Are online petitions effective for change?

                                       We Charge Genocide Petition (1951)


Online petitions have been around a while. A quick internet search will come up with many different page hits. What is the point of them and can they effect real change?

When confronted with human rights violations, animal cruelty or wanting any government law changed or passed, a petition can become a people's voice so to speak. If a group or individual sees something wrong in society, then anyone can write a petition in the belief of change, right?

I do like the idea that anyone can get involved with e-petitions. I get asked to sign many, but am also asked, why sign them? Good point, well why not?

Are they maybe a meaningless gimmick for some? Taking a mere few minutes to sign, is it merely the feel good factor of believing you've done something useful in life and then can forget about it?

The critics argue that those who sign heaps of online petitions are a bunch of do-gooders, armchair activists or as this article ponders, "Are you a Slacktivist? When activism comes too easy, is it effective?"

What about this one? Does it do more harm than good?

Indeed, in comparing different government initiative led petition sites, I do wonder how truly effective they are for change.

I have tried to follow many petitions and see how they supposedly worked out.

The Whitehouse.gov petition site was set up in 2011 as a new way of petitioning the government online. Anyone within the USA can submit a petition on the "We the people" website, as long as it is not deemed offensive. That sounds great!

Currently, I see about 114 petitions on there, and a petitioner only has 30 days to gather enough signatures before it is closed, a pretty tall order. For a petition to get a response from the White House, it has to reach 100,000 signatures, or so they say.

Nextgov has provided some data on which petitions were responded to by the White House.

I wonder why this Snowden petition for pardon has yet to receive a reply despite reaching the required threshold.

Well ok, a few petitions have been successful on there at least:

1. stop using monkeys in military training
2. push patent reforms
3. publish the recipe for White House ale (whoop!)

We have a similar government raised petition site here in the UK. HM Government e-petitions also demands a 100,000 person threshold. Typically it will allow petitions to run for one year, then parliament decides if it should be debated.

Neither of these governmental sites seem to publish any success stories. However after some digging, I located one highly publicised one that did indeed pass in parliament:

Full disclosure of all government documents relating to 1989 Hillsborough disaster (government link)

Hillsborough disaster cabinet papers to be released (Guardian article)

So governments do take notice of the big petitions then, but why is change so difficult and rare?

                 "People are always looking for a single magic bullet that will totally change everything.                       There is no single magic bullet." ~ Temple Grandin

If it's unclear there is much hard evidence of their effectiveness in promoting change, why bother with them at all?

A small team of researchers at Oxford University did just that with their analysis described in this article. It is apparently extremely difficult for a petition to succeed.

Therefore, for some online petitions to really work, it's going to take more than just gathering signatures. Garnering media involvement appears crucial. For a petition to go viral and hence gather enough signatures, it must be perceived as having a good chance to reach the threshold and make an impact.

I've wondered if an e-signature is even valid. Are we just wasting our time?

I only got one response from Greenpeace when asking that!

"We represent you whenever we take action in the Artic, or in the forests of Indonesia, or lobby politicians or corporations who threaten our environment with their decisions and practices, so we thank you for your continued support"-Emily

Thanks, Emily. I am reassured signatures are helping then?

        The Mike Brown Law petition asks for police to wear body cameras.

Was this petition superfluous? The momentum is building anyway for police activity to be videotaped. The US government seems compelled to respond because Ferguson and other police killings of unarmed Black men have been all over the news. There has been an extreme public outcry on police violence along with widespread protests in the streets. Petition, shmetition?

The following might be an easier example to see a cause and effect. This change.org petition soon got into the news and social media with success; parents of a stage 4 cancer child were arrested because they wanted the best care which wasn't available in England.

Here was 16 year old Ethan Dallas handing in his petition in London. I do like this guy.

                                          Ashya King: Arrest warrant for parents to be withdrawn

                                          as CPS confirms they will face 'no further action' (link)

                                       

While this story seems to be one of the few and far between successes, if an e-petition merely raises awareness and public debate, is this a bad thing?

This Guardian article highlights how Change.org and its online petition formula has recently blossomed.

That's a pretty convincing argument e-petitions can and do create positive change. So let's not give up just yet on petitions. Let's keep an eye out for results. Imagine how useful a tool it might become to help abolish evils in this world.

Where do we start? Do you see this one working?

Okay, maybe that's not the best example.

I could go on and present many more examples, but the key issue in any petition is you have to hope it's going to work! I know. The question still remains: Is this fool's gold or are we onto something worthwhile?

Perhaps signing a petition is merely better than doing nothing at all. Hopefully at a minimum we are witnessing and participating in small seeds of change which will grow into meaningful social movement. It's something to reflect and act on. There's no point in simply spinning one's wheels, so we must do our homework.

I'll leave you with one highly influential petition site on the web. This link highlights Amnesty International's hard work in addressing human rights violations. I like them a lot.

Amnesty International Victories

Is Mike Pacteles the next cop to become famous?

                                          (click on images for better view)


Compare that to disgraced, San Jose cop Phillip White:

There is a fake anon who I used to follow and interact with. We were getting along fairly well. But then I started noticing things, like how that person is racist and interacts with verified paid fakes such as Jen Emick.

I learned many years ago that anon cowards are not worth troll-busting. Who are they? What would be the point? But give me a real name and then things get real and worth it.

The anon coward led me to Bleach Detroit. I would have never heard of them otherwise.

The big break came several days ago when Preacher was identified. Combine that with Pacteles' many uncomfortable, social media comments, and that is called Bingo.

Mike is now trying to distance himself from Bleach Detroit.

But that denial doesn't add up.

I have a lot of things saved, but I am trying to keep it short and simple to give this story the chance to go viral. Mike Pacteles is listed as a vendor owed money by the City of Detroit.

Is that for Bleach Detroit?

Detroit reporter Ronnie Dahl will be of no use. She is in Mike's back pocket.

I am the kind of internet investigator who lets the game come to him or her. If people leave me alone, I will probably have no clue who they are or what they are up to. However, if they keep getting in my space, I may decide to research and appraise the situation.

Pacteles has made more than a few tweets to me calling me mentally ill. I have saved those, if needed. That is called verbal abuse.

Beyond Mike being a supertroll, social media cop, an article popped up in August which caught my eye.

From Anarchists to Tibetan Monks, Here Are Some of the Outsiders Joining Protests in Ferguson

I was ready to give up on researching Kimberlin/BradBlog, until the "Michael Connell threatened by Karl Rove" hoax took wings. I was ready to forget about Bleach Detroit too, until I noticed they were getting plugged by Mother fricken Jones.

Have you ever heard of Hal Turner?

Pro-black bloc anarchists are working with Mike Pacteles as auxiliary police? Is that what we are supposed to believe? I have tons of saved stuff but am trying to not overwhelm anyone curious. I am trying to be patient.

Bleach Detroit's Preacher Exposed as Convicted Felon Let Out in October 2013

This will be the first of several posts I make concerning Bleach Detroit. For those who have followed me on Twitter, most of it will be nothing new. The above most definitely is.

This is the man referred to as Preacher. Here he is from a media photo confirming it is the same dude.

Why is a convicted felon running a privatised, neighbourhood policing group? Hmmmm, Mike Pacteles?

Feel free to click on images to get a larger view.

He is #421222 under the Otis MDOC system. It is extremely disturbing that the leader of a police group was just let out for having carried a concealed weapon.

I don't think he is the true leader of Bleach Detroit. Mike Pacteles is the one authorising it, in my educated opinion.

Mike is the kind of cop we have seen in social media getting fired for being an idiot.

Maybe he should have been more careful with whom he trolls.

Much more to come, when I get to it.

Riotous!

Donkeytale was kinda sorta prescient. He blasted Google for being in cahoots with the military-industrial complex. I was like, stifle it meathead. I'm tying together grand Rauhauser theory to modern day internet cointelpro, Edith.

Anyway, Julian Assange socratised it. Here is the link.

Police State Festering in Large Swath of Missouri

                                          (from In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police
                                          Whitney Curtis for The New York Times)

That was absolutely bizarre and surreal to witness. I found live feeds and social media was fairly useful in this story gaining national attention. I am talking about the militarised, police presence. There are actually a lot of different topics going on in relation to the assassination of Mike Brown. For this entry, I am sticking to the police state angle, on the aftermath of the brutal murder of unarmed teenager and apparent cigar aficionado Mike Brown. I found some stuff.

But first, I dropped a tweet on the Nick Gragnani mentioned in the above article.

I did a bit of socratisation, i.e. googling. This guy is tied to the hip of both the M.I.C. and the St. Louis County Police Department.

                                         
(Update: This loser has scrubbed both his linkedin and his Twitter account. So the next link is broken. Was it something I said?)

This guy is hardcore military. His linkedin account proves it.

Anyway, take a moment and reflect on Gragnani's money quote from the NYT's article:

“The focus is terrorism, but it’s allowed to do a crossover for other types of responses,” he said. “It’s for any type of civil unrest. We went by the grant guidance. There was no restriction put on that by the federal government.”

This dude was with that county police racket for over 18 years and then went directly into this Homeland Security crap.

You all probably recognise Jon Belmar at this point. He was the one in charge of the militarised police.

This is scary stuff, if you think about it. Without a doubt, the military is in control of St. Louis County, Missouri. These documents prove it. Granted, Alex Jones to the side, it was a fluke that Ferguson 2014 ever developed. Where else in the country could that type of police response have ever occurred? I know they locked down Watertown because of the Boston Marathon bombings, but no way in hell would Massachusetts police ever pull this kind of anti-constitutional, Kent State garbage. This was surreal and you know it. This crossed an incredibly hard to believe line. Thank God for what social media accomplished with this story, despite disinfo agents/police being all over comment sections. Here's more from Belmar's Linkedin:

Oooh, Special Operations.

His Linkedin reveals that he is just another Mr. Homeland Security pig. They surely went Stasi style indeed in arresting and attacking journalists with militarised police brutality. That was not very bright. This was truly a wow, wtf moment in American history.

Good sources and images explain it all.

Aaah, what's this?

Mass casualty drill held at Chesterfield Mall 

(excerpt - emphasis mine)

(KMOV.com) – Chesterfield Mall was the scene of a multi-agency mass casualty drill on Sunday night.

According to the Monarch Fire Protection District, the drill focused on decision-making, coordination and integration with other organizations during an active shooter scenario.
The drill included two active shooters who randomly shot at citizens throughout Chesterfield Mall. One of the shooters detonated a backpack IEP after he was shot by police. The second shooter heard an explosion and took hostages... Chesterfield Police, St. Louis County Police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were among those who participated.

Oh, did I mention that Belmar also has FBI training to go with his homeland security skills?

Here is a nice news story which reported on this specific Homeland Security corruption taking place in a sizable chunk of a state.

Homeland security: 'Did we spend the money wisely

An Abe Cook is prominently featured. This guy and all these people must be raking it in pretty good off of the taxpayers. 

I have two final links to share. They are in pdf. Those guys are in total cahoots with STARRS and the Nick Bragnani featured by the NYT. Belmar and Cook are on the Board of Directors. Here is the proof to go with Belmar's admission on Linkedin:

That is the group getting all the millions if not more of dollars for the War on Terror hoax. There is your smoking gun, from their very own website.

This explains why it went so nutty in Ferguson. I'm sorry, but I am not from a redneck state where this could ever have happened. Those people are totally fried in the head. It's called authoritarian personality disorder.

This is what it boils down to. The St. Louis County Police Department is run by Homeland Security, which itself is part and parcel of the Military-Industrial Complex and emerging fascism. I tweeted the Governor. I told him to remove the militarised police at once.

And the man heeded my wisdom. Good for him. He fired the SLCPD military numbnuts and replaced them with the regular guy state trooper schtick. We all love the state troopers over the other cops. They still suck. But they tend to have guys e.g. who smoke weed and don't sweat the small stuff. But this is a pure gratuitous digression. I am sorry.

This was basically the easy, Captain Obvious move for Nixon to make. I am not sure why he didn't see this coming to begin with. Maybe he has the Richard Nixon gene. Though I doubt they are related. It is a fairly common last name. There was this guy on the Red Sox, another redneck, named Trot Nixon. He really has nothing to do with this report. Mike Timlin and Curt Schilling are certified wingnuts, though. I can confirm that as a witness.

The expenditures by STARRS are disgusting. You can check out some of them (pdf's):

ST. LOUIS AREA REGIONAL RESPONSE SYSTEM 
BOARD OF DIRECTORS 
Thursday, September 20, 2012 - 11:30 A.M.


AGENDA 
ST. LOUIS AREA REGIONAL RESPONSE SYSTEM 
BOARD OF DIRECTORS 
Thursday, March 13, 2014 - 11:30 A.M. 
EAST-WEST GATEWAY COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS


My work here is done. Now you know the rest of the story.

Internet Cointelpro Confirmed as Part and Parcel of The Program

What is SAIC and why should we care?

[Update: I have had this one on the back burner for far too long. My heart is simply no longer into blogging. It's not about not being paid. It's more like how many times can someone hammer in the same nail. (This is an update within the update: blogging is fun. It goes in cycles. I'm actually trying to run through whatever is left here, edit lightly, then click publish. I know there is stuff at the end I never finished, but that's where the miracle of the related links schtick will come into play. Now we will return to the update I wrote before.)

I have been proven correct over time. I have been one of the loudest saying the internet is rigged with various forms of astroturf all over it, including military. Glenn Greenwald is now a confirmed fraud. His "big finale" turned out to be nothing new. If anything, he is promoting "The Program" by making it seem the M.I.C.'s true objective is to fight terrorism.

The "War on Terror" is a hoax. This is literally about Orwell's vision of 1984 coming to fruition. There is something called Special Operations Division (SOD). Law enforcement wishes to use the creepy surveillance to make arrests. Their big problem is they must generate something called parallel construction. They can't admit where they got the original information. This is the crucial link to read:

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans [end of update]

The Actual Blog Entry

SAIC stands for Science Applications International Corporation. Mark Rasch is its public face. He ends up on t.v. and is quoted in a lot of articles. The link above proves SAIC is part and parcel of grotesque surveillance. That is from Snowden documents. Rasch is in essence a general for internet cointelpro.

A quick googling of SAIC/FBI reveals that the two have been in deep, historic partnership. There was something called Trilogy. It was going to be new and improved J. Edgar Hoover. However, its "virtual case file" schtick failed miserably. Nonetheless, that failed enterprise does establish an early, direct tie from cointelpro to SAIC. Ironically, the Trilogy debacle didn't end the FBI's partnership with SAIC. In 2010, the Financial News Network reported that the two were still tied to the hip.

The tragedy of 9/11 was churned into the primary propaganda used by the M.I.C. to justify their total information dragnet of today. If only the information was shared better! If only we had ALL the info! This led to Homeland Security being established along with all sorts of partnerships including FBI and even police. It is all classified. We only know what they admit to sans whistleblowers, and then that is only if we put on our critical thinking caps and dig, read, and reflect.

On July 3, 2013, SAIC opened up a position for an XKEYSCORE Systems Engineer. Unfotunately for them, this program was exposed to the zeitgeist by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald just 28 days later. In that listing, SAIC claims:

SAIC is a FORTUNE 500® scientific, engineering, and technology applications company that uses its deep domain knowledge to solve problems of vital importance to the nation and the world, in national security, energy & environment, health and cybersecurity. The company's approximately 41,000 employees serve customers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, other U.S. Government civil agencies and selected commercial markets. Headquartered in McLean, Va., SAIC had annual revenues of approximately $10.6 billion for its fiscal year ended January 31, 2012. For more information, visit www.saic.com. SAIC: From Science to Solutions®

 Hmmm, selected commercial markets....

We know through Anonymous that HB Gary was practicing cointelpro. Now we see that HB Gary and SAIC work together.

Stratfor is another security company caught with its hands in the internet cointelpro cookie jar. They were exposed by hacker Jeremy Hammond, who we now know was entrapped by the FBI via Sabu. Apparently the FBI was more interested in catching another patsy than in protecting information highlighting their entrapment scams and attacks on freedom of association.

By the way, Hammond is a political prisoner to go with Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange. We are all prisoners of this insanity. This will establish we are doomed, if this madness is not crushed based on its merits. There should be no debate that total information surveillance should be abolished. Only sick fucks could have ever come up with something like that. And someone would have to be quite the stupid fuck to not see this. Please pardon my language. This is unsettling because it's true and it's what's going on during our lifetimes. It's utterly shocking and grotesque.

Another quick google search confirms my suspicion that Stratfor too is buddies with SAIC. Thank you, Wikileaks.

Re: SAIC Group Sub

[Customer Service/Technical Issues] SAIC Seats

This link exhibits more conspiracy between Stratfor and SAIC, while referencing something called Trapwire.

Let's get back to the SAIC document on virtual games, the link at the very top of this page. If you scroll down to where the screenshot was taken, you can see that all my chatter over the years about internet cointelpro was spot on. The thing is, you can look at what they are doing with computer games/arg's and apply it across the board to everything they do. They are everywhere. Donkeytale is either being retarded or works for them.

You can read the thing for yourselves. They talk of infiltrating whole sections of the internet. They speak of dispensing counter-propaganda. Snowden didn't lie. He could have spied on Obama in real time, if he had his email address or some other identifying information. These fuckers are all about collecting everything. Only an asshole would downplay the chance to end The Program, seeing that so much got dumped and revealed.

It just hit me there is soooo much evidence that cointelpro is all over the net. That is good. It is better to know than to sense. It also means we should have more faith in people. A lot of the so-called trolls are indeed agent provocateurs. We know that now.

The original title of this was gonna be, "Is Wired Magazine Part and Parcel of the Military-Industrial Complex?" However, of course Wired Magazine is disinfo. They are not worthy of being in any title.

It takes reading and analysis to piece it together. Basically, you can take something like the above and apply it to blogs, Twitter, social media, etc.. This is what they do. They admit above it is all psychological operations. The cyber magician document covering the Brits is the same garbage. You can read that document and be rest assured the FBI/NSA are doing the same. They don't even need FISA rubber stamps to track anyone they want to. And yes indeed they are doing it to whomever they like.

Greenwald is supposed to reveal a huge list of American targets. I don't know what he is waiting for. I am now doubting it ever happens. I hope I'm wrong.

I kind of want to mail the rest of this one in. The proverbial them want us to feel overwhelmed. I don't go that route anymore. I respect thinkers. I am not paid and am not going to spoon-feed what is readily available.

Rasch is directly tied to Rauhauser and Wired Magazine. That was the inspiration to this whole thingie to begin with. But that is just noise, those two along with Poulsen and Kim Zetter. So I will simply organise the rest of the remaining links and share them. They open up in new windows for convenience.

I am basically taking the pressure off of myself to write in a linear, conformist manner.  The mosaic approach is how I operate. They chart your reactions when they troll you. They log in all your metadata. They grab everything they can for your own personal, virtual case file for The Program and paid through your taxes. Do you feel safe?