News on Technology, Etc.

DARPA is shown off its 1.8 gigapixel surveillance drone. It can spot a person from 20,000 feet. DARPA and the U.S. Army has taken the wraps off ARGUS-IS or a 1.8 gigapixel video surveillance platform that can resolve details as small as six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet or 6 km according to Extreme Tech. ARGUS is by far the highest-resolution surveillance platform in the world, and probably the highest-resolution camera in the world, period. It can be attached to some kind of unmanned UAV (like a Predator) and flown at a high altitude. It can observe an area of 25 square kilometers or 10 square miles at any one time. That is like ARGUS hovering over New York City to see half of Manhattan. Two ARGUS equipped drones and the U.S. could keep an eye on the whole of Manhattan theoretically 24/7. This is a part of the next generation of surveillance. These capacities have existed. It can fit into an UAV. The sensor of ARGUS has been classified. There have been plastic curtain on it. The technology is so advanced that it is like a 100 Predators looking at a medium sized city at once. The images from ARGUS have strong resolution. It can create a moving image. A human being can touch a screen to see moving objects and track moving objects from far distances as well. It can store 5,000 hours of high definition footage every single day. He used imaging chips from cell phones as a means to create the device. Our society is increasingly electronic with our moves increasing tracked all of the time from emails to buying purchases in everyday stores. The situation of police state like policies is very similar to the North American integration agenda. This agenda has been exposed greatly by the researcher Dana Gabriel.


There is a huge amount of hypocrisy of anti-gun extremists. Even Senator Diane Feinstein's gun control bill exempts government officials from the planned semi-auto assault ban. This reality illustrates the huge hypocrisy among some anti-gun extremists. Some of these extremists do not want to disarm the American people and some do actually. Yet, many of them surround themselves with armed bodyguards and own guns themselves. The Washington Times reported recently that: "...Mrs. Feinstein’s measure would exempt more than 2,200 types of hunting and sporting rifles; guns manually operated by bolt, pump, lever or slide action; and weapons used by government officials.” Back in 1995, Feinstein carried a concealed weapon for her own protection and called for Mr. and Mrs. America to turn in all of their guns. This hypocrisy is expressed by other such people. The President says that he goes shooting all of the time. He wants semi-automatic assault rifles to be only in the hands of the military, but the Department of Homeland Security has purchased no less than 7,000 fully automatic assault weapons for the purposes of personal defense in addition to more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition over the last 10 months alone. There have been political figures that have armed Secret Service protection for life. A new investigation by the Daily Caller has found that Media Matters for America or a group that wants gun control admitted that it conspired with the White House as a means to influence news. It hired a staffer to carry a firearm to protect its founder David Brock. The staffer had no permit to carry a concealed firearm and was later hit with multiple felony charges. The Glock handgun used to defend Block was brought using Media Matters' funds. When investigative reporter Jason Mattera asked New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg if he plans to disarm his entire security team to comply with his own gun control mandate, Mattera was accosted, harassed, and follow by security. Bloomberg refused to answer the question. Michael Moore is a very strong advocate for gun control, but he has armed bodyguards. One of them was arrested for carrying an unlicensed weapon at New York's JFK airport back in 2005. The Time Warner Cable recently issued a companywide ban on television ads that show gun pointed at people. Its subsidiary Warner Bros. regularly distributes blockbuster movies that are replete with gratuitous gun violence. Many celebrities who are involved in a PSA campaign called Demand a Plan that used the Sandy Hook massacre to push for gun control regularly star in movies and television productions that depict gun violence as commonplace. Prominent gun control advocates like Piers Morgan, who base their argument on reducing gun violence, routinely threaten violence against ideological adversaries. Once, Morgan talked of his desire to use machine guns to take out his critics in a sarcastic way. He made jokes about this in January 8. Some of these hypocrites are really sad. The way to handle this violence is to improve our socioeconomic conditions, use programs to not allow criminals or anyone that doesn't need a gun to have them, to handle mental illness affairs, to use more locking systems in school, and other commonsense solutions. Gun rights are important to protect among law abiding citizens. Gun ownership has increased in America. The support for gun rights and the 2nd Amendment has been high as well. Liberty is superior to violations to that liberty.



Richard Nixon's legacy is ever known. There is talk of him opening to China, the EPA, etc. There is a comparison with Nixon and ideological Republicans. Yet, some have ignored the more evil side of Nixon's legacy. That is that he shaped the mood of the GOP by advancing the slick bigoted Southern Strategy. He also used dirty election tactics in both 1968 and 1972. It is no secret that the veiled racism against President Barack Obama by some extremists is linked to Nixon's coded appeals to unreconstructed white segregationists in the South over 4 decades ago. Republicans in recently years have tried to use election rigging. Nixon helped to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and he was involved in the Watergate chicanery in 1972. In 1968, LBJ was on the verge on bringing the bloody Vietnam War to an end. This didn't happen since Nixon allowed the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris peace talks. This is documented by numerous U.S. Archives and from personal accounts of South Vietnamese and GOP participants. For example, we now know that President Johnson ordered his national security aide Walt Rostow to remove from the White House the top secret file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks and that Nixon – after learning of the file’s existence from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – ordered Kissinger and White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman to conduct a search for this missing file. Kissinger and Haldeman were able to recreate the file. They failed to locate the actual file. This influenced Nixon's mind back in June of 1971. That was the time when the NY Times published the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers documented the Vietnam War deceptions from 1945 to 1967 under mostly Democratic administrations. Nixon knew that there was a sequel to the Pentagon Papers. This was about a file where wiretap evidence shown that Johnson called Nixon's act treason of how the war was prolonged. This was done as a means for Nixon to gain a political advantage over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. If the missing filed came before the 1972 Election, Nixon might have been defeated or even face impeachment. So, according to Oval Office tape recordings – released in connection with the Watergate scandal – Nixon on June 17, 1971, ordered a renewed effort to locate the missing file. One of Nixon’s aides believed the file was hidden in the safe at the Brookings Institution, leading Nixon to order a break-in at Brookings to recover the file. Even many Nixon critics omit this history. Nixon supporters claim that Nixon knew little or nothing of the actual Watergate crime. 2 weeks after break in at Watergate, Nixon proposed having ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to create a special team to conduct the Brookings break in. This never took place. Yet, Hunt did organize a team of burglars whose political spying was exposed by June 17, 1972. Five of its members were caught inside the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex. The 2 scandals of the 1968 peace talk sabotage and the Watergate spying were linked. Nixon feared that the first scandal could lead to the exposure of the second one. The participants in the Watergate robbery said different accounts. Yet, the burglars were seemed to be involved in a general intelligence gathering operation. They were helpful for Nixon's reelection campaign. Nixon wanted to know about the Democratic vulnerabilities as a means to know about how to effectively win the 1972 election. Walt Rostow had the 1968 wiretap evidence of Nixon trying to stop the Vietnam peace talks. The X Envelope has the file and it was still not complete. By June 1971, when Nixon ordered creation of Hunt’s team to search for the missing file, the war was ripping America apart as thousands of body bags with dead American soldiers continued to come back from Vietnam, as another million or so Vietnamese died, and as the war spread into Cambodia. Much of the modern GOP's actions of suppressing the voters of African Americans and other minorities originated from the tactics of Richard Nixon. These facts outline the sinister side of the Nixon Presidency.



I knew thought that I will see the day when the establishment is so in love with overt extrajudicial killing. For centuries, the White House has executed tyrannical policies in the world. This is nothing new at all. That is why the current administration enforces Bush era police state laws. He also added more of his own. In this era, the feds have targeted free expression with spying against innocent Occupy Movement members. Dissent, whistleblowers, and other constitutional freedoms have been targeted. We live in a time where civil protections, judicial fairness, and other fundamental rights are being threatened all of the time. The abuse of power is institutionalized. The leader of the White House has issued an executive order where anyone can be indefinitely detained with or without charge on his say. Guantanamo Bay is open despite his promise to keep it open. There is still a worldwide, secret U.S. global torture prison network. Individuals from across the political spectrum have discussed this issue. In January of 2013, Law Professor Jonathan Turley called America “no longer the land of the free,” saying: “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them.” “If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.” After 9/11, the war on constitutional rights continues. The federal government continues to act extra judicially. The President ordered the outspoken Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki to be killed. He was an U.S. citizen. He threatened no one. He lived in Yemen. He disagreed with U.S. imperial lawlessness. He was not given a trial or due process. Others like him are vulnerable and even his 16 year old son was murdered too. The rule of law means something. No man should appoint himself, judge, jury, and executioner without due process at all. The Obama kill list has not been rescinded at all. We need democracy to be stronger than it is presently in the world not only in the West. On February 5, The New York Times headlined “Memo Cites Legal Basis for Killing US Citizens in Al Qaeda,” saying: "...Administration lawyers turned jurisprudence on its head. They call it lawful to kill US citizens if “an informed high-level (government) official” says they belong to Al Qaeda and pose “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” A Justice Department “white paper” inverted inviolable legal principles. It’s titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” It’s unsigned and undated. It’s “the most detailed analysis yet to come into public view.” It calls lawless killing without trial or evidence legal. There is vague language in the document. There is talk about imminent threats and the ill-defined terrorism. An extrajudicial authority is immoral where the courts and Congress has no say so in the development of laws. Attorney General Eric Holder back in March of 2011 claimed that America had the lawful right to operate extra judicially. He said that Washington can kill U.S. citizens affiliated with Al Qaeda if capture is not possible. Holder claims that due process is not the same as judicial process, which is a lie. The reason is that due process by its very definition relates to legal affairs and judicial processes all of the time. Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson have made the similar claim that U.S. citizens have no legal rights if they are allied with Al Qaeda. ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi addressed the white paper. She calls it a “profoundly disturbing document.” “It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances.” “It summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority – the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement.” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer called the document “chilling.” It manipulates legal standards. It turns them on their head. Doing so justifies the unjustifiable. The reality is that we do not need extrajudicial killings. The extrajudicial killing of potentially American citizens is immoral. Torture is immoral as well. John Brennan was a key architect of the targeted killing program today. He during the Bush administration was involved in their rogue actions. The CCR filed suit in Al Aulaqi v. Panetta want the rule of law. Some of these new policies are worse than actions of George W. Bush in some ways. The Times quoted Center for National Security Studies director Kate Martin calling the white paper “a confusing blend of self-defense and law of war concepts and doesn’t clearly explain whether there is a different standard for killing a senior Al Qaeda leader depending on whether he is a citizen.” “Its due process is especially weak.” Congress ought to address these issues, restore the balance of power legally, and make sure that extrajudicial actions are banned.


Some issues are used as wedge issues as a means to divide Americans while the oligarchy gets richer and richer. Wedge issues were exploited by numerous Republicans from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove as a means to deceive a majority of American in accepting reactionary policies. One example is how the Southern Strategy allowed human beings to vote against their economic interests, but to maintain great reactionary powers in the old Confederacy. Much of this political agitation has been funded by Wall Street bankers, the Koch brothers, and some left gatekeepers have been funded by George Soros. We ought to address taxes, labor unions, federal regulations, and other like-minded issues. The interests of voters and all of humanity is needed not the plutocratic privilege of a select amount of human beings. It is also hypocritical for anyone to say that he or she disagrees with mass shootings, but agree with killer drones that have killed men, women, and children. Some want to use certain issues as a means to plan for more cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, child nutrition, food stamps, and Social Security -- which will inflict whole orders of magnitude more in the way of needless deaths and human suffering on all age groups than the gun crimes themselves, bad as these are. Likewise, it is wrong for those who claim to advance gun rights when they want to strip the American people of their economic rights. The reactionaries are wrong to demand an economy with low wages, no unions, no unemployment insurance, and virtually no social safety net. Overall U.S. standard of living including real wages has declined by about two thirds since the end of the Johnson administration. The deregulation and laissez faire globalization has influenced the rising consumer debt, the need for multiple jobs, the need to keep a home, etc. What we don't need are the extremes of neither tyrannical government nor neo-feudalism (which is made of a dismantling of real government). We need efficient government that can help the masses of the people. Many libertarians like Ron Paul are right on much civil liberty issues, but are wrong to deny the American people the right to health care. Paul condemned parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He opposes the right of collective bargaining as natural rights. So, he is wrong on this issue. Despite FDR's flaws, he was right to fight for economic rights. He wanted an Economic Bill of Rights as said in his State of the Union address from January 11, 1945. FDR’s proposed economic rights included a productive job; an adequate income for food, clothing, and recreation; a decent home for every family; adequate medical care; a good education; insurance for old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; protection for small businessmen against monopoly cartels; and parity prices for farmers. Radical libertarians will mostly not fight for these economic rights at all. That is why we need to have employment, wages, education, infrastructure, science, technology, and grow other parts of our land to have real economic development. A National Marshall plan for urban and rural communities suffering harsh realities is something that I will be for completely. The massive violence in the world is easy. One thing out of many to decrease this violence is a campaign that can eradicate poverty, grow unemployment, end poverty, decrease the amount of underemployment in the world, and handle other social related problems. A job creation program and a means to treat the causes of poverty not just the symptoms will grow our world.

 

By Timothy