Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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John Maguire: Death Row Letter on US Slavery (Prison) System

07 Other Atrocities
John Maguire
John Maguire

A poignant last will and testament describing everything that is wrong with modern-day prisons and courts. A brutally honest appraisal of a dysfunctional and disturbing system that profits off of human misery.

From gawker.com: Texas death row inmate Ray Jasper is scheduled to be put to death on March 19. He has written us a letter that, he acknowledges, “could be my final statement on earth.” It is well worth your time.

Ray Jasper was convicted of participating in the 1998 robbery and murder of recording studio owner David Alejandro. A teenager at the time of the crime, Jasper was sentenced to death. He wrote to us once before, as part of our Letters from Death Row series. That letter was remarkable for its calmness, clarity, and insight into life as a prisoner who will never see freedom. We wrote back and invited him to share any other thoughts he might have. Today, we received the letter below. Everyone should read it.

http://gawker.com/a-letter-from-ray-jasper-who-is-about-to-be-executed-1536073598

EXTRACTS:

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Nik Peachey: Marginnote for PDF Documents

IO Tools
Nik Peachey
Nik Peachey

Marginnote – for making notes on PDF readings

This looks like a really useful study tool for working on PDF documents, especially the ability to organise notes with mind maps.

The notes in the visible margin

Other productivity apps don’t let users see their notes and their main document text at the same time, However, MarginNote Reader is totally different and completely better! Now, users can see their notes and main document text all at once, without having to deal with distracting or annoying pop-ups. It’s a fundamentally more intuitive and productive way to get anything done, whether at school or at work.

Organize notes by outline & mindmap

MarginNote Reader also eliminates the need for users to lug around heavy, bulky textbooks and notebooks. All of their data is ready for them in one place, and users can organize and reorganize their notes with the swipe of a finger! This ease- of-use is one key difference between MarginNote and other note apps.

Other key MarginNote special features

Seamless syncing with Evernote.The power to organize notes by outline and mindmap integration.The ability to create outlines of important note files, in order to easily and quickly find specific points without having to scroll through their entire document. The option to export markup and notes in print-ready format. The capacity to store notes on the iPad or in the Cloud.

Learn more.

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Robin Good: Tools for Kids to Curate Content on New Topics

IO Tools
Robin Good
Robin Good

Content Curation: How To Help Students Learn, Discover and Make Sense of New Topics All By Themselves

Here's a short first-hand report highlighting how an 8th grade social studies class teacher (Terri Inloes) has fully leveraged the content curation potential to let her students dive, discover and make sense of topics (in this case social reform movements) that they had not studied before. All by themselves.

Here the steps taken to make this happen:

a) By using the Question Formulation Technique, the teacher prepared pairs of photographs representing each of the reform movements, one picture dating back to the late 19th century, and another representing where that social reform movement stands in today’s society.

b) After checking out all of the photos, students settled on the pair of pictures that most caught their interest.

c) They brainstormed and refined a set of specific questions, and then shared their thinking with the class.

d) With the feedback received they selected the topic which they would curate.

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Mini-Me: Don’t Reform the CIA. Abolish It

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Don’t Reform the CIA. Abolish It.

by

Anyone who reads the works of the late Chalmers Johnson will have an excellent understanding of the role that the U.S. national-security state, especially the vast military empire and military-industrial complex, plays in America’s foreign-policy woes. I particularly recommend his four books: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis, and Dismantling the Empire. For those who would prefer to begin with online articles, here is a link to an article I wrote in 2011 that contains a list of some of the online articles written by Johnson.

Among the most insightful articles written by Johnson are two that are pertinent today, given the controversy that has erupted over the CIA’s spying on Congress. The titles of those two articles are: “Abolish the CIA” and “Improve the CIA? Better to Abolish It.”

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Berto Jongman: Appraisal of US False Flag Possibilities in Ukraine

Idiocy, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

I find it difficult to judge. It is interesting to read the comments by various ‘ anonymous' people. Much of the confusion seems to be related to a bad translation of Ukrainian to English.  There is a tremendous information war going on. Today Kerry and Merkel have stepped up the pressure by giving very strong  and threatening statements. Yatsenyuk spoke at the UNSC. The first oligarch has been arrested abroad At the same time both sides are deploying and positing military forces. The situation is very tense and there are all kinds of shady paramilitary militia-like groups running round  that could create incidents that could lead to unwanted escalation. I was surprised that we've seen not more incidents yet and that Ukrainians have been very calm and did not let themselves be provoked. We have to see what will happen tomorrow and how the West will respond. I am getting more and more worried that we are slowly moving to a military confrontation.  A false flag could speed up developments. It all reminds me of the Balkan war in the 1990s. The EU and the West were very slow in their reactions and did not want to believe that a war was coming and hoped that diplomacy could solve the problems. Currently many politicians have stated that nobody wants war and that we have to let diplomacy do its work while nobody seems to see the military preparations.

Hacked Email from U.S. Army Attache in Ukraine – Four False Flags to occur so U.S. can take military action against Russia

 

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Berto Jongman: Enemies of the Internet

Government, IO Impotency
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

A Short Guide to the Internet’s Biggest Enemies

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual “Enemies of the Internet” index this week—a ranking first launched in 2006 intended to track countries that repress online speech, intimidate and arrest bloggers, and conduct surveillance of their citizens.  Some countries have been mainstays on the annual index, while others have been able to work their way off the list.  Two countries particularly deserving of praise in this area are Tunisia and Myanmar (Burma), both of which have stopped censoring the Internet in recent years and are headed in the right direction toward Internet freedom.

In the former category are some of the world’s worst offenders: Cuba, North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus, Bahrain, Turkmenistan, Syria.  Nearly every one of these countries has amped up their online repression in recent years, from implementing sophisticated surveillance (Syria) to utilizing targeted surveillance tools (Vietnam) to increasing crackdowns on online speech (Saudi Arabia).  These are countries where, despite advocacy efforts by local and international groups, no progress has been made.

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