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"The say slavery is over, but Obama is clearly up for sale." Not cool. Not only because it is insensitive and overgeneralizing, but because it is factually inaccurate.

1) "wheres my reparations" in this context implies that as a proxy for all African Americans, O'bama is uneducated. He was a professor of Constitutional Law at Chicago. And many other African Americans are also well-educated, or even capable of making the number of their nouns and verbs agree.

2) Slavery implies you are up for sale by others, without your consent. That is the difference between slavery and capitalism. Of course there are ethical concerns around selling your vote, but we've made a choice to legalize that, so long as the money doesn't go directly to you but rather goes to political campaigns. The people still get to vote you out if you're actively evil and someone can convince them of that.

3) Slavery is not over by any means. Legalized slavery in the United States ended as a result of the civil war, but millions of people are enslaves around the world, including tens of thousands of American teens at high risk for being trafficked into slavery. Check out the Polaris Project, or River of Innocents.

I ignore the US on these and many world issues, because they only complain when Oil or money is involved, and only pass laws that increase profit for the few.

Not true; those issues--and complaining, for that matter--just get more press. We put out a watch list for human trafficking, too, as part of the annual Trafficking in Persons Report. (Google it, or look at River of Innocents for a good primer on the issue).

The US does care about money and oil, of course--money and oil pay for everything and make everything work, and we want things to work and influential donors care about those things, so so does the government. But those aren't the only things we care about. The Global Health Initiatives, for example, have tremendously increased the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people, yet they rarely make it into the news. For some reason it's not as sexy to prevent Malaria as it is to do another story on Charlie Sheen.

> The feds have NO interest whatsoever in providing skill training, no matter what their propaganda tells you. At the FCI where I was, inmates typically slept till lunch, signed false pay sheets claiming 40 hours worked. They thought they were getting over, but it's actualy the feds, who can provide "proof" of "gainfully employed inmates."

> But it's a scam. The BOP/DOJ has a vested interest in the 75% recidivism rate..

It's used as a scam. That doesn't mean it *is* a scam. If justice knew how to lower the recidivism rate 50%, they would do it. Maybe you think they wouldn't, but realize you're seeing it from a very different POV than they are. The inside of a prison doesn't work the way that the people at Justice wish it did, and most of the exposure you get in a prison or as an inmate to people from Justice, or Feds, or even regular cops, is them trying to entrap guards or prisoners into drug deals, or the typical confession scenario. Places where cops act essentially as Judas Iscariot, as a betrayer, because that's what they're trained to do and it's what works in the short-term. But just because they betray doesn't mean they mean evil because of some screwed up incentive structure to want more money for Justice.

Maybe it's a scam for BOP, something they can sell the politicians. When you work in the field a long time, you get used to the recidivism rate, and think most people, you can't really do anything to help. But that doesn't mean they *want* that recidivism rate. There's enough bad sh*t in the world that if all the recidivists went away, you'd still be able to argue for more money for justice than the budget they have now, and there'd still be reasons for it. We have hundreds of thousands of american teens at high risk for being actually enslaved every year, with the human trafficking problem. (Sources: The Polaris Project, River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas). Kids who survive hell and get back up again and build their lives. Children who can't build their lives because they've never known a family and they never learned how to build themselves up. There are more than enough problems for Justice. The day there's no more need for the DOJ is the day the DOJ employees have their biggest freaking party ever.

> Try Googling "human trafficking". I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live under conditions little better than slavery.

Close. Actually, I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live in conditions of slavery. To the extent where the only real distinction is that the law--which they don't know anyway--says that it's illegal.

You'll also find that hundreds of thousands of American teens are at high risk for being kidnapped or tricked into a life of slavery. Sources: The Polaris Project, Terry Lee Wright's River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas.

Not that we should care whether it's an immigrant or not. And the difference in the cultures of different immigrant groups make different techniques useful in finding and prosecuting human traffickers. But it's not really an immigrant problem, so much as a human one.

Gamers sometimes learn bad fictional behavior. (Consider the evil character paths in various D&D games.) Gamers frequently learn good fictional behavior. (Consider the hero character paths in many D&D games.)

In contrast, a chapter of Hell's Angels in Hamburg ran multiple houses for the rape of teenage girls and women held as slaves. (Sources: Victor Malarek's The Natashas, Terry Lee Wright's River of Innocents.) They were responsible for enabling thousands of rapes in the real world.

Yes, it's atypical for a biker gang. But all things considered, it's more rare for the gamer.

> File sharing is also only one step away from human sharing, or human trafficking as you name it.

Note, for those who don't know: Human Trafficking is modern-day slavery. In the US alone, several hundred thousand teens are at high risk for being trafficked each year. (Sources: Polaris Project; National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.)

> dark background, with large-font bright text. It's the easiest webpage on the internet to read, and despite having some graphics, it loads very quickly because he uses the graphics as actual content, not just filler.

Example: http://www.riverofinnocents.com/wp/

Take a look at River of Innocents once you're done with Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's the modern version, for slavery today. (Which is still a massive problem.)

The abolition of legal slavery, but we still have lots of slavery here. (And a lot more around the world.) It's actually cheaper to own a slave today than it was in the 1800s, which means slaves are more disposable. (See http://www.riverofinnocents.com/)

It's also worth noting that the abolition of slavery in the 1800s was by no means something that Americans simply accepted. The Civil war was rather a big deal.

You're right about desegregation, though--it, too, had opponents, but as a nation we mostly embraced it. (Though there are still plenty of towns where you can should expect to be harassed by uniformed men with guns if your skin is the wrong color.)

Also, women's suffrage and equal opportunity employment between genders are good examples that support your point.

No one's saying denying workers their rights under CA law is a good thing. But slavery is also a huge problem, and a much worse one on an individual level than not getting one's work break.

It would be like someone living in a normal apartment in Boston that had a problem with the hot water heater every four hours complaining that they were being forced to live in an outhouse. Or a tar pit. Only like there really were millions who had to live in outhouses and tar pits. The claim takes the focus away from the hot water heater.

And there really are millions of slaves.

Agreed--they should be compensated for their time, but they shouldn't be calling it slavery. Slavery is a massive problem. We have millions of people worldwide (including many in the US) who actually do live as slaves.

The difference between not being allowed to take your meal breaks and being told you'll need to be raped until you've earned your way out of an $80,000 debt is... the difference between a mosquito bite and being impaled by a triceratops. Twice. Each day.

Only it's harder, because after you've been a slave, people look at you differently, and you look at yourself differently. Sometimes your family won't have anything to do with you, and it's common to have major health problems or psychological problems because of it. And then there's the trick of trying to get back into society.

River of Innocents is a good, accessible primer on the subject. The Wikipedia Human Trafficking page also has some info.

A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.

I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.

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Thousands are enslaved every day: http://www.riverofinnocents.com/

He's saying pushing or pulling an asteroid is better than hitting it with a nuclear weapon, but the interesting thing is that he's claiming NASA issued its pro-nuclear statement last year in response to political pressure to put nuclear weapons in space.

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Thousands are enslaved every day. http://www.riverofinnocents.com/

You wouldn't want to buy them, But you almost certainly can.

Lots of rape, slavery, abuse, etc... Not something we should be joking about.

Assuming these were targeted more specifically than "Congressional Computers," it is interesting to note that this could easily be criminal crackers as opposed to national crackers--Rep. Smith was a fairly substantial motivating force behind the US Government's Anti-Trafficking legislation.

Note that's anti-Human Trafficking, as opposed to anti-Drug Trafficking; slavery is one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world, and people with a financial interest in it suffer, somewhat, from the consequences of legislation Smith introduced.

That doesn't necessarily mean it is cracking by or on behalf of slave-traders, of course; they've been hurt, slightly, by some Congressional action and some consequent State Department action, but I'm not sure what the financial advantage of the crack would be, and criminals usually go for those.

Still, some of the people involved clearly have strong ties to criminal organizations with significant cracking experience, so it's worth noting the possible connection.