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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Essential Government Worker In Action [Video]


Here's one of those "essential" government workers for whom society would fall apart without.

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The Wal Mart of mail delivery. No wonder they are bankrupt! Too fat to walk 10 feet to deliver the mail. Instead the blog drives across their lawn. The homeowner should sue them for destruction of private property. Incompetent Gluttonous Ginormity redefinned. This is is bad dream's bad dream. Still - why am I laughing so hard? @nonymous 5029, today I was driving behind a car that had a license plate which read: "is is ," and, it also had a bumper-sticker which read: "the sun is not yellow, the sun is a chicken." I wondered over the meanings to both for a bit, before recalling a prior construct set-up; which read: "Reality - It's not what you've been told it is."

as for this article.... my mail lady is far-less thinner than the one in this video, though, if 'physical weight' were the means, by which substance of character was measured in this realm... I would be considered to be "lacking," while, all postal employees would be considered to have "depth."

the only thing that makes me laugh is "irony," so, no, I can't comprehend the reason for your "laughing so hard."

also, what do you make of the b-day: 5/27/81? jeez "I" would hate to be that person.

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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Polls Continue to Show Majority of Americans Against NSA Spying


By Mark M. Jaycox

Shortly after the June leaks, numerous polls asked the American people if they approved or disapproved of the NSA spying, which includes collecting telephone records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act and collecting phone calls and emails using Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The answer then was a resounding no, and new polls released in August and September clearly show Americans' increasing concern about privacy has continued.

Since July, many of the polls not only confirm the American people think the NSA's actions violates their privacy, but think the surveillance should be stopped. For instance in an AP poll, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they oppose the NSA collecting data about their telephone and Internet usage. In another national poll by the Washington Post and ABC News, 74 percent of respondents said the NSA's spying intrudes on their privacy rights. This majority should come as no surprise, as we've seen a sea change in opinion polls on privacy since the Edward Snowden revelations started in June.

What's also important is that it crosses political party lines. The Washington Post/ABC News poll found 70 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans believe the NSA's spying programs intrude on their privacy rights. This change is significant, showing that privacy is a bipartisan issue. In 2006, a similar question found only 50 percent of Republicans thought the government intruded on their privacy rights.

Americans also continue their skepticism of the federal government and its inability to conduct proper oversight. In a recent poll, Rasmusson--though sometimes known for push polling--revealed that there's been a 30 percent increase in people who believe it is now more likely that the government will monitor their phone calls. Maybe even more significant is that this skepticism carries over into whether or not Americans believe the government's claim that it "robustly oversees" the NSA's programs. In a Huffpost/You Gov poll, 53 percent of respondents said they think "the federal courts and rules put in place by Congress" do not provide "adequate oversight." Only 18 percent of people agreed with the statement.

Americans seem to be waking up from its surveillance state slumber as the leaks around the illegal and unconstitutional NSA spying continue. The anger Americans--especially younger Americans--have around the NSA spying is starting to show. President Obama has seen a 14-point swing in his approval and disapproval rating among voters aged 18-29 after the NSA spying.?

These recent round of polls confirm that Americans are not only concerned with the fact that the spying infringes their privacy, but also that they want the spying to stop. And this is even more so for younger Americans. Now is the time for Congress to act: click here now to join the StopWatching.Us coalition.


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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

America's Prisons: The Worst National Disgrace


By Anthony Gregory

The U.S. correctional system is the worst of America?s domestic disgraces. More people languish behind bars in the United States than in any other country, except perhaps China if we factor in the unknown numbers in labor camps. As the Economist?summed it up:
America has around 5% of the world's population, and 25% of its prisoners.?Roughly one in every 107 American adults is behind bars, a rate nearly five times that of Britain, seven times that of France and 24 times that of India. Its prison population has more than tripled since 1980. The growth rate has been even faster in the federal prison system: from around 24,000--its level, more or less, from the 1940s until the early 1980s--to more than 219,000 today.
Much of the blame for this falls on the war on drugs, particularly the policies spearheaded by the Reagan administration, escalating through the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. But ending the drug war will not address the whole problem. Drug offenses account for about half of federal inmates but closer to a quarter of state inmates. Many others face punishment for non-violent property crimes. Even some of the truly vicious criminals, however, experience conditions that the state should never inflict on anybody.

In practice, U.S. imprisonment has become an institution of slavery, torture, and rape.?New studies indicate that about two hundred thousand inmates fall victim to sexual abuse each year. The rates are highest in the juvenile system. What?s more, the assailants are not who you might think they are:

The new studies confirm previous findings that most of those who commit sexual abuse in detention are corrections staff, not inmates. That is true in all types of detention facilities, but especially in juvenile facilities.
In American popular culture, it is common to joke about prison rape, as though there?s something funny about someone with no chance of escaping being brutally violated day after day. It is also accepted as part of the implicit sentencing. But a justice system worth the name doesn?t inflict rape on anyone, even the worst criminals. Torture and sexual abuse as punishment have no place in any society that claims even a casual appreciation of what it means to be civilized.

Another outrage: At any given time, about 80,000 American prisoners endure solitary confinement, a punishment developed in the early nineteenth century and banned by much of the world as a form of torture. It fails the Eighth Amendment test on cruel and unusual punishments, considering that it is not only cruel but was unheard of at the time of the Constitution?s ratification.

In solitary, prisoners suffer day and night in tiny cells, kept from virtually all human contact, for months at a time. They are fed through?a slot in his door and isolated from light. Many prisoners are not allowed to read, watch TV, or have practically any personal possessions at all.

Within the last month,?Herman Wallace?was released when a judge vacated his conviction after 41 years in solitary in a Louisiana prison. Four decades of this type of torturous imprisonment is an immoral punishment for any crime.?As it so happens, some people end up in solitary who were never even accused of committing violence against anyone. Cameron Douglas, actor Michael Douglas?s son, ended up in prison on drug charges. After nine years of incarceration, he failed a drug test--they can?t keep drugs out of prison, of course--so they stuck him in solitary.

If solitary inmates try to pass a note to another prisoner, the punishment is another six months in solitary. Some face years and years of solitary--even a lifetime--who never did anything but acted naturally, as any animal or human would, if stripped of all their agency, confined to a minuscule cage.

The rest of the industrialized world looks upon America?s prison population in horror and disbelief. The sheer size and scope of the system dwarf practically all the penal systems in the world, the vast majority of them by an order of magnitude. The cruelty of America?s system easily surpasses that of almost any other developed country. The disproportionate nature of U.S. punishments probably makes some foreign sadistic tyrants, who lack the material means to construct such an enormity, green with envy.

It is hard to imagine anything going on within the borders of the United States that is worse than the correctional system. There are many other awful injustices--most of which have a direct or indirect relationship to the prisons. The police have become totally out of control. The public schools typically treat children as low-security prisoners or worse. Child protective services, coerced institutionalization for the ?mentally ill,? and the dehumanizing treatment of undocumented immigrants, including their confinement to concentration camps along the border, all come to mind, and almost all involve something related to or resembling the standard correctional system. Outside the borders, the U.S. wages bloody wars and engages in systematic abuse in its foreign detention camps. Yet nothing scandalous in Guantanamo should ever shock an American who knows anything at all about what happens every day in hundreds of prisons in America.

In a sane world, the domestic atrocity known as American prisons would be discussed in mainstream media outlets on a daily basis, forcing politicians to speak about this nearly unfathomable outrage. Defenders of the status quo typically demand those who radically critique this system to explain their own ideal alternative. Well, maybe there is no ideal alternative, but we do know for sure that the current system is 100% morally unacceptable and cries for constant national attention until increasingly better alternative ideas do get a chance at being seriously tried. We do know that the vast majority of people in prison do not belong in any kind of detention center, and that those who might warrant institutional confinement should nevertheless not face rape and torture on a regular basis. We know the system is rotten enough that figuring out its proper replacement should be a fixture of perennial debate until the replacement occurs.

In a sane world, no presidential or congressional election would go by without millions clamoring to know: ?What are we going to do about the prisons?? Unfortunately, most people don?t care much about the prisons and those inside them. But systems of inhumane horror have a tendency eventually to ensnare those who thought they were immune. If you think you or someone you love could never wind up in prison, you really have been neglecting to educate yourself. We must stop this madness before it eats America whole.


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cops,prisons with guards,they are needed.just not as currently used and abused .I beleive in the U.S. government, just not all the corruption that runs rampent within it.anybody else notice the glazed look on the powers that be?that is the addiction to abuse of the powers granted to them .look at the fed shutdown and how it is being used to place as much harm as possable on the best people in U.S. society. douugo, "that glazed look" you mention, is indicative of mind control.

I'm curious about your believing in the US government. Do you believe in the "ideal" that it's supposed to be? or, do you support the bad actors playing politicians, that our government is comprised of presently?

when the fed shutdown, did you cease to exist? clearly not - that should tell you: the GOVERNMENT CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT YOU!
YOU CAN EXIST WITHOUT THE GOVERNMENT!

help the people who are in need on your own - that's how you can get back to the "ideal." that's what I do.

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Monday, October 28, 2013

Virginia State Police Used License Plate Readers At Political Rallies, Built Huge Database


By Rebecca Glenberg, Legal Director, ACLU of Virginia

From 2010 until last spring, the Virginia State Police (VSP) maintained a massive database of license plates that allowed them to pinpoint the locations of millions of cars on particular dates and times. Even more disturbing, the agency used automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to collect information about political activities of law-abiding people. The VSP recorded the license plates of vehicles attending President Obama's 2009 inauguration, as well as campaign rallies for Obama and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. (Documentation of this program, disclosed in response to an ACLU of Virginia public records request, can be found here.) These practices starkly illustrate the need for tight controls on government use of technology for surveillance purposes.

To be sure, there are legitimate law enforcement purposes for ALPR. Some law enforcement agencies maintain "hot lists" of vehicles that are stolen or that have been used in crimes. Data from ALPRs can be instantaneously checked against these lists to quickly locate suspect vehicles. The impact on privacy rights is minimal as long as information about license plates not on the hot list is disposed of promptly.

But by creating and maintaining a database of millions of license plates and targeting political activity, the VSP crossed well over the line from legitimate law enforcement to oppressive surveillance. In the cases of the campaign rallies and the 2009 inauguration, the VSP collected personally identifying information on drivers solely because those drivers were heading to a political event. These drivers were not suspected of or connected to any crime -- their only offense was practicing their First Amendment rights to speak freely and assemble peacefully.

Monitoring protests and political rallies will chill this fundamental form of expression. We must be able to participate in demonstrations and campaign events without fearing that our license plate will be scanned and stored by law enforcement. Surveillance or perceived surveillance of political events -- especially if participation might be controversial -- will make law-abiding people think twice before attending. This is a threat to democracy, and we are not the first to recognize that. Back in 2009, the police themselves beat us to this scoop -- the International Association of Chiefs of Police explained that when it comes to license plate readers, "[t]he risk is that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance."

Belatedly, the VSP asked Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli about the legality of its information-gathering practices. In a strong opinion, Cuccinelli explained that the use of ALPRs for "passive" collection of information violates Virginia's Government Data Collection and Dissemination Act. That is, law enforcement may use ALPRs to search for specific vehicles suspected of involvement in criminal activity, but it may not simply collect and save data on thousands of vehicles for which there is no grounds for suspicion.

Since the Attorney General's opinion was issued, the VSP says that it has purged its license plate database and now disposes of such information within 24 hours of collection, unless it is relevant to a clearly defined criminal investigation. But, return of passive data collection should not be just a bad Attorney General opinion away -- our lawmakers must act to clearly prohibit the VSP from resurrecting this surveillance in the future.

The VSP's former use of ALPR data is just one of the ways government uses technology to obtain detailed information about the everyday lives of Americans, along with the National Security Agency's collection of data on every phone call to or from the United States, or the increasing warrantless tracking of cell phone locations by law enforcement agencies. It is essential that Americans remain alert to these encroachments on liberty and demand that their legislators rein in the use of surveillance technology by local, state, and national government.


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The headline should read "Virginia Police State"

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Sunday, October 27, 2013

Hero Cop Takes On 15-Yr-Old Strapped To Gurney


Chris | InformationLiberation

KDVR reports:
DENVER ? A former Adams County Sheriff?s Deputy was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for punching a teenager in the face while the teen was strapped to a gurney, District Attorney Dave Young?s office announced.

[...]Morrow had responded to a disturbance call at 8790 Welby Road in Adams County. According to court records and evidence presented during the trial, the 15-year-old boy, who appeared highly intoxicated, was taken into custody and transported by ambulance to the hospital because parent contact information could not be obtained from him.

The ambulance attendant had restrained the juvenile?s hands and feet because of his verbally combative behavior. Morrow struck the juvenile on the face with a closed fist while the teen was restrained on the ambulance gurney.

How heroic. Be sure to thank the officer for his "service."

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more scum will take his place while he is on vacation. there is no end to this until the people choose to end this. period.

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Saturday, October 26, 2013

Shutting Down but Not Closing Up


by James E. Miller

At the time of publication, the United States government is shut down. That does not mean the gears of the state have come to a thankful halt. Over three-quarters of Washington's global hegemony remains fully functional. Tax dollars are still being redistributed. Wars continue to be waged. The public at large is going about its day unbothered by the furlough of tens of thousands of government employees. For once, apathy has paid off. The only poor souls bemoaning the shutdown are the ones sitting at home.

The hysteria over the non-closure has hit peak levels in the royal court media. It's on the front page of every newspaper and periodical in America, and in major news outlets around the globe. Taken at face value, one gets the impression that out-of-work bureaucrats are starving like dogs in the street. But reality tends to be far from what's editorialized. One half of the chamber of thieves passed a funding bill to ensure all government workers are back-paid. The other, more judicious, half will not think twice before sending the measure to the President's desk. Like that, the painful and impoverishing hiccup in operation will become a fully-funded vacation.

In the meantime, the ticks deprived of taxpayer blood are still whining at the top of their lungs. In an interview with a Washington Post reporter, an unnamed military contractor bemoans the current furlough and displays incredible angst over his time off. He is perturbed by the constant crisis-to-crisis governing. It's all too much uncertainty for his soft, subsidized, and overworked being. In between crying through his tax-fattened lips, the anonymous complainer lets the secret out of the bag: "I thought that 'hey, government will always be here.' I mean, I'm not that naive, but you think it's pretty stable."

It's often forgotten that government is not outside all the constraints of normal industry. Public sector employees should plan for bad times like everyone else. Civil servants treat their position like Christmas Morning ? a guarantee where mommy and daddy will have presents under the tree. The state provides society's most unproductive members with a venue for making a living by predation. Why worry about pleasing fickle consumers when you can just shake them down to pay your rent? Of course, it's a bit more nuanced than that. The bureaucrat in one of the many departments of trivial spending relies on tax collectors for his paycheck. Not only does he live off theft, but he is far too cowardly to perform the dirty deed of robbing his fellow man. The days go by, stuffed in a concrete monochrome building, with the hope of only climbing the ladder of officialdom. This is a comfortable living for someone whose life goal is to exist nonchalantly as a parasite.

The ongoing shutdown provides a valuable lesson for the average person outside of the state. For the everyday man, government is an abstract concept of pure force. Once in a while, it tosses him a bone to chew on. For the most part, Leviathan keeps to demanding ransom in the name of "national glory," exceptionalism, or some other trite phrase. Even the slowest of folks doesn't truly buy that their vote counts for anything. The Oppenheimer distinction between the economic means and political means is apparent to anyone who subsists through their own labor. Everyone else believes they are adding something to society for the greater good, when in fact they act as a subtraction.

A closing of government services, absent those in charge of property protection, brings little attention to those minding themselves and their business. The sufferers are, of course, the minority who find themselves unneeded for the time being. In a separate Washington Post article, the plight of the unneeded bureaucrat is center stage. For a paper that survives by printing government idolatry, the editors likely have their hands full gathering scoops on a demoralized workforce. With nearly a million freeloaders out of the job, there is bound to be some seething resentment. One of these aimless paper-pushers told the Post that his mood was pivoting from "resignation to anger." A lack of income left him and his fellow leeches feeling like "pawns" caught up by some exogenous power.

A furloughed employee of the welfare-enabling, cronyist Department of Housing and Urban Development complained that she "used to be really proud to work for the federal government." It's a humorous assertion considering her agency specializes in penning up ne'er-do-wellers in shoddy apartment complexes. How any respectable person could take pride in bribing easy voters while paying kickbacks to contractors, I have no idea.

All this fear making its way into the media is demonstrative of just how entrenched the state is within contemporary society and the difficulty of scaling it back, if even by the smallest of millimeters. Throwing a bunch of desktop laborers to the curb elicits a loud enough peep. Taking away expected benefits is a whole different story. Like a mother rodent hissing and clawing to protect its young, the feeders at the government trough will react abrasively if the flow of money is challenged. Vitriolic rhetoric, street theater, pandering to emotion, and the occasional bout of violence are all sickly creatures that come forth when the mere prospect of making a chink in the state's bulky armor is floated. With enough cacophony, the public will fold. It's a game of banging spoons ? and the political class specializes in trumpeting its own necessity.

Dissent over cutting government benefits is not limited to the United States. The recent mass outrage in Greece by the youth and organized labor was caused in large part by the threat of state benefit cuts. In Quebec, students engaged in wide-scale protests over a proposition by the provincial government to raise university tuition. These actions were not some new phenomenon. The irritable cry of losing a "gimme gimme" benefit is learned in the toddler stage, and reemerges in adulthood for those conditioned to think life simply hands you resources.

The United States government is not going away anytime soon. Soon enough, even the defenders of a limited state in Congress will capitulate and reopen the empty agencies. Bureaucrats will return from vacation to resume tormenting the men and women forced to fund their lavish lifestyles. The fact that these public servants were considered "non-essential" is waived away as some semantic tomfoolery. All government positions lack essentialness for societal function. But to be explicitly labeled "non-essential" is horribly degrading and emasculating (for those bequeathed with the Y chromosome). Yet there is no fuss. The government worker, in his heart of hearts, knows he brings nothing to the table. As economist Shawn Ritenour writes,

Pretty soon, these mid-to-low-level bureaucrats get trapped. They hate their jobs, because they see that rarely does effort or ability count for anything. They find themselves out of the political loop and, hence, cut off from the best route to promotion. They are stuck. They despise their jobs, yet it is too costly for them to leave and forge their way in the private sector.

The same government workers kicked out of their day-job will go crawling back once given the green light. Being called the equivalent of worthless will be of no consideration. The paycheck is paramount to their dignity. They have my sympathy, but there would be more to share if the state didn't thrive off the fat of the rubes.
_
James E. Miller is editor-in-chief of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. Send him mail


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Friday, October 25, 2013

A Killer of a "Joke"


by Will Grigg

A US citizen who jokes about assassinating the president or any other prominent official can expect to receive a visit from the Secret Service or the FBI. Even if the statement was an ill-advised act of whimsy, rather than a credible threat, the citizen who makes it will most likely be prosecuted and face fines and a prison sentence.

Things are rather different when public officials speak irresponsibly about killing citizens. This is true even ? or perhaps especially ? for officials who have the means to carry out such designs.

During the 2013 Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former chief of the CIA and the National Security Agency, joked about putting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on a ?kill list.? Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, replied: ?I can help you with that.?

The ?kill list,? of course, refers to people who are subject to summary execution on presidential orders. No fewer than three US citizens on that list have been killed through drone strikes, and both Hayden and Rogers have been implicated in those extra-judicial killings.

This isn?t merely a bad joke. It?s a public admission of conspiracy to commit murder.


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So, are the CIA / FBI agents, going to visit themselves?

If killing Obama were the means to freedom, he would have been dead a long time ago. Obama is merely an avatar for the party - likened to "Big Brother" (Big Bother).

I would never joke about killing a party official, though, I do wish them 'out of existence' on a regular basis. If "death" were the means to an end of this system of things, this nonsense would have been put to death with Plato. "Ideologies can live forever," in other words....however, killing the people who have been brainwashed by those ideologies, is not a solution.

I'd love nothing more than to be visited by one of those acronym agencies.

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Thursday, October 24, 2013

This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories


by Phillip Smith

Cops peddling pot, cops gobbling steroids, cops with sticky fingers, and, of course, a crooked prison guard. Just another week on the drug war corruption beat. Let's get to it:

In Sunrise, Florida, a Sunrise police officer resigned Monday after he and his girlfriend were accused of selling marijuana from his home. The officer, Joseph Rodriguez-Santiago, 27, was cited last week for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia and quit his job of six years after he was placed on administrative leave. His girlfriend faces two felony counts after twice selling pot to a snitch, including once while Rodriguez-Santiago was present. The two dope deals were for $20 and $40.

In St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a Roseville police officer was arrested last Thursday on federal drug charges. Officer Gregory Moore, a 10-year veteran of the department, went down in a DEA probe of steroid and performance-enhancing drug use. He faces two counts of felony drug possession and one count of maintaining a drug house. He's out on a $5,000 cash bond.

In Tampa, Florida, a Tampa police officer was arrested last Friday on charges she stole money orders seized during a drug investigation. Detective Jeannette Hevel allegedly took $1,900 worth out of the evidence room and then cashed them. She has been charged with grand theft. At last report, the 27-year veteran was still in jail after being booked in.

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a former Tuscaloosa narcotics officer agreed to a plea deal Monday that would see him doing 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to theft charges. Prosecutors have accused Snyder of ripping off more than $125,000 from the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force. He had commanded the unit before retiring last year. A judge still has to approve the deal, and a hearing is set for December 5.

In Jersey City, New Jersey, a former state prison guard was found guilty last Wednesday of smuggling drugs to inmates at the state's prison for sex offenders. Bobby Singleton, 55, was found guilty of conspiracy, official misconduct, and bribery for the scheme in which he carried in heroin and marijuana and inmates paid for the drugs by wiring money to co-conspirators on the outside. Singletary is looking at at least five years in prison when he's sentenced next month.


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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Cops Shoot Texas Homeowner Dead After He Kills Intruder



A career criminal broke into a neglected-looking Far East Dallas home Thursday night thinking the homeowner had died and his belongings were there for the taking, police said.

But the homeowner, William Keith Hall, wasn?t dead after all. He shot the burglar, Jerry Wayne Hale, then stood over him in an alley with a gun in hand, police said. Hall told Hale, 30, that he wanted to shoot him again.

When police arrived, Hall pointed the 9 mm pistol ? which had stopped working ? at them and witnesses. Officers ordered Hall to drop his weapon and when he refused, they fatally shot the 57-year-old man.

Maj. Jeff Cotner of the crimes against persons division said Friday that responding officers didn?t realize in all the chaos that Hall was defending his home in the 10300 block of Sandra Lynn Drive.

But Cotner said Hall ?had plenty of opportunities to de-escalate? the situation.

?He was given plenty of notice, and he didn?t choose a path other than to confront officers,? Cotner said.

Police received a 911 call around 7:45 p.m. Thursday from a contractor working on a nearby house. The caller told police about the shooting and said that when witnesses got near Hall, he pointed a gun at them and ?tried to shoot? them. Cotner said Hall repeatedly tried to manipulate the gun?s jammed slide to fire it again, but to no avail.

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Such a misleading headline - shame on you. Cops were in the right for a change. yeah right, i am sure the cops tell accurate stories after they kill the witness. cops will always cover their tracks in the most cowardly fashion. not a chance i believe their side of this. I had to read and re-read that a few times to make sure I was getting the story straight. Finally I just went to the article source.

Strange story with no winners, and I'm not sure what informationliberation is trying to 'prove' or demonstrate with this particular story.

It's not like he was some civic-minded patriot homeowner who was in his right mind. ...

"Humphrey (witness) also told Hall that police were on the way. The contractor told Channel 8 that Hall replied, ?Good, I?ll shoot them, too.?"

In Texas they should just abolish the police. Most people in
Texas are self sufficient. Again in this story police are liars of course the police can say whatever they want and find witnesses to lie for them doesn't matter at the end they killed their victim. I hate police abuse with a passion, and there is MORE than enough, way more, that is sickening and bad, but I gotta agree with 8199, THIS instance, from the information, was not abuse. They didn't have a lot of choice and if the victims actions are described correctly, it's unfortunate but not in the same league as the other abuses documented here all the time. 97119, you've gone too far then. If you don't believe ANYTHING no matter what is reported, you are as bad as those idiots that when confronted with real police abuse (which is abundant) always chime in "I'm sure there is MORE to the story than this, they don't just taze/shoot/beat a man for no reason you know"

This is every bit as bad, not constructive, and pretty lame actually. Your comment is meaningless at that point. It would be another thing to say "it sounds legit this time, from what is reported, but this might not be all the evidence" but not a chance...eh?

The headline is from Fox News and it is factually correct. Oh sure, but misleading.

How about: "Police Kill Disturbed Man"

That seems factually correct as well. I suppose a nitpicker could charge that it makes the man sound like the agressor.

Hmmm. How about:

"Disturbed Man Dies Defending Self from Police"
"Police Shoot Killer"
"Man Defends Self, Killed by Police"

They're all factually accurate, aren't they?

"Cops Shoot Texas Homeowner Dead After He Kills Intruder"

Oh, wait that's the actual title. Hmmmm.....

See, all those titles I made up, and the real one as well, comprise examples of what is called "slant". The title tells you what to expect, and based on the actual title, what you expect is that the brute police killed a poor innocent homeowner, who was merely defending himself.

How about this:

"Police Forced to Kill Man Who Became Disturbed After Killing Intruder"

That probably would lead you to expect something more like what the real story seems to be.

@20138 It is extreme to say that I do not believe anything at all that is reported. But it is not extreme to say that I do not believe any story the way that they report it. They are masters at weaving the truth with lies. I will always question every story this regime pumps out. If that is just too much for you then, oh well, that is how I function.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Authoritarianism Of Elizabeth Warren


Nathan Goodman

Throughout the US government ?shutdown,? Democratic politicians have compared their Republican rivals to ?anarchists? and argued that the ?shutdown? proves government necessary. A recent speech?by Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor exemplifies this trend.

Misconceptions run rampant in Senator Warren?s speech. She conflates cooperation and government, stating ?In our democracy, government is just how we describe the things that we the people have already decided to do together.? Nonsense. Government decisions are in practice not made democratically, but rather by a privileged class of politicians, bureaucrats and corporate cronies. Real community and cooperation happen outside the state. People do things together without government coercion every day. Mutual aid exists without government. Unions and and other labor groups exist without government. Community centers exist without government. Federations and cooperatives exist without government. Mutually beneficial market exchanges exist without government. Government is not community, cooperation or togetherness. Government is centralization and coercion that all too often crushes vibrant social cooperation.

?The boogeyman government is like the boogeyman under the bed; it?s not real,? proclaims Senator Warren. But the harm done by government is real and concrete. For example, U.S. sanctions against Iran are causing poverty, food insecurity, and medical shortages. Senator Warren supports those sanctions. Closer to home, recent research shows that nearly 200,000 inmates were sexually abused in American prisons, jails, and detention centers in 2011. This same research finds that prison guards, employed and empowered by government, perpetrated these rapes more often than inmates did.

The violence of government continues during the ?shutdown.? Last week, Capitol Police shot and killed an unarmed woman in front of her child. The FBI shut down the website Silk Road, making the public less safe in the process. A NATO air strike in Afghanistan killed at least five civilians, three of them children. Violence and coercion are constant features of government, even during a ?shutdown.?

Senator Warren derisively refers to the House Republicans as ?the anarchy gang.? The ?shutdown? was not engineered by ?anarchists,? and it is insulting to anarchists to compare us to the House Republicans. The ?shutdown? has kept intact most of the state violence that anarchists oppose, including militarism, police violence, crony capitalist patent monopolies, mass incarceration, mass surveillance and deportations. It has cut off relatively harmless programs like Women Infants and Children that serve as bandages over the structural poverty that the state maintains. Some parts of the ?shutdown,? such as barring citizens from national parks and prohibiting scientists from speaking about research, are enforced through state violence.

Warren fearmongers about safety regulations, snidely asking ?when was the last time anyone called for regulators to go easier on companies that put lead in children?s toys???But the reality is that regulations need not be administered by top-down government. There are other ways to establish oversight. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers uses boycotts, social pressure and grassroots action to pressure companies to sign contracts with their Fair Food Program, a farmworker organized program that establishes rigorous oversight and worker protections for migrant farmworkers who are often brutally abused by both their bosses and the legal system. This innovative program has been praised by liberals and anarchists alike. Consumers could organize to implement similar grassroots oversight for product safety. The Fair Food Program was won through grassroots action, and is maintained through libertarian means like contracts, boycotts and social pressure. State regulations, in contrast, are often used by big business as a way to restrict competition, consolidate power, and dodge accountability. This is a pervasive problem called regulatory capture.

Elizabeth Warren is wrong. Government is an unnecessary evil.


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Her and all her big government communist friends should be run out of town, I say bring back the tar and feathers! She is a fool and should be treated as such! She is like whorehouse Harry and views the government as an immaculate magic fountain of all that is good in the world. Fuck you guys and your bullshit about communism. Im gonna vote for her if she runs. You fucking fascists think you are so much better GOI FUCK YOU STUPID SELVES.

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Monday, October 21, 2013

Did the Chinese Discover America?


By Michael Zennie

A copy of a 600-year-old map found in a second-hand book shop is the key to proving that the Chinese, not Christopher Columbus, were the first to discover the New World, a controversial British historian claims.?

The document is purportedly an 18th century copy of a 1418 map charted by Chinese Admiral Zheng He, which appears to show the New World in some detail.

This purported evidence that a Chinese sailor mapped the Western Hemisphere more than seven decades before Columbus is just one of?Earth-shattering claims that author Gavin Menzies makes in his new book?'Who Discovered America?'?- out today, just in time for the Columbus Day holiday.?

'The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it's fairy tales,' Mr Menzies told MailOnline.

Among Menzies other claims are that the first inhabitants of the Western hemisphere didn't come over land from the Bering Strait, but instead were Chinese sailors who first crossed the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago.

He also writes that DNA markers prove American Indians and other natives are the descendants of several waves of Asian settlers.

Furthermore, he says a majestic fleet of Chinese ships, commanded by Zheng He, sailed around the continent of South America ? 100 years before Ferdinand Megellan supposedly became the first the undertake the task.

Columbus features heavily in the book ? insofar as Menzies has devoted the last 20 years to finding and laying out evidence that Columbus not only didn't discover America ? he was 40 millenia late.

Mr Menzies believes that Columbus actually had a map of the world that was plotted by the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who created the map when he sailed to the New World in 1421, more than seven decades before Columbus.

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Sunday, October 20, 2013

US Supreme Court Rejects Marijuana Reclassification Appeal


by Phillip Smith

The US Supreme Court Monday declined to hear an appeal from medical marijuana advocacy groups who had challenged the DEA's decision to maintain marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, the category reserved for the most dangerous substances.

The court denied in summary order a petition for a writ of certiorari from the groups, led by Americans for Safe Access, which had sought Supreme Court review of a DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the DEA's ruling that a change in marijuana's classification required the Food and Drug Administration's recognition of acceptable medical uses for the drugs.

Advocates of rescheduling marijuana have been trying to do so for more than four decades, but have been thwarted by DEA delays and intransigence. This was the third formal rescheduling effort to be blocked by DEA decision making.

Schedule I drugs are deemed to have no acceptable medical uses and a high potential for abuse. Other Schedule I drugs include LSD, MDMA, and heroin. Despite the fact that there is an ever-increasing mountain of research detailing marijuana medicinal effects and despite the fact that 20 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, the DEA continues to insist that it cannot be down-scheduled.

Joe Elford, lead attorney on the case for Americans for Safe Access, told Law360 that the Supreme Court's denial of certiorari was in line with its reluctance to overturn lower courts and administrative decisions on medical marijuana.

"It's disappointing, but not altogether surprising," he said.

A fourth effort to reclassify marijuana led by the governors of the medical marijuana states of Rhode Island and Washington was filed in 2011 and is still awaiting action.

[For extensive information about the medical marijuana debate, presented in a neutral format, visit MedicalMarijuana.ProCon.org.]


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Saturday, October 19, 2013

"Defelonization" --The Next Step in Winding Down the Drug War

by Phillip Smith

Thirteen states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government have already passed laws making simple drug possession a misdemeanor instead of a felony, and the momentum appears to be growing. A bill in California to do something similar has passed the legislature and is currently sitting on the governor's desk, and efforts are afoot to push a defelonization measure through the Washington legislature next year.

Such measures are designed to ease prison overcrowding, ease pressures on budgets, and help drug users by avoiding saddling them with felony convictions. They also reflect increasing frustration with decades of drug prohibition efforts that have failed to stop drug use, but have resulted in all sorts of collateral costs.

In California alone, even after Gov. Jerry Brown's (D) prison realignment scheme, more than 4,000 people remain in state prisons on simple drug possession charges. At $47,000 per inmate per year, that comes out to more than a $200 million annual bill to state taxpayers.

Under current California law, people convicted of a drug possession felony can be sentenced to up to three years in prison. More than 10,000 people are charged with drug possession felonies each year, although many of them receive probation if convicted.

California state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) moved to redress that situation with Senate Bill 649, which passed the legislature on the final day of the session. The bill is not a defelonization bill per se; instead, it makes drug possession a "wobbler," meaning it provides prosecutors with the flexibility to charge drug possession as either a felony or a misdemeanor.

"Our system is broken," said Lynne Lyman, California state director for the Drug Policy Alliance, which supported the bill. "Felony sentences don't reduce drug use and don't persuade users to seek treatment, but instead, impose tremendous barriers to housing, education and employment after release -- three things we know help keep people out of our criminal justice system and successfully reintegrating into their families and communities."

Even Republicans got on board with the bill, helping to get it through the Assembly earlier this year.

"I am proud that we got bipartisan support in the Assembly," Leno told the Chronicle.

The bill currently awaits Gov. Brown's signature, and although his signature is not required for the bill to become law, Leno said he believed the governor would act on it, and he urged supporters to let the governor know now that they want him to sign it.

"Anyone can go to the governor's web site and offer support through an email communication," Leno said. "I am always hopeful he will sign it."

While Californians wait for the governor to act (or not), activists and legislators in Washington are gearing up to place a defelonization bill before the legislature there next year. Sensible Washington, the activist group behind the effort, says it has lined up legislative sponsors for the bill and will pre-file in December for next year's legislative session.

State Rep. Sherry Appleton (D-Poulsbo) will be the primary sponsor of this proposal in the House. Reps. Joe Fitzgibbon (D-Burien), Jim Moeller (D-Vancouver), Jessyn Farrell (D-Seattle), and Chris Reykdal (D-Tumwater) have all signed on as official cosponsors, with more to be announced soon. Sensible Washington hopes to have a companion bill filed simultaneously in the Senate.

Under current Washington law, the possession of any controlled substance (or over 40 grams of cannabis) is an automatic felony. Under this new proposal, the possession of a controlled substance -- when not intended for distribution -- would be reduced from a felony charge, to a misdemeanor (carrying a maximum sentence of 90 days, rather than five years). Laws regarding minors would not be affected.

"Removing felony charges for simple drug possession is a smart, pragmatic approach to reducing some of the harms associated with the war on drugs," said Anthony Martinelli, Sensible Washington's communications director. "The goal is to stop labeling people as felons, filling up our prisons and ruining their lives in the process, for possessing a small amount of an illegal substance."

He elaborated in a Tuesday interview with the Chronicle.

"We support full decriminalization, like the Portuguese model, but defelonization is a big step forward, and we feel that the public and lawmakers are ready for it," he said. "We have to find a way to deal with the dangers of the war on drugs. Another reason is the massive disparity in our cannabis law -- an ounce is legal, but an ounce and a half is a felony. This would remove felonies for cannabis possession, but we don't think anyone should be hit over the head with a felony for personal drug possession."

Martinelli said Sensible Washington and its allies would be spending the next few months preparing to push the bill through the legislature.

"We will be building public and legislative support, continuing to work on garnering media attention, activating our base, and getting more lawmakers on board," he said. "We're really trying to form a bipartisan coalition and get other organizations involved as well."

One of those groups is the ACLU of Washington. Sensible Washington and the ACLU of Washington were bitter foes in the fight over the state's successful I-502 marijuana legalization initiative -- Sensible Washington opposed it as a half-measure that endangered medical marijuana, a claim that ACLU and other advocates contested -- but appear to be on the same page when it comes to this sentencing reform.

"We support the decriminalization of drug use", said Alison Holcomb, criminal justice project director for the ACLU of Washington. "We're looking forward to working in collaboration with Sensible and its allies to achieve that goal."

Martinelli said he could now announce that the proposed bill has picked up its first Senate sponsor, Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Wells (D), to add to its growing list of House sponsors. Missing from that list of House sponsors is one of the most prominent drug reformers in the House, Rep. Roger Goodman (D-Kirkland), the chairman of the House Public Safety Committee, but that's not because he opposes the idea, Goodman told the Chronicle Tuesday.

"As chair of the committee, it's important for me to be an honest broker to get legislation through," Goodman explained. "My position as chair is weakened if there is a potentially controversial issue and I'm seen as being on one side of it. It's not that I oppose it, and I certainly will hold a hearing on it and move it, but my role is more to facilitate negotiations on provisions of the bill without being an interested party," he said.

It is an idea that is certainly worth pursuing, he said.

"We need to reprioritize. The tough penalties we impose on people for merely possessing drugs is so arbitrary compared to the penalties for other offenses where there is direct physical harm perpetrated against others," Goodman said. "And by now, we all acknowledge that drug possession is not merely an indiscretion, but might be linked to behavioral health issues. Our approach should be to facilitate therapeutic interventions. We have deferred prosecution programs already, but only for alcohol. Those arrested for drug possession are not eligible because it's a felony. If we could make deferred prosecution available for drug cases, we could make much more headway on the problem," he said.

And doing so would only codify what is already often existing practices, he said.

"Many or most courts and prosecutors are already pleading down felony drug cases to misdemeanors because of budget constraints and space limitations in the jails," Goodman noted. "We can change the law to conform with that practice without an additional threat to public safety. Beyond that, we could remove the prejudicial effect of a felony conviction when it is so evident they hinder people from reintegrating into the community."

While Sensible Washington and its allies are moving full steam ahead, passing the bill could be a multi-year effort, Goodman warned.

"I anticipate prosecutors saying that if we set a certain possession threshold, drug dealers will make sure they possess no more than that amount and will play the system," he said. "We have to figure out a way to find a threshold or divide possession cases into degrees. I hear the concern, but I'm not sure what the solution is. But this is a next important phase of drug policy reform: cranking down the drug war yet one more notch and doing what's rational and fiscally responsible."

There is lots of work to be done, Goodman said.

"We'll see how this plays out in the legislature. It's probably going to need more lobbying and more background discussion among more legislators," he predicted. "So far, it's not a real prominent topic, so it might end up being a work in progress. But who knows? It might catch on fire, and we'll get a quick consensus."


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Friday, October 18, 2013

Cop Drives Into Pole Going 70-75 MPH, Wasn't Wearing Seatbelt, Wasn't Responding To Emergency, Collects Workers Comp & Still Being Paid


Chris | InformationLiberation

Here's an example of one of those speeding cops 20/20 caught on camera. This cop drove his car into a pole while speeding, wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and wasn't responding to an emergency, yet he's collecting workers comp on the taxpayers dime and still being paid while the police "investigate."

Patch.com reports:

An internal affairs investigation will decide whether Deputy Adewale Olukoju is punished after he drove into a Marguerite light pole at 70-75 MPH.

Deputy Adewale Olukoju, 44, who was not wearing a seatbelt when he sped 70-75 MPH into a light pole in June, continues to collect a paycheck during the investigation, OCSD Lt. Jeff Hallock said.

Olukoju has not returned to work though, Hallock said, because he is on leave for worker's compensation.

Olukoju was ejected from his police cruiser after he crashed while traveling south on Marguerite near Vista Del Lago. He was not responding to an emergency, authorities said. The deputy is not suspected of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the crash.

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

Cops Fired For Lying About Beating And Pepper-Spraying Group of Women Appeal To Get Their Jobs Back



From the Denver Post:
Two Denver police officers at the center of a high-profile beating outside the Denver Diner plan to appeal a judge's decision upholding their firings, their attorney said Friday.

Police Chief Robert White signed letters terminating Ricky Nixon and Kevin Devine for lying during the internal investigation into the July 2009 incident, in which surveillance cameras captured them beating and pepper-spraying a group of women outside the diner.

They were initially fired, but the Civil Service Commission reinstated them, a decision District Court Judge Elizabeth A. Starrs ruled Thursday was wrong. Footage from police department cameras did not match the officers' statements to investigators, the judge wrote in her decision.

The officers can appeal to the Colorado Court of Appeals.

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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Video Of DC Police Car Running Straight Into Barrier At Capitol Hill


Chris | InformationLiberation

Amazingly, the officer was not gunned down for doing the same thing as the woman he was chasing.

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Video has already been taken down - Just received a YouTube error that this "Video is Private" ... Thanks, just replaced it with a mirror. Brains are obviously not a requirement for law enforcement these days. Too much GTA 5 can be bad thing. Somebody tell this shield he needs a break fro the PS3. I wish I could understand what that lady is saying in the video, is there a transcript? I hear profanity and a few phrases but there's some part in the middle, I can't even tell if she's speaking english, it sounds odd.
Didn't Ms. Carey get stuck in a barrier with fixed posts shaped in a V pattern....initially on Fox they said that was her first stop, and somehow when she was in that area, that's when her panic set in. They didn't mention if there was a crash, only that she was stuck, may have turned in the wrong area, etc.

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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Transforming America's Schools into Authoritarian Instruments of Compliance

By John W. Whitehead

?To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.? ? psychologist Peter Gray

These days, it is far too easy to rattle off the outrageous examples of zero tolerance policy run amok in our nation?s schools. A 14-year-old student arrested for texting in class. Three middle school aged boys in Florida thrown to the ground by police officers wielding rifles, who then arrested them for goofing off on the roof of the school. A 9-year-old boy suspended for allegedly pointing a toy at a classmate and saying ?bang, bang.? Two 6-year-old students in Maryland suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers. A 12-year-old New York student hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. An 8-year-old boy suspended for making his hand into the shape of a gun, in violation of the school district?s policy prohibiting ?playing with invisible guns.? A 17-year-old charged with a felony for keeping his tackle box in his car parked on school property, potentially derailing his chances of entering the Air Force. Two seventh graders in Virginia suspended for the rest of the school year for playing with airsoft guns in their own yard before school.

Thus, it?s tempting, when hearing about the 7-year-old suspended for chewing his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun to chalk it up to an isolated example of school officials lacking in common sense. However, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these incidents are far from isolated, occurring as they have for the better part of the past 30 years under the guise of maintaining safety and security in the schools. They are part of a concerted, top-down approach to creating a generation of obedient worker-bees content to be directed, distracted and kept in line.

Despite a general consensus that zero tolerance policies have failed to have any appreciable impact on student safety, schools have doubled down on these policies to the detriment of children all across the nation. Indeed, the zero tolerance mindset is so entrenched among school administrators all over America that we are now seeing school officials reaching into the personal lives of students to police their behavior at all times. For example, 13,000 students in the Glendale Unified School District in California are now being subjected to constant social media monitoring by school officials. Superintendent Richard Sheehan has hired private firm Geo Listening to analyze the public social media posts of students both off and on campus. Whether on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or any other social media platform, students will have their posts and comments analyzed for evidence of ?bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse and truancy.?

Unfortunately, the Glendale program is simply one component of a larger framework in which all student activity is treated as an open book by school administrators. What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in American society, in which no personal activity is safe from the prying eyes of government agents and their corporate allies. Every decision and action, no matter how innocent, is scrutinized, analyzed, filed, stored, and eventually held against you when those in power feel like it.

When one pulls back the veil of zero tolerance, one can see the real culprit is the corporate-state, which has been meticulously applying the zero tolerance mindset to not just public schools in America, but our workplaces, our political forums, our social interactions and even our own homes. The end result is a society which is completely pacified and willing to march in lockstep with the corporate-state.

Government officials have worked hard to indoctrinate Americans into the belief that everything you do is suspect, and anything you do can be held against you at a later date. This mindset is clear in all aspects of society, from zero tolerance policies in our nation?s schools, to SWAT team raids in our neighborhoods, from the NSA?s surveillance of all Americans? communications, to the corporate-state?s insistence that people aren?t capable of managing their own affairs. More and more people are becoming suspicious of others, quick to judge, and more than willing to follow the government?s dictates, however irrational and immoral they may be.

This manner of thinking has been slowly adopted by many Americans, but more worrisome is the manner in which it?s being foisted upon our nation?s youth. We are now living in an era in which childhood as it was once understood, a time to learn, to make mistakes, to try and fail, to try again and succeed, has been replaced by the worst elements of corporate and government culture. Children are treated as workers and prisoners, collected, corralled and controlled by teachers who increasingly act as bureaucrats, forced to fit every child into the exact same mold, regardless of their personal abilities and talents. This mindset is apparent among the proponents of the Common Core Testing Standards which threaten to unleash a new system of standardized testing on a new generation of kids.

As communications consultant Luba Vangelova has noted, the key attributes of a productive member of society are ?a zest for life, creativity, perseverance, empathy, effective communication and the ability to cooperate with others. These are things that can?t be measured well ? if at all ? by tests.? Our obsession with testing leaves children without basic reasoning and analysis skills. They are taught to parrot information, rather than produce arguments. Their value is tied to letter grades and numbers.

Psychologist Peter Gray takes this criticism further, noting that children today are rarely allowed the opportunity to engage in undirected creative activity, also known as playing. Gray notes that since the 1960s, time for play has taken a backseat in the lives of children in favor of rigid curriculums revolving around high-stakes testing. Even sports, which were once simply games played on the fly by a mixed group of neighborhood kids, have taken on the rigidity of life in a factory or cubicle. The obsession with quantifying childhood progress has gone so far that charter schools in DC are beginning to conduct high stakes testing for three and four year old children.

Over the same time period, incidences of childhood mental illness have steadily increased. The number of children and young adults suffering from major depression and generalized anxiety disorder have increased between five and eightfold since the 1950s. The suicide rate for 15 ? 24 year olds has doubled, while the suicide rate for those under the age of 15 has quadrupled.

The rise in these mental illnesses is coupled with a decrease in empathy and an increase in narcissism in young people, indicating that their ability to work with others ? as is necessary in a society ? has been muted. We?re raising a generation of anxious individuals who expect their life?s direction to come to them from orders from above. In short, we?re creating a generation ingrained with an authoritarian mindset.

This authoritarian mindset is an unavoidable consequence of the American education system. Indeed, while so-called education reformers insist on more tests, pushing schools to emulate the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean educational systems, they miss a big piece of the puzzle: educators in those countries consider their systems a failure. Despite performing better than American children on certain international standardized tests, Chinese educators have noted that Chinese students have also demonstrated a ?lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.?

Despite this fact, states are pushing ahead with programs like Common Core, which not only threatens our children?s quality of education, but their privacy as well. A great deal of data will be collected under new guidelines proposed by the program. While the purposes of the data collection appear legitimate on their face, mainly focused on keeping track of student progress, we must keep in mind that we are living in the era of Big Data, in which information becomes currency between the government and their corporate benefactors. The data collected on students goes beyond test scores and includes ?social security numbers, attendance records, records of interaction with school counselors, identification of learning disabilities, and even disciplinary records.? Of course, having all of this information about every misstep or mistake one has made through his whole life does not bode well in a society in which government and corporate authorities are happy to punish any minor mishap.

We are living in an era where every personal decision, such as where to work, where to shop, where to play, who to love, who to befriend, who to worship, what to believe, and what to say, is open to scrutiny by government officials and corporate managers. It?s a poisonous mentality for those hoping to preserve democracy, and it?s being foisted upon our children, whether in the form of bureaucrats fashioning one-size-fits-all educational standards, or police officers investigating innocent activities such as children playing in the street as possible crimes.

This situation will only get worse as our children are taught to accept the police state as normal. Between the regimes of zero tolerance, the surveillance of students both in school and in their homes, and the value placed in standardized testing over teaching analytical thinking skills, we are raising a generation which is being encouraged to adopt the authoritarian mindset which pollutes the minds of our government and corporate leaders. By allowing our children to be subject to the forces of the market and the dictates of the state, we are ensuring tyranny within a generation or two, if not sooner.


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Monday, October 14, 2013

BBC Caught Staging Syria Chemical Weapons Propaganda?


Former Ambassador labels video ?stunning fakery?
Paul Joseph Watson

Within 2 hours of posting this story, the BBC filed a copyright claim with YouTube to get the 45 second clip removed. This shows how nervous the BBC is about this information coming to light. News organizations routinely rely on dubious copyright claims to censor damaging revelations. An copy of the video via LiveLeak is embedded below.

A video of a BBC interview with a doctor in Syria in the aftermath of a napalm-style attack appears to have been artificially dubbed to falsely make reference to the incident being a ?chemical weapons? attack, a clip that represents ?a stunning bit of fakery,? according to former UK Ambassador Craig Murray.

The news report was first released on August 29, just days before an attack on Syria seemed inevitable, and served to further the narrative that military action was necessary to halt atrocities being committed by President Bashar Al-Assad?s forces.

The first clip is from the original interview with British medic Dr Rola Hallam, from the Hand in Hand for Syria charity. She states;

"..It's just absolute chaos and carnage here, erm we've had a massive influx of
what looks like serious burns, er seems like it must be some sort of, I'm not
really sure, maybe napalm, something similar to that.."

However, in the second clip, which is from the exact same interview, her words are slightly altered.

"..It's just absolute chaos and carnage here, erm we've had a massive influx of
what looks like serious burns, er seems like it must be some sort of chemical
weapon, I'm not really sure.."

The second clip seems to have been artificially dubbed to characterize the event as a ?chemical weapon? attack rather than an incendiary bomb attack. Hallam?s mouth is hidden by a mask, making the dub impossible to detect without referring to the original clip.

The clip has sparked frenzied analysis by numerous Internet users, who point out that the background noise in the clip that uses the ?chemical weapon? quote is different from the original. The BBC has been asked to explain the discrepancy but has so far not responded.

?I suspect the motive in this instance and others by the BBC are propaganda intended to affect public opinion in the UK in such a way as to congregate support and underpin an offensive against the Syrian government,? writes one user who closely analyzed the audio.

In a?subsequent BBC interview, Dr Rola Hallam complained about the UK Parliament?s refusal to authorize a military strike on Syria. Hallam?s father is also on the Syrian National Council, the political body which represents opposition militants.

Hallam?s bias in supporting military action while working for a charity in Syria and being linked to the FSA makes the video clip all the more intriguing. It also explains why the BBC, which has aggressively pushed for military intervention in Syria from the beginning, is apparently using her to stage propaganda.

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray said the video represented, ?Irrefutable evidence of a stunning bit of fakery by the BBC,? adding that the woman?s words could have been faked in their entirety.

?The disturbing thing is the footage of the doctor talking is precisely the same each time. It is edited so as to give the impression the medic is talking in real time in her natural voice -- there are none of the accepted devices used to indicate a voiceover translation. But it must be true that in at least one, and possibly both, the clips she is not talking in real time in her own voice. It is very hard to judge as her mouth and lips are fully covered throughout. Perhaps neither of the above is what she actually said.?

?Terrible things are happening all the time in Syria's civil war, between Assad's disparate forces and still more disparate opposition forces, and innocent people are suffering. There are dreadful crimes against civilians on all sides. I have no desire at all to downplay or mitigate that. But once you realise the indisputable fact of the fake interview the BBC has put out, some of the images in this video begin to be less than convincing on close inspection too.?

A link to Murray?s blog on the issue was also tweeted by Wikileaks, the whistleblower organization, under the headline,? BBC puts out fake video with Syrian medic claiming chemical weapons.?

This would by no means be the first time that evidence of war crimes has been staged in order to lay the blame on Bashar Al-Assad?s forces.

As we have previously highlighted, there are numerous videos showing supporters of the western backed FSA staging fake injuries and deaths for propaganda purposes.
_
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News. Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71 FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet


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Here is my take on it:

http://doyouwearblack.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/bbc-panorama-with-more-dodgy-footage.html

The video showing Dr Rola in each case is different ? see the man just behind her in the fluorescent jacket, his arms are in a different position. The audio does sound exactly the same to me except for the change of words. The only other explanation, given the video is different, is that they took several takes. In any case that is just as fraudulent in what we?re supposed to believe is a chaotic situation where she needs to attend to patients.

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