wikipedia | The MIM-104 Patriot is a surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, the primary of its kind used by the United States Army and several allied states. It is manufactured by the U.S. defense contractor Raytheon and derives its name from the radar component of the weapon system. The AN/MPQ-53 at the heart of the system is known as the "Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target" which is a backronym for PATRIOT. The Patriot system replaced the Nike Hercules system as the U.S. Army's primary High to Medium Air Defense (HIMAD) system and replaced the MIM-23 Hawk
system as the U.S. Army's medium tactical air defense system. In
addition to these roles, Patriot has been given the function of the U.S.
Army's anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which is now Patriot's primary mission. The system is expected to stay fielded until at least 2040.[5]
Patriot systems have been sold to the armed forces of the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan, Greece, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Romania and Sweden. South Korea purchased several second-hand Patriot systems from Germany after North Korea test-launched ballistic missiles to the Sea of Japan and proceeded with underground nuclear testing in 2006.[6]Jordan also purchased several second-hand Patriot systems from Germany.
Poland hosts training rotations of a battery of U.S. Patriot launchers. This started in the town of Morąg in May 2010, but was later moved further from the Russian border to Toruń and Ustka due to Russian objections.[7]
On December 4, 2012, NATO authorized the deployment of Patriot missile launchers in Turkey to protect the country from missiles fired in the civil war in neighboring Syria.[8] Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat.[9]
The Patriot system gained prestige during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 with the claimed engagement of over 40 Iraqi Scud missiles. The system was successfully used against Iraqi missiles in 2003 Iraq War, and has also been used by Saudi and Emirati forces in the Yemen conflict against Houthi missile attacks. The Patriot system achieved its first undisputed shootdowns of enemy aircraft in the service of the Israeli Air Defense Command. Israeli MIM-104D batteries shot down two HamasUAVs during Operation Protective Edge on August 31, 2014, and later, on September 23, 2014, an Israeli Patriot battery shot down a Syrian Air ForceSukhoi Su-24 which had penetrated the airspace of the Golan Heights, achieving the system's first shootdown of a manned enemy aircraft.[10]
moonofalabama | The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic
weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered
Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:
"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing
and pose significant risks to security and stability across the
Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.
At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’
between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of
the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START
treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but,
notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by
the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard
missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per
START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.
But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?
We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons
in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response
from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian
‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now.
Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given
way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already
operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal,
now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the
Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and
submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew
of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much
smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.
The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed.
More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in
order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A
ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7
km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere.
[Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute
measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea
level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also
higher.]
But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward
trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot
change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.
This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be
tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be
noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the
straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been
demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic
missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times,
sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan,
consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.
Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration
of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima!
But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile
defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of
the North Korean rockets!
The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic
missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It
is a very hard thing to do.
But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even
subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the
Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case
with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows
just how difficult missile interception really is:
At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.
‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken
moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency
vehicles streamed onto the runway.
Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at
the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.
The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of
a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original
Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!
Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five
times at the incoming missile.
‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss?
That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is
supposed to work.’
Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate
from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not
surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had
done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in
the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in
Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th
Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at
Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of
timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation
for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by
one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent
to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial
claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds
launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!
NYTimes | The official story was clear: Saudi forces shot down
a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group last month at
Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. It was a victory for the Saudis and for
the United States, which supplied the Patriot missile defense system.
“Our system knocked the missile out of the air,”
President Trump said the next day from Air Force One en route to Japan,
one of the 14 countries that use the system. “That’s how good we are.
Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.”
But an analysis of photos and videos of the strike posted to social media suggests that story may be wrong.
Instead, evidence analyzed by a research team of
missile experts appears to show the missile’s warhead flew unimpeded
over Saudi defenses and nearly hit its target, Riyadh’s airport. The
warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that customers
jumped out of their seats.
Saudi officials did not respond to a request for
comment. Some U.S. officials cast doubt on whether the Saudis hit any
part of the incoming missile, saying there was no evidence that it had.
Instead, they said, the incoming missile body and warhead may have come
apart because of its sheer speed and force.
The findings show that the Iranian-backed
Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to
strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of
their years-long war. And they underscore longstanding doubts about
missile defense technology, a centerpiece of American and allied
national defense strategies, particularly against Iran and North Korea.
“Governments lie about the effectiveness of
these systems. Or they’re misinformed,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst
who led the research team, which shared its findings with The New York
Times. “And that should worry the hell out of us.”
theatlantic | After President Vladimir Putin
announced this week that Russia was conscripting some 300,000 reservists
and military veterans to reinforce its war effort in Ukraine,
international flights out of Russian cities quickly sold out. This latest wave of Russia’s exodus included Anton Shalaev, a 38-year-old senior manager at an IT company, and 15 colleagues.
On
less than a day’s notice, these men of military age all left their
relatively comfortable lives in downtown Moscow to fly to Yerevan, the
capital of Armenia. Because of Putin’s war, Shalaev tossed a book, an
iPad, and a laptop in a backpack and got out of Dodge.
Shalaev and his co-workers are true tech geeks, producers of high-value
computer games. They represent their country’s brightest and best,
members of a tech elite that was the economic foundation of Russia’s new
middle class. In a last selfie from Moscow, Shalaev brandished a coffee
mug that bore the slogan Not today, Satan.
Anna Nemtsova: Why didn’t you want to be drafted to fight in Ukraine?
Anton Shalaev:
On the day Putin declared the war, I knew I would never fight on behalf
of this new Nazi Reich. They are my personal enemies: mercenaries who
steal my country from me, occupy foreign territories, and kill innocent
people. Putin’s army commanders have had plenty of time to turn down
their contracts; instead, they are recruiting more cannon fodder now.
So
I chose to help Ukrainians suffering from this horror—pay for shelters
in Kyiv with cryptocurrency and write antiwar posts on social media. To
encourage Russians at home, I said: “Guys, look, I am writing this from
Moscow.”
Nemtsova: What do you think of the Kremlin’s decision making?
Shalaev:
A few old men and an army of zombies are leading us to hell. I say that
because people around me in Russia behaved as if they had been bitten
by a zombie, dragging my entire country into a dreadful war. All I saw
was Russian loser husbands beating their wives, while the entire rotting
house of the state system has turned my people into an army of the
dead.
They are my enemies.
Nemtsova: What do you know of the situation in Ukraine?
Shalaev:
I constantly follow the war news in Ukraine—and I seek out the best,
most objective analysts. My main sources on the atrocities are Ukrainian
refugees from cities bombed by Russian forces.
I
realize that I would rather go to prison than go to fight against the
Ukrainian army. I openly embrace my antiwar position. I urge my
social-media followers to donate to Ukrainians. This entire war is a
crime against humanity.
amidwesterndoctor |One of the greatest challenges for individuals with advanced
knowledge in a subject is the gradual realization of just how little
they know (conversely, as shown by the Dunning–Kruger effect,
the less individuals know, the more they overestimate their knowledge
and competence). Being able to proceed forward despite not knowing if
you were on the correct path requires a great deal of courage,
especially when most of your peers oppose what you are doing. That said,
virtually every person who has been highly successful and changed the
world for the better had this type of courage.
In
some cases, we are just born with it, but in the majority cases, it
comes from living a life that cultivates courage. One of the most useful
words of wisdom I heard at a young age was “comfort makes you weak”
which is important because our technocratic society has tried to create
the illusion that if we always comply with it, it can guarantee our
safety and prevent all discomfort.
This is
fundamentally impossible (and often creates many medical issues), but
many traumatized and pampered members of society have become so
ingrained with this mythology they now lack the courage to venture
outside safe spaces created by the technocracy. Unfortunately, if you
lack the courage to oppose something you know is wrong, as history
repeatedly shows, that same evil will eventually show up at your
doorstep, and by the time it does it will have gained enough momentum
that you will no longer have the ability to oppose it.
The
strength that produces courage ultimately arises from our connection to
ourselves (particularly our physical body) and our connections to each
other. Hence, like many things in medicine where you cannot reduce a
problem to one single component, mass formation is also a complex
process that weaves into so many other aspects of our society that it
must also be dealt with holistically. Just remember:
Postscript: I have noticed that many groups will develop a
collective consciousness that often transcends the individual
participants (often leading them to rapidly adopt terrible behaviors
once they join the group holding that collective conscienceless) and can
often persist for generations. The best term I ever came across for
this, Egrigore, was something I came across on wikipedia.
I cannot fully endorse the idea because of where it originates from,
but over and over I have come across situations where it appears an
egrigore has taken over a group (particularly in Allopathic medicine,
which I believe carries fairly malignant Egrigores).
Reading
Desmet’s work has led me to suspect crowd psychology and the mass
formation concept provides another potential explanation for the
“Egrigore” concept I keep on running across. Put differently, this
means I believe in addition to Mass Formation applying to society as a
whole, it can also manifest within specific subgroups which have some
type of strong ritualistic link to each other especially when they also
have to suffer through a collective hardship.
apnews | President Joe Biden,
speaking to donors at a Democratic fundraiser here, said Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “didn’t want to hear it” when U.S.
intelligence gathered information that Russia was preparing to invade.
The
remarks came as Biden was talking about his work to rally and solidify
support for Ukraine as the war continues into its fourth month.
“Nothing
like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people
thought I was maybe exaggerating. But I knew we had data to sustain he” —
meaning Russian President Vladimir Putin — “was going to go in, off the
border.”
“There was no doubt,” Biden said. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”
Although
Zelenskyy has inspired people with his leadership during the war, his
preparation for the invasion — or lack thereof — has remained a
controversial issue.
In
the weeks before the war began on Feb. 24, Zelenskyy publicly bristled
as Biden administration officials repeatedly warned that a Russian
invasion was highly likely.
moa | The New York Times, here via Yahoo, has some rather weird piece over alleged lack of intelligence on Ukrainian warplanes:
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has provided
near-daily updates of Russia’s invasion on social media; viral video
posts have shown the effectiveness of Western weapons in the hands of
Ukrainian forces; and the Pentagon has regularly held briefings on
developments in the war.
But despite the flow of all this news to the public, U.S. intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures, according to current and former officials.
Governments often withhold information from the public for
operational security. But these information gaps within the U.S.
government could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to
decide how to target military aid as it sends billions of dollars in
weapons to Ukraine. ... Avril D. Haines, the director of national
intelligence, testified at a Senate hearing last month that “it was
very hard to tell” how much additional aid Ukraine could absorb.
She added: “We have, in fact, more insight, probably, on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side.”
One key question is what measures Zelenskyy intends to call for in
Donbas. Ukraine faces a strategic choice there: withdraw its forces or
risk having them encircled by Russia.
Well, NYT decided to start steering clear of this whole
Russia "lost in Ukraine" BS it promoted together with neocon crazies,
and begins this ever familiar tune of the "intel failure". Right.
U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine's War Strategy, Officials Say
Hm, how about I put it bluntly--the U.S. never had clear picture on
anything, especially on Russia, or, as a private case, [the Special
Military Operation] and completely bought into Ukie propaganda, which
shows a complete incompetence of the "intel" in the US. ... The
narrative on [the Special Military Operation], in reality, is dead and
the failure is not being set, it already happened. It is a fait accompli
no matter how one wants to put a lipstick on the pig.
Larry Johnson thinks there is another another motive behind the story:
Frankly, I find it hard to believe that there are not solid
analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency who know the answers to all
these questions. The real problem may not be a lack of intelligence.
Nope. It is the fear of telling the politicians hard truths they do not want to hear.
Given the billions of dollars the United States is spending on
“intelligence” collection systems, it is time for the Congress and the
American public to demand that the intelligence services do their damn
job.
I do not believe for one moment that U.S. intelligence services do
not know what is going on in Ukraine and in Kiev. They know that the
Ukraine has lost the war and will have to sue for peace as soon as
possible.
They also have told the White House that this is a case and that the
whole idea of setting up the Ukraine to tickle the Russian bear was
idiotic from the get go. The question now is who will take the blame for
the outcome. Who can the buck be passed to?
dailybeast | As families in this rural town prepare to bury the 19 children and two adults gunned down
in a brutal school massacre this week, they are left shell-shocked by
not only the devastation the gunman wrought, but by the revelation that,
as they see it, those who were sworn to protect and serve them did just
the opposite.
“While those babies were in there dying, they stood
there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to
do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students.
“I
mean don’t we pay them to rush in and protect people? Somebody needs to
be held accountable for this,” Garza told The Daily Beast.
“We were waiting outside and yelling about how we wanted to go in and
storm the classroom,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter,
Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack. “I came running and the
police were in a panic trying to figure out what to do. Now we know
children, including my daughter, were dying in there. That is what
hurts. Knowing they could have maybe protected her and those other
kids.”
Cazares wants to know why they didn’t do anything; it is a question that everyone here is asking.
“While
those children sat in there with this madman, as many as 19 officers
had to think about what to do,” said Ignacio Perez, who was doing his
best to comfort Cazares. “I promise you these parents had a plan and
were ready to act on it. Where was the bravery? In those kids. That is
where it was.”
Amid the growing outrage over the botched police response,
authorities in Uvalde have reportedly called in reinforcements from
around the state to protect the local officers from potential threats.
The
additional cops, from various agencies in other jurisdictions, will
supplement Uvalde’s ranks for an unspecified period, and will also
provide security for the mayor, officials with the Texas Police Chiefs Association told CBS DFW.
In
the immediate aftermath of the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary, Gov.
Greg Abbott lauded the police response, insisting that officers had
acted heroically and saved numerous lives. But he lashed out angrily
when a different narrative later emerged, saying he was “livid” over
having been “misled.” Federal agents on the scene said no one seemed to be in charge, and at one point, agonized parents waiting outside considered rushing the school themselves.
One Uvalde cop claimed there “was almost a mutiny,” telling People magazine that he and his colleagues “felt like cowards” for not storming the building earlier.
NYTimes | The official story was clear: Saudi forces shot down
a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group last month at
Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. It was a victory for the Saudis and for
the United States, which supplied the Patriot missile defense system.
“Our system knocked the missile out of the air,”
President Trump said the next day from Air Force One en route to Japan,
one of the 14 countries that use the system. “That’s how good we are.
Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.”
But an analysis of photos and videos of the strike posted to social media suggests that story may be wrong.
Instead, evidence analyzed by a research team of
missile experts appears to show the missile’s warhead flew unimpeded
over Saudi defenses and nearly hit its target, Riyadh’s airport. The
warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that customers
jumped out of their seats.
Saudi officials did not respond to a request for
comment. Some U.S. officials cast doubt on whether the Saudis hit any
part of the incoming missile, saying there was no evidence that it had.
Instead, they said, the incoming missile body and warhead may have come
apart because of its sheer speed and force.
The findings show that the Iranian-backed
Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to
strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of
their years-long war. And they underscore longstanding doubts about
missile defense technology, a centerpiece of American and allied
national defense strategies, particularly against Iran and North Korea.
“Governments lie about the effectiveness of
these systems. Or they’re misinformed,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst
who led the research team, which shared its findings with The New York
Times. “And that should worry the hell out of us.”
businessinsider | Vanity Fair, which first reported on the Obamas' dissatisfaction with Spotify, noted that they are most interested in producing shows featuring fresh voices.
Spotify
has spent well over $1 billion to diversify beyond music content and
into the broader audio market, scooping up podcast studios like Gimlet Media and The Ringer and signing exclusive deals with talent including Rogan and Dax Shepard.
A
big piece of its strategy has been to ink development deals with
bold-faced names like the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who
have yet to produce a show for Spotify outside of a 2020 holiday
special.
So far, the strategy appears to have worked. Spotify
said in October, citing third-party data from Edison Research, that it
now ranks ahead of Apple Podcasts as the most popular podcast app in the
US.
But there have also been challenges, including a cultural
reckoning within Gimlet Media linked to its popluar"Reply All" podcast
as well as the shuttering of Spotify's in-house podcast studio, known
internally as Studio 4. More recently, the Rogan controversy has led
some Spotify podcasters to call out the company.
Brené
Brown, for instance, said she would take a pause from producing new
episodes as she sought to "better understand the organization's
misinformation policy," and Wendy Zukerman, host of Gimlet show "Science
Vs." said she would stop making new episodes of the show except to
counteract misinformation on the platform.
The Obamas' podcasting
deal with Spotify followed their initial move into entertainment one
year earlier, when they announced the formation of Higher Ground and its
multi-year film and TV deal with
Netflix. They are behind the streamer's Oscar-winning documentary
"American Factory" and Kevin Hart drama "Fatherhood," among other
projects.
bbc | Emily Thomas asks whether the coronavirus pandemic will turn out to be
the defining moment in the fight against obesity. Will we see
governments take radical action, now that the pandemic has turned the
spotlight on this growing global
problem? And why hasn’t the pandemic made most of us eat more
healthily? Even experts have been surprised by just how strong an impact
obesity has been found to have on the risks of coronavirus. We hear
from Professor Barry Popkin, of the University of North
Carolina, who led a major study into the relationship between the two.
He tells us he’s worried that food companies are using the pandemic to
push ultra processed food on low-income populations.
Professor Corinna
Hawkes, of City, University of London, explains
how obesity policy became personal in the UK after Boris Johnson caught
the virus. And Jacqueline Bowman-Busato, Policy Lead for the European
Association for the Study of Obesity, tells us how her own experience of
living with obesity has led her to lobby
for changes in how obesity is viewed and treated. She says the pandemic
has provided a much needed wake up call on a neglected and
misunderstood public health issue. If you would like to get in touch
with the show please email thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk
medium | I wondered if maybe I had been totally wrong from the start. Maybe I deserved what I got. Maybe I had
been too ambitious and competitive in the party. Late in 2018, I had a
conversation with the president of the original Wake progressives. He
began to discuss the work of that chapter, before there had been a
Caucus, from 2004 to 2016. He explained how they had worked to organize
precincts in the county, so they could get progressive chairs and vice
chairs who would thus be entitled to votes in Wake’s county party
meetings. He told me how they organized themselves at county conventions
to ensure that progressives would be elected from Wake to have a vote
in the state party. He explained similar efforts for similar offices in
the party. In other words, he told me that, for twelve whole years,
progressives in Wake, whom I had never met, were implementing the exact
same strategy, to a tee, that I had developed and written for my own
chapter in Orange.
And
this was my next Weinstein moment. It was that “Eureka” moment with
negative undertones, which I guess can be called a “Dysreka.” Just as
Bret and Eric, years later, saw their advancements being used and pushed
by someone else, I was getting the exact same confirmation about my
strategy (although he had not stolen it from me). This guy who had been
at it longer, whose chapter was the inspiration for the Caucus itself,
told me that I had stumbled upon the exact plan I was supposed to have
for my chapter.
I
don’t think this elected official from Hillsborough or this gentleman
from Wake have ever met each other. Nevertheless, they quickly moved to
shut down threats to the establishment of the Democratic Party here in
North Carolina, as soon as they detected it, in manner much like what
Weinstein has described. They were manifestations of the DISC, of an
autoimmune response in the Democratic Party, and they moved through
indirect, defamatory manners that played upon uninformed and ignorant
crowds to derail those in their paths.
These
events and others that I could tell really hurt. The chapter I had
organized was like a baby of mine or a work of art (and you guys can see
some of my art here on Medium to know what I mean by that). All the
work I did to make the Democratic Party more accountable, while also
trying to plant seeds to make it more electable, just blew up in my face
because actors who want to defend the system acted swiftly. The
corruption and abuse of power in the Democratic Party exists beyond the
DNC. It manifests itself through brutal patronage relationships at the
grassroots level as well that allow for decentralized policing and,
frankly, sabotage.
I
still think the Democratic Party can fix this country, but it needs a
lot of home repairs before it can do so. We need something to break the
Gated Institutional Narrative (another Weinstein term) that enables
this. At the moment I am mostly out of ideas, but I am attempting
another run for the NC House, here in Chapel Hill.
I
hope this story informs you all decently and that it motivates you to
do something good and productive, even though I know something like this
is likely to produce more anger. We really do not need more anger. We
need people who are more excited about the utopia and less about the
revolution. I also hope it inspires you to share your own encounters
with the DISC.
I
also hope Eric comes across this and can get a few ideas on what to do.
He is a Democrat like me, however begrudgingly, and he does have a role
to play in reforming it. For those of you Republicans out there, I hope
you are also noticing where the DISC exists in your party and are
thinking of how to counter it. Fixing America is going to be a
bi-partisan job, after all.
propublica | Experts said how police respond to
demonstrations is, in part, dictated by the availability of nonlethal
weapons and on how officers are trained to use them.
In 2016, Haar surveyed
25 years of research on crowd-control weapons used around the world,
including three commonly used in the United States: projectiles such as
rubber bullets or beanbag rounds; chemical irritants such as tear gas; and disorientation devices known as flashbangs. Her report found that when fired, tear gas canisters can cause vision loss or other traumatic injuries.
“These
are all weapons that should be used as a last resort when open dialogue
and communication fail and the violence is so out of hand that normal
policing methods and arresting people have been tried and don’t work,”
Haar said.
The size of protests also influences how police
respond, Straub said. Small protests can likely be handled by
specialized units that are regularly tasked with managing crowds. Larger
protests may require many more officers, some of them drawn from parts
of police departments that have less experience and training in crowd
control and de-escalation, and thus may be more likely to resort to
weapons.
In the Washington video, by not rushing the crowd when a
protester threw a bottle, Straub said, the officers remained calm and
acted with “restraint.” It would be unfair, Straub said, to require the
police to analyze what protesters are throwing at them before reacting,
given how quickly such an encounter could escalate. “One person throws a
water bottle, five people throw water bottles, and then somebody throws
a brick,” he said.
Experts said how quickly officers choose to
deploy weapons in the field depends on their training, which can vary
widely between departments.
No entity sets training standards for
police use of force, experts said. However, departments, equipment
manufacturers and state officials have mandated that officers undergo
training before they are allowed to use nonlethal weapons. Depending on
the training, officers may be taught how to shoot weapons so they “skip
off the pavement” in order to decrease their velocity and risk of
serious injury.
In firing their guns, officers are taught to aim
at the person’s torso because it reduces the risk that a bystander will
be struck. But with nonlethal weapons, officers are often instructed to
avoid the torso, head or groin, said Thor Eells, executive director of
the National Tactical Officers Association, a trade group for SWAT teams
that also conducts training for police departments. Precise aim in a
crowd is extremely difficult, he said.
“We explain to them that in
a crowd control situation, it’s a dynamic environment,” Eells said.
“It’s not the same as a paper target.”
Reaction to police escalation caught on video has been swift.
As demonstrations continued and the media drew attention to the police tactics, departments in at least 40 cities have announced changes. In Philadelphia, officials announced a moratorium on tear gas to control crowds, New York moved to make officers’ disciplinary records public, San Francisco announced plans to stop sending police officers to calls that don’t involve criminal activity and Atlanta now requires officers to intervene if they see another officer using unreasonable force.
Straub
said that the scrutiny of officers’ actions in protests, and the
condemnation of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, were strong
signals “that that kind of behavior isn’t going to be tolerated.”
Meanwhile,
academic conversations around defunding or abolishing the police have
been around for decades, but now, some politicians are opening up to
such notions. That’s in part, Bell said, because of the “intellectual
organizing” Black Lives Matter activists did early on to help frame the
injustices they were protesting.
“Now, the real question about whether this time will be ‘different’ also has to do with what’s adopted,” Bell said.
ianwelsh | A sea change happened in the 60s and 70s: one where the legitimacy of
violence was rejected by the left, and violence was gifted to the
right. The end of the draft and the left wing hatred of all violence
meant that the left gave the military to the right wing. Cops have
always been right wing, of course, but the draft had meant that the rank
and file military included many left wingers. It also meant that people
on the left had violent skills, taught courtesy of the military.
That ended. Meanwhile the right, including the most far right,
encouraged their people to join the military and the policy, to learn
the skills and to make sure those institutions were run by right wingers
from top to bottom.
So there are two likely reasons the Michigan legislature gave into
violence. One: they think that right wing violence is legitimate. Two,
they don’t trust the police or national guard to stop right wingers they
sympathize with and support.
Meanwhile only two parts of the left believe they have a right to be
violent: Antifa, and the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers have taken
to armed escort of legislators they support.
Those who disarm; those who believe fanatically in non-violence,
always exist at the whim of those who believe in violence and are good
at it.
This is the position the left has put itself in in America and many
other countries: disarmed, bad at violence, with no influence over the
violent organs of the state and almost no tradition or skill in violence
in the few organs it still has influence over (like some unions.)
Some of this weakness was caused by the right: as with their gutting
of unions in the 80s. But much of it is because the left both believes
that violence is always wrong and that it is ineffective.
Michigan is the fruit of those beliefs.
And, children, history is a record of violence often working.
Sometimes non-violence works, yes, sometimes it even works very well.
But effective violence, especially if it is perceived as legitimate, is
also a winning strategy.
Quartz | In the past several weeks, a biting joke has been
widely shared on Chinese social media: The new coronavirus is patriotic,
so it goes, because it infected only one of China’s 33 provinces and
municipalities before venturing outside of the mainland.
Then, people this week woke up to official announcements of a shocking surge of confirmed new infections, and of the virus’s spread to more than a dozen provinces and municipalities. As of Thursday, there are more than 550 confirmed cases, 17 people have died and Wuhan, where the outbreak started, is on lockdown.
Beyond mainland China, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the US and Hong Kong have confirmed cases, and more countries could report cases as China’s biggest travel season gets underway: Chinese Lunar New Year.
People
are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it’s undeniably hard
to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making
the problem harder to solve, even though it should have learned from the
SARS outbreak in 2003, when the government admitted to underreporting cases
in the initial stages. Nearly 800 people died in that epidemic, which
saw desperate people emptying shops for Chinese herbal medicines and
vinegar that would turn out to be ineffective.
That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate
information and rumors because of a vacuum in top-down communication.
The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China’s
political system made “conceal as many as possible and keep it at the
local level” a natural immediate response to a crisis like this. That
approach to information might work on other kinds of issues, but not
when it comes to a potential epidemic. Trying to control information in
that case becomes a kind of shackle in the face of something that can
progress and change swiftly beyond one’s control.
Of
course, there is one thing that’s different than 17 years ago: WeChat. A
tool connecting more than a billion users in China should be one the
government can use to help keep the public up-to-date, and to debunk
false information. Yet it too has become a hotbed
for both rumors and information suppression amid China’s broader regime
of online censorship honed over the past decade. Already, a focus of
social media discussion about the current virus crisis has been on how
hard it’s been to get correct information, and whether officials were
slow to respond in the early stages, at least in Wuhan. While some
international public health experts have commended China’s information
sharing as superior to 2003 in the face of a quickly evolving situation,
others have expressed doubt that the country is being as transparent as
it should be.
Edge | I'm thinking about collective awareness, which I think of as the
models we use to collectively process information about the world, to
understand the world and ourselves. It's worth distinguishing our
collective awareness at three levels. The first level is our models of
the environment, the second level is our models of how we affect the
environment, and the third level is our models of how we think about our
collective effect on ourselves.
Understanding the environment is something we've been doing better
and better for many centuries now. Celestial mechanics allows us to
understand the solar system. It means that if we spot an asteroid, we
can calculate its trajectory and determine whether it's going to hit the
Earth, and if it is, send a rocket to it and deflect it.
Another example of collective awareness at level one is weather
prediction. It's an amazing success story. Since 1980, weather
prediction has steadily improved, so that every ten years the accuracy
of weather prediction gets better by a day, meaning that if this
continues, ten years from now the accuracy for a two-day weather
forecast will be the same as that of a one-day weather forecast now.
This means that the accuracy of weather prediction has gotten
dramatically better. We spend $5 billon a year to make weather
predictions and we get $30 billion a year back in terms of economic
benefit.
The best example of collective consciousness at level two is climate
change. Climate change is in the news, it's controversial, etc., but
most scientists believe that the models of climate change are telling us
something that we need to pay serious attention to. The mere fact that
we're even thinking about it is remarkable, because climate change is
something whose real effects are going to be felt fifty to 100 years
from now. We're making a strong prediction about what we're doing to the
Earth and what's going to happen. It's not surprising that there's some
controversy about exactly what the outcome is, but we intelligent
people know it's really serious. We are going to be increasingly
redirecting our efforts to deal with it through time.
The hardest problem is collective awareness at level
three—understanding our own effects on ourselves. This is because we're
complicated animals. The social sciences try to solve this problem, but
they have not been successful in the dramatic way that the physical and
natural sciences have. This doesn’t mean the job is impossible, however.
Daily Beast exec editor @NoahShachtman sent this note out to staff today regarding the @JoyAnnReid situation. He says reporters @kpoulsen and @maxwelltani are investigating her claims and examining her history: “In the meantime, we’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns...” pic.twitter.com/eJwwFeHSCn
rutherford | In the American police state, police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
In fact, police don’t usually need much incentive to shoot and kill members of the public.
So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?
Nothing.
There were four armed police officers, including one cop who was
assigned to the school as a resource officer, on campus during that
shooting. All four cops stayed outside the school with their weapons
drawn (three of them hid behind their police cars).
Not a single one of those cops, armed with deadly weapons and trained
for exactly such a dangerous scenario, entered the school to confront
the shooter.
Seventeen people, most of them teenagers, died while the cops opted not to intervene.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people.”
In other words, you can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing
to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job
description.
This begs the question: if the police don’t have a duty to protect
the public, what are we paying them for? And who exactly do they serve
if not you and me?
Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties?
NYTimes | When the F.B.I. knocks on someone’s door or appeals to the public for assistance in solving crime, the willingness of people to help is directly correlated to their opinion of the agency. When an agent working to stop a terrorist plot attempts to recruit an informant, the agent’s success in gathering critical intelligence depends on the informant’s belief that the agent is credible and trustworthy. And, as the former director, James Comey, would frequently say in underscoring the importance of high standards, whether a jury believes an agent’s testimony depends on whether it has faith in the bureau’s honesty and independence. To be effective, the F.B.I. must be believed and must maintain the support of the public it serves.
Do F.B.I. agents make mistakes? You bet. They are human beings. Because they are not infallible, the bureau is subject to a robust system of checks and balances, including its internal affairs division, the Department of Justice inspector general, congressional committees and the courts. These watchdogs ensure that personal opinions regarding politics, causes and candidates do not affect investigations. The system also provides an outlet for any investigator who suspects malfeasance on the part of the agency’s leadership to make those concerns known.
What, then, are we to make of the recent allegations of political bias at the F.B.I., particularly those involving two employees whose cringe-worthy text messages continue to threaten the agency’s reputation? While it would be disingenuous to claim that those two are not at least guilty of exercising incredibly poor judgment, it would be equally disingenuous for anyone who really knows the modern-day bureau to insinuate that the organization is plotting from within.
Furthermore, a congressional memo released on Friday accuses the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. But every statement of fact included in an affidavit for foreign intelligence collection must withstand the scrutiny of at least 10 people in the Department of Justice hierarchy before it is reviewed by an independent court.
There is, however, a difference between oversight by those in charge of holding the F.B.I. accountable and criticism by politicians seeking partisan gain. Political operatives are weaponizing their disagreement with a particular investigation in a bid to undermine the credibility of the entire institution. “The system is rigged” is their slogan, and they are now politicizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process used to collect critical intelligence about our adversaries.
The assumption among confused and dismayed F.B.I. employees is that the attacks are meant to soften the blow should the investigation by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, lead to additional charges. However, these kinds of attacks by powerful people go beyond mere criticism — they could destroy the institution. Although those critics’ revisionist supporters claim their ire is reserved for institutional leadership and not the rank and file, it is the F.B.I. agent on the street who will be most severely affected as public support for federal law enforcement is sacrificed for partisan gain.
These political attacks on the bureau must stop. If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.
NYTimes | It’s a legitimate observation. It’s also a dead end. Turnabout may be fair play, but it’s foul morality. It’s also foolish politics. Mirroring the ugliness of white nationalists and the alt-right just gives them the ammunition that they want and need.
Which is precisely what some fevered activists at Evergreen State College did when they shouted down a white biology professor and the school’s white president, who stood there as one woman screamed: “Whiteness is the most violent system to ever breathe.” (I deleted the profanity between “violent” and “system.”)
It’s what an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware did with a Facebook post saying that Otto Warmbier — the American student who was imprisoned in North Korea, came home comatose and died soon after — “got exactly what he deserved.” The professor wrote that like other “young, white, rich, clueless white males” in the United States, Warmbier thought “he could get away with whatever he wanted.”
Meanwhile a professor at Trinity College in Hartford used his Facebook page to post an incendiary story about the Republican lawmakers who found themselves under gunfire on an Alexandria, Va., baseball field. Its headline included the language “let them die,” a phrase that the professor also folded into a hashtag accompanying a subsequent Facebook post.
Thanks in large part to social media, which incentivizes invective and then magnifies it, our conversations coarsen. Our compasses spin out of whack. We descend to the lowest common denominator, becoming what we supposedly abhor. I’m regularly stunned by the cruelty that’s mistaken for cleverness and the inhumanity that’s confused with conviction.
freebeacon | Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) said Wednesday that she isn’t sure
what to do about her Democratic colleagues facing sexual harassment
allegations.
Hirono did not say Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn) or Rep. John Conyers
(D., Mich.) should step down, adding that the world is not "so black and
white" as to make it clear what to do. Franken was photographed with his hands over a sleeping woman’s breasts and Conyers is facing numerous harassment allegations, but Hirono called for regular procedures to continue.
"I think that we are [cleaning up politics] in the sense that we have
procedures, you know?" Hirono said to MSNBC's Chuck Todd. "We are
figuring out how we can best deal with the kinds of complaints that have
come forward, the allegations."
She was quick to say that the problem is not confined to the
Democratic Party and extends to other parties and industries. Todd
countered by saying, "you have to start somewhere," and he asked Hirono
if she was comfortable working with Conyers and Franken.
"I have served with them before we knew that they engaged in this
kind of behavior—which, by the way, anybody who engages in this kind of
behavior should be held accountable—but notice that good people do bad
things," Hirono replied. "Gee, I wish that life were so black and white
that you can't think of a single good person who has done bad things."
Hirono emphasized that the problem is cultural and argued that people should not focus too much on individual offenses.
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