The number of adults behind bars, on parole or on probation reached a record 6.47 million in 2000 -- or one in 32 American adults, the government reported Sunday.

We will all be under lock and key someday

I like being blobby. Nowadays, it seems like a lot of punk bands are getting buff. I don't really get it. Tim from Rancid looks like he could lift me over his head. Davey from AFI looks like he could lift 2 of me over his head. H20, Bouncing Souls, even Green Day are lifting weights. Backstage of the warped tour looks like World's Gym. Call me old fashion, but I like being lazy and sluggish. Being fat is a state of mind, not just a body type. Being fat is punk. It's telling society you don't care if they think you're a big fat slob. Who would you rather be in Animal House, Bluto or Neidermeyer? John Goodman from Roseanne, or Bob Saget from Full House? Misfits or Poison Idea? Well, that's a tough one. I'm not saying you should strive to be a 6.

FATMIKE---

Sasha Abramsky ... My hat is off to you. Anyone... Do a search on Yahoo and read anything Sasha has ever wrote.

READ THIS

In October, Human Rights Watch and the D.C.-based Sentencing Project released a twenty-six-page report titled "Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States." The report revealed that throughout the country, 3.9 million parolees, ex-prisoners, and prisoners cannot vote. And because of several little-known laws in fourteen states -- mainly in the South -- more than two million of them will never vote again: convicted of a felony, their disenfranchisement is permanent. Of those, 1.4 million are black men, including one in three black men in Alabama and Florida. In Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming, one in four black men cannot vote.

THEN GO HERE. AND SEE WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON

I believe it is time for a serious re-evaluation of human priorities. As a species of such advanced intelligence and technology, we have the tendency to think of nothing but human advancement. We view the human race as being separate and above the life cycles of nature. This ideology of superiority over all things living and of the very land itself is leading to a large rupture in the natural order. One need not look far to see the ill effects of the "beneficial" technology.

Just count the number of super-fund sites or toxic/nuclear waste dumps. The hole in the ozone layer, that grows larger year by year with the ever rising climate temperature. The loss of wild areas, in search of more, always more, resources. These are just a few of the examples of destruction (there are many more) that the mindset of "human first" is causing. The very fact that we know the use of petrol chemicals releases toxins and pollutants into the ground water and the atmosphere attests to our continued willingness to ignore our impact upon our environment.

The reason for this willingness is, of course, that we have not yet significantly suffered the results of our actions. Although cancer is on the rise, the rate of extinction is increasing and natural disasters that have never occurred in certain regions of the world are becoming common,(i.e. tornadoes in Southern California), as a general rule we wish not to think of these things. No longer can we separate ourselves from wild nature, pretending that technology will keep us safe and intact. We must accept and embrace the fact that we, too, are a part of the natural life cycle, not above it, not on top of it. We must scrutinize the effect that we are having.

It is time for us to once again learn to live in harmony with the Earth and the other inhabitants of it. I am not suggesting that we go back to a completely primitive lifestyle, for we have forgotten far too many survival instincts for that. But we must have a reprieve of advanced, oppressive, life controlling technology. We must learn to live sustainably or become completely artificial. We have the means to change, the question is, do we have the desire?

FREE-

What is wrong with drugs?

While glimpsing through a issue of Rolling stone I came across the disturbing story of this guy. This is just another nail in the coffin of America. This is not the land of the free anymore.

I am quickly loosing whatever respect I had for the US. All that land of the free bullshit we learned in school seems to be just that, fairy tales told to children. We are a society of nonthinkers and we walk with our eyes closed, unaware of the world around us.

FORD vs. FIRESTONE

Lawyers defending Bridgestone/Firestone against accusations their tires caused a highway wreck said their client was blameless - and then pointed to the vehicle's manufacturer as a culprit.

No company sets out to design an unsafe vehicle. But creating a car always involves making trade-offs among engineering, manufacturing, safety, sales and advertising components as well as responding to consumer and competitive pressures. It is a wildly expensive process that takes five years or so to complete.

Look at the Explorer, you can easily see that if a tire blows out its gonna roll.

Everything at Mcdonalds has meat in it! Everything! Duhh!!

A pigeon trained to courier drugs between Holland and Germany was caught after landing in the wrong place with marijuana attached to its feet.


A German pigeon breeder from Bunderneuland, near the Dutch border, took the bird to the police after it landed at his home.


The drugs packet was attached to the bird's leg. Police are still trying to trace its owner.


A Bunderneuland police spokesman said: "We have heard of isolated incidents of this sort of thing happening before. Fortunately, the amounts concerned are always relatively small."

A TOTAL of 2,071,686 people were incarcerated in the United States at the end of last year.


The new figures consolidate the US lead over China and Russia in the total number of people behind bars, according to a list compiled by the British Home Office.

The Chinese prison population was 1.4 million at the end of the 1990s while Russia's did not exceed one million inmates, the list showed.


The US number includes those held in federal, state and local facilities as well as detention centres run by the US military and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service.


Although the prison population rose only 1.3 per cent during 2000 – the smallest annual growth rate since 1972 – the slowdown was not enough to prevent the United States from reaching the two-million mark.


The rate of incarceration at the end of last year was 478 sentenced inmates per 100,000 US residents.

now here is an interesting site about Atlantis. If you check it out I would have to go with section 2. I remember seeing Ducktales so long ago and seeing an episode about Atlantis. Now all those Disney movies are out. I love all that shit. I really really do. Eldorado, Atlantis, and even the fountain of Youth.... Those mystical places that are no more, or can't be found, but maybe than can... have you looked personally?

The supposed Drug war is a war against ever american citizen. Everyone I know has uses or has used drugs. The president even used drugs. I know of cops and mayors and officials that use. Useing drugs is part of being human. So who are they really trying to fight here? The poor black man. When this drug shit finally hits the fan and they realise that its futile. They will let all the people out of prison for those charges that simply don't exist anymore. I would sue...... its someones life not a thing that can be taken lightly. What a fucked up world we live in.

Small homemade bombs, apparently aimed at calling attention to a little-known rebel group, exploded outside three Mexico City banks causing slight damage and no injuries, city authorities said on Thursday.

Banks after insurance companies are the biggest assholes around. They steal... I hate banks...

PUNK ROCK IS STARTING A BAND WITH SOME FRIENDS WHO HAVE NEVER PLAYED AN INSTRAMENT BEFORE, AND PEOPLE COME TO YOUR SHOWS AND ACTUALLY LIKE YOU EVEN THOUGH YOU TOTALLY SUCK.


Fat Mike

The best RANCID site yet!

Following the Warped Tour, Rancid will head to Europe and Japan for a series of festival shows before returning home to record their sixth album.


This is very good news for any Rancid fans, also Lars had this to say about the rumours that Rancid were going to break up after the Warped Tour:


"I say this from the stage every night; Rancid will be making records in eighty years," Frederiksen says. "Families don't break up, not this one anyway. That's what we are first and foremost, a musical fucking family. My kids and Tim's kids will be growing on the jungle gym together, getting tattooed at the age of five.."

ANOTHER ALBUM.... I CAN NOT JUST SIT HERE AND WAIT!!!!!!!

A Muskegon man who authorities say admitted he was "huffing" propane and smoking marijuana, causing his house to blow up, now faces a felony charge. According to the arrest warrant, Miller allegedly intended to use the cylinder containing propane for the unlawful purpose of inhaling hydrocarbons ... to cause "a condition of intoxication, euphoria, excitement, exhilaration, stupefaction or dulling of the ... nervous system, also known as huffing."

So is he getting fined for the pot, or for being a dumbass?

Timothy DiPaolo, 26, was interviewing for a job at the sheriff's department when he admitted that he had made pipe bombs and exploded them in the past, according to Chief Deputy Richard Gagliano. After further questioning, DiPaolo told police he had recently made another bomb, but had not exploded it. He later brought the bomb to the sheriff's office to be dismantled and was taken into custody.

Gagliano said members of the State Police Explosive Disposal Unit disarmed the device, which could have been detonated.

DiPaolo was charged with criminal use of explosives, a Class C felony. He is being held at Cumberland County Jail on bail of $5,000 cash or $25,000 property. DiPaolo faces up to five years in prison, though Gagliano said the bombs were not exploded around other people.

Who knew this was against the law?

My patio is well lit by the summer sun, which illuminates the floor and the adjacent walls. Last year I noticed that when a bird flew overhead, it cast a shadow on the patio. The bird was flying at the correct height to just clear the wall on my right. Its shadow moved across the patio floor at the same speed as the bird. However, when the shadow reached the base of the wall, it accelerated instantly, climbing the wall before reaching the top and continuing along the flat roof, again at the same speed as the bird. If the bird had been an object travelling at the speed of light, then the shadow on the ground and the flat roof would have also been travelling at the speed of light. But what of the period when the shadow was travelling up the wall? Under this condition, the shadow would have had to travel faster than the speed of light, which would present a direct challenge to Einstein. Is there any other explanation?

Do you have nothing better to do than think of questions which are fundamentally easy to answer, but you yourself are to stupid to solve?

Over a period of thirty-five years, General Electric Company dumped an estimated 500,000 kilograms (1.1 million pounds) of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the river. The chemical, which is linked to cancers in humans, was banned in 1977.

The world's population may reach a peak of nine billion as early as 2070 and then start to shrink, according to a new analysis by Austrian researchers. Lutz thinks declining fertility rates around the world are the main driving force behind the slowing in population growth. The population will start to shrink when the average number of children per woman falls below 2.1 In some parts of Europe, fertility levels have already dropped dramatically. In Spain, the average number of children per woman is 1.2. In Russia the figure is 1.1.

I think that in areas of severe hunger and economic futility there is a overwhelming feeling of the species to not want to propagate. Why should they make it harder upon themselves by briniging a child into this world?

Injuries resulting from falls from playground equipment are responsible for a higher proportion of severe injuries than bicycle or motor vehicle crashes, according to a new Children's Hospital Medical Center of Cincinnati study of emergency department visits throughout the United States.

The goverment wants you to smoke


The early deaths associated with smoking have economic benefits, according to a controversial report commissioned by Philip Morris Inc. According to the report, the Czech Republic saved about $147 million in 1997 through the deaths of smokers who would not live long enough to use healthcare or housing for the elderly. The study was compiled as a cost-benefit analysis and delivered to the Czech Government. It applied the savings against the income tax lost and cost of caring for smokers before they died. But tobacco industry opponents have attacked the report as an attempt to show that governments benefit from smoking related deaths.

Scientists are saying there's a 9 out of 10 chance that the global average temperature will rise by 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, and a 4 to 6 degree increase is the most likely scenario. The scientists are reporting on a new probability analysis. The most likely projected increase is five times the one-degree temperature rise observed over the past century. By as early as 2030 the planet is likely to heat up by a degree or two, the scientists say. The study is published in the July 20 issue of the journal Science.

Few outside Russia pay attention to who's getting elected in the boonies. They'd better wake up. At the grass roots, Russia is going communist again.
In two key regions of the Russian Federation, communist candidates were elected to the governorships Sunday.

No fluke elections, they are of enormous importance, politically and geographically, for these reasons:


• They tipped the scales.

Only 10 years after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 45 of the 89 regions of the Russian federation are now in the hands of Communist Party governors.


• Within Russia, that is not considered startling.

With shrugs of their shoulders, Russians in the streets have increasingly come to accept communist governors as the wave of the future, just one more reflection of the economic hard times besetting the Motherland.


• In both of Sunday's regional elections, a little more than a third of the eligible voters turned out – below par for Russians in the decade during which they have had the vote.

It is being regarded as a sense of resignation among Russian voters, who have seen little improvement in their lives since the advent of a democratic form of government in 1991 to replace the dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, likes to say that people are once more turning to the Communists because the decade of reforms – beginning with Boris Yeltsin and continuing under his successor, President Vladimir Putin – has not delivered the fruits promised.


• The communist governorships are being considered as working to Putin's advantage.

As the Russian newspaper Izvestia put it: "It is clear that it makes no difference for the Kremlin what [political] color the governor is. The main point is that he should be loyal to the president and the government."


• These communist election victories occurred in areas traditionally least likely to be hospitable to communism.

According to Izvestia, "the Communists have [in past elections there] been supported by fewer voters than in the country on an average."


• Nor did these latest elections take place in some "red spot" of concentrated communist power on the sprawling map of Russia, which spans 11 time zones – nearly half-way around the globe.

The capital cities of the two regions involved in Sunday's elections are more than 4,000 miles apart.


• They are in regions crucial to Russia's economic power – and, in one instance, to its relationship with communist China because it is so close to the Russian-Chinese border.

One of the elections was held in the Nizhni Novgorod region, known during the Soviet Union days as Gorky. It is a lynchpin in the Russian economy.

Although about 250 miles east of Moscow, it is looked upon as an industrial subsidiary of the Russian capital. Nizhni Novgorod is one of the country's half-dozen largest metropolitan areas, a major industrial center producing aircraft, automobiles and trucks, agricultural machinery, plastics, textiles and electrical equipment.

The victor there was Gennady Khodyrev, who was once the senior secretary of the Gorky Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The other region electing a communist governor this week is Irkutsk, lying north of Mongolia.

The city of Irkutsk, near the shore of Lake Baikal, is a principal center of commerce on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Throughout its history it has looked to trade with China and the Amur Valley, a border area of contention between Russia and China.

One of the purposes of the recent Moscow-Beijing Treaty of Friendship was to dampen those tensions.

Now, a communist Irkutsk, so close to communist China, could well send a chilling signal to Putin.

DETROIT - Michigan police have used the state's law enforcement database to stalk women, threaten motorists and settle scores, the Detroit Free Press reported Tuesday.
The newspaper examined hundreds of pages of records for the Law Enforcement Information Network and concluded that abusers have turned the high-tech crime fighting tool into a personal search engine.

The Free Press said it found more than 90 Michigan police officers, dispatchers, federal agents and security guards have misused the LEIN system.

"I wouldn't doubt that it happens very often," said Lawrence Carey, former Plymouth Township police chief. "A lot of them are taken care of internally."

LEIN was set up in 1967. It searches the FBI's National Crime Information Center, the Michigan Secretary of State vehicle registration system and driving histories along with other databases.

It can tell police whether there are outstanding warrants on an individual, whether an individual is a sex offender, was reported missing or is deemed dangerous, as well as confidential information such as an individual's address or whether someone has a suppressed juvenile record.

A suburban Detroit jail guard, whose Internet name is "BRN 2B NAKED," allegedly used LEIN to gather personal information about a woman he met on the Internet. He then allegedly stalked the woman and later was fired for conduct unbecoming to an officer.