Immanent Imaginal: The Loving and The Free

When the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic to El Paso Airport earlier this year, nobody could have guessed than an experimental high-energy laser weapon was the cause. After days of chaos and speculation, it was revealed that Customs and Border Patrol officials had fired off a laser volley from a US Army base adjacent the El Paso Airport. Though the trigger-happy Border Patrol grunts evidently thought they were firing at drug-smuggling drones, their real target turned out to be a kids’ party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test-drive a week before FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody in the air was killed. Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch, however.

New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.

We are an all-volunteer mutual aid food pantry and garden based in Gainesville, FL. We support our communities’ right to healthy and nutritious food by distributing free food through delivery and in-person services, and by growing some of the food ourselves! We give out food for free to people dealing with food insecurity, no questions asked. We deliver food to folks who can’t leave their homes due to lack of transportation or disability. We grow veggies at the McRorie Community Garden! All produce is distributed through our pantries.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

With public anger at AI data centers boiling over, all it takes is one bad neighbor to get every data center in town locked out. That’s the story unfolding in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where local officials are revoking waste-dumping privileges for every data center campus connected to municipal water services. As Cowboy State Daily reported, the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has rolled out a sweeping ban on fill-and-flush discharge, the process in which data centers flood their cooling systems with water before powering up for the first time. That decision came after one bad actor, the Meta-affiliated data center company Goat Systems LLC, flooded local waste water pipes with fill-and-flush swill containing a rare and deadly bacterium known as Cupriavidus gilardii. Per Cowboy State, Goat Systems was found to be in “significant noncompliance” with Cheyenne’s industrial waste regulations after a months-long investigation traced the bacteria to Meta’s discharge. “This isn’t something we normally test for,” Frank Strong, Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities engineering and water resource division manager told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle of the investigation. Strong noted that the bacterium was first spotted during routine testing for fecal contamination, adding that it’s a bizarre pathogen to find in any wastewater, even that coming from a data center. “We actually had to go through quite a process to figure out what it was,” he said. Cupriavidus is a little-known, multidrug-resistant pathogen. Though human infection is extremely rare, it has nonetheless been linked to ten deaths, including three cases involving immunocompromised children. According to one review of Cupriavidus cases, the bacterial infection has a mortality rate of 31.3 percent, out of a sample size of 32 known infections dating back to 2009. “As soon as we became aware of the bacteria, and then of where it was coming from, we shut them down immediately,” Strong told the Wyoming Tribune. Strong caveated that the exact source of the pathogen within the facility is still unknown, but that wastewater from Meta’s 800,000 square foot Cheyenne campus — which is still under construction — nonetheless contained it. Cheyenne’s sanitary sewer system routes to a water reclamation plant, which supplies water for parks and other public green space. Citing concerns around what happens if Cupriavidus-laden water was released during irrigation, Strong says the city temporarily shuttered its reclamation program to conduct additional tests.