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New study: Prop. 47 would help California address overcrowded prisons

[Author]by Ngoc Nguyen and Nicole Hudley

New America Media
[/Author]
SAN FRANCISCO – A measure on the November ballot would reclassify six non-violent felonies to misdemeanors, a move that observers say could help California finally comply with a federal mandate to reduce its overcrowded prison system.

Under Proposition 47, those who commit certain low-level offenses – check fraud, drug possession, forgery, petty theft, receiving stolen property and shoplifting – would receive lighter sentences as long as they had no serious or violent crimes on their record. The reclassification would apply to property crimes involving amounts less than $950, and it would apply retroactively.

The change is expected to reduce the number of prisoners in state facilities, and state savings would be funneled into mental health and drug abuse treatment, K-12 education, and victims’ services.

Prop. 47 would move California closer to meeting a looming deadline to shrink its prison population under a federal-court mandate, according to a new study by the California Budget Project.

For the last three years, the state has been attempting to address overcrowding in state prisons by shifting nonviolent offenders — and funding — to local county jails, a process known as realignment.

But while the policy has succeeded in reducing the state prison population, it hasn’t been enough.

In 2011, a panel of three federal judges found that California’s severe prison overcrowding was the main reason it was failing to provide prisoners with adequate medical and mental health care, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. It set a prison population benchmark that the state was supposed to have met this year, to reduce the number of inmates in the state’s 33 prisons to 137.5 percent of design capacity. California still has not met the threshold and court judges have extended the deadline by another 17 months.

According to the Budget Project analysis, state prisons housed 115,972 individuals as of August. It still needs to shrink that number by about 2 percent –roughly 2,300 individuals – to comply with the federal-court mandate, and it has to do this by February 2016.

Barry Krisberg, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley, says Prop. 47 will help the state achieve that goal, without having to release violent offenders.

“Frankly, the only way you could bring the prison population [down] even further, you’d have to start releasing more lifers…you’d have to go to the violent population,” said Krisberg, who researches juvenile justice issues at UC Berkeley’s School of Law.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that Prop. 47 could impact 40,000 people and generate savings in the low hundreds of millions annually.

According to the Budget Project report, the measure, if passed, would reduce prison overcrowding in two ways: Going forward, fewer individuals would be sent to state prison for the reclassified crimes; and those already in state prison for those offenses would be resentenced and sent to county jails.

Some county jails are already experiencing their own overcrowding problems as a result of realignment. But San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, a sponsor of the measure, says the change wouldn’t worsen conditions in county lock-up. Shorter sentences for individuals convicted of the reclassified crimes, he says, could ease overcrowding in the county jails.

And because misdemeanors carry shorter sentences than felonies, he says, “there will be a reduction in the time that people will spend in custody.”

But not everyone affected by Prop. 47 would be sent to county jails. Instead of jail time, someone who was convicted of a misdemeanor could receive supervised probation or court-ordered drug treatment.

“Prop. 47 will help, not hinder, counties working to reduce any pressures they are experiencing in their jails,” said Lenore Anderson, who directs Californians for Safety and Justice. The group has a 501 c4 Vote Safe that is a sponsor of Prop. 47.

The measure grows out of an idea that began with realignment, explains Rev. Ben McBride of PICO California. The question both are trying to address, he said, is: “How do we get non-violent offenders closer to getting home, building relationships with families?”

“When folks are closer to family…visitation of clergy…they keep more connected [and it helps] the process of rehabilitation,” McBride said. “The further they are from what PICO calls the ‘lifeline to healing’…the worse they will be.”

These community-based practices, the Budget Project analysis found, help lower crime rates and save money. For example, mental health courts that prescribe therapy instead of jail time for non-violent offenders has lowered re-arrest rates in San Francisco.

Similarly, drug courts that mandate drug treatment in the city reduce recidivism by up to 26 percent.

“Most people agree we have a challenge because a lot of crime incidents are connected to drug addiction and mental issues and yet our communities don’t have resources to really address those issues,” said Anderson. “A lot of those problems get much worse in the criminal justice system.”

UC Berkeley’s Krisberg noted that Prop. 47 has very little opposition thus far. Opponents, including the California Police Chiefs and the California Correctional Officers Organization, have raised $8,000 – far less than supporters of the measure, who have raised more than $3 million.

Public support for the measure also appears to be high. A June Field Poll found that 57 percent of Californians support the initiative, with 19 percent undecided.

Anderson says the lack of opposition and strong support for Prop. 47 shows state residents are “increasingly frustrated with spending on prisons.”

“We have the ability to …significantly reduce the prison and crime problem in state with this ballot measure,” she said. “And reinvest [the money] into things that Californians think are more important priorities to keep communities safe.”

Obama ignores Congress, announces Syria strikes

[Author]Assad government to consider any military action an act of war

by Paul Joseph Watson
[/Author]
President Barack Obama is set to ignore Congress once again by launching military strikes inside Syria without consulting lawmakers, a move that threatens to enflame the entire region given that the Assad government has repeatedly insisted it will consider any military activity inside Syrian territory as an act of war.

“President Obama is prepared to use U.S. military airstrikes in Syria as part of an expanded campaign to defeat the Islamic State and does not believe he needs formal congressional approval to take that action, according to people who have spoken with the president in recent days,”reports the Washington Post.

Obama is set to deliver a prime time speech tonight during which he will make the case for U.S. air strikes inside Syria in the name of targeting ISIS militants.

In citing ISIS, which was armed and funded by the United States’ biggest allies in the region, as a justification for a military campaign inside Syria, Obama is set to accomplish what the administration failed to achieve last year after the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta was blamed on the Assad government, despite a subsequent MIT report which concluded the incident was more likely the work of US-backed rebels.

Despite many calling for Washington to renew its support for so-called “moderate” rebels in Syria in the name of combating ISIS, it recently emerged that murdered journalist Steven Sotloff was sold to ISIS by FSA militants. In addition, arms given to FSA rebels that originated from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were later seized by ISIS fighters.

Bassel Idriss, commander of an FSA-run rebel brigade, also recently admitted that US-backed “moderate” rebels are still collaborating with ISIS.

During a recent appearance on Fox News, General Thomas McInerney also revealed how the United States inadvertently bolstered ISIS as a result of the terrorist group obtaining weapons from the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. A more direct method of support involved the U.S. training militants at a secret base in Jordan who later went on to become ISIS fighters in Syria.

Obama’s decision to launch air strikes inside Syrian territory without congressional approval echoes his 2011 assault on Libya, which again was a move to support radical jihadists that ended up with the African country turning into a failed state.

At the time, Obama brazenly undermined the power of Congress by insisting his authority came from the United Nations Security Council prior to the attack on Libya and that Congressional approval was not necessary. “I don’t even have to get to the Constitutional question,” scoffed the President.

According to Congressman Walter Jones, this was an act that constituted “an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.”

Obama’s move to strike inside Syria in the name of fighting ISIS militants which his administration helped boost as a result of its disastrous policy to arm so-called “moderate” rebels threatens to spark a regional war given that the Assad government has repeatedly insisted that any military action within Syrian territory will be considered an act of war.

The global resistance to a U.S. attack on Syria, which successfully derailed last year’s seemingly inevitable assault, has largely evaporated in light of the western media’s ceaseless promotion of ISIS as a catastrophic threat.

As an MSNBC poll showed last night, anti-war fervor amongst liberals has all but disintegrated, with just 12 percent calling on Obama to get permission from Congress before launching an attack on ISIS inside Syria.

 

White House denies murdered journalist was sold to ISIS by US supported Syrian rebels

 

Will not change strategy on supporting Syrian ‘moderates’

Following accusations by the spokesperson for Steven Sotloff, the U.S. journalist murdered by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Obama administration has claimed that the American was not sold to the extremist group by moderate Syrian rebels currently being supported by the White House.

The administration says that its own initial intelligence surrounding the disappearance of Sotloff has not revealed any indications that the journalist was exchanged by Syrian rebels for cash.

“Based on the information that has been provided to me, I don’t believe that is accurate,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday. “But I do know, at the same time, that this is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation. So this is something that they’re looking into all aspects of this, including how Mr. Sotloff may have come into the hands of [ISIS].”

Appearing on CNN Monday, Sotloff family spokesman Barak Barfi slammed Obama, saying that “The administration could have done more, they could have helped us, they could have seen them through.”

Barfi also revealed that “sources on the ground” in Syria have informed the Sotloff family that the TIME journalist was sold for between $25,000 and $50,000 by the “so-called moderate rebels that people want our administration to support”

Barfi accused the White House of using Sotloff and his compatriot James Foley as “pawns” in their strategy for Syria, saying that the administration had made inaccurate and misleading statements, hiding the fact that the relationship between the family and the White House is “very strained”.

Barfi also threatened to divulge damning information should leaks by the White House to the media continue regarding the situation.

Despite these claims, White House press secretary Earnest said “the thoughts and prayers of everybody here at the White House continue to be with the Sotloff family as they grieve for the loss of their son.”

“Everybody here is grieving alongside them,” he added.

Earnest suggested that the U.S. support of Syrian rebels will not be altered or affected in any way by the accusations, calling the support “a core component of the strategy here.”

“The reason for that is simply that it is very dangerous for [ISIS] to be operating in a virtual safe haven anywhere in the world,” he said. “It’s particularly dangerous for them to be operating in a safe haven in a region of the world as volatile as Syria and Iraq.”

The same extremists who Killed US and NATO Troops in Iraq were supported all the way by the U.S. and its allies in Libya and Syria.

ISIS terrorists had already infiltrated those groups and the U.S. government knew it from their own intelligence and from independent intelligence. Like a cancer, the group grew and eventually consumed the so-called rebels fighting against the Syrian government.

Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech outlining a strategy to defeat ISIS. It is thought that he will advocate entering into a limited conflict that will last beyond his own term as president.

Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Preparing the ground for more whistleblowers

[Author]by Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com[/Author]

 

It’s possible we will get more whistleblowers coming out and admitting they covered up vaccine damage.

In order to help prepare the ground, some education is required.

This article is a backgrounder. The intention is to sweep aside the vaccine propagandists whose main thrust is: the US medical system is excellent, just fine, science is succeeding on all fronts, so why should we doubt vaccines; don’t worry, be happy.

In the wake of the CDC whistleblower scandal, many such “defenders of the realm” have emerged.

Expressing generalized outrage and disbelief, they assure us that no doctor or healthy agency would do great harm to the population.

They tell us that modern medicine, in all its aspects, is a wondrous land.

They assure us that whatever the whistleblower, William Thompson, is saying about published research fraud and vaccines—well, it’s simply wrong. All is well. Rainbows and marshmallows.

How little they know. How little they care.

Documents within the privileged halls of the medical establishment prove them wrong.

First and foremost among these documents is Dr. Barbara Starfield’s stunning July 26, 2000, review, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Is US health really the best in the world?”

Proper and elite credentials were crisply present and accounted for, all the way along the line. Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Starfield was a widely respected public health expert, working at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Her conclusions?

Every year, in the US, the medical system kills 225,000 people. That’s 2.25 MILLION killings per decade.

Of these, FDA-approved medical drugs kill 106,000 Americans per year. That’s a MILLION killings per decade.

In my 2009 interview with Dr. Starfield, she stated that, since her July 2000 publication, other researchers have pegged the death figures even higher.

If you go to Startpage.com and search for “FDA Why Learn About Adverse Drug Reactions,” you will see, on the FDA’s own website, a page where the annual 100,000-death figure is confirmed.

Of course, the FDA takes absolutely no responsibility for this horrific fact. Being the sole US agency in charge of certifying drugs as safe, when those drugs kill 100,000 Americans per year…the FDA’s conscience doesn’t waver an inch. To put it another way: what conscience?

Want more?

The citation is: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer. (See http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e3989 — “Anticoagulants cause the most serious adverse events, finds US analysis”)

Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.’”

The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”

And here is the final dagger. The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”

Given what I’ve written here so far, alert readers will begin to wonder: how can these medical drugs kill so many people, when medical journals report, in thousands of published studies, that the drugs are safe?

Ah yes: reliance on published drug-studies.

The gold standard. This is what “the professionals” point to when challenged. This is the basis of their “science.”

It’s all a ruse. The published studies declaring the drugs safe are frauds. An insider among insiders confirms this.

For 20 years, Dr. Marcia Angell was the editor of one of the most prestigious journals in the world; The New England Journal of Medicine.

On January 15, 2009, the NY Review of Books published Dr. Angell’s devastating assessment of medical literature: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” —(Marcia Angell, MD, “Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.” NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009.)

Here is another quote of a similar nature, also published in the NY Review of Books (May 12, 2001, Helen Epstein, “Flu Warning: Beware of Drug Companies”):

“Six years ago, John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, found that nearly half of published articles in scientific journals contained findings that were false.”

Here’s another quote from the same article:

“Last year, GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia was linked to thousands of heart attacks, and earlier in the decade, the company’s antidepressant Paxil was discovered to exacerbate the risk of suicide in young people. Merck’s painkiller Vioxx was also linked to thousands of heart disease deaths. In each case, the scientific literature gave little hint of these dangers.”

And finally, here is yet another statement from Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine: “A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies [that praised the drugs] were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome.”

It turns out that the informational pipeline that feeds the entire perception of pharmaceutical medicine is a rank fraud.

So… when CDC whistleblower William Thompson made a public statement, on Aug. 27, admitting he and his co-authors cooked and buried vital data in a 2004 Pediatrics study on the MMR vaccine and autism, and when shocked observers rushed to claim there was really no problem and “the official science” was safe and true and good and right, and the CDC was innocent of wrongdoing and it was all a tempest in a teacup, they were entirely ignorant of the big picture, or they were lying through their teeth.

Whistleblower Thompson was merely adding one more footnote about medical fraud to a massive and growing encyclopedia of fraud.

The encyclopedia stands, dust-covered, on a remote shelf. The US government, the CDC, other public health agencies, doctors, medical schools, drug companies, and those execrable corporate front men—television media anchors—proceed apace, praising US medical science.

Problem? What problem? All is well in fairyland. Rainbows and marshmallows.

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed,

Tiburón Film Society presents The Tinaja Trail

[Author]Compiled by the El Reportero’s staff[/Author]

A 65-min documentary filmed in the U.S. and Mexico.
In the desolate borderlands of the American Southwest, hundreds of undocumented immigrants die every year while attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico.
In response, volunteers are caching water supplies along the migratory trails and others are imagining cell phones running geo-poetic trail-finding software promising to lead migrants to water. Through the voices of those who have crossed, those who have failed, and those who are trying to prevent more deaths, a complex picture of the immigration crisis emerges.
At the Bay Model located at 2100 Bridgeway in Sausalito on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2014 at 6 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.

East Side Story and Chicano Soul History: Lowrider photo exhibit and more
In conjunction with the Lowriding season MCCLA is thrilled to present featured artists: Yolanda López, Art Meza, Adolfo Arias, and Fern Balladares whose art work represent lowrider culture past and present. Join us at the opening reception to meet the artists, hear excerpts of Meza’s Lowriting book, view screening of Why I Ride, a documentary on 80s lowrider car scene in San Francisco, walk along the display of lowrider cars parked in front of the center, and listen to oldies by DJ Soulera. Be a part of reclaiming public space. Don’t miss out.
Exhibit runs through Sept. 12, at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco.

6th Annual San Francisco Latino Film Festival
Cine+Mas SF celebrates its 6th year of the San Francisco Latino Film Festival, opening with our annual kick-off event sponsored by KPIX-CBS local at their studios (855 Battery St, SF) on Tuesday, September 16, 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The SFLFF program includes award winning and critically acclaimed documentary, feature and short films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Peru, Uruguay, Guatemala and the USA. Local and visiting filmmakers from around the country and Latin America will be in attendance.
The festival is proud to open this year at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District, recently designated as the Latino Cultural Corridor. The opening night celebration will be at Brick & Mortar in San Francisco. Additional venues include Opera Plaza Cinemas (SF); Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (SF); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF); Red Poppy Art House (SF); Eastside Cultural Center (Oakland), La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley); Mexican Heritage Plaza (San Jose).
“The festival’s purpose is to build community through film, while educating, entertaining, and recognizing the work of Latin American, Spanish and US Latino filmmakers which otherwise may not be seen in San Francisco,” said festival director Lucho Ramirez.
Some of the Short Films include a documentary animation this year: Frontera! Revolt & Revolution on the Upper Rio Grande, (USA/San Francisco), directed by John Jota Leaños, about the seminal events and colonial entries that have shaped the deeply contested territories of the US-Mexico Borderlands. Native and Chicano narrators recall this living history through memory, play, humor and song. The film is a collaboration between Chicano and Native artists in New Mexico and California.
From September 19 through the 27 at different locations in the SF Bay Area, with extended locations. For more info http://www.sflatinofilmfestival.org or call 415-826-7057. For tickets visit www.brownpapertickets.com or call 1-800-838-3006.

“Cantinflas” movie makes strong showing in box office

[Author]by the El Reportero’s news services[/Author]

 

“Cantinflas”, the biopic about Mexican actor Mario Moreno, premiered in the United States with a total box-office of $3.2 million and the highest average number of moviegoers per movie theater that screened it.

The Sebastian del Amo flick opened in 382 theaters with an average box-office of some $8,400, while placing 13th on the list of the most revenues over the long Labor Day weekend.

Starring Spanish actor Oscar Jaenada, the picture tells the life story of the man described as Mexico’s Charlie Chaplin with a plot that focuses on the production of “Around the World in 80 Days,” with which Moreno (1911-1993) broke into Hollywood in 1956.

 

Guillermo Arriaga’s Words With Gods screens at Venice Film Festival

A wave of spirituality washed over the Venice Film Festival on Saturday with the out-of-competition screening of Words with Gods, a series of religious-themed short films directed by Mexico’s Guillermo Arriaga and eight other filmmakers, including Spain’s Alex de la Iglesia and Argentine-born Brazilian Hector Babenco.

“It doesn’t deal with religions so much as human beings,” Arriaga, who also produced the project, said here of his short, La Sangre de Dios (Blood of God).

“The goal of the film is to spark a dialogue so we can understand ourselves better and become better human beings,” he added.

Words with God consists of nine short films that take the movie-goer from the Australian desert to Iranian Kurdistan and from boisterous Mumbai to tsunami-battered Japan.

Mira Nair, Emir Kusturica and Amos Gitai are among the other directors whose short films were included in Words with Gods, the first of four installments in the Heartbeat of the World anthology film series.

La Sangre de Dios tackles the theme of atheism and “the death of God” through a story focused on the devastating impact of human beings on nature.

“It’s an ambiguous work that leaves open all the interpretations about what God is, if (God) exists or not,” Arriaga, former screenwriter for Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and the director of The Burning Plain, said.

The short that received the most applause at the Venice Film Festival, which kicked off on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6, was De la Iglesia’s, the only one of the nine to use humor to address its theme – Catholicism and the forgiveness of sins.

De la Iglesia said that at first he wondered whether the theme might be too transcendent for a “comedian” like him to tackle and that he might offend people, even though he considers himself a Catholic.

“Then I thought that humor is a technique of expression that helps us approach reality more freely, and that was very important in talking about religion,” he said.

“For me, the forgiveness of sins is the most important part of the Catholic religion, which is defined precisely by its preference for the repentant sinner over someone who always does good. That fills me with hope,” De la Iglesia added.

Babenco’s film, meanwhile, invites the viewer to follow a homeless man who is distraught over the death of his son and attends an Afro-Brazilian religious ritual in which evil spirits are exorcised through dance.

How the excessive militarization of the police is turning cops into counterinsurgents

[Author]FROM THE EDITOR:

 

Dear readers,[/Author]

I don’t need to repeat the horror stories that have been plaguing the mainstream media or corporate media, as it is now called, about the increasing police executions of people in their “line of duty.” The same excuses: the suspect had a gun (but who didn’t shot a bullet); he didn’t obey police command to stop but kept running; he didn’t show his hands; I called the police to help me restrain my daughter who was acting crazy, etc. They all got killed. The following article, written by Matthew Harwood, brings us inside of the how the police are becoming more violent, and how the killings go unpunished.

 

[Author]by Matthew Harwood

TomDispatch
[/Author]

 

Second part: Everyday Militarization
 

Don’t think, however, that the military mentality and equipment associated with SWAT operations are confined to those elite units. Increasingly, they’re permeating all forms of policing.

As Karl Bickel, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Department’s Community Policing Services office, observes, police across America are being trained in a way that emphasizes force and aggression. He notes that recruit training favors a stress-based regimen that’s modeled on military boot camp rather than on the more relaxed academic setting a minority of police departments still employ. The result, he suggests, is young officers who believe policing is about kicking ass rather than working with the community to make neighborhoods safer. Or as comedian Bill Maher reminded officers recently: “The words on your car, ‘protect and serve,’ refer to us, not you.”

This authoritarian streak runs counter to the core philosophy that supposedly dominates twenty-first-century American thinking: community policing. Its emphasis is on a mission of “keeping the peace” by creating and maintaining partnerships of trust with and in the communities served. Under the community model, which happens to be the official policing philosophy of the U.S. government, officers are protectors but also problem solvers who are supposed to care, first and foremost, about how their communities see them. They don’t command respect, the theory goes: they earn it. Fear isn’t supposed to be their currency. Trust is.

Nevertheless, police recruiting videos, as in those from California’s Newport Beach Police Department and New Mexico’s Hobbs Police Department, actively play up not the community angle but militarization as a way of attracting young men with the promise of Army-style adventure and high-tech toys. Policing, according to recruiting videos like these, isn’t about calmly solving problems; it’s about you and your boys breaking down doors in the middle of the night.

SWAT’s influence reaches well beyond that. Take the increasing adoption of battle-dress uniforms (BDUs) for patrol officers. These militaristic, often black, jumpsuits, Bickel fears, make them less approachable and possibly also more aggressive in their interactions with the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

A small project at Johns Hopkins University seemed to bear this out. People were shown pictures of police officers in their traditional uniforms and in BDUs. Respondents, the survey indicated, would much rather have a police officer show up in traditional dress blues. Summarizing its findings, Bickel writes, “The more militaristic look of the BDUs, much like what is seen in news stories of our military in war zones, gives rise to the notion of our police being an occupying force in some inner city neighborhoods, instead of trusted community protectors.”

Where do they get those wonderful toys?

“I wonder if I can get in trouble for doing this,” the young man says to his buddy in the passenger seat as they film the Saginaw County Sheriff Office’s new toy: a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. As they film the MRAP from behind, their amateur video has a Red Dawn-esque feel, as if an occupying military were now patrolling this Michigan county’s streets. “This is getting ready for f**king crazy times, dude,” one young man comments. “Why,” his friend replies, “has our city gotten that f**king bad?”

In fact, nothing happening in Saginaw County warranted the deployment of an armored vehicle capable of withstanding bullets and the sort of improvised explosive devices that insurgent forces have regularly planted along roads in America’s recent war zones. Sheriff William Federspiel, however, fears the worst. “As sheriff of the county, I have to put ourselves in the best position to protect our citizens and protect our property,” he told a reporter. “I have to prepare for something disastrous.”

Lucky for Federspiel, his exercise in paranoid disaster preparedness didn’t cost his office a penny. That $425,000 MRAP came as a gift, courtesy of Uncle Sam, from one of our far-flung counterinsurgency wars. The nasty little secret of policing’s militarization is that taxpayers are subsidizing it through programs overseen by the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department.

Take the 1033 program. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) may be an obscure agency within the Department of Defense, but through the 1033 program, which it oversees, it’s one of the core enablers of American policing’s excessive militarization. Beginning in 1990, Congress authorized the Pentagon to transfer its surplus property free of charge to federal, state, and local police departments to wage the war on drugs. In 1997, Congress expanded the purpose of the program to include counterterrorism in section 1033 of the defense authorization bill. In one single page of a 450-page law, Congress helped sow the seeds of today’s warrior cops.

The amount of military hardware transferred through the program has grown astronomically over the years. In 1990, the Pentagon gave $1 million worth of equipment to U.S. law enforcement. That number had jumped to nearly $450 million in 2013. Overall, the program has shipped off more than $4.3 billion worth of materiel to state and local cops, according to the DLA.

In its recent report, the ACLU found a disturbing range of military gear being transferred to civilian police departments nationwide. Police in North Little Rock, Arkansas, for instance, received 34 automatic and semi-automatic rifles, two robots that can be armed, military helmets, and a Mamba tactical vehicle. Police in Gwinnet County, Georgia, received 57 semi-automatic rifles, mostly M-16s and M-14s. The Utah Highway Patrol, according to a Salt Lake City Tribune investigation, got an MRAP from the 1033 program, and Utah police received 1,230 rifles and four grenade launchers. After South Carolina’s Columbia Police Department received its very own MRAP worth $658,000, its SWAT Commander Captain E.M. Marsh noted that 500 similar vehicles had been distributed to law enforcement organizations across the country.

Astoundingly, one-third of all war materiel parceled out to state, local, and tribal police agencies is brand new. This raises further disconcerting questions: Is the Pentagon simply wasteful when it purchases military weapons and equipment with taxpayer dollars? Or could this be another downstream, subsidized market for defense contractors? Whatever the answer, the Pentagon is actively distributing weaponry and equipment made for U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns abroad to police who patrol American streets and this is considered sound policy in Washington. The message seems striking enough: what might be necessary for Kabul might also be necessary for DeKalb County.

In other words, the twenty-first-century war on terror has melded thoroughly with the twentieth-century war on drugs, and the result couldn’t be anymore disturbing: police forces that increasingly look and act like occupying armies.

Three foods that can treat kidney disease and boost renal function

[Author]by Michael Ravensthorpe
[/Author]
Every year, more than 100,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with kidney disease, a serious, life-threatening condition in which the kidneys can no longer filter waste products from the blood. (1) The National Kidney Foundation estimates that one in three American adults is currently at risk of developing kidney disease and those odds increase to one in two over the course of a lifetime.

The leading causes of poor kidney health are diabetes and high blood pressure, which in turn are caused by a poor diet and lifestyle. Therefore, the only real long-term solution to kidney disease is to drink more clean water, get more exercise and, most importantly, to reject processed and unhealthy foods in favor of natural whole foods. The foods listed below are proven to be particularly effective at boosting renal health.

Asparagus

Asparagus was regarded as the perfect healing food for our urinary system for centuries in its native Europe and Asia, and we now understand why. This green spring vegetable is packed with natural compounds, including glycosides and saponins, that give it significant diuretic, anti-rheumatic and blood purifying qualities. Consequently, the regular consumption of asparagus is known to increase urine production, soothe the urinary system, boost cellular action in the kidneys and even dissolve the acids and salts that comprise kidney stones.

Moreover, a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in June 2013 found that a compound present in asparagus, 2”-hydroxynicotianamine, could inhibit angiotensin-converting enzyme activity in the kidneys, thus “preventing hypertension and preserving renal function.”

Garlic

Garlic has long been considered one of nature’s greatest disease fighters due to its impressive concentrations of the sulfur compound allicin. A proven antibacterial, antimicrobial, antiviral, antifungal and antioxidant, allicin is well-known for treating two of the main conditions that cause kidney disease, namely diabetes and high blood pressure. However, several studies have shown that this pungent and aromatic herb could be even better for our kidneys than previously thought.

One study published in Pharmacological Reports in 2008 discovered that garlic could significantly reduce kidney damage associated with mercury chloride exposure in laboratory animals (mercury chloride is a potential carcinogen used in disinfectants, batteries, insecticides and many other products to which humans are regularly exposed). (5) Another study, published in Food and Chemical Toxicology in 2001, found that garlic in low doses could enhance the antioxidant status of the kidneys, thus protecting them from the cell-damaging effects of free radicals.

Watermelon

There are three reasons why watermelons are good for treating kidney disease. Firstly, they are low in potassium and phosphorus, which are two minerals that dysfunctional kidneys can have problems balancing. Secondly, they are comprised of approximately 92 percent alkaline water, which helps flush the urinary system of accumulated toxins (watermelon fasts can even dissolve kidney stones). Lastly, they help the liver to process ammonia and deliver it to urea, thus easing the strain on the kidneys while ridding the body of excess fluids.

Unlike asparagus and garlic, watermelon is high in natural sugars. For this reason, people with diabetes-sourced kidney disease should be careful not to consume too much of it on a regular basis.

The President’s solid ground for executive action on immigration

by the El Reportero’s wire services

 

Comprehensive immigration reform legislation would give a majority of America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and work authorization.

But with immigration reform stalled in the House, President Obama announced that he plans to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress.” The President is reportedly considering deferring the deportations of up to 5 million immigrants, starting with those with families.

While most columnists have supported the President’s authority to take action, a minority have accused President Obama of “rewriting the law” and called him a “domestic Caesar.”

UCLA Professor of Law Hiroshi Motomura’s report, The President’s Discretion, Immigration Enforcement, and the Rule of Law, thoughtfully argues that President Obama has broad executive authority to defer deportations, if he so chooses. Motomura concludes that the “President has the legal authority to make a significant number of unauthorized migrants eligible for temporary relief from deportation,” “similar to the relief available under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.” The technical term is “administrative action”—action by the President’s administrative agencies, such as Department of Homeland Security.

At the outset, Motomura makes clear that the President is only considering temporary reprieves from deportation. The President cannot unilaterally change the rules for granting green cards or citizenship. Nor did the President “enact” the DREAM Act when he announced DACA. While the DREAM Act would provide a path to a green card and citizenship for immigrants brought to America while children, DACA only gave them a temporary, renewable two-year reprieve.

But Motomura also makes clear that the President, when he announced DACA and generally, has broad prosecutorial discretion, especially as to setting enforcement priorities and a system for applying them. Indeed, Congress has created and funded a system that relies heavily on that prosecutorial discretion since Congress funds capacity for about 400,000 deportations each year out of an unauthorized population of 11 million, leaving it to the administration to carry out those deportations. As prosecutor-in-chief, though, President Obama can set formal criteria and a process, so that his enforcement agents on the ground can implement the priorities he chooses. As the Supreme Court said in United States v. Arizona, “Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all.”

Moreover, Motomura argues that setting formal criteria and a process is more consistent with the rule of law than not doing so. Doing so makes discretionary enforcement decisions more uniform, predictable, and nondiscriminatory. Indeed, issuing public, transparent guidelines keeps government officials, including state and local officials, from targeting some noncitizens based on race or ethnicity. And the fact that ICE’s union disallowed its agents from participating in trainings on prosecutorial discretion guidelines, and sued the federal government to block DACA, underscores the necessity of a formal process to check agents’ individual decision-making. Motomura thus rebuts arguments that President Obama is “lawless,” or a domestic Caesar.

Motomura thus joins a chorus of experts concluding that the President’s has broad legal authority to defer deportations, including Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel to USCIS; Eric Posner of Chicago Law School; Alberto Gonzales, President George W. Bush’s attorney general; Jonathan Adler, who is otherwise suing the Administration over Obamacare; and Shikha Dalmia at the Reason Foundation. Looking forward, the question will not be whether the President can take action, but what action he will take. As The New York Times said: “Mr. Obama, Your Move.”

God is the guardian of undocumented children

[Author]by Andrea Acosta

El Pregonero
[/Author]
SILVER SPRING, Md. – While children cross the border alone, their parents in the United States are going through intense anxiety — and the only thing they can do is pray to God to protect their kids along the journey.

Each successful trip is God’s doing, according to many immigrant parents who are waiting on the other side of the Río Grande, impatient and full of faith.

“What I did was put her in the hands of God and God put angels along her path to bring my girl to me,” Salvadoran immigrant Carmen Molina told El Pregonero recently, referring to the trip her daughter Valeria made nearly three years ago.

Two journeys

Carmen left El Salvador 10 years ago, crossed through Guatemala and Mexico by bus and taxi, and then crossed the Rio Grande to come to the United States. She made the journey with her brother, guided by coyotes, and says that God took care of them along the way.

The worst part of the trip, she says, was the journey on the infamous train known as “La Bestia” (The Beast), but she was saved from any harm inflicted by traffickers. “There are a lot of deaths on the train,” she says. “Some people lose limbs, immigrants are stripped of their clothes and robbed, women are raped….”

After three dangerous weeks making the journey north, Carmen was arrested by immigration authorities. She decided not to appear in court, so she remained undocumented. She had left her family and her country behind, with the goal of working to help her family back home.

“I cried every day for my 6-year-old and 10-year-old daughters, who I left in my mom’s care,” says the parishioner of the San Camilo Church in Silver Spring, Maryland.

She tearfully recalled the moment she said goodbye, when her younger daughter told her, “‘Take me with you, Mom… I’m going to go with you and I won’t leave your side.’”

Carmen remembers Valeria’s words and the expression on her little face. “They are painful moments you’ll never forget,” she says. Since she got here, she’s been working as a housecleaner and has always been able to send her money to her mother in El Salvador.

Carmen wanted her older daughter to come to the United States, but she was too scared to make the journey. Her younger daughter, who was 13 years old at the time, kept saying that she wanted to see her mother. She was excited, brave and determined to undertake the adventure of crossing three countries.

Before making the decision, the desperate mother knelt down and prayed: “My God, help me. Bring me my daughters. I miss them so much, and I can’t stand the pain….”

Carmen had already gotten married in the United States and couldn’t abandon her husband and her three daughters who were born here. If she returned to El Salvador, she wouldn’t be able to get back in the country.

So, between a rock and a hard place, she chose to come up with $4,500 to pay a woman who had been recommended to her to guide her daughter across the borders.

The trip

Valeria set out on the trek and the woman didn’t leave her alone for a moment.

“I wasn’t that worried because my daughter would call me along the way, and tell me where she was,” says the Salvadoran mother. But she admits that she became extremely anxious when it came time for her daughter to cross the river. “As they crossed the river, I spent the whole time on my knees asking God to help my daughter.”

After Valeria made it across, she had one last challenge: getting past the Border Patrol. So Carmen kept doing the only thing she knew how to do: pray. She knelt down again to pray to God that the agent would only look at the woman’s papers… and that’s what happened. “They just looked at us and said, ‘Go ahead,’ says Valeria.

Carmen recognizes her daughter’s courage and describes all of this as God’s work. “I’m happy that everything was OK and my daughter made it to my home in 22 days.”

The day of the reunion was very emotional, says the mother, who went from feeling anxiety to being at peace. Her daughter ran to her and said: “Mommy, mommy, I got to see you again. I did it. I’m here with you.”

Carmen was surprised to see how thin Valeria was. “She was so skinny that she didn’t even fit into size zero pants. I just felt her bones when she hugged me and I started to cry,” recalls the mother, who says she is now finally happy.

Climate change: hoax of the century

[Author]by Joseph A Olson

Analysis
[/Author]
Carbon dioxide, a benign, life giving molecule has been miscast by a world wide political movement to be an environmental hazard in what will soon be discovered to be the hoax of the century.

This molecule, CO2 is vital to all life on earth. It is exhaled by all living things and even comes from nocturnal emissions by plants. It forms the bubbles in your soda, wine and beer. Standard air has 370 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide of which 93 percent comes from “natural sources” which are all beyond human control. These sources include decomposition of organic matter, exhaling by living things and volcanic vents, which is by far the greatest atmospheric source. The climate change hoax is based on faulty science from two things.

First, hoaxers assume that ice layers give information on temperature like tree rings do with rainfall. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, from thousands of years of deposi s, are measured for CO2 content of the air at the time the snow layer was deposited and thickness of the ice layers. The thickness of these snowfall layers is then assumed to be an indication of global temperature. There are numerous errors in this assumption, which have been presented in a more technical analysis, but for now pretend that this evidence is true. The hoaxers then show graphs over time with a near perfect match of CO2 levels and snow thickness and by implication the earth’s temperature. The second bit of “proof” of human caused global warming is the Global Climate Model which is available to all at Wikipedia. By their own admission, this model was developed for SHORT RANGE weather forecasting and we all know how accurate that is. This formula, though not given on this web site, has a hundred parameters each with its own coefficient and exponent. By manipulating these numbers the hoaxers are able to “prove” that an increase of CO2 will raise world temperature.

The whole concept of “greenhouse gas” is absurd. The earth receives a full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation by day (Duh!) but by night only a portion, the infrared stored on the surface, is radiated back into space. There is no gaseous one way control of this energy. The atmospheric gasses can absorb or reflect some of this energy but can not increase the incoming amount. Carbon dioxide is a three-atom molecule that cannot possibly determine that all radiation should be allowed in by day, but none can escape by night. Consider the insulation or radiant barrier in your home’s attic. The radiant barrier bounces solar radiant energy away from your living space in the summer and bounces radiant energy trying to exit back into your house in the winter. Insulation does the same thing with convective energy, keeping heat out in summer and heat in during the winter. The atmosphere behaves the same way. To claim that any gas, whether CO2 or methane or any other, can simultaneously allow energy in by day but block energy exit by night is absurd. To think that the hoaxers claim of a change in 10 parts per million of CO2 molecules could effect the earths climate in any way is insane. IF CO2 had these miracle properties then all double pane glass panels would be filled with CO2 and the magic molecules would work like little Venetian blinds allowing full heat by day and no loss at night. In fact, greenhouse glass does not block radiant heat loss at night, but only a fraction of convective heat loss that is trapped by the physical glass barrier.

[efoods]If you Goggle the Last Glacial Maximum you will see maps of the thousands of square miles of ice and the ocean levels over 400 ft below current levels. All of this ice melted in 100 years. There is no evidence that humans caused this so we must look for the force that could cause this change. The earth does not rotate in a circle around the sun but rather in an ellipse, varying our distance between 91 and 93 million miles. Because of this we receive a 4 percent change in solar radiation every year but this has no effect on earth’s climate. Our seasons are the result of the planets 23 degree axis of rotation. Our summer occurs when we are farthest from the sun. The southern hemisphere has summer when the planet is closest to the sun. There is little difference in latitude by latitude comparisons of these opposite globe seasons. Based on this fact, even a 10 percent change in solar activity would have negligible effect. A ten percent change is beyond any observed solar cycle. The earth’s crust is a 10 to 20 miles thick layer of solid rock that floats on 7000 miles of molten rock. Gravity cannot provide the pressure necessary to melt this much rock. What causes this rock to melt and the earth to have massive periodic climate changes is the irregular decay of uranium in our earth’s core. A more technical analysis of this earth warming force has been presented to members of Congress and for scientific peer review but for this presentation just consider two elements that result from this uranium decay. Radon, the radioactive gas we are warned about constantly can only occur from nuclear reaction and has a half-life of 3.8 days. A one-pound container of Radon would only weigh 1/8 of an ounce in just 23 days. The fact that Radon is a health hazard is proof of its daily production. Helium, another inert element, is eight times lighter than air and all helium released on earth is lost to outer space in just minutes. Helium does not come from the break down of any compound but only from nuclear reaction. It is occurs in natural gas deposits in just a few locations on earth. The geo-nuclear energy that melts our core and creates these gases is also the greatest variable in the earth’s climate. This geo-nuclear energy is at present beyond human control or understanding. It is most convenient for the hoaxers to neglect this greatest variable in climate change from their defective climate model. The graphic match of CO2 and ice core layer thickness (earth’s temperature ?) is also matched by the amount of ash in the layer. When volcanic energy is released it produces large amounts of heat….and ash…. and CO2. Blaming CO2 for climate change is like saying ashes cause fire. CO2 is the effect of heat and not the cause.

Our democracy depends on informed consent. Informed should not be limited to lies told by a political movement. When the full scope of the scientific errors involved in this hoax are exposed everyone will realize this has been the greatest folly since the flat earth theory. We deserve a real debate. In this case, the truth will be very inconvenient. (This article was first published by Infowars.com on November 2019).

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