For decades now, we’ve been force-fed the dogma that American higher-education is the epitome of “woke”–a fully-owned subsidiary of “the Left.” I spent three years working for the National Association of Scholars, an outfit dedicated to manufacturing and marketing propaganda of this kind. I spent twenty-six years in higher education, teaching at a dozen institutions on two continents. I happen to live in a college town, Princeton, have lived here for fifteen years, am walking distance from Princeton University, and spend time on campus just about every day. I happen to work near another college town, New Brunswick, home to Rutgers University, and spend time on campus there about once a week. And I have friends and colleagues in higher education across the United States and Canada. So I’m no stranger to higher education or to controversies about it.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Human Shields
The Human Shields of West Palm Beach
The New York Times ran an article the other day that’s notable both for how ordinary and how extraordinary it is. The facts are extraordinary, the attitudes taken to it predictably complacent. It’s yet another addition to my running series here on the use of “Human Shields,” not in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, but right here at home. “The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,” it’s called, describing a military start-up based in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s the beginning:
Continue readingFor Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business.
In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.
The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.
The factory is the company’s first foray into the Middle East, and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or contract manufacturer in the Emirates.
Silicon Valley’s Human Shields
Consider this excerpt from a Guest Essay in today’s New York Times by Sharon Weinberger, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and author of a forthcoming book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War.
People seem to forget that Silicon Valley was largely born on the back of Pentagon funding during the Cold War. Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that became the wellspring of the computer chip industry’s growth, was one of those beneficiaries. Conventional wisdom held that, by 2016, many firms, not to mention their employees, found the idea of working on defense projects distasteful, if not unthinkable. Mr. Trump’s election that year seemed to widen the divide. In 2018, Google, under pressure from employees, pulled out of Project Maven, a Pentagon-funded A.I. project to advance drone warfare.
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Masters of the Universe
The Times “Covers” the Iran War
Here’s The New York Times describing recent developments in the US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon:
The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later. But Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.
Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart. Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.
In other words, according to the Times, “expert” opinion tells us that the failure of the ceasefire is to be chalked up to Iranian belligerence and irrationality. In fact, what it actually tells us is that the “experts” are full of shit. Every claim made in this passage is factually challenged nonsense.
Continue readingGetting in the Way
“…Jesus did get in the way of empire…”
–Mary Anne Grady Flores, Ithaca Catholic Workers Movement
As I’ve mentioned here a few times (May 26, May 28, July 1), I support the direct-action activist effort to block weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. These shipments conscript our complicity in Israeli aggression, occupation, and war crimes, and also conscript (and are embedded in) civilian commercial networks that are exploited for military purposes. They turn all of us into accomplices of and human shields for wars of aggression and brutality, a status that I think we’re obligated to resist and refuse.
Continue readingUnfortunate Sons
What’s remarkable here is the total lack of self-awareness with which these people will hold a graduation ceremony for soldiers (officers) in a public park, then rationalize the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges, power plants, and crowds of starving civilians by claiming that the presumptive presence of n “terrorists” or “militants” at those locations makes it all OK. Wouldn’t the same logic rationalize blowing up everyone in the park pictured here, including all of the complacent but supportive civilians? What complaint could they offer if someone did here what was done at Old Dominion University?
Continue readingPort Newark Activists on Trial
On May 26th and 28th, I mentioned a group of activists who’ve put their bodies on the line at Port Newark/Elizabeth, not far from Delaney Hall, to stop military shipments through those ports to Israel. These activists are part of a little-discussed worldwide effort–spanning Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Denmark, the UK, Canada, and the U.S. (Newark, Norfolk, Houston, Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles) to block the flow of military hardware to Israel.
Continue readingFrom Big Tech to Mass Grave
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.”
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Another Night of Military Exercises Using Civilians as Human Shields
Not a joke headline. It happened the other day in Pasadena, California. It almost sounds like a comedy skit intended to unmask the hypocrisy of “Western” claims that Hamas uses “civilians as human shields.” We can’t, of course, be entirely sure of the military’s intentions here. The residents might not have been human shields; they might be simulated targets, after all. But that doesn’t really improve things.
Continue readingPASADENA, Calif. (KABC) — A late-night military training exercise in Pasadena startled residents as helicopters flew overhead and landed at a long-closed medical facility.
The exercise began around 8:30 p.m.Wednesday, with helicopters landing on the former St. Luke’s Medical Center building, which has been closed for more than 20 years. Residents said the noise continued into the early morning hours.
Policy of Truth 