Category: Uncategorized

A video that was brought to the attention of the Free Thought Project this week shows a situation that is all too familiar among interactions with law enforcement today — racial profiling.
As the video begins, a group of teens, many of them with skateboards, are crossing a street in a manner not fit for the police state; also known as jaywalking.
As police arrive to restore order, they immediately target the lone black guy. In spite of dozens of other people jaywalking, the one person who happened to have darker skin became the scapegoat of the police.
The singling out of the …read more

On February 5, the U.S. District Court that is handling Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, s.d., 2:13cv-953, got closer to a final decision on the last issue to be decided. That last issue is whether Ohio applied a campaign finance law in a discriminatory manner in 2014, when for the first time it kept a candidate off the ballot because the circulators didn’t fill out a blank form on the petition, telling who their employer was. The law had never before kept anything off the ballot, whether a ballot measure or a candidate. But in 2014, …read more

(RT) — In response to a Florida woman documenting a police officer speeding down Miami’s Dolphin Freeway and claiming he was pushing 90, the head of Miami’s police union posted her business card and cellphone number online and encouraged people to call her.

In late January, Claudia Castillo pulled over a police officer and accused him of speeding. She filmed the encounter and posted it to YouTube, where it went viral. In response, Miami Police Union President, Lt. Javier Ortiz released photos of her consuming a beer while driving a boat, along with her phone number, and included instructions to call …read more

Preserving food is an essential skill of the homesteading lifestyle. Whether you grow the food yourself or purchase it in bulk at farmers markets, some kind of preservation is needed so you can have certain fruits and vegetables later in the year.
While canning, pickling and freezing work well, adding dehydration to the mix gives you even more diversity. Instead of spending lots of money on a fancy machine, you can make a solar food dehydrator for much less, and take pride in your DIY project.
Dennis Scanlin of the Appropriate Technology Program at Appalachian State University spent nearly 20 years testing …read more

This story says Republicans are becoming more supportive of the National Popular Vote Plan. The story has a focus on Missouri. …read more

I remember some years ago that Ubuntu was talking about “convergence”, the idea more recently made possible by Windows Phone’s “Continuum” technology that turns your phone into a (more or less) full-fledged desktop once you connect to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Ubuntu was planning this sort of thing back during the Galaxy Nexus days, and they even tried out a $32 million dollar crowdfund (which didn’t make its funding) to create the Ubuntu Edge smartphone which would achieve this “convergence” in 2013.
Now, in the attempt to run a full version of Ubuntu on a mobile device that can “simply” …read more

Miami Gardens, FL — On February 15, Lavall Hall had a schizophrenic episode when he grabbed a broom and then went outside in his underwear. Unable to get her son back inside, Hall’s mother called the police for assistance to get her son back to the hospital, as he was only released one week prior.
Hall’s mother says that the police were aware of her son’s condition as they had responded to calls for medical assistance at her home in the past, and that she repeatedly told the officers that he was schizophrenic and bipolar on this evening.
“Don’t hurt my child,” …read more

On February 4, the Florida Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in Brinkmann v Francois, SC14-1899. It agrees with the Florida State Court of Appeals that write-in candidates in general elections are “real” candidates.
The case arose because Florida has closed primaries, except in instances when all the candidates who file are members of the same party and the winner of that one party’s primary will be be the only candidate in November. At the 2014 election for Broward County Commissioner, district 2, all the candidates who filed for any primary filed for the Democratic primary. But, one …read more

A case I’ve made often on my science and tech podcast, Sovryn Tech, is a case that was originally made by the pioneering and important work of ex-Microsoft employee, Caspar Bowden (and I make sure to credit him every time I bring it up). Caspar had spent years–long before Edward Snowden revealed anything–explaining and proving how just through very open facts “on the books” that there is NO data privacy from the US government for any consumer that is using the services/software/etc. of a corporation that is set up within the United States (ie: Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on). …read more