Quickly...

Not long back I was told that I should "get mad" about my subject material.  The following, "Enjoy the party?" is what happens when I do get upset.  Kinda windy ain't I?  ;-)

Enjoy the party?

There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Will Rogers

Well folks, I hope you enjoyed the party, as it may well have been our last holiday celebrating American independence and the birth of our free nation.  No matter how you celebrated, or what you believe, you by now recognize that a major change in American life and our political system is quickly approaching.  If this process continues, it'll completely change how you, and the rest of the world, see America.  It'll change how you live, where you work, what you eat, where you shop, how you travel, how you worship, and indeed, how you obey your new masters.

The facts are these; Mr. Obama has gone out of his way to divide this country in a manner unseen since the days of the civil war.  In line with his apparent Marxist/Fascist worldview he has split our people on economic lines, he has divided us politically even more than we were in 1860, and he has been busily separating us from our various religious beliefs.  “His” government is pitting the “takers” against the “producers” in a form of class warfare we’ve never seen before, and is rapidly accelerating the taking of our individual wealth such as it may be, and giving it to somebody else, all in the name of “sharing the wealth”.  His taxes are forcing American business to move overseas to survive, and leaving American jobs behind.  He has spent us into a totally unprecedented national debt that we’ll be centuries paying off.  He antagonizes our friends, and cozies up to our mortal enemies.  He has subverted the mainstream media, which now happily “twist the facts” to his advantage, while demonizing any and all political opposition.  He ignores the “inconvenient” provisions of our Constitution and declares that revered document to be an outdated relic of the past.  He now informs us that Americans did not succeed at building much of anything by their own effort, and that only “the government” made our great nation possible.  Skillfully utilizing our laws and the mistakes of the past to his advantage, he has set us up for a complete takeover of our government, turning us into a Hitlerian state with himself at the helm and his cronies as our new socialistic commissars.  And now he expects us to reward him for all this in the November elections!

Think about it, since taking office, Obama has made himself a dictator in all but name.  He appoints “Czars” answerable only to him, directing the nation’s day to day business, ignoring both Congress and our law.  His “Obamacare” program opens the door for the government to order us to do just about anything a bureaucratic mind wants, with no legal recourse.  He controls the media, and through it he can control what we think!  He now has a number of new programs in the pipeline that will go into effect in January 2013, just in time for a second term in office. The economic burden and increased taxes on everyone will be enough to cause a complete economic collapse, at which time he can declare Martial Law and assume complete dictatorial control of this once free nation.

Many Americans assume that the armed forces would refuse to cooperate with such a takeover, and I’m sure that many of our soldiers will so refuse.  However, personnel cutbacks, allowing homosexuals to serve, and a changing retirement program is causing many servicemen to leave the military.  It’s been noted that they are being replaced with a large increase in the enlistment of radical Muslims and illegal aliens, people with no allegiance to the provisions of our constitution. These “new” soldiers, loyal only to their paymaster, are equipped with our most modern weapons and receive extensive training in their use.  (Ahh… we don’t have any idea of how many of them there, who they are, or what positions they hold.)  And please don’t think that we’re going to have another revolution either, American citizens may be armed, but we don’t have near the weapons that even the poorest Islamic revolutionaries have in their fight for freedom.    Our few deer rifles and shotguns aren’t going to be very effective in a fight against Abrams tanks, attack helicopters, and guided missiles!

Under Mr. Obama, the Department of Justice has happily been subverting federal laws to strip us of any number of freedoms.  Many federal courts have been loaded with left wing socialist judges that rule in Obama's favor on virtually anything, thus ending constitutional rule and law.  When Congress doesn’t immediately roll over and do his bidding, he simply bypasses them by using executive orders to accomplish whatever it is that he wishes.  This has set the stage for dissolving Congress, and would not be the first time in history that a dictator took control of a nation by dismissing a more or less powerless legislature.  

By effectively using a pliant media, Mr. Obama has been anesthetizing the public to the danger he poses.  The American people ignore the changes he has already brought about, and won't have a clue to what happened until they wake up one morning and realize that a free America has been replaced with a regime that parallels those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro.  Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a group of people in Iowa that "Barack Obama is not incompetent, ladies and gentleman. He knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it.  He sees America differently than you or I see America."  Indeed, Mr. Obama gives every indication of actively hating American exceptionalism and our premier position in today’s world.  He seems to object to our defense of human rights and individual freedom around the world.  He, and his minions object to the high degree of freedom and independence American citizens are supposed to be enjoying.  So… he’s hard at work attempting to destroy it all.

We’re seeing more and more of the real Barack Obama as Election Day draws close.  And what we see is an angry far left radical hiding behind the mask of Hope and Change.  His remark; “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen” is astonishing, and is somewhat similar to the Department of Homeland Security report claiming that pro-life citizens, returning military personnel, gun-owners, Ron Paul supporters, Christians, and just about everybody else in the "Red States" can be classified as domestic terrorists to potentially be locked away in internment camps.  Words like this represent a declaration of war on our American way of life and even the concept of private property. They tell every citizen, every businessman, and every property owner, that the fruits of your labor are not yours, and that government and those whom it claims to represent are free to appropriate your property at their will.  Now we see Obama standing firmly in the line of radical thinkers going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that owning private property is theft from the masses.  (A concept picked up and used by Karl Marx you might note.)  Obama wants us to believe that “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.”  Because (goes the argument), your success depends on roads and bridges and police and fire departments and the labor of your employees.  What you own, Mr. Obama is saying, is a public holding subject to his rules of “fairness” and “common good.”   Even though you paid the taxes that paid for those roads and bridges, and you paid wages to those employees, it all, even your home, belongs to “them”, not you.  It doesn’t just gut the concept of private property; it opens the door to complete social chaos.   

Barack Obama and his minions are often described as Socialists, or in the extreme as Marxists, and I have done so myself.  Bill O’Reilly calls him a “Social Justice Anti-capitalist”.  Whatever, his actions are beginning to appear to be more a modern copy of a fascist economic system than a socialist system… the modern version of Nazi fascism without the militarism of Germany in the 1930s.  Socialism seeks control of an economy through state ownership of the means of production and income, with all valuate going directly to the state.  Fascism, an off-shoot of socialism, seeks the same control by “state domination” of private ownership, and limits individual wealth by severe taxation.  Thus, in a fascist state, when something goes right, the “benevolent government” can take the credit.  When things go wrong, it’s all the fault of those evil private businessmen, for not doing as the all knowing state directed.   

We face another “plot” dear to the heart of the radical left in "AGENDA 21”, another UN plan supported by the Obama regime that proposes an array of actions intended to be implemented by (perhaps I should say ‘against’) every person on earth.  Effectively, Agenda 21 is a reorientation of human society and a redeployment of Earth’s human and economic resources, a plan that will turn the United States into a massive planning and zoning district and internationally controlled third world sub-state. It does nothing less than turn the United States, and indeed the world, over to the EPA and various echofreak groups, to establish "international norms" of personal behavior, dictated by a handful of elitists who believe they know best how people ought to live.  This one decrees where you will live and work, it even goes so far as to decree how much and of what you will eat!

As part of his plan for “change”, Mr. Obama has called for the establishment of a national police force to combat crime and internal terrorism.  It’s to be a parallel our armed forces, nearly as large, to be just as well armed, and answerable of course only to the presidency.  (Shades of the Nazi Gestapo and the black shirted SS!)  To make things easier for his personal police force, he now has his Secretary of State sidestepping the Second Amendment, and negotiating with the UN to disarm American citizens!  With the so-called "Small Arms Treaty" the gun-grabbers are coming clean with what they want...  full-scale international firearm registration, soon to be followed by confiscation, particularly in the U.S. which is one of very few countries with a constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.  So, the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs states, "Insurgents, armed gang members, pirates, terrorists - they can all multiply their force through the use of unlawfully acquired firepower."  The UN fails to mention that the weaponry of those groups was produced by and for the old Soviet Bloc, and are now being sold around the world by the very people who control this “Office of Disarmament Affairs”!  People who happen to see your gun rights as a "loophole" in the international arms trade, even though US law denies you the right to have a machine gun or rocket launcher!  You might also have noticed that the “Fast and Furious” fiasco was directed by the Obama regime, not by American gun owners or the NRA.  And of course, Second Amendment supporters have been labeled as "domestic terrorists" in Janet Napolitano's Homeland Security report.  According to the United Nations, the US government needs to crack down on the Second Amendment, and then everything will be fine in the world… and Mr. Obama is only too willing to oblige.

While we don’t think about it much, the American people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other point in history.  The growth of technology has given governments, police, and spy agencies the monitoring tools that dictators of the past could only dream of.   Today we have to deal with “pre-crime” surveillance cameras that use body language to spot criminals.  We have unmanned drones watching us from far above.  Street light cameras, and cell phones are, and our home appliances may soon be, spying on us in this hi-tech world!  We are rapidly heading into an era where there is no such thing as privacy, where government has become an all-invasive means of controlling every moment of our lives.  Our world is changing at a breathtaking rate, and most of those changes are not for the better.  The days of  Orwell’s “Big Brother” have finally arrived.

It’s crucial to the freedom we all enjoy that the American voter resoundingly defeats Mr. Obama and his cohorts in the November election.  If Team Obama wins the election, we can expect to see a flood of unwanted changes hit us head-on in January.  If he looses… well… I have little faith in politicians, so I can only hope that the victor will reverse the course we’re presently on.  But, it’s still possible that between the election and Inauguration Day he might use the power of Executive Orders… to declare the election null and void… suspend the Constitution… dissolve Congress… and become America’s sole ruler.  Will this happen?  I don’t know.  But it certainly could happen!

I hope you enjoyed the fireworks, the parades, the hot dogs and beer over the fourth.  I for one am not looking forward to next year, as the Fourth of July became a rather ironic holiday with the passage of the Patriot Act, and now, with the upholding of Obamacare and all it portends, our Independence Day has become little more than a sick joke.

A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Freedom isn't Free

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Edmund Burke

A long time ago I heard the comment “That’s the sound of freedom” in response to a complaint about the noise caused by Air Force jet fighter aircraft taking off.  I don’t know who origionally thought up that idiom, but it’s one I fully agree with, and have always remembered.  Years of close exposure to those jet engine noises has cost me most of my hearing unfortunately, but I think that’s a small price to pay for that which I value so highly, the freedom of every American.  Another idiom that says much the same to me is “Freedom isn’t Free” (This one was authored by Colonel Walter Hitchcock, USAF, Retired), that expresses gratitude for the sacrifices made by members of the military through the years of our nations existance.  Written as a poem by Cdr. Kelly Strong, USCG Ret, the later half goes something like this;

“I heard the sound of taps one night,
When everything was still
I listened to the bugler play
and felt a sudden chill.
I wondered just how many times
That taps had meant "Amen,"
When a flag had draped a coffin
Of a brother or a friend.
I thought of all the children,
of the mothers and the wives,
of fathers, sons and husbands
with interrupted lives.
I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.
No, freedom isn't free.”

Quite so… retaining the freedom enjoyed by Americans has been very expensive over the years, but we must also remember that the service and sacrifice of our servicmen isn’t the only thing that makes us a free nation.  There was the wisdom and foresight of the men who gave us our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, to give our flegling nation a start.  There are the untold multitudes who gave their all to push back the frontier and gave our young nation room to grow.  Countless public figures have served us and the nation well through the decades, joined by the millions of young men who guarded us from those who, jealous of our freedom, would destroy us.  Or consider the three quarters of a million young men who gave their lives during our civil war, proving to all and sundry that freedom and liberty are for all Americans, and that freedom is the cornerstone of all that America stands for.  You might think of the young men who marched off in two great wars to prove once again that America was a most terrible enemy of tyrany wherever it raised it’s ugly head.  And of the women left behind, who worked the farms and factories so necessary to forge the critically needed weapons of war.  There, in all those Americans, you will find the effort and sacrifice made by the American people for the last 236 years.    

No, freedom is not free, and today the price we must pay is eternal vigalance.  Our world is full of greedy, evil men whose only wish is to be powerful at our expense.  It is our duty as citizens of this great land to stand guard against such people and their plots against our liberty.  It is for us, the citizens of America, to root out the oh-so-many enemies of our nation, enemies both foreign and domestic, who wish nothing less than to see us enslaved, subjected to their every whim, and our free nation not even a memory.  Far to many Americans, some of them elected officials, some educators, others merely common people who know no better, expect us to believe the fuzzy thinking, the failed political theories, warped morality, and the outright lies spread by those evil people, in hopes of changing the very things that make us a free nation.  Innocent American lives are being taken everyday, and our precious freedoms steadily eroded, because some people just want to be powerful. 

The leaders of our country from long past fought against great odds for the rights that make up our treasured freedoms.  Freedoms that form the basis of the Constitution which has bound us together as a nation for over two hundred years.  Today these rights are being twisted into totally unrecognizable form, and used in courtrooms, schools, our neighborhoods, and even our nation’s highest office, to strip us of our rights.  It's hard to realize that today, while many countries around the world continue to fight for any basic freedom, Americans seem so willing to surrender our rights to powerful men in the name of “safety” and “security”.  

America is in deep trouble today, and unless we soon begin selecting leaders who believe in American values, my grandchildren will live in a third world country, a mere parody of the America I remember.  This situation is enough to break an old soldiers heart.  We served to protect our Constitution, the nation’s freedom, and the greatness of our country, and yet Americans today constantly elect people to high office who only desire to take that freedom away from us.  And it’s all happening without our even putting up a fight!  I’m constantly heard bemoaning the fact that we lack leaders with high moral courage and values.  (In some cases, any morals or values!)  Consider, in today’s world, where Americans are so absorbed in the antics of assorted celebrities, where greed overshadows morality, where our young people are not even taught our history or just what it is that America stands for, we expect inspired leadership.  Yet can we really expect to see, just in the nick of time, another Jefferson or Franklin, Lincoln or Reagan riding forth on a white horse to defeat those evil men and lead us into the promised land?  Or will we, the citizens of this failing nation, have to do it the hard way, one vote at a time, all by our lonely selves? 

If George Washington were alive today, and could see what has happened to the founding fathers dream, he’d probably sue us for calling him “The Father of the Country”.

Drones...

The thing that won't die, in the nightmare that won't end.

A quite realistic replacement for the notorious government “black helicopters” of conspiracy theory fame are UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), or as they’re more popularly called, Drones, that seem to be much in the spotlight lately. Being much less expensive to purchase or to operate than manned helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, both the military and the CIA have been using an assortment of these remotely controlled flying machines to very aggressively prosecute the war on terror in the mid-east.

On the home front we now have reconnaissance drones patrolling a section of the Canadian border under the control of those ever so popular Homeland Security folks, more of them playing around on the southern border, and even some of our smaller police departments have taken to using smaller versions for assorted surveillance flights. Then there are quite a number of privately owned “mini-drones” in existence, used for everything from commercial power line inspections to simple hobby flying enjoyment.

We have drone aircraft, drone helicopters, drone gliders, and a couple of things that I haven’t figured out quite how to classify cluttering the skies of the world today. These aircraft come in all sizes as well, from the “really big” on down to some very specialized reconnaissance units about the size of an insect. (Humm… don’t swat that strange metallic looking “bug” on your wall, you might find yourself charged with the destruction of government property!) Their flight characteristics are just about as unusual. While some can fly for only a few minutes with a range measured in yards, a solar powered craft under development NASA and the DoD can stay aloft for nearly five years, flying at 100,000 feet! Military drones are generally quite stealthy, and some are acknowledged to operate well in excess of 20,000 feet while traveling a couple of thousand miles, at 500+ miles per hour, and carrying thousands of pounds of death and destruction!

Originally these were simple camera equipped radio control model airplanes intended to be used in real-time short range battlefield reconnaissance operations. Oh how they’ve grown! UAV’s have been developed into quite successful tactical and even strategic reconaissance platforms equipped with any number of nearly science fiction spy devices! Devices ranging from optical cameras to infra-red sensors, or if your mission requirements prefer, a wide assortment of electronic equipment that can include ground penetrating radar. Rest assured, they can see and probably identify you and what you’re doing, even if you have no idea they’re anywhere nearby. Currently, operational drones are remotely controlled by a human operator, much like the model planes that preceded them. They are however semi-automatic in that the operator tells the machine which direction to turn, when to start taking pictures or launch a missile in Pakistan, and even when to come home, leaving the machine to do everything else. That “Practically everything else” is controlled by on-board computers, assorted flight data sensors, and up-to-date GPS technology.

In the interest of protecting our soldiers from harm, drones are being armed, in some cases quite heavily with everything from “smart” iron bombs to long range “fire and forget” target seeking guided missiles. (If you can put a weapon on an airplane, you can put it on a drone.) These weapons can find, and hit, a target designated from miles away by a laser beam or radar. They can track a target, day or night, from the heat it radiates. They can be guided remotely by built in television. Or they can seek out and hit a specific GPS position. (Remember not long back, when the census folks came by and recorded the GPS position of your front door?) Mr. Obama’s eye-in-the-sky can quite easily find you nowadays. And, if it can find you…

Additionally as one pundit comments, they can quickly determine if you’re properly recycling your trash according to whatever current government standards demand, or perhaps if you’re speeding a bit on the highway… well, they can also determine if the old roof on your house is leaking more heat than whatever the EPA has determined is proper energy usage in fighting global warming. Get used to living in a government controlled and operated fishbowl folks, there’s very little you can do, either indoors or out, that can’t be observed, and reported to the “proper authorities”, by these government controlled aerial spy-eyes.

Nor is it just airborne drones that concern me. The Army and law enforcement agencies are developing an entire stable of ground bound robotic vehicles as well. This includes everything from full grown tanks with big guns, to cargo trucks that don’t need a driver (scratch yet another American job), to robot cops and security guards. Some move on treads, some roll on wheels, and some even walk on two legs! And the majority of these are, unfortunately, armed! Dunno about anyone else, but the thought of a machine-gun toting robot suddenly telling me to halt and produce my papers is quite frightening! Slightly behind the deployment curve, the Navy is also working on drones, predominantly small warships and even robot attack submarines!

Another frightening aspect of these things is that they are slowly becoming completely autonomous, where in accordance with pre-set generalized instructions, the machine “thinks” for itself in following those instructions, without a human operator in the loop. But still, it’s a machine that can only do what it’s told. We are also familiar with the ills that can befall a computer, and what results might occur… The Navy X-47B currently under test is a fully automated aircraft carrier based strike drone that only needs to be told where to go and who to kill… unless it decides to just kill everything in the target area. After all, who’s the bad guy, the Arab looking dude sneaking up on you with an RPG… or perhaps it’s that evil conservative guy down the street, who objects to the Obamacare program?

So here we have the scenario of an almost undetectable killing machine, armed with terribly precise weapons, flying over our heads and looking over our shoulders. I certainly hope there’s no hiccup in the master computer, or that another Hitler or Stalin hasn’t somehow gained control… and it’s already been demonstrated that computer hackers can access the system, feeding wrong targets, positions, and even control information to the on-board computer. I have no issues with the limited use of military drones during wartime. I can also quickly understand and approve of some civilian use as well. I do, strenuously, object to the use of drones of any sort being used by the government to “spy” on American citizens for any reason. If the government or the police want to know what I’m up to today, they can darn well come and ask me in person. They most definitely do not “need these new tools” to control my life. Even more so, I object to the very idea of armed, autonomous, robots running around looking for somebody to kill, no matter what the motive!

Nearly all of us have seen the opening scenes of the movie “Terminator”, where robot fighting machines battle humans for control of the Earth. The movie is futuristic science fiction of course… but that future may be getting much closer than you think.