Disturbing military news

I caught a short YouTube video entitled “This is TERRIFYING” from an Englishman known for sarcastic commentary. He showed a clip of a businessman in a suit giving a very casual presentation about Palantir’s Maven Smart System.

The man boasts from the stage, “We’ve gone from finding the target to now coming up with a course of action to actioning that target, all from one system. This is revolutionary. We were having this done with 8 or 9 systems, where humans were literally moving detections left and right in order to get to our desired instate, in this case, actually closing a kill chain.”

Here’s the British YouTuber’s analysis: “ ‘Actioning that target’ is English for killing. Pinpointed killing from satellites and AI and this, of course, is a military demonstration, but if you don’t think that this, along with your facial recognition, your digital ID, your social credit scoring system and the absolute surveillance of your new 15-minute city infrastructure . . . I f you don’t think that that can be used effectively on the everyday citizen, dude, moving into our very quickly approaching dystopian nightmare, then you’re not paying attention.”

Also yesterday, I saw a headline that caught my eye about how our military is finding messaging from the White House very disturbing. The article is from the Washington Post and begins:

“When the retired U.S. Army colonel Joe Buccino first saw White House posts mixing Iran war footage with clips from cartoons and video games, he felt something he had rarely experienced from American military messaging: disgust.”

The article continued:

“But President Donald Trump’s top communications team, he said, had decided to treat the international conflict like a big joke. Veterans who were already questioning the war’s strategy and endgame, he added, were unnerved to find the nation’s highest office posting pop-music-scored clips of missile strikes, mixed with footage from Call of Duty and ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’

“ ‘They’re completely diminishing what they’re asking the nation to do in Iran,’ Buccino said in an interview. ‘It seems almost obscene relative to the actual violence and suffering that’s involved with this.’

“The videos have also fueled fierce backlash as they clash with real-world grief: On the same day earlier this month that an Air Force refueling plane crash killed six American service members, the White House posted a meme video interspersing explosions in Iran with celebrations from a sports game on the Nintendo Wii.”

(new article this evening before midnight)