Home » Posts tagged 'police state' (Page 3)

Tag Archives: police state

“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan

First broadcast in America 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Enough Is Enough: If You Really Want to Save Lives, Take Aim at Government Violence [SHORT]

March 27, 2018

Enough Is Enough: If You Really Want to Save Lives, Take Aim at Government Violence [SHORT]

Enough is enough.

That was the refrain chanted over and over by the thousands of demonstrators who gathered to protest gun violence in America.

On March 24, 2018, more than 200,000 young people took the time to march on Washington DC and other cities across the country to demand that their concerns about gun violence be heard.

More power to them.

I’m all for activism, especially if it motivates people who have been sitting silently on the sidelines for too long to get up and try to reclaim control over a runaway government.

Curiously, however, although these young activists were vocal in calling for gun control legislation that requires stricter background checks and limits the kinds of weapons being bought and sold by members of the public, they were remarkably silent about the gun violence perpetrated by their own government.

Why is no one taking aim at the U.S. government as the greatest purveyor of violence in American society and around the world?

As journalist Celisa Calacal recognizes, “It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.”

Enough is enough.

The systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government has done more collective harm to the American people and our liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.

Violence has become our government’s calling card, from the more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans to the military’s endless wars abroad.

Indeed, the day before thousands of demonstrators descended on Washington DC to protest mass shootings such as the one that took place at Stoneman Douglas High School, President Trump signed into law a colossal $1.3 trillion spending bill that gives the military the biggest boost in spending in more than a decade.

With more than $700 billion earmarked for the military, including $144.3 billion for new military equipment, you can be sure this financial windfall for America’s military empire will be used to expand the police state here at home.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1984 is in Full Bloom

March 21, 2018

1984 IS IN FULL BLOOM

When I read this forwarded email from Yojimbo from HollyO this morning it seemed surreal. I swear it sounded like a scene from 1984, the movie. I can’t believe this is happening in this day and age. I think we are all being naive regarding how far our ruling class will go to suppress free speech, freedom, and our liberties as human beings. We are living in dark times, despite the delusion of wealth, health and supposed democracy.

A virtual police state is being created, with government surveillance agencies conspiring with the social media mega-corps to control and monitor our every thought, action, or conversation. If anything, as this Fourth Turning progresses, it will get worse. We are already at war, we just don’t know it, and we’re losing. I need to repost the Hangman poem as a reminder what will happen.

I have a Pdf of Holly’s article on my hard drive. I will email it to you directly if you contact me at quinnadvisors@gmail.com.

Email from HollyO:

The landline rang yesterday which was unusual because no one ever rings me. I picked it up and heard, ‘Heddlu.’ Then the phone was put down on the other end.

I went into shock, then moved fast. I opened protonmail and fired a message to Yojimbo to contact Admin, signed out, wiped what I had under my immediate control, then heard a car pull up.

The last thing I did was burn a PDF to a thumb drive, then trashed the file. I ejected the thumb drive, capped it and heard a knock on the door.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Selco on Martial Law: Forget your “movie illusions about being a freedom fighter”

February 23, 2018

Selco on Martial Law: Forget your “movie illusions about being a freedom fighter”

Let’s talk about martial law. This is when the normal law of the land is suspended and the authority comes from the military or federal government.

One recent example of undeclared martial law in the US was when the police were looking for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and went door to door, forcing innocent people to come outside with their hands on their heads at gunpoint, while their homes were searched without warrants.

It turns out that many of us have some serious misconceptions of what it’s really like to live through a martial law situation. I asked Selco, who has personally been through it, to clear up the myths and tell us what it’s actually like.

Would you say that your city in Bosnia was under martial law for any part of your ordeal? How long did it last?

During Yugoslav wars, in different regions (states) based on particular timing and events you can say that martial law was in place, or “state of direct war threat” as some call it here.

There were different “stages” or even levels of it, but one common fact is that during that all normal civil rights and laws were completely and absolutely a matter of the will of the “war government.” (Or “military council” or “war headquarters”.)

The names were different for different regions, even cities, but the results were the same.

In the case of my city in that particular time, it was “war government” that had little influence on ordinary citizen simply because there were too many factions.

But prior to that time and after that year I experienced and went through something that looks more like real “martial law” as your readership imagines it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington Threatens America and the World

February 8, 2018

Washington Threatens America and the World

When I look at news reports from whichever country, I see no awareness of the two most ominous developments in US history. One is the conspiracy between US security agencies, the US Department of Justice, the Democratic Party and the American print and TV media to overthrow the democratically elected president of the United States. With “Russiagate” we have been experiencing a coup against President Trump and American democracy. Although the Democrats’ Identity Politics cannot conceive of it, it is possible to be opposed to President Trump without believing that a police state coup against him is desireable.

The other ominous development is the just released US Nuclear Posture Review, which calls nuclear weapons “useable,” legitimizes their first use, and sets the stage for spending trillions of dollars acquiring more nuclear weapons when massive public needs go unmet and 10 percent of the existing US arsenal is sufficient to destroy all life on earth.

I have written about these extraordinary developments. See, for example, https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/ and https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/02/nuclear-posture-review/

As for the effect it has had, I might as well not have bothered. No government and no news organization of which I am aware has sounded the alarm that the CIA, FBI, DOJ, Democratic Party, and the entirety of the American print and TV media have been caught red-handed in a coup to overthrow the President of the United States, and nothing is being done about it. The coup cannot even be exposed, because the security agencies, media, and Democrats shout down the hard evidence. Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were murdered on the basis of total lies, and now the President of the United States faces the same fate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Spanish Government Uses Hate Speech Law To Arrest Critic Of The Spanish Government

January 30, 2018

Spanish Government Uses Hate Speech Law To Arrest Critic Of The Spanish Government

from the shocked-SHOCKED-to-find-such-a-predictable-use-of-a-bad-law dept

Spain’s government has gotten into the business of regulating speech with predictably awful results. An early adopter of Blues Lives Matter-esque policies, Spain went full police state, passing a law making it a crime to show “disrespect” to law enforcement officers. The predictable result? The arrest of someone for calling cops “slackers” in a Facebook post.

Spain’s government is either woefully unaware of the negative consequences of laws like this or, worse, likes the negative consequences. After all, it doesn’t hurt Spain’s government beyond a little reputational damage. It only hurts residents of Spain. When you’re already unpopular, thanks to laws like these and suppression of a Catalan independence vote, what difference does it make if you’re known better for shutting down dissent than actually protecting citizens from hateful speech?

One Catalan resident is getting the full “hate speech” rap-and-ride.

A Catalan high school teacher, Manel Riu, appeared in court on Thursday accused of hate speech for his tweets and Facebook posts criticizing Spain, government members and the Guardia Civil police. Over a hundred people escorted him to court in Tremp, west of Catalonia, where he denied any wrongdoing and asked for the case’s dismissal.

As a Catalan, Riu certainly has reason to criticize the Spanish government. During the last attempted referendum, the Spanish government sent police to seize ballots, voters’ cellphones, and ordered Google to remove a voting location app from the Play store. The evidence against Riu is composed of 119 tweets gathered by the Guardia Civil, Spain’s oldest law enforcement agency — one that blurs the line between playing soldier and playing cop far more often than its US counterparts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Has Devolved into a Police State

January 10, 2018

The US Has Devolved into a Police State

Yesterday I posted at this URL — https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/01/09/democracy-america-oxymoron/ — a news report and two vidos of a white female school teacher being removed and brutalized by a black police officer from a public meeting of school teachers with the school board while the school teacher was engaged according to the rules in normal conversation with a school board member.

The school board is comprised of both genders and both races. (Yes, I know that today we have more than two genders and there are more than two races.) Obviously, the school teacher was removed at the order of the school board or some member of it.

The school teacher is surprised to be interrupted in her conversation with a school board member by a policeman. She attempts to continue the conversation and is ordered to leave the room by the black cop. She complies with the black cop’s illegal order. As she leaves the room, the black cop knocks her down, handcuffs her, calls backup, and sends her to jail.

This is an accurate picture of America today. The woman did nothing, broke no law, no school board rule, no meeting rule, complied with the black cop and was still brutalized and arrested. The black cop as he brutalized her kept saying “stop resisting.” It is perfectly clear from the video that there is no resistance only assault by the black cop in what is clearly a criminal action against a member of the public by the police.

Will the black cop get away with it. Of course.

What was it all about.

The meeting was about the school board’s approval of a raise in salary for a school board member equal to the annual pay of school teachers, while the teachers themselves received not one cent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey on What Happens After the Next 9/11

December 16, 2017

Doug Casey on What Happens After the Next 9/11

Is a police state in the US possible? Absolutely.

That’s because people are essentially the same the world over, regardless of their culture, religion, race, or what-have-you. A certain percentage of them are sociopaths.

There is a standard distribution of sociopaths across time and space. It’s a function of Pareto’s Law, better known as the 80-20 rule. 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Another 20% are responsible for 80% of the crime. 20% of the population always winds up with 80% of the wealth. And so forth, through all areas of human endeavor. This observation can be represented by a bell-shaped curve—a “standard distribution”—with a small minority at each extreme, but the large majority in the middle. The people who will take us to a police state are sociopaths—criminal personalities who don’t respect the liberty or property of others. And sociopaths gravitate towards government, and eventually come to control it.

My view is that 80% of human beings are basically decent, get along, go along types. 20% are what you might call potential trouble sources, that can go either way. But then you take 20% of that 20% and you’re dealing with the sociopaths.

When social conditions reach a certain stage these really bad guys come out from under their rocks and take advantage of the situation. We’re seeing that right now in the US, across the political spectrum. Just as we’ve seen in the past in hundreds of places throughout history.

A major tipping point occurred sixteen years ago, on September 11, 2001, with the attacks in New York and Washington. They were disastrous. But not nearly as disastrous as the government’s reaction to them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is America a Police State?

November 30, 2017

Is America a Police State?

The current state of the United States’ criminal justice system, if it can even be called that anymore, is truly appalling.

Recently, in a small town in Pennsylvania, an insurance agent for Nationwide Insurance noticed a certain plant growing in a garden on the property he was inspecting. This insurance agent identified the plant as marijuana and notified the police about this nefarious behavior. An elderly couple lived at that property, and while the husband was out at the time, the wife was dragged from her home, in her underwear, while police proceeded to ransack the home for four hours. They found nothing illegal. And that marijuana plant that started this whole debacle? Actually a hibiscus. This is only one of countless examples of this exact sort of “raid first, ask questions later” mentality that police forces in this country have adopted. But it’s only natural that this sort of bad behavior has evolved because of the huge problem of overcriminalization. And when the difference between “criminal” and “lawbreaker” is more than just splitting semantic hairs, something needs to be done. Special guest Clark Neily of the Cato Institute joins James Harrigan and Antony Davies to talk about this and more on this week’s episode of Words and Numbers.

The public-choice dynamics behind overcriminalization

57-year-old grandfather from India partially paralyzed by a cop while visiting his son in Alabama — cop charged with assault but jury hung; charges dismissed

Philadelphia police captain slugs woman because he mistakenly believed she threw water on him. The officer was terminated by the police chief, but reinstated by an arbitrator with back pay.

Phila. cop who punched woman gets job back
6abc.com

NYPD officer nearly kills bicyclist by pushing him into a curb. The officer was convicted of lying about it in court but not punished.

Ex-Officer Guilty in Critical Mass Confrontation
www.nytimes.com

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Secret Code Is Recording Every Keystroke You Make On More Than 400 Of The Most Popular Websites On The Internet

November 22, 2017

Secret Code Is Recording Every Keystroke You Make On More Than 400 Of The Most Popular Websites On The Internet

If someone secretly installed software on your computer that recorded every single keystroke that you made, would you be alarmed? Of course you would be, and that is essentially what is taking place on more than 400 of the most popular websites on the entire Internet. For a long time we have known that nothing that we do on the Internet is private, but this new revelation is deeply, deeply disturbing. In my novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End”, I attempted to portray the “Big Brother” surveillance grid which is constantly evolving all around us, but even I didn’t know that things were quite this bad. According to an article that was just published by Ars Technica, when you visit the websites that have installed this secret surveillance code, it is like someday is literally “looking over your shoulder”…

If you have the uncomfortable sense someone is looking over your shoulder as you surf the Web, you’re not being paranoid. A new study finds hundreds of sites—including microsoft.com, adobe.com, and godaddy.com—employ scripts that record visitors’ keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior in real time, even before the input is submitted or is later deleted.

Go back and read that again.

Do you understand what that means?

Even if you ultimately decide not to post something, these websites already know what you were typing, where you clicked and how you were moving your mouse.

Essentially, it is like someone is literally sitting behind you and watching every single thing that you do on that website. The following comes from the Daily Mail…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship in the Digital Age

October 20, 2017

Censorship in the Digital Age

The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.

Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.

The Triple Evils

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village

September 19, 2017

Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village

“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan

First broadcast in Great Britain 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Growing Threat of the Police State

September 1, 2017

The Growing Threat of the Police State

Doug Casey, Jeff Thomas, and Nick Giambruno recently discussed a critical topic—the rise of a police state in the former “free” world.

Nick Giambruno: In my experience, the US has some of the most aggressive police in the world. I first noticed this when I started traveling many years ago.

I’ve also noticed that law-abiding citizens are more likely to encounter the police in the US. Both of these trends are accelerating.

What happened to “the boys in blue”—the friendly cop on the beat that everyone knew personally and trusted?

Doug Casey: The fact is that police forces throughout the US have been militarized. Every little town has a SWAT team, sometimes with armored personnel carriers. All of the Praetorian style agencies on the federal level—the FBI, CIA, NSA, and over a dozen others like them—have become very aggressive. Every single day in the US, there are scores of confiscations of people’s bank accounts, and dozens having their doors broken down in the wee hours of the night. The ethos in the US really seems to be changing right before our very eyes, and I think it’s quite disturbing. It’s a harbinger, I’m afraid, of what’s to come.

Jeff Thomas: Yes, this change has certainly been more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. And I don’t doubt that the black combat uniforms are intentional. Psychologically, combat gear is very threatening. It serves only one purpose—aggression. And blue is the color of officialdom, whilst black is the color of death. This, to me, was a very conscious change—maximum intimidation.

Nick Giambruno: Police training has also changed. The War on (some) Drugs and the so-called War on Terror have turbocharged police militarization. What are your thoughts?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Worse Than You Think

November 12, 2016

It’s Worse Than You Think

New York City police officers guard Trump Tower, President-elect Donald Trump’s Manhattan home. (Richard Drew / AP)

Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.

Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.

Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salveminipointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A World Hangs in the Balance

September 25, 2016

A WORLD HANGS IN THE BALANCE

The overwhelming number of well-funded groups “fighting for change” in this world are misdirected. Intentionally so.

These groups are designed to go off track, eliminate freedom, and produce answers that bring about more top-down control.

I can’t emphasize that strongly enough:

—The use of dupes and pawns, organized into groups, which cause more chaos and try to demoralize and box in THE INDEPENDENT INDIVIDUAL.

But the independent individual must survive, because he is where civilization begins.

The independent individual must understand this: his rational powers, and his imagination and creative impulse, are the foundation of anything that could be called civilization.

He can sacrifice these abilities on some altar of expediency or fear, but if he does, his light goes out.

Virtually ALL well-funded groups in the world who opt for change and betterment, under the banner of “greatest good for everyone,” are controlled.

They are paid for and run as fronts for global takeover. Their workers on the ground are clueless.

The elites we call the Globalists are basically promoting the following message: “If consent is withdrawn from our brilliant structure, life will go down the drain. We must have more groups who support our structure.”

Who basically withdraws consent? THE INDIVIDUAL.

Those individuals who sacrifice their own rational power and imagination are, in effect, consenting to the Globalist takeover.

That takeover is not civilization in any meaningful sense of the word.

It is tyranny.

Tyranny takes everything from the independent individual, and gives it to the permanently dependent individual.

And then, as the vortex spins deeper, more people become dependent, and the tyrants allow them just enough to survive on the margins.

Every sane person wants a better world, but most sane people don’t yet recognize how that impulse can be twisted against them. Do you believe power-elites would promote their vision under the banner of “a police state” or “dictatorship, poverty, and loss of hope for all”?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: police state

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Would you say that your city in Bosnia was under martial law for any part of your ordeal? How long did it last?

Post navigation

Latest Posts