REPUBLIC REBORN

“In the future imagined by the Department of Homeland Security, an army of small drones will hover over the southwestern border, outfitted with facial recognition technology that can cull criminal histories of people on the ground. Advanced cameras will instantly identify drivers and passengers as they cross international bridges into Mexico. Artificial intelligence software will comb through the social media accounts of immigrants seeking to enter the country.”

It’s not just the US border, as the ACLU has repeatedly reminded us that the “border” extends 100 miles into the US. It should be noted that two-thirds of the US population live within 100 miles of the border. So this technology can and will be used freely on everyone living within that “Constitution-free zone”.

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.