By Allison Kilkenny (In These Times) When a series of crackdowns on the Occupy camps suddenly occurred in, more or less, the same week, many observers wondered if perhaps the attacks had been coordinated at a national level. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan confirmed that suspicion during an appearance on the BBC – excerpted on The [...]

By Paul Krassner (Huffington Post) Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000-member People’s Temple in San Francisco, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes’ rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), how he could obtain political power. She answered, sardonically, “Arrange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs.” [...]

By Adam Bernstein (Washington Post) Loren R. Mosher, 70, who died of liver cancer July 10 at a clinic in Berlin, was a contrarian psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert who was dismissed from the National Institute of Mental Health for his controversial theories on treatment. While chief of NIMH’s Center for the Study of Schizophrenia from [...]

By Mike Masnick (TechDirt) Charlie Savage of the NY Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out the federal government’s interpretation of its own law… and had it refused. According to the federal government, its own interpretation of the law is classified. What sort of democracy are we living in when the [...]

By Noah Shachtman (Wired) In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online [...]

By Walter Brasch (Spectrum) The federal government has launched what may become one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history. Beginning September 2012, every cigarette manufacturer must display one of nine government-approved graphics on the top half, both front and back, of every cigarette pack. Among the warnings is a picture of a [...]

(Wikipedia) Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s and published in 1980, by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Alexander’s hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in [...]

By Jules Siegel (Moronia) Anthony Weiner’s wife came home and told him to quit. He immediately complied. I can get behind that. If he persisted, she would have had to share the consequences. She would have it on him forever. This way, when she gets annoyed about his hanging around in his underwear surfing the [...]

By Jules Siegel (Moronia) In case you missed it, a Democratic congressman named Anthony Weiner sent a picture of his bulging briefs to a female college student who had invited him to add her to his private Twitter harem. Unfortunately he inserted the wrong code and sent it to all his zillion followers, none of [...]

By Leigh Paynter (ABC News10) Kenneth Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as a S.W.A.T team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn. “He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” [...]