S. Smith

The “Russian collusion” narrative ends at a click-bait farm

Posted on February 22, 2018 by S. Smith

The year-long “investigation” into Russian interference with the US Presidential election has ended with the indictment of 13 Russian nationals connected to a click-bait business operated from Russia. As Justin Raimondo notes, the indictment is a joke, a pie to his own face and to that of the entire media establishment that promoted the notion that Russia threw the election in Trump’s favor with a few Facebook ads and Twitter accounts. To think that this sham has been compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor is an outrage.

All 13 Russians are still in Russia, with a snowball’s chance at extradition. Putin is surely laughing at the entire farce.

Public schools condition children to accept total surveillance

Posted on February 22, 2018 by S. Smith

Stella Morabito has a very insightful post up at The Federalist today, entitled, 13 Ways Public Schools Incubate Mental Instability In Kids, and cuts to the foundations of the cause for public school violence. Forced conformity, conveyor-belt mass education, and the “gen pop” environment that breeds identical hierarchical dynamics as those found in US prisons. And that’s something that should be plainly faced up to: the public school environment and the prison environment are almost identical. Kids form cliques and gangs, enforce social acceptance or ostracization, and learn to be brutal to each other out of necessity in order to survive this environment.

But these giant schools also do something else, something far more sinister: they condition children to accept total surveillance at a young age. Schools are basically laboratories for total surveillance, with our kids the test subjects. Rather than a means to teach them the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which would require around a mere 100 hours of attentive instruction, as Morabito explains, our kids are subjected to 17,000 hours inside a warped mini-Police State, only to emerge as adults believing their treatment within those confines can and should be applied to all of society.

The brutal enforcement of conformity among adolescent peers who are confined within an artificial environment for 8 hours every day for years is mentally and emotionally crippling for kids. And we wonder why they go nuts and either commit suicide or shoot up a school.

02/22/18 Overnight Links

Posted on February 22, 2018 by S. Smith

Techdirt: Research paper links police unions to increased officer misconduct

Forbes: Revealed: Two secret cogs in the FBI national surveillance machine

The Hill: Dopey Russian ads didn’t swing the election—federal coverups did

RAND PAUL: Is our military budget too small, or is our mission too large?

Reason: Supreme Court case could spell the end of mandatory public sector union dues

Ars Technica: Man removes feds’ spy cam, they demand it back, he refuses and sues

The Federalist: 13 ways public schools incubate mental instability in kids

Motherboard: Top-secret US military base will melt out of Greenland ice sheet

Activist Post: Michigan committee passes bill to ban “material support or resources” for warrantless federal surveillance

247WallSt: 20 companies profiting the most from war

Al Jazeera: Philippine Senator: Duterte’s drug war has killed 20,000

Reason: Countering the threat of the malicious use of artificial intelligence

NBC: Could aliens hack our planet?

Questions about Florida survivor David Hogg shouldn’t be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”

Posted on February 21, 2018 by S. Smith

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.

02/21/18 Morning Links

Posted on February 21, 2018 by S. Smith

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

Why we must oppose the Surveillance State

Posted on February 20, 2018February 20, 2018 by S. Smith

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”.

Image result for soviet soldiers murder

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.