From Big Tech to Mass Grave

Posted on by under Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

Here’s an item from Business Insider of the sort you see just about every day in that publication, at least if you read it every day, as I do. It’s so common that its implications seem to go in one ear and out the other. “More big tech execs are joining the Army Reserve as senior officers,” we’re told.

  • The Army has added three more tech executives to its special Detachment 201 reserve unit.
  • Det 201 members join as lieutenant colonels, advising the service on AI, cyber, and modernization.
  • The new troops come from places like Cloudflare, a major private equity firm, and Facebook AI Research.
  • A second crop of tech executives entered the Army Reserve last week, expanding the service’s ties with Big Tech as it continues a dramatic effort to modernize its equipment and systems and better prepare for modern warfare.

Those who recently joined include Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare; Sam Pullara, managing director and CTO of Sutter Hill Ventures, a Palo Alto investment firm; and Serkan Piantino, a former Reddit executive and co-founder of Facebook AI Research.

The executives have joined a unit known as Detachment 201, a special unit “designed to bridge the gap between private-sector innovation and military modernization,” the Army said in a press release, reflecting the Pentagon’s push to leverage private-sector technical expertise to address complex national security and defense challenges.

Members are reservists, can work remotely, and must complete a minimum of 112 hours of service annually.

“Their primary role is to serve as senior advisors to help drive the Army Transformation Initiative, concentrated on high-level technological strategies in areas such as cyber, AI and machine learning applications, and other data-driven capabilities,” Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Orlando Howard said in an email to Business Insider.

They join four other tech leaders who entered the Army Reserve one year ago: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, former chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer at OpenAI.

All entered the Army as lieutenant colonels, a rank that takes most officers over a decade to reach. The senior entry, known as a “direct commission,” is not unheard of, though. Most military medical providers, chaplains, and veterinarians join at slightly more senior ranks, though they undergo their own version of boot camp, while Det 201 does not.

“The program selects applicants who are highly skilled civilian technology professionals at the executive or C-suite level to serve as part-time strategic advisers,” Howard said. “These officers use their advanced expertise in commercial tech and private industry to offer a different perspective and advise senior Army leaders on solving military problems.”

Continue reading →

A Cato Institute Delegation to Delaney Hall?

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, libertarianism, liberty and the left, migrant defense, slices of life

Scenes from Delaney Hall (6)
Here’s a first: I was at Delaney Hall last night for The Peoples’ Vigil, a quasi-religious event held each Monday at 7:30 pm. During the vigil, Shane Claiborne, a self-described Anabaptist and founder of the New Monastic Movement, made admiring reference to the Cato Institute, of all things. “Even the Cato Institute,” he said, “is against this building…” He was alluding to the research of David J. Bier, Cato’s Director of Immigration Studies and Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy, and in particular, to Bier’s paper, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting” (Policy Analysis 1003, August 2025), which argues that contrary to popular belief, comparatively few immigrants are violent criminals. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or hit by lightning than killed by an “illegal immigrant.”

Continue reading →

Changing the Game

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The Knicks play at Madison Square Garden. The World Cup is taking place at the Meadowlands. The Delaney Hall concentration camp is in the industrial sector of Newark. All three places are within half an hour of each other. I asked ChatGPT to run a quantitative analysis of the amount of mass media coverage each event was getting in mainstream reporting in the New York metro area. This is what it said:

Continue reading →

J’Accuse

Posted on by under character based voting, Electoral Ethics and Politics, moralism, Palestine, Ukraine, War with Iran

Bret Stephens vs. Graham Platner
Graham Platner just won the Maine Democratic primary. I’m glad. To be honest, I can’t say that I was all that invested in Platner’s candidacy. I only really took notice of it a few days ago, and only because it belatedly occurred to me that Platner’s popularity is a slap in the face to centrist liberals, something I greatly enjoy. So I’m feeling good about their misery today.

Continue reading →

The Fire This Time

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (5)
It’s a serious mistake to rely exclusively on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening at Delaney Hall. If you’re doing this, you’re being misled by omission: you’re systematically depriving yourself of information that’s relevant to getting a balanced picture of what’s happening there, or for passing a verdict on it.

To illustrate this, I want to work through a representative example of mainstream journalism, a June 4 article on Delaney Hall in The New York Times. My aim here is not to find fault with the author, or to condemn the article, but simply to point out as a matter of objective fact that whether fault is involved or not, the article systematically misleads the reader to the detriment of the protesters. It fails to supply necessary background context, fails to ask the right questions, fails to answer them, and misses salient points of detail. Again, my point is not primarily that the author should have included this or that, but simply that given what he excludes, he misleads, full stop. Why this is the case is a separate question. How it’s to be remedied, or whether it can be remedied within mainstream media at all, is also a separate question.

Continue reading →

Graham Platner and the Merchants of Mass Death

Posted on by under character based voting, Electoral Ethics and Politics, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

The Graham Platner controversy is an instructively stupid one. It’s a little bit like the Katie Hill controversy of yesteryear, but even dumber.

Platner is accused of saying and doing some problematic things, mostly many years ago. The accusations fall into two categories. Either the facts are contested, or not. In the most serious cases, the facts are not only contested but essentially unknowable, which raises the suspicion that many of the allegations are either exaggerations, false memories, or lies. In the uncontested cases, what is alleged is simply not serious enough to be disqualfying. Much of the “scandal” turns on the widespread inability to grasp or acknowledge the fact that people often say things in anger or through thoughtlessness that they don’t really mean. These claims often don’t tell us very much in the first instance except that the person lacks a certain kind of self-control. Once the problematic claim comes out, it’s out, but if sincerely apologized for, much of the problem is, often enough, resolved. 

Continue reading →

Holly Schepisi and the Mechanics of Misinformation

Posted on by under activism, Fatwas, migrant defense

Holly Schepisi is a Republican member of the New Jersey State Senate from Montvale, an attorney, and previously, the President of the Holy Name Medical Center Foundation. She’s also a loud defender of ICE, and a loud critic of migrant defense efforts. About a week ago, she posted the following on Facebook. I challenged her to produce evidence for her claims, which she blithely ignored. So let me try again.

Here are some issues with her claims:

Continue reading →

Ian Austin, Outside Agitator

Posted on by under liberty and the left, moralism, cancel culture, libertarianism, activism, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.

Continue reading →

Outside Agitation

Posted on by under activism, migrant defense, Neutrality and Complicity

Scenes from Delaney Hall (3)
In 1963, an outsider named Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama to protest injustice there by deliberately intensifying “tension” in that, to him, foreign city. His presence, as well as that of his followers, was questioned by locals:

However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

King unapologetically doubled down on being an outsider:

Continue reading →