Author: Tom Sullivan

Facebook’s aerospace team
by Tom Sullivan

Now there’s a phrase to give one pause. This just came in over the transom:

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook says it will begin test flights later this year for a solar-powered drone with a wingspan as big as a Boeing 737, in the next stage of its campaign to deliver Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world.

Engineers at the giant social network say they’ve built a drone with a 140-foot wingspan that weighs less than 1,000 pounds. Designed to fly at high altitudes for up to three months, it will use lasers to send Internet signals to stations on the ground.

Facebook’s engineers at engineers at Connectivity Lab are designing a laser-based communications system to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world the NSA cannot currently monitor from ‎Fort Meade or Bluffdale.

The plan calls for using helium balloons to lift each drone into the air, Parikh said. The drones are designed to climb to 90,000 feet, safely above commercial airliners and thunderstorms, where they will fly in circles through the day. At night, he said, they will settle to about 60,000 feet to conserve battery power.

Each drone will fly in a circle with a radius of about 3 kilometers, which the engineers hope will enable it to provide Internet service to an area with a radius of about 50 kilometers.

Facebook drones at 90,000 feet. Amazon delivery drones below 400 feet. Large military drones in between — commingled with your Aunt Millie’s flight to Omaha. Amateur idiots anywhere, anytime. And one FAA NextGen air traffic control system to rule them all. (They’re only having a little trouble meeting the September 2015 deadline for writing those rules.) And c’mon, Zuckerberg, right? No worries. Not until one takes down an airliner or crashes into a school.

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. — Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993)

And instant communications. Anywhere. Anytime. It’s been a dream of techies since at least George Orwell.

But, you know, all that hardware to maintain. So much needless expense. TPC had a better idea for handling that little problem back in 1967:

(h/t Barry)

Next come the phony quotes
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump continues to wow the GOP’s nativist base. Jeff Tiedrich explained why yesterday in a Tweet:

.@realDonaldTrump is a dumb white male's idea of what a rich person sounds like.— Jeff Tiedrich (@jefftiedrich) July 29, 2015

Michael Savage interviewed Donald Trump on his radio show yesterday, declaring, “I’m for Trump. Point-blank. Best choice we have.” The two discussed voter identification laws, immigration and the Iran nuclear agreement.

Savage called Trump the “Winston Churchill of our time.”

Next come the phony Trump quotes, I guess: “You can always count on Americans to pick the right president – after they’ve tried everybody else.”

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens …”
by Tom Sullivan

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation.”

– Acting Under Secretary of Defense Michael W. Wynne speaking in 2006 about using nonlethal weapons such as microwave emitters. Wynne signed the 2004 DoD Airspace Integration Plan for Unmanned Aviation.

Ponder that a moment.

Meanwhile, those little drones are getting just a bit pesky. On July 17:

Fire officials said aircraft sent to battle a wildfire that swept across a Southern California freeway were briefly delayed after five drones were spotted above the blaze.

U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Lee Beyer said it was the fourth time in a span of a month that a drone disrupted efforts to suppress a wildfire in the region. He said some firefighting planes that were in the air were grounded, while several other aircraft that were on the way to the blaze had to be diverted until the drones left the area.

On July 21:

A Lufthansa plane with 108 passengers on board nearly collided with a drone as it approached Warsaw’s main airport on Monday afternoon, the airline said on Tuesday.

But those little Chinese-made drones do not worry me so much. I’m worried about “the big Corellian ships now,” the kind the military plans to fly from 144 U.S. locations — the Reapers, and Global Hawks with wingspans greater than a 757’s. (Go back and re-read the quote at the top.)

At Al Jazeera, Joshua Kopstein is worried about drones used by the police and the FBI:

As I’ve written before, letting police fill the streets and skies with networked cameras is a fast-approaching nightmare scenario for privacy and civil liberties. The combination of persistent aerial surveillance tech with already widespread facial recognition — for example, in the form of drones or manned aircraft making secret surveillance flights for the FBI — robs us of a fundamental right to control what information we reveal through our mere physical presence. When anyone with access to a database can instantly identify and track anyone walking down the street, it destroys the protective barrier between one’s private and public self.

Technology has a multiplier effect, and it’s naive to think police won’t use these tools to optimize predatory practices such as stop and frisk, civil asset forfeiture and discriminatory violence and surveillance. In India, police have adapted drones to shoot pepper spray at protesters. In the U.S., aerial surveillance systems already exist that enable authorities to monitor entire cities and zoom in on objects as small as 6 inches. These ubiquitous, soon-to-be-automated systems and sensors combine to create what Rob Kitchin, a geographer and spatial analysis expert at Maynooth University, calls the “smart city,” which he describes as “an all-seeing, all-tracking, all-reacting system that stifles dissent before it has chance to organize.”

Right out of “Minority Report.” There’s no chance the NSA would avail itself of all that surveillance tech to violate Americans’ privacy, right?

For a panel looking at drafting drone rules in Illinois, Kopstein writes, “not a single privacy or civil liberties group has been invited.” Furthermore:

Another panel on facial recognition, which will inevitably be used by police drones, ran into similar problems in Washington, D.C., last month. Nine major privacy and consumer advocacy groups walked out of the talks, convened by the Commerce Department, because tech lobbyists refused to agree to the basic premise that people should be able to walk down the street without being identified and tracked by unknown parties.

But being tracked anywhere is a small price to pay for having Amazon drop a cold six-pack on your doorstep during halftime. Plus, if you have done nothing wrong….

Clown car or musical chairs?
by Tom Sullivan

There are only 10 chairs onstage for the first GOP presidential debate on August 6 in Cleveland. The clowns are circling, circling, circling, tripping over their big shoes and eyeing each other, listening for Katie Perry to stop singing “Roar.” Several are going to be left without a chair.

Politico calls the GOP race for 10th place a “Darwinian struggle for survival.” Couldn’t happen to a better bunch of social Darwinists:

Debate host Fox News has decided that only the top 10 contenders, determined by an average of national polls out by Aug. 4, will merit a spot onstage — setting off a Darwinian struggle that has some candidates taking desperate measures to try to move their numbers, and others spinning away their near-certain failure to qualify. Several campaigns also are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV ads to boost their profiles, even though the Iowa caucuses are six months away.

So who will be left when the music stops?

According to POLITICO’s latest average of national polls, eight candidates are looking like a lock for the debate: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson. Perry and Chris Christie are in for now, but only barely. Those still with a chance to make the stage are John Kasich, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. For the other candidates — Carly Fiorina, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham and Jim Gilmore — it will be very difficult to get to Cleveland.

It’s not looking good for Graham:

“I think it sucks,” the South Carolina senator said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Gentlemen, start your blenders.

Throw down the crutch of Medicare!
by Tom Sullivan

Reports of Medicare’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Jeb! Bush doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo, however. His people quickly backtracked after he suggested, “We need to figure out a way to phase out the program for others.” (Those not already receiving benefits, of course.)

Paul Krugman was looking at the trend lines at his blog over the weekend. He provides some nifty charts to illustrate just how the health care cost curve has indeed been bent. Projections for runaway growth have all but vanished since passage of the Affordable Care Act:

The truth is that there never was an entitlements crisis. But now there isn’t even an excuse for pretending that such a crisis exists.

But then, who said the right needed an excuse, good or otherwise? Krugman finishes the thought in his Monday column:

The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.

What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

Vouchers, yes. With tax cuts, vouchers are the miracle elixir of conservative economics. Throw down those crutches of Medicare and public schooling, my boy! Nothing better than vouchers and tax cuts for curing what ails ya, save a clean bowel, an economic Road to Wellville, where…

the spirits soar, the mind is educated, and the bowels – – the bowels are born again!

It’s only racist to point it out
by Tom Sullivan

It is not clear as I’m writing this exactly what went down in Cleveland on Sunday afternoon:

The streets of Cleveland turned ugly on Sunday following the first national Black Lives Matter conference, where activists convened to discuss the use of deadly force between police and African Americans.

Witnesses told local ABC affiliate Newsnet5 that a 14-year-old who was thought to have been intoxicated was slammed to the ground after transit police confronted him about an open container by a bus stop.

Think Progress has more:

After this arrest, protesters rallied near the scene, and one video of the protest shows them linking arms in an apparent effort to prevent police from breaking up the protest. According to reporting by Jonathan Walsh, a reporter with the ABC affiliate, that’s when a white officer began to pepper spray the crowd.

LIVE on #Periscope: #CLE Police Harassment after #M4Bl https://t.co/pSPbwZkFlM— Dante Boykin (@DanteB4u) July 26, 2015

Coverage of such events always bring out the trolls — the kind that still insist racism is over and those who bring it up are the real racists. The comments on Dante Boykin’s Periscope video started with “Is this a new Zoo exhibit?” and got uglier from there.

But you know, it’s only racist to point it out.

“Monsters from the id”
by Tom Sullivan

So I’m driving through an upscale neighborhood in Greenville, SC this week and pass a big house with a big yard, and a fresh, new Confederate flag flying right beside the road.

Except it’s not the familiar battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, the one they just took down in the state capitol. It’s the first flag of the Confederate States of America.

I’ve seen a lot of Confederate battle flags over the decades, but this is the first time I’ve seen this particular flag displayed by a homeowner. Ever.

I wonder how many others recognized it? The battle flag came down in Columbia just weeks ago and already neo-confederates are going “more abstract” with their white supremacist. Just as they once did with “forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.” Somewhere, is Lee Atwater smiling?

The RNC apologized to the NAACP a decade ago for the Southern Strategy. Republicans just never abandoned it. Fueling white resentment as a get-out-the-vote tool has worked too well too long for the GOP. They just can’t quit that flag. Resentment is the conservative id. Nurtured for years. Promoted. Now in the person of Donald Trump it is coming back to bite them. Maybe:

They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,” in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.

And now that the party can’t control him, Trump threatens to destroy its chances if he doesn’t get his way, running as an independent with unlimited wealth — a political suicide bomb.

Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.

Dan Balz wrote at the Washington Post:

Many Republicans want Trump to go away. But they are wary about trying to hasten his fall because they fear they will pay too high a price among those for whom he has provided a voice.

A voice for those with years of conditioned resentment thirsty to guzzle the Kool-Aid Trump is peddling. And ready to burn down their own shining city on a hill if they can’t have her for themselves.

“Monsters from the id.” The horrors of our nightmares were unseen enemy in Forbidden Planet. An enemy unleashed by a race of geniuses who destroyed themselves when their own creation spun out of control.

But don’t hold your breath.

Republican Lite and lighter
by Tom Sullivan

Long before the craft brewing craze started in the U.S., a German student told me that in America they only made two kinds of beer: light and lighter. How times have changed.

Times have changed politically as well. In the wake of centrist Democrats’ recent trouncings, a resurgent liberal movement has emerged. “Liberal” is no longer a dirty word.

Yet in spite of the fact that Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders drew 11,000 at rally last week in Arizona, red-state Democrats do not seem to have gotten the memo. They have taken the wrong message from their trouncing in the 2014 elections. Politico quotes centrist Democrats fretting over the party’s blue shift:

“The national Democratic Party’s brand makes it challenging for Democrats in red states oftentimes and I hope that going forward, the leaders at the national level will be mindful of that and they will understand that they can’t govern the country without Democrats being able to win races in red states,” said Paul Davis, who narrowly failed to unseat Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback last year.

“Davis and his ilk” (Politico’s words) failed to win in 2014 because their party went too far left rather than that centrist Democrats went too far milquetoast:

“It’s important that the Democratic party be ‘big-tent,’” said Vincent Sheheen, who lost last year to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. “So if the result of that kind of rhetoric is an antagonism toward or a hostility toward the moderate elements of the Democratic Party then yeah, it’s big trouble and big problems.”

“We’ll never take back Congress unless we can win in the South. We’ll never take back governorships unless we can win in the South,” he added.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell tells Politico, “I think what we need to do is we need to have a message that is compelling to Democrats, to independents, and even to some Republicans.”

I couldn’t agree more. Republican Lite ain’t it.

In North Carolina, former Sen. Kay Hagan snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2014 running for reelection on her Republican Lite record, dodging questions early in her campaign on her support for the president and Obamacare. Lightweight Thom Tillis was opposed by many in his Republican party, yet prevailed. In Georgia, Democrat Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), “prevaricated, kvetched, and weaved” regarding her support for Obamacare. I could go on.

“Where the hell is the Democratic party?” an exasperated Howard Dean asked in the aftermath. “You got to stand for something if you want to win.”

Centrist Democrats have reason to be nervous. The public isn’t buying what they’re selling. Given a choice between Republican and Republican Lite, they will choose the real thing. At least they know what they are getting.

Your daily death count
by Tom Sullivan

Wonder what time Lester’s Guns and Ammo opens? ‘Cause it’s time to run down and stock up again. Again.

The gunman who opened fire inside a packed movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, Thursday night, was John Russel Houser, police said at a news conference this morning.

Houser, 59, who killed himself, is among three people who died, police said. The other two were Mayci Breaux, 21, of Franklin, Louisiana, who died at the theater, and Jillian Johnson, 33, of Lafayette, who died at the hospital.

Nine others were injured, including one who was in critical condition, police said.

Gov. Bobby Jindal praised two New Iberia teachers as heroes. One leaped over the other to shield her and pull a fire alarm:

“Her friend literally jumped over her, and in her account actually saved her life,” Jindal said during a press conference. “If she hadn’t done that … that bullet, she believed it would have hit her in the head.

“Even though she was shot in the leg, she had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm to help save other lives.”

So there’s a bright side. Sure, more people are dead and traumatized this week. After others were dead and traumatized last week — the same day Colorado convicted another guy for killing 12 and wounding 70 at another movie theater two years ago. But, you know, heroes.

At least I know I’m free

We may be slow on the uptake, but Americans have finally learned to respond appropriately to the ongoing gun-rampage carnage. We set up GoFundMe accounts for survivors. Private charity is an appropriate response to gun violence because government action is tyranny. And we buy even more guns. That goes without saying.

So for many of our neighbors, it will be off to Lester’s once again for another backup weapon, more magazines, ammo, and maybe one of those new laser sights. Because soon the only way they’ll feel safe going outdoors is wearing a web harness with magazine pouches and grenades hanging off it.

If needing an arsenal to defend against neighbors and your government is your idea of freedom, you don’t need weapons. You need medication.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the ALEC States of America
by Tom Sullivan

Republican presidential hopeful Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in San Diego this morning to address the 2015 convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). If politicians really did wear sponsors’ logos on their jackets like NASCAR drivers, Walker’s relationship with ALEC’s funders would win him the pole position:

It is a relationship that spans two decades. Since he first took public office in 1993 as a Wisconsin legislator, through to his current position as that state’s governor, Walker has maintained close ties to Alec, with policies to match. Many of Walker’s most contentious actions – a tough-on-crime bill that sent incarceration rates soaring, stand-your-ground gun laws, protection of corporate vested interests, attacks on union rights and many more – have borne the Alec seal of approval.

Should Walker win the Republican nomination in 2016 (a plausible outcome) and then defeat the Democratic candidate to take the presidency (a harder, though not unthinkable, challenge) he would become the first Alec alum to enter the Oval Office. In short, it is now possible to conceive of the first Alec president of the United States.

See Merriam-Webster’s definition for “shill.”

For those needing a refresher, Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reports:

More than 200 corporations and a quarter of state legislators belong to ALEC, where corporations vote as equals with state legislators on “model” bills before they are introduced in legislatures to become binding law. The group receives 98 percent of its funding from corporations like Shell Oil, Peabody Coal, and Altria/Phillip Morris, and from sources like the Koch family foundations, and many of the “model bills” that it has promoted – from prison privatization to environmental deregulation — directly benefit the financial interests of its funders.

Fischer explores the conference agenda here.

ALEC may have chosen San Diego for its conference to draw a line in the sand. ALEC strongly opposes moves across the country to raise the minimum wage:

Aside from the weather, ALEC organizers may have also been attracted to the city’s political climate. Last year, the San Diego City Council voted to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour. It joined Los Angeles and Boston as one of the communities to raise the minimum wage at the local level. Detractors were able to put the measure to a referendum scheduled in 2016. Businessweek labeled San Diego a “bulwark against minimum wage hikes” in headline, talking [about] the referendum.

The group has long had public education as a target, with a goal of transferring public education funding to private schools (part of its overall privatization agenda) and abolishing pubic education altogether. Milton Friedman addressed this at an ALEC meeting in 2006 [emphasis mine]:

How do we get from where we are to where we want to be—to a system in which parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you’re not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. And the answer is, in my opinion, choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of its being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so that the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.

And of course deceiving the public about that goal is the way you go about it. You sell the hollowing out of the American tradition of public education with talk about choice, racial inequity, innovation, etc. And school reformers did for a long time. At this ALEC conference, however, it seems finally the mask has come off:

With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is meeting in San Diego today, has decided to drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class—a project which, if pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic standing.

As President of the United States, Scott Walker hopes to take the first ceremonial swing with ALEC’s golden sledge hammer.