I’ve been thinking the same thing for years now, whenever I see a “reality” police show, Cops, etc. Your rights? What rights? (!).
Watching all of the fast-proliferating prison documentaries gives the same message.
What’s next? Reality shows documenting entire families being hauled off and tortured for mis-deeds of the siblings? More of the “pirate” cell-phone camera documenteries of Saddam and etc. being hanged by Uncle Sham?

The police are being given “terrorist” training when there are no terrorists. Quite naturally, the police use those “terrorist” tactics on whoever they can get their hands on. You and me and the other citizens that pay their salary.

In Britain there is video of 4 or 5 male policeman tying up middle aged women like they were terrorists for taking a picture of the police. Seriously. The lady took a picture of a policeman and 3 or 4 of them jumped her.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/21/kingsnorth-protester-arrests-video-complaint

How can police justify trussing up middle aged women like turkeys, then physically assaulting them? There is no justification.

The police know they can use their “terrorist” training on anyone and get away with it. This video is titled in the newspaper as if the newspaper is reporting an outrage.

I personally think the paper is showing the video as a sanctioned government warning to people about what will happen to them if they decide to protest the economy or politics or anything else.

Mousavi defends ‘right’ to protest, after 17 die in Iran (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1094502.html)

If only the Pentagon agreed that Americans have the same rights!

Carl Sagan died in 1996 and to know then earlier about West Antarctic ice sheet was very clear thinking indeed.

While many of the environmental impacts of humankind closely map demographic indicators, this leaves out one vital component: consumption. The per-capita consumption of key natural resources varies hugely around the world. Typically, but not universally, the citizens of rich industrialized nations use more of the world’s resources and produce more waste. Sometimes they thereby deplete their own environments; sometimes other people’s.

For many resources, the United States of America is the world’s largest consumer in absolute terms. For a list of 20 major traded commodities, it takes the greatest share of 11 of them: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, tin, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil and natural gas. For many more it is the largest per-capita consumer.

Sometimes other people’s. No sometimes about it. Excuse me how much to you weigh only 310 pounds, cool. How many cars do you have wow you must have made a lot of money doing late night TV. Do you really need all those? How many bed rooms in that house 25 cool. The way we live in the States is nut’s and how is it all working out? You tell me. The amount of water and resources on just golf courses is mind boggling and lawns same. I know un American keep your mouth shut or else. Let’s see how California is doing by September and in say just three more years. The people who need to keep there mouth shut is so called leaders who’s ideas seem to be old ideas that got us here and there plan is keep us there with them as we all go down the drain in slow motion and we are finding out now not so slow. Keep your mouth shut am I in trouble now well I think we are all in a little trouble. Men in black I still think shorts and Hawaiian shirts used shorts and shirts from a second hand store. Our military in the States what shape are they in? Just one more tour I promise. Here take these pills call me in a week.

It irritates me to no end to hear the American news media compare the right of protesters in America and Iran.

It’s a damn joke.

There have been over 15,000 arrests for resistance to war since 2002.

Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and removed from the July 4, 2004, rally at the state Capitol, where Bush gave a speech.

An Australian man was denied permission to board a connecting flight within Australia unless he removed the T-shirt titled “World’s #1 Terrorist” with a picture of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Hunter College student Stephanie Schwartz says Coast Guard officials stopped her two weeks ago aboard the ferry. During the summer, Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar was stopped by security officials for wearing the same t-shirt at JFK Airport. He was forced to change the shirt before boarding a JetBlue flight.

A computer seized and government is investigating her for “sedition”.
Berg, a clinical nurse specialist, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. She urged people to “act forcefully” to remove an administration she said played games of “vicious deceit.”

Investigated and harassed by Home Land Security.
When the Iraq War was looking imminent, not long after September 11, Dwight attached a garbage bag to the back of his truck bed. He splattered the bag and the truck with ketchup and added a sign reading, “This veteran knows that our children are worth more than a $6.95 body bag.” When he drove down the freeway, the bag would inflate and appear occupied.

In Iran the younger and some not so young in the millions right now a face off with the supreme leaders people. Is it good against evil. How about new and old. Real old real, real old.

And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations; and then the end will come. Oh boy

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Carlo Sagan

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. Sagan

Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn – so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth – to see how it ends. They’re all on Times Square – making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines. Spoken by Dr. Norbert Woodley.
Kurt Vonnegut

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut

We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?
Carl Sagan

Yes keep your mouth shut–or else and keep consuming like there’s no tomorrow because to do that you will be right. Shut them down sort of.

Blankenship issued the challenge Friday to renowned NASA scientist James Hansen after word came out that Hansen was scheduled to attend a mountaintop removal protest next week outside of one of Massey’s Raleigh County operations.

Hansen is among the headliners at the Tuesday event, along with actress Daryl Hannah. Protesters plan to meet near Marsh Fork Elementary School, which sits below a huge Massey slurry impoundment, and risk arrest at a nearby Massey office.

“While I don’t recall anyone inviting out-of-state environmental protesters from San Francisco and a Hollywood actress to Massey’s property on June 23, I’m more than willing to invite Dr. Hansen to have a factual discussion about coal mining in West Virginia, which provides thousands of jobs in the state and provides low-cost energy to millions of Americans,” Blankenship said in a press release.

That’s June 23 Tuesday Massey’s Raleigh County operations meet near Marsh Fork Elementary School West Virginia.

http://mountainaction.org/wordpress/updates/ Check out these pictures.

14 people were arrested June 18 in a peaceful act of direct action on a Massey Energy Co. mountaintop removal mining site near Twilight, W. Va. In Iran a few more people protesting in the millions not in the States in the hundreds and after all it’s only about the survival of the human race no big deal.

“I guess it’s not low-level terrorism if the CIA is funding the protests…”

The CIA funding is not a law, but a known policy to enhance “democracy” in the world. This is nothing new. The concept or definition of the Pentagon is a very dangerous approach if it is meant to enhance security on U.S. soil. It is not a legislation, but it could be one if Americans remain indifferent and submissive. I think there are good potential purchasers in the Congress of such an ideological marketing. You have mentioned some drawbacks in the U.S. society. Let us hope that the Americans get out and write on their chests: the Pentagon should protect and not attack us.

In the strongest message yet from the U.S. government, the House of Representatives voted 405-1 Friday to condemn Iran’s crackdown on demonstrators and the government’s interference with Internet and cell phone communications. (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1094274.html)

I guess it’s not low-level terrorism if the CIA is funding the protests…

You’re already there. The banks the corporations own the government. That’s the definition of fascism.

Your government spies on everyone, it detains people without charges, and ships them to secret prisons around the world…. that’s fascism.

There’s no critical media, and even the “critical media” drops the ball on all of the important issues…. that’s fascism.

The means to suppress dissidence has always been at the ready, but now we’re paying, out of fear, neglect, stupidity, and apathy, our precious lives and personal resources working for a state apparatus that will stop short of nothing to maintain its stranglehold on our lives and on the fate of the planet. American lives are just another zit to be popped if we mouth off and demand democracy.

Until Americans, collectively, wake up and respond to fire with bigger fire (whatever that means to use, take it and run with it), we’ll be led like sheep to the slaughter for practicing our individual and constitutional rights.

Want totalitarian fascism? We’re well on the way — just ask the citizens of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, the Philippines, Colombia, Zaire, Iraq, Afghanistan, et al., et al., et al. — and we’re all responsible for not resisting to the greatest extent possible. Really, are TV, golf, and cosmetics more important than building a world where your grandchildren can live decent lives? What value if all the material crap if life on this planet continues to be bludgeoned by capitalism?

The U. S. government is the only terrorist in the room.