Ok, I'm from Pittsburgh, and I can tell you that a vast majority of the cops were brought in from elsewhere, as well as a vast majority of the protestors & anarchists were not from Pittsburgh. Yes there were more cops than protestors. Perhaps it was an over-reaction, but it was based on the precedent of events in London and Seattle. Many of those brought in were national guard. I can't speculate on who wears what kind of camo/fatigues - most were dressed in dark gray & black riot gear. From the video (no where near downtown) I would guess that they targeted this particular individual, and just removed him out of the crowd to the police line that was 50 ft away. I couldn't see any plates or lights on the car - most undercover cop cars are easy to spot, so this might have been a civilian vehicle.

Personally I was disappointed that there were so many cops, yet the anarchists got away with breaking so many windows. (this was probably because most of the cops were in the downtown area, and most of damage was in other neighborhoods outside of downtown). What point are they trying to prove? "ooh, I'm 19 years old and being repressed by the evil government, so I'll get back at them by breaking windows of a local business!!" Unless your goal is to provide work for local window replacement companies, it's pointless.

But in the end there were several peaceful protests as well (much larger turnout than you see in these videos), and no major damage or injuries, so it's probably better to err on the side of caution.

The channel 11 news (nbc) interviewed the girl who was on video from the previous night getting arrested for throwing her bike at the riot cops. Now that was entertainment... What did she think was going to happen?

Also, I disliked all the reporters comments about how downtown turned into a ghost town for 2 days - well that's what happens when the secret service quarantines a 16 block area and nearly every road in and out of downtown. All the businesses closed because it's too much hassle for employees and customers to even get there.

Here is a longer video with a lot more police encounters.
This particular video is included in it, at 1:52.

http://www.videosift.com/video/G20-Pittsburgh-Protests-Batons-Tear-Gas-and-Rubber-Bullets

>> ^Payback:
Complete utter bullshit. Was a poor attempt at even faking it. The driver was wearing cowboy boots, ffs.


You are an idiot. The driver is not wearing cowboy boots.

The car is clearly a govt car of some sort, notice the window vent thing is only for the back seat, and the stubby radio antenna on the trunk.

I guarantee this is real and your only criticism is "not wearing hats" and the different uniforms. It could be Pittsburgh cops who are also Natl Guard that had some special detail. It could also be "undercover" cops that decided national-guard-like might be more tolerated then a plain clothes cop.

It's not staged, you can see riot cops in the first part of the video snatching someone else, and how did the car drive through police like that and the video is crawling with cops and national guard looking people.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/9nxw2/armored_police_seize_university_of_pittsburgh/

^ documentation of some legitimate injustices done by police in Pittsburgh

I agree this is fishy, too brief, and taken out of context..

Nice *vintage footage of Allentown, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, including the Mummers parade.

>> ^blankfist: Exactly, so limiting someone's ability to travel is infringing on this right.

This claim is demonstrably false. My 60 year old neighbor has lived in Pittsburgh all her life and never learned to drive. Last month she called a cab, went to the airport and flew to Ireland. She has elected to not sign the contract. She has traveled across state and national boundaries without difficulty. She has, at the same time, not demanding the right to do whatever she wants with somebody else's (the state's) property.

If I decided to move my entire home from Los Angeles back to North Carolina and loaded everything onto
a horse drawn buggy...

If you decide to do something absurd, expect absurd results, hire a moving company next time, let them sign a contract with the state for the use of it's roads, so that you don't have to.

Specifically giving you permission (which is what a driving permit is) is not the same as not giving you something you didn't necessarily earn.

You, and video asshat, have not been given permission to drive over the speed limit, therefor misusing the state's property constitutes non-contracted use, which is indistinguishable from theft.

driving is the most accessible personal mode of transportation.

So you are not arguing for a right, you are arguing for means of expression. That was my point for the cash/NY skyline comment. You don't have a right to a means of expression, only to the right to express. You have abjectly failed to demonstrate that not having a license makes use of the right functionally impractical, and I have supplied a counter example.

>> ^gtjwkq:
>> ^bareboards2:
But remember, you folks who hate taxes so much -- remember where the internet started. It wouldn't be here without having been developed at the government level first. Roads. Schools. The university you went to.
Seriously, how can you say the internet wouldn't exist without being developed by government first? That's ludicrous. Roads, schools and universities weren't invented by government either and I'm not the least bit thankful for things that were created at the expense of high taxes that diverted productive resources and applied them unproductively.


Have you looked at the history of the internet before you responded? The government funded a great deal of the research.
Basic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

In addition, it was the government funding and contracts with telephone companies that build the backbone of the internet. Do you think the telephone companies laid all that fiber / copper lines for new customers? No, it was funded by the government. BTW, the US National Science Foundation is a government agency. Not from wiki:

"Thus, the first Internet backbone, called the NSFNET because it was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), linked six supercomputing centers (University of California-San Diego, National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Cornell University, and the John von Neumann Supercomputing Center/Princeton) and their associated regional networks in the United States in order to provide supercomputer access to scientists. Today, a single government-managed Internet backbone has been transformed into a multitude of different backbones, most of which are private commercial enterprises."

You can't have an internet without a backbone. The government is responsible for the first backbone that the private networks "leeched" off of while building theirs. Also, the government has given much money to telephone companies for laying of fiber, etc.

Yes these blogs are sweet indeed, glad to see you utilizing yours. It'd be a neat idea to start a little link-sharing blog thingum. Like a mini-reddit at VS. I'll add a couple:

Former employees of Blackwater say it's owner, Eric Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe"

Mirror of the personal diary of the Pittsburgh shooter

I live in Pittsburgh.
Western Pennsylvanians like guns (look up some statistics).
I don't own one, but I have nothing against them.
I don't think you should be able to own assault rifles unless you are police or military trained (and pass psychological exam).

Canadians also like guns, but they are responsible with them (go watch bowling for columbine).

Richard Poplawski is a nutjob (he's still alive in jail, someone above said it was suicide). He is a neo-nazi. He believes FEMA is going to round up americans and put them in containment camps. He has no remorse for what he has done, and only wished he had killed more cops.

All the police who showed up for the memorial of the 3 dead officers was touching. They came from as far away as toronto, boston, virginia, to show respect for their fallen brothers. 2 banks were robbed whilst 10,000+ policemen were in town. Hooray for humanity.

I like what Olberman says, but not how he says it. He is so incredibly fake. He's trying so hard to be the white Malcom X that it's distracting.

Glenn Beck is a nutjob, but he didn't create Richard Poplawski or Ted Bundy or Ted Kaczynski or Ted Danson.

Saw them at the now defunct Electric Banana in Pittsburgh. Rest in peace indeed. Rock them lutes lyres and harps now.

An example is here:
http://howto.videosift.com/video/Lebanese-food-in-Pittsburgh

It is blocked in UK & Aus and if you look at the embed code it is youtube.com/v/
So this post is a *lie

I feel genuinely bad for having missed this my last (first) time in Pittsburgh.

Then again...

http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/

My GF and I lived in San Francisco in a house with five other people which we all collectively rented. We both worked 50+ hrs a week, and rarely got out to do anything fun. We had put about 90k away, and thought about buying a house with it. If we had done that four years ago we would have negative equity, and owe over $0.5M, instead we got out.

We moved to Pittsburgh PA, where we bought two houses for < $20k each. We rent one and live in the other, we do web work and print design when they come our way.

The cash flow about breaks even, but we have no debt, and we have everything we need, and loads of free time.

I have a cyclical habit of downsizing my life. After I dropped out of UCSB in the late '90s I went to live off the grid in Canada for a few years, the catalyst being the existential arrest caused by my job as a university IT manager.

After I resettled in SF I was sqatting, and dumpsering myself a generally punk-rock existence (minus musical preference). As tends to happen I ended up living with my GF and living a somewhat "normal" life, until we decided to buy a house, and realized we would not be able to do it in SF, and so we downsized to Pittsburgh, and became landlords (gasp squatter -> landlord in 4 years flat).

I'm kinda hoping for total economic collapse, so that I can massively simplify my life again. I'll be planting a garden this year, to make sure we can keep veggies on the table if California has trouble shipping them out in their current low-water-reserves condition, that's going to be my bad economy "side business".

Nobody show this to my GF, she would never go out in the snow again. We grew up in the desert, and now we live in Pittsburgh, snow driving freaks her out to no end. this would put her right over the top.

>> ^ambassdor:
That said, the only thing I find interesting, and probably what people allude to a conspiracy to is that I haven't seen any clear evidence of a plane crash on the Pentagon/Pittsburgh. Then again, I'm not an expert in plane collisions. So who I am to say how/what happened?


Here are pictures of wreckage at the Pentagon.
http://www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm

I'm sure it was planes. However I'm not sure if there is no conspiracy. I think it's possible that the government suppressed or ignored intelligence. Maybe even demolished WTC 7.