News You Can Use

Here are a couple articles that caught my eye:

NSA Surveillance Scandal: Snowden In Moscow, Asks Ecuador for Asylum

What occurs to me is Snowden is not the name we should be concentrating on, or the one that should be on the run. It’s the NSA names that signed off on the illegal spying that should be the names of the hour. Names to admonish and remember.

and lest the NSA have all the fun…

Confirmed: The FBI is Spying on the US with Drones

The interesting thing about drone technology is, quite like science fiction stories of yesteryear(fact being forged out of fiction), they are no longer restricted to the size of small robot controlled planes high in the sky. Increasingly they are the size and contour of innocuous things like insects.

Seriously. I would not joke you. Look it up, I’ll wait.

Hmm-hm-hmmmm-hmm …. duh-da-da da … Ah, you’re back. So looked it up have you? All proven? Good.

So, Take a close look at that next dragonfly buzzing around, it may just be time to say… cheese. :).

Civil Liberties? Human Rights? Privacy? Where or where have they gone. :).

Maybe there is a simple answer to the preservation of these endangered concepts like liberty … fighting for them. Every way we can… fighting for them. They must be preserved by seeing a wrong, acknowledging it as such, and acting against it.

Snowden, whatever his believed goals, did more right than wrong, in putting morality before money, and conscience before corporations and the corporate stranglehold on American policy. And before any of this gets better(this being our steep slide to totalitarianism and slavery) we must… all of us… make judgments about what we allow to be done in our name, by a largely hidden minority, who hide behind letters like… US.

United States.

Who the hell are they to hunt and kill and torture under that cloak? Under that mask, under that lie, of the United States. I am the United States as long as I pay taxes to the fiefdom. And I see the spying programs as illegal at best, and Snowden as a necessary byproduct of a culture of lies. As a man who sees the truth, and has the temerity… to believe the governed have a right to the reality of the machinations that govern them.

We must all of us judge what is done in our name, and if found wrong… resist it.

And whether that wrong be called Schutzstaffel or its progeny of the NSA, Darpa, Homeland Security, our response to it must be the same…

Resist it.

The NSA, Programs of Terror and Crime and the rights of the Governed

I find it interesting how the attention is focused on the young man who to my mind, did his duty and put the interest of the American people’s right to know, above the interest of a few shadowy spooks right to play god.

The Government is the servant of the people, and when it forgets that, it forfeits its right… to blithely be obeyed.

It forfeits its right to unquestioningly… govern.

There are such things as illegal orders and illegal acts, and any soldier’s or representative’s ultimate duty is not to his government but his country, and the moral imperative to know and act when those two things diverge.

The defense of the NSA in their criminal enterprise boils down to “our actions have stopped potential crimes”.

To that I would answer… you can not preserve freedom by eradicating freedoms, and you can not preserve the law by breaking the law.

Full stop.

That road lies in dark places that we have been before.

The NSA attempts to justify it like all overreaching totalitarian regimes justify anything, that their ends justify their means. And that has never been remotely true, and is not in this case. The NSA’s claim to have stopped acts of terror, misses the truth, which is… they have traded their greater acts of terrorism for others’ smaller, potential acts of terrorism.

It’s like Nazi’s Germany’s answer to any petty and supposed crime of the individual was the magnitude greater crime of the state, such as concentration camps. That we are walking down that road with the American government today is obvious and clear, from Darpa designing ever more sophisticated machines to kill men (in the event enough of our military wakes up to the idiocy of murder and assassination as government policy, well of course we need unquestioning machines there to do it instead) to the barbaric state of our prisons… we use the threat of terror to support an increasingly terrorist American Government.

It is a hypocrisy that must be recognized… clearly recognized… and opposed… vigorously opposed.

The person’s name we should be broadcasting is not the young man, that the culpable press (in the payroll of the very interests getting rich treating the common citizen as criminal before crime) calls demeaningly “whistle-blower”, it’s the ones who run the NSA. The shadowy directors and heads of the NSA and CIA and FBI and all those acronyms that hide their big crimes under the lie of persecuting small ones.

They are like the lynchmob hanging and castrating boys for whistling at women, they use the lie of petty crimes, as a smokescreen to commit great ones.

We’ve cut so many social and humanitarian programs for supposed lack of funds, yet so much of your tax dollars go into a black hole, where abhorrent individuals do abhorrent things under the lie of doing it in the name of “National Security” or “for the people” when the truth is, they do it for the reasons it has historically been done, they are diseased animals in positions of power and no one has told them no.

No one has put them down.

“No.”

And “Get down.”

It’s a start.

Maybe instead of cutting programs to feed and clothe and inspire and employ our citizens, maybe we start closing down the acronyms. This country ran before them, I reckon we’ll run after them.

And maybe run a damn sight better.