Boing Boing

Monsanto is facing over 100 lawsuits in a Federal district court in San Francisco brought by people who attribute their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to exposure to glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer, and as part of the discovery process, it submitted internal documents to the court that detailed shenanigans in the company’s internal science and its dealings with regulators and the press.

Then Monsanto’s lawyers neglected to a motion seeking continued protection of the confidential documents, believing that a “a standing confidentiality order” was in place, something that the plaintiff’s lawyers disagree with, which is why they released a huge tranche of damning memos.  Continue reading “Monsanto’s lawyers forgot to ask a court to suppress damning evidence about cancer and corrupt science”

The Drive – by TYLER ROGOWAY AND JOSEPH TREVITHICK

very unique USAF surveillance aircraft has been flying highly defined circles over Seattle and its various suburbs for nine days now. Nobody at the DoD seems to know who the aircraft belongs to or what exactly it is doing flying so many missions over the Seattle area. But based on its visibly exotic configuration, and information collected by open source flight tracking websites, we can get a good idea of its capabilities and guess as to what it’s up to.

The aircraft, which goes by the callsign “SPUD21” and wears a nondescript flat gray paint job with the only visible markings being a USAF serial on its tail, is a CASA CN-235-300 transport aircraft that has been extensively modified for the surveillance mission. You can see more pictures of the aircraft here.

Continue reading “This Mysterious Military Spy Plane Has Been Flying Circles Over Seattle For Days”

Anti-Media

New Mexico — A small community in New Mexico is learning firsthand the consequences of relying on corporate industry to fuel your economy. In the case of Torrance County, it’s the private prison industry. From a July 25 article by the Santa Fe New Mexican:

“The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days, according to a statement issued Tuesday by county officials.”   Continue reading “Private Prison Demands Small Town Give It 300 More Prisoners or It Will Close Down”

The Hill – by Joe Uchill

LAS VEGAS — One of the nation’s largest cybersecurity conferences is inviting attendees to get hands-on experience hacking a slew of voting machines, demonstrating to researchers how easy the process can be.

“It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it,” said security consultant Thomas Richards, glancing at a Premier Election Solutions machine currently in use in Georgia.

The DEF CON cybersecurity conference is held annually in Las Vegas. This year, for the first time, the conference is hosting a “Voting Machine Village” where attendees can try to hack a number of systems and help catch vulnerabilities.   Continue reading “Hackers breach each of dozens voting machines brought to conference”

Return to Now

American slavery was technically abolished in 1865, but a loophole in the 13th Amendment has allowed it to continue“as a punishment for crimes” well into the 21st century. Not surprisingly, corporations have lobbied for a broader and broader definition of “crime” in the last 150 years. As a result, there are more (mostly dark-skinned) people performing mandatory, essentially unpaid, hard labor in America today than there were in 1830.

With 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison population, the United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world. No other society in history has imprisoned more of its own citizens. There are half a million more prisoners in the U.S. than in China, which has five times our population. Approximately 1 in 100 adults in America were incarcerated in 2014.  Out of an adult population of 245 million that year, there were 2.4 million people in prison, jail or some form of detention center.  Continue reading “How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it”

The Intercept – by Sharon Learner

FOR DECADES, SOME of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.

As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.   Continue reading “100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now”

Personal Liberty

A women’s march in Fairfax, Va., sought to call out the National Rifle Association for “advocating violence” in a recent online video. A huge part of the faux feminists’ message was that guns are bad. Whether the armed guards they hired to accompany them for the event agree, we don’t really know.

A Facebook post announcing last week’s march declared: “Recent actions of the NRA demonstrate not only a disregard for the lives of black and brown people in America, but appear to be a direct endorsement of violence against women, our families and our communities for exercising our constitutional right to protest.”   Continue reading “Women hire armed guards for march against guns”