[video]
The U.S. Military Will Spy On Afghanistan Decades After The War Is Over
America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back to a remote headquarters.
Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors’ operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed.
“Were going to leave behind a lot of special operators in Afghanistan. And they need the kind of capability that’s easy to put out so they can monitor a village without a lot of overt U.S.-made material on pathways and roadways,” says Matt Plyburn, an executive at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.
And they won’t just be used overseas. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. Defense contractors believe one of the biggest markets for the next generation of the sensors will be here at home.
[video]
“I’ve seen a ton on the facebooks about “thanking veterans for their service.” As a veteran let me just be very straightforward and honest with you. We didn’t “serve our country”; we don’t actually serve our brothers/sisters or our neighbors. We serve the interests of Capital. We never risked our lives or spent months on deployment away from our family and friends so they can have this abstract concept called “freedom”. We served big oil; big coal; Coca-Cola; Kellogg, Brown, and Root and all the other big Capital interests who don’t know a fucking thing about sacrifice. These people will never have to deal with the loss of a loved one or the physical and/or psychological scars that those who “serve”, and their families, have to deal with for the rest of their lives. The most patriotic thing someone can do is to tell truth to power and dedicate yourself to building power to overthrow these sociopathic assholes. I served with some of the most real and genuine people I’ve ever met. You’ll never see solidarity like the kind of solidarity you experience when your life depends on the person next to you. But most of us didn’t join for that; we joined because we were fucking poor and didn’t have many other options.” —
An anti-capitalist veteran (via elitc)
Well heres a take on it not often uttered or shared
(via threezerooo)
(Source: elitc, via light-essence)
Of course the US is one of the few who DOESN’T make labeling a requirement! Pfft!
(via lonelyvagabond)
“Our culture expects women’s – and men’s – bodies to be a certain way. People are very invested in the idea that Men Look Like This and Women Look Like That and Never the Twain Shall Meet. Well, guess what? Nature doesn’t give a fuck about your sexual binary. Nature puts us together in a million different ways – actually, about seven billion, give or take a few hundred thousand – and a lot of us are going to walk that imaginary line. There are going to be short, hairless men with high voices and tall women with deep voices and people who are intersexed in a bunch of different ways, and here’s the great thing – it’s all okay. Every single one of us. There’s not a thing wrong with any of us.” — The misgendering of Brittney Griner « Fit and Feminist (via sexisnottheenemy)
(via doangivadam)
![mohandasgandhi:
fearandwar:
To anyone who doesn’t see how The Dictator is part of a long history of Hollywood slandering Arabs and Muslims, read this book. Until then, I really don’t give two shits about how “it’s just comedy, dude! Stop being so serious!”
One of the saddest things this book revealed to me was not just how bad the stereotypes. It’s the way even movies that have nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anything like that throw in Arab/Muslim (because in Hollywood, the two are always the same) as asides. For instance, Father of the Bride Part 2. It’s a movie about a father upset about his daughter’s pregnancy. Midway through, though, they throw in a horrible Arab/Persian stereotype of a dictatorial Middle Eastern male who is greedy, oppresses his wife, and screws over an honest white guy.
That’s how Hollywood works.
The Dictator is hardly alone in its racist portrayal of Arabs. Arabs are the new token villains in Hollywood films, similar to the way Russians were during the Cold War only, it’s a lot more racist.
And thus we have the Timeline of International Villainy. To create drama, especially in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and in their time, the Japanese and Germans, and later the Koreans and Vietnamese, served that role. For a long while, commies were useful foils (with their taste for world domination, nukes and vodka), but with the end of the Cold War, the Soviets became the Russians, and the Russians only worked if they were gangsters, and Hollywood already had the Italians to do that job. Colombian drug traffickers were employed as handy replacements, but then coke just felt … dated. Transnational corporate evildoers are okay, if not that sexy. But there just has been something about those Arabs. They’ve got legs.
In an interview before the premiere, Shaheen says that the OPEC oil embargo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain beginning in the 1970s. “We pray and we kill,” Shaheen says of the depiction. Like other stereotypes on film — of blacks, Jews, gays, Latinos, Native Americans — Arabs are now in the crosshairs.
“The Arab serves as the ultimate outsider, the other, who doesn’t pray to the same God, and who can be made to be less human,” says Shaheen, who argues that movies and TV shows do matter — that they shape public opinion at home and abroad. “Do you have any idea what it must be like to be a young person watching this stuff over in the Middle East?” he says. And if you ask Shaheen who even cares about an old Chuck Norris film, he answers, “Have you ever looked through a TV Guide? These movies are on television constantly. The images last forever. They never go away.” [Source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4d7xeUYZS1qhwm08o1_400.jpg)
To anyone who doesn’t see how The Dictator is part of a long history of Hollywood slandering Arabs and Muslims, read this book. Until then, I really don’t give two shits about how “it’s just comedy, dude! Stop being so serious!”
One of the saddest things this book revealed to me was not just how bad the stereotypes. It’s the way even movies that have nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anything like that throw in Arab/Muslim (because in Hollywood, the two are always the same) as asides. For instance, Father of the Bride Part 2. It’s a movie about a father upset about his daughter’s pregnancy. Midway through, though, they throw in a horrible Arab/Persian stereotype of a dictatorial Middle Eastern male who is greedy, oppresses his wife, and screws over an honest white guy.
That’s how Hollywood works.
The Dictator is hardly alone in its racist portrayal of Arabs. Arabs are the new token villains in Hollywood films, similar to the way Russians were during the Cold War only, it’s a lot more racist.
And thus we have the Timeline of International Villainy. To create drama, especially in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and in their time, the Japanese and Germans, and later the Koreans and Vietnamese, served that role. For a long while, commies were useful foils (with their taste for world domination, nukes and vodka), but with the end of the Cold War, the Soviets became the Russians, and the Russians only worked if they were gangsters, and Hollywood already had the Italians to do that job. Colombian drug traffickers were employed as handy replacements, but then coke just felt … dated. Transnational corporate evildoers are okay, if not that sexy. But there just has been something about those Arabs. They’ve got legs.
In an interview before the premiere, Shaheen says that the OPEC oil embargo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain beginning in the 1970s. “We pray and we kill,” Shaheen says of the depiction. Like other stereotypes on film — of blacks, Jews, gays, Latinos, Native Americans — Arabs are now in the crosshairs.
“The Arab serves as the ultimate outsider, the other, who doesn’t pray to the same God, and who can be made to be less human,” says Shaheen, who argues that movies and TV shows do matter — that they shape public opinion at home and abroad. “Do you have any idea what it must be like to be a young person watching this stuff over in the Middle East?” he says. And if you ask Shaheen who even cares about an old Chuck Norris film, he answers, “Have you ever looked through a TV Guide? These movies are on television constantly. The images last forever. They never go away.” [Source]
(via violentopinions)
“
“U.S. soldiers don’t listen, they are too arrogant.”
“They get upset due to their casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches.”
” — Some Afghan soldiers in a survey attempting to establish the increasing rates of Afghan soldiers killing Coalition Forces.(Source: The New York Times, via knowledgeappliedispower)
A girl who used to live beside the Thapathali hospital cries during the clashes in Katmandu on May 8, 2012.
(via swannery)
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