Camp Beaverton (free)

Sex, gender, freedom and more sex in this documentary on Hulu…

Gestapo Strategies & U.S. Policing

Civil Rights and the Militarization of Police: Lessons from the Gestapo, America’s Path to Tyranny

UTR: Radio Free Albemuth

The lack of budget and slick effects hampered this Philip K. Dick film, but the story is interesting and topical. What’s more Phil wrote himself into the movie.

Snared in the rising fascism of the Reagan era, the paranoia and political persecution of dissidents are strong threads running throughout this one. The former McCarthyism red scare paranoia influenced this assault on free association in the land of the free. Dick was personally targeted, and this appears to be his response to an out of control security state, going after sci-fi writers and dissidents of the new “conservative” social order.

In a purely personal moment, the actress playing the lead neo-nazi bitch looks a lot like my own stepdaughter. And yeah, I can see it.

Dick brought a lighthearted treatment to this serious descent into totalitarianism. The situations are not new, but the alien contact twist certainly tosses in a monkey wrench. The ending was a bit weak, and this may have relegated it to the desperate-indie bin. With a stronger finish, it could have had the bucks it needed to succeed. C’est la vie.

Malaysia Excluded From MH-17 Investigation…

…While the neo-Nazi Ukraine junta (the culprit) is included.

The Malaysian Insider cited Malaysian scholar Dr. Chandra Muzaffar who believes the decision to exclude his country from the investigation is politically motivated, aiming at excluding members that may urge caution and objectivity instead of draw conclusions first and bend the investigation’s results around those conclusions. In particular, Dr. Muzaffar believes that the investigations is intentionally being skewed to target Russia.

MH17: Malaysia’s Barring from Investigation Reeks of Cover-up

The Truth and Lies About Ebola

The official lies and cover-up are very real.

Press Corruption Shielding the White House

Sniper Boy – The Propaganda Exploitation

When Fake Videos Go Viral: What the Fake Syria Sniper Boy Video Tell Us About “Media Experts”

The western press very quickly accepted the video as real and used it to support the US administration’s narrative on Syria. Many top US news sources began to spread the story. Even though the producer said he explicitly added big hints that the video was fake, like the children surviving multiple gun shots.

Propagating false stories on Syria, is nothing new for the western press. In the lead up to the conflict many stories were exposed as frauds, such as the Anti-government activist “Gay Girl in Damascus” which turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland. Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem which was frequently interviewed by CNN was using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews.

…These tweets were inline with an official State Department Twitter account @ThinkAgain_DOS which blamed Assad for the fictitious bullets in the film. This casts doubt on how deeply the US administration scrutinizes information it bases it’s policy on.

E-Cigs: 10x More Cancerous

​E-cigarettes contain 10 times the carcinogens of regular tobacco – study

8yo Palestinian Girl Documents Military Occupation

‘We want to live in freedom’: 8yo Palestinian girl uses smartphone to report on Israeli occupation

Police Arrest Man Over Facebook Criticism!

Creeping fascism found some steroids…

Wisc. Police Come To Man’s Home, Arrest Him For Calling Them Racists On Facebook

Smith then received a call from officers, who wanted to know if he had posted the comment. Smith replied that he had posted the Facebook message, and that he had meant it.

That night, officers arrested him at his home in Arena. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communications.

WW3 Ukraine: Hacked Documents Cache

A number of documents are posted detailing US aid to the Ukraine neo-nazi junta, many signed by John Kerry:

http://cyber-berkut.org/en/

Hackers Leak US Document Scans With Plans to Supply Weapons to Kiev

Carry a Badge and Gun? Carry a Body Camera.

by Joe Giambrone

“Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”
-Brown Family Statement

Let a real evolutionary leap come out of this Ferguson fiasco. Police will be required to wear body cameras at all times when on duty. Their actions will be recorded and not fall into the black hole where only one side of a story remains, as dead men tell no tales.

Police are to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us for several reasons. It is their job to enforce laws, and they are given discretion as well as deadly weaponry to do so. Regular citizens have no such priviledge. Police are a special case where accountability, oversight, accuracy, and the public trust need to be maintained. Right now these are all at an all-time low.

Paterson, Newark and Jersey City plan on equipping their forces with body cameras, and this is just the beginning. “The federal court in New York has ordered some police officers to carry cameras, while departments in Albuquerque, Fort Worth, Texas, and Oakland, California, have voluntarily started the practice.”

This is still a land of sovereign citizens with Constitutionally protected rights. As such we need to make sure that these rights are not systematicallly stripped away by law enforcement that operates above the law, beyond the law, outside the law. How much more difficult would it be for a dirty cop whose shifts are recorded? Think about it.

The Michael Brown slaying, whether one wishes to believe it or not, is an unclear situation. We have only the testimony of the officer, and some forensic evidence that may or may not have come about as claimed by the officer. If the officer was wearing a body camera then this entire shooting incident would be recorded frame by frame without the possibility of embellishment or of deception. It would also provide clear evidence against the assailant… or not.

The body camera has proven to be one of the most powerful and revolutionary tools of community policing to come about in decades. Where they have been in use, “public complaints against officers plunged 88% compared with the previous 12 months. Officers’ use of force fell by 60%.”

In a land where the police are turning into militarized organizations from out of 1984, or The Hunger Games, we are now at a crossroads. Either all that rhetoric about freedom, liberty, rights, law and order was meant to be taken seriously, or else we are to tolerate a fascistic system of double standards and unaccountable state power, including the wholesale murder in the streets of the poor and of minorities.

It’s time we put the solutions on the front page. Sixty percent decrease of police use of force. Nearly ninety percent reduction in citizen complaints. That means better policing, honest policing, trust built with the communities they are meant to serve. That is a solution that is beyond money, beyond empty slogans and has already been proven to work.

The White House has already responded to a petition demanding body cameras on police officers. Empty rhetoric so far, the usual bland say nothing, do nothing vapidity of politiicians. This is going to take citizens to stand up and demand a just system of justice. It will take awareness, political pressure and local action across the land. The structures of police departments are largely local and respond to local pressure.

Even the ACLU has gotten on board the recording of on-duty police officers. While the unaccountable surveillance of the public remains a violation of the 4^th Amendment, the oversight of policing falls into a different category. ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley said that, “all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints.” Interactions with police tend to be kept to a higher standard when there is a video record of everything said and done.

I have no idea if Michael Brown is the best icon for this cause, but he is clearly one of many, many victims of police violence against civilians in the US. Today there are 8,790,000 videos of “police brutality” searchable through Google. These are not taken as seriously as an official record, from the officer’s own body camera. Yet they are all one would need to make a reasoned case that it is time to hold police to the standard of the law.

Society only works when the social contract is honored by all parties. The citizens of Ferguson are telling us this week that one party has broken this contract.

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Joe Giambrone publishes Political Film Blog.