i am out with lanterns

gaza soup kitchen

the sameer project

salam charity

Once the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, the United States had a huge army in Iraq and a smaller but still significant one in Afghanistan, and it could not recruit or retain enough troops to staff both. Rather than reinstate the draft as in Vietnam, they looked for another solution.

There was serious discussion in 2005 and 2006 about bringing back conscription. A “Reinstate the Draft” bill went into Congress because there was broad recognition that the military was breaking and needed more bodies. Rumsfeld dismissed that option. George W. Bush said he would have vetoed it if it passed, and in the end it didn’t. They were haunted by the memory of Vietnam and the role the draft played in turning the US public against that war and forcing withdrawal in 1973.

With the Iraq war already unpopular, they feared a draft would be the final straw. So, rather than conscription, they dismantled regulations built up since Vietnam. Some of this was public. They raised the enlistment age from thirty-five to forty-two. They loosened rules on body weight so heavier people could sign up.

What I wanted to investigate was the groups they were not advertising, the ones being quietly enfranchised by this new free-for-all that the Pentagon was embarrassed about and trying to hide. The first and most obvious were neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Over three decades, the military had put in place specific rules to keep such people out. The reasons were straightforward. Sending neo-Nazis and white supremacists into a country of mostly brown people with automatic weapons is not going to end well. Those same people then come back to the United States or serve on domestic bases. They are often highly violent, with an accelerationist, sometimes openly terroristic outlook, and they can turn US-funded training into a resource for what they call a “racial holy war” at home.

Those protective regulations were effectively switched off. When I started talking to neo-Nazis and their organizations, they all told me the same thing: “We have never had it this good in the US military. We can get in with swastikas, we can get in with SS bolts.” That was the starting point for a yearslong investigation.

I found they were not just being tolerated; some were promoted. One of the central figures in the book is Forrest Fogarty, who served in Iraq in 2004–5. He is an American History X–style neo-Nazi, completely open about his politics. When I met him, he told me that his commanders all knew he was a Nazi and liked it. They sent him on the hardest missions because they thought he was “hardcore.”

You can't change anything with your actions so don't bother. You going vegetarian won't shut down a factory farm so don't bother. You buying something in sustainable packaging won't make a dent in the landfill so don't bother. You donating five bucks to a charity won't solve poverty so don't bother. You buying ethically-made clothing won't stop sweatshops from operating so don't bother.

I agree that the only way these problems are going to get solved is if the government enacts regulations to do so, but the key point here is that the government is not going to spontaneously do that. Everybody says they want to protect the environment and for people to make a living wage in the abstract but as soon as regulations start being passed people start throwing fits about how it's impacting their lives.

If the government banned factory farms, meat would suddenly be priced like a luxury item and people would throw fits about how poor people can't afford protein anymore, if they banned plastic packaging people would throw fits about how we're expected to bear the increased production costs, if they banned imports of items made in sweatshops or by slave labor people would throw fits about how they can't get their coffee and chocolate and electronics anymore.

There's a post on here about how community river clean-ups don't actually make much of an impact on water pollution, because the major cause of water pollution isn't random trash but industrial and agricultural run-off. But the clean-ups are still extremely valuable because they get the community invested in the cause of water pollution, the community starts taking pride in their local environment and start actually caring about environmental regulations on a personal level, and that grants activists the buy-in to push for changes that actually can reduce water pollution.

We absolutely must get individual buy-in before we can expect systemic change. You can't solve systemic problems with individual action, but you can't solve them without it either. Making small changes to your consumption habits isn't going to fix the world, but it gets people invested in and connected to the cause, it makes them feel like they're part of a larger movement, and it primes them to think of these regulations as wins for that movement rather than a sacrifice being forced upon them by the government.

We are living in a tent with almost nothing, trying to get through one day at a time. But my biggest fear right now is my father. His health is getting worse, and he needs treatment and medication that we are struggling to afford every single day.

I never imagined that I would have to ask strangers for help just to keep my family going and to keep my father alive. But this is where we are now.

Please help my family with a donation and share our story with your friends.

We are still here, still trying to hold on. Please don’t let us face this alone.

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"