Plans for the X-37B revealed by Edward Snowden show the military’s attempt at total global surveillance of the entire Earth’s surface.
INTERNET—Edward Snowden, hacker and NSA leaker, told reporters Sunday that the United States Air Force plans to deploy hundreds, if not thousands, of production variants of the X-37B spaceplane to maintain constant and total worldwide real time video surveillance.
Snowden told reporters, “In another few years the X-37B will be renamed the SR-76, and planners hope it can carry up to seventy surveillance satellites per orbit, deploying them strategically for constant video coverage of an area the size of Texas. Because the SR-76 is reusable, designers plan for at least fifty launches in the lifetime of each of the spaceplanes. Black budgets I’ve looked at call for the purchase of at least seventy SR-76 space planes to justify development costs, so we can assume that the aim is total surveillance over all populated sectors of the earth’s surface.
The huge data storage centers built by the NSA will be able receive and store these surveillance videos indefinitely, leaving no event on the surface of the earth outside of the permanent gaze of law enforcement and the US military, decades or centuries later.”
Supporter of the US Government and former engineer for the Army, Jebediah Kermon, said, “If it saves just one soldier’s life, it’s worth it. We can’t be caught with our pants down. The Space Race never ended, and we’re really winning, now.”
At least fifty local teens bought ISIS t-shirts through a local distributor who purchased the shirts directly from ISIS.
INTERNET—More than 40 teens at Hidden Vale High in Roamoke Virginia were sent home Thursday for wearing offensive pro-ISIS t-shirts, which police traced through a local flea market back to ISIS. Principal George Glevins told reporters at an impromptu press conference, “These students were mostly wearing the t-shirts in irony and didn’t understand that they were supporting terrorists both figuratively and financially, and they were glad to be rid of the shirts once they knew what they were. I can chalk almost all of the mess up to natural youthful rebellion, but there might be something more here.”
Glevins stunned parents and reporters by adding that the Department of Homeland Security would embed agents in classrooms for the rest of the semester to investigate possible terror threats, saying, “I want everyone to be hypervigilant. If your kids are too private or spend too much time with friends, you should look into it. Asking questions isn’t enough — don’t assume you know your kids or what they do with their time. I’ve approved the ongoing investigation of all students involved in supporting ISIS, but we need your help if we’re going to be truly safe instead of sorry. As an extra measure of caution, I’ve asked the school board for weekly active-shooter drills and armed guards around the clock.”
One student spoke under the condition of anonymity, “Who cares if we sent a few bucks to ISIS? I’m actually glad. Our parents are paying thousands to kill them and whoever else they want to kill every year, and our parents are so stupid. I want my ISIS shirt back because it brought all the constant wars home for me.”
Is the Islamic State religious? Are they just like the Spanish Inquisition?
INTERNET—Yet another anti-religious scientist columnist slipped miserably in a fraught attempt to deploy a historic parallel to back up his point of view. Jerry A. Coyne, of New Republic, veered into the perilous field of theology in his unfortunately entitled opinion piece, If ISIS Is Not Islamic, then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic. This mildly Islamophobic tract, which criticizes Obama and others for declaring that the Islamic State is not Islamic, proposes the absurd and wrong parallel with the Catholic tradition of inquisitions but doesn’t touch at all on the history.
The most infamous and brutal inquisitions were not at all endorsed or carried out by the Catholic church, but rather enforced independently by practitioners of statecraft in the Machiavellian political spirit, especially Ferdinand and Isabella. Ironically, giving flesh to the titular parallel would undo Coyne’s position that the Islamic State is indeed motivated by religion and instead seems to point towards the Islamic State as a bare political power grab using religion only so far as it is politically useful.
Coyne’s ironically problematic titling aside, the basis of his theological argument is that there is no such thing as true religion and that Obama and others are calling “false” on the Islamic State only because it conflicts with their personal view of what a “true” Islam should look like. Never mind the centuries of Islamic scholarship that could be brought in to compare to that of the Islamic State, it is simple enough for Coyne to dismiss religion as a field of meaninglessness where without a true or a false we’re left with pessimistic political speech from the likes of Obama.
Coyne’s theology says that if there were such a thing as a true religion, its holy texts should appeal to the same kind of truth as science. That is, the historic literalism of some fundamentalists who believe a seminal text to be true history are on the right track but fail only because they do not possess true history. This is troubling because it affirms the interpretations of religions that transfer best into the political ideologies, the kind that are ruining the public school system in America and inspiring Islamic terrorists.
Coyne also says that all religion is worse than false, it is irrational, implying that only science can be true or false, or rational. He mixes blood libels against Islam — the usual genital mutilation, et al. — with recurring bugaboos from American political struggles such as abortion. In this way, he transfers frustrations of America’s left from the right’s still growing religious impulse over to the Islamic State, and this way aligns the left with the right in their fear and hate for the Islamic State.
It is beyond depressing to watch this kind of warmongering Islamophobia work its way through America’s left like a virulent salve soothing the guilt of perpetual war on the Muslim world.
