It’s a shame that the questions regarding 17-year old David Hogg’s questionable behavior has been branded with the “conspiracy theory” label, because there are legitimate concerns about how Hogg is behaving on-camera.  Instead of going into theories about this guy, just watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GpWiHUczNc

It seems fairly obvious that he’s attempting to remember a rehearsed script.

Now, David Hogg is the son of retired FBI agent Kevin Hogg.  Does that matter?  It probably at the very least is influencing David’s blind defense of the FBI, despite the fact that they received, and failed to act on, two tips regarding the Florida shooter.

Additionally, and significantly, the local police department received 20 calls warning of Nikolas Cruz’s clear desire to massacre a school, calls that they also ignored.

David also began pushing the gun-control narrative very early, even recording a bizarre video of himself supposedly while inside the school while the shooting was taking place. Here is a link to that particular video:

Student David Hogg during Florida school shooting: “It’s time to take a stand on gun control”

Does he seem oddly calm to you?  Is this how you would behave in the midst of a massacre of your fellow students?

All this doesn’t mean that Hogg is a “crisis actor”, although there appears to be something off about him.  He appears to be someone who desires attention above all else and is clearly willing to do anything in order to be on TV.

BUT, questions about his odd behavior should not be dismissed as baseless paranoia.  They are legitimate, as are the questions about the lack of response to the multiple warnings of an imminent attack on a school.

Instead, the gun-control narrative immediately emerged, and the major media outlets appear to be doing everything they can to drag the survivors in front of their cameras to give an account that advances that narrative.

An event as serious as the death of 17 schoolkids should be probed and prodded with endless questions by everyone.  Instead, we are being cowed and bullied into accepting the one narrative that not only absolves the incompetent bottom-feeding bureaucrats at the FBI and police department, but grants the federal government even more power over the lives of everyone else.

The Guardian: Britain sold spying gear to Philippines despite Duterte’s brutal drug war

ZDnet: Facial recognition in lieu of passport close to reality at Australian airports

Reason: City orders businesses to join its police surveillance system

The Intercept: US-trained police are hunting down and arresting protesters amid post-election crisis in Honduras

The Hill: Bump stock prices skyrocket after Trump proposes ban Ed: Actual, real gun control coming from Trump.  And remember, during the campaign he proposed empowering police to literally take guns away from people, probably minorities, in the inner-cities.

CNN: We guard office buildings and casinos, so why not our children?

Motherboard: The Pentagon has the worst PowerPoint slides you’ve ever seen

Places Journal: The disposition of drones

FEE: Socialized medicine is “free”, but leads to really, really long wait times

National Review: Don’t overestimate Trump’s ability to knowingly collude with Russia

Motherboard: Hackers infiltrated Tesla to mine cryptocurrency

Reason: After the gun ban

Big Think: Why Hitler thought the world was made of ice

Welcome to the new visitors to this site.  As I’ve said before, this is a stripped-down news aggregation site with short commentary by someone with credentials that don’t stretch much beyond ‘concerned citizen’.  New content will be added throughout every day, along with short commentary. The main focus will be the rise of the Surveillance State, with an aim to killing it while its still wobbling about with the shell still on its head, before it realizes its potential.  We are rapidly approaching a point in time when it will no longer be possible to end total surveillance, when the interests of so many powerful groups are aligned in its favor that peaceful revolt will be impossible.

My previous writing has been scattered to the digital winds, and covered a range of subjects.  All of my writing will now be confined to this space, and focused almost exclusively on raising awareness of a rapidly expanding complex of total surveillance of every citizen by our own government.  It’s not conspiracy, it is fact.  On a daily basis, headlines proclaim the advance of the latest form of surveillance.  We must resist this normalization of the destruction of our privacy.

The fundamental motive for our resistance to total surveillance is one of mere survival.  During the 20th century, governments of the world murdered 262 million unarmed, unresisting civilians.  R.J. Rummel, the researcher who estimated this number, dubbed this hideous phenomenon “democide” and said that this total is 6 times the number of people killed in combat in every single war combined during that century.  This fact alone should be enough to convince most people to be “anti-government”.

We resist total surveillance because we resist the expansion of power of the most murderous institution devised by the human race: government itself.  While we need some method of enforcement of our laws and protection of our liberty, it should be recognized that once we place the monopoly on the use of violence within one institution, we have created the single greatest threat to our survival as a species.  This thing, once created, must be kept chained down.  But all of history has shown that every attempt to keep this institution shackled has failed.  It immediately surrounds itself with a religious aura, with symbols that must be worshipped.  And not to get too melodramatic, but this institution like no other demands reverence, hands over hearts, and sacrifices, whether in the form of a portion of our paychecks or a mortgage on the lives of our children and grandchildren.

I recently attended Oklahoma’s legislative session, and came away with several insights I hadn’t thought of before.  One: the State worships itself.  Specifically, there was a very long prayer recited before the bills were voted on.  While it was ostensibly directed at the Christian god, it was obvious to what institution this orison was directed.  Whatever was circling the air and infecting the minds and hearts of those in attendance was not a god of justice or mercy.  Heads were bowed and eyes closed in fealty and reverence to the granter of riches, to the man-made god of organized and institutionalized aggression.  Then came the hideous Pledge of Allegiance, progeny of State-worshipping Francis Bellamy’s sick mind, who also thought up what has been dubbed the ‘Bellamy Salute’, or a hand outstretched to the flag.  This is what we resist.

For the sake of the survival of the human race, we must retain the ability to hide from the State.  This is why we oppose total surveillance.  Once our every action, every movement, is catalogued, assessed, scrutinized, we stand completely vulnerable under the ancient, unblinking eye of the executioner of entire populations.

And so ends this caffeine-fuel screed.

Reason: Border Patrol agents don’t need Big Brother spying powers over Americans, but they want them anyway

Futurism: As drones become tools of war, companies turn to hacking them

Idaho Statesman: This Boise company will demonstrate how its tech can thwart a drone attack

Ars Technica: Facebook has been sharing our data for months to help study income inequality

VICE News: Neil Gorsuch is shaping up to be an unlikely defender of your privacy

Washington Examiner: Is it time to crack down on facial recognition tech?

Techdirt: Court sends cop back to prison for bogus ‘contempt of cop’ arrest

Eurasia Review: Germany launches intelligence satellite to escape US influence

Policy Options: Personal drones, AI, and our privacy

MultiBriefs: New developments in police technology

NextGov: Nvidia making facial recognition AI for smart city surveillance

The Verge: Here are some of the ways experts think AI might screw with us in the next five years

MIT Technology Review: The ‘Black Mirror’ scenarios that are leading some experts to call for more secrecy on AI

The Drive: Samsung just patented display drones controlled by your eyes, face, and hand gestures

Quartz: Artificial intelligence’s ‘paper-clip maximizer’ metaphor can explain humanity’s imminent doom

Ars Technica: Inching closer to a DNA-based file system

PAT BUCHANAN: Is that Russian troll farm really an act of war?

The Federalist: Is a former Feinstein staffer running Fusion GPS’s post-election Steel dossier operation?

Techdirt: NSA-created computer security exploit stolen by hackers now powering cryptocurrency mining malware

Bloomberg: The car of the future will sell your data

Telegraph: US preparing ‘bloody nose’ cyber attacks on North Korea

American Thinker: Why aren’t the media and other Democrats angry at the FBI for not doing their job instead of Trump for tweeting about it?

The Intercept: Blowback: How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it

BestVPN: UK children subjected to invasive data retention

City Journal: Judgment day for public unions

Activist Post: End the War on Drugs for these very practical reasons

Washington Post: Taxing Americans out of its liberty

Mises: Security works at Disney—but can’t work at a public school?

Biometric Update: EFF calls for independent oversight and privacy protection in facial recognition report

City Journal: America’s missing $21 trillion

LA Times: The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries

The American Conservative: Trump’s military parade: Toy soldiers made larger-than-life

Washington Post: AI ‘gaydar’ could compromise LGBTQ people’s privacy, safety

Ars Technica: Ketamine studies help zero in on roots of depression

High Times: 8 of the craziest weed conspiracies that might be true

The Intercept: For President’s Day, here’s one vicious, ghastly and/or fascinating fact about every US President  Ed: George Washington had dentures made from the teeth of the men and women he enslaved.  For Godssake.

Reason: A cure for mass shootings doesn’t exist

American Thinker: An emerging police state that spies on Americans? The Left yawns

Washington Examiner: Jeff Sessions: Justice Department investigating process used by FBI to apply for FISA warrants

Activist Post: Fox News cuts off reporter when she links psychotropic drugs to Florida shooter

FEE: Foreign meddling won’t undermine tyranny, but this will

National Review: Fire the FBI Chief

Consortium News: Anti-Trumpists use Mueller indictment to escalate tensions with nuclear-armed Russia

I really like this group of socialists: WSWS: Indictment of Russian nationals used to campaign for censorship and war

NR on a roll today: National Review: End 9/11 Syndrome at the FBI

ScienceMag: This Roman ‘gate to hell’ killed its victims with carbon dioxide

The Sooner Politics front page has a picture that declares “There’s 2 kinds of people: 1. Those who love freedom. 2. Those who love power. The 2nd group preys on the 1st. Never elect the 2nd.”

A straight-forward sentiment that most people would agree on in theory.  In practice, we almost always elect the 2nd. Why?  Because the second type is very good at hijacking the message of the 1st.  Indeed, in many ways they’re better at selling a false hope of more freedom than the true freedom-fighters.  These political grifters have an uncanny ability to time their slogans and emotional appeals to the spirit of the moment, and, once swept into office, proceed to enact their authoritarian agenda.

To distinguish the two groups, one must have a fairly solid understanding of the philosophy of liberty, as well as the type of person most likely to defend and advance it, as opposed to an authoritarian opportunist who picks up pro-freedom slogans when it suits his campaign.  The hidden authoritarian will be inconsistent: they’ll tell one group of voters one thing, and another group will get another message. They’ll speak generically, and shy away from any specific policy proposals.

The true pro-liberty candidate will leap into specifics immediately, and will be straightforward with policy proposals.  The hidden authoritarian will hedge his comments and leave a way out for himself if his comments get him into trouble.

Beware vagueness, which, more than any other quality, augurs the future authoritarian.

Ars Technica: Judge shuts door on attempt to get a new trial for Ross Ulbricht

Inverse: How Facebook seemingly knows everything about you

Antiwar.com: Ike’s Military-Industrial-Congressional complex is alive and well

The Intercept: How the UK hacked a European ally and got away with it

Mises: How to kill 300,000 Americans with opioids

New York Times: Russia isn’t the only one meddling in elections.  We do it, too.

Alternet: Humans would rather be in contact with aliens than artificial life created here on Earth, according to study

MintPressNews: The US military will have more robots than humans by 2025

DANIEL LARISON: Maximalist demands won’t change North Korean behavior

Techdirt: The US intel community’s demonization of Huawei remains highly hypocritical

The future’s coming at us fast: Gizmodo: Freaky flea-like robots could one day flip and tumble inside your body

Biometric Update: House subcommittee considers impact of facial recognition bias on gov’t adoption of AI tech

New York Post: Find out if you’re cut out for the CIA at this exhibit

The Skanner: Former FBI director addresses spying on black activists

Daily Beast: FBI admits it failed to investigate tip about school shooter

Vanguard: Facebook threatened with $125m over privacy invasion

WIRED: Inside the mind of Amanda Feilding, countess of psychedelic science

PsyPost: Study reveals similarity between psychedelic states and dreaming

Futurism: Scientists can’t replicate AI studies. That’s bad news.

High Times: The origins of your favorite weed slang

Guardian: Lost Mexican city had as many buildings as Manhattan