Teams of police officers equipped with submachine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs have become a part of the landscape of post-Sept. 11 New York, patrolling around Wall Street and such landmarks as the Empire State building.

Similar squads are set to begin daily patrols of the busiest sections of the city subways this month, in what officials describe as a first for a U.S. mass transit system.

So begins this article from the Associated Press.

The creeping tyranny which is swallowing this country is starting to bare its teeth. Ask yourself the simple question, “Why do police officers need automatic weapons?”

Submachine guns and machine guns are weapons designed to throw a lot of bullets in the general direction of the target in question, in hope that a bullet or two will hit the desired target, or that the spray of such a weapon will cause an advancing enemy to take shelter and cease their advance. Automatic fire is not fully controlled and highly inaccurate, which is exactly why such weapons are utterly useless in the role of civilian law enforcement!

There is only one reason for law enforcement to carry fully automatic weapons: intimidation.

Welcome to the new Amerika, where it seems everyday we’re closer to picking up where the Soviet Union left off.

Folks, this is going to continue until the People of this nation stand up and declare that we’re not going to be treated like criminals anymore. We’re showing all the signs of the nation’s various police forces stinking with the attitude of “us vs. them”, where the common populace is the enemy. As these Gestapo tactics continue and the tyrannical beast snaps at more and more ordinary citizens, more ordinary citizens are going to be hurt or killed without the slightest residual taint of reasonable cause.

If we continue on this march toward despotic rule, we the People will be eventually forced into making the decision of whether to submit to the Jack boot stomping on our face, or fight back.

Three submarine Internet cables have been cut, leading to a massive outage of Internet connectivity in the Middle East, including the now known exaggerated complete cutoff of all Internet traffic to and from Iran.

One submarine cable being cut is an event for news. Three underwater cables cut within 72 hours of each other, all to the same region, but at different locations? Something is up and it doesn’t smell good. I have a very difficult time believing that this is coincidence.

The potential for this being a strategic, purposeful event to cut off communication with Iran cannot be overlooked. From a military perspective, this could be the sign of a coming attack against Iran.

Time will tell.

Addendum, Feb 2nd: It appears that Iran had partial bandwidth all along and India may be near 80% back by Monday. More here. Still no word as why three cables in two different areas were cut.

As a side note to this all, here is a fascinating article from back in 2001, talking about the NSA’s potential tapping of an undersea fiber run and just how much data transfer between continents is hinged on a few strands of fiber.

It is also interesting to note that Iran started its oil burse on Friday, no longer accepting the US dollar as trade currency. Exaggerated or not, this still smells fishy.

Another article on the incident here.