the blog of war

Gil Scott -Heron, Work For Peace (by ladybret)

Sun, 27 May 2012 13:30:46 -0400

Gil Scott -Heron, Work For Peace (by ladybret)

midmarauder: Criterion Cover Special Request # 4 Stanley...

Sun, 27 May 2012 12:13:56 -0400

Criterion Cover Special Request # 4 Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”

The Fourth Film in the series is from fellow tumblr Nailwraps for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Satirical Farce, Dr. Strangelove or : How I learned to stop worrying and Love the Bomb

Request # 5 is coming soon !! Thanks MM

nevver: “Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the...

Fri, 25 May 2012 22:42:15 -0400

nevver:

“Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.” ― Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays

A Chinese couple on a bicycle take cover as tanks cross overhead...

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:54:52 -0400

A Chinese couple on a bicycle take cover as tanks cross overhead June 5, 1989

Tiananmen Square, June 5, 1989. Photo by Liu Heung Shing

Right On.

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:12:24 -0400

Right On.

cinoh: art-documents: Anselm Kiefer / Isaac Abravanel :...

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:51:01 -0400

cinoh:

art-documents:

Anselm Kiefer / Isaac Abravanel : das Gastmahl des Levithan, 2004

Photo

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:02:43 -0400

As NATO Meets in Chicago, Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn Condemn "Militarized Arm of the 1 Percent" | Interview via Democracy Now!

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:02:10 -0400

As NATO Meets in Chicago, Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn Condemn "Militarized Arm of the 1 Percent" | Interview via Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Bernardine, we wanted to bring in a comment of the Chicago police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: These are plans—these are comments he made about the department’s plans ahead of NATO protests.

SUPERINTENDENT GARRY McCARTHY: We’ve taken the added steps to train the entire department, to at least a minimal level, to have knowledge of the crowd control procedures that everybody else is getting trained up to a higher level for. Only about a third of the department is going to be used for this event. Those officers are being trained to levels that have been called exceeding the national standards by the people who do this across the country. And the fact is, there’s a three-tiered level that we’re looking at. We are not only going to be ready, we’re going to be more ready than any other city in the country, as per the people who do that training have told us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy speaking to Chicago Tonight. Bill Ayers, your comments on what the superintendent had to say?

BILL AYERS: Well, what they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat. They’ve begun to—there’s a mass campaign. They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear. We have police officers we—who are friends of ours, we run into in coffee shops. They’ve told us that the training is focused a lot on the danger of the protesters and how you should be careful when you grab one of them, because they might have some kind of poison spike in their sleeve or something. I mean, it really is quite nuts.

At the same time, they’ve denied permits, taken permits away, given them back, been very vague about making any agreement with the protesters. Bernardine just said we’ve asked—we insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: Yeah, but I want to emphasize that these war games—and where does this money come from? Let’s just ask. How do we have the money to do this when we don’t have the money for basic human needs in Chicago? But, OK, so there’s suddenly, as for all the wars, moneys available. We don’t have budget concerns for any of this permanent militarization. But this is war games at home. This is the war come home. This is national security state.

Photo

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:24:01 -0400

"Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:53:49 -0400

“Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. Its followers are not aware, however, that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives. The threat of violence, it is believed, is alone able to deter aggressors. It secured us forty-five years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the Bomb to grant us peace. The roots of this devotion to violence are deep, and we will be well rewarded if we trace them to their source. When we do, we will discover that the religion of Babylon—one of the world’s oldest, continuously surviving religions—is thriving as never before in every sector of contemporary American life, even in our synagogues and churches. It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America.”

- Walter Wink (May 21, 1935 - May 10, 2012) (via theadamglass)

have a good war

Sat, 12 May 2012 02:51:58 -0400

have a good war

"Kill me. But a bath of blood awaits you in Argos."

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:31:25 -0400

“Kill me. But a bath of blood awaits you in Argos.”

- Polymestor to Agamemnon in Euripides’s Hekabe, translated by Anne Carson in Grief Lessons (via proustitute)

nothingman: Here’s the first drone bomber. It’s the RQ-7...

Thu, 10 May 2012 01:16:50 -0400

nothingman:

Here’s the first drone bomber.

It’s the RQ-7 Shadow armed with a Shadow Hawk smart bomb (Mike Hanlon over at Gizmag did a great job with his article).

(via Drone Bombers)

"Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 02:46:03 -0400

“Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people. The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.”

- Fareed Zakaria (via azspot)
Another prison system,
Another prison system,
Another prison system. (for you and me)

"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 02:35:00 -0400

“I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”

- Albert Einstein (via occupyallstreets)

Almost seems inevitable. How to stop...

Sat, 05 May 2012 01:00:43 -0400

Almost seems inevitable. How to stop it?

socialuprooting:

Drones: The Nightmare Scenario

In our drones report, we discuss the coming onslaught of domestic drones and the weak state of the privacy laws that should protect us, and we outline our recommendations for protections that Congress and local governments should put in place.

But if nothing is done, how might things go? Let’s take a look at how police drone use could unfold:

The FAA’s new rules go into effect. Acting under orders from Congress, the FAA in coming months and years will significantly loosen the regulations that have been holding back broader deployment of drones. Starting later this year, for example, the FAA must allow any “government public safety agency” to operate any small drone (under 4.4 pounds) as long as certain conditions are met.

More and more police departments begin using them. The FAA’s new rules allow for the release of pent-up demand among police departments for cheap aerial surveillance. Ownership of drones quickly becomes common among departments large and small. Organizations are formed by police drone operators, who exchange tips and advice. We also begin to hear about their deployment by federal agencies, other than on the border.

We start to hear stories about how they’re being used. Most departments and agencies are relatively careful at first, and we begin to hear stories about drones being put to use in specific, mostly unobjectionable police operations such as raids, chases, and searches supported by warrants.

Drone use broadens. Fairly quickly, however, we begin to hear about a few departments deploying drones for broader, more general uses: drug surveillance, marches and rallies, and generalized monitoring of troubled neighborhoods.

Private use is banned. A terrorist like the pilot who crashed his plane into an IRS building in Texas uses an explosives-laden drone to try to attack a public facility. In response, the government clamps down on private use of the technology. The net result is that the government can use it for surveillance but individuals cannot use it to watch the government.

Drones become able to mutually coordinate. Multiple drones deployed over neighborhoods can be linked together, and communicate and coordinate with each other (see this video for an early taste of what that could look like). This allows a swarm of craft to form a single, distributed wide-area surveillance system such as that envisioned by the “Gorgon Stare” program.

The analytics gets better. At the same time, drones and the computers behind them become more intelligent and capable of analyzing the video feeds they are generating. They gain the ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around a city or town, with different drones handing off the tracking to each other just as a mobile phone network passes a signal from one cell to another as a user rides down the highway.

Flight durations grow. Technology improvements (involving blimps, perhaps, or solar-power innovations) allow for drones to stay aloft for longer periods more cheaply, which becomes key in permitting their use for persistent surveillance.

The cycle accelerates. The advancing technology incentivizes agencies to buy even more drones, which in turn spurs more technology development, and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating.

Laws are further loosened. As drones get smarter and more reliable and very good at sensing and avoiding other aircraft, FAA restrictions are further loosened, permitting even autonomous flight.

Pervasive tracking becomes common. Despite opposition, a few police departments begin deploying drones 24/7 over certain areas. The media covers the controversy but Congress takes no action, and eventually it becomes old news, and the practice spreads until many or most American towns and cities are subject to the practice.

Technologies are combined. Drone video cameras and tracking analytics are combined or synched up with other technologies such as face recognition, gait recognition, license-plate scanners, and cell phone location data.

The data is mined. With individuals’ comings and goings routinely monitored, databases are able build up records of where people live, work, and play—what friends they visit, bars they drink at, doctors they visit, what houses of worship, or political events, or sexually oriented establishments they go to—and who else is at those places at the same time. Computers comb through this data looking for “suspicious patterns,” and when the algorithms kick up an alarm, the person involved becomes the subject of much more extensive surveillance.

motherjones: Bin Laden was killed one year ago. Some charts on...

Tue, 01 May 2012 19:38:37 -0400

motherjones:

Bin Laden was killed one year ago. Some charts on the real cost of killing bin Laden.

BRAVE PATRIOT Lady Speaks Out Against Illegal Drone Attacks! (by...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:45:52 -0400

BRAVE PATRIOT Lady Speaks Out Against Illegal Drone Attacks! (by vic3003)

Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War - By Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:33:13 -0400

Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War - By Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy

Operation Tiger: D-Day's Disastrous Rehearsal : NPR

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:43:52 -0400

Operation Tiger: D-Day's Disastrous Rehearsal : NPR:

The Fog Machine of War