Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
WHEN MEDGAR EVERS' BROTHER WANTED TO MEET BOB DYLAN
On May 17, ten years ago, Bob Dylan performed at the Jackson Mississippi JAM - the city’s arts and music festival. (Yes, when Freddy Koella was on lead guitar.) What I missed at the time was an account in the Jackson Free Press on June 12, which concentrated not on the music, or the rain and mud, but on the attempt by Medgar Evers’ surviving older brother, Charles Evers, to meet Dylan to thank him for the song ‘Only A Pawn in their Game’. I wasn’t aware of this story the following year either, when I arrived by train to spend Martin Luther King Jnr. Day in Jackson MS, where I went to Medgar Evers’ house and stood at the edge of the suburban lawn where he’d been gunned down just over 40 years earlier.
Now the Jackson Free Press editor, Donna Ladd, has reprinted the story of Charles Evers’ attempt to meet Dylan - it was published June 5. The original account, which is the same, is from June 12, 2003. In neither does she explain how Charles Evers is related to Medgar, or that Charles (now 90) came back to Mississippi after his brother’s death, took over the local NAACP and became the first black mayor in Mississippi since the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War - she was writing for a local readership who know who Charles Evers was and is. Yesterday I republished that 2003 account, but I've been asked simply to link to it instead - which is fair enough - so here is that link.
With thanks to Andrew Muir for alerting me to the story.
NOT SAVING BUT DRONING
While western leaders pretend to debate whether economies should cut back or spend to achieve growth, it's worth remembering how much they spend on “defence" (ie. arms) regardless.
And when the complaint is that much of this phenomenal expenditure is wasted on projects that come to nothing (as if the rest is value for money) there are always a happy few who don't complain. Naturally, these people tend to be close to the politicians responsible for the budgets.
And when the complaint is that much of this phenomenal expenditure is wasted on projects that come to nothing (as if the rest is value for money) there are always a happy few who don't complain. Naturally, these people tend to be close to the politicians responsible for the budgets.
Here's an excerpt from Andrew Cockburn's
excellent and painstaking piece on Obama’s remote-controlled wars - in this section tracking how one three-star general came to rake it in thanks to drones that don't work properly. It comes from the London Review of Books (Vol. 34, no.5; March 8, 2012)
“In the first Gulf War, US military technology was more successful, indeed it seemed to function flawlessly. TV images relayed from cameras mounted on bombs as they homed in on their targets turned the war into a spectator sport, and the swift victory did much to dispel memories of Vietnam. A coterie of airforce officers who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision.
“... Deptula made no secret of his desire to turn the entire business over to remote control as soon as possible. The technicians operating drones from US soil, he told an interviewer, were ‘very comfortable with the responsibilities of finishing the kill chain when called upon to do so’. He retired from the air force as a three-star general in 2010 and became chief executive of MAV 6, a company describing itself as a provider of ‘enhanced situational understanding’ of battlefields. MAV 6 now has a $211 million contract to develop Blue Devil Block 2, an unmanned airship 350 feet long that will carry automated intelligence collection systems capable of intercepting and tracing a high-value target’s mobile phone, recording video of his location, and relaying that information to drone operators. Hovering four miles above Afghanistan for days at a time, Blue Devils will cover huge areas and transmit enormous quantities of digitised images back to the US – the daily equivalent, according to Deptula’s airforce successor, of ‘53,000 full-length feature movies’.
“The Gorgon Stare surveillance system, which is destined to be carried by the Blue Devils, was developed at a cost of $500 million and can supposedly keep cars and people across an entire city under constant video surveillance. Civil libertarians, apprehensive about the expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, have objected to its being deployed inside the US. But a December 2010 report by a specialised airforce testing unit in Florida suggests they have little cause for worry. Gorgon Stare’s camera images could not distinguish humans from bushes, or one vehicle from another. It had severe problems working out where it was. It broke down, on average, 3.7 times per sortie. The testing unit recommended that it shouldn’t be deployed, advice rejected by higher authorities, who quickly dispatched it to Afghanistan."
“In the first Gulf War, US military technology was more successful, indeed it seemed to function flawlessly. TV images relayed from cameras mounted on bombs as they homed in on their targets turned the war into a spectator sport, and the swift victory did much to dispel memories of Vietnam. A coterie of airforce officers who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision.
“... Deptula made no secret of his desire to turn the entire business over to remote control as soon as possible. The technicians operating drones from US soil, he told an interviewer, were ‘very comfortable with the responsibilities of finishing the kill chain when called upon to do so’. He retired from the air force as a three-star general in 2010 and became chief executive of MAV 6, a company describing itself as a provider of ‘enhanced situational understanding’ of battlefields. MAV 6 now has a $211 million contract to develop Blue Devil Block 2, an unmanned airship 350 feet long that will carry automated intelligence collection systems capable of intercepting and tracing a high-value target’s mobile phone, recording video of his location, and relaying that information to drone operators. Hovering four miles above Afghanistan for days at a time, Blue Devils will cover huge areas and transmit enormous quantities of digitised images back to the US – the daily equivalent, according to Deptula’s airforce successor, of ‘53,000 full-length feature movies’.
“The Gorgon Stare surveillance system, which is destined to be carried by the Blue Devils, was developed at a cost of $500 million and can supposedly keep cars and people across an entire city under constant video surveillance. Civil libertarians, apprehensive about the expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, have objected to its being deployed inside the US. But a December 2010 report by a specialised airforce testing unit in Florida suggests they have little cause for worry. Gorgon Stare’s camera images could not distinguish humans from bushes, or one vehicle from another. It had severe problems working out where it was. It broke down, on average, 3.7 times per sortie. The testing unit recommended that it shouldn’t be deployed, advice rejected by higher authorities, who quickly dispatched it to Afghanistan."
Oh you masters of war...
UPDATE: 1000-YEAR TIME-LAPSE MAP
This blog entry offered a terrific moving map that swept forward through the turmoil of Europe's history/geography from 1000 AD until 2005. Unfortunately, the video of it had only been up here a couple of days when YouTube withdrew it from its website (and therefore from everywhere online), because of a disputed copyright claim. Apologies to readers who hadn't yet caught up with it here.
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