Photos of fear

I don't know what is going on at Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara, Canada--I've never been there.  Based on these photos of horrified people, though, they have many satisfied customers. At least these Nightmares Fear Factory customers asked for it, unlike this creepy elevator scenario foisted on unsuspecting people by this Brazilian television show.  You couldn't do this in America--the show would get sued after one of the victims had a heart attack.

Continue ReadingPhotos of fear

New organization–Freedom of the Press Foundation–protects meaningful freedom of the press

Glenn Greenwald is a member of the Board of the Directors of a new organization called Freedom of the Press Foundation. Here's how Greenwald describes the mission:

The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group (for reasons I explained here).

We intend to raise funds ourselves and then distribute it to the beneficiaries we name. The first group of beneficiaries includes WikiLeaks. We can circumvent those extra-legal, totally inappropriate blocks that have been imposed on the group. We can enable people to support WikiLeaks without donating directly to it by donating to this new organization that will then support a group of deserving independent journalism outlets, one of which is WikiLeaks. In sum, we will render impotent the government's efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.

. . . I'm very excited to have participated in its formation and will serve as an unpaid member of the Board of Directors, along with the heroic whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, 2012 McArthur-fellowship-receipient and Oscar-nominated documentarian Laura Poitras, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow, the actor and civil liberties advocate John Cusack, BoingBoing co-founder Xeni Jardin, and several other passionate free press and transparency activists.

David Carr of the New York Times recently wrote an article titled: "Group Aims to Be a Conduit for WikiLeaks Donations":

A group advocating a more transparent government has formed a nonprofit organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation to serve as a conduit for donations to organizations like WikiLeaks. The goal is to insulate those groups’ fund-raising efforts from political and business pressures.

In December 2010, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would no longer accept transactions for WikiLeaks, the online leak group that released thousands of secret documents from the American government. The move to cut off donations, which came after vocal protests against the organization’s activities from members of Congress, eliminated the vast majority of financing for WikiLeaks.

Michael Calderon of Huffpo is recently posted on FPF:

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Timm said the idea for the foundation grew out of conversations with fellow co-founders, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers, and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former Grateful Dead lyricist.

The foundation plans to direct tax deductible donations to WikiLeaks for as long as payment processors block the organization, while protecting other outlets if they are similarly targeted.

"WikiLeaks was the inspiration for it, but we wanted to make the mission much broader than WikiLeaks," Timm said.

For that reason, the group is also raising money for three other entities: MuckRock News, an open government organization; National Security Archive, an archive of declassified government documents; and The UpTake, a citizen-journalism news site.

Here is more on the four beneficiary organizations. FDL's Kevin Gosztola writes:

[T]he idea had come from something that had been discussed for months. There was a “real sense that the blockade on WikiLeaks was censorship of not just of WikiLeaks but actually of the people who wanted to express their opinions by making donations.” It was a suppression of “their rights to free speech,” as well.

FPF decided to do something that would empower people to do something that could keep WikiLeaks operational while also inspiring a new generation of WikiLeaks-like organizations that would be resistant to government and corporate pressures.

Here's an excerpt from the About Page of Freedom of the Press Foundation: The Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. We accept tax-deductible donations to a variety of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is built on the recognition that this kind of transparency journalism — from publishing the Pentagon Papers and exposing Watergate, to uncovering the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons — doesn’t just happen. It requires dogged work by journalists, and often, the courage of whistleblowers and others who work to ensure that the public actually learns what it has a right to know. But in a changing economic and technological age, media organizations are increasingly susceptible to corporate or government pressure. This can lead to watered-down or compromised coverage, or worse: censorship. Increasingly, non-profit media and transparency organizations are emerging as a critical component of the journalism landscape. Leveraging the power of the Internet, these organizations are helping to reinvent and reimagine independent watchdog reporting. Right now, too many of those organizations are struggling for funding, relying on a few large foundations or competing for donors. Our goal is to broaden the financial base of these types of institutions—both start-ups and established non-profit organizations — by crowd-sourcing funding and making it easy for people to support the best journalism from an array of organizations all in one place. Using the same networked, collaborative approach, the Freedom of the Press Foundation will also provide support for organizations and individuals that have been unjustly censored or cut off from funding for doing their job as journalists. Given the variety of corporate and government pressures on journalism outlets around the world, the need has never been greater.

Continue ReadingNew organization–Freedom of the Press Foundation–protects meaningful freedom of the press

Politicians trash the 5th Amendment

This is the opening paragraph from "Scandal Alert: Congress Is Quietly Abandoning the 5th Amendment, published by The Atlantic:

What everyone must understand is that American politics doesn't work the way you'd think it would. Most people presume that government officials would never willfully withhold penicillin from men with syphilis just to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. It seems unlikely that officers would coerce enlisted men into exposing themselves to debilitating nerve gas. Few expected that President Obama would preside over the persecution of an NSA whistle-blower, or presume the guilt of all military-aged males killed by U.S. drone strikes. But it all happened.

Continue ReadingPoliticians trash the 5th Amendment

Stunning gun statistics

The following statistics come from an article in the Minnesota Post:

680 Americans were killed accidentally with guns each year between 2003 and 2007. 46 Americans committed suicide with guns each day between 2003 and 2007 Two-thirds of all murders between 2003 and 2007 involved guns. The average number of Americans shot and killed daily during those years was 33. Children in the U.S. get murdered with guns at a rate that is 13 times higher than that of other developed nations.

Continue ReadingStunning gun statistics

The costs of unintended pregnancy

Guttmacher Institute has compiled facts and figures for all 50 states regarding the incidences of and costs of unintended pregnancies. This is a detailed state by state analysis, including statistics on abortion. I live in Missouri, where these statistics apply (follow the link to Guttmacher for the stats on your state):

• In 2006, 53% of all pregnancies (61,000) in Missouri were unintended, compared with 49% nationally. • Missouri’s unintended pregnancy rate in 2006 was 51 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. Nationally, the rate was 52 per 1,000, ranging from a low of 36 per 1,000 in New Hampshire to a high of 69 per 1,000 in Mississippi. • The teen pregnancy rate in Missouri was 63 per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 2005. The national teen pregnancy rate was 70 per 1,000, ranging from 33 per 1,000 in New Hampshire to 93 per 1,000 in New Mexico. • In 2006, 61% of unintended pregnancies in Missouri resulted in births and 25% in abortions; the remainder resulted in miscarriages. • In Missouri in 2006, 46% of all births (37,700) resulted from unintended pregnancies, compared with 38% nationally. • The services provided by family planning centers in Missouri helped avert 20,800 unintended pregnancies in 2008, which would likely have resulted in 9,200 births and 8,700 abortions.

Continue ReadingThe costs of unintended pregnancy