Category Archives: History

History, Security

This Day in History: Munich Agreement

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Ondřej Matějka, the deputy director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) provides a fascinating interview on the 80th anniversary of the infamous Munich Agreement:

…the problem wasn’t that the Czechoslovak state couldn’t hold the borders. The problem was more within the society living there, where the pressure from the Sudetendeutsche Partei towards our citizens and people who were sympathetic towards other political parties, especially social democrats and communists, was big. I think the Sudetenland is an extraordinary example of the making of a totalitarian society, where one power, through terror and social pressure, is taking over power in the society

The agreement led to annexation of Czechoslovakian border territory by an expansionist Nazi regime, and the designation of this area as “Sudetenland”.

It also setback plans to overthrow the fascist dictator of Nazi Germany.

Opponents of the Nazi regime leader, such as the head of the German Army, perceived the Munich agreement as foreign states having weak appetite for more permanently ending the Nazi terror and social pressure.

Energy, History, Security

Jaywalking is a Fantasy Crime

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Brilliant comedy routine by Hannibal Buress

Humor helps underscore a very real problem with Jaywalking laws, which any historian should be able to tell you:

What sets jaywalking apart is that it never should have been against the law in the first place. City streets were meant for foot traffic and horses from ancient times until the early twentieth century. As a result, early automobiles found themselves alongside all sorts of pedestrians. To make way for cars, literally and figuratively, wealthy drivers and the U.S. auto industry set out to stigmatize lower-class pedestrians who crossed streets at will. Those who wouldn’t step aside for vehicles became known as “jay walkers”…

Or more exactly, clowns were repeatedly rammed by cars in public displays paid for by car manufacturers, to shame anyone walking on the street

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th-century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

I cover some of this history in my presentations on big data security, such as “Security in a World of Intelligent Machines”

If you look carefully at that police notice from 1866 London it has two modes of operation for the red and green street lights:

  • CAUTION: all persons in charge of vehicles and horses are warned to pass the crossing with care, and due regard for the safety of foot passengers
  • STOP: vehicles and horses shall be stopped on each side of the crossing to allow passage of persons on foot; notice being given to all persons in charge of vehicles and horses to stop clear of the crossing

British railroad managers took ship right-of-way red/green lanterns and recommended using them to stop vehicles so pedestrians could walk safely.

American car manufacturers then took that street light concept and flipped it around completely, telling pedestrians to stay off roads, inventing a fantasy crime to shame and physically harm certain races of people for not driving.

Yes, you read that right. Racism permeates America’s enforcement of this fantasy crime:

In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.

And just to make the point even starker, North Dakota lawmakers in 2017 actively promoted the concept of using vehicles as a weapon to murder pedestrians, awarding zero liability for drivers:

A bill introduced by an oil patch lawmaker would provide an exemption for the driver of a motor vehicle if they unintentionally injured or killed a pedestrian obstructing traffic on a public road or highway.

“It’s shifting the burden of proof from the motor vehicle driver to the pedestrian,” said Rep. Keith Kempenich, R-Bowman

Several months later, Kempenich’s campaign led to a federal civil rights investigation of a white nationalist for murder instead of the zero liability for killing people with cars, which he had promoted to them.

One person was killed and 19 were hurt when a speeding car slammed into a throng of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, where a “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalist and other right-wing groups had been scheduled to take place, the city tweeted on its verified account.

A 32-year-old woman was killed while walking across the street, Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas said. Police were still in the process of notifying her family.

[…]

Federal authorities said a civil rights investigation into the deadly crash was opened hours after it happened.

In related news, dozens of cities today are restoring pedestrian rights and looking at ways to ban cars from streets:

  • Oslo, Norway
  • Madrid, Spain
  • Chengdu, China
  • Hamburg, Germany
  • Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Paris, France
  • London, England
  • Brussels, Belgium
  • Berlin, Germany
  • Mexico City, Mexico
  • Bogoto, Colombia
  • San Francisco, USA
  • New York, USA

And while Jaywalking is a fantasy crime that produces little if any positive results, Pontevedra, Spain is being called a paradise after banning cars across most of the city. It is quite clearly the opposite of the city in the Buress comedy routine:

Lores became mayor after 12 years in opposition, and within a month had pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre, paving the streets with granite flagstones.

“The historical centre was dead,” he says. “There were a lot of drugs, it was full of cars – it was a marginal zone. It was a city in decline, polluted, and there were a lot of traffic accidents. It was stagnant. Most people who had a chance to leave did so. At first we thought of improving traffic conditions but couldn’t come up with a workable plan. Instead we decided to take back the public space for the residents and to do this we decided to get rid of cars.”

The results they have reported are amazing. Can’t wait to hear what Buress has to say about it.

Update Oct 2019

A kind reader sent another comedy video of great relevance:

Think about it, a group of private businessmen coined an offensive slur to promote their product and it worked so well that today it’s a legal term…the streets went from a public place where everyone was welcome to a terrifying off-limits death trap.

Update Feb 2021

Orange County Sheriff’s deputies argued whether or not a Black man had jaywalked and if it was necessary to stop him, then taunted and forcibly detained him until shooting him to death.

History, Sailing, Security

Fruit Fly Movements Imitated by Giant Robot Brain Controlled by Humans

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They say fruit flies like a banana, and new science may now be able to prove that theory because robot brains have figured out that to the vector go the spoils.

The Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) has just published their latest research

The manoeuvres performed by the robot closely resembled those observed in fruit flies. The robot was even able to demonstrate how fruit flies control the turn angle to maximize their escape performance. ’In contrast to animal experiments, we were in full control of what was happening in the robot’s ”brain”.

Can’t help but notice how the researchers emphasize getting away from threats with “high-agility escape manoeuvres” as a primary motivation for their work, which isn’t bananas. In my mind escape performance translates to better wind agility and therefore weather resilience.

The research also mentions the importance of rapidly deflating costs in flying machines. No guess who would really need such an affordable threat-evading flying machine.

I mean times really have changed since the 1970s when…

Developed by CIA’s Office of Research and Development in the 1970s, this micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was the first flight of an insect-sized aerial vehicle (Insectothopter). It was an initiative to explore the concept of intelligence collection by miniaturized platforms.

The Insectothopter was plagued by inability to fly in actual weather, as even the slightest breeze would render it useless. In terms of lessons learned, the same problems cropped up with Facebook’s (now cancelled) intelligence collection by elevated platform.

On June 28, 2016, at 0743 standard mountain time, the Facebook Aquila unmanned aircraft, N565AQ, experienced an in-flight structural failure on final approach near Yuma, Arizona. The aircraft was substantially damaged. There were no injuries and no ground damage. The flight was conducted under 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 as a test flight; the aircraft did not hold an FAA certificate of airworthiness.

Instead of getting into the “airworthiness” of fruit flies, I will simply point out that “final approach” is where the winds blow and the damage occurred. If only Facebook had factored in some escape performance maximization to avoid the ground hitting them so dangerously when they landed.

History, Security

US Regime’s Concentration Camp Kills Toddler

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Multiple news outlets are reporting the US Regime’s rush to setup and expand concentration camps, based on a hurried policy of enacting forced mass detention to scare people from coming to the US, has killed a girl through a painfully slow and tortured process that started with inadequate health care.

VICE

One week after arriving at Dilley, Mariee developed a cough, congestion, and a fever of over 104 degrees. During the next two weeks of her confinement, Yazmin felt powerless as her daughter got sicker, rebounded, and got sick again, battling a virus that started with a common cold.

[…]

But Mariee did ultimately die from an infection that was first detected at Dilley, which has a history of complaints of inadequate medical care for children. In July, two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security released a review of care in facilities including Dilley over the last four years. The doctors found a host of problems and called the practice of family detention “an exploitation and an assault on the dignity and health of children and families.”

[…]

The administration is planning to expand its capacity to hold migrant families by constructing more facilities like Dilley. In June, ICE requested space to hold 15,000 more people in family detention, cementing the policy into the future.

…medical experts and advocates have long stressed that conditions in ICE facilities can be risky for sick children. Detention puts children at higher risk of contracting disease, and crowded, stressful conditions make it harder to recover.

“Those stresses are real; they affect the child’s abilities to fight an infection and illness and win,” said Brian Blaisch, a pediatrician in Oakland, California, who has experience working in immigrant detention centers.

AZ Central:

…medical staff at the Texas detention center failed to provide Mariee Juarez with adequate medical care after the healthy girl became sick inside the facility. As a result, the girl died after a treatable respiratory infection turned into pneumonia, according to the legal notice.

Mariee Juarez died on May 10, after “six agonizing weeks in hospitalization and extensive medical interventions,” the legal claim says.

NPR:

When Juárez raised concerns about her daughter’s deteriorating condition, [law firm] alleges, she wasn’t taken seriously. “The medical care that Mariee received in Dilley was neglectful and substandard”…

KRISTV:

At the detention facility, Mariee became sick with a severe respiratory infection that went “woefully under-treated for nearly a month,” according to the law firm. Juárez continually sought attention from medical staff but she was prescribed medications that did not improve the child’s condition and Mariee continued to get worse…

ABC

Mariee’s symptoms worsened over the coming days and Yazmin Juarez “sought medical attention for Mariee multiple times but was often left waiting for many hours, including at least two instances where she was turned away and told to wait for an appointment on a later day,” according to the claim.

By March 15, Mariee had lost 2 pounds — nearly 8 percent of her body weight — and her symptoms were worse, according to the claim. Mariee was examined at the detention facility’s clinic several more times as her symptoms worsened. Her fever remained high and she was unable to keep down medication or food, according to the claim.

[…]

Mariee died on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage and “irreversible brain and organ damage with no hope of survival,” the claim states; her cause of death was bronchiectasis, pulmonitis, and a collapsed lung.

Time

The statement also included comments from Dr. Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at New York University Langone Health, who reviewed Mariee’s medical records from her time at Dilley. He said it was clear ICE medical staff failed to meet the “basic standard of care” and that the medical staff engaged in “troubling practices,” including the use of unsupervised non-physicians to provide pediatric care over a long period of time.

“If signs of persistent and severe illness are present in a young child, the standard of care is to seek emergency care,” Dreyer said. “ICE staff did not seek emergency care for Mariee, nor did they arrange for intravenous antibiotics when Mariee was unable to keep oral antibiotics down. These are just a few of the alarming examples of how ICE medical staff failed to provide proper medical treatment to this little girl.”

All of this comes after US federal courts already clarified in 2014 “under the Flores settlement, families couldn’t be kept in detention for longer than 20 days”.

While I know this is a sad and tragic story, full stop, there also is an important broader national security subtext here. Being unprepared is the exact opposite of what the US needs to be doing with communicable diseases. And this story emphasizes that the camp conditions themselves dramatically increase likelihood of spreading disease not only because proximity, also because stress and anxiety factors lowering immunity.

The latest research is showing that the girl died because the concentration camp experience itself lowered her ability to survive disease present in the camp.

If the border is meant to process humans safely to enter, or even turn them around to leave for that matter, it has to maintain levels of preparedness to eliminate disease spreading.

Even if the defense in this lawsuit trots out an army of doctors to say they would have done nothing different and ignored symptoms until too late, this actually would demonstrate the US is unprepared and basic humanity of disease control is not being taken seriously. It reminds me of when huge companies went offline from NotPetya because they hadn’t cared enough to help patch/remedy one little machine inside huge global networks.