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Thousands of Girls Are Locked Up for Talking Back or Staying Out Late

by WinonaFlora Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

It was late on a weekend night and Kara was bored. Her adopted mother, Dotty—nearly 70, arthritic, and having recently recovered from heart surgery—was asleep upstairs. Talking with her cousin on the phone wasn’t easing Kara’s restlessness. She wanted a snack from the corner store a few blocks away, so the 12-year-old told her cousin she was going to drive her mom’s car.

“That is not a good idea,” her cousin warned.

“I’ll be all right,” Kara said before hanging up. She went outside, turned the ignition of Dotty’s burgundy Oldsmobile, and carefully stepped on the gas.

Kara, who was in seventh grade and had been assessed as a gifted student, drove a few blocks—passing near the spot where she’d gotten into a fight with a gang of girls who’d beaten up her friend, and then by the local fast-food joint where a woman would later be shot during a robbery. Then she tried to park and swiped a dumpster, scraping the front of the Olds. Panicked, she drove home, parked, and slipped upstairs.

These Photos Show What Life Is Like for Girls in Juvenile Detention

When Kara woke up the next morning, two policemen were standing at the foot of her bed. Dotty had seen the scratch, called the cops, and told them that she suspected her increasingly hard-to-handle daughter. Kara confessed. The officers saw an elderly, single mom and a cocky adolescent in need of some discipline. Not long afterward, Kara was summoned to juvenile court.

Kara was born in 1991, while her biological mom was in prison for stabbing an ex-boyfriend. To keep her out of the foster system, family friends Dotty and Ralph adopted Kara. (Their names and those of others appearing in this story have been changed.) Both were then in their early 60s. Kara became attached to Ralph, but he died when she was only six years old, and she started to act out. Tantrums gave way to drinking with friends and smoking cigarettes. Dotty struggled to keep up.

In front of the judge, Dotty’s frustrations poured out: Kara was always talking back, always disobedient. She took advantage of their age difference and Dotty’s health problems. Dotty was worried that her daughter’s underage driving was going to raise the rates of her car insurance. As she listened to her mother vent, Kara didn’t know how to act—especially in court—so she just sat there and fixed a smile on her face.

That didn’t help. “The judge looked at me and said, ‘You think this is funny? How about 10 days in secure detention? Would you think that’s funny?'” Kara, who is now 25, tells me. We are in her hometown in Virginia, walking toward the courthouse where she first faced a judge—and where she spent a lot of time during law school. She’s now waiting on her bar exam results.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2013. *Excludes weapons charges

After the judge’s sentence that day 12 years ago, an officer handcuffed her and drove her to a hulking concrete detention center where she had to undress and put on her uniform: underwear, a sweatsuit, and socks. “I couldn’t believe it at first. It was so unreal,” she says. She spent most of that first day in tears. Over the next 10 days, she met a lot of girls like her. “It felt like we were all just troubled,” she says. “Not like we were horrible.” When Kara was released on probation, she was given rules she had to abide by: obey curfew, don’t skip school or probation meetings, don’t talk back to your parents, and keep your room clean.

From that point on, Kara and Dotty had to meet with Kara’s probation officer every week. And every week Dotty would tell the officer about Kara’s late hours, how she was disrespectful. “My health being so bad, she got away with a lot. I didn’t know who else to go to,” Dotty tells me. She didn’t realize the list of grievances she was getting off her chest constituted “technical violations”—infractions of the terms of Kara’s probation. When Dotty repeatedly complained that Kara didn’t clean her room or make her bed, Kara was sent back to juvie. When Dotty kept telling the probation officer that Kara talked back, she was sent back again. A probation officer once busted Kara by calling her house after curfew, catching her out. By the time she was 16, Kara had been detained three times—one of the nearly 50,000 adolescent girls who enter the courts every year because of a system of criminalizing low-level offenses that has long been biased against girls. “My biggest thing was not making my bed,” Kara says. “That was considered a violation of probation. That I got locked up for it is ridiculous.”

How does a kid wind up in jail for an unmade bed? Ironically, the answer lies in the primary goal of the juvenile justice system: rehabilitation. So that young people have a chance at changing their behavior, juvenile court judges are given great discretion in sentencing. Court proceedings are more informal than those for adults. Juveniles’ misdeeds are “petitioned” at a hearing rather than prosecuted at a trial. Instead of being found guilty, kids are “delinquent”—language that implies a state both psychological and changeable. Juveniles can also be charged with infractions known as “status offenses,” so named because the person’s status as a minor is the single factor that makes his or her actions illegal. Running away from home is a status offense. So is skipping school or missing curfew. Once a kid is roped into the system, she can be drawn in again and again for minor violations of her probation. The flexibility in the system means kids have greater opportunities to reform, but it also means judges have a lot of leeway to inflict arbitrary and extreme punishment for, say, an attitude problem.

In 1974, in its first big push to set some national standards for how courts should treat kids, Congress passed the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which emphasized keeping nonviolent kids out of the system. States were told to stop throwing juveniles in secure detention for status offenses because these kids, lawmakers surmised, would be better served by community treatment programs, family therapy, and the like.

E.E., age 13, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, Los Angeles area. E.E. has been here five times for aggressive behavior. She normally lives with her mother and sister. “Me and my mom get into it a lot. It sometimes is verbal but then it gets physical,” she says. “My mom treats me bad.” Sometimes her mother kicks her out of the house, and once “she made me sleep outside with the dogs.” E.E. hopes she will be able to live with her grandmother when she gets out. If not, “they will send me to another lockdown.” Richard Ross

Funding, however, was scarce. So a lot of judges simply sent kids back home with entreaties that they do better—”don’t miss curfew again” or “stop skipping school.” If kids disobeyed these orders and ended up in court, judges had little recourse but to send them home with yet another warning, though many opted instead to bring new charges, like criminal contempt, in order to detain kids anyway, says Robert Schwartz, who co-founded the Juvenile Law Center in 1975 and ran it from 1982 to 2015.

In 1980, members of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges lobbied Congress to reinstate their formal power to send kids to detention for status offenses. Congress passed an amendment that said that if a kid disobeyed the judge’s original requests, or “valid court orders,” the judge could now put that kid in detention. Some states have since dropped the use of this loophole, but Kara’s home state of Virginia is one of 26 states that still use it, along with the District of Columbia.

As a result, the portion of juvenile detainees who are locked up for status offenses and technical violations has hovered around 25 percent. “What started as a small exception has become a loophole you can drive a truck through,” says Liz Ryan, president of Youth First, a national campaign opposing juvenile incarceration. “It’s created a pathway for kids to come into the justice system who really shouldn’t be there.”

Kara’s story also points to another issue: The juvenile justice system has a long history of judging the morals of girls differently from those of boys. The first juvenile court, established in 1899, had two lists of sins for the sexes: For girls, “frequent attendance at saloons and pool halls” and “the use of indecent language” were actionable offenses. In the ’30s and ’40s, girls were hauled into court for being in “danger of becoming morally depraved.” In the 1960s, New York let juvenile courts have jurisdiction over girls until they were 18 years old; boys aged out at 16. In the early ’70s, these kinds of gendered discrepancies were overturned in court, but that didn’t mean judges suddenly treated boys and girls equally.

Over the last 30 years, the percentage of girls in the juvenile justice system has dramatically increased, not because girls have grown more criminal, but because the system has increasingly criminalized them for things like breaking curfew or running away. Between 1995 and 2009, cases of breaking curfew rose by 23 percent for girls—and just 1 percent for boys. In 2011, girls made up 53 percent of runaway cases brought before a judge. Between 1996 and 2005, arrests for “simple assault”—which could be as minor as a daughter throwing a toy at her mom—went up 24 percent for girls and down 4 percent for boys. By 2013, girls were almost twice as likely as boys to be in detention for simple assault and certain other nonviolent offenses.

M.E., age 14 (left): “I got here yesterday. It’s my first time.” J.R., age 16 (center): “I probably get out today. I can’t wait to see my baby. He’s 10 months. He’s been with my mom since I’ve been here…My mom will come to pick me up. She is at home with my little boy.” C.J., age 14 (right): “I’ve been here 34 days. On the outs I get really good grades. How long am I here for? Long!” Richard Ross

So how did we get to this statistically unlikely place? Meda Chesney-Lind, a University of Hawaii-Manoa women’s studies professor who focuses on girls in the juvenile justice system, blames two things. The first is the practice of cops treating status offenses like more serious offenses, such as simple assault, that allow for immediate detention. And the second is “judicial paternalism.” Judges, she says, are the final step in a system that’s often stacked against girls from the start: “Parental bias morphs into police bias, which morphs into court bias.”

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2014

“Courts are more likely to open a case with girls because they don’t see what they’re doing as punishment. They see it as social work,” says Andrew Spivak, a University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor and co-author of a study on gender and the treatment of status offenders. “Courts think that they need to protect girls and give them guidance.”

Take sex and drugs: A 2007 study from California State University-Fullerton looked at more than 100 juvenile court files and found that boys’ drug use was often framed as a lifestyle choice, but girls’ drug use was presented as contributing to “criminal behaviors.” Boys’ sexual behavior was usually only recorded if it pointed to potential sex crimes such as pedophilia or violence. Not so with girls. Probation officers (in this study, mostly women) wrote notes like, “She admitted to having unprotected sex and was not interested in modifying behaviors.”

Three different studies conducted by criminologists over the last decade found that juvenile records often stereotype girls: She is “big” and “very loud.” Girls are “criers” who are “promiscuous,” “manipulative,” and “pouting.” Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the National Crittenton Foundation, a nonprofit that works with at-risk girls, says, “Being ‘big’ means a girl is more of a threat.” Once this sort of coded language is in a juvenile offender’s file, it can come back to haunt her. “If there’s any kind of altercation, an officer of the court can look at the file and say, ‘Oh, she’s aggressive,’ and lock her up,” Pai-Espinosa says.

Girls line up outside their cells in Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles County. Richard Ross

Of course, racial and heteronormative biases compound the problem: A 2013 study found that the likelihood of black girls being found guilty for a status offense is almost three times greater than the likelihood for white girls, and a 2015 study showed that 41 percent of LGBTQ girls in detention were there for status offenses, compared with about 35 percent of straight girls. Kara is black and gay—two facts that vastly increased her chances of being detained.

While reporting this article, I spoke to women in their 20s and 30s who’d spent a few days or even weeks in detention for actions that look like coping mechanisms, not crimes.

One of the most heartbreaking stories came from a young woman who was arrested for running away from her foster home. She had been taken from her biological family at the age of seven after child protective services found they were using a hospital emergency center as a shelter. She ran away because she wanted to see her sister. When she was 17 years old, she was arrested on an outstanding warrant and put in an adult jail with violent criminals. She was terrified. “I was just arrested, no explanation. I didn’t even see a judge,” she says.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2014

Another young woman was locked up for almost two weeks at the age of 15 after running away from her home in South Carolina. She’d been molested by one of her mother’s many boyfriends and berated for actions as trivial as doodling on notebook paper. “No one asked if there could be something wrong, a reason” for acting out, she says. She wasn’t the only one I spoke to with such a story. Nationally, more than a third of girls put in juvenile detention say they were sexually abused when they were young.

“If the reason you violated the law is because of trauma and then you’re detained, well then we have just sent you to hell and back,” says Darlene Byrne, a district court judge in Travis County, Texas, who has presided over juvenile cases for eight years. Byrne says she feels lucky that her jurisdiction offers ankle monitors to kids so she can track but not detain vulnerable children.

It has been well documented that incarcerating young people for small infractions increases the chance that they’ll get into more serious crimes as they age. Even a brief period in detention can lead to mental and physical health issues, higher unemployment rates, lower lifetime earnings, and substance abuse. The moral judgment that underlies the charges girls face can also change how they see themselves. “Once they internalize that they are ‘bad girls,'” says Pai-Espinosa, “it almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

That was true in Kara’s case. “The more I got in trouble, the less self-restraint I had,” she says. “I didn’t want to be locked up all the time. But the more I went, the more I felt invincible.” Her reputation around town toughened—and returning to detention began to feel inevitable.

Kara’s judges didn’t spend much time trying to understand why she was acting out. If they had, they might have discovered that she was still grieving for Ralph, or that in her neighborhood, more people ended up in prison than in college. On top of that, when she was 11, Kara also started to understand that she was attracted to girls. “I thought I was a bad person for feeling differently.”

After two detentions, when she was 16, Kara was caught with alcohol. This turned out to be a lucky break because the judge gave her more options. Kara could either spend six months in secure detention or attend drug court—where judges and counselors help offenders get off probation and stay clean. She chose drug court.

F.E., age 17 Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center, Ohio. This is F.E.’s sixth incarceration since she was 13 years old. She has violated probation a number of times, most recently for fighting with her mother, who called the police. Her parents are separated. When F.E. was 12, her mother sent her to Alabama to live with her father, who she says beat her and only gave her $20 a week for food. “I told my mom how bad it was,” she says. “But she thought I was just saying that.” She began acting out, so her father kicked her out. She went to live with a friend, but her father found her, broke the door down, and beat her. She had a black eye and bruises, and her father sent her back home to Ohio, where she took Molly and Xanax. She is now in a drug program while in detention. “I am going to go to Lakewood College and then to Kent State and do a degree in psychology,” she says. “If I ever get on track.” Richard Ross

When she was locked up for probation violations, Kara had worried her grades would slip or she would lose her after-school job at a nursing home. But in her weekly meetings at court, she, her mom, a case manager, and a judge went over her school attendance, grades, behavior, and drug test results. Her drug court counselors showed her that getting scholarships to college and even law school—Kara had dreamed of becoming a lawyer since she first watched Law & Order—was possible. “It wasn’t like, ‘You messed up,’ and lock you up,” Kara says. It was, “You want to be a lawyer? You want to go to school? Let me help you fill out your applications.”

“If I’d gone to juvenile detention for those six months, there would have been no coming back,” Kara says, throwing her hands up. “I would have lost hope.” In 2008, Kara graduated from drug court; in 2013, she graduated from college; and the summer of 2016, she completed law school.

Last year, Kara worked with the public defender’s office as a legal intern—in the same juvenile court where she had been sent as a kid. Last December, when we walked into the courthouse the postman gave her a hug and the security guard flirted with her. “I know everybody,” she said with a laugh. She has faced some of the district attorneys who once prosecuted her, and she’s even argued juvenile cases before the very judge who first locked her up. It was terrifying to walk into his courtroom again, but “I always told people back at home that I would come back and be a lawyer.”

Today, juvenile and family court judges are pressuring Congress for action—this time to close the loophole they helped open. Judge Darlene Byrne says the profession has largely reversed its position because of the ample evidence proving detention hurts kids: “It’s time for the courtroom to come up to speed with the science.”

Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who co-sponsored the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), invoked the evidence showing that incarceration for status offenses is ineffective. The House is set to vote on its version of Whitehouse’s Senate bill on Tuesday, and if both chambers can’t agree by the end of the year, they’ll have to start from scratch in January. So far, the bill’s success this term is up in the air. In February, the reauthorization failed to pass the Senate unanimously—which would have expedited its passage through Congress. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) opposed closing the “valid court order” loophole. On the Senate floor, he said his state’s Legislature had chosen to “retain secure confinement as a last-resort option,” and that he didn’t “believe Congress should second-guess that choice.” He didn’t add that detention in his state is not a last resort: It’s among the top five worst states in detaining low-level offenders—about a third of detained youths in Arkansas are locked up for status offenses and technical violations.

Kara knows all too well how the effects of detention can linger: She had to disclose her childhood run-ins with the court when she entered law school. During her final semester, she worried she would have to submit her juvenile record when she applied to take the bar exam. She didn’t, but she still wonders if she’ll ever shake the reputation she got when she was a kid: “I worry they will think I have a bad streak,” she says of her future colleagues. “Will people look at me and think, ‘What kind of attorney is she going to be?'”

Richard Ross’ photos first appeared in his 2015 book, Girls in Justice. For more, visit juveniles-in-justice.com.

This article was originally published in our September/October 2016 issue and has been updated.

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Thousands of Girls Are Locked Up for Talking Back or Staying Out Late

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Minimalism 101: 5 Ways to Simplify Your Life

by MarianaG59 Posted on September 18, 2016

Do you try to keep extraneous items and clutter to a minimum? Do you avoid purchasing new items unless you absolutely need them? Do you focus on quality over quantity and believe that every item you own should be used regularly and have a proper place and purpose in your life? If so, you may be a minimalist.

Minimalism is a big trend among health and wellness gurus, and its catching on throughout the world. In a nutshell, minimalists livewell, minimally. They believe in owning only completely necessary possessions, decorating lightly and purchasing consciously. However, theres more to minimalism than simply clearing out your closet.

You can apply the tenets of minimalism to many different aspects of your life. Here are a few areas where you may want to consider downsizing:

Finances

Its trueyou can be a minimalist with your finances. In fact, embodying minimalism in the financial sense closely resembles spending the way everyone did about 60 years ago: with cash. To simplify your finances, make sure to avoid using credit cards. Pay for everything with cash or your direct debit account, thereby ensuring that you can afford everything you buy. Bonus: This will also have the effect of ensuring that you buy LESS, which will help you keep extraneous clutter at bay.

Applying this in a broader sensemeans saving to buy things like cars or home appliances, rather than taking out lines of credit. It means consolidating the debt you already have so you can make one or two monthly payments, rather than many. And finally, it means balancing your checkbook the old-fashioned way (or usingan app or digital budget tool) so you track your spending and curb it appropriately.

Transportation

Why deal with oil changes, gas purchases, detailing, car cleaning and tire replacement when you could simplify by going car-free? Obviously, depending on where you live, this may or may not be an option. But youd be surprised to see how much going car-free, or even just driving less, can change your life when you opt to walk, participate in a car-share, take public transit or carpool to work.

Not only will this save you from the bills and time spent on car payments and maintenance, it will also help you get into better shape thanks tothe extra physical effort it takes to live a car-free lifestyle. Hello savings on gym memberships!

If you dont live in a walkable city, you can still simplify your transportation options. Do you and your spouse really need two separate cars? Could you potentially leave a little earlier and carpool to work? Perhaps you have a coworker who lives nearby whod let you chip in for gas in exchange for a ride. Think about slashing your car-associated fees in half and it may look like an increasingly attractive option.

Food

Yes, you can practice minimalism with your food purchases! And no, it doesnt mean eating out every day rather than buying kitchen supplies. Get in the habit of eating meals that can easily be combinedi.e. one protein, one vegetable side and one grain. This means you can pick up a few filets of salmon or blocks of tofu, a few fresh veggies and bulk brown rice or quinoa and thats literally all youll need for at least one weeks worth of dinners.

Do you have frozen foods crowding up your freezer space? Get rid of them! Purchase (or grow!) simple, fresh foods that will keep you healthy and full all week at a low price.

Finally, meal prepping on Sundays can be a huge minimalist-friendly time saver. All you need to do is cook your weekly meals in one two- or three-hour sitting on Sunday, and then distribute them onto five plates, covering with plasticwrap or tinfoil. Now, your meals will be perfectly proportioned and ready to heat up throughout the week, cutting down on weeknight prep time as well as food waste.

Memberships and Subscriptions

Do you have subscriptions to magazines, gyms, clubs and programs? Give some thought to what you REALLY need. Sure, maybe your gym membership is actually minimalist-friendly if you use it regularly and it keeps you from purchasing workout equipment to clutter your home. But if you dont really use it, its just weighing you down.

Magazines and newspapers are now almost always published digitally as well as in print. Checking out your favorite publication from your laptop, Kindle or iPad will mean that you dont have extra papers and clutter lying around your home. Plus, itll save a bunch of trees from certain peril in the process.

Social Engagements

Theres nothing wrong with maintaining an active social life, but if you find yourself getting stressed out by the hustle and bustle of your schedule, you may need to employ some minimalism to your social engagements. Learn to say no to events that wont bring you joy and only cause you stress.

For example, if you truly look forward to your girlfriends weekly Thursday night card game, by all means, dont give it up! But if those after-work happy hours with your coworkers feel more like an obligation than an indulgence, skip themgo home and take care of the things youd rather be doing instead. Learning to say no to work and social pressures is increasingly difficult in our society, butlearning to do so is dire.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Minimalism 101: 5 Ways to Simplify Your Life

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Chicago just named a street for an environmental justice hero.

by SallyLandon Posted on September 15, 2016

At the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Obama announced the creation of The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which will protect deep-sea ecosystems off the coast of New England.

The monument, which lies about 150 miles east of Massachusetts, includes three submerged canyons — one of them deeper than the Grand Canyon — and four underwater mountains. The designation means that commercial fishing will be phased out of the region, and resource extraction such as mining and drilling will be prohibited. That’s good news for creatures like endangered whales, sea turtles, and deep-sea coral — and those less sexy microorganisms that sustain all of them, like plankton.

According to a recent study by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, ocean temperatures in this section of the Atlantic are projected to warm three times faster than the global average. This new monument, according to the White House, “will help build the resilience of that unique ecosystem, provide a refuge for at-risk species, and create natural laboratories for scientists to monitor and explore the impacts of climate change.”

President Obama has protected more land and water than any other American president — including the world’s largest marine protected area in the Pacific.

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Chicago just named a street for an environmental justice hero.

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Confessions of a Gun Range Worker

by MarkusChappel Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Americans today aren’t just stockpiling guns in record numbers; they are also shooting them at upward of 2,100 gun ranges across the country. In February, the pseudonymous author of this piece—a former employee at a gun range in Orange County, California—contacted Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson, who interviewed the author and corroborated his account (as told to Harkinson below) through official documents, news reports, and interviews with two other former employees of the gun range. The management and owner of the gun range did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

I’ve worked in the firearms industry for decades, including at a range in Orange County, California. It’s inside an industrial park, in your standard warehouse type of building. People come in and say, “Oh, I never knew this place existed.” Once you check in, there are two entryways and 16 lanes. The lanes are monitored by video cameras, and there are also large double-paned windows, which, it turns out, are not made of bulletproof glass.

I later worked as a contractor at ranges all over the region. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve witnessed multiple suicides. Three rampage shooters practiced at the Orange County range. The general vibe at the ranges has gotten much more extreme and paranoid. I don’t think this is unique to where I worked. The gun industry is really changing for the worse.

I was attracted to guns as a teenager because my family had been victims of violent crime. My dad had been mugged and my family has been held up in their store at least a couple of times at gunpoint. I guess you could say it’s a way of reclaiming some sense of power over a powerless situation.

My first gun was a military surplus bolt-action, a Lee Enfield. The ATF has a category for these things: curio and relic weapons. It was the only gun that at 18 years old I could legally purchase and walk out the door with. It was fully capable of punching through a car or a cinder block. I started buying and fixing up other relic firearms. At the time I was a college student; I’d sell a gun and use the money to pay for my books. I can’t even remember all the guns I’ve owned. That’s part of what attracted me to working at the range. You would see all sorts of different guns come through. I also came to enjoy the camaraderie. In some ways it’s not just a range so much as a gathering place for a certain type of crotchety old man. You sit there on the bench and drink your nasty cup of coffee and trade lies and war stories. For me, it was something that I kind of didn’t have growing up, because my dad wasn’t always there.

But there were certain people who were difficult. At some point during the day, you would have a gun pointed at you. I had a guy with Parkinson’s, and he had severe muscle tremors. He can’t hold the gun properly, and it jams. He walks off the range, he’s pointing the gun at me, and he’s saying, “Hey, hey, my gun is jammed!” I sidestep the muzzle and say, “Let’s have a look, shall we?” All the while that I am handling it I am saying, “You really shouldn’t be doing that.” And the guy, without missing a beat, says, “It’s all right, the safety’s on the gun.” I pull the slide back and there’s a live round that ejects from the chamber. And I’m thinking, okay, I was a three-pound trigger pull away from getting shot.

The ranges make a lot of their money from renting guns to people—those are the people you really have to watch out for. Like the time we rented a Ruger handgun to this woman. After I turned my back to her, she put the gun behind her ear and blew a nice, clean, round hole through the center of her head. I didn’t really feel anything at the time. At first it was disbelief, and then I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to take care of stuff.” Different guys handle it differently. I know a guy who quit right after something like this happened.

Our standard operating procedure when this happens is to call a cease-fire. Then we clear the range so that nobody is in any danger. Then sometimes you’d go up and, if it’s safe to do so, you’d kick the gun out. I still remember this: The manager at the time wound up putting gloves on and plugging the side of her head with his fingers. I’m thinking, “This isn’t going to do a whole lot. She’s toast, dude.” Not to be callous about it, but she was dead. Her eyes were flapping, there was nothing there.

Gun ranges often have policies that require anyone who rents a gun to be accompanied by a friend. It’s supposed to be a way to prevent suicides, but it doesn’t always work very well. Eventually the range started paying a service to come pick up the bodies and scrub everything. But before that happened, Christ, what was it? Bleach and kitty litter. I remember one time I had come in for a shift change and there was a pool of blood. We didn’t have any bleach but we did have some kitty litter. I remember using that to soak up the blood. And because we didn’t have the bleach, some of my members were kind enough to go across the street to the grocery store and buy some. In hindsight, we had no protocols, we had no protective suits. I could have exposed myself to blood-borne pathogens.

Another one was a father who was getting divorced. He was a pretty big guy. I felt the impact, and when I turned around there was pandemonium. Some of my members came rushing out the door yelling at me to call the police, and we did. The guy had sent suicidal text messages to his family. It made the paper because he was a beloved figure in the community, big into Little League. He was totally normal acting. And the next thing you know, you have 300 pounds hitting the floor.

I feel sorry for the families. Anybody who is that depressed for the most part has my sympathy. I do get a little bit irritated that they have to do it while I’m on duty. I think it’s kind of—I don’t know if you’d say inconsiderate—but almost that. You can’t really ask these people, “Hey, if you are going to kill yourself, why don’t you do it out in the desert or something like that?”

Around 2002, a middle-aged guy named Hesham Hadayet came into the range. He’d purchased a gun at a store. He asked me, “Hey, can you show me how to load and operate this gun?” I am thinking, “Wait a minute, didn’t you just take a class?” I’m like, “Fine, not a problem.” I think he came in two or three more times. I didn’t pay any attention to it. Well, a few months later, I turn on the TV and I see this guy’s face. He’d shot up a ticket counter at LAX. He killed two people and injured two more before being fatally shot by a security guard.

The second guy, Phong Thuc Tran, also shot at the range. He worked for the gas company and had been forced to resign. After he killed his supervisor and his co-worker, he was running around for like a day or two before he parked his car in front of a police station. That’s where he shot himself. We only found out about it when the local cops walked in. The guy, he was a little off, but he was very quiet, respectful. No outward signs of anger. You never would’ve known.

The third one, Scott Dekraai, practiced at the range in 2011 and after that he goes on a shooting rampage. He shot nine people at the Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach, including his ex-wife. Only one of them survived.

We talked about them amongst ourselves, but if a member of the shooting public comes in and wants to, we pretty much dummy up. Because who wants to say, “Hey, yeah, there was a mass murderer here at the range?”

There are some good bosses that run these ranges, but for the most part they willingly overlook the fact that this stuff is dangerous. And I’m not just talking about the guns. They’re supposed to properly train people for handling lead, which gets released in large quantities by spent bullets. There’s not really a safe level for lead in your body once you get above five micrograms per deciliter of blood. At the end of the day, you’ve got various things that you have to clean up: the brass shells, paper from the targets, un-burnt powder from the ammunition, little bits of atomized lead. Anything with high enough concentrations of lead is supposed to be put into a canister and treated as hazardous material, but that didn’t always happen.

We’d get tested for lead in our bodies maybe once or twice a year. They would kind of look sideways at you if you asked for the test results. I knew better than that. I just said, “The hell with it.” But the last test that I had, it came back high. I was contacted by the California Department of Public Health, and the guy said, “Uh, why is your lead level so high?”

I started noticing a difference in the type of people coming to the range when Bill Clinton was president. It was the first time I had actually seen somebody post a picture of the president as a target. I told them, “Look, you can’t do that.” Now there’s a company that sells targets with images of Obama, and they put apelike features on him.

You never would have seen something like that 20 years ago when I started. It’s an echo chamber. It’s a place where people feel safe because they feel that people are of like mind. A few months ago, this woman wanted to know about getting her license. I asked her, “What do you need the gun for, if you don’t mind my asking? Was there a crime?” She said, “No, I think there’s going to be an influx of Muslims coming in from our southern border and then they are going to start killing people.” I’ve had people come up to me and say, “I don’t like it that you show these ragheads how to shoot.”

Paranoid? What would you call it when people have six months worth of food? What would you call it when people have 30-plus guns? What would you call it when they are stockpiling ammunition? The gun industry is making a killing, and it’s doing its best to fan the flames. You see stuff in internet gun forums like, “Hey, FEMA is purchasing a million and a half rounds of ammunition.” It’s supposedly because the government is preparing to come around and knock on your door and round you up into camps.

It all plays into people’s paranoid fantasies, and guns are always the solution. They give people a sense of control in a world that is out of control. You go into the NRA convention and look around at the sea of faces— I’m sorry, it’s a bunch of paranoid white guys who see their country slipping away from them. They think people like Trump, or the gun industry, are the “real” Americans. The gun industry could give a rat’s ass. They are laughing all the way to the bank.

I’m leaving the industry to make better money. Dude, I will still be into guns. I like working on ’em. My friends and I still shoot. But the other motivation, just as strong perhaps, is that I don’t want to have to be around a bunch of crazy people.

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Confessions of a Gun Range Worker

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

by NevaFulkerson78 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post writes today that the Hillary Clinton email story is “out of control”:

Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not.

….Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff….Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell….Last is a finding that 30 Benghazi-related emails that were recovered during the FBI email investigation and recently attracted big headlines had nothing significant in them….The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

I’m not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, hasn’t the Washington Post hyped the email story as much as anybody? On the other hand, even if they have, they still deserve credit for seeing the light.

The email story is one of the hardest kinds of stories for the press to handle appropriately. At the beginning of a story like this, it’s impossible to know if there’s something to it. Then the facts drip out slowly over the course of months as everyone chases leads. At some point it becomes clear that there’s no there there, but reasonable people can disagree on when that point is. Personally, I’d date it from sometime between October of last year, when Trey Gowdy’s committee was unable to find anything even marginally corrupt during an 11-hour inquisition of Clinton, and July of this year, when FBI director James Comey made it clear that she had done nothing remotely serious enough to warrant prosecution.

But that’s it. Since at least July we’ve basically known the contours of the entire affair. Clinton was foolish to use a single email account hosted on a personal server—which she’s acknowledged—but that’s it. Beyond that, it was an unclassified system and everyone treated it like one. The retroactively classified emails are more a spat between State and the intelligence community than anything else. Nor is there any evidence that Clinton was trying to evade FOIA by hosting her email on a private server. That would have been (a) deliberate and calculating deception on a Nixonian scale; (b) phenomenally stupid since nearly all of her emails were sent to state.gov addresses and were therefore accessible anyway; and (c) unusually half-assed since she retained the emails for years after she left office and turned them over as soon as State asked for them. Only an idiot would try to evade FOIA like this, and even her bitterest enemies don’t think Hillary Clinton is an idiot.

Emailgate has been investigated and reported to death. Unless some genuine bombshell drops, further leaks should be treated as obvious partisan attacks, not news, and further production of emails should be noted briefly on page A17. Let’s not turn this into another Whitewater.

And with that out of the way, can we now move on to the Clinton Foundation? It’s been investigated to death as well, and the only thing we’ve learned is that Doug Band needs to shut his pie hole a little more often. Aside from that, literally every shred of evidence points to (a) appropriate behavior from Hillary Clinton and her staff; (b) Bill Clinton leveraging his fame to raise money for charity; and (c) billions of dollars spent on worthy causes. Beyond that, you might find Bill’s personal moneymaking enterprises a little off-putting, but that’s all. So how about if we give the Foundation a rest too?

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

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The Trump Files: Why Donald Called His 4-Year-Old Son a "Loser"

by IndiaDeloach Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of GOP nominee Donald Trump.

If you’re hosting a TV show that claims to be a “roadmap to the American Dream,” who better to turn to for tips on success than the Trump family? So in 2006, CNBC’s Donny Deutsch brought Donald Trump, Jr. onto his show, The Big Idea, to get the “next-generation billionaire secrets” on how to make it big. Trump Jr.’s lesson, passed down from his dad at an early age, was simple: paranoia.

Seven o’clock in the morning, I’m going to school—hugs, kisses, and he used to say a couple things. ‘No smoking, no drinking, no drugs.’ I think a great lesson for any kid. But then he followed up with: ‘Don’t. Trust. Anyone. Ever.’ And, you know, he’d follow it up two seconds later with, ‘So, do you trust me?’ I’d say, ‘Of course, you’re my dad.’ He’d say, ‘What did I just—’ You know, he thought I was a total failure. He goes, ‘My son’s a loser, I guess.’ Because I couldn’t even understand what he meant at the time. I mean, it’s not something you tell a four-year-old, right? But it really means something to him.”

Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:

Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man
Trump Files #12: Donald Can’t Multiply 17 and 6
Trump Files #13: Watch Donald Sing the “Green Acres” Theme Song in Overalls
Trump Files #14: The Time Donald Trump Pulled Over His Limo to Stop a Beating
Trump Files #15: When Donald Wanted to Help the Clintons Buy Their House
Trump Files #16: He Once Forced a Small Business to Pay Him Royalties for Using the Word “Trump”
Trump Files #17: He Dumped Wine on an “Unattractive Reporter”
Trump Files #18: Behold the Hideous Statue He Wanted to Erect In Manhattan
Trump Files #19: When Donald Was “Principal for a Day” and Confronted by a Fifth-Grader
Trump Files #20: In 2012, Trump Begged GOP Presidential Candidates to Be Civil
Trump Files #21: When Donald Couldn’t Tell the Difference Between Gorbachev and an Impersonator
Trump Files #22: His Football Team Treated Its Cheerleaders “Like Hookers”
Trump Files #23: The Trump Files: Donald Tried to Shut Down a Bike Race Named “Rump”
Trump Files #24: When Donald Called Out Pat Buchanan for Bigotry
Trump Files #25: Donald’s Most Ridiculous Appearance on Howard Stern’s Show
Trump Files #26: How Donald Tricked New York Into Giving Him His First Huge Deal
Trump Files #27: Donald Told Congress the Reagan Tax Cuts Were Terrible
Trump Files #28: When Donald Destroyed Historic Art to Build Trump Tower
Trump Files #29: Donald Wanted to Build an Insane Castle on Madison Avenue
Trump Files #30: Donald’s Near-Death Experience (That He Invented)
Trump Files #31: When Donald Struck Oil on the Upper West Side
Trump Files #32: When Donald Massacred Trees in the Trump Tower Lobby
Trump Files #33: When Donald Demanded Other People Pay for His Overpriced Quarterback
Trump Files #34: The Time Donald Sued Someone Who Made Fun of Him for $500 Million
Trump Files #35: Donald Tried to Make His Ghostwriter Pay for His Book Party
Trump Files #36: Watch Donald Shave a Man’s Head on Television
Trump Files #37: How Donald Helped Make It Harder to Get Football Tickets
Trump Files #38: Donald Was Curious About His Baby Daughter’s Breasts
Trump Files #39: When Democrats Courted Donald
Trump Files #40: Watch the Trump Vodka Ad Designed for a Russian Audience
Trump Files #41: Donald’s Cologne Smelled of Jamba Juice and Strip Clubs
Trump Files #42: Donald Sued Other People Named Trump for Using Their Own Name
Trump Files #43: Donald Thinks Asbestos Would Have Saved the Twin Towers
Trump Files #44: Why Donald Threw a Fit Over His “Trump Tree” in Central Park
Trump Files #45: Watch Trump Endorse Slim Shady for President
Trump Files #46: The Easiest 13 Cents He Ever Made
Trump Files #47: The Time Donald Burned a Widow’s Mortgage
Trump Files #48: Donald’s Recurring Sex Dreams
Trump Files #49: Trump’s Epic Insult Fight With Ed Koch
Trump Files #50: Donald Has Some Advice for Citizen Kane
Trump Files #51: Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on “Trump: The Game”
Trump Files #52: When Donald Tried to Shake Down Mike Tyson for $2 Million
Trump Files #53: Donald and Melania’s Creepy, Sex-Filled Interview With Howard Stern
Trump Files #54: Donald’s Mega-Yacht Wasn’t Big Enough For Him
Trump Files #55: When Donald Got in a Fight With Martha Stewart
Trump Files #56: Donald Reenacts an Iconic Scene From Top Gun
Trump Files #57: How Donald Tried to Hide His Legal Troubles to Get His Casino Approved
Trump Files #58: Donald’s Wall Street Tower Is Filled With Crooks
Trump Files #59: When Donald Took Revenge by Cutting Off Health Coverage for a Sick Infant
Trump Files #60: Donald Couldn’t Name Any of His “Handpicked” Trump U Professors
Trump Files #61: Watch a Clip of the Awful TV Show Trump Wanted to Make About Himself
Trump Files #62: Donald Perfectly Explains Why He Doesn’t Have a Presidential Temperament
Trump Files #63: Donald’s Petty Revenge on Connie Chung

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The Trump Files: Why Donald Called His 4-Year-Old Son a "Loser"

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How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists

by TedBarela22815 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, when Donald Trump tapped the chairman of Breitbart Media to lead his campaign, he wasn’t simply turning to a trusted ally and veteran propagandist. By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the “alt-right,” a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee’s favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.

“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon’s target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an “electic mix of renegades,” accusing President Barack Obama of importing “more hating Muslims,” and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of “political correctness.”

“Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it,” former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro wrote last week in Daily Wire, a conservative website. “With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”

Exactly who and what defines the alt-right is hotly debated in conservative circles, but its proponents—who tend to be young, white, and male—are united in a belief that traditional movement conservatism has failed. They often criticize trade and immigration policies as examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of outsiders and elites instead of “real Americans” (a.k.a. Trump supporters). They bash social conservatives as ineffective sellouts to the GOP establishment, and rail against neo-conservative hawks for their embrace of Israel. While often tapping into legitimate economic grievances, their social media hashtags (such as #altright on Twitter) dredge up torrents of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes.

Trump’s new campaign chief denies that the alt-right is inherently racist. He describes its ideology as “nationalist,” though not necessarily white nationalist. Likening its approach to that of European nationalist parties such as France’s National Front, he says: “If you look at the identity movements over there in Europe, I think a lot of them are really ‘Polish identity’ or ‘German identity,’ not racial identity. It’s more identity toward a nation-state or their people as a nation.” (Never mind that National Front founder Jean Marie Le Pen has been fined in France for “inciting racial hatred.”)

Bannon dismisses the alt-right’s appeal to racists as happenstance. “Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe,” he says. “Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that’s just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements.”

A Twitter analysis conducted by The Investigative Fund using Little Bird software found that these “elements” are more deeply connected to Breitbart News than more traditional conservative outlets. While only 5 percent of key influencers using the supremacist hashtag #whitegenocide follow the National Review, and 10 percent follow The Daily Caller, 31 percent follow Breitbart. The disparities are even starker for the anti-Muslim hashtag #counterjihad: National Review, 0 percent; Daily Caller, 37 percent; Breitbart News, 62 percent.

Bannon’s views often echo those of his devoted followers. He describes Islam as “a political ideology” and Sharia law as “like Nazism, fascism, and communism.” On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her “one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,” on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.

During our interview, Bannon took credit for fomenting “this populist nationalist movement” long before Trump came on the scene. He credited Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—a Trump endorser and confidant who has suggested that civil rights advocacy groups were “un-American”—with laying the movement’s groundwork. Bannon also pointed to his own films, which include a Sarah Palin biopic and an “exposé” of the Occupy movement, as “very nationalistic films.” Trump, he said, “is very late to this party.”

At Breitbart News, one of the most strident voices for the alt-right has been Yiannapolous, who was banned by Twitter during the RNC for inciting a racist pile-on of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. Published back in March, his “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt Right” featured an illustration of a frog taunting an elephant—the frog image being a meme white supremacists had popularized on social media. The piece praised the anti-immigrant site VDare, the white nationalist site American Renaissance, and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, as the alt-right’s “dangerously bright” intellectual core.

On the RNC’s opening day, Yiannapolous spoke at a “Citizens for Trump” rally. He also co-hosted a party featuring anti-Muslim activist Geller and the Dutch far-right nationalist politician Geert Wilders. Yiannopolous has proved to be Breitbart‘s most vitriolic anti-Muslim presence, erasing the distinction many conservatives draw between Islam and “radical Islam.” After the Orlando shootings, Yiannopolous told Bannon on his weekly radio show that “there is a structural problem with this religion that is preventing its followers from assimilating properly into Western culture.”

Bannon has stoked racist themes himself, notably in a lengthy July post accusing the “Left” of a “plot to take down America” by fixating on police shootings of black citizens. He argued that the five police officers slain in Dallas were murdered “by a #BlackLivesMatter-type activist-turned-sniper.” And he accused the mainstream media of an Orwellian “bait-and-switch as reporters and their Democratic allies and mentors seek to twist the subject from topics they don’t like to discuss—murderers with evil motives—to topics they do like to discuss, such as gun control.” Bannon added, “Here’s a thought: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent.”

Some Breitbart staffers who resisted the site’s transformation into a pro-Trump alt-right hub eventually resigned in protest. Several jumped ship after Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, manhandled Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields at a rally. (The site appeared to side with Lewandowski, and staffers were reportedly told not to question his account.) Among the departing staffers were Fields, who now writes for the Huffington Post, and Shapiro, who has emerged as one of Breitbart‘s most vociferous conservative critics.

On Thursday, in the Washington Post, Shapiro upped the ante, describing the alt-right as a “movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and Breitbart News as “a party organ, a pathetic cog in the Trump-Media Complex and a gathering place for white nationalists.” The reception he and another conservative Jewish Breitbart critic, Bethany Mandel, have experienced in the Bannonosphere is revealing: In May, when Shapiro, who became editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire after leaving Breitbart, tweeted about the birth of his second child, he received a torrent of anti-Semitic tweets. “Into the gas chamber with all 4 of you,” one read. Another tweet depicted his family as lampshades. Mandel says she has been harassed on Twitter for months, “called a ‘slimy Jewess’ and told that I ‘deserve the oven.'”

After Shapiro called out the anti-Semitism, Breitbart News published (under the byline of Pizza Party Ben) a post ridiculing Shapiro for “playing the victim on Twitter and throwing around allegations of anti-Semitism and racism.”

Back at the RNC, Bannon dismissed Shapiro as a “whiner…I don’t think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all,” he told me. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic.”

In any case, Breitbart’s conservative dissenters are fearful of what the Trump-Bannon alliance might bring. As Mandel puts it, “There’s no gray area here: Bannon is a bad guy. And he now has control of a major campaign for president.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Additional reporting was done by Kalen Goodluck, Josh Harkinson, and Jaime Longoria.

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How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists

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The One Plan – Yogi Cameron Alborzian

by Myrna Posted on August 15, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The One Plan

A Week-by-Week Guide to Restoring Your Natural Health and Happiness

Yogi Cameron Alborzian

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $0.99

Publish Date: January 8, 2013

Publisher: HarperOne

Seller: HarperCollins


What if you could follow a program that, like in so many other books, helped you get results in only a couple of weeks? As with these other programs, you could lose weight, attract more beneficial relationships, and find a greater state of balance in very little time. But what if, on top of all that, the program helped you create not just a fast change, but a permanent one? What if you had a plan that has all the benefits of a short-term overhaul but with the guidance necessary to ensure that it's the last program you'll ever need? Over two thousand years ago, the Indian sage Patanjali compiled what we now know as The Yoga Sutras, a concise text that forms the basis of everything we know today about the philosophy of the yogic path. In The One Plan, Yogi Cameron lays out a fifty-two-week structure based on Patanjali's teachings as well as the ancient medical system of Ayurveda; it delivers the proven authenticity of an ancient path but has been adapted to take your life in the modern world into account. As a practical and accessible guide to help you improve your life, The One Plan will provide you with specific exercises and regimens for crafting an effective daily routine, tips and reminders for becoming truly grounded in that routine, real-life stories and inspiration, practical tools for responding to life's inevitable struggles and setbacks, and even a section on eating the Ayurveda way. By following the One Plan, you will live a life of health, balance, and purpose. Your commitment to the One Plan may last fifty-two weeks, but the changes you make will last a lifetime.

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The One Plan – Yogi Cameron Alborzian

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The Trump Files: Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on "Trump: The Game"

by NevaBrowne Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of GOP nominee Donald Trump.

“It’s a much more sophisticated game than Monopoly,” Donald Trump said when his new board game, “Trump: The Game,” debuted in 1989. (Note: It’s not.) So sophisticated, in fact, that Trump admitted that even he sometimes lost. “I’ve done very well at the game…but on occasion, I got clipped,” he said at the game’s announcement in February.

Bob Stupak, a Las Vegas casino owner, was apparently listening. A month later, he challenged Trump to a head-to-head “Trump: The Game” battle for a $1 million prize, announcing it via a full-page ad he ran in the New York Post and the Press of Atlantic City.

Stupak told his local NBC station, KSNV, that he was generously giving Trump a chance to profit off the Stupak name. Stupak had recently earned fame for winning a $1 million bet on that year’s Super Bowl. “I’m not looking to ride on Donald Trump,” he said. “I’m giving him an opportunity to ride on my reputation. I’m the one who makes the large wagers, or has a history of doing it. And also to give him an opportunity to try to promote his new game.”

Trump, sadly, said no. “It’s always possible to lose, even for someone who’s used to winning,” he told the New York Post.

Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:

Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man
Trump Files #12: Donald Can’t Multiply 16 and 7
Trump Files #13: Watch Donald Sing the “Green Acres” Theme Song in Overalls
Trump Files #14: The Time Donald Trump Pulled Over His Limo to Stop a Beating
Trump Files #15: When Donald Wanted to Help the Clintons Buy Their House
Trump Files #16: He Once Forced a Small Business to Pay Him Royalties for Using the Word “Trump”
Trump Files #17: He Dumped Wine on an “Unattractive Reporter”
Trump Files #18: Behold the Hideous Statue He Wanted to Erect In Manhattan
Trump Files #19: When Donald Was “Principal for a Day” and Confronted by a Fifth-Grader
Trump Files #20: In 2012, Trump Begged GOP Presidential Candidates to Be Civil
Trump Files #21: When Donald Couldn’t Tell the Difference Between Gorbachev and an Impersonator
Trump Files #22: His Football Team Treated Its Cheerleaders “Like Hookers”
Trump Files #23: Donald Tried to Shut Down a Bike Race Named “Rump”
Trump Files #24: When Donald Called Out Pat Buchanan for Bigotry
Trump Files #25: Donald’s Most Ridiculous Appearance on Howard Stern’s Show
Trump Files #26: How Donald Tricked New York Into Giving Him His First Huge Deal
Trump Files #27: Donald Told Congress the Reagan Tax Cuts Were Terrible
Trump Files #28: When Donald Destroyed Historic Art to Build Trump Tower
Trump Files #29: Donald Wanted to Build an Insane Castle on Madison Avenue
Trump Files #30: Donald’s Near-Death Experience (That He Invented)
Trump Files #31: When Donald Struck Oil on the Upper West Side
Trump Files #32: When Donald Demanded Other People Pay for His Overpriced Quarterback
Trump Files #33: The Time Donald Sued Someone Who Made Fun of Him for $500 Million
Trump Files #34: Donald Tried to Make His Ghostwriter Pay for His Book Party
Trump Files #35: Watch Donald Shave a Man’s Head on Television
Trump Files #36: How Donald Helped Make It Harder to Get Football Tickets
Trump Files #37: Donald Was Curious About His Baby Daughter’s Breasts
Trump Files #38: When Democrats Courted Donald
Trump Files #39: Watch the Trump Vodka Ad Designed for a Russian Audience
Trump Files #40: Donald’s Cologne Smelled of Jamba Juice and Strip Clubs
Trump Files #41: Donald Sued Other People Named Trump for Using Their Own Name
Trump Files #42: Donald Thinks Asbestos Would Have Saved the Twin Towers
Trump Files #43: Why Donald Threw a Fit Over His “Trump Tree” in Central Park
Trump Files #44: Watch Trump Endorse Slim Shady for President
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The Trump Files: Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on "Trump: The Game"

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French Prisons May Be Producing Dangerous Terrorists

by BTZBrittan Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, two ISIS-linked extremists killed a priest and stabbed another parishioner during morning mass at a Catholic church in Normandy, the 11th terrorist attack on French soil since January 2015. One of the alleged attackers was identified as Adel Kermiche, a French teenager who was imprisoned briefly for attempting to travel to Syria, likely to join ISIS. He was released into his parents’ custody with an ankle monitor in March.

While Kermiche was likely already dedicated to violent jihad, the radicalization of young Muslims in lockup is a growing concern for officials in France, where a majority of the nation’s more than 65,000 prisoners are Muslim. Two of the three Frenchmen involved in last January’s Charlie Hebdo killings met in prison, where they were radicalized by another inmate. The mastermind behind the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris became radicalized while imprisoned in Belgium, his father said. A man who fatally stabbed a police officer and his wife in their Magnanville, France, home last month had been flagged by prison officials for trying to convince other inmates to join him in jihad. And at least one other perpetrator of a major terror attack in France in recent years also served time—although it’s unclear what role that played in the subsequent attack.

France, hoping to curb this apparent trend, has instituted de-radicalization programs in a number of prisons. Inmates incarcerated on terror-related charges, or whom prison officials believe are susceptible to radicalization, are boxed off from the general population and offered the services of psychologists, teachers, imams, and other professionals, with the goal of coaxing the inmates toward healthier perspectives. But the preliminary verdict of some French prison officials is that the programs are not working.

Mourad Benchellali is a French anti-radicalization lecturer who spent a total of four years imprisoned at Guantanámo Bay and France’s Fleury-Mérogis prison—Europe’s largest penitentiary—for training with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He has been called in to speak with inmates in the de-radicalization units at six prisons. “If you put all these people together who are only thinking about radical Islam, who are only talking about it, it’s hard to break that mentality,” Benchellali told me. It’s also risky, he adds, to put people in the program who aren’t yet radicalized, because constant interactions with committed terrorists could push salvageable inmates over the edge.

But there’s something more fundamental at play here—something US authorities can learn from, notes Mark Hamm, a former director of education and programming for the Arizona Department of Corrections who now studies prison radicalization at Indiana State University. Many young Muslim inmates—often children of immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa—come from impoverished backgrounds, and feel alienated and rejected by French society. This makes them easy marks for charismatic radicals. “They feel like France doesn’t want them,” Benchellali says.

It’s not hard to see why they feel that way. Muslims make up less than 10 percent of France’s population but more than half of its prisoners. Muslim women are legally barred from wearing face veils in public. During the 2012 presidential election cycle, French candidates debated whether Muslim butchers were lying to their customers about selling them halal meat (akin to kosher meat). The state of emergency France instituted in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks last January has resulted in police raids on thousands of Muslim homes, mosques, restaurants, and other establishments—hundreds of Muslims have been placed on house arrest without a court order. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International cried foul in recent reports.) French authorities have closed mosques and expelled from the country imams they deemed too radical, and the prime minister recently proposed banning foreign funding for French mosques to cut down on potential cash flows from extremist groups. And the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping Europe amid the Syrian refugee crisis was deepened by the latest wave of attacks in France, Belgium, and Germany.

In this hostile atmosphere, Benchellali says, radicalism becomes an attractive route for young Muslim inmates—separated from friends and family, and thus more susceptible to emotional manipulation—to resist a system they feel has attacked them. Radicalism makes them feel like they belong.

A recent study by the Brookings Institute found—to the authors’ surprise—that the single biggest predictor of whether a person traveled from a particular country to join terrorist groups in the Middle East was whether or not French was (or used to be) the originating country’s official language. Four of the five countries that produce foreign fighters at the highest rate—France, Belgium, Tunisia, and Lebanon—were Francophone (Jordan is the fifth). Partly to blame, the authors surmised, is the French political culture in those countries—specifically, the aggressive French approach to secularism. (Unconvinced, France’s ambassador to the United States scoffed that the study didn’t “make any methodological sense.”)

In the United States, there has been periodic worry about prisoner radicalization. Such concerns peaked in the years after the September 11 attacks, waned, and have popped up again thanks to a 2010 Senate report that cited dozens of American former convicts who had traveled to Yemen—possibly to fight with Al Qeada—and also President Obama’s proposal, earlier this year, to transfer dozens of Guantanamo inmates to US prisons. Congress introduced a bill last December that would require federal prison volunteers to undergo background checks to look for ties to terrorist groups.

The number of inmates radicalized in American prisons who went on to commit terrorist acts—whether Islamic extremists, right-wingers, black nationalists, or otherwise—Hamm says, is minute. In a study of prison radicalization in Western nations from 1969 to 2011, Hamm found just 51 such cases—nearly 80 percent of which involved radical Islamists—Benchelalli adds that radicalization is not happening “en masse” in French prisons either. Yet despite the small numbers, “the acts they commit are spectacular,” Hamm says.

The small sample size makes it hard to draw up a profile of the American inmates most likely to become radicalized, Hamm says. But there are some patterns: Radicalization tends to follow a prison gang model, with charismatic leaders calling the shots. Among African Americans—who make up the largest percentage of prisoners—many of those who become radicalized bounce from one religion to the next, converting to southern Baptist Christianity, for example, then to Islam, joining the Nation of Islam, and then progressing to yet more radical forms of the religion, Hamm says. Data on the religions of US inmates is scarce, but Islam is the fastest-growing prison religion in America, France, and other Western nations, Hamm says. Whereas a previous generation of prisoners adopted Marxism as the ideology of the oppressed, Hamm and other scholars say, the younger inmates have replaced it with Islam.

In a failed 2005 plot that received widespread attention, several radical Islamists planned to bomb synagogues and an Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, along with several military bases. The attack was planned and ordered by Kevin James, a black inmate incarcerated on robbery charges at California State Prison in Sacramento (a.k.a. New Folsom). A former Crip, James had converted to Islam in prison and radicalized a fellow convert from a rival faction of the gang who led the plot on the outside upon his release. (He was later convicted of charges related to the plot.)

American prison inmates become radicalized for reasons similar to inmates in France, Hamm told me. “The social and political contention of the times have always had an impact on prisoners,” he says. Inmates entertain themselves by reading the newspaper and magazines and watching the news when it’s available: “Identities are formed around these conversations.”

New Folsom, a maximum-security prison, is among the nation’s most dysfunctional, Hamm says. “Radicalization doesn’t happen in well-managed, small, medium-security prisons,” he says. “It does happen in large, overcrowded, mismanaged, maximum-security prisons where rehabilitation, treatment, and work have disappeared.”

France’s prisons are notoriously overcrowded—former president Nicolas Sarkozy once called them “the disgrace of the Republic.” And with few trained imams available for religious guidance, Benchellali says, questioning Muslim inmates turn to their peers for answers.

Hamm told me he’s skeptical about French prison officials’ assessment that the de-radicalization program—which has been in operation for a little over a year—isn’t working. “It’s too early” to tell, he says. “You need longitudinal studies” to determine that. In any case, the best cure for prison radicalization, he says, is you “give people hope and you give them something to do. You keep them busy. You don’t neglect them. You don’t let them turn into gang bangers and people who are racist.” What helped Benchellali in prison, he says, was doing things like playing sports and talking to non-radical inmates about topics other than terrorism.

Meanwhile, the anti-Muslim backlash to terror attacks will only drive more such attacks, Georgetown professor Daniel Byman argued on Slate earlier this month. “More vitriol and hostility toward French and European Muslims,” he said, makes it “easier for ISIS to gain recruits and score victories.”

Indeed, in a video released just two months before the Charlie Hebdo attack, French ISIS fighters called on French Muslims to join the Islamic State or wage jihad at home, because in France, one fighter noted, “just wearing the niqab is very difficult.”

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French Prisons May Be Producing Dangerous Terrorists

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