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My rejection of war and violence…

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This was my second tattoo at 18 years old.April 23, 2025 / Fabiola Cardozo  Ponte / NNOMY -  It began at a very young age, born and raised in an environment of precariousness and economic hardship, where I felt the hostility of the world. Structural violence reduces your opportunities for advancement and makes your life an endless series of daily challenges. Living in a poor home where violence and its various manifestations were present made me understand that it was neither appropriate nor fair for me or any other human being. Over time, I grew up rejecting all expressions of violence, but at the same time, I strengthened my rebelliousness, my critical thinking, and my insatiable need to explore other ways of relating. From a young age, I was certain that education was my only option to overcome my situation of extreme poverty, and I took refuge in books. I had a special sensitivity to the injustices, slights, and marginalization of the victim era, and although my destiny seemed already determined by my social class and gender, I continued as a good rebel, determined to achieve what I so yearned for… At 16, I had a clear understanding of Gandhi's principles, his peaceful resistance, his Satyagraha, and his rejection of any unjust social imposition. The economic difficulties continued, and although I attended various public universities, it was in 2018 that I finally graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a degree in Sociology, and in 2021 from the Latin American and Caribbean University with a degree in International Humanitarian Law.

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DOGE gets access to Selective Service registration database

U.S. Selective Service SystemApril 17, 2025 / Edward Hasbrouck / Edward Hasbrouck's Blog - The Selective Service System has confirmed that, as of this week, personnel from the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have arrived at the SSS and have been given access to the SSS database of men registered for a possible military draft.

Today an SSS spokesperson provided me with this official response to my questions about DOGE and SSS records:

A DOGE representative visited our Agency this week. We’ve established a great working relationship. They asked us about our data and requested access, which we gave in compliance with the President’s Executive Order on Establishing and Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency.

The SSS spokesperson also told me that no new computer matching programs involving SSS registration records have been carried out (yet) by DOGE. But it’s not clear whether the SSS would even know what DOGE has done with SSS data, once DOGE has gotten access to it and possibly exfiltrated it. DOGE and the SSS have operated computer matching programs that appear to violate the Computer Matching Act, so there’s little reason to expect that either would provide the required advance notice of new uses of SSS data.

The SSS registration database contains information on all those male U.S. citizens or residents born on or after 1 January 1960 who have registered with the SSS or have been registered by state driver’s license agencies. Compliance is low, many men in these cohorts never registered, and few of the addresses, even for draft-age men, are up to date. But the database is still huge and vulnerable to abuse. Because SSS registration records are so inaccurate and incomplete, matching them against other databases would produce large numbers of mis-matches, with unknown consequences.

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The Army Is Losing Nearly One-Quarter of Soldiers in the First 2 Years of Enlistment

The Army is grappling with a staggering attrition rate among newly enlisted troops, even as recent recruiting figures suggest the service is clawing its way out of a yearslong enlistment crisis.

Nearly one-quarter of soldiers recruited since 2022 have failed to complete their initial contracts, according to internal Army data reviewed by Military.com. While the Army's recruiting totals look solid on paper, a high dropout rate raises serious doubts about whether those numbers are an accurate portrayal of how well the service is manned.

It remains unclear why the Army is losing so many soldiers, but one explanation could be the declining quality of its recruiting pool. One-quarter of all enlistees last year had to go through at least one of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, which were set up as a sort of silver bullet for recruiting woes -- getting applicants up to snuff with academic or body fat enlistment standards before they ship out to basic training.

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The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship

Donald Trump’s dismantling of the deep state presages the formation of something far worse.

 

One Mind - by Mr. FishFeb. 18, 2025 / Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report - The Trump administration’s war with the deep state is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance. It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.

All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d'état by inches. Now we get our own.

Rearguard battles — as in the early years of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — are taking place in the courts and media outlets openly hostile to Trump. There will be, at first, pyrrhic victories — the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were stalled by their own judiciaries and hostile press — but gradually the purges, aided by a bankrupt liberalism that no longer stands or fights for anything, ensures the triumph of the new masters.

The Trump administration has expelled or fired officials who investigate wrongdoing within the federal government, including 17 inspectors general. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump. Courts, as they are stacked with compliant judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.

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Rep. Sara Jacobs: FY 2025 NDAA Will Undermine Military Recruitment

Glad to join @Sdmac_official for their 2024 Military Economic Impact Report rollout highlighting the importance of lowering costs for military families and how San Diego is driving innovation in defense and technology. I will keep prioritizing these important issues in Congress.December 11, 2024 / Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs / Media CenterPress Releases - Rep. Sara Jacobs (CA-51) released the following statement after voting against the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a gender-affirming care ban for dependents. If passed into law, this would mark the first time that Congress put anti-LGBTQ+ provisions into statute since Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s. This year’s NDAA also failed to include Rep. Jacobs’ bipartisan and bicameral provision to expand TRICARE coverage of IVF and other assisted reproductive technology to service members and their spouses.

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The Pentagon Goes to School

The Battle for the Soul of American Science

September 30, 2024 / William Hartung / Tom Dispatch - The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

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Military Draft Sign-Ups Plunge as War Fears Rise

Image: Selective Service System - US GovOctober 11, 2024 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - Of men in the U.S. who turned 18 in 2023, fewer than 40% signed up for the draft – down from more than 60% in 2020 before the start of the war in Ukraine.

This eye-popping and previously undisclosed admission, as well as other revelations equally damning to plans to increase readiness to activate a draft, was included in documents released recently by the Selective Service System (SSS) in response to a Freedom Of Information Act request.

The SSS maintains a database of eligible male U.S. citizens and residents who could be conscripted if and when Congress and the President institute a draft. Per the law, American males must register within 30 days of their 18th birthday or find it difficult to get a drivers license in some states.

Public statements from supporters of draft registration have justified preparation for a draft as needed for national emergencies, self-defense, or implausible existential threats such as a Chinese invasion of the mainland US. But the lead bullet point in the newly-disclosed SSS talking points to Congress in support of the SSS proposal to automatically register all young Americans for a future draft is the possible activation of a U.S. draft for foreign wars in Ukraine and/or the Middle East.

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