Attached is a really first rate assessment of the real benefits and costs of the American infatuation with drone warfare. The writer, Patrick Cockburn, is one of the very best reporters now covering the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.
World View: The use of unmanned aircraft to assassinate its enemies is guaranteed to backfire on Washington
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, Sunday, 10 June 2012
As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder weapon despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The attraction of the drone for President Obama and his administration five months before the presidential election is self-evident.
“A Civilization of, by and for the Normal Human Being”
While many articles on psychopaths have appeared in the last few years, few have anything interesting to say about psychopaths in politics and the military, except clichés and overly broad generalizations. This article, published in an obscure source in Idaho of all places, is one of the best I have ever seen on psychopaths, and it focuses on psychopaths in power and the military. The most profound segment in the article has compelled me to change my views on what constitutes the most fundamental human conflict, which before I thought was between rich and poor, and represented in great power struggles and conspiracies of the former against the latter, with the latter usually losing. This segment from the article makes me think the dichotomy is more fundamental:
“So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.”
The author mentions a useful concept, what he calls the “criminal overworld” expressed in political/military psychopaths and their cliques:
The US Department of Justice has released new files about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s bid for presidential clemency. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. Documents in the Freedom of Information Act response (PDF) reference 32 pages of government agency deliberative communications and 37 pages of new communications between Pardon Attorney Ronald Rogers and Pollard’s legal team — all produced since July of 2011. While the contents have been withheld, their existence signals that the Pollard commutation request may be nearing a conclusion within the Obama administration. June 18 could mark the culmination of a massive lobbying campaign for release. Obama’s dismal record on Israeli accountability suggests Pollard will soon walk free.
I've known Dr. Vint Cerf since 1992, and it is with enormous regard for him personally — and the culture of sharing and shared decision-making that he and other Internet pioneers fostered — that I take note of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and the fact that it now makes possible the Internet of Things.
This article, scouted by Berto Jongman, merits a close reading:
What the article does not touch upon is in my view urgently in need of reflection, and that is the Internet of Open Costs and Open Source Everything.
The author, Dominic Basulto, writes:
When devices and sensors can be hooked up to the Internet, it means they can start sharing information: “Soon, companies will be able to perfectly match product demand to raw materials orders, streamlining supply chains and minimizing waste to an extraordinary degree. Efficiency goes through the roof.”
There is one truly severe flaw with that view. IPv6, if applied in this manner, will accelerate and deepen the existing manner in which we do business–one author calls this The Myth of Digital Democracy. We will, as Dr. Russell Ackoff put it, be doing the wrong thing righter. Absent transparency and truth, absent the full integration of Dr. Herman Daly's pioneering specification of how “true cost” of anything must include water used, child labor used, environmental degradation impacts, toxins imparted to end users and unwitting bystanders, and so on, IPv6 will extend the information pathologies I have identified with the help of many others, and it will broaden the chasm between rich and poor, informed and ignorant.
What is required now is a conceptual architecture for IPv6 that demands that true costs be embedded in every thing. It is now possible to create digital identities for the same product coming from different locations during different points in the life cycle of the producing facilty. It is now possible for a product to “acquire” a complete history of its ingredients, storage, transport, handling, exposure to excessive water or sunlight or other “triggers.” In short, it is now possible to demand Open Everything, starting with Open Costs.
Lacking within what passes for dialog about global Internet governance are the ethics of IPv6. The core question we should be asking is how one imbues IPv6 with ethics so as to create an information ecology that holds all humans in any production process accountable for the true costs of what they are about. IPv6 is a newborn. It lacks ethics and it lacks a sense of integrity in the holistic sense of the word. Now is the time to have this discussion.
“A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.” – Michael Parenti, Historian, Author The Face of Imperialism
Phi Beta Iota: metanoia-films.org has some of the most important free video online … the Psywar video post was a huge hit at phibetaiota … it had some of the most hits of any post in a short period of time. This is the latest video series which is loaded with unsettling truths of US history.
On the one hand, we in the US are watching grotesque income inequality and extreme wealth being used to buy power and more wealth to further control our political and economic systems. On the other hand, we have a grotesque collective failure to formulate and promote a compelling and sustainable moral vision for our country. These two factors go hand in hand, magnifying and enabling each other and driving the US to ruin, at great cost to the international community, to the biosphere, and to future generations.
The 2008 election cycle cost more than 5 billion dollars. This year's US election costs are estimated to top 6 billion dollars – maybe even $7,000,000,000 or more. Remember that a billion is a thousand million. This is not a problem for the ultrarich. The US has 403 billionaires. Together their net worth exceeds that of half of America's households combined. In other words, the net worth of almost 60,000,000 households, all added up all together, is less than the net worth of 403 very rich people.
Just as a mind-bending factoid, this is pretty amazing. As a social reality, it is a tsunami wreaking havoc on our capacity to govern ourselves.
