San Francisco Chronicle propaganda article on Oscar Grant case

Today in the San Francisco Chronicle there was an article on the front page of the local news section about some protests regarding the Oscar Grant killing. The protesters who claim Oscar Grant was murdered were claiming to be imitating Grant's position when he was shot, lying face down with their hands behind their backs. The reporter, Demian Bulwa, accepted that this was in fact how Grant was positioned, stating in the article:

they lay in the street mimicking Grant's position when he was shot - prone with his hands behind his back.

And one of the two featured photos was captioned:

Counterprotesters lie in the street with their hands behind their backs to illustrate the unarmed Grant's position when Mehserle shot him.

The problem with this is that the BART officer, Mehserle, testified Grant did not have both hands available to be handcuffed and that is why he decided to Tase Grant:

But when attempting to arrest Grant, the former officer testified that it turned into a brief struggle for the man’s hands.

“His hands were underneath him,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention to his left hand, I was trying to get his right hand.”

Mehserle said he saw Grant’s right hand reach into his pocket.

“It made me question what his intentions were…I knew the right front pocket was a place where people kept–,” Mehserle then paused.

“Guns.”

It was at this point the former officer said he decided to Tase Grant.

The attorney prosecuting the case (who wanted Mehserle charged with murder), Stein, also says that Grant didn't have his hand available to be handcuffed and explained why in this San Francisco Chronicle article (by the same reporter Demian Bulwa):

Stein said that before Mehserle fired his single shot, the prone Grant had tried to get his right hand behind his back to be handcuffed. However, the prosecutor said, officers had pinned him against the outstretched left leg of a friend, Carlos Reyes, who was also detained.

He referred to the TV screens, where footage of the shooting showed Reyes' leg moving a split second before the gunshot, and Grant's right arm coming back at about the same time.

The San Francisco Chronicle is treating as fact something that seems clearly false to me. It is inserting this propaganda in what is presented as a straight news story. Clearly, the judge, having heard the evidence, believed that the decision to Tase was appropriate under the circumstances when he ruled out murder as an option for the jury. And clearly the jury believed that the decision to Tase was appropriate under the circumstances when they convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Here is the court's compilation of the eyewitness videos from cell phones. You can see from various vantage points and it is clear Grant was resisting being handcuffed.



I wonder if the attorney for the civil suit by Grant's family, Burris, is behind the attempts to create the belief that Grant was not resisting arrest. But why is the San Francisco Chronicle playing along?

Humbolt County: More Bad Trips for LSD Users

Humbolt County in Northern California is "the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California." The county has been ceded to the marijuana growing industry, as one can see in the film Humbolt County. But now I see in the San Franicisco Chronicle that LSD is a problem there.

Police in one Humboldt County town are warning LSD users to beware after responding to a rash of incidents apparently connected to bad acid trips.

Arcata police say the problems began last month when officers responded to a home where paramedics found a 31-year-old man who had castrated himself.

I followed this to the source in the Eureka Times-Standard, Arcata Police Report Rash of Bad LSD Trips:

It started on April 18, when officers responded to a residence to help Arcata-Mad River Ambulance personnel with a 31-year-old man who had just castrated himself. Medics and officers couldn't find the man's testicles, according to APD, and he later told police that he'd flushed them down the toilet because they contained “monsters.”

Then, beginning on May 8, the incidents picked up. A 21-year old man took LSD and wandered from his home without adequate clothing or shoes and without saying where he was going. The man wandered in the forest for two days while his family and friends looked for him. He returned two days later, according to police.

The next day, police were called to Mad River Hospital to assist with a combative 19-year-old man reportedly undergoing flashbacks -- two weeks after he took LSD.

And the list goes on.

The police are not sure if the recent incidents are due to bad LSD or an increase in usage because the police have not been able to obtain samples related to the incidents, according to Arcata Police Chief Tom Chapman. He also made some general observations about the drug:

Chapman said people using the drug can become a danger to themselves and others, and that its use can trigger a mental health “break” in someone with underlying mental health issues.

Arcata is Humbolt County's college town, home of Humbolt State University.

Just Completed My Absentee Ballot -- Voted for Poizner

Last night I received a phone call from one of the automated polling companies. At first I thought it was another Robo-Call. But, it wasn't, so I listened. The questions were about my opinions of the Republican Primary candidates for governor and senator. I used to hang up on these automated polls, but this time I listened to the questions and pressed the number on my phone to answer each one. I wasn't completely honest. On Meg Whitman, I chose the number to indicate I had heard about her and had no opinion. In fact, I had formed a negative opinion of her, but I wasn't quite ready to tell that to the machine.

I have been receiving so many robo-calls this past week. And many Meg Whitman mailers. A few weeks ago, I was a lucky recipient of the Meg Mag, a 48 page magazine titled Meg 2010: Building a New California. I was going to vote for her until I received that extravaganza. The state of California is going broke and she is running as a fiscal conservative who will get the state spending under control. Before the Meg Mag I knew she was spending $65 million on her Primary campaign (well, $68 million now, but who's counting?) and I recognized intellectually that she was spending too much.

But when I got the Meg Mag I couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance. I thought of the old saying "the medium is the message". Whatever good was in the content of the Meg mag, the message I got was the profligacy of creating such a campaign mailer. It is the size of a news weekly. And many pages are just photographs, with maybe a caption or a few lines of text. The message I got was: Spendthrift.

I decided to pay attention to Steve Poizner. And I liked what I saw. As Deborah Saunders explains in her piece on the Meg Mag, Whitman can spend, but can she govern?, Poizner has been

a Republican active in politics over the last decade. While Whitman didn't even register as a Republican until 2007, Poizner volunteered in public schools, steeped himself in the charter school movement and ran for office in a decidedly Democratic district. Failing in that race, he went on to win the state insurance commissioner's post, a rare statewide office win for a Republican. Poizner proclaimed, "I'm not a rookie."

The I got another Meg Whitman vanity piece. This is smaller than the Meg Mag, but even worse in terms of its message. The cover is a large photo of Meg Whitman as a young girl with her mother. Her mother looks nice in a Barbara Bush sort of way and Meg is about 12 or so. Then you open the cover and there is a portrait photo of Meg, again at about 12 or so. The text on the accompanying page reads

"My mom, Margaret, was a determined woman and taught me I could accomplish anything. When we were young, she packed my brother, sister, and me into a Ford Econoline van, and we spent three months car-camping throughout the West" California seemed larger than life, a place where anything seemed possible."

I thought, this is ridiculous. This is childish. The point we Californians have learned is that anything is not possible, at least any more. We are going broke! Why are you spending your money sending me this?

So, now I've shared my secret with you all, the negative opinion I've formed of Meg Whitman. And I've marked my ballot. I voted for Poizner because he has shown an interest in the issues facing California for many years now. He is currently serving in state government. And I think he will hold up better against Jerry Brown in the General Election. Brown is frugal and always was. Whitman has proven herself to be a spendthrift. And California needs a frugal governor.

Arizona: 46% of K-2nd grade school children are "English Language Learners"

The people of the state of Arizona say they are being overwhelmed by non-English speaking illegal immigrants and their children. Maybe it is true. I found this table in an article in the Wall Street Journal last Friday on education of non-English speaking school children in Arizona:



How much extra does it cost the state per pupil to educate "English Language Learners"?

Here's a news article I found that says the legal formula estimates the extra costs of educating the English Language Learners at 40 million but:

Horne places that cost at a fraction of the amount put together by the Arizona School Administrators at $304 million. Horne explained he arrived at the $40 million after he weeded out extra costs and deleted textbooks and classroom-space expenses because they are not allowed under the formula created to guide spending on ELL instruction.

Much of the $40 million covers the hiring of 1,500 extra teachers, he said.

Why aren't the newspapers talking abut this when they report on the new legislation in Arizona?

Update: I just found a report from the California Legislative Analyst's Office on the 2007-8 budget that says that for California "Nearly 40 percent of the state’s kindergarteners and roughly one-third of the state’s elementary school students are classified as EL."

Bill to eliminate research to cure pedophilia

There is a new bill being proposed to the California legislature this week, AB2199, to repeal Section 8050 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which reads:

8050. The State Department of Mental Health, acting through the
superintendent of the Langley Porter Clinic, shall plan, conduct, and
cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures
of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes
against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality, and into methods of identifying potential sex offenders.

The bill to repeal this was introduced by California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, but according to the Sacramento Bee, the gay rights group Equality California is the motivating factor behind this move:

Lowenthal's chief of staff, Will Shuck, said the section was brought to Lowenthal's attention by Equality California, the state's largest gay-rights group.

"This section of the code is deplorable," said Geoff Kors, the group's executive director, because it implies both that homosexuality is an illness and that gays are a threat to children.

And their sponsorship of the bill is confirmed on the Equality California website.

But if the language making the link with homosexuality was really the problem, couldn't the section have been revised like this to strike out the part about homosexuality and continue the parts about sex crimes against children?

8050. (my example of a proposed revision) The State Department of Mental Health, acting through the
superintendent of the Langley Porter Clinic, shall plan, conduct, and
cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures
of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes
against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality, and into methods of identifying potential sex offenders.

That would be simple, right? So I am wondering if Equality Califiornia doesn't want the state to fund research into "the causes and and cures of sexual deviations conducive to sex crimes against children and into methods of identifying potential sexual offenders." Is it possible that gay rights advocates are concerned that such research might lead back to homosexuality? Or is it that the gay rights ideology of sexual expression ultimately does require support of child sexual abusers as well as homosexuals?

Wolf in sheep's clothing: Liberal media doesn't get it

The new anti-Tom Campbell ad from Carly Fiorina's campaign is being dissed by the elites. It is very campy, very funny, over the top. But it sort of works. And maybe it works better if you know the Christian cultural reference from the Sermon on the Mount.



For example, Michael Scherer at Time totally misses the meaning of the red eyed creature disguised in the sheep's hide, calling it an "alien robot sheep, or something" Uh, Michael, that's the wolf in sheep's clothing. And Sherer seems to be unaware that it is culturally normative for Christians to think of themselves as sheep when he writes:
"The coolest part of the whole thing is that Fiorina is positing fiscal conservatives as sheep, which is a bit like Barack Obama running a spot that posits liberals as leeches or lizards,". That only makes sense if there is some canonical text that most liberals use that also uses a metaphor in which they are referred to as leeches or lizards.

All I can think is we have a media elite who don't know some of the primary cultural references of the majority of voters.

Matthew 7:15 (New International Version), quoting Jesus:

"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves."

Also from Paul's speech to the elders in Acts 20:28-30 (New International Version)

28 Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.[a] Be shepherds of the church of God,[b] which he bought with his own blood. 29 I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. 30 Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them.

12 year old raped at SF East Bay middle school

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that a 12 year old girl was raped in the stairwell of Portola Middle School in El Cerrito last Thursday. Classes were in session. The accused boy is 14. There was a witness who went to get authorities.

A new article this morning in the Chronicle by Jill Tucker has a paragraph with some facts on the number of violent incidents and discipline measures taken at Portola Middle School. We learn that last Spring, some students a Portola attacked a music teacher, pelting her with rocks and knocking her to the ground.

Last school year, Portola reported 381 suspensions and two expulsions, including 76 incidents of violence or force - most notably the rock-throwing incident involving several students who attacked a music teacher, hitting her and knocking her to the ground after she refused them entry to a classroom. Yet overall, the school had a lower suspension/expulsion rate than most of the district's other middle schools, according to state Department of Education records.

If several students attacked the music teacher, there should be more than two expulsions for the year. This indicates an unwillingness to exercise appropriate discipline by the school's authorities. (Where is a Safe Schools Czar when we need one?)

Portola Middle School is in a neighborhood of homes that cost around half a million. Here is a Zillow of the neighborhood.

Across the street from Portola is the Middle School of Prospect Sierra School, a private K-8.

Tuition for 2009-2010

Elementary School (K-4): $18,975
Middle School (5-8): $20,950

So, the family pays $500,000 for a home. And for an additional $21,000 a year, they can keep their children separated from the worst elements at their age level.

California does Copenhagen

California has "hundreds, if not thousands" of politicians, "academic superstars, green-tech gurus, environmentalists and college students" at the climate conference in Copenhagen this week according to this article by Margot Roosevelt in the Los Angeles Times. And in this photograph accompanying the article, we can see not all are in fancy limousines. Some are walking the talk. Or biking the talk, anyway, whatever.


Daniel Sperling, a U.C. Davis professor, bicycles in Copenhagen with his California Air Resources Board colleague Anthony Eggert. (BreAnda Northcutt / For The Times.)

What are they there for?

None of the Californians are involved in the actual negotiations, which are led by diplomats behind closed doors. "Interacting with a delegate is about as likely as a comet colliding with a planet," said Margaret Bruce, director of the Center for Climate Action, a California-based nonprofit.

But that's not the idea. At hundreds of side panels, conferences, receptions and exhibits, everyone who is anyone in the world of carbon control gets a chance to rub shoulders with other players.

"This is Disneyland for policy wonks," said Gary Gero, president of the Los Angeles-based Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit that designs protocols for greenhouse gas offsets.