Social // Current TV

Doubts About Scouts, Part III: EXCLUSIVE -- Vatican Air Force Surveillance Photos Of Soviet-Style Girl Scout Encampments In Cuba and North Korea

Scandal grows

mfb1949
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10 days ago
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Doubts About Scouts, Part II: Prominent Blog Investigation Finds New Evidence Of Communist Agenda In Girl Scouts USA

Apparently, new uniform chapeaus are in the offing. (2nd of a series)

mfb1949
added this
14 days ago
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2 comments

Millenial trapped in a 'dumb' world

I’ve often considered myself an old soul trapped in the wrong generation. Social... more

Elizabeth_Grady
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30 days ago
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Tunisian 'Pirate Party' gets legal approval

Tunisian bloggers succeeded in getting permission to form the first anti-censorship... more

worrg
added this
2 months ago
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Draft Constitution for the Syrian Arab Republic + Damascus referendum day - photo essay

Arab civilization, which is part of human heritage, has faced through its long history... more

worrg
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3 months ago
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0 comments

Electrogravitics, Free Energy and Action

You seem to be ones who would support efforts to get free energy "out in the... more

Amaterasu
added this
3 months ago
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A letter to a Wall Street banker from his son + An Open Letter from Black Blocs anarchist to Occupy Wall Street

You Should be Proud I’m Not a Coward Like You Dad. ----- It’s all fraud... more

worrg
added this
4 months ago
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Assata Shakur, former Black Panther, speaks from exile in Cuba

Twenty-eight years ago, in a highly disputed trial, an all-White jury convicted former... more

worrg
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4 months ago
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US Military's 'sock puppet' software that manipulates social media

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social... more

worrg
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5 months ago
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0 comments

The British Are Drunk In 76 Percent Of Their Facebook Photos

According to a study conducted by photo storage website MyMemory, over three-quarters... more

worrg
added this
6 months ago
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0 comments

Having Clout is Better than Having Klout!

My wife tipped me off to an article after I read a newspaper article about how tech... more

baghdadbythebay
added this
6 months ago
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Freedom in the 50 States - An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom

This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. It updates, expands, and improves upon our inaugural 2009 Freedom in the 50 States study. For this new edition, we have added more policy variables (such as bans on trans fats and the audio recording of police, Massachusetts’s individual health-insurance mandate, and mandated family leave), improved existing measures (such as those for fiscal policies, workers’ compensation regulations, and asset-forfeiture rules), and developed specific policy prescriptions for each of the 50 states based on our data and a survey of state policy experts. With a consistent time series, we are also able to discover for the first time which states have improved and worsened in regard to freedom recently.
Purpose of the Index
This project develops an index of economic and personal freedom in the American states. Specifically, it examines state and local government intervention across a wide range of public policies, from income taxation to gun control, from homeschooling regulation to drug policy.
Measuring Freedom & Government Intervention
We explicitly ground our conception of freedom on an individual-rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and properties as they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.
Fiscal Policy
We divide fiscal policy equally into spending and taxation subcategories. These subcategories are highly interdependent; we include them both as redundant measures of the size of government.
Regulatory Policy
In this study, regulatory policy includes labor regulation, health-insurance coverage mandates, occupational licensing, eminent domain, the tort system, land-use regulation, and utilities. Regulations that seem to have a mainly paternalistic justification, such as home- and private-school regulations, are placed in the paternalism category.
Paternalism
In deciding how to weight personal freedoms, we started from the bottom up, beginning with the freedom we saw as least important in terms of saliency, constitutional implications, and the number of people affected, and working up to the most important.
Ranking & Discussion
By summing the economic freedom and personal freedom scores, we obtain the overall freedom index, presented in table 5. New Hampshire and South Dakota again find themselves in a virtual tie for first.
Conclusion
Although we hope we have demonstrated that some states provide freer environments than others, it would be inappropriate to infer that the freest states necessarily enjoy a libertarian streak, while others suffer from a statist mentality.
State Profiles
The state profiles (found through the above map) highlight some of the most interesting aspects of each state’s public policies as they affect individual freedom. In preparation for this year’s edition of Freedom in the 50 States, we conducted a survey of free-market policy analysts at think tanks associated with the State Policy Network (SPN).
Effects of the Federal Stimulus on State & Local Governments
This section assesses the consequences of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (stimulus) for individual freedom, as affected by state and local policies. While the stimulus was passed immediately after the period covered by this study, we can use findings on the effects of federal grants on state policies to infer what the long-run consequences of the stimulus will be.
Comparison to Previous Indices of State-Level Economic Freedom
This project remains the only effort to code both economic and personal freedom in the 50 states. Other studies compare economic freedom or “competitiveness” in the states but do not treat other critical aspects of individual liberty or selectively subsume a few noneconomic issues within economic freedom concepts.
Construction of Index
We started by collecting data on state and local public policies affecting individual freedom as defined above. All of the statutory policies are coded as of January 1, 2009, the fiscal data are coded for the fiscal year 2007–2008, the law-enforcement data cover the entire year of 2008, and all data are also back-coded consistently to January 1, 2007 (FY 2006–2007). We omit federal territories.
Data Appendix
This data appendix contains a description of each variable used in the study and its location in our spreadsheets on the website, as well as a hierarchical summary of category, issue subcategory, and variable weights.This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that... more

MotherForTruth
added this
7 months ago
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John Lennon- On Revolution

John talks about, peace, peaceful revolution, the black panthers and the Native... more

mab001
added this
7 months ago
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4 comments

Blockboard: Know Your Neighborhood

An old friend of mine who I haven't seen in probably close to 30 years, Ian... more

baghdadbythebay
added this
8 months ago
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0 comments

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City + Are You a Rebel or a Slave?

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must... more

worrg
added this
8 months ago
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0 comments

Passa la bottiglia! E Riciclala!

The European consumer movement Friends of Glass lancia un gioco virale su facebook... more

EffettoTerra
added this
9 months ago
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Van Houtte and Montaña Verde: A Fruitful Partnership - Part 1

Honduras ranks 9th in the world production of coffee and is the second most important... more

alternativechanneltv
added this
9 months ago
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AN AGE OF PEACE & PLENTY FOR ALL - A dream or could it be made real?

While many households in the world struggle just to find and sustain adequate shelter... more

Vivek_Nanda
added this
9 months ago
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Empire Avenue: Stock Trading for Social Media

I don’t have lots of money to play around in the stock market as those who saw... more

baghdadbythebay
added this
10 months ago
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CANDLE LIGHT PEACE WALK IN SUPPORT OF CORRUPTION FREE INDIA

Today I was part of the "CANDLE LIGHT PEACE WALK" held at Malaysian... more

Vivek_Nanda
added this
10 months ago
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