The Already Forgotten War

I am not the first member of my family to spend time in the Gulf. 

In 1991, when I was in seventh grade, my mom’s Army Reserve Unit, the 50th General Hospital, was activated for the first time since the Normandy landing. She was deployed to Saudi Arabia as a part of Operation Desert Shield to provide medical care in support of what would become the first of two US military invasions of Iraq. 

Military service is a tradition in my family. My father was a Warrant Officer in the Army and this was his route to the PNW. My brother was in the Army. My uncle was an Airmen, my step-father was drafted into the Army and wounded in the Vietnam War. I split the difference between my uncle and my mother and I enlisted in the US Air Force Reserves after high school. It felt like what I was supposed to do and I figured it would help pay for college. I enjoyed my time in the military. It gave me my first taste of travel—much of it in Texas.

But by mid-2002 the terrain changed. I publicly opposed the impending war in Iraq and my commentary about the war made for awkward situations during the waning days of my enlistment. I remember reading Norman Soloman’s Target Iraq and trying to explain the ways public opinion was being shaped in support of the war. I remember reading a PDF copy of Chomsky’s What Uncle Sam Really Wants and giving people highlighted copies of excerpts of the text. In 2003, I decided not to reenlist. I had become more a “college kid” than an “Airman”—those two aspects of my life having been at tension for years.

As the war went on, I remember being enraged listening to pols & pundits say “no one knew…” or “who could have foreseen…” as body counts soared and the nation soured on the war. It’s odd how clear those memories from twenty years ago are in my head because it seems like we’ve collectively forgotten about the Iraq War. 

The Iraq invasion was based on false premises from the jump.  The war was catastrophic, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, wasting an estimated 2.4 trillion USD ($2,400,000,000,000) dollars of taxpayer money, and destabilizing much of the region. The war undermined American legitimacy in the region. It created a power vacuum that allowed extremist groups like ISIS to rise and allowed Iran to make the new government in Iraq another of its client states. The war inspired the largest protests in human history, damaging America's reputation and credibility with its allies. 

The Iraq invasion was a disastrous decision, a bipartisan blunder that passed  77-23 in the US Senate. All but the Ron Paul brand of Republicans were champions of the war and nearly 60% of Congressional Democrats supported it. My own Senator Maria Cantwell voted for it; 2016 Democratic Nominee, Hillary Clinton voted for it; Joe Biden voted for it, calling it “not a rush to war but a march to peace and stability.” But no one in the US political establishment ever faced any consequences for this failure. The cost was paid by the people of Iraq and the 7,000 US servicemembers and military contractors who died in the conflict. 

For my older students, the invasion is like Watergate is for people my age: a formative event with lasting repercussions that happened before I was born, like a memory belonging to someone else.

The Iraq War was the moment I learned America is allergic to holding people in power accountable. We saw this again during the 2008 crisis, poor Covid pandemic management, and are seeing it again with the current bank liquidity crisis. This allergy is arguably the defining characteristic of America’s political culture.

The Feds Were Asleep at the Switch for Crypto, AI Could Be Much Worse

An annoying part about getting older is that you realize how cyclical things are and that much of life is the same hustles and hassles with new names and labels. Whatever your thoughts about cryptocurrency (I'm a skeptic but also own a small amount), it's indisputable the sector is rife with scams, rugpulls, and unregulated securities. As a result, billions were lost in crypto hacks and scams over the last two years (see table below). This isn’t counting the firms like FTX, Celsius, and Voyager that went under, wiping out an additional 200 billion dollars from retail investors and people who trusted the shadow banks called crypto exchanges.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally woke up from its multi-decade slumber this month and issued massive fines against several crypto exchanges and the influencers shilling for them. Retired NBA star Paul Pierce was fined 1.4 million dollars for promoting a token called Ethereum Max. EMax was a pump & dump scheme where new investors were served up as exit-liquidity for the founders. EMax currently trades at $0.00000000099 per worthless token. Kim Kardashian was fined a similar amount for touting the same token in December. Regulators have stablecoins in their sights. Crypto exchange Kraken agreed to a 30 million dollar fine and agreed to shut down their staking program (if you don’t know what crypto staking is, you’re probably better off that way). Kraken’s rival Binance is expecting a massive fine as well.

2022 was a record year for hackers in crypto - Source: Decrypt, data from Chainalysis

The handwriting was on the wall for years about crypto scams but federal authorities waited over a decade before acting. In the interim millions of people were harmed. A regulatory framework for crypto exists and has existed since before the first token came to market. We can't afford to wait fourteen or even four years for the government to set the ground rules for AI. The potential for society wide harm is incalculably larger. 

After-the-fact debates are biased toward the expansion, rather than limitation, of a practice. In 2016, the city of Dallas had to reckon with the question of whether they would allow police to kill a barricaded shooter with a remote operated drone. They decided "yes" this is an acceptable use of force. Unfortunately, they decided it retroactively, months after the police had killed their target (with a Remotec Androx Mark V A-1, manufactured by Northrup Grumman). The police department refused to release documents related to the decision to use the robot and the city absolved the chief and the entire chain of command after the incident. The police chief, David Brown, now runs the police department in Chicago and there’s now a precedent regarding the use remote operated robots to kill people.

As venture capital abandons crypto projects, opting to fund cowboy AI projects, policymakers can't be passive. The potential harm from AI in journalism, financial markets, deep-fake aided scams, and law enforcement use of force have the potential to do far more damage than the crypto bros. Letting the DARPA and Boston Dynamic chips (see video) fall where they may is societal malpractice. If my concerns here seem alarmist to you, imagine trying to explain in-flight wifi to someone in 1994.

We can't wait to make the decision about the limits we will put on the use of AI until after they’re deployed. If you don't think there's people in law enforcement salivating to deploy AI robots and drones in low-income and Black neighborhoods, you don't know American history.

Back in Tacoma for the Holidays

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch

You really are a heel,

You're as cuddly as a cactus, you're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.

In my pre-teaching life, I spent six years working at UPS. The holidays were my most chaotic and least restful time of year. It shaped how I view the season today. Combined with my general anti-consumerist bent* (and putting my faith to the side), I'm pretty meh on the festive season. But we live at the mercy of those we love. After what my family has been through the last two years, coming home and celebrating with family was a must. So after fourteen hours sitting in a right-triangle of crying babies, Hope and I touched back down in Cascadia on Monday.

The fifty-five degree temperature change tested the limits of my layering. I departed our apartment in Abu Dhabi in a t-shirt, adding a hoodie at DXB. I donned another layer upon landing, and added a fourth as I exited Sea-Tac into the blowing snow. It’s currently Timberland boots and goose down cold here. But we made it.

Each time we return to Tacoma feels a bit odd. This is now our fourth year overseas and we've signed contracts for year five. So, the earliest we would return, barring an unforeseen emergency, would be summer of 2024. But even that seemingly distant date is unlikely. The trends in public education that caused us to decide to pursue work abroad have accelerated, not abated.  I struggle to picture myself sliding back into my old role. I know there's a future for us in Tacoma but that time isn't now, not yet. 

With all that swirling in my head, on Thursday night I got up in front of an audience of civics nerds and  hosted Adult Civics Happy Hour at the Press Room. ACHH is a series of live events that I began hosting in various forums in Tacoma five years ago. It’s a live community dialogue featuring policymakers, journalists and activists. Thursday's program, the first since the start of the pando, included two panels: one on the local sheriff and one on the upcoming legislative session.

The legislative panel, L to R: yer boi, Rep Bateman, Sen Trudeau, Rep-elect Mena

The situation with the sheriff is telling for where things are right now. The window for meaningful police accountability laws that opened with the mass protests of 2020 has largely closed, with little gained to show for it. Pierce County is a microcosm of the country. Tacoma has four murdering police on a multi-year administrative vacation for a killing they committed in March 2020.  The county has a sheriff that is drunk on power (among other things); he was recently acquitted in a trial where he was charged with making false reports. During the trial multiple witnesses, including fellow officers, indicated he had lied, repeatedly. But he was acquitted by a jury (If you’re not local and want to learn more about this case, I have covered it on my podcast here, here, and here.)

In the second panel, three state legislators talked about the upcoming legislative session. We talked about their policy priorities, what was likely to pass and I asked about my priority issues  as well. The audio from both panels will be on future episodes of Nerd Farmer. 

I acknowledge that it is odd (but also very me) to fly 7,500 miles across the globe to visit family and also toss in hosting a sold out political forum. But we did it—we packed out the venue on a brick cold night. It felt good, like putting on that old comfortable sweater you haven’t worn in ages.