Louisiana Prison Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans also means first in the world (the U.S. has more prisoners then Russia and China combined).

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.

 

Here’s a few startling facts:Louisiana Incarcerates More Blacks

  • The state imprisons 1,619 people per 100,000 — more than any nation in the world including the U.S. (730), Russia (525), Iran (333) and China (122).
  • 1 in 86 adults in doing time.

  • Among blacks, 1 in 14 is behind bars.
  • 1 in 7 is either in prison, on parole or on probation.
  • Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day in state money, and sheriffs trade them like horses, unloading a few extras on a colleague who has openings.
  • If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.
  • Law enforcements is financed in large part by the total number of prisoners kept.
  • Those profits, in turn, are used to finance the budgets of Louisiana law enforcement in the form of new squad cars, guns and laptops.

“You have people who are so invested in maintaining the present system — not just the sheriffs, but judges, prosecutors, other people who have links to it,” said Burk Foster, a former professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and an expert on Louisiana prisons. “They don’t want to see the prison system get smaller or the number of people in custody reduced, even though the crime rate is down, because the good old boys are all linked together in the punishment network, which is good for them financially and politically.

BP Uses Prisons for Gulf Spill During the Gulf Spill disaster, BP used prison labor to clean up beaches.

 

Survival Acres Blog ImageI’ve now added all of the missing Newsletter issues from 2009 to the blog, Issues 1 – 29. You can find them all here. They cover pretty much “everything”, there was plenty of things happening back then.

Google did get the blog re-indexed. Those of you that have made links to this blog using  /wordpress URL should note that it’s now /blog from here on.

 

Blog Changes & Updates

The Sustainable Living & Common Sense Blog has been de-listed by Google in their search index per my instructions.  Google has been driving me nuts over the last several weeks with its new algorithms. Many (thousands) of my old posts were being called “duplicate content” and bringing site rankings way down.

Try as I might, I could not find a way to get Google to accurately update their index.  Delisting the entire blog was the first cliff-jump in an effort to fix this problem. Continue reading »

 

Democracy has been described as “two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

Wolf Pack

I’ll take this a bit further.  Once the wolves cemented their “officialdom” over the flock, there is absolutely no question what’s on the menu.

There will always be wolves. Sometimes they’ll choose to prey [or pray] directly on those around them [serial killers and what have you], but plenty of wolves work to get themselves promoted. This gives them the luxury of having the sheep show up for dinner on their own [voluntarily].  The sheep are very easy to fool. Continue reading »

 

Here’s something you don’t see everyday (or perhaps in your entire lifetime):

Once the oil runs out, all the dams in the world are going to silt up, eventually crack and do the same thing. It’ll just take longer then what is shown in the video.

 

Old Age, New Life

How Doctors Die — It’s Not Like The Rest of Us, But It Should Be

I just read this article, found it first on Gaea’s Box of Rocks .  It’s really a very good and worthwhile read.

I think it takes a lot of courage to die, but with courage or not, we’re all going to face this.

My hope is to also “do it right”. I recently spent time in the hospital for surgery. That wasn’t so bad, but then weeks later, I had to go see a specialist.  The office was full of dying people. Continue reading »

 

Funny in a sad way that that lady said “We’ve struck the motherload!!!”  I don’t remember the rest of the movie, but since then, well, I guess we’re really not mad as hell, ’cause we’ve sure been taking a LOT more…

 

Wired Danger Room has broken a story about the U.S. Military training officers in “total warfare” against Islam:

Total War Against Islam

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.” Continue reading »

 

This is how the other 90% of the world lives – BBC audio slideshow, Human Planet.

Makes you wonder how utterly disconnected the rest of us are.

Or lucky, depending on your personal perspective.

 

I’ve updated the Better Business Bureau page today, but immediately ran afoul with the BBB and their claims to “copyright” on an image we created.

The owner of this website put up a butchered version of our logo again containing our BBB trademark. If you could please suspend it and keep it down, we’d appreciate it.

Thank you very much,
Anjali Karina Hansen | Associate General Counsel

The very, very strange thing is, the image in question was entirely created by us, does not even contain the words “Better Business Bureau” or any part of their logo or image.

It actually says “Better Buyer Beware“, but at the moment, I’m not even allowed to show it to you.

Wait, here’s one way:

Mine Theirs
Better Buyer Beware - The BBB Scam

I can show you however, our rating of the BBB and their “service”:

Better Business Bureau Scam

We recently received a sterling review from one of our customers on the BBB’s website, which probably attracted the attention of the BBB, who has sought for years to coerce us into joining their “organization” (using the term loosely, a gang of crooks is also an “organization”). Continue reading »

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