Why You Should Never Speak To The FBI Without A Lawyer Present
From the ACLU of Massachusetts comes words of wisdom from civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who explains quickly and clearly why activists (or anyone else) should never have a conversation with an FBI agent without a lawyer and tape recorder present. The reason? Because the FBI is capable of blackmailing almost anyone into becoming an informant:
Learn how the FBI can manipulate what you say and use it against you, and how to prevent them from doing so! With civil liberties and civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate.
It’s official. CISPA is back. It’s a law that violates your most basic right - privacy. Sign the petition to stop it in its tracks.
While we’re all focused on the Boston Marathon bombers and the manhunt for suspect #2, the House has already passed CISPA, which can and will completely violate your 4th Amendment rights. Sign this petition telling Congress not to pass it if you value your privacy at all. The rights granted to you by the Constitution are at stake. Inform yourself and do something about it.
Fight this shit. IT DIRECTLY AFFECTS YOU, TUMBLR USER.
Sorry for yelling. Seriously though, if you value your internet privacy, read up on & fight CISPA.
Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.
“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.
The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
Everything that qualifies “The American Dream” is presumed within the context of “free” market capitalism and a “democratic” republic of citizens’ voices, which, both, separately, purport the acceptance of majority/minority or winner/loser; something that is well demonstrated in the chaotic order of our natural environment. However, when these two pillars of western civilized society become profoundly fused together, facets of both must be reconsidered in that this evolutionary step in governance still serves its function: serving citizens.
Separation of private wealth and state should be equally as heard as separation of church and state. Money has become the capitalists religion (re: “In God We Trust”) and we’ve been at war for over a decade now trying to impose our beliefs onto others who have a clearer view of this hard reality: this new system of governance is failing us. From gun laws to foreign aid forgotten to the leaking of documents illustrating painstaking efforts to overthrow leaders in other countries who simply tell us “No?”
The United States is violating our brothers and sisters abroad while simultaneously destroying this beautiful and miraculous planet which we are meant to share with them because when we don’t get what we want we fucking take it with no regard for others because those who are meant to represent and serve the interests of the majority have sold out to the petty pleasantries of the minority.
And you must wonder why in the past year you’ve seen BULLYING and GUN CONTROL and RAPE CULTURE. We’ve got a real fucking problem right here in the United States, and it’s not one faced by those in the second or third worlds.
Our hybrid system of predatory economics and authoritative dominance is savagely marginalizing the human experience, revealing that the evolution of the self-aware homosapien has come to a miraculous opportunity in our time: conscious evolution. This is a matter of life or extinction for our kind. The CHOICE to work to overcome apathy, to learn to understand ourselves through understanding others, and to find success and fulfillment in our own lives by sharing in that with our kin, together. This is what’s next.
THIS IDEA, this truth, as I have found it through my own experiences, is something that will NEVER be purported by this system which rules us, that tells us how our lives ought to be lived.
