In South Africa, big game “hunters” can enjoy the experience of slaughtering wild animals who are bred for the purpose of being within easy shooting distance of wealthy tourists. Canada has similar resorts for rich killers hoping to bag a drugged wild cat or grizzly bear, strategically placed where they can just be blown away by old guys bored with underage sex tourism in SE Asia. Meanwhile, in the occupied territories, bloodthirsty “adventurers” can experience the ‘thrill’ of shooting Palestinians in specialized camps led by IDF counterterrorism experts – places where the entire family can participate in ethnic cleansing – one keffiyeh-patterned target at a time. This is our world in a nutshell: An increasingly barricaded enclosure that provides a chimeric backdrop of open space, permits the inmates “freedom of movement” within a confined area, but in reality, a hunting ground for the wealthy individuals who set the boundaries according to their depraved whims.
If incarcerating “wild” and expendable populations for blood sport weren’t enough to satisfy our cowardly overlords, they’ve now crafted a constitutional loophole that allows them to gather DNA samples from the ever-growing prison population on their own doorstep. Carry that cancer-carrying gene? Visa/Green Card/insurance denied. Does your helix strand spell out a propensity for dissent? Or an ancestor named ‘Mohammed’? Don’t be surprised if you suddenly find yourself on a ‘no fly’ list, or are pre-emptively arrested the next time the G20 comes to town.
Not content to violate us at the cellular level, the Obwana administration is now scouring our digital footprints with telecommunication giant Verizon providing them with the proof they need to implicate you in an al-Qaeda sexting scandal in the form of millions of subpoenaed phone records. (Somewhere in Texas George Bush the Lesser is putting down his finger paints to ponder the irony of his successor outdoing him in creating a national security gulag state). If you think you and your law-abiding, tax paying, non-terrorist ass can avoid being probed by the long, hairy arms of law enforcement, think again. (On second thought, thinking is just as likely to land you in hot water as googling pressure cooker recipes from Dagistan, as thoughts become the next frontier for Homeland Safari Security. You can only run as far as a drugged lion in a safari theme park. If some oligarch/hedge funder dressed as Elmer Fudd doesn’t get you in his crosshairs, some domestic drone program from the very near future will count you as collateral damage, suitable for mounting over the fireplace.
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I read about breeding large trophy animals for rich hunters in the Manchester Guardian. Much needed cash for the impecunious Africans with the requisite facilities for breeding, drugging, and selling these ‘hunts’.
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The Israelis do NOT advertise a similar option on Palestinians. When I was in school, a fellow student was an Israeli who explained that, whenever a Palestinian did something Israel considered a crime, he was sent out with his tank squadron to shell the Palestinian’s home. But he didn’t invite rich people to come along and push the ‘Fire’ button for a big bundle of shekels. Do you have a link?
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The DNA ruling is strange. The news is filled with people exonerated by DNA evidence, but the courts refuse to accept it: ‘You get one bite at the apple,’ says the court. ‘You did NOT present this evidence at your trial, so it cannot be presented after your conviction and sentence of execution.’ So I hope none of this DNA evidence will be abused to exonerate criminals just because they were innocent, but is ONLY used to convict the guilty.
As I said, the ruling is strange. We need ways to convict people who have used witchcraft to commit their crimes, so there is absolutely no evidence against them, and they think that, just because there is absolutely no evidence, the criminal justice system cannot touch them. We HAVE to be able to convict those people we know are guilty, even though we have not the slenderest shred of evidence against them. (Obviously, we now do this to all Islamist terrorists, but what about other criminals?)
So I’m assuming this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the criminal justice system will soon be able to use enlightened methods (e.g., Star Chamber, or that excellent Spanish institution of justice mentioned by E. A. Poe et al.) to prosecute all criminals and ‘take a bite out of crime’.
Especially those criminals for whom we don’t have any evidence of their crime.
Here is a link to an article about an Israeli commando camp for tourists:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/06/02/180824990/U-S-Tourists-Become-Israeli-Commandos-For-A-Day
Um, yeah. With wooden cutouts of weapons.
There’s really bad stuff going on over there but you undermine your own arguments with this weak dreck.