Media Roots Radio: Video Game Warfare, Covert War in Iran, SOPA & Fair Use
Via Media Roots:
Abby and Robbie discuss the reality of war: the pre-propaganda that has manufactured consent for the illegal occupations, video game warfare and cognitive dissonance in combat, the Marine urination scandal; Martin Luther King Jr. and historical revisionism minimizing how anti-imperialism was the main pillar of his philosophical platform; the CIA and the US covert war in Iran; SOPA, PIPA breakdown, the difference between copyright and fair use, the threat to net neutrality and websites like Media Roots under this overarching legislation.
The Rise Of The Drones
Military planners are also pushing for greater autonomy for drones and other unmanned systems. Some are even arguing that the autonomous systems themselves will be better at making the decision about when and where to fire weapons than humans.
New Left Project writes about the inhuman future of how we engage in warfare. Will the decision whether to conduct military strikes eventually be determined by algorithm?
One night last summer Shakeel Khan and his family were at home in North Waziristan when there was a huge explosion. ‘I was resting with my parents in one room when it happened. God saved my parents and I, but my brother, his wife, and children were all killed.’ The children were five and three years old. Khan says, ‘I must support my aged parents now but I earn very little We don’t have enough to reconstruct our house and fear that the drones will strike us…
HRW: All Sides In Somalia War Guilty Of Crimes
Mass burial for those killed during Mogadishu infighting. Photo: Abdurrahman Warsameh/International Relations and Security Network (CC)
Where there is conflict there is someone to point the finger. Human Rights Watch have decided that everyone is ‘guilty’. Via AFP:
All the parties to Somalia’s conflict have violated the rules of war and are guilty of causing civilian casualties in the fight for territorial control, Human Rights Watch said Monday.
Somali government forces backed by troops of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) have fought bloody battles in the capital Mogadishu with the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels who want to topple the administration.
“All sides have used artillery in the capital Mogadishu in an unlawful manner that has caused civilian casualties,” the rights group said in a report.
“Al-Shebab has fired mortars indiscriminately from densely populated areas and the TFG (government) and AMISOM forces have often responded in kind with indiscriminate counterattacks.
“As a result, civilians have…
The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs
I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:
Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.
Military’s Best Secret Weapon: Dolphins
Assassinating enemy divers with CO2-filled syringes? Parachuting from the sky and blowing up enemy ships kamikaze-style? Acoustically detecting a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness? All this and more as Skeptoid covers the James Bond’s of the sea, deployed first by the USSR and today by the Indian Navy and U.S. Navy Marine Mammal System:
Dolphins and sea lions have advantages that are hard for navies to ignore. They swim far faster than divers, and are much easier and cheaper to deploy than remote underwater vehicles. They can dive hundreds of meters and return, with no concern about decompression, quicker than a human diver could even get suited up. Dolphins’ underwater acuity is such that they can acoustically detect a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness, and even discriminate between different kinds of metal. A dolphin’s brain is famously larger than a human’s, in part because so much of…
Navy Turns To Online Gamers In Fight Against Somali Pirates
If you have spent the past fifteen years in a dank basement playing video games while immersed in a thin layer of Dorito crumbs, the U.S. military needs you to sort out the geopolitical mess around the Horn of Africa for them, please. AFP reports:
The Office of Naval Research plans this month to launch the US military’s first online war game to draw on the ideas of thousands of people instead of the traditional strategy session held inside the Pentagon’s offices.
“Piracy off the Horn of Africa has been an enduring problem that has many stakeholders. We selected this topic for the pilot scenario,” Schuette said.
The game will have three rounds over three weeks, with players in the first stage faced with a piracy scenario and asked to propose brief, Twitter-length solutions. Players will be presented with boxes labeled, “Innovate” and “Defend,” with questions such as: “What new resources could turn the…
Osama Bin Laden: Myths of Villainy and Deceit
Commentary on the subject of the week, on Modern Mythology:
This is how it works with terrorism, by definition. Our own psychology works against us. Fear, a popular tool of the Bush administration, was used to do a real disservice to their own “war on terror” by painting the picture of this guy hanging out in his underground bunker with Destro, Cobra Commander, and The Joker. (That is should they ever hope to win a “war on terror” — I assume they actually intend to “win” as much as the “war on drugs” could ever be won, as we meanwhile prop up the regimes that supply the materials).
Recent reports say Osama didn’t have a gun. But that’s almost beside the point, since the deed is done and it’s not likely we’re going to be seeing criminal investigations in the assassination of a figure like Osama Bin Laden. In the end he…
Climate Change and the 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence
Matriarchy.info reviews Dr. James DeMeo’s book SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World:
A new geographical study on the ancient historical origins of human violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological evidence, has just been published presenting substantial proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and loving than are most humans today – moreover, the study points to a dramatic climate change in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara and Asian Deserts, with attending famine, starvation and forced migrations which pushed the earliest humans into violent social patterns, a trauma from which we have not yet recovered in over 6000 years.
The study and book, titled SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World, by retired professor James…
