@bcglorf

i don't think using @drradon 's example of anarchy a good use as a rebuttal.

now may be larken rose's vision is an extreme example,taken from the von mises institute,and where they dreamily offer a counter to police with a "non-aggression principle".while cute and adorable,humans tend to be far more vicious and violent in nature,especially when desperate.

but again,i think our respective approaches to authority will not find common ground here.

i do not seek a leader,but i am ok with a representative,though i do not seem to have any in my government at the moment.

i find it curious,amazing and not a little disturbing just how easily people will quietly,and tacitly accept a police that has become more and more draconian,violent and aggressive while SIMULTANEOUSLY decreasing the citizens rights to protect themselves,defend themselves and resist unlawful police practices.

because they simply change the law to make what WAS illegal...legal.with a stroke of a pen.

and i simply cannot respect when an american says,without any sense of justice or history,to just sit down,shut up and do what you are told.

while claiming they are a patriot,waving their american flag made in china.

the history of law enforcement in this country reveals that their main job,their main focus and duty is NOT to the poor,the dispossessed or the marginalized.

the police's job is to protect those who hold assets,who have money and wield political power.

and before you say anything,i am quite aware that there are some,and they are the majority,who do their job with honor and distinction.my argument is not about singular police officers but rather the systematic problems inherent in the system.

lets take my city for example.
i am blessed enough to live adjacent to a very wealthy and influential housing development.

average police response time?=7 minutes.

right down the street,not 10 miles down the road,is a depressed area of town.industry and manufacturing abandoned that area 20 years ago.it is stricken with prostitution,heroin addicts and abject poverty.

average police response time?=22 minutes

yet the main police station is in THAT area.

or should i bring up the history of american labor movement?
where the coal miners in west virginia decided to strike,and because the owners of the mines were politically connected.the governor sent in the state police to...and this should send chills down your spine...shoot any miners unwilling to go back to work.

and they did.
they murdered any coal miner still willing to stand up against the owners of the mine,and this included women and children.

now lets examine that for a minute.
workers for a coal mine decided to strike for better working conditions (which were horrible) and actually have a day off,besides sunday (because:god).

the owner of the mine,who was losing immense of amount of money due to zero production of coal,called the governor to have the state police,a civil institution,sent in to put those people down.to force them to either get back to work or face violence.

*now the owner brought in his own mercenary group to assist in the process of intimidation,strong arm tactics and violence.

i will add one more story that is personal,and comes from my own family,and may possibly explain my attitude towards police in general.

my father was born in 1930,in alton illinois.
now that small town had been hit particularly hard during the depression.my father spoke of not having indoor plumbing until he went into the navy,and how the floors in his childhood home were simple boards over dirt.

he grew up extremely poor,and my grandfather struggled to find steady work,and i gather from what my father told me.my grandpa made bootleg beer out of the bathtub.so he and his 6 brothers and 1 sister had to bathe in the mississippi river while grandpa tried to make money by selling illegal hooch.

my father also regaled me with stories of the chores he had as the youngest of 8 kids.it was his job every morning to head to the train tracks and pick the coal that dropped from the coal carts.(which he admitted to being lazy and stole directly from the very full coal cart itself while his brother kept an eye out for the station master).

my point is that my father grew up in desperate and poor times.

but one story always stood out,and i think it is because it has a wild west feel to it that always transfixed me,and i made him tell me the story over and over as a child.

when times are tough,people will do whatever they have to in order to survive,so my grandfather making illegal hooch was not the only illegalities being played out in that small town.neighbor upon neighbor did what they had to,and most were considered criminals in the eyes of the state.

so i guess one of my grandpa's friends was on the run from the law,and sought refuge at my grandpa's home.which he allowed,because neighbors take care of neighbors,at least they used to.

well,in a small town everybody knows everybody,and eventually three police officers showed up at my grandpa's house,and demanded that he turn over (i forgot the guys name).

and i remember the pride on my fathers face whenever he retold this story....

my grandfather stood tall on the top of his stairs facing his front door,holding his gun he was given during WW1 and told the police officers (which he knew.small town remember?),that if they took one step into his home..he would blow their heads off.

now this is a story retold from a childs perspective many years later.i am sure my fathers memory was a tad....biased..but i would bet the meaty parts were accurate.

now my question is this:
how would that exact same scenario play out in todays climate?

well,we would see on the 6 o'clock news how a family was tragically shot to death for harboring a criminal and that the police had done EVERYTHING in their power to avoid this kind of violence.

i know this is long,and i hope i didn't lose you along the way,but i think we should not dismiss the very real slow decent into a society that silently obeys,quietly accepts more and more authoritarian powers all in the name of "safety",and that any form of resistance is to be viewed as "criminal" and "troublesome".

so while i agree that "when should we shoot a cop" should be in the realm of:let us try to never do that.

i also cannot agree to placing cops on a hero platform as if their job is somehow sacrosanct and beyond reproach.they are human beings,of limited intellect,whose main job it is to protect those who own property,have wealth and wield political power.

and with the current disparity and blatant inequality their job has been more and more focused on keeping those 30% undesirables down.

the poor,the destitute,the marginalized,the addict and the junkie and the petty criminals.

those are a threat to the "better" citizens.they are a blight on a community that should be cleansed from the tender eyes of those who are deemed more "worthy".

rich folk may wring their hands,and lament the plight of the poor and wretched,but for GOD's sakes! they don't want to actually SEE them!

so a police officer can do all the mental gymnastics they want in order to justify their place in society,but at the end of the day,they serve the elites.

and they always have.

Mississippi River Hydrostatic Model has been added as a related post - related requested by Mekanikal.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Mississippi-River-Hydralic-Model

I find models of this type fascinating.

"Years earlier, they had amassed...", before building the model.

The model came later as a result of the failed projects, realizing that a symptomatic approach was flawed. The model was to take a more holistic methodology to addressing the flooding along the Mississippi.

The timeline is as follows:
the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:
Flood Control act of 1928-
Army Corps of Engineers gets to work
Sec. of Commerce H.Hoover directs Flood Relief
towns & cities which had flooded get levees
The Great Flood of 1937:
towns downstream of newly protected communities get flooded.
ACE begins with simple models in dirt
1943 gets funding to build largest scale model for study:
1"=1000' horizontal, 1"=100' vertical
German POWs used for initial labor.

sorry that wasn't clear enough before. There was no model before.

"They modeled all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River and surrounding areas on more than 200 acres with the sole purpose of understanding how it would flood and which techniques worked best and how they affected things up/down river. Years earlier, they had anassed several failed large scale prevention/levee projects."

The way you wrote this---implies to me that they either misunderstood the model or the the model gave them flawed data. Or perhaps, that they got good data and ignored it (lol). I'm curious: which was it?

Hilarious. Maybe they should have tried to not giggle like naughty teenagers making a prank call if they want to be taken seriously.
First, they did make the shirt he asked for, a quality one it seemed, just with a bonus secret message.
Second, Trump supporters are the same people who advocate the refusal of service for people who offend their religious (or political) sensibilities, so what's his problem? He was probably hoping they would refuse him service so he could use the video as proof that "liberals" are totally hypocritical and refuse service to those they dislike but vilify "conservatives" for the same thing, but got something unexpected instead.

It's now pretty clear that initially they did this looking for and expecting a negative reaction they could exploit somehow, then pressed the point when they got one, thinking they 'got them' and now he can be the conservative hero of the week.

To be fair though, what response does one expect when one goes into a business in a firmly red state like Alabama or Mississippi, and an even more firmly Republican city, and then go to a world famously Republican neighborhood in that city, enter a store with a Trump sign in the window and ask them to make you a HILLARY T-shirt? I would bet $10 it involves threats of violence if not actual violence and firearms, not a quality shirt with a 'secret' message inside.

I'm from Mississippi and can confirm his accent as legit.

Your video, New Mississippi Anti-Gay Tourism Ad, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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I watched this when I was bored as fuck in Oaklahoma during the summer of 2002 at my ex's grandma's house. It's too hot to go outside, let's watch grandma's VHS collection. 12 volumes of Conway Twitty specials, Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone: Henry Fonda and Charles fucking Bronson motherfucker), Breaker Breaker starring Chuck Norris, 9 to 5 starring tig ol bitties, and Mississippi Burning with the Gene HACK-man.

Yep. I watched Mississippi Burning, Once Upon a Time in the West and Breaker Breaker over and over AND OVER all summer in the back woods of Oaklahoma. And played shit tons of magic the gathering (and sex). Even now, when I play magic, all I think of is the word Shitkicker, semi truck car chases, dreary harmonica drifting over a desert, and Dolly Parton's tits (and femdom bondage).

White American culture, huh? This clip is awesome.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'gene hackman, willam defoe, mississippi burning, kkk, racism, civil rights, fbi' to 'gene hackman, willam defoe, mississippi burning, kkk, racism, civil rights, FBI' - edited by SFOGuy

Tags for this video have been changed from 'gene hackman, willam defoe, mississippi burning, kkk, racsim, civil rights, fbi' to 'gene hackman, willam defoe, mississippi burning, kkk, racism, civil rights, fbi' - edited by SFOGuy

I've never actually agreed with the idea that nobody wants to eat them. Very few people eat the local carp, but outside of having a -lot- of bones, they make a great meal, with a wonderful flavor. And you can minimize the problems with the bones in a few different ways. Once they hit about 12-15 pounds, you can cut them into steaks, with two bones per steak. Or you can smoke and can them (my own personal favorite, as they soak up the smoke better than any other fish I've ever tried), which softens the bones until they're edible, just like canned salmon.

I'd have more worries over eating -any- fish caught in the Mississippi than I would over this one species from any other waters.

The ultimate TERRIBLE fishing spot. No one wants to eat Asian Carp, and nothing else can live where they've taken over, which is more and more of the Mississippi and it's tributaries all the time. :-(

While I find it entertaining and hilarious, this is simply horrible strawmanning. The US has one of the simplest systems of inclusion of any major nation. He either is not understanding, or he's simply being a demagogue about it.

It's really, really simple.

Want full rights? Then join permanently. Become a state. It's literally the exact same thing that Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii did.

Guam, the Marianas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands have the EXACT SAME OPTIONS as those states listed above had when those states were territories.

Samoa is different because they don't meet the minimum population requirement (60K) to be bumped up to qualify for statehood.

They're pretty close tho.

But yeah... it has nothing to do with race or bigotry or anything like that. If John Oliver can't understand that simple system, then how does he explain the different rights of citizens in the British Overseas Territories vs the British Crown Dependencies, or how Wales and Scotland are sort of countries and sort of not countries.

I'm assuming he can understand the wonky UK system, and if that's so, he should easily understand the simple US system (want full rights, vote to join permanently).

Just last year, there was a movement in Guam to call for a vote of statehood. Basically a glorified (but meaningful) petition. They didn't get the required % of people wanting to vote, so, in essence, Guam doesn't even care enough to vote for statehood.

They have every right that every other territory has had in terms of what category they fall under.

Basically, just look at states as permanent (and thusly more rights as well as more responsibilities) and territories as temporary until they decide what they want to be. Or territories can stay in limbo forever.

Guam, PR, and the rest can go the route of Hawaii (okay, that was naked imperialism but whatever) or the route of Cuba and the Philippines... or just stay how they are.

Mississippi has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the US... I wonder why...