VIDEO: Black Man Pulled Over by White Cop for 'Making Direct Eye Contact'

In 2015, 1,134 black men were killed by police in the United States, including several high profile cases like Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old shot by the Cleveland, Ohio police, Walter Scott, shot by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by a Chicago, Illinois police officer. In the case of McDonald, while the shooting took place in 2014, the case became a public sensation in November 2015 with the release of a dashcam video that allegedly contradicted the police reports. [Source]

This Black Driver’s Mistake Was Looking a Police Officer in the Eye

August 28, 2015

Slate - John Felton was driving to his brother’s house in Dayton, Ohio, on a recent night when he noticed a police car tailing him. Not wanting to give the officer any excuse to pull him over, Felton, who is black and was visiting Dayton from Michigan, tried to drive extra carefully. But the effort was insufficient: Soon after making a turn, Felton was forced to stop his car and show the officer his driver’s license.

It turned out Felton had not switched on his turn signal at the exact right moment; as you can see from the video Felton made of the encounter and sent to talk show host David Pakman, the white officer told him he had failed to signal within 100 feet of making his turn.

But why, Felton wanted to know, had the officer decided to follow him in the first place? That’s when the stop went from being an ordinary illustration of racial profiling to an extraordinary one.

"You made direct eye contact with me and held onto it when I was passing you," the officer told Fenton. 

The implication was that Fenton had marked himself as a suspicious character simply by looking at the officer.

Update, Aug. 28, 5:10 p.m.: The city of Dayton put out a statement about the incident, acknowledging that "making direct eye contact with an officer is not a basis for a traffic stop.” The statement implies—but doesn’t say outright—that in pulling Felton over for not signaling within 100 feet of a turn, the officer was complying with a Dayton police initiative called "Safe Communities Through Aggressive Traffic Enforcement,” aimed at reducing traffic-related fatalities. The statement also says that the police department "is in contact with Mr. Felton,” and that he "has agreed to a conversation with the officer, facilitated by the Dayton Mediation Center” that will "allow Mr. Felton and the Officer to discuss the specifics of the incident.”

For those who have been following the past year in race relations between police officers and black people, that will sound familiar: Making eye contact with cops was also what set off a chase in Baltimore that ended with Freddie Gray sustaining fatal injuries in the back of a van.

During a eulogy, the Rev. Jamal Bryant to say the following to Gray’s mother:

On April 12 at 8:39 in the morning, four officers on bicycles saw your son. And your son, in a subtlety of revolutionary stance, did something black men were trained to know not to do. He looked police in the eye. And when he looked the police in the eye, they knew that there was a threat, because they're used to black men with their head bowed down low, with their spirit broken. He was a threat simply because he was man enough to look somebody in authority in the eye. I want to tell this grieving mother ... you are not burying a boy, you are burying a grown man. He knew that one of the principles of being a man is looking somebody in the eye.

John Felton made it out of his encounter with the Dayton police officer with only a citation. As you can see from watching his video, he knew it could have been worse.

“No disrespect—I don’t have nothing against police officers,” Felton said after being pulled over. “But with all the shit that’s going on, that’s some scary shit, to have a police officer just trailing you.”

Not that he was surprised—you can hear him say “Didn't I say he was going to do this?” to his brother at the beginning of the interaction. Nor should he have been. According to the book Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, a sociological study of traffic stops in the Kansas City metropolitan area, black people are much more likely to be pulled over for so-called investigatory stops—in which the purported violation is extremely minor, like failing to signal, as opposed to serious, like driving drunk—than white people. As my colleague Jamelle Bouie wrote after the murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina—following a traffic stop for a busted taillight—the study found that more than half of all stops for blacks were for minor violations, as opposed to just 34 percent of stops for whites. 

TIP: Be like most cops and wear sunglasses, and then they can't accuse you of making direct eye contact. Also, when pulled over, always have your hands in front of you, on the steering wheel, where they can see them.

Federal Reserve Might Not Raise Interest Rates in September Due to China's Slowing Economy

China is the biggest holder of reserve assets in the world, holding a combination of bonds, currencies and commodities like gold. It held $1,271 billion in U.S. Treasurys at the end of June 2015, according to data from the Treasury Department. Societe Generale analysts estimate that the People's Bank of China (PBoC) has sold at least $106 billion of U.S. reserve assets since announcing its currency devaluation on August 11, 2015. China had cut its holdings of U.S. Treasurys to raise the U.S. dollars needed to support the yuan. [Source]

China has officially ruined everything for everybody [Excerpt]

August 27, 2015

Quartz - We know China is big. By some measures, China is now a bigger chunk of the global economy than the US.

But it’s also slowing.

This slowdown matters. A lot. China is the world’s largest consumer of—in no particular order—copper, steel, iron ore, automobiles, aluminum, mobile phones, nickel, rice, tobacco, meat, Swiss watches, television, rubber, potash, energy, robots, beer, machine tools, red wine, flavored milk, rare earths, wheat, coal, as well as plenty of other raw materials and products.

And because of China’s seemingly endless demand for such sundries, companies—and entire countries—have built their business and economic strategies around catering to the People’s Republic.

That means China’s problems are the world’s problems.

The US economy is not built around supply exports to China. So, in that sense, the country enjoys a bit more insulation from China than many others.

But the US does import a lot of stuff from China, and one of the most important imports—at least lately—has been deflation.

Because of slack conditions in the Chinese industrial sector, producer prices—prices of goods as they leave the factory gate—have been tumbling.

That, along with the devaluation of the Chinese currency, should put further downward pressure on US import prices.

Ostensibly that’s a good thing for consumers.

On the other hand, that deflationary pressure will make it even more difficult for the Federal Reserve to achieve its goal of getting inflation up to a level where it feels like it can raise interest rates. Inflation remains abnormally low, largely due to low oil prices. But the Chinese situation won’t help matters either.

Markets are now much less sure that the Fed will finally start raising interest rates for the first time in roughly nine years in September.

Former U.S. Soldiers and Increasingly Militarized Police Forces

The military defends the nation from abroad; cops defend it from within. Ninety-nine percent of the work a cop will do is traffic stops, investigations, and show of force. They do train to use their weapon if needed, but firefights are not the bread and butter of their job. Infantry in the military, on the other hand, trains for combat, mainly large scale combat. The military doesn't teach you how to restrain people or prevent injuries to your combatants. A board established by Gov. John Kasich is considering ways to make needless use of violence by law enforcement officers less common. Suggestions, some already adopted by the General Assembly, have included better education requirements and improved training. Another idea, one the board is studying, is standards for when police officers and sheriffs' deputies can use force. All of this will help. But the bottom line - individual officers' psychological traits - has not received adequate attention. Is a certain officer easily rattled in stressful situations? Does another enjoy harassing people? Is yet another given to using his weapons even if they are not necessary? And how can law enforcement officials tell these things about their officers and deputies? There is a difference between the military and police, of course, and it is an excellent reason for Kasich's panel to talk to the Pentagon: On the streets, deadly force should always be a last resort. In fact, one prized character trait in the military - aggressiveness - is a drawback in law enforcement. You may not want a soldier who is courteous, patient and understanding, but those aren't bad things to have in a cop. [Source]

Cops or soldiers? [Excerpt]

March 22, 2014

The Economist - Civil libertarians such as Radley Balko, the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop”, fret that the American police are becoming too much like soldiers. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie, paramilitary police units) were first formed to deal with violent civil unrest and life-threatening situations: shoot-outs, rescuing hostages, serving high-risk warrants and entering barricaded buildings, for instance. Their mission has crept.

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a license”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organizing cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit because they “want to keep up” with larger forces.

The courts have smiled on SWAT raids. They often rely on “no-knock” warrants, which authorize police to force their way into a home without announcing themselves. This was once considered constitutionally dubious. But the Supreme Court has ruled that police may enter a house without knocking if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that announcing their presence would be dangerous or allow the suspect to destroy evidence (for example, by flushing drugs down the toilet).

Read the whole thing

Watch the video:

With Aid of the Pentagon, Police Develop Military Mind Set [Excerpt]

September 12, 1999

Diane Cecilia Weber - Since 1981, when Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Official Act, the military has become increasingly involved in civilian law enforcement, and has been encouraged to share equipment, training, facilities and technology with civilian enforcement agencies.

Who are the Psychopaths That Rule the World, the Tiny Occult Elite?

The Corbett Report
Published on March 15, 2013

SHOW NOTES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=7094

In this sixth part of the ongoing Sibel Edmonds Gladio B conversation, we ask the question: Who is at the top of the pyramid. We look beyond the usual suspects and follow the money back to the industries and lobbies whose existence depends on the perpetuation of boogeymen enemies.

Follow the money, which gives you power. The winners of war are the people who are able to make a lot of money from it. Follow the money to see who are the ultimate winners. Look at the War Industry [Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc.], Oil, Financial Institutions [Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, etc.], and Heroin [the CIA traffics heroin and other drugs and uses the drug money to fund covert operations].

Germany Initiates Move to Ban GMO Crops

Germany starts move to ban GMO crops: ministry letter

August 24, 2015

Reuters - Germany has initiated a move to stop the growing of genetically modified crops under new European Union rules, documents seen by Reuters showed on Monday.

German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt has informed German state governments of his intention to tell the EU that Germany will make use of new "opt-out" rules to stop GMO crop cultivation even if varieties have been approved by the EU, a letter from the agriculture ministry seen by Reuters shows.

A new EU law approved in March cleared the way for new GMO crops to be approved after years of previous deadlock. But the law also gave individual countries the right to opt out by banning GMO crops even after they have been approved as safe by the European Commission.

Widely-grown in the Americas and Asia, GMO crops have divided opinion in Europe. Britain is among those in favor of them, while France and Germany are among those opposed.

Previously, when the EU approved crops as safe to produce they had to be permitted for cultivation in all EU states.

In the letter, the ministry stressed that Schmidt is continuing a previously-announced policy to keep a ban on GMOs in Germany.

Under the new EU rules, countries have until Oct. 3, 2015, to inform the Commission that they wish to opt out of new EU GMO cultivation approvals, the ministry letter said.

Schmidt has asked German state authorities to say by Sept. 11 whether their region should be included in the opt-out, the letter said.

Iran Unveils New Missile and Says It Seeks Peace Through Strength

Iran unveils new missile, says seeks peace through strength

August 22, 2015

Reuters - Iran on Saturday unveiled a new surface-to-surface missile it said could strike targets with pin-point accuracy within a range of 500 km (310 miles) and it said military might was a precondition for peace and effective diplomacy.

The defense ministry's unveiling of the solid-fuel missile, named Fateh 313, came little more than a month after Iran and world powers reached a deal that requires Tehran to abide by new limits on its nuclear program in return for Western governments easing economic sanctions.

According to that deal, any transfer to Iran of ballistic missile technology during the next eight years will be subject to the approval of the United Nations Security Council, and the United States has promised to veto any such requests. An arms embargo on conventional weapons also stays, preventing their import and export for five years.

But Iran has said it will not follow parts of the nuclear deal that restricts its military capabilities, a stance reaffirmed by President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday.

"We will buy, sell and develop any weapons we need and we will not ask for permission or abide by any resolution for that," he said in a speech at the unveiling ceremony broadcast live on state television.

"We can negotiate with other countries only when we are powerful. If a country does not have power and independence, it cannot seek real peace," he said.

The defense ministry said the Fateh 313, unveiled on Iran's Defence Industry Day, had already been successfully tested and that mass production would start soon.

Iran has one of the largest missile programs in the Middle East. It wants to export arms to its allies in the region and import anti-missile systems to prevent any possible attack by its arch-foe Israel.

Israel's Former Defense Minister Says Netanyahu Pushed to Attack Iran at Least Three Times in the Past Few Years

Netanyahu pressed for Iran attacks, but was denied: ex-defense chief

August 22, 2015

Reuters - Israel's political leaders pushed to attack Iran at least three times in the past few years but had to back down on the advice of the military and due to concerns about its ally the United States, former defense minister Ehud Barak said.

In interviews to his biographers aired late on Friday by Israel's Channel Two, Barak said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted military operations against Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Israel has regularly hinted it could attack Iran to stop it getting nuclear weapons, something Teheran denies it is seeking.

In 2010, the Israeli leadership wanted an attack but the military said it did not have "operational capability," said Barak, defense minister between 2007 and 2013, and prime minister in 1999-2001.

In 2011, two ministers in a top security forum convened to discuss an attack changed their mind and decided against it, Barak said.

In 2012 the timing coincided with a joint military exercise with the United States. "We intended to carry it out," Barak said, but going ahead with an attack on Iran while U.S. forces were conducting the exercise would have been bad timing.

"You're asking and demanding America to respect your sovereignty when making a decision to do it even if America objects and it's against her interests, you can't go in the opposite direction and force America in when they're here on a drill that was known ahead of time," Barak said.

Netanyahu's spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Like Israel, the United States, had said military action was an option if diplomatic efforts failed to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons. The Obama administration says a deal agreed with Tehran in July will prevent Iran getting the bomb.

That agreement is opposed by Israel, which believes it will be ineffective and allow Tehran to exert greater international influence.

The Global Warming Cycle Ended in 1998

In a Geological Society of America abstract by Dr. Easterbrook, data showed we were in a global warming cycle from 1977 to 1998, at which time we entered into a new global cooling period that should last for the next three decades. The Pacific Ocean has a warm temperature mode and a cool temperature mode, and in the past century has switched back and forth between these two modes every 25-30 years. This is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. In 1977 the Pacific abruptly shifted from its cool mode (where it had been since about 1945) into its warm mode, and this initiated global warming from 1977 to 1998. The PDO typically lasts 25-30 years and assures North America of cool, wetter climates during its cool phases and warmer, drier climates during its warm phases. The establishment of the cool PDO in 1998, together with similar cooling of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), virtually assures several decades of global cooling and the end of the past 30-year warm phase.  

PDO typically lasts 25-30 years:

1. 1945 - 1977: PDO cool phase (27 years)
2. 1977 - 1998: PDO warm phase (21 years)
3. 1998 - 2028: PDO cool phase (30 years)

[Source]

 

Water vapor is the overwhelming greenhouse gas [it is 30 to 50 times more important than carbon dioxide (CO2)], and CO2 attributed to man is minuscule. Yet government-paid scientists claim HUMAN-INDUCED CO2 is the primary climate driver and must be eliminated to save the earth. Of course man is prideful enough to think he is a major player when in actuality man is an insignificant producer of CO2.

The greatest amount of CO2 is locked up in plants, rocks and the oceans. It should not be surprising that these each contribute more CO2 emissions than any other sources. This is a good thing, since there is a relatively stable and finite amount of both oxygen and carbon on this planet.

If it weren’t for carbon dioxide, the earth could well be a frozen ball in space, and life, as we know it, would probably not be able to survive.

The largest emitters of carbon dioxide are volcanic eruptions, forest and wild fires, and natural decomposition of plants and animals. Thankfully, ocean water has a great propensity for absorbing this gas, and, as ice melts, it means that the oceans can take in a great deal more CO2.

1. The biggest source of CO2 emissions is volcanic eruptions. At any given time, according to agencies such as the USGS, there are about 13-17 volcanoes erupting somewhere on Earth.

2. Next in line for emissions is the natural decomposition of plant life.

3. The next biggest emitter of carbon dioxide is probably the ocean.

4. Other large emitters of carbon dioxide are forest and wild fires.

A person may wonder where man and animals fit into all of this. Animals and mankind breathe in oxygen and breath out CO2, and their bodies also contain CO2 and carbon, which is released when they die and decompose. Man burns fossil fuels, which release CO2 as a byproduct. Animals and mankind don’t produce nearly as much carbon dioxide as the major producers, with the possible exception of the death and decomposition of animals.

The instrument temperature records since 1850 or so (until satellite measures started in the 1970s) which are used to prove human-induced global warming (AGW) have been shown to be inaccurate, unreliable, and tainted by numerous errors. Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, suggests that since the IPCC climate models are now so far off from what is actually happening, that their projections for both this decade and century must be considered highly unreliable.

No Global Warming for 17 Years, 6 Months – (No Warming for 210 Months)

March 4, 2014  

Lord Christopher Monckton, Climate Depot - Seventeen and a half years. Not a flicker of global warming. The RSS satellite record, the first of the five global-temperature datasets to report its February value, shows a zero trend for an impressive 210 months. 

The graph above shows no global warming at all for 17 years 6 months (as of March 2014):

Monctkon analysis: 

1: This graph is highly topical. It is right up to date. Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. (RSS) is one of the two satellite-based datasets (the other is the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). And RSS is one of the five standard global temperature datasets, which include the two satellite datasets and the three terrestrial datasets – Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS); the Hadley Centre/CRU dataset, version 4 (HadCRUT4); and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). As this month, RSS is usually the first to report, and its latest monthly value, for February 2014, became available just hours ago. 

2: The satellite datasets are based on measurements made by the most accurate thermometers available – platinum resistance thermometers, which not only measure temperature at various altitudes above the Earth’s surface via microwave sounding units but also constantly calibrate themselves by measuring the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation, which is 1% of the freezing point of water, or just 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. It was by measuring minuscule variations of the cosmic background radiation that the NASA anisotropy probe enabled the age of the Universe to be determined: it is 13.82 billion years.

Netanyahu Wants to Retain Sanctions to Keep Iran Hobbled and Politically Outcast

Netanyahu doesn’t care about Iran getting the bomb

August 12, 2015

Paul W. Kahn, Al Jazeera - When politicians speak nonsense, it is a good bet that there is something else going on behind the scenes that cannot be said directly. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements about the Iranian nuclear accord are nonsense. So what is really going on? One cannot know for sure, but things become a good deal clearer when we begin with a startling idea:  Netanyahu does not care whether Iran has the bomb. 

Israel has real enemies and real security worries. They just don’t happen to include Iran, which is far away and unlikely to intervene directly in Israel. Israel’s immediate security concerns are in Gaza and southern Lebanon, where it has repeatedly fought Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran provides millions of dollars of support, including weapons, to Israel’s enemies. It is altogether likely that that support will increase when and if the Iranian economy improves. American-led sanctions would continue to hobble that economy. 

Money and politics are what this dispute is about, not nuclear bombs. This is what Netanyahu will not say, for to focus on Israel’s real enemies is also to raise the issue of what more Israel could do to end the dispute with the Palestinians, which is at the heart of all of this. 

First, the nonsense. Netanyahu argues that the proposed deal will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, which would threaten the very existence of Israel. He objects that Iran will be able to develop its centrifuge technology such that in 15 years, when the limits on nuclear production end, Iran will be in a position to quickly develop a bomb. He argues that the possibility of a 24-day procedural delay before inspectors can arrive to check out any alleged violation would allow Iran to cover up its illicit activities.

But the absurdities become apparent when you consider the alternative, Iran without an agreement. Suppose he is right that Iran can comply while still developing its nuclear knowhow, which would allow it to develop a bomb quickly at the end of the agreement. Yet without an agreement, Iran may be only months away from the construction of a bomb should it choose to go that route. How is 15 years not better than 15 months?