Fart of the Deal: Alaska Edition

Donald Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine on "day one."  207 days later, the "fart of the deal" has failed to deliver on a key campaign promise.

War is Meant to be Continuous

Star Wars: Millenials Awaken

My own personal fan theory...

8,000 U.S. veteran suicides per year

source: "Democracy Now!" - 11/10/14

The War is Coming Home

A police officer, surrounded by several others, restrains a struggling, unarmed man in a choke hold as he gasps “I can't breathe” 11 times.  Moments later, he is dead on the streets of Staten Island.  A 2 year old child in Atlanta is asleep in his crib at 3 a.m. when a SWAT team's flash grenade blows a hole in his face and chest during a no-knock raid, leaving the child in critical condition and requiring extended hospitalization.  In Ferguson, a heavily-armed police officer sweeps his assault rifle across a crowd of demonstrators, announcing “I will fucking kill you.”  When asked to identify himself, the officer declines and instead says “go fuck yourself.”  Earlier, journalists are confronted by militarized police units in a nearby McDonald's and ordered to disperse as they attempt to cover the protest.  Elsewhere, a news crew has a police teargas canister thrown directly at their production van.

A typical afternoon in "the land of the free?"  The police and the military are merging into a single force of aggression.

The war is coming home. After decades of zealous U.S. government (deficit) spending (much to the delight of private weapons manufacturers), Americans are seeing more military weapons and tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan on their own streets.  All that surplus military equipment produced for that “War on Terror?”  National Safety Council stats reveal that Americans are now 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist (source).  Americans are not interested in being lectured on why maximum force by their own government is necessary to obtain their “compliance.”  They recognize the difference between paying for an organization to “serve and protect” neighborhoods and a trigger-happy, weaponized force more interested in serving and protecting itself.  Which is why Ferguson residents alleging police abuse are now lining up to file a $40 million lawsuit against the Ferguson and St. Louis PD.

More Americans are finally realizing what the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly asserted: police have “no obligation to protect” citizens.  Increasingly, that seems to be of mere incidental consideration.  The American Civil Liberties Union found of 800 SWAT team deployments between 2011 and 2012, only 7% of SWAT team raids were genuine emergencies (the purpose for which a militarized police force was intended) (source).  Nearly 80% were used for ordinary law enforcement purposes like serving search warrants on people’s homes.  Police apologists will give lengthy rationalizations as to why any possible scenario contains an element of potential danger and therefore justifies aggressive tactics and maximum armament as a matter of standard operating procedure.  Prepare to be unconvinced; it's hard to assure people they are under military-style occupation for their own good.

In the line of duty, U.S. police discharge their firearms more often in a single day than German police do in an entire year; Der Spiegel reports that in 2011, the entire German police force fired 85 shots, most of which were not aimed at anyone (source).  More dramatically, a recent article in The Economist reported, “Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero. In 2012 the figure was just one” (source).  Meanwhile, U.S. police shots fired is not even a number that is tracked; single U.S. police incidents include more weapon discharges than other countries' police fire in a year.

And when they are not being shot at, the American people are also the most imprisoned in the world.  The ACLU found that with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's prison population, which has grown 700% since 1970 (source).  This is a historical record for the U.S. and the world.

Check out the recruiting commercial, “Newport Beach Police Dept - Are You Qualified?”  In 85 seconds (starring only white males), you will see a variety of assault-style weaponry, aggressive close quarter combat, pursuit and confrontation.  Not a single frame of “community policing,” – walking the beat of a familiar neighborhood, establishing trust with residents.  If these 85 seconds are any indication of the “qualifications” necessary for NBPD, the job appears to be one of constant urban warfare.

Most Americans strongly condemn rioting, looting, and other violence.  Yet community outrage such as in Ferguson doesn't occur in a vacuum and it isn't created overnight.  While there is the incendiary incident such as the fatal police shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown, behind the headlines are many residents of color who tell stories of their own sustained, antagonistic relationship with Ferguson police officers—who are almost all white, increasingly living elsewhere, and apparently bringing with them a war-zone mentality to the job.  In training and in practice, police officers are becoming soldiers deployed for combat.

In terms of spending alone, no nation prioritizes warfare like the United States – not even close (source).  And now the war is coming home.  So it is of no surprise that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  But in Ferguson and elsewhere, the American people are becoming less tolerant of paying their government to be hammered and nailed.

War is Making Us Poor

Contrary to Keynesian economics, warfare is not good for the economy because war only destroys wealth; it cannot create it. Government spending on war, including escalating borrowing on credit to fund military operations, has both short term and long term destructive effects - morally and economically.

Armed Chinese Troops in Texas!

TURN THE TABLES, WORK FOR PEACE AND PROSPERITY. What if America was occupied by a foreign military power? What should you do about it? And what should the people of the occupying country do...? A valuable thought exercise.

Paul in 90 Seconds

The Ron Paul Media Blackout continues.  Last night's GOP presidential debate lasted 3,600 seconds (60 minutes) and Ron Paul was only allowed 90 seconds. Of the eight candidates on the stage, the "average" candidate should have 450 seconds - of course Romney, Cain, and Perry had far more, reiterating the same Bush/Obama talking points of occupation and neo-colonialism. Ron Paul only got 20% of his fair air time!

Nonetheless, in 90 seconds Ron Paul was able to stand for:

-peaceful foreign policy through trade and diplomacy, not military aggression 

-ending torture for moral, legal, and practical reasons 

-ending the Obama Administration's program of unilaterally assassinating American citizens without due process of law 

-oppose nation-building, policing, and occupying countries across the globe

Some of my liberal friends seems puzzled or even outraged when I state my support for Ron Paul as president in 2012. But it's really not complicated.

The American Terminator

Tom Engelhardt has written a sobering yet terrifying article on the development and demand for UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) by the U.S. Defense Department.  Often called "Predator Drones" or "Reapers," these mammon machines are becoming all the rage for waging war from above.  Remotely controlled and increasingly networked with information-sharing technology to create a single "hive mind," these aptly-named drones will likely become the killing force of the future (source).  Engelhardt writes of their growing appeal: 

They are relatively cheap. When they “hunt,” no one dies (at least on our side).  They are capable of roaming the world.  Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of “hive minds.”

A "Hunter-Killer Drone" from the Terminator film series (L) and a U.S. military "Predator Drone" (R).

This is all wonderful news, of course, if you are a deeply indebted, crumbing empire with 1 in 4 children living in poverty (source).  Rather than conscripting or back-door drafting soldiers to face down gunfire and improvised explosive devices to take out insurgents in up to 80 countries (source), the Bush and Obama Administrations have increasingly outsourced their military force to machines.   No more military funerals, no more burning draft cards, no more public outcry over the human cost of war.  Well, at least not on the side of the "good guys."  But geopolitics and nationalism aside, Engelhardt understands the woeful ghost in the machine of mechanized warfare:

Just think about the last time you went to a Terminator film: Who did you identify with?  John and Sarah Connor, or the implacable Terminators chasing them?  And you don’t need artificial intelligence to grasp why in a nanosecond.

With their growing economy, particularly in the tech sector, it might be worth asking how U.S. citizens would react to China flying UAVs over the United States.  Or any country, for that matter.  While the doomsday scenario of Technological Singularity - in which machines gain self-awareness and promptly decide humans must be eradicated (source)- is still a few decades away, the grim realities of dehumanized warfare are already upon us.

Beneath the slick action sequences and Hollywood plot line, the Terminator film series is a cautionary tale of how much military might to entrust in machines; the main antagonist in the series is the faceless, calculated computer brain of Skynet - which controls a vast network of sophisticated, weaponized robots that patrol the ground, sea, and air.  Developed by Cyberdyne Systems for the U.S. Armed Forces, Skynet was hailed as the first "Global Digital Defense Network" (source).  This is not dissimilar from the terminology and tactics currently underway by the CIA.  Engelhardt reports:

As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, in a “Presidential Finding” on September 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally. By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.”

On the moral spectrum of behavior, humans killing one another is bad enough.  But humans programming machines to remotely kill other humans seems to me far worse in terms of ethical approaches to problem-solving.  Simply, sending machines to kill on one's behalf is not something "the good guys" do.  Imagine any action or science fiction film in which the hero sits at a computer terminal and annihilates his enemies halfway around the world as they flee from a hovering drone's machine gun fire.  There is no nobility in warfare without sacrifice, without even a pretense of putting the courage of one's convictions on the line.  And yet, despite the obvious physical safety of piloting robots 7,000 miles away, the psychological cost of operating a Predator Drone may be far greater than conventional aerial warfare.  Written on the Military.com news website in 2008 (source):

In a fighter jet, "when you come in at 500-600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don't see what happens," said Col. Albert K. Aimar, who is commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing here and has a bachelor's degree in psychology.  But when a Predator fires a missile, "you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it's very vivid, it's right there and personal. So it does stay in people's minds for a long time."  He said the stresses are "causing some family issues, some relationship issues."  He and other Predator officers would not elaborate. 

Often, the military also directs Predators to linger over a target after an attack so that the damage can be assessed.  "You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize the fight," said Col. Chris Chambliss, commander of the active-duty 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.  "You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground.  The images can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset.  We know that some folks have, in some cases, problems."

The ethical dimensions of mechanized warfare are vast.  Can a machine be held legally responsible for the death of a civilian?  Who is put on trial - in military or civilian courts - when a UAV mistakenly identifies a  fruit stand in a bustling village as a terrorist munitions bunker and kills a dozen innocents?  The manufacturer of the weapon?  The programmer?  The drone operator?  The commanding officer who ordered the strike?  More importantly, would any machine hesitate - even for a second - to shoot down a mother clutching her baby if programmed to do so?  Can empathy and humanity be programmed into a machine?  If it is designed to kill, would that even be a useful design goal?

The American Terminator - coming to a battlefield near you.

Indeed, we must now add "remote mechanized warfare" to the list of reasons as to "Why They Hate Us."

Obama Nation

"drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Libya

is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?

first black president, the masses were hungry

but the same president just bombed an African country"

A stunning, raging, sagacious hip-hop video about the betrayed ideals placed in Barack Obama: