Police State

Hyperbole about Ferguson.

"The facts surrounding the murder of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old resident of Ferguson, Missouri, gunned down by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson police officer, are not entirely known – but enough is known that it’s quite justified to characterize it as cold-blooded murder."

I haven't heard enough to justify this conclusion. What we can say is that a cop shooting an unarmed man on the street from a distance is never justified. At a distance, the man could pose no imminent threat. If he charged from relatively close-by, then he would become a threat and shooting could be justified.

"As citizens of Ferguson took to the streets to protest what they view as a racist attack on their community, the response from the authorities was similar to that of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic during the turmoil that eventually ended in the Serbian despot’s overthrow. Indeed, the comments of many in the news media – at least eleven, at the current count, who were arrested during the proceedings – were that it seemed like something that would happen in a foreign country. "

But this has happened in the US over and over. Watts. Rodney King. The Democrat Convention. Sure, it would be nice to think this never happened in the US before now, but that's not true.

"Much has been said about the shocking "militarization" of the police, and how this seemed to many like a provocation: police in Ferguson were encased in armor that one veteran remarked was heavier than anything he wore in Iraq."

I don't dispute the cops were heavily armored or that police shouldn't be armed like the military, but this is hyperbole as well. The Pentagon can't give heavier equipment to the police than it uses.

"The disease is imperialism, otherwise known as US foreign policy: the underlying condition is the American Empire, an international regime of terror and exploitation which cannot be expected to treat its own citizens much better than it treats its overseas subjects. How on earth did we ever expect otherwise?"

That's right. If you empower people to attack and murder foreigners, they will attack and murder Americans too because attacking and murdering is integral to their characters.

"It isn’t just the fact that the Pentagon decided to offload its surplus military gear – formerly used to subjugate foreigners – onto local police departments. The problem is the culture of imperialism which has leaked like a poison into the groundwater of American society. It permeates not only public policy but our art, our literature, and our minds: it is broadcast 24/7 via every media outlet, until it becomes like the air we breathe."

True too. Military worship and paramilitary police worship run hand in hand.

"Every empire, by definition, is a multinational, multicultural entity: it extends its power over diverse populations who have in common a single conqueror. While this means more open borders and favorable trading arrangements – conditions libertarians would applaud – it also means that the methods of state repression and control are universally applied. It means you get hit with the same truncheon that struck some demonstrator in the West Bank: it means, in short, that being a US citizen doesn’t immunize you from being treated as if you were a member of the Taliban. Mike Brown discovered this too late."

Exactly. When the only tool you have is a gun, shooting people becomes the solution to every problem.

"To the ruling class, we are all foreigners, outsiders in our own country. Geographically and culturally, they live in a world apart, in the protected enclaves of the Washington-New York corridor, and the details of their lives have as much in common with the ordinary American’s than ours do with the daily routine of an Eskimo."

Fantastic analogy.

"Truly transnational “citizens of the world,” the Washington elites have more regard for the delicate sensibilities of some Ukrainian oligarch than they do for the average American businessman – because the former suits their purposes, while the latter is only a cash cow. The dogma of universalism, which is the official ideology of the Empire, dictates that all shall be treated equally – and so why shouldn’t our police force present themselves to Americans as our occupying forces confront the peoples we have conquered?
Imperialism doesn’t recognize national boundaries, and so there’s no reason why our rulers should show any regard for the civil liberties of an American citizen any more than they would respect the rights of an Afghan peasant. Just look at the ways and means by which they spy on us: as Edward Snowden revealed, while the "legal" rationale for scooping up online data supposedly protects US citizens, and is unleashed only on "foreign" communications, in reality the nature of the technology – combined with the inherent nature of government to expand its power at every opportunity – means that all Americans are subject to the Panopticon’s unblinking gaze."

Raimondo killed this one. The consequences of progressives' empire.

Holder's politicization campaign in Ferguson begins with him declaring its personal to him, as if being black made it personal; the law be damned. After changing nothing of substance but dividing America, Holder says change is coming. He might well be talking about Obama unchained after this election. This picture of Holder patronizing some woman is disgusting.

Researchers discover how easy it is to fool TSA's nude scanners. We've already seen this on youtube.

"The researchers attribute these shortcomings to the process by which the machines were designed and evaluated before their introduction at airports. “The system’s designers seem to have assumed that attackers would not have access to a Secure 1000 to test and refine their attacks,” said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego. However, the researchers were able to purchase a government-surplus machine found on eBay and subject it to laboratory testing."

The more likely explanation is the creators didn't care because they had a former DHS head as CEO of their company so sales were guarantee.