Perhaps you were wondering whether or not the U.S. was really at war in Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan. Well, President Obama just put those questions to rest.
With everyone from Hillary Clinton to Robert Gates to General David Petraeus at his side, Obama announced this morning "a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Not Afghanistan, with an occasional cross-border drone strike. Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I highly recommend reading Danger Room on a regular basis. The writers there provide some of the best reporting on military issues that I've ever found.
Next time you order a new pair of skinny jeans from Gap.com, you should know that you are helping welcome in the hive-mind robot overlords of retail.
Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.
All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.
Also from Wired comes word that even as the United States dramatically scales up its use of robots on the battlefield, Russia is now making progress along the same lines.
Scientists at the University of California created a neural implant for a beetle that gives them wireless control over the insect. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight.
Beetles and other flying insects are masters of flight control, integrating sensory feedback from the visual system and other senses to navigate and maintain stable flight, all the while using little energy. Rather than trying to re-create these systems from scratch, Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues aim to fuse the ‘born’ with the ‘made’.
A San Francisco federal appeals court stood by its ruling to reinstate the case of Margaret Witt that was dismissed by a trial judge and challenged the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Witt had served as an Air Force reservist flight nurse for 20 years until she was ratted out by a citizen in her home town of Spokane who, according to her attorney, called the Air Force and told them she was living with her female partner there:
"The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to have an 11-judge panel review a ruling in which a three-judge panel in May allowed Maj. Margaret Witt to go ahead with a lawsuit in federal court in Seattle...She contends the discharge violated her constitutional right to due process...The circuit court's action means the next step in the case is now either a return to U.S. District Court in Seattle for further proceedings or an appeal to the Supreme Court, if the U.S. Justice Department chooses to appeal. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said, 'We're considering our options' and said no decision has been made on whether to appeal. The government has 90 days to file an appeal, and thus the decision on whether to do so could be made by the administration of either President Bush or President-Elect Obama. Miller said he did not know when the determination will be made."
If the US Supreme Court would be willing to strike down "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" on due process and/or equal protection grounds, it would give Obama cover in ending the policy. Though I'd like to see the president stand up to those who favor this scandalously backward policy, having another court ruling in favor of gay equality may provide more long-term benefits given the precedent it would set in terms of further establishing discrimination on the basis of sexuality as deserving heightened judicial scrutiny.
And--as much as right-wing ideologues now deny it--one of the Supreme Court's core functions is protecting individual rights against the tyranny of the majority.
I've posted this video of a Congressional hearing regarding "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" before, but I'll do so again because it provides such an excellent explanation of why the policy is in fact utterly insane:
Today we hear from John Robb, a software entrepreneur and former Air Force special operations pilot. He is the author of Brave New War.
The current global economic and financial meltdown may yet become something worse: a protracted global depression. As with the last century's Depression, which spawned fascism and WWII, it could recast the world at a fundamental level. As such, it may soon represent our biggest security challenge in over 50 years. Here's what a global depression means...
