Tag Archives: It Can’t Happen Here

How police officers’ military uniforms affect their mental state

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“As the saying goes, ‘the clothes make the man.’ In Ferguson, the men who work as police dress like soldiers. Dressing police in camouflage is certainly ridiculous (John Oliver recently quipped, ‘If they want to blend in with their surroundings, they should be dressed like a dollar store’), but recent psychological research now indicates that the effect of militarized dress may be much more insidious.  There are at least two ways in which the clothes people wear can affect how they act. The first is the symbolism that the wearer associates with the clothing. The second is the extent to which the clothing masks the person’s identity.”

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/12/cops_deadly_identity_problem_how_police_officers_military_uniforms_affect_their_mental_state/

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Perfecting Tyranny: Foreign War as Experimentation in State Control

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“Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mark Twain provided ominous commentary about a hypothetical ‘Great Republic’ that had adopted a foreign policy of actively intervening in distant societies.  What if Twain’s scenario were not hypothetical, but rather real? What if foreign interventions abroad have the long-term effect of undermining liberties and freedoms at home? This paper explores how interventions abroad can affect domestic government activities in a way that reduces its citizens’ freedoms and liberties. Although our analysis is generalizable, we focus on a specific ‘Great Republic’—the United States—because of its global dominance in economic and military affairs.”

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=1012

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How Empires End

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“Histories are generally written by academics. They, quite naturally, tend to focus on the main events: the wars and the struggles between leaders and their opponents (both external and internal). Whilst these are interesting stories to read, academics, by their very nature, often overlook the underlying causes for an empire’s decline.  When the history is written about the era we are passing through, it will reflect, in large measure, a rehash of the news. As the media of the day tend to overlook the fact that present events are merely symptoms of an overall decline, so historians tend to focus on major events, rather than the ‘slow operations’ that have been the underlying causes.”

http://www.internationalman.com/articles/how-empires-end

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Paul Craig Roberts: 9/11 After 13 years

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“The chairman, vice chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have said that information was withheld from the commission, lies were told to the commission, and that the commission ‘was set up to fail.’ The worst security failure in history resulted in not a single firing. No one was held responsible.  Washington concluded that 9/11 was possible because America lacked a police state.  The PATRIOT Act, which was awaiting the event was quickly passed by the congressional idiots. The Act established executive branch independence of law and the Constitution. The Act and follow-up measures have institutionalized a police state in ‘the land of the free.'”

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/10/911-13-years-paul-craig-roberts/

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In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist

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“A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—’taken in for an emergency medical evaluation’ for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/in-cambridge-md-a-soviet-style-punishment-for-a-novelist/379431/?single_page=true

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By the Numbers: How Dangerous Is It to Be a Cop?

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“In the name of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, the federal government has provided thousands of pieces of military-grade body armor, mine-resistant armored personnel carriers, assault rifles, grenade launchers, helicopters, and night-vision goggles to local police and sheriffs. Almost every county in America has received equipment from these programs.  But has policing really become so dangerous that we need to arm peace officers like an invading army? The answer is no. It’s never been safer to be a cop.  Officer fatalities peaked in 1930 at 297, spiking again in the 1970s before steadily declining since.  2013 was the safest year for American policing since 1875.”

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/by-the-numbers-how-dangerous-is-it-to-be-a-cop

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Militarism Is a Public Safety Crisis

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“The United States cannot live like other wealthy nations while dumping $1 trillion a year into a killing machine.  There is a no-fly-zone over Ferguson, Mo., because people in the U.S. government, from which local police forces take their cues, view the people of the United States increasingly as they view the people of other countries: as best controlled from the air. The War Resisters League noted this view is perpetuated by police militarization programs, such as DoD 1033 and 1122 and the Urban Areas Security Initiative, in which the St. Louis Police participate, that train, equip and arm police departments from Pentagon supplies and directives.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/19/militarism-is-a-public-safety-crisis/

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Fed Vice Chair: Your Bank May Seize Your Money to Recapitalize Itself

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“The bottom line is that financial, economic and monetary policymakers in the U.S. are fearful that another crisis, perhaps even worse than what we saw in 2008, is going to be playing out in the very near future. Otherwise, why would they find it necessary to take the drastic step of forcing bank depositors to act as a backstop for their financial institutions?  But this time around, it won’t be the government that bails them out directly. Instead, if you have an account with the bank, you are an unsecured creditor for that institution, just like Cypriots. And when that bank inevitably comes under pressure because of an inability to cover their debts, it is you who will become the bailout mechanism.”

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/fed-vice-chairman-warns-your-bank-may-seize-your-money-to-recapitalize-itself_08272014

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Just Wait Until Ferguson Police Get Federally Funded Drones

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“What could possibly justify police ‘red-dotting’ peaceful protesters with laser sights, or an attempted head-shot, with a tear gas canister, at a man standing in his own yard, insisting, ‘this [is] my property!’? Here you can watch police fumigate a news crew and take down their cameras — then chase off the other journalists filming the assault.  The Ferguson clampdown has even law and order conservatives like Red State’s Erick Erickson worried about ‘the militarization of the police and overkill by local police forces.’ But maybe they’re not worried enough.  It’s no accident that technology developed for population control in foreign counterinsurgencies is being turned inward.”

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/just-wait-until-ferguson-police-get-federally-funded-drones

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The Final Nail in the Coffin: The Death of Freedom in Our Schools

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“Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.  What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the 16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school. Stone’s mother was never alerted to the school’s concerns about her son’s creative writing assignment or his subsequent interrogation and arrest.”

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_final_nail_in_the_coffin_the_death_of_freedom_in_our_schools

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