This boy wants to kill you.
Or so I’m told, by the talking heads.
He really didn’t look too imposing shivering on the sidewalk, way too early in the morning to be radical.
I’m not sure how many people that showed up have even finished puberty yet. They carried drums and banners and wore rags and scarfs covering their faces.
Going to a rally, and concealing your identity?
By quarter to ten, there were maybe 300 people at most. It was your general granola bar mix of nuts and flakes. If you can name a cause from the sixties, they were there. Environmental, Organization of Anarchists, big government haters. I felt like I was back at a Saturday afternoon in college.
This was a rite of passage, not protest or rally. These are the same people that show up any time a cause is in danger. The important thing is the protest itself.
People concerned about the cause would probably put more effort into the message than the props, and would show up here more than one day a year.
So what the fuck was MetroPDs problem. Fuck me if they were there to observe and ensure.
I was once assaulted by 5 guys 100 feet from my apartment. It was over an hour before I saw a single police officer, and then I had to prove to them I wasn’t the one doing the assault. But a bunch of high school radicals with cloth banners brought out one third of the metroPD.
Those cops that weren’t lineing every street and intersection for six blocks around the park, or sitting on one of at least a hundred motorcycles were sitting on Metro buses across the street from the park. Just sitting there.
Until 5 minutes before the rally started. At which point over 100 riot troops in full gear marched out and surrounded the entire area, three officers deep at some spots. And proceeded to constrict themselves into a smaller area every few minutes. Thirty seconds into the march, the cops started gathering up all the people sitting on the grass. shit or get off the pot, I guess. There was no option… if you were in the park, you were forced to march by big, ugly men in riot gear.
This is when I turned on my sorry ass and went the other direction. When cops start forcing people to join a protest, it will not be a good day for the protesters.
No doubt. I kept an eye on several other protests in the city that day. I wasn’t able to find that one again, after circling around a couple blocks.
That night of course, there were stories of how protesters marred a peaceful rally with violence.
Bull fucking shit. These people couldn’t do anything more violent than blow their nose. They didn’t even have ammonia soaked rags this year. I suppose they beat the shit out of an innocent bystander with the blue peace-symbol or the swan signs.
And this kid shivering on the sidewalk looks like a threat to a 6’5, 250 lb. cop in full riot gear.

Feeling good about being an American? Freedom and all that?
A little something for your paranoia: “Government seeks to extend reach of secretive court used on spies, terror”.

The former IMF-World Bank, now anti-war/pro-justice protests are scheduled to start in an hour.
And the only thought in my head is how the police are going to do their damndest to screw it up. It may or may not be enough to show up on the news. But the MetroPD long ago dropped the idea of impartial observer. What the hell gives them the right to try and upset protests, much less legally sanctioned ones, is beyond me.
We will see.

Shut up.
You try and be coherent when you’re this tired.

Someone slap a piece of duct tape on George’s mouth, please.
Since the day he was elected (okay, maybe 50 days after he was barely elected), he has been a doomsayer with an awkward way of making his predictions come true.

“The economy will slow down”
“There will be a recesion.”
“We need more defenses in case we’re attacked”

now..
“We must go to war.”
(Maybe I could get him to predict a more active sex life for me?)
It’s awfully hard to take as coincidence the fact that the economy boomed about the time the previous president was elected. And when he left, so did people’s confidence. Regardless of what you thought of the man, he inspired strong feelings. People act on strong feelings.
George was put in office by an election that showed just how apathetic people were about the candidates. Until he decided to declare a non-existant war, you couldn’t get him to take a stance on anything more vital tha boxers-or-briefs.
George, stop feeding us lines of patriotic bullshit about this slaughter (I refuse to use the word tragedy), and start actually doing something progressive for this country. When the public school system is in need of over 20 billion dollars, you give the airlines 15 billion?
Fucking hell.
Planes won’t stop flying. There is still a huge demand for it. Someone will fill it. At worst, it will force the airlines to start treating passengers like people again to get their business.
Someone want to explain to this man that the Presiden’t of the United States is the embodyment of the entire country?

I can’t read the national news any more.
Yikes! I used the ‘r’ word… I’m sorry. *slap* bad monkey, bad
All it does is annoy the hell out of me.

Someone send me a pair of wire cutters.
Please.
And I’ll stand on the District border, and stop each car that approaches. First I’ll snip the wires leading to each and every car horn.
And for anyone who complains, I’ll use the clippers to whittle off their limb of choice.
You know, you could almost get the impression I hate people who honk their horns unreasonably?

you gotta wonder about any society where companies can spend millions of dollars on advertising paper towels.

me? a bit vitriolic?
could be.

I may be getting old. I can feel the weather in my broken ankle. Like some blue-haired, chain-smoking, old woman predicting a hurricane.
At least I’m not as stupid as you idiots though.
You ignorant, childish, vapid, weak-willed idiots.
Did you ever think it was any different than this? And if so, how long ago was it that you pulled your head out of your ass.
There has been mass transit by air for probably over 65 years now. Big ol’ flying hunks of steel and copper carrying big ol hunks of flesh and drool at hundreds of an hour at thousands of feet in the air.
And there are people who hate us — Americans. When you park a battleship off someone’s coastline and start lobbing 30-inch shells into their country, they may get miffed. Or maybe we bought them a new President. Or we told them if they make our Nikes for 60 cents a piece, we won’t nuke them until they become puddles of irradiated genetic stew.
And you’re suprised these people dropped a couple jetliners on our cities?

“I’m saddened to admit that this job is even necessary, but it is necessary. Our nation faces an unusual threat that it’s never faced before.”

— Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge

This man was just appointed head of “homeland security”. And he is already feeding you a line of bullshit so long it dwarfs our welfare lines.
People hate us. Lotsa reasons. Some not even so reasonable. But they do. And they have been trying to kill us. In large numbers. One by one. Any way that works. Do you think all those nuclear weapons pointed at our collective asses are there for show?
They get stopped. 99.999 percent of the time.
How many people died on American soil at the hands of foriegn terrorism in the last 20 years? a little over 5,000? I’m willing to bet that gang killings in this country dwarf that number considerably. And suicides. And negligent homicide.
We are much better at destroying ourselves than they are.
This is not new. They’ve been doing it forever. This is not different. I can’t think of a decade in the last 50 years when a couple of planes and/or buildings haven’t been blown up in the name of a cause.
The people in government are not stupid. They know all this.
With one hand they are wiping away your tears while the other hand is pushing through legislation that is going to do to you what is probably being done to Ted Kazinsky right now.
Legislation to require any cryptography created to have a backdoor that the US government can exploit. So you are allowed to have secrets from anyone except a government employee? Forgetting that, this would effectively be the end of cryptography, period. Once it is known every crypto system has a exploitable weakness, it will be exploited, in very short order, by anyone with half a clue about computer programming.
Of course, you might also want to ask why this is being passed to protect us when it would have done nothing to prevent the very incident that spurred it’s presentation.
Legislation that would allow the INS and Attorney General to lock up and deport ‘foriegners’ with no evidence of wrongdoing, and basically no chance to appeal the decision.They’re not just talking about people who step off a flight from Iraq with a load of C-4 in their suitcase. They mean every international citizen in this country. All the friends I had in college who were there on educational Visas. Probably all the cab drivers in New York City. The computer programs who flocked here a few years ago.
And just in case you think the government is run by reasonable people who wouldn’t let this get out of hand, consider the words of Lousiana Representative John Cooksey, who is running for Senate next year:

“If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked,”

This Congressman sits on the Committee on International Relations.
Apparently you dont have civil rights unless you were born in East Bumpafuck, NJ.
Just a taste of what we’re in for.
Rule of thumb: Everytime someone tells you they are doing something to protect you, cover your ass (in every sense of the phrase).