When SCI FI Becomes a Reality, the 2nd Amendment Will Feel Cosy

America has now decided to employ the same drones used to kill terrorists in Yemen above our own skies. Combine this decision with the fact that the Administration is now hiring people who meet psyche profiles that will allow them to more easily kill our own citizens and it makes a good scifi movie.

Every city is now being outfitted with cameras at road intersections for traffic control. Every state security center is being outfitted with facial recognition software and computing power to recognize any individual that passes through these videos. Every cell phone is now by law a listening device for law enforcement to be used without warrant. Every security center can listen to every phone conversation in America and with enough artificial intelligence can create dossiers on every individual in America summarizing their speech. Every cell phone GPS can be matched by location to every suspected crime scene, mob, demonstration or assembly to monitor and assess probabilities of being connected to action against the state. Every security center can add every credit card transaction to dossiers to scan for probabilities of terror or crime. EVery public form of transportation, every banking transaction, even your use of electricity can be monitored and compared to the norm for suspected illegal activity.

Add to this immense detection power, growing exponentially and connecting interagency, interstate, and internationally, a computing and analytical capacity that is breaking through previous paradigms of what is possible faster than our policing laws can be changed to keep up with them and you have an immense, almost inconceivable capability to determine the DNA of our citizenry in real time.

Now take this microscopic surveillance and add it 30,000 drones operated by sociopathic twenty somethings that have sworn to remotely joy stick their contraptions in grid formation and to trigger their kill switches to employ deadly lazers with precise accuracy anywhere in their assigned grid and you have a Orwellian destruction machine awaiting he who would be king.

Now as a law abiding citizen, I am ambivalent of such policing power. The love part of my thinking is that this artificial intelligence strength can be used against that not so mythical future terrorist organization that plots to take down our country through weapons of mass destruction. Such immense policing force could not have been accepted by our government at all levels were it not for the very real possibility and high probability that our government and/or financial structures could be incapacitated by ideological organizations possessing nuclear or other means of destruction within our borders.

As this power that is now flying up the curve of capability begins to pin point and prioritize those individuals amongst the 310 million of us moving within the boundaries of America that might perpetrate these most heinous of crimes, we will all watch in amazement at how much more easily our law enforcement continues to apprehend individuals set on perpetrating terrorist crimes of all levels of sophistication. For that terrorist that might one day attempt to destroy an entire city in a lunch pail, it will give America a fighting chance to find this needle in a haystack and to stop such an atrocity of unspeakable scale before it is triggered.

The mistrusting part of my ambivalence feels this power could be used to enslave our nation through a rising tyrannical government of ideological extremes almost as easily as it could be used to protect us from destruction by a rogue terrorist bent on destroying what they feel is an evil hegemony that enslaves the world. America now debates the use of automatic pea shooter ak-47s that might one day have to fight a 30,000 headed, lazer breathing dragon in the sky bent on destroying every human within the border whose dossier meets predictive probabilities of becoming an enemy of the state.

 

This scifi thriller above would be out on the lunatic fringe if it weren’t so real.  Advocates of gun control say that the whole concept of the 2nd amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But mankind is capable of some pretty way out lunacy.

The trillions of dollars the United States and others have spent on nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire planet many times over is even farther out on the lunatic fringe, yet our societies marched in lockstep out to the fringes as we taught our children to make sense of our lunacy through the exercise of climbing under their school desks. 

The North and Central American holocaust, EuroAmerican slavery, the rise of the Nazis, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Chinese re-education and so many other atrocities, these are all so lunatic as to be deniable to the human condition, if it were not so that they actually occurred. 

Are we on this planet going to be so deluded as to think that in the next 5,000 years of human history, if mankind is lucky enough to figure out how to deny its own extinction, that we will not time and time again repeat of our horrific nature on civilizations yet to rise? 

Yes, the 2nd Amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But when the world is confronted by its next lunatic existence, this one simple protection of the right to bear arms might just seem normal. It might just be that as we meander through the burned out cities in our roving gang of hunters and gatherers, that we look back at that band of elite eighteenth century farmers that gave us the 2nd amendment with a solemn reflection to thank them from the pit of our hearts for the bit of sanity they gave to our now post apocalyptic chaotic world.

The Holocaust Museum – America’s Voice for Vigilance Against Evil

I visited the Holocaust Museum the last time I was in DC. It was an honest portrayal of the ghastly horror that was inflicted on a people by the most degenerate qualities of humanity.

I took a tour from a survivor who shared with the group in the most humble of ways. What happened during this tour shook my faith in our world a bit. It wasn’t just because I was faced with the reality that mankind can be so demonic to those who allow themselves to be vulnerable to the state that I was so disturbed, although the demonstration of this quality at the museum was quite frank. No, it was that a mother, father and little boy aged 9 that took the tour seemingly quite lamblike were actually wolves reliving the history.

As we walked from exhibit to exhibit, the tour guide took questions and comments from the group. The little boy continued to make me more uncomfortable as he increasingly voiced inappropriate gestures toward the guide. I continued to watch his parents as he blurted out what were obvious slurs and they remained fixed in upright smiles.

At the end of the tour, the group came to the display was of the Nuremburg trials and subsequent hangings and firing squads. The little boy as he witnessed the deadly justice being delivered to the perpetrators of Nazism, screamed out. I thought that the gravity of the museum must have finally gotten to him until I heard him crying to his mother for assurance that this final phase of WWII was a lie.

While the holocaust survivor guide was quite gracious to all under the circumstances, I felt the shock of witnessing this twist of fate. I then watched the little boy’s mom come over to comfort her son as all were disbanding. She leaned over maternally hugging her child and she whispered calmly in an all too clear voice that he was correct, that this last display was the lying propaganda of the Jews.

That night I prayed for Israel, for those that seek her destruction and for those who deny the evil that is part of humanity.