If anyone thinks these homicidal maniacs are leaving in 2028, when they lose, I have one question.
"Are you smoking crack?"
This is way worse than the Precrime system in the 2002 movie "Minority Report", which was based on Philip K. Dick’s novella. The Precrime System functioned as an arrest-and-detain apparatus, not an ICE/CBP death penalty system.
Suspects were arrested “precognitively” — before committing the predicted crime.
They were then incapacitated and placed into long‑term suspended animation, essentially a form of indefinite detention. [Another of Curtis Yarvin's insane ideas.]
No executions were part of the Precrime process in the film’s world. Just in ours.
The movie's moral tension comes from the fact that these people are alive, conscious, and imprisoned for crimes they never actually committed, raising questions about free will, determinism, and state power.
In our world? Americans and others are murdered for . . . Nothing.
There was a TV series about a surveillance state run by an AI called Samaritan, that did the samething, and tracked you everywhere except underground in abandoned subway tunnels.
No need to indoctrinate troops or brainwash civilian authorities to get the job done. This is the Tech Bros answer to everything---let the robots and AI do it.
Thom's Report info is the dream come to life for those that want a Technate of America where they control the lives of a billion people in the Western Hemisphere. They also have something for the folks they don't want dead. They will shut down their internet and lifelines until they obey. Expose. Share. Vote. See you in the streets.
As creepy as it is? That is one of my favorite movies. And I am with you. All of this sounds even more terrifying than what was shared in Minority Report. Thanks for sharing that. Spot on.
OMG! This regime has got to go. Amendment 25 Drump and his corrupt Cabinet, Now! No one is safe under their watch!!! Thanks to SCOTUS and a complicit and spineless GOP led Congress!
**All** of this report from Thom is real - it's not science fiction, it's not in a far away future. It is **today**. The **widespread use** of these capabilities is just a few tomorrows from now.
What will we do to prevent this?
What will we do in the event we fail to prevent this?
These two questions have answers, but they won't become apparent if we look away. We must become comfortable with the uncomfortable, and we must never accept the unacceptable. Now is **always** the moment. We do not possess the luxury of "perhaps tomorrow".
Thanks for the simple explainer here, Thom:
"This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now."
Even if "lavender" or "Where's Daddy" are BS, the fact that we're talking about them is intimidating.
When I was a grunt, I would have paid big time to have systems like that displace me.
I don't think that Operation Phoenix was in operation when I was in country, but we had human enemy detectors provided by ARVN and CIDG. We'd turn over all of the prisoners to let them sort them out.
In UK, the entire country is ostensibly monitiored 24/7 via satellite through a fragmented network of over 21 million CCTV cameras, the vast majority of which are privately owned.
Google sez research indicates that CCTV is 15% more effective at reducing crime when it is "actively monitored" by operators who can coordinate immediate police responses.
Police Deployment: Special police units, such as the Metropolitan Police's red vans, are often deployed to busy pedestrian areas to anonymously monitor crowds during specific operations.
Whe I left DC about 2018, the police were working on something similar.
We need to do a lot of things. Question is how? Especially when they have the means of control, surveillance, police, military and the means of enforcement, justice and police, and they have rigged the elections, and he won't vacate the premises even if he should lose.?
I totally agree, but it will take, something that Americans don't have, the ability to take discomfort and pain, to risk everything, including their comfort and lives.
America is full of sunshine patriots. And as I was told by another poster, he wasn't issued a hair shirt."
Sez the sunshine patriot. All's well and good, so long as there is no discomfort or sacrifice. I can actually see you jumping the fence, when the shit really gets nitty gritty.
Dream on about getting converts from Republicans. The know what happens to those that fall out of step and out of line, not tomention that they are all probably committed culture warriors anyway.
You have been yaking about converting Republicans for ages, and yet here we are. Even those that have defied Trump on matters like the Epstein files, are still confirmed culture warriors.
It is a fucking religion, and you don't convert religious believers by exhortation, they can feign religious conversion.
Convert a Muslim to a Jew, or a Haredi Jew to a Muslim, or a rad trad Catholic to a Muslim
Understood, but I don’t think we dare give up. And the fighters are gaining traction (e.g: Graham Platner vs Janet Mills). And those who champion “big tents” don’t insult their occupants. You’re no fool.
Who said anything about giving up. I have been proposing fighting, and I mean being able to take risks,pain and punches. The only way to defeat this fascist regime is by guerrilla warfare, BDS, withholding labor, withholding payments. bring the machinery to a halt, throw a monkey wrench in the gears, before the gears crank up and haul us to concentration camps. Resistance, real resistance not pressure release marches that they ignore.
Remember Trump dumping shit on the No Kings protesters. How many of them have there been, all across the country, and what effect have they had on changing the course of action or policies" None, in fact they have achieved the opposite. Trump let loose ICE tha is killing people and violating rights, and then started a war, misused our military, invaded a country, arrested the leader, and is still planning on taking over Greenland, Cuba, even Mexico and Canada, the rest of Central America has submitted, and he is attacking Ecuador, and Colombia under the guise of the war on drugs.
As I see it there are only two chances to save ourselves.
1. An election turnout of 100% of Democrats and fed up independents, as it will take that to over ride all of the voter suppression laws, policies and activities they have set up.
2. A complete collapse of the economy, enough that even the hard core theocrats, racist and MAGAts say enough, we were wrong, and that means pain.
There is a 3rd, and it is a stretch, the entire world is fed up, stops buying and selling stuff, shifts from the dollar to the renembi (yuan) or the Eurodollar. and Trump is isolated from the world, which means we are isolated, and that hurts us economically, that too will bring a lot of pain, but it is the only way to rid ourselves.
Civil war is never a good option. Need to fought out at the ballot box. We need better policy to protect voters and insure that their vote is counted. I have that plan on Retired Analyst Mike.
You got that right, William, Trump has all of the trump cards; we have nothing but our lives and bodies.
A few anti-Trumpers have guns, but they are severely outnumbered, unorganized and probably already under surveillance. The rest of us (like myself,) are scared witless - and we should be.
To be honest, everything for me is working just fine. I still get my SSA checks, my retirement, as does my wife. no mortgage, paid off, no debts, I can handle inflation, (where I live gas is over $6.00 a gallon.,but I use more gas in my ride mower than I do in my cars.
If I were simply self concerned, I would say "no problem",however I am able to look five or six steps ahead, and see where everything is headed, and the fuure is not so bright as the present.
Then again at 87, with diabetes on Mountjaro, and 8 years in remission from stage 4 lung and brain cancer, I am living on borrowed time, and I don't expect to have to live under, or suffer from the horrors of the regime that is taking form.
But I do care, I care deeply enough that I can't stand the idea of evil winning, and that is what I see today. not just in the U.S. but evil being perpetuated all over the world, not only for greed and personal power but in the name of religion. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist.
There are two things that drive the authoritarian mind: (1) as control freaks, they can never have enough control, and this leads to (2) they can only have peace of mind through "the final solution". These are tormented individuals who blame us normals for their torment.
Congratulations Thom, you mentioned Gaza for the second time on your Substack. And again, just for context, Democrats have approved of and funded mass surveillance as much as or more than Republicans. Just last month Washington state’s Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson was “proud to welcome” over 700 war profiteers and AI surveillance companies to Seattle for a convention of the same death dealers who supply the US with munitions and intelligence for the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s bombing of Iran. Attendees include top US military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, and Boeing and AI/surveillance giants Palantir, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Textron. So Democrat Ferguson is “proud to welcome” the same companies that Trump is now using to blow up the Middle East, and expand mass surveillance and drone technology, just like his predecessors.
I lived through Nixon. Through Reagan’s slow dismantling of the social contract. Through the post 9/11 fever dream that gave us the surveillance state we now can’t unwind.
Nothing prepared me for the feeling I had reading this.
It’s not the technology that breaks me. It’s the sequencing. First you build the culture of impunity, where agents shoot a mother on a residential street and the Vice President calls her brainwashed. Then you make sure nobody gets charged. Then you quietly transfer the targeting decision from a reckless human to a patient machine, and suddenly there’s no one left to even accuse.
That’s a blueprint.
Phoenix didn’t start as a massacre. It started as a database.
Democracies don’t usually die with a declaration. They die when enough people decide, separately, in private, that it’s safer to stay home. That filming an arrest isn’t worth it. That showing up isn’t worth it. That the risk calculation has changed.
That’s what a confidence score does before a single drone ever launches. It doesn’t have to kill you. It just has to make you wonder if it might.
And a country where citizens do that math before they step outside? That’s already not a democracy. That’s a country performing the memory of one.
Renée Good didn’t do that math. She stopped her car.
The question this moment is asking every single one of us is whether we still have the nerve she had.
Are you kidding? The Biden administration prosecuted over 3,000 pro-Palestinian student protestors, with hundreds injured by Biden's Gestapo. Here in Illinois, Governor Pritzker had his State Troopers attack protestors (including me) at the Broadview ICE facility. Obama expanded George W Bush's Patriot Act twice, and Obama lied about the NSA's illegal surveillance of millions of Americans. Democrats take as much tech/surveillance money as Republicans, and they have been supportive of ICE and CBP from their inception. Unfortunately as the capital letters show Thom has you thinking with your hippocampus and not your prefrontal cortex.
Can you be a little more specific about dates,places,news coverage of the incidents you're referring to. Throwing out info without specifics does not convince anyone.
If I write a comment here that's critical of Trump, will my name go on a list somewhere? I'm not sure that I still want to be an American after reading this.
After 911, a bill was pulled out of a file drawer that had been drawn up during Clinton's tour, called the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, it created the National Security State and authorized the construction of a National Data Center, to collect and store all electronic communication.
It is located in Bluffdale, UT and is huge, five huge buildings, and now powered with themost effective AI, that exists.
It scoops up all electronic communication and data, but supposedly only screened data between a foreign source and the U.S., and if you believe that, you will believe anything.
But even that prohibition has been abandoned under Trump and with that Russian Asset Gabbard in charge of the NSA.
Russians are using FPV drones to kill civilians in the streets. Ukraine has gone to the expense of stringing anti drone nets over their streets.
Ukraine is using autonomous drones to attack the Russians. They have even had soldiers surrender to drones.
They already know everything about you, Palantir has all your personal data, the National Data Center has all of your electronic communications. The IRS has your tax returns, HUD has your mortgage and loan applications. Experian, Transunion all of your credit info and bank accounts,
Traffic camera's, CCTV, doorbell cameras, facial recognition software, license plate readers. You better be good, obedient boys and grils.
Americans don't know anything about the Russo Ukraine war, because our media doesn't cover it and there are no American reporters in Ukraine. The use of Drones is constantly evolving on both sides. And in Ukraine they are made in homes, garages and in backyard bunkers, for a most $10,000 for the most sophisticated, made from microchips from salvaged washing machines, and off the shelf commercially available parts.
However there is plenty of reporting, especially about the use of drones on medium.com, alas it is a paywall, but Ukraine is not the only thing that is on the site.
"Thank You" for letting us all know what's going on behind closed doors within this Regime. I WILL be calling my Congressman/Congresswoman TODAY! I appreciate you SO MUCH Thom...
Maybe this horror is being done by people who sincerely believe they are doing the right thing. Or maybe they just don't care. The result is the same. As E.B. White wrote in "The Morning of the Day They Did It" (1950), ultimately we are creating our own destruction:
There is, of course, a mild irony in the fact that it was the United States that was responsible. Insofar as it can be said of any country that it had human attributes, the United States was well-meaning. Of that I am convinced. Even I, at this date and at this distance, cannot forget my country’s great heart and matchless ingenuity. I can’t in honesty say that I believe we were wrong to send the men to the platform—it’s just that in any matter involving love, or high explosives, one can never foresee all the factors. ... Anyway, it was inevitable that it should have been the United States that developed the space platform and the new weapon that made the H-bomb obsolete. It was inevitable that what happened, at last, was conceived in good will.
You are mistaken - None of this was ever or is ever conceived in "good will". Neither was Nazi Germany conceived in "good will". It is conceived by over testosteroned men - mentally sick and perverted and at the basis of their lives probably evil although they would call it "doing the right thing". The Spanish Inquisition also was "doing the right thing". Same for Uganda and Rwanda where millions were massacred by machete. So was Pol Pot, so was Mao, so was Stalin.
I agree, it is the idea that "the right thing" can be justified by "good intentions" (and we know where those often lead). White was writing during some of the darkest days of the Cold War, so there was a bias here too, but it is a long way from "Stuart Little". In the story the U.S. is dystopian but few, if any, see how bad things have gotten and the narrator maintains his delusions. I think what is actually worse are those who don't consider the ethics or consequences of what they are doing. They are the technicians and bureaucrats who make the systems run. And anyone who isn't morally dead to the implications either doesn't go into this work or soon leaves, either voluntarily or not.
Scary as Thom's tale may seem, drones have been around for over a century. However, it was not until the 21st century that they were taken seriously by the world's militaries because they were cheap and effective ways to eliminate ground troops. The Turkish MIC especially started producing affordable remote-controlled drones in 2018. Most have been deployed in the Middle East. Back in 2015, I read an article about a toy drone delivering a grenade to a field unit sitting around a campfire. It hovered over the fire, set off the grenade, and killed the entire unit. Today, such small weaponized drones are still in use, but the military is finding that larger ones are effective at clearing trenches and disabling armored vehicles.
So, yes, the technology is here to use drones as assassination tools as well as spy tools. The US MIC has resisted getting into drones even when it was feasible for a submarine to quickly surface near an aircraft carrier and launch 100 or more drones to disable the carrier. Flying en masse, the Navy had/has no effective weapons but machine guns to try to bring them all down. So enough drones could disable operations in a single, inexpensive attack without loss of life.
Ukraine has finally "woked" the US and RU militaries as they refined the weapons and developed effective tactics to deliver them. The MIC was, of course, resistant to drones because where's the profit in that? Cost is one reason why we are buying spaceships, armed satellites, and battleships. It is also an excuse to retrofit all ships at sea and armored personnel carriers with laser anti-drone weapons. Finally, it is also why DOD has recently begun recruiting video game addicts because we need people who enjoy sitting in dark rooms all day remotely blowing things up.
What more…what else… has to happen before Congress stops these madmen and their machines of death, destruction and annihilation ???? What could possibly be the HOLD UP ????
Be afraid. Be very afraid. And after you are afraid, be very angry and wonder how these misfits and weirdos were able to deceive so many people and gain so much power while we were busy with work and worry and survival. We were failed by our institutions, and we were lulled into complacency by our comfort and confidence in our leaders, forgetting that we are supposed to be the leaders who stand up and speak up when they commit outrage after outrage. We the people let our guard down because we were led to believe that the system would auto-correct, and that someone else would do the hard work of figuring out what was being done behind the scenes.
If anyone thinks these homicidal maniacs are leaving in 2028, when they lose, I have one question.
"Are you smoking crack?"
This is way worse than the Precrime system in the 2002 movie "Minority Report", which was based on Philip K. Dick’s novella. The Precrime System functioned as an arrest-and-detain apparatus, not an ICE/CBP death penalty system.
Suspects were arrested “precognitively” — before committing the predicted crime.
They were then incapacitated and placed into long‑term suspended animation, essentially a form of indefinite detention. [Another of Curtis Yarvin's insane ideas.]
No executions were part of the Precrime process in the film’s world. Just in ours.
The movie's moral tension comes from the fact that these people are alive, conscious, and imprisoned for crimes they never actually committed, raising questions about free will, determinism, and state power.
In our world? Americans and others are murdered for . . . Nothing.
Here's a sample of the tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7yIzY1BxuI
Somewhere, Hitler is smiling, if you know what I mean.
There was a TV series about a surveillance state run by an AI called Samaritan, that did the samething, and tracked you everywhere except underground in abandoned subway tunnels.
A Person of Interest was the name.
No need to indoctrinate troops or brainwash civilian authorities to get the job done. This is the Tech Bros answer to everything---let the robots and AI do it.
Thom's Report info is the dream come to life for those that want a Technate of America where they control the lives of a billion people in the Western Hemisphere. They also have something for the folks they don't want dead. They will shut down their internet and lifelines until they obey. Expose. Share. Vote. See you in the streets.
Sadly, I know what you mean.
As creepy as it is? That is one of my favorite movies. And I am with you. All of this sounds even more terrifying than what was shared in Minority Report. Thanks for sharing that. Spot on.
OMG! This regime has got to go. Amendment 25 Drump and his corrupt Cabinet, Now! No one is safe under their watch!!! Thanks to SCOTUS and a complicit and spineless GOP led Congress!
**All** of this report from Thom is real - it's not science fiction, it's not in a far away future. It is **today**. The **widespread use** of these capabilities is just a few tomorrows from now.
What will we do to prevent this?
What will we do in the event we fail to prevent this?
These two questions have answers, but they won't become apparent if we look away. We must become comfortable with the uncomfortable, and we must never accept the unacceptable. Now is **always** the moment. We do not possess the luxury of "perhaps tomorrow".
Thanks for the simple explainer here, Thom:
"This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now."
Saving lives.
Even if "lavender" or "Where's Daddy" are BS, the fact that we're talking about them is intimidating.
When I was a grunt, I would have paid big time to have systems like that displace me.
I don't think that Operation Phoenix was in operation when I was in country, but we had human enemy detectors provided by ARVN and CIDG. We'd turn over all of the prisoners to let them sort them out.
In UK, the entire country is ostensibly monitiored 24/7 via satellite through a fragmented network of over 21 million CCTV cameras, the vast majority of which are privately owned.
Google sez research indicates that CCTV is 15% more effective at reducing crime when it is "actively monitored" by operators who can coordinate immediate police responses.
Police Deployment: Special police units, such as the Metropolitan Police's red vans, are often deployed to busy pedestrian areas to anonymously monitor crowds during specific operations.
Whe I left DC about 2018, the police were working on something similar.
1984
Lavender & Where’s Daddy are not bullshit, they are real & have been in use in Gaza for at least 3 yrs
No proof. We used to do similar stuff, psy ops.
We need to elect and support aggressive, creative, informed, tenacious fighters. Nothing less is acceptable.
We need to do a lot of things. Question is how? Especially when they have the means of control, surveillance, police, military and the means of enforcement, justice and police, and they have rigged the elections, and he won't vacate the premises even if he should lose.?
The characteristics I listed will be far more effective than huffy protestations and strongly worded letters.
I totally agree, but it will take, something that Americans don't have, the ability to take discomfort and pain, to risk everything, including their comfort and lives.
America is full of sunshine patriots. And as I was told by another poster, he wasn't issued a hair shirt."
Fool. You don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
IMHO Trump is working on suspending the elections. At the moment we need Congressional Republicans to emulate converts like you..
Sez the sunshine patriot. All's well and good, so long as there is no discomfort or sacrifice. I can actually see you jumping the fence, when the shit really gets nitty gritty.
Dream on about getting converts from Republicans. The know what happens to those that fall out of step and out of line, not tomention that they are all probably committed culture warriors anyway.
You have been yaking about converting Republicans for ages, and yet here we are. Even those that have defied Trump on matters like the Epstein files, are still confirmed culture warriors.
It is a fucking religion, and you don't convert religious believers by exhortation, they can feign religious conversion.
Convert a Muslim to a Jew, or a Haredi Jew to a Muslim, or a rad trad Catholic to a Muslim
You are exhibit "A". You converted.
People cut off their noses to spite their faces all the time. Why else would we keep using that warning?
You go first.
Daniel,nothing about the Epstein files recently,what's up?
Understood, but I don’t think we dare give up. And the fighters are gaining traction (e.g: Graham Platner vs Janet Mills). And those who champion “big tents” don’t insult their occupants. You’re no fool.
Who said anything about giving up. I have been proposing fighting, and I mean being able to take risks,pain and punches. The only way to defeat this fascist regime is by guerrilla warfare, BDS, withholding labor, withholding payments. bring the machinery to a halt, throw a monkey wrench in the gears, before the gears crank up and haul us to concentration camps. Resistance, real resistance not pressure release marches that they ignore.
Remember Trump dumping shit on the No Kings protesters. How many of them have there been, all across the country, and what effect have they had on changing the course of action or policies" None, in fact they have achieved the opposite. Trump let loose ICE tha is killing people and violating rights, and then started a war, misused our military, invaded a country, arrested the leader, and is still planning on taking over Greenland, Cuba, even Mexico and Canada, the rest of Central America has submitted, and he is attacking Ecuador, and Colombia under the guise of the war on drugs.
As I see it there are only two chances to save ourselves.
1. An election turnout of 100% of Democrats and fed up independents, as it will take that to over ride all of the voter suppression laws, policies and activities they have set up.
2. A complete collapse of the economy, enough that even the hard core theocrats, racist and MAGAts say enough, we were wrong, and that means pain.
There is a 3rd, and it is a stretch, the entire world is fed up, stops buying and selling stuff, shifts from the dollar to the renembi (yuan) or the Eurodollar. and Trump is isolated from the world, which means we are isolated, and that hurts us economically, that too will bring a lot of pain, but it is the only way to rid ourselves.
Do you have another idea?
Civil war is never a good option. Need to fought out at the ballot box. We need better policy to protect voters and insure that their vote is counted. I have that plan on Retired Analyst Mike.
You got that right, William, Trump has all of the trump cards; we have nothing but our lives and bodies.
A few anti-Trumpers have guns, but they are severely outnumbered, unorganized and probably already under surveillance. The rest of us (like myself,) are scared witless - and we should be.
To be honest, everything for me is working just fine. I still get my SSA checks, my retirement, as does my wife. no mortgage, paid off, no debts, I can handle inflation, (where I live gas is over $6.00 a gallon.,but I use more gas in my ride mower than I do in my cars.
If I were simply self concerned, I would say "no problem",however I am able to look five or six steps ahead, and see where everything is headed, and the fuure is not so bright as the present.
Then again at 87, with diabetes on Mountjaro, and 8 years in remission from stage 4 lung and brain cancer, I am living on borrowed time, and I don't expect to have to live under, or suffer from the horrors of the regime that is taking form.
But I do care, I care deeply enough that I can't stand the idea of evil winning, and that is what I see today. not just in the U.S. but evil being perpetuated all over the world, not only for greed and personal power but in the name of religion. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist.
There are two things that drive the authoritarian mind: (1) as control freaks, they can never have enough control, and this leads to (2) they can only have peace of mind through "the final solution". These are tormented individuals who blame us normals for their torment.
It's the amygdala. Flee or fight.
Congratulations Thom, you mentioned Gaza for the second time on your Substack. And again, just for context, Democrats have approved of and funded mass surveillance as much as or more than Republicans. Just last month Washington state’s Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson was “proud to welcome” over 700 war profiteers and AI surveillance companies to Seattle for a convention of the same death dealers who supply the US with munitions and intelligence for the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s bombing of Iran. Attendees include top US military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, and Boeing and AI/surveillance giants Palantir, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Textron. So Democrat Ferguson is “proud to welcome” the same companies that Trump is now using to blow up the Middle East, and expand mass surveillance and drone technology, just like his predecessors.
I lived through Nixon. Through Reagan’s slow dismantling of the social contract. Through the post 9/11 fever dream that gave us the surveillance state we now can’t unwind.
Nothing prepared me for the feeling I had reading this.
It’s not the technology that breaks me. It’s the sequencing. First you build the culture of impunity, where agents shoot a mother on a residential street and the Vice President calls her brainwashed. Then you make sure nobody gets charged. Then you quietly transfer the targeting decision from a reckless human to a patient machine, and suddenly there’s no one left to even accuse.
That’s a blueprint.
Phoenix didn’t start as a massacre. It started as a database.
Democracies don’t usually die with a declaration. They die when enough people decide, separately, in private, that it’s safer to stay home. That filming an arrest isn’t worth it. That showing up isn’t worth it. That the risk calculation has changed.
That’s what a confidence score does before a single drone ever launches. It doesn’t have to kill you. It just has to make you wonder if it might.
And a country where citizens do that math before they step outside? That’s already not a democracy. That’s a country performing the memory of one.
Renée Good didn’t do that math. She stopped her car.
The question this moment is asking every single one of us is whether we still have the nerve she had.
Do you stand up in a field of fire?
To those of us who survived combat, "get low" was the best advice.
That’s earned wisdom and I respect it. Getting low to survive is different from staying low forever. At some point the field has to be crossed.
That's when we call in the reserves/artillery & air support..
Now we’re talking the same language. Different terrain, same principle. You don’t abandon the field. You escalate the response.
DomEstic surveillance, identifying and harassing proteseters, murder by federal "law enforcement" agents?
Did we have this five years ago, before Trumpp II?
NO
All of this lawlessness, denial of due process, murder in international waters,
IT ALL STARTED WITH TRUMP.
IT WAS ALL APPROVED BY THE SILENT CONSENT OF A REPUBLICAN CONGRESS.
It will not stop until this evil administration is ejected.
AMERICA! WAKE UP!
WE HOLD THE ULTIMATE POWER BY OUR VOTE.
IN NOVEMEBER . . . VOTE!
Are you kidding? The Biden administration prosecuted over 3,000 pro-Palestinian student protestors, with hundreds injured by Biden's Gestapo. Here in Illinois, Governor Pritzker had his State Troopers attack protestors (including me) at the Broadview ICE facility. Obama expanded George W Bush's Patriot Act twice, and Obama lied about the NSA's illegal surveillance of millions of Americans. Democrats take as much tech/surveillance money as Republicans, and they have been supportive of ICE and CBP from their inception. Unfortunately as the capital letters show Thom has you thinking with your hippocampus and not your prefrontal cortex.
Can you be a little more specific about dates,places,news coverage of the incidents you're referring to. Throwing out info without specifics does not convince anyone.
https://dailytarheel.com/article/investigations-past-student-protesters-update-20260120
You are not aware of this because Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich and all the faux progressive pundits will not cover the misdeeds of the Democrats. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nearly-2200-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-protests-on-college-campuses-as-police-clear-nyu-encampment
Are you part of the " NeoNazi" party that has taken over Gov't ?Is Pete Hegseth your best friend? Apparently you are not a "pro Democracy advocate.
THe : Nazis" are winning because the Democrats are weak,but that is changing,no more diplomacy,no more " Mr Nice Guy" .Down in the trenchs.
https://www.propublica.org/article/four-questionable-claims-obama-has-made-on-nsa-surveillance
If I write a comment here that's critical of Trump, will my name go on a list somewhere? I'm not sure that I still want to be an American after reading this.
After 911, a bill was pulled out of a file drawer that had been drawn up during Clinton's tour, called the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, it created the National Security State and authorized the construction of a National Data Center, to collect and store all electronic communication.
It is located in Bluffdale, UT and is huge, five huge buildings, and now powered with themost effective AI, that exists.
It scoops up all electronic communication and data, but supposedly only screened data between a foreign source and the U.S., and if you believe that, you will believe anything.
But even that prohibition has been abandoned under Trump and with that Russian Asset Gabbard in charge of the NSA.
Russians are using FPV drones to kill civilians in the streets. Ukraine has gone to the expense of stringing anti drone nets over their streets.
Ukraine is using autonomous drones to attack the Russians. They have even had soldiers surrender to drones.
They already know everything about you, Palantir has all your personal data, the National Data Center has all of your electronic communications. The IRS has your tax returns, HUD has your mortgage and loan applications. Experian, Transunion all of your credit info and bank accounts,
Traffic camera's, CCTV, doorbell cameras, facial recognition software, license plate readers. You better be good, obedient boys and grils.
Americans don't know anything about the Russo Ukraine war, because our media doesn't cover it and there are no American reporters in Ukraine. The use of Drones is constantly evolving on both sides. And in Ukraine they are made in homes, garages and in backyard bunkers, for a most $10,000 for the most sophisticated, made from microchips from salvaged washing machines, and off the shelf commercially available parts.
However there is plenty of reporting, especially about the use of drones on medium.com, alas it is a paywall, but Ukraine is not the only thing that is on the site.
Also Malcolm Nance, Black man spy, Danish Intelligence expert Jacob Kaarsbo and Wajeeh Lion, cover it, but at the moment they spend most of their time on TrumpBibi's war. https://malcolmnance.substack.com/p/us-iran-war-cast-day-57-live-wmalcolm
"Thank You" for letting us all know what's going on behind closed doors within this Regime. I WILL be calling my Congressman/Congresswoman TODAY! I appreciate you SO MUCH Thom...
What Congress person?A Democrat (as it stands now) has no influence, and a Republican doesn't give a damn, or is afraid to rock the boat.
Maybe this horror is being done by people who sincerely believe they are doing the right thing. Or maybe they just don't care. The result is the same. As E.B. White wrote in "The Morning of the Day They Did It" (1950), ultimately we are creating our own destruction:
There is, of course, a mild irony in the fact that it was the United States that was responsible. Insofar as it can be said of any country that it had human attributes, the United States was well-meaning. Of that I am convinced. Even I, at this date and at this distance, cannot forget my country’s great heart and matchless ingenuity. I can’t in honesty say that I believe we were wrong to send the men to the platform—it’s just that in any matter involving love, or high explosives, one can never foresee all the factors. ... Anyway, it was inevitable that it should have been the United States that developed the space platform and the new weapon that made the H-bomb obsolete. It was inevitable that what happened, at last, was conceived in good will.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/02/25/the-morning-of-the-day-they-did-it
You are mistaken - None of this was ever or is ever conceived in "good will". Neither was Nazi Germany conceived in "good will". It is conceived by over testosteroned men - mentally sick and perverted and at the basis of their lives probably evil although they would call it "doing the right thing". The Spanish Inquisition also was "doing the right thing". Same for Uganda and Rwanda where millions were massacred by machete. So was Pol Pot, so was Mao, so was Stalin.
I agree, it is the idea that "the right thing" can be justified by "good intentions" (and we know where those often lead). White was writing during some of the darkest days of the Cold War, so there was a bias here too, but it is a long way from "Stuart Little". In the story the U.S. is dystopian but few, if any, see how bad things have gotten and the narrator maintains his delusions. I think what is actually worse are those who don't consider the ethics or consequences of what they are doing. They are the technicians and bureaucrats who make the systems run. And anyone who isn't morally dead to the implications either doesn't go into this work or soon leaves, either voluntarily or not.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Original sin.
Scary as Thom's tale may seem, drones have been around for over a century. However, it was not until the 21st century that they were taken seriously by the world's militaries because they were cheap and effective ways to eliminate ground troops. The Turkish MIC especially started producing affordable remote-controlled drones in 2018. Most have been deployed in the Middle East. Back in 2015, I read an article about a toy drone delivering a grenade to a field unit sitting around a campfire. It hovered over the fire, set off the grenade, and killed the entire unit. Today, such small weaponized drones are still in use, but the military is finding that larger ones are effective at clearing trenches and disabling armored vehicles.
So, yes, the technology is here to use drones as assassination tools as well as spy tools. The US MIC has resisted getting into drones even when it was feasible for a submarine to quickly surface near an aircraft carrier and launch 100 or more drones to disable the carrier. Flying en masse, the Navy had/has no effective weapons but machine guns to try to bring them all down. So enough drones could disable operations in a single, inexpensive attack without loss of life.
Ukraine has finally "woked" the US and RU militaries as they refined the weapons and developed effective tactics to deliver them. The MIC was, of course, resistant to drones because where's the profit in that? Cost is one reason why we are buying spaceships, armed satellites, and battleships. It is also an excuse to retrofit all ships at sea and armored personnel carriers with laser anti-drone weapons. Finally, it is also why DOD has recently begun recruiting video game addicts because we need people who enjoy sitting in dark rooms all day remotely blowing things up.
What more…what else… has to happen before Congress stops these madmen and their machines of death, destruction and annihilation ???? What could possibly be the HOLD UP ????
Thank you for making us aware of this!
Be afraid. Be very afraid. And after you are afraid, be very angry and wonder how these misfits and weirdos were able to deceive so many people and gain so much power while we were busy with work and worry and survival. We were failed by our institutions, and we were lulled into complacency by our comfort and confidence in our leaders, forgetting that we are supposed to be the leaders who stand up and speak up when they commit outrage after outrage. We the people let our guard down because we were led to believe that the system would auto-correct, and that someone else would do the hard work of figuring out what was being done behind the scenes.