>>12437330 pb

The Gorgon Stare

part 1/4

So the smooth stone analogy seems to be pointing to how it was used, perhaps?

The stone was slung.

The stone hit him between the eyes.

Are the "eyes" the satellites?

And here's another thought.

What about the saying about waiting until you see the whites of their eyes?

Satellites are called "eyes of the sky":

https://www.cnet.com/news/eye-in-the-sky-behind-the-amazing-satellite-photos-you-see-on-google-and-instagram/

Article I found from The Atlantic, so I took some excerpts, ;;;note the joystick and monitor' (pic of Pompeo talking to Obrien) in the article, and note the unclassified clips of aerial attacks (think the video Q dropped several times),then it talks about "the Gorgon stare", (Gorgons were three monsters in Greek mythology, daughters of Echidna and Typhon, the mother and father of all monsters respectively. Their names were Stheno, Euryale, and the most famous of them, Medusa. Although the first two were immortal, Medusa was not. Weirdly, Medusa was also not considered the child of Echidna and Typhon, but of Phorkys and Keto. Their faces were ugly and their hair was replaced by snakes; anyone who would gaze into their eyes would be turned to stone instantly https://''www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Creatures/Gorgons/gorgons.html ):

The Killing Machines-how to think about drones

Consider David. The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath. Armed with only a slender staff and a slingshot, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in a brass helmet and chain mail, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a staff “like a weaver’s beam.” Goliath scorns the approaching youth: “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” (1 Samuel 17)

David then famously slays the boastful giant with a single smooth stone from his slingshot.

A story to gladden the hearts of underdogs everywhere, its biblical moral is: Best to have God on your side. But subtract the theological context and what you have is a parable about technology.The slingshot, a small, lightweight weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, was an innovation that rendered all the giant’s advantages moot.

>>12437330 pb, >>12438991

The Gorgon Stare

part 2/4

……the drone, a weapon that can find and strike a single target, often a single individual, via remote control.

When linked via satellite to a distant control center, drones exploit telecommunications methods perfected years ago by TV networks—in fact, the Air Force has gone to ESPN for advice.

…..American soldier sat at a desk before a large color monitor, watching this action unfold in startlingly high definition…….This was his first time at the controls, essentially a joystick and the monitor.The drone he was flying was roughly 15,000 feet above the besieged patrol, each member marked clearly in monochrome on his monitor by an infrared uniform patch. He had been instructed to watch over the patrol, and to “stay frosty,” meaning: Whatever happens, don’t panic. No one had expected anything to happen. Now something was happening.

The young pilot zoomed in tight on the approaching truck. He saw in its bed a .50-caliber machine gun, a weapon that could do more damage to an army than a platoon of Goliaths.

A colonel, watching over his shoulder, said, “They’re pinned down pretty good. They’re gonna be screwed if you don’t do something.”

The colonel told the pilot to fix on the truck.A button on the joystick pulled up a computer-generated reticle, a grid displaying exact ground coordinates, distance, direction, range, etc.Once the computer locked on the pickup, it stayed zeroed in on the moving target.

Those who have seen unclassified clips of aerial attacks have only a dim appreciation of the optics available to the military and the CIA.

The Hellfire is a 100-pound antitank missile, designed to destroy an armored vehicle.

After slaying Goliath, David was made commander of the Israelite armies and given the hand of King Saul’s daughter. When the Pentagon announced earlier this year that it would award a new medal to drone pilots and cyber warriors, it provoked such outrage from veterans that production of the new decoration was halted and the secretary of defense sentenced the medal to a review and then killed it. Members of Congress introduced legislation to ensure that any such award would be ranked beneath the Purple Heart, the medal given to every wounded soldier. How can someone who has never physically been in combat receive a combat decoration?

The question hints at something more important than war medals, getting at the core of our uneasiness about the drone.Like the slingshot, the drone fundamentally alters the nature of combat.

>>12437330 pb, >>12438991, >>12439017

The Gorgon Stare

part 3/4

“The political message [of drone strikes] emphasizes the disparity in power between the parties and reinforces popular support for the terrorists, who are seen as David fighting Goliath,” Gabriella Blum and Philip B. Heymann, both law professors at Harvard, wrote in their 2010 book, Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons From the War on Terror. “Moreover, by resorting to military force rather than to law enforcement, targeted killings might strengthen the sense of legitimacy of terrorist operations, which are sometimes viewed as the only viable option for the weak to fight against a powerful empire.”

The Defense Department has a secret state-of-the-art control center in Dubai with an IMAX-size screen at the front of the main room that can project video feed from dozens of drones at once. The Air Force has been directed to maintain capability for 65 simultaneous Combat Air Patrols. Each of these involves multiple drones, and maintains a persistent eye over a potential target. The Dubai center, according to someone who has seen it, resembles a control center at NASA, with hundreds of pilots and analysts arrayed in rows before monitors.

……Iran managed to recover a downed RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy, weaponless, unmanned vehicle flown primarily by the CIA, one of the most sophisticated drones in the fleet, it had little more than a nifty flying model. Anything sensitive inside had been remotely destroyed before the Sentinel was seized.

James Poss, a retired Air Force major general who helped oversee the Predator’s development, says he has grown so weary of fascination with the vehicle itself that he’s adopted the slogan “It’s about the datalink, stupid.”The craft is essentially a conduit, an eye in the sky. Cut off from its back end, from its satellite links and its data processors, its intelligence analysts and its controller, the drone is as useless as an eyeball disconnected from the brain.

Drones collect three primary packages of data: straight visual; infrared (via a heat-sensing camera that can see through darkness and clouds); and what is called SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), gathered via electronic eavesdropping devices and other sensors.One such device is known as LIDAR (a combination of the words light and radar), which can map large areas in 3‑D. The optical sensors are so good, and the pixel array so dense, that the device can zoom in clearly on objects only inches wide from well over 15,000 feet above. With computer enhancement to eliminate distortion and counteract motion, facial-recognition software is very close to being able to pick individuals out of crowds. Operators do not even have to know exactly where to look.

>>12437330 pb, >>12438991, >>12439017, >>12439040

The Gorgon Stare

part 4/4

"We put in the theatre [in 2011] a system called Gorgon Stare,”Lieutenant General Larry James, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, told me. “Instead of one soda-straw-size view of the world with the camera, we put essentially 10 cameras ganged together, and it gives you a very wide area of view of about four kilometers by four kilometers—about the size of the city of Fairfax, [Virginia]—that you can watch continuously. Not as much fidelity in terms of what the camera can see, but I can see movement of cars and people—those sorts of things. Now, instead of staring at a small space, which may be, like, a villa or compound, I can look at a whole city continuously for as long as I am flying that particular system.”

Surveillance technology allows for more than just looking: computers store these moving images so that analysts can dial back to a particular time and place and zero in, or mark certain individuals and vehicles and instruct the machines to track them over time. A suspected terrorist-cell leader or bomb maker, say, can be watched for months. The computer can then instantly draw maps showing patterns of movement: where the target went, when there were visitors or deliveries to his home. If you were watched in this way over a period of time, the data could not just draw a portrait of your daily routine, but identify everyone with whom you associate.Add to this cellphone, text, and e-mail intercepts, and you begin to see how special-ops units in Iraq and Afghanistan can, after a single nighttime arrest, round up entire networks before dawn.

…..as for Big Brother’s eye in the sky,authorities have been monitoring public spaces from overhead cameras, helicopters, and planes for decades.

How should we feel about drones?Like any wartime innovation, going back to the slingshot, drones can be used badly or well.

Full article here, talks also a lot about Hussein, Brennan, Rhodes, a little of Bush, and even Hillary Clinton:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

Mini bun:

The Gorgon Stare

>>12437330 pb, >>12438991, >>12439017, >>12439040, >>12439070

The Gorgon Stare

>>12437330 pb, >>12438991 (You), >>12439017 (You), >>12439040 (You), >>12439070