and the beat drones on

The war on terror. Its long way from those hobby remote controlled planes of forty years ago with 1200 horsepower twenty-eight foot wingspan weapons of today.  The aesthetics of the war on terror, frightingly, resemble the artistic sensibilities of Marinetti’s futurism, the purity and cleansing capacity of destruction, the glorification of the machine, and the Dada nihilistic undertone of marcel Duchamp; the urinal as cleaning art. Or rather art in the shithouse, factory produced a la Warhol in the same stream of design as Bauhaus art was for mass production. Almost a self-propelling art like the drone warcraft. Remote control for the playstation generation. Its ironic that Bauhaus engineers and architects got the nod for concentration camp design, also a kind of cleaning purge that  drone warfore seems to have in store in de-ethnicizing the targeted areas., all done from a safe,abstract distance.

And all airforces are making the transition from manned to unmanned platforms. …

—When this is put into the context of the rest of Singer’s book – where we read, for instance, that “at least 45 percent of [the U.S. Air Force’s] future large bomber fleet [will be] able to operate without humans aboard,” with other “long-endurance” military drones soon “able to stay aloft for as long as five years,” and if you consider that, as Singer writes, the Los Angeles Police Department “is already planning to use drones that would circle over certain high-crime neighborhoods, recording all that happens” – you get into some very heady terrain, indeed. After all, the idea that those drone aircraft circling over Los Angeles in the year 2013 are actually someone’s else literal daydream simply blows me away. —Read More:http://bldgblog.blogspot.ca/2009/04/subterranean-machine-dreams-of.html

Of course, the end game for all this technology is electronic warfare….

(see link at end)…However, he has got it entirely wrong if he thinks the Taliban or al-Qaida would be happy with our work. They don’t want peace; they want recruits for more war. U.S. policies hand them these recruits. I saw this firsthand in Pakistan. We interviewed a number of people who had family members killed by our drones. More than a couple said that if they had the chance they would do whatever necessary to get back at the people who did this to their family members.

This is how terrorism is born. They asked us over and over again why the U.S. feels it has the right to go into a country that it is not even at war with, like Pakistan, and kill whoever it wants without a trial or even any proof that they are combatants. There is much anger and hatred toward the U.S. in Pakistan….

—I suppose when the Bauhaus first appeared it looked like a breath of fresh artistic air, but in retrospect it looks like something more perverse: a purveyor of urban anonymity and more insidiously, a milestone on the way to the mechanization — denaturalization — of life, bringing with it the robotization of human beings, and with that their dehumanization, that is, the loss of the feeling of being human, bringing in its wake depression and barbarism. Paradoxically the pursuit of hyper-efficiency in all areas of life — domestic as well as public (Bauhaus furniture and teapots as well as buildings) — results in defective human beings and a defective society — peculiarly unfit human beings and a peculiarly unfit-for-organically-alive-human-beings environment.—Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/bauhaus-war-machine12-2-09.asp image:http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2012/06/07/comment-obama-a-appris-a-ne-plus-s-en-faire-et-a-aimer-les-drones_1714461_3222.html

…Our trip showed many that not all Americans support what our government is doing. This gave many a perspective that they did not have before and probably did more to undercut the terrorists than the U.S. military has done with all its drones and bombs. While I applaud Mr. Marchewka for his service, I’m not sure I hold the same regard for drone pilots. There is nothing heroic about sitting behind a computer screen thousands of miles from your target and killing people.

The people from Waziristan, where most of the drone strikes occurred, told us drones fly overhead 24/7 and people are afraid to congregate for fear they will be targeted. Their kids no longer to go school for fear of being targeted. Their governing body, the jirga, was targeted and at least 40 were killed. What right does the U.S. have to do this to these people? Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Letter-Do-we-have-right-to-fly-drones-4014169.php#ixzz2BYwSZjm1

—The Heron TP is the largest Israeli UAV with a 26-meter-long wingspan. It can fly for up to 45 hours and carry a payload of 1,000 kilograms.
The Israeli drone is also capable of launching missiles.
Israel has increased the use of its drones over the past few years in areas including the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.
In July 2011, France announced its decision to purchase the Israeli Heron TP in line with plans to upgrade its UAV capabilities. —Read More:http://www.asian-defence.net/2012/01/israeli-heron-tp-srone-crashes-during.html

(see link at end)…Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the new face of warfare for the US and ma

f the world’s biggest defence spenders. But where are they based around the world?

Yesterday we published a complete database of reported drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, as a senior diplomat criticised their use. But it may be too late. Drones are everywhere.

Data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which it has allowed us to re-publish here on the Datablog, identifies 56 different types of UAVs used in 11 different countries. Where it can calculate actual stocks, this covers 807 drones in active service around the world – and this is a huge underestimate: number data is not available for China, Turkey and Russia….The US is the most open about its drone stocks. The IISS data shows that is has at least 678 drones in service, of 18 different types. Some 14 of them are identified as ‘heavy’, and includes UAVs such as the MQ-1B Predator, of which it has over 100….Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/aug/03/drone-stocks-by-country

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Both were ruthlessly utopian and inbred — the Bauhaus wanted an inbred art, the Nazis wanted an inbred society — forms and Aryans incestuously breeding in eugenic pursuit of an imagined pure, perfectly formed breed of art and human being. Both expected technology to do the eugenic work, as though technology would guarantee the ideal and absolutely pure and was ideal and pure in itself. The Bauhaus ideal of pure, well-managed art and the Nazi ideal of pure, well-managed Aryan society were curiously correlate however ostensibly at odds. After all, the Nazis were great advocates of industrialism, and also had a totalitarian ideology. Just as the Bauhaus wanted a one-dimensional art — totalized and stereotyped art as exclusively geometrical, with whatever pseudo-expressive variations bringing the geometry to quasi-life, like a robot going through the motions of dancing — so the Nazis wanted a one-dimensional society, that is, a society in which there was only one kind of “authentic” human being.

In short, the Bauhaus pursuit of purity in art is peculiarly similar to the Nazi pursuit of purity in society. Both pursued technological purity for its own sake, imposing it on rather than integrating it into everyday life. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/bauhaus-war-machine12-2-09.asp

So, Obama, our president of peace, Obamacare, has been signing off on the escalation of drone warfare and all the economic activity it seems to generate. The response is always the same: certain  “anonymous officials” promise greater caution in the future, but the kill totals of these nameless strikes keeps tallying up. The math doesn’t add up from what is claimed and the corpses on the ground. Face it, in Yemen and Pakistan probably a majority of males in given areas have beards, have Islam on their lips and carry a weapon. Every day. But it doesn’t mean they are risks to national security or will carry out attacks on Americans. But, they end up getting bombed out. Just in case. its pretty obvious that the hostility will only darken, making even more toxic the problem the idea of drone warfare was pitched to deal with in the first place.

 

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One Response to and the beat drones on

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