From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed against the OWS, has taken place at every level of law enforcement.
December 3, 2011

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”
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Eliot Spitzer: 5 Ways to Make Banks Pay for Their Secret $7 Trillion Free Ride

The CEOs of major banks maintained they were in good financial shape. Meanwhile, they secretly borrowed massive amounts from the government to stay afloat.
December 1, 2011

Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit. Then, three years later, after fighting disclosure all the way, you were forced by a court to tell the truth: At the time you made the statements to the bank, you actually were unemployed, you had a $1 million mortgage on your house on which you had failed to make payments for six months, and you hadn’t paid even the minimum on your credit-card bills for three months. Do you think the bank would just say: Never mind, don’t worry about it? Of course not. Whether or not you had paid back the personal line of credit, three FBI agents would be at your door within hours.
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OCCUPY WALL STREET

eXiled Online / By Yasha Levine

People Locked in Tiny Cages, Crying in Pain: What I Saw and Heard When the LAPD Threw Me in Jail for Exercising My Right to Protest the Oligarchy
Don't believe the PR. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD's attack on Occupy LA -- or the way detainees were later treated.
December 2, 2011

Editor's note: Yasha Levine, editor of the Exhiled.com, spent a . Here's his account of the crackdown on Occupy LA.

I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings. On top of severe dehydration and sleep deprivation, I’ve got one hell of pounding migraine. So I’ll have to keep this brief for now. But I wanted to write down a few things that I witnessed and heard while locked up by LA’s finest…
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Michele Bachmann’s Sandusky Comments Show She Can’t Run a Country

Posted by Nicole Fabian-Weber
on November 14, 2011 at 12:17 PM

When Michele Bachmann was on Meet the Press yesterday, she had some thoughts she wanted to share on Jerry Sandusky and the child sex scandal he and Penn State are currently involved with. She first mentioned that if, God forbid, something like this had happened to one of her children, she would want to find Sandusky and "beat him to a pulp." And for the first time, I'll admit, I actually agreed with Bachmann. If anything so horrific ever happened to anyone I love, violence would definitely be the first thing that came to mind. (I'm not running for president, though.)

Her second comment revealed how she feels that this case should remain strictly on a state level. She doesn't think Washington should get involved because “Congress has a lot of other things to pay attention to.”

And this is where the old Bachmann I know and love made an appearance. Clearly, the woman had no idea what she's talking about.

To see the original article click here.

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10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion

By Megan Carpentier
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won’t direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she’ll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women’s Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you’ll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service.

Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you “I didn’t find any abortion clinics.”
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Believers view atheists as untrustworthy: study

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, December 2, 2011

Religious people distrust the world’s estimated 500 million atheistsas much as rapists, a study found Friday in the wake of a poll that said less than half of Americans would vote for an atheist president.

“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The study published in the current online issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that outward displays of belief in God are viewed as a proxy for trustworthiness.

This is particularly true for “religious believers who think that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them,” explained the study’s co-author Ara Norenzayan.
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Eurozone Catastrophe: How Saving the Euro Could Mean Blood on the Streets

The whole future shape of Europe must be resolved in a week or so. It’s a high-stakes game of poker that the Germans are determined to win--at the expense of misery for many. READ MORE
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