If this is just some psyops thing meant to scare me shit-less — it’s working. Kudos to whatever ad-man/operative thought it up.
According to RT.com (ironic one of the few places to get real news, as opposed to agit-prop and old lace, is the Russian Times), some guy out west who calls himself “Milo Danger” built a Do It Yourself (DIY) Drone, armed it with a paint-ball gun, and flew it around zapping targets the size of dinner plates from as far as 15 yards, to demonstrate the inevitable future’s droning on and on. He said it took him about twelve hours and cost less than two thousand dollars to construct.
Can’t help but think of poor Snoopy atop his crappy old dog-house chasing the Red Baron. WWI dog-fights (holy shit, that’s a pun; never noticed that before; gotta love that Charles M. Schulz!).
How quaint.
Can’t help but think of Obama atop some sleek new Predator Drone.
How queer (in the “Alice In Wonderland” sense, not the “gay” sense; nothing gay about Obama, in any sense; just spooky, creepy, downright weird. As “Honest” — yeah, I’ll believe that one — Abe Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but…oh hell, I’m out-classed here. Gotta give it up to Obama. Damn, that guy’s good!”)
Seems Wordsworth was not the boring, pompous ass-hole Byron said he was (I’m not the suicide type, but honestly: almost offed myself mid-way through “The Prelude” as a sophomore at Fuck U.), but actually as keen a satirist as the Lecherous Lord himself; and a master of understatement. “The world is too much with us” indeed.
“The world” is with us, in us and above us. Simultaneously shooting us with guns and cameras. Hell, it’s enough to make a man…what? Do what? Write snarky satire as a kind of, I dunno, catharsis? I’m sure Power is about as concerned about our enlightened jibes and criticisms as it is about our illicit drug-use. Something to be monitored for future prosecution but nothing to get hot’n’bothered about.
It’s all up with us. I’m down.
Or maybe it’s just this gee whiz high-tech digital age of crap-o-matic bombs and gew-gaws…
I mean, hell, I still refer to iPods as “Walkmans.” To this day, every time I hear the word “drone” I think of some exhausted bee whose sole purpose in life is to “service his Queen” — till she gets pregnant and kills him. When I hear “unmanned” together with “aviation” my mind jerks to images of a somber, wise, but secretly disgusted Freud; and childhood dreams of Mom with hedge-cutters cutting it up — no pun intended — with Amelia Earhart. I’ve been superannuated — by decades.
Naturally, your bored lunatic hobbyist will be mounting guns, I mean BIG guns, to these things, not to mention persons in need of quick, cheap assassinations. Probably put a lot of hit-men outta jobs. Are hit-men unionized, or do the CIA, Mafia and other such organizations enforce “right to work?” I’m one of those paranoids who gets super pissed off when people call for “gun control” cause, I mean, who the hell do you think will be controlling these guns, as if they don’t “control” enough firepower already? I’m not gonna whine to them for “drone control.”
30,000 drones — mostly unarmed, just for surveillance (oh, thank heavens!) — supposed to be buzzing all over the continent by 2020. I mean, like, golly! I’m already surveyed out the wazzooga. What the hell do they want from my life? Make sure I get home okay before the gun-toting psycho-freaks (soon to have air-strike capability) proliferate towards midnight (note: I’m obviously referring to a criminal element, but which sort and on whose payroll?)?
Never-mind the surveillance, think of the clutter. Air-traffic control’s gonna be a night-mare. People wanted to shoot geese for clogging up jet engines a few years back…these contraptions are gonna be zipping around commercial air-liners like gnats
And on some distant jumbo-jet, Boobus Americanus will snap photos of the beautiful drone-filled sky at sunset, his combination digicam-phone-word-processor-urinal pressed against the porthole and his fat ass pushing Ms. Americanus out into the aisle…
Meanwhile, beyond the stratosphere, amid Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars, is the cold-war junk of thousands and thousands of Soviet and American satellites, not to mention the “live” ones photographing these words as I type them (gee, wonder how the new surveillance drones’ll top that?)
Junk, junk and more junk. Well, hell, the land and water’s already sclerotic with detritus and putrid glop, might as well clutter up the skies…
Of course the first thing they’ll do with these DIY drones is regulate them, so only “law enforcement” hobbyists, purchasing state-of-the-art drones from legitimate, government-contracted corporations, can use them to smoke “bad guys.” Then they’ll de-regulate the corporate drone-makers so they can fill the back-ordered requests of every Fuhrer and flat-foot from the Mayor of NYC to Sheriff Mayberry and Deputy Fife…
“30,000 drones by 2020.” Who thought that one up, Wordsworth? Count every grain of sand on Pismo beach (wherever that is; I think I heard it referred to in a Bugs Bunny cartoon; I dunno, all this data’s got me dizzy as a drone programmed with palindromes), if you’ve the time and inclination, and multiply the total by ten, fifteen, twenty. Then attach to the sum the word “drones.”
Hasta la vista, la humanidad!
I’m droning home.