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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Legacy

RFID Chips Used to Track Alzheimer's Patients

Met Police officers to be 'microchipped' by top brass in Big Brother style tracking scheme

RFID "Tag the world"

You need to know what you are up against in a declining economy where a job loss can put you on the streets and ruin your future forever. Especially during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the federal Bradley Law concretes the concept of a permanent subclass of Americans.

Getting Rid of the "War on Terror" Mindset

GOP Responds To Cheney’s Concealment Of CIA Program With Strawmen And Shrugged Shoulders

Criminal Justice

Snitches: Wasted Money on False Justice

A report this week from the Leicestershire Constabulary in England revealed that the country police force spent £250,000 (more than $400,000) on paid informants in the last two years. In Scotland, the Daily Record spent a year digging up the informant budgets of two police departments - and found their spending at £200,000 over four years.

Paid informants are notoriously unreliable. They have a built-in motive to provide information, even false information: they're getting paid. Jailhouse snitches who receive leniency on their own charges in exchange for information are even more motivated to lie - and they do. Would you want your local police department spending thousands on questionable information and using it in criminal cases?

Friday Tweets

6,446 Days on Death Row

Juan Melendez (above) spent more than 17 years (6,446 days) on Florida's death row for a murder he has always said he didn't commit. He was finally freed in 2002 based on errors in his conviction and mounting evidence of his innocence, including a confession from the real perpetrator of the crime.

A documentary film about his conviction and release - "Juan Melendez - 6446" will be featured next week as part of the New York Latino Film Festival. Sister Helen Prejean saw the film and wrote yesterday that watching it with Juan and his mother was "was heartbreaking and maddening and it stirred the soul."


Racial Profiling is Alive and Well

Gates wasn't arrested for breaking and entering, he was arrested for disorderly conduct for allegedly disobeying the officer who asked for his ID. Gates disputes the officer's version of events, but only the two of them know what happened. The officer involved apparently teaches new recruits how to avoid profiling.

Will 'Tough-on-Crime' Derail the California Budget?

Hours after California lawmakers reached a tentative agreement on a budget deal Monday night to begin the process of bailing the struggling state out of debt, Republicans balked at the details behind $1.2 billion in anticipated cuts to the prison budget.

The plan would send some sick elderly prisoners to non-prison hospitals, transfer some non-violent prisoners to house arrest for the last year of their sentence and shorten sentences for non-violent prisoners who earn a GED. A sentencing commission would review the state's policies and recommend adjustments that aren't such a budget drain. These are sensible reforms, and it's a shame that it takes a budget crisis to bring them about. But we'll take progress any way we can get it, and the enemies of sensible prison policy will stop it any way they can - usually by screaming about how 'dangerous' these non-violent prisoners will be when they get on the street.

The Last Drug Czar

Obama's point man in the war on drugs is calling off the troops. But that doesn't mean legalization is around the corner. "I'm ending the phrase, 'the war on drugs.'"

Welcome to the New Economy… bitch. 

Did the real 'cyber 9/11' happen on 9/11?

Government sources immediately began blaming North Korea for the recent cyberterror attacks on South Korea and the U.S., despite having no evidence to back up those claims. Now, an examination of the evidence by independent computer experts show that the attack seems to have been coordinated from the UK. The hysterical media coverage in the attack's wake, however, echoing the government line that it was likely the work of North Korea, served to cement in the minds of many that this was an act of cyberwarfare.

What the cyber security establishment does not want you to know is that the most incredible cyber terrorist story of all time began 15 years ago. And it centers on 9/11. The establishment is interested in suppressing this story because it demonstrates that the very investigative bodies that are clamoring for more power on the pretext of the "cyber terror" hysteria are the exact same bodies that failed to investigate the documentable links between government-designated terrorists and a software company with direct access to some of the most sensitive computer systems in the United States. FBI agents whose investigation into this story were suppressed have even said that these investigations could have prevented 9/11.

Cheney pressed Bush to test Constitutional limits by using military force on US soil--National Level Exercise next week
According to a story in Friday's New York Times, Vice-President Cheney advocated in 2002 for the Bush administration to send military troops to Buffalo to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six as enemy combatants.

This would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement.

Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose.

The Lackawanna Six were a group of young Yememi-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their "cell" in his January 2003 State of the Union address. 

However, an investigation by Salon failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a "sleeper cell" or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists
.
DHS plans massive, five-day 'terrorism prevention' exercise

The exercise is expected to last for five days and is being designed to test a variety of "capabilities," including intelligence sharing, counter-terrorism investigation, border security, infrastructure protection, security alerts and international coordination, FEMA said.

July 27 through July 31, 2009. NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery.

* Intelligence/Information Sharing and Dissemination
* Counter-Terrorism Investigation and Law Enforcement
* Air, Border and Maritime Security
* Critical Infrastructure Protection
* Public and Private Sector Alert/Notification and Security Advisories
* International Coordination
For more information about NLE 09, contact the FEMA News Desk: 202-646-4600.

Inside Bush and Cheney's Final Days

The Vice President believed he and the President could claim the war on terrorism as his greatest legacy only if they defended at all costs the men and women who fought in the trenches.

Wrong Answer!

Seems the pony soldiers and their current federal bosses have a bit of a problem with Braidwood's recommendations.

 Cathie coins a term: "Police Entitlement Syndrome" or PES. Known to afflict police, politicians and the general public, symptoms include but are not limited to victim blaming, uniform fetishism, machine fetishism, weapon fetishism, state sanctioned violence, lying, cover-up, and cognitive dissonance. Provisional treatments include radical institutional reform aimed at securing substantive civilian oversight and redress procedures, as well as internal police organisational culture change. These treatments, however, are in short supple due to a significant dearth of democracy resulting from socially and politically entrenched power inequalities and hegemonic ideologies.

The New World Order of the Coming Neo-Middle Age

The American Federal Empire  is feeling the pressures of over-extension, currency devaluation and economic fatigue. The AFE is the largest Western Empire to start disintegrating since the Romans 1570 years ago ( Unless you count the British Empire, but in comparison of political control and era in time, the Roman Empire had greater influence ). The Empire’s leadership and population are currently going through the ‘denial’ stage of this Fall and like in all deaths, this is grief in the fullest.

When the AFE finally Falls, there will be many power vacuums throughout the world, but not too many governments are going to shrink and die away since the AFE is an Empire of military bases.

As history has shown, there will be an apocalypse after the Fall of Empire, there always is. And there will be proclaimations of the Second Coming of Christ, the Twelth Imam, the Technological Singularity or Alien Brothers that will come and save us from our travails.

But there will be no saving.

Just the living, struggling and suffering there always has been during human history.

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