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In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors
X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."
If only it were the police; it looks like the FBI may be involved as well http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/31/raids/index.html
For the sake of the country, the people responsible for these raids must be fired (and very possibly sent to prison) for this. This is utterly unacceptable.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Actually, you COULD travel inside the USSR without showing papers. Train and airplane tickets were anonymous and you did not need to show ID to board a train or an airplane.
Well, Foo, I was there (I worked in downtown at the time), and it's not quite a you state. But there's really no point in arguing with someone who thinks "anarchists breaking windows and throwing bottles" is a minor issue.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
From: http://www.nornc.org/
This isn't a peaceful assembly if you ask me:
"How we get there (the strategy):
1. Start Strong - Throw all of our energy into the first day. We'll kick this off right and stretch the militarized police state out so far that it can no longer contain and suppress our voices and desires.
2. Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."
This is the group that the Star article describes as having been arrested.
This happened in NY City in 2004 during the Republican Convention although the police waited until the convention had started. My brother was one of the thousands swept up in the sweeps the police did to clear protesters from the street. His lawsuit is still pending, most likely he will wind up with a nice settlement, but the goal was to get these "troublemakers" off the street and that was accomplished. The same marching orders are likely in effect for the Republican Convention this year, and by the time the lawsuits are settled in four years the next election will be on the horizon. Kind of depressing that the police can get away with this bs.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
It obviously doesn't.
But consider this : in order for Those In Power to keep their power, they have to do a number of things;
1) Subvert the Constitution - because it gets in the way of their plans.
2) Create an atmosphere of Fear - this is accomplished in a number of ways;
a) Create more criminals - this is done by adding lots of laws.
b) Engineer situations where you can create enough world tension that eventually you can say you
are in a permanent state of "war".
3) Dumb the people down - again, this can be accomplished in a number of ways;
a) Culturally - dumb down the Press, TV
b) Educationally - dumb down the system.
What you have seen is the use of point 2)(a) in that basically They Can Get You For Anything if you do something
to disrupt their plans.
Welcome, America, to your Police State.
According to KSTP: "The sheriff's office said it confiscated weapons on Saturday including a machete, hatchet and several throwing knives, empty glass bottles, rags and flammable liquids, homemade devices used to disable buses, metal pipes, axes, bolt cutters, sledge hammers, empty plastic buckets made into shields, an Army helmet, and large amounts of urine." http://kstp.com/article/stories/S561752.shtml?cat=1
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
This is how we do it in a civilised country
Note the quote from the police - Police said despite the massive traffic disruption on the motorway, the man had the right to protest peacefully.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
Here's your "better explanation." Not that it will change your thinking in the least.
Also, since when was ownership of a firearm evidence that someone intends to perpetrate a crime? The NRA would like to have a word with you.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
they said on the cnn, the buckets of urine were from a house that didnt have working bathrooms.
The Star-Tribune SUCKS. Can't trust them. I've lived in Twin Cities.
My sources (in MN) say that that most the buckets were gray water and a few were because there was no bathroom (the place was over crowded.) Not to mention there is no crime for pissing in a bucket.
In addition, the Star Trib spends time on the anarchist group when most the raids were OTHER groups that were not anarchist and the paper didn't explain that and left it for the reader to mis-characterize all the other people involved in the raids when most of them were peaceful people gathering on private property.
They were NOT civil to reporters in all situations. Plus in some cases the people they held were the people asserting their constitutional rights. (there no warrants in most cases.)
Plus if you have been following, there were reports of the FBI trying to get students to be informants for them... One student spoke out about it months ago; one wonders what kind of characters volunteer for it-- and how trustworthy they are if they hate these protesters to begin with and that is why the agreed to be a voluntary government spy.
here is another link
http://www.twincities.com/ci_10346122?source=most_viewed
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
unless someone has a better (serious) explanation for the buckets of urine.
Maybe they didn't pay their sewer bill.
There was no toilet in the apartment where the only bucket of urine was found. The other buckets were filled with dirty water, to flush the toilets that were in the building. But they, whoever they is, will turn off water. I live in Minneapolis in an apartment and so far this year we have gotten 3 notices the water will be turned off if the bill is not paid.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is utterly unacceptable.
I agree and I've written to Obama/Biden headquarters (again) to let them know that we citizens are expecting them to give us back the Bill of Rights. Writing here http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/contact/ to express our concerns should be more effective than all of us bemoaning the situation on /.
If anyone knows of a site where the GOP candidates are also asking for comments (and having someone read them), please post it also.
The Ba'athist parties are about all thats left of that classical Socialist-Fascism
And guess who supported Saddam and the Ba'athists in Iraq in the 1980s? Republican presidents Reason and Bush Sr. Guess who was on Bush's staff or is now on Jr's staff who helped Saddam? Here are some photos of Rumsfeld and Saddam together. They're shaking hand like old pals. At first Secretary of State Cheney also supported Saddam during Bush Sr's term in office. Support for Saddam only ended after he invaded Kuwait who, Saddam had accused of and was later verified, was slant drilling into Iraq to pump Iraqi oil as if it was Kuwaiti oil. Before his invasion of Kuwait Saddam could do no wrong no matter how many people he used chemical weapons against.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
For the record, when I submitted this I hadn't gone more than a few paragraphs into the articles, and hadn't realized it was for a Republican event. This wasn't submitted for any sort of bashing, more of an "oh my god people need to know about this" submission.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Really? What country do you live in?
I live in one where the black prison population per capita is six times higher than for whites, and the poverty rate for black children is more than twice that for white children. Racial profiling ("driving while black") remains a pervasive problem. Women still don't get equal pay for equal work, and efforts to criminalize abortion - and even birth control - continue apace.
Are things better than they were in this regard 100 years ago? Sure. But that's damning with faint praise.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There was an informant inside this organization that told authorities what was planned.
Here's a link about your informants: "Moles wanted". Informants only get paid if an arrest is made. Let's see, I'm a mole and I know if the info I give doesn't lead to an arrest do I tell the truth or do I lie?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I was going to accuse you of inaccurate quoting, but now I find (while writing my comment) that there are TWO articles: the one you link to and the one the summary links to, which I checked first. In the article I read first I found this:
Quote
The alleged urine[...] was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket.
End quote
I haven't seen anything about coltraps or equipment for disabling buses in that one either. All I found was that
Quote
[The sheriff] displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
End Quote
I have not enough time to read all of the article you link to (gotta go to work :-( ), but I find this interesting...
To be clear: I quoted from the linked article.
The weird thing is that the article you link to is on first sight
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
From TFA:
Deputies seized a variety of items that they believed were tools of civil disobedience: a gas mask, bolt cutters, axes, slingshots, homemade "caltrops" for disabling buses, even buckets of urine.
From another article by the same newspaper, the Star-Tribune:
"The alleged urine, Nestor maintained, was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket, Nestor said."
As for the rest you list, when were they made illegal?
I'm not saying it's right to raid their houses and arrest them just for having it, but I'm having a hard time coming up with legal ways to protest using buckets of urine and equipment for disabling buses.
One bucket of urine in an illegally occupied apartment, the occupant of which had nothing to do with the protest group. And again, when was the other stuff made illegal?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The horrible number of casualties were the result of
A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
Additionally:
1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.