Um, Why Are Military Helicopters Firing Machine Guns Over Houston and Miami?

[Fire Walk With Me]

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/joshua-holland/um-why-are-military-helicopters-firing-machine-guns-over-houston-and-miami

The sight of Army helicopters and the sound of gunfire created a lot of concern Monday afternoon in one Houston neighborhood.

SkyEye 13 HD was over the south side where at first look, it appeared there was a massive SWAT scene happening.We received a lot of phones calls, Tweets and Facebook posts from worried neighbors, wondering what was going on.

With military helicopters flying above her southeast Houston neighborhood, Frances Jerrals didn't know what to think.

"When you see this, you think the worst. When you hear this, you think the worst," Jerrals said.

(More, and videos at the link.)

[patrice]

1. Disaster prep exercise? Maybe someone has decided to make it look like they did something

useful with all of that Homeland Security money that we gave them . . . ?

Though I have NO idea why that would include weapons' use, simulated or otherwise.

[DJ13]

2. (More, and videos at the link.)

[Fire Walk With Me]

4. Sorry! Updated. n/t

[DJ13]

6. Thanks!

[Renew Deal]

3. Alex Jones must be going crazy

[Angry Dragon]

5. Showing their support for the 2nd Amendment

[longship]

7. Because doing so over Detroit doesn't accomplish much?

[Demeter]

8. There's no one left to notice in Detroit

I cry for my hometown

[longship]

9. There's always the Heidelberg Project.

And then there's the Detroit Opera House:


I saw two performances of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro there. The second was the best of the best, including the performance at The Met in the late 70's.

Detroit is doing fine, I hope. If only the Tigers could repeat their 1968 season. Too bad that Tiger Stadium is gone.

[tama]

10. Community gardens

http://www.slowfooddetroit.org/articles6.html

Perhaps too much under radar to take notice of, but better eat (healthy and delicious local slow food) than to draw too much attention.

[Demeter]

13. Detroit has lost 2/3 of its population and most of its jobs

Reverting to pre-US times to survive.

[tama]

14. pre-US times?

What does that mean? That if US is not a technocratic monster ethnociding indigenous peoples and destroying horticultural etc. sustainable ways of life, it's not US?

What about Johnny Appleseed? Thoreau? Hippies and Rainbow people? Millions of American gardeners and family farmers? Have they been contemporary Americans or anti-Americans?

Even accepting that, the correct temporal relation would be post-US, not pre-US.

[Demeter]

15. 1600's is Pre US

[tama]

16. We have learned a lot

about gardening etc. since that. That's something we have been very good at for a long time, and keep on getting better. Horticulture is very progressive.

When PO awareness was becoming more common, there was a book and movie called 'End of Suburbia' with wide audience. What we are seeing in Detroit and elsewhere, however, is not the end, but rebirth.

[Demeter]

17. Several Groups of the American Indians

were into sustainability long before the first Europeans arrived. Depending on the society and the terrain.

They probably learned shortly after wiping out most of the larger mammals on the continent....

[tama]

18. Yes

And the scope is almost unimaginable nowadays, all of California a food forest tended by Indian fires etc., the pre-Columbian Amazon civilization of which we only now beginning to learn about, etc.

Those are old skills that we can relearn, but we have also new skills to add to the mix. Many plants have been using humans very effectively to spread them to new areas and to widen their gene spool. Johnny Appleseed is just one, but classic example, of a human serving a plant, which gave him also the name by which he is best known. Sometimes things go kudzu, from our limited human point of view, but that too is... interesting. Besides edible and medicinal.

[antiquie]

20. Many are in survival mode.

Wood-burning on the days it is allowed, growing own food and sharing, making own clothes, doing without, the list goes on.

[tama]

11. Very irresponsible and contemptuous

not to inform residents or even fire department of the drill.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

12. The constant conditioning,

desensitizing and media-stupefying is unbelievable. And it works. DU would have completely freaked out if this shit went down during the Bush administration, but now a GD thread about it is 'creative speculation'.

[antiquie]

19. Keep the public afraid.

It must suit more of their purposes than just their economics.