HUNGER STRIKE OR NOT?

The so-called California prison hunger strike is now into its seventh week and nobody has yet to land in the hospital. According to stories in the LA Times and other sources, the "hunger strikers" are only ingesting Gatorade. This is laughable. Unless they're getting food from sources other than the prison kitchen, the handful of strikers should be dead by now. The accepted time table is that you can survive ten days without food and three days without water. After that, the body starts feeding on itself and systems start shutting down. Seven weeks without solid food? Really?

The published details are that the strikers are a little pale and slightly dehydrated but still very coherent, alert and otherwise healthy. So what are they eating? According to people who are in the system or recently released, they're eating commissary or forcing non-strikers to share their food. They're refusing the prison meals but clearly stuffing their faces from other sources. The fact that they're still healthy proves it.

For some reason, this very obvious point is completely missed by the media. Why is it so hard for the media to ask these fundamental questions? I'll leave you to ponder that and feel free to comment. I'd love to have a rational answer to that one.

SO IS IT LEGAL OR NOT?

Adding more confusion to an already confusing issue, Attorney General Holder issued a memo to his local AGs on recreational and medical marijuana use. Basically, it gives local AGs the option of prosecuting if they feel that local pot laws are not being enforced. There's also some curious wording about what will NOT trigger a Federal prosecution. The two items are the amount of money changing hands and the volume of marijuana trafficked.

This sort of goes against the DOJ's prior ruling that armored car operators are forbidden to transport money from Med Pot stores to banks.

So you can make as much money as you want and sell as much pot as you want but you can't deliver the proceeds of the sales in an armored car to a bank. Is that clear to anyone?

It seems to be a set of laws tailor made for hijackers.

Also curious is leaving prosecutions to local AGs but providing them with a very thin set of hard and fast rules. This once again throws confusion on top of confusion and opens more questions than it answers.

Why is this issue important to this blog which is supposed to be about gangs and organized crime?

It doesn't take much analysis to realize that the beneficiaries of relaxed sales and cultivation will be the people who have always been in the business of sales and cultivation. Say what you will about ultra high quality cross bred Cannabis, nutrient-rich hydroponics or what have you in the world of gourmet Cannabis, the fact still remains that tons and tons of street dope comes from south of the border and from illegal growers inside the border. This memo does nothing to address that issue.

There's nothing in this memo about permissible quantities in possession, under cultivation or hauled during transport.

Also, there's no Federal mechanism to tax sales or cultivation and the States are doing a lousy job of monitoring sales. This leaves the door wide open for an untaxed, cash only underground economy. Basically, there's reason to wonder if this latest memo was designed to make the issue better or way worse.

THUG COPS, GUNS AND LIQUOR

The poisonous thug culture seems to have no boundaries. The LA Times reported today that some campers at Prado Regional Park in Chino got into a boozed up argument over loud music or something and then started popping rounds. Some reports say they shot at each other. Others say they shot into the air. The shooters on both sides of the argument turned out to be off-duty LA County Sheriff's Deputies.

If this story is true - and at this point, there's no reason to believe it isn't - these two assbites should be immediately fired and stripped of all pension and health benefits. There's absolutely no excuse for a cop to fire his weapon under those circumstances. Firing into the air? Idiotic and goes against the policies of every department in the country. Firing at a target you can' identify when there's no immediate deadly threat to innocent life? Ditto.

This is outrageous and if it were a couple of civilians engaged in this event, they'd be in jail right now. These two cops should be there instead of paid leave. Cops should not be allowed to act like thugs and they aren't given any extra-judicial power to act like asses and get away with it.

One more thing. Baca should resign immediately. He clearly does not have his head in the game and he's letting thugs with badges into a department that should know better run around in a county that deserves better. From elected officials more preoccupied with their private parts, pensions and back room deals to thug cops acting like they ARE the law, the citizens of this County, State and Country are not being well served at all. Time to clean house.