AnotherMcIntosh
AnotherMcIntosh's JournalElderly 75-year Old Illinois Man Who Picked Dandelions for Food Gets $75 Ticket
A 75-year-old retiree who lives in the Chicago area with his wife on a $1,500-a-month Social Security payment was caught picking dandelions by a Cook County Forest Preserve cop. At one time, the Chicago area was covered with trees and bushes. Most are gone, but some land has been set aside for the preservation of what remains. The dandelion is a weed which is not a native one.
The Forest Preserve cop gave the retiree a $75 ticket, an increase in his blood pressure, and a story to tell his wife. His court date is set for July 9th. A forest preserve cop is a political appointee who got his position by knowing someone. He can wear a uniform like a real cop. And apparently throw his weight around while ignoring common sense.
There is nothing to indicate that the Social Security retiree was picking the dandelions for any purpose other than to help sustain his wife and himself. However,
"A spokeswoman for the forest preserve district noted that foraging is prohibited there and called the practice "unsustainable, especially when it's done for commercial purposes"
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/elderly_man_who_picked_dandelions_for_food_gets_75_ticket
On the plus side, the Forest Preserve cop didn't Taze him.
Albert Einstein died with a nearly 2,000 page FBI file
Surveillance = unaccountable, undemocratic power over persons who have done no wrong
J. Edgar Hoover gathered secret information on anyone and everyone of consequence, which gave him power over some presidents. In the 1960s, the FBI's COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) secretly monitored civil rights, anti-war and even feminist groups.
Hoover's "black bag jobs" against such public activists as Martin Luther King Jr., secret blackmailing attempts and nonjudicial "disruption" of these groups is what actually led to the Church Committee investigation of abuses and the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA has now effectively dismantled.
Who wants to go back to the good ole' HUAC-Hoover era?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/11/opinion/rowley-nsa-surveillance/index.html
It you can't get a sip from a fire hose, squandering money to build a spy Niagara Falls is wasteful.
When President Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1961, he warned us about the military-industrial complex and said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Yet, with all the massive poverty in this country and the continuing destruction of the American middle-class, there are those who are saying that they don't mind the spying upon all Americans. You've seen some of this.
What do these undemocratic trillion-dollar surveillance programs get for us?
"But there's no evidence the NIMD theory has worked. Researchers long ago concluded that the NIMD-type promise of detecting and accurately stopping terrorists through massive data collection was simply not possible.
"Think about how Bush administration officials defended themselves from not following up on the incredibly specific intelligence warnings urgently going to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and National Counterterrorism Director Richard Clark in the months leading up to 9/11. Their common response back then was something along the line of: intelligence is like a fire hose, and you can't get a sip from a fire hose. There was apparently too much for top officials to even read the key memos addressed to them.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/11/opinion/rowley-nsa-surveillance/index.html
Can anything be more foolish than squandering the money and this nation's future? For what?
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