TL;DR: I wander in circles on this one, at least its a short rant.
==================================================
This is a nation of fear. The government and mega-corp have managed to convince the people of America that without Big Brother, they would surely be dead.
This fear has let them extend their control into every aspect of our lives. America is fat, stupid and lazy….and its all by design. They don’t want healthy, critically thinking, educated members of society. They want a nation of imbeciles, easily distracted and slow of thought.
The militarization of the police was another step in this natural progression, they needed a culture of wannabe-warriors that would follow orders, no questions asked. And so, out with the Peacekeeper and in with the Law Enforcement Officer. Where once the town sheriff was a part of the community, now we have police that are apart from the community. Us vs Them.
With this militarization came law after law, because if you have a hammer every problem turns into a nail. They needed to justify these expenditures (if only barely), and now they can trot forward trumped up stats by the bucketful, all showing that we would surely be dead without the divine intervention of the government and their muscle, the LEO.
Honestly, one of the last pieces of the puzzle (to me) is the legalization of pot. While I am for it on libertarian grounds, I harbor a deep trepidation about its future implications.
We have cheap and plentiful food. We have endless entertainment via the TV fools. While we are a nation of drug users (legal and illegal), we still don’t have that one silver bullet of a drug that lets the government truly do whatever it wishes.
I believe marijuana will be that drug. Its easy to produce, cheap, and has little to no harmful side-effects. The people will be warm, fed, entertained, and soon drugged up. Freedom is an abstract thought, and one that requires work. The people willing to put in that work are going to have a hell of a time fighting through the cacophony of distractions….what a fucking world we live in.
AWD
April 3, 2014 11:09 am
Is the US turning into a police state?
Already has, 10 years ago if not more. That’s when we started the “War of Terror”. Failing to actually catch more than a handful of terrorists, the police state instead terrorizes the population and puts people in prison. It’s utterly disgraceful.
The “War on Drugs” has been a miserable failure. Instead of slowing drugs into this country, they simply put people in prison and destroy their lives. Again, the police state terrorizing citizens.
[img[/img]
Again, this data is 10 years old, so it’s much worse now. The number of cops have quadrupled, the number of Judges and lawyers has quadrupled, and the expenditure for corrections has gone up 600%. Yes, we live in a police state.
[img[/img]
Then there are the domestic terror organization of the IRS, TSA, DHS, FBI, ATF, and Obama laws like NDAA. We’re all just one arrest away from imprisonment.
Stucky
April 3, 2014 11:36 am
Of course the USA is NOT a police state. You paranoid freakoids need to stop listening to the voices in your head.
Did you know we are so free that other nations actually hate us for our freedoms?
[img?1372462694[/img]
Thinker
April 3, 2014 11:45 am
And yet, this reads like something out of Keystone Cops:
Boston Marathon bomb response exposed ‘fault lines’ in policing: study
BOSTON (Reuters) – The massive manhunt for the perpetrators of last year’s Boston Marathon bomb attack exposed some “fault lines” in coordinating law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, according to a study released on Thursday.
Emergency responders racing to a crime scene without waiting for orders might save lives by tending to the wounded, but during the chaotic chase to catch the suspects a few days later, they also risked being shot by police, the Harvard University report found.
The hairiest events after the bombing, which killed three people and injured 264, began three days later when the two ethnic Chechen brothers accused of planting the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line, shot and killed a university police officer in a failed attempt to steal his gun and flee the city.
The shooting prompted hundreds of local police, as well as law enforcement officials who had traveled from other towns to help with the investigation, to race to Watertown, Massachusetts, where the suspects traded shots with police.
Officers surrounded the suspects, placing police at a high risk of shooting one another, the report found.
“They were incredibly lucky that there weren’t a lot of friendly fire casualties,” said lead author Herman “Dutch” Leonard, a professor of public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The study was based on interviews with some 100 law enforcement and other public officials who took part in the response.
One officer, Richard Donohue of the transit police, was badly wounded in that gun battle and witnesses told local media that he may have been accidentally shot by a fellow officer. No official report on the shooting has been released.
That incident was not the only case in which possibly overtired officers ran the risk of shooting one another, the report said. The gunbattle ended in the death of one suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while his younger brother Dzhokhar, now 20, managed to elude police.
When the younger brother was found hiding in a drydocked boat the next evening, dozens of police raced to the scene.
One officer on a rooftop fired at Tsarnaev, prompting “a substantial volume of contagious fire” by other police at the scene, the report found.
It noted that contagious gunfire, in which the sound of shots prompts others to fire their weapons, poses a high risk in densely populated areas such as the Watertown suburb of Boston where the younger Tsarnaev was apprehended.
The suspect is now awaiting trial on charges that carry the threat of execution if he is convicted.
Despite problems during the manhunt, the report found that law enforcement officials worked together smoothly on the day of the bomb blasts, evidenced by the fact that most of the casualties, many of whom lost legs, survived despite substantial loss of blood.
That coordinated effort was a result of years of planning and coordination around the marathon, Boston’s best-attended sporting event.
The Harvard report suggests that law enforcement officials responding to major security threats take more aggressive steps to establish tactical command, including planning rest shifts so that they are not relying on overtired officers.
The lessons of the response to the Boston bombing could easily apply to future security scares, Leonard said.
“Any significant terrorist activity on the homeland is going to generate a similar ramping up and presence of many different law enforcement agencies,” Leonard said.
“This event illustrates how much progress we’ve made since 9/11 and Katrina in being able to form rapid command structures that are effective,” he said. “But we have a lot of work to do in projecting the same philosophy down to operating on the street.”
Maddie's Mom
April 3, 2014 12:51 pm
And be sure to not have a family argument outside a movie theatre.
Update:
OKLAHOMA CITY
The medical examiner’s office rules a man’s death while in police custody outside of the Warren Theater a homicide.
The ME says Luis Rodriguez died from a cardiac arrhythmia due to physical restraint and his body has signs of a struggle that would not have been enough to kill him.
Of course it is. By any measure, if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and are just, in fact, unlucky, your ass can be grass and the police will mow it.
They know they do not prevent crime except by accident. They have two outstanding goals; the first is to go home to mama and the kids after the shift is over; the second is to allow those (more than a few) of the Type A, overbearing, power trippers to vent their aggression in an acceptable way i.e. on the public.
There are good dedicated cops and bad copfucks. Hope you don’t run into a bad one.
MA
overthecliff
April 3, 2014 1:20 pm
We have made criminals of a lot of people who would not have been criminals 40 years ago. We have 4 times as many people in prison now as in 1970. Believe me, we are not more safe. We have used the law to persecute black and brown people and wonder why they rage at the injustice. I can`t believe I am saying these things. No longer a conservative but a libertarian. Just leave everybody alone.
PrisonerofZelda
April 3, 2014 1:34 pm
The police have evolved. They are no longer content to abuse the rights of Neegros and Taco Benders, they have moved on to include white folks in the fun.The ideal police recruit. Ex military, low intelligence, sociopathy, psych problems, psychotropic meds and willingness to blindly follow orders. Those of you who think the police wont open fire on their fellow citizens when the SHTF better wake up fast.
BUCKHED
April 3, 2014 5:35 pm
I think Menken said it best :
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
TeresaE
April 3, 2014 8:12 pm
@TPC, simply beautifully stated.
Watched a few minutes of the local news tonight before coming in here to work. Michigan just passed a new law where ALL “arsons” come with an automatic 20 years in the pen. Even if abandoned, nobody is harmed, and no insurance fraud takes place.
Which leads me to believe that we must have private prison contracts to keep full.
Michigan residents should keep in mind that we have had at least TWO instances of Arson investigators (one with a dog, one without) where they fabricated “evidence” and made shit up to implicate innocent people.
Now those people would be facing 20 years in prison.
Just wtf. How many more years, crimes, punishments can this country withstand?
Why won’t people care until the day after it is their friend/family member being taken away?
I nearly can’t take this fucked up country anymore. Run by the corrupted and rich, supported by the brain dead and stupid.
Final note, yeah TPC on the pot. Not to mention that once Monsanto gets ahold of it, all the medicinal qualities will be trashed and it will become yet one more pathway for our cancer feeders into our bodies.
Americans will believe the marketing propaganda as if it was coming out of a real scientific center.
so it goes…
bb
April 3, 2014 10:43 pm
They do have some nice weapons.Makes me envious.
Thinker
April 4, 2014 9:42 am
White Man Beaten By Mob In Detroit After Hitting Boy With Truck: Was It A Hate Crime?
“As my dad’s truck was coming down the street, the kid stepped right in front of my dad’s truck. My dad had absolutely not one chance in the world to try to swerve out-of-the-way or stop,” he said. “He got out of the car to check on the kid and before he even got up to the kid, he got assaulted by 11, 12 people. They jumped all over him and beat him up. While they were jumping him, somebody else jumped in the truck and stole his belongings. They took his wallet, his cellphone, everything out of his truck.”
TL;DR: I wander in circles on this one, at least its a short rant.
==================================================
This is a nation of fear. The government and mega-corp have managed to convince the people of America that without Big Brother, they would surely be dead.
This fear has let them extend their control into every aspect of our lives. America is fat, stupid and lazy….and its all by design. They don’t want healthy, critically thinking, educated members of society. They want a nation of imbeciles, easily distracted and slow of thought.
The militarization of the police was another step in this natural progression, they needed a culture of wannabe-warriors that would follow orders, no questions asked. And so, out with the Peacekeeper and in with the Law Enforcement Officer. Where once the town sheriff was a part of the community, now we have police that are apart from the community. Us vs Them.
With this militarization came law after law, because if you have a hammer every problem turns into a nail. They needed to justify these expenditures (if only barely), and now they can trot forward trumped up stats by the bucketful, all showing that we would surely be dead without the divine intervention of the government and their muscle, the LEO.
Honestly, one of the last pieces of the puzzle (to me) is the legalization of pot. While I am for it on libertarian grounds, I harbor a deep trepidation about its future implications.
We have cheap and plentiful food. We have endless entertainment via the TV fools. While we are a nation of drug users (legal and illegal), we still don’t have that one silver bullet of a drug that lets the government truly do whatever it wishes.
I believe marijuana will be that drug. Its easy to produce, cheap, and has little to no harmful side-effects. The people will be warm, fed, entertained, and soon drugged up. Freedom is an abstract thought, and one that requires work. The people willing to put in that work are going to have a hell of a time fighting through the cacophony of distractions….what a fucking world we live in.
Is the US turning into a police state?
Already has, 10 years ago if not more. That’s when we started the “War of Terror”. Failing to actually catch more than a handful of terrorists, the police state instead terrorizes the population and puts people in prison. It’s utterly disgraceful.
The “War on Drugs” has been a miserable failure. Instead of slowing drugs into this country, they simply put people in prison and destroy their lives. Again, the police state terrorizing citizens.
[img
[/img]
Again, this data is 10 years old, so it’s much worse now. The number of cops have quadrupled, the number of Judges and lawyers has quadrupled, and the expenditure for corrections has gone up 600%. Yes, we live in a police state.
[img
[/img]
Then there are the domestic terror organization of the IRS, TSA, DHS, FBI, ATF, and Obama laws like NDAA. We’re all just one arrest away from imprisonment.
Of course the USA is NOT a police state. You paranoid freakoids need to stop listening to the voices in your head.
Did you know we are so free that other nations actually hate us for our freedoms?
[img
?1372462694[/img]
And yet, this reads like something out of Keystone Cops:
Boston Marathon bomb response exposed ‘fault lines’ in policing: study
BOSTON (Reuters) – The massive manhunt for the perpetrators of last year’s Boston Marathon bomb attack exposed some “fault lines” in coordinating law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, according to a study released on Thursday.
Emergency responders racing to a crime scene without waiting for orders might save lives by tending to the wounded, but during the chaotic chase to catch the suspects a few days later, they also risked being shot by police, the Harvard University report found.
The hairiest events after the bombing, which killed three people and injured 264, began three days later when the two ethnic Chechen brothers accused of planting the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line, shot and killed a university police officer in a failed attempt to steal his gun and flee the city.
The shooting prompted hundreds of local police, as well as law enforcement officials who had traveled from other towns to help with the investigation, to race to Watertown, Massachusetts, where the suspects traded shots with police.
Officers surrounded the suspects, placing police at a high risk of shooting one another, the report found.
“They were incredibly lucky that there weren’t a lot of friendly fire casualties,” said lead author Herman “Dutch” Leonard, a professor of public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The study was based on interviews with some 100 law enforcement and other public officials who took part in the response.
One officer, Richard Donohue of the transit police, was badly wounded in that gun battle and witnesses told local media that he may have been accidentally shot by a fellow officer. No official report on the shooting has been released.
That incident was not the only case in which possibly overtired officers ran the risk of shooting one another, the report said. The gunbattle ended in the death of one suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while his younger brother Dzhokhar, now 20, managed to elude police.
When the younger brother was found hiding in a drydocked boat the next evening, dozens of police raced to the scene.
One officer on a rooftop fired at Tsarnaev, prompting “a substantial volume of contagious fire” by other police at the scene, the report found.
It noted that contagious gunfire, in which the sound of shots prompts others to fire their weapons, poses a high risk in densely populated areas such as the Watertown suburb of Boston where the younger Tsarnaev was apprehended.
The suspect is now awaiting trial on charges that carry the threat of execution if he is convicted.
Despite problems during the manhunt, the report found that law enforcement officials worked together smoothly on the day of the bomb blasts, evidenced by the fact that most of the casualties, many of whom lost legs, survived despite substantial loss of blood.
That coordinated effort was a result of years of planning and coordination around the marathon, Boston’s best-attended sporting event.
The Harvard report suggests that law enforcement officials responding to major security threats take more aggressive steps to establish tactical command, including planning rest shifts so that they are not relying on overtired officers.
The lessons of the response to the Boston bombing could easily apply to future security scares, Leonard said.
“Any significant terrorist activity on the homeland is going to generate a similar ramping up and presence of many different law enforcement agencies,” Leonard said.
“This event illustrates how much progress we’ve made since 9/11 and Katrina in being able to form rapid command structures that are effective,” he said. “But we have a lot of work to do in projecting the same philosophy down to operating on the street.”
And be sure to not have a family argument outside a movie theatre.
Update:
OKLAHOMA CITY
The medical examiner’s office rules a man’s death while in police custody outside of the Warren Theater a homicide.
The ME says Luis Rodriguez died from a cardiac arrhythmia due to physical restraint and his body has signs of a struggle that would not have been enough to kill him.
http://www.newson6.com/story/25146390/me-rules-moore-in-custody-death-as-homicide
Of course it is. By any measure, if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and are just, in fact, unlucky, your ass can be grass and the police will mow it.
They know they do not prevent crime except by accident. They have two outstanding goals; the first is to go home to mama and the kids after the shift is over; the second is to allow those (more than a few) of the Type A, overbearing, power trippers to vent their aggression in an acceptable way i.e. on the public.
There are good dedicated cops and bad copfucks. Hope you don’t run into a bad one.
MA
We have made criminals of a lot of people who would not have been criminals 40 years ago. We have 4 times as many people in prison now as in 1970. Believe me, we are not more safe. We have used the law to persecute black and brown people and wonder why they rage at the injustice. I can`t believe I am saying these things. No longer a conservative but a libertarian. Just leave everybody alone.
The police have evolved. They are no longer content to abuse the rights of Neegros and Taco Benders, they have moved on to include white folks in the fun.The ideal police recruit. Ex military, low intelligence, sociopathy, psych problems, psychotropic meds and willingness to blindly follow orders. Those of you who think the police wont open fire on their fellow citizens when the SHTF better wake up fast.
I think Menken said it best :
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
@TPC, simply beautifully stated.
Watched a few minutes of the local news tonight before coming in here to work. Michigan just passed a new law where ALL “arsons” come with an automatic 20 years in the pen. Even if abandoned, nobody is harmed, and no insurance fraud takes place.
Which leads me to believe that we must have private prison contracts to keep full.
Michigan residents should keep in mind that we have had at least TWO instances of Arson investigators (one with a dog, one without) where they fabricated “evidence” and made shit up to implicate innocent people.
Now those people would be facing 20 years in prison.
Just wtf. How many more years, crimes, punishments can this country withstand?
Why won’t people care until the day after it is their friend/family member being taken away?
I nearly can’t take this fucked up country anymore. Run by the corrupted and rich, supported by the brain dead and stupid.
Final note, yeah TPC on the pot. Not to mention that once Monsanto gets ahold of it, all the medicinal qualities will be trashed and it will become yet one more pathway for our cancer feeders into our bodies.
Americans will believe the marketing propaganda as if it was coming out of a real scientific center.
so it goes…
They do have some nice weapons.Makes me envious.
White Man Beaten By Mob In Detroit After Hitting Boy With Truck: Was It A Hate Crime?
http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/04/04/white-man-beaten-by-mob-in-detroit-after-hitting-boy-with-truck-was-it-a-hate-crime/
“As my dad’s truck was coming down the street, the kid stepped right in front of my dad’s truck. My dad had absolutely not one chance in the world to try to swerve out-of-the-way or stop,” he said. “He got out of the car to check on the kid and before he even got up to the kid, he got assaulted by 11, 12 people. They jumped all over him and beat him up. While they were jumping him, somebody else jumped in the truck and stole his belongings. They took his wallet, his cellphone, everything out of his truck.”