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The United States-Mexico border has become a war zone. It is also a transfer station for sophisticated American military technology and weapons. As our country’s foreign wars have begun to wind down, defense contractors look here, on the southern border, to make money.

Lately it has become entirely normal to look up into the Arizona sky and to see Blackhawk helicopters and fixed-wing jets flying by. On a clear day, you can sometimes hear Predator B drones buzzing over the Sonoran border. These drones are equipped with the same kind of “man-hunting” Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (Vader) that flew over the Dashti Margo desert region in Afghanistan.

…

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Customs and Border Protection, plans to invest billions more in borderland surveillance towers, drones and helicopters if the House adopts the immigration reform bill that the Senate passed in June.

Even if it doesn’t pass, there is more than $1 billion in the federal budget for surveillance towers that will likely be clustered around the Arizona desert lands, near Mr. Loew’s farm, where most undocumented migrants cross the border.

The Republican senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota added a proposal to the immigration bill that would provide about $40 billion in financing for extra agents and 700 miles of fencing along the United States’ southern boundary, which Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, noted would become “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Indeed, if the Senate’s bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, passes in the House, the Border Patrol will swell to 40,000 agents, making it the size of a small army.

…

Mr. Loew says he wonders if the agents were veterans, since so many Border Patrol recruits seem to be ex-military men; in fact, almost one-third of all agents have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s no wonder that more and more people in the 100-mile zone from across the political spectrum view the Border Patrol as an occupying army.

If immigration reform passes, it will mark another milestone in a transformation that has already resulted in the creation of a war-zone-like area in which agents enjoy special powers to chase down, question and detain people.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/opinion/sunday/war-on-the-border.html?pagewanted=2&ref=opinion&

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Here in Britain, our weakling government is attempting to launch a web filter that would somehow erase “violent material” from Internet provision — placing it, by association, in the same category as child pornography. Every week seems to bring a new attempt to ban something or other because it’s uncomfortably or scary or perhaps even indefensibly disgusting. Meanwhile, Jim Carrey is refusing to promote his latest film, Kick-Ass 2, following a change of heart in which he “cannot support that level of violence.”

That, right there, is the problem, as I see it.

Imagine if Mr. Carrey had instead decided to do the press tour for Kick-Ass 2. Imagine if, on every stop on the junket, he’d used this promotional soapbox to talk about real-world violence versus violent fiction. His reticence to appear in support of the film comes from the Newtown shooting event — an event, like all the others, characterized by those left behind saying, “I don’t understand.”

The fact that he didn’t use the opportunity is less a failure of intelligence and imagination than it is a symptom of the way we generally demonize violent acts and violent work. We make them Other, and we just distance ourselves. They are Other, and they didn’t come from us, and we’re just going to stand over there and shake our heads sadly. And, moreover, anyone who gets closer to it in order to experience or understand it must be a freak.

…

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

http://www.vulture.com/m/2013/08/warren-ellis-essay-why-we-need-violent-stories.html

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catvincent:

5 Man Job: Team structures in The Invisibles and Leverage

It’s canon that The Invisibles cells work on a rotating 5-person structure, at least in the main cell we get to see. Each role defined by an element, each selected randomly and changed round often.

So I woke up on 14 August thinking about how the team in Leverage is also a 5-person team with well-defined roles & wondered if it’d fit an Invisibles cell structure.

(And if you doubt the relevance of the Leverage team… well, go and watch the show. They are very much part of the Rescue Operation.)


Trouble is, finding just what that cell structure is turns out to be non-trivial…

From the Invisibles text;
(guesses and half-remembered in brackets):
Guesses as to group role written as BOLD?
((Other notes in double brackets))

AIR  (yellow) –  LEADER  (originally King Mob, then Robin – from Vol 2, issue 2, “Kickin’”)

EARTH (black)  –  LOGISTICS  (originally (Robin?), then King Mob)

FIRE (red) –  COMBAT? (orig. (Boy?), then Fanny) ((Includes combat and tactical magic, e.g. Fanny taking down the security in Dulce))

WATER (blue) – PSI-OPS? (orig Fanny, then Jack) ((I’m taking Psi-Ops to mean both psychic work & social engineering))

SPIRIT (white)  – HEART/CENTRE? (orig Jack, then Boy) ((I’m sure I remember a reference to Jack as the team’s spiritual heart))




Here’s the much clearer scheme for the Leverage outfit…
From Leverage credits: 




THE HITTER – Elliot Spencer



THE HACKER – Alec Hardison

 ((Who also handles logistics, financials etc))

THE GRIFTER  – Sophie Devereaux



THE THIEF – Parker ((Who the show does eventually define as the odd little heart of the team))



THE BRAINS – Nathan ‘Nate’ Ford




So therefore, one could more-or-less map the two schemes over each other thus…



AIR = LEADER = NATE


EARTH = LOGISTICS = HARDISON


FIRE = COMBAT = ELLIOT


WATER =PSI-OPS = SOPHIE


SPIRIT = HEART = PARKER



Or, to put it another way…




THE HITTER – BOY



THE HACKER – ROBIN



THE GRIFTER  – FANNY



THE THIEF – JACK



THE BRAINS – KING MOB

I leave the deeper elemental aspects of this schema as an exercise for the alert reader/viewer. And if anyone has any questions or corrections or improvements, sing out!

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Gandhi remains today the only complete critique of advanced industrial society. Others have criticized its totalitarianism but not its productive apparatus. He is not against science and technology, but he places priority on the right to work and opposes mechanization to the extent that it usurps this right. Large-scale machinery, he holds, concentrates wealth in the hands of one man who tyrannizes the rest. He favors the small machine; he seeks to keep the individual in control of his tools, to maintain an interdependent love relation between the two, as a cricketer with his bat or Krishna with his flute. Above all, he seeks to liberate the individual from his alienation to the machine and restore morality to the productive process.

Nelson Mandela on Mahatma Gandhi for Time. (via thejaymo)
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