COLLAPSE! Ignoring Tsipras Plea For Calm, Greeks Storm ATMs, Stores, Gas Stations

Just a few hours ago Greek PM Tsipras addressed his nation imploring then to "remain calm" and reassuring them that their "deposits were safe." It appears the Greeks did not believe him. Many were wondering where the Greek bank lines were for the past several months. Turns out the local depositors were merely waiting until just after the last minute to withdraw their funds... horde gas... and stack food. Greece, it appears is Venezuela - the new socialist paradise.

Long Gas Lines

Blocks long bank lines

Long ATM lines

Grocery stores mobed

Stations out of gas

Even Airport ATM have long lines

Charleston Shooting Hoax Was a Confirmed Active Shooter Drill

Stockton CA judge won’t hear local farmers’ case over water cuts

STOCKTON — Dozens of Central Valley farmers who were hoping a local judge would come to their aid and fend off sweeping state water restrictions imposed on some of California’s most senior water rights holders were dealt a blow Tuesday when the court declined to hear their case, citing a potential for “local prejudices.”
San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Carter P. Holly, after three hours of arguments, honored a request by state water officials to transfer the challenge to their conservation measures to a less partial county. A new site has not been determined.

The lawsuit brought by the Banta-Carbona Irrigation District in Tracy is the first to question the state’s authority to demand that those with century-old water claims stop pumping from rivers and creeks in light of the drought.
Although the case was filed on behalf of just 75 or so growers, it could affect thousands of farmers, water districts and communities whose supplies hinge on senior water rights. It is viewed as a crucial test of the state’s power to manage water use during the drought.
The bulk of Tuesday’s debate, which focused on just how far the State Water Resources Control Board can go in its conservation crackdown, won’t be ruled on since the case will be moved before another judge. However, it provided a glimpse of the fight to come.
“The hearing exposed the state board’s flawed thinking,” contended Jeanne Zolezzi, one of the attorneys representing the irrigation district.
The district’s argument is that its century-old right to draw water from the San Joaquin River predates the state’s requirement for permits and cannot be compromised.
Since the river water is the district’s only supply, all deliveries to the farmers in the area will cease under the state’s directive. The suit estimates this will mean $800 million of crop losses this year.
Farmers in attendance
Dennis Baker, who runs a hay business in Tracy, was one of about 50 in the courtroom Tuesday who looked as if they would rather be back at the farm with their dusty boots, work jeans and Western hats. The issue was too important to ignore, however.
“I have like a cutting of hay left in the field. After that, there will be no more if they turn the water off,” Baker said.
Baker has been using extra fertilizer to make up for the water shortage, but that won’t be enough to yield the usual three or four harvests that ensure he can pay the bills each year.
The irrigation district was still delivering water to Baker and other customers Tuesday, citing a one-week grace period after receiving notice from the state to stop pumping. The district’s board had not decided whether it would continue drawing water after the deadline.
Those who illegally pump face fines of $1,000 per day plus $2,500 per acre-foot drawn. An acre-foot of water is enough to supply one or two homes for a year.
The state water board contends there simply isn’t enough water in California’s rivers and creeks to meet the demands of all water rights holders. So, per the state’s system of seniority, cuts need to be made by those with less senior rights.
Orders to stop pumping were issued earlier this year to thousands with claims after 1914, the year that California began granting permits for water draws. On June 12, the state water board took the unusual step of extending the directive to senior rights holders with claims back to 1903.
Only once before, during the drought of the late 1970s, has the state reached as deep into the hierarchy of water rights. Those with claims older than 1903 can still draw water.
The Banta-Carbona Irrigation District staked its claim in 1911.
The curtailment applies across California’s biggest farming regions: the Sacramento River watershed, the San Joaquin River watershed and the delta.
State attorneys argued Tuesday that they have the power to force water rights holders to stop pumping when those with more senior rights are at risk of not getting their water.
“It’s the reality of the water shortage,” said attorney David Rose.
The heart of the dispute was over what legal mechanism the state had to regulate water rights holders whose claims precede California’s regulatory system.
Attorneys for the irrigation district held that pre-1914 rights were simply off-limits, while state lawyers contended that the water board’s authority rests on its legislative mandate to protect California’s water supply.
The irrigation district also claimed that it hadn’t been given the opportunity to protest before pumping restrictions were issued, denying it due process. State attorneys said due process would come when the state enforced the restrictions.
Drilling a new well
Not knowing what would happen with the district’s water supply, grower Kris Thomsen, who attended Tuesday’s hearing, made the decision to pay $230,000 to drill a new well on his property to secure another source of water.
The well still needs a motor and pump, so he is not sure yet how much groundwater he will have to irrigate his almond trees, but he is hoping for the best.
“We’re not necessarily looking to get a bumper crop,” he said. “We just want to keep them alive.”
Similar suits to the one heard Tuesday also have challenged the state’s authority to restrict senior water rights holders. No others, though, have gone before a judge.
Among those filing suits are the Patterson Irrigation District also along the San Joaquin River and a consortium of water agencies that draw from the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers. Several other irrigation districts have threatened legal action.
By Kurtis Alexander : San Francisco Chronicle staff writer 

Quote de Jour

Study Finds Over The Counter Heartburn Antacids Could Give You A Heart Attack

Quick relief from acute heartburn and its chronic cousin GERD is a good thing. But is it worth risking a heart attack?

That's the devil's choice that millions of Americans may be making without realizing it. A large new "big data" study finds a strong statistical link between proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) such as Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium (and their generic versions) and heart attacks. It's big news because PPIs are the third most popular prescription drugs and the second most popular over-the-counter drugs in the country...used by 21 million Americans. And the increased risk for heart attacks is not just to people with heart conditions or those taking certain medications, but to everyone, healthy or sick, young or old.

A CHORUS OF MEDICAL CONCERNS OVER PPIs--SUDDENLY LOUDER

PPIs, which temporarily turn off the body's ability to make stomach acid, reducing symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and other medical conditions, have been raising safety concerns for years. They interfere with the body's ability to absorb nutrients, increase the risk for fractures and make it difficult to treat gastrointestinal infections such as C. difficile.
There has been ongoing concern about PPIs and the heart, too, but mostly for people who already have heart disease. Doctors have known for a long time that people who take both the blood thinner clopidogrel (Plavix) and PPIs are at higher risk for heart attacks and stroke. They suspected that PPIs blocked an enzyme that allows clopidogrel to do its job.
But other researchers worried that the heart risks were broader. There was a whisper in the data that suggested that even people not taking blood thinners were at increased heart risk. So the researchers designed the latest study. And what has come back from the data was less like a whisper and more like...a roar.

A NEW DATA-MINING APPROACH FINDS A RISK THAT OTHER STUDIES MISSED

This new study was conducted using a "data-mining" method to search through two large databases that contained the medical records of more than three million patients. These included patients treated in doctor's offices around the country as well as patients treated at Stanford University Medical Center.
First, they identified adults diagnosed with GERD. Then they examined their medical records to see whether they had received one of two main types of acid-suppressing medication. Some are by prescription only, others over-the-counter, and some are available both ways...

- PPIs: Omeprazole (such as Prilosec), lansoprazole (Prevacid), pantoprazole (Protonix), esomeprazole (Nexium), rabeprazole (AcipHex) and dexlansoprazole (Kapidex).

- Histamine blockers: Cimetidine (such as Tagamet), famotidine (Pepcid), nizatidine (Axid) and ranitidine (Zantac).
They excluded anyone taking the blood thinner clopidogrel. Then they compared the patients with others who had GERD but did not take either of these two classes of medication. These controls were matched to the drug takers based on age, gender, length of follow-up and other variables. Finally, the researchers looked for diagnosis codes in the medical records of both GERD patients and controls indicating that they had had heart attacks sometime after starting either sort of medication.
The researchers used two different databases, but each one showed a similar result--PPIs increased heart attack risk substantially....
- PPI use overall was associated with 16% to 19% greater chance of heart attack.
- PPI use by people 55 or younger was associated with 25% to 40% increased risk.
- Among all the drugs, pantoprazole had the strongest association with increased heart attack risk, a 34% higher risk when averaged across age groups.
- Esomeprazole had the weakest association with increased heart attack risk--8% higher risk.
- Histamine blocker use was not associated with increased heart attack risk in either set of data.
Then the researchers looked at the data from the other side. Instead of looking at people who took these GERD drugs, they looked at those who had had coronary angiograms after having abnormal cardiac stress tests, chest pain or shortness of breath--indicating the probability of heart disease. Amongst these cardiac patients, after adjusting for all known risk factors, those who had used PPIs had double the risk of dying from a cardiovascular cause such as a heart attack, heart failure or stroke compared with cardiac patients who hadn't used PPIs. Again in this case, histamine blockers were not associated with increased risk.

All of these results, whether reached by looking first for people who took PPIs or first for people who had heart trouble, look like very bad news for the safety of PPIs!

TAKING PPIs? WHAT TO DO NOW
How might PPIs damage the cardiovascular system? The researchers note that these drugs suppress an enzyme needed for the body to make nitric acid, which relaxes and protects arteries and veins. In short, PPIs may lead to constriction of blood vessels, causing heart disease.
It's not proof, to be sure. Like any statistical study, even this large study can show only an association. The researchers acknowledged that their analysis didn't account for several factors, including use of other types of over-the-counter drugs and the presence of other medical conditions, that could contribute to risk for heart attacks. They note that future epidemiological studies may find different risk percentages, so comparing one PPI to another isn't an exact science. But they emphasize that their analysis indicates that there is 97.5% chance that the PPI/heart attack association they identified is real.
Some day, a large, randomized, placebo-controlled study with thousands of patients may be powerful enough to prove (or disprove) that PPIs cause heart attacks. But you don't have to wait to protect yourself whether you have GERD or are using a PPI for any other condition. PPIs are prescribed for many conditions besides heartburn, such as stomach ulcers, including those caused by H. pylori bacteria and those brought on by chronic use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories (for arthritis pain, for example)...Crohn's disease...and complications of certain gastrointestinal cancers such as Zollinger-Ellison syndrome. If your doctor has prescribed a PPI to you for a specific medical condition other than GERD, make it a point to have a discussion about whether there are alternate approaches worth exploring now.

If it's GERD, there are safer ways to get relief. Even before this study, the official advice was to use PPIs for no more than two weeks at a time or for more than three times in a year. But once you stop taking them, your stomach may respond by temporarily making even more acid than before, so your symptoms might get worse. In other words, it's easy to get hooked. It's also possible that your GERD got worse while you were on PPIs for a long time--they don't cure GERD or stop its progression.

Whether you have taken PPIs or not, a lifestyle approach to managing GERD is key...
- Cut back on coffee and other sources of caffeine.
- Cut back on fatty foods.
- Eat smaller, more frequent meals rather than a few one large ones
- Cut back on alcohol.
- Wait three hours after eating and drinking before lying down.
- Elevate the head of your bed so that gravity keeps stomach acid in your stomach.
- Lose weight if you need to.
- Don't smoke.

Treating An Ulcer With Medication Can Be Fatal, Yet Treating It Naturally Heals It For Life

Blast From The Past!

In Wyoming it’s now illegal to collect data about pollution

A new Wyoming law expands on the “ag-gag” trend of criminalizing whistleblowers in a new way: making it illegal for citizens to gather data about environmental pollution.

Wyoming’s Senate Bill 12, or the “Data Trespassing Bill” as it’s being called, criminalizes the collection of “resource data.”

 It defines collection as “to take a sample of material, acquire, gather, photograph or otherwise preserve information in any form from open land which is submitted or intended to be submitted to any agency of the state or federal government.”

Yes, you read that correctly. This law is explicitly targeting those who gather evidence from open land of corporate pollution for the purpose of turning that evidence over to the government.

The law goes on to say that any evidence gathered without the property owner’s written or verbal permission will not be admissible as evidence in any civil, criminal or administrative proceeding.

The Wyoming bill came with heavy support from cattle ranchers, who are involved in a lawsuit against the Western Watershed Project. Ranchers say the environmentalists improperly collected water samples, which showed elevated E. coli levels.

The lawsuit is pending, but regardless of how it turns out, collecting data on public lands is now illegal in the state.

“This is an effort to make it illegal for citizens to gather truthful information about all the people using natural resources,” Wyoming attorney Justin Pidot told VICE News. “It has a significant chilling effect on citizens who want to gather information about public land.”

I talked to VICE about how this fits into the broader ag-gag trend:

Will Potter, an investigative journalist who has written extensively on government attempts to clamp down on environmentalists, told VICE News the Wyoming bill had the potential to be enforced as broadly as Pidot and Wilbert fear because the wording gave room for a myriad of interpretations.

“Over and over again I’ve seen promises by politicians that legislation is not going to be used in X, Y, or Z way but it doesn’t play out that way,” Potter warned. “Once you put laws like this on the books they can be pushed to their limits.”

North Carolina recently passed a sweeping ag-gag law as well, which was opposed by AARP, veterans, animal welfare advocates, and domestic violence groups.

These laws are a blatant attempt by corporations to shut down any attempt to investigate their activities and hold them accountable.

This Wyoming law, just like ag-gag laws, ensure that evidence collected can’t be used in court. Even if the evidence shows pollution that is putting public health at risk.

Cash-Strapped Kansas Moves to Limit ATM Withdrawals for Residents on Welfare

Kansas is in trouble. After slashing income taxes in 2012, the state faces a revenue gap of more than $400 million. Republican Governor Sam Brownback and state legislators are debating how to make up the shortfall. So far they’ve agreed on one way to control how state money is spent. Starting in July, people on the dole will be limited to a single ATM withdrawal of no more than $25 per day. The law also prohibits spending public-assistance cash at movie theaters, swimming pools, and video arcades. Nail salons and tattoo parlors are out, too.

“The primary focus is to get people back to work, because that’s where the real benefit is—getting people off public assistance and back into the marketplace with the dignity and far more income there than the pittance that government gives them,” Brownback said when he signed the Kansas bill into law in April.

Kansas is among several Republican-controlled states that have recently cut or limited public-assistance funds. In Arizona, which faces a $1 billion budget shortfall, lawmakers voted on May 18 to limit welfare to a year, the shortest window in the nation. On May 5, Missouri’s Republican legislature overrode Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s veto to enact a bill that cut thousands of low-income families from aid rolls by reducing how long people can claim cash from five years to fewer than four. Michigan’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill on June 2 that strips cash assistance from families with chronically truant children. “During the recession there were lots of blue states, for fiscally driven reasons, that were cutting welfare,” says Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. “This year’s cuts feel more ideologically driven.”

“This is not a data-driven policy decision. This is a solution seeking a problem.”

Shannon Cotsoradis, president Kansas Action for Children

 

A September 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 73 percent of Republicans feel the government can’t afford to do much more to help the needy, compared with 32 percent of Democrats. “If you look at cycles in history, you’ll see that there is compassion, then compassion fatigue, and then blame,” says Patricia Baker, a senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, a Boston nonprofit that researches poverty. “This happens because there’s impatience with the solution.”
The number of families receiving cash through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the federal-state aid program that grew out of the 1996 federal welfare reform law, peaked in 1994 at 5.1 million families, according to the Congressional Research Service. It’s since plummeted to 1.5 million at the end of 2014. In Kansas 6,478 families were on welfare at the end of last year, down from 7,553 in 2013. Monthly payments for a family of three range from $386 to $429, depending on a county’s population and cost of living.

The restrictions on ATM withdrawals could eat up as much as 10 percent of that in transaction fees, according to Shannon Cotsoradis, president and chief executive officer of the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children. She says state lawmakers acted on anecdotes about TANF cards being used at casinos and, in one instance, on a cruise ship. “This is not a data-driven policy decision,” she says. “This is a solution seeking a problem.”

Duane Goossen, a former Republican state lawmaker who served 12 years as Kansas’s budget director under governors of both parties before leaving the post in 2010, says the restrictions won’t do anything to help fix the budget crisis. It will have “zero” effect, he says. Others say the political calculus for lawmakers facing reelection next year is clear. “Now they can go home and say they made it really tough on” the poor, says Burdett Loomis, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas. “No more free ride, blah-blah-blah.”

The bottom line: Kansas, like other Republican-led states, is adding restrictions on welfare benefits.