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› The Following is Detailed Instructions in Matters of Crime

› Los Tocayos Carlos

Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution

› Study shows that Negative Words Shut Down Higher Level Mental Processes.

anticapitalist:

The brain can unconsciously ‘decide’ to suppress negative information to minimize anxiety or mental discomfort, according to a new study.

Just as psychologists have previously discovered that people who are bilingual and subconsciously access their first language when they are reading in their second language, the latest findings suggest that the brain unconsciously shuts down the same access to a bilingual person’s native language when it encounters a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience and unfortunate.

UK researcher who conducted the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, believe that a specific unconscious brain reaction that blocks negative language inputs from reaching the part of the brain where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes by shutting down access to certain forms of knowledge. 

Experts say that people exhibit greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their first language, explaining why some bilingual parents choose to speak to their children in their native tongue despite being fluent in the language of the country where they reside. 

Researchers also point out that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker’s native language, and emotional information processing is less powerful in the second language compared to the first language.

tl;dr Being mean to people makes you stupider. 

› Constructive Direct Action Against Censorship

› TSA: Fail

› Haditha killings

On March 19, 2006, U.S. military officials confirmed that contrary to the initial report, U.S. Marines, not Iraqi insurgents, killed 15 civilians.

› The world war on democracy

By John Pilger 

Since the Second World War, the US has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20^th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

› Guantánamo: An Oral History

January 11, 2012, marks the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay—the first of what would be nearly 800 prisoners to cycle through the camp. One hundred and seventy one are still there. Despite President Obama’s pledge, the facility remains open, a prisoner of fear-mongering and politics—and it continues to be a symbol of mistreatment and missteps in the prosecution of the war on terror. Vanity Fair has interviewed dozens of people associated with Guantánamo—lawyers, soldiers, diplomats, former detainees—in order to tell the story in their own words.

› Vote STORACUTA – Stop Taking Our Rights And Calling Us Thieves Act

› Why asylum seekers could be banned from TV

“Censorship is advertising paid by the government.”

 - Federico Fellini

› There Are Realistic Alternatives

by Gene Sharp

› CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

› An Australian Abroad

› Request for Comment: SOPA and a strike

A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately. As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of “Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through Congress on a bit of a fast track. I may be attending a meeting at the White House on Monday (pending confirmation on a couple of fronts) along with executives from many other top Internet firms, and I thought this would be a good time to take a quick reading of the community feeling on this issue. My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case. There are obviously many questions about whether the strike should be geotargetted (US-only), etc. (One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.) At the same time, it’s of course a very very big deal to do something like this, it is unprecedented for English Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimbo Wales(talk • contribs) 07:42, 10 December 2011‎