Patrick's Notebook

This article was first posted on Straight Line Logic on Memorial Day, 2015. It will be published every Memorial Day for as long as SLL continues as a website

You don’t fight for your country, you fight for your government.

The Golden Pinnacle, by Robert Gore

On Memorial Day, America remembers and honors those who died while serving in the military. It is altogether fitting and proper to ask: for what did they die? Do the rationales offered by the military and government officials who decide when and how the US will go to war, and embraced by the public, particularly those who lose loved ones, stand up to scrutiny and analysis? Some will recoil, claiming it inappropriate on a day devoted to honoring the dead. However, it is because war is a matter of life and death, for members of the military and inevitably civilians, that its putative justifications be subject to the strictest tests of truth and the most probing of analyses.

Millions have marched off to war believing they were defending the US, which implies the US was under attack. Yet, setting aside for a moment Pearl Harbor and 9/11, US territory hasn’t been invaded by a foreign power since the Mexican-American War (arguably—Mexico claimed the territory it “invaded” was part of Mexico), or, if the Confederacy is considered a foreign power, the Civil War. That war ended a century-and-a-half ago, yet every US military involvement since has been justified as a defense of the US. That has gradually attenuated, in a little noted slide, to a defense of US “interests,” which is something far different.

Only one of those involvements could, arguably, have been said to have forestalled not an invasion, but a possible threat of invasion: World War II. Watching newsreel graphics of Germany’s drives across Europe, Northern Africa, and the USSR, and Japan’s across Asia and the Pacific, it was perhaps understandable that Americans believed the Axis powers would eventually come for them, especially after Pearl Harbor. However, that was a one-off attack by the Japanese to disable the US’s Pacific Fleet. To launch an invasion of the US, Japan, a smaller, less populated nation whose economy depended on imports of vital raw materials, including oil, would have had to cross the Pacific and fight the US, and undoubtedly Canada, on their home territories. The Pearl Harbor attack, provoking America’s entry into the war, proved a strategic blunder for the Japanese. An invasion would have been ludicrous. Similarly, Germany, up to its eyeballs in a two-front war, couldn’t conquer Russian winters or Great Britain across the English Channel. How was it supposed to either cross the Atlantic, or the USSR and hostile guerrillas, then the Pacific, and attack the US? That, too, would have been ludicrous. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Raul Diego

Privacy advocates are raising the alarm over the North Dakota governor’s cozy ties to Bill Gates and big tech as the state deploys new mass surveillance tech under the auspices of limiting COVID-19.

College football is deeply ingrained in popular American culture and represents one of the most important mechanisms to foment social cohesion in the country. Owing to the close ties between the government and military and America’s institutions of higher learning, often through research grants and recruitment programs, it will come as no surprise that the amateur, albeit massively profitable sport would be used as a testing ground for a surveillance tracking app developed more than six years ago by a Microsoft engineer.

Tim Brookings, a principal engineer at the software giant and CEO of ProudCrowd, created an app called “Bison Tracker” to follow the movements of thousands of football fans across the country over the course of North Dakota State’s 2013 perfect 15-0 season, on route to their third consecutive Division 1 national championship. The app, which was made available on both Android and Apple devices, was billed as a way to build comradery among fans by letting each other “know where they are tailgating or where they are sitting in any stadium.“

Fast forward to 2020 when former colleague of Brookings at Microsoft and now governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, launched a public-private partnership with ProudCrowd and the North Dakota DOH (NDDoH) to develop a free mobile app based on the popular fan-tracking app to “help slow the spread of COVID-19” called Care 19. The new app will rely on the “Exposure Notification API” technology developed by Apple and Google in a “landmark partnership” announced in April. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Ralph Nader

Where are the calls for Trump’s resignation? Since his first months in the White House, Trump has been the most impeachable, most lawless, most self-enriching, most bungling President in U.S. history. He relies entirely on lying and scapegoating to avoid taking responsibility for his failures. Trump didn’t even win the popular vote – the Electoral College selected him. President Trump has fomented chaos and corruption in his administration without encountering insistent demands for his resignation.

The supine Republican Senate shields Trump from any political accountability. Dominated by the evil “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, the Senate prevented Trump from being convicted under the impeachment clause of the Constitution. But Trump makes the case against himself – “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump makes good on that statement every day, making decisions with reckless abandon and doubling down, falsely accusing people of crimes, turning our government over to big businesses, and firing inspectors general investigating crime and corruption in Trump’s regime of corporatism, favoritism, and nepotism.

Trump exercises his pouting, unstable ego as the determinant of misgoverning on a deadly scale, as with his delaying, downplaying, over-riding science, and providing lethal advice regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. For which he boastfully gives himself a perfect ten. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Paul Joseph Watson

Don’t expect too much media coverage of this.

The culprit behind the horrific beating of an elderly man at a nursing home in Detroit made a YouTube video in which he asserted that “black people are supposed to rule the earth.”

Footage emerged yesterday of a man later identified as 20-year-old Jadon Hayden beating up a defenseless elderly white man by repeatedly punching him in the face.

Absolutely shocking footage has emerged from a black male nurse from Detroit (Jadon H.), who filmed himself beating elderly white men into a bloody pulp.

“Get the fuck off my bed, nigger,” he is heard saying.

Viewer discretion advised.

Another clip shows him beating an elderly white woman.

I’ll never understand why Americans work 40+ hrs a week, pay taxes, fight for their country, just for their children to dump them in care homes in old age and subject them to this kinda treatment.

The relevant authorities have his information so dw and I don’t mean the police!

Hayden uploaded the videos to his social media accounts but after the clips started to go viral on Twitter he was quickly arrested by police.

Content Hayden had previously uploaded to his YouTube channel suggested he holds black supremacist beliefs. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)

The Trump administration has quietly ramped up a vicious bombing – and covert raiding – campaign in Somalia amid a global coronavirus pandemic. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has provided any explanation for the deadly escalation of a war that Congress hasn’t declared and the media rarely reports. At stake are many thousands of lives.

The public statistics show a considerable increase in airstrikes from Obama’s presidency. From 2009 to 2016, the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced 36 airstrikes in Somalia. Under Trump, it conducted at least 63 bombing raids just last year, with another 39 such attacks in the first four months of 2020. The ostensible US target has usually been the Islamist insurgent groupal-Shabab, but often the real – or at least consequent – victims are long-embattled Somali civilians.

As for the most direct victims, it’s become clear that notoriously image-conscious AFRICOM public affairs officers have long undercounted and underreported the number of civilians killed in their expanding aerial bombardments. According to Airwars, a UK-based airstrike monitoring group, civilian fatalities – while low relative to other bombing campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria – may exceed official Pentagon estimates by as much as 6,800 percent. Only these deaths don’t tell the half of it. Tens of thousands of Somalis have fled  areas that the US regularly bombs, filtering into already overcrowded refugee camps outside of the capital of Mogadishu. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Jake Johnson

“While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and frontline workers, these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top.”

America’s billionaires saw their combined net worth soar by $434 billion between March 18 and May 19 while the coronavirus pandemic killed tens of thousands of people and ravaged the U.S. economy, forcing more than 30 million out of work.

That’s according to a new analysis released Thursday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) titled “Tale of Two Crises: Billionaires Gain as Workers Feel Pandemic Pain.”

The report shows that the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and Larry Ellison of Oracle—saw their collective wealth grow by a total of $75.5 billion between March 18 and May 19, a 19% jump.

ATF and IPS pinpoint March 18 as “the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place.”

Bezos—the world’s richest man—saw his wealth jump by nearly $35 billion in the two-month period. Yet even as Bezos’ fortune continues to grow, Amazon announced last week that it will not extend $2-an-hour hazard pay for warehouse workers beyond the end of May. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Jeffrey Tucker

For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty, security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible.

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake.

Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven wrong time and again throughout this crisis.

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski. » Read the rest of this entry «