The decline and eventual fall of the USA as world superpower?

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/cnn-exposed-emmy-winning-former-cnn-journalist-blows-the-whistle-cnn-is-paid-by-foreign-and-domestic-government-agencies-for-specific-content

Emmy Winning Former CNN Journalist Blows The Whistle: CNN is paid by foreign and domestic Government agencies for specific content.

[Brian]

Disturbing, isn't it?

[Thunder_Gooch]

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/obama-nixon-media-war/

 

 

Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon, Report Says

Edited October 21, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Brian]

Lots of parallels between these two individuals, I think.

[silent thunder]

the smoother the talk, the greasier the process.

[joeblast]

"What is happening in Japan is what happens when you crush all hope in a society that the future will be better than today."

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-20/why-have-young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

[Thunder_Gooch]

[zerostao]

Lots of parallels between these two individuals, I think.

of course there is and everyone in between also.

[Brian]

i agree that it can be more beneficial to give and/or offer help this way. especially on the local level. i think more important than seeing that your money was used properly, is that you as an individual put your own energy into it. and connection is made on a very human to human level.

of course events can happen far from home, that should compell us to some action of helping. it could happen to anyone anywhere and anytime. calamity does not discriminate. it is easy for me to sit at some relaxed atmosphere, drinking my beer casually and amongsts friends and think, gee, what i lucky ol' cat , that i am,,,and reality should be that we use the resources of our military to assist those in times of severe need instead of expanding our imperialistic follies,,,,,eventually chickens do come home to roost,,,

<snip>

as far as who funded any message, i care more about the accuracy and content of the message , rather than who is delivering it or funding it. americans have lost their balls, imo, it is like someone or something has been fattening us up for a kill, slowing us down in our passion, our agility, our sense of, sense of anything-especially reality.

where is the sense of urgency? where is that word that used to circulate (militant)? where is the passion? where is the life? are we all just zombies staggering along mindlessly? or is that what we are very close to transforming into? where is our hearts?

this is no time or place for the feint of heart. isnt the path clearly laid out before us?

<snip>

 

Totally agree about actions speaking louder than words. Wife and I contribute blood, sweat and treasure, and have helped to directly support folks who have gone to provide assistance outside our neck of the woods as well as providing direct support within our neck of the woods. (I disagree with the idea of trying to use the military for direct humanitarian purposes but not with the idea of using the military for humanitarian first-response & logistics support for major disasters -- but even more than that I'd like to simply dial back the idea of "policeman to the world.")

 

I should have been more verbose regarding The Tides Foundation -- they are a propaganda fide organization, helping to spread their religion in much the same way that the Catholic Church was doing when the term was coined (as well as before and since, of course). That video is a case-in-point -- it uses half-truths couched as academic facts as the basis for false conclusions, starting with the notion that the model is broken because it didn't have little stick-people standing around the buildings and therefore humanity is ignored. ("OMG! We have to do something right away!!! Think of the children!!!1!!1OMG!!WTF!!BBQ!!!!")

[zerostao]

we could use one of these?> "“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” General Colin Powell

 

brian i am not surprised by your level of support to your community. and i agree , it is good to do what we can close to home.

i always feel a vibe of generosity from you and joeblast.

doesnt mean i will back down from pushing further tho, haha

do you feel that our current level of consumerism is sustainable?

[Brian]

Nope! Primarily because it is artificially enhanced and therefore "unnatural."

[Thunder_Gooch]

[silent thunder]

I contend our current system is a corpocracy.

[joeblast]

and a cnn whistleblower just up and outed the company as taking money from governments to publish some information and not others.

 

 

bought and paid for.

[Brian]

Ever read The Charter of Carnaro?

[Thunder_Gooch]

Who Will Protect You from the Police? The Rise of Government-Sanctioned Home Invasions

 

 

“Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.”—Winston Churchill

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been asleep for hours when suddenly you hear a loud “Crash! Bang! Boom!” Based on the yelling, shouting and mayhem, it sounds as if someone—or several someones—are breaking through your front door. With your heart racing and your stomach churning, all you can think about is keeping your family safe from the intruders who have invaded your home. You have mere seconds before the intruders make their way to your bedroom. Desperate to protect your loved ones, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, your son’s baseball bat, or that still unloaded gun you thought you’d never need. In a matter of seconds, the intruders are at your bedroom door. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon. In the moments before you go down for the count, shot multiple times by the strangers who have invaded your home, you get a good look at your accosters. It’s the police.

 

Before I go any further, let me start by saying this: the problem is not that all police are bad. The problem, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that increasing numbers of police officers are badly trained, illiterate when it comes to the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, and, in some cases, willfully ignorant about the fact that they are supposed to be peacekeepers working for us, the taxpayer.

 

Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

 

Consider, for example, the sad scenario that played out when a SWAT team kicked open the door of ex-Marine Jose Guerena’s home during a drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets made contact. Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

 

Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was sleeping on her living room sofa, which was positioned under a window, when suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered by a flash grenade thrown through the living room window, followed by the sounds of police bursting into the apartment and a gun going off. Rushing into the room, Aiyana’s father, Charles, found himself tackled by police and forced to lie on the floor, his face in a pool of his daughter’s blood. It would be hours before Charles would be informed that his daughter was dead. The 34-year-old suspect the police had been looking for would later be found elsewhere in the apartment building.

 

Then there was the time police used a battering ram to break into the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson, mistakenly believing her house to be a drug den. Fearing that burglars were entering her home, which was situated in a dangerous neighborhood, Johnson fired a warning shot when the door burst open. Police unleashed a hail of gunfire, hitting Johnson with six bullets. Johnson died.

 

Eighty-year-old Eugene Mallory suffered a similar fate when deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, claiming to have smelled chemicals related to the manufacture of methamphetamine, raided the multi-unit property in which Mallory lived. Thinking that his home was being invaded by burglars, Mallory allegedly raised a gun at the intruders, who shot him six times. Mallory died. “The lesson here,” observed the spokesman for the sheriff’s department, “is don’t pull a gun on a deputy.”

 

In Fort Worth, Texas, two rookie police officers sent to investigate a possible burglary circled 72-year-old Jerry Waller’s house with flashlights shining. Waller, concerned that his home was being cased, went to his garage, armed with a gun for self-defense. The two officers snuck up on Waller, who raised his gun on the intruders. When Waller failed to obey orders to lower his gun, the officers shot and killed him. It turned out the officers had gone to the wrong address. They blamed the shooting death on “poor lighting.”

 

During a raid in Ogden, Utah, police dressed in black and carrying assault rifles charged into a darkened home. Upon entering the hallway and encountering a man holding a shiny object that one officer thought was a sword, police opened fire. Three shots later, 45-year-old Todd Blair fell to the floor dead. In his hands was a shiny golf club.

 

In Sarasota, Florida, a mixture of federal and local police converged on the apartment complex where Louise Goldsberry lived after receiving a tip that a child rape suspect was in the complex. Unaware of police activity outside, Louise was washing dishes in her kitchen when a man wearing what appeared to be a hunting vest pointed a rifle at her through her window. Fearing that she was about to be attacked, Louise retrieved her revolver from her bedroom. Meanwhile, the man began pounding on Louise’s front door, saying, “We’re the f@#$ing police; open the f@#$ing door.” Identifying himself as a police officer, the rifle-wielding man then opened the door, pointed a gun at Goldsberry and her boyfriend, who was also present, and yelled, “Drop the f@#$ing gun or I’ll f@#$ing shoot you.” Ironically, the officer later justified his behavior on the grounds that he didn’t like having a gun pointed at him and because “I have to go home at night.”

 

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons), the privacy of civilians is negligible in the face of the government’s various missions, and the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government intrusion that they once were.

 

It wasn’t always this way, however. There was a time in America when a man’s home really was a sanctuary where he and his family could be safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

 

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of writs of assistance. These writs were nothing less than open-ended royal documents which British soldiers used as a justification for barging into the homes of colonists and rifling through their belongings. James Otis, a renowned colonial attorney, “condemned writs of assistance because they were perpetual, universal (addressed to every officer and subject in the realm), and allowed anyone to conduct a search in violation of the essential principle of English liberty that a peaceable man’s house is his castle.” As Otis noted:

 

“Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient.”

To our detriment, we have now come full circle, returning to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

 

Actually, we may be worse off today than our colonial ancestors when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause, the latter of which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.

 

Indeed, if Winston Churchill is correct that “democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman,” then it’s safe to say that we no longer live in a democracy. Certainly not in a day and age when the Fourth Amendment, which was intended to protect us against the police state, especially home invasions by government agents, has been reduced to little more than words on paper.

Edited October 22, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Thunder_Gooch]

You should watch this:

 

 

Edited October 23, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Thunder_Gooch]

[Thunder_Gooch]

[Thunder_Gooch]

[h.uriahr]

The entire world is a puppet show.

 

[Thunder_Gooch]

They don't drag you out back at a puppet show and shoot your wife and kids because you don't support a totally corrupt government.

 

We are headed in that direction, and that will soon be a real reality we will all have to deal with.

 

[h.uriahr]

The puppeteers want control. Full control. That's Religious, Economic, etc. Executing families to instill fear and confusion.

[Isimsiz Biri]

The world is going towards its end with a great speed. There is very little time left.