Drudge Story On Midwest Spy Drones Doesn't Even Mention Drones!

In fact, the story says EPA officials actually go up in small planes to conduct surveillance:

EPA officials explained during a meeting with ranchers in West Point, Neb., that they lease small planes that fly EPA staffers over cattle operations. The staffers take photographs as they seek evidence of illegal animal waste running off into rivers and streams.

ParanoiaWillDestroyYa.

An Historicist Explanation Of Fascism Which Unintentionally Describes America

Seen here:

"Fascism resulted from the mobilization of mass armies, the creation of command economies, and the problem of reintegrating veterans into war-torn societies."

Is there a better explanation than this for what happened in America since The Great Depression, whose presidents have drawn their inspiration, now more, now less, from the strong men of Europe as mediated through the legacy of FDR?

In America the creation of the command economy preceded the mobilization for the world war, but the twin developments set the conditions for the state's new role in American life. 

American-style fascism bloomed in The Great Depression and Second World War and then grew through the post-war cult of education, with its original GI Loan Program writ ever larger year by year with newer names and until finally nationalized under Barack Obama, who owes his political success not to the Marxist socialists who inspired and bank-rolled his education but to Chicagoans whose financial success in real estate depended upon government planning, cooperation and exploitation of the poor. He is the epitome of the strangely blended system. 

The proliferation of American fascism occurred through the decades-long expansion of minor educational institutions, cow colleges and junior colleges into degraded and degrading universities which came to elevate the promise of mere vulgar employment to the status of an educated person's learned and wise perspective. A Bachelor's Degree in Physical Education became the equivalent of one in mathematics, and the sixth grade teacher seriously asks the students today to bring an empty white business "envelop" to the next class.

If an education no longer results in gainful employment, we are told, a sin has been committed against education's one and only commandment: Thou shalt get a credential for a job. From fund-raisers who call university alumni to the Rush Limbaughs and Dave Ramseys of the world, an education in a traditional department of human knowledge which fails to lead to employment is useless and worthless.  

Today there are hopeful signs of acute crisis in this consensus even as it reaches its zenith.

Participants graduate with crushing loads of debt in a new environment of depressed wages, long before they have good jobs, spouses, homes, cars and children.

And while the fields of graduates are white unto harvest and they continue to be recruited on-site by big businesses, many of which are responsible for key program funding for the system itself, the number of available jobs has shrunk dramatically as low American GDP resembles present day Europe more than it does its own much more vibrant past. It's as if the system has reached its limit to perpetuate itself.

The lesser products of the universities end up as functionaries in government union shops in the public school system or as media mouthpieces whose job it is to promote the jobs message, but declining tax revenues in the states and diffusion of media due to technology change the calculus for career-minded teachers and "information" workers. As we've seen in Wisconsin, the people who must pay and pay and pay again have had enough. And today's pad will doubtless become yesterday's laptop.

Those not yet quite up to the college experience who can't get an assembly line job because there aren't any may hope to join the military with the promise of money for education later, after the tour of duty. But the prospects for duty look less likely to include personnel-rich adventurism going forward as drone-war proliferates. Out-of-shape teenagers and malcontents in any event will find it increasingly difficult to join a shrinking all-volunteer military.

The failure of faith in the cult of education will necessarily precede the demise of the system, and it appears to be accomplishing this all by itself by not delivering on its promise. It wouldn't be the first time, but you'd need a useless degree to appreciate that. 

The UK Guardian Savages Obama As An Authoritarian and Killer

Here:

[T]he three major policies of the Bush war on terror – rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention – continue to this day. But Mr Obama has also presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. There is a ferocious crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. And he has become a true believer in drones. ...

[T]his administration is highlighting the fact that its president is a killer. In this new age of secrecy, three dozen current and former advisers are allowed to talk to the New York Times about the president's role of personally overseeing the shadow war with al-Qaida. Mr Obama has not been shy about the role he personally played in Osama bin Laden's death. His counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan makes speeches defending drone strikes as legal, ethical and wise. This administration is not on the defensive about its summary executions. It positively seeks to advertise them.

Misspelled Words Have Become Routinized At The Atlantic

As seen here, where the writer evidently thinks "routenized" is built off of "route", or something:

Sorry Krauthammer, A Drone's Already Been Shot Down

A cheap $300 drone anyone may purchase, but still a drone. It was shot down anonymously, by small arms fire, here in the USA.

For Krauthammer's remarks, see here. For the drone shoot-down, which was in February already, see here.

What Krauthammer doesn't realize is these things are going to get so small you'll never know one from the moth resting on the side of the house in a shady cool spot in the heat of the day.

Better shoot while the shootin's good, because pretty soon you're going to need a flyswatter instead of a shotgun.

George Orwell's Black Vision of Total Surveillance Realized With Drones

So says Peter Popham for the UK Independent, here:

The use of drones for the surveillance purposes sketched by Gitlin takes us back to their original function. The critical weakness of the Nazi doodlebug was the lack of control: its only use was as a mechanical kamikaze. Once you had control of the thing, everything changed. George Orwell was the first to describe the possibilities, in his novel 1984. "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and dashed away again with a curving flight," he wrote in the novel's first chapter. "It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows...". ...

It is the snooping function foreseen by Orwell that is the most significant next step for drones in our societies: with our cities and public buildings already saturated with surveillance cameras, we may fondly suppose that the state's monitoring of our daily lives has gone as far as it can go. But we ain't seen nothing yet. ...

Orwell's black vision of total surveillance – "It was even conceivable," he wrote in 1984, "that [the Thought Police] watched everybody all the time" – is finally achieving its technological apotheosis. In a few weeks, the US Army is expected to deploy in Afghanistan its latest helicopter-style drone, the A160 Hummingbird, equipped with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras. Able to hover, unlike current drones, it will have "unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground", the Army says. Able to track people and vehicles from above 20,000ft, and with a 65sq-mile field of view, it will have 65 steerable "windows" able to follow separate targets. More modest surveillance drones may be used to enhance police monitoring of London's Olympics.

Domestic Drone Authorizations Are Set To Explode

Locations on this map in red are active.

Get the map here.

Government will soon have total information awareness about YOU.

The decision was bi-partisan and sailed through the so-called Tea Party US House of Representatives.

Thanks, Republicans. What good are you?

Prepare for Police Drones Spying on You from 400 Feet Starting May 1

Total information awareness, brought to you by the Republican US House of Representatives, the Democrat US Senate, and the president who cares only about himself: his ideas, his pleasure and his power.

Computerworld has the story here:

The Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, signed into law by President Barack Obama last month, requires the FAA to permit the use of drones by law enforcement agencies, commercial organizations and hobbyists.

The statute will initially let law enforcement authorities and emergency services use drones that weigh less than five pounds and fly at an altitude of less than 400 feet starting in May. The law requires that the FAA have rules in place permitting the use of all varieties of drones by law enforcement and private entities by the end of 2015. ...

The Center for Democracy and Technology contends that the legislation provides no privacy or civil liberties protections for ordinary citizens.

The law "says nothing about the privacy implications of filling the sky with thousands of flying robots," said Harley Geiger, senior policy council at the Washington-based think tank.

In South Carolina Private Drone Shot Down With Small Arms

Video here. Story here.

F. Fukuyama: Our World is Devoid of Monstrous Projects of Social Transformation

The Big Lie, softly told.

In The New York Times, here:

"The undergraduate students I teach . . . are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes."

He's never heard of Barack Obama, I guess, nor the enormous crime of abortion in which all our intellectuals are complicit, nor the compulsion of ObamaCare, targeted drone killings, the TSA's war on the fourth amendment, the illegal war in Libya, TARP and the fascist bank bailouts, the zero interest rate policy war against elderly savers, the war on carbon, the war on the rich and the middle class, gays in the military . . ..

Obama's Attack on Roman Catholicism Evokes Charges of Tyranny, Fascism, Totalitarianism

From one Mark Judge, here:

The New Comstockery is a metastasizing liberal cancer not just of intolerance, but of hatred for those who disagree. ...

The New Comstockery is fascist. ...

[L]iberal tyranny ... has become evident recently in both the Obama administration[']s violation of the First Amendment in forcing Catholic institutions to sell birth control, and the reaction to the Susan Komen Foundation's attempt to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. ...

[S]omething ... in our time has become a terrible reality: the totalitarian impulse of liberalism, particularly when it comes to sexual matters.

Pace Mark Judge, the consequences of the relaxation of morals in the West produced a horrific 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic. It makes no difference that the tens of millions killed here in America have been faceless. Their blood cries out no less than the millions of Stalin's and Hitler's victims.

Nor has the impulse to liberal tyranny been only just recently evident.

It was evident to many of us much earlier, especially in ObamaCare in 2010 and in the fascist bailouts of 2009, which gave rise to the Tea Party. George Bush's liberalism which ended with TARP at home was just the kinder, gentler Republican version of it, trampling out the vintage for the most part in foreign fields.

But Obama has brought the grapes of wrath back home.

Few have been the voices decrying the expansion of the national security state in 2011. The Department of Homeland Security and the TSA have been hard at work implementing nationwide checkpoint programs, using scanners and military surveillance technology, particularly drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to "patrol the borders," hunt down cattle rustlers and execute without trial (admittedly noxious) American citizens in foreign lands.

In 2012 the Republican House is actually cooperating by passing legislation which routinizes the domestic integration of UAVs under the control of the FAA. And Republicans think Mitt Romney is going to make a difference?

The revolution has been measured, taking off one obstacle at a time so as not to cause widespread alarm, but its objectives are indeed totalist.  Dismissing religious freedom now in 2012 almost comes as an afterthought, a mere by-product of ObamaCare.

The spider weaves its web, and soon we will all be caught it in, if we aren't already.

It's good that Mark Judge is finally paying attention.

Is anyone else?

"There is no contradiction between economic Liberalism and Socialism."

                               -- Oswald Spengler, 1933 

Supremes Rule Unanimously Against Warrantless GPS Use By Police

As reported by The Washington Post here:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.

The GPS device helped authorities link Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction.

NOW WE NEED A SIMILAR RULING ON . . .

SPY DRONES

SCANNERS

AND SATELLITES.

ND Sheriff Calls in US Border Control Predator B Drone to Execute Search for $6K in Rustled Beef

Reminds me of Lincoln starting a civil war over a dead horse at Ft. Sumter.

Note the prominent emphasis on "law enforcement" at this government website (link). The use of military weaponry for law enforcement is the modus operandi of the US government at least since the Clinton regime used tanks to crush the Branch Davidians in Waco. 911 gave the strategy new impetus under the Bush regime, and the starry eyed leftist dupes who voted for Obama have witnessed nothing but a continuation of Bush policies under Obama building on the Patriot Act.

The crime here was a lousy misdemeanor offense, and escalated into a felony in part because of the sheriff's actions. More ominously, Federal level quasi-military resources were mobilized against citizens. The militarization of units of the FBI, DHS and BATFE, among others, is all part of the same pattern of Federals crossing the line into military tyranny (Is there any other kind?).

The LA Times has the story (link):

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

Unmanned Drone

h/t Steyn

Here Come The Bird and Insect Drones: They'll Be Hiding in Plain Sight, Watching You

The New York Times has the story, here:

In February, researchers unveiled a hummingbird drone, built by the firm AeroVironment for the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which can fly at 11 miles per hour and perch on a windowsill. But it is still a prototype. One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.

Miami Police Want Honeywell Spy Drone to Stare into Homes and Backyards

The story is reported by CBS Miami here:

Police admit the MAV, if flown low enough, has the ability to look into people’s home, but that is not its intended purpose.

For a description of the Honeywell (designed-for-the-military-backpack-able) Micro Air Vehicle, see here and here:

The story uses the word "scan," which is alarming and is reminiscent of the backscatter scanners being used at airports, but these MAVs are equipped with cameras only, as if that isn't bad enough. The technology isn't developed enough to make scanners this small (13 inches in diameter), but don't say you weren't warned when I'm telling you again that that's coming.

Super Bowl "Unmanned Helicopters" is Code for DHS Spy Drones

The NBC DFW affiliate reports here:

Arlington Police have acquired some new equipment with homeland security grants including unmanned helicopters to watch over the stadium site [for the Super Bowl].

That's code for DraganFlyers, provided by DraganFly Innovations, Inc., teeny tiny little spy drones which look like little remote control toy helicopters but have sophisticated camera capabilities, as described here:

Police in Colorado Use Draganflyer Spy Drone

According to The Washington Post, here:

"Not since the Taser has a technology promised so much for law enforcement," said Ben Miller of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, which has used its drone, called a Draganflyer, to search for missing persons after receiving emergency authorization from the FAA.

From the company website here:

Carried in a backpack, ready for flight in minutes.

"At hover the Draganflyer X6 produces less than (approx.) 65dB of sound at one meter (3 feet), and less than (approx.) 60dB at three meters (9 feet)."

Used under very cold conditions at accident scene.

This unit was made ready for deployment under very cold conditions in the front seat of a police car.

Police in Austin, Texas, Deploy WASP to Reconnoiter Suspect's House

Story here in The Washington Post:

So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect. ... Among state and local agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety has been the most active user of drones for high-risk operations. Since the search outside Austin [in 2009] ... the agency has run six operations with drones, all near the southern border, where officers conducted surveillance of drug and human traffickers. ... In a 1986 Supreme Court case, justices were asked whether a police department violated constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure after it flew a small plane above the back yard of a man suspected of growing marijuana. The court ruled that "the Fourth Amendment simply does not require the police traveling in the public airways at this altitude to obtain a warrant in order to observe what is visible to the naked eye."

WASPs are made by AeroVironment, Inc.

You will have nowhere to hide from the tyranny, unless you stop it now.

Incompetent WSVN.com Shows the Wrong Spy Drone in Miami-Dade Police Story

Here's the drone shown in the video by WSVN.com, which their own story says weighs 20 pounds and is called a Honeywell T Hawk:

Link to the story with video here (dc20500 caught the error and posted so in the comment section).

You'd think the numbskulls could at least check Wikipedia (here) and showcase the correct object so people in Florida know what to look for.

And when it's weaponized it will perfectly resemble the probe droid sent to the planet Hoth in Star Wars.