Is bragging about abusing the jury system

something the admins want to look into?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1107&pid=115161

My prediction: Within 48 hours

of the issue of the Harriet Tubman $20, we will have news stories about the bill being defaced with racial slurs. The dateline will be Texas or South Carolina.

Navy SEAL who claims shooting Osama Bin Laden charged with DUI

Source: Washington Post

Robert James O’Neill, the former member of SEAL Team 6 who claimed to have shot and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a 2011 raid was charged with DUI in his hometown of Butte, Mont., Friday.

According to George Skuletich, the undersheriff of Butte-Silver Bow City and County, local officers responded to the parking lot of a local convenience store after multiple complaints of a man sleeping in the front seat of his car with the engine running.

The officers recognized O’Neill, 39, and proceeded to wake him. After a brief conversation, the officers noticed that he was impaired, said Skuletich. The officers then proceeded to administer one field sobriety test–known as the horizontal gaze–that O’Neill failed. O’Neill then refused any further field sobriety tests and was detained.

At the local jail, O’Neill took and failed a second sobriety test and then refused to take a breathalyzer or blood test. He was charged shortly after and released on bond for $685. His license is currently suspended and in the interim he was given a 72 hour temporary driver’s license, as it is his first offense, said Skueletich. O’Neill is expected to appear in court Monday.

Attempts to reach O’Neill were not successful.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/04/08/navy-seal-who-claimed-to-shoot-osama-bin-laden-charged-with-dui/

Ritual Human Sacrifice: Keeping the 99% in their place?

I would argue that eternal warfare, waged by the poor for the profit of the rich, is the new ritual human sacrifice:

Thanks to math, we can calculate the benefits of human sacrifice
Ars Technica

Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

To do that, they created statistical models using Bayesian methods, testing to see how human sacrifice affected societies that fit into three buckets: egalitarian, moderately stratified, and highly stratified. They write:

Evidence of human sacrifice was observed in 40 of the 93 cultures sampled (43%). Human sacrifice was practiced in 5 of the 20 egalitarian societies (25%), 17 of the 46 moderately stratified societies (37%), and 18 of the 27 highly stratified societies (67%) sampled.

The researchers ran these societies through several different probabilistic models, exploring how the cultures had changed over time and what role (if any) human sacrifice played in those changes.

What they found is probably not too surprising, though it is revealing. Human sacrifice has the effect of maintaining stability in highly stratified cultures, and it can also turn a moderately stratified society into a highly stratified one. Interestingly, egalitarian societies that introduced human sacrifice did not become stratified.

Human sacrifice, in other words, is a useful tool for elites who want to maintain their power in a stratified society. This is especially true in the Austronesian context, where religious and political leaders were often the ones doing the sacrificing, and the sacrificial humans were generally slaves or people with low social standing