Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Monday, August 24, 2009
California's Overcrowded Prisons By-The-Numbers (200% of design capacity a big enough number for ya?) - Sacramento Bee
(Click the image for an "Interactive" @ Sac Bee)Other charts are available from the sidebar:
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Where The Crank Labs Are... AKA "Californians in Prison, By County"
A panel of federal judges Tuesday ordered state officials to lower California's prison population by about 40,500. No mass prisoner releases are imminent, but the order eventually could affect some counties more than others, since many counties send a higher proportion of residents to prison.Da Buffalo commented @ Google Maps:
"Where the Methamphetamine labs are in California" would be a useful comparison. But as someone who's watched the drug culture over the last 40 years morph to nihilistic escapism, and has lived in California for the last 33 of them, I'd say the prison-industrial complex is making 'bank' on Meth.
View Californians in Prison, By County in a larger map
Also See: Methland... @ Global Guerillas
(A PDF of the prologue to Nick Reding's book "Methland" is available here)
Why Midwestern Small Towns Have Been Ravaged by Meth Addiction @ Alternet
(with a recent review of the now-released Nick Reding book and discussion)
...and this Travus T. Hipp Commentary: Incidental Illuminations And A Closer Examination Of The Situation In Burma - We Have Some 'Conflicts Of Interest' Besides Chevron/Texaco Oil... Drugs & Gems
(The drug now driving Burma's underground economy is NOT Heroin anymore)
In summation... my socio-cultural insight @ the Global Guerrillas article (and a partial answer to this statement pulled from the Alternet article):
"Aside from its ease of manufacture -- you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis -- the drug's most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren't that kind of people. "We're in Iowa, for God's sake," a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. "We don't do that." In mainstream America's Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training."
I live in a town where there are literally hundreds of teenage speed freaks and AFAICT (and I've been watching the drug culture since the sixties) it fill a hole in one's psychology that, in consumer cultures such as the U.S. and most of the Western industrial world, is caused by the media's endless pitch that one is never good enough, the car is never classy enough, WHAT? You don't have a diamond studded Rollie on your wrist?
...and of course, the girl is NEVER skinny enough or self-assured enough to get the boy she likes (or so she thinks).
In other words all that advertising batters their self-esteem to the point, when it's all said and done, our children take a drug that essentially makes it easy for them to say: "I don't give a f*ck what you think!"
Last fathers day, I was listening to a local radio station.
There was this loud audio-compressed pitch for a local superstore.
BUY A CELL PHONE... BUY A PLASMA TV... BUY THIS... BUY THAT!... BUY SOMETHING!!! (the ad really said that last...), and after that ad, a PSA for methresources, the US government's meth self-help site.
Go figure.
Oh, and by the way, Perdue Pharma, the folks who brought us "Hillbilly Heroin", OxyContin (Rush Limbaugh's favorite), another curse on the rural youth of America, were fined a few million dollars and slapped on the wrist for lying to doctors across America about the non-addictive quality of their product.
The FDA told them it was OK to say that it MIGHT be less addictive... but that's NOT what their sales reps told the doctors.
Why hammer on the poor rural folks of America in need of a few extra buck to make the mortgage for the shack, and not put companies like Perdue Pharma out of business entirely for creating a generation of teenage junkies?
I'll answer that... Because the imprisoning and 'programming' of American youth is BIG dollars, and attacking the pharmacological source of another plague isn't.
The local smoothie store, 'Jamba Juice', employing kids in, and just out of high school, makes it quite clear on their job app that if you've been in a 'program' it no problem at all.
They expect you've been institutionalized by the time you leave High School.
Sick.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Local News For 95060 - Santa Cruz County California (Specifically Watsonville) Is #1 For Highest Unemployment In Northern California
Santa Cruz county is numero uno now all you Fresno losers...
Don't forget it!
Watsonville WAS the home to Seagate Technology(and Connor Disc Drives) in the 90s, who eventually moved their operations overseas, leaving a few janitors and security guards working their empty Scotts Valley world HQ, and Watsonville's machine shops which were re-instituted as Watsonville's new (earthquake resistant) hospital, but what really finished it was NAFTA, which allowed all the packing and canning companies like Green Giant a chance to increase their corporate profits by moving South to Mexico:
(Note from the USDA: This chart is for processed foods. U.S. authorities do not report similar statistics for production agriculture, mainly to protect the confidentiality of individual companies, but the stock of U.S. direct investment in Mexican crop and livestock production may run in the hundreds of millions of dollars).
The Photo Slideshow with the complete list of Top 20 highest unemployment areas in Northern California at the Sacramento Bee
Thursday, October 30, 2008
That's My Town! Man arrested with beer keg, harmonica, wet suit, hallucinogenic mushrooms
Man arrested in Santa Cruz with beer keg, harmonica, wet suit, hallucinogenic mushrooms
Sentinel Staff Report
10/29/2008 10:12:08 AM PDT
SANTA CRUZ - A transient claiming to be a covert military operative from Australia was arrested Monday on the Westside because he was drinking from a full-size beer keg and trying to sell the booze to passersby, police reported.
Marshall Cartwright, 33, was sitting on the ground drinking from the partially full keg when officers went to the Bethany Greenbelt Park, near Delaware Avenue and Bethany Curve, around 11:45 a.m. Monday, police said.
Someone had called 911 after reportedly seeing Cartwright drinking beer from a Mason jar and urinating in the bushes, according to police Capt. Steve Clark. He had a second Mason jar he used to sell the beer, which he had purchased along with a tap at a Pacific Avenue liquor store.
Cartwright got hostile when officers tried to interview him and told them he was a military operative, police said. He was arrested on suspicion of being drunk in public.
Police said they searched his belongings and found about 20 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and a Camelbak bladder with more beer in it. He also had a harmonica and a wetsuit with him, both of which police suspect were stolen.
Cartwright was booked into County Jail on the public intoxication charge and also on suspicion of possessing a controlled substance, police reported.
Source, Santa Cruz Sentinel
Friday, April 4, 2008
Introducing...... Police States For PotHeads: U.S. to dispatch drones to hunt pot over California - McClatchy
U.S. to dispatch drones to hunt pot over Calif. forestsA quote from a Northern California Hemp grower:
Now I can use that ManPad missile launcher I purchased from FARC last year without worrying about 'civilian' casualties
The federal government plans to escalate its eradication of marijuana plantations in the backwoods of national forests this year, beginning in California with the deployment of larger strike teams and the controversial launching of miniature, remote-controlled spy planes to outfox growers, a top Bush administration official said Thursday.
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said an increasing number of pot growers financed by Mexican drug cartels are taking cover in the forest, particularly in the southern Sierra Nevada.
According to Rey, the administration decided to disclose the planned surge in forest surveillance after news organizations persisted in questioning U.S. Forest Service officials about a $100,000 purchase of two battery-powered "unmanned aerial vehicles."
Source, Sacramento Bee/McClatchy
There Have Been
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Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said an increasing number of pot growers financed by Mexican drug cartels are taking cover in the forest, particularly in the southern Sierra Nevada.
According to Rey, the administration decided to disclose the planned surge in forest surveillance after news organizations persisted in questioning U.S. Forest Service officials about a $100,000 purchase of two battery-powered "unmanned aerial vehicles."
Source, Sacramento Bee/McClatchy
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