Remote control war – a look at the daily grind of Predator pilots

What's it like to kill human beings by dropping bombs with the push of buttons on your computer keyboard 7,000 miles away? Imaging doing this every work day, then driving home to hug your wife and kids every night. This video from FrontLine will give you a good idea of what it's like. Whatever your emotional reaction to this form of "warfare," you will find someone agreeing with you (and disagreeing with you) in the comments following the video. If our enemies were using robotic planes to drop bombs on American soil, I suspect that we'd be outraged, much more than by conventional warfare. This is certainly a sterile way of war, no matter how much the supervisors remind the pilots that they are killing human beings. If I understood why we are at "war" in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe then I could understand whether these drones are furthering our "war objectives."

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The unspoken reality of “Peak Oil”

THE world will have to find four Saudi Arabias by 2030 if it wants to maintain its oil dependency, the International Energy Agency says. The reality of peak oil is fast approaching, and more must be done to develop and encourage the use of alternatives including solar and nuclear, the agency's chief economist has warned. "My main motto never changes, the era of low oil prices is over," Dr Fatih Birol said.
That's the verdict reported today in The Australian. I thought I'd check to see what other sources had to say about Birol's assertion, but I cannot find a single U.S.- based source reporting it, other than blogs that are dedicated to peak-oil issues. This is rapidly becoming a crisis, and almost nobody is discussing it in America. Not just here, of course-- study groups in Britain have been trying to get their government to begin planning for the reality of peak oil for years, and now they are saying it's simply too late. (see this also).

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America’s paranoid irrationality

How paranoid have we become? Here's what Allison Kilkenny of Alternet has to say:

The culture itself is sick, which is why America has a military budget that is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined, and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China, and yet Americans feel more afraid, and more paranoid, than ever. Everyone is against us, we're told. Everyone hates our freedom, and our amazing culture. China wants to overtake us. The entire Middle East wants us dead. Europeans laugh at us, and think we’re stupid. Emperor Penguins are plotting something. Canada is about to attack. And then there's Iran. Don't even get us started on Iran. Until Americans decide to break this addiction to "The List," this cycle of irrationality will continue into the foreseeable future.
And see this post, for the best friend of America's politicians: peddling nightmares.

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Guantanamo guard converts to Islam

Put on your psychologist hat and figure this one out. Terry Holdbrooks, one of the Guantanamo guards converted to Islam six months after being assigned to guard duty there. While working at Guantanamo, he was ostracized by the other guards because he was too nice to the prisoners. He didn't have a very good impression of them either, claiming that they often "indulged in alcohol, porn and sports":

"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of them were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks, racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had stopped talking to them altogether.
Holdbrooks was discharged from the military, still practices Islam, but seems to be struggling with life. This article presents an interesting personality profile.

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