Summations Only

Don't worry!
You have a massive prison population to help prop up your economy with cheap labour!

Generally British or Britons would be acceptable here, Britains doesn't really work.Cheers,WKp.s. I agree, holidays in the US are crazy.

I've been working since I was 16. At no job I've had since then, full time or part time, has my employer EVER said.."Hey, whatcha doin on that vacation? Going to the lake? No no no, I'll have to decline your vacation because I don't agree with you using YOUR vacation time for that".They have never taken away one of my DAYS OFF because of what I was going to do with my day off. They have NEVER forced me to stay until midnight because I was going to have something for dinner AFTER WORK that they didn't like, or made me come in earlier because of how I enjoy spending my morning BEFORE WORK.It is MY vacation. It is MY TIME. If I have accrued several weeks off (which I have, several times) nobody CARES what I do with it. If I want to go sit at a park and protest for a week, nobody stops me. It would be no more expensive than going camping for the week (or are you also against people using their vacation time for camping?) so why are you so surprised that people can take a week off and do with it what they want?Because YOU wouldn't find it a valuable use of your time? Who cares, get off your cross. I can guarantee I would find very little exciting or worth my time on one of YOUR vacations, so let's just agree to let each other choose how they want to spend their own time off, ok?I get it tho. In the Christian Amerikkka you wish to live in, vacations will only be granted to those going on pilgrimages to the holy land or other "Church Approved" activities (insert Buz Church Of Preference, all others need not apply). Here in the real world, the actual US, we can CHOOSE where we go on our own time, we can CHOOSE how we spend our disposable income.I find it hard to believe that a man of your age is having trouble with the concept of vacation time. Perhaps we should start another thread and go point by point through the definitions of a day (24 hours), a week (7 days), and vacation so that you can clearly understand why this.. is just more of your verbal diarrhea with no actual basis in reality. Just like most of your other posts. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

...You do realize that some states in the US are actually trying to do exactly that, yes? The head of Alabama's agriculture department suggests using prison inmates to work the fields to make up for Hispanic workers who have fled the state to avoid a tough new immigration law, the Montgomery Advertiser reports.The proposed law would pay the inmates minimum wage, but charge them for transportation, housing, food, etc. Basically, Alabama wants to re-institute slavery. And of course, just to add insult to injury, which race do you think is disproportionally represented in Alabama prisons?

Just bringing it back to OWS...The Marine veteran who was shot with a tear gas canister had apparently been standing right in front of the barricade, no more than about 10 feet from the cops. The canister struck him directly in the face with sufficient force that he has a skull fracture. It seems more likely to me that an officer must have been aiming directly for his face, because at that range an accident just doesn't sound probable.If I had more vacation accrued, I'd be outside with the Occupy folks right now.

Since prison labor has been far less efficient than the migrant workers, I wonder how long this will last before we are whipping the inmates to increase production..

The privatization of prison construction and management is a hot topic in Alabama these days--the surrounding four states have turned to privatization to lower their incarceration costs.Once privatization is accomplished in Alabama and prisons are fully profitable, Plantation Redux will be complete.

I plan on heading to Oakland this weekend if I can clear it with the fiance. I had wanted to make the trip sooner, and now I am beating myself up over not getting off my ass and doing it.Pay attention Buz. My EMPLOYER has no real say over how I spend my free time. Fiances however...

Ha! See, that's exactly my problem too. I need to save my PTO for the wedding!And of course my employer has no say in who I marry, or where, or what we do for our honeymoon.

The Oakland Police Dept. initially denied the use of rubber bullets. Faced with viral web video to the contrary, they have admitted their use.They are currently denying the lobbing of a flash-bang into the group of protestors huddled around Scott Olsen.AbE: Dr A posted video of the denied flash-bang above.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Gotta love cell phone cameras.But for a moment, imagine that half of the population was not walking around with a video camera in their pocket.I suddenly have even more respect for Civil Rights and Vietnam-era protestors, who wouldn't typically have been able to combat media spin with video evidence, or to circulate it on a global scale instantly like we can with the internet.

From what I am informed, the maxim 'don't point the weapon at something you do not wish killed or maimed' applies to propelled gas canisters and head shots with any less-than-lethal weaponry is known to be lethal force. With fired gas canisters that I've seen deployed before, the general principle is to fire long or at the ground.From the video, Olsen is just a few feet away from police so I would agree that this was no accident. I'm going to be charitable and say that maybe the police officer did not intend for the consequences that followed to occur, but ultimately it was his responsibility to ensure his weapon was discharged safely.The guy that threw a flashbang grenade into the heart of the group that went in to attend to an injured person is basically scum though. I can't think of any charitable interpretation other than he wasn't paying attention, which I think in the circumstances is criminally negligent.I'm still trying to figure out what happened exactly. The video that we're getting clearly only shows one side of the picture. I'm assuming the police have recordings that might well give a more complete picture: There were reports that some people threw objects at the police, which may have lead the police to seek to disperse the crowd for their safety. But the official line at the moment appears to be that they didn't use flashbang grenades and the noises were all fireworks that the protesters were throwing at the police. This seems to run counter to the video evidence which only shows brilliant white light and loud noises originating from within the crowd. Tear gas canisters as far as I am aware don't do that.The police may have been otherwise justified in seeking to disperse the crowd, especially since they had been blockaded in on the streets, blocking what appear to be major roads^* (and several locals have said that this was the case). The two solutions seem to me to have been to allow them to reach their destination (which was apparently the park they had previously been kicked out of) or deploy gas canisters safely after giving warning. The video shows they gave warning, but the evidence suggests that at least two officers did not discharge their weapons safely (or that one officer is a sadistic twisted bastard).As a result, I think the Oakland streets are now less safe for police officers than they were previously (and from what I understand there is a historical tension already present in Oakland). Furthermore this kind of imagery tends to harden the resolve of those protesting, rather than deterring them: as we saw with the 'Pepper Spray incident'. An own goal for the police I think.

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^* The police seem to have chosen their blockade point, so it remains to be seen if there wasn't a less important place they could have set up. One conspiracy theory might suggest they chose that place deliberately to drive a wedge between the local residents and the protesters by essentially forcing the protesters into being a local inconvenience.

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abe: Does anyone have a clue what the girl in the sign on the right of the screen right at the end of the clip is doing? She seems to be wildly batting at something or someone. I can't find a longer cut to see if it becomes clearer. Either way, the girl that falls over on her side (centre right) seems to have been knocked over by whatever she's doing.Edited by Modulous, : added last paragraph

We certainly could have used some video cameras in the sixties--even walkie-talkies with still cameras (as we might have seen cell phones) would have been phenomenal. It took many massive demonstrations and multiple deaths to persuade media networks to air footage and print photos of police dogs (of all varieties) savaging Civil Rights marchers.Even now Wiki says of the Democratic Convention in 1968, "Rioting took place between demonstrators and the Chicago Police Department, who were assisted by the Illinois National Guard.""rioting between" I lived a few hours from Chicago in those days, and I was there that August, a few days before starting my senior year of high school. There was some critical press, but mostly because the police had roughed up some reporters: the true level of gratuitous violence visited upon protestors went largely unreported--even then, no video, didn't happen.Now a number of organizations distribute video cameras to oppressed peoples.Videre Est Credere is among the most well known. On-Q does similar work, providing cameras to indigenous peoples in Alaska, Brazil, Peru and Borneo.My last two camcorders went to such efforts. Keep these folks in mind if you dispose of a phone with video capabilities.At last. the whole world really is watching.

I hope it helps, but it seems like every time video evidence of police brutality comes out, someone always pops up to say "Oh, but you didn't see what happened right before the video, which I obviously didn't see either but I'm sure that it justifies the officer's brutality, somehow."It's funny. You'd think that if police are somehow always subject to attacks that occur right before somebody starts videotaping, they'd start taping themselves. I wonder why they aren't? (I don't really wonder. Fucking pigs.)Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I'd like to return to what I think is the single most important issue in the OWS movement and that is Income Inequality and the Quality of Life.Of the developed nations, the US has the greatest income inequality and also the lowest quality of life.If we return to the graph I presented before, the one from Richard Wilkinson's TED Talk, ... we can see a very direct correlation between a nation income inequality and quality of life.Even there though, the US is an outlier have a far greater inequality of incomes and a far lower quality of life than any of the other 20 industrialized nations.The US has a higher infant mortality rate than even Cuba.The US has a higher incarceration rate than ANY other country, 50% higher than Russia, about five times higher than the UK or China and ten times higher than Japan.In the US, this current case of income inequality (there have been several other such cases) really grew from the perversion of economics instituted during the period when Reagan was President. At that time the concept of "Profit is the answer" was sold to the masses and we saw the concept of "for profit health care" and "for profit education" and "for profit incarceration" proliferate like a cancer on the American Dream.Any cure though will take time but if we look and learn from the other 20 or so developed nations there is still a possibility that the US can once again join the group of First World Nations.