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This bike was stolen from RFW Whitlock’s house in Olympia between Bigelow park and State ave. Thanks! #olywa pic.twitter.com/lIWQhQlcCt

by Naomi Klein (10-29-13), New Statesman

What scientists and experts are saying, says Klein, is “that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.”

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet.

“I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

“The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes.”

But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreedupon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbonpricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.

But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special 10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org.

Harvest Moon is a Quinault native story teller who weaves baskets in addition to her retelling of Pacific NW 1st Nation traditional folk tales. Animated with a lilt in her delivery and a great sense of humor, she’s well worth listening to in the company of your children.

How The Dog Got Its Tail (1/3)

The Promise of the Whale (2/3)

Why Heron Stands In Water (3/3)

USA: Last Bastion of Market Priced Health Care

“..The USA is the last holdout with market-priced medical care not because of any inherent conservative or free market ideology. Rather, as the wealthiest nation that ever existed we are the last ones who can afford it. Switzerland was one of the last advanced economies to abandon market-priced medical care. It is arguably a greater bastion of conservatism than the USA. Switzerland’s women were not granted the right to vote until 1971. During the debate as to whether Switzerland would abandon market-priced medical care there was considerable concern about how it would affect the major Swiss pharmaceutical giants such as Hoffmann-La Roche (RHHBY) and Novartis (NVS) which was Sandoz prior to the merger with Ciba in 1996. However, it was then realized that the Swiss pharmaceutical giants made much of their profits in the American market. The reason that no nation, including the wealthiest can allow markets to set the prices of medical care indefinitely is that demand for medical care is inelastic. Demand for a good or service is inelastic if a percentage increase in price results in a smaller percentage decrease in the quantity demanded. Basic economics tells us that sellers facing inelastic demand will continuously raise prices until prices reach the elastic portion of the demand curve. Consequently in every developed country in the world, all goods or services with inelastic demand have their prices regulated by government. Medical care in the USA being the only exception. Health care is one of the very few things for which the sellers face inelastic demand. The prices of all other goods and services facing inelastic demand in the USA are regulated by government. Retail electricity service providers face inelastic demand. Consequently, their prices are strictly controlled by all governments worldwide, including the USA. The inelasticity of retail electricity is obvious. If Consolidated Edison (ED) or any other electric utility were to triple retail service prices, people might be a little more careful about turning off the lights. Turning off their refrigerators? Watching less television? Not likely. Thus, tripling the price would result in only a small reduction in kilowatt-hours sold. Almost all other goods and services are price elastic. That includes non-medically necessary elective cosmetic and lasik surgery whose prices have actually relatively decreased over time. Medical care in the USA is the only instance in any developed country where any product facing inelastic demand is not substantially price regulated. Medical prices are controlled in various ways in the rest of the developed world. In Japan, the land of $100 melons and tiny $10,000 per month apartments, all medical care prices are listed in a book, thicker than the Manhattan telephone directory. The prices set in the book are usually less than a third of those in the USA. An MRI that costs $1,200 in the USA costs $88 in Japan. Japanese insurance companies are private as are most doctors. Japan spends less than a third per capita on medical care than America. However, the Japanese are greater consumers of medical care than Americans. They visit doctors and hospitals more often, have much more diagnostic tests such as MRIs. They also have better health outcomes as measured by all metrics such as life expectancy. They also wait less for treatment than Americans do as Japanese doctors work much longer hours for their much lower incomes. Japan’s explicit price controls are roughly emulated in other countries via the use of monopsonistic systems. Monopsony, meaning “single buyer” is the flip side of monopoly. A monopolist sets prices above free market equilibrium. A monopsonist sets prices below free market equilibrium. It does not matter if there is an actual single payer or many buyers (or payers) whose prices are set by the government or by insurance companies in collusion with each other. More competition among sellers generally leads to lower prices. However, more competition among buyers leads to higher prices. In the health insurance industry the beneficial effects of more insurance companies competing for patients are far outweighed by the adverse effects of insurance companies competing for doctors and hospitals in their HMO plans. This was completely misunderstood during the recent debate on health care reform. With health care, more competition among insurance companies on balance results in higher prices. Focusing attention on the insurance companies, which are simply intermediaries between the doctors and the patients, was a tragic error. It would like trying to solve a problem of high energy prices by focusing on gasoline stations. Only if the government sets prices can health care prices be controlled. Controlling prices does not automatically result in longer waiting times. Japan and Switzerland generally have shorter waiting times to see doctors than does the USA. Additionally, if prices were controlled there would be no such thing as “in-network” or “out-of-network” since all doctors would accept all insurance plans…”
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1647632

In Praise of the 5th

Talking Considered Harmful

Alleged dark web drug kingpin arrested @ SF library

by Henry K. Lee

On April 29, 2013 in Washington County, Tennesee, Police Strapped Stewart Peppers into a Restraint Chair and, while Restrained, 6 Cops Beat and Tasered Him to Death! He would have been 23 this month.

by Melissa Hipolit, Reporter

WASHINGTON COUNTY, TN (WJHL) — The parents of a former Washington County, Tennessee inmate who died on April 29th are suing the county, Sheriff Ed Graybeal, and six corrections officers for more than $20 million, alleging their son died as a result of injuries sustained during a beating inside the jail.

The lawsuit was filed July 6th in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Greeneville.

It was filed by attorneys for Joe and Natasha Peppers, who are the parents of Stewart Peppers.

Peppers died while in the Washington County Detention Center in April.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege Peppers began shouting obscenities at jail personnel while in his cell on April 29th.

The lawsuit states that six corrections officers entered the cell and began to beat Peppers.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege the corrections officers than strapped Peppers to a restraint chair and struck him repeatedly in the face while also using chemical spray and electrical tasers.

CLICK to read wrongful death complaint: Peppers vs. Washington_Co_Sheriff’s Office

The lawsuit states that after the beating, the defendants laid Peppers on the floor and began to perform CPR.

The plaintiffs believe a video recording of the incident was captured by the jail’s surveillance system, and it is now in the hands of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs believe Peppers rights as a pretrial detainee were violated when the defendants used excessive force against him.

The plaintiffs are asking for $20 million in compensatory damages, and an additional one million dollars for loss consortium.

The TBI is currently investigating what led up to Peppers death, as well as the death of another former inmate, Charles Frederick Young III, who died in the same week.

[…and in another report:]

by Kristen Swing, Executive Editor

Washington County Sheriff Ed Graybeal and a handful of corrections officers at the Washington County Detention Center are adamantly denying allegations that an inmate was beaten to death inside the jail in April.

The parents of Stewart Peppers, who died on April 29 while incarcerated at the jail, filed a $20 million lawsuit in federal court against the sheriff and his jailers in July. The suit claims Peppers died because of injuries he sustained in an alleged 20-minute beating by corrections officers at the jail.

Peppers had been in the jail for three days, incarcerated on charges including aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon and the manufacture of a controlled substance.

All parties agree that Peppers was being housed alone, in a single cell on April 29 when he became incensed and began shouting obscenities at jail personnel on duty that day.

Peppers’ parents say their son endured an initial beating when officers entered his cell, then strapped him to a restraint chair and again beat him even though he was unable to move.

They also claim chemical sprays and a Taser were used on the 22-year-old.

In an answer to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court on Aug. 9, the defendants admit to using both a Taser and chemical spray on Peppers, but deny any beating took place.

“…the defendants used the amount of force that was reasonably necessary to try and control an extremely strong and manic individual who posed a severe threat to the officers, to himself and to the security of the WCDC,” states the court document filed by Jeffrey Ward, attorney for Sheriff Ed Graybeal and the six corrections officers named in the suit.

According to the filing, the officers entered Peppers’ cell in an “attempt to maintain discipline and to prevent him from causing further injury to himself.”

Officers said they used both a Taser and chemical spray on Peppers, but neither tool was successful at controlling the inmate.

Peppers’ parents allege the officers laid their unresponsive son on the jail cell floor at the conclusion of the alleged beating and began to perform CPR, but could not revive him. At that time, they claim, a nurse was called for help.

In response, corrections officers say nursing staff was actually contacted to assess Peppers after the Taser was deployed and while Peppers was still resisting the restraints.

“However, because of Mr. Peppers’ violent behavior, the nurse initially could not safely approach Mr. Peppers to assess him,” the document states. “When Mr. Peppers suddenly stopped resisting, he was assessed and it was determined that he had stopped breathing and did not have a pulse. CPR was started and EMS was called immediately.”

Peppers was transported by ambulance to an area hospital where he died a short time later.

The WCSO issued a press release about Peppers’ death on the same day he died.

In the press release, Graybeal said no foul play was suspected in Peppers’ death, but the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was called in to investigate, as is agency policy in such cases. The TBI’s investigation is ongoing and authorities are still awaiting the results of an autopsy.

Stewart Pepper When Alive:

Kern Co: More brutality cut from same warp & weave in David Silva’s death:

BAKERSFIELD, CA — Kern County deputies beat an intoxicated man to death in the street Tuesday night, then detained and intimidated witnesses, confiscated video evidence, and arrested another man who spoke out. David Silva was beaten with batons, left in a pool of blood until an ambulance finally arrived after he was already dead.

A female 9-1-1 caller named Selena told the dispatcher, “There’s a man laying on the floor, and your police officers beat the (expletive) out of him and killed him.” She said that she witnessed the victim do nothing wrong to cause 8 officers to bludgeon him to death. “These cops had no reason to do this to this man.”

https://www.facebook.com/PoliceStateUSA

A 19-year-old male witness, Ruben Ceballos, was awakened around midnight by screams and loud banging noises outside his home. He said he ran to the left side of his house to find out who was causing the ruckus.”When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with batons and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head.” He said that Silva was on the ground screaming for help, but officers continued to beat him After several minutes, Silva stopped screaming and was no longer responsive, according to Ceballos.

Another witness, Jason Land, said that he witnessed the beating of David Silva. “They jumped out, reached for their bats, and beat that man until they killed him,” he said, “right in front of my face.” Land spoke up about what he saw and was arrested as retaliation. The witness was on probation and says police responded to his eyewitness report by claiming he was high on PCP and arrested him without any proof.

Witnesses also say that the victim’s body was left to bleed out in the street for a prolonged period without any medical attention, wasting crucial minutes before the ambulance arrived. By that point, it was too late and CPR attempts were futile.

Other witnesses, including Melissa Quair, were harassed and told that they must surrender their cell phones as “evidence.” Their houses were even searched as a crime scene in order to confiscate the video evidence.

The victim’s brother, Christopher Silva, says his brother was murdered and wants justice. He is demanding that his brother’s body be released so that he can see the result of the beating. He wants the confiscated videos to be released. “My brother spent the last eight minutes of his life pleading, begging for his life. The true evidence is in those phone witnesses that apparently the sheriff deputies already took. But I know the truth will come out and my brother’s voice will be heard.”

Requiem For The Innocent

Daytona Cops Try to Detain Man for Videotaping Cars as He Walks Away

Jeff Gray entered Daytona City Hall/Police Department to submit a public records request, which despite what the Florida Sunshine Law states, have proven extremely difficult for government officials to abide by throughout the entire state.

But this time, it was surprisingly easy with a clerk allowing him to video record the daily visitor log, which is allowable by state law, and probably the easiest public record to obtain considering it is sitting right there in the front lobby.

Unfortunately, Daytona police had to go and ruin this positive experience when they detained him outside for video recording cop cars for b-footage.

Cops are funny like that. They think it’s suspicious for a man to openly record the cars leaving the parking lot, not realizing anybody could just walk in and make a public records of the surveillance video that is no doubt recording the cops coming and going through the gate.

Under Florida law, that person wouldn’t even have to provide a name or identification.

But the two plainclothes cops that confronted Gray in front of the police station weren’t too keen on the law considering they were under the impression that Florida’s wiretapping law pertains to areas where they would not have an expectation of privacy.

So maybe they should check out Gray’s other video where he spoke to an assistant state attorney who had written article two years ago, confirming that citizens are allowed to record cops on duty with or without their consent.

Although he was asked several times, Gray never provided identification nor his name, keeping in full control of the conversation, eventually walking away to his car and driving off, with them no doubt writing down his plate number so they can run his name through the crime database, which is not exactly legal either.

Brandon Darby (Citizen Patriot Response) www.citizenpatriotresponse.org
Brandon Darby is an activist who rose to international recognition for his role in co-founding and directing the Common Ground Relief organization in New Orleans’ 9th Ward in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His story is one of a leader of the radical Left who saw the light and became an American Hero for conservatives.

In the following clips, he exposes how the groups he’d come to know condoned senior spokespersons manipulating the young idealists to avoid putting themselves in harm’s way or bearing the consequences of the illegal acts they instigated. What Brandon fails to mention is that the mentally ill, homeless, hungry, and destitute are similarly manipulated to stunning effect. He lists the inconsistencies of equating private property to theft, the state to oppression, society to slave masters, and civilization itself as needing to be destroyed when young violent activists argue creation flows from destruction and how each shall do as they wilt shall be the whole of the law.

What does his nemesis have to say about a man they label (as is their habit) a ‘snitch’?

“Turncoat–a show from This American Life about informant Brandon Darby, from the 2008 RNC cases of David McKay and Bradley Crowder. Following this show, Darby has started an informant advocacy group Citizen Patriot Response, in which he encourages people to snitch on activists to the FBI.  He has also admitted in recent speeches to right-wing neo-fascist Tea Party conference goers that he is traveling to Occupy camps around the country and attending assemblies to collect information and share it with the government.”

Given Occupy’s still birth, the above indictment appears dated. But, Darby is, indeed, a gifted speaker and persuasive advocate of transparency if not a facile analyst of the contradictions he exposes in his erstwhile fellow travelers. Take the time to listen and see if you don’t find yourself nodding your head in agreement with many of his most salient points.

The following clip reveals Darby coordinating the removal of protesters opposed (as many Americans are) to what Sheriff Joe (from AZ) stands for. However, the distinction between Darby’s actions and the behavior of (A)narchists in their own events is one without a meaningful difference. Neither tolerates dissent or the ‘diversity’ to which they give so much lip service, but so little respect.

Here, Brandon Darby gets verbally attacked at a July 21,2013 Trayvon rally organized by the New Black Panther Party and Quanell X. The Occupy contingent recognized Darby while he was on assignment for Breitbart News.

The following clip ‘Better This World’ claims to tell the story of two friends who were betrayed by a friend and mentor (Brandon Darby) who influenced them to become violent during the RNC convention in 2008 — but filmmakers, Kelly Duane and Katy Galloway, left out/distorted the real story. Learn how from Brandon Darby, who stopped Brad Crowder and David McKay from hurting anyone. This is the full unedited interview including the creepy dude taking pictures.