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William D. Hartung, A Manhattan Project for AI Weaponry?

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Yes, the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., was promptly fired as, on the very first day of the second age of Trump, was the first woman to lead the Coast Guard Admiral Linda Fagan, as only days later was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to head the Navy. So, give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth full credit. They swore they would cut back on government and they’ve begun doing so remarkably quickly. They’ve clearly decided to run a pared-down military focused on versity, quity, and exclusion, or VQE. But count on one thing: despite all President Trump’s and RME (Richest Man on Earth) Musk’s talk about cutting back everywhere, including the Pentagon, in a world where, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung suggests today, Musk’s psychic doubles running Silicon Valley military tech firms are preparing for a new (and wildly expensive, as well as wildly dangerous) world of artificial intelligence weaponry, cutbacks there will be anything but the name of the game.

It’s already clear enough that, while Musk has been eager to cut the U.S. Agency for International Development and so strip funding meant to deal with Polio, H.I.V., Malaria, and nutrition globally, weaponry — especially high-tech weaponry — is another matter entirely. In fact, amid all the cuts now underway, Republicans in Congress seem eager to add at least another $100 billion to the Pentagon budget in the years to come, bringing it close to the trillion-dollar mark. I mean, why in the world would you ever want to cut the biggest source of contract spending in the federal budget when you can easily begin slashing the government agencies that already spend the least?

So, peace? Cut it dead! Diversity? Clip it off! Help for veterans? How about getting rid of 80,000 or more employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs? Medical research? Who needs it? Education? Shut it down! But I don’t really have to go on, do I? You get the point and so, with all of this (and so much more) in mind, let Hartung take you into a world in which the funding for what could prove to be the most dangerous weapons on Earth is essentially guaranteed to, all too literally, head for the heavens. My suggestion is: Duck (and don’t quack or they might notice you)! Tom

The New Age Militarists

And Their Threat to Our Common Future

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Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands -- in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

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Best of TomDispatch: Ann Jones, Social Democracy for Dummies

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This classic 2016 piece by Ann Jones on what the Scandinavians once had (and still have) that (sad to say) we don’t — an article then shared with the Nation magazine — seems particularly appropriate to run today as a “best of TD piece” in the all-(un)American world of Donald Trump. It’s also appropriate because Jones has just published a fascinating new book, Democracy Lost and Found: USA and Norway, that I only recently finished reading and that lays out vividly the relations of those two countries from the nineteenth-century moment when significant numbers of Norwegians began emigrating here to late last night. In summary, Jones suggests in her book “that today’s Norway, which surely would have impressed my ancestors, should also inspire Americans. That may be a tall order, however, for Donald Trump, now a convicted rapist and felon, has once again danced and blathered his way to the presidency of the United States of America. He has been propelled by many more powerful plutocrats, led by billionaire Elon Musk. Trump had already announced to his followers that, if they voted for him in 2024, they would never have to vote again. It may help Americans to remember that Norway was once subjected to a deadly forcible occupation and emerged stronger.”

So, check out Jones’s TD piece and then give some thought to getting your hands on her new book. Now, read Nick Turse’s 2016 introduction and then the piece itself. Tom]

Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a “moldy, rancid odor.” A child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit public school system, which, according to a recent New York Times report, is “run down after years of neglect” and “teetering on the edge of financial collapse.” And yet, last Thursday, this was the closest thing to a “good news” story about Michigan on the front page of that newspaper. A companion piece covered the even more dismal “water crisis in the poverty-stricken, black-majority city of Flint,” a penny-pinching state “austerity” measure turned public health emergency that has left children there with elevated levels of lead in their blood, putting them at risk of lifelong adverse health effects.

How did it come to this? An America dotted with feral cities left to decay into ruin? Man-made catastrophes spawned by harebrained austerity schemes? A country of crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, failing schools, a woefully neglected mental health system whose ample slack has been taken up by a disastrous criminal justice system? Take your pick when it comes to rotten institutions and rotting infrastructure, since the list goes on and on. Presidential candidates are vowing to “make America great again” or talking about “reigniting” its “promise,” but perhaps a counterfeit, sepia-tinged trip to the beginning of the road that got us here isn’t really the solution to twenty-first-century America’s problems. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones has a different idea. In her latest piece, a joint TomDispatch/Nation article which will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine, Jones takes a welcome detour to a place where welfare isn’t a dirty word, the social safety net isn’t the preferred place for budget cuts, and axe-wielding children are — believe it or not — fostered, not feared: Scandinavia.

A world citizen who has journeyed across Africa, spent years living in the Afghan war zone, and was most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, Jones examines how a couple of Nixon-era decisions led the U.S. down the road to ruin, while Scandinavian nations charted a different course, embracing principles of uplift, equality, and humanity. Yes, some American-esque values seem to be seeping into the Scandinavian scene of late, from the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden to a Danish town attempting to stick it to Muslims by way of pork meatballs in school lunches. But even far-right parties in these Nordic nations champion a robust welfare state and a generous social safety net. So let Jones, an intrepid journalist whose latest book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story, is already a classic of Iraq and Afghan War reporting, help explain why Norway, Denmark, and Sweden invariably top global indexes when it comes to affordable housing, education, health, life expectancy, and overall citizen satisfaction, while the United States has ended up with failing cities, crumbling schools, and poisoned water. Nick Turse

American Democracy Down for the Count

Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Don’t?

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Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends -- which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

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Nan Levinson, It Can’t Happen Here (or Can It?)

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It’s a distinctly strange — in fact, that’s far too mild a word for it — moment in these (dis-)United States of America. Donald Trump is in power (big time) and his buddy (until he’s not) Elon Musk is going wild, trying to fire government employees en masse while attempting to shut down or wreck government agencies. The two of them are also remarkably hard at work wiping out any government effort to stop this planet from heating to the boiling point. Yet, while all this has been happening, it almost seems as if the Democrats haven’t been there.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions, including (of course, again!) Bernie Sanders, who has been traveling the country on a National Tour to Fight Oligarchy, trying to whip up opposition to the Trumpian nightmare; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a few lesser-known congressional representatives like Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico who have indeed been speaking out. And given what’s happening, I suspect a lot more Democrats could be up and yakking soon.

Sadly, though, despite some growing demonstrations, it’s been all too quiet in the already disastrous second term of You Know Exactly Whom, even if he seems to be preparing the way, once all those tariffs go into effect, along with a series of tax breaks for billionaires that Republicans in Congress are eager to pass, for Americans who aren’t billionaires to start paying through the nose, for the economy to plummet (as it undoubtedly will), and for the Democrats to retake Congress almost two years from now, even as the president revs up for — yes, it would be historic (in the worst sense imaginable) — a possible third term in office.

Yikes! In the context of all that (and possibly the longest single sentence paragraph I’ve ever written), let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson explore how indeed it might be possible to disrupt the Great Disrupter sooner rather than later. Tom

How to Resist This Fresh Hell

Withholding Consent from the Trump Regime

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Not even two months since Inauguration Day and it’s already been quite a trip. Ping-ponging between vindictive pettiness and unconstitutional overreach while using everything in his power (and much that isn't), Donald Trump has served up a goulash of dubious orders with a slathering of venom on top. He's been abetted in the upheaval he promised on the campaign trail by the richest man on Earth, a cabal of lickspittles, and a cabinet filled with people who appear to have answered job ads stipulating, “Only the unqualified may apply.” As it became clearer what the battles to come would be, a friend wrote me: “I feel now like we're watching it all happen. It being that thing that can't happen here.”

There would be something strangely exhilarating about the frenzy of activity in Washington, if only it weren’t so careless, mean, dishonest, and destructive. Some of the most egregious actions have indeed been temporarily halted by the courts, but there’s no guarantee that trend will hold up -- if, of course, Donald Trump and crew even pay attention to court decisions -- especially when cases arrive at what's potentially "his" Supreme Court. Meanwhile, insidious ideological purges encourage citizens to rat out their neighbors and coworkers, as leaders of industry, the media, and other institutions rush to appease the president before he dissolves into a hissy fit of revenge. (The speed with which many corporations complied with the order to axe DEI programs illuminates how shallow their commitment to that effort really was.)

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