Drones That Fire Pepper Spray Bullets

Using a BBC technology article as a source, Bruce Schneier tells us about these newly available weapons:

Desert Wolf's website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second.

In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls.

The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as "blinding lasers" and on-board speakers that can communicate warnings to a crowd.

If you're planning the next-generation Occupy movement, you may want to consider the casualties to be inflicted on practitioners of a legal and once-respectable civic activity, and prepare by having several hospitals at your disposal. Given the thirst for violence evidenced by some big-city police departments in the original Occupy protests, one may be confident this isn't going to be pretty.

Amy Goodman Interviews Robert Reich About Life, The Universe And Everything His New Film

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and current professor at Berkeley, speaks about the new film (opens 9/27) to which he contributed much of the content, Inequality For All. Here's the interview. It's about an hour long, and if you've ever been involved in any aspect of a social and economic justice movement, that hour will pass very quickly:



When I was a young man, I thought (as doubtless you also thought, if you're bothering to read this blog) that we were going to save the world, or at least the nation, from environmental depredation and gross economic injustice. Not only has our good head start on those twin movements vanished, we... the nation and the human world... are now in the worst shape we have ever been. What went wrong, and what, if anything, can be done?

Robert Reich, in his new film INEQUALITY FOR ALL: A Passionate Argument on Behalf of the Middle Class, attempts to address those questions. If you're lucky, you live in a city in which the film is opening (Austin is one; Dallas is one... Houston is not). If not, maybe you can persuade a friend with a large living room to host a showing. I am fairly certain your time and money will be well-spent.

Pepper-Spraying Cop Applies For Workers Comp, Claiming Psych Injuries

This is astonishing. At the same time, in this day and age, it's unsurprising. Here's a submicroscopic snippet from AP via TPM:

Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Students At Occupy Protest Wants Worker’s Compensation For ‘Psychiatric Injury’

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — The former police officer who pepper-sprayed students during an Occupy protest at the University of California, Davis is appealing for worker’s compensation, claiming he suffered psychiatric injury from the 2011 confrontation.

...

You remember? THIS guy?

I agree he needs therapy. I suggest music therapy. Perhaps a thousand repetitions of the inimitable Dave Lippman's "Sgt. Pepper Spray & Heads Clubbed Band" ...

Post-Occupied

It is with real sadness that I remove the Occupy banner from the upper left corner of this blog. What is left of the Occupy movement seems at once more distributed around the world and more focused on effecting change in America by means not so much designed to obstruct "the system" as to use it effectively in pursuit of things that really need to be done. The Wikipedia post concludes as follows:

The Occupy movement is now more a global collection of groups working toward similar goals under the Occupy name than an effort to occupy physical spaces. These groups include Occupy Sandy which has provided needed relief to the New York Area since Hurricane Sandy hit,^[175] Occupy London's Occupy Economics group that hosted, and was praised by the Bank of England's Executive Director for Financial Stability,^[176] Occupy the SEC which monitors US financial regulatory matters ^[177] and Strike Debt ^[178] which is raising money to retire defaulted debt.^[179] There are numerous non-listed groups and actions.

In the words of a Forbes Magazine blog: "But this is a protest movement of techno-competent, administratively well-informed, thinkers, do-ers and creators who know the system well and have levers in it. The changes that we need to see happen will come about because of them and what they are capable of, not because of what they object to."^[180]

(See the wiki for footnotes.)

We owe our thanks to the Occupy Movement for shaking things up for a while, using mostly nonviolent means that stood in stark contrast to violent responses by many local governments, especially New York City. If I were in one of those city governments, I wouldn't be too self-satisfied at having "put down" the protests: what is left behind may prove of greater long-term importance than what was dispersed by police with rubber bullets, tasers, pepper spray, handcuffs, billy clubs and portable fences. Only time will tell.

Occupy Sandy... Wow

Cynthia Kouril at FDL tells us how, in the face of super storm Sandy, Occupy Wall Street, now transformed into Occupy Sandy, is effectively managing the recovery effort.

Not the city. Not the police. Not FEMA. Not even the Red Cross. No, it's OWS, delivering the organizational skills and labor to make it happen. Here's Kouril:

OWS did what they do best, rallied compassionate people, started cooking meals and gave them away, just like at Liberty Plaza (it’s hard to get me to call it Zuccotti Park). They organized blankets and flashlights and charging stations (including the Green Peace solar truck and those cool Gilligan’s Island bicycle generators), just as they did at Liberty Plaza. They knocked on doors to ask the stranded residents what they needed. They sent out tweets for “needs of the occupiers” and supporters from all over the world sent supplies, just like at Liberty Plaza. They even improved on that with an Occupy Sandy “wedding registry” on Amazon that helps do[n]ors to ship supplies quickly and easily. Genius!

But you need to read the whole post to capture the flavor of just how effectively this large, amorphous, leaderless organization (can one call it an organization?) has succeeded where established recovery channels have failed. Somebody needs to tell the world about this. But our media, instead, delivers Mayor Bloomberg's press conferences to an audience of people whose electricity is on. Ah, irony!

Can Occupy Use Techniques And Approaches From The Civil Rights Movement?

In a long, thought-provoking piece, Ted Rall says NO, and explains his reasons at length and in considerable detail.

For better and worse, the 1950s and 1960s are long, long past. Many conditions of that era which permitted the civil rights movement to accomplish its goals are either absent or completely reversed in today's federal government.

Read what Rall has to say; we all have some hard thinking to do about what comes next.