By Nathan Barton

Good morning.  I guess some folks were upset about stool pigeons, yesterday.  Sorry, I just calls ’em as I sees (or reads) ’em.

And it might not have been the Taleban: given that it happened at Thanksgiving time, it COULD have been the Turkey Liberation Front, or even a rival group that is trying to combat Chick-fil-A‘s cow-conspirators in the black and white suits.  And the story said nothing at all about ANY involvement by Turkey, I should add.  Someone else points out that it MAY have been a very low-budget competitor of Rutan’s SpaceShip 2 and this was a failed test flight.  Unmanned, of course.

In the interests of fairness, I must point out that I am not the only commentator to singe some feathers about this rather foul situation.  Eric Margolis, in his column at UNZ.com (republished at Freedom’s Phoenix, talks about “Nuclear Chicken in the Mideast” (but I think he is stretching things a bit: there is nothing in the reports about either a nuclear bomb, a dirty bomb using radioactive materials, or the bird using some sort of nuclear power pack, and the photos certainly don’t look like chicken (but what do we expect from an Afghani police cook?).  And Eric really does have a point about how talks between Persia and the Ferengi (the West) have stalemated.  With the Caliphate, the need for Western powermongers to make Tehran their whipping boy (or poster child) for nuclear proliferation is just not there.  But although they’ve moved it to the back burner, the heat is still on.

Maybe we need some of these birds (at least with the antenna and camera) here in the US? In DC, we find that the FAA wins a legal battle and drones are re-classified as aircraft subject to FAA regulations. Photography is not a Crime (PINAC.org) warns: “Aerial photographers beware.” The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) declared “drones” are aircraft subject to regulation by the Federal Aviation Administration, overturning their decision that effectively made commercial drones legal. An example: Mesa County, Colorado, has a drone for mapping, and apparently now each drone must have a licensed pilot AND a navigator.  Among other things, it means that the drones cannot be operated in much of the county precisely where they are needed because there is no ground access possible. I will be curious to see if the FAA will also require at least the pilot to be on-board, as well as licensed.

Mama’s Note: Job opportunity for very, VERY tiny people? I don’t see how that can work. And a navigator? I thought machines took over that job a long time ago. Nutty, to say the least.

There is, of course, another kind of foul situation in which a different meaning of “chicken” applies.  FedGov security agencies are warning both active and inactive military members here in the US to scale back their visibility in social media, lest they become targets of Caliphate and Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters out to kill and strike back right here at home. Indeed, a six-minute ISIS video shows just that, encouraging them to target neighbors and other contacts in France and English-speaking countries. But the idea of just sneaking around and trying to avoid the attacks sounds more like fearful police than what we should expect of military people.  Unless they are part of the “kinder, gentler, politically correct and corrupt” military the Fuehrer is creating.  Not his only legacy, of course, as the next story relates.

How stupid is this? In Africa’s most impoverished lands, a little-known clause of the infamous Dodd-Frank Act, called “Obama’s Law” in these African nations, keeps US and other Western companies from buying minerals mined, thus destroying tens of thousands of jobs and creating situations in which many, including very young teens, are pressured into becoming members of armed gangs (“rebels”) to make a living.  Thus creating the very situation the rather stupid and “well-intentioned” law was supposed to combat. How stupid?  Government stupid. Just like the FAA business and so many other things today.

Mama’s Note: I’d like to see some proof that this “law” was at all “well intentioned.” I think it, like most others, was intended to put money in certain pockets and retain control of both the economy and the people there.

Due to travel and work, this is a short commentary today!