The next time you go for a drive, you might want to look up. The company that put thousands upon thousands of automated license plate readers in communities all over America is now putting them in the sky. Flock Alpha drones can travel at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, and they can read license plates from 2,000 feet away. These drones are being marketed as “first responders”, and they have the potential to be far more intrusive than automated license plate readers that are simply mounted on the side of the road.

Of course Flock automated license plate readers don’t just read license plates.

According to DeFlock, these highly sophisticated surveillance devices are actually “AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time”…

DeFlock, a national organization, says automated license plate readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are “AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time” and collect the data (which includes identifying details like dents or bumper stickers) “regardless or whether the driver is suspected of a crime.”

In addition, Flock cameras also make a record of the exact make, model, color and body type of your vehicle.

If your vehicle has any aftermarket modifications, roof racks, bumper stickers, decals or visible body damage all of that is recorded too.

Are you starting to understand why so many people consider these cameras to be extremely intrusive?

According to CNN, there are more than 120,000 Flock cameras actively operating in the United States right now.

All of the information that they collect is entered into a searchable national database that has so much potential to be abused.

Read the entire article here…

To prevent damage to your license plate, you might consider one of those clear covers that you see on some cars. To prevent UV damage, there are even tinted covers. Also, having a selection of magnetic bumper stickers that you rotate might be interesting.

I salute Matt Van Swol and his wife and their decision. THIS is what will make a real difference.

Trump’s team is weighing three paths on Iran: escalate militarily, tighten economic pressure, or declare victory and pull out — according to The New York Times, citing sources.

The NYT writes that Trump has effectively trapped himself in a war he can’t exit, “despite wielding the world’s biggest hammer.” A president who believed his power had no limits has run into several — and it’s left him rattled and increasingly erratic, the paper says. His presidency, per the report, has been slowly consumed by a war with no clean off-ramp.

As evidence of this erratic pattern, the NYT points to last week’s episode with Saudi Arabia: Trump’s own Energy Secretary signed a landmark civil nuclear deal with Riyadh — then less than 24 hours later, Trump blew it up himself, blindsiding the Saudis by declaring the 18-months-in-the-making agreement dead unless the kingdom joins the Abraham Accords and recognizes Israel.

Aaron David Miller, a former US diplomat with decades of Middle East experience, said Trump has once again “alienated the Saudis, delighted Netanyahu, and handed Iran a solid argument for why making deals with the US is pointless — since betrayal is inevitable.”

From DD Geopolitics

The great redeeming value of the Donald Trump years is that they’ve clarified things. They have offered no salvation or solutions, but the polarization they’ve engendered ensures no one can delude themselves about what’s at stake. There is no longer any consensus about so-called American values. The Left has abandoned free speech since 2017, and the Right is turning against the “proposition nation.” Now, it appears both factions are dismissing the “rule of law” itself, except as a slogan wielded in bad faith. We can’t dispense with it quickly enough.

It was always a sham. Most of the great triumphs of American progressivism, from desegregation to homosexual marriage, were imposed undemocratically by justices who wanted to implement their policy preferences. Conceived by the Founders as the weakest branch of government, the Supreme Court is today essentially sovereign when it comes to domestic policy, with Congress unable or unwilling to legislate, the states rendered meaningless administrative entities, and even an “authoritarian” like Trump unwilling to defy the Court on decisions like birthright citizenship.

… another case may do what the Supreme Court has not: awaken ordinary white people to the lie of the “rule of law.” It is a case that every American has a stake in. It is the case of Shiloh Hendrix, a white mother in Minnesota who has been convicted for saying a word that is repeated countless times every single day by the Regime’s pets.

Read the entire Arktos substack …

Ukraine’s drone attack on the Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea on Saturday, in my view, was a desperate attempt by Zelensky to pander to Donald Trump and show his willingness to sacrifice more Ukrainians in a war that has nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine. As you can read in the captioned image above, Iran reportedly is gearing up to hit Ukraine with a missile or two. My guess, if it happens, is that Iran will go after targets in Odesa.

… we are getting some hints that Pakistan and Qatar are working to revive the now defunct MoU. The latest news from Interfax is a clue:

Benjamin Netanyahu has informed his cabinet ministers that the United States is insisting on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip,according to Channel 13, citing a well-informed source.

According to the television channel’s source, Washington is interested in the Israel Defense Forces carrying out a “series of withdrawals” on three fronts, but does not specify whether this refers to a complete or partial withdrawal of troops.

This tells me that the Iranians are insisting, as a precondition to revive the MoU, that the first paragraph of the now inactive MoU must be complied with, i.e., Israel pulls out of Lebanon and Gaza. While Bibi insists that he will firmly resist Trump, Israel’s dependence on the US for imports of critical diesel and jet fuel gives Trump critical leverage over Netanyahu and Israel.

Read the entire Sonar21 post …

From Vox Popoli

Never, ever, imagine for one second that a single drop of all the intergenerational hate directed at the Boomers is unjustified. Frankly, at this point, I’m a little shocked that they’re not all being forcibly euthanized for their assets while any still remain.

Antiques Roadshow

Boomer w/ a 60s Fender guitar: “Cost me $383. My grandkids can fight over it when I’m gone.”

Appraiser: “This guitar is worth about $12,000.

Boomer boomingly: “Weh-heh-hell! I guess the grandkids won’t be getting it!”

They aborted their children and bankrupted their grandchildren, and remain proud of their philosophy, their behavior and their self-identification to this day. On the plus side, we now understand why the Israelites were not allowed to enter the Promised Land until every member of the wicked generation had died off. The New Testament is perfectly clear on how this all-too-typical Boomer behavior is “worse than an infidel”.

And if you’re a Boomer who is behaving like every normal generation previously did and leaving your children and grandchlldren better off than you were, do try to keep in mind that this is what everyone was always supposed to do!

Roth Note: I like Vox Day (Popoli). He provides what I consider valid insights on most things. That said, I believe he must have had a terrible personal experience with his parents, or perhaps it’s a regional cultural thing (Yankees). He continually beats on Boomers. First off … everybody? Well, I’m a Boomer and I suspect many of the readers here are, as well. So I ask, do you identify with Vox’s description? I certainly don’t and I know of no other Boomers who do. We take care of our children and grandchildren. We give now while we can enjoy the pleasure of helping them, same as our parents did for us. We could pick on the Millennials, etc., but what would be the point? None of us are perfect.

From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

If all of this is a law of nature, then what’s the point of doing anything? If winter comes no matter what, why not draw the curtains and wait for the dark?

The answer to that is in ancient poetry.

The Norse had Ragnarök, and named the run-up to it the Fimbulwinter — three winters with no summer between them, the season when kin turn on kin:

• The wolf-age
• The axe-age
• The sword-age.

Hidden in a wood, Hoddmímir’s holt, which the wise have long suspected is the world-tree itself, two human beings shelter while the world burns. Líf and Lífþrasir: Life, and the one who clings to life. They live on nothing but the morning dew.

When the fire has burned itself out and the long winter finally cracks open, they walk out of the wood, and everyone alive after them descends from those two. The land comes up green out of the sea. Wheat grows that no one sowed.

So there is work to do, and the work never stops in the winter. Nobody in any of these stories could stop it, and the ones who said they could were selling something. The work is to be the seed; the thing that comes through the reset because it was never leaning on the thing that is collapsing.

That is not voting harder, btw.

Voting harder is grabbing a spoke as the wheel goes over. The real work is older, quieter, and mostly unseen.

You keep the memory alive on purpose, because forgetting is the engine of the whole descent. You hold a few people close against the wolf-age.

You carry the old stories down into the dark, so that whoever climbs out the far side still knows what a king was — still has the word for the thing we are all half-grieving — and can build it again instead of only missing it.

We have done exactly this before. It is the only thing that has ever worked.

So look honestly at the hour. It is late autumn.

The man on the white horse is real, and he is coming. But his name will never be on a ballot, and he may not arrive in our lifetimes.

Between now and the rider, there is only the wood, and the dew, and the seed. Be sure to tend it for your descendants.

Roth Note: It’s our turn on the battlefield. We will not survive this time of monsters, this dying of the world. Our mission is to protect the knowledge of truth, tradition, and the ways of our ancestors. Our mission is to leave a remnant for our descendants. A new world is coming. Therein lies our confidence.

Life skills and faith.

From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

A dying civilisation does throw up its strong man, Spengler granted. The chaos becomes unbearable, and somebody grips the wheel.

But that man may not be the cure. He’s perhaps the last symptom of the rot.

Spengler called it Caesarism, after the men who finished the Roman Republic. It makes sense because Caesar does break the rule of money, and he does bring a kind of order, but he is ordering a people who have already forgotten how to be a people, and the old crowns and titles he puts on are fancy dress over a corpse.

To distinguish between a strongman holding the steering wheel of a collapsing civilisation and a people’s rebirth through a strongman, you can read the symptoms.

Tacitus left the plainest gauge ever written: the more corrupt the state, the more laws it keeps.

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” —Tacitus, Annals 3.27

One might add: a people that trusts itself needs few rules; a people that trusts nothing needs a rule for everything.

Watch the free bread and the free spectacle: the poet who coined “bread and circuses” spat the words, at a public that had once handed out armies and now asked only to be fed and amused. And watch the money go thin: over two centuries, the Roman silver coin was clipped and watered by one emperor after another until it was a copper slug under a bright wash of silver, a lie you could hold in your hand.

We are not the first people to stand here.

We are only the latest to assume we are the exception.