I spent most of last week at the College of the Atlantic Summer Institute in Bar Harbor. Every summer the college brings in speakers from all across the country to talk about any variety of topics relating to our country and the world. This year’s topic was Questions of Democracy and here are a few quick takeaways:
-The Secretary of State from Michigan is a political powerhouse who you should get to know now. Her name is Jocelyn Benson and you’ll be seeing a lot of her in the future.
-Tim Alberta is probably the best writer covering the evangelical movement in America.
-Joe Scarborough either gets really intense sunburns or is constantly caked in makeup that makes him look like a lobster that’s been left in the pot a little too long:
We were at a party. His ear lobe fell in the deep.
-We are blessed to have Chellie Pingree in office. And Jamie Raskin. More elected officials should cultivate their kind of resilience, intelligence, and thoughtful approach to politics.
During one of the breaks I decided to pop up to Ellsworth to see my accountant, Jerbadiah Mescalina. Jer is a twisted creature, a strange man who spends most his time locked away in a decrepit radio station thinking about questions of ancient religions, human potential, and straight up Machiavellian manipulation. In short, he’s a fun guy to talk to if you’ve got an hour to waste and don’t mind saying only about three words.
On the way to his office you pass a series of electrical poles shortly after you leave Mount Desert Island. During the school year these poles are usually decorated with signs praising whatever sports team is headed to an important away game. “Go Jamie!” they might say. “Dad loves you!” “MDI Trojans (yup, that’s their mascot) rule!”
It’s always things like that.
In my 20 years living on the island I never once noticed a sign in the summer. Last week there were two.
The first one said: Lavender and Where’s Daddy?
The second one said: It’s your tax money. Google it.
My first thought was, I wonder what that is?
My second was, Where’s Daddy?
I hope it isn’t porn.
It is very much not porn. Five minutes later, sitting in my accountant’s driveway, I looked it up.
“Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy? are two artificial intelligence systems being used by Israel in their genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Lavender was first confirmed to +972 Magazine and Local Call earlier this year by six Israeli intelligence officers who had used it. In the early days of the war these programs identified as many as 37,000 individual Palestinians as suspected militants and targeted their homes for possible air strikes.
One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions. They added that an actual person spent only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all… An additional system called Where’s Daddy was used to track these individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family residence.” Read that last sentence twice. Israel was not necessarily targeting these people at military or paramilitary operations centers. It was targeting them at home. When they were with their families.
The author who broke the story said that this program led to “Entire Palestinian families being wiped out inside their houses” and that he spoke with members of the Israeli military who were “shocked by committing atrocities.”
We all know that war is universally terrible. We need to start demanding from our government, before it is too late, that they not go down this role. We are entering into a whole new era of military conflict and it won’t be pretty. Remember readers, just because there hasn’t been a war in the continental United States since the Civil War, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be one here ever.
It could be coming sooner than we like to think.
That’s the thing about massive, senseless violence. It never seems possible where you live. Until it happens. When it does, do we want humans making decisions about who has to die and why? Or do we want to outsource that to machines?
We don’t want to outsource that to machines.
We need to end our financial backing of this war now. If it’s not too late, we need to become a neutral arbiter in this region again. There are millions who are watching.