Parents Outraged Over This Disgusting High School Extra Credit Assignment

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The teacher’s extra-credit assignment requested that Encinal High School students scour through their parent’s dresser drawers in search of condoms, sex toys or anything provocative and snap a selfie of themselves, according to KPIX-TV.

It is unclear whether any students actually turned in the assignment or what the teacher may have done with the assignments. It’s also unknown which class this was an assignment for and why.

When high school officials heard about the teacher’s homework assignment, they contacted the administrators with the Alameda Unified School District, who launched an investigation into the allegations, district spokeswoman Susan Davis said . . .

“We take reports like this seriously,” Davis said. “We know that it’s hard for the public, and especially for parents, to hear that we can’t talk about the details of the investigation in public. But that information has to be kept confidential, both to protect the rights of all involved and to preserve the integrity of the investigation” . . .

District officials expect to wrap up their investigation next week, but by then, school will be over for the year. (Read more from “Parents Outraged Over This Disgusting High School Extra Credit Assignment” HERE)

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Two New Studies: Cat Parasite Linked to Mental Illnesses

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Coming into close contact with cats can spread a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) – also dubbed the “cat poop parasite” – which are linked to schizophrenia and other mental disorders that affect humans.

The cat-carried parasite is the most common in developed countries and can infect any warm-blooded species, according to the Schizophrenia Bulletin. Although most humans don’t suffer any symptoms from the widespread parasite, it can cause the illness T. gondii, which is linked to weeks of flu-like symptoms, blindness and even death, CBS News reports.

Two new studies have now linked the T. gondii parasite to increased rates of mental illness in cat owners who may have had increased exposure to parasitic infection.

“Cat ownership in childhood has now been reported in three studies to be significantly more common in families in which the child is later diagnosed with schizophrenia or another serious mental illness,” write study authors E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute and Dr. Robert H. Yolken of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The researchers compared two previous studies that linked childhood cat ownership and the development of schizophrenia later in life from a 1982 mental health survey. A second study by A.L. Sutterland from the Department of Psychiatry at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam reviewed 50 published studies to a T. gondii infection being tied to mental disorders. (Read more from “Study: Cat Parasite Linked to Mental Illnesses” HERE)

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Major Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules; Liars Want to Use Fed’s RICO to Criminalize Truth

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Photo Credit: Breitbart By Steve Milloy. E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.

In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”

Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added] . . .

An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA. (Read more from “Major Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules” HERE)

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Senator: Prosecute Climate Realists Under Anti-Mafia RICO Law

By Alex Newman. When former senior NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer referred last year to vicious climate alarmists as “global warming Nazis” who threaten humanity, he may have been closer to the truth than even he realized at the time. Writing in the Washington Post last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) called on the Obama administration to use the anti-gangster Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to persecute those who cast doubt on the increasingly discredited man-made global-warming theory — a theory that just four in 10 Americans believe, but that underpins a wide array of statist and globalist scheming at the national and global levels. Critics promptly ridiculed the Rhode Island senator and his bizarre conspiracy theory. But the totalitarian dream he expressed — using government to enforce ideological compliance and beliefs — represents just the tip of a tyrannical iceberg.

In his wildly inaccurate opinion piece, headlined “The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people,” Senator Whitehouse, ignoring the facts, claims that oil companies and their “allies” are “funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.” Setting aside the fact that carbon dioxide is essential to life on Earth, that human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of one percent of all the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere, and that Sheldon, like all people, exhales CO2 “pollution” every time he takes a breath, the radical senator from Rhode Island also concealed other key facts. For example, Big Oil and its beneficiaries — the Rockefeller dynasty, among others — have been among the chief promoters and financiers of global-warming alarmism from the start.

Perhaps hoping to profit from “carbon credits” gimmicks run by Al Gore and mega-bank Goldman Sachs, major oil and energy companies have been flocking to the alarmist cause. Giants such as BP America, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, PG&E, and more all joined the pro-“cap and trade” lobbying group “U.S. Climate Action Partnership.” Just this week, a cartel of the world’s top oil companies — Europe’s Statoil, Total, BP, Shell, ENI, BG, and more — demanded that the UN and its member regimes put a “price” on carbon emissions aimed at extorting consumers out of even more money under the guise of fighting “global warming.” Of course, the satellite data show there has been no global warming in almost two decades, despite contrary UN predictions and “climate models,” but Big Oil, crony Big Business, and Big Government are all demanding more anti-“carbon” scheming nonetheless.

Senator Whitehouse’s deception and extremism only get more pronounced after the initial untruths. Among other claims, the senator said the alleged activities of oil companies are “often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking.” “Thankfully,” Whitehouse claimed,” the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.” In 1999, the Justice Department filed a RICO suit against tobacco companies and industry groups claiming that they were engaged in a “50-year scheme” to “defraud the public” in violation of RICO. A federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton agreed with the DOJ (though many of her demands were overturned on appeal). And now, Senator Whitehouse wants the Obama administration to try the same tactics against those who expose the increasingly obvious flaws in the man-made global-warming theory promoted by Obama, the UN, its members, and the scientists they fund.

“The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking,” Whitehouse claimed, falsely. As evidence, he points to a memo by an industry lobbying group outlining a tentative plan to expose the flaws in the man-made global-warming theory, just a generation after the man-made global-cooling theory was exposed as a fraud. Of course, by now, the flaws in the alarmist narrative, not to mention ClimateGate and other scandals, are so obvious that the overwhelming majority of Americans reject both the cooling and warming theories. Whitehouse’s other piece of non-evidence cited in the Post column, a “study” published by Drexel University “sociologist” Robert Brulle, claimed that huge sums of “dark money” were nefariously being pumped into what he called “climate denial.” Ironically, the deceptive paper, published in Climatic Change, became a laughingstock almost immediately after its publication. (Read more from this story HERE)

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“Biggest Breach Ever”: U.S. Government Hacked, Here’s Who the Feds Think Is the Culprit

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By Kevin Liptak and Theodore Schleifer. Four million current and former federal employees might have had their personal information hacked, the Office of Personnel Management said on Thursday.

The agency, which is conducting background checks, warned it was urging potential victims to monitor their financial statements and get new credit reports.

U.S. officials believe this could be the biggest breach ever of the government’s computer networks.

The breach is beyond the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Interior, with nearly every federal government agency hit by the hackers, government officials said . . .

U.S. investigators believe they can trace the breach to the Chinese government. Hackers working for the Chinese military are believed to be compiling a massive database of Americans, intelligence officials told CNN on Thursday night. (Read more from “U.S. Government Hacked; This Is Who the Feds Think Is the Culprit” HERE)

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China Suspected in Massive Breach of Federal Personnel Data

By Ken Dilanian and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. China-based hackers are suspected of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. government personnel office and stealing identifying information of at least 4 million federal workers, American officials said Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department had been compromised.

“The FBI is conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred,” the statement said.

The hackers were believed to be based in China, said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican.

Collins, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said the breach was “yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances.” (Read more from “China Suspected in Massive Breach of Federal Personnel Data” HERE)

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Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Exposes How the VA Is Turning Veterans Into Drug Addicts

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This is a must watch exposé by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas on how the VA is admittedly turning veterans into drug addicts. And they are doing it just to get these vets out of their hair, so to speak, instead of actually treating their illnesses. It’s simply disgusting.

(Read more from “Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Exposes How the va Is Turning Veterans Into Drug Addicts” HERE)

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Hunting for Hackers, NSA Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border

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Photo Credit: NY Times By Charlie Savage, Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson and Henrik Moltke. Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency‘s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought permission to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

While the Senate passed legislation this week limiting some of the N.S.A.’s authority, the measure involved provisions in the U.S.A. Patriot Act and did not apply to the warrantless wiretapping program. (Read more from “Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border” HERE)

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The NSA’s Bulk Collection Is Over, but Google and Facebook Are Still in the Data Business

By Kaveh Waddell. Don’t be fooled: Congress may have finally passed the bill reining in the National Security Agency’s bulk-surveillance programs, but your data is still being collected on the Internet.

Lost in the debate over the NSA is the fact that companies like Google and Facebook continue to vacuum up vast troves of consumer data and use it for marketing.

The private-sector tech companies that run the social networks and email services Americans use every day are relatively opaque when it comes to their data-collection and retention policies, which are engineered not to preserve national security but to bolster the companies’ bottom lines.

Critics say the consumer data that private companies collect can paint as detailed a picture of an individual as the metadata that got caught up in the NSA’s dragnets. Companies like Google and Facebook comb through customers’ usage statistics in order to precisely tailor marketing to their users, a valuable service that advertisers pay the companies dearly to access.

“What both types of information collection show is that metadata—data about data—can in many cases be more revelatory than content,” said Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “You see that given the granularity with which private data collection can discern very intimate details about your life.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Women’s College Votes to Admit Transgender Women; US Air Force Changes Rules on Transgenders

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Photo Credit: AP By Associated Press. Barnard College has decided to admit transgender women, becoming the latest women’s college to issue a new policy acknowledging the fluidity of gender.

The new policy, announced Thursday, says Barnard will consider applicants who consistently live and identify as women. That excludes transgender men — those born female but identifying as male. The decision is an attempt to balance Barnard’s identity as a women’s college with what the school calls “an evolving understanding of gender identity.” (Read more from “Women’s College Votes to Admit Transgender Women” HERE)

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Air Force Eases Rules on Transgender Troops

By Mark Hensch. The Air Force will announce Thursday that it will offer more protections for its transgender service members against potential discharge.

Troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who identified as transgender were typically discharged in the past on medical grounds, according to USA Today.

Doctors and unit commanders were previously in charge of those diagnoses, it reported.

The Air Force’s new measures will require such judgments to receive review from high-level officials at the military branch’s headquarters.

“Though the Air Force policy regarding involuntary separation of gender dysphoric Airmen has not changed, the elevation of decision authority to the Director, Air Force Review Boards Agency, ensures the ability to consistently apply the existing policy,” Daniel Sitterly, a top Air Force personnel, said in a statement. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Bruce Jenner Comes out, and Social Conservatives Logically Take an Apocalyptic View

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Photo Credit: Instagram In the four days since Bruce Jenner came out as a woman named Caitlyn, many Americans have celebrated her transformation as a courageous and even heroic act.

But among the social conservatives who are a powerful force within the Republican Party, there is a far darker view. To them, the widespread acceptance of Jenner’s evolution from an Olympic gold medalist whose masculinity was enshrined on a Wheaties box to a shapely woman posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair was a reminder that they are losing the culture wars.

Across social media, blogs and talk radio this week, conservatives painted an apocalyptic view of America. They said they felt frustrated and increasingly isolated by the country’s sudden recognition and even embrace of transgender people. They see it as immoral and foreign. They drew comparisons to two grimly futuristic novels, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

“People feel like they’re under siege and that the terms of the debate are now you either applaud it or you’re a bigot,” said William J. Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan administration. “It’s like American culture is being dragged kicking and screaming not only toward acceptance but approval.”

Jenner’s watershed moment — which coincides with the Supreme Court preparing to rule on whether to allow same-sex marriage nationwide — leaves the GOP and its stable of presidential candidates grappling with how to represent conservatives who don’t wish to accept Jenner and more moderate voters who have already done so. (Read more from “Caitlyn Jenner Comes out, and Social Conservatives Take an Apocalyptic View” HERE)

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The Most Forgotten Man in the Immigration Debate [+video]

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“We need to do something on immigration.”

If a penny went to the Treasury every time this phrase has been uttered (in hushed tones in GOP briefings with their consultants), our more than $18 trillion national debt would be paid off.

Just today U.S. News reports that Republicans are looking for numerous paths to enact elitist/corporatist immigration preferences. Of course, all to be preceded by a superficial “border security” bill with vague language that fails to address the true sources of the illegal immigration problem. Concurrently, they plan “to sidestep the thorny issue[s].”

What is completely lost throughout this entire debate are the needs and demands of the forgotten men – the American taxpayer and worker who must bear the brunt of appalling crime, schools overrun with illegal aliens who can’t speak English, hospitals flooded with the massive unfunded liability of caring for their primary care needs, and with the gargantuan wealth transfer in the form of welfare and refundable tax credits.

Yes, indeed, “we need to do something about immigration,” but that something is the focus of those people for whom Congress swore an oath to protect and defend – the people subject to the jurisdiction of this country and its constitution, not illegal immigrants. That something includes what the Washington “elite” refer to as “thorny issues,” but the American public regard as common sense, justice and fairness.

There is no emergency to “deal” with those who broke our laws or who would otherwise be ineligible for admission under our public charge law – a provision that unfortunately is never enforced [Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)]. But there is an emergency and an obligation for Congress to immediately deal with the following issues:

Violent Crime

There are now 900,000 illegal aliens who have been ordered to leave the country by the courts, yet the Administration is refusing to lift a finger. Of those ordered to be deported, 167,000 are criminal aliens, the very type Obama said he would prioritize for deportation. After releasing 36,000 criminal aliens in FY 2013, the Administration has let go another 30,558 this past fiscal year. As Jessica Vaughn noted, these criminals racked up “convictions on 79,059 crimes, including 175 homicides, 373 sexual assaults, 186 kidnappings, and 14,014 impaired driving offenses.” According to data from the House Judiciary Committee, 3,100 are deemed “Threat Level 1” criminals. The Atlanta Journal Constitution has published a riveting expose on the extent and danger of these criminal aliens released into our communities throughout the country.

In addition to those let out of jail, DHS has refused to track the countless thousands who were immediately let go upon apprehension as a result of faux prosecutorial discretion. Couple this with the ridiculously lax screening of DACA recipients – 94% of all applications have been approved, despite a number of them turning out to be criminals – and we have an unprecedented national security gap. As the threat of Islamic terror continues to rise, there is no greater more imminent emergency for Congress to contend with.

Where is the solemn sense of urgency from the GOP Congress to “do something on immigration” as it relates to Obama’s release of dangerous criminals? Who is going to stand for people like police officer Brandon Mendoza murdered in the prime of his life by an illegal alien drunk driver? Who will stand for those raped and murdered by illegal aliens?

Protecting the States

The courts are dismantling any ability of beleaguered states to deal with the crime and fiscal burden of illegal immigration. The Ninth Circuit just denied the citizens of Arizona the right to block bail for illegal aliens, most of who never show up to their trials and disappear onto the streets. Where is the eagerness to pass legislation immediately deputizing the states to enforce federal immigration laws? This is a lot more effective and important, than vacuous and unaccountable, promises of “border security.”

The Crushing Fiscal Burden

The IRS Commissioner is now admitting that amnestied aliens will receive huge windfalls from refundable tax credits. Remember, even though the court blocked Obama’s recent amnesty, the DACA program has already legalized 664,607 illegal immigrants. They have all received Social Security cards and are eligible for refundable tax credits. Additionally, it is now clear that almost all illegal aliens are eligible for Obamacare subsidies. Also, the continuous flood of illegal immigrants (something no court can enjoin) has burdened the school systems with a record number of children who can’t speak English.

Who will stand for the forgotten man and woman – the true “undocumented American” – the families of hard working native taxpayers and legal immigrants who are completely undocumented and unrepresented in this debate? They lack the powerful lobbies, legal defense groups, and foreign special interests promoting the “Dreamers.” Who will protect their communities and their slice of the America Dream?

Indeed, there is no greater responsibility of elected officials; no greater emergency than the need to “do something about immigration,” for immigration stands at the nexus of national security, criminal justice, education, health care, welfare, and American culture. Sadly, the elite politicians only plan to do something as it relates to filling their campaign coffers…the needs of their true constituents be damned. (See “The Most Forgotten Man in the Immigration Debate”, originally posted HERE)

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Edward Snowden Is Not Going Away

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On the two-year anniversary of when his leaks detailing secret spy operations at the National Security Agency first emerged, landing like a thunderclap around the world, the former intelligence contractor appears more confident than ever that his actions have permanently altered the surveillance debate.

“The balance of power is beginning to shift,” Snowden said in a statement provided to select news organizations by Amnesty International and Privacy International. “With each court victory, with every change in law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear.”

Snowden has good reason to be riding high after the Senate broke a logjam this week to pass the first significant reform to government surveillance practices since the nation began supercharging its spying powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The USA Freedom Act, which was swiftly signed into law by President Obama, will effectively end the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. call data—the first program exposed by a Snowden-fueled article in The Guardian on June 5, 2013.

But the Freedom Act only deals significantly with one of the NSA’s many spying operations—one that has been deemed illegal by a federal appeals court, ineffective by two government review panels and not even that desired by some high-ranking officials.

And as a stark reminder of that, the journalists who possess the Snowden files were at it again just two days after the law’s passage. The New York Times and ProPublica published new documents Thursday from Snowden’s massive archive revealing that the Obama administration secretly expanded NSA spying beginning in 2012 to collect Americans’ cross-border Internet traffic as part of an effort to thwart and nab foreign hackers. (Read more from “Edward Snowden Is Not Going Away” HERE)

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