Taser Assault

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:00:00 GMT
# Joanna Bale at The Times - Caller swears revenge on helpline - Ashley Gibbons discovered that pressing the "*" button on his telephone twice, while on hold to a cable TV company, allowed him to change their outgoing message. So, being angry about waiting for an hour for service, he did. Hehe. [clairefiles]

# Palm Beach Post - How One Tasing Unfolded in Boynton Beach - Quicktime Video. A woman refuses to stop talking on her phone about a traffic stop, and the cop shoots her with a taser. She screams, lies on the ground, and squeals for a long time. I didn't see her physically resist. The pig was upset about a paperwork violation: her license had been suspended. My conclusion: if you don't intend to follow the pig's every command, right away, like a good little slave, kill it quickly, and escape. But good luck at escaping. They travel in packs, and don't take kindly to their herd being thinned. [pournelle]

# Chris Hedges at LewRockwell.com - War: Realities and Myths - a war correspondent reveals the true, disgusting, face of war. [lew]

I have felt the attraction of violence. I know its seductiveness, excitement and the powerful addictive narcotic it can become. The young soldiers, trained well enough to be disciplined but encouraged to maintain their naive adolescent belief in invulnerability, have in wartime more power at their fingertips than they will ever have again. They catapult from being minimum wage employees at places like Burger King, facing a life of dead-end jobs with little hope of health insurance and adequate benefits, to being part of, in the words of the Marines, "the greatest fighting force on the face of the earth." The disparity between what they were and what they have become is breathtaking and intoxicating. This intoxication is only heightened in wartime when all taboos are broken. Murder goes unpunished and often rewarded. The thrill of destruction fills their days with wild adrenaline highs, strange grotesque landscapes that are hallucinogenic, all accompanied by a sense of purpose and comradeship, overpowers the alienation many left behind. They become accustomed to killing, carrying out acts of slaughter with no more forethought than they take to relieve themselves. And the abuses committed against the helpless prisoners in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo are not aberrations but the real face of war. In wartime all human beings become objects, objects either to gratify or destroy or both. And almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

...

The attacks on the World Trade Center illustrate that those who oppose us, rather than coming from another moral universe, have been schooled well in modern warfare. The dramatic explosions, the fireballs, the victims plummeting to their deaths, the collapse of the towers in Manhattan, were straight out of Hollywood. Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide bombers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language we have taught them. They understand that the use of indiscriminate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards. We delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. It was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who in the summer of 1965 defined the bombing raids that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon as a means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi.

# The Libertarian Enterprise - Letter from Liz Michael - an invitation to join the Revolutionary Coalition. Rick Stanley is quite active in this group. Liz Michael is less active, but there. 64 messages were posted yesterday, 765 in May, 290 so far in June. I subscribed web-only, and doubt I'll spend much time there. [tle]

"Uniting the third parties, the independent voter and the non-voter into a New Super Third Party is our goal, bringing all interested parties to the negotiating table to win elections. These three groups are all together, roughly 60% of America. The Democrats and Republicans together, only total 40% of America. They are not the majority of America. The fraud, deceit, and lies of U.S. politics has destroyed our republic that was based upon Constitutional rule of law. All of America's problems would be solved with a return to the Constitution, the nation's heritage and birthright restored. The platform is one single line: "To defend our God given, unalienable, Constitutionally protected and guaranteed rights...

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