Ralph Nader tells us the TPP is not a done deal despite the Senate’s procedural maneuver this week making it easier for it to pass. He tells us to go to www.tradewatch.org to make it easy to take action. Listen to an excerpt:
With his law troubles now behind him, Comic Fred Stoller recounts the newly discovered joys of THC.
https://youtu.be/mvR7xdctPfY
Louis Theroux is a damn fine reporter, and this article is a perfect example of his skills. Please check out our interview with Louis to find more out about this brilliant man.
The BBC News website will be changing next week. Learn more Every year in the US, courts find people not guilty by reason of insanity. Treating and evaluating them is a painstaking business, writes Louis Theroux. On my first day at Ohio’s Summit Behavioral Healthcare Hospital I met Jonathan. Thirty-nine years old, at one time he’d been an engineering student. But for the past seven years he’d been confined to a mental institution. He showed me his room – it was bare but not uncomfortable, decorated and furnished in the style of a modern hospital.
He showed me his room – it was bare but not uncomfortable, decorated and furnished in the style of a modern hospital. He had fitness magazines by the bed and a small selection of books.
Then he told me his story – how he had killed his father, stabbing him to death seven years earlier while in the grip of mental illness, before being found NGRI, not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to Summit.
My idea had been to get to know some of the patients at a top American forensic facility. I wanted to meet men and women who have done some of the worst crimes imaginable – not through choice but under the influence of mental illness.
Read more here Louis Theroux: The people who are not guilty by reason of insanity
The internet is a constantly evolving experience, and quite often when you are in the middle of a movement you really aren’t able to keep up with how things are changing so quickly. Such is the case with our digital age. This article from The Atlantic does a great job explaining the world we live in today, and what is in store for our future on the internet. – JLW
Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the Internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the Internet and the communication and information tools it has spawned—like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook—are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or citizen journalists.
It is hard to disagree with these two beliefs. Yet they obscure evidence that governments are having as much success as the Internet in disrupting independent media and determining what information reaches society. Moreover, in many poor countries or in those with autocratic regimes, government actions are more important than the Internet in defining how information is produced and consumed, and by whom.
Illustrating these points is a curious paradox: Censorship is flourishing in the information age. In theory, new technologies make it more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for governments to control the flow of information. Some have argued that the birth of the Internet foreshadowed the death of censorship. In 1993, John Gilmore, an Internet pioneer, told Time, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”