Michelle Obama, who obviously speaks truth to power, doesn’t believe at all in the “Lean In” concept. The title of this post comes from her being quoted in a new Wired story about the aristocratic methods of Facebook’s COO (referred to as an empress).

Wired points out how “Lean in” instead soon may be more known as some sick “shit”, fast becoming the “Let them eat cake” of our times.

Aiding the enemy and inciting civil war are quite literally the same things that the French Aristocracy and Facebook’s executives have been accused of…am I right?

The Wired piece is an excellent dive into the how and why Facebook leadership worked to hack people into bits they could profit from; a form of human exploitation and mining of assets.

The “chiefs” overseeing Facebook’s industrial-scale hacking of humans took on such aristocratic airs, there’s probably a book to be written about what that looked like in terms of mental health. They arguably have gone mad in their race for wealth accumulation.

Some of my neighbors in San Francisco literally lost their grip on reality by working one day a week in Facebook’s human exploitation mills, amassing piles of cash to spend on luxury goods and cake-filled offices and homes of isolationism.

The California Attorney General (AG) Xavier Bacerra has posted Proposed Regulations to implement the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). Bacerra also has posted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Action (NOPA) and an Initial Statement of Reasons (ISOR).

Critics already are playing up that they can’t do business if they have to follow regulations set to protect privacy of consumers. These lobbying types are, of course, peddling risk management nonsense in the face of far too many breaches and a long slide downward of consumer confidence in data platforms.

The current round of criticism reminds me of those opposed to food safety regulations even after Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle pointed out how rats and workers’ body parts were being ground up and shipped as sausage.

Cloud providers are like sausage factories, especially the largest ones, and for far too long have been allowed to operate without basic duties of care, deliberately avoiding innovation investment because avoiding accountability for harms. And yes, Facebook is the wurst.

Those of us actively innovating in information technology see regulations such as CCPA as welcome guard rails, which spur long overdue innovations in data platform controls and help the data platform market grow more safely.

The proposed regulations set out some clear “shall not” of consumer personal information:

(3) A business shall not use a consumer’s personal information for any purpose other than those disclosed in the notice at collection. If the business intends to use a consumer’s personal information for a purpose that was not previously disclosed to the consumer in the notice at collection, the business shall directly notify the consumer of this new use and obtain explicit consent from the consumer to use it for this new purpose.
(4) A business shall not collect categories of personal information other than those disclosed in the notice at collection. If the business intends to collect additional categories of personal information, the business shall provide a new notice at collection.
(5) If a business does not give the notice at collection to the consumer at or before the collection of their personal information, the business shall not collect personal information from the consumer.

They also set out clear timelines for requests to delete data:

(a) Upon receiving a request to know or a request to delete, a business shall confirm receipt of the request within 10 days and provide information about how the business will process the request. The information provided shall describe the business’s verification process and when the consumer should expect a response, except in instances where the business has already granted or denied the request.
(b) Businesses shall respond to requests to know and requests to delete within 45 days. The 45-day period will begin on the day that the business receives the request, regardless of time required to verify the request.

A Chinese/German drone collaboration is delivering micro-dose poison at 14 hectares/hour and achieving a 98% kill-rate on armyworm.

Specifically, the drone atomises the pesticides into micron-level droplets, so the chemicals can evenly adhere to the surface of maize plants with higher coverage rate. The strong downdraft generated by the propellers can significantly reduce liquid drifting and increase pesticide deposition, which means that both sides of the leaves and the central part of crops can be more precisely targeted. Such mechanism can not only increase fall armyworm’s exposure to chemicals but also cut down a large amount of pesticide use and better conserve the beneficial insects.

Targeting sounds like it’s more of a “bracketing” spray than an injection into each worm on a leaf, although the drone company suggests they are looking into worm-recognition capabilities.

Targeting the individual worms instead of plant-level dosing still seems cost-prohibitive in this story. To achieve that accuracy I think we’d be talking Integrated Pest Management (IPM) with technology-augmented insects, or micro-drones, instead of these sprayers.

Perhaps soon there will be Integrated Drone Management (IDM) appearing in agricultural operations centers where augmented bugs are deployed from drones like static-line parachute jumpers.

Many years ago when we were starting research on how to stop drones setup as biological weapons, we looked at them as flying bombs in the same way the Italian fascist military dropped mustard gas on field-hospitals and ambulances.

Chinese agriculture, however, clearly is being driven to develop more highly-efficient low-dose toxin delivery at a micro-target levels. That kind of emphasis in tooling accuracy means drones soon may advance past U.S. bladed assassination missiles, innovating so quickly we will have to update the risk discussions.

To be fair, five years ago any kind of anti-drone methods to stop weaponized versions meant a specific audience where examples needed to be general. Today it seems a general audience is open to hearing what harms may be ahead and more specific examples are more welcome.

Unfortunately what I must emphasize most today isn’t just how drones rapidly move towards highly-targeted assassination methods for something labelled pest. I must also point out members of our security community actively have been found labeling non-whites as pests. Beware people advertising themselves as deserving authority to protect humans from harm, who may in fact be enabling and promoting harm through technology.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a drone is being created to replace pesticides at a more macro level. Ducks have been used to eat weeds and pests in rice paddies, avoiding the need for toxic chemicals. So someone decided they would attempt to replace the ducks with a robotic one.

Immediate downsides that come to mind are 1) the lack of fertilizer byproduct from robot collecting instead of digesting the weeds and bugs and 2) the lack of meat byproduct from eating the ducks before rice harvest (ducks have to be removed anyway or they’ll eat the rice).

A while ago I explained in “Lost History of Knob Creek” how American history of whiskey production is tied to slavery.

In particular, Jack Daniel took his recipe from emancipated slaves even though he used his own name for the brand.

Now the man who taught Jack Daniel, “Nearis” Green, is getting his own brand. Proceeds from the sale of this new whiskey are going to fund college education of master distiller Nearest’s descendants

See if you can trace how the story originally flowed from “never a secret” to “embrace, tentatively” to “gauzy and unreliable” to “never be definitively proved”…

Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green — one of Call’s slaves.

This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer.

[…]

Frontier history is a gauzy and unreliable pursuit, and Nearis Green’s story — built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails — may never be definitively proved.

Then a successful writer comes onto the scene and quickly realizes there is a market for trust and ethics, scientifically eroding the structural white supremacist deception and lies that intentionally obscure roots of American innovation.

…when she got to Lynchburg, she found no trace of Green. “I went on three tours of the distillery, and nothing, not a mention of him,” she said.

Rather than leave, Ms. Weaver dug in, determined to uncover more about Green and persuade Brown-Forman to follow through on its promise to recognize his role in creating America’s most famous whiskey. She rented a house in downtown Lynchburg, and began contacting Green’s descendants, dozens of whom still live in the area.

Scouring archives in Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D.C., she created a timeline of Green’s relationship with Daniel, showing how Green had not only taught the whiskey baron how to distill, but had also gone to work for him after the Civil War, becoming what Ms. Weaver believes is the first black master distiller in America. By her count, she has collected 10,000 documents and artifacts related to Daniel and Green, much of which she has agreed to donate to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

So much for the thinnest of archival trails. Congratulations to Ms. Weaver and the Green family for restoring and preserving American history.

Ronald Reagan’s arrival to office in 1981 was accompanied by a sentiment that the prior U.S. President’s policies should be rolled back, regardless of what they were.

One of the policies ended was the arms embargo on Guatemala, put in place by Jimmy Carter due to human rights abuses by that regime.

We know today that the CIA in late April 1981 was sending memos that rolled up to the White House describing the massacre of civilians within Mayan Indian territory. CIA memos documented how social support for guerrillas was high enough that soldiers said they were “forced” to fire indiscriminately into non-combatants.

Two months after news of the massacre Reagan un-blocked $3.2 million in military support to Guatemala’s army. The unblocking method used was crafty, as Reagan reclassified trucks and jeeps to transport Guatemalan soldiers to commit massacres. Military vehicles known to be used in the massacres no longer were under the human rights embargo.

One might be tempted here to ask “ok, but they’re just trucks and jeeps, so general use, right?” History helps a little, as it reminds us America has made this mistake before, facilitating genocide for profits:

GM’s president, Alfred P. Sloan, knew what was happening in Germany. Sloan and GM officials knew also that Hitler’s regime was expected to wage war from the outset. Headlines, radio broadcasts and newsreels made that fact apparent. America, it was feared, would once again be pulled in.

Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic business relationship. Opel became an essential element of the German rearmament and modernization Hitler required to subjugate Europe. To accomplish that, Germany needed to rise above the horse-drawn divisions it deployed in World War I. It needed to motorize, to blitz — that is, to attack with lightning speed. Germany would later unleash a blitzkrieg, a lightning war. Opel built the 3-ton truck named Blitz to support the German military. The Blitz truck and its numerous specialized models became the mainstay of the Blitzkrieg.

In 1935, GM agreed to locate a new factory at Brandenburg, where it would be geographically less vulnerable to feared aerial bombardment by allied forces. In 1937, almost 17 percent of Opel’s Blitz trucks were sold directly to the Nazi military.

The Guatemalan government was emboldened by the new U.S. President’s support of their killing plans. Thus by early October 1981 the U.S. State Department was talking about Reagan’s ambassador General Vernon Walters meeting with Guatemalan leaders to discuss repression measures. Guatemalan General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia “made clear that his government will continue as before that the repression will continue.”

This wasn’t really any kind of secret. Word of violations were published by groups like the Inter-American Human Rights Commission who in October 1981 openly called out the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.” The Reagan Administration engaged in whataboutism and deception to avoid addressing why they would sell military aid linked to mass human rights violations; falsely claiming Guatemalan human rights violations were a guerrilla strategy (as I’ve explained elsewhere).

Things escalated quickly after the U.S. government support shifted from embargo to support. The Guatemalan army issued instructions in 1982 that any resistance or incoming fire from a town or village meant everyone in the town is hostile and would be destroyed.

This might sound similar if you heard recently the current U.S. regime call to troops that they treat rocks and bottles as rifles.

In fact, Reagan’s support led to a fundamentalist Christian taking control of Guatemala in a March 1982 coup d’etat. General Efrain Ríos Montt seized power and announced a policy of “rifles and beans” — either eat beans quietly in obedience to dictatorship or be killed by rifles. In response Reagan described him as “a man of great personal integrity”.

…more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands were eradicated or occupied by the military. The slogan “rifles and beans” meant that pacified communities would get “beans,” while all others would be the target of army “rifles.”

In March 1983, Americas Watch condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said there was proof that the Guatemalan government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”

Three months after the coup was applauded by Reagan, government death squads were unleashed on civilians. And Reagan then increased military aid in 1983 to $6 million despite evidence of civilian massacres increasing at the hands of American-trained soldiers riding in American vehicles, again reported in memos to the White House.

Such memos might sound strange to fans of Reagan, so consider the kind of writing found in his official documents

During the height of Montt’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaign, a CONFIDENTIAL cable from Secretary of State George Shultz praised his “impressive progress in human rights”.

(click that document link if you want to help disclose more strange truths from primary source materials)

In effect, the Reagan administration worked to reverse Carter’s human rights policy, centralizing power in U.S. presidency through deception and tricks in order to expedite military support to violent dictators killing democracy.

Within the U.S. government, there was no apparent struggle to reconcile the notion that the Guatemalan government “badly needed” arms with its horrific crimes. There was only a struggle to determine preconditions (which were never met) in order to gain minimal support from Congress so as to circumvent protections against abetting war criminals, which were put into place by the Carter administration.

Ríos Montt wasn’t an isolated case, either. Look into Regan’s support for genocide by Indonesian dictator Suharto, or why Chadian dictator Habre (another recipient of President Reagan’s “product shipments”) was sentenced to life for war crimes.

So there is our backdrop to news today from Guatemala, about prosecution of Reagan’s “special unit” for their attrocities:

A Guatemalan former soldier has been sentenced to more than 5,000 years in prison for his role in a massacre during the country’s civil war.

More than 200 people were killed in the village of Dos Erres in 1982, one of the most violent episodes in Guatemala’s brutal 36-year conflict.

Santos López was found responsible for 171 of the deaths.

He was a member of the Kaibiles, a US-trained counter-insurgency force fighting left-wing guerrillas.

López was sentenced to 30 years for each of the 171 killings committed in the village and to an additional 30 years for his role in the murder of a girl who had originally survived.

[…]

The massacre happened during the brief rule of military strongman Efraín Ríos Montt, who was accused of ordering the killing of more than 1,700 ethnic Mayans during a civil war.

He died in April aged 91 while on trial on charges of genocide.

Montt was the first military dictator in Latin America to be charged with genocide in his own country. Ronald Reagan was never charged for his role.

Some may be tempted to believe propaganda of the Reagan administration that fueling the mass murder of civilians somehow was meant to be about the U.S. fighting Communism. However, recent genocide trials have uncovered facts of Reagan’s “special units” that prove they engaged in genocidal practices, brutally murdering children by hand and terrorizing anyone within earshot of someone speaking about democracy.

The soldiers shot, strangled and bludgeoned the villagers to death with sledgehammers, and one admitted to throwing a baby into the village well.

In 1994, forensic anthropologists found the remains of 162 bodies in the well, including 67 children less than 12 years old.

The above should be serious food for thought when people now talk about news of migrants walking all the way from Guatemala to the U.S seeking aylum from violence. Imagine what they think when finding out they will be greeted with rifles instead.

It appears to this historian that the current U.S. regime has replaced the “beans and rifle” decision tree of Reagan’s Guatemalan death squads with…just rifles.