Feeding The Homeless BANNED In Major Cities All Over America

What would you do if you came across someone on the street who had not had anything to eat for several days? Would you give that person some food? Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live. 

Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America. Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those who want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become "out of reach" for most average people. Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the "health risks" of the food being distributed by ordinary "do-gooders."  Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed. But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those who are hurting?

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Feeding-The-Homeless-BANNE-by-the-web-120324-37.html

Is Your New HDTV Watching You?

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

While Web cameras and Internet connectivity are not new to HDTVs, their complete integration is, and it’s the always connected camera and microphones, combined with the option of third-party apps (not to mention Samsung’s own software) gives us cause for concern regarding the privacy of TV buyers and their friends and families.

Read More:

http://hdguru.com/is-your-new-hdtv-watching-you/7643/

Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.”  Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America. 

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality.  There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you.  If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you.  Trust us.  Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars.  You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand.  Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this.  It makes them angry.  In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race.  Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

*There are more African American adults under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175520/

Facebook's Dark Side

When Darth Vader was introduced as the dark side of the Force in the first installment of the original trilogy, "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" (1977), Christopher Carpenter, the 30-year old assistant professor of communication at Western Illinois University, was not yet born.

Now, Carpenter is getting worldwide news coverage for his study of the "dark side," but on the timely subject of Facebook. Carpenter's study, "Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and Anti-social Behavior," is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Narcissism is defined in this study as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and an exaggerated sense of self-importance," Carpenter said.

For the average narcissist, Facebook "offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication." More importantly, for this study, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users, he added.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120319194046.htm

Valerie Strauss - Corporate-Driven Report Exemplifies Failed Thinking on US Education

A new report being officially released today — by a Council of Foreign Relations task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice — seems to want very much to be seen as the new “A Nation at Risk,” the seminal 1983 report that warned that America’s future was threatened by a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s public schools

It’s a pale imitation.

The U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, to be sure, has some similar language and themes of a Nation at Risk. It says (over and over) that America’s national security is threatened because America’s public schools aren’t adequately preparing young people to “fill the ranks of the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the armed forces” (or diplomats, spies and soldiers).

But it takes a very different view of the public education system than the authors of “A Nation at Risk,” who sought to find ways to improve public schools and treat the system as a civic institution. The new report seems to look at public schools as if they are the bad guys that need to be put out of business, with a new business taking over, funded with public dollars.

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/condi-rice-joel-klein-report-not-the-new-a-nation-at-risk/2012/03/19/gIQAI8hKOS_blog.html

TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old In Leg Cast And Wheelchair (VIDEO)

A three-year-old boy in a cast and wheelchair on his way to a Disney vacation with his family was stopped by TSA agents at Chicago's O'Hare airport. He was traveling with his parents, two siblings and two grandparents.

The video, which appears to be shot by the boy's father, shows him visibly confused, nervous and squirming to get out of his chair. Holding back tears, he says he just wants to go by mom. But, according to comments in the video, nobody was allowed to touch the child or come near him during the process. His dad was asked to come over to lift the boy's shirt.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/19/tsa-pats-down-3-year-old-_n_1361843.html?ref=travel&icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D144547

Mike Lux - Community versus Individualism: How To Tell The Progressive Story

One of the clearest dividing lines between conservatives and progressives is represented by a battle of metaphors: the individualistic "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" metaphor vs. the community "we're all in this together" metaphor.

Conservatives have always been individualists first and foremost, believing that we are all ultimately on our own, and that being dependent on others and especially the government is the ultimate sin. Believing fervently in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the marketplace, many conservatives are so passionate about the primacy of market forces and individualism that they are willing to embrace the Social Darwinists' idea that if you're wealthy it was because that was how natural law intended things to be. They also embrace Ayn Rand's argument that selfishness is the ultimate virtue and that charityand self-sacrifice actually weakens a society by helping the "leeches.”

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154442/community_versus_individualism%3A_how_to_tell_the_progressive_story

Suppressing Feelings of Compassion Makes People Feel Less Moral

 It's normal to not always act on your sense of compassion -- for example, by walking past a beggar on the street without giving them any money. Maybe you want to save your money or avoid engaging with a homeless person. But even if suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality.

Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn't have any cost -- that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on. But Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors of the paper, suspected that wasn't true. "Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer," Cameron says. A sense of other people's suffering may even be the foundation of morality -- which suggests that suppressing that sense might make people feel less moral.

The researchers showed each participant in their experiment a slideshow of 15 images of subjects including homeless people, crying babies, and victims of war and famine. Each participant was given one of three tasks. Some were told to try not to feel sympathy, some were told to try not to feel distress (an unpleasant, non-moral feeling), and the rest were told to experience whatever emotions come to them. The instructions were detailed, telling the people who were supposed to suppress an emotion exactly what that emotion was and that they should do their best to eliminate it.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120315110416.htm

David Moberg - Piven: Labor Revival Needs Push From Outside and Below

Frances Fox Piven, the City University of New York sociologist best known for her work on poor people's movements (which led to unwanted attention as the bete noire of right-wing fulminator Glenn Beck), turned her attention last week to an oft-repeated question: "Can American labor recover?" Her short answer might be: Maybe (I hope so), but not on its own, and not without a push from outside.

For more than a century, Piven told an audience primarily of University of Chicago graduate students, most visions of the left revolved in some way around the unions and their power to organize the working class at work and in politics, thereby disciplining capitalists and supporting social democratic gains or the flimsy U.S. "safety net." At its high point after World War II until the 1970s, the unions created a "tacit social compact" with broadly shared benefits.

Read More:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12875/piven_labor_revival_needs_push_from_outside_and_below/

Upper Class People More Likely to Behave Unethically

A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Individuals who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in a variety of unethical behaviors. 

That is the finding of new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our studies suggest that more positive attitudes toward greed and the pursuit of self-interest among upper-class individuals, in part, drive their tendencies toward increased unethical behavior," said lead researcher Paul Piff of UC Berkeley.

The research revealed that relative to the lower class, upper-class individuals are more likely to break the law while driving, more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, more likely to take valued goods from others, more likely to lie in a negotiation, more likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and more likely to endorse unethical behavior at work.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120307145432.htm