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      Ron Johnson’s Binary Thinking

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      Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is a voice the media counts on to faithfully echo the positions and culture of the former US president, Donald Trump. For the liberal media, Johnson represents everything reasonable citizens should reject in the name of democratic values. He is also a multimillionaire, who, like the billionaire Trump, “promised to place his assets in a blind trust to ensure that he would legislate in the public interest. That did not happen.” To make sure his current and future millions would be safe, like many other wealthy people, Johnson found a way of profiting from the movements of the market provoked by the coronavirus pandemic. Such people will always be respected for their prescience and their success.

      In the absence of Trump himself — no longer in the White House and banned from Twitter — the media remain attentive to any public statements Johnson is willing to make. Since the events of January 6, when a mob stormed Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and threatened the lives of legislators, a debate has raged about who, if anyone, was responsible. Many claim that members of the mob were ready to physically attack any lawmaker favorable to certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, consecrating Trump’s defeat. Johnson himself publicly refused to certify the results, contributing to the mob’s ire against a “stolen election.” That explains why he felt at the time that he had nothing to fear from the crowd.

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      Now, Johnson is criticizing Democrats who say they feared for their lives, implying that they are either cowards, liars or both. Johnson has qualified members of the mob as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law.” Clearly they were white patriots. How could anyone doubt their peaceful intentions toward America’s white republic?

      Johnson added a remark that his opponents see as a direct admission of racism: “Had the tables been turned and President Donald Trump won the election and those were thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protestors I would have been concerned.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Tables turned:

      An expression dear to those who see every problem as a simple binary opposition, enabling them to suppose that on one side are those who represent the good and on the other, evil

      Contextual Note

      Johnson’s racism is patent. But far more interesting and far more sinister is his assumption — shared even by Americans who claim to oppose everything he stands for — that all problems can be reduced to a binary opposition.

      The senator makes a purely rhetorical point by evoking an imaginary situation that in all probability could never have occurred. It allows him to establish a theoretical equivalence between very real criminal actions — with far-reaching political consequences — conducted by those he considers his allies and the fantasized actions of those he identifies as his enemies. Johnson evokes the counterfactual idea of a Trump victory and imagines everything would play out symmetrically thanks to turned tables.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The notion of turning the tables reflects a widespread contemporary belief that opposing sides within a competitive system will always indulge in destructive behavior, inconsistent with their stated democratic ideals. It even suggests that in an oppositional two-party system, destructive behavior becomes the norm.

      The idea that public action can be reduced to the symmetry of turning the tables has its source within a deeper trend in US culture: the growing tyranny of binary logic. Silicon Valley’s success derives from the triumph of binary code. It contains the idea that every thought or creative impulse can be represented by a 0 or a 1 and subsequently built into an algorithm. With the era of fossil fuel as the dominant force in the economy presumably drawing to an end, the reign of information technology and its binary culture appears to be taking over.

      Analog thinking, as opposed to binary thought, supposes a range of values across a continuous spectrum. Binary thought cancels the spectrum and replaces it by what are taken to be fundamental units that combine to simulate the spectrum. That process underlies not only the logic of computers, but also the construction of political and cultural hyperreality. Reality has an analog structure. Hyperreality uses binary logic to simulate reality. It forces every identity into a 0/1 opposition: liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican, white vs. black, woke vs. unwoke. The points of division may vary according to different algorithms, but the underlying principle remains the same. 

      Within such systems, the idea of opposition rules. Politicians promote an ideology based on simplistic algorithmic thinking because voters find it easy to accept. This in turn tends toward defining an attitude that tends toward excluding “the other.” It buttresses the notion of exclusion that justifies racism. To counter this impression and create the illusion of equality and fair play, it introduces the pseudo-logic of tables being turned. If both sides are expected to play foul, then all will be fair. Human society in a competitive culture takes on the zero-sum logic of professional sports. For one side to win, the other must lose, at least until the next rematch.

      Historical Note

      It may simply be a coincidence that the oppositional fragmentation of society has grown in intensity at the same historical moment in which information technology has come to represent the ultimate manifestation of progress, economic success and, for some, human virtue. 

      In his book, “Les mots et les choses” (literally, “words and things”), whose title was rendered in English, “The Order of Things,” Michel Foucault pointed to a major paradigm change that took place in European culture starting in the 17th century. The modes of thought of the intellectual class began shifting from an analog model — premised on a mode of reasoning that produced meaning through the observation of multiple and often random similarities — to a binary model that permitted the growth of scientific thought. Science thrives on the analysis of individual components rather than associations based on appearance. Foucault points to the role played by the Académie Française when it reduced the idea of language to the binary pair of signifiant and signifié, signifier and signified. It implicitly excluded other associations that human language conveys through nuance.

      In European popular culture, the two systems of accounting for the world — ternary and binary — continued to coexist for at least two centuries, with the binary logic of science playing an increasingly dominant role. The ultimate triumph of science in the 20th century had the effect of banishing from the regime of legitimate thought the ternary thinking that still existed in traditions associated with the idea of “folklore.” It also remained uncomfortably present in the arts and, in particular, poetry and song.

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      Thanks to its efficacy and omnipresence in people’s lives today, information technology has sealed the triumph of binary thought. But the latest evolution of science, the quantum revolution, may be upsetting the paradigm by introducing a troubling third state. The smallest of Foucault’s “things” exist in the alternative states of a particle and a wave. This means that, in some sense, they are also neither one nor the other. And they may be much more, as quantum computing is beginning to reveal.

      Were he to think about such things, Ron Johnson would probably assume that when an electron shifts from particle to wave, it is simply “turning the tables.” But it is doing much more. Part of it concerns its entanglement with other particles which, whatever their distance, synchronize their behavior thanks to principles that no known physical force determines.

      In his explanation of quantum entanglement, Frank Wilczek explains this fundamental truth: “In practice, unentangled (independent) states are rare exceptions, for whenever systems interact, the interaction creates correlations between them.” Despite the tragic implications of Schrodinger’s metaphor of a cat that is both alive and dead, this is not a zero-sum game in which the tables are turned and the winners smile as the losers weep. It is about “correlations,” which implies solidarity. The traditional model expects competition or at least independent (indifferent) action.

      Some dare to speculate that the quantum paradigm may eventually push our society toward overcoming the tyranny of binary thinking. How long will it take for the politicians to catch up?

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on defence and foreign policy: an old-fashioned look at the future | Editorial

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      The integrated review offers a nostalgic – at times, even anachronistic – response to the challenges of the 21st century. Its intent is laudable: acknowledging that attempting to defend the status quo is not enough, and seeking to carve out a path ahead. It recognises the multiple threats that the UK faces – from future pandemics to cyber-attacks – and the need for serious investment in science and technology. But overall, “global Britain” offers a hazy vision of a country that is looking east of Suez once more, wedded to the symbolic power of aircraft carriers, and contemplating a nuclear response to cyberthreats.The policy paper is in essence a response to three big shifts: the rise of China, the related but broader decline of the existing global order, and Brexit. Two of these confront democracies around the world. But the last is a self-inflicted wound, which the government appears determined to deepen. And the need to deal with the first two is not in itself a solution to the third, as this policy paper sometimes seems to imagine.The plan essentially recognises the move that is already taking place towards a warier, more critical approach to China, away from the woefully misjudged “golden era” spearheaded by George Osborne, and the fact that parameters will be set for us by the tougher approach of the US, in particular. It accepts that we must engage on issues such as climate change, and that we are not in a new cold war – we live in a globalised economy – albeit that there is likely to be more decoupling than many anticipated.But it does not try to explain how the UK can square the circle of courting investment while shielding itself from undue Chinese influence and expanding regional alliances. Australia is currently finding out what happens when Beijing is angered by a strategic shift.The tilt to the Indo-Pacific may – like Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” – fail to live up to its advertising. But it is true that Britain has paid insufficient attention to Asia, and is wise to pursue stronger ties with Five Eyes nations and other democracies in the region. These relationships will sometimes be problematic; India is the world’s largest democracy, but under Narendra Modi is looking ever less democratic. The pursuit of new partnerships could have been “in addition to” rather than “instead of”. Yet Britain is snubbing old, reliable, largely like-minded friends with clear common interests. The review is written almost as if the EU did not exist, preferring to mention individual member states. That seems especially childish when it also identifies Russia as an “active threat”. Nor is it likely – even if the UK joins the Trans-Pacific free-trade pact – that countries thousands of miles away can fully compensate for the collapse in trade with the EU that saw Britain record a £5.6bn slump in exports to the bloc in January. Geography matters.Behind the rhetoric of the review is a country that has failed to match its words and ambitions to its actions. Britain boasts of its soft power and talks of upholding the rule of law internationally – yet has declared itself happy to break international law when it considers it convenient. Though the paper promises to restore the commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid “when the fiscal situation allows”, slashing the budget is not only undermining the UK’s standing, but global security and stability too.Most strikingly, after 30 years of gradual disarmament since the end of the Soviet Union, and despite its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty, Britain is raising the cap on its nuclear warheads – a decision met with dismay by the UN Elders and others, and bafflement by analysts. Mr Johnson has not deigned to explain why.The review has rightly asked difficult questions. While Joe Biden has brought the US back to multilateralism, his predecessor has shown that the longer-term parameters of US policy may not be as predictable as Britain once believed. Old certainties have gone. But the new challenges cannot be met by turning back to nukes and aircraft carriers. The government should have looked closer to home and been bolder in addressing the future. More

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      in US Politics

      Natural but deadly: huge gaps in US rules for wood-stove smoke exposed

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Green Light newsletter Glenn Helkenn lives in a spruce forest, in a tiny log cabin he built himself on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska’s third largest city.Give him an hour and a handsaw and Helkenn says he can harvest enough firewood to heat his 96 sq ft home for a couple of days, even when the temperature drops to -40F. For him, it’s about more than free fuel.“It is what I enjoy doing,” Helkenn said. “You know, it’s the fresh air. It’s the time out in the woods. It’s the snowshoeing. It’s the exercise.”The trouble is about 12,000 much larger Fairbanks-area homes heat with wood too. The city is partially ringed by hills, so smoke can get trapped in low-lying neighborhoods for days or weeks.Fairbanks has some of the dirtiest air in the country, in large part due to smoke from wood stoves. Wood smoke is a serious health threat. It emits high levels of fine-particle pollution that can be inhaled deep into the lungs, exacerbating respiratory problems like asthma and increasing the risk of premature death from heart attacks and strokes.In 2015, the US government required that newer models of wood stoves perform better and began spending millions of dollars to subsidize the transition away from older models. Now, an investigation by state environment officials is revealing a critical flaw in that plan: the latest stoves might not be any less polluting than the previous ones.A review of 250 wood-burning stove certifications found unexplained data omissions and atypical lab practices. When the officials retested about a dozen of the heaters in their own labs, they were not able to reproduce the certification results. They found many stoves were polluting as much as the previous models. One was producing so much pollution that it wouldn’t have met the Environmental Protection Agency’s first-ever standards from 1988.“We pulled the test reports that are supposed to be publicly posted and we compared – did this certification report meet all the rules? And we couldn’t find any that actually met all the rules,” said Cindy Heil, an air official with Alaska’s department of environmental conservation. “That’s a problem.”Alaska, along with a group of north-east air regulators called Nescaum, expanded the review and concluded the certification procedures and EPA’s oversight of them are a “systemic failure”.As long as the stove review process continues virtually unsupervised, people inhaling wood smoke from the stoves will continue to get sick and die early, not just in Alaska but around the US, the state officials said.Fairbanks resident Patrice Lee has been campaigning for cleaner air for 14 years, since her son, who was born with heart defects, collapsed outside his high school on an especially smoky day.Lee says millions of dollars have been wasted trying to get people to burn wood more cleanly when it would have been better spent switching them to another fuel.“We have a whole generation of young people who may never achieve their full lung capacity, or even potentially their cognitive potential, because they’ve been breathing this smoke,” Lee said.Lee says the problem isn’t just stove technology. Wet wood sends more particulates up the smoke stack, so Fairbanks is steeped in public service messages about how to split and store firewood. A new kiln in town dries firewood for three days before it’s offered for sale. A local stove dealership offers classes every Saturday to ensure residents know how to operate their stoves for minimal pollution.And yet Lee can drive around her city on a cold day and see chimneys emitting thick plumes. “This house right here is a habitual offender. Just burns and burns and burns,” she said, pointing out a home in an older neighborhood. An air sensor there, on the porch of an 86-year-old woman, regularly registers the worst readings in Fairbanks, Lee said.Lee doubts the problem will be solved in her lifetime. The attempts to clean up Fairbanks’ air are a story of half measures, technology that didn’t pan out, administrative blunders and political resistance. It’s also been hard for many to accept that burning wood – an activity that seems so wholesome and close to the land – should be subject to intense regulation.Lee says her neighbors are nice people who believe that what they do on their property is their own business.“Their smoke all blows on to my property,” she said. “My most personal property is my body. And when I can’t avoid smoke, that’s invading the most personal property I have.”Airborne particulates from burning wood in homes may be to blame for 10,000 to 40,000 premature deaths annually in the US, according to two studies. In 2017, the particle pollution from residential wood heating was four times higher than the particle pollution from coal-fired power plants.Only about 4% of residential heating in the US is from wood. But that wood heating is responsible for more particulate pollution than any other source – 22%.People in Fairbanks have limited options. Most residents who have wood stoves use them to supplement another heater – typically one that burns oil. But oil costs more. Propane doesn’t perform well in extreme cold. A new utility is trucking natural gas to Fairbanks and piping it to homes, but it’s not available everywhere and residents say the cost of getting it installed is steep.With those factors in mind, the state of Alaska has spent about $12.5m in EPA grants to replace older wood stoves with newer ones in Fairbanks. It has about $15m more available to spend on wood stove programs.At the end of 2020, Congress also approved a 26% tax credit for new wood stoves that meet a certain efficiency level. Ten states provide tax incentives or rebates for the newer stoves, ranging from a 100% tax deduction in Alabama, Georgia and Idaho to a $500 tax deduction in Arizona.In 2015, the Obama administration wrote new rules for wood stoves. They were the first revisions since 1988. The regulation was in full effect as of May 2020. It basically requires that newly manufactured wood stoves meet stricter pollution restrictions and are certified by independent laboratories.But the wood stove industry is suing the federal government over the rule. It also lobbied federal regulators to change testing methods while the rule was under development. The state officials behind the wood stove report argue that led to loopholes that made certification easier.Although the EPA has approved hundreds of new wood stove models, Alaska has double-checked those certifications and allows only a few dozen to be sold or installed in the Fairbanks area, which is not meeting federal standards for particle pollution.“Right now we’ve made compromises and have left some things on the list that we still have concerns on – because we need to have something on the list,” said Heil, the Alaska air official. “We’re hoping through time that will get better and we’ll have more and more confidence.”The EPA is reviewing complaints about the certification program and acknowledged it could revoke approvals for stoves and test labs if appropriate.“Having wood-burning devices that are not meeting the standards is problematic for homeowners, as well as for communities and states working to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for [particulate matter],” the agency said.The wood stove industry has defended its new models. John Crouch, public affairs director for the trade group the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, said he doesn’t know of any significant data missing from stove test results.Crouch said he was not surprised a second lab can’t reproduce the same results.“This is fire. Fire is pretty random,” he said. “And these are in the laboratory. You can imagine when you get out into the real world. It varies a lot.”Crouch said many Fairbanks residents are still using stoves that predate the standard. Area residents have sent hundreds of older stoves to be crushed in change-out programs, but as many as 2,000 may still be in use, according to state regulators.A company called Blaze King produces some of the most popular wood stoves in Fairbanks – black boxy things with catalytic converters.Blaze King’s vice-president, Chris Neufeld, said he had had to run a regulatory obstacle course to sell stoves in the Fairbanks area. The Alaska DEC added a metric that Neufeld calls arbitrary: a particulate limit of six grams for the first hour, when stoves burn less efficiently.“That same stove that might be burning dirtier at the first hour – in hour three, four and five, it might be immaculate,” he said. “It might be burning super-clean. But we’re not giving it any credit for that.”Neufeld said a first-hour standard is like judging a car by how many miles per gallon it gets driving uphill. One Blaze King stove series did not make Alaska’s approved list for the Fairbanks area, even though it was certified by the EPA. Neufeld suspects a testing fluke.“If the wood fell just the way it was intended, it probably would have been like some of the other stoves that were below one gram per hour in the first hour filter-pull. We just got a bad run,” he said.Paul Miller, the executive director of the group of north-east US air associations, said the issue is a “backwater area for EPA”. He said the agency had not double-checked a stove certification in decades.“It’s like having your car out there and EPA never going back to check to see if one of these millions of cars on the road actually performed as certified by the automaker.”Go behind the scenes with the reporters on this story at Floodlight. More

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      in US Politics

      Maybe I was wrong about Joe Biden – is he actually the progressive president I was waiting for? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      OK, fine, I was wrong. But, in this case, I’m very happy to be wrong: it seems that Joe Biden may be shaping up to be a progressive president after all. I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, but I can now see that Biden was the better choice.When Biden announced he was running for president, I was dismayed. I thought he was Hillary Clinton 2.0 and we were going to see a repeat of 2016. (And I maintain that, had it not been for the pandemic, which changed everything, then it probably would have been.) Then, when Trump lost, I was relieved but not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a Biden presidency. He largely campaigned on a platform of returning the US to “business as usual” – but business as usual just wasn’t working for most people.Instead of simply turning back the clock four years, however, Biden has been pushing forward undeniably progressive policies. The $1.9tn pandemic relief bill that just passed is expected to reduce US poverty in 2021 by more than a third. And many of its provisions won’t be temporary: the Biden administration has indicated that it will aim to make permanent the increase in child credits contained in the bill, which could cut child poverty in half.How is all this going to be paid for? Partly by – get this – taxing the rich. Biden’s next big move may be the first major federal tax hike since 1993. The White House is expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate, increasing capital gains tax for people earning more than $1m annually, and raising income tax for those earning more than $400,000. Whether all this will get passed by the Senate is yet to be seen, of course, but it’s a big shift in the right direction.I don’t want to go overboard here. Biden is far from perfect. It only took him a month, for example, to start doing what American presidents love doing best: bombing the Middle East. And a number of things he is being effusively praised for also don’t really stand up to scrutiny. Biden’s executive order pausing new oil and gas drilling on federal land, for example, is riddled with loopholes; one industry analyst told the Financial Times it presented a “best-case scenario for the oil industry under a Biden administration”. Indeed, Biden issued at least 31 new drilling permits in his first few days of office.Nevertheless, he is advancing a far more progressive agenda than I expected. And, while I was rooting for Sanders to be president, I think Sanders would have got a lot more pushback than Biden from Republicans on the same policies. Sanders is a brilliant agitator: he has helped to bring into the mainstream a lot of progressive thinking in the US. In the end, though, I think he is probably more effective at putting pressure on Biden to move to the left than he would have been as the president.In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks called Biden a “transformational” president. That is a ridiculously premature assessment: we are only a couple of months into his presidency. Plus, Biden is not going to change anything if Republicans block his most ambitious policies. For Biden to really be effective, he needs to end the filibuster – a tactic that has significantly increased in recent years, in which you debate a bill endlessly in order to block or delay it. Biden doesn’t seem to want to do this – which is frustrating because he does have the potential to be transformational. Time and time again, it seems establishment Democrats like talking about change a lot more than they actually like making it happen. Still, I’ve been proved wrong about Biden once. I hope he proves me wrong again. More

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      in World Politics

      We Need an International Convention on Drones

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      In the aftermath of the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, drone warfare is being touted as the latest breakthrough in military technology, a “magic bullet” that makes armored vehicles obsolete, defeats sophisticated anti-aircraft systems, and routs entrenched infantry.

      While there is some truth in the hype, one needs to be especially wary of military “game changers,” since there is always a seller at the end of the pitch. In his examination of the two major books on drones — Christian Brose’s “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare” and Michael Boyle’s “The Drone Age” — analyst Andrew Cockburn points out that the victims of drones are mostly civilians, not soldiers.

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      While drones can take out military targets, they are more commonly used to assassinate people one doesn’t approve of. A case in point was former US President Donald Trump’s drone strike in 2020 that killed Qasem Solemani, Iran’s top general, a country we are not at war with. In just the first year of his administration, Trump killed more people — including 250 children — with drones in Yemen and Pakistan than former President Barack Obama did in eight years. And Obama was no slouch in this department, increasing the use of drone attacks by a factor of 10 over the administration of George W. Bush.

      Getting a handle on drones — their pluses and minuses and the moral issues such weapons of war raise — is essential if the world wants to hold off yet another round of massive military spending and the tensions and instabilities such a course will create.

      There Are No Bloodless Wars

      That drones have the power to alter a battlefield is a given, but they may not be all they are advertised. Azerbaijan’s drones — mostly Turkish Bayraktar TB2s and Israeli Harpys, Orbiter-1Ks and Harops — did indeed make hash of Armenian tanks and armored vehicles and largely silenced anti-aircraft systems. They also helped Azeri artillery target Armenian positions. But the Azerbaijanis won the recent war by slugging it out on the ground, with heavy casualties on both sides.

      As the military historian and editor of the Small Wars Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, points out, drones were effective because of the Armenians’ stunning incompetence in their use of armor, making no effort to spread their tanks out or camouflage them. Instead, they bunched them up in the open, making them sitting ducks for Turkish missile-firing drones and Israeli “suicide” drones. “While drones will be hailed as the straw that broke the camel’s back in this war,” says analyst Samuel Bendett, “Azerbaijani success is also attributed to good ol’ fashioned mechanized infantry operations that took territory, one square kilometer at a time.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Turkey has made widespread use of drones in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and they again have played a role on the battlefield. But Turkish drones have mainly been used to assassinate Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Syria. In April 2020, a Turkish drone killed two Iraqi generals in the Kurdish autonomous zone of northern Iraq. In July 2020, Turkey deployed drones in Syria to block an offense by the Syrian government against Turkey’s allies in Idlib Province, but they failed to stop President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from reclaiming large chunks of territory. In short, they are not always “game changers.”

      The selling point for drones is that they are precise, cheap — or relatively so — and you don’t have a stream of body bags returning home. But drones are not all-seeing, unless they are flying at low altitudes, thus making it easier to shoot them down. The weather also needs to be clear and the area smokeless. Otherwise, what drones see are vague images. In 2010, a US drone took out what its operators thought was a caravan of Taliban trucks carrying weapons in Afghanistan. But the trucks were filled with local peasants and the “weapons” were turkeys. The drones incinerated 23 civilians.

      Nor do they always live up to their reputation for accuracy. In a 2012 test, the US Air Force compared a photo of a base taken by the highly-touted Gorgon Stare cameras mounted on a Predator drone and the one on Google Earth. The images were essentially identical, except Gorgon Stare cost half a trillion dollars and Google Earth was free. “In neither,” says Cockburn, “were humans distinguishable from bushes.”

      Drones have killed insurgent leaders in Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan — with virtually no effect on wars in those countries. Indeed, in the case of Afghanistan, the assassination of first-tier Taliban leaders led to their replacement by far more radical elements. The widespread use of drones in the US war on drugs has also been largely a failure. Drug cartels are bigger and more dangerous than ever, and there has been no reduction in the flow of drugs into the United States.

      They do keep the body bag count down, but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If wars don’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them?

      Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers in 2001 and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do — and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.

      The Global Drones Arms Race

      Drones certainly present problems for any military. For one thing, they are damn hard to spot. Most are composed of non-metallic substances, like Kevlar, and they have low heat signatures because their small motors run on batteries. Radar doesn’t pick them up and neither do infrared detectors. The Yemen-based Houthis’ drones that hit Saudi Arabian oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019 slipped right through the radar systems of three anti-aircraft networks: the US Patriot system, the French-supplied Shashine surface-to-air-missile system and the Swiss Oerlikon 35mm radar directed cannons. Those drones were produced on a 3D printer supplied to the Houthis by Iran.

      Drones also raised havoc with Armenia’s far more capable Russian-made S-300 air defense system, plus several other short and medium-range systems. Apparently, the drones were not detected until they struck, essentially obliterating Armenia’s anti-aircraft system.

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      The Russians claim they beat off drone attacks on their two bases in Syria — Khmeimim Air Base and the naval base at Tartus — with their Pantsir air defense system. But those drones were rather primitive. Some were even made of plywood. Pantsir systems were destroyed in Nagorno Karabakh and Turkish drones apparently destroyed Pantsirs in Libya.

      The problem is that even if you do detect them, a large number of drones — a so-called “swarming attack” similar to the one that struck the Saudis — will eventually exhaust your ammunition supply, leaving you vulnerable while reloading. The US is working on a way to counter drones with directed energy weapons, including the High Energy Laser Weapons System 2, and a microwave system. At a cost of $30 million, Raytheon is building prototypes of both. President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, General Lloyd Austin, formerly served on the company’s board of directors.

      If drones rely on GPS systems to navigate, they can be jammed or hacked, as the Iranians successfully did to a large US surveillance drone in 2010. Some drones rely on internal maps, like the one used in the US Tomahawk cruise missile. It appears that the drones and cruises that hit Saudi Arabia were running on a guidance system similar to the Tomahawk.

      Of course, that makes your drone or cruise missile autonomous, something that raises its own moral dilemmas. The US is currently working on weapons that use artificial intelligence and will essentially be able to “decide” on their own what to attack. Maybe not “Terminator,” but headed in that direction.

      We Need an International Convention

      Drones are enormously useful for a range of tasks, from monitoring forest fires to finding lost hikers. They are cheap to run and commercial prices are coming down. Turning them into weapons, however, is not only destabilizing. It also puts civilians at risk, raises serious moral issues about who bears the cost of war and in the long run will be very expensive. Drones may be cheap, but anti-aircraft systems are not.

      India and Pakistan are in the middle of a drone race. Germany is debating whether it should arm its drones. Mexican drug cartels are waging war against one another using drones. An international convention on drone use should be on any future arms control agenda.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Deb Haaland confirmed as first Indigenous US cabinet secretary

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      Deb Haaland has been confirmed as the secretary of the interior, making her the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in US history.The 60-year-old from New Mexico will be responsible for the country’s land, seas and natural resources, as well as overseeing tribal affairs.The US Senate confirmed the Democrat on Monday by a vote of 51-40, after she secured the support of Republican senators including Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan and Susan Collins.In a statement after the vote, Haaland said she was “ready to serve”.Thank you to the U.S. Senate for your confirmation vote today. As Secretary of @Interior, I look forward to collaborating with all of you. I am ready to serve. #BeFierce— Deb Haaland (@DebHaalandNM) March 15, 2021
      Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of 574 sovereign tribal nations located across 35 states. She is the most senior Indigenous American in the US government since the Republican Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw nation situated in what is now Kansas, who served as vice-president to Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1933.She will lead about 70,000 staff who oversee one-fifth of all the land in the US and 1.7bn acres of coastlines, as well as managing national parks, wildlife refuges and natural resources such as gas, oil and water.Haaland will also be responsible for upholding the government’s legally binding obligations to the tribes – treaty obligations that have been systematically violated with devastating consequences for life expectancy, exposure to environmental hazards, political participation and economic opportunities in Indian Country.According to the 2010 census, 5.2 million people or about 2% of the US population identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native – descendants of those who survived US government policies to kill, remove or assimilate indigenous peoples.“Native youth look to Representative Haaland as a role model, as a fierce defender of their rights and their communities, and as the living representation of the future of Indigenous communities in this country,” said Nikki Pitre, the executive director of the Center for Native American Youth.New Mexico’s Democratic senator, Ben Ray Luján, who presided over the Senate during Monday’s vote, said Haaland’s appointment sends a signal to young Native Americans.“She’s the embodiment of the old adage that if you see it you can be it,” he said.Haaland’s confirmation comes after several days of grilling by senators over her past criticism of Republicans, even though she had one of the best records of bipartisanship in the previous Congress. She also faced hostile questions from senators from oil and gas states, who claimed her opposition to fossil fuels projects would destroy jobs.Last year, Haaland sponsored a bill that would set a national goal of protecting 30% of US lands and oceans by 2030 – the 30 by 30 commitment since made by Biden in an executive order.In a recent interview, Haaland told the Guardian that as secretary of the interior she would “move climate change priorities, tribal consultation and a green economic recovery forward”.She added: “I’m going to continue to reach across the aisle, to protect our environment and make sure that vulnerable communities have a say in what our country is doing moving forward.”Nick Tilsen, the president and chief executive of the NDN Collective, a grassroots indigenous power organization, said: “Deb Haaland is going to be a breath of fresh air who will fight for lands, jobs and people.”Reuters and Vivian Ho contributed reporting More

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      in World Politics

      Germany’s Handling of the Pandemic: A Model of Incompetence?

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      There is an unwritten rule in politics: If you are incompetent, at least you should not be corrupt. It seems nobody ever informed the German Christian Democrats that this was the way of things. How else to explain why Christian Democratic MPs thought it was perfectly fine to take advantage of Germany’s COVID-19 crisis to line their own pockets? In German, we have a word, “Raffzahn,” to refer to somebody who cannot get enough, never satisfied with what they have. In the concrete case, a member of the German Bundestag from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) pocketed €250,000 ($298,000) in commissions for brokering a deal involving the procurement of FFP2 face masks by the federal and the state governments.

      Another member, who so happened to serve as deputy leader of the Christian Democratic parliamentary group, this time from the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, appears to have made similar deals. Both were exposed and were ultimately forced to resign from the parliamentary group and leave their parties. End of the story, or so the Christian Democrats hoped. But this Maskenaffäre (masks affair) continued to provoke strong emotions. In the process, it not only severely damaged the CDU/CSU’s image, but also caused a significant loss of trust in the party.  

      Beware! Populism Might be Bad for Your Health

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      The mask affair is not the only scandal that has haunted the party. Another controversy has been smoldering for some time now, involving dubious business relations between CDU MPs and the quasi-dictatorial regime of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s strongman. A few days ago, one of the MPs involved in the affair relinquished his mandate. Two other MPs are being investigated by the public prosecutor’s office in Munich on charges of corruption. Apparently, payments were made to the MPs in exchange for their keeping quiet about the dismal human rights record of the regime in Baku. Pecunia non olet, as they used to say in ancient Rome — money does not stink — not even in the offices of the Christian Democrats.

      A Super Election Year

      Unfortunately, this year is what in German is known as a Superwahljahr — a super election year. In September, Germans are called upon to elect a new federal parliament. In the meantime, a number of Germany’s Länder, the regional administrative units that constitute the federation, will elect their regional governments. The process started with elections in two southwestern regions, Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, over the weekend. With a population of more than 11 million, Baden-Württemberg is the more important state; Rheinland-Pfalz’s population amounts to a mere 4 million.

      In addition, Baden-Württemberg used to be a CDU stronghold. In the 1970s, the party routinely scored more than 50% of the vote, with a high point in the 1976 state election which saw the CDU gain over 56%. From then on, things started to go downhill. In the first election in the new century, the CDU still commanded roughly 45% of the vote; by 2016, it reached rock bottom, at 27%. It could not get any worse, or so it seemed. It did. The latest pre-election polls had the CDU at 24% of the vote. On Sunday, the party lost roughly 3% compared to the previous election, which left it with roughly what the polls had anticipated.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The situation in Rheinland-Pfalz was similar. In the 1970s, the CDU gained on average around 50% of the vote. By the new century, its support stood at 35%; 15 years later, at 32%. Pre-election polls had the party at around 29%, with a downward tendency. And fall it did: With a loss of around 4% of the vote, it scored a historic low. At the same time, in both Länder, the radical populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) returned to parliament, even if significantly decimated. It should also be noted that a large number of people in both states voted by mail, in many cases weeks before the election and before the disastrous masks scandal. Otherwise, the CDU losses would probably have been even greater. Hardly surprising, the dominant issue in these elections was COVID-19 or, more precisely, the government’s handling of the pandemic, particularly after the second wave hit the country in late fall.

      By now, the judgment is in, and it is devastating on many accounts. You know that something has gone terribly wrong when those who used to admire you, such as the British, now express either derision or, worse, pity; or when Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel feels the need to ask why the United States — once jeered for its lack of preparedness during the Trump administration — “is so much better when it comes to vaccinating.”

      A recent account of vaccination data collected and put online by Germany’s leading public television channel, ARD, proves the point. Germany is far, far behind countries such as Israel, Great Britain, the United States, Chile, Hungary and even Greece — the country Germans love to denigrate as mismanaged and corrupt. At the beginning of March, merely 3% of the population had received the vaccine in Germany, and this despite the fact that the first vaccine to be certified was a German co-production.

      Appearance vs. Reality

      The pandemic has brutally exposed the fundamental difference between appearance and reality. For long, Germany has promoted itself as a model to follow — the famed “Modell Deutschland” — or at least was promoted by outsiders as such. The perhaps most prominent promoter was Michel Albert, the former head of the French General Commission for the Modernization and Equipment Plan. In his 1991 book, “Capitalisme contre capitalisme” (“Capitalism Against Capitalism”), he postulated the superiority of “Rhenish capitalism” over the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. The book was translated into several languages and proved highly influential. One wonders whether Albert’s analysis would be the same today. I somehow doubt it.

      Central to progress in any kind of capitalist system is innovation, what the prophet of innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, famously characterized as “creative destruction.” New technologies and particularly digitalization have advanced with dramatic speed over the past two decades, making innovation absolutely crucial for a country’s competitiveness. This is a painful lesson Germany has been forced to learn as the pandemic progressed. As an article in the country’s leading business newspaper, Handelsblatt, warned last year, Germany was falling farther and farther behind with respect to innovation. Among the reasons are, most prominently, a dearth of top research, high-tech investments and, last but not least, openness to the world. For Germany to regain its competitive edge, the author charged, politics had to wake up from its Dornröschenschlaf (Sleeping Beauty’s slumber) and provide necessary measures.

      A year later, politics has still not completely woken up; or, perhaps, it has woken up but is fundamentally incapable of addressing the myriad of problems and challenges it confronts. Examples abound, some tragic, others bordering on the ridiculous and the grotesque. Take the case of inoculations. The program started a couple of weeks ago. It progressed at a snail’s pace. In the face of massive public attempts to secure an appointment, the server crashed and phone hotlines were overwhelmed for hours on end. In the meantime, letters designed to inform the over 80-year-olds could not be sent, among other things because authorities lacked the necessary information regarding age. As a result, in some cases, authorities guessed the age of potential recipients on the basis of their first names. Adolf and Adolfine — a sure bet the person is eligible for priority vaccination.

      Angela Merkel: A Retrospective

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      Take the case of COVID-19 tests as another example. Bavaria introduced them in the late summer of 2020, with suboptimal results, to put it kindly. Test results were supposed to be delivered within 48 hours. In reality, it took up to a week, the result of a technical glitch at the private server provider in charge of the tests. The experiment turned out to be a major debacle, with doctors having to cancel appointments and health authorities going incommunicado. In the new year, German authorities once again took up the question of testing in a lengthy debate that took several weeks. Finally, in early March, Germany’s health minister from the CDU, Jens Spahn, announced that the government had ordered hundreds of millions of test kits. Critics were quick to point out that Germany lacked the capacity to carry out the tests.

      In an earlier article on Angela Merkel’s legacy (she leaves office in September), I have suggested that her place in history will be judged by the way she handles the pandemic. By now, it is apparent that the chancellor’s COVID-19 crisis management has been nothing short of disastrous. In early February, Merkel conceded mistakes but insisted that on the whole, the government’s cautious and hesitant approach had been justified. The fact is — and German media have pointed it out on numerous occasions — that many of the problems linked to the pandemic are the result of years of neglect during Merkel’s mandate, particularly when it comes to Germany’s digital infrastructure. Compared to other countries in the European Union, Germany is a “digital developing country,” an assessment recently made by the Boston Consulting Group and widely commented on in the media. In fact, it seems that over the past decade or so, Germany has fallen even more behind other countries, such as Estonia.

      The pandemic has brutally exposed to what degree Germany was lagging behind its main competitors — at least five to 10 years, as one observer asserted last year. The impact is felt every day in offices, labs and particularly schools. Last year, an EU education report noted that in 2017-18, only 9% of Germany’s elementary students had access to a digitally well-equipped school. Once the pandemic forced schools to shut down and go online, the consequences of Germany’s digital divide became glaringly obvious, to the detriment of the youngest generation.

      Don’t Expect Too Much

      It is becoming increasingly clear that Angela Merkel’s time in office has been characterized by a degree of Panglossian complacency combined with a cautious and hesitant don’t-rock-the-boat mentality that left the country largely unprepared to deal with this pandemic in an efficient, effective and competent way. The most recent example is who gets to be part of the vaccination program. While family doctors and general practitioners have strongly expressed their desire to be part of the roll-out, the government continued to prefer public vaccination centers, thus ignoring viable options to accelerate the pace of immunization.

      It was only after protracted negotiations between the federal government and the Länder that an agreement was reached to open the vaccination campaign to private practices starting in mid-April. At the same time, Spahn, himself heavily criticized for the test kit disaster, dampened expectations given the bottlenecks in the procurement of vaccines. As the health minister put it, “One has to be a bit cautious with regard to the management of expectations.” In other words, don’t expect too much — a perfect characterization of the government’s dealing with the pandemic over the past several months.

      The result has been growing popular discontent. In early March, a large majority of respondents in a representative poll expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the vaccination campaign, the supply of testing kits and the way the vaccines were procured. At the same time, in a second poll, almost half of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the work the Christian Democrats did in government (a bit more than 40% said they were satisfied). And as a result of the Maskenaffäre, trust in the Christian Democrats has plunged to record lows.

      In German, we have the word, “richtungsweisend” — pointing to a direction or setting the trend. Ulli Hoeness, the iconic former president of Germany’s most successful soccer club, Bayern München, once proclaimed that “the trend is your friend.” This might be true for Germany’s premier soccer club, but it is certainly not true of the Christian Democrats. The results of the two elections last weekend portend ills for the federal vote later this year.

      They also do not bode well for the reputation of Angela Merkel, who is likely to be remembered primarily for her (mis)handling of the coronavirus crisis, for failing to halt or reverse the Christian Democrats’ downward spiral at the polls and, last but not least, for being incapable of preventing the AfD from establishing itself in Germany’s party system. As the good book says, “You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27).

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Mitt Romney calls for ‘economic and diplomatic’ boycott of Beijing Olympics

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      The US should boycott the Beijing Winter Olympic Games next year, Mitt Romney said on Monday – but not by keeping its skiers, curlers and bobsledders at home.In a New York Times column, the Utah senator said Washington should implement “an economic and diplomatic boycott” of the quadrennial winter sports jamboree.Such a move, he said, would “demonstrate our repudiation of China’s abuses in a way that will hurt the Chinese Communist party rather than our American athletes: reduce China’s revenues, shut down their propaganda and expose their abuses”.Romney went on to list such abuses. China, he wrote, had “reneged on its agreement to allow Hong Kong self rule; it has brutally suppressed peaceful demonstrators and incarcerated respected journalists”.“It is exacting genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities; Uighur women are forcefully sterilized or impregnated by Han Chinese men. Adults, ripped from their families, are sentenced into forced labor and concentration camps. Among ethnic Chinese, access to uncensored broadcast news and social media is prohibited. Citizens are surveyed, spied upon and penalized for attending religious services or expressing dissent.”Romney is a former venture capitalist and Massachusetts governor who famously took charge of preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Debate has raged ever since over the extent to which he helped to “save” an operation dogged by financial and management scandals.Romney won the Republican nomination for president in 2012, a race he lost after Barack Obama pulled away in the home straight. The Republican’s Secret Service codename was the appropriately the Olympic-sounding “Javelin” and he regularly referred to his success in Salt Lake City. Beijing last hosted the summer Olympics in 2004. It will be the first city to host the winter games too, but it seems sure to face some sort of boycott.Groups representing Uighurs, Tibetans, Hong Kong and campaigners for democracy in China are pushing for athletes or diplomatic boycotts. Having failed to persuade the International Olympic Committee to move the games out of China, activists are targeting national committees, athletes and sponsors.The US last mounted a boycott in 1980, when American athletes stayed away from the summer games in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. China also stayed away then.But in Romney’s view now, “prohibiting our athletes from competing in China [in 2022] is the easy, but wrong, answer”.“… The right answer is an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. American spectators – other than families of our athletes and coaches – should stay at home, preventing us from contributing to the enormous revenues the Chinese Communist party will raise from hotels, meals and tickets. American corporations that routinely send large groups of their customers and associates to the games should send them to US venues instead.“Rather than send the traditional delegation of diplomats and White House officials to Beijing, the president should invite Chinese dissidents, religious leaders and ethnic minorities to represent us.”Romney also called on NBC, which broadcasts the Olympics in the US, to “refrain from showing any jingoistic elements of the opening and closing ceremonies and instead broadcast documented reports of China’s abuses”.In his own column on Monday, for Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz said US athletes “should go to Beijing next year proudly, bring home medal after medal, and show the world what it means to compete on behalf of a free society”. More