Drone Demonology: Flying Robots, Cop Mustaches & Resistance in the End Times

by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

The first time I ever saw a drone I was sweating my ass off, hiking jugs of water through a cactus forest to drop in remote canyons for famished migrants making the deadly trek through the Sonoran desert. U.S. Customs and Border Protection surveillance drones patrol the skies along the border with Mexico on the daily. Like any good activist I gave the drone the bird and then quickly ducked beneath a cholla, which I don’t advise doing, as it is a cactus with a reputation.

Two 10,000-pound Predator-B border patrol drones. These are the fellas that patrol the borderlands, from Yuma, Ariz., to Brownsville, Tex.

Since his inauguration, noble peace prize winning president Barack Obama has increased the U.S. military’s use of drones and rewritten the rules of engagement in over a dozen countries around the world. Hundreds of civilians, including swaths of children and several dozen Al Qaeda operatives have been eviscerated by remote. Even four U.S. citizens have been assassinated by drones, violating due process and habeas corpus protections in the U.S. constitution. Reports put the ratio of civilians to “suspected terrorists” killed by drone strikes at about 50 to 1, meaning roughly 98% of the deaths are “collateral damage.”    

Anarchist Beekeepers Claim Responsibility for U.S. Drone Attack

The Earth First! Journal office received this short video in which a group of self described anarchist beekeepers take credit for a recent attack on a media drone by a swarm of bees.  The video appears to come from a camera mounted on the drone itself. In a separate communique, the group taking responsibility say they hacked the news corporation to access the footage. At the end of the video you will see an image of the drone itself.

In several instances one can see individual bees land on the lens of the camera. It looks as though the bees swarm the vehicle and bring it down.

It is difficult to tell if anyone was injured during the attack.

If you think this bee news is strange, be sure to check out this recent article from the newswire: Robotic Bees to Pollinate Monsanto Crops

Robotic Bees to Pollinate Monsanto Crops

by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! Newswire

Traducción español aquí. Traduzione italiana qui.

Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you’re partaking of an ancient relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides created by Shell and Bayer and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies like Monsanto.

But never worry, those real life pollinators—the birds and the bees, as they say—may soon be irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.