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Ellen Pao vs Kleiner: What It Means to You and Silicon Valley

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain:

Ellen Pao’s gender discrimination lawsuit has the tech world talking about what it will mean if she wins a verdict against her former employer, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

It’s a crazy case. Among the highlights: an office affair gone wrong, with the jilted married guy accused of retaliating against the jilting single woman; a company ski trip for bros before hoes; juicy revelations about huge salaries and ridiculous work hours, including putting in time during a honeymoon.

So what does it mean?

Maybe it’s about the power of money.

ellen-pao“What’s Really at Stake in Ellen Pao’s Kleiner Perkins Lawsuit,” asserts Emily Bazelon in The New York Times, is the tantalizing possibility of “a cultural shift” in Big Tech, infamous for its young white male-dominated “bro” culture. (They used to call that “frat boy”crap.)

“As the kingmakers who decide which start-ups survive, they have the leverage to make the industry more receptive to women and their ideas or continue to reinforce the ‘brogrammer’ norm,” she writes. (Disclosure: Bazelon edited some of my work in the 1990s.)

Or maybe this lawsuit is about the tightrope women have to walk in the American workplace.

“The real drama is in the more mundane charges, about slights familiar to any woman in any workplace that are rarely aired in public, much less in a courtroom,” Claire Cain Miller writes, also in the Times. “Ellen Pao, a former junior partner, was told that she didn’t speak up enough and was too passive — but also that she spoke up too much and was pushy and entitled.”

Could Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers be about the paucity of women?

“What is really under examination in this trial is the question of why there are so few women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley. At stake is any hope that the tech world can claim to be a progressive place, or even a fair one.” That’s David Streitfeld. Also in the Times.

Three different takes in the same paper!

Here, let me help make things more confusing — with yet another interpretation of why it matters.

Ellen Pao’s case is really about accountability.

The Silicon Valley that emerged after the dot com crash of 2000 has been a cultural and legal Wild West, dominated by companies run by executives who don’t think the rules apply to them.

Every human resources hack knows that gender discrimination is strictly prohibited under federal law. That’s been true for decades.

Google, the biggest tech employer, has a 70 percent male-30 percent female workforce. (It’s 79 percent – 21 percent for “leadership” positions.) Men in the Valley earn 61 percent more than women with the same job and qualifications. It’s actually getting worse.

Numbers like that lead to one obvious conclusion: the bros aren’t even trying. Because they’re not worried about the EEOC, or PR, or anything at all.

The rules-are-for-peasants mentality was epitomized by late Apple chief Steve Jobs, who famously parked in handicapped spaces. “He seemed to think the blue wheelchair symbol meant the spot was reserved for the chairman,” Andy Hertzfled wrote.

As I reported late last year, tech companies violate federal laws against age discrimination even more brazenly than those concerning gender — which is saying something. Many tech ads overtly state that anyone not “young” need not bother to apply. Electronic Arts had no employees over age 35.

And they’re just as bad on race. Whites and Asians are radically overrepresented; Latinos and blacks, if and when you can find them in Silicon Valley, are paid less than whites for the same job.

It’s not just legal stuff. Silicon Valley firms ignore the golden rule of business that the customer is always right. For the Valley, the customer — you and me — are sources of data and money to be exploited and drained dry without so much as a thank you.

Got a problem with Facebook? Too bad.

They don’t have a single customer service rep you can telephone for help when, say, your creepy ex-boyfriend posts photos of your intimate moments.

Facebook also resets the default on your “privacy” settings to “public” without asking. Nice respect for the fundamental American right to privacy.

Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg — I could have just as easily picked on any other company. Nothing personal.

Back to Ellen Pao.

If she wins, which is by no means certain, it will not mean that Silicon Valley will begin treating its customers with respect, or hire people over age 35. What it will mean is that they have to follow the same rules as the rest of us — or pay the price.

CDs are Dead. Long Live the CD!

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Ted Rall

Originally published by Breaking Modern:

Compact discs are dead. I realized this recently while shopping for a replacement for my dead 25-year-old Sony CD player; where there used to be lots of brands, now there are only a few and where there were many models, fewer still. Of course, this follows years of watching brick-and-mortar music stores — HMV, Tower, Virgin Megastore et al. — close their doors.

Perhaps it would be more precise to say that CDs were murdered. But was that just? Was that right?

Apple, which both predicts and creates the future, thinks streaming is the future — so they’re driving a stake through the heart of those shiny 5-inch discs whose design was supposedly inspired by an episode of Star Trek.

The computer giant recently ceased production of the signature device it introduced in 2001, the 160GB version of the iPod Classic. Says Will Dunn, editor of Stuff:

The iPod’s days have been numbered since the first iPhone, and the subscription model shows no signs of slowing down. Apple itself is transitioning into music subscriptions with iTunes Radio, and Google has just started trialling YouTube Music Key.”

Still, despite the pressure, many consumers prefer to own rather than rent their music.

Here’s Dunn again: “There’s still a huge affection for the iPod Classic and it’s not hard to see why – Spotify might offer 20 million songs, but 120GB of music is more than most people need, and your iTunes library doesn’t carry data charges or a subscription fee. Also, I think the Classic is a more distraction-free listening experience – I’m more likely to get through a full album on one.”

Music geeks have driven up the price of used iPod Classics on eBay and Amazon by hundreds of dollars more than their original cost.

Apple isn’t alone. Auto manufacturers have signaled that new cars will soon come with MP3 players, not CD players, standard.

2014 was a disastrous year for the music industry, with sales of both compact discs and MP3 downloads way down — to historical lows — as streaming gained steam. “Digital track sales are falling at nearly the same rate as CD sales, as music fans are turning to streaming—on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and music blogs,” reports Derek Thompson of The Atlantic.

Before you sell all your CDs on eBay, however, you might want to think twice. Compact discs have a number of distinctive advantages over streaming and digital downloads.

CDs Win on Quality

“Steve Jobs was a digital pioneer, but when he went home, he listened to vinyl,” Neil Young noted in 2012. Audiophiles who know the difference say vinyl offers the richest, most textured listening experience. Though vinyl is decidedly superior to compact disc, the CD is better than MP3 as we know it.

Downloads and streams music is highly compressed in order to keep the data flowing and maximum storage space, but that efficiency comes at a cost. “True CD-quality files take up anywhere from three to 10 times as much as space as an MP3 or AAC file, depending on the latter’s bit rate; 24-bit files take up even more space,” according to PC Magazine.

Owning Beats Renting

Digital data is easy to lose. If you don’t believe me, Google “lost my iTunes music library.” Yes, sometimes it’s possible for the poor souls who somehow managed to erase thousands of dollars of music from their devices to restore them. Other times, not so much. Either way, the one thing you can be sure of is that it won’t be painless.

A friend – she was the first person to show me how cool the iPod was – got rid of all of her CDs after ripping them. Then some jerk broke into her apartment and stole both the player and the laptop to which she synced it. Just like that, she became a music pauper.

True, if she had downloaded all her songs from iTunes she could have gotten them back. To me, however, the bigger lesson is, I trust myself more than I trust some company. She should’ve held on to the CDs.

The Physicality of Music Is Rewarding

A woman from England wrote to NPR’s music blog: “When I was a teenager, I saved up to buy music, bought one CD or record at a time, and listened to the crap out of it. I knew all the lyrics, I knew melodies and bass parts, I had different recordings of the same track — all that. Now, I download a heap of music: some albums, some singles, some random tracks that catch my fancy. I listen to them a few times, and then they get lost in the iTunes pit of despair.”
Downloaded MP3s aren’t songs as much as they are items on a list. Stuff you stream on Spotify or Pandora doesn’t even rise to that level; it’s just something that you hear in passing the middle of a bunch of other stuff. Unless a song really stands out, you’re not going to pay close attention. The odds that a tune will grab you enough to learn the lyrics, much less change your life, are radically diminished by the combination of abundance and randomness inherent to post-compact disc formats. 

I recently reorganized my extensive CD collection – aside from being a bit of a music addict, I reviewed records for many years and so have thousands of them – and found myself falling back in love with the physical form of the CD. While the artwork and liner notes in 5-inch booklets pale in comparison with their 12-inch vinyl predecessors, they’re better than nothing – and nothing is what we get when we stream or download. Like it or not, visuals matter.

Albums Force Serendipity

Remember the joy of discovery? On a vinyl album or a compact disc, the listener is “forced” to sit through “lesser” songs that, when they don’t work out so well, are viewed by fans and critics as contract-fulfilling filler. But that’s hardly the case for every band. In the digital age you can always download a single for 99 cents and avoid the dross — but what if the songs that never made it as hit singles for whatever reason turn out to be great? Odds are, you’ll never know. With a CD, you get to experience the full creativity of your favorite musicians as they experiment and stretch free of the constraints that come with trying to score that big hit.

Support Musicians, Not Streamers

Obviously you want the bands and musicians whose work you enjoy to make as much money as possible so that they’ll be motivated to soldier on. Unfortunately, digitalization has hit creative people hard, and musicians are no exception.

It’s pretty clear that, for the average band with a decent sized but not crazy fan base, compact discs are far more lucrative than digital radio and other contemporary formats.

Streaming services like Pandora and Spotify are notoriously parsimonious with artists, and at this point anyone with a conscience really shouldn’t be supporting them.

You Can Sell CDs …

Although the price per song is roughly the same when you compare a 99-cent download to a $14 CD with 13 songs on it, the price differential changes radically when you consider the fact that you can easily sell a used CD. If you have good taste, in fact, you could probably make a pretty good living investing in CDs – I’ve noticed that many of the CDs I bought for $12 way back when are worth $50 or more to collectors.

That’s a better rate than I got on my 401(k).

You could even make a habit of purchasing physical compact discs, ripping them at the highest possible quality to save and sell them. In many cases, you would probably be getting a dozen songs for just a couple of dollars. And then you wouldn’t be stuck with all those discs to store.

Just make sure to keep a backup hidden away in case my friend’s burglar drops by.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Her Bad! Again, Hillary Reveals Her Terrible Judgement

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Ted Rall

https://cbswashington.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/465683786.jpg?w=620&h=349&crop=1

 

Hillary Clinton’s political setbacks and scandals come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they highlight a personality with questionable judgment.

The question before the media, and American voters, is whether a person with such bad judgment should be trusted with nuclear launch codes at 3 AM.

The former Secretary of State during Obama’s first term acquitted herself fairly well during yesterday’s news conference (though I wonder why none of her advisers told her to lose that pinched I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-put-up-with-this-crap look on her face), though she did commit two rookie errors (I’ll get to those below).

To Hillary’s credit, she admitted she made a bad call in 2009, when she decided to exclusively use a private email account – whose server is kept at her private home in Chappaqua, New York – rather than an official .gov one issued by the State Department. “Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two e-mail accounts,” she conceded. “I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Yes, it would have been, and no, it hasn’t.

The thing is: Hillary had all the information she needed to make the right decision back in 2009.

At the time, there was a clear-cut, well-publicized federal regulation that required government employees to keep all their emails. At the time, there was a recent history of politicians getting into trouble for falling afoul of this best practice. At the time, email was – as it is now – the default communication medium between government officials.

Given all that, she nevertheless decided to err on the side of secrecy rather than transparency. Her bad.

When her judgment failed her before — voting with Bush to invade Iraq — hundreds of thousands of people died and she lost her presidential campaign.

Again to her credit, she belatedly admitted that she shouldn’t have voted for Bush’s Iraq War. Her sort-of-apology was buried in her 2014 memoir: “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had…And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.”

But lots of others, including 23 Senators, got it right.

At the time.

As with Emailgate, however, then-Senator Clinton had exactly what she needed to make the right decision – but then chose not to do so. As The Atlantic reported last year, she was one of six senators who read a secret 96-page National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. Because the classified document made clear that the case for war was based solely on conjecture and speculation, at least two of the other five senators who saw it decided to vote against the invasion. (Unfortunately, neither of them is running for president.)

Most pundits, me included, assumed that Clinton’s 2002 vote was motivated by rank cynicism – Bush, militarism, war were running high in the polls in the year after 9/11. Now she says that’s not true. Either way, it was a stupid decision.

At the time, it was clear to millions of Americans, me included, that Bush and Cheney didn’t have solid evidence that Iraq possessed WMDs. If they had, they would have shown us, the same way that JFK revealed spy photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba on TV. You don’t go to war based on maybes.

At the time, her vote for war was also politically idiotic. Hillary represented New York, a solidly Democratic state where opposition to invading Iraq would have been rewarded at reelection time, not punished. Also, many people who didn’t even have access to classified intelligence could tell that the United States was likely to lose the war. If she were smart, she would have seen that too. You don’t vote on wars that are likely to become unpopular by the time you’re running for election or reelection.

That’s why I voted against her in the 2008 Democratic primary. I might be able to vote for a cynical bastard.

But not a fool.

Unfortunately for Hillary, the Democratic Party, and – if she wins – the American people, she repeatedly makes the wrong call when it really matters. It was the same during the 1990s Whitewater controversy that embroiled her husband.

In an open letter to Clinton, Paul Waldman of the liberal American Prospect reminds us: “On Whitewater, where yours was the strongest voice urging your husband to fight the release of information. We all saw what happened: A story about a failed investment turned into the subject of an independent counsel investigation, which ultimately led to impeachment. All the inquiries eventually concluded that you did nothing wrong in the Whitewater investment.”

What could be stupider than masterminding a cover-up when you have nothing to hide?

Hillary messes up little decisions too.

Yesterday’s press conference featured two boners you wouldn’t expect out of a freshman state representative:

First she rather hilariously set herself up for accusations of hypocrisy. “No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,” she said. Perfectly reasonable coming from you and me, but not from a senator who voted for the USA Patriot Act, which authorized the NSA to intercept everyone’s phone calls, emails and everything else. (Talk about lousy judgment.) Or from someone who called Edward Snowden a traitor. (A year later, she’s walking that one back too.)

Second, the multi-multi-multi-millionaire crankily channeled Tricky Dicky with a cheesy attempt to distract from the email controversy with some ridiculous I’m-a-real-person-too pleas for sympathy: “At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.”

“Yoga routines“? Via email?

(For the under-90 set, here’s Nixon’s “Checkers” speech: “It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”)

This woman. Wants to be. President.

“It all seems so preventable, so easily avoided,” marveled Newsweek about Emailgate and Hillary’s other screw-ups.

Yes it does and yes it does.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” You can support his work by subscribing to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

EmailGate and the Unexpected End of Hillary Clinton

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain:

Will the revelation that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account – that, indeed, she never even had a .gov email account – derail her chances of being elected president next year?

Maybe.

How Hillary Messed Up

Under the Federal Records Act of 1950, which has been amended several times, “all government employees and contractors are required by law to make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency.”

During his first full day as president in January 2009, President Obama directed federal agencies to preserve all emails relating to government business so that agencies could add them to paper and other non-digital records requested as part of Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenaed by judges for judicial reasons, and for eventual transfer to the National Archives for study by historians.

Clinton served as Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013. So clearly her emails fell under the purview of the law.

It is difficult to imagine that, as a high-level politician and recent presidential candidate, Clinton was unaware of this requirement.

In 2007, the scandal over the Bush administration’s dismissal of eight US attorneys centered around precisely the same issue: the destruction of up to 5 million emails authored by Bush Administration and Republican Party officials, which were either lost or intentionally deleted because they weren’t sent using government email accounts.

Upon taking charge of the State Department, Clinton made the same exact move as the Bush people caught up in the US attorney scandal two years before.

end-of-hillary-clinton-ted-rall-chatham-wikimedia-commonsWhereas Bush and Republican party operatives created a private domain, gwb43.com, in order to keep prying Democratic and journalist eyes out of their correspondence, Clinton’s staff registered the domain that she used, clintonemail.com, on January 13, 2009. That was one week before Obama’s inauguration, on the day of her confirmation hearings.

Millions of Americans go to work at new jobs where, as part of the standard human resources package, they receive a new company email account. This happens at countless federal, state, and city government agencies as well.

For some reason, however, Hillary Clinton not only never used her state.gov email address – she was never issued one.

Today the New York Times is reporting that:

… an examination of records requests sent to the department reveals how the practice protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public. Mrs. Clinton’s exclusive use of personal email for her government business is unusual for a high-level official, archive experts have said. Federal regulations, since 2009, have required that all emails be preserved as part of an agency’s record-keeping system area in Mrs. Clinton’s case, her emails were kept on her personal account and her staff took no steps to have been preserved as part of State Department record.”

In effect, she has erased a significant portion of the history of the foreign policy of the United States of America.

As a result, reports the Times, “political groups and news organizations said that requests for records related to Mrs. Clinton have repeatedly gone unanswered.”

Hillary’s Defenders’ Talking Points

Clinton surrogates took to relatively friendly airwaves on MSNBC and elsewhere yesterday to try to deflect accusations that range from the generally unpleasant – she is sneaky, has something to hide, and/or thinks that she is not subject to the same laws as other Americans – to the downright conspiratorial – somewhere in those deleted private emails is the smoking gun of the 2012 attack on the US consulate at Benghazi, Libya.

Talking Point 1: Clinton did provide more than 55,000 pages of emails in response to congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

My take: not terribly convincing.

Though an impressive number, most Americans will think about it a second before realizing that they themselves generate thousands, if not tens of thousands of electronic communications per year, and that a high-powered Secretary of State like Hillary Clinton is no doubt responsible for many more times than that. The question isn’t how many emails she has turned over, the question is, where are the rest of them?

Talking Point 2: She cc-ed her staffers on many of the emails, and those staffers had government email accounts whose records were preserved.

My take: totally unconvincing.

At best, this looks like sloppy disregard for the historical record and the letter of the law, not to mention the understanding that she is a public servant who works for the public, and that the public has the right to know what she was up to during her tenure in office. At worst, it comes off as a disingenuous ploy to cherry pick what she reveals and what she chooses to hide.

Talking Point 3: Secretary of State Colin Powell, her predecessor under George W. Bush, also used a private email account.

My take: lame, but might be enough to convince some.

Powell served between 2001 and 2005, ancient history in the timeline of technological development. By 2009, even insulated, relatively elderly people like Clinton were routinely using email and were aware of the rules and regulations surrounding it. Besides which, as pointed out earlier, federal regulations changed in 2009.

Talking Point 4: Both the Daily Beast and the Democratic media watchdog Media Matters criticized the New York Times, claiming that the Federal Records Act wasn’t formally amended to include email until Obama signed a change in 2014, which was also when the State Department told its employees to preserve all their emails.

My take: if anything can save Clinton, this is it.

Complicated scandals have trouble gaining traction with a distracted citizenry. It’s hard to take on a politician with something like Iran-Contra, which involved money laundering and the Sultan of Brunei. Breaking into Democratic Party headquarters and lying about it, on the other hand, was something that the American people could understand. If Clinton’s defenders managed to muddy the waters by turning this into an arcane debate over the difference between a federal regulation and a federal law, and what qualifies as notification, people may soon get bored and turn to something else.

What Happens Next Year

It is beyond difficult to imagine that the Democratic Party will consider an alternative to Hillary Clinton as its 2016 presidential nominee. At this late date, it would be close to impossible for a rival – currently, no serious contender has presented himself or herself – to raise the money and builds the brand awareness necessary to go against the Republicans in the general election in the fall. So unless this turns really worse really fast, she probably doesn’t have to worry about a fellow Democrat.

One caveat: the real shocker here is that someone with so much political experience, especially fending off political attacks directed at her and her husband, allowed herself to play fast and loose with even the appearance of an ethical or legal breach.

As political experts say, this betrays a surprising lack of discipline. That’s the part that is shocking the establishment. In other words, if this could happen, what else might occur between now and the end of the year?

Assuming that Clinton weathers the storm, the real implications here are for her fall 2016 challenge from the Republican nominee, whoever that is.

Clinton will already be carrying the burden that is also her great advantage: her surname. Presidential elections are always about looking forward; electing another Clinton would be about restoring the past. Further complicating the challenge for her and her political team is that, as a Democrat, making the small-c conservative case for her – be afraid of the Republican, I won’t be as bad – doesn’t come naturally to the party’s liberal base voters.

And those liberals aren’t excited about her in the first place, due to her pro-Republican votes on free trade and the Iraq war, among other things.

The big trouble for Hillary is that Emailgate feeds into an existing negative narrative: that she feels entitled, that she is sleazy, that she is hiding something, that this is about her and not about us, that she is above the rules. Forget Benghazi: this is serious scandal gold for the Republicans.

If I Were Hillary

If I were advising Clinton, I would get ahead of this.

Even if she’s right – that no one told her, and she had no idea that, she was supposed to preserve her emails – she shouldn’t say so. What she should do is issue a semi-apology: “Honestly, I’m not really sure whether I was supposed to save all those emails or not. My top priority was security; I didn’t want hackers to get into national security secrets. But the main point is, public records belong to the public and need to be preserved whether they exist in analog or digital form. I will work with my staff and with federal officials to try to find every single email I wrote during my term as Secretary of State, and of course turn them over to the National Archives. I am proud of my record, so of course I have nothing to hide.”

It might not hurt to show a sense of humor that also might shore up her liberal base. Something along the lines of “maybe I’ll ask my friends at the NSA whether they kept any of my stuff.”

A Theory of the Drone: Clarifying, Terrifying

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain:

Without debate or even formal acknowledgment by the government that it uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to kill people overseas, drones will – or have, depending on your perspective – revolutionize war as we know it.

a-theory-of-the-drone-review

Written with breathtaking clarity from a perspective that blends politics, history and philosophy, A Theory of the Drone convincingly argues that armed drones are drastically altering relations between nations and individuals, and that it’s probably already too late to turn back.

I’ve been obsessed with drones since the Bush administration deployed them during the months after 9/11 over Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they have since killed thousands of people, the vast majority of them demonstrably innocent civilians who were not targeted, the remainder so-called “militants” who don’t fit the popular definition of a terrorist determined to attack America, but are merely guerrilla fighters trying to bring down the governments of American client states and allies.

Coverage of the Aviary, a drone research facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio that designs drones to mimic flight in the animal kingdom from hawks and hummingbirds down to bees and dragonflies, convinces me that we have only begun to scratch the surface of the unmanned flight revolution.

Even though I’ve read tons about drones, French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou blew my mind with his lucid observations about the political and psychological of armed UAV warfare. Whether or not you find the subject of interest, I can say with certainty that “A Theory of the Drone” will be one of the most important books you have ever read.

Because even if you don’t care about drones, drones care about you.

In combat, two or more adversaries clash violently. To be sure, there can be and often is a wide gap in manpower, training, and technology that all but assures the outcome. Nevertheless, combat entails risk to everyone who participates in it.

To cite an extreme sample, the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima might have experienced an equipment malfunction that caused his plane to crash.

There was of course a vast difference in the risks taken by the Japanese residents of Hiroshima on the ground and Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, but still, he did place himself in some physical jeopardy.

Drone warfare, on the other hand, is not combat between adversaries. Drone warfare, Chamayou points out, is the relationship between hunter and prey.

“Contrary to Cael von Clausewitz’s classical definition,” he writes, “the fundamental structure of this type of warfare is no longer that of a duel, of two fighters facing each other the paradigm is quite different: a hunter advancing on a prey that flees or hides from him. The rules of the game are not the same.”

He quotes George A. Crawford, author of a report on “manhunting theoretical principles” for a military university:

In the competition between two enemy combatants, the goal is to win the battle by defeating the adversary: both combatants must confront to win. However, a manhunt scenario differs in that each player’s strategy is different. The fugitive always wants to avoid capture; the pursuer must confront to win, whereas the fugitive must evade to win.”

This is huge.

Chamayou notes attempts by the military, including an attempt to issue combat medals to drone operators, to imbue these remote-control killers with the glory that follows the courage demonstrated by risk-taking.

But there is no risk-taking – none whatsoever. Not even psychological: despite media reports that drone operators could suffer PTSD, there is no evidence whatsoever that this is ever happened to a single one.

a-theory-of-the-drone-review-ted-rallAt worst, drone operators report being mind numbingly bored as they watch hour after hour of ordinary civilians walking around dusty towns in the Middle East and South Asia doing ordinary civilian things, and sometimes the surreal aspect of blowing people up at work and then coming home to your wife and kids every night in the American suburbs.

Eliminating physical risk, however, comes at a political cost to the country that uses drones to invade foreign airspace.

And notice how no one talks about sovereignty?

Classic counterinsurgency doctrine teaches that asymmetric warfare is a war for hearts and minds.

Drones, Chamayou says, seem to solve the problem of the terrorist hydra whose death inspires dozens of his family and friends to take up the fight.

Chamayou writes:

An armada of hunter killer drones…can win that race and eliminate individuals at least as fast as new ones are recruited. The strategic plan of air counterinsurgency is now clear: as soon as the head grows back, cut it off. And never mind if, in a spiraling development of attacks and reprisals that is hard to control, the perverse effect of that prophylactic measure is to attract new volunteers … Never mind if the enemy ranks thicken, since it will always be possible to neutralize the new recruits as fast as they emerge. The cull will be repeated periodically, in a pattern of infinite eradication.”

Even if this doesn’t make your blood thicken, it should make your brain hurt: “The partisans of the drone as a privileged weapon of ‘antiterrorism’ promise a war without losses or defeats,” he writes. “What they fail to mention is that it will also be awarded the victory. The scenario that looms before us is one of infinite violence, with no possible exit; the paradox of an untouchable power waging interminable wars toward perpetual war.”

“Nobody dies – except the enemy.” That’s the argument proponents of drone warfare have sold, fairly successfully, to the American public. It’s understandable. Nobody wants to see their sons or daughters, or other American sons or daughters, coming home from battle in body bags.

The problem with this tribalist attitude, writes Chamayou, is that the rest of the world is paying attention. Drones broadcast: American lives matter, foreign lives do not. You can’t blame the foreigners for not liking us very much.

Especially when the US military and its allies in the media claim that drones are actually a humanitarian weapon due to their precision – he makes a mockery of this – and because it saves American lives. “The drone,” he scoffs, “does indeed save our lives.”

When you choose this lesser evil, he notes, you are nevertheless choosing evil.

Countries like the United States – spending billions of dollars for thousands of drones employed around the world – will become “drone states,” nations whose reliance on military technology abroad must inevitably lead them to apply them domestically, by law enforcement agencies in the cities and states.

One can easily foresee how police drones, which have already been acquired by numerous local law enforcement agencies and have taken part in the pursuit of criminal suspects on the lam, might be used to shoot and kill a dangerous fugitive.

Few people would complain about this use of armed drones on American soil.

What happens next is less a slippery slope argument than a logical prediction.

The US military and CIA often justify using drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan on the grounds that it’s too dangerous to send in ground troops to try to capture its targets.

Rather than send policemen into a hostage situation, drug den, or other place where a criminal suspect or someone wanted for questioning who might be considered armed and dangerous, the authorities might instead choose to use a so-called precision drone to blow the place up and eliminate the suspect entirely.

Although it happened during the pre-drone era, this isn’t unprecedented in recent history: Philadelphia police dropped military grade bombs on the headquarters of a radical political cult called MOVE in 1985, burning down 65 houses.

Eventually, drones will be used to crush domestic political dissent.

Unfortunately, we have forgotten so much of America’s basic constitutional rights and traditional political ethics that those who appeal to our better natures find themselves lecturing to us as though we were not particularly bright kindergartners. Having found myself there, I wish there were a better way. In the meantime, we need to digest Civil Society 101:

“In law enforcement, one should first try to capture the individual, giving him the possibility of surrendering and even, if possible, offering him that chance,” Chamayou writes.

How far we have devolved since 9/11!

Did, for example, anyone ask whether Osama bin Laden was given the chance to surrender? And when it came out that he was captured alive but wounded, and was then executed on orders from someone sitting next to the President of the United States in the White House Situation Room, did anyone but a few leftists care?

When someone like bin Laden is denied rights that until recently were widely considered universal, is only a matter of time before those rights erode and eventually vanish.

The armed drone, which unambiguously allows the state to kill anyone and everyone with impunity, without the slightest physical risk whatsoever, has set the stage for a future dystopian nightmare even George Orwell didn’t imagine.

One Hour a Day Earbud Limit? WHAT?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by Breaking Modern:

The World Health Organization (WHO) now warns teens and young adults that they are at high risk of hearing loss if they listen to music on headphones more than an hour a day. Buy in open office spaces, headphones are required to keep out distracting noises … including co-workers’ music.

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Wannabe ISIS Fighters Arrested in NYC: Chickens Coming Home

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain:

As a frequent traveler to and author of several books about the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, I was surprised by the news that the FBI arrested a citizen of Kazakhstan along with two men from Uzbekistan for attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Although Kazakhstan has a majority Muslim population, it is a highly secular culture where radical Islamism has had less success attracting adherents than in neighboring countries. Walk the streets of major cities like the capital of Astana and the intellectual center Almaty and you will see casinos, bars, men smoking and drinking beer and vodka, and countless women in miniskirts and tightfitting blouses.

These troubling arrests – they practically fit the dictionary definition of entrapment, the federal government’s definition of “material assistance to a terrorist organization” is overly broad, and anyway, why should it be illegal to go and fight for a foreign army that isn’t legally at war with the United States? – are still a developing story, so what follows necessarily relies upon speculation.

Akhror Saidakhmetov, 19, is the youngest of the three. The feds intercepted him at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City early Wednesday morning, while trying to board a flight to Istanbul. Turkey is a typical transit route for would-be ISIS recruits trying to get into Syria.

My off-the-cuff assumption was that his radicalization must have been influenced by his fellow suspects, both of whom are from Uzbekistan, particularly his roommate and former fellow restaurant worker, 24-year-old Abdurasul Juraboev. But that may not be the case.

Saidakhmetov is from the southern Kazakh city of Turkistan. He left for the United States at age 16 and has not been back.

According to the Kazakhstani Foreign Ministry, however, he is listed as an ethnic Uzbek.

The third man, Abror Habibov, 30, was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida.

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If the Uzbek connection turns out to be a central thread in the three men’s desire to join the Islamic State, a Taliban-style attempt to reboot the caliphate eliminated at the end of World War I and establish a medieval interpretation of sharia law in the Middle East, it would not be surprising to those of us who pay attention to Central Asia. When I heard that the three were all ethnic Uzbeks, I immediately thought:

Fergana Valley.

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

Islam Karimov.

The Fergana Valley is a mountainous geographical knot connecting Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Long a hotbed of Islamic extremism, particularly among ethnic Uzbeks, Fergana is the center of power of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU, whose members attended Afghan training camps during the Taliban era in the late 1990s, is dedicated to the overthrow of Islam Karimov, the authoritarian dictator of Uzbekistan.

Given their ages, it’s unlikely that any of the three men, including Habibov, were members of the IMU. In the age of radical jihad, however, self-radicalization is inspired by the ideology in the air around you. If you’re fundamentalist and Muslim and radical in Uzbekistan, or still have ties to that country, the IMU comes with the territory the same way that growing up Irish and Catholic in the 1970s, and resenting the British occupation forces, necessarily leads one to embrace, if not join, the IRA.

All of the Central Asian republics are seriously screwed up, and all of them are run by authoritarian despots, but none are nearly as heinous or universally despised by their citizenry as Karimov.

Karimov, a Communist Party boss who kept his job after the fall of the USSR, runs one of the most violent and corrupt dictatorships in the world. Among other atrocities, he has personally supervised the massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and ordered political dissidents to be either boiled or frozen to death. Central Asia watchers have long expected Karimov-related blowback.

When I traveled in Uzbekistan, everyone I met – secular or religious, regardless of ethnicity, wherever they stood on the spectrum of political ideology, young and old, male and female, rich or poor – despised Karimov, and wished for his speedy painful death. Unfortunately for the people of Uzbekistan, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. That’s because he is one of America’s best friends in the so-called global war on terror.

It is not difficult to imagine three young Uzbek men, struggling to make their way in New York City, feeling resentment against the West and in particular against the United States, which has long propped up a regime which has looted spectacular amounts of wealth from and abused their countrymen. Was this a case of chickens coming home to roost, or simply three guys who were led astray?

Sooner rather than later, I suspect that we will find out. Whatever the case, US foreign policy has contributed to radicalization in a Central Asia that, after 1991, could have easily gone the other way had we simply let their domestic political situations sort themselves out, rather than insist upon supporting a group of ruthless tyrants who were wildly unpopular among their own people, simply to cut deals for cheap oil or natural gas or to lease airfields for American military operations.

“Although Central Asian governments have attempted to crack down on extremism within their borders, analysts suspect that ISIS has effectively targeted Central Asian nationals for recruitment,” reports the Christian Science Monitor. That’s what happens when you alienate people by giving them nothing to lose: the beneficiaries are inevitably the most extreme groups, like the Islamic State. “A report published last month by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group claimed that up to 4,000 recruits from Central Asia had joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Many of these recruits are from the Fergana Valley, an ethnically diverse region that includes eastern Uzbekistan. The Kazakh National Security Committee estimates that about 300 from that country, about half of them women, are fighting in Syria for ISIS.”

Heckuva job.

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