Kern County deputies are accused of savagely beating a man to death while he begged for his life and then intimidating witnesses into giving up their cameras and phones in a coverup. The victim, David Sal Silva, was a 33-year-old father of four, and is alleged to have been publicly intoxicated in Bakersfield, CA, when Kern County deputies and California Highway Patrol officers began to beat him. After he was dead, the officers are said to have then systematically intimidated all witnesses into giving up their cameras and phones:

John Tello, a criminal law attorney, is representing two witnesses who took video footage and five other witnesses to the incident. He said his clients are still shaken by what they saw.

"When I arrived to the home of one of the witnesses that had video footage, she was with her family sitting down on the couch, surrounded by three deputies," Tello said.

Tello said the witness was not allowed to go anywhere with her phone and was being quarantined inside her home.

When Tello tried to talk to the witness in private and with the phone, one of the deputies stopped him and told him he couldn't take the phone anywhere because it was evidence to the investigation, the attorney said.

"This was not a crime scene where the evidence was going to be destroyed," Tello said. "These were concerned citizens who were basically doing a civic duty of preserving the evidence, not destroying it as they (sheriff deputies) tried to make it seem."

A search warrant wasn't presented to either of the witnesses until after Tello arrived, he said, adding that one phone was seized before the warrant was produced.

Tello said the phone of the first witness was taken after the deputies told him he was either going to give up the phone the easy way or the hard way.

"They basically told him they were either going to keep him at this house all night until they could find a judge to sign a search warrant or he could just turn over his phone," he said.

Dad who died during arrest 'begged for his life'; witness videos seized (via Reddit)

Atmospheric rivers are meteorological phenomenon that we humans only discovered in 1998 and which supply about 30-to-50 percent of California's annual precipitation. In the NOAA satellite image above, the atmospheric river is visible as a thin yellow arm, reaching out from the Pacific to touch California. Or, more evocatively, reaching out to slap California silly with a gushing downpour.

An atmospheric river is a narrow conveyor belt of vapor about a mile high that extends thousands of miles from out at sea and can carry as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers. It strikes as a series of storms that arrive for days or weeks on end. Each storm can dump inches of rain or feet of snow.

The real scare, however, is that truly massive atmospheric rivers that cause catastrophic flooding seem to hit the state about once every 200 years, according to evidence recently pieced together (and described in the article noted above). The last megaflood was in 1861; rains arrived for 43 days, obliterating Sacramento and bankrupting the state.

As you might guess, climate change is also involved. Evidence suggests that warming global temperatures could increase the frequency of atmospheric rivers. That, combined with the 200-year event expected soon and the fact we're learning so much much more about these storms, means that you should expect to hear the phrase "atmospheric river" more often.

Scientific American has two interesting stories on the phenomenon right now. The first, which I quote from above, is a blog post by Mark Fischetti. The second is a much longer feature story that gets into the forces that cause these storms and the climate change connection.

"OnCentral," a KPCC/Southern California Public Radio reporting project focused on the communities of South LA, has published a terrific series of very detailed posts by José Martinez on graffitti and gang tagging. Here's part one, here's part two, and here's part three, just published today. The latter digs in to the nuances of gang tags that indicate hostile conversations between gangs, or specific gang members; and tags that reveal the presence of Mexican Mafia or various gangs acting in collaboration with local businesses. The snapshot above shows a handpainted sign on a liquor shop in the area, bearing the name of that shop—but it contains a hidden symbol for one of these organized crime groups, suggesting that the liquor store is in cahoots. (via Tony Pierce)

Marty Halpern sez, "Help me find a home for my father's (he passed away in 1998, my mother passed away this past October) hand-designed Wild West whiskey bottle collection. By 'hand-designed' I mean my father designed the bottles himself. The home would hopefully be in Southern California to avoid packing and shipping these 30-odd full-size (and breakable) whiskey bottles."

So, as I said, there are about thirty of the individual, full-size bottles, and I need to find a home for them. If I can find the right home, I would be more than happy to "donate" the entire set. I have already contacted Knotts Berry Farm in Buena Park, but their representative informed me that they already have so many items in storage that they are being forced to dispose of them. I have also contacted the Anaheim Historical Society and the Orange County Archives -- all to no avail. I am hoping to find a home for these in Southern California to avoid packing and shipping them outside the area, which would be very expensive (a minimum of eleven boxes at least), with no guarantee that every bottle would survive the journey.

If you can think of a resource, an organization, an individual, etc. in the Southern Cal area who might be interested, please do have them contact me, and/or post a comment below. There are already offers on my parents' house so I may only have a few weeks at most to relocate these decanters. They are all up for adoption, but I'd like to keep all the children together (at least those that are still left2) if at all possible.

Now that California's video-game censorship law has been struck down by the courts, the state finds itself $2 million poorer, having had to pay the legal expenses of all the vendors they sued under it.

A bit over half a decade ago when California legislators felt entitled to protect children across their state by restricting sales of violent video games struck me as deeply amusing from the onset. Not because it would end up costing the state roughly $2 Million in legal fees after a failed appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court nor out of the sheer disregard for the First Amendment. But because the sheer bureaucratic arrogance on the parts of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, the Governor of California and State Attorney during this time in believing it was their responsibility to discern what content children should or shouldn’t have exposure...

Created by California lawmaker Former San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Leland Yee, now a senator, in the hopes of curbing children’s access to games that allow for assassination, violent crimes, rape, etc. – the law would have fined retailers $1000 for each instance of selling a game to a child that depicted any sort of terrifyingly horrible act that could teach children the crimes in games versus reality are exactly on par. Yee also made a provision in the law that violence in a game would be visibly denoted by some sort of label on the packaging, a measure already taken by the game industry’s ESRB.

California's struck down video game law saddles state with $2 Million bill (via /.)

From Jay Rosen, "Excerpt from UC Davis 2010-2012 General Catalog":

176. Introduction to Pepper Spray. (3) Lecture— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Crowd Control Through Chemicals 122B. Basic uses of pepper spray in threatening, semi-threatening and completely non-threatening and utterly peaceful situations. Common spraying techniques. Overview of rationalization methods. Color choices. Jackboot styles.

177. Advanced Pepper Spraying. (3) Lecture— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Introduction to Pepper Spray 176. Calculating optimum angles in spraying situations. Spraying seated vs. standing persons. History and development of chemical warfare against inconvenient demonstrations. Elements of CYA: basics and best practices.

178: Pepper Spray Practicum. (3). Laboratory— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Advanced Pepper Spraying 177. Working in teams, students locate sites where individuals are exercising so-called First Amendment rights and develop a strategy for spraying them. Emphasis on intimidation and staying calm under awesome hippie threat. Teams are held responsible for escaping responsibility and insulating higher-ups.

Excerpt from UC Davis 2010-2012 General Catalog (Thanks, Jay!)