MAMA MAKOSSA!!! (ya'll know how it goes)

today i would like to take this opportunity to drop some jewels....

"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or 'disappeared,' at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame." - Amnesty International, 1996


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remember the book "1984" by George Orwell? well, ol' Orwell was not lying in his depiction of a totalitarian state... check out what i found:


"A national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity."
(an article found on www.yellowtimes.org)
---One of the current Administration's "anti-terror" initiatives is slowly taking shape, and it isn't a pretty sight. TIPS, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (www.CitizenCorps.gov/tips.html)*, is a government plan for recruiting millions of Americans to spy and snitch on their neighbors. The recruitment focuses on people with access to homes and businesses, including letter carriers and utility employees.

---this is on the website of citizencorps.gov
Operation TIPS, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice and developed in partnership with several other federal agencies, is one of the five component programs of the Citizen Corps. Operation TIPS will be a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.

---also check out disinfo.com's article on my man jim redden's "Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned Into the Eye and Ears of the State" .. here is an excerpt:

Redden's book features a wealth of historical analysis and rich anecdotal material. Few readers will fail to be disturbed by the many vivid depictions of children being indoctrinated to snitch on their parents, government-connected "watchdog" groups infiltrating and discrediting political movements, global surveillance systems monitoring citizen communications, and horrifying tales of desperate offenders coerced into manufacturing evidence against the innocent at the behest of malevolent prosecutors.


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OKAY.... a nation of snitches. ain't that something. someone will argue "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't have to worry about it"

once again, my beef with people is that they remain IGNORANT of history.. please go back and read about Stalinist Russia. He had children snitching on their parents who hid a little extra bread. He would send people who committed such actions against the state to gulags in brutal Siberia or put them in the firing squad. According to Zbignew Brezinski's (another ugly dude, man) "Out of Control" (classic book, you MUST get..drops mad jewels), the number of people that were informed who were eventually excecuted or died of terrible prison conditions numbered in the millions. he pointed out that we will never know an exact count.

AGAIN, someone will argue "this is NOT communist Russia" and they have a point. BUt remember the McCarthy Era and his Red scare? how many people lost their jobs and homes because of his Red Scare? How many people were persecuted and put out into the streets? how many people were left languishing in prisons for committing no crime?

It's funny, one day i was playing my berimbau and this person walked up to me and asked if i was playing arabic music. i did not answer them and laughed. Remember, in a society that refuses to learn about other cultures or READ, can we expect people to correctly identify suspicious activity? I DON'T THINK SO...