does this cause you to feel more protected;

Collegedale, TN — Most people reading this article know what it is like to have the blue and red lights pop up in your rear view mirror. The last thing going through your mind at this point is the feeling of ‘being protected.’ This feeling comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time a driver sees police lights in their mirror is because they have been targeted for revenue collection—often the result of a quota system—and they are about to be given a ticket, or worse.

Police, we are told, are here to keep us safe and protect us from the bad guys. However, public safety all too often takes a back seat to revenue collection. Time and time again, the Free Thought Project has exposed quota schemes in which officers were punished for not writing enough tickets.

The most recent ticket writing scheme to be exposed comes of out Collegedale, Tennessee in which multiple police officers claim they were fired for attempting to call out the illegal orders handed down to them to make arrests and write tickets. Former Collegedale police officers Robert Bedell, Kolby Duckett, and David Schilling have all filed lawsuits against the city and its officials for wrongful termination after speaking out against what they refer to as an “illegal quota system.”

Now, this month, the last officer left on the force finally resigned. On Friday, Ridgetop Police Chief Bryan Morris submitted his resignation and the town is now without a police force.

“Due to the allegations of a quota system being implemented by members of police department administration either written or unwritten, stated or implied, I feel it is necessary for a formal investigationto [sic] be conducted,” read a statement from City Commissioner Ethan White in July when Bedell announced his lawsuit. “Today, I have reached out to District Attorney General Neal Pinkston requesting that he immediately request the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to conduct a full investigation into the Collegedale Police Department’s operating policies.”.........https://thefreethoughtproject.com/department-gone-quota-system/

this could only be written as a dystopian novel but 'our' government which won't pay for southern  border wall expansion just provided money for said walls in the mid east;

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has voted to fund efforts to “enhance the border security” of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia while moving to deny all funding to build walls, fencing or any other structures to enhance the border security of the United States.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants have their priorities. 

To them, borders on the other side of the world are more important than our own.

On June 19, the House approved a massive spending bill. In an act of legislative polygamy, it “married” the appropriations bill for the Department of Defense to the appropriations bills for the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated this monstrosity would cost taxpayers $984.7 billion in fiscal 2020.

Yet there is one thing on which this bill would forbid the Trump administration from spending one penny to accomplish.

On page 304 (of 650), it says: “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or any prior Department of Defense appropriations Acts may be used to construct a wall, fence, border barriers, or border security infrastructure along the southern land border of the United States.”

A month later, the House Appropriations Committee sent the full House a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

This bill — so far — is unmarried and would cost taxpayers $63.8 billion.........https://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/house-votes-to-enhance-the-border-security-of-jordan-lebanon-egypt-and-tunisia-not-the-usa/257026

fred does his usual excellent job of identifying things and their potential outcomes in this essay about trump offering the american military to solve mexico's narco problems;

I suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and effectively. “

Trump phrased this as an offer to help, not a threat to invade, which is reassuring. AMLO, Mexico’s president, wisely declined the offer.

While the President seems to have made the offer in good faith, he has little idea of Mexico, the military, or the cartels. The American military could not come close to wiping them off the face of the earth, much less effectively and quickly. Such an incursion would be a political and military disaster. The President needs to do some reading.

If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of the world. They don’t know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War, detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton’s incursion–the list could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as invaders. Which they would be.

The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The is exactly what Trump seems to be doing............http://www.unz.com/freed/lets-invade-mexico/

the empire never fails to fail in any promise that i makes, and the trouble that creates is larger than you might imagine;

Where did all the time go?  Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell.  Then Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite.  It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle of our times.

The once mighty Soviet Union had become exhausted by its long military/economic/political struggle to keep up with the much wealthier United States and its rich allies.  Moscow had 40,000 tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an empty shell.

A senior KGB general in Moscow told me that, a decade earlier, the renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had warned the Politburo that failure by Soviet industry to account for deprecation to modernize and replace outdated equipment would provoke a major crisis by 1990.  This is exactly what happened..........https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/eric-margolis/how-we-betrayed-russia/

i've only gotten this far into this article and am posting it as it makes several points about the american 'educational system' i fully agree with;

We know all the criticisms. China’s children are taught only to memorise and not to think or question. They are rote-learning robots without capacity for original thought. They know only how to produce high scores but not to apply any knowledge. They have no creativity, no imagination, no concept of innovation. The classes are too large; there is no individual attention paid to students. The entire Chinese educational system is corrupt and failing. But this is all nonsense, yet one more foolish myth propagated by the Americans. There has never been any evidence to document such claims which, like so many others, are fabricated solely on an imaginary moral superiority.

The quality of American education, as we will see, is far lower than the world has been led to believe, and the quality in China is in many cases much superior to that in the US. Americans might care to ask why it is that Chinese elementary or high school students moving to the US are often promoted by one or two grades. The reason is that they know so much more than their American counterparts they would suffer terminal boredom if forced to remain at their prior grade level. If we refer to the PISA tests, Shanghai’s math scores were 119 above the OECD average, or the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling, with reading and science exceeding the OECD average by about 1.5 years of schooling. And in some cases, the American students were behind the OECD average by approximately the same number of years as the Chinese were ahead.

The myth persists that the US has always led the world in quality of education, but this is nothing more than branding propaganda and part of the indoctrination process of American moral superiority that is wholly unsupported by facts. Consider this quote from an American education expert:

“The US has never been first in the world, nor even near the top, on any international tests. Consistently over the past half century, American students have typically scored near the median at best, but most often being in the bottom quartile. The historical record indicates that American elementary students are only average at best, their performance degrading year by year until high school seniors perform last in almost all international tests. The International Science Studies that began in high schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s found that 14-year-olds were below average and seniors scored last of all countries. In the International Mathematics tests that began in the 1960s, American high school seniors scored last of all nations. In the 1982 International Mathematics Study, high school seniors placed at the bottom on almost every test. In terms of the PISA tests, American students – placing last – are simply following the pattern that has been consistent for the past 50 years or more.”

Recent tests in the New York area show that less than half of all students are proficient in English and Math, and in some areas the number is as low as 13%. This is true in most of the country, literacy being marginal in most American secondary schools. In an article published in the San Jose Mercury in 2001, it was documented that 75% of California high school seniors could not read well enough to pass their exit exams............https://www.globalresearch.ca/brief-look-substandard-education/5694267

i'm on record for having no interest in trump, and in case you get confused, the hildabeest was worse, but pcr makes some good points in his latest essay;

Only Donald Trump Can Save American Democracy and Only with Our Support

Paul Craig Roberts

Now that the “quid pro quo gate” hoax has collapsed, like the Russiagate hoax, the presstitutes are inventing a new quid pro quo hoax. It wasn’t money that Trump dangled before the Ukrainian president in exchange for an investigation of Ukraine’s contribution to the Russiagate hoax. It was a presidential visit to Ukraine. I listened to the latest CIA-directed presstitute plot unfold today on NPR. Three semi-males devoid of integrity did their best to substitute a visit to Ukraine by Trump for the unsubstantiated promise of money. The visit is all third hand as there is no mention of such a visit in the telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky. The impeachment hoax now rests on unverifiable alleged conversations between Trump aides and Zelensky aides that Trump will honor Ukraine with a visit if Ukraine reopens the investigation. Whether this is the investigation of the Urainian company closed down by Joe Biden or the investigation of Ukraine’s contribution to the “Russiagate” hoax has yet to be made clear by the presstitutes.

This is how hopeless the coup against Trump is.

Nevertheless, it might succeed anyhow.

It is a known fact that the CIA director John Brennan orchestrated the Russiagate hoax, an act of sedition, and it is a known fact that FBI director Comey committed a felony by misleading the FISA Court, and it is a known fact that FBI official Peter Strzok and his FBI mistress were involved in a plot to prevent Trump’s election, and so on and on. Yet despite the publicly known information of their crimes, no indictments have come forth from the Justice Department..........https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/11/08/only-donald-trump-can-save-american-democracy-and-only-with-our-support/

i'm always entertained by those who repeat the mantra they were given in school: we're a democracy and as such we determine our future, etc. its complete crap and the following piece by hornberger goes some ways towards making that clear, though there are countless other examples that will readily come to your mind, if you have one and use it;

Drug-war proponents are scratching their heads over what to do about the latest drug-war massacre in Mexico. They are considering three options.

Option 1. Have the Mexican military crack down even more fiercely than it already has during the past 10 years of fierce military drug warfare.

The problem with this approach, however, is that it has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens, made the mountain of official drug-war corruption within the Mexican government even higher, and converted much of the country into a hell-hole of drug-war violence.

Option 2. Send in the U.S. military and the CIA into Mexico.

Yeah! They’ll show those Mexican drug gangs how the cow ate the cabbage. Just ask the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Bombs, missiles, shootings, arrests, indefinite detention, torture, raids, prison camps, kangaroo military tribunals, extra-judicial executions, warrantless searches, and state-sponsored assassinations.

Just be prepared for the deaths of countless Mexican children, wedding parties, and thousands of other innocent people, as the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen will attest.

But what the heck? If we get the violent drug gangs, won’t the deaths of all those innocent Mexican people be considered “worth it,” just like the deaths of innocent foreigners are considered “worth it” when U.S. forces kill a “terrorist” in the U.S. government’s perpetual “war on terrorism”?......https://www.fff.org/2019/11/07/another-drug-war-massacre/