Kyle Reese… and Reinhard Heydrich

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In the original Terminator movie, Reese – the heroic resistance character sent to our present from a horrific future in which machines tyrannize humanity – displays a bar code embedded on his arm to convince Sarah Conner he’s not nuts and that his story is all-too-real. The bar code, of course, is used to scan people instead of groceries.  bar 1

Creepy sci-fi in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out.

An even creepier reality this 2012 – a time when men use machines to tyrannize man.

In Virginia – my home state, but by no means the only state looking into this – lawmakers are “studying” the idea of bar-coding license plates and possibly even embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into them so that every car – and thus, every driver – can be more readily kept track of.Microsoft Word - D002250-V003-5627

Ostensibly, for mere revenue collection.

The Virginia soviet – er, DMV – issued a report (see here) about a week ago bemoaning the loss of toll fees resulting from cars being able to slip through the revenue gantlet, particularly along the I-95 corridor near Richmond, where automated toll machines are supposed to snap pictures of toll both scofflaws and send them a piece of payin’ paper in the mail. It is insufferable that anyone escape paying “their fair share” to use roads they’ve already paid more than their fair share to use via motor fuels taxes and all the countless other taxes each of us is already forced to pay.bar 3

But toll-skippers are small fry – just a convenient excuse to bar code and chip our cars. And thus, us. The DMV soviet’s study estimates that, at most, $70,474.73 is lost each year to toll non-payers. Chump change – for an entity that disposes of $85 billion annually (see here). Seventy thousand? It’s amazing they even noticed it. Probably, that amount of other people’s money is spent on lawmakers’ mini-bar incidentals in a month.

No, the real sweet spot is the millions that could be mulcted via these bar-coded and RFID’d license plates. Readers have already pointed out – in response to my last article about “creative resistance” (see here) that many jurisdictions already have mobile plate scanners that enable cops to quickly suss out out-of-date vehicle registrations and so on. Bar-coded and chipped plates would make things even more efficient for the mulcters. A single cop – or even several cops – cannot scan everyone. The “offender” must be within range of the cop’s car. There are only so many of these. And if your car (or bike) is parked off-street, inside an enclosed garage – or in the backyard…

But if the plate can transmit…   a brave new world of possibilities opens up. Forget being able to benignly neglect to re-up your registration, or get your vehicle properly inspected. They will know.

And you will pay.

Unfortunately, more efficient fleecing is merely one aspect of it. The other – more sinister – aspect is more efficient monitoring.

Which is another way of saying, more efficient controlling.

Enter the silent partner of the bum’s rush toward bar-coded and RFID-embedded license plates: Der Heimatsicherheitsdienstamt (HSDA), rendered with less felicity  in English as The Department of “Homeland” Security. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute released another “study” of the benefits (to the state) of bar-coding and chipping us (well, our cars… for now). Guess who is frequently mentioned as a co-beneficiary? Guess who has a prominent link on the bottom of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s web site?bar 4

You guessed right.

As intolerable as the notion of “lost revenue” is to your ordinary political greedhead, it is the notion of anonymous free travel that is anathema to the control freak Clovers who run the HSDA. They cannot abide the idea that anyone might go somewhere without someone (i.e., them) knowing about it.  The slightest  remaining wisp of freedom of action left to us amounts to a loss of control to them.

And that is what cannot be tolerated.

Bar coded and RFID-tagged plates (along with the just-mandated “black boxes” for all new cars) will solve the problem.  If, for example, the HSDA decides so-and-so is an “enemy of freedom,” his freedom to travel will be easy enough to terminate, just like that. Maybe this will simply be done in the name of “congestion pricing” – or to “reduce your global warming footprint.” The reasons are many – and largely irrelevant.

It’s the means that matters.

In particular, one of the few remaining impediments to a total, 24-7 surveillance and control grid is pre-GPS, pre-black box vehicles. They can’t be turned off remotely – and it’s much harder to keep track of them. And so, control them.

One of the easiest ways to get them under control would be to impose a new law requiring that all vehicles wear bar-coded and RFID embedded plates. This would end-run the problem (for the HSDA) of older, “off grid” vehicles – without having to resort to an overt law declaring them obsolete, politically incorrect and impermissible.

Reinhard Heydrich, if only you’d been born a couple of decades later… .

Throw it in the Woods?

156 COMMENTS

  1. I remember watching the original Terminator in the theatre. Twice in a row. Me and my fellow kleptomaniac friend Chris had just stolen a few hundred dollars of art supplies from our art teacher’s husband’s store.

    What a couple of assholes. Two of the richest kids in town, stealing shit to escape the crushing boredom of our superfluous existence. After admiring our loot, we both settled deep into our seats and became riveted by Kyle Reese, and his gritty realistic persona of a near-future John the Baptist type of hero.

    Joining a resistance in preparation for the coming of J. C. – John Connor – Jesus Christ. That was exactly the kind of apostolic army we were looking to join. Living on the breakneck fringe. Running with zaftig-yet-hard chicks like Sarah Connor and barking orders at them; that felt like real life the way it was meant to be lived.

    Our daily mass Wine & Bread tasting New Testament hippie-fest on the Mount of Beatitudes overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The the drunken stumble-bum priests and vacuous guitar strumming eunuch nuns, that was tedious drudgery with nothing of interest to virile young men ready to burst upon the world.

    We wanted to graduate from being amateur assholes, into being full fledged regimental alpha male assholes. After all, it was our fellow asshole upper-classmen who we most listened to and most loyally followed. It was the permissive party place asshole parents and adults who attracted our emulation and compelled our attention and admiration.

    Even to this day, it’s the assholes I once befriended, like Chris; the assholes I once worked for, the assholes I encountered in charge and in places of power with whom I needed to negotiate with, that I most remember and most benefitted from.

    I have come to avoid most men who seem polished and benevolent. The ones who only talk but never really do help you. The ones, who, always behind your back, were working secretly to destroy you, and to keep you helplessly at bay, and locked in your matrix designated place.

    Usually, the good guys, who say the right things, who pretend to care about you, and who appear to live virtuous lives, always turns out to be liars, and always serve to keep us enslaved and in our chains.

    They are always covering for something sinister and inhuman behind the scenes, that’s what makes them work so overly hard to appear to be of kind temperament and good fellowship. That’s what makes them such cunning and convincing actors.

    Fortunately, we are entering an age who rejects these sweater set illuminati. We are now living in the age of naked assholism. The blunt Chinese, the serious Germans, Trump, Jobs, Zuckerberg: We have finally joined the wisdom of the world and its idolization of high achievement assholes.

    This is an era of obnoxiousness – the more arrogant and nasty you behave, have more successful you tend to be, and those with whom you surround yourself as well.

    Consider the most successful book in the world, with 6 billion copies now sold. The Bible. The Bible is the work of unconscionable assholeness. The Babylonian and later the diaspora Jews appropriated all the ancient literature of the world, renamed its protagonists and characters, and proclaimed all recorded meaningful history to have been in service to their God, and he alone. What assholes!

    But really, the world is at her best when the assholes are in their ascent. We have entered a modern age of assholism, mainly because we find the phenomenon and its practitioners so interesting, so provocative, so compelling, or so compellingly repulsive, or sometimes all of those things at once.

    I’m not thinking so much of assholes of opportunity like Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson, or of incidental assholes like James Cameron or Brett Favre, whose assholism only adds a colorful sidebar to an independently impressive career.

    There’s little about those people that’s particular to the asshole age, save that in earlier periods the public probably would have been spared the details of the personal tics and twitches that qualify them for the asshole label.

    What’s unique to our time is the fixation with certain iconic assholes, who exemplify each in his way the dominant allure of the whole human species. Steve Jobs, for example, was a modern personification of the asshole as achiever, someone whose assholism seems to be inextricable from his success as a leader.

    Even the most abusive manager and owner of property wants assurance that he’s on the right track; that his over the top ego is what’s good for the team and good for his investments. He knows, that after all is said and done, whatever his subordinates and dependents may say about him, they’ll be grateful later on, when their wealth and worth stay on the increase in an up and down world.

    For some, Jobs fills an analogous role in the digital age. Shortly after his death and the publication of a bestselling biography about him, it was written about Jobs in the Atlantic:

    CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: “See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I’ll be successful like Steve.”

    And indeed, some observers depicted Jobs’ assholism as a deliberate management style. As Newsweek once put it, Jobs was a “master of psychological manipulation”:

    He found that by delivering brutal putdowns of his co-workers he could test the strength of their conviction in their own ideas. . . . He found that many of the most brilliant engineers and creative types actually responded well to cruel criticism, since it reinforced their own secret belief that they weren’t living up to their vaunted potential.

    Not everyone agrees with that assessment of Jobs’ skills as a manager; Many insiders says that he was terrible at it, and that success came despite his being a colossal asshole, not because of it. But it isn’t as if there are no advantages to being an asshole, in business or elsewhere. Life rarely makes moral choices that easy for us. When he was preparing “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,” Robert Sutton reports he was repeatedly challenged by Silicon Valley leaders who asked him, “What about Steve Jobs?” to the point where he reluctantly added a chapter called “The Virtues of Assholes.” He concedes that judicious displays of irrational anger have their uses—fear of humiliation can be a motivator for employees if it’s balanced with the hope of praise, and a well-timed tantrum can get you a boarding pass at the last minute from uncooperative airport staff. And there are fields where behaving like an asshole offers a clear career advantage, such as professional wrestling and the law.

    In any event, few of the people who bought Jobs biography were looking for tips on becoming masters of the universe or pretexts for rationalizing their own arrogance. The stories told about Jobs’ assholism often demonstrate a capacity for irrationality, spitefulness, and petulance that had little to do with any psychological jujitsu: firing a manager in front of an auditorium of people; short-changing Steve Wozniak on a bonus in the early days of their partnership; taking credit for the ideas of others; screaming, crying, and threatening when the color of the vans ordered at NeXT didn’t match the shade of white of the manufacturing facility; and launching savagely into anyone who aroused his displeasure. (I know of one person who says he quit his high-level job at Apple because he got tired of wiping Jobs’ spittle off his glasses.) True, the Patton of historical fact was by most accounts even worse: a full-blown prick, sadist, and suck-up detested by both his superiors and his subordinates. But most of that iconic firebrandery is inextricably interwoven into Jobs’ pathological behavior and is an essential element of his myth.

    It says something about Jobs’ assholism that it hasn’t been retouched for public consumption the other heros often are. That has a lot to do with the anti-heroic temper of the times; we demand all the dirt, especially on our heroes. But it also suggests a different idea of what makes these asshole achievers compelling, even to those with no interest in emulating them. Jobs’ tantrums and rants don’t evoke the resolute toughness of a Leader of Men so much as the temperament that we associate with creative genius.

    Jobs styled himself as an artist rather than a businessman, the turtlenecked begetter of the cool exuded by the company’s iStuff. That was a credible posture in an age in which people found it natural to compare the launch of the iPhone to the previous generation’s Woodstock, and it seemed to license the prodigal shittiness that goes with being a Bernini, a Picasso or a Pound — or, for that matter, a Robert Plant.

    One reviewer of Jobs’ biography compared reading it to “going backstage at a Led Zeppelin concert in the seventies and seeing your heroes wasted, and babbling like babies, surrounded by bimbos.” Indeed, Jobs was a rock star, in a sense that Bill Gates couldn’t possibly be, not just because he was idolized, but because he was one of those people like Jim Morrison, Kanye West and the Metallica guys, whose behavior as flaming assholes is taken as evidence of being exceptional enough to be able to get away with it.

    • • •

    Donald Trump comes closer than anyone else to being the archetype of the species; crossing genres, he exemplifies all the ways an asshole can capture our attention. He’s in a different league from Jobs, whose assholism is perceived relative to his other achievements — they’d be remembered even if they had been even-tempered and self-effacing, though perhaps not the subjects of a best-selling biography or an Oscar-winning biopic, whereas Trump would have no more claim on our attention than Harold Hamm, Charles Ergen, Dannine Avara or most of the other hundred-odd Americans who have more money than he does.

    But Trump is a pure asshole in a way that very few people are ever a pure anything, as one dimensional as the villain in a Batman movie. Everything he says reveals the workings of a hermetically self-referential mind. Trump is type of deep footing upon which you can forge a nation.

    Controversial as Trump is in some regards, no one disputes that he’s an asshole, though people have very different reasons for finding that compelling. Some regard him with disdain. Once in the 1980s, Spy magazine made a fetish of his arriviste coarseness with the recurrent epithet “short-fingered vulgarian” (in retrospect, the “Not our class, dear” condescension of that phrase is a reminder of how tricky it is to deride an asshole from above). Others take pleasure in seething at his outrageousness. His presidential foray in early 2011, with its opportunistic rekindling of the birther dementia, briefly made him Topic A not just on the right but on the left—at the Huffington Post, mentions of Trump trail only those of Sarah Palin, who has been playing the game much longer and much harder.

    At the time of his possible Presidential run, even his online supporters conceded that he was an asshole, though they either looked past it or saw it as a plus. To some it meant that he was someone who would get the job done, to others that he wouldn’t mince words in letting the world know what an asshole Barack Obama is:

    If given the chance, I would have voted for him. The guy might be an asshole but the economy needs a fucking businessman at the helm. He is the right asshole for an asshole job.

    I would vote for Trump, precisely because he is a jerk, but a jerk who knows when he’s getting screwed on a deal, and will make sure it is America that comes out on top. Trump may be an arrogant asshole but he says what he thinks. He inspires you to say what you and other people are thinking but are afraid to say it because it isn’t PC.

    Trump is so fearless and does not give a damn about what people think about him. Unlike most people who are afraid to speak their mind and say what they really believe because they will be called racist bigoted etc. he just jumps once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.

    Trump’s preeminence in this line testifies to his mastery of the mechanisms of publicity. Few in public life understand better than he how engaging assholism can be, both in real life and in its broadcast simulacra. “The Apprentice” epitomizes the genre of reality television built around situations in which people can be abusive to others who have willingly consented to take part in return for money or celebrity. Every episode arcs towards a finale that gives the viewers the opportunity to watch a powerful man acting like an asshole towards his supplicants, dispatching the losing competitor with a brisk, “You’re fired.”

    The phrase is supposed to evoke the pitilessness it takes to survive in “the ultimate jungle,” but you don’t actually feel much compassion for the losers. They’ve fought to get there, after all, and any residual sympathy you might have had for them is dissipated in the final boardroom scene where they’re incited to act like assholes themselves, selling each other out in an effort to be spared the axe. And anyway, “fired” here really means “playing a subordinate role in the rest of this season’s episodes.”

    There’s none of the vicarious outrage one is supposed to feel upon watching a movie of the week that depicts Leona Helmsley summarily discharging a busboy who spilled some tea in her saucer. These asshole scenarios are reproduced, with variations, across many of the genres of reality television, from “American Idol” to “Restaurant Makeover” to Bering Sea Gold. These capitalistic showpieces show one “the thrill of witnessing real men at peace with their own arrogance”.

    In each instance, the format keeps the “reality” close enough to the actual so that the asshole’s behavior is distressing to his targets without ever reaching so deep into their off-the-job lives that it becomes genuinely disturbing to the viewer. They allow us to enjoy the spectacle of social aggression without experiencing any vicarious moral risk, in the same way that “dare” shows like “Fear Factor” allow us to watch contestants attempt to jump from one building to another without any real physical danger. On the contrary, our indignation over the behavior of the designated assholes on the job-search shows like “The Apprentice” and the documentary-style shows like those in the Real Housewives franchise isn’t diminished by knowing how much of it is engineered by the producers or simulated for the camera.

    It’s the same suspension of disbelief that makes possible the Comedy Central roasts, in which some celebrity, ideally a high-profile asshole himself, winces good-humoredly as comedians who have never met him take turns making pointed put-downs at his expense. There have been eras that took a far more intense interest in spectacles of cruelty than ours, but none that was so transfixed by watching people act like assholes.

    That fascination is fed in equal parts by our fantasies of rock star self-indulgence and the resentments and anxieties that assholes evoke. Both are popular themes in recent cinema. I’m not thinking so much of the innumerable comedies and dramas that feature assholes as their stock villains, but of movies in which the assholes are the focus of dramatic interest. Some of these are tales of asshole redemption, like “Rain Man” or “Minority Report”. Others are mean-girl movies like “Heathers” and “Mean Girls” which also break new generic ground.

    Meanwhile, television has made a mini-industry of the dirtbag sitcoms that I mentioned earlier. And one should make a special place for “The Office,” the original version with Ricky Gervais, which created one of the most incisive modern portraits of the asshole’s clueless self-delusion. Gervais’ David Brent elicits contempt and irritation, pity, even affection — a sign not so much of the complexity of the character but of how conflicted we are about the type he personifies.

    • • •

    Some of these assholes are just old curs warmed over, but others are creatures new to film. “The Social Network,” for example, could have been subtitled “Asshole 2.0.” There are obvious resemblances between Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs as driven high-tech creators, but the character of Zuckerberg created by Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher (which by all accounts is substantially different from the real Zuckerberg) belongs to a different genus of assholes. No one would be tempted to describe him as a “master of psychological manipulation,” as Newsweek did Jobs; he’s arrogant, self-absorbed, and insensitive to the point of near-autism. In the opening scene, he preens and condescends to his girlfriend, Erica, in a Cambridge bar (“You don’t have to study . . . You go to BU [Boston University]”). She tells him he’s an asshole, breaks up with him, and walks out. As if to prove her right, he goes back to his dorm and posts some unflattering and sexist remarks about her on his blog, then, in a misogynistic follow-up, creates the “Facemash” application that allows people to rank the women students for hotness. Later we see him cutting out his best friend, who put up the money for the project, and responding with prodigal snottiness to a lawyer who’s deposing him:

    GAGE: You don’t think I deserve your attention. . . .

    ZUCKERBERG: You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

    Only in an incongruously mawkish final scene does Zuckerberg reveal a dim awareness of his isolation and loneliness, as he sits alone at a conference table in the offices of his lawyers and sends a Facebook friend request to his former girlfriend, Erica, then keeps compulsively refreshing the page to see if there’s a response. All of a sudden he’s pathetic, and for the first time strikes us as a possible object of sympathy. “You’re not really an asshole,” his lawyer, Julie, has told him, but what the scene really shows is that he’s only an asshole, not an unmitigated shit like most of the other characters — the slick hustler Sean Parker, the supercilious and self-infatuated Winklevoss twins who accused him of stealing their idea.

    That last scene put several critics in mind of Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud,” and it seems to set the movie in the long line of American stories that show successful figures repaid for their unchecked ambition with loneliness. The scene is obviously meant to leave the audience with the consoling thought that it profiteth a man nothing if he gains the world but loses his soul mate. But there are no real film antecedents for the figure of the emotionally stunted nerd billionaire (a very far cry from Mickey Rooney in “Young Tom Edison”), just as there are no media precursors of the digital culture that seems to many to foster a kindred sense of disconnection and casual meanness. Or at least that’s the perception of many people in the generation of Sorkin and Fincher, who were in their late forties when the film was made. They obviously meant for their Zuckerberg to personify the digital culture, as they signaled in the ambiguous title “The Social Network.”

    Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebookistan? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder . . . Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is . . . We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebookistan Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

    But that’s not how people who grew up with Facebookistan see either Zuckerberg or his creation. When you talk to the younger generation about the movie or the social platform website, they acknowledge that Zuckerberg sometimes behaves badly, but they don’t see him as the alien and alienating figure that the media try to make him out to be — to them he’s a routine sort of jerk.

    If people have it in for Zuckerberg, it’s more often because of Facebookistan’s privacy policies than any of the wrongs committed by his media persona or movie avatar. They don’t see their walls and profiles as the places where they live their lives, just as one of the many venues, material and immaterial, where they circulate. And they’re quite clear on the difference between friends and “friends.” If they thought Facebookistan was a representation of their actual life, they’d begin to reevaluate things quickly.”

    In the same way, I, like other digital natives am not as disturbed by the snark and assholism endemic in the online world, not because the my perpetrations aren’t assholism, but because I fell they’re relatively harmless ones.

    It’s a curious feature of the asshole age that the forms of assholism that people find most alarming tend to be those that have less drastic effects on their daily lives. Abusive blog comments are much easier to ignore or shrug off than rude remarks from people standing behind you in the line at the DMV.

    Its possible, I am missing something significant. If only for the reason that the more remote and impersonal forms of assholism are much easier to engage in remotely online without rippling one’s conscience too much.

    While my virtual activities don’t generally inflict the personal injuries that my real-life assholism can at work, home, or play, it is nonetheless plausible that they are enormously destructive to the fabric of my public life, and therefore something to bring under control, and to do more sparingly.

  2. Time to move to another state, Eric. Or someplace the fuckers are too poor or disinterested to care. But this nonsense is meant to track and otherwise drive (pun intended) you out of your vehicle. Damn them all to hell.

  3. Texas A&M, I am disappoint.

    Not surprised at all though. The transport institute is all about engineers figuring out how to most efficiently move around all cars in any place in a day. Few engineers will conclude that getting out of the way is the best means to efficiency, it certainly isnt in the mechanical and civil fields. The idea that most of what they spend studying and tweaking is counterproductive at the very core, is as foreign a concept to them as was the earth being round to people hundreds of years ago.

  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-ZPass

    In NY NJ and Pa we have this E-ZPass thing. You get an electronic thingy (called a tag) to keep in your car. The electronic thingy is not needed as the toll plazas have cameras that read your license plates. I have tested this, you don’t need the electronic thingy as long as your vehicle’s plate is correctly registered with your credit card info you are billed normally and the authorities do not send you nasty letters. So the electronic thingy is a back up if the computer cannot read your plate.

    If there is an actual toll gate that needs to be raised you need the electronic thingy, although I think the police will raise the gate and let you go if you are registered with e-zpass.

  5. Dear Eric Reese and the Resistance,

    Shalom from the future my synchronic sonderkommandos.

    Years from now, we all come to realize the wars of 1812, 1861, 1914, & 1939 were all false flags launched to hide the predation and destruction of the banking system.

    We learn that Bastiat was right. When goods stop crossing borders, armies start crossing borders – as is now underway. The rise of the TSA was a ploy to prevent wealth or goods from being transferring between jurisdictions.

    This time, when they waved that false flag, but we never charged. We went seven suns of sun tzu on their ass. We outwitted and outlasted them. We found reserves of ancient knowledge and courage inside ourselves and then tapped and fracked them to the last ounce.

    We decided we are all one people. The Germanic-Anglos. There is no difference between the British, Dixies, Dutch, English, German, Wild Westerners, & Yankees. We stopped being manipulated into belligerent infighting Balkan states.

    We recognized the mechanistic cyborgs among us trying to instigate illusions and fear. We learned we are one. We learned how to win the classic prisoners dilemma. We fought back with gambits of our own. We found that by keeping a clear head and firm hand on our reasoning faculty, technology was our greatest friend and their greatest foe.

    . . . James Cameron = Captain Nemo . . .
    James Cameron is the shit. Writing and directing The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), Dark Angel (2000–02), and Avatar. He builds you classrooms and even shows you the answers from the Teacher’s Edition Textbook, you just need to LOOK.

    . . . Hunter Killers Are Nothing To Fear . . .

    Cool Hexacopter Bomb Drop of Household Objects

    Multimadmanable 1 week ago
    Whether one wants to admit it or not there is great responsibility that goes with flying RC & multirotor . It bothers me when people who enjoy the same hobby I do make references such as “bomb dropping” & then display the payloads these platforms are capable of hauling. The FAA is taking a very close look at our hobby & the possibility of it being illegalized is very High. My point is videos with titles like this give them ammunition to work with in a court of law.

    RobscoRC 1 week ago
    You clearly live in the US. I feel really bad for you guys down there having such strict laws on these things. Up here in Canada its the opposite. Companies are springing up everywhere using them for commercial and industrial purposes. Our government is encouraging people to experiment with these machines, and overseas its been like that for 10 years. Its a shame the US government is so afraid of their own people and are falling so far behind the rest of the world. My title remains Bomb Drop

      • Lol. She’ll be back.

        1
        When we were kids, we were told “Skynet” was all around us. Otherworldly souls in mirrors and reflective surfaces – like the moon, that can enter your body through your eyes.
        2
        From Lilith’s Cave – Jewish tales of the supernatural.
        3
        Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She wasn’t subservient enough for him, so a new one was made for him, including one of his own ribs to serve as a key to ensure her obedience.
        4
        “The wife brought the mirror and all of the fine furnishings in the cellar to her own home and proudly displayed it. She hung the mirror in the room of their daughter, who was a dark-haired beauty.
        5
        The girl glanced at herself in the mirror all the time, and in this way she was drawn into Lilith’s web…. For that mirror had hung in the the den of demons, and a daughter of Lilith had made her home there. And when the mirror was taken from the haunted house, the demoness came with it. For every mirror is a gateway to the Other World and leads directly to Lilith’s cave.
        6
        That is the cave Lilith went to when she abandoned Adam and the Garden of Eden for all time, the cave where she sported with her demon lovers. From these unions multitudes of demons were born, who flocked from that cave and infiltrated the world. And when they want to return, they simply enter the nearest mirror. That is why it is said that Lilith makes her home in every mirror…
        7
        “Now the daughter of Lilith who made her home in that mirror watched every movement of the girl who posed before it. She bided her time and one day she slipped out of the mirror and took possession of the girl, entering through her eyes. In this way she took control of her, stirring her desire at will…. So it happened that this young girl, driven by the evil wishes of Lilith’s daughter, ran around with young men who lived in the same neighborhood.”
        8
        From Lilith’s Cave: Jewish tales of the supernatural,
        9
        The daughters of Lilith are the people who give us problems. They are a burden to be fed and and entertained, as a voluntary mitzvah.
        10
        In any zombie scenario, it seems prudent to find something for the zombies to eat and keep themselves busy. But in a separate area. That way the chasing ends.
        11
        It takes time and effort, but if done efficiently and humanely, it will leave you most of your life to do what you want. Zombieologists and the zombies themselves will find ways to evolve and mature, in whatever sense zombies are capable of achieving.

    • No, in 1812 the war started when Napoleon attacked Russia because its trade with Britain was still going on (he wanted to starve Britain financially and of strategically vital naval supplies from the Baltic – his “Continental Policy”). So Bastiat was wrong, the troops crossed borders precisely because goods were doing so.

      Oh, and the sideshow in North America at about the same date was also in furtherance of the same objectives (among other things), to cut off Britain’s second sourcing of strategic materials. This second sourcing isn’t widely appreciated now, but it was well known at the time; even Tom Paine mentions it, and he was fairly superficial in his analysis.

      • I am sure you are right. Mencken warns that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

        So even way back then, Britain had only two sources of materials? I would’ve assumed there were dozens of nations they could procure strategic goods from. And many privateers at the ready to transact with as well.

        I do believe “treasonous” American frontiersmen fed and supplied the Canadians and British during the war of 1812.

        To refocus Bastiat’s insight, perhaps one can opine that free and prosperous men are less inclined to go engage in war. Why spill blood and risk loss, when one can engage in a battle of barter? When one can strike agreement, shake hands, and make a deal with a “foreign” comrade which serves you both with advantage and enrichment?

        I have read Payne’s Common Sense, and Age of Reason. I am not as familiar with The Rights of Man. Those are said to be the three top selling works of literature for the 18th Century.

        I do know that in the middle of the night before Christmas 1793, French Jacobin police hauled him away to Luxembourg Prison, on suspicion of being English. There, Paine was held without trial in a tiny, solitary cell. Seven months later, the public prosecutor added Paine’s name to the men who would be beheaded. Somehow this didn’t come to pass, and Payne ended up being freed during a lull in the Reign of Terror

        In this Wine Break, Some French had grown so tired of all the terror, they sought to calm everybody through a quaint artistic beheading of Robespierre. With the most fanatical promoter of Jacobin violence, and the worst was over for Paine.

        During Paine’s last years, he was desperate for cash as his health deteriorated. He lived in pitiful squalor. At his request, he asked to be moved into the home of his friend Marguerite de Bonneville at 59 Grove Street, New York City.

        He died on the morning of June 8, 1809. Madame de Bonneville arranged for burial at his New Rochelle farm because no cemetery would take him.

        Paine still didn’t rest in peace. A decade later, one of Paine’s contemporaries secretly dug up his casket and shipped it to England in a bizarre attempt to reform of the government and Church of England.

        Paine remained a forgotten Founder for decades. The New York Cowboy and Populists Purse-snatcher Theodore Roosevelt summed up the prevailing view when he referred to Paine as a “filthy little atheist.” Even now, there isn’t an authoritative edition of Paine’s complete work.

        The American bicentennial revived some interest in Paine. During these historic times of upheaval, a new generation is rediscovering this marvel of a man. He didn’t have much money. He never had political power.

        Yet Thomas Paine showed how a single-minded private individual could, by making a moral case for natural rights, arouse millions to throw off their oppressors—and offer an example of how it could happen again.

        • Paine was surely one of the world’s greatest critical thinkers. Would that people today were as literate as the thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One could fill a book with quotations from just about any one of them.

          tgsam

          • Literate – and decent.

            One of the things that attracted me to Paine – and still does – is the decency running through everything he ever wrote. By which I mean his clear aversion to coercion. The absence of moralizing. The “live – and let live” attitude he continuously displayed.

          • True story. Too many Langniappe’n, not enough making groceries now days. If my friend had only read up about “I know where you got them shoes at.” before Mardi Gras, he wouldn’t have been parted with his $50

            Dear Ayn Randers,

            I’m in Los Angeles for a day and I don’t have much spending cash. What are some fun things to do that are cheap and easy?

            – SoCal SoCheap

            Dear SoCal,

            Here are some options:

            Tattoo “laissez faire” on a celebrity’s bagel.

            Build a statue of me, Ayn Rand, out of cheap materials (rose gold, the word of a liberal, Mexican day labor).

            Throw that statue at the Chair who built it (aim for the throat).

            Go to the zoo and taunt an animal smaller than you (human children count).

            Make a coat out of some Dalmatians.

            Push a baby into another baby and point and laugh while they cry and then trip the babies and then laugh more at those babies that you tripped.

            Make a coat out of someone with Medicare.

            Hope this helps,

            Ayn

  6. T.G. Sammons that book was made into a great movie in 1977 by Sam Peckinpah about the landser (German grunts) fighting on the Eastern front. Jäger means hunter in German. The local library has a page where you can recommend movies and books for them to purchase. I recommended Cross Of Iron and they purchased it. I would hit reply but it was un-highlighted for some reason, it could be this browser. I use multiple browsers and sometimes copy paste from one to another. Carry on.

  7. There will be a number of ways to defeat these devices. The key to defeating the policy, however, will be massive and widespread refusal to comply. A few hundred people here and there won’t do the trick. We will need millions of people across the country to simply refuse to participate. Ask yourself at what point we are going to stop being sheep and stand up and be people.

  8. FYI– In Texas you are not required to have an inspection, have insurance, or have a license plate if your vehicle is an unmodified/original or restored military vehicle. I have three M1009’s and one M1008. I only tagged one M1009. I drive with the top off — violating the rules.

    (See the steel soldiers forum for verification)

  9. Eric,
    I live in Roanoke and took my car for a state inspection recently. The mechanic told me they now are required to report to the state at the time of inspection via computer the results. He said a guy brought in a car for inspection without a inspection sticker. The mechanic went online and found out the car had been rejected at another inspection station. He also told me that the state is thinking about requiring other localities to start doing smog inspections like northern Va. He says he could not aford to buy the expensive equipment for the test. The reach and intergrated data collection by the state is growing.

    • A bar graph monitoring the O2 sensor provide an accurate indication of how efficiently fuel is being burned in the combustion chambers.

      tgsam

    • Yep. Eric and I were just talking about this recently. We learned the exact same thing. They are only able to do one state inspection every 15 minutes (as far as entering it into the computer goes). Yes sir, the noose tightens…

      • My friend who owns the shop does state inspections. He gets to pay for the printer/paper and ink that they now use to print the customer’s receipt. Or rather, we do – because he has to tack the costs onto what he charges to do the job.

        Antique plates are still a way around all this… for now. Exempt from annual safety and emissions tests. However, the catch is you’ve got to have a modern/normally registered/plates car before they’ll issue the antique plates. And technically, with antique tags, you’re only supposed to use the thing for occasional “testing” purposes and “to and from” car shows, etc.

        They can bust you for regular/daily driving.

      • I don’t care if they don’t even look at my car other than to affix the sticker and keep the revenue collecters out of my bank account. It’s bad law and I’m fully aware that I’m a victim of extortion by law.

        tgsam

  10. Wait until it’s economically feasible for governments to place traffic cameras on EVERY intersection. We will all become subservient, scared pussies.

    • Viewing cameras, yes. Plate scanning cameras yes. Enforcement cameras? No.

      Automated enforcement everywhere is not profitable and never will be. The system works based on engineering defects. Without these engineering defects the cost of installing and operating enforcement cameras and processing tickets would have to drop to near zero to show any profit from most intersections. Most intersections are engineered good enough to minimize violations and/or have too little traffic volume. The end result is poor ROI.

      Plus if the cameras are everywhere people might start obeying in a very mechanical way which would hurt government’s revenues and their power to stop anyone at any time. If everyone obeyed then no longer is everyone a violator or suspicious.

      • Plus if the cameras are everywhere people might start obeying in a very mechanical way which would hurt government’s revenues and their power to stop anyone at any time. If everyone obeyed then no longer is everyone a violator or suspicious.

        Once we’re all sufficiently cowed, disarmed, and pussified, I foresee cops just randomly pulling people over, dragging them out of their vehicles, beating the shit out of them, and forcing them to whip out their crebit cards (there won’t be any cash accepted after a certain point) and pay an arbitrarily-determined “fine” right on the spot. They’ll do this anytime the local thieves guild called municipal or state government (or just themselves, if they need extra cash) needs extra revenue.

        • They already do it in many places across the country big and small but for cash and property. Often no real violation is required.

          I forgot earlier, mass obedience breaks the system. The system needs disobedience to exist and thrive. If it creates anything it will be more disobedience by defining more normal behavior as criminal behavior.

        • It all comes down to the number of violations. Efforts to maintain the machines and the capital investment will always be where the money to be made is, not where it is not. There is no money to very very little to be made at the vast majority of intersections. Once an intersection is fixed the cameras are shut off and moved somewhere else or simply removed without fail.

          At intersections with no money to be made all that goes up are cheap observation cameras.

  11. After Heydrich was shot, he whipped out his sidearm, leaped from the car and chased his attackers until he collapsed. Hitler was furious that Heydrich was dumb enough to ride around in an open limo. Hitler then commented (I think the source is William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”) that even though Heydrich was a mischling (part Jewish), he (Hitler) kept him around because “he (Heydrich) was very good at getting rid of people.” Heydrich’s tacking system consisted of 3×5 cards stored in little boxes, constantly updated.

    • Living proof that not all bullys are cowards. Heydrich was obviously a courageous fellow.

      I learned at an early age that the bigger they are the harder they hit.

      tgsam

      • They’re all cowards; in the words of Chuck Norris, “you never see a bully picking on someone stronger.”

        Hitler was a mischling too, that’s why he was bullied in his Ashkenazi neighborhood as a child.

        • No, they’re not all cowards; the only reason they tend to pick on smaller people (and even then, only for physical rather than psychological bullying) is because it gives them more bang for the buck. Of course, non-cowards are slower to become bullies because the idea that someone could ever be intimidated is less likely to occur to them spontaneously – but if they get the idea by seeing someone else do it they still can, and many have.

  12. In the words of Charlie Brown..

    [IMG]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/11/2010/01/charliebrown.jpg[/IMG]

    Time to remove all our plates – permanently.

  13. Eric, I think you made a mistake about the tolls being on the I-95 corridor near Richmond. I travel I95 frequently and the current proposal by the state legislature is to install tolls on I-95.

    Currently, there are toll stations on the Downtown expressway (195), the Pocohontas and Powhite Parkways. They have installed the Smart Tag readers above dedicated “EZPass” lanes which bypass the toll plazas.

    I’m in agreement with you on how ridiculous it is to want to mandate these RFID tags statewide in order to collect $75k more right around Richmond. The true aim is likely to pave the way for tolls on I-95 and to make automatic ticket issuing possible at red lights.

  14. No need for RFID chips in/on tags as all new cars here since I don’t remember when come with on-board computers that can be programmed, as your cell phone, for GPS purposes.

  15. That is why I do not want a vehicle with On Star,reflash your PROM and put a set of V rated tires on it(you dont see the OnStar commercial anymore ,were the cops get the OnStar folks to shut a perps vehicle down)-Kevin

    • The black boxes are already – and have been for several years – de facto standard equipment in most new cars. I think the figure is upward of 85 percent already.

        • Good question. It might be difficult to do so on most models RIGHT NOW without disrupting the overall vehicle functionality, but, as I’ve hammered home repeatedly here and elsewhere, there is ALWAYS a workaround to any computerized electronic device. It’s just a matter of time before someone discovers it. Once they do, they’ll make a fortune doing what you’ve just asked.

        • “How can I find it and remove it?”

          Not really practical on modern vehicles.

          Up to the mid ’90s most light trucks still only had a fuel injection ‘brain’ but it was not usually integrated into the rest of the systems. I don’t know of any that had black boxes.

          Get a good, pre-1987 vehicle (or several) and maintain it as long as possible.

          If you do have a modern ‘black box’ car, locate the box and keep a heavy hammer in the car. If you crash, smash it repeatedly. “Must have been accident damage”

          If you have OnStar or the like, disconnect the antenna at the minimum. At least remote shut down won’t work.

          • That’s why I’m intent on getting my ’93 Chevey diesel going again. No computer, no nothing. It’s a good truck, gets good mileage and is really quiet and comfy even though it’s a one ton. I have an El Camino that needs to run again too.

  16. Agree MoT. The defecation is going to strike the roto-oscillator in an epic fashion in 2013. Comrade Chairman Hussein the Immaculate Messiah is going to fundamentally transform this formerly great representative republic into North Korea in a fast and furious fashion. Get a gun and some rounds no matter what the caliber if you don’t have one already. It is coming.

    • I really think that the sepia-skinned sock puppet will overreach on behalf of his masters. When you toast in the new year in a couple of weeks, be sure to make a toast to “The Tipping Point,” which will most assuredly come this year. It ain’t gonna be pertty – in fact, it’s gonna be downright ugly and traumatic — but it’s essential to putting the house back in order.

      • Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Reagan smash. Reagan sleepy.

        When you consider Eric’s American fuhhtball meme, and recall that “The Gipper” was the great footballer philosopher of the Eureka Red Devils.

        You just know Reagan, the Great Orator, was well versed in these essential concepts during his attendance of the Athenian Academy of Illinois:

        Adiaphora: Outside moral law,
        Apatheia: Equanimity, Apeiron: Boundlessness,
        Arche: First cause, Arete: Excellence,
        Ataraxia: Tranquility, Demiurge: Creator,
        Doxa: Common opinion,
        Dunamis and Energeia: Potentiality and actuality, Episteme: Knowledge, Epoché: Suspension,
        Ethos: Character, Eudaimonia: Flourishing,
        Henosis: Oneness, Katalepsis: Comprehension,
        Logos: Reason, Nous: Intellect,
        Pathos: Appeal to emotion, Phronesis: Practical wisdom, Physis: Natural law, Sophia: Wisdom

        Reagan Smash Russia. Bob Dole. Bob Dole. Bob…

  17. Sweet Jeebus! Either you expat out of this dump or it’ll come to guns a blazin because these fuckers will never stop otherwise. It’s only the fear of attaining room temperature that keeps them in check.

    • Dear LeChat,

      “The US is becoming a 21st Century version of Nazi Germany.”

      I hear you.

      What clued you in? For me it was the term “Department of Homeland Security.”

      I swear to god, a Hollywood screenwriter writing a “Doctor Strangelove” or “Wag the Dog” style political comedy could not have come up with a more sinister, Nazi-sounding name if he tried.

      The fact that they themselves named it that speaks volumes. It says they don’t care if it sounds like a name that Nazi Germany would give its secret police.

      • In re “Homeland” –

        There is an excellent book by Jim Marrs called “Rise of the Fourth Reich” – in which he lays out the extent to which not only actual Nazis but the apparatus of national socialism (sans the racialism) was incorporated into national security state America. It is frightening because it’s fact – and the seeds planted 60 years ago are bearing their fruit in abundance today – right down to the nomenclature.

        • Dear Eric,

          Damned straight.

          How sad that the Amerikanischen Schafen-Menschen don’t see it, merely because the superficial trappings differ.

          They don’t realize that the fundamentals are nearly identical.

          Straight-armed salutes, heel-clicking, and “Hogan’s Heroes” German accents, are hardly essential for Nazism.

          • There was a reason that the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) worked so hard to get as many “useful” Nazis as they could into Amerika right after the war. The novel and movie The Odessa Files are closer to historical reality than most people imagine and the Amerikanische Regierung had a bigger role in its success than most people realize and are willing to admit.

          • WILLI HEINRICH

            [Novelist]Willi Heinrich was born in Heidelberg, and during the Second World War he experienced heavy fighting on the Eastern Front with the 1st Battalion 228th Jäger Regiment of the 101st Jäger Division. The same infantry unit featured in Das Geduldige Fleisch (The Willing Flesh; Cross of Iron).
            During the war the 101st Jäger Division sustained a seven hundred per cent casualty rate; Heinrich himself was wounded five times. –Internet

            I’m convinced that Heinrich accurately portrayed the German Grunts in CROSS OF IRON. I felt that way in the late Fifties when I first read the work and after rereading a recently acquired copy I am more convinced than ever. Caucasian Grunts surely have more in common with Gruts of other Caucasian nations than they have with office holders of their own government.
            tgsam

          • No joke. The first time I heard it I immediately thought of Fatherland and the Nazi’s. The fact is there is more data collected on each and every American by a factor of many times than the Soviets or anyone has ever had on anyone and there’s another warrantless spy bill being pushed through right now without any fanfare, as usual. Go to EFF and get the facts.

        • I read that in June sitting on a beach in Mexico.

          Brilliantly researched and well-written…and totally convincing.

          The interface between the national socialist, and the original Bavarian Illuminati, ties in closely with Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and others’ obsession with the occult.

          We imported 20,000 of them with Operation Paperclip–and today they’re bearing their evil fruit.

      • Only the racial element is missing.

        No, there’s a racial element today too. Consider the overt Islamophobia and the racial dimensions behind that. Also, not to mention that it’s not a good idea to have any skin color other than white if you’re going to commit a felony crime (white folk don’t get off easily either, but I think we can all admit that the darker your skin shade, the worse your treatment at the hands of “law enforcement” gets).

        • Like in the USA when the federal reserve was enacted, you have to be the right kind of white or at least be somebody who knows somebody. If you’re some white guy of the wrong ethnic background and social class and you don’t know anybody who knows somebody your skin color will help the odds of not getting picked for harassment but once targeted it’s not going to help all that much.

    • Actually Nazi Germany became a 20th-century version of the US.

      From Mein Kampf:

      “What is a federated state?

      By a federated state we understand a league of sovereign states which band together of their own free will, on the strength of their sovereignty; ceding to the totality that share of their particular sovereign rights which makes possible and guarantees the existence of the common federation.

      In practice this theoretical formulation does not apply entirely to any of the federated states existing on earth today. Least of all to the American Union, where, as far as the overwhelming part of the individual states are concerned, there can be no question of any original sovereignty, but, on the contrary, many of them were sketched into the total area of the Union in the course of time, so to speak. Hence in the individual states of the American Union we have mostly to do with smaller and larger territories, formed for technical, administrative reasons, and, often marked out with a ruler, states which previously had not and could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that had formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states. The very extensive special rights granted, or rather assigned, to the individual territories are not only in keeping with the whole character of this federation of states, but above all with the size of its area, its spatial dimensions which approach the scope of a continent. And so, as far as the states of the American Union are concerned, we cannot speak of their state sovereignty, but only of their constitutionally established and guaranteed rights, or better, perhaps, privileges.”

      Hitler also took his “Final Solution” directly from Sherman’s handling of the Native American population, including the term itself.

      • Hi Sarah,

        Exactly.

        Hitler also spoke admiringly of Lincoln – and (as you’ve noted) regarded the people of Russia as “Indians” to be dealt with in the same way Sherman, et al, dealt with the native population here.

  18. The first thing I did when Chase bank sent me my ATM card was to locate the RFID (the little square outline above and to the right of the “blink” logo) and smacked it hard with a hammer. Dead RFID.

    If I had one on my license plate I would hammer it into a broken piece of silicon, just like my ATM card. Don’t stick the plate into a microwave oven because the metal plate would probably ruin your microwave. But, beating the hell out of the chip will break it. “Sorry about that officer but someone must have backed into me and broke that poor, defenseless RFID.”

    • I don’t see the difference between an RFID chip in a license-plate, and a simple OCR reader, since they are probably equally expensive.

      A good ploy, however, would simply be to switch the RFID chip with someone else’s license-plate, and you’d be effectively anonymous since they wouldn’t who belonged to which.

  19. The dreaded SicherheitsDienst (security service) of NSDAP Germany a sub agency technically part of the SS, ol’ Reinhard took the same route every day around a curve in an open convertible Mercedes. Brave Czech patriots trained and sponsored by the U.K. waited on that curve with sub machines guns and grenades and got Heydrich. He died of his wounds from grenade shrapnel a few days after the attack. The nazis even feared Heydrich and some were happy he passed away. He had dossiers on everyone even Hitler and the first move Himmler made was to check Heydrich’s desk and files. The world might suffer the tyrants for a while but it never lasts.

    • Fun story mark-of-the-beast!

      A German bankster was assassinated in a similar manner back in 1989. He took the same route every day, with a lead car, his limousine, and a follow car–all full of bodyguards.

      An enterprising freedom-fighter first placed a child’s bicycle and chained it to a lamp-post each morning…until the guards were used to it.

      One day it had a backpack in its carry-basket…with something special inside–an HE charge with an eight inch wide, one inch thick copper plate (don’t know if it was curved to be a shaped charge).

      Fun fact: equal masses of HE and metal will propel said metal at about 1/3 the detonation velocity of the HE.

      So Herr Herrhausen’s car was cut in half by a copper plate moving at roughly 6000fps, severing his legs.

      Neat trick.

      • I had never heard about that bankster in Deutschland until reading the reply. These limousine liberal globalist traitor rats believe their own bootlicking lackey presstitute whore reports and think everyone loves them when it is fact the opposite. They are hated by anyone who is not a gibsmedat 47% dependent or kool aid swiller. Learned all that info about Heydrich from the book Hangmen Also Die which was also made into a movie. I have studied NSDAP Germany and the Bolshevik CCCP since I was ten years old but I never thought a time would come when it would be lived through firsthand. Interesting times are way overrated.

        • Me either, no one –

          If, when I was a high school kid in the ’80s, someone had said: In about 25 years, anyone who wants to fly someplace will have to assume the “I surrender” pose and walk through a scanner that allows a government official to view their naked body – and/or submit to being physically groped in their genital region by a government employee – the reaction would have been one of literal disbelief. Inconceivable. That’s the sort of thing they do in Russia – not here in America!

          Yeah.

          • Eric, how is it that we SEE this, we REMEMBER what it was like such a short time ago…

            …and nobody else is shocked?

            I can only point to the mass poisoning, mass hypnosis, and mass propaganda.

            But how could it be this effective?

            The PTB may be idiot-savants; but the parts they’re savants at–studying and exploiting our weaknesses–they’ve shown real genius.

            We laughed at “ihre papieren, Bitte“–and the Stasi checkpoints in East Germany. “We’re so much better than that!” we exclaimed.

            Don’t they see?

            I’m getting dangerously close to those movie characters–such as They Live–who run around screaming at the top of their lungs, while their zombified fellow stumble around in a trance as the screamer’s taken away in a straight jacket.

          • Back then konspiracy kooks who warned of such things were told:
            “It can never happen here”

            I don’t hear that dismissal so much any more. “Love it or leave it” is still popular though.

            And yes averros in ways this system has surpassed the 1980s CCCP.

            methylamine, way too much 60s-80s sci-fi is turning out to be brilliant looks into the future.

      • That fun fact is at best a generalisation. In particular, the velocity of the material thrown forward by a shaped charge depends on the charge’s own shape and the shape of the detonation front as well as the detonation velocity. It can be a lot higher than the detonation front’s velocity, though with that you get a fairly small proportion of the mass in the forward jet and it tends to disrupt itself over a very short distance.

    • Interesting that you’d use the title “Mark of the Beast,” since that’s what this is. From Revelations 13:16-18:

      “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave,[a] to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,

      17 so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

      18 This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”

      While I don’t put any stock in scriptural prophecy, it doesn’t take a psychic to realize that societal branding is a means of controlling the population through commerce.

      • Way back in the Middle Ages the early Ottomans instituted a system that forced people to wear turbans that identified their wearers’ ethnic/cultural/religious group through colour coding. This approach has a long history.

      • AH, you vile subjects are too clumsy to be allowed the privilege of an external tag. Mongo here is going to insert your new one…..bend over.

        • Dear Me2,

          You think you’re kidding?

          Some screenwriters already thought of it, and worse, as far back as 1967.

          Mandatory chip implantation in pets. It’s only a matter of time before Amerikanischen Schafen Menschen submit to implantation in themselves.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst

          TPC has developed a “modern electronic miracle”, the Cerebrum Communicator (CC), a microelectronic device that can communicate wirelessly with any other CC in the world. Once implanted in the brain, the user need only think of the number of the person they wish to reach, and are instantly connected, thus eliminating the need for The Phone Company’s massive and expensive-to-maintain wired infrastructure. (The operation of the CC is shown in animation that parodies the animated sequences in the Bell Telephone Science Series television programs.)

          For this to work, every human being will be assigned a number instead of a name, and the CC prenatally implanted.

  20. liberranter, I foresee a huge potential market for RFID spoofing, counterfeit RFID tags and RFID jamming technology. I’ll bet a grey market laser / radar / RFID / GPS jammer / spoofer could easily put set a man up for early retirement (or a vacation at Hotel Graybar). This could get very interesting if enough of the sheeple “bow up” on the system. We’ll see…

    • RFID’s huge weakness is its incredible vulnerability to cloning.

      It’s totally trivial. Cheap commercial RFID readers can sniff a tag from a hundred feet easily. Once you have the number–the unique identifier it transmits in response to the query transmission–you can program another RFID to return the same code.

      Knowing this I’m totally surprised there aren’t thousands of cloned EZ-Pass toll-booth tags cruising around.

      Walk around a parking lot, scan a half-dozen toll-booth tags, and voila–free toll road passes.

      I suppose they could correlate the tag scan with the license plate number on photo record…

      • The fellow the State Department hired to test out their new RFID Passport Card said exactly the same thing. State swore that the card could not be duplicated.

        The gentleman then demonstrated otherwise by making an Osama Bin Laden passport card and breezing through security at an airport.

        Now, he is in prison.

      • Plate cloning kits that will be available. Likely even before the plates are issued.

        Imagine walking by the local police station with a scanner and capture a half-dozen plates. Local cops here don’t use plates, so the cops’ personal vehicles would have to substitute for RFID clone donors.

        Then let your tag clone toll management device rotate through that collection of police plates (or other handy government “officials”/parasites, judges, prosecutors, etc.) for each pass through EZ-Pass.

        I suspect the RFID system would be more amusing to those of us who will enjoy sending the bill back to the parasites imposing the tolls.

        It will happen (trust me), and it will be a blast to see it backfire. Imagine the headlines when the local road-side-tax-collectors get toll bills in the thousands…..

        Then the cops will have to do double “traffic enforcement” duty to attempt to “make-up” that “lost” revenue….. Imagine the additional revenuing actions annoying the clovers targeted as “revenue donors”. All revenuing performed in the name of “traffic safety” of course 😉

    • I concur Boothe. I once thought I forsaw a huge market in 1,3-Cyclohexanebis.

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    • Being an engineer I will let you know that you don’t have to worry about RFID for a car parked in your garage. All you need is a good piece of Aluminum foil. It’s called a faraday shield. Copper foil is better yet. Given the frequency of most RFID is in the MHZ and 100’s MHz then the skin depth is very small, this means that only very small thickness of conductor is needed to block the signal. Enclose a conductor around the total surface and you have a RF block. Passive RFID is double easier to bypass with Aluminum foil as it must first produce the signal that gives the passive chip power and then the BPSK return signal must make make it through the same piece of foil. If active power source then you can still place a conductive foil over it an block the signal or you can get control of the power source and turn it off. Further if you want a nice way to destroy the chip without any mechanical damage get a flyback transformer from an old TV or monitor and use the ESD to fry that little bastard. Though this would not be advisable as they would probably then correlate a moving vehicle down the street with a visual and no responding RFID calling for you to replace the RFID. Hence, why the foil trick would be a good way to bypass any parked vehicles on your property from drive by scans. Also, you could get a Proxmark RFID sniffer electronic board. And basically passively listen to both signals and use that to either play back the original signal or the RFID chip. The technology as the government will implement will be an easy hack job for a junior engineer, with a little bit of RF knowledge and some encryption technology. Even when there are SSH-1 or DES encryption keys that are kept secret inside an RFID pair, there are engineers who make a full time living popping the top of the ceramic casing off and manually going in and reading the silicon states, recovering and probing the secret key. The whole technology will be silenced very similar to radar guns. Though I do admit that there is a possibility that the government will arrest anyone who tries to make a living making these things especially in the U.S. Hence why a nice chap over here will do the front work and release it to GPL, where the Chinese will manufacture the cheap sniff and duplicate technology.

      All this technology its a waste of time really, but like a lock its only meant to keep out people that are devious and stupid. I’m not afraid of RFID in the slightest because its even a stupider idea than SSN and will die an even rapider death as identity theives sniff random people’s credit cards/ID’s and then use them as their own. It will make the people mad as hell and the government will lose all respect. At least with SSN’s you can choose not to have a facebook account, most people will where the RFID on their sleeve and be stolen by the random street theives. But here again my friend foil will be your refuge to allow all the other people to suffer first.

      • where=wear the RFID…Sorry for all my mis-spellings and typos and bad grammar. I never really was into the proper English writing, was overly criticized so I pretty much hate it. Nevertheless I still respect those that have good writing style and something intelligent to say.

      • What if those who run the system do not care about these issues what-so-ever? What if these holes actually serve their interests?

        This system thrives on failure. Failure means more money and more power. Choosing a system that is designed to be flawed, designed to be insecure, designed to be replaced, is perfect for them.

        Furthermore it’s government. The burden will always be on the individual. If someone clones Joe’s RFID he is responsible for the bill or else. Joe has to prove it was cloned. Joe has all the burden.

        So what does Joe and others do? Clamor for more government control.

        One big manipulation.

        • Yes that is exactly what it was meant to be. However, they forget competition of the marketplace. They no longer control the news or the technology of communication or the free market, their old model is flawed in that they still think there is no competition out there against their ideas. Certainly, people like us are going to be the ones to furnish technology that is both easier to use and secure. Even against the very same government and its agents. Bitcoin is but a flea on the back of the elephant of what is coming down the pipe of this freedom movement, I can tell you though what comes to replace it will be much more decentralized and eventually even electronic payments like credit cards. These people certainly are controlling and if they had the knowledge to stop it they would, fortunately they aren’t as bright as they are control freaks.

          • Hot Rod, did you notice where the feds came down on a perfectly legal coinage? Liberty coins has been banned from selling on ebay.

          • Yes liberty coins was banned because it was using an archaic technique of top down marketing in my humble opinion. So far bitcoins haven’t been banned even though I realize its not the ideal form of money, and this is because its less centralized. Though the bitcoin exchange could easily be attacked by the Feds, again I’m not saying this is easy. I’m saying that the liberty market is adapting from a pyramid distribution to a peer to peer network.

      • Morning, HR –

        I get all that,but I grow weary of the hassle. Of having to reorient my life – limit my life – based on the existence of yet another “law.” Enough.

        I am a free man.

        I have the right to travel without papers, without being interrogated, searched or monitored.

        My property – including my car – is mine. Where I go, what I do is my business.

        I will not be scanned, bar-coded or chipped – and neither will my car.

        • Dear Eric,

          That was straight out of the 60s TV series, “The Prisoner.”

          [over the opening of each episode – Number 2 played by various actors]
          Number 6: Where am I?
          Number 2: In the Village.
          Number 6: What do you want?
          Number 2: We want information.
          Number 6: Whose side are you on?
          Number 2: That would be telling. We want information… information… information.
          Number 6: You won’t get it.
          Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
          Number 6: Who are you?
          Number 2: The new Number 2.
          Number 6: Who is Number 1?
          Number 2: You are Number 6.
          Number 6: I am not a number, I am a free man.

          • Say Bevin, when was that show? I’m an old trucker and as such, missed decades of radio and tv(supplied my own tunes during that decade and a half of disco). I’m not much of a MSM person and don’t even have outside tv right now.

          • Dear Eightsouthman,

            It was during the 60s.

            To be precise:

            The Prisoner is a 17-episode British television series first broadcast in the UK from 29 September 1967 to 1 February 1968.[2][3] Starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan, it combined spy fiction with elements of science fiction, allegory, and psychological drama.

            Had to look it up. It was so long ago.

            I’ve missed a lot of TV since I ex-patted myself to Taipei.

            My solution? Either rent the DVDs at the local Blockbuster or watch them online.

            I recently watched the entire “24” series in a single month. Wanted to understand its implications for the national security state.

        • @Bevin–The Prisoner–my favorite TV series, ever! The complete collector’s edition is available at Amazon…and there’s a cheaper set too.

          @Eric:

          At this point, they can make whatever “laws” they want, I’m done. I’ll continue to obey the REAL Law; and grudgingly fulfill the terms of ones whose cost/benefit ratio is high enough to just put up with.

          But I’m with you. I am a free man; I am nobody’s slave. I am not fooled by their machinations or magicks. I do not consent. I am a human being.

          I’m reading The Most Dangerous Book in the World right now, and it’s fascinating.

          Whether we believe in the occult or not, the PTB at some levels definitely do. Even if they don’t, they use the rituals as a way of mocking their slaves–us. One of the book’s key points is the psychological power of open mockery of the populace, to which they become aware, and consent by their acquiescence.

          It’s somewhat akin to a serial killer telegraphing his moves to police with sigils and portents, like the Zodiac Killer; it’s a taunting, a mocking, an arrogance.

          Well guess what?

          I mock you right back, NWO freak-show. Retarded in-breeds like the Bushes, the “Royals”, Rothschilds, and Rockefellers have nothing to offer me…and have nothing over me.

          I do not fear you, I do not revere you, I do not idolize you.

          I finally understand the biblical theme of storing one’s wealth in heaven; I see it now as my REAL wealth–my children, my wife, my close friends, the love and camaraderie I share with them all. The skills I have stored up in my head, knowing I can do almost anything. But most importantly–I own myself, and my actions.

          It’s those that the psychopaths crave, because they lack. And lacking them, and seeing us enjoy them, and being incapable of gaining them…they set out to destroy them.

          • Thanks rEVOLutionary…I’ll have to re-read those, I loved them when I was a kid.

            He and Tolkien had a fine sense of meta-politics; Tolkien was a pure classical liberal, Lewis was not far off.

          • Dear meth,

            I only saw the series once, back when it ran for the first time on TV.

            I was pretty young then, and I’m sure I missed a lot of the allegorical references.

            Here’s what one blogger says about it:

            http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2001/57/megan.html

            How I was Politically Educated by ‘The Prisoner’
            Megan Shaw Prelinger
            Issue #57, October 2001

            By looking at this history of how I constructed political meaning from a commercial television show, I will be able to comment on how it works for a commercially produced text to operate as a tool for political education.

            The Prisoner is one of the most appreciated and analyzed television shows ever. There is no shortage of consensus among its legions of fans that the show is richly allegorical, yet there is no grand consensus about what the show means. The Prisoner is so allegorically dense, and appeals across such a broad spectrum of interest, that people of divergent value systems find meaning in it. And it presents a “scalable” narrative; accessible to young people, on the one hand; important to scholars, on the other. This scalability allowed The Prisoner to be a point of continuity as I watched it and responded to it at different stages in my early intellectual development.

            As you can see, pretty sophisticated stuff. I look forward to reading her article as well as watching the series again after so many years.

          • Hey, you can’t talk about the Bush’s like that. I get constant flack from guys in my forum who aspire to be libertarians but can’t actually leave their Republican roots behind and so give me all sorts of shit for taking the Bush’s to task. Bush is the past they say. BS, Bush crimes are making our lives a living hell and will continue to do so. I wish it were in the past. Now they have more of them waiting in the wings ready to do their worst.

            • My contempt for Republicans who supported The Chimp – and still do – is limitless. They are as vacuous as fuhhhhhhhhhttttttttball “fans” who support “their” team, no matter what.

              The Chimp accelerated the timetable and prepared the ground for everything that’s happening now – and soon to happen.

              Without The Chimp, no Obama.

              But even that brutal fact is not enough to sway “good Republicans.”

        • I agree with your moral substance. I’m not sure I think the freedom movement can be achieved by our demands. Whatever naivety we placed in limiting the power in such things as the constitution and courts has been shown not to work. Now that the people and governments no longer even acknowledge any restraints or individual liberties I don’t think its possible to believe we could somehow force this back to place A by simply being tired of our rights being seized. The precedence of adultery has been forged into the minds of too many people to simply believe a movement of “We the People” can take it back simply by demanding it into a state of naivety. Even in armed revolt where our side won and stuck it to the losers, like we mean it when we mean the “bill of rights” except we are going to remove the general welfare clause etc wouldn’t work. Within a half hour the same creeps would be back to ignoring the new constraints to supposedly protect our so called rights. Personally, I believe non-compliance of a large or possibly small but significant part of the economy is the only answer. I understand anyone who wants to disagree with my beliefs or presumptions, as I don’t proclaim they are anything other than helpful suggestions. As such I like you to bring up the possible hindrance of what they might do, since my goal is to make those who care to know of ways around these possibilities when I can see the technical flaws of their implementation. I can do this without inciting anyone to break the law for a law that doesn’t exist yet. But, when such laws become the law of the land then one better be careful how he makes a populace aware of alternatives. Still I’d like to assume there might be someone who has a better alternative than mine, there certainly are many smart people, I certainly think Eric is a genius and also many others who disagree with what I suggest.

          Best Regards,
          HotRod

          • BTW just to let you guys know I’m visiting Las Vegas right now. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson as we went to rent a house out today. The thing is that the Landlord asked us what was my motto was and I said that I was a Libertarian and live and let live guy. The lanflord who I will call Vinny, really took a liking to me maybe a little too much. He started talking about how he knew all these people and if I had any problems with anyone let him know and he would twist their arms (smile). He was talking about how the last tenant went to work for his boss and he got a free house out of him. I won’t tell you how he said he had the mayor on a leash or anything else as that would be not so good of me lest he correlates me to this God forbid. He was telling me how he knew Jimmy Hoffa and all kinds of other scary crap. Suddenly I realized that he being a nice elderly gentlemen was probably the real deal of the mafia. Yes I do believe they exist in Las Vegas. I’d seen enough Godfather movies and this guy was the nice old grandad that starts talking about the family but without the thick Italian accent. I should’ve told him I’m an individualist which means I’m not a company man or big group kind of guy. Anyway, you know I love Italians, but they can scare the crap out of me. I’ll be careful who I talk with about being a libertarian here again as opening my big mouth obviously can get me in trouble. I’m afraid I won’t be renting his house, he was nice to me though and it sure nice to know that if the mayor or anyone else gives me any problems I got connections.

            Regards,
            HR

      • So let’s say people are “foiling” the system. What happens when the cop notices that your plates aren’t emitting a signal?

        • Like anything else, you get a nasty-gram from your benevolent “Gubmint” demanding “compliance” – at your expense, by designated contractors with a monopoly and therefore ability to overcharge, and, of course, pay a “service fee”. Get and keep running a VW, Plymouth Valiant, or Rambler American of 1960s vintage and flip off our would-be overseers.
          I’m reminded of a scene from Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971). The President and the prominent scientist (a German, it’s always the “evil Kraut Scientist” in film) are discussing Cornelius, Zira, and their expected child as a threat to mankind. When Dr. Hasslein brings up the idea of killing the intelligent Apes, the President objects, saying, “King Herod (the Elder) tried that, and Christ survived…and Herod became very unpopular.”. To which Hasslein responds: “Mister President, Herod lacked our facilities.”. So even forty years ago an astute observation: it’s not a lack of will, but only means that deters Government from tyranny.

        • You take off the foil and go to the designated “service center”. Prove that your chip is working fine, must be the gov’s equipment! Put the foil back on after. They’ll have techs scurrying around trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.It’s also relatively cheap to make a focused EMP device to zap unattended police cars. This will cause less patrols and skyrocketing budgets, making it too expensive for such a scheme to work very long.

          • Why not put a heavy duty industrial magnet to the back of it and give it the ride of it’s miserably short life? Nothing physically done but should be dead dead dead.

        • No strong magnets will usually not disrupt the signal. The only case where this would be possible is if there was a ferrite or ferrous core inductor that was used as a filtering core or part of the oscillator feedback. Hence place a strong magnet near such a coil could saturate the iron and change the inductor’s frequency or mode of operation. The higher the frequency of operation of the RFID the less likely that their will be any ferrous or ferrite core in the oscillators coil hence it will be most likely a air core. Air core’s do not respond to large magnets place next to them. So it would do little to nothing to its operation. Further, when I talk about inductors I’m referring to a feedback oscillator using say colpitts feedback of inductance. The inductor feedback of creating oscillation is rarely used in RFID as its much easier to use a ripple oscillator or resistance capacitance discharge charge circuit with thresholds to get a cheap oscillator. So in essence to make RFID cheap you’ll either have a air core type inductance which is really nothing more than a etched circuit trace, since the coil core is nonmagnetic then you can be assured a big magnet will do nothing. The oscillation itself can be modulated with no inductance. I’ve worked on a a few RFID designs. They are usually near field devices, which means they are purposely trying to keep the coupling local so that people can not sniff with an antenna the RF digital information from a distance. Though some RFID is made to be detected over distances, say in package shipment. The technology is usually a simple design actually with no more than one chip, one capacitor and a coupling coil (air core). A DC magnet placed next to it would have zero effect. Although, you could white noise squelch the signal by producing a frequency at the same bandwidth at much larger amplitude. Basically another method which could be used to block RFID readers. Say you turned on the power amplifier of your scrambling signal and there was 25 cars passing the cop car at one time, his signal to noise ratio would go to crap and he’d be able to read none of the RFID signals at that time. So here is again another way around RFID.

        • I remove magnets from hard disk drives. These magnets are extremely strong. Say, if you put an HDD magnet behind the RFID mounted plate, will it disrupt the sending/receiving signal?

          • I just read Hot Rod response — magnets no good. Another item that can be removed from HDDs is the cooper coils, which could be used to make a Faraday cage. How tight a weave must have?

      • Your argument is like claiming to avoid parking tickets by removing you license plates. Blocking the technology will not work. They will require a valid return to open the toll gate or whatever. Failure to return a signal at a roadside monitoring station? You car is tagged for being pulled over.

        • Correct blocking the signal while driving would not be advisable. Though it would be of benefit if you were say parking your car in a garage and didn’t want it scanned.

          Though the technology to mimic RFID signals is elementary. Even with encryption recovering the secret keys would be minimal cost and easily done by some entrepeneur here or abroad or offered for free download say at a GPL do it yourself website. Further an all out attempt to scramble the signal by raising the noise of the signal to noise ratio detection of the receiver would black out all RFID. Which would be kind of interesting if you were driving with a pack of cars all around you.

          Anyway, the RFID most likely will have minimal impact as the computer visual recognition of drivers plates is much more harder to block. The two used together will provide a little more redundancy for the police with RFID being a weak utilization. The only thing I’d fear about RFID technology is if say they are able to download say your tickets in one state on the license plate RFID chip, so when you’re visiting another state they can download all that information. Right now the method of communicating traffic violations from one state to another is somewhat archaic but the RFID chip on a license could keep a person from leaving the state behind and thus previous tickets. With internet and voluntary sharing of states of such information, the additional threat added of RFID plates telling anyone anything more is probably not much. I suppose the thing with RFID that is most troubling is that it is as Eric said an infringement on our rights of ownership. The right to keep government crap off our property (cars). And by the same token many people see the extension of the RFID chipping to come to the human body next. If we stay our course of tyranny this is probably going to happen, though their are forces of equilibrium coming into play here in the next few years that are going to rock the whole estate in a way you never would’ve thought much less government. My biggest fear is not RFID chipping but DNA genome sequencing. The are coming up with parallel processing bio chips that will be able to billions of genome sequencing a second. Pretty soon knowing who you are by your DNA will be the next state crime in biometric analysis. And unlike RFID DNA cannot be turned off or squelched or anonymously generated.

      • By the way, that tinfoil idea works on GPS transmitters/receivers too. When I worked at Yellow Cab, we had an on board computer dispatch system, known as an MDT (Mobile Data Terminal) to dispatch the calls. Someone discovered a glitch in the computer program. They learned that if you covered the GPS antenna with a bit of aluminium foil, the computer back at base could not determine where your cab was, and would fall into a default mode allowing you to log into any dispatch zone you wanted, and take whatever call you wanted. We made a killing at it until the road supervisor caught us, and fired us all! (I was the only one who apologized, and kept my job.) It was hugely fun.
        As Mr. Scott once said in one of the Star Trek movies, “The more complex it is, the easier it is to stop up its plumbing.”

      • Yes and no. Yes, Faraday cages do indeed block these things off, as do a number of other things. But no, that’s not a good enough fix, as there are a number of technical approaches to spot when those have been used (which will undoubtedly be taken as evidence of illegality). For instance, a chip can log how recently it has been polled or pinged and download that when it is next polled – and the chips in cars can ping each other to test that they are accessible, so it doesn’t need the police to have their own equipment everywhere. Any car that went near the police without registering as chipped would provoke a stop, and any car that did register but hadn’t been polled recently would too, with the burden being on the driver to show that the car had been lawfully in an unfrequented and unpoliced area during its gap time. Having your own stable of cars to ping each other could be prevented too, by registering which cars had pinged which and then analysing the police downloads to spot such stables (the adjacency and string distance matrices to do it are easy these days).

        Sure, spoofing that with your own purpose-built equipment would be straightforward at the moment, just like making a chip with fake ID details, but it is quite practical to design them with cryptographic systems that vary their handshakes in ways that can’t be reverse-engineered. It’s just that that would cost more, but guess who would be paying?

        • Yes complex systems always fail with user overload. No police is going to have the ability to determine why your car didn’t ping, they aren’t rocket scientist or computer scientist or electrical engineers. Yes they could have analysis software but shit happens and I think RFID will be a spoiler. Even outside of faraday cages a person could flood the area with a noise to drive down the signal to noise and thus just kill all the transmission. That would be interesting as 50 cars were pasing that police cruiser at that moment. And about encryption, any device can be reversed engineered if its in silicon. I can pay a guy 10,000 dollars right now to have him laser probe a chip (reverse a given functionality and give me its secret key or know any other function of that chip. Yes they could change the algorithm from public standard say DES to something not published, but that isn’t the definition of security either. Encryption experts make it known that only the key and not some unknown algorithm of encryption is the only way to protect data. Sandia labs facilities about 6 years ago could XRAY a chip, then actually actively probe and insert signals on the chips bus using UV lasers,even into multiple layers of the IC. Thats pretty small probing but the point was that there are no secrets that can be kept in chips. You could say that would be a lot of time and money for a average shop, and I can tell you that an average shop can do nothing short of miraculous with equipment not even up to Sandia type of technology I mentioned. Used equimpent and innovation are a reversers trade.

    • Any transmitter is required to be licensed and approved by the FCC, except for amateur radio transmitters that operate in the ham bands built by the operator. You will get hefty fines just for transmitting without a license and could get jail time for interfering with police radios.

      • Yes we used to test our equipment for FCC and EU compliance. Open Air Test Systems (OATS) and Anechoic chambers which would emulate open air testing. You know how we got a typically noisy instrument to pass FCC most of the times? Besides adding ferrite and extra shielding or slowing clock edges we would test the device under a “typical” usage which would be usually when a lot of digital bits weren’t changing. If this failed we would legally break the device into components and test them seperately and pass them that way. Does FCC go around testing and triangulating the entire spectrum of emissions at all geolocations at once for compliance? Understand that FCC compliance testing is nothing less than another way to limit competition in the electronics market, it does nothing to prevent RF noise pollution. Probably your computer your using right now is breaking the FCC compliance in aggregate, but they get around it monkey footing and playing the beuracrats. The answer is nobody is out there looking for blip in the night of a moving radio source at a given frequency, at a given location, at a particular time, with a given spectrum or information, and further triangulating on that given signal. Do you see what I’m saying there is no FCC police and there couldn’t be even if they wanted. Now all what I’m saying is just hypothethical conjecture and understand that I in know way advocate you to do any of things I’ve said about radio emissions. I’m not inciting any of you and your on your own if you do break the law…As a hypothetical is much different than actually inciting someone or doing it myself.

    • “I’ll bet a grey market laser / radar / RFID / GPS jammer / spoofer could easily put set a man up for early retirement (or a vacation at Hotel Graybar).”

      I doubt it.

      “Hey! I had to set the plate somewhere while I removed the old plate! How was I to know that setting it on the battery would ruin it?”

      “Officer, I blew two batteries recently. Turns out the insulation on my starter cable had worn through, shorting out the whole car. Well, these things happen to older cars. It only took a few minutes and a battery & cable to fix, though.”

      “Officer, lightening struck the tree next to the driveway where our car was parked. Do you think that might have something to do with it?”

      “Officer, my idiot teenaged son idolizes ‘jackass’ of all things. So he decided to ride his bicycle at top speed and collided with…”

      “Officer, our girl won the science fair with this lovely tesla-coil that she built in our garage! Oh no! Do you think that could have damaged the license plate on our classic car?”

      “It take some real fabrication skills to keep a beauty like this in shape! Why I had to weld in some patch panels in the foot well just the other day…”

      “Check out my ground-effects lights and gigantic sub-woofers! Best of all are the exterior speakers I put in behind the license plate for tail-gate parties.”

  21. I probably sound like a broken record regarding these tracking systems. I’ve seen the end goal for years. It’s been playing out very slowly, but playing out it is.

    All the various systems from RFID plates to visual plate scanners cost millions upon millions to implement and operate in every local area. Billions nationwide. The cost of collection will likely far exceed what is collected until new taxes are added to pay for the systems to collect the taxes.

    So why is the government going for costly systems that require new taxes just to pay for the cost of collecting taxes? Two reasons depending on the individual government functionary. First, is likely plunder. It’s a lot of money to skim from. Second is the side benefits. The alternative uses of the technology.

    The other angle the government has been using is to say today’s electric cars and hybrids have to be taxed, that road tax revenues are declining. The solution of course is tax-by-mile, otherwise known as tracking. The government has already been caught cooking the books on the figures to make this case to the masses. (documented on thenewspaper.com)

    They want to track everything and they will keep trying different excuses until something sticks.

    • I agree also. Electric vehicles are a Trojan horse for mileage monitoring. If any tax can be considered less obnoxious it is fuel taxes. They are anonymous and proportional. Drive more? Pay more tax. Have a heavier vehicle? Less fuel efficient, pay more tax per mile. Electric vehicle bypass the fuel tax gate. In order to get them to pay “their fair share” their driving, or at least their mileage will need to be monitored.

  22. Wow! With all that mechanical/electronic automation it should be possible to lay off a multitude of outrageously costly tax supported parasites.

    Tinsley Grey Sammons (1936 –)

  23. Ooops officer…I didn’t realized I accidentally scratched the bar code on my plate when I installed it. Sorry, the screwdriver must have slipped

    And all those magnets behind my plate are designed to hold it in place in case the screws rust through…with all that road salt you guys are using here.

    • Exactly.

      Mystery of mysteries why the RFID in my new passport doesn’t work, either. Tends to happen after 2 or 3 seconds in the microwave, I hear…

        • Going down Highway 180 and there’s a bale of hay(round bale)in the west bound lane with a guy standing there directing traffic around it. He was a dept sheriff(so he said)from another county big dogging it. He asked if I could move it as I was backing across the road to line up on it. I eased up and put the cowcatcher against it and eased it onto the shoulder. He thanked me, I acted like I was doing his bidding(been here, done it before)and drove away. I noticed later my plate was mighty shiny and conformed to the base plate really well. Of course my rear plate had so much mud, cowshit, and trailers banging on it you could barely read it. I don’t think this will work in Texas. I have been known to be wrong, just off by a couple decades generally.

    • IT’S NOT WORKING?????

      NO, I DIDN’T DISABLE IT!!!!

      I did have a short in my license-plate-light circuit though! Do you think that might have fried the circuit?

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