Tag Archives: guns

05.19.18
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Weekend Reads and Quick Hits, Mostly Bleak

Hey, remember on Wednesday, when we had sort-of good news about things? A post that wasn’t super bleak? Well, don’t get used to it, chumps.

Let’s hit some things, quickly! How about we start with…the death of the planet?

Planetary Forcast Is Hot and Dead

 

Image result for venus

Earth, 2075. (Note: POSSIBLE exaggeration)

 

At Inverse, which is really a wonderful site, Mary van Aue reports that we’ve had our 400th consecutive month of above-average temperatures. We’re also pretty much guaranteed to have a temperature change of at least 2 degrees, Celsius. This is: bad.

With these new records behind us, scientists are now forecasting that the “worst case scenario,” one in which the planet heats up more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century, is more likely.

That number isn’t arbitrary. Limiting global warming to just 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures would limit the carnage that climate change has on the Earth’s biodiversity. A new study published in Science on Friday found that keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius would preserve tens of thousands of land-based species of plants, vertebrates, and insects living on the planet.

For anyone who thinks “biodiversity” is just something liberals like, remember that we all eat plants and animals! And they eat other things, and get nutrients from other things, and keep other plants and animals alive, and often work in complex, symbiotic ways.  When species start dying, whole ecosystems can collapse. We live in a bunch of overlapping ecosystems. This is a catastrophe, and honestly, I don’t think we’re going to make it.

Congressman Has Odd Ideas About Rising Sea Levels

You probably saw this earlier, but Mo Brooks (R- Alabama, the least surprising parenthetical ever) made maybe the dumbest comments ever uttered in the House of Representatives, a place that employs Louis Gohmert. It was about climate change and the rising seas.

Now, the official GOP position is that global warming doesn’t exist, and that it is all a hoax made up for some reason, most likely to make scientists rich. This is enshrined in our nation’s highest office.

But on the other hand, there are things like “facts” that make it super hard to pretend this isn’t happening. One fact is that we just passed 410ppm of CO2. That’s not a record, probably, since there have been times when it was higher, like when the Deccan Flats or Siberian Traps were coming damn near to extinguishing life on the planet, but it is the highest we have in about 800,000 years. (I linked to Business Insider there because I don’t think they’re known for their raving liberalism.) This keeps going up, according to the dangerous radicals at NASA.

There’s also the fact of rising oceans which threatens a lot of the world’s population, and which is getting considerably worse. One of the reasons it is getting worse is because of all that CO2 floating around, and warming the oceans, which is melting Antartica from beneath, which we just discovered, and is genuinely terrifying.

So it is the job of Republicans to wave away these facts, and they showed their tactics in full at a hearing this week. As Science explains:

The purpose of the hearing was to focus on how technology could be deployed for climate change adaptation. But the hearing frequently turned to the basics of climate science. Many of the questions by Republicans and Democrats alike were directed to Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said he was bothered that established climate science has not been questioned more by the committee, which has accused federal climate scientists of fraudulently manipulating climate data and subpoenaed their records.

“I’m a little bit disturbed by, No. 1, over and over again, I hear, ‘Don’t ever talk about whether mankind is the main cause of the temperature changing and the climate changing,'” he said. “That’s a little disturbing to hear constantly beaten into our heads in a Science Committee meeting, when basically we should all be open to different points of view.”

That’s the most common Republican tactic…allege that the scientists aren’t open to other points of view, that it is a conspiracy, and that they just want to get the truth. It’s a very hard-to-fight cynicism, because overwhelming consensus is whistled away as proof that everyone is in on it. It’s a real mob mentality! That this is being put forward by bought Russian stooge Rohrabacher is the real icing here.

But it is up to Mo Brooks to not just counter the idea of rising seas, but to find alternate ideas. These are…interesting.

Brooks then said that erosion plays a significant role in sea-level rise, which is not an idea embraced by mainstream climate researchers. He said the California coastline and the White Cliffs of Dover tumble into the sea every year, and that contributes to sea-level rise. He also said that silt washing into the ocean from the world’s major rivers, including the Mississippi, the Amazon and the Nile, is contributing to sea-level rise.

“Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up,” Brooks said.

“What about the white cliffs of Dover, California, where time and time again you’re having the waves crash against the shorelines, and time and time again, you’re having the cliffs crash into the sea. All that displaces water, which forces it to rise, does it not?”

Duffy responded: “I’m pretty sure that on human time scales, those are minuscule effects.”

It’s really the “does it not”, that sells this, like Brooks just check and mated the eggy egghead liar. There’s no doubt that on a grand geologic timeframe the land all washes into the sea and the world is remade, but it doesn’t actually happen this quickly. Brooks could also possibly be surprised by the fact that, as the earth is currently constituted, there is more ocean than land.

At least this was a nice exchange.

Brooks added that Antarctic ice is growing. That was true a few years ago, and scientists say it does not disprove the theory of global warming because different factors affect the Arctic and Antarctic rates of melting.

“We have satellite records clearly documenting a shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheet and an acceleration of that shrinkage,” Duffy said.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but the data I have seen suggests — ” Brooks said.

Duffy answered: “The National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

Your Reminder That The President Doesn’t Know Anything: North Korea and Libya Edition

Sigh…

The US president issued the threat at the White House when he was asked about the recent suggestion by his national security adviser, John Bolton, that the “Libyan model” be a template for dealing with North Korea at a summit between Trump and Kim planned for 12 June in Singapore.

“The model, if you look at that model with Gaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely. But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy,” Trump said, suggesting that the regime’s survival could be assured if Kim agreed to disarm.

“This with Kim Jong-un would be something where he would be there. He would be running his country. His country would be very rich,” the president said.

I mean…that’s not what the Libya model is. It’s when, after the invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear power in exchange to be welcomed into the world community and keep getting rich. The problem is that after a while, the world helped him be overthrown and killed. So it is a weird precedent for Bolton to suggest, but I see the outline of coherence there.

But Trump doesn’t know that, or doesn’t care. He’s just making random threats, only remembering one thing, and using that as his “model”. If you wanted to argue that he was making a point, it is that he’s assuming Kim saw what happened to Gaddafi, so he knows the US could take him out, so he should make a deal. After all, Trump literally says that they’ll decimate the regime if a deal isn’t made, which now that I read it, should be the fucking headlines.

That’s terrifying and a horrible way to negotiate. I know he thinks it sounds tough. But combined with the “Libya model”, what reason is there for Kim to give up his weapons? The stability of the United States? The strength of our promises? It’s madness predicated by total ignorance and a half-cocked notion of how strongmen talk.

What 100 Miles In Means to Border Patrol

 

border

The borderlands of Indianapolis

 

A year and change ago, we talked about how an aggressive CBP, who, along with ICE, is the spear end of Trump’s white nationalism, were using the full extent of their powers to harass people “100 air miles from any border“.

It’s a weird notion for those of us who don’t really have to worry about Border Patrol. We don’t really understand the extent of their jurisdiction. But Tanvi Misra and the great people at CityLab showed exactly what this means, in a tremendous piece of research and data-reporting.

In the “border zone,” different legal standards apply. Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.

That’s striking because the border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population, and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI. This zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It also includes all of Michigan and Florida, and half of Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a prior rough analysis by Will Lowe, a data scientist at MIT.

Read the whole piece to understand the democratic dystopia that has been gaining steam for decades, and has now been shot into hyperspeed.

Finally, A Nice Thing About Rivers

 

Bluff Springs Fen, October 31

Bluff Springs Fens, Oct 31st. By the artist. I mean, this is just lovely, right? 

 

The Center for Humans and Nature has a nice interview with an artist named Joel Shessley. (Disclosure: the company I work for has the Center as a client, though I wasn’t there when we did their website.) He is painting the Fox River, and his work will be presented at Aurora University in September. Anyway, he has some lovely thoughts about rivers, and I’ll leave you with them, contemplatively.

How has painting from different perspectives and during various seasons transformed the way you view life on the river and the life of the river itself?

Since I’m dealing with the watershed, and not just the river itself, I’ve become much more aware that the river cannot be separated from the land that feeds it. The river is what it is by virtue of all the named and unnamed tributaries, all the little rivulets and the larger streams that flow together to become the Fox River. Working across the Fox River Valley, I’ve begun to feel the pull of gravity down the gentle slopes. I’ve begun to sense how the river and the land interact. A topographic map would show you this, but patient observation on the ground and moving with the current in a canoe puts this information into your bones in a visceral way.

03.30.18
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Friday Good Reads and Quick Hits

It’s been a busy sort of week at the homefront, but we’ve got some exciting articles in the hopper for next week. In the meantime, to slake the omniscient society-hurdling thirst percolating in your word-hungry oppressed and power-lusting eyes (ed note: I’ve been taking writing lessons from Mr. Sean Penn!), here are some quick hits and good reads.

  • The White Sox, now projected to be among the teams with a 162-0 record, are also on pace to hit over 900 home runs this year, a new MLB high mark! In a year that’s between rebuilding and contending, that was a fun start. Matt Davidson has been the forgotten man, going from a top prospect to bust to a steady player. I don’t really expect him to hit three dingers every game (which I think is generous and understanding of me), but he has undeniable raw power, and could become a genuine steadying surprise. As it is, this is the weirdest and worst off day in baseball history.
Image result for matt davidson three homers

Giancarlo Davidson

  • Sticking with baseball for one more second, read David Roth’s little piece on Rickey Henderson the Involved Landlord. He’s exactly how you’d expect Rickey to be, sweeping the floors with his own nutball perfectionism, even explaining, in the traditional third person, that ‘Rickey needs Rickey’s houses to be clean!” It’s a bit of fluff, but a fun brief look at one of the 10 greatest, and probably 10 weirdest, baseballers of all time. And while you’re at it, take a look at Rickey’s stats. Did you know he led the league in stolen bases in 1998, 18 years after the first time he did? That’s nuts. Granted, 66 wasn’t super high for him, but it still would have led the league last year. Actually, it’s only been surpassed 5 times in the last two decades. That’s partly because we’ve gotten smarter about the risk/reward of a stolen base, but to reiterate my earlier point: that’s nuts.
  • All right, slightly more serious: read Peter Salisbury’s latest in-depth report on Yemen for Chatham House, this time on the Southern Question. I don’t think there is any question that the south is key to all of Yemen, and it is being largely ignored in the Saudi/Houthi/US/GCC/Qaeda-ISIS mix. But the Southern Question is really asking “what is Yemen“, and the answer doesn’t seem to be reflected in anyone’s policy. This piece is comprehensive and important, and you should read it all.
  • As a side note, Salisbury’s piece and a maybe-poorly-worded tweet by me spurred a bunch of private conversations, some angry but mostly civil, with southern Yemenis. I’m working on a long piece about the Southern Question that was born of those conversations, and obviously influenced by Salisbury’s great paper.
  • Alana Semuels has a harrowing piece on poverty and segregation in Chicago, making the what-should-be-obvious-point, often completely ignored in our politics and punditry, that “people at the bottom are struggling as much as they always have, if not more—illustrating that it’s not just the white rural poor who are being left behind in today’s economy.” Chicago is vibrant and wealthy and beautiful, filled with fit and educated people biking along luxurious lakefront trails and eating at incredible restaurants, and it is a scuffling dangerous and violent city, where life can be snuffed out in a flash of an instant, the police are another gang, and opportunity is denied by dint of education, by the misery of geography, and by the willful neglect of history. Something as simple as a rail line means the difference between getting a job and staying poor. These two cities rarely intersect.
  • This was illustrated to me at the March for Our Lives on Chicago’s near west side last week. The rally was held in Union Square, now at the far end of one of the hottest restuarant-and-condo districts in the city, which until recently was a meat-packing district. Beyond it a few blocks, the city becomes the “other city”. The rally was filled with the Good Sign Crowd, as boisterous as we were at the women’s marches. But the students, who live in the forgotten Chicago, weren’t interested in the NRA or in Trump or even, really, in Parkland. They reminded us, without pulling any punches, that they were afraid for their lives every day, and that a vast system, in which the petty bloodmanship of the NRA only played a part, kept them oppressed and poor. Those were the two cities colliding; then half of us walked back east, back toward downtown, back toward the gleaming skyscrapers and cool brunch places and open suburbs. The other went back to their lives.
  • London could face water scarcity in 2040! As Circle of Blue points out,  “demand for water could outstrip London’s supply by 2040″, by as much as 20%. Maybe when the rich areas of the world start to run out of water, as opposed to just the poor hot places, we might take it seriously. Ah, but 2040 is a long time away, right? There’s no need for…for…
  • Unrelatedly, 2040 from 2018 is equidistant as 2018 is from 1996.
  • But of course, things don’t just get bad the year of projections. It’s steadily worse. Like, when they say the seas will rise X meters by 2100, it’s not like we’ll go to bed dry and wake up deluged. Climate change is already happening, and happening quickly. That’s the point of this Inverse article about the record rate of arctic ice disappearance. The ice disappears because the planet is getting warmer, and disappearing ice means less solar reflection, which means more heat trapped on the planet. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, which is why long-term projections might actually be optimistic.
  • Another stark reminder of that is Noah Sneider’s Letter from Siberia, in this month’s Harper’s. Titled “Cursed Fields”, it is about an anthrax outbreak that slaughtered reindeer in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, where reindeer are the primary economic driver for the Nenet people. While there are some who think the anthrax (or some other poison) was spread by Gazprom to drive away the locals in order to access the sweet sweet oil and gas of the peninsula, the probable truth is even more terrifying. Global warming is melting the permafrost (as seen in vast sinkholes and methane explosions, another self-reinforcing cycles), and unleashing microbes dormant from earlier outbreaks. And maybe even earlier diseases to which we aren’t immune. It’s a gripping piece, and a great look at a life in a vast and difficult land, an old way of life uprooted, for ill and for good, by oil and gas in the last century. Sneider also points out that Russia stands to benefit enormously from the treasures unlocked by a melting permafrost, which go hand-in-hand with the diseases pouring forth.
  • Happy Easter and Passover to everyone celebrating. Easter isn’t my favorite holiday, per se, but it might be my favorite one to celebrate. We go to my Aunt Marilyn’s house, as we have every year since I was born. She, and my Uncle Leo while he was alive, lived in the same house for that entire time, raised a family, had us over every year. It is in Wheeling, which is now a booming suburb, but when they moved there was past the outskirts of Chicagoland. Even when we were going there when I was growing up, there was farmland all around their little pocket of houses. It struck me as odd and exotic then, and I felt a powerful nostalgia for it that I couldn’t place, even while it was still there. Maybe it was just being there once a year, every spring, in dewy and never-quite-warm days, but I always felt an intense and unspeakable loss for the day even while I was there, even while I was a kid. And every year the farmlands got smaller, subdivisions were built, and now those subdivisions are old, showing their age, part of the landscape. The slow flattening of America caught up to it, homogenized. But I still see parts of the openness I remember, in carved out fields filled with power lines, in old drainage ponds that used to be for irrigation, in cul-de-sacs that seemed designed for Spielbergian heroes in that 80s borderland of sameness and weirdness, of suburbia and the still-wild rural areas in which monsters lurked. That’s gone now. It was fleeting even while it existed. But you know what they say: you can’t stop progress.

bloom

  • But, on the plus side, I can always say “I remember when this was all farmland”, and feel good and properly old.
02.27.18
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To Arms, Teachers! Trumpism as Totalitarianism

I just finished Masha Gessen’s truly great The Future is History, her story of “how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia”. It was hard to read, not just because of the grey bleakness that choked out all Russian political space throughout the book, but because of the vast parallels between Russia and the United States…especially, of course, between the rise of Trump and the Reign of Putin.

I don’t mean, right now at least, in the strictly legal or political sense. The book doesn’t at all touch on potential collusion, or cooperation between the parties. Trump is really only mentioned a couple of times at the end, once where Gessen is talking about the growing global influence of Alexander Dugin, the philosopher of Putinism and Russia’s aggressive revanchism, with its white nationalism, hatred of modernity, anti-gay hysteria, political oppression, and swaggering love of upsetting norms.

In the epilogue, she writes of his growing international fame: “With the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the neo-Nazi movement known as the ‘alt-right’ gained public prominence, as did its leader Richard Spencer, an American married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian woman who served as Dugin’s English translator and American promoter.”

This, I think, is part of the key. The philosophy behind Putinism, especially once his second terms started, has been aggressive and deeply conservative, almost atavistic. And that movement, which I’ve lumped as “white suprenationalism“, has been the driving moral force behind Trump.

This isn’t a full review of the book, nor is it trying to tease out the enormity of the Russian connection, in a spiritual, legal, and economic sense (indeed, every time I try to, I get lost in the vastness of the details, which might be the point). I hope to do a full review this week, and hope to bring out more connections as we go along.

But there was one passage that struck me, and that clarified a lot of what I have been thinking about when we talk about arming teachers.

Continue reading →

02.16.18
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“Blue Apron” Food Stamps. Refugees. School Shootings. For the GOP, Meanness is The Goal

On Valentine’s Day, which will forever be known to the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland as the day their young lives became forever associated with trauma, Allison and I decided to watch something old, and romantic, so we could not talk about the daily horrors for a few hours. We had that luxury, of course.

We quickly picked Casablanca, which neither of us had seen for years.  What struck me watching it again, beside how great it still is, is that beside the main three (or four) characters, you are meant to deeply sympathize with the young couple trying to get out of the city.

Real people (2/3rds)

We’re primed to sympathize with them, to feel their plight, to feel the agony of their neverland time in Casablanca. This isn’t just because they are young and attractive, but because the opening narration perfectly lays out their situation.

With the coming of the Second World  War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately,  toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so, a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.

Here, the fortunate ones, through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca — and  wait — and wait — and wait .

You can feel their desperate pain. These are people whose lives have been upturned by the horrors of war, by the mad headlong rush of violence into their lives. They are broken and shattered and scared and lost, half-dead, barely clinging onto hope. We feel for them, because they are human, and we can see ourselves in them.

We have the same situation in Syria, today. Millions of people have had their lives turned inside out, blown apart by a savagely cruel war. They spent their lives under the cadaverous pallor of the Asad regime, and when some rose up, peacefully, they were slaughtered. Over the next 7 years, their country has been turned into a charnel house, ripped apart by warring factions inside the country (especially the regime), transnational groups like ISIS, and international actors like Russia, Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia, now Turkey, maybe Israel.

They fled across the self-same Mediterannean. They fled to Europe, many with eyes toward America. But we didn’t see them as people. We saw them as others, verminous danger, and closed our doors.

Not real people

That’s clear in the latest budget, and it is clear in, say, the dozens of refugee resettlement centers that are being closed under Trump and Paul Ryan.

But that’s the GOP. That’s who they are as a party, and it is clear in issue after issue: cruelty is the point, and empathy is a weakness. It is not a coincidence, nor a distortion, that their President is a man entirely incapable of empathy, and whose primary instinct (other than self-aggrandizement) is to be cruel to those he thinks are weaker than him.

It’s how he became President after all, and in every move he makes and every reaction he has, and in every piece of policy crafted in the head of Paul Ryan, making the lives of actual humans even worse is the primary goal. Punching down, and pulling the last shreds of a decent life from those who have so little.

Continue reading →

06.15.17
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Say No to Unity: A Quick Aside on the Scalise Shooting (and programming note)

Image result for alexandria shooting

(Apologies for the no posts in a week- have been working on a side project that goes off today, and will finally have time to breathe after this evening. Back to regular posting next week.)

As a quick aside on the horrific shooting in Alexandria yesterday. The shooter was clearly disturbed, and driven mad by the constant thrum of political anger that hangs over the country like a cloud of doomed, lust-mad cicadas, endlessly screeching to be heard before the reaping. And that is a very dangerous situation. The surprising thing isn’t what happened yesterday; it’s that it hasn’t happened more often.

(It has, of course, just not directed toward Congressmen. Hate crimes and race-driven murders have spiraled upward since Trump’s election, and of course, violence is part of the fabric of America. A gunman killed three in San Francisco yesterday, and it barely was a blip.)

But there are a few things about that, as we are met with calls for “unity” and “turning down the temperature” and everything.

  1. Donald Trump is still a uniquely horrifying President, who should not be in office. His policies hurt the United States, he is bone-dumb ignorant and childishly cruel, and his whole circle is based on corruption. Mueller is looking into obstruction of justice. That hasn’t changed because a crazy person also hated him. He still must be resisted.
  2. The GOP is still trying to destroy the environment, wreck workers rights, and take away the health care of tens of millions of Americans, which will lead to the deaths of thousands. That they were shot at by someone who is opposed to that doesn’t make their policies any less destructive.
  3. It benefits the party in power to call for “unity” and to ask people to stop being so gosh-darn angry.

Obviously, Point #3 isn’t conspiratorial. It’s just cynically convenient. It’s convenient to say that looking into all this colluding and justice-obstructing is “raising the temperature.” It’s convenient for the GOP to say that despite this assault, they’ll continue to do “the people’s work”, regardless of the fact the people are opposed to the AHCA with almost shocking bipartisan uniformity. It’s convenient for them to say they’ll soldier on courageously, and using the shooting to deflect criticism.

And, to be sure, it is brave, in a sense. What happened yesterday was horrifying, and I’m sure personally shocking. Granted, it doesn’t seem to have changed anyone’s mind on guns. Indeed, there are many calling for fewer restrictions, so that everyone there could have returned fire. (which, I guess, isn’t politicizing tragedy?) You can see the depth of ideological madness where the response to getting a taste of the violence that keeps this country on the butcher’s block is to sound out a clarion call for increased violence.

And that’s the point. Their policies are still ruinous and destructive. They still must be resisted. That Steve Scalise caught a bullet doesn’t make his push to destroy healthcare and shatter the lives of millions any more moral or understandable. The Mo Brooks came across pretty well doesn’t mean his promotion of total corporate mastery over labor and the environment any less hideous. Scalise didn’t deserve what happened, and nor did the people around him.  We all obviously hope they all recover fully, and live long happy lives.

But they still should be resisted, at every step of the way. They are trying to deny others that long, happy life. They are trying to turn humans and the earth into capital. This shouldn’t be met with violence, but with votes and with voices. Silence and unity, at this moment, will more destructive than anger.

08.31.16
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Remote Control ISIS Weapons: Probably Not Good

WaPa: 

While the advantage of remotely operating a direct-fire weapon such as a machine gun or sniper rifle is obvious, remote weapons can also make small bands of insurgent groups seem stronger and better equipped. The report covers one instance in which Kurdish troops attacked an Islamic State remote-controlled sniper rifle, losing men in the process while the shooter remained protected in a bunker nearby. Instead of using men to protect the remote weapon, the Islamic State instead tied up dogs around the system.

Experts are increasingly impressed and worried with the level of technological sophistication of tele-weapons used by militant groups in Iraq and Syria, especially ISIS. Mowing down Kurdish fighters with a remote-operated gun protected by dogs seems like a perfect combination of ISIS’s patented brutality and technological sophistication.

But really, it’s only the dogs, and the relatively crude-but-successful nature of the operation that make it any different from the way violence is changing, and becoming more remote and even automized. It’s one of the main issues of our day, and I don’t think it will ever be possible to have a real discussion about it, since we rush forward, and any attempt to say we shouldn’t have a weapon is lost in a deafening drum circle of retrograde chest-thumping.

Look for example at the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System. Even just the name makes it sound like a bad idea, but saying “this will protect the lives of Marines”– which could very well be true!– makes its deployment essentially a done deal. It needs human control now, but that’s just the first step.

 

This is the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or MAARS for short. It's an unmanned ground vehicle that can be outfitted with a medium machine gun or a grenade launcher.

This makes me uncomfortable. Image from Tech Insider

 

There will be a point one day soon when robots will make the kill decision, algorithmically. I’m not a person afraid of a robot takeover, but I am apprehensive of them making what are essentially moral decisions. I’m also concerned that adopting higher and higher tech makes it impossible for us to condemn it, and keep it out of the hands of even worse actors. But barring high-level political action, I don’t see this as a road off of which we’re going to veer.

08.23.16
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A Brief Note on Gabby Giffords Endorsing Kirk and Toomey, and the Myth Of Encouragement

Politico: Americans for Responsible Solutions, the anti-gun violence PAC founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, on Monday endorsed two Republican senators for their 2013 vote following the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre.

“In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, Republican Sens. Pat Toomey and Mark Kirk broke from the gun lobby and supported a bill to help prevent felons, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining firearms at gun shows and online,” Giffords and Kelly wrote in aCNN op-ed. “This week, they are earning our organization’s endorsement.”

We just talked about Kirk, and his attempt to keep Republican votes while not losing everyone in Illinois who hates Trump, which is most people. Part of his (deserved) political reputation comes from things like bucking the NRA, even briefly, which is how he gets endorsements from groups like Giffords. But while, like anyone with a heart, I love Gabby Giffords, this endorsement is nonsense.

I get the instinct. If you “reward” Republicans with your endorsement in exchange for behaving like reasonable human beings on guns, you’ll get more support. That’s the theory. The other calculation is that Americans for Responsible Solutions can’t only endorse Democrats, because then they are seen as partisan actors. It’s a tough situation, to be sure.

Continue reading →

07.11.16
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Reacted to the Gun: Yemen and the US; National Security and the Illusion of Exceptionalism

 

Pictured: Lunatics

Pictured: Patriots

 

Back when I was writing more or less exclusively about Yemen, the same conversation would always come up: “I’ve heard that there are so many guns in Yemen, and like, people just carry them around.” And that’s true! Yemen is a country completely awash in guns, and it was not uncommon to see people carrying rifles in the streets of San’a. Old rifles, generally, and rarely loaded, but yes. It’s something you got used to. The point of the question was generally not curiosity, but a way to explain how violent and dangerous and maybe even primitive a land it was, one ruled by savage bloodlust.

You clearly see where this is going. The person who asked was nearly always American, and my followup would be “yeah, by a lot of estimations Yemen has the second most guns per capita in the world!”, the first, of course, being America. But that’s where there was always a disconnect. Regardless of how the person I was talking to felt about gun control, there was never an idea that it was a similar thing. They had too many guns and that’s why it was so violent. We just have a lot of guns, is all.

Global Gun Policy Comparisons

A few notes on this graph from CFR. The last Small Arms Survey was in 2007. Some more recent estimates have US guns per capita at an incredible 112.6 guns per person, though the actual amount of gun owners has decreased. Just more people with an absurd amount of guns. Yemen has a wide variance, with some estimates putting it at 2nd (54.8 guns per capita) and others considerably lower.

I feel that people may be realizing just how insane this is getting, which the last terrible week may have shown. When Philando Castille was shot by a police officer, he was (reportedly) carrying a weapon he was legally allowed to. The officer, by way of exoneration, said through his lawyer that he was reacting to the “gun, not to race.” You can quibble about the role race played in how that gun was reacted to (spoiler: probably a lot!), but the key is the gun.

“Reacting to the presence of that gun” could be our national motto. We saw it again in Dallas, where protestors, enacting their legal right to armed carry, added to the confusion of an active shooter situation. This makes the incredibly difficult job of a police officer even tougher. How are you supposed to determine, in the moment, whether a person is a “good guy with a gun”?

For that matter, how are we? A couple of years ago, a man in Georgia went to a park with a Little League game, waving around a gun and bragging about how it was legal, and there was nothing anyone could do.

“Anyone who was just walking by – you had parents and children coming in for the game – and he’s just standing here, walking around [saying] ‘You want to see my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing,” said parent Karen Rabb.

Rabb said that the man’s intimidating behavior panicked parents causing them to hustle children who were there to play baseball to safety after the man refused to leave.

After deputies arrived, they questioned the man who produced a permit for the handgun. According to authorities, since the man made no verbal threats or gestures, they couldn’t arrest him or ask him to leave.

(Again, if the man was black, he’d be dead, but move on). This is insane. Unless and until he started shooting, there was nothing anyone could do except hope this man wasn’t a murderer. That’s where we all live now. We are all on the front lines. We’re all at the mercy of chance, hoping we don’t get shot. We’re all just reacting to the presence of a gun.

But what does it all mean?  We’ve talked a lot about how our devotion to guns is a reflection of a violent national character — we’re a country whose national symbol of freedom, for many, isn’t the founding documents or the broken chains of even the Statue of Liberty, but a tool designed by man to kill other men. More than that, I think, the mere presence of so many guns has a distorting and fearful impact on who we are. It’s hard to go out to dinner without thinking, in the back of your head, that this is a great spot for a mass shooter, whether they are pledging allegiance to the Caliphate or just the voices in their head. I think it makes us more savage.

It makes us less safe, and makes us feel less safe. There are people who carry, and feel a little more secure, but really: if you actually felt secure you wouldn’t need to. And yes, in an era of global terrorism, nowhere is safe, but getting shot is far more likely to happen here, for no reason, not even a sick and twisted justification. Just because someone falls asleep angry every day and wakes up exhausted and has access to guns.

This refusal to look at the impact being flooded with guns has on our national character is the dangerous side of American exceptionalism. It’s easy to look at Yemen and assign a national characteristic based on loosely-understood ideas about gun culture. I think taking any one thing and making it as synecdoche is foolhardy, but there is something there. It is there a little in Yemen (tribal culture is inherently more a negotiating one than a violent one, but revenge always has to be in the toolbelt). And it is here in the US.

We aren’t immune from history. It shows in our borders (having migration issues a mere 100+ years after mass annexation is not unusual!), and it shows in the way we react to the physical presence of guns. But we refuse to have an actual national examination. It’s easy to say “Yemen has guns and so it is violent”; but we have a lot of trouble doing it here, a country that is way more gun-heavy and death-ridden. It’s the same mentality that says torture is OK if the US does it, because our inherent goodness alchemizes war crimes into justice. It’s this inability to look nward, this blithe shattering of every national mirror, that I think more than anything is responsible for our decline.

07.08.16
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The Dallas Backlash: Joe Walsh Makes It All Clear

H/T Slate

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I wasn’t calling for violence, against Obama or anyone. Obama’s words & BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed. Time for us to defend our cops.

Joe Walsh is a dimbulb Tea Party punk who briefly became the face of yapping white suburban anger in Northern Illinois in 2010 before being put back in his place by Tammy Duckworth. He’s the voice of those who think that police don’t have enough power, who thinks that anyone of color who looks askance at a cop is a thug who deserves to get shut down, and who, it goes without saying, defends traditional family values.

The collar counties in Illinois go through spasms of reaction, like the seismic reverberations of white flight. Walsh rode that wave until it broke, but these horrible shootings (which now seem to be the broken reaction to police-based murder) are tailor-made for a racist like him. He’s one of those goons (who are also the entirety of the FOX News lineup, all of talk radio, and like 80% of elected GOP officials) who have wanted to bury Black Lives Matter since it came up, because an organized effort and consistent spotlight on systemic injustice makes them uncomfortable. It’s far better to imagine it a violent militant movement, with gun-toting cop-killing rapists around every corner. This plays right into his hands.

It also plays into the hands of Donald Trump, who has tried to rally the “Law and Order” white reaction to his side, with some success. Expect failed authoritarians like Rudy Guiliani to be all over tying this to Obama, and of course to Hillary, for not “defending cops”, as if anything Obama has ever said about it has been untrue.

What this does is allow any talk of black rights or black lives to be smothered in a sea of righteous anger. Your concern for your lives, it will essentially be said, is costing other people their lives, and their lives are, need we say, more worthy. They are the ones that matter.

Or, as Tommy Craggs said, ” A lot of subtext is going to become text in the next few days. Seems only right for Walsh to have gotten us started.”

Obama, and by connection Hillary, are “to blame” for this because they recognize that things aren’t right, and that we have a long history of violence toward black Americans. Black Lives Matter is hated because they refuse to conform to the official story, to the legend of justice. That’s why they have to be smeared. They have to be discredited. The mythology can’t stand up to the light.

The story is that official unwillingness to sweep police violence and the pervasive violence and injustice against the black community under the rug is un-American, and dangerous. Both might be true, but that tells you more about America than anyone is comfortable with.

07.08.16
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Angry Blacks, Angry Whites, Angry Muslims: The Howling Madness Grows

 

Image from LA Times

 

As of this moment (7:15, CST), there hasn’t been anything released on the suspects in the coordinated attacks on Dallas police last night during an anti-police-violence protest that left five officers killed. Right now it seems like there are three possibilities, which puts us at a possible hinge moment in our violent history. This could be one of those days that we look back on as definitive: the anger and wild yawning vacuum that is swallowing this gun-drowned country might be on the verge of overtaking our history.

As we said after Orlando, “not politicizing” a tragedy is insane. The murder of black men by police is political. Protests are political. Anti-police violence is, in a grotesque way, political. We are human actors in a political society, which is why it is important to think about the implications of this violence.

  • Black Protestors. Even if they had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter (and they wouldn’t in any real sense, since that is not a militant movement), it would be tarnished forever as a cop-killer one, or at least cop-killer adjacent. Their real concerns, the absolute reality that black lives don’t matter, that black men especially are seen as expendable, the daily thrum of both major and petty injustices, will be drowned out in a sea of blue.
  • ISIS “inspired”. It’s not impossible to think of a way that actual ISIS would benefit from this, as a racial violence and backlash in America just makes us seem more decadent and broken (correctly!) and might help with recruiting, or at least more inspiration, but that’s the most far-fetched scenario I can think of. It might be an “inspired” shooting, like Omar Mateen in Orlando, but the coordination would be surprising for a lone wolf-style attack. That’s not to say that it is impossible for multiple people to coordinate even in the absence of central guidance, but I would be surprised. Needless to say, the ramifications of this would be terrible. We’d devolve into full-panic-mode, and without steady hands from the President and both candidates (um), you could see an even more massive rollback of civil liberties.
  • White nationalists/wingnuts. Remember that the white nationalist/pro-gun/militia movement has always been a weird chest-thumping mix of pro-veteran and cop but anti-law and anti-government. There is a strain that thinks killing police is a necessary way to overthrow the state; the police are, after all, tools of the elite. It may also be people just hoping to start a race war- the RaHoWa. If this is the case, we may actually have a conversation about guns and the anger that is consuming this country, and driving one-half of our politics.

There’s no question that, human tragedy (and ongoing, daily, human tragedy) aside, this will be ugly, as ugly as anything we’ve seen in many years. People will find a way to blame whom they want regardless (Black Lives Matter forced cops to gather in one place because of their protests- it’s their fault!). And we’ll continue moving down a bloody path, where what binds us together seems irrevocably frayed, or worse, proven to have been a lie all along. We have a thousand different narratives, and they don’t seem to connect anywhere. The narratives meet like crashing fairy tales, the old ones, in an intersection of gnarling wolf-teeth and wilding violence, of children being sacrificed to dark mythologies and the only lessons learned are those of fear. Our national story is becoming a burning marching band playing a ragged and pained Sousa as they march off a cliff into a frothing sea.

I feel that everyone is uneasily “rooting” for the shooters to be aligned more or less with their political opposition. That is in an of itself a damning enough statement of where we are as a country.