During the Cultural Revolution, millions of dissidents (and those suspected of dissidence) were sent to "re-education camps" where torture and slave labor were augmented by marathon "self-criticism" sessions where prisoners would have to engage in prolonged recitations and disavowals of their heresies. Read the rest

In 1911, inventor Frank P. Snow invented this "hat guard" to inflict a painful punishment on any creep with the gall to steal a chapeau belonging to another gentleman. From Weird Universe:

A thief could take the hat, but if he tried to put it on, a "guarding prong" would jab into his skull. The prong locked in place and could only be moved if you knew the code to the combination lock.

When Yeonmi Park was just 13 years old, after suffering inhumanely under the North Korean regime, she and her family escaped to China (and eventually to South Korea).

She is now 24 years old and has become a vocal advocate for human rights in the country she once fled from. In this New York Times video, this brave young defector describes the terrible conditions for people in her home country and asks Trump to hold its dictator Kim Jong-un accountable for these human rights violations.

You may remember Park from a few years ago when she told her story at the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland:

If her story interests you, give her powerful and inspiring 2016 memoir, In Order To Live, A North Korean Girl’s Journey To Freedom, a read:

Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea.

The psyopsing worked.

Gina Haspel now appears to have secured enough votes to be confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, after two additional Senate Democrats today announced they will vote for her. Read the rest

Gina Haspel is the evidence-destroying torturer whose Senate confirmation hearings for CIA chief were so frightening to her that she tried to bow out of them (she went, and bullshitted her way through). Read the rest

For more than a century, the Canadian government pursued a policy of forcibly removing First Nations people from their homes and imprisoning them in largely church-run "residential schools" where violence, rape and other forms of abuse were rampant. The last residential school closed in 1986. Read the rest

David Chasteen is a veteran of the CIA, who has also served in combat with the United States Army in Iraq, and elsewhere. Read the rest

Gina Haspel is a 33-year veteran of the CIA, notorious for overseeing a torture camp in Thailand where rendered suspects were subjected to simulated executions; Haspel is also notorious for participating in a mass coverup of CIA torture, helping to destroy over 100 videotapes of abuses that took place under her direction. Read the rest

Lauri Love is a British man on the autism spectrum who also has depression and severe eczema, who was facing extradition to America on charges of hacking US military and private agencies. Read the rest

When Rep Tim Murphy resigned in shame after he was outed for pressuring his mistress to get an abortion while serving on the "House Pro-Life Caucus," it triggered a special election in Pennsylvania's 18th, a rustbelt district in the southwest corner of the state, where a strong Democrat candidate named Conor Lamb is polling high against his Republican opponent, torture advocate Rick Saccone, who served as an Army intelligence support consultant at Abu Ghraib prison after its torture scandal. Read the rest

Bassel Khartabil was a Syrian free software, free speech and Creative Commons activist who was jailed and tortured by the Assad regime, which eventually secretly sentenced him to death, then executed him in 2015, but kept it a secret until 2017. Read the rest

This video is hard to watch. It shows a group of Cheatham County, TN Sheriff's Deputies restraining a teenager in a chair and shocking him repeatedly with a stun gun. Read the rest

Psychologist James Mitchell is the self-described "architect" of the CIA's torture program (a consulting gig that netted him a cool $80m at taxpayer expense), along with his partner John "Bruce" Jessen -- they're the pair who oversaw black-site torture programs that killed and maimed people who'd been convicted of no crime by any court, anywhere in the world. Read the rest

The administration of President Donald Trump has started to return to Congress copies of an extensive 2014 report on the the CIA's interrogation and detention practices, U.S. officials revealed on Friday. Read the rest

Today, the whistleblower Chelsea Manning stepped out of the Military Corrections Complex at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, having served the longest sentence in US history for whistleblowing; for the duration of her ongoing appeal, she is on "excess leave in an active-duty status" which entitles her to access to military health-care insurance and other benefits. Read the rest

A sharia court in Indonesia’s ultra-conservative Aceh province has sentenced two gay men to public caning. Read the rest

For four years, N313P, a modified Boeing 737 bizjet, flew people who'd been kidnapped by the CIA to secret torture-camps; it's only got 5,942 hours on it, and sports a customized seven-tank fuel reserve for long-haul flights. It's yours for a mere $27.5M. Read the rest