestial bodies.

As I was sitting in the Jury holding area last week, I began to read volume one of the “Centennial History of the Civil War” by Bruce Catton: “The Coming Fury“.

Between periods of listening for my number to be called, I plunged into the 1860 presidential primaries. Those left wing liberal Republicans had the good-old-boy Democrats running in circles. Except that the main issue was homeland integrity instead of Homeland Security, the machinations seemed quite similar to recent news. That is, allowing for technological and social context.

We now know that the issue was powerful enough to split the conservative party down the middle, the liberal party won the election, and then the country split across the middle. Those were interesting times, in the Chinese Proverb sense.

This year the same formerly conservative party (”Democrats”) have as front runners two Senators who would have been ineligible to vote or own property in 1860. Some things do change.

But to keep this post short, a more recent historical note. I had cut this political cartoon from a paper some weeks less than 16 years ago and found it in my desk recently:

Need proof? Check out Romney’s own carefully crafted words. Let Glenn Greenwald be your tour guide.

These are just some of the powers which Romney — and, among the respondents, Romney alone — claimed the President possesses, either by explicitly claiming them or refusing to repudiate them when asked directly:

* to eavesdrop on Americans with no warrants, even if doing so is in violation of Congressional law (Question 1).

* to attack Iran without Congressional authorization, even in the absence of an imminent threat (Question 2).

* to disregard a congressional statute limiting the deployment of troops (Question 3).

* to issue a signing statement reserving a constitutional right to bypass laws enacted by Congress (Question 4).

* to disregard international human rights treaties that the US Senate has ratified where said treaties, in his view, “impinge upon the President’s constitutional authority” (Question 8 ).

Missouri’s first State Poet Laureate.  Walter Bargen.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am by this.  Walter is a first-rate poet and, just if not more importantly, a decent human being.

He will be formally introduced on February 13th at the state capitol.  After that, he will serve a two-year-term, administered by the Missouri Center for the Book .  We are enormously proud of this and look forward to a fruitful affiliation.

The shameless promotional part:  if anyone feels generous and wishes to support an institution whose goal to the elevation and promotion of the literary arts, go to our website, find the P.O. Box address, and…you know…

We will appreciate it.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Walter Bargen and a thank you to all who support the arts.

I came across an article a few days ago written by John Hockenberry, an award-winning journalist who once worked for NBC’s Dateline and is now a fellow at MIT’s Media Lab. Titled “You Don’t Understand Our Audience”: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, this article is a relentless, burning indictment of everything that’s wrong with the mainstream media today. In a future era, when historians look back on our time and ask how so many people could have been deceived into supporting the disastrous, nightmarish war in Iraq and ignoring so many other pressing issues, Hockenberry’s article will be Exhibit A.

Point by devastating point, Hockenberry shows us exactly what’s wrong with the media: their mindless pursuit of “balance” on even the most non-controversial issues of fact:

Our story [on America's "shock and awe" attacks at the beginning of the war] arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter’s voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures.

…At the conclusion of the screening… an NBC/GE executive responsible for “standards” shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter’s voice. “Doesn’t it seem like she has a point of view here?” he asked.

The way they shove legitimate, critically important stories aside to make room for feel-good fluff, pandering to their viewers rather than risk upsetting them by telling them things they might not already know:

I had been in Corvo’s office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. “Maybe,” said Zucker, “we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters.” He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.

The way news organizations are literally forced by corporate executives to choose certain stories to air in order to better promote other programs on the same network (I hadn’t known about this, and it floored me to hear it):

Sometimes entertainment actually drove selection of news stories. Since Dateline was the lead-in to the hit series Law & Order on Friday nights, it was understood that on Fridays we did crime. Sunday was a little looser but still a hard sell for news that wasn’t obvious or close to the all-important emotional center. In 2003, I was told that a story on the emergence from prison of a former member of the Weather Underground, whose son had graduated from Yale University and won a Rhodes Scholarship, would not fly unless it dovetailed with a story line on a then-struggling, soon-to-be-cancelled, and now-forgotten Sunday-night drama called American Dreams, which was set in the 1960s. I was told that the Weather Underground story might be viable if American Dreams did an episode on “protesters or something.”

The way obvious conflicts of interest are steadfastly ignored:

At mandatory, hours-long “ethics training” meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver’s-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of “shareholder value.”

…I did, however, point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity “team leader,” how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. “You make an interesting point I had not thought of before,” he told me. “But I don’t know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news.”

And the way in which legitimate, serious issues are barred from the table because they’re not telegenic enough:

In 2003, one of our producers obtained from a trial lawyer in Connecticut video footage of guards subduing a mentally ill prisoner. Guards themselves took the footage as part of a safety program to ensure that deadly force was avoided and abuses were documented for official review. We saw guards haul the prisoner down a greenish corridor, then heard hysterical screaming as the guard shooting the video dispassionately announced, “The prisoner is resisting.” For 90 seconds several guards pressed the inmate into a bunk. All that could be seen of him was his feet. By the end of the video the inmate was motionless. Asphyxiation would be the official cause of death.

…Yet at the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely. “These inmates aren’t necessarily sympathetic to our audience,” he said. The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn’t seem as if anything was wrong.

“Except that the inmate died,” I offered.

“But that’s not what it looks like. All you can see is his feet.”

…”But,” I pleaded, “the man died. That’s just a fact. The prison guards shot this footage, and I don’t think their idea was to get it on Dateline.”

“Look,” the producer said sharply, “in an era when most of our audience has seen the Rodney King video, where you can clearly see someone being beaten, this just doesn’t hold up.”

“Rodney King wasn’t a prisoner,” I appealed. “He didn’t die, and this mentally ill inmate is not auditioning to be the next Rodney King. These are the actual pictures of his death.”

“You don’t understand our audience.”

There’s much, much more in the article, and I can’t recommend highly enough that you read the whole thing. I swore off network TV news long ago, as well as CNN and Fox, and I can’t be happier that I did. It’s now thoroughly clear, to any thinking person, that their sole reason for existing is to soothe us and pander to us so we’ll sit still long enough to watch the commercials. Any idea of informing the public, of telling us the facts we need to know to make informed judgments on important issues, is long, long gone.

For all that blogs are derided as uncouth and radical by the self-appointed guardians of the mainstream, many of them contain more original, relevant, insightful reporting and analysis than the major news networks can muster in days. These lumbering corporate behemoths have already begun to slide into irrelevance, but the sooner we can bring about their collapse, the better.

In this entertaining video, Ken Robinson discusses the critical role creativity should play in education.

Robinson is the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. Robinson argues that Western education has failed to teach young people to think critically about life, art, culture, and humanism. Instead, most education is geared to producing workers. In the process, most education systems downplay or even disparage art: “Don’t do music; you’re not going to be a musician.” Many brilliant people are taught to think that they are failures because the things they do well–often valuable things-are not valued by most schools. Robinson argues that we’ve got to develop a new “ecology” of education–we’ve got to stop “strip-mining young minds.”

This disturbing NYT graphic allows you to count them up, all the deaths that billions of U.S. tax dollars can buy.  It includes all of the deaths of those in uniforms caused by the conflict, not just the deaths of U.S. soldiers.  It does not show the civilian deaths. “[S]adly, civilian fatalities in Iraq last year were simply too numerous to represent on a single newspaper page.”

I caught this list of telltale signs over at De-conversion:  Resources for Skeptical, De-converting or Former Christians.  Here are a few items from the list:

• You see nothing wrong with stating “facts” about what God thinks as if you are His personal secretary.
• You complain about Christians not being allowed to practice their religion in foreign countries, yet when someone tries to set up a Hindu temple/Mosque/Pagan or new age bookshop in your town you go ballistic and think it shouldn’t be allowed.
• Your typical prayer uses the phrase “Lord Jesus” or “Lord God” more times than the Bible.
• God regularly opens up convenient parking spaces, JUST FOR YOU.
• You think people who enjoy science fiction and fantasy, especially those who enjoy the Harry Potter novels, are going to be in hell.
• You think that being tortured for all of eternity for any reason is an appropriate punishment.

Personal anecdote time.

Yesterday (Sunday) we went shopping.  We stopped at Office Depot to buy a new chair.  As we approached the entrance, I spotted a friend of ours and called her name.  We gathered outside the entrance to chat.

As we talked, a man approached us, begged our pardon, and asked for a personal opinion.

“Do any of you know what that is?” he asked, pointing across the parking lot.

That is a tower under contruction adjacent to a one-story building that used to be a bank and is now The Islamic Community Center.  We’ve been watching the tower rise for months now, a very careful construction project because it is at least fifty feet tall, maybe more, a fluted column with other motifs on its white surface.

“Oh, it’s a minaret,” our friend said without missing a beat.  Of course I thought makes perfect sense.  “For call to prayer,” she continued.  “Which is beautiful if you’ve ever heard it.”

“Do you think that’s appropriate?” the stranger asked.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You know the first one is at five in the morning,” he said.  “I just wonder what the neighborhood around here will think.”

I turned around and from where we stood we could see three church steeples.  “Probably no more than they think of the bells ringing on those.”

“But not at five A.M.” he said.

I looked at him.  “What the problem?  Bells are okay but a muezzin isn’t?”

“Well, this is a christian community.”

“I live in this community and I’m not a christian.”

He looked at me oddly.

“Get a petition up to shut down the bells ringing,” our friend said, “and we’ll back a ban on call to prayer.”

“I just wonder if anybody was asked what they thought,” this guy said in a huff and started to walk off.

“Evidently,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have gotten a permit to build the damn thing in the first place.”

He didn’t answer, just stalked off.

It won’t surprise me in the coming months to have a canvasser show up at my door now with a petition to have hearings on whether Those People should be allowed to make noise in This Community.

What part of tolerance don’t folks understand?

Oh.  I forgot.  As long as it’s not where we can see or hear it, we’re as tolerant as anyone.

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the author of  “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”  In an op-ed piece in the January 2, 2008 NYT, he reports that American rates of resource consumption are horribly out of wack with the rates of other inhabitants of the world and that Americans are due for a substantial adjustment:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences . . .

Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people . . .

[W]hether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life.

It is five days into the new year, and I am glad of that - 2007 was a particularly trying time for me, full of a lot of personal and professional changes and challenges. It is good to have a fresh chapter to write, a blank page upon which to scribble. I am, as usual, filled with my own familiar mix of optimism and cynicism, which is often how the winter holidays leave me. The new year will most likely be much like the old year, and since it is an election year we will be treated to a panoply of events from all sides showing the problems inherent in our our political machine. Still, as we like to tell ourselves, our system is the best thing going, but it is certainly not as good as it could be.

Once again I am frustrated because stupid human tricks (with an emphasis on uneducated and opinionated humans) are as usual playing more of a role instead of less. Really, who would have thought that in 2007- 2008 there would be so much discussion about evolution from presidential candidates. Who would have thought that the Republican winner in the Iowa caucuses would be a candidate who has stated he doesn’t believe in evolution. For me a lack of belief in evolution betrays a fundamental illiteracy in and hostility toward science. I find that behavior problematic when coming from an average citizen, but when it is embraced by a presidential candidate who has gained some traction, I am annoyed and frightened. Holy Cow, Pope John Paul II said that God isn’t afraid of Science over 10 years ago - one wonders why we as a country are still struggling with this issue today. It isn’t a question of atheism vs. religion, because even from my undeniable skepticism I see it is possible to be a religious person committed to rigorous intellectual inquiry. I think that thinking (along with fact checking) is going out of style, and that scares me more than any bogeyman I can imagine.

Our system of government is based on an educated populace capable of self-determination, and I think that dream is as far away as it has ever been, perhaps further. We have a “marketplace of ideas” where “truth” is often based on popular vote by the uneducated rather than actual evidence, and it isn’t working. It would work if people were interested in actively seeking the merits of theories and ideas, but that is not the case. Otherwise, why would I have heard so many people, who seemed otherwise reasonable, saying that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was sworn in on a Koran instead of a Bible. I would think it just an example of the lunatic fringe, but it came up too often for comfort this week. In fact the checkout lady at my grocery thought he could be linked with the “terrorists”. Good Grief! Some say we used to respect science and knowledge in this country, and now truth is defined by whichever group yells loudest. I am not sure we ever really respected science and knowledge as much as we like to think, but one thing I do agree with - Americans are losing sight of what it means to be rational.

It is enough to make for a nasty mix of rage and despair worse than any New Year’s Day hangover. I think of that saying/bumpersticker/slogan “If you are not outraged you aren’t paying attention” and I cringe. I want to pay attention, but I do not want to spend my time being outraged, enraged, or any variation of raging at all. So I am faced with a bit of a dilemma as I ponder how to be engaged and not enraged in 2008 and beyond.

I do think that a great deal of our problems with embracing or at least tolerating new ideas, or difference as a whole come from fear, and fear driving policy on education, science or anything else is a very dangerous thing for us as a nation.

I can only start with myself, of course. I believe that in order to work for a better world I need to work to create mindfulness in my own life, and in order to work to create better critical thinking and debate, I need to work to understand those perspectives so different from my own in a compassionate way, instead of dismissing them outright. I need to train myself to listen and understand where folks are coming from instead of immediately judging and reacting.

It doesn’t immediately solve my rather dismal view of the reality of science, education and politics in America 2008, but I am reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh describing our planet as a small boat crossing the Gulf of Siam, and caught in a vicious storm. He says that often people panic, and boats sink. But one person staying calm and lucid on the boat can help the boat survive. He or she can remain present and communicate with others on the boat what to do and thus save the lives of many people. I am learning that I can choose a different response than despair and/or anger when I look at what is happening to my country, and it can help me have the energy to actually try to make change happen. Staying calmly present and rooted in the moment, as I try to foster real, engaged discussion with even those who disagree with me is certainly better than being pissed off at all the stupid all the time.

I guess working toward that personal reality is a reasonable resolution for the new year. But from my reaction to Mike Huckabee, I sure have a long way to go.

Why did Obama win in Iowa? This video gives you a good idea of why. Obama adopted, as his motto, “The fierce urgency of now.” Obama is not a mere speech reader, as you can see from this speech he gave on November 10, 2007. He really hits some solid notes along the way.

Best known for his attacks on Father Nature, Sam Harris is now warning us about Mother Nature:

Might we be better off just leaving things to the wisdom of Nature? I once believed this. But we know that Nature has no concern for individuals or for species. Those that survive do so despite Her indifference. While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven’t adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene.

But our environment and our needs — to say nothing of our desires — have changed radically in the meantime. We are in many respects ill-suited to the task of building a global civilization. This is not a surprise. From the point of view of evolution, much of human culture, along with its cognitive and emotional underpinnings, must be epiphenomenal. Nature cannot “see” most of what we are doing, or hope to do, and has done nothing to prepare us for many of the challenges we now face. . .

Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us.

Full story here.

Yesterday, I saw the following quote on a t-shirt in a little souvineer shop in Hannibal, Missouri:

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

This quote uses a formula that could work for many other verbs, too.   Instead of “read,” you can substitute “think,” “vote,” “empathize,” “speak,” “listen,” or “give a damn.”

Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune

by Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

Tab, The Calgary Sun

by John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

[admin note:  DI proudly supports cartoonists through its subscription to Cagle Cartoons.  Each of these cartoons is printed with full permission]

Here in Surf City the second and most powerful of three back to back winter storms is just making landfall. Gusts up to 50 mph are predicted, with 20 foot ocean swells. Surf’s up with a vengeance!

The power has gone out briefly twice this morning, so if you don’t hear from me in a while you’ll know why. We’re well stocked up on groceries, candles, reading matter, and charged batteries. I’m looking forward to weathering the storm safe inside, glad that I don’t have to go and be anywhere. I salute all the utility crews and emergency workers who are out there in the storm, and I hope all the homeless have found safe harbor.

Rod Humble, a game developer (I guess, even if you don’t play computer games, names like The Sims, he is Head of the Sims Studio, or EverQuest will sound familiar to you) created an artgame, The Marriage. Available for download from his website.

The Marriage is intended to be art. No excuses or ducking. As such its certainly meant to be enjoyable but not entertaining in the traditional sense most games are. This means I am certain to be perceived as being pretentious by some who read this, my apologies. This is also a very difficult game to understand, again my apologies, I have tried to assist those who are interested but frustrated with the rules summary below.

To raise your curiosity:

JR: And the question that everyone wants to ask: What does your wife think of the game?

RH: Ah! She was amused this question came up and is happy for me to talk about it. She didn’t like the central mechanic when she first saw it at all, although she has always loved the end game and meta game which she thought was very romantic. Ever since the game has been released though and she has seen the emails from husbands who have said they thought it was so romantic they went home and bought their wife some flowers or wives who felt they understood and loved their husbands just a little more her opinion has changed to one of total joy (and to my dismay surprise that a game was capable of such things). Given that my wife really doesn’t like computer games at all (to the point of not particularly approving of my career) the fact that she is actually proud of this one has probably made our marriage better in a little way in the years to come.

For the whole interview go here.

I have not figured it out completely as it comes without any rules or explanations and am not sure what to think of this game, but I thought others who are indeed married might want to play it. I think it probably would be more fun to just start playing the game and then read the interview or the background information that Humble provides on his website.

Here’s a screenshot:

Scientific American has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: “By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions.”

The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That’s a HUGE amount of money. Where could we EVER get that sort of money? Oh, yeah. The U.S. has already spent that much on the Iraq debacle. For the amount of money that we’ve wasted in Iraq, we could have already funded a great way to wean ourselves from mideast oil.

Now, specifically, what could $420 Billion buy if one spent it wisely? It’s an incredible investment that would pay for itself over and over. Here are the highlights of the plan, according to the Scientific American article:

Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.

The plan would include photovoltaic farms, pressurized caverns for storing the solar power, concentrated solar power (using numerous mirrors to focus the light as heat) and long-distance direct current transmission systems (because most of the solar power would be produced in the desert Southwest, far from major cities.

I remember when the FBI unleashed their “Carnivore” internet monitoring system in the 1990’s. Everyone was up in arms because the FBI could listen in to all email and run it through filters to store a database of all emails containing suspicious phrases, or from specific addresses. The controversy got so big, that they renamed it to the less aggressive DCS1000. Then they went to a third party snooping system (off the shelf) to do the same thing.

However, there is now a new system to watch what all potential internet miscreants are saying and viewing. Here’s a ZDNet article about it with plenty of source references. In brief, they monitor and record all traffic through a “pipe” (an internet node) for which they have a warrant to sniff for one particular suspects traffic. Unlike Carnivore, this new system stores the address information and keywords from all traffic on that pipe. This new system is like getting a warrant to monitor the trunk line from a local telephone office and record all calls because a suspect usually places calls from a phone in that area. And the press recently got upset that specific phone lines were being monitored without proper warrants!

I’m interested to see what mainstream media coverage this invasion of privacy might get.

Edge.org has just released it’s Annual Question.  This year’s version: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?”  I’ve read a couple dozen answers so far. As always, the answers are intellectually stimulating, challenging to common sense and entertaining.

Television producer Karl Sabbagh weighs in this year with his realization that expertise has serious limitations.  I agree with him that expertise is not necesarily an indication of all-round wisdom, yet there is a general tendency to think otherwise:

I used to believe that there were experts and non-experts and that, on the whole, the judgment of experts is more accurate, more valid, and more correct than my own judgment. But over the years, thinking — and I should add, experience — has changed my mind. What experts have that I don’t are knowledge and experience in some specialized area. What, as a class, they don’t have any more than I do is the skills of judgment, rational thinking and wisdom. And I’ve come to believe that some highly ‘qualified’ people have less of that than I do.

I now believe that the people I know who are wise are not necessarily knowledgeable; the people I know who are knowledgeable are not necessarily wise. Most of us confuse expertise with judgment. Even in politics, where the only qualities politicians have that the rest of us lack are knowledge of the procedures of parliament or congress, and of how government works, occasionally combined with specific knowledge of economics or foreign affairs, we tend to look to such people for wisdom and decision-making of a high order.

The United States. Here are some shocking details from Nomi Prins of Alternet:

The United States has more inmates and a higher incarceration rate than any other nation: more than Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, India, Australia, Brazil and Canada combined. Nearly 1 in every 136 US residents is in jail or prison. That’s 2.2 million people, an amount that quadrupled from 1980 to 2005. (There were only 340,000 people incarcerated in 1972.) Adding in figures for those on probation or parole, the number reaches 7.1 million.

Over the next five years, the American prison population is projected to increase three times more quickly than our resident population. The Federal Prison system is growing at 4% per year with 55% of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses, and only 11% for violent crimes. Women are more likely than men (29% to 19%) to serve drug sentences, dismantling thousands of families. One-third of prisoners are first time, non-violent offenders. Three-quarters are non-violent offenders with no history of violence.

For one of the main causes, consider these additional stories and statistics regarding the alleged ”War on Drugs.”

“Duelity” has put together a creative side-by-side presentation for your enlightenment, with a fun twist.

When you visit Duelity, pick “Watch,” then choose “Duelity” (rather than just “Creationism” or just “Evolution”) for the best effect.