Potential platforms for surveillance and weaponry

In an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press Adam Chapelle wrote about why many Native American tribes remain poor. Chapelle is director of the Tribal Law & Economics Project at George Mason University. He started by noting recent news: Britney Spears has been trying to get out of a conservatorship run by her father because it controls her too much. In the same way Native reservation lands are held in conservatorship by the US federal government. That means the feds have restrictive oversight into everything reservation residents do. It means several things: Few non Native business are willing to operate on reservations. Since the residents don’t own the land they must get approval to mortgage it to start a business. Regulations mean there is a housing shortage and the existing housing is substandard. That lack of sanitation means poor health conditions – COVID ravaged Native communities but is not their only health problem. This poverty is not because Indigenous cultures are incompatible with the US market economy, as is sometimes claimed. It is because Native people are live under regulations that keep them poor. Yesterday I mentioned that Texas Gov. Greg Abbot issued an executive order saying businesses in Texas cannot have a vaccine mandate. That’s in defiance of the federal vaccine mandate for contractors. I added that the order was being ignored. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that three big corporations with federal contracts and a big presence in Texas – IBM, Southwest Airlines, and American Airlines – issued statements saying they will comply with the federal mandate. United Airlines added: Too late. 99.7% of our workforce is already vaccinated and we’re going through the termination process with the 232 who refused. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Krugman started by saying the Republican Party used to be basically a front for big business interests.

Now, however, Republican politicians are at odds with corporate America on crucial issues. It’s not just vaccines. Corporate interests also want serious investment in infrastructure and find themselves on the outs with Republican leaders who don’t want to see Democrats achieve any policy successes. Basically, the G.O.P. is currently engaged in a major campaign of sabotage — its leaders want to see America do badly, because they believe this will redound to their political advantage — and if this hurts their corporate backers along the way, they don’t care.

Kev looked it up – redound really is a word, not a misspelling. It means to have an effect for good or ill. Eleveld reported that Moscow Mitch’s influence in the Senate is waning. Part of it is Mitch “caving” to Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. And part of it ...

But overall, McConnell's stock is depreciating. Trump is breathing down his neck at every turn. He's got an increasingly recalcitrant caucus. And the fundraising muscle that he has flexed for years to buy the loyalty of GOP lawmakers is being undercut by the sheer force of Trump's endorsement within the GOP base. The truth of the matter is, the people really running the Republican Party right now are all the rage-filled GOP voters hungry to claw out the eyes of any perceived traitor. They have no use for McConnell—an establishment sell-out, in their view. But they still have a great deal of affection for Trump, who will gladly tell them whatever they want to hear to maintain his celebrity status.

Mitch isn’t in danger of his leadership job – no one wants to or can challenge him. But after next year’s election his colleagues will be even further to the right.

So much for Trump being a “fading brand,” as McConnell put it.

Leah McElrath tweeted a thread about robotic “dogs.” Videos in her thread show them acting like dogs out on the street and even one called “Spot” on the football field at halftime with the Mizzou marching band. So cute! Some of what McElrath wrote:

The attempted normalization of these autonomous robots in public spaces is not a good sign. The @ACLU has written about legal and ethical issues around these machines colloquially referred to as robotic “dogs.” My take is a more radical: they are potential platforms for surveillance and weaponry and should be treated as such. Drop kick them. If we have a right to defend ourselves from an armed human or an attacking dog, we should have the right to defend ourselves against these machines as though they are weaponized. It should not be incumbent on the public to have to know for sure exactly what dangers they present.

They could also be hacked, particularly by bad foreign actors. Also note defense contractors don’t call it a dog, they call it a “Ghost Robotics Vision-60 quadruped” that can include a rifle.

This is what normalization looks like—and notice the naming of the machine as “Spot” to further the idea that it is a friendly dog and not a platform for surveillance, etc.:

After the vote to end the filibuster to allow raising the debt limit (and perhaps after the actual debt limit vote) Sen. Chuck Schumer spoke, saying clearly what the Republicans were doing. A few Republicans declared they were offended. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted a tweet by John Harwood that explains the Republican viewpoint.

The GOP, which shielded Trump from accountability and whitewashed a violent insurrection against democracy, struggled tonight to get one-fifth of its 50 senators to permit a vote allowing Democrats to save the economy from a calamitous threat it contrived for political advantage. Republicans considered mustering 11 of 50 senators to let Democrats defuse their economic threat a huge favor to Democrats, as opposed to their obligation to the country. Their feeling of entitlement to deploy that threat is why Schumer's criticism so offended them.

Dworkin also quoted an article from the Guardian:

Top Republicans in the Senate are advancing a campaign of disinformation over the debt ceiling as they seek to distort the reasons for needing to raise the nation’s borrowing cap, after they dropped their blockade on averting a US debt default in a bipartisan manner… The treasury department acknowledges that raising the debt ceiling would allow the US to continue borrowing in order to finance projects, such as Democrats’ social spending and infrastructure package that is expected to now cost between $1.9tn and $2.2tn. But economists at the department also say that attempts to portray the need to tackle the debt ceiling as an effort to pay for Democrats’ budget resolutions that are yet to pass Congress amount to disinformation, according to sources familiar with the mechanism.