Disposable Minds Expendable People

As a young girl, G. C. Rossi must contend with a mother prone to violent outbursts. Even so, she's able to enjoy life with the help of a loving father and a great imagination. But everything changes when her father dies. At just ten years old, she becomes a ward of the state; when she contracts hepatitis, she is hospitalized and sinks into depression. Her condition becomes so serious that she is transferred to the Allan Memorial Institute. One of the institute's doctors, Ewan Cameron, is working with the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct mind control experiments on patients. He has a number of foot soldiers working on his behalf; as a result, for the next three and a half years, G. C. is pumped full of drugs. This account reveals serious flaws in the medical and psychiatric systems. While the world may have thought that experimenting on people ended with the Nazis, the story told in Exploitable Minds, Expendable People shows that the past may continue to haunt unsuspecting, innocent victims.

Your Mind at Siege is a bold and insightful book that challenges us to break free from blind faith and reassert our cognitive independence. It shines a spotlight on our learned obedience to gurus, elite intelligentsia, and sacred texts, predisposing us to kneel before the emerging power of Artificial Intelligence. Delving into the heart of consciousness, the book scrutinizes our growing submission to AI, exposing the lurking danger: not the AI itself, but our uncritical surrender to it as a silicon deity, jeopardizing our very humanity. Through a daring critique of The Diamond Sutra, the book highlights how language’s inherent limitations can inadvertently confine our understanding of consciousness. Drawing on cutting-edge studies from environmental biology, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences, the author emphasizes the intimate link between consciousness and our physical senses, challenging the notion of consciousness as a detached entity. Key Takeaways from the Book - Liberate your mind from the constraints of dogma and societal thought control, and reclaim your cognitive freedom. - Scrutinize our growing reliance on AI, revealing the perils of unquestioning devotion to technology as a modern-day god. - Demystify the interplay between sensory perception and consciousness, dispelling the myth of consciousness as a separate entity. - Reconsider long-held religious and philosophical doctrines, spotlighting the value of personal revelation & lived experience in untangling the riddles of consciousness. Your Mind at Siege isn’t just scholarly discourse, it’s an invitation to inward reflection, a rebellion against accepted mores, and a road map for understanding the intricate web that links consciousness, technology, and the human condition.

Since the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the capacities of Native communities to resist cultural, economic, and political domination, Gerald M. Sider offers an ethnographic analysis of aboriginal Canadians' changing experiences of historical violence. He relates acts of communal self-destruction to colonial and postcolonial policies and practices, as well as to the end of the fur and sealskin trades. Autonomy and dignity within Native communities have eroded as individuals have been deprived of their livelihoods and treated by the state and corporations as if they were disposable. Yet Native peoples' possession of valuable resources provides them with some income and power to negotiate with state and business interests. Sider's assessment of the health of Native communities in the Canadian province of Labrador is filled with potentially useful findings for Native peoples there and elsewhere. While harrowing, his account also suggests hope, which he finds in the expressiveness and power of Native peoples to struggle for a better tomorrow within and against domination.

"Freedom Inside? offers a combination of personal narrative and scholarly research in order to examine the role of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons. It offers a glimpse inside the system now known as mass incarceration, which disproportionately punishes, confines, and controls those from black, brown and/or poor communities at exponentially higher rates, diminishing their life-chances and creating a vast underclass of disempowered, subordinated citizens. How do self-disciplinary practices such as yoga and meditation work when they are taught inside unjust systems? Do they produce political passivity, quietism, and compliance, if offered as palliatives to accept, cope and comply with unjust power structures? Or, might they prove disruptive to mass incarceration, if offered as tools to develop awareness and attunement toward injustice, to engage in non-conformist responses that include critique and challenge? The book explores both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation when taught in prisons in different ways. It is based on four years of immersion in prisons and prison volunteer communities, along with ethnographic work inside a detention facility, and many in-depth interviews with those who teach and practice inside prisons. It interweaves academic narratives with personal experiences of collaboration with volunteers and incarcerated practitioners"--

Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable. Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals. Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation. Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy. All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.

The radical history of a dynamic, multiracial American neighborhood. “When I think of the future of the United States, and the history that matters in this country, I often think of Boyle Heights.”—George J. Sánchez The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval. Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.

Featuring new coverage of the brain and language, and lexical corpora, the 4th edition of Words in the Mind offers readers the latest thinking about the ways in which we learn words, remember them, understand them, and find the ones we want to use. Explores the latest insights into the complex relationship between language, words, and the human mind, creating a rich and revealing resource for students and non-specialists alike Addresses the structure and content of the human word-store – the ‘mental lexicon’ – with particular reference to the spoken language of native English speakers Features a wealth of new material, including an all-new chapter focusing exclusively on the brain and language, and enhanced coverage of lexical corpora – computerized databases – and on lexical change of meaning Incorporates numerous updates throughout, including expansion of many notes and suggestions for further reading Comprises state-of-the-art research, yet remains accessible and student-friendly