I love your ideas here. Here's my take on them.

Public officials do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the performance of their duties. Private citizens do.

This distinction will help considerably for those trying to figure this issue out.

I'm in agreement with you and believe we should take it up a level further. I say, record any and every interaction with public officials. Then, lets all collectively begin holding their feet to the fire.

There are ever-increasing examples of police immunity being stripped because they act outside of the law.

Cell phones with video cameras are looking better and better.

* What they emphasize in their language and behavior.
* What they dwell on.

But the really big things I look for are what their presuppositions REALLY say. Are they trying to distract us and point our attention elsewhere? Do their presuppositions indicate they're up against their limit in their model of reality? What useful information can I draw from their presuppositions that will allow me to draw inferences? If I took their presuppositions out into the future a year or five years even 10 years what would be the outcome?

Hopefully this gives you a little more idea about my thoughts on this issue.

Great questions as usual, Jack.

I believe you're right -- the revolution is coming! More and more people that I talk to are fed up.

And just today I saw something hysterical. The Lowe's store chain put out a catalogue advertising "Family Trees". Can you believe that?

Should the Hanukkah menorah now be called the "family branched candle stand"?

For all practical purposes, we've lost our freedom of speech and the "Prince of New York" almost instituted drivers licenses for illegal aliens. We have no rights but apparently everyone else does.

Enough is enough. Let's all stop with this political correctness. Let's speak our mind. It can be done while still being kind and respectful. There's no need to remove our culture, religions (and soon I'm sure, even our ancestral heritage) from our language in public places.

Who's with me?

in fact, I have an idea. Think up funny ways we can remove religion etc. from holidays and post them here. I started with "family trees". My daughter came up with "end of the year tree" (instead of Christmas tree). There's got to be a whole lot like that that we can come up with.

Post them here and let's all have some fun.

With the IRS - you're guilty until you prove your innocence
At the airport - at least in Houston - "any irrgeular comments regarding secuirty may result in your arrest"

At the airport - the TSA assumes you're guilty until proven innocent and subject to search without consent.

And on and on....

The revolution is coming...eventually common sense will return. When we decide enuff is enuff.

Great post.

Quote: "When you truly know an issue, only then can you defend what you believe to be true. And only by engaging others, can we learn and understand our differences."

I agree. The problem is most people aren't interested in a lot of issues that don't affect them immediately--"it can't happen to me". Couple this lack of interest with some devious framing by the powers that be and what do you get? A creature called Sheeple.

I'm forwarding the video to a bunch of people I know after I post this message.

Warmly,
Jack

P.S.

Dave, that was one well thought out post. Well done.

The question is how to best move forward. In this case, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," is the phrase that screams so loudly, I can't hear what the officers say.

CEOs of large companies used to have immunity from the reporting of their company’s activities. Enron abused that power to the extreme. Now Sarbanes-Oxley has drastically curtailed the activities of reporting in such a way that all reporting is seriously considered and the ramifications of wrongful reporting results in personal fines and jail time.

The list of people in power who used to have immunity from action is quickly shortening, as it should.

Most of the police officers in the United States are well trained and behave very well, respectfully, and perform excellent service. There will always be exceptions to every group of well-performing people. To ensure that under-performing people are held to appropriate standards, a balance is needed for authority figures to have both professional and personal consequences for their actions. Yes, the police need to be able to do their jobs with the police department being their professional protection. However, if they are out of line and cross the boundaries of what they are allowed to do, shouldn't there be a limit as to how much they can be professionally protected?

Limits need to be imposed such that seriously infractions are dealt with seriously, just as Sarbanes-Oxley did with CEOs. While the police officers in this series of actions were way, way wrong, the saving grace in these situations could well be the video cell phone along with personal consequences. When there are people around, cell/video phones are around. Video footage tends to set records straight extremely quickly. I'd encourage people to video record events as they seem them. Easy to forward via email and easy to erase.

Police officers in situation like the one that was being video’d ad hoc, should be recorded more judiciously. Care should be taken that more than one recording is made to prevent cover-ups.

In my opinion, there should be personal fines given to anyone who demands video be turned off (the only exception is the property owner, who should always maintain the rights of what is done on their property as long as it isn't hurting anyone.) in public places.

Imagine the difference the complete video would have divulged if the man could have continued recording and turned that video into multiple authorities. If citizens aren’t going to stand up for their rights verbally, video footage may be the solution.

Some people may say they don’t want to be video recorded. While this sounds like a privacy issue at first glance, it really comes down to what Kenrick calls frames.

One frame is that a person shouldn’t be video recorded as it takes away some of their privacy. Another frame is that if a person isn’t doing anything wrong, why wouldn’t they want to be video recorded? And this fits in with a police officers professional duty – if they aren’t doing anything wrong, why would they object to being recorded?