This is either a brilliant idea or an example of hipster excess:

Eric Garner fallout: Cops feel "thrown under the bus," union says

NEW YORK -- The head of New York City's police union said officers felt "thrown under the bus" by Mayor Bill de Blasio following a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict an officer in the death of Eric Garner, CBS New York station WCBS-TV reports.

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch said the mayor needs to do more to support New York City cops.

"What police officers felt yesterday after that press conference is that they were thrown under the bus," Lynch told reporters Thursday. "That they were out there doing a difficult job in the middle of the night, protecting the rights of those to protest, protecting our sons and daughters and the mayor was behind microphones like this throwing them under the bus."

The mayor said he and his wife, Chirlane, have had to have painful conversations with their teenage son, Dante, about "how to take special care with any encounter he may have with police officers."

"I've had to worry over the years, Chirlane has had to worry: Is Dante safe each night?" de Blasio said Wednesday. "And not just from some of the painful realities of crime and violence in some of our neighborhoods but safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors."

Lynch slammed the mayor's comments, saying "our city is safe because of police officers" and said New Yorkers should be afraid of the criminals, not the police.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/eric-garner-case-reaction-from-new-york-city-mayor-riles-police-union/

'Congratulations, your son is now in paradise,' he says.

From German Teen To ISIS Jihadist: A Father's Struggle To Understand

Manfred Karg says he doesn't know how his eldest son, Alfons, became mixed up with radical Islamists.

Whatever happened, the German pensioner's 19-year-old son from Hamburg is now dead, one of at least 60 Germans killed fighting alongside ISIS militants, nine of them in suicide attacks, according to German authorities.

Karg says two young men with an "immigrant background" knocked on Alfons' mother's door to tell her of his death in Syria last summer.

"When she opened up, they said: 'Congratulations, your son is now in paradise,' " he says.

Karg adds they showed her a photograph of his bullet-ridden body and his goodbye letter, neither of which they let her keep for fear the police would use the items to track the young men down.

Estranged from the mother and his son, Karg says he didn't find out Alfons was dead until he saw a report on a TV news program in October.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/12/03/368049116/from-german-teen-to-isis-jihadist-a-fathers-struggle-to-understand

Slow-Witted Conspiracy Theorist Convinced Government Behind NASA

BARRINGTON, RI—Calling it the most scandalous cover-up of the past half century, dim-witted conspiracy theorist Daniel Burgess told reporters Thursday he believes the U.S. government has, for years, been clandestinely exercising total control over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The 34-year-old dullard cited a wealth of evidence he said proves “beyond a doubt” that every NASA project—from Project Mercury to the moon landings to the shuttle program—has been approved and bankrolled by the federal government.

“Follow the money and you’ll find out who pulls NASA’s puppet strings: Washington, D.C.,” the unfathomable moron said. “The arrangement goes way back, too. Do you think it’s a coincidence that when NASA went to the moon they just happened to plant an American flag there? Don’t tell me the feds had nothing to do with that. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the government’s payroll. All astronauts are.”

“Think about it: The funding has to come from somewhere,” continued Burgess, mentioning records he found online that suggest the federal budget included $16.9 billion for NASA in the year 2013 alone. “And they’ve been careless enough to leave a massive paper trail.”

The simpleminded dope said he also finds it “highly suspicious” that so many astronauts have been ex-military personnel who came up through the U.S. Air Force.

According to Burgess, all the evidence linking the government to the space program is “hidden in plain sight.” Speaking to reporters from the basement of his home, where he waded through copious binders of documents representing more than a decade’s worth of research, he alleged that “every single president since Dwight Eisenhower” has been complicit in NASA’s operation. Richard Nixon approved the development of Skylab, he said, and Bill Clinton conspired to allow the International Space Station to move forward.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/slowwitted-conspiracy-theorist-convinced-governmen,34749/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:NA:InFocus

fuckin' CT nutbars

The Police Are Still Out of Control (I should know)

In the opening scene of the 1973 movie “Serpico,” I am shot in the face—or to be more accurate, the character of Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino, is shot in the face. Even today it’s very difficult for me to watch those scenes, which depict in a very realistic and terrifying way what actually happened to me on Feb. 3, 1971. I had recently been transferred to the Narcotics division of the New York City Police Department, and we were moving in on a drug dealer on the fourth floor of a walk-up tenement in a Hispanic section of Brooklyn. The police officer backing me up instructed me (since I spoke Spanish) to just get the apartment door open “and leave the rest to us.”

One officer was standing to my left on the landing no more than eight feet away, with his gun drawn; the other officer was to my right rear on the stairwell, also with his gun drawn. When the door opened, I pushed my way in and snapped the chain. The suspect slammed the door closed on me, wedging in my head and right shoulder and arm. I couldn’t move, but I aimed my snub-nose Smith & Wesson revolver at the perp (the movie version unfortunately goes a little Hollywood here, and has Pacino struggling and failing to raise a much-larger 9-millimeter automatic). From behind me no help came. At that moment my anger got the better of me. I made the almost fatal mistake of taking my eye off the perp and screaming to the officer on my left: “What the hell you waiting for? Give me a hand!” I turned back to face a gun blast in my face. I had cocked my weapon and fired back at him almost in the same instant, probably as reflex action, striking him. (He was later captured.)

When I regained consciousness, I was on my back in a pool of blood trying to assess the damage from the gunshot wound in my cheek. Was this a case of small entry, big exit, as often happens with bullets? Was the back of my head missing? I heard a voice saying, “Don’ worry, you be all right, you be all right,” and when I opened my eyes I saw an old Hispanic man looking down at me like Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan. My “backup” was nowhere in sight. They hadn’t even called for assistance—I never heard the famed “Code 1013,” meaning “Officer Down.” They didn’t call an ambulance either, I later learned; the old man did. One patrol car responded to investigate, and realizing I was a narcotics officer rushed me to a nearby hospital (one of the officers who drove me that night said, “If I knew it was him, I would have left him there to bleed to death,” I learned later).

The next time I saw my “back-up” officers was when one of them came to the hospital to bring me my watch. I said, “What the hell am I going to do with a watch? What I needed was a back-up. Where were you?” He said, “Fuck you,” and left. Both my “back-ups” were later awarded medals for saving my life.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-police-are-still-out-of-control-112160.html#.VIDeQqQo5zk

LEGEND

History’s Postscript: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy

A quarter-century ago, a virtually unknown State Department official published an article in a neoconservative policy journal. The title of the piece as well as its author would go on to acquire global fame—or perhaps notoriety. Critics did not hesitate to dismiss Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” Strobe Talbott, for instance, called it “the beginning of nonsense.”

Yet the article, and the subsequent book that grew out of it, was often misinterpreted and misconstrued. Contrary to what has often been alleged, Fukuyama had not predicted anything like the end of all conflict. Rather, he had asserted that only liberal democracy was capable of fulfilling basic human aspirations for freedom and dignity. This claim has not been so obviously disproven today. The few self-proclaimed ideological alternatives to democracy, whether the Chinese Dream articulated by Chinese leader Xi Jinping or the Eurasianism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, do not exercise anything like the global attraction that fascism and communism enjoyed during the 20th century.

But this does not mean that all is well with the state of democracy. Democracy has a serious rival today that actually lays claim to many of the values democrats themselves endorse: populism.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also an anti-pluralist form of politics. And despite the optimistic notions of many liberals, populist parties are not just protest parties that always prove incapable of governing. Populist regimes have recently been consolidated in Hungary, Turkey and to some degree Russia, among other countries. These regimes are often supported by what political observers since Aristotle have liked to think of as the social backbone of democracies: the rising middle class. Fukuyama himself recently affirmed the belief that “middle-class societies . . . are the bedrock of democracy,” but they can just as easily be the bedrock of populism.

Populist rabble-rousers today rely on middle classes who increasingly feel like—and are portrayed as—threatened minorities. Less obviously, populist regimes try to create their own middle class and equate it with the “true” people as such. These regimes typically weaken checks and balances, colonize the state, crush independent civil society and almost always prove highly corrupt. But all of the above tactics, even corruption, can be presented as benefiting a regime’s protected middle class, and hence do not obviously discredit a populist government.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/14562/history-s-postscript-the-populist-threat-to-liberal-democracy#

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire

Jesse Deflorio faces one count of reckless conduct after he was accused of firing a BB gun in the direction of Concord police officers who were doing a routine traffic stop earlier this month.

Police said that on Sept. 5, two officers stopped a car near the intersection of Water and South Main streets in Concord.

During that stop, the officers said, they heard what sounded like shots being fired, but they were able to determine the gun was most likely a BB gun and not a traditional firearm.

The officers and the occupants of the vehicle were unharmed.

The officers said they heard projectiles striking a dumpster in the area and believed the shots were coming from a nearby apartment building.

Police said they located Deflorio and two other men at an apartment at 203 South Main St. On Tuesday, police filed charges against Deflorio.

He appeared in court Wednesday morning on the reckless conduct charge.

Prosecutors said he was arrested a year ago on a similar charge of shooting a BB gun at a random person who was driving along Loudon Road in Concord.

Prosecutors said he pleaded guilty to reckless conduct last September and is on probation for that incident.

http://www.wmur.com/news/police-man-arrested-after-shooting-bb-gun-at-officers/28219706

Snowden "blows whistle" on US signals collection targeting Qaddafi's regime

Rand Paul blames Eric Garner's death on high NYC cigarette tax

Washington (CNN) -- In 2010, the New York State Legislature passed a law raising taxes on cigarettes purchased in New York City to $5.85 per pack of 20 cigarettes. Fast-forward four years: A U.S. senator is blaming the politician that created that law for the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in New York City in July 2014.

"I do blame the politician," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, explained on MSNBC's "Hardball." "We put our police in a dangerous situation with bad laws."

Garner died after a police officer put him in a chokehold while trying arrest him for selling tax-free cigarettes. The police officers at the time were unaware of Garner's pre-existing health conditions that likely helped lead to his death. On Wednesday, Paul said Garner's death would have been prevented if the law creating New York City's high cigarette taxes -- the highest in the country -- wasn't created.

"I think it's also important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes," Paul said. "So they've driven cigarettes underground so as not to make them so expensive."

The likely Republican presidential hopeful continued, "But then some politician also had to direct the police to say, 'Hey, we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette.' And for someone to die over you know breaking that law -- there really is no excuse for it."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/03/politics/rand-paul-eric-garner-taxes/index.html

DU Paulites! Please explain what in the hell kind of point your boy is trying to make...

It's clear that "Blame the politician (but not me)" is going to be Paul's general purpose catchphrase moving forward into the primaries, so we all better get used to it...

On a parting note, go fuck yourself, Rand...

CIA Admits Role In 1985 Coup To Oust David Lee Roth

LANGLEY, VA—Shedding new light on a tumultuous period of upheaval that dominated international headlines nearly 30 years ago, the U.S. government declassified hundreds of documents Tuesday that confirm the CIA covertly organized and executed the coup that ousted lead singer David Lee Roth from Van Halen.

According to a preliminary analysis, the newly released information includes more than 1,600 pages of formerly top-secret material detailing the CIA’s clandestine plot to infiltrate the platinum-selling rock group and unseat the magnetic, impulsive musician from his leadership position in the spring of 1985. The documents reveal that the agency worked behind the scenes for years, beginning after the release of the disco-inflected “Push Comes To Shove” single in 1981, to foment the internal turmoil and unrest needed to destabilize the band and ultimately force Roth to step down from the American heavy metal act.

“As Van Halen’s creative direction became uncertain in the early 1980s, it became increasingly apparent that we would have to take the steps necessary to remove Roth from power,” said former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John N. McMahon, describing the covert process by which he and his colleagues quietly forced a schism between the vocalist and members of the band’s inner circle in order to disrupt the dangerous cult of personality that had taken hold around the hard-rock frontman. “Well before the commencement of the Hide Your Sheep Tour, Roth had become too unpredictable, too brazen, and he was preventing the band’s sound from moving toward synthesizer-driven, radio-friendly rock. So, we felt we needed to act, and quickly.”

“Quite simply, our office determined that Roth was no longer fit to exercise control over Van Halen, and that his aspirations for the band were not aligned with the best interests of the American people,” he continued.

Dubbed Operation Diamond Cutter by the select top-ranking CIA administrators who orchestrated the plot, the confidential initiative reportedly sought to quietly undermine Roth’s influence within Van Halen and replace him with Sammy Hagar, a charismatic but largely inert puppet leader who agency officials were confident would be easily manipulated once installed atop the iconic rock group.

The CIA confirmed that it was able to exploit preexisting strains in the band by capitalizing on internal concerns over Roth’s long-term musical ambitions following the release of his solo EP, as well as pent-up tensions that had simmered for years after the lukewarm commercial and critical reception of Van Halen’s Fair Warning album. Additionally, American intelligence operatives succeeded in enlisting Roth’s manager and utilizing the double agent to convince his client that relinquishing his position would allow him to pursue what was portrayed as a budding and potentially prosperous film career.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/cia-admits-role-in-1985-coup-to-oust-david-lee-rot,37570/