Humanity's Final Arms Race: UN Fails to Agree on 'Killer Robot' Ban

The world should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It should not sleepwalk into dystopia.

A robot distributes promotional literature calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons in Parliament Square on April 23, 2013 in London, England. The 'Campaign to Stop Killer Robots' is calling for a pre-emptive ban on lethal robot weapons that could attack targets without human intervention. (Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

JAMES DAWES

December 30, 2021

 by The Conversation

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity's final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn't reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world's cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might have been the last chance to head off an arms race.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could be combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

As a specialist in human rights with a focus on the weaponization of artificial intelligence, I find that autonomous weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear world—for example, the U.S. president's minimally constrained authority to launch a strike—more unsteady and more fragmented. Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might have been the last chance to head off an arms race.
Lethal errors and black boxes

I see four primary dangers with autonomous weapons. The first is the problem of misidentification. When selecting a target, will autonomous weapons be able to distinguish between hostile soldiers and 12-year-olds playing with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat?


The problem here is not that machines will make such errors and humans won't. It's that the difference between human error and algorithmic error is like the difference between mailing a letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot systems—ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across an entire continent—could make misidentifications by individual humans like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan seem like mere rounding errors by comparison.

Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of the runaway gun to explain the difference. A runaway gun is a defective machine gun that continues to fire after a trigger is released. The gun continues to fire until ammunition is depleted because, so to speak, the gun does not know it is making an error. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately they have human operators who can break the ammunition link or try to point the weapon in a safe direction. Autonomous weapons, by definition, have no such safeguard.

Importantly, weaponized AI need not even be defective to produce the runaway gun effect. As multiple studies on algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the very best algorithms—operating as designed—can generate internally correct outcomes that nonetheless spread terrible errors rapidly across populations.

For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software used by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

The problem is not just that when AI systems err, they err in bulk. It is that when they err, their makers often don't know why they did and, therefore, how to correct them. The black box problem of AI makes it almost impossible to imagine morally responsible development of autonomous weapons systems.
The proliferation problems

The next two dangers are the problems of low-end and high-end proliferation. Let's start with the low end. The militaries developing autonomous weapons now are proceeding on the assumption that they will be able to contain and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it's this: Weapons spread.

Market pressures could result in the creation and widespread sale of what can be thought of as the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots that are cheap, effective and almost impossible to contain as they circulate around the globe. "Kalashnikov" autonomous weapons could get into the hands of people outside of government control, including international and domestic terrorists.

The Kargu-2, made by a Turkish defense contractor, is a cross between a quadcopter drone and a bomb. It has artificial intelligence for finding and tracking targets, and might have been used autonomously in the Libyan civil war to attack people. 

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY

High-end proliferation is just as bad, however. Nations could compete to develop increasingly devastating versions of autonomous weapons, including ones capable of mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear arms. The moral dangers of escalating weapon lethality would be amplified by escalating weapon use.

High-end autonomous weapons are likely to lead to more frequent wars because they will decrease two of the primary forces that have historically prevented and shortened wars: concern for civilians abroad and concern for one's own soldiers. The weapons are likely to be equipped with expensive ethical governors designed to minimize collateral damage, using what U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has called the "myth of a surgical strike" to quell moral protests. Autonomous weapons will also reduce both the need for and risk to one's own soldiers, dramatically altering the cost-benefit analysis that nations undergo while launching and maintaining wars.

Asymmetric wars—that is, wars waged on the soil of nations that lack competing technology—are likely to become more common. Think about the global instability caused by Soviet and U.S. military interventions during the Cold War, from the first proxy war to the blowback experienced around the world today. Multiply that by every country currently aiming for high-end autonomous weapons.
Undermining the laws of war

Finally, autonomous weapons will undermine humanity's final stopgap against war crimes and atrocities: the international laws of war. These laws, codified in treaties reaching as far back as the 1864 Geneva Convention, are the international thin blue line separating war with honor from massacre. They are premised on the idea that people can be held accountable for their actions even during wartime, that the right to kill other soldiers during combat does not give the right to murder civilians. A prominent example of someone held to account is Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

But how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier's commanders? The corporation that made the weapon? Nongovernmental organizations and experts in international law worry that autonomous weapons will lead to a serious accountability gap.

To hold a soldier criminally responsible for deploying an autonomous weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors would need to prove both actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms describing a guilty act and a guilty mind. This would be difficult as a matter of law, and possibly unjust as a matter of morality, given that autonomous weapons are inherently unpredictable. I believe the distance separating the soldier from the independent decisions made by autonomous weapons in rapidly evolving environments is simply too great.

The legal and moral challenge is not made easier by shifting the blame up the chain of command or back to the site of production. In a world without regulations that mandate meaningful human control of autonomous weapons, there will be war crimes with no war criminals to hold accountable. The structure of the laws of war, along with their deterrent value, will be significantly weakened.
A new global arms race

Imagine a world in which militaries, insurgent groups and international and domestic terrorists can deploy theoretically unlimited lethal force at theoretically zero risk at times and places of their choosing, with no resulting legal accountability. It is a world where the sort of unavoidable algorithmic errors that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now lead to the elimination of whole cities.

In my view, the world should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It should not sleepwalk into dystopia.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on September 29, 2021.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License


JAMES DAWES

James Dawes conducts research in human rights. He is the author of The Novel of Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2018); Evil Men (Harvard University Press, 2013), winner of the International Human Rights Book Award; That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Harvard University Press, 2007), Independent Publisher Book Award Finalist; and The Language of War (Harvard University Press, 2002).

New Poll: Amazon's Labor Violations Caused Unnecessary Deaths. Voters Want to Hold Them Accountable

PRESS RELEASE

WASHINGTON -

Less than a month ago, deadly tornadoes struck several states in the South and Midwest over the course of a single night, destroying homes and killing at least 88 people. During these devastating tornadoes, managers at a Kentucky candle factory and an Amazon warehouse in Illinois refused to allow employees to leave, resulting in 14 deaths.

New polling from Data for Progress finds that Americans overwhelmingly want to hold these companies accountable for workers' deaths by a +67-point margin. This includes Democrats by a +77-point margin, Independents by a +68-point margin, and Republicans by a +57-point margin.​
 

Read the full polling tabs and methodology here.

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Data for Progress is a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes.

 

For Immediate Release

Monday January 3, 2022, 5:09pm EST

Data for Progress

Contact

McKenzie Wilson, mckenzie@dataforprogress.org

Trump-Appointed Judge Sides With Cops Who Brutalized DAPL Protesters

The ruling "effectively legitimizes launching an hours-long barrage of freezing water, explosives, and highly dangerous munitions into a crowd of demonstrators."


Over two hundred tribes, joined by environmental activists and hundreds of United States military veterans, camp and demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline, just outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, North Dakota, on December 5, 2016. (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL

December 31, 2021

Five years after police brutalized activists opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump has dismissed a lawsuit accusing North Dakota law enforcement officers of excessive use of force—a decision that critics have characterized as a tacit endorsement of the violent repression of climate justice advocates.

Several peaceful protesters who gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to struggle against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure were assaulted by law enforcement officers on November 20, 2016. Police sprayed demonstrators with water cannons amid sub-freezing temperatures that night, and according to the plaintiffs' lawyers, they also used tear gas and fired rubber bullets and exploding munitions "indiscriminately into the crowd."

Attorneys for law enforcement officers named as defendants, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier and Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler, "say officers were outnumbered and were concerned for their lives and safety," The Bismark Tribune reported Thursday. "They sought to have the protesters' legal claims dismissed."

"U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor issued the order granting their request Wednesday," the newspaper noted, "writing that 'the Court finds the undisputed and irrefutable evidence in this case could only lead a reasonable juror to conclude the officers' conduct in this case was objectively reasonable.'"

Traynor argued that police violence was justified given the "unprecedented" nature of the situation. He cited the fact that "officers issued two code red requests and a Signal 100, requesting the assistance of every available officer in the state," which "has never been done in North Dakota history."

Morton County Assistant State's Attorney Gabrielle Goter applauded the ruling, saying in a statement that "law enforcement reasonably believed the protestors were trespassing and therefore, law enforcement was permitted to use less lethal force to protect themselves and others, from violent protestors that law enforcement perceived as" threats who intended to "physically injure" them.

Rachel Lederman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, warned that Traynor's ruling "effectively legitimizes launching an hours-long barrage of freezing water, explosives, and highly dangerous munitions into a crowd of demonstrators."

According to the Tribune:

The lead plaintiff in the case is Vanessa Dundon, a member of the Navajo Nation whose eye was injured the night of the incident.

The plaintiffs alleged in court documents filed earlier this year that officers "used a wildly disproportionate amount of force when they deployed water cannons, impact and explosive munitions at the plaintiffs, who were unarmed, peaceful, and not committing any crime or actively resisting law enforcement in any way."

Traynor in January threw out another lawsuit filed by a pipeline protester claiming that law enforcement used excessive force at a 2017 protest site. The order came weeks after a similar ruling in a case brought by another demonstrator.

A lawsuit filed by protester Sophia Wilansky, of New York, is continuing in federal court. Wilanksy claims police targeted her with a concussion grenade during the Nov. 20, 2016 confrontation. She suffered a left arm injury in an explosion and had multiple surgeries to save the limb.

Janine Hoft, another attorney for the plaintiffs, said Traynor's decision this week "is an example of how judges use 'qualified immunity' to let law enforcement off the hook for even the most extreme brutality."

After he infamously led the Morton County Sherriff's office in terrorizing opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Kirchmeier went on to advise other law enforcement agencies on how to put down anti-fossil fuel demonstrations elsewhere, Common Dreams reported in 2017.

Since DAPL, which transports crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale basin to a terminal in Illinois, became operational—and immediately started leaking—in 2017, opponents of the project have been subjected to surveillance and counterterrorism measures carried out by local police forces and private military contractors hired by the company behind the pipeline, corporate-led lawsuits, and arrests that could result in lengthy prison sentences.

Environmental justice and Indigenous rights advocates welcomed a federal judge's ruling in March 2020 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act in 2016 by approving federal permits for DAPL, which allowed construction to happen before expert analysis put forward by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe was considered.

Campaigners celebrated a few months later when a U.S. district court ordered DAPL to be shut down and emptied of oil while federal regulators conducted a comprehensive environmental review.

However, despite his campaign pledges to respect tribal sovereignty and transition the U.S. to clean energy, President Joe Biden in April 2021 refused to shut down DAPL, instead allowing the project to continue operating without a federal permit.

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Court: Tyson Was Not "Acting Under" Federal Orders in Allowing Covid To Run Rampant Through Waterloo Plant

Statement from attorneys representing the families of the deceased workers

WASHINGTON -

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit today unanimously affirmed an Iowa federal court decision, holding that wrongful death claims brought by the survivors of meatpacking workers that died after being exposed to Covid-19 at Tyson's Waterloo, Iowa plant belong in state court. Public Citizen and The Spence Law Firm, LLC represented the families of deceased workers.

"Today's decision recognizes that this was an easy case," said Adam Pulver, attorney, Public Citizen. "As the court explained, the facts provide no support for Tyson's arguments that choosing to continue to operate its Waterloo plant without taking appropriate precautions and lying to workers about the safety of the plant was somehow compelled by a federal officer. Tyson's arguments had the potential to immunize thousands of American employers from negligent and reckless behavior throughout the pandemic—the Eighth Circuit has confirmed that Covid-19 did not alter well-established legal principles of federalism. Tyson was focused on profits, not the safety of the American people, much less its own workers, and its attempts to pin the blame on the federal government while delaying this case are shameful. We hope Tyson allows this case to promptly move forward so that the grieving families of its workers can finally have their day in court.

"The community of Waterloo was ravaged by Covid-19—because of Tyson's choices and conduct," said Mel C. Orchard, III and G. Bryan Ulmer, The Spence Law Firm, LLC. "As the Eighth Circuit recognized, a local Iowa jury should have final say on right and wrong."

Tyson had argued that various statements by President Trump, communications with USDA inspectors, and requests for government assistance meant that it was "acting under" the direction of federal officers, and thus only a federal court could hear the case. Tyson's Waterloo facility was the source of one of the largest Covid-19 outbreaks in America, with over 1000 Tyson workers contracting Covid-19 in spring 2020 alone. The cases decided by the Eighth Circuit today are brought on behalf of the families of four Waterloo workers who died in April and May 2020. The case will now return to Iowa state court, where it will be litigated on the merits. Read more about the cases here and here.

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Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.

The Fatal Flaw at the Heart of Our Civilization

Unless We Have a Great Transformation, We Face Three Decades of Collapse

umair haque
Jan 3 · 2022

Snowy

LONG READ


“But what is he?” I would constantly ask, frustrated. My mind would hurt. I need to figure these things out, or else I go a little crazy. And this was one question that I couldn’t figure out, for months. Nothing seemed to fit.

“Well,” my kid sis finally replied, furrowing her brow, taking a long moment to reflect, “he’s a…he’s a person.”

And then it all made sense.

“Ahhhhh.” I sighed in sweet relief. A buddy? A friend? A toddler? A child? My child? All of the answers I’d come up with were true, but only in a small way. Inadequate, not developed, not true enough. The correct answer was as simple as it was elegant. My little doggy. What was he? He is a person.

Forgive me. I know that you probably know this. But I only had a little friend later on in life. I’m slow, sometimes. OK, much of the time, my lovely wife would say.

We’re going to talk about the future, why it seems to be going wrong, how to fix it, and to do that, we’re going to have to talk about the past. And to do that, it all begins with my little buddy, and maybe yours, too.

What is this thing called human civilization, at its root? It’s a long, long struggle for personhood.

Today, you can see that struggle writ large. The forces of regress — the ones who want to undo civilisation, the fascists, Trumpists, Brexiters, and so forth — want to unmake personhood. They want to make women, minorities less than human again.

They are ascendant in the world today. Even if Trump has finally been defeated, Trumpism hardly has. Why are the forces of regress and barbarism ascendant? Why is this an age of little fires of fascism everywhere? Because the forces of progress have forgotten that civilisation is the struggle for personhood. For always advancing it, expanding it, enlarging it.

Let me explain that super abstract point, which might not really make sense yet.

In the beginning of the thing we call human civilization, there were three kinds of groups. First came kings, who were more than human. Then came nobles, who were human. And then came everyone else — serfs and peasants, who were not fully human, and slaves, who were less than human. This form of society was lopsided: persons made up a tiny, tiny minority. And those who were full persons could do whatever they wanted to everyone else, more or less, whether they were nobles in Europe, or samurai in Japan.

It took millennia for an age of revolutions to come about — in the 18th century — and personhood finally began trickling down. At last, more people were persons. Men, with enough money and land. After another half century or so, most men become persons — if they were the right skin colour. Another half century, and after a long, long struggle, women began to be persons, too. And after another long, bitter struggle, finally, minorities were recognised as person, like, for example, during the era of civil rights in America.

That’s the story of human civilisation in one paragraph. Do you see how it has everything to do with expanding personhood, enlarging it, so that it’s boundaries stretch outwards? That is how the fundamental values of civilisation — decency, kindness, truth, beauty, fairness, goodness — grow. And when we don’t expand those values, the forces of regress tend to resurface — and win, because this struggle is perpetual, as Camus pointed out.

So are we done? Is that it? To human civilization? The long struggle is over, now that minorities and women are recognized as persons — beginning to be, anyways? Let me ask that a different way.

Why isn’t the centre left fighting anymore to expand the boundaries of personhood? The answer is that it believes that we have reached the end of history — that the struggle has been won, and there is nowhere left to take personhood now.

But it is wrong — badly wrong. Believing in ends of history is always a mistake.

Where personhood must go from here is, in one sense, painfully obvious.

The planet is burning. We are in an age of mass extinction. The earth’s great ecologies are reaching tipping points, from which there’s no return. And all that is because personhood is still barely an inkling of what it should be. At the same time, more than half the world lives without decent food, water, sanitation, healthcare, education. Humanity, too, is not fully granted personhood yet, either.

Snowy — that’s him in the pic above — does something funny and strange. Something so human that I can’t help understand that he really is a person. He won’t do his business if anyone’s around — especially not if anyone’s looking at him. Which they tend to do, because, well, he’s supercute. Now, a scientist might say — “that’s just an animal protecting himself from being too vulnerable!” But…and here’s the point…what about you? I’d bet that you can’t exactly do your business when people are staring at you, either. You’re not so different.

In other words, like Snowy, you have an innate sense of what dignity means to you. Of shame and guilt, and also of empathy, belonging, grace, truth, meaning, love, beauty. You don’t have to try to be these things. You just are. Snowy will be your friend, if you are his friend. It’s the most natural thing in the world for him. He will recognize you as a person, if you recognize him as one. Do you see what I mean a little bit? Snowy passes both my tests of personhood. He has it, and he can give it. But we are failing this test of personhood. We are not giving it as much as we should. When we would go for our little daily walks, I pass by the old, old trees, on the street where the college is. I wonder: why don’t they have names? They’ve been here longer than any of us have. Perhaps you see what I mean.

In 1972, James Lovelock offered the Gaia Hypothesis. What if, he asked, the earth was alive? I don’t know if I “believe” the Gaia hypothesis. That’s a very American way to put it. A religious one. Educated minds, enlightened ones — they contemplate, reflect, entertain, think about. I contemplate what the Gaia hypothesis might mean. And it leads me to another question.

What if the earth was a person? I mean: how would our world change institutionally, politically, socially, culturally, if we recognised the earth as a person?

Well, one thing we’d immediately begin to see is that this person is a slave. One thing that “civilization is always expanding the boundaries of personhood outwards” means is that we are always faced with new slaveries. And the unrecognised slavery of the 21st century is about nature. We enslave it. If the earth were a person to us, it would be a person who did most of our work — provided our water, air, food, and medicine — but received less than nothing in return. It wasn’t paid for the work it did — and so how could it sustain itself? It had few rights, if any, and mostly, they were superceded by our right to abuse and exploit it, however we wished. Is it any surprise, then, that just like a slave, nature is in shock, terrorized, traumatized, dying slowly?

If we recognised the earth was our slave — but should be a person — then our systems would have to change. All of them. Our economics could no longer be built on the foolish idea of GDP — which counts profits, but not, say, the species going extinct to provide them — and “stock markets” booming, while life on earth begins to go extinct. We’d need to reinvent our economies wholesale — at a conceptual level, not just with money.

Our politics would have to change radically, too. We’d need to probably have parliaments with Speakers for the Earth. Endow this person with constitutional rights — make it free and equal and deserving of fairness, which is what personhood is — and then grant it representation, too. Imagine that the Speaker for the Earth could get up and object, every time some Senator who’s a well-paid corporate shill demands more of the planet and life on it to abuse, exploit, and enslave.

That’s how we begin to have a livable planet again — through this kind of deep change. A Green New Deal is good, but it’s a band aid for a civilisation that has stopped being one, stopped expanding personhood outwards, so the forces of regress are winning.

Let’s go further still. How would our societies have to change? I often wonder why our cities are so…ugly. Recognising the earth as a person would mean what some call “rewilding” our cities. Letting animals and plants thrive, and learning to live beside them, making space for them, instead of simply concreting over them. Why is it that you have to travel to a zoo to “see” animals”? Why don’t they just get to live in parks, on every block?

“LOL,” you might say, “Umair! Grow up!! What’s the point of that?” I’m coming to that. How do you think that would affect us — being closer to a planet we recognised as a person, instead of walking apes living in isolation in concrete and steel bunkers?

We’d be much, much happier. More peaceful. More pleasant and kind and empathic and generous and loving.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s what having a little buddy, a dog or a cat, does to a person — tons of research proves that. Want to be happier? Get a pet, not (only) a shrink. But the lesson is profound. We are alienated things, living in our shining towers of glass and steel, in our concrete cities and suburbs.We’re deeply unhappy as a civilization, and it shows in everything we do. In our addiction to anti-depressants — can you think of another species like that? — in our constant need for dumb, violent escapism, in our endless wars, in our susceptibility to superstition, in our need for the acquisition of shiny things to fill the gaping hole in our lives.

We have a life-shaped hole in our lives, my friends, and it exists because we live in such a way that nature is not really part of it. Put nature into it — even in the way of a tiny pet — and our sense of happiness and meaning and fulfilment all skyrocket. That says, too, though, that our way of life needs to be redesigned.

Why does our happiness and meaning and fulfilment go hand in hand with nature? And by nature, I don’t just mean “animals” or “woods.” I even mean a dancefloor. Something as simple as that.

The answer goes like this.

We’re social beings. That’s our nature. And the more social that we are, the more happiness, meaning, and fulfilment we’re capable of. Those things come from having social bonds, from enacting them, from expressing them, from enlarging them.

Now think about us through that lens. Excising nature from our lives with an industrial-age scalpel, what have we really done? We’ve massively reduced our own sociality, which just means we’ve massively limited our own chances at happiness and meaning and fulfillment. One, we live in isolation. Two, we don’t have the opportunity for sociality with the planet, for relationships with nature.

Remember those trees on my block with no name? That’s a lost relationship. But Snowy’s become a part of the naeighborhood. Everybody smiles when they see him. “Hi, Snowy!” they say. That’s sociality becoming happiness, in vivid reality. Do you see what I mean a little bit when I say that bringing nature back into our lives is how we expand sociality, and since we are social beings, that is how our own happiness and meaning and fulfilment grow?

I stay up all night, because the light can kill me. And standing by the window at night, as Snowy sleeps, I smoke a cigarette, and a clever little fox walks by. At 3AM, every single night. Doing his nightly rounds for food. I chuckle. Another little guy. But why does he have to live in fear, skulking around? Why doesn’t he have a real place, a protected space, to live on my block, too? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone — making the kids happy, the parents, the dogs, and so forth, all a little happier, closer? Why don’t they greet him by name? Why isn’t he part of us?

The answer is that we walking apes have fallen prey to a dangerous delusion. We imagine that we’re supreme. You might not be a racist, but I bet you believe in human supremacy. The idea that you’re better than, above, an “animal.” Are you? Who said so? Just because our species destroys everything it touches? How is that “better”? In what sense, really, are you any more of a person than a dolphin, a dog, a tree, or a little fox? They all feel just the same things you feel. They all communicate and emote and know and love and bond and touch and want and live and die. Just as you will, one day.

How much happier would you be if you recognised all of them as just like you? You wouldn’t be so alienated, and so you wouldn’t be so unhappy.

Human supremacy is a toxin. It bears no fruit. It isolates us, limits us, restrains us, while justifying the slavery of the 21st century, which is the annihilation of our world. We aren’t supreme. We are just here, like everyone else. And all of us — fish, forests, reefs, rivers — are people.

Until we recognize that — really recognize it, reshaping our world politically, economically, socially, culturally, my guess is this. We’ll go on being the violent, brutal, walking apes who destroy everything they touch. Maybe, finally, including themselves. Their violence comes from their loneliness, their isolation, their sense of meaninglessness. Not a single God they’ve ever invented, the walking apes, has reduced their capacity for violence one iota. Think about that for a second. Not one. Nothing has. So what can? Just being here, like the rest of everything living. Learning to recognize every single life has dignity, worth, purpose, and truth, too. Then, as our happiness grows, as our sense of meaning and fulfilment expand, maybe our need for violence, to enslave and exploit and terrorize, finally declines, too.

Human supremacy is the fatal error our civilisation has made. Will it be the one that finishes us off?

Let me connect those final two ideas. The more people — recognized persons — that there are in our society, the more opportunities for happiness there are for all. Think about the fight for gay rights. Before, they weren’t people. Poof — opportunities for happiness lost. Today, they can marry, date, romance, share — that’s personhood creating happiness.

We are deeply unhappy beings, us walking apes, because our opportunities for happiness are so small. It shows, in us being a civilisation that is still — still — built on violence, on slavery, on abusiveness. Of nature, and also of the half of the world that doesn’t have a decent life, while 1% of it has too much. How do we change all this? Fix it? Redress the balance?

The time has come to recognize the world as a person, too. To employ the half of humanity that doesn’t have enough in better things than being neo-slaves earning pittances for making baubles for the 10% of the world that enslaved them. Neither of these parties should be exploited and abused like slaves — the planet, or the half of humanity that still doesn’t have enough. Recognising them both as full persons is how our own opportunities for happiness expand — those of us in rich societies, anyways.

That’s a lot of ideas for one essay. Maybe they’re a little too disconnected, I don’t know. I hope you get, a little bit, the spirit of what I am trying to say to you. If you want me to sum it up more simply, take a look at the pic above. Little puppy, big world. That’s not just Snowy. That’s me and you, too.



Umair
January 2022
Eudaimonia and Co

FOX ‘Straight News’ Show Promotes Abolishing CDC

POSTED BY BRIAN -4PC ON JANUARY 03, 2022 · FLAG

Fox’s Special Report roundtable got a right-wing threefer Wednesday when they promoted demolishing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, attacked pandemic safety measures and used it all to smear President Joe Biden.

The pretext was the CDC’s decision to cut quarantine time for the coronavirus from 10 to five days. Not one of the panelists has any apparent credentials in public health or medicine.

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen got the politicization going.

THIESSEN: [H]onestly, we would have been better off in this if the CDC didn't exist. It's been a disaster from the beginning. Just this week they revised downward the prevalence of the Omicron variant from 73.2 percent, which they reported great confidence last week, to they said, no, it actually was 22.5. That's not a minor revision. That's a 50.7 percentage points. How do you get that badly wrong?

And they did this now on the isolation? They also came up with the six feet distance rule out of whole cloth. There was no science behind it. That's what shut down all these schools. So, the CDC were wrong on masking, they screwed up the testing at the beginning of the pandemic, they wouldn't let private labs do testing. The CDC is an absolute disaster. I don't understand how people can trust our public health officials anymore.

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane helped validate the messaging:

LANE: [P]eople will tolerate a lot of things from government in a situation like this. But the one thing they won't tolerate is mixed messages and confusion. And, unfortunately, I think that's kind of what's been coming out of the authorities all over the country now.

Anchor Bret Baier prodded for more, this time asking his unqualified panel to play education/child psychology experts. He said to right-winger Mollie Hemingway, “It’s hard to imagine virtual learning coming back across the country, Mollie, after what we saw for 18 months and the detriment that a lot of people say it did to kids.”

Sure enough, Hemingway played her part.

HEMINGWAY: It is scandalous that it's even being proposed. There was never good scientific reason for locking children away from school and in-person learning. It really is true now that we know that it is not something that is good for children, that it has a scientific basis.

I was so struck by how Anthony Fauci talked today in terms of the costs and benefits associated with different policies. Cost benefit analysis is what all of our public health officials and the people who listen to them should have been thinking about during this entire pandemic, and it's something that you don't really hear them talk about at all. When you look at schools, the cost to our children of banning children from schools have been way too high. It has been so bad for the mental health of these children. It has been so bad for the educational development of these children. That you have union officials and other bureaucrats talking about doing it again is scandalous.

Thiessen also played child development expert.

THIESSEN: Germany just reported that in 15 months not one single healthy child has died of COVID in Germany. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, was asked what the number was here in the United States. She said we don't know. The U.S. government doesn't know whether any healthy children have died of COVID. Well, Germany, not one. There is no excuse for closing schools. There is no excuse for the damage that we are doing to these children that they'll never, especially poorer minority kids, that they'll never recover from.

Nobody mentioned that Germany has strict public safety measures against COVID.

Schools are closing in the U.S. because COVID cases are at an all-time high. It’s too bad these fake experts won’t use their platform to urge people to mask up, get vaccinated and stop the spread. Instead, they’re using it to stop the public safety measures we have.

Hawaii upholds order requiring Navy to drain fuel tanks at center of water crisis
By Audrey McAvoy, The Associated Press
Jan 3, 2022

The Defense Department Inspector General is undertaking a sweeping investigation of the Navy and DoD's management of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii. The World War II-era facility has 20 steel-lined underground storage tanks encased in concrete. (Navy)

HONOLULU — Hawaii’s Department of Health on Monday upheld the governor’s order requiring the Navy to drain massive World War II-era fuel tanks after oil leaking from the aging facility contaminated Pearl Harbor’s tap water.

Marian Tsuji, the department’s deputy director, on Monday said she agreed with the conclusions of an official appointed by the department to review the facts of the case. She said she would adopt the official’s proposed findings as final, though would fix a typographical error.

The Navy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tsuji’s decision. Hawaii law allows parties to appeal such decisions in the court system.

RELATED

Top DoD official visits Hawaii base amid contaminated water crisis

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks visited the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility Dec. 14, speaking with military families and facility workers about the water issue.
By Rachel Nostrant

The department’s hearings officer for the case, Deputy Attorney General David Day, concluded the tanks were a “ticking time bomb” that threaten the water supply on the state’s populous island.

He said they posed “an imminent threat to human health and safety or the environment” and agreed with the governor’s order to defuel the tanks.

The Navy objected to Day’s findings last week, saying he used an “overbroad” interpretation of the Department of Health’s emergency authority to regulate underground fuel storage tanks. The Navy argued the tanks didn’t currently pose an “imminent” threat to human health and the environment.

Stop Normalizing Islamophobia

Hateful attacks on Ilhan Omar and other Muslims should be forcefully condemned, regardless of partisanship.

January 3, 2022 

by Other Words 


By Farrah Hassen

In her latest act of demonizing Muslims, Rep. Lauren Boebert recently insinuated at multiple events that Rep. Ilhan Omar could have been a suicide bomber because of her Islamic faith.

This might be business as usual for the Colorado Republican. But for Muslim Americans like myself, it’s another painful reminder of prevailing hatred in the country we call home.

In the past, Boebert has made other pointedly hateful anti-Muslim comments. She once called Omar the “Jihad Squad member from Minnesota” during a speech on the House floor, as well as an “honorary member of Hamas” on other occasions.

Boebert offered a non-apology apology on Twitter for her latest vitriol, but she refused to apologize directly to Omar.

More disturbingly yet unsurprisingly, Republican leaders have remained silent and refused to rebuke Boebert’s dangerous and bigoted rhetoric. Although House Democratic leaders have condemned Boebert’s latest comments, it remains to be seen whether they’ll issue a formal resolution or penalty regarding her statements.

Meanwhile, Omar has reported hundreds of death threats.

This episode isn’t just about an unhinged Congresswoman stoking the extreme fringe of the Republican base. The real issue is the ongoing normalization of Islamophobia in America, which has soared to frightening new heights since 9/11.

Islamophobia contains religious and racial components and generally refers to fear, prejudice, or hatred of Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim. Islamic traditions, culture, and religion come to be viewed as threats to Western values, which often leads to hostility, intolerance, and discriminatory practices.

These views have become commonplace in our culture. Politicians and pundits routinely make false claims that Muslim Americans seek to replace the Constitution with “Sharia law.” Even more pervasively, Hollywood and the mainstream media endlessly portray Muslims as inherently violent or oppressed.

After 9/11, Muslims became the main target of U.S. government policies that resulted in racial profiling and FBI surveillance of mosques across America. And from 2000 to 2009, hate crimes against American Muslims spiked by over 500 percent, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute. People of Arab and South Asian descent who “looked” Muslim were also attacked.

Since 9/11, the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims have had their religion conflated with the reprehensible terrorist acts of a few individuals. The Trump administration further exacerbated anti-Muslim sentiment through its policies, including the “Muslim ban,” which barred citizens of seven predominately Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S.

Twenty years after 9/11, a September 2021 report by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute surveyed Muslim Americans and found that 76 percent had experienced Islamophobia recently. Close to a quarter of respondents identified “discrimination/racism/prejudice,” followed by “ignorance/misconceptions of Islam,” as the top issues facing Muslim Americans.

These survey results only confirm why Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks against Omar must be forcefully condemned, regardless of partisanship. Leaving this behavior unchecked would send a message that hatred against Muslims is totally acceptable.

Even worse, it may inspire more acts of anti-Muslim hatred on top of the over 500 incidents documented in the U.S. so far this year.

Regardless of whether it occurs in the halls of Congress or in our communities, Islamophobia must end because, just like other forms of hate, it has no place in a free and just society.

The Muslim American perspective is rarely sought out in public debates over matters of our own discrimination. In that context, Rep. Omar’s response provides a much-needed voice: “I know that when we proudly stand up for our values — when we celebrate the diversity of this country, and the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, others stand with us.”

—

This post was previously published on otherwords.org and under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

India’s income inequality fell post 2020 lockdown as rich got poorer, US economic study shows

Non-peer-reviewed paper by US-based non-profit NBER says pandemic brought decline in inequality in two senses, the second being consumption inequality also fell marginally.

NIKHIL RAMPAL
4 January, 2022 

File photo | A view of the Outer Ring Road as shot with a drone camera during coronavirus lockdown in Bengaluru | PTI

New Delhi: Millions of Indians were pushed into poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the period post the initial strict lockdown also saw a decline in income inequality in the country, a working paper published last month has said.

The paper, titled ‘Inequality in India declined during Covid’, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based non-profit that focuses on conducting and disseminating research on economics, said the pandemic in India was associated with a decline in inequality in two senses. The first was that Indians from higher income groups had larger relative reductions in income than the poor, and the second was that consumption inequality also declined, albeit only marginally so.

The non-peer reviewed study was led by three scholars — Arpit Gupta from the Stern School of Business, University of New York, and Anup Malani and Bartosz Woda from the University of Chicago Law School.

The researchers’ main source of data was the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS),

Opinion

World has moved on from US, EU’s drug monopoly. India and China are changing IP regulations

Even without an IP waiver from the WTO, China and India are leading the challenge to the West’s vaccine monopoly.

HANNAH SWORN
3 January, 2022 

Vials of Zydus Cadila's Covid-19 vaccine ZyCoV-D | Photo: zyduscadila.com

Twenty years after the HIV/AIDS crisis, the world faces a new pandemic but a familiar problem. Technology needed to produce life-saving drugs remains fiercely guarded by the Western pharmaceutical companies who develop it. But there are signs that their tight grip may be loosening.

In the mid-1990s, a course of anti-retroviral drugs (ARTs) was priced at US$10,000. This was an impossible sum in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90 per cent of new HIV infections in 1995 were recorded. But governments of developing countries were blocked from supplying their HIV-affected citizens with affordable, generic alternatives by strict global intellectual property (IP) regulations.

Patents: power and regulations

In the negotiation of IP regulations, the world’s most powerful states use their economic clout to establish rules that disproportionately benefit them. Introduced at the behest of the United States and European Union, stringent IP standards protect high-value patented drugs developed by Western pharmaceutical companies.

Eventually recognising that HIV/AIDS could destabilise entire regions of the globe, the US and EU backed the 2001 World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha Declaration. This allowed governments to overrule IP regulations in the interest of public health. Facing competition from generic versions, the price of patented ARTs dropped to US$700 a year.

But after Doha, Western governments reverted to their old ways. Unable to work through the WTO, these powers shifted to threats of sanctions and narrower trade agreements to extinguish the IP flexibilities provided by the declaration.

In 2021, most IP related to COVID-19 vaccines is owned by pharmaceutical giants based in the US and EU who have reaped tens of billions of dollars in sales. Struggling to access immunisations, just under four per cent of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated.

This contrasts with the much higher 69 percent vaccination rate in high-income nations, an inequality that is prolonging the pandemic with new strains of the virus. Once again, developing countries are beseeching the WTO to waive IP protections. But the review process has been hamstrung for more than a year.

Also read: Govt panel recommends emergency use nod for Covovax, Corbevax

Big pharma vs generic drug makers

Drafted in 2015, the then Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a 12-member mega-regional free-trade agreement that would have required many less-developed signatories to increase IP protections — including for pharmaceuticals — beyond what was already mandated by the WTO.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was another controversial and ambitious US-driven arrangement that would have allowed countries to seize in-transit shipments of generic drugs suspected of IP infringements.

The rules embodied in these agreements once again bestowed advantages on Western pharmaceutical companies, while generic drug manufacturers based in countries like India, Brazil and Thailand were restricted in what they could produce.

Fearing the loss of precious access to the US and EU’s enormous markets, developing countries were prepared to capitulate to these IP regulations, all the while arguing that open access to knowledge was necessary for education, public health and economic development in their countries.

But since the 1990s, a tiger has joined the table. China has now overtaken both the US and the EU in GDP (PPP), positioning it to influence global IP regulations. While China has been reluctant to directly challenge the economic system that enabled its rise, it has endorsed flexible IP regulations advocated by the developing countries who are its most important economic partners.

Also read: Govt panel recommends EUA for COVID-19 vaccines Covovax, Corbevax and anti-Covid pill molnupiravir

Rival camps in global IP

Trends in recent trade agreements suggest that the US-EU regulatory hegemony may not be as robust as was presumed. Beijing has placed ASEAN at the centre of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a mega-regional trade agreement rivalling the TPP that does not include the US and EU.

The agreement, which will enter into force in a few weeks on 1 January 2022, has emerged with flexible, development-friendly IP provisions that contrast starkly with the TPP. When in 2017, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the TPP, RCEP became the world’s biggest free-trade agreement. Left to pick up the pieces, the remaining TPP members unveiled the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) a year later.

The CPTPP eliminated all but one of the original IP chapters — including those related to pharmaceuticals — while leaving the rest of the agreement intact. Suddenly, the global landscape of IP regulation appeared very different.

Thailand has now expressed interest in joining the CPTPP, citing a reduced threat to access to medicines, and China formally filed a bid to join in September 2021. If the CPTPP advances in its current form, global IP regulations will be even further cemented away from the US and EU’s preferences, giving generics manufacturers greater scope to produce affordable medicines.

Also read: SII gets DCGI nod to manufacture drug substance, test it for developing jab against Omicron

Asia steps up its pharmaceutical game

Even without an IP waiver from the WTO, vaccine competition is heating up as Asia’s pharmaceutical companies leverage high demand and an injection of funds into R&D to put alternative immunisations on the market. With the second and third highest number of COVID-19 vaccine developers in the world, China and India are leading the challenge to the West’s vaccine monopoly.

While Chinese vaccines suffer bad publicity from questionable efficacy rates, generics giant India has seen Baharat Biotech’s Covaxin recently obtain WHO emergency approval and has another immunisation hot on its tail from Zydus Cadila.

South Korea and Japan are investing billions of dollars in local vaccine development, with multiple candidates in clinical trials in both countries. Another high-profile generics manufacturer, Thailand, has two promising vaccines in the pipeline — one mRNA and another protein-based — as well as two nasal sprays beginning human trials.

Asia’s home-grown vaccines could drive down prices globally by increasing supply. They could also produce valuable spillover effects for the development of other innovative drugs, rendering Asian firms more competitive against their Western counterparts in the long run.

A fractured Western IP camp

The West’s IP dominance has not only been weakened by the changing balance of power, but also from within. The US and EU’s powerful partnership came under strain as the latter found it increasingly difficult to achieve agreement between the European Commission and European Parliament on IP issues.

In 2012, the European Parliament rejected ACTA, sealing its political death. Even the US’ special partner, the United Kingdom, has begun negotiations to join the CPTPP, further indicating the pact’s viability with countries that have traditionally been firmly in the US and EU’s IP camp.

But the trajectory of IP regulations is far from settled. Property protections are key for encouraging innovation, especially given the high R&D costs for pharmaceuticals. As countries develop and produce more innovations, they are likely to demand higher IP standards.

China is shifting from a dependence on trade in goods toward high-technology sectors that benefit from more stringent IP regulations. If history repeats itself, developing countries may once again find themselves at the mercy of these great power interests.

Hannah Elyse Sworn is a Senior Analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

This article was previously published by the RSIS and first published by 360info™ under Creative Commons. It has been reproduced here with permission.