Today I Learned

•A Brief History of America’s Private Prison Industry

•From FBI reject to private warlord: the rise of George Wackenhut

•By 1966, Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans

•An ICE Contractor Is Worth Billions. It’s Still Fighting to Pay Detainees as Little as $1 a Day to Work. GEO Group, whose stock is valued at $4 billion, says that state minimum wage laws don’t apply to the cleaning services that it’s asked detained migrants to perform at facilities where they’re kept.

•Ice contractor plans for surveillance boom under Trump migrant crackdown: Geo Group, an Ice partner, is moving at ‘unprecedented speed’ to build out its monitoring, executive chair says

•Better know a private prison giant: GEO Group’s Board of Directors

•Feb 2025: Private Prison Exec Calls Mass Deportation Plans ‘Unprecedented Opportunity’ GEO Group Chairman George Zoley said the company stands to gain up to $1 billion in additional revenue from detaining and surveilling undocumented immigrants.

•The man who is making a killing from Trump’s current onslaught of immigrant persecution is himself an immigrant. In fact, if George Zoley had been born just 20 years later, he’d more likely be cowering inside the Aurora Detention Center instead of raking in the profits from it.

•George C. Zoley, chairman of the board and founder of GEO Group, the second largest private prison company is the United States, has been with GEO or its former parent company, the Wackenhut Corporation, since 1981. Zoley has called late George Wackenhut, the controversial right-wing founder of Wackenhut Corporation, the person he most admired.

Among the many concerning controversies involving Wackenhut corporations, one that might seem especially relevant in 2026, was their suspected involvement in several murders relating to the very convoluted Inslaw and PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) software scandal of the 1980s. The software was sold as an automation system for police and court data, and advertised as one day having the potential to predict crime before it even happened. It was allegedly stolen and modified before being distributed by the U.S. government and used to spy on other countries.

•We know from witness statements that the murders appear to be connected to the corruption surrounding Wackenhut and the PROMIS affair. We know from FBI’s own records that the Bureau looked into the matter. And most recently, we know that the FBI has not only repeatedly refused to release those files, but apparently removed the request from their FOIA tracking system.

 adults more prone to spontaneous false memories than children are. However, children are still more vulnerable to externally induced false memories, like those that stem from leading questions or learning new information after the event.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development provides one evidence-based protocol investigators can follow when working with young witnesses.

The author wrote a book about this subject in 2022:

Are Children Reliable Witnesses? | Springer Nature Link

The larvae of the cheese fly (Piophila casei) are deliberately introduced to pecorino cheese, where their digestive action produces an advanced level of fermentation, including a breakdown of the cheese's fats. The cheese's texture softens, and a liquid called làgrima ('teardrop') may seep out.

Source: Wikipedia.

Jesus fucking christ wtf. And here I thought I have a depressing "family".

I had always known about what it meant, translation etc, but not the actual meaning

https://no.lastname.nz/post/2372390

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization

Source is Chapter Eighteen of Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times by Joel Richard.

I went in expecting this to be dry, but it's one of the best biographies I've ever read. It's oozing with the faux-cordial schoolgirl drama of the early Republic, including anecdotes like one where Marshall's second cousin and bitter rival Thomas Jefferson missed him for a meeting at his hotel and wrote on a calling card that he was "lucky to find him out" – but then realized his mistake and clumsily corrected it to "UN-lucky". Marshall later remarked that it was only time Jefferson had ever come close to telling the truth.

The book describes Marshall's The Life of George Washington – which he wrote dually as a favor to Bushrod Washington and to pay down his own land debt – as a "glutinous" five-volume, 1000-page advance subscription series whose first volume was delivered two years too late, which starts at Pre-Columbian history but gives scraps for Washingon's early life ("Washington sprang full-grown in volume two and immediately plunged into the Revolutionary War"), and which gives "flat descriptions" of the war which he participated in alongside Washington.

I love this book.

Socialism for the elite but not for the masses?

Today I learned that snot turns yellowy greenish for the same reason that pee turns yellow, dehydration. The snot usually isnt yellow other than when we are sick because usually we don't have a runny nose while dehydrated except specifically when we are sick.

And also once again, humidifiers save the day because they both tackle the dehydration by putting moisture into your airways and the nature of water in the air helps break up stuff that is stuck anywhere in your airways by lubing it up and making it take its course faster while also freeing up bandwidth for your body to continue shoving more of the sickness out of your body faster which helps you recover sooner.

In fact, 99.999999% is an extremely low estimate. The number of ways that a deck of cards can be shuffled is 52! Which is equal to 8065817517094387857166063685640376697528950544088327782400000000000 possibilities.

If you shuffled cards every second from the birth of the universe until now, you still wouldn’t even come close (statistically) to getting the same arrangement twice.

I don't know how legit their research is

Nerdy leaked passwords:

Treebeard - "This password has been seen 1,207 times before in data breaches!"

NedStark - 20 times

CerseiLannister - 30 times

youknownothingjonsnow - 61 times

PicardIsSexy - 0 times (!The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world you're safe. ;)

edit:

Gandalf1 - 53,478

Gandalfthewhite - 51

sexygandalf - 6

NSFW leaked passwords:

Weird leaked passwords:

BillClinton - 378

DonaldTrump123 - 792

youwillneverguessmypassword - 390

redgreenblue - 2,040

123qweasdzxc - 1,010,515

poopstick - 6,845

((More to come later))

Real intelligence is not about having all the answers, but about staying humble enough to keep questioning, brave enough to stand alone and strong enough to resist the confort of stupidity

Bonhoeffer was accused of being associated with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and was tried along with other accused plotters, including former members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office). He was hanged on 9 April 1945 during the collapse of the Nazi regime.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau in 1906. The son of a famous German psychiatrist, he studied in Berlin and New York City. He left the safety of America to return to Germany and continue his public repudiation of the Nazis, which led to his arrest in 1943. Linked to the group of conspirators whose attempted assassination of Hitler failed, he was hanged in April 1945.

Unlike many of Hitler’s victims, Bonhoeffer was not a Jew, but a Lutheran minister, scholar, and theologian who boldly spoke against Hitler’s policies. Bonhoeffer landed a position in the German government during WWII and subsequently used that position as cover for assassination attempts against Hitler.

While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer recorded a number of his thoughts in a work we now know as Letters and Papers from Prison. One of these essays, entitled On Stupidity, records some of the problems which Bonhoeffer likely saw at work in Hitler’s rise to power:

“Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

I began reading about rabies after I noticed one of the local cats behaving somewhat oddly and aggressively and ended up learning that my odds of catching it from a wild animal while hiking are lower than I previously believed.

There is one part of the article that I disagree with and it's right at the top: "But what if the animals you need to vaccinate are wild raccoons roaming through forests, or foxes living in the mountains? You can’t exactly call them into an office for an appointment."

I mean, have you tried? Maybe leave a message with their assistant? They're always busy when I see them.

Tuan Anh Nguyen was born in Vietnam to an American father and a Vietnamese mother who were not married. He moved to the United States with his father and became a legal permanent resident of the U.S. at age six, but his father did not attempt to establish any claim of U.S. citizenship for the boy. At age 22, Nguyen pleaded guilty to sexual assault; this made him subject to deportation based on his criminal record.

Nguyen's father obtained evidence of parentage in an attempt to have his son recognized as a U.S. citizen, but his efforts were rejected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) because 8 U.S.C. § 1409 required any such evidence to have been presented before the child's 18th birthday. Nguyen—together with his father—mounted a court challenge to the law, claiming that 8 U.S.C. § 1409 was unconstitutionally discriminatory because it imposed stricter requirements for a foreign-born illegitimate child of an American father than would have applied if his American parent had been his mother.

The Supreme Court rejected Nguyen's arguments and upheld the law denying him citizenship, holding by a 5–4 majority that 8 U.S.C. § 1409 was consistent with the equal protection principle, applied through the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

First, the Court noted that whereas a mother's biological relationship to her child is easily verified and documented, the same cannot be said of the father.

Second, the Court concluded that the law was designed "to ensure that the child and citizen parent have some demonstrated opportunity to develop... a relationship... that consists of the real, everyday ties that provide a connection between child and citizen parent and, in turn, the United States"—something that was inherent in the case of an American mother and her child, but not inevitable in the case of a single father.

Even though Nguyen's father had submitted DNA evidence proving the father-son relationship, the Court noted that "scientific proof of biological paternity does nothing, by itself, to ensure contact between father and child during the child's minority". In the end, the Court held that Congress was "well within its authority in refusing, absent proof of at least the opportunity for the development of a relationship between citizen parent and child, to commit this country to embracing a child as a citizen".

The dissent (written by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor) concluded that the INS "[had] not shown an exceedingly persuasive justification for the sex-based classification... because it [had] failed to establish at least that the classification substantially relate[d] to the achievement of important government objectives", and on that basis the minority would have ruled in Nguyen's favor.

Source

The song was originally written and performed by Dolly Parton in 1974. She wrote it for her mentor and partner Porter Wagoner after leaving their band.