The Noble Lie

Adbusters is running a piece on the "Tarnac 9" in France, the leader of which is under preventative arrest as the pre-terrorist leader of an "anarcho-automonist cell". Police want to know if he authored the anonymous tract, "The Coming Insurrection."

The Tarnac 9 were once just nine individuals who had withdrawn from the capitalist paradigm to live a quiet, communal life in an isolated French mountain village. They grew their own food, opened a small grocery store and started a movie club where they screened films for their rural neighbors. The group, nearly all of whom hailed from affluent Paris suburbs, were highly educated and, by all accounts, friendly, helpful and generous. It was an idyllic existence, far from the consumer spectacle of modern urban existence.

But then someone – it has yet to be determined who – sabotaged railways in the surrounding countryside, injuring no one but delaying thousands of passengers for several hours.

Suddenly the commune became a cell. The isolated farmhouse became a base, the store became a front and the absence of mobile phones became evidence of an effort to avoid detection. Tarnac’s native population became unwitting accomplices to terrorism. Nine became 9.

In a terrifying show of force, French authorities raided the farmhouse in the predawn hours of November 11, 2008 and tore its sleeping inhabitants from their beds. The balaclava-clad police handled their wards not as alleged vandals or even saboteurs but as high-level enemies of the state: terrorists.

Is "pre-terrorism" an actual offense in France?

Speaking of atrocities, here's a video found from Carlos Miller's site. A girl calls 911 when her father has a seizure. She can't get an answer and uses "the F word" as somebody finally does pick up, and the cop on the other end denies her an ambulance because of her "foul mouth." The story gets worse from there, and she ends up getting arrested for disorderly conduct and failure to beg and grovel to a police officer.

According to the article, the man who answered the phone, Sgt. Robert McFarland, received only two weeks suspension without pay (which according to the crybaby tantrum-throwing commenter on the thread, who probably doesn't realize how damning his comment is, was even restored) and some training.

I remember horror stories of Soviet Russia, of folks groveling and bribing orderlies to get their dying family member a blanket in their hospital bed. Is that the kind of America that scum like Sgt. Robert McFarland dream of?

Great find by Mark Baard and Flux Rostrum. This had to be highlighted. Andy Griffith, we need you now.

This is a first for me... the Twitter front page scooped the Google News front page.

Today in Russia, riot police dispersed a gay rights protest, dragging off and arresting over 20 people. BBC coverage here.

I've got about a million stories bookmarked, so I might be blasting through some news here in the next day or two.

In case you haven't read it in a ton of other places yet, Obama came through on his promise to release CIA torture memos and they are bad. Very, very bad.

Apparently, 2 suspects were waterboarded over 260 times, among them the "9/11 mastermind," Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In olden days, when a bunch of zealots go around torturing people until they  "confess their sins," they would call it an Inquisition.

UK Guardian: CIA waterboarded al-Qaida suspects 266 times

Carlos Miller shares a chilling video today of an off-duty police officer bragging, very drunkenly, about his latest murder to a laughing, receptive audience at a bar.

Recently, Miller provided a 24 hour glimpse into police misconduct, highlighting the work of the "Injustice in Seattle" Twitter feed and struck a real nerve that brought in many comments from all sides. Personally, I think "Misconduct" is such a soft term for (in this case) child molesters and murderers.

This is what happens when church and state are not kept separate. As our nation's founders pointed out, the marriage of church and state erodes the state, and it erodes the church, too. As Michael Parenti pointed out, this marriage has a lot of power.

I've been busy blogging in other venues, to the type of people who would never be caught dead at a site called "The Noble Lie." The news just gets more surreal every day, and the atrocities are coming down in torrents. I couldn't pass this issue up and I want everybody to be aware of what our gov't is up to. People like Rahm Emanuel do not simply say things like this to hear their gums flap.

GovTrack.us (one of my favorite recently-discovered sites) is now my first destination when I need to look up draconian new legislation.

HR 1388, the GIVE (Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education -- where do they come up with this bullshit?) Act, was a funding bill for AmeriCorps and a number of other federal programs.  However, they tried to sneak in a very dirty little piece of laundry:

TITLE VI--CONGRESSIONAL COMMISSION ON CIVIC SERVICE

SEC. 6104. DUTIES.

(b) (6)

(6) Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.

There was enough outcry over this Orwellian Hitler Youth-style provision that they had to take it out of the bill.. and put it into its very own bill, HR 1444, the Congressional Commission on Civic Service Act.

Unrelated I know, but blogger and actual-honest-to-god-real-life-activist Tad of The Plazoid writes extensively about the California Medical Algorithm Project (CalMAP) and forced medication, "rope em and dope em" as he calls it. He is facing charges for "disrupting" a local county supervisors meeting. I am waiting to see such a "rope em and dope em" bill or program make its way into the federal arena.

Remember "don't taze me, bro?" Remember when a young student got brutally ejected and tasered for asking about John Kerry's involvement in Skull & Bones?

EDIT: The young man who was dragged away and tasered was a 21 year old by the name of Andrew Meyer. I was going to link to the Wikipedia article describing the incident, but it is frankly too disgusting for words, complete with pictures and loaded captions such as, "University of Florida police attempt to escort a resisting Andrew Meyer out of the auditorium."

Here's the original incident.

This a classic Greg Palast interview about the Bush dynasty and the police state. The interviewer is the famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) radio host and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones.

I should point out if I haven't lately that I don't create any of the videos on this site (yet). This one comes from EsotericRiddler, whom I don't know but who posts and favorites a lot of good videos.

Plus, I have to say that I really respect Palast's journalism even if he has called 9/11 conspiracy guys nutjobs. I have both of his books and I've read them multiple times.