This is the opening paragraph from a story on WCBSTV.com:
Surveillance cameras rolling inside our local schools is nothing new, but what’s taking place inside Demarest’s public schools is truly cutting edge: a live feed from more than two dozen cameras with a direct connection to the police.
This is not freedom, or anything close to this. Dictatorial Governments of history dreamed of doing the kind of surveillance that is now commonly accepted as ok, let alone the things that are being pushed for now.
You’ll continue to get exactly the amount of this kind of tyranny you’re willing to accept. It’s completely up to you. How much more tyranny are you willing to live with?
I can’t believe that let him get away with this. Don’t be surprised if Jon Stewart gets busted by the cops or drawn into a scandal. These banking guys don’t fuck around when it comes to people who even think about interfering with “their” system.
I don’t know if this is real, or if this guy made it up. My gut says even if this isn’t real, that there are documents as bad or worse that are still under wraps.
I saw another post referring to this saying they didn’t think the American people would stand a chance against the Military if it came down to that. I believe this is completely wrong. When push comes to shove, people will stand up for themselves.
I just wish we could hurry up and get it over with, so we could all move on with our lives.
I hate how people say, “oh, we restrict your right to drive, so we can restrict your right to own a gun.”
If we had a Government that was as well reigned in as the US Constitution calls for there would be no such thing as a “driver’s license” and you would surely never hear driving referred to as a privilege, let alone even think about restricting the ownership of firearms.
The Government has been accused of being on a mission to destroy subjects over its new style geography lessons to be announced today.
A major shake-up of the secondary curriculum will include a stronger emphasis on climate change and world poverty, says Lord Adonis, the schools minister.
Children will grow into “global citizens” as sustainable development becomes a compulsory part of the geography curriculum, he says.
But the plan was denounced by Professor Alex Standish who claims pupils will learn less geography as they spend time “obsessing over what they buy and where they put their rubbish”.
Prof Standish, the author of a critique of geography teaching in a report published by Civitas, the independent think tank, last month said it was time the Government stopped playing politics with the curriculum.
“They seem to be on a mission to destroy subjects. If we want young people to develop into citizens capable of positively shaping society, then they need to be taught about how the world works through subjects providing an intellectual insight,” he said yesterday.
The thing is they’ve been at this since the 40s, if not earlier:
“As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism . . . . We shall presently recognize in nationalism the major obstacle to development of world-mindedness. We are at the beginning of a long process of breaking down the walls of national sovereignty. UNESCO must be the pioneer.”
William Benton, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State, told a UNESCO meeting in 1946
The sickest part of this is that it’s being sold by the BBC as a great step that’s going to stop voter fraud.
From the article:
When we visited the town in the suffocating heat of a Bangladeshi summer, two lines of people, one for men and one for women, were queuing outside a government building.
Inside, they were invited to sit down by young soldiers, who took their photographs and fingerprints and stored them as digital images.
A number of such centres have been set up across the district.
So far, more than 46,000 people have come to re-register as voters and claim their place in what they hope will be a fraud-free voting future.
“The new system will mean only I can cast my vote,” one woman tells me.
“Whatever happened earlier,” another man says, “God willing, Bangladesh will now have a real free and fair election again.”
The funny thing is they already do this to us here. Most states make you give your fingerprint to get a driver’s license, and under the REAL ID Act all of this will go into a national database.
Think about this. If you’re reading this, most likely the idea of having to scan your fingerprint to do anything is atrocious. That’s because we’ve been raised in a society where only criminals have their fingerprints taken. Only in recent years have we seen adults being fingerprinted for travel purposes, but these programs are small in comparison to the programs targeted at our children.
If you can’t see that this is by design then you’re either extremely ignorant, or in denial.
One other thing I’ve noticed is how privacy concerns are brushed away by saying they don’t actually keep the fingerprint, just a number generated based on 45 different locations on the fingerprint. This is the biggest line of shit out of the whole story. That’s they same way they store any fingerprint they get, whether it’s a 2nd grader or a murderer, they call go into the computer the same.
While all of this seems overwhelming, and people say “what can I do about it?” here is some hope. Some schools have rejected these proposals. The key to beating this is to be involved. Get mad. Go to school board meetings. Organize with other parents. No one wants their child fingerprinted like this, but most people are to busy working or watching American Idol to care.
You can make a difference. Be a leader, and stand up for what’s right!
So I was reading the LA Times and I saw this little blurb about an American Citizen who was arrested in the US, declared an “enemy combatant” and put in a military brig where he was tortured for 44 months without being charged with any crime.
Then, just before the Supreme Court was going to rule on whether or not you can declare an American Citizen who is arrested in the US an “enemy combatant” the Bush Administration had Padilla transferred into federal custody and charged with a crime.
It turn out his lawyers brought up Padilla’s Constitutional right to a speedy trial, believing that that they had been violated. Turns out they weren’t:
Accused Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla was held in military detention without charges as an enemy combatant for three years and eight months, but his constitutional right to a speedy trial has not been violated, a federal judge ruled in Miami.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke refused to scrap the terrorism charges that Padilla faces, saying, “Dismissal of the indictment is not appropriate at this time.”
Padilla was arrested May 8, 2002, and declared an enemy combatant by President Bush the next month. During the following years at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., Padilla was repeatedly interrogated about terrorism activities, but he was not formally charged until November 2005. His trial is set for April 16.
This guy is an American Citizen. He has all the same rights you and I have. That means they can do this to you and me.
They can arrest you and hold you indefinitely without charges.
They can torture you.
They can use evidence gained through torture against you.
Thank you for your letter regarding the data retention provision of the “Internet SAFETY Act of 2007,” which I introduced earlier this year. We agree that unrestricted monitoring of law-abiding citizens’ online activity would be a troubling intrusion of privacy.
The data retention provision of this legislation is intended to provide law enforcement officials an additional tool to identify pedophiles and child pornographers on the Internet. The provision does not give law enforcement officials unfettered authority to monitor and track Internet activity.
When law enforcement officials locate and shut down a child pornography website, they have no information about the operator or users of the site. They must subpoena the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) records to identify these offenders. Unfortunately, many ISPs only retain their records for as little as 24 to 72 hours.
For more information on my work in Congress, please visit the 21st District’s web site, www.lamarsmith.house.gov.
Sincerely,
Lamar Smith
Ranking Member
Committee on the Judiciary
Confirmation# 1253490
DISCLAIMER
The integrity of the text of this email cannot be guaranteed if it was not sent to you directly from my Congressional Email Account: Tx21.LS@housemail.house.gov. If you have any questions about the validity of this message, call Congressman Lamar Smith’s Washington, DC office at: 202-225-4236.
This mailbox is unattended. If you would like to contact me, please visit my Congressional website at http://lamarsmith.house.gov/
Some people might say okay, he’s just trying to protect kids. Unfortunately that is not the case. This bill will make it so everything everyone does online is recorded in a permanent database. The ways this could be abused are immeasurable. Even if Mr. Smith’s intentions are pure and he really just wants to help kids this isn’t the way to do it.
He acts like he’s never heard of “function creep.”
However, this bill and it’s implications are not the reason I am advocating a revolution. Please note the last line of his response.
This mailbox is unattended. If you would like to contact me, please visit my Congressional website at http://lamarsmith.house.gov/
How can our representatives in Congress represent us without the ability to engage in dialogue with them? Don’t these people understand that we send them to Congress to do what we want? Right now their attitude is that they’re going to dictate to us what they’re doing and we aren’t allowed to question their answers to our questions/comments.
That’s not the kind of Government that is outlined in our Constitution. We live in a Constitutional Republic, where we send people to Washington to do our bidding. When those people are no longer functioning in that capacity then it is time to start anew. The Founding Fathers understood that, and the enshrined that idea in the Declaration of Independence.
Our Government has degenerated to the point where the vast majority of the people of this country can be opposed to a certain issue and the people in power will just keep on pushing it with completely disregard. When they run into resistance they spend billions of dollars of our money on propaganda to lie to us about the issue.
It’s called “manufacturing consent” and it does not serve the people, it only serves special interests i.e people with a lot of money.
This is not America. We’re not going to get America back without a fight, that’s just the way it is. I know it’s not fun to think about but that’s just too damn bad. Accept it, deal with it, and get off you ass and do something about it!
