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Going out to drink? Eat these 15 foods to beat the adverse effects of alcohol

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2019

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-12-06-15-foods-beat-the-effects-of-alcohol.html

by:

…

Foods to eat before getting a drink

Drinking lightly on an empty stomach may not result in bad side effects, but it is still best to grab a bite before consuming alcohol. The following foods will fill the stomach and help prevent unwanted outcomes:

  1. Asparagus – To prepare the liver for the night, eat a lot of asparagus. This beneficial plant produces antioxidants that can help boost liver health.
  2. Avocado – It is made of healthy, monounsaturated fats that take longer than proteins and carbs to digest. This slows down the rate of alcohol absorption in the small intestine.
  3. Bananas – They are rich sources of potassium, which can prevent electrolyte imbalance caused by alcohol intake. Eat at least one banana before going out to drink.
  4. Beets – They are rich in antioxidants and protects the liver from damage.
  5. Berries – All kinds of berries, like strawberries and blueberries, are rich in nutrients and antioxidants. Moreover, they are filled with water and can help a person stay hydrated.
  6. Chia pudding – This snack is filled with fiber and protein. Protein, in particular, can help slow down the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream.
  7. Eggs – These protein-packed food can help a person feel full for a longer time. Eating eggs can help reduce cravings that usually increase when people drink.
  8. Grapefruit – The juice of this citrus fruit helps boost the levels of several enzymes that improve liver function and detoxification.
  9. Hummus – It is a great alternative source of protein for vegetarians. It also contains fats, proteins and carbohydrates that can help you feel full.
  10. Melon – This large fruit is filled with water and potassium. Cut some honeydew or cantaloupe for a refreshing snack to fend off the side effects of alcohol.
  11. Oats – Packed with fiber and protein, oats can be prepared in numerous ways, including baked goods, smoothies and granola bars for a quick snack.
  12. Quinoa – This whole grain superfood is rich in potassium and magnesium that can reduce imbalances in electrolyte levels.
  13. Salmon – This fresh fish is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which reduce brain inflammation associated with excessive alcohol drinking.
  14. Sweet potatoes – Aside from potassium, sweet potatoes are made of complex carbs that take longer to break down. They reduce the effects of spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels as a person drinks.
  15. Trail mix – It has a healthy combination of different nuts like almonds, walnuts and flaxseeds – all of which are rich in fiber and protein. Take this portable nutrient-packed snack for the night.

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American breakup: secession is much closer than we think

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2019

The states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative

https://spectator.us/american-breakup/

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this?

Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together. Canada was an admirably liberal country, yet it came within a hair’s breadth of secession. America is headed the same direction today, and without the reserve and innate conservatism that has permitted Canadians to shrug off differences.

We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861.The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and no-platforming, the growing tolerance of violence — it all suggests we’d be happier in separate countries.

That’s enough to make secession seem attractive. But there’s a second reason why secession beckons. We’re overlarge, one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. Smaller countries, as I’ll show, are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It might therefore seem odd that we’ve stayed together so long. If divorces are made in Heaven, as Oscar Wilde remarked, how did we luck out? The answer, of course, is the Civil War. The example of Secession 1.0 in 1861, with its 750,000 wartime deaths, has made Secession 2.0 seem too painful to consider. In my book, American Succession, I explode the comforting belief that it couldn’t happen again. The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.

To begin with, we’re far more likely to let it happen today than we were in 1861. John Kerry had a point when he said that Putin, by invading Crimea, was behaving as if it were the 19th century. While the secretary of state was mocked for what seemed like naivety, public attitudes have in fact changed since 1861. We are now less willing to take up arms in order to maintain the Union and readier to accept a breakup instead. Next time, we’re likely to find a President James Buchanan in office and not an Abraham Lincoln.

Second, a cordial divorce might be worked out through the amending machinery of a convention held under Article V of the Constitution, if all sections of America were good and tired of each other. Secession cannot be unconstitutional when there’s a constitutional way of making it happen, through a constitutional convention.

Finally, the Supreme Court might revisit its denial of a right of secession. The originalists on the Court would recognize that the Framers had thought that states had the right to secede, while the more politically minded members of the Court might hesitate before ruling secession illegal and permitting the president to make war against a state. Instead, the Court could be expected to look northward, to the more nuanced view of secession rights taken by the Canadian Supreme Court, which rejected both an absolute right and an absolute bar to secession.

So it’s not difficult to imagine an American breakup. The reasons why a state might want to secede today are more compelling than at any time in recent history. Slavery isn’t on the ballot, and there would be no undoing of the civil rights revolution anywhere. Indeed, the states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative. Were secession to happen today, it would be politically correct.

So it might happen. I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that might stop us have failed, and if we want to remain united we must learn how to slow the engine. That will take things that have been in short supply lately: a greater tolerance for ideological differences, thicker skin to imagined slights, a deeper repository of confidence in and sympathy for our fellow Americans. These are things we used to have, and can learn to have again if we recognize that the alternative is secession.

Federalism used to allow for greater differences among the states, and that permitted us to sort out our differences by settling among people with like beliefs. And while federalism was discredited when it sought to excuse racist Jim Crow laws in the South, we’ve left that world long behind. That is why I propose, as a solution to our divisions and an antidote to secession, a devolution of power to the states — not mere federalism, but the alternative that the British presented to the Continental Congress in 1778 after it had decided upon secession through the Declaration of Independence. It was what Gladstone and Charles Stuart Parnell sought as an alternative to Ireland’s outright secession. The solution was ‘home rule’. Adopted in America, this would return more power to a seceding state than it possesses now, or ever possessed under American federalism.

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Mapping Europe's Secessionist Movements | Zero Hedge

 

 

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Buried Memories

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

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Ohio Residents Just Abolished Two Villages Over Tax Increases

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

https://taxfoundation.org/amelia-ohio-dissolve-tax-increases/?utm_content=buffer72cc6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Jared Walczak

Last week, a New York Times reporter reached out to ask if I had heard that the village of Amelia, Ohio was dissolving over a tax increase. Facing an unpopular new tax, voters went to the polls and just… abolished their local government.

I wasn’t aware of the drama bubbling up in Amelia (or in nearby Newtonsville, also dissolving over a new tax), but I wasn’t surprised, either. As the resulting Times article notes, at least 130 municipalities dissolved between 2000 and 2011, without, presumably, seeing the communities descend into anarchy. The loss of Amelia and Newtonsville brings the count of recently dissolved Ohio municipalities to 14. So what’s going on, and what do taxes have to do with it?

In most of the country, the governmental hierarchy is relatively straightforward: states are divided into counties, and those counties contain some range of municipalities—cities, towns, villages, boroughs, townships, hamlets, and the like. But, especially outside more densely populated regions, you can also find vast tracts of unincorporated land, where no (or limited) municipal government exists below the county level. Here, core services like police, fire, and emergency services, along with road maintenance and other government functions, are provided by the county or even the state, while more municipal-oriented services—water and sewer or waste management, for instance—are either privately provided or non-existent.

For many rural areas, this works reasonably well. Many of the amenities offered by a city or even a town aren’t necessary for or even suited to a rural community, and even a village like Amelia may not need much that higher tiers of government cannot provide. (In Amelia’s case, it will not become wholly unincorporated, but instead partitioned among two townships.)

Sometimes, in fact, having too many layers of local government introduces a great deal of complexity. Ohio is an example of this; so is neighboring Pennsylvania, where there are eight classes of counties (with five different property tax codes), four classes of cities, two classes of townships, and two configurations of borough government, and where each township holds elections for local offices all the way down to local tax collector and municipal assessors. This does not always make for effective, professional administration, and residents can find it frustrating to comply with local taxes and administration that are often idiosyncratic and duplicative.

If Ohio is not quite so bad in this regard as Pennsylvania, it is almost certainly second worst. Local income taxes, the bane of Amelia and Newtonsville, are heavily concentrated in the two states situated at the Forks of the Ohio, with Pennsylvania “boasting” 2,978 local income tax jurisdictions and Ohio claiming another 848, together accounting for 77 percent of local income tax jurisdictions nationwide, more than ten times their share of the U.S. population. It’s fair for Ohioans to ask why they’re paying local income, sales, and property taxes when vast swaths of the population nationwide only face property taxes as a major local tax. And it’s not like they’re getting a break on the property taxes, either: Ohio’s property taxes are the 9th highest in the country as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value…

 

In other words, the new municipal income tax increased a typical family’s state and local tax burden (among major taxes, at least) by 11 percent, and their state and local income tax burden by 44 percent. That’s significant, especially if the benefits of living in a small incorporated municipality aren’t that substantial.

It’s hard to give up a local identity, but you have lightly populated counties in Plains States constrained in size by the ability to take a horse and buggy to the county seat within a day’s time; you have towns in the Midwest that have lost most of their population and could gain economies of scale by joint service agreements with neighboring jurisdictions. You have levels of government that are sometimes no longer suited to 21st century needs.

This is not always just about taxes, but taxes are a major part of it. People are willing to pay for local services—but they want to get something for their money. And there will be times when that perfectly reasonable expectation is in tension with the smallest units of government.

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Living in a World Bereft of Privacy – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

This low-level and laughably amateur attempt at extortion is risible. Unfortunately, the threat from our governments spying on us all is not.

Even back then we knew that computers could be captured by adversaries and turned against you – keystroke loggers, remote recording via microphones, cameras switched on to watch you, and many other horrors.

Living in a World Bereft of Privacy

By Annie Machon
in Brussels
Special to Consortium News

A few days ago I first received a menacing email from someone calling herself Susana Peritz. She told me “she” had hacked my email, planted malware on my computer, and had then filmed me getting my jollies while watching “interesting” porn online. Her email had caught my attention because it mentioned in the subject line a very old password, attached to a very old email address I had not used for over a decade. The malware must have been planted on a defunct computer.

Putting aside the fact that I am far more concerned about GCHQ or the NSA hacking my computer (as should we all be), this did rather amuse me.

Apparently, I must pay this “Susana” $1000 via Bitcoin or, shock, have my alleged pleasures shared with my acquaintances. And just last night I received another courteous request for cash from someone calling themselves Jillie Abdulrazak, but the price has now been inflated to $3000.

Why am I not concerned? Well, I can safely say – hand on heart – that I have never watched online porn. But this got me thinking about how or why I could have been singled out for this mark of a blackmailer’s esteem, and that brings me on to some rather dark thoughts.

It is perfectly possible that a rare, unguarded moment of long-distance online love might have been captured (but by whom?). That would probably be over a decade ago and would certainly have been using the old email account which was attached to the particular password at the time.

However, even those memories have been denied me – I distinctly remember that I have been too paranoid for too long and have always covered the built-in computer camera lens. Anything that could possibly have been recorded could only be audio – a saucy phone call at most. There can be no video of my younger self, alas.

I have had good reason to be paranoid. In the late 1990s I supported my former partner and fellow MI5 intelligence officer, David Shalyer, in his whistleblower exploits to expose the crimes and incompetence of the UK spy agencies at the time. This resulted in us literally going on the run across Europe, living in hiding for a year in la France profonde, and another two years in exile in Paris before he voluntarily returned to the UK in 2000 to face the music and inevitably, under the terms of the UK’ draconian 1989 Official Secrets Act, being sent to prison for exposing the crimes of British spies.

From those years, knowing what we knew about the spies’ capabilities even then, the sense of being always potentially watched has never rubbed off.

The Bigger Picture

So, knowing absolutely that I have never watched any online porn and that I always keep my computer camera lens covered, “Susana” and “Jillie” can go whistle. You have tried to shake down the wrong paranoid ex-MI5 whistleblower, darlings. And my tech people are now hunting you.

Any possible audio could, I suppose, be spliced in some way to some dodgy video to make this the stuff of a blackmailer’s dreams. That, surely, will be easy to “forensicate” – and indeed I have other friends who can do this, at world class level.

Alternatively, the former love at the time could have recorded the audio for his own nefarious personal usage for some nebulous time in the future. And if that future is now, after he had shown himself a long time ago to be chronically dishonest, why do this in 2018 when we have been separated for years?

He may have possibly continued to used the old email account himself to watch vile material – he certainly had the password back then and perhaps he uses it to distance himself from his own porn habit (fapware, as the geeks call it)? If that is the case, he is even less honorable than I had considered him to be.

Or perhaps this is some type of dark LoveInt operation by the spooks, in some failed attempt to frighten or embarrass me?

But there is, of course, a bigger, more political picture.

Ever since I worked as an intelligence officer for MI5, before going on the run with Shayler during the whistleblowing years in the late 1990s, I have been painfully aware of the tech capabilities of the spies. Even back then we knew that computers could be captured by adversaries and turned against you – keystroke loggers, remote recording via microphones, cameras switched on to watch you, and many other horrors.

The whistleblowing of Edward Snowden back in 2013 has confirmed all this and more on an industrial, global scale – we are all potentially at risk of this particular invasion of our personal privacy. I have kept my computer and mobile camera lenses covered for all these years precisely because of this threat.

One specific Snowden disclosure, which has received little mainstream media traction, was a programme called OPTIC NERVE. This was a GCHQ program (funded by American money) that allowed the spooks to intercept in real time video conferencing calls. It turned out, horror, that 10 percent of them were of a salacious nature, and the spooks were shocked!

I have spoken about privacy and surveillance at conferences around the world and have many, many times had to debate the supposition that “if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.”

However, most people would like to keep their intimate relationships private. In this era of work travel and long distance relationships, more of us might well have intimate conversations and even video play via the internet. In an adult, consensual and mutually pleasurable context, we are doing nothing wrong and we have nothing to hide, but we surely don’t want the spooks to be watching us or listening in, any more than we would want the criminals capturing images and trying to shake us down for money.

This low-level and laughably amateur attempt at extortion is risible. Unfortunately, the threat from our governments spying on us all is not.

Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer in the UK’s domestic MI5 Security Service.

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Working Teens Dragged Back to School By Bounty Hunters | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/working-teens-dragged-back-to-school-by-bounty-hunters/

By Joe Jarvis

There has been an uptick over the past year in “children skipping school,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

And that is where the problem begins. Because the article does not talk about “children.” It talks about teenagers, young adults. They are “adolescents,” the invented stage between childhood and adulthood which keeps teens in an oppressive purgatory.

And why are these “children” skipping school?

Greene County Career Center, a high school in Xenia, Ohio, dispatches a truancy interventionist to meet with students at home or in school to determine why they are missing classes. ”She has gone to work sites before, if she knows a kid is working,” said Jenny Adkins, the school’s supervisor of student services.

That’s it, let’s drag these “kids” away from work and back to school. Forget making money and building experience in the real world. Let’s keep the real world on hold so they can get a public education.

Especially ironic is that this particular school is called a “Career Center.” Nothing says career training like snatching a teen from work.

So the first problem is that teens are being treated like children. Some have made the choice to work, and the government forces them to attend school instead.

The second problem is that it is taken as a given that school attendance is positive. They act like just being inside a school building will magically educate students. That’s probably why so many people end up with jobs that require little more than a warm body sitting in a cubicle.

It terrifies most people to have a job where getting paid depends on your work output. Yet that is the training that would be most valuable. The gig economy is growing, and getting paid depends on finishing tasks, not putting in your hours.

But schools are on a crusade to encourage attendance. Why? Because that is where the administrators’ incentives lie.

States typically fund school districts based on attendance, so school officials worry about losing money due to absent students.

And there you have it. It has nothing to do with “the children.” It has everything to do with money.

“Truancy interventionists,” are simply bounty hunters for the school. They round up the escaped chattel and return them to their pen.

Of course, it is tempting to equate higher budgets with better education. But the data simply does not back this up.

Some of the worst schools in Camden, New Jersey spend over $23,000 per student. And some of the best schools in American Fork, Utah spend just $5,600 per student.

Most of the ballooning school budgets go to administration. The chart below shows the increase in students, teachers, and administration since 1950.

school administration costs chart

There are about twice as many students, and seven times as many administrators and other non-teaching staff…

If public schools could be replaced with optional resource centers for teenagers, that would be a massive improvement. Provide laundry, showers, and a safe environment. Teens, especially those in bad living situations, could go to learn on their own, or get help from the staff. Even provide certain meals. The cost would be less than public schools, and the benefit would be astronomically higher.

Look, anything the government does is going to be done terribly. It will be inefficient. The incentives will be aligned all wrong. And this solution would have those same flaws. But it would be an improvement.

Perhaps these “Charter Resource Centers” could be placed near some of the worst schools, and allow teens to opt out of mandatory school, and opt into this alternative. If the funding followed them, this might make a difference.

But the current public school system ruins lives. It destroys potential. It creates conflicts in society.

Skipping school is not a problem. It is the solution.

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Presenting The Syria Deception: Al Qaeda Goes to Hollywood (VIDEO) – Grayzone Project

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/09/15/presenting-the-syria-deception-al-qaeda-goes-to-hollywood-video/

An exclusive Grayzone investigative documentary rips the cover off of the most sophisticated and expensive campaign of humanitarian interventionist propaganda in modern history.

By Dan Cohen

For decades, Western governments, corporate media, and Hollywood have engaged in a project of mass deception to manufacture consent for military interventions. Waged in the name of lofty ideals like freedom, human rights, and democracy, US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya wound up bringing death, destruction and even the return of slavery to the African continent.

As the wounds from those catastrophes festered, Washington embarked on its most ambitious project yet, marketing another war of regime change, this time in Syria.

The following investigative mini-documentary exposes the cynical deceptions and faux humanitarianism behind the campaign to sell the dirty war on Syria.

It also demonstrates the lengths that the US and its allies have gone to develop new ploys to tug at Western heartstrings and convince even liberal minded skeptics of war that a US intervention was necessary — even if it meant empowering Al Qaeda’s largest franchise since 9/11 and its theocratic allies among the insurgency.

Big lies and little children have formed the heart of what is perhaps the most expensive, sophisticated, and shameless propaganda blitz ever conducted. Welcome to The Syria Deception.

Hollywood’s role in promoting war is nothing new. The American film industry has collaborated over the years with the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services to produce an array of films burnishing the military’s image, revising controversial US actions, and propagating official accounts of critical events through action blockbusters.

See the rest here

New Netflix documentary series explores how Hollywood ...

 

 

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The NZ authorities that are fine with you drinking glyphosate, 1080 & chlorine have recently conducted raids on raw milk suppliers throughout the country

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

Mercantilism, banksterism and control is not limited to the US nor EU.

https://envirowatchrangitikei.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/the-nz-authorities-that-are-fine-with-you-drinking-glyphosate-1080-chlorine-have-recently-conducted-raids-on-raw-milk-suppliers-throughout-the-country/

A number of raw milk suppliers NZ wide have just been raided by MPI. As a consumer of raw milk myself I’ve watched this with interest over more than a decade. The regulatory conditions have gradually tightened up over the years, so that suppliers I’ve spoken with have said it’s become more and more expensive to keep up, costing thousands of dollars, jumping through impossible hoops to remain registered with all boxes ticked. These raids will all of course have the effect of frightening people off supplying altogether, or simply price them out of business as has already happened with many.
(Note in the very apt meme below raw milk is not as yet banned in NZ but as I say, I’ve been watching the signs and it certainly looks to be headed that way).

11811463_436964599845692_538422940604897356_n.jpg
NOTE: it’s not banned in NZ …. yet

Such are the vagaries of the NZ corporation (aka government) that is happy to see the known carcinogen glyphosate in your breast milk & water, chlorine in your water (another carcinogen),1080 in your food chain, a myriad of other chemicals, hormones & antibiotics in your food supply, yet treat suppliers of a highly nutritious natural product as criminals. (Note also, ‘probable carcinogen’ is about as close as they’ll admit with glyphosate but hey, the grossly tumoured rats and the current law suits going on in the US right now are surely enough to make you want to stop using it?)

Note raw milk is been described in the articles as ‘dangerous’ for heaven’s sake. And it’s reported people have been sick from drinking it? Really? No details of exactly who and where though. Enough to rark up some suspicion & bias among us by mainstream media doing its job well as always. Humans have consumed raw cows milk for hundreds of years and not died. Whilst I am all for health compliance, let’s face it, the authorities are simply making it all non viable with their hefty costs. Enjoy it while you still can people … they won’t rest until it’s completely gone as has happened in other countries already.

Please do read this article on how raw milk completely healed a little girl of very pervasive eczema that literally controlled her life:

Hello Dolly, Farewell Eczema

And this one on the benefits of raw milk:

The Health Benefits of Raw Milk

11836765_1134425943239652_6814460703939815393_n

 

EWR

See links below for just three of the related articles on the milk raids … do a search there are many more :

MPI investigating unregistered raw milk suppliers in Southland

Non-compliant raw milk suppliers ordered to stop selling by MPI

Unregistered raw milk sellers are being called out for their dangerous practice

 

 

 

 

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World War II, Pearl Harbor and Poland

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

Did you ever realize that WWII was started because England was obligated by treaty to defend Poland (from Hitler in this case) but FDR and Churchill gave away Poland to Franklin’s “Papa Joe” at Yalta? It seems to have defeated the whole purpose.

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Editorial: California can’t account for billions of education dollars

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

Expand that concept to a national level.

We are probably better off not knowing where that Kalifornia money went.

Safe rooms and Play Doh maybe.

Then think about what is taught. That is the scary part.

Government is the last thing we need in the education system.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/12/04/editorial-california-cant-account-for-billions-of-education-dollars/

By Stephen Frank

Want to waste tax dollars? Give it to your failed government schools. Want quality education? LAUSD is a holding action, no longer an education facility—so few graduate with real diploma’s earned. Now we find the government schools can not even keep accurate the money given to them…

Inexcusable that, six years after K-12 spending revamp, audit finds needy kids aren’t getting help they should

By Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Boards, 12/4/19   |

It’s been six years since California lawmakers revamped the state funding formula for local schools.

It was heralded by then-Gov. Jerry Brown as a way to simplify K-12 education spending and close the state’s achievement gap by giving more money to districts that disproportionately serve needy kids.

Since then, state spending on schools has increased about 50%. But, as state Auditor Elaine Howle explained in a troubling report last month, there is no way to track whether money is being spent as it should.

School officials across California have co-mingled billions of dollars of state money that was supposed to be used for children who fall into one of three categories: English learners, low-income or in foster care.

Howle’s findings confirm what critics have been saying for years: Rather than specifically helping needy kids, the money has simply been used to boost general spending.

That partially explains why California students’ test scores continue lagging the national average and the state has failed to close the achievement gap that divides along racial and economic lines.

If California has any hope of narrowing that divide, legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom should require accountability for the $63 billion of state money currently spent annually on K-12 education.

It’s time to end this reckless spending. As we enter the state budget cycle for the 2020-21 fiscal year, lawmakers must stop doling out money without a meaningful tracking system for how it’s spent.

Brown’s original plan made sense. State spending for schools had become far too complicated, with more than 110 special “categorical” programs that had different funding and eligibility requirements.

The plan was to eliminate the categorical programs and give local school districts more control over the money. Hence, the Local Control Funding Formula was created.

LCFF is pretty simple. School districts receive a base amount determined by students’ attendance figures and grade levels. In addition, they receive a supplemental 20% for students falling into one of the three needy categories. And in districts with concentrations of more than 55% needy students, per-pupil funding increases 50% for each kid beyond the 55% threshold.

The so-called supplemental and concentration funding is supposed to be spent to provide additional help for those targeted children. But when Howle audited a sample of three school districts — Oakland, Clovis and San Diego — only Clovis tracked how the money was spent.

That’s because there are no state regulations to ensure districts separately account for the extra funds. Moreover, if the districts don’t spend the money on those needy students the year they receive the funds, they can spend it on anything the following year.

Hence, there are no rules to ensure Brown’s law is being followed. Indeed, while he was in office, Brown repeatedly resisted such a requirement. Consequently, there is no way to determine whether the additional funding is producing measurable student performance improvements.

The idea behind LCFF was to provide more local control. Parents were supposed have input into how the money is spent — something that’s meaningless if they’re not provided useful data — and school districts were supposed to be freed from the restrictions of hundreds of categorical spending programs.

But LCFF was never intended to be a giveaway of funds without obligations. Our neediest students were supposed to be better served. There’s no way to know whether that’s happened.

The lack of accountability — for how the money is spent and whether it’s producing results — is no longer acceptable.

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