Police misconduct may spread like a contagion, new study suggests

Stephan:  Every week I read stories of police abuse of power, often resulting in the death of someone, particularly if they are a person of color. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 372 men and women have been murdered during interactions with the police. European and Asian friends tell me that the general take in their world is that if you come to the states, which fewer do now, avoid the police. They are not there to help you; American police are militaristic, dangerous, and to be avoided. Here is some actual data on this issue.

Police officers in a crowded London street
Credit: GUY CORBISHLEY/ALAMY

In the late 1990s, Los Angeles Police Department detectives in California uncovered one of the biggest policing scandals in modern U.S. history. More than 70 officers in the antigang unit of the city’s Rampart Division were accused of stealing drugs, robbing banks, beating suspects, framing defendants, and—in a separate civil suit—conspiring to murder rapper Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G. Researchers have long studied patterns of misconduct in such “rogue units,” to see whether they can identify how misbehavior spreads from one officer to another. Now, a team of economists says it has gone even further and measured, for the first time, the influence that misbehaving officers have on one other.

The approach is “promising,” says Robert Worden, a political scientist who studies criminal justice at the State University of New York in Albany, who was not involved with the work. But he’s skeptical that it reveals anything about how police misconduct really spreads. “It’s really hard to pull together that kind of data,” he says. “There’s no magic bullet.”

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Banned bread: why does the US allow additives that Europe says are unsafe?

Stephan:  Here is yet more on the American food crisis trend, and once again the fundamental of the story is that in the United States profit is more important than the health and wellbeing of the people who live in this country, and the laws are rigged by a corrupt Congress, and president (and not just Trump or Republicans) in service to their corporate masters.

In America, you may find in a loaf of bread ingredients with industrial applications. Credit: Getty

Give us this day our daily foam expander. It may sound odd, but in America, your loaf of bread can contain ingredients with industrial applications – additives that also appear in things like yoga mats, pesticides, hair straighteners, explosives and petroleum products.

Some of these chemicals, used as optional whiteners, dough conditioners and rising agents, may be harmful to human health. Potassium bromate, a potent oxidizer that helps bread rise, has been linked to kidney and thyroid cancers in rodents. Azodicarbonamide (ACA), a chemical that forms bubbles in foams and plastics like vinyl, is used to bleach and leaven dough – but when baked, it, too, has been linked to cancer in lab animals.

Other countries, including China, Brazil and members of the European Union, have weighed the potential risks and decided to outlaw potassium bromate in food. India banned it in 2016, and the UK has forbidden it since 1990. Azodicarbonamide has been banned for consumption by the European Union […]

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Mitch McConnell’s new admission confirms he pulled a historic fraud on the American people

Stephan:  Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chou, Secretary of Transportation (see SR yesterday), are so openly and blatantly corrupt that they would be comic relief if it were a play. But it is not, it is the American government, and your life and the lives of your family are directly affected by their lack of integrity. I think you have to ask, what is wrong with the voters of Kentucky that they keep sending this loathsome man back to Congress?

Republican Senator and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made plain on Tuesday that he’s just as manipulative, mendacious, and unprincipled as any of his critics have ever said.

CNN reported that at a Paducah Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Kentucky on Tuesday, someone asked if Republicans would fill a Supreme Court seat if it opened up in 2020:

Of course, this admission confirms that he never believed the principle that he propounded in 2020 after Justice Antonin Scalia died, that no Supreme Court justice should be confirmed during a presidential election year. Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate never even considered President Barack Obama’s nominee Judge Merrick Garland. This was based on a made-up principle at the time, with no justification and no rational basis, but McConnell pretended that he believed it, and the Republican Party went right along with him.

He said the decision to block Garland was about “a principle, not a person.”

The principle, he said, was based on the idea that voters […]

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The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate

Stephan:  Chris Hedges is telling us something very important about what is going on with mainstream corporate media. This is one of the main reasons I began SR 20 some years ago.

Credit: Mr. Fish / Truthdig

In “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” published in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky exposed the techniques that the commercial media used to promote and defend the economic, social and political agendas of the ruling elites. These techniques included portraying victims as either worthy or unworthy of sympathy. A Catholic priest such as Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, murdered by the communist regime in Poland in 1984, was deified, but four Catholic missionaries who were raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by U.S.-backed death squads were slandered as fellow travelers of the “Marxist” rebel movement. The techniques also included both narrowing the debate in a way that buttressed the elite consensus and intentionally failing to challenge the intentions of the ruling elites or the actual structures of power.

“Manufacturing Consent” was published on the eve of three revolutions that have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media’s faux objectivity, the […]

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The Bioenergy Delusion

Stephan:  A number of people on the island where I live heat with wood in some form and, when I ask them why, they tell me one that it is cheaper, since this is a heavily forested island; and two, that they don't want to burn petroleum. I have learned that telling them that burning wood is worse for the environment usually ends the conversation. But it is true. Using bioenergy is actually going backwards. Here is a good article on this widely misunderstood issue.

Replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy only takes us backwards, continuing our addiction to burning and extraction, and causing extensive ecological damage.

The bioenergy industry gives the impression of being at the forefront of tackling climate change. Every wood pellet that’s burned communicates the illusion of innovative progress away from fossil fuels and towards ‘renewable’ energy.

In the context of our urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is easy to be persuaded by a strategy which can supposedly help steer us away from impending doom.

Before I took my job working to protect forests I was under the impression that bioenergy was something positive.

Capitalism growth 

Since humans first discovered how to create fire about 1.5 million years ago, our ability to harness the flames has sustained us, warmed us, and fed us.

Most of the world is fiercely globalised and intensely capitalist, focusing on – or subjected to – short-term economic gain.

Societies in the global north have become demanding and consumerist, reaching ever further afield for products to satisfy our desires. We have plunged deep into oil wells, and exploited pristine, ecologically priceless ecosystems in the Arctic and 

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