Babies in the war. Fake Plastic Oceans. The Taxman Cometh.

Roughly 15 years ago, the US invaded Iraq, an incredibly foolish, strategic decision that was stupid in hindsight and stupid at the time. Since then, several Presidents, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, have staked some to significant parts of their candidacy on saying they either didn’t support the invasion, or would disentangle the US from that region. Clearly, it has been a blow to the US in all areas: Lives, suicides, PTSD, burn pits, military standing, financial waste, etc… But we were lucky. In comparison, it destroyed Iraq.

Of the many things I regret, this is one: failing to allow an expectant mother with pregnancy complications and her husband violate night time curfew to get to the hospital. My platoon could have escorted them to the hospital. Simple. As a 22-year old Second Lieutenant, what did I know about life, pregnancy, and babies? Maybe this is why this scene from Children of Men has always resonated with me.

Looking back, if the father and I traded shoes, I wouldn’t be surprised if I too, would have sworn a blood oath against the American occupiers after that night. We are good at creating our own enemies: Inadvertently, clumsily, personally, and strategically.

There are countless micro-stories like this from soldiers like me who created trauma. Of course, sympathy should be extended to the traumatized and not the ones who live to tell. But perhaps there is something to be said about the damage and blowback experienced by both the passer and the receiver (the bully and the bullied). For the Iraq war it has become a pox on both of our houses at not just the nation state level but at the individual level. And for some veterans, the major damage of the war isn’t the physical component, but the mental and visceral element.

“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs! […] But you’re not going to write it that way, are you […] You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.” – Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five

The Taxman Cometh for the Techopolies: Europe is leading the way in the quest to recoup revenue from technology companies that have avoided paying their share of corporate taxes by registering in low-tax countries. On Wednesday, at the G-20 trade summit in Buenos Aires, EU officials outlined a plan ushering in sweeping changes in how digital businesses in the 28-nation bloc would be taxed. The system would tax a company’s revenues in the countries where revenues are generated, rather than on its profits, which regulators say are too easily moved to regional offices in certain countries to reduce a business’s payments. The argument is tech companies use the profit-shifting method to excessively reduce their tax burdens, resulting in an average effective tax rate of only 9.5% compared with 23.3% that traditional businesses pay.

The new proposals recommend a 3% tax be levied on the sale of user data, targeted advertising, and “interfaces that put together buyers and sellers.” Only the bigger tech businesses across all the bloc’s member states would be subject to the tax, and companies would be able to deduct the digital tax from their corporate tax payments to avoid double taxation. Officials estimate the new tax would generate at least 5 billion euros, or $6.15 billion, annually for EU member states, which must approve the plan before it can be implemented.

Science Warns of Plastic in the Oceans and Unregulated Industries: The Foresight Future of The Sea report is written by experts for the UK Government Office for Science. Its purpose is to brief ministers on significant medium- and long-term issues. The report warns that the amount of plastic in the ocean is on track to triple in the decade from 2015 to 2025 unless action is taken now. The physical effects of plastic pollution accumulating on the coasts or in particular areas of the sea are obvious, but the toxic effects that occur when the plastic breaks down and winds up inside marine organisms are nebulous.

The authors of the report say much more knowledge about the ocean is needed. They recommend a “Mission to Planet Ocean,” suggesting that could be even more important than voyaging to the moon or Mars. As Professor Edward Hill from the UK National Oceanography Centre said, “We invest a lot of money and enthusiasm for missions to space – but there’s nothing living out there. The sea bed is teeming with life. We really need a mission to planet ocean – it’s the last frontier.”

Ian Boyd, chief scientist for the UK government’s environment department, indicated his concern that offshore wind farms, oil industries, and mining firms are spreading into unexplored areas faster than legislation can keep up. “Scientists need to get in there faster than the commercial people or at least at the same time – to put proper regulation in place to govern those industries,” he said. The advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate was prescient but instead of just “plastics” it should have been a warning of “plastics everywhere will cause incredible environmental damage.”

– A horrible fate awaits so many Rohingya refugee children, mostly young girls, seeking safety in Bangladesh after fleeing from violent conflict in Myanmar. They are being sex trafficked. (BBC)

– A different kind of agony is visited upon Dalit Hindus in majority Muslim Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital and the world’s most crowded city. They must perform what has been called the world’s worst job: Sewer cleaner. (Guardian)

– Despite being told it was a “fireable offense and likely illegal” to leak Trump’s briefing papers to the press, somebody did anyway. Reporters learned Tuesday one of the guidance points given to President Trump before his congratulatory call to Russian President Putin was typed in ALL CAPS and said: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” Nevertheless, he persisted. (AP News)

– A 23-year old man from Pflugerville, Texas, the suspect in a string of bombings in Austin, killed himself early Wednesday as SWAT team members were closing in on him. Mark Anthony Conditt was sitting in his vehicle in Round Rock, north of Austin, and set off an explosive device as officers approached. (Dallas News)

– The Big Four – not to be confused this month with the Big Ten or the Big 12 – are House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). These players huddled Wednesday morning, hoping to hammer out details of a massive congressional spending bill that will avoid a government shutdown due Friday. (Politico)

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– Depeche Mode is right, many of us “just can’t get enough.” Elon Musk, better known as our modern day version of a real life Tony Stark, enjoys shooting rockets into space on his free time. He also can’t get enough cheddar and has the potential for a rocket like salary as he “has won approval for a new pay deal that could land him a $55.8bn (£40bn) bonus, smashing all compensation records.” (Guardian)

– Speaking of rockets, “A Chinese space lab the size of a city bus will soon be falling back to Earth, and no one knows exactly where bits of it might crash down.” The good news and most important piece of information to convey is that “Most of it, though not all, should burn up during the fiery re-entry.” Some Chinese engineer right now is doing their best Steve Urkel imitation of “did I do that?” (NPR)

– Speaking of more money and how incentives are or are not completely shaped by more cheddar: “A wealth of psychology research suggests that there’s little causal relationship, if any, between how much you pay someone and how hard they work. The problem is one of diminishing returns. Once a person’s salary is high enough to keep the wolf from the door (plus buy a luxury or two), more money doesn’t increase their happiness very much.” (Inc.)

– Donald Trump has been on WWE (soap opera for men), and it seems like Joe Biden might also have the urge to do so. Except it seems MMA is more to his style as he noted that if he and Trump “were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” If Biden runs in 2020 against Trump then given where our national politics and discourse is headed, we might have a real MTV Celebrity Deathmatch in lieu of an election. (Newsweek)

– “We know that Americans committed a massacre 50 years ago today; and we also know that an American stopped it.” An examination into the My Lai massacre and Hugh Thompson, a real American hero. (LA Times)

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