San Francisco as Open Sewer
August 28th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times:
City officials say corrosion from urine — human and canine — contributed to the collapse of a light pole that fell on a car at Taylor and Pine streets in San Francisco.
…
In the Tenderloin, at Eddy and Jones streets, I watched a group of small schoolchildren ushered across the street like ducklings by their teachers, who steered them around an unconscious man on the sidewalk and warned them to avoid stepping in two separate piles of excrement that I assumed were canine in origin.
The Zapruder Film Mystery
August 28th, 2015Via: E2 Films:
The Zapruder Film Mystery from E2 Films on Vimeo.
We Are the Government: Tactics for Taking Down the Police State
August 27th, 2015They don’t like jury nullification.
Using your First Amendment right to free speech in front of a court house could result in indictments.
Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment
Denver DA Charges Man with Jury Tampering for Handing Out Jury Nullification Flyers
Via: Rutherford Institute:
Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror.
As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive.”
According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.”
Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just.
In a world of “rampant overcriminalization,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.”
Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises:
If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes.
Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America.
Unfortunately, for thousands of Americans who are serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes as a result of harsh mandatory sentencing laws passed by “tough on crime” politicians, the punishment rarely fits the crime.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every ill inflicted upon us by the American police state, from overcriminalization and surveillance to militarized police and private prisons, it’s money that drives the police state. And there is a lot of money to be made from criminalizing nonviolent activities and jailing Americans for nonviolent offenses.
This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime.
Research Credit: pookie
13,000 Fall Into Homelessness Every Month in L.A. County
August 27th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times:
About 13,000 people on public assistance tumble into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County, according to a new study that experts say provides the clearest picture yet of extreme poverty in the region.
Although many quickly find work or rely on family to get off the streets, the number experiencing “continuous, unremitting, chronic homelessness” continues to grow, even after 10,000 people were housed over the last three years, according to the report being released Tuesday by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles.
The report recommended that the welfare system intervene to help children and young adults who become homeless before their condition becomes chronic.
China Sells U.S. Treasuries to Support Yuan
August 27th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
China has cut its holdings of U.S. Treasuries this month to raise dollars needed to support the yuan in the wake of a shock devaluation two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the matter.
Channels for such transactions include China selling directly, as well as through agents in Belgium and Switzerland, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as the information isn’t public. China has communicated with U.S. authorities about the sales, said another person. They didn’t reveal the size of the disposals.
The People’s Bank of China has been offloading dollars and buying yuan to support the exchange rate, a policy that’s contributed to a $315 billion drop in its foreign-exchange reserves over the last 12 months. The $3.65 trillion stockpile will fall by some $40 billion a month in the remainder of 2015 because of the intervention, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey.
New Boss on Construction Sites Is a Drone
August 27th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
For some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint. The drones will almost certainly notice.
The workers building a lavish new downtown stadium for the Sacramento Kings in California are being monitored by drones and software that can automatically flag slow progress.
Once per day, several drones automatically patrol the Sacramento work site, collecting video footage. That footage is then converted into a three-dimensional picture of the site, which is fed into software that compares it to computerized architectural plans as well as a the construction work plan showing when each element should be finished. The software can show managers how the project is progressing, and can automatically highlight parts that may be falling behind schedule.
India Just Turned Off Mobile Internet for 63 Million Citizens Amid Protests in Ahmedabad
August 27th, 201563 million!
Imagine everyone in California and Texas without mobile data access.
Via: The Next Web:
Mobile internet services have been blocked in the Indian state of Gujarat (home to nearly 63 million people), following violent protests led by the Patel community after one of its leaders was detained by local police in Ahmedabad.
North Dakota Police Can Now Use Drones with Less Than Lethal Weapons
August 26th, 2015Via: The Daily Beast:
It is now legal for law enforcement in North Dakota to fly drones armed with everything from Tasers to tear gas thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist.
With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, no one noticed that the state became the first in the union to allow police to equip drones with “less than lethal” weapons. House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a lobbyist representing law enforcement—tight with a booming drone industry—got his hands on it.
The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Rep. Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.
Then Bruce Burkett of North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. “Less than lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones.
How Companies Make Millions Off Lead-Poisoned, Poor Blacks
August 26th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
Rose sold everything to Access Funding — 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.
In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
Rose, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that her full name not be used, had just tumbled into the little-noticed, effectively unregulated netherworld of structured settlements.
Traditional settlements are paid in one immediate lump sum. But these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money. Since 1975, insurance companies have committed an estimated $350 billion to structured settlements. This has given rise to a secondary market in which dozens of firms compete to purchase the rights to those payments for a fraction of their face value.
Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked
August 26th, 2015Via: The Awl:
The centerpiece of the CIA’s effort to organize the efforts of anti-Communist artists and intellectuals was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Established in 1950 and headquartered in Paris, the CCF brought together prominent thinkers under the rubric of anti-totalitarianism. For the CIA, it was an opportunity to guarantee that anti-Communist ideas were not voiced only by reactionary speakers; most of the CCF’s members were liberals or socialists of the anti-Communist variety. With CIA personnel scattered throughout the leadership, including at the very top, the CCF ran lectures, conferences, concerts, and art galleries. It helped bring the Boston Symphony Orchestra to Europe in 1952, for example, as part of an effort to convince skeptical Europeans of American cultural sophistication and thus capacity for leadership in the bipolar world of the Cold War. By purchasing thousands of advance copies that it gave away for free, the CCF supported the publication of many of the era’s anti-Communist classics, such as Milovan Djilas’ The New Class. But its most impressive achievement was a stable of sophisticated literary and political magazines. The CCF’s flagship journal was the London-based Encounter, but it also published Preuves in France, Tempo Presente in Italy, Forum in Austria, Quadrant in Australia, Jiyu in Japan, and Cuadernos and Mundo Nuevo in Latin America, among many others.
