damnedifIknow
damnedifIknow's JournalUK surveillance Tribunal reveals the government spied on Amnesty International
In a shocking revelation, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) today notified Amnesty International that UK government agencies had spied on the organization by intercepting, accessing and storing its communications.
In an email sent today, the Tribunal informed Amnesty International its 22 June ruling had mistakenly identified one of two NGOs which it found had been subjected to unlawful surveillance by the UK government. Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.
The NGOs were among 10 organizations that launched a legal challenge against suspected unlawful mass surveillance of their work by the UK’s spy agencies.
“After 18 months of litigation and all the denials and subterfuge that entailed, we now have confirmation that we were in fact subjected to UK government mass surveillance. It’s outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General."
This shows the urgent need for significant legal reform, including proper pre-judicial authorization and meaningful oversight of the use of surveillance powers by the UK security services, and an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organizations.
It also underlines Amnesty International’s call for an end to mass communications surveillance by governments."
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/uk-surveillance-tribunal-reveals-the-government-spied-on-amnesty-international/
The Fate of Captive Orcas
Killer whales, more properly known as orcas, have been kept in captivity since 1961, helpless victims of a blatantly commercial experiment which has seen dozens of wild orcas plucked from their families and forced to live in artificial social groupings which bear scant resemblance to their natural order."
There are currently (June 2015) a total of 56 orcas held in captivity (21 wild-captured plus 35 captive-born) in at least 14 marine parks in 8 different countries."
At least 148 orcas have been taken into captivity from the wild since 1961 (including Pascuala and Morgan).
127 of these orcas are now dead.
In the wild, male orcas live to an average of 30 years (maximum 50-60 years) and 46 years for females (maximum 80-90 years).
At least 161 orcas have died in captivity, not including 30 miscarried or still-born calves.
SeaWorld holds 24 orcas in its three parks in the United States and owns (at least) a further four at Loro Parque in Spain (ownership of Adan and Morgan not verified). At least forty-four orcas have died at SeaWorld."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUzPEqF9aNNrZ14oqbQmstVg&t=30&v=2-dEC3p4xDw
http://us.whales.org/wdc-in-action/fate-of-captive-orcas
How Smartphones Would Have Changed World History
1889
DOCTOR: It’s a boy! Herr and Frau Hitler, what are you calling him?
HERR HITLER: Adolf. It means “noble wolf.”
FRAU HITLER: Wait, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. A tenth-century earl named Adulf had the surname “Evil-child.”
HERR HITLER: We certainly don’t want that association for our son. Let’s name him Keefer, or “barrelmaker.”
FRAU HITLER: That is a wonderful name. It means our son will definitely make barrels when he grows up.
HERR HITLER: It’s a well-respected profession. Being a barrelmaker in Austria will satisfy all his psychological needs, and he will trade so many of his wares with Germany in the nineteen-twenties and thirties that its government will not need to scapegoat anyone for the country’s financial woes, even if it happens to lose a great war.
DOCTOR: To your son, Keefer Hitler, the future barrelmaker, and to Germany’s unassailable barrel-trade-based political and economic stability!
2000
TECHNICIAN: There you go—the last voting machine I needed to install here in Palm Beach County, Florida.
ELECTION OFFICIAL: Hold on. I just texted a photo of a sample ballot to my elderly mother, and she was confused by the butterfly layout. She thought the section for Bush was actually for Gore.
TECHNICIAN: I’m glad you told me. Let’s reinstall all of the machines in the state.
OFFICIAL: That’s a prudent measure, although I’m sure nothing bad would have come of it.
TECHNICIAN: Yes, I can’t imagine anything would really be different based on a few Florida seniors misunderstanding the ballot and accidentally voting for George W. Bush.
OFFICIAL: And, even if he won mistakenly, I’m sure he’d make a thoughtful, on-top-of-everything President.
TECHNICIAN: To a completely fair election, and to America’s unassailable political and economic stability!
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/how-smartphones-would-have-changed-world-history?intcid=mod-latest
Trust Differs Most by Ideology for Church, Police, Presidency
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In the U.S., liberals and conservatives report markedly different levels of confidence in nearly every key institution Gallup measures, reflecting the general polarization that typifies the country today. The confidence gap -- the difference between groups in levels of confidence for a particular institution -- is largest for the presidency (by 36 percentage points), followed by the church (27 points) and the police (26 points). Liberals have more confidence in the presidency, while conservatives are more likely to trust the church and the police."
http://www.gallup.com/poll/183875/trust-differs-ideology-church-police-presidency.aspx?utm_source=POLITICS&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles
Can Religion and Science Coexist?
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In May 1988, a 13-year-old girl named Ashley King was admitted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital by court order. She had a tumor on her leg—an osteogenic sarcoma—that, writes Jerry Coyne in his book Faith Versus Fact, was “larger than a basketball,” and was causing her leg to decay while her body started to shut down. Ashley’s Christian Scientist parents, however, refused to allow doctors permission to amputate, and instead moved their daughter to a Christian Science sanatorium, where, in accordance with the tenets of their faith, “there was no medical care, not even pain medication.” Ashley’s mother and father arranged a collective pray-in to help her recover—to no avail. Three weeks later, she died.
This tragic story backs up the chief argument Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, makes in Faith Versus Fact, namely that “it is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term ‘person of faith’ as a compliment.” In the book’s 262 pages, Coyne tackles arguments stating that belief in God is a laudable quality, and reasons instead that faith is detrimental, even dangerous, and fundamentally incompatible with science, even while peacemakers try to find common ground between the two. Coyne, it should be noted, has spent much of his career objecting to religious rejection of Darwinism—he published a bestseller, Why Evolution Is True"
*One of the most significant examples of conflict between religion and science is the global-warming debate, and Coyne takes care to stress the religious roots of the arguments against climate change. He refers to Rick Santorum’s claims about it all being a “hoax” and the Illinois Representative John Shimkus’s 2009 Genesis-based testimony before a House subcommittee. Religion and climate-change denialism are inextricably linked, Coyne writes, because people of faith have a vested belief in “God’s stewardship of the planet, and his promise to preserve it until his return.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/religion-science-coexist-faith-versus-fact-coyne/396362/
Most Americans now say learning their child is gay wouldn’t upset them
Three decades ago, most Americans felt it would be troubling to have a child tell them he or she was gay: In a 1985 Los Angeles Times survey, nine-in-ten American adults (89%) said they would be upset if this happened, and just 9% said they would not be.
But views of homosexuality have shifted over time, and today nearly six-in-ten (57%) say they would not be upset if they had a child come out as gay or lesbian, according to a Pew Research "
The change in attitudes toward having a gay child reflects broader shifts in views of homosexuality. More than six-in-ten Americans (63%) now say homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with 46% in July 1994, according to the same May poll. In 1994, 49% of the public said society should discourage homosexuality.
Millennials are the least likely to say they would be upset (29%) if their child told them he or she was gay or lesbian. But the older the respondents, the more likely they are to say the moment would be a difficult one: 36% of Gen Xers say they would be upset, as would 47% of Boomers and 55% of Silents."
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/29/most-americans-now-say-learning-their-child-is-gay-wouldnt-upset-them/
Less than half of Americans would actually attend a same-sex wedding
The YouGov polling found that just 7 percent of Americans have so far attended nuptials for a gay or lesbian couple, with self-defined Democrats and liberals more likely to (11% and 16%) compared to Republicans and conservatives (3% and 2%).
The polling also found that less than half of Americans would attend a same-sex wedding if invited to one.
46 percent of Americans said they would attend – with just 28 percent of Republicans willing to do so, and 26 percent of strongly religious people."
Meanwhile, despite the Catholic Church continuing to militantly oppose same-sex unions, the polling found that US Catholics are actually ahead on the issue – with 50 percent saying they would attend one.
Perhaps they aren’t getting as many invites as they’d like, however – as just 8 percent of Catholics have actually been to a gay wedding.
On the issue of same-sex marriage as a whole, the poll continued previous findings of majority support."
53 percent of Americans and 67 percent of Democrats support same-sex marriage, with 42 percent of Americans and 66 percent of Republicans opposed."
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/07/04/less-than-half-of-americans-would-actually-attend-a-same-sex-wedding/
Healing a Wounded Sense of Morality
Many veterans in the program are there seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
But many of Amidon’s patients talk about another kind of trauma, a psychic bruise that, unlike PTSD, isn’t rooted in fear. Some of these soldiers describe experiences in which they, or someone close to them, violated their moral code: hurting a civilian who turned out to be unarmed, shooting at a child wearing explosives, or losing trust in a commander who became more concerned with collecting decorative pins than protecting the safety of his troops. Others, she says, are haunted by their own inaction, traumatized by something they witnessed and failed to prevent"
*Experts have begun to refer to this specific type of psychological trauma as moral injury. “These morally ambiguous situations continue to bother you, weeks, months, or years after they happened,” says Shira Maguen, the mental-health director of the OEF/OIF Integrated Care Clinic at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center and one of the first researchers to study the concept. Examples of situations that might precipitate moral injury are betrayals by those in leadership roles, within-rank violence, inability to prevent death or suffering, and hurting civilians. Sometimes it co-exists with PTSD, but moral injury is its own separate trauma with symptoms that can include feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal, regret, anxiety, anger, self-loathing, and self-harm."
“Nothing really prepares you for killing in war, even with the training.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/healing-a-wounded-sense-of-morality/396770/
A Superman comic just took on police brutality
One of the biggest changes to come out DC Entertainment's big comics revamp this summer turned Superman's world upside-down: Lois Lane revealed his identity to the world, and then he lost almost all of his powers.
When a Metropolis citizen then gets unruly, the commanding officer sees it as an opportunity to march on those gathered, with batons and shields at the ready — and then Superman, absolutely exhausted from his fight, places himself in between the crowd and the cops."
http://www.businessinsider.com/superman-action-comic-42-police-brutality-2015-7
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