Emails Show Racist Motivation Behind Arizona Immigration Law

Common Dreams

Protestors gather around Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce,
Arizona's immigration bill SB1070 author, outside
the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse
 in Phoenix, Feb 2011.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released thousands of emails from a former Arizona legislator which they say prove that the controversial Arizona immigration law SB1070 was racially motivated. The slew of emails sent or forwarded from former Senator Russell Pearce (R), architect of the law, promoted discrimination and racial prejudice and lied about immigration issues, ACLU contends.

The e-mails were acquired through a public records request to the state legislature. The ACLU included many of the emails in a legal filing on Thursday,asking U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton to prevent the 'show me your papers' section of the law, slated to go into effect.

The e-mails uncovered from Pearce included racial bias and offensive language. Some quotes released to theArizona Republic include:

"Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance ... It's like importing leper colonies and hope we don't catch leprosy. It's like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream."

"Last week, Denver's illegal aliens sang our national anthem in Spanish and bastardized the words of OUR country's most sacred song."

"Corruption is the mechanism by which Mexico operates. Its people spawn more corruption wherever they go because it is their only known way of life."

"I'm racist because I don't want to be taxed to pay for a prison population comprised of mainly Hispanics, Latinos, Mexicans or whatever else you wish to call them."

On Friday, Pearce denied that he was racist or that the emails show discriminatory intent.

The section of the new Arizona law in question, the "show me your papers" provision, requires police to check the immigration status of people they have stopped if the person appears to be an immigrant. The section was upheld in the Supreme Court last month.

ACLU argues that the law should be blocked because Latinos in Arizona will face legalized racial profiling and discrimination.

Environmental Advocates Use Racism to Dismiss Global Warming Skeptics

Reduced to desperate measures, proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have resorted to formally identifying those who are skeptical of the global warming science as conservative white males.  

One inherent shortfall of the study is that it inadvertently celebrates the intelligence of conservative white males and denigrates every other race, gender and political background (including my own). 

Recently, mainstream media began the slow, tacit admission that global warming hasn't manifested in the way it was so definitively predicted 10 years ago.   This admission was presented last month through a recent study suggesting that Çhina's sulfur emissions were to blame for the lack of global warming.   Blaming China wasn't enough, so scientists scrambled to present the following two additional excuses for the foiled predictions of the past 10 years:

Volcanoes Now Blamed for Lack of Global Warming

Aerosols Blamed for Lack of Global Warming

Ironically, the aerosols article also blames the burning of fossil fuels for offsetting the effect of global warming.  Fossil fuels were initially blamed for global warming.

To understand how a group pushing human induced climate change could be reduced to conducting such a bizarre survey involving the socio-economic class of those who question the science of AGW, one has to look at the way they handle adverse information.

On a local level, anyone can make this discovery for themselves.  For example, If you have a group of environmentalists in your area that refer to global warming as one of the reasons for great ideas like localization, cleaning up the eco-sphere or reducing automobile exhaust, introduce some of the contradictory information involving climate change and see how they react to you. Pay close attention to the way they try to dismiss you or shape the argument away from what you present in support of recent conventional climate research. See if they actually answer your questions or address the specific points you present. Turning over this rock may involve an ugly discovery underneath.

An article describing this study indicates a comparison between conservative white males and the rest of the population.  Race, gender and political affiliation aside, the survey comes up with 39% "denying there's a scientific consensus".  White male conservatives boast a portion that is as high as 59%.  Not only does the scientific consensus of global warming have nothing to do with the science of global warming, the AGW movement is notorious for suppressing skeptical scientists.   The question should be, "Who is aware of the skeptical scientists being suppressed?"

The AGW climate scientists' tendency to suppress alternate views was revealed earlier through the hacked emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).  Suppression was one red flag in addition to suggestions for "hiding the decline" of global temperatures and refusing requests to see the original data. 

Since this incident occurred in November of 2009, East Anglia's CRU hired a PR firm to help with their public image after the email scandal.  This is an unusual move by a research department because the science is expected to hold up to public scrutiny on its own.

In what is commonly called the "third party technique" among PR professionals, panels were put together on three occasions to examine the hacked emails.  The idea was to reassure the public that the inquiry was indeed independent and trustworthy.  All three "blue ribbon panels" exonerated East Anglia's CRU by downplaying the erroneous activity and declaring that none of the relevant data was affected.   Unfortunately for East Anglia, it appears that their PR department had a hand in this process.

Common sense would have the AGW movement take its blows, distance itself from the scientists involved with East Anglia, and allow newer cleaner research to emerge.  Instead, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seemed hell bent on protecting the research called into question with the hacked emails. 

For some reason, the AGW movement thought that the best tactics were to further corrupt the peer review process, 'conspiracy bait' those who question the severity of CO2's warming effects and chime together with the mantra of "scientific consensus".   In the short run, this strategy seemed to work, especially when the establishment joins in with the motivation of another market bubble - carbon derivative scams.  Banks love human-driven climate change.  Anthropogenic global warming enjoys the privilege of mainstream acceptance.   When contradictory information slips by, the story is typically interspersed with statements reaffirming "the reality of anthropogenic global warming".  Sometimes, the information is revealed in such a vague manner, one begins to wonder what the initial purpose of the story was supposed to be. 

But the recent avalanche of contradictory information and discrediting scandals seem to be overwhelming the self aggrandizing orthodoxy that is AGW.

NASA Denies Entry To Chinese Journalists For Shuttle Launch

Space Travel

U.S. space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, kicking off its 25th and final mission. The event was important to the eyes of media and scientists in China because the shuttle carries the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) particle detector, mankind's most ambitious effort to date to explore the universe' origin with Nobel laureate physicist Samuel Ting as the program's principal scientist.

The 7,000-kg AMS worth 2 billion U.S. dollars will be placed in the International Space Station (ISS) and an international team of more than 600 scientists, including many from China's mainland and Taiwan, have joined Ting's exhausting but respectable AMS program.

China's scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the device. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavour were simply denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives.

The United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revoked the media passes granted to journalists from China due to the ban, or the "Wolf Clause", which was regarded as "discriminative" by even Americans themselves.

On April 15, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law the budget bill for fiscal year 2011 which will end on Sept. 30 after the House of Representatives passed it.

The bill included a clause which bans any China-U.S. joint scientific research activities related to NASA or coordinated by the White House's Science Policy Office.

Under the clause in the budget bill, none of the Congress-approved funds for the U.S. government "may be used for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company."

It also applies the limitation "to any funds used to effectuate the hosting of official Chinese visitors at facilities belonging to or utilized" by NASA.

As a result, Chinese journalists were denied the opportunity to make live coverage of the shuttle's blast-off, just as their peers from other countries have done. The Chinese journalists were also kept away from NASA's press conferences.

Obviously, the "Wolf Clause" runs counter to the trend that both China and the United States are trying to push ahead their exchanges and cooperation in science and technology.
During the third round of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S and ED) held in Washington earlier this month, the two sides published accomplishments of the dialogue, which includes the cooperation in science and technology.

Moreover, China and the U.S. this year renewed their bilateral agreements on scientific and technological cooperation.

The Obama administration also attached importance to the current development and trend of scientific and technological cooperation between China and the U.S. and realized the nature of mutual benefit brought about by such cooperation.

John P.Holdren, director of the Science and Technology Policy Office of the White House, has told Xinhua that the cooperation on science and technology was one of the most dynamic fields in bilateral relations between China and the United States.

The "Wolf Clause" exposed the anxiety of hawkish politicians in the United States over China's peaceful development in recent years, and it also demonstrated their shortsightedness to the whole world.

The "Wolf Clause" was a result of compromise made by Obama to Republicans to avoid possible bankruptcy of the U.S. government.

It is also a concession between U.S. Republicans and Democrats, but the "clause" will not in any way change the trend of the increasingly closer scientific and technological cooperation between China and the U.S.

In fact, the "Wolf Clause" has incurred criticism, even from some U.S. scientists.
Richard Milner, director of Laboratory for Nuclear Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), thought China's contribution to the project was "crucial".

The professor believed that the "Wolf Clause" was a "discriminative decision" and it would eventually hurt the U.S. itself.

As the unpopular clause came into effect, China's journalists became the first victims of the discriminative legislation by being turned away from the Kennedy Space Center.

Although the clause will terminate as the fiscal year 2011 ends in September, Wolf seemed unreconciled and claimed he will work to extend the ban to next year.

Today, while the Chinese and U.S. governments are deepening their cooperation, Wolf acted against the trend with a cold war mentality. This is something that should raise the vigilance of peace-loving people in the world.

Editor's note: This was a machine translated news report from China's Xinhua News Agency, and contains a fair number of grammatical errors. As a couple of reader have alerted us to, these errors make the copy difficult to fully understand. We plan to have an update on this report in the next couple of days from our China Space guy.

‘False positives’ suggest police exploit canines to justify searches

Raw Story
By Daniel Tencer

Ex-cop: Police 'using dogs to trample our rights as citizens'
A study of "false positives" involving drug-sniffing police dogs suggests some police forces may be using canines to do an end-run around constitutional protections against search and seizure, and may be profiling racial minorities in the process.

A survey of primarily suburban police departments in Illinois, carried out by the Chicago Tribune, found that 56 percent of all police searches triggered by a drug-sniffing dog turned nothing up.

But, perhaps tellingly, that number jumped to 73 percent when the search involved a Latino subject -- meaning that nearly three-quarters of all dog alerts on Latinos turned up no contraband. The study covered a two-year period from 2007 to 2009.

Police spokespeople say the numbers are no surprise, because dogs' noses can sniff the residue of drugs on a person or in a vehicle long after the drugs have been removed.

But civil liberties advocates smell a rat, and say this is evidence that police are using canines to carry out racial profiling and unjustified searches. And dog-training experts say the problem stems at least in part from an almost complete lack of standards for police dogs in the US.

"We know that there is a level of racial profiling going on, and this is just another indicator of that," Virginia Martinez, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, told the Tribune. "People of color are just targets."  Barry Cooper, a former Texas police officer who has worked with police dogs, told Raw Story that use of canines has "gone out of control in America. They're using dogs as an excuse to search cars when people refuse consent. The reason these numbers are like this is because the dogs aren't always really alerting: it's actually the cops using those dogs to trample our rights as citizens."

Cooper said he was recently hired to assess an Arizona police dog handler's record. "Out of 50 traffic stops, the canine reportedly alerted on every car but four. Drugs were only found on six occasions," he said.

Lawrence Myers, an Auburn University professor who studies police dogs, told the Tribune that residue from long-gone drugs isn't the only way a dog can give a false positive. Dog handlers can trigger a false positive from a dog by walking it around a car too many times, or too slowly, giving the dog a cue that a certain behavior is expected.

Myers pointed to the "Clever Hans" phenomenon in the early 1900s, named after a horse whose owner claimed the animal could read and do math before a psychologist determined the horse was actually responding to his master's unwitting cues.

Cooper told Raw Story that part of the problem stems from a lack of standards for police dogs. "There is no standardized test for these dogs. Anybody could open up tomorrow and start selling dogs to cops."

The Tribune notes that the legal system offers little remedy for the problem, because while drug seizures end up in court, false positives don't, leaving little room for judges to rule on the legality of the searches.

Put together, the situation makes for an alarming opportunity to violate individuals' rights, civil rights activists say.  "We've seen a national outcry about being frisked and scanned at airports," ACLU attorney Adam Schwartz told the Tribune. "The experience of having police take your car apart for an hour is far more invasive and frightening and humiliating."

-- With additional reporting by Stephen C. Webster