Religion vs. Using Religion to Control Others

Too many people seem addicted to the need to judge and control others based upon their own personal beliefs. We have lots of admonitions in the New Testament on the subject (I was born and raised a Christian), such as these quotes from Matthew: ₇“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  ⁴How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. ⁶ “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.”

Strangely enough, Karl Marx, who turned on religion, started out as a committed Christian. He and Frederick Engels philosophized and wrote together, and as they observed how religion was actually used by society, they felt less negative out the teaching of the Bible but of how the relevant religious teachings were being used by those in charge to control the lives of others through threats, intimidation and passing vile judgment on behavior that they wished to control. Oddly, they seemed to embrace Biblical teachings (although they came to reject religion itself), partially noted above in the quotes from Matthew, that proselytized against self-righteous misuse of faith in judging and controlling others.

Both men came to the conclusion that religion historically seemed to be just a tool used by an elite to control the masses, and thus, organized religion could no longer be trusted. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” said Marx.

Indeed, historically, religious justification has been routinely used throughout history, from the Japanese Shinto faith that was used to justify atrocities in Korea and China in the first half of the twentieth century, the Spanish Inquisition in the 15^th century, human sacrifices throughout primitive and tribal history, the Salem witch trials in 1692 and most recently the slaughter of innocents by Muslim Islamist groups such as al Qaeda, al Shabaab, al Nusra Front, ISIS, Boko Haram, Haqqani Network and the Taliban in general, and the Houthis, to name but a few. Religious missionaries from all sorts of religions have brought literacy and care to impoverished and ignorant peoples all over the world… but usually with strings attached that often required both religious commitment and perhaps even a willingness to die in the service of the new masters who imposed that conditional faith upon them.

Strong condemnation of non-believers seems to allow oppressors to command, control and even cause the new supplicants to kill in the name of the new faith. That some deeply pious and morally-committed individual was born in some village in India, where the only practiced and accessible faith was Hinduism, is condemned to an after-life of hellfire simply because of the accidental place of his or her birth does not make sense if morality and goodness are the aim of most organized religions.

Non-believers are often viewed as less-than-human, fodder that allows evil terrorists to justify slaughter, such as we have been witnessing of late in Africa and the Middle East. Small pockets of diehard zealots believe it is not only their right, but their mandate to cull non-believers from the earth, to spread their “word” as the only faith, and to look at all others as condemned deniers of God and their interpretation of faith. There is no tolerance for any other belief system.

Lest we get up on a moral high horse, the United States has a significant Christian force that rejects most of humanity as hapless non-believers who can never ascend to the heavens as God’s chosen people. But that force is, when looking at the world as whole, a tiny dot of a belief system among the religions of the world. “There are an estimated 285,480,000 Evangelicals, corresponding to 13.1% of the Christian population and 4.1% of the total world population. The Americas, Africa and Asia are home to the majority of Evangelicals… The largest concentration of Evangelicals can be found in the United States, with 26.8% of the U.S. population or 94.38 million, the latter being roughly one third of the world's Evangelicals. The next most populous is Brazil, with 26.3% or 51.33 million.” Wikipedia.

American Evangelicals accept Israel and Judaism as necessities in fomenting that Armageddon in the Middle East that will bring the Second Coming of Christ, but their intolerance of other faiths is powerful, despite the fundamental tone of brotherly love, forgiveness and not sitting in judgment of others that literally defines the New Testament, and hence Christianity. What is clear is their absolute right, under our First Amendment, to practice and believe as they wish. Indeed, in the pantheon of diverse religious beliefs, who can declare that their tenets are false? The issue, then, is seldom with the underlying beliefs, but with the seemingly uncontrollable urges of humanity throughout the ages to use their religious beliefs as God-mandated obligations to impose their beliefs on others.

Most certainly, one can appreciate their passion in fighting against abortion – an extinguishment of life vs. free choice – but it is hard to understand why they feel a need to deny others the right to protect themselves against man-induced climate change, since attempting to fix the issue cannot negatively impact upon their lives even if their belief were to be found correct… no harm, no foul. Business interests, wanting as few costly environmental regulations as possible, have embraced this “social” issue as a convenient method to avoid the restrictions.

I was raised a Christian, in the Episcopal Church, even served as an altar boy for several years, and still adhere to the general teachings of the New Testament. I am not commanded by the precise language of the Bible these days, but my faith in God continues as I pray daily and seek a moral vision of my own life. What I cannot and will not do is force my view of religion on others, and I deeply resent those who try to impose their beliefs on me, particularly by distorting the American political process to force their ideology on me.

I will close this rather personal blog with a story, an event that occurred two decades ago on one of my many trips to India. My then-girlfriend and I were touring Udaipur under the rather excellent guidance of a gentleman, educated as a lawyer and exceptionally well-read. He was erudite, worldly and we spent many days together. I noted that every time visited a Hindu temple, he was reverent, humble and always sought a blessing from the Brahmin cleric, marked by a Bhindi dot placed in the middle of his forehead each time.

I finally mustered by courage to ask an impudent question. “How can you, educated and worldly, be so deeply pious in a religion that, at last count, had roughly four to five million known gods and goddesses?” When he smiled, I knew I was in for a very interesting response. “I believe as you do that there is but one God… but He has an infinite number of faces and reaches each of us in so many different ways.” Other than, “what a great answer,” I was humbled… learning what faith could mean when it is not deployed to control or hurt others. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wrote this little blog on Easter Sunday as I contemplated the meaning of God in my own life.

Nuke ‘Em High!

We really don’t like the Iranian government. We started off on the worst foot possible with the 1979 hostage crisis and never improved our relations over the years. Their fomenting of Shiite extremists, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen, their alignment and support of the minority Assad regime in Syria, their rather powerful control over the “elected” Iraqi government and their rather undisguised efforts to coopt even Sunnis extremists – like Gaza’s Hamas – have collided violently not just with American policies in the region but with both such stalwart Sunni nations – from Saudi Arabia to Egypt – and our ally Israel.

We dislike Iran’s religious leaders even more that the little old men ruling Cuba today. Iran’s leaders have been secretive, made nuclear arm’s inspectors from the United Nations crazy and have been pretty overt in their anti-American (“Great Satan”) and anti-Israeli sloganeering. And those nasty Iranian nuclear-enrichment centrifuges (pictured above) have seemingly been working overtime of late.

Are these all good reasons not to enter into a nuclear arms containment treaty with them? Or is this precisely why an treaty is the right approach, short of a military effort that most probably won’t stop a nuclear program maintained deep, deep underground and scattered all over Iran? Are disarmament treaties supposed to be between opposing countries? Think the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. Such American-supported armed efforts against Iran might also lead to the mining of the Strait of Hormuz, the unleashing of sleeper terrorist cells against U.S. targets everywhere, allow Iran to fund anti-American efforts among existing terrorist groups and generate a very steep and destabilizing rise in the price of petroleum worldwide, rather abruptly ending the current decline in prices at the pump. And let’s face it, there are a whole pile middle class Iranians who hate their religious leaders more than we do… who might perish in an attack on their country.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu tells us that the sanctions will produce a total surrender by Iran of all of its nuclear ambitions; we just have to keep them in place a bit longer. But despite a rather severely wrecked economy, Iran has not budged until recently on anything resembling a stand-down in the development of fissionable, weapons-grade, materials. Global sanctions have supplemented U.S. sanctions rather severely, and sanctions have been in place for a very long time. Sorry Bibi, despite so many, many years of sanctions, nothing has happened. Your theory of denying this potential treaty and going back to a rather clear path of failed sanction efforts flies completely in the face of hard facts.

“After the invasion of Iran by Iraq, the United States increased sanctions against Iran. In 1984, sanctions were approved that prohibit weapons sales and all U.S. assistance to Iran. The United States also opposed all loans to Iran from international financial institutions. In October 1987, President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12613 prohibiting the importation and exportation of any goods or services from Iran.

“The Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) that is the basis of the current sanctions against Iran is a revised version of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) that was signed on 5 August 1996 (H.R. 3107, P.L. 104-172). The act was renamed in 2006 when the sanctions against Libya were terminated... On 31 July 2013, members of the United States House of Representatives voted 400 to 20 on 31 July 2013 in favor of toughened sanctions.” Wikipedia.

Okay, we may have some general structural goals in the newly announced, proposed basic provisions of a possible nuclear-containment treaty with Iran, but as many have noted, the devil is in the details, how agreements are monitored and enforced become critical. But we are on a path that offers more practical hope that the rather absurd assertions from flip-floppy-Netanyahu and that probably needs to be explored before we embroil ourselves into another Middle Eastern conflict.

Indeed, it seems pretty clear that if Iran did develop a nuclear weapons capacity, there would be a countervailing effort from neighboring Sunni powers, explored in a recent blog, to expand into their own nuclear arsenal. Just what the world needs: a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Bibi and his cabinet strongly oppose the announced deal (outlined below); he tells us the treaty would cause just that arms race to begin, but in fact, this deal may just stem that effort.

“Netanyahu said after [a special cabinet] session that ‘Israel will not accept an agreement which allows a country that vows to annihilate us to develop nuclear weapons, period.’… However, he also acknowledged the possibility of a final agreement being reached, saying that such a deal must ‘include a clear and unambiguous Iranian recognition of Israel's right to exist.’

“Netanyahu said his Cabinet ‘is united strongly opposing the proposed deal,’ which he said would threaten Israel's survival. ‘Such a deal does not block Iran's path to the bomb,’ he said. ‘Such a deal paves Iran's path to the bomb. And it might very well spark a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East and it would greatly increase the risks of terrible war.’ AOL.com, April 3^rd. His assumptions that Iran will have a nuke in spite of the treaty are interesting, and his belief that he has any support anywhere in the rest of the world for his position is misplaced, outside of his fragile conservative coalition and those American politicians who have marched in lockstep with Netanyahu’s commands. 

Israel is not and was a party to the sanctions agreement or the negotiations between Iran on one side, and the U.S., U.K., German, French, Russian and Chinese parties, on the other side, that were actual parties to the negotiations. America is the keeper of its own foreign policy, and despite his efforts to inveigle Congress with his demands, Bibi’s rather obvious and successful merger of his Likud Party with the GOP on issues he wishes to command, it is time for our Congress to do what’s best for Americans. And the United States remains committed to keeping Israel alive and well in this maelstrom, even if we do it “our way” and not under direct orders from Bibi.

So exactly what how did President Obama describe these challenging basics of the Iran agreement to the American public? “Under the accord, Iran agreed to cut the number of operating centrifuges it has by two-thirds, to 5,060, all of them first-generation, and to cut its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium from around 10,000 kilograms to 300 for 15 years. An American description of the deal also referred to inspections ‘anywhere in the country’ that could ‘investigate suspicious sites or allegations of a covert enrichment facility.’ But in a briefing, American officials talked about setting up a mechanism to resolve disputes that has not been explained in any detail.

“In a move not seen since before the Iranian revolution in 1979, and to the surprise of many in both countries, Iranian government broadcasters aired Mr. Obama’s comments live. In parts of Tehran, people cheered and honked car horns as they began to contemplate a life without sanctions on oil and financial transactions, though the issue of when the sanctions are to be removed looms as one of the potential obstacles to a final agreement on June 30.” New York Times, April 2^nd.

Among my massive coterie of Jewish friends, I have found very little support for Netanyahu’s extremism. But there are powerful forces, with deep ties to Israel’s Likud Party, working to align the United States with Netanyahu’s demands. Is Republican opposition towards the accord based on what’s best for America or simply paying off a cash-for-votes debt funded by some of our country’s richest, and most Hawkish, Jewish billionaires? Rejecting a treaty that has yet to be finalized? “The alliances in Congress that pro-Israel donors have built will certainly be tested as they lobby lawmakers to oppose the deal with Iran and perhaps even expand sanctions against the country, despite objections from the Obama administration.

“Donors say the trend toward Republicans among wealthy, hawkish contributors is at least partly responsible for inspiring stronger support for Israel among party lawmakers who already had pro-Israel views… ‘Absolutely, it is a factor,’ said Marc Felgoise, who manages the Philadelphia Israel Network, a campaign fund-raising group, and whose own contributions have shifted to Republicans, though he still supports many Democrats. ‘They are trying to cater to people who are ultimately going to support them.’

“Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, saw his donations from pro-Israel donors soar to about $285,000 in the 2014 election cycle from less than $100,000 in 2008, during his previous election, the analysis by MapLight shows. Pro-Israel contributions to Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, plummeted to less than $150,000 in 2014, when he was also re-elected, from nearly $300,000 in 2008, according to this count.

“But few candidates have benefited as much as [Arkansas GOP Senator Tom] Cotton [who fomented that letter from 47 Republican Senators to Iran’s religious leadership]… The Emergency Committee for Israel, led by William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, spent $960,000 to support Mr. Cotton. In that same race, Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire from New York and a leading donor to pro-Israel causes, contributed $250,000 to Arkansas Horizon, another independent expenditure group supporting Mr. Cotton. Seth Klarman, a Boston-based pro-Israel billionaire, contributed $100,000.” New York Times, April 4^th. And nobody is bidding for GOP votes for moderation, it seems. Exactly how meaningful would escalated U.S. sanctions be if the other negotiating nations – U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China – lifted their restrictions, putting Iran pretty much in the same position with or without America support?

So where are we? Probably in a better place than we expected if you just look at the bones of the treaty. We have become strange de facto allies with Iran in our attempt to defeat ISIS, a further complicating factor. Despite the above cash-for-votes reality, are we seeing glimmers of hope among our Congress, from both sides of the aisle, that they might actually put partisan politics aside to look at this proposed treaty objectively, or is the lure of campaign issues for the upcoming 2016 elections (and lust for campaign support) just too juicy to put American well-being above our heavily politicized and polarized bickering? The President may not need Congressional approval to finalize the accord, but the failure to get everyone on the same page continues to frustrate us all. Strangely, if the accord is sufficiently attractive, perhaps opposing it for the sake of opposition might just backfire in the next election. Think about it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and am I going to see America’s best interests trump stupid politics on major issues ever again?

The Inequality Effect

The old adage, “the rich get richer,” has never been more true for the United States since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. We know that 90% of America’s publicly-traded shares are held by 10% of the population, we now have 1% of the population owning 40% of total wealth (rising to 54% if you go up to 3%), there is a huge cadre of unemployed who would love a job but have given up looking (and they just don’t show up in the unemployment statistics everyone is “bragging” about) and the majority of new jobs that have been created have fallen primarily into lower-paying, part-time and contract work.

And too much of the academic analysis has rested on looking at communities and comparing them based on “average” incomes. But when the University of Wisconsin looked beyond the averages and into the actual income diversity within the community, the statistics for those communities with large numbers of low income residents, regardless of the higher income minority that might raise that “average,” the painful numbers begin to appear.

“The report, from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ranks every county on a range of health-related factors, from behaviors like smoking and drinking to social issues like crime and unemployment and environmental problems like air pollution…

 “[P]eople are less healthy if they live in a community that has a big disparity between the richest and the rest of us. People in unequal communities were more likely to die before age 75 than people in more equal communities, even when the average overall income in the communities was virtually the same… It's called "the inequality effect," and several possible reasons for it are cited:

“• A community with a wide income disparity usually has a few very rich people, and many more poor people. Those numbers tilt the data towards risk factors that affect the poor, like inadequate health care and bad nutrition.

“• The very rich may not invest in the communities where they live. They send their children to private schools and travel for the best health care. That leaves the rest of us to support local schools, hospitals and other services that are critical to community health.

“• Life might just be more stressful in a community with a wide income inequality.

“In any case, poverty had a measurable impact on health. In every state, the poverty rate in the unhealthiest county was more than twice as high as in the healthiest county. The unemployment rate in the unhealthiest counties was 1.5 times higher than in the healthiest ones. The child poverty rate was more than twice as high in the unhealthiest county as in the healthiest.” Jobs.Aol.com, March 31^st.

The March 31^st New York Times writes about the underlying theories challenged by the Wisconsin study as well as the general assumptions and findings: “The research on inequality at the county level is new, but existing literature suggests there are relationships between income inequality and life expectancy among countries in the world. ‘Inequality effects, over and above average income, are pretty well established,’ said S.V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at Harvard, who has studied the phenomenon. We know that inequality tends to concentrate income in fewer hands, creating more low-income households — and people in low-income households don’t live as long. But what causes the drop in life expectancy is debatable.

“One theory is that while money does tend to buy better health, it makes a bigger difference for people low on the income scale than those at the top. That means that having fewer very poor people in a community will improve average health more than having fewer very rich people will diminish it.

“But another, more sociological theory, has to do with the communities themselves. The researchers think that places where wealthy residents can essentially buy their way out of social services may have less cohesion and investment in things like education and public health that we know affect life span. There is also literature suggesting that it’s stressful to live among people who are wealthier than you. That stress may translate into mental health problems or cardiac disease for lower-income residents of unequal places.

“The researchers measured inequality by comparing the incomes of people in a given place who earned the 80th percentile in the county with the incomes of those in 20th percentile. Then they measured life expectancy using a custom measurement they developed — it counts the ‘potential life years lost’ in each community by measuring all those who died before the age of 75, and the age at which they died. So someone who died at age 70 would have five years of potential life lost. Then they adjusted the numbers according to how old people were in the county, so counties with more old people wouldn’t look sicker than counties that were younger. The study looked at only the average life span and not that of higher-income versus lower-income residents.

“For every one-point increase in the ratio between high and low earners in a county, there were about five years lost for every 1,000 people. That’s about the same difference they observed when a community’s smoking rate increased by 4 percent or its obesity rate rose by 3 percent. Researchers said that inequality effect persisted even when they compared communities of similar average income and racial composition.”

Income inequality is one of the biggest issues facing federal candidates in the 2016 elections. So far, the Republicans cling stubbornly to the rather thoroughly-disproven theory of trickle-down economics (give rich people extra cash with light regulations and low taxes, and great new jobs and commercial advantages will trickle down and be good for us all). Democrats propose to hit the rich with new income-leveling taxes and use that money to fund social programs and education, and perhaps some direct federally-subsidized jobs.

The contracting middle class, the falling standard of living and reduced average buying power hasn’t traditionally been much of an issue for American voters in the past, but as fewer people feel secure in their earning power, watching the playing field tilt wildly in favor of the rich, the issue today literally drowns out even such looming concerns like immigration reform and defense-spending. If income inequality is not balanced, there is an increasing consensus among sociologists and economists to begin to worry about the survivability of the United States itself.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are rapidly running out of time for slogan-driven non-solutions that will impact whether the United States can continue as a single, unified political unit.

Emails and Older Politicians

What is it with politicians over 60 – a lot of them – and digital communications? Cell phones rolled out in the 1980s, but mobile bandwidth didn’t really open the door to smart phones until 1999; most of that growth was after 2000 (there are over 1.4 billion smart phones out there today). Emails began their most rapid growth in 1993. Texting (SMS, MMS, etc.) didn’t begin to become pervasive until the mid-1990s. Facebook, which devastated it predecessor MySpace, didn’t even launch until 2004; Twitter in 2006.

To younger generations, digital communications have been the mainstay of inter-personal linkage for about two decades, all or most of their adult lives for the majority of us. For folks over 60, they had two or three decades of communications before most of this electronic “stuff” was the norm. If you’re over 70 or 80, well… you get it. Faxes replaced the “telex,” and paper (“snail mail”) correspondence through the mails, even handwritten notes, were just how it was done.

While lots of older folks think they got “modern” with emails, the truth for most of them is simply that using digital communications was (is?) intimidating and just plain scary. But for a politician to admit being uncomfortable with electronic communications was simply to admit that they were old and out of touch with the electorate, which was not considered particularly smart. For too many younger voters these days, even communicating by email is “yesterday’s technology.”

Oh for some politicos, anxious to establish their “cool with the Evangelicals” anti-scientific bent, they wear their technological ignorance like a badge of honor. For example, on NBC’s Meet the Press (March 8^th), Republican Lindsey Graham (Senator, South Carolina) – who doesn’t turn 60 until this July – was discussing subpoenaing Hillary Clinton to discuss her missing or misdirected emails while Secretary of State. His response when asked about his own email practices was staggering: “I don’t email,” Graham said. “You can have every email I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one.”

67-year-old Democrat Hillary Clinton is in a heap o’ controversy over her “explanation” that to simplify not having to carry two smart phones, she stepped over Department of State policies to use her personal smart phone and personal account (gee, 30,000 personal emails seem to have been deleted) for both official and personal functions. She simply forwarded official emails to State for archiving and storage. 55,000 emails were turned over for release to the relevant authorities.

It gets worse, however. “[The] State Department disclosed on Friday [March 13^th] that until [February 2015] it had no way of routinely preserving senior officials’ emails. Instead, the department relied on individual employees to decide if certain emails should be considered public records, and if so, to move them onto a special record-keeping sever, or print them out and manually file them for preservation.

“This patchwork system, reflecting a broader confusion and slowness throughout the government as federal agencies struggle to catch up with the digital age, raises the possibility that some emails from Mrs. Clinton to other State Department officials may have been lost altogether.” New York Times, March 13^th. Oy! Even the State Department was intimidated by the digital era…

Well, it didn’t take much to roust Lindsey Graham on the evils of the Clinton email scandal, but what about former Florida Governor, Republican Jeb Bush? At 62, Bush fits the “old person” paradigm (as do I). He too rebuked Clinton for her email controversy, holding up his own record as an example of proper and transparent conduct. The Dems countered with a “not so fast” response and suggested that during Bush’s 1999-2007 tenure in Florida, he followed a similar “one phone” path as attributed to Clinton. But that was about a decade ago.

“Bush has released a few hundred thousand emails from his time as governor, and his aides say the rest are accessible by the state of Florida through freedom of information requests. He did not release emails he deemed private.” Reuters, March 13^th. He denied that he used his personal email address for official communications, however. “But it took Mr. Bush seven years after leaving office to comply fully with a Florida public records statute requiring him to turn over emails he sent and received as governor, according to records released Friday [March 13^th].

“Mr. Bush delivered the latest batch of 25,000 emails in May 2014, seven and a half years after leaving the Statehouse and just as he started to contemplate a potential run for the White House, according to a newly disclosed letter written by his lawyer.” New York Times, March 13^th.

Okay, okay, none of this looks good, and each of the above three individuals are unofficial candidates for the 2016 run at the presidency. But nobody seems to be pointing to the fact that while most Americans are reasonably fluid and totally comfortable with e-communications, this just isn’t the case for most older Americans, even if they actually and frequently indulge in such “modern” digital connectivity themselves (or have their secretaries read and send emails, as lots of older executives, lawyers and elected officials often do).

I even wrote a book (look at the above right corner of this blog for specifics) for people of all ages scared to ask questions about communicating in a digital era for fear of coming across as ignorant or misinformed… even when they really need to know! And all of these candidates fit squarely into a seemingly Luddite or semi-Luddite elderly age demographic. Their experience and wisdom on polices issues may benefit from their age, but how in the world do they ever admit how they still do not fully understand communicating in a digital era, when issues from net neutrality to digital polarization are in the headlines every day. But maybe, just maybe, they really still aren’t “there” yet the way most Americans just take for granted. Sometimes the obvious explanation is the best explanation. Get over it! It just is. Pong, anyone?

 I’m Peter Dekom, and how many times have you faked it with a technology you may not fully understand?

How They Do Drone On

We have spy drones, police drones, well-armed attack drones, pick-up and delivery drones, aerial movie drones, snoopy drones and even model airplanes. It’s clear that wars of the future will have more unmanned aircraft than pilots in super-jets. Their mega-special technology advantages will self-destruct when they are captured or shot down, but video-game-trained “ground pilots” and computers (that artificial intelligence thang that Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking keep warning us about) will control the future of combat and spying. Little teeny weeny drones, floating like bees in the air, will look up to their monster “ambulance” drones transporting the injured across heaving traffic to the nearest hospital.

But there are some “desperately necessary” drones that the March 16^th FastCompany.com wants to remind us about. Here are two applications, farming and environment enforcement, that might actually make your life better:

Farming: “It's 2020. Drones are flying over the tomato plants, taking constant quick snapshots of the field to look for problems. A stream of ultra-accurate weather data informs crop decisions, while a handheld pathogen detection system sets off alerts for diseases in the field in a matter of minutes. The whole farm is hooked up to a massive outdoor wireless network, to ensure that no swath of land is ever left unconnected. Somewhere around here is a farmer…

“Agriculture is a huge industry in the U.S., and precision agriculture—the practice of using sensors, software, analytics, and drones to micro-manage crops—is a growing part of it, with a market size estimated to be up to $2 billion (and rising fast). Entrepreneurs and big companies alike are salivating; Monsanto recently bought San Francisco-based weather analytics company Climate Corporation for $1 billion, and a number of agriculture technology startup incubators and funds, including Farm2050, have started popping up in the [Silicon Valley]…

“Patrick Dosier, an agronomist and mentor in the RoyseLaw incubator, thinks he can bring farmers and entrepreneurs together with that age-old Silicon Valley ritual, the hackathon. But he's not advertising the Apps for Ag event, which will be held in April, as such. [He’s just trying to find California farmers open for the change. They often see ‘just another salesman.’]

“While startups are developing tools that can offer precise crop data, down to the individual tree, farmers are by and large still managing dozens of acres of crops at a time… And so, while the young generation of [the California] Central Valley growers seems interested in Dosier's hackathon, he ‘hasn't gotten a whole lot of commitment’ yet…

“It's not as if farmers are getting any younger. Over the past 30 years, the average age of farmers in the U.S. has climbed from 50.5 years to 58.3 years, according to the USDA. This is a trend that's unlikely to change, especially if land costs remain as high as they are now. Even so, the promise of money-saving technology, no matter how unfamiliar, could be hard to ignore—that is, if it actually ends up saving money.” Will technophobe older farmers balk or see the value. Is the next generation of farmers ready for the change? What about farming in under-educated developing worlds?

Environmental Enforcement: “For decades, lawyer Ray Purdy worked in academia, examining the ways that satellite data could be used as legal evidence and as a law enforcement tool, with a special focus on environmental law. But his work never stayed in the academic world for long: just about every month, he would get a call from the police, an environmental agency, or a health and safety executive complaining that they wanted to get a hold of satellite imagery but found it hard to find and even harder to interpret. Purdy sensed an opportunity…

“Satellites are getting smaller, cheaper, easier to launch. A growing number of startups, including Planet Labs and Skybox (purchased by Google in 2014) are operating fleets that send back imagery from all corners of the planet, taking pictures sharp enough that you can see a manhole cover, though not a face or a license plate. To capitalize on this new glut of images, Purdy and Ray Harris, a geography professor at University College of London who has dedicated his career to Earth observation, teamed up in 2014 to launch Air and Space Evidence, a consultancy that specializes in using satellite and drone imagery as evidence in insurance and legal cases. The two Rays, who act as middlemen between satellite companies and people who want to use satellite data, call their business the world's first ‘space detective agency.’...

“Hiring a space detective agency isn't always necessary to find serious environmental crimes. Global Fishing Watch, a partnership between Google, Oceana, and SkyTruth—a nonprofit that uses mapping and remote sensing to track environmental destruction— that was launched in the fall of 2014, is an interactive online tool that lets anyone watch potentially illicit commercial fishing activity in the ocean, via a feed of fishing vessels that are tracked by satellite and identified by their onboard systems.

"‘Everybody’s jaws kind of drop when they see what kind of commercial fishing activity happens in the ocean. Patterns emerge where you see fishing efforts up along the border of marine protected areas,’ says John Amos, the head of SkyTruth. ‘It's a way to get people to start asking questions. In many cases, fishing is a large corporate activity. You could find a chronically bad actor.’

“SkyTruth has a record of finding those bad actors. Amos, a geologist by training, says the small nonprofit's ‘biggest episode’ was the BP oil spill, when it used satellite data, aerial images, and remote sensing to prove that the spill was much worse than BP was acknowledging…SkyTruth's report on the spill's size went viral, ultimately leading to a situation where the federal government had to up its own estimates… In addition to Global Fishing Watch, SkyTruth is also working on a tool called FrackFinder, which is crowdsourcing data about fracking infrastructure as the industry booms so that researchers can examine the health and environmental implications.”

Intrusive? Oh yeah, but if we are going to have to live with this privacy destroyer, no matter what we might think, at the very least we need to get some pretty terrific direct and immediate benefits for all of us along the way.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you can’t beat ‘em, have ‘em work for you at least.

Taxpayer Values - Guantánamo

“At a cost of $2.8 million per prisoner per year, Guantánamo is the most expensive prison in the world. (The costliest prison in the U.S., the Colorado Supermax, at $78,000 per prisoner per year.) And the costs will continue to rise as facilities that were built to be temporary, like the Camp America Dining Facility, deteriorate. In addition to the dining facility repairs, the 2015 defense budget also calls for $11.8 million to upgrade a medical clinic that was never built to serve an aging population of prisoners. Congress earmarked another $69 million to renovate Camp 7, the top-secret facility that holds the 15-high value detainees who were tortured in CIA black sites prior to their transfer to Guantánamo. In March, The Miami Herald reported that the ground below the facility had shifted, causing the floors and walls of the building to crack.” New Republic, September 21, 2014.

Wow, at that cost level, I guess that Gitmo must be both a model prison and an exemplar of the best and fairest justice system on earth, right? Well, blogger fans, you know me well enough to know how deeply my tongue must be embedded into my cheek! So let’s get the straight dope from one who really knows, to see how effective this “detention center” has been. Try this Op-Ed in the March 27^th New York Times from Morris D. Davis, a retired Air Force colonel, who was the chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until October 2007:  “Just six detainees have been both convicted and sentenced for war crimes in military commissions since President George W. Bush first authorized them in November 2001.

“Charges against three were later dismissed, and five who were convicted were eventually transferred from Guantánamo. Thus we have a legal system where it is more advantageous to be found guilty of a war crime than never to be charged at all and remain imprisoned indefinitely.

“About 85 percent of the 779 men ever held at Guantánamo are no longer there. Most left during the Bush administration. While the number of transfers has been much smaller under the Obama administration, the pace accelerated in the latter part of 2014… Of the 122 men detained, nearly half have been cleared for transfer by unanimous votes of military, intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic officials who determined that the detainees could not be prosecuted, posed no identifiable threat to the United States and did not need to remain in our custody. Nevertheless, 56 men cleared to leave still remain…

But the list of nations that will accept detainees that we no longer wish to detain is growing short. Uruguay is the latest country to say they’re finished taking such releasees. And as for the United States, state after state has suggested that NIMBY is the operative philosophy: not in my backyard. They don’t want trials moved to their precious  venues, and the most conservative Congressmen and women seem to like indefinite detention almost as much as they enjoyed the “enhanced interrogation” techniques (applied to a number of Gitmo detainees before they arrived by loving cadres from the C.I.A.).

The problem is not only the rapidly deteriorating infrastructure but the inability to keep leadership, judges and counsel at the facility: “[In early March], we learned that, only months into the job, the official in charge of the military courts system at Guantánamo Bay was stepping down, after judges ruled he had interfered in proceedings. The appointment of an interim replacement was the sixth change of leadership for the tribunals since 2003…

“That’s not all. Besides the revolving door at the convening authority’s office, six military attorneys have served as chief prosecutor for these courts over the same period. (I was the third.)” Davis in the NY Times.

Guantánamo has become a rich source of anti-American propaganda which terrorist organizations use to recruit more of their ilk. Our European allies consider these tribunals to be little more than “kangaroo courts,” and the entire debacle of indefinite confinement under very hard circumstances to be a rather total violation of human rights. What worse, even Americans who suffered real pain from unlawful terrorist attacks have never seen the convictions of the perpetrators that would have brought defined justice to the losses they have suffered: “As unfortunate as this waste of resources and damage to America’s reputation are, the greatest tragedy is the pain inflicted on the friends and families of the 9/11 and Cole victims. For them, justice has been endlessly delayed.

“Rather than showing ‘the world that justice is in fact being done,’ as [venerable Washington lawyer Lloyd N.]  Cutler wrote, Guantánamo has come to symbolize torture and indefinite detention, and its court system has been discredited as an opaque and dysfunctional process. The latest reshuffle of personnel will not alter this impression." Davis in the NY Times.

Indeed, even the United Nations has taken a pretty strong stand against Gitmo and the American practices in that camp of unending misery. But the United States has done everything in its power to frustrate U.N. efforts to investigate and find the truth. Here’s a report from British newspaper, The Guardian (March 16^th): “The Pentagon said it will refuse the United Nations special rapporteur on torture from interviewing or even meeting detainees held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The UN’s Juan E. Mendez called for increased access to the prison last week….

“The Guardian reported [March 15^th] that the Obama administration had reaffirmed its commitment to secrecy at the notorious detention center following a visit to Gitmo by a handful of new US senators who are supportive of the prison… Méndez, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, ‘has been invited to visit Guantánamo; however, he will not be permitted to interview detainees,’ Army Lieutenant Colonel Myles Caggins, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Guardian.

“[In Early March], Méndez said he has been offered certain terms attached to a Gitmo visit, yet he, like his predecessor in 2004, declined to accept based on stipulations he deemed too narrow… ‘The invitation is to get a briefing from the authorities and to visit some parts of the prison, but not all, and specifically I am not allowed to have unmonitored or even monitored conversations with any inmate in Guantanamo Bay,’ he said… Mendez has sought a level of unfettered access to Gitmo detainees since 2010, yet the Obama administration continues to spurn his requests, maintaining that Mendez is allowed only a restricted viewing of the prison facilities.”

So let me see, Guantánamo is the most expensive prison to operate (cost per inmate) of any prison earth, is decaying and eroding fast, cannot keep its personnel to work in that facility, its mere existence has recruited an untold number of additional terrorists, justice remains denied for both victims and inmates, the notion of “justice” at that facility violates just about every democratic principle we hold sacred, we are held in scorn, as a hypocritical rogue bully unwilling to support human rights in our own system, and all that wasted money could go for programs that we desperately need at home. And the reason we have this facility, which Congress will not allow Guantánamo Bay to close is????

I’m Peter Dekom, and as long as we cannot fix the most egregious violations of our own principles, how in the world can we ever generate the kind of respect we used to have as a nation… or will we ever again?