Local

After a year and half, the NTSB has finally determined the cause of the Dayton Air Show crash that killed wingwalker was what everybody already knew.

"Federal safety investigators have determined the probable cause of a biplane crash that killed two performers at the Dayton Air Show was "pilot controlled flight into terrain," according to the National Transportation Safety Board."

I wonder how much that cost taxpayers.

DP&L blames snake for widespread power outage. Maybe their system shouldn't be so fragile.

Complaint against Huber Heights's mayor comes to nothing.

Governments still short on salt.

Mechanicsburg schools locked down.

Ohio to steal another million from taxpayers and give it to billionaire owner of Fuyao.

More on $1 million for Fuyao.

Police State

US Customs destroys flutists 13 flutes because they were supposedly agricultural items.

Judge upholds warrantless, suspicionless searches of laptops at border crossings.

NTSB considering forcing GPS and V2V communication into new cars, allowing government and hackers to track every movement of every car and even control them. This has nothing to do with safety.

Misc

NTSB stands by TWA-800 probe findings. They probably have no choice because the NSA blackmailed them to do so.

Police State

NSA whistleblower Snowden to seek asylum in Ecuador.

""He goes to the very countries that have, at best, very tense relationships with the United States," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., adding that she feared Snowden would trade more U.S. secrets for asylum. "This is not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States.""

Because everybody else has extradition treaties. He's trying to escape oppression, so he has to go to countries that resist the US. And I doubt these countries will demand any more info. I'm sure they're happy to protect this guy from the US given what he's already released.

Snowden seems to be missing, and the US is angry.

"In the name of “democracy promotion” efforts in places like China, Iran, Belarus, and elsewhere, the US government has spent millions of dollars providing tools and training to “dissidents” so that they could burrow into their governments and expose abuses and human rights violations. When these governments crack down on the activists acting on US instructions, the US issues another State Department Human Rights report detailing the troubling decline in democracy in said country.

When Snowden reports on his government’s abuses, however, he is charged with espionage – of aiding the enemy. But who is the enemy?"

What hypocritical scams.

The prosecution of Snowden has nothing to do with preventing espionage or keeping us safe.

"What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It's a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws. It's all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they're interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically. The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people.
The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.
They haven't learned anything from these disclosures that they didn't already well know. The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been "harmed" is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability. If anything is a crime, it's that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it."

Exactly.

I like this comparison of Snowden to Paul Revere. The NSA is trying to prevent people like Sam Adams and Paul Revere from threatening their modern tyranny.

"As McClatchy News reports, the Obama administration – already surpassing all previous administrations combined in their relentless prosecution of whistle-blowers – is cracking down hard within the government to make information of all kinds unavailable to the public, including the press. Tyranny percolates best in the dark, especially when the transition from a constitutional republic to democratic despotism is still in process. And we are right at that conjuncture when it’s still possible to stop it – which is why we’re getting a virtually united bipartisan Establishment pushing back hard against Snowden, Greenwald, and those who support them. "

I don't think there's time to stop it.

More on the TWA Flight 800 cover-up. More.

Obama orders federal employees to spy on each other to stop whistleblowers.

Australian ruling coalition rejects NSA-style ubiquitous surveillance right before an election it seems likely to lose.

Privacy and security services to protect your communication from PRISM.

Police State

NSA whistleblower Snowden reportedly flew to Moscow. Remember when Soviets used to defect to the US to escape oppression? Now it's the other way around.

"A former National Security Agency contractor wanted by the United States for revealing highly classified surveillance programs has been allowed to leave for a "third country" because a U.S. extradition request did not fully comply with Hong Kong law, the territory's government said Sunday.
An Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong believed to be carrying Edward Snowden landed in Moscow. Russia's state ITAR-Tass news agency cited an unnamed Aeroflot airline official as saying Snowden was on Flight SU213, which landed on Sunday afternoon in Moscow. The report said he intended to fly to Cuba on Monday and then on to Caracas, Venezuela."

Cuba and Venezuela? The US must really be putting the pressure on.

Evidence of a cover-up during the TWA flight 800 investigation.

"Elizabeth thought of Stacey as "a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy" and respected him for it. After a phone introduction arranged by Elizabeth, James Sanders and Terrell Stacey agreed to meet. "What he told me over those first hours," Sanders would later tell me, "was one thing: 'I know there's a cover-up in progress.'"
As a result of that one introduction, the FBI arrested Elizabeth and oversaw her conviction on federal conspiracy charges. James and Stacey had been arrested, too. The crime? Stacey had sent Sanders a tiny piece of foam rubber to have tested."

That's suspicious.

"To control the information flow, the White House hit upon a strategy that dazzled in its simplicity and in its sheer nerve.  The Clintons' trusted point person, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, took the investigation away from the professionals in the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the amateurs of the FBI.  There was one reason why.  The FBI reported to Gorelick.  The NTSB did not.
This was illegal, of course, but the media had a president to re-elect soon enough, and they were not about to scruple over details.  The second part of the strategy was as simple as the first.  The FBI would talk only to The New York Times.  This essentially made the Times Gorelick's Ministry of Truth."

OMG, there's that Gorelick woman from the 9/11 investigation again. She was probably directing things at Waco and Ruby Ridge too.

"Of the 270 eyewitnesses who told the FBI they saw what looked like a missile strike on TWA Flight 800, the Times would interview exactly none.  Fearing perhaps the loss of their privileged status and trusting the FBI more than they should have, the Times people followed the FBI lead.  The other media, some grudgingly, followed the Times.
Four weeks after the disaster, the Times would report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."  Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion."

I remember that.

"As each week passed, the Clintons had to be stunned that so obvious a truth remained so thoroughly ignored.  To sustain the lie, however, insiders had to tell more lies still.
The FBI would fabricate a second interview with Witness No. 73 that never took place.  The CIA -- the CIA? -- would fabricate a second interview with Mike Wire that also never took place.  NTSB insiders would lie outright about what Joseph Delgado saw, but the election came and went without anyone even knowing who these people were."

The Clintons were masters at this stuff.

"Gorelick could not have slept easily through all of this, but the lotto was around the corner, and she knew she had the winning ticket.  In May 1997, the White House called her number.  The Fannie Mae Board picked her, a lawyer with no relevant experience, to be its new vice chair.  Gorelick would earn more than $4 million a year for the next six years, and no one in the media asked why."

It's always about the money.

"They did not even ask why when she stepped down.  Always the patriot, Gorelick resigned to take one of five Democratic seats on the Sept. 11 Commission.  Who knew where talk of aviation terrorism might lead?  Someone had to keep talk of TWA Flight 800 off the table, just as someone had kept it off from 1996 to 2001."

That explains that.

"And lest some messy scraps of information find their way to the committee's Republicans, the Clintons dispatched their most trusted adviser to do a little cleanup work.  Alas, Sandy Berger got caught stuffing evidence in his underwear, but this proved much easier to bury than TWA 800.  Democrat staffers in the Bush Justice Department arranged for a wrist slap on a Friday, the day after Terry Schiavo died and the day before Pope John Paul II did."

They're all in on all the corruption together.

If you look back at the way the secret police took Petraeus out of the CIA and the way Chief Justice Roberts switched his vote to vote against Obamacare at the last second, you might think the secret police are really running the country. NSA whistleblower Russel Tice says they are.

"They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people."

But of course they would. Once somebody has that power, they use it to their advantage.

"This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now." 

Somebody has dirt on Obama.

Police State

Isn't it ironic that the surveillance state is destroying the very national security leaders who developed it?

"But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America's national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: "Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?""

It's sick.

Google reports that government surveillance is growing. Imagine that.

Why are DHS and NTSB investigating a home explosion in Indianapolis? Doesn't Indianapolis have its own police department?

How did we survive the last 100,000 years without emergency alerts from government. Don't sign up. You're just making it easier for the government to track, harass, steal from and possibly kill you.

Misc

NASA's solar theory falsified by CME that travelled at 1/4 the speed of light. This is the scientific equivalent of a builder who had every building he ever built collapse at the same time, yet nobody got fired.

A year after a crash of a Wright B flyer killed two people, the NTSB still can't identify why the crash occurred.

NASA has become the best propagandist outfit in the US as it makes the case that Curiosity may or may not have discovered methane in the amount that would be expected by biology.  What a tease. We're paying NASA to tease us. If we did that voluntarily, that would be masochism. If NASA discovered life on Mars today, it wouldn't tell us. Like any tease, it gets more money from us by teasing us than telling us the truth.