Thursday, September 11, 2025

Perspective.

https://www.bespacific.com/national-guard-documents-show-public-fear-troops-shame-over-dc-presence/

National Guard documents show public ‘fear,’ troops’ ‘shame’ over DC presence

Washington Post – no paywall: “The National Guard, in measuring public sentiment about President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., has assessed that its mission is perceived as ‘leveraging fear,’ driving a ‘wedge between citizens and the military,’ and promoting a sense of ‘shame’ among some troops and veterans.” (How do we have access to internal National Guard documents? Someone accidentally sent them to the Post.) The assessments, which have not been previously reported, underscore how domestic mobilizations that are rooted in politics risk damaging Americans’ confidence in the men and women who serve their communities in times of crisis. The documents reveal, too, with a rare candor in some cases, that military officials have been kept apprised that their mission is viewed by a segment of society as wasteful, counterproductive and a threat to long-standing precedent stipulating that U.S. soldiers — with rare exception — are to be kept out of domestic law enforcement matters. Trump has said the activation of more than 2,300 National Guard troops was necessary to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, though data maintained by the D.C. police indicates an appreciable decline was underway long before his August declaration of an “emergency.” In the weeks since, the Guard has spotlighted troops’ work assisting the police and “beautifying” the city by laying mulch and picking up trash, part of a daily disclosure to the news media generated by Joint Task Force D.C., the military command overseeing the deployment.

Not for public consumption, however, is an internal “media roll up” that analyzes the tone of news stories and social media posts about the National Guard’s presence and activities in Washington. Government media relations personnel routinely produce such assessments and provide summaries to senior leaders for their awareness. They stop short of drawing conclusions about the sentiments being raised. Trending videos show residents reacting with alarm and indignation,” a summary from Friday said. “One segment features a local [resident] describing the Guard’s presence as leveraging fear, not security — highlighting widespread discomfort with what many perceive as a show of force.”





Another protocol to ignore?

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/ais-free-web-scraping-days-may-be-over-thanks-to-this-new-licensing-protocol/

AI's free web scraping days may be over, thanks to this new licensing protocol

AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight publishers and tech companies -- Reddit, Yahoo, People, O'Reilly Media, Medium, and Ziff Davis (ZDNET's parent company) -- have developed a response: the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard. 

You can think of RSL as Really Simple Syndication's (RSS) younger, tougher brother. While RSS is about syndication, getting your words, stories, and videos out onto the wider web, RSL says: "If you're an AI crawler gobbling up my content, you don't just get to eat for free anymore."

The idea behind RSL is brutally simple. Instead of the old robots.txt file -- which only said, "yes, you can crawl me," or "no, you can't," and which AI companies often ignore -- publishers can now add something new: machine-readable licensing terms. 

Want an attribution? You can demand it. Want payment every time an AI crawler ingests your work, or even every time it spits out an answer powered by your article? Yep, there's a tag for that too. 



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