Recommended Reading
….Drones. Robots are transforming the US military and warfare. I’m a former military pilot. I have seen first hand what drones are doing to the Air Force. Already more than half of all of the people going through pilot training end up flying drones. There are more military drones flying right now than manned planes. We’ve also seen the development of the last manned fighter (the F-35) and I doubt anybody anywhere will produce a new one. Around the world, drones are being deployed permanently (eliminating the need for soldiers) and they are being used frequently (they kill thousands). Unfortunately, this makes sense. Drones are nearly costless. They don’t generate any public push back (no US casualties) and they are much less expensive than people (no retirement/health/etc.). They can also be controlled from Washington. What makes them really scary is how fast they are becoming autonomous, smaller, and less expensive. It’s easy to envision a 10 million drone swarm pacifying a 30 m person city in 20 years time (completely controlled by just a few people at the top).
Cheryl Rofer –We Need Some Disruptive Thinking Here
….Kissinger and Scowcroft’s first three points are straight out of Herman Kahn: strategic stability, and second strike. Strategic stability is a concern, in the credibility of reductions. Their fourth point almost addresses this, but it is in the Kahnian mode. Verification is the basis for this credibility, but, rather than the uncertainty associated with the measurements, the methods are the primary concern. Credibility now lies in the status of warheads taken out of service. That means counting warheads and access to storage and decommissioning facilities, unthinkable in Kahn’s time.
Their point five would apply Kahnian logic to the up-and-coming nuclear powers: China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. But until the United States and Russia come down to several hundred nuclear weapons, this is simply not an issue. The analysis may be worth doing, but it is hard to see how being in the same range of nuclear numbers would damage strategic stability. In any case, none of those countries poses a serious threat to the United States. And joining up together? Please.
Diane Ravitch –NY State Education Department is a Problem and New York’s Bargain Basement Tests
Corporate ed reform, with some exceptions, is largely a political fraud designed to re-route tax dollars to politically connected equity investor groups and testing companies; but in New York, under billionaire autocrat Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo, corporate ed reform is also an intellectual embarrassment.
Climate scientist journalist longs for a planetary dictatorship and gets a platform at Scientific American
….Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?
Wow.
Talk about self-referential cluelessness.
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