pankajs wrote: 1. Then there are what can only be described as official and lawful rapes as approved by the Supreme court and government of US.
2. I Think the above figures do not include lawful rape. The conviction rate in sexual assaualt case will drop further down from the 3% quoted above.
Sir, what is the text in emphasis supposed to be?Airbnb’s prominent and large profile photos may facilitate discrimination against home-rental hosts who are black, according to a study conducted by two Harvard Business School professors.
Reduced demand for listings featuring black hosts appears to have led them to charge a lower amount — on average, $16 per night less than non-black hosts.
In the study, which has been submitted for publishing in an economics journal, the researchers found that non-black hosts in New York charge approximately 12 percent more per night than black hosts for an equivalent rental.
“These findings highlight the prevalence of discrimination in online marketplaces, suggesting an important unintended consequence of a seemingly routine mechanism for building trust,” wrote authors Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca.
The authors suggest that Airbnb should consider eliminating or downsizing its host photos as a proactive measure against discrimination, though they note the company is not breaking any laws by simply showing photos.
Quick GUBO sessions aka strip search legalised by SC of US of A.prahaar wrote:pankajs wrote: 1. Then there are what can only be described as official and lawful rapes as approved by the Supreme court and government of US.
2. I Think the above figures do not include lawful rape. The conviction rate in sexual assaualt case will drop further down from the 3% quoted above.
At first glance, Matt Heimbach looks like a friendly neighbor, an always-smiling, 22-year-old college graduate who goes to church, and loves country music and drinking beer with his buddies.
But Heimbach is a white separatist who believes that the United States would be a better place if it were divided and went back to segregation. He has been called the future of organized hate in this country.
"Loving one's people is natural," he said. "Every other group is allowed to love their race for the best interest of their race. There's no reason why whites shouldn't."
When asked if he considered himself a racist, Heimbach said, "Sure. So what? I call it natural."
Last year, Heimbach launched a nationwide college recruitment campaign to spread his beliefs and has been on a cross-country trip to form all-white student unions on college campuses. His recruitment efforts started at his alma mater Towson University, and has plans to visit George Mason University in Virginia, Indiana State in Terre Haute, Ind., and American University in Washington, D.C. this spring.
He is tapping into a growing and frightening discontent in the U.S. In the last decade, the number of hate groups has nearly doubled from 602 to 1,007, according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"The election of Barack Obama ... has ginned up the anger and fury out there," Potok said. "The fact that a black man was elected president, not once but twice, has merely added to that fury."
Heimbach was raised in a middle-class Maryland suburb. His parents are schoolteachers who, Heimbach admits, did not teach him to be racist. Today, he is estranged from his family.
"People always say, 'Well, he was raised like that.' Well, no, I wasn't. I was raised [in a] moderate Catholic home," he said. "My parents are ... very, very moderate."
Heimbach said he loved history and the Bible, and in his reading both, he found a place of superiority. In high school, he played a Confederate soldier in Civil War battle reenactments. It's those days of slavery that Heimbach calls the good old days.
"We would be a lot better off if the South would have won," he said.
He fears white heterosexual Christians have fallen prey, as he puts it. Many white separatists note that U.S. Census trends show whites being a minority by 2043. Heimbach attributed the issues white people face today to the slaughter of Native Americans centuries ago.
"The cataclysmic end to this empire is fast approaching," he said. "Was what happened to the Native Americans horrible? Yeah. But that's what's happening to whites now in this country."
Heimbach is far from alone in these beliefs. This year, he was a speaker at a "Stormfront" convention, a sort of annual retreat for white supremacists, where he met David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and former Louisiana state representative. He has since appeared as a guest on Duke's Internet radio show.
Heimbach sees the future of America as a place of extreme segregation "where there is no ill will, there is no hostility."
"We can still trade and get a visa," he said. A visa to visit, in his world, white Christians in the South, Jews in New York, blacks in Detroit, just to name a few of his examples.
Steubenville High School rape casepankajs wrote:97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail
{97% of the rapist just walk away!! Don't you think that figure is shocking .. from a so called first word country .. the land of freedom and justice, milk and honey .. the land of the oh so righteous Preet Bharara}
Approximately 2/3 of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim
38% of rapists are a friend or acquaintance
See how the lives of the remaining 3% rapists "fell apart" after justice catches up with them, so sad noCriticism has also been placed upon media outlets themselves, especially CNN, for their biased coverage of the case. During the course of the delinquent verdict on March 17, 2013, CNN's Poppy Harlow stated that it was "Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart...when that sentence came down, [Ma'lik] collapsed in the arms of his attorney...He said to him, 'My life is over. No one is going to want me now."
Nearly half of prison staff who sexually abused inmates faced no legal consequences, according to a new federal report.
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"The key takeaway here is the levels of impunity in detention facilities," Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, spokesperson for Just Detention International, told The Huffington Post. "Corrections agencies are not punishing sexual abuse committed by staff members nearly enough. These are known cases of sexual abuse and we're talking about nearly half of staff who were found to have committed sexual misconduct who didn't face any legal sanction."
The report also said that just 27 percent of staff who were referred for prosecution were arrested, and only 1 percent were convicted.
The BJS said officially reported sexual assaults increased significantly between 2005 and 2011, from 6,241 to 8,763. But the report captures a small fraction of the total number of assaults that take place in prisons, according to Just Detention.
A press release from the organization cites a previous BJS self-report study that found 200,000 people behind bars were sexually abused in a single year.
"That's a sign that inmates are not comfortable reporting sexual violence because of fears of retaliation, Lerner-Kinglake said. "They don't think these reports will be taken seriously."
Allegations of sex abuse across the country's prisons are on the rise, with nearly half of cases allegedly being perpetrated by guards, according to a new study conducted by the Justice Department.
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The study found 49 percent of the unwanted sexual misconduct or harassment involved prison staff as perpetrators, in acts ranging from verbal sexual harrassment to the most serious nonconsensual sexual penetration.
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Bradley W. Brockmann, executive director of The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University told ABC News that although the study showed there was a rise in the number of reports of sexual abuse, those cases represented a minute fraction of the "extraordinary sexual victimization that goes on daily."
"The biggest challenge here is that prisons are closed doors," said Brockmann, who is also a civil rights attorney. "What happens behind those walls generally stays behind them. For somebody to speak out takes immense courage."
Brockmann said that often when prisoners do speak out, they fear retaliation from the correctional officers.
"Ultimately unless there are witnesses -- which is rare -- it's going to come down to the word of the prisoner versus officer," he said.
This aligns with the study's findings, which revealed that only 10 percent of sexual abuse claims were investigated and substantiated by officials, the rest being dismissed as "unfounded" or "unsubstantiated."
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Of the fewer cases in which the sexual abuse claims against correctional officers were found to be substantiated, more than three-quarters of those officers were fired or resigned, while 45 percent were referred for prosecution and only 1 percent were actually convicted of a crime.
A Justice Department investigation accuses Alabama officials of violating women’s rights by fostering an environment of rampant sexual abuse at the state’s Tutwiler Prison, where inmates “universally fear for their safety” and officers allegedly forced women to engage in sex acts just to obtain basic sanitary supplies.
The nearly 900 women incarcerated at the maximum-security prison live “in a toxic environment with repeated and open sexual behavior,” the Justice Department said in announcing its findings today into the Wetumpka, Ala., facility.
As part of the alleged abuses, male officers openly watched women shower or use the toilet, staff helped organize a “strip show,” prisoners received a constant barrage of sexually offensive language, and prisoners who reported improper conduct were punished, according to the department.
What’s more, at least a third of the 99 employees at Tutwiler have had sex with prisoners, the department said.
“We conclude that the state of Alabama violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution by failing to protect women prisoners at Tutwiler [Prison] from harm due to sexual abuse and harassment from correctional staff,” the Justice Department wrote in a letter to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.
Perhaps most disturbing, investigators concluded the Alabama Department of Corrections and officials at Tutwiler have been “well aware of the multitude of structural problems that allow this abuse and harassment to continue unabated.”
“Officials have been on notice for over eighteen years of the risks to women prisoners and, for over eighteen years, have chosen to ignore them,” the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels, said in the letter. In that time, inmates have been raped, sodomized and fondled by prison staff, yet officials “remain deliberately indifferent to the serious and significant need to protect women prisoners.”
In addition, the report found the sexual abuse and harassment were grossly under-reported due to fear of retaliation.
“Action needs to be taken immediately,” George Beck Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, said in a statement.
The Justice Department’s inquiry began in February 2013, after what it called a “sordid history of sexual abuse and harassment” at Tutwiler since it opened in 1942. As part of their investigation, federal officials visited Tutwiler, interviewed dozens of prisoners, and reviewed 233 letters from current inmates.
But their work is not over. In a notice to Alabama officials, the Justice Department said its investigation will now look at more potential violations of prisoners’ rights, including allegations of excessive force and constitutionally inadequate conditions of confinement and health care.
America is still a deeply racist country
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood in the 1960s. It's been replaced by a subtler, still ugly version
By Chris Arnade
A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, "Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up."
Only one day in the town and I thought, "Damn the south."
I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our house down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a "nigger lover".
It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I was just residing in the seam of something much uglier.
It is also why I left as soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New York City to work on Wall Street.
In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as president.
Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby. I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York's Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.
In my Florida hometown, there is a train track that splits the town into two colors. When we passed into the black section of town, even if I were lying in the back of the station wagon, I knew it. The gravel roads would wake me, and I could basically smell poverty through the windows.
Crossing into Hunts Point in New York is the same, complete with a train track. The roads are paved, but feel unpaved. The stench of poverty has not changed much (industrial waste rather than uncollected garbage), nor has its clamor or its destructive power.
Neither has the color of its residents: the poor side of town in New York is still almost entirely dark skinned.
It took me a few months of slow recognition, fighting a thought I did not want to believe: we are still a deeply racist country. The laws on the books claim otherwise, but in Hunts Point (and similar neighborhoods across the country), those laws seem like far away idyllic words that clash with the daily reality: everything is stacked against those who are born black or brown.
We as a nation applaud ourselves for having moved beyond race. We find one or two self-made blacks or Hispanics who succeeded against terrible odds, and we elevate their stories to a higher position, and then we tell them over and over, so we can say, "See, we really are a color blind nation."
We tell their stories so we can forget about the others, the ones who couldn't overcome the long odds, the ones born into neighborhoods locked down by the absurd war on drugs, the ones born with almost even odds that their fathers will at some point be in jail, the ones born into neighborhoods that few want to teach in, neighborhoods scarce of resources.
We tell the stories of success and say: see anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, further denigrating those who can't escape poverty. It plays into the false and pernicious narrative that poverty is somehow a fault of desire, a fault of intelligence, a fault of skills. No, poverty is not a failing of the residents of Hunts Point who are just as decent and talented as anyone else. Rather it is a failing our broader society.
It took me seeing one black teen thrown against a bodega wall by cops, for no reason, to erase much of the image of seeing Obama elected. It took the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Hunts Point girl, a girl my middle daughter's age, to make me viscerally understand how lucky my children are. It took watching as one smart child grew from dreaming of college to dealing drugs to viscerally understand how lucky everyone in my old office is.
The barriers between Hunts Point and the rest of New York are not as high as they were between the white and black section of my hometown in the 1960s. People can freely pass over them. Practically, however, they are almost insurmountable.
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has been replaced by a subtler version.
It is a racism that is easier to ignore, easier to deny, and consequently almost as dangerous.
BERLIN (AP) — Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden claims in a new interview that the U.S. agency is involved in industrial espionage.
German public television broadcaster ARD released a written statement before an interview airing Sunday night in which it quotes Snowden as saying that if German engineering company Siemens had information that would benefit the United States — but had nothing to do with national security needs — the National Security Agency would still use it.
ARD did not give any further context and it was not clear what exactly Snowden accused the NSA of doing with such information.
Snowden faces felony charges in the U.S. after revealing the NSA's mass surveillance program. He has temporary asylum in Russia.
The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
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Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user's life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, martial status – options included "single", "married", "divorced", "swinger" and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children.
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A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information.
So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that "t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.
Not only are they less likely to apply for a mortgage than any other ethnic group, but African-Americans are also 2.4 times more likely to get denied a mortgage than Whites, a recent study conducted by Zillow and the National Urban League found.
As a result, far fewer African-Americans have achieved the American dream of homeownership.
Thousands of schools in states across the country take taxpayer money to cast doubt on basic science.
A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach “alternatives” to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs. As the map below illustrates, creationism in schools isn’t restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in any of these states, there’s a good chance your tax money is helping to convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly contested scientific hypothesis as credible as “God did it.”
James Dean, the executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, flew to New York, arriving at Bloomberg headquarters on Saturday to deliver a heartening message. He wanted to do it in person. “We made mistakes. Horrible things happened that I’m ashamed of,” he said over coffee in our newsroom, sparsely populated on a weekend. “Student-athletes and other students, too, were hurt” as a result of hundreds of phony classes offered beginning sometime in the 1990s. “The integrity of our university was badly damaged.”
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That painful history consists of the transformation of UNC’s former African and Afro-American Studies Department into a factory churning out fake grades from phony classes disproportionately attended by varsity athletes. No one is disputing that anymore. What’s still unclear is the degree to which Chapel Hill’s powerful Athletic Department initiated and/or exploited the fraudulent Afro-Am department. (It has since been reformed and “rebranded,” Dean pointed out, as African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies.)
Agnimitra wrote:A very good read:
The Two Faces of American Empire: Melville Knew Them, We Still Live With Them
"Insurgents like Ahab, however dangerous to the people around them, are not the primary drivers of destruction. They are not the ones who will hunt animals to near extinction — or who are today forcing the world to the brink. Those would be the men who never dissent, who either at the frontlines of extraction or in the corporate backrooms administer the destruction of the planet, day in, day out, inexorably, unsensationally without notice, their actions controlled by an ever greater series of financial abstractions and calculations made in the stock exchanges of New York, London and Shanghai.
If Ahab is still the exception, Delano is still the rule. Throughout his long memoir, he reveals himself as ever faithful to the customs and institutions of maritime law, unwilling to take any action that would injure the interests of his investors and insurers. “All bad consequences,” he wrote, describing the importance of protecting property rights, “may be avoided by one who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.”
German ancestry...must be running in the family.Rony wrote:Matt Heimbech
This is a good video interview and gives a very good idea of how fundamentalist christianity has infiltrated the US armed forces. The current republican party is also controlled by fundamentalist christians. Last president Bush was their man who was a devout christian and invaded iraq. The US republican party is a christian nationalist party. The mainstream media portrays BJP as hindu nationalist. But at least Hinduism is an indian religion. But US republican party is more christian nationalistic than hindu nationalism of BJP and christianity is not even native to the US. They wiped out all the native indian religions and spiritual traditions of Americas. My 2 cents.Rony wrote:Fighting Religious Indoctrination in the US Military
Mikey Weinstein is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (http://militaryreligiousfreedom.org), an organization dedicated to combating the unconstitutional religious proselytization that remains far too prevalent in all branches of the United States Armed Forces.
In this interview, he and Cenk Uygur discuss Mikey's recent run-in with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, the prevalence in the military of "Dominionism," the radical Evangelical Christian theology that anticipates the imminent return of Jesus Christ, and why the fight for religious freedom within the military may be all that stands between us and global nuclear destruction.
Before founding the MRFF in 2006, Weinstein was an Air Force officer, Reagan Administration legal counsel and General Counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corporation. He is also the author of With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military and No Snowflake in an Avalanche, both of which describe his fight against alleged coercive Christian Fundamentalist practices by some members of the military.
“Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”
Arguing that the American Dream, with opportunity for all, had “suffered some serious blows,” Mr. Obama’s speech referenced weaknesses in the ongoing economic recovery admitting, “Too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all.”
Just over half of the 183 nuclear missile launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana have been implicated in a widening exam cheating scandal, the Air Force said on Thursday, acknowledging it had "systemic" problem within its ranks.
The cheating was discovered during an investigation into illegal drug possession among airmen, when test answers were found in a text message on one missile launch officer's cell phone. The Air Force initially said 34 officers either knew about the cheating or cheated themselves.
But Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday that the total number of implicated officers had grown to 92, all of them at Malmstrom, one of three nuclear missile wings overseeing America's 450 inter-continental missiles, or ICBMs.
"I believe now that we do have systemic problems within the force," James said. "We do have systemic issues out there and we need to address this holistically.
James expressed confidence in the safety of America's nuclear arsenal, despite the scandal, saying there were multiple checks to ensure nuclear launch officers knew how to do their jobs. She said the entire force had been re-tested.
But she also said all 92 implicated officers had been decertified and pulled from their missile duties. The Air Force said that meant remaining launch officers were doing extra shifts, and officers with the missile launch backgrounds were being pulled from other assignments to supplement the force.
"I'll tell you right up front, there's been no operational impact and we do not see an operational impact in the mission at Malmstrom Air Force Base," Lieutenant General Stephen Wilson, the head of the Air Force's Global Strike Command.
Officials said they did not believe the cheating extended to the other missile wings since the tests at each base were different, meaning answers cannot be shared between bases.
The scandal is the largest single case of cheating in recent memory in America's nuclear missile forces, which are struggling with questions about discipline and morale in the post-Cold War era, when other missions, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, garner more attention and resources.
But the exam cheating is only the latest embarrassment for the nuclear force. James acknowledged on Tuesday that 13 airmen were under investigation for illegal drug possession, up from 11. That includes three nuclear missile launch officers.
The head of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile force, Air Force Major General Michael Carey, was fired in October for getting drunk and carousing with women while leading a government delegation to Moscow for talks on nuclear security.
According to an investigation by the Inspector General of the Air Force, Carey was at one point said to be slurring his words on a delegation trip to a local monastery and asked repeatedly for a chance to sing with a Beatles cover band at a Mexican restaurant.
The cheating scandal itself is an early test for James, who last year became the second woman to take over the Air Force's top civilian job. She has so far seized the issue, addressing the Pentagon media twice on the matter this month, and committing to handle the matter transparently.
James, who visited the nuclear missile wings last week, has said over the past two days that the problems within the nuclear missile force were in part cultural, with airmen not "wanting to report on their buddies."
Beyond a lack of integrity and poor judgment among airmen, she has also blamed the decision to cheat on a test-driven culture within the nuclear force, which must consistently score a passing grade of at least 90 percent correct on exams.
"I heard repeatedly from teammates that the need for perfection has created a climate of undue stress and fear. Fear about the future. Fear about promotions. Fear about what will happen to them in their careers," she added.
This is bojitive neuj onlee bliss to cross post in bojitive news from joo ess yeeaaaahhhh.
LOS ANGELES: The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state's drinking water supply.
....mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.
"Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing" said Gov. Jerry Brown, .........
....Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters.
From the moment Barack Obama appeared on the national stage, conservatives have been searching for the best way to describe the danger he poses to America's traditional way of life. Secularism? Check. Socialism? Sure. A tendency to apologize for America's greatness overseas? That, too. But how to tie them all together?
Gradually, a unifying theme took hold. "At the heart of the debate over Obama's program," declared Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in an influential 2010 National Review cover story, is "the survival of American exceptionalism." Finally, a term broad and historically resonant enough to capture the magnitude of the threat. A year later, Newt Gingrich published A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, in which he warned that "our government has strayed alarmingly" from the principles that made America special. Mitt Romney deployed the phrase frequently in his 2012 campaign, asserting that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." The term, which according to Factiva appeared in global English-language publications fewer than 3,000 times during the Bush Administration, has already appeared more than 10,000 times since Obama became president.The Rise of Anticlericalism
For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom."Today's conservatives often cast themselves as defenders of this religious exceptionalism against Obama's allegedly secularizing impulses. "Despite the fact that our current president has managed to avoid explaining on at least four occasions that we are endowed by our creator," Gingrich declared at a 2011 candidates forum, "the fact is that what makes American exceptionalism different is that we are the only people I know of in history to say power comes directly from God."
But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, Millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as Millennials age.
When conservatives worry that America is not as economically exceptional anymore, they're right. A raft of studies suggests that upward mobility is now rarer in the United States than in much of Europe. But if America's exceptional economic mobility is largely a myth, it's a myth in which many older Americans still believe. Among the young, by contrast, attitudes are catching up to reality. According to a 2011 Pew poll, young Americans were 14 points more likely than older Americans to say that the wealthy in America got there mainly because "they know the right people or were born into wealthy families" rather than because of their "hard work, ambition, and education." And as young Americans internalize America's lack of economic mobility, they are developing the very class consciousness the United States is supposed to lack. In 2011, when Pew asked Americans to define themselves as either a "have" or a "have-not," older Americans chose "have" by 27 points. In contrast, young Americans, by a 4-point margin, chose "have-not." According to the exceptionalist story line, Americans are all supposed to consider themselves "middle class," regardless of their actual economic fortunes. For seniors, that's largely true. According to a 2012 Pew study, they were 43 points more likely to call themselves "middle" than "lower" class. Among young Americans, by contrast, the percentage calling themselves "middle" and "lower" class was virtually the same.
Jhujar wrote:The End of American Exceptionalism
( Amreeka becoming Rich India: Rishtedari will happen in 2 Decades)
From the moment Barack Obama appeared on the national stage, conservatives have been searching for the best way to describe the danger he poses to America's traditional way of life. Secularism? Check. Socialism? Sure. A tendency to apologize for America's greatness overseas? That, too. But how to tie them all together?
Gradually, a unifying theme took hold. "At the heart of the debate over Obama's program," declared Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in an influential 2010 National Review cover story, is "the survival of American exceptionalism." Finally, a term broad and historically resonant enough to capture the magnitude of the threat. A year later, Newt Gingrich published A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, in which he warned that "our government has strayed alarmingly" from the principles that made America special. Mitt Romney deployed the phrase frequently in his 2012 campaign, asserting that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." The term, which according to Factiva appeared in global English-language publications fewer than 3,000 times during the Bush Administration, has already appeared more than 10,000 times since Obama became president.The Rise of Anticlericalism
For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom."Today's conservatives often cast themselves as defenders of this religious exceptionalism against Obama's allegedly secularizing impulses. "Despite the fact that our current president has managed to avoid explaining on at least four occasions that we are endowed by our creator," Gingrich declared at a 2011 candidates forum, "the fact is that what makes American exceptionalism different is that we are the only people I know of in history to say power comes directly from God."
But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, Millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as Millennials age.
When conservatives worry that America is not as economically exceptional anymore, they're right. A raft of studies suggests that upward mobility is now rarer in the United States than in much of Europe. But if America's exceptional economic mobility is largely a myth, it's a myth in which many older Americans still believe. Among the young, by contrast, attitudes are catching up to reality. According to a 2011 Pew poll, young Americans were 14 points more likely than older Americans to say that the wealthy in America got there mainly because "they know the right people or were born into wealthy families" rather than because of their "hard work, ambition, and education." And as young Americans internalize America's lack of economic mobility, they are developing the very class consciousness the United States is supposed to lack. In 2011, when Pew asked Americans to define themselves as either a "have" or a "have-not," older Americans chose "have" by 27 points. In contrast, young Americans, by a 4-point margin, chose "have-not." According to the exceptionalist story line, Americans are all supposed to consider themselves "middle class," regardless of their actual economic fortunes. For seniors, that's largely true. According to a 2012 Pew study, they were 43 points more likely to call themselves "middle" than "lower" class. Among young Americans, by contrast, the percentage calling themselves "middle" and "lower" class was virtually the same.
Right on cue the rain gods sent 4 inches of rain over last three days and proved him wrong!!!chaanakya wrote:Mandatory Water Conservation Measures spurs efforts for gold digging in West Coast Making farmers rich
LOS ANGELES: The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state's drinking water supply.
....mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.
"Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing" said Gov. Jerry Brown, .........
....Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters.
I think she is now the guiding light of Palantir Technologiesmatrimc wrote:Why GOP not backing Condi Rice for next pres candidate? Or is it she doesn't want to contest? She would first woman and African American to boot.
Check out how they are involved in removing Pakiness from Planet. And guess the SDRE engine in this brain train . One day he will figure out how to do cavity search without finger or foot. Buried inside vast amounts of computerized data are answers to big questions, both helpful and lucrative. Shyam Sankar is working to extract those answers to solve crimes, fight terrorism and save lives.Sankar leads a team of engineers at Palantir, a data-mining company with a reputation for mystery: It was founded in part with funding from the CIA, and its work has been tied to the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance programs.Indeed, Palantir helps the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department and other federal agencies fight crimes such as financial fraud by looking at large, sensitive data sets for anomalies and patterns. But Sankar has loftier goals in mind.
“I believe that a handful of computer scientists organized around a higher purpose can change the world,” he wrote on his blog.Palantir’s philanthropy engineering team studies data to tackle such global problems as human trafficking, the spread of disease and the atrocities that can erupt suddenly in conflict-torn countries.“The most valuable and elusive elements lurking within big data sets are often human: fast-moving targets such as terrorists, cyber criminals, rogue traders and disease carriers who tend to slip through the cracks,” Sankar wrote.Private companies have hired Palantir to help them operate more efficiently. For example, Palantir works with health care companies to help them identify populations that are at risk for disease or other illnesses.And Palantir’s data-crunching has helped responders find order in chaos after natural disasters. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a Palantir program helped aid workers map the locations of collapsed buildings and camps of the suddenly homeless. The company offered similar services to New Jersey officials after Hurricane Sandy struck last year.Sankar is interested in the human pieces of these data puzzles and believes that technology should amplify human intelligence instead of trying to replace it.Even with Palantir's powerful computers, all problem-solving starts with people’s insight and creativity, he said. No algorithm can replace that."That ability for the human to iterate on the problem is the crux of what we do," he said. ( Rumor was these guys help trailing OBL)
LokeshCji,LokeshC wrote:A_Guptaji,
The logic behind all this is simple: We, the west,dont understand the world,We understand it very well,its MY WAY OR but since we have more power than them we will change them to our ways instead of trying to understand their ways. Very convenient to the west but very very disruptive to everyone else. Hopefully the "spreading democracy" days are behind the west and I think it ended with the happenings in Syria. Its going to be a slightly balanced world from now on.