Growth in China’s Drone Program Called ‘Alarming’

Such is the title of a piece in the NY Times which contains the following:

Israel, Britain and the United States have pretty much had a corner on the global drone market, but the recent Chinese air show and a Pentagon report have exploded that notion.

“In a worrisome trend, China has ramped up research in recent years faster than any other country,” said the unclassified analysis published in July by the Defense Science Board. “It displayed its first unmanned system model at the Zhuhai air show five years ago, and now every major manufacturer for the Chinese military has a research center devoted to unmanned systems.”

The report, which said “the military significance of China’s move into unmanned systems is alarming,” suggested that China could “easily match or outpace U.S. spending on unmanned systems, rapidly close the technology gaps and become a formidable global competitor in unmanned systems.”

Question: Who is it that did not expect that nations, non-white nations, non-white nations who mass produce high technology for "white" nations, to not build drones?

Who is it that didn't think other nations after seeing the US and NATO float drones over countries with no regards to sovereignty and bombing any civilian male 16 years or older who happens to be in a location of "known" terrorists, thought that no one else would produce these things?

Are the people in these "white" nations still so stuck in their racist fantasies of docile people of color that they could not even fathom that their development and use of drones on people of color would not result in the same?

I have written a number of times about drones and the very real threat they pose to life on earth. Well not the drones but the lack of morals that allows their use.

Drones are a game changing technology in warfare. Unlike every other type of technological "advancement" in warfare such as the bow and arrow, spear, gun, missile, bomb, plane, long distance rifles, etc. there has always been some sort of risk to the soldier (intercontinental missiles possibly excepted). A nation had to put a soldier at risk whether he or she be in a plane, on the ground or on or under the sea. There was always some sort of risk entailed with warfare. Drone warfare changes this.

With drones you do not need "well trained" soldiers. You do not need professional soldiers. You could get a teenager who is adept at a game console to operate a drone (and I don't mean just the airplanes). All you need is a drone and a target. The only person at risk is the target as the killer is safely tucked away at his or her controller, which theoretically could be a laptop at their place of residence while the operator is in his or her pajamas.

Seriously.

Have you watched the movie "Surrogates"? There is a scene in there where drones (in the form of androids) are doing the killing while the "soldiers" are in a booth. This is a phase we will go through. Believe that.

Next is the self operating drone. This will be like the episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where the Enterprise encounters a planet in which the biological inhabitants have been killed off by automated learning war drones. The Terminator series also conceptually is plausible sans the liquid metal killers and time travel. The US military is already testing out self programmed drones. These drones would be able to be programmed with predefined targets and be "authorized" to execute when the target is found.

Now do you think that the programming capability to do this is limited to the United States, Britain and Israel?

Oh the UN is now concerned. Apparently the killings of civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere wasn't bother enough. NO, they are concerned because non-whites have the ability now.

Typical.

Warren Buffet Channels The Ghost

I remember back when Obama had floated the idea of lowering the employee tax in order to stimulate business. I got into a silly argument on twitter trying to explain how silly that was because businesses dont' hire or not hire based on taxes. Rather it is the case that businesses hire in response to demand. If they need more people to produce the product or service they will hire that next person to get that profit. It would be near impossible to stifle employment via sane tax policy.

The way I saw it, the entire reduction in employment (payroll) taxes was simply yet another give away to businesses who already have an array of tax regulations that benefit them greatly.

Here comes Warren Buffet saying the same thing:

SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.” Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.

It's the same argument. What business is going to say "meh, I got all these orders I COULD be filling, customers I could be serving and making that money, but these taxes are just too high so I'm just gonna pass on all that money so I don't have to pay that extra 3 percent (or whatever it is)."

That's silly. You think all the part time hiring going on right now for the holiday season would NOT happen due to payroll taxes? You think all these retailers would pass on selling as much as possible by hiring as many people as necessary to maximize profit?

Clearly not.

Gaza

Let us be clear. Israel is about the last, if not THE last of the European settler states. It was founded by booting people out of their homes. People who still have keys to their homes or who have passed them down to their children.

Right now we have a president of the United States who is directly related to a man who was in the Kenyan Mau Mau resistance, who is defending a white settler state.

This president is in office in part because 95+ percent of African Americans, also victims of European settlers and their descendants who in some cases bombed their towns and "appropriated" their land for their own use without recompense.

Israel is backed by a country founded on the very same violence and dispossession of the native population and no one dares speak this truth in Congress, in the mainstream media or in loud tones for fear of being the target of the financial arm of the Israeli lobby.

This state is supported for one reason and one reason only: The security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

This entire episode with the backdrop of Iran exposes the Big Lie(tm) that the most dangerous country to the stability of the Middle East is Iran. Israel claims to fear an existential threat by a population segregated into less than 10% of the land mass that makes up the area. Iran exists, thousands of miles away and surrounded by American bases and yet and still only Iran is mentioned as a "threat".

Let us be clear. It has been and still is the fact that it is the Europeans who have been floating war ships and establishing bases in the region who are the "existential threats" in the region. It is their settler state on the banks of the Mediterranean that is the existential threat. Let us call this spade a spade. Everything else is politicking.

NLP and the Presidential Campaign

Back in 2008 I saw an article that pointed out that Obama was using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in his speeches. For this reason I make it a point to not listen to him speak but rather to read transcripts of his presentations.

Those who are familiar with NLP know that when mastered one can manipulate a lot of "lesser conscious" people easily and also be aware of when other people are trying to hide true intentions or are trying to suggest things to you on a sub-conscious level.

I'm sure a lot of people thought I was just nuts and being an Obama hater. Well the NY Times has revealed that the 2012 campaign in fact used "Behavioral science" experts.

Campaign volunteers who knocked on doors last week in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada did not merely remind people to vote and arrange for rides to the polls. Rather, they worked from a script, using subtle motivational techniques that research has shown can prompt people to take action.

“We used the scripts more as a guide,” said Sarah Weinstein, 18, a Columbia freshman who traveled with a group to Cleveland the weekend before the election. “The actual language we used was invested in the individual person.”

This is classic NLP. Note that in the article they point out that they have not and "cannot" disclose the specific techniques that have been deployed. There is a list of people who are disclosed as being "advisors" look up their work.

If you think that Team Obama is the only one's using such techniques to manipulate the behavior of the general public well I suppose you don't have any emergency supplies in your home either.

Garveyism and Employment

I saw the following at Techyville.com I cannot verify the story but it is in line with the published research in regards to "black sounding" names and employment prospects.

At the end of my little experiment, (which lasted a week), Bianca White had received nine phone calls—I received none. Bianca had received a total of seven emails, while I’d only received two, which again happen to have been the same emails Bianca received. Let me also point out that one of the emails that contacted Bianca for a job wanted her to relocate to a different state, all expenses paid, should she be willing to make that commitment. In the end, a total of twenty-four employers looked at Bianca’s resume while only ten looked at mines.

Is this a conspiracy, or what? I’m almost convinced that White Americans aren’t suffering from disparaging unemployment rates as their Black counterpart because all the jobs are being saved for other White people.

I'm going to paraphrase what Marcus Garvey said in regards to black employment in America:

When the white man needs employment what do you think he will do? He will hire his own first.

Let us be clear that the number ONE reason why African-American unemployment is so high is because we do not have businesses that employ our own first. By not having these businesses we are unable to give our youths the "first job" experiences and must depend on other folks to do that. WHo do you think they are going to hire when it's time to do "first job"? I can't even be mad at them because that is what they are supposed to do.

Unfortunately the most common response to this will be the most common response to this: "they" need to provide (put whatever you want here) for us.

I know folks will see that comment as "shades of Romney" but y'all don't understand: I don't want y'all having to be workers to be exploited and then kicked to the curb by a Romney. If you can't tell the difference then I can't help you.

Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president

From the BBC. I appreciated one of the comments from the president in regards to materialism:

"I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more," he says. "This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself," he says.

Mau Mau Verdict Exposes Crimes of British Imperialism In Kenya

From the African Globe

Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85, described how he was stripped, chained and castrated, with large pliers normally used on cows, at Embakasi detention camp, near Nairobi. He said: “I felt completely destroyed and without hope. I have never had children of my own and never will have. I am unable to have sexual relations with my wife.”

Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, described how when she was 15, she was beaten and subjected to sexual abuse with a glass bottle containing scalding water inserted into her vagina at Gatithi detention camp. She had felt “completely and utterly violated”. The pain “has been bad ever since the beatings and has worsened as I have aged…. I do not understand why I was treated with such brutality for simply having provided food to the Mau Mau.”

No Work, No Pay. The New Economy is the Old Economy

The NY times has a great piece about the employment situation in NY since the storm.

Yesterday, or maybe Thursday I had a brief discussion about the jobs report and how "fishy" they are. I pointed out that the previous report had dropped unemployment by 3 points but the latest one had reported more jobs but had no effect or an increase in unemployment.

I had pointed out that people are taking jobs that don't pay well, are part time and are generally not the type you want to have when you are trying to improve the lot of the so called "middle class". This NYT piece underscores what I've been saying:

Low-wage workers, more likely to be paid hourly and work at the whim of their employers, have fared worse in the recovery than those at the top of the income scale — in New York City the bottom 20 percent lost $463 in annual income from 2010 to 2011, in contrast to a gain of almost $2,000 for the top quintile. And there are an increasing number of part-time and hourly workers, the type that safety net programs like unemployment are not designed to serve. Since 2009, when the recovery began, 86 percent of the jobs added nationally have been hourly. Over all, about 60 percent of the nation’s jobs are hourly. [My emphasis]

Women of the Klan

I good reading on women in the KKK:

Thanks to Kathleen M. Blee's superb scholarship in "Women of the Klan," I must now live with the fact that the Klan contained "all the better people": businessmen, physicians, judges, social workers--even Quakers, political reformers and (this is the truly discomforting part) feminists. In fact, during the 1920s, the period of Blee's research, the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan considered itself, with some justice, to be a major advocate of women's rights and interests--white, Protestant women's rights, that is.

Women of the Klan