I’ve also been looking through a few videos about flying saucers and unusual aircraft. One of these was this video posted by Mashable on their YouTube channel three years ago. It shows a saucer-shaped drone, the ADIFO – All-Directions Flying Object – zipping about the sky. The video claims it’s far more versatile and manouverable than conventional quadcopters as it can move in any direction immediately. It’s designers are, or were, looking for a partner to begin producing the aircraft industrially.
I wonder if this isn’t the only drone like this to have been developed and that some of them may be responsible for UFO sightings.
Clown Planet is a YouTuber who puts up short videos about the weird, bizarre and stupid happening around the world. I think he’s a man of the right, as much of his content is about some of the daft, nonsensical and dangerous stuff uttered or done by the extreme gay rights and trans crowd. In this video, however, he covers the reintroduction by the NYPD of their Digidog and K5 robots. The Digidog is a version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, equipped with an artificial arm. It was first put on the streets by New York’s finest two years ago, but was subsequently taken off following complaints that it represented a science fictional, aggressive style of policing. As you can hear from the audio in one of the excerpts, the cops state that it will only be used for situations like terrorism and hostage negotiations,
The K5 robot looks to me like a giant pepper pot, a bit like a Dalek shorn of gun, sink plunger and eyestalk. This machine is intended to police the subway and Times Square.
This is getting close to some of the dystopias in science fiction in which machines patrol the streets keeping criminals and the general public in their police. One of the first SF stories about the dangers of this kind of mechanised policing was Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian. This was a short tale about a man stopped and arrested by a robot police car, which judges him suspicious simply for going for a walk. With these machines now patrolling New York, this is starting to look more than a little prescient. The video is bookended with Alex Jones looking amazed and horrified. Which he may well be, as this is precisely the kind of SF scenario he kept banging on about. When he wasn’t ranting about ‘the globalists’, Barack Obama planning to incarcerate everyone in emergency camps and declaring himself totalitarian overlord of the US, Hillary Clinton being an alien, or a cyborg, or possessed by demons, and stupid and dangerous nonsense about the Democrats operating a child abuse ring out of a Boston pizza parlour.
At present I don’t think these robots present a serious threat to humanity. Their own intelligence and autonomy is very limited, and it doesn’t look as if there’s going to be many of them hitting New York’s streets. So at the moment it’s still going to be human police officers keeping citizens safe from the bad guys.
The situation in China, on the other hand, may be very different. A year or so I found another video on YouTube showing what the Covid lockdown was like there. It was very restrictive over here, but this video showed drones flying through the sky and one of the Spot robots patrolling the ground making sure that everyone kept to their apartments. A very chilling, totalitarian sight, from a state that is using facial recognition technology to track and monitor its dissidents.
I think we’ll have to watch this very carefully. At present it’s a harmless gimmick, but if American politics becomes authoritarian, it’ll easily become something much more sinister.
I’m reposting this because some of the great contributors on this blog have reported that it’s vanishing from their computers. I honestly can’t think why this should be the case, but here it is again.
‘Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
As it’s the Christmas season I’m planning to leaven the serious stuff on this channel with more fun material just to spread a bit more cheer around in this new Winter of Discontent. And here’s a jolly bit of fun I found on the ‘Found and Explained’ YouTube channel. It discusses what would possibly result if Santa Claus upgraded his sleigh, which is more fitted to a time before modern technology when horse-drawn carriages and sleighs were the only or main vehicles available. This was all right until the story went global and its credibility was challenged by the problem of travelling around the world, including crossing the Atlantic to North America. Hence the need to upgrade to something more modern.
The video notes the apparent similarities between the supernatural qualities of Santa’s sleigh and UFOs. However, it doesn’t actually talk about using UFO technology, which in the UFO legend is available through back engineering crashed alien space craft. No, the video instead discusses how Santa would swap his sleigh for a state of the art stealth aircraft manufactured by Lockheed at their skunkworks, but incorporating other features from autonomous drones.
Santa’s new ‘sleigh’ would be a high-performance White Star aircraft, utilising pulse jet powered by nuclear energy to achieve speeds of Mach 10 to Mach 15. There would be no windows, and instead the crew would see out using technology that turned much of the cabin into viewscreens. Santa would not be able to deliver the presents personally, except in some circumstances where the consumption of mince pies is concerned, and so would deliver his presents using drones. When he was required to make a personal appearance, the craft would use the autopilot system from another, autonomous drone. Rudolf would not be able to survive the stresses he’d experience at the front of such a high velocity vehicle, and so on the nose of the aircraft himself would be a navigation system using information from satellite position systems.
The video acknowledges that there are problems with this design. Extra space would be needed for all the presents, drones, nuclear fuel and so on. This would be solved using the technology of Santa’s bag, which like the Bag of Holding in D & D games, has ample space to contain everything required.
Expense is also a problem, even given the vast wealth Santa must have to employ his army of elves on holiday pay, plus writing it all off as charity expenses. The video suggests that this could be solved by donating one or two White Stars to the American air force, where they could be reconverted to military aircraft complete with nuclear-tipped warheads. These could also be used against naughty children. And here the video shows the Grinch being fought with explosions.
It’s a bit of seasonal fun from the channel and obviously not meant to be taken seriously. I hope you enjoy it.
This is awesome. I found this fascinating little video on the YouTube channel of the Roswell Flight Test Crew, whose name seems to suggest that they’re a group into weird aviation technology, just like whatever it was that came down on Mac Brazel’s ranch in Roswell in 1947. In this video they’re at the UAV expo in Florida, talking to Tomas Pribanec, the CEO of a new start-up company, Undefined Technology. Pribanic and his team have created a drone that flies without any propellers, or indeed, it seems, wings or any conventional aircraft parts. It looks a bit like a Borg cube that’s been made out of wire. The machine flies using electricity to attract and repel the ions, the charged particles already present in the atmosphere. At the moment it can only fly for 15 minutes carrying a 2 pound payload, but it has the advantage of being silent. This has made it attractive to a number of other companies, according to Pribanic. Ion engines, which create thrust by generating charged particles, are already used in spacecraft, but it’s unusual to see the principle used on Earth. The blurb for the video on the Roswell Crew’s YouTube page runs
’22 Sept 2021 • In this episode, the Roswell Flight Test Crew speaks with Tomas Pribanic, the founder and CEO of Undefined Technology, based in south Florida. The company has built a prototype drone of approximately the same dimensions and configuration as a conventional multirotor – but without propellers. Instead, it uses charged ions that exist in the atmosphere and attracts or repels those ions as needed to develop thrust and maneuver. The prototype is five-foot square, capable of flying up to 15 minutes while carrying a two-pound payload. Owing to the lack of propellers, the aircraft is virtually silent in flight, making it a good candidate for cargo delivery and other missions in the urban environment where noise can be an issue.’
I think the technology has been around for a little while as there are a number of videos also on YouTube showing people, who’ve built their own. There was also a piece of news a year or so ago about a research group, who had incorporated it into a plane to demonstrate that it could be used to create more fuel efficient aircraft. They took their inspiration from Star Trek’s shuttlecraft and the way they flew without any moving parts.
This is next level technology very much like something out of science fiction, and I look forward to it being developed further.
This video comes from WION, which I think is an Indian news network. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has released a mock video on his website of Donald Trump being assassinated by a drone while playing golf. The video was produced as part of a competition to mark the American drone assassination of General Soleimani, and the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi has pledged to avenge his death. The Americans have responded with a statement that Iran will face dire reprisals for any attack on an American national.
This comes a few days after Iran issued a demand for Trump to be prosecuted and killed, while over the Christmas period the regime’s armed forces simulated an attack on an Israeli nuclear installation.
Readers of my blog will know what I think of Iran’s government: I despise them as ruthless, theocratic dictators. But I can’t condemn them for producing the video or calling for Trump’s prosecution. Trump was responsible for the killing of Soleimani by drone, and while I don’t think Soleimani was in any way an angel, the Americans don’t really have a counterargument if other countries use the same methods against them. As Kant said, ‘When you legislate for one, you legislate for all’. Which is why we have international law.
As for the simulated attack on an Israeli nuclear plant, again it’s immensely hypocritical for America or the Israelis to condemn it. Israeli has nuclear weapons, which is against international law but no-one seems to condemn them for it. They have launched attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, though I think they’ve so far been with viruses rather than drones. Even so one of these attacks left a number of Iranian nuclear scientists dead. Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest have been trying to tell the world that Iran’s trying to develop nuclear weapons and we should all be very worried. The Iranians have said that, on the contrary, they’re developing it for their power industry. This is actually quite likely. Iran’s economy depends on its oil exports, and if they want to increase that then one way to do it is cut down on domestic oil consumption. Nuclear power would be a way of doing so, with the oil saved sold for export.
But I also wouldn’t blame the Iranians for developing nuclear weapons either. They’re on the list of the seven countries, whose regimes the Neo-Cons want overthrown. The same people behind the Iraq invasion and their theft of its oil and state industries are no doubt also keen to do the same to Iran. The reason America had Mossadeq, the last democratically elected prime minister of Iran overthrown in a CIA sponsored coup, was because he had nationalised the Iranian oil industry. Previously it had been owned and controlled by foreigners, principally Britain. And there is a very good reason why Iran would want to acquire nuclear capability simply for domestic safety. Bush and Blair both claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but only invaded when Saddam Hussein assured them he didn’t have nuclear weapons. This teaches any country at the receiving end of western imperialism that the only way they can protect themselves is through acquiring nuclear weapons. The Iraq invasion has encouraged nuclear proliferation, not discouraged it, and has made the world less safe.
I don’t want Trump killed in a drone strike, nor do I want him executed, although I do accept that there is a case for prosecuting him for the drone strike that killed Soleimani. Not that I don’t think that Soleimani wasn’t a butcher himself. I also don’t believe that Iran has the capability to launch any kind of drone attack against anyone in America. If they had, they wouldn’t bother putting up fake videos about it.
My guess is that Trump is perfectly safe from Iranian drone strikes. I don’t want one to happen, but I don’t blame the Iranians for dreaming about it either.
More robot news, but this time it’s really sinister with very grave implications not just for the Indo-Chinese region, but for the survival of the human race. Because the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has just posted military robots along the Tibet border to reinforce its human personnel.
This chilling video comes from Gravitas, part of the WION, World Is One network. I started getting their reports on YouTube on my mobile. I don’t know who WION is, but the accent and the concentration on south Asia, India, Pakistan and the surrounding countries, suggests that they’re Indian. They’re interesting, as they present the news from a different national perspective. Nearly a week ago they posted a report about a special forces unit in the American army in Syria acting as a death squad through drone strikes that also killed innocent civilians as well as soldiers. It’s the kind of news al-Jazeera reports, and gets labelled as Islamist propaganda by an outraged American right for doing so. There were calls a few years ago to ban al-Jazeera in America, and I wonder how long WION and Gravitas will go on before they’re faced with similar opposition.
According to this report, China has stationed 88 ‘Sharp Claws’ war robots and 120 ‘Mule-200’ robots along the frontier. The human soldiers had trouble adjusting to the high altitude in Tibet. The Sharp Claws are true robot weapons. They consist of a machine gun mounted on tank tracks with a camera so they can see where they’re going. At the moment they’re operated remotely by a soldier, but Beijing would like to make them autonomous. The Mule 200s are transport vehicles intended to carry supplies like ammunition. Beijing is also keen to develop other autonomous robots. The army wants to develop land-based robots, the navy robot subs and their air force intelligent drones. The Chinese government roped a number of private firms into developing them, including TenCent, Waowei, and at least three others, who were all declared robot champions. The UN is concerned about the increasing use of autonomous robots, and tried to set up an international treaty to restrict them. But this failed due to lack of support from the main countries producing them, a tactic that has worked to Beijing’s advantage.
Back in the ’90s many scientists were extremely worried about the real possibility of a robot takeover. Kevin Warwick, the robotics professor at Reading University, begins his book March of the Machines, with a description of life in 2050. The machines really have taken over. Humanity has been largely wiped out, and the remaining humans are lobotomised, neutered slaves used by the machines for work in environments they cannot operate in, and in fighting those human communities that have remained free. When one company reported they were developing war robots for real, they were met with an angry response from many leading scientists telling them not to, because it would pose a real threat to the human race. Warwick was deeply depressed at the threat, and only recovered through exploring the possibility of augmenting humanity through cyborgisation. A few months ago Panorama posted a documentary, ‘Are You Worried Yet, Human?’, about China’s use of robotics and AI to control and monitor its population. And in one test, warplanes were remotely piloted, not by humans, but by a computer. This successfully shot down a piloted warplane.
This looks all too much like the scenario behind the Terminator movies, and we’re in big trouble if someone develops something like Skynet for real. As Isaac Arthur says in a video about robot rebellion in one of his Science and Futurism videos, ‘Keep them stupid, keep them dumb, else you’re under Skynet’s thumb’. Quite.
We don’t need these machines. They are a real threat to the human race. Robots operate through machine logic and programming. They don’t have the moral judgement of humans, although there has been precious little of that shown in wars. And perhaps this is why China, a totalitarian state committing genocide against the Uighurs in Sinjiang, is using them.
If we must have war robots, let them be moral, intelligent, humanoid machines like Hammerstein of the long-running 2000AD strip, ‘ABC Warriors’. A robot soldier, who fights for peace, democracy and justice against the tyrants of Earth and Mars. We need robot soldiers like him, not automatic mechanical killers, and far fewer wars and conflicts.
As Hammerstein says in the comics‘Increase the peace’. Until wehave robotwarriors like him, the UN is right. Autonomous war robots need to be strictly controlled, no matter who has them.
According to mad right-wing internet radio host, Alex Belfield, parliament has been recalled to discuss the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan. Belfield made it very clear that we should not go back there. This was a country whose culture and way of life we would never understand. Four hundred British squaddies have already died during the invasion and occupation, and besides, we’ve too much on our plate here at home with domestic crises like the Plymouth mass shooting, rampant knife crime in London and the surge of illegal immigrants trying to cross the Channel in dinghies and other flimsy craft. I agree with him, but partly for reasons that are very different from his.
Firstly, like the invasion of Iraq, the British and American public were deliberately deceived about the invasion of Afghanistan. Yes, the invasion was an appropriate response to al-Qaeda’s attack on America in 9/11, although it was planned and executed by the Saudis. And there is very strong evidence that the responsibility for the atrocity goes all the way up to the highest levels of the Saudi state. But the American neo-Cons had been planning the invasion years before. They’d been in talks with the Taliban over the construction of a new oil pipeline to run through the country, allowing them to get around the Russian affiliated pipelines in the region. These talks stalled and eventually failed. So George Dubya Bush and his friends in big business got together and planned an invasion, waiting for a suitable opportunity to arrive when they could launch it. The liberation of the local people from a deeply repressive, bloodthirsty Islamist regime was never the real, primary objective.
As for Afghan society, this is a deeply conservative, tribal culture. The Taliban have their roots in their traditional way of life and particularly the very traditional Daobandi movement in Islam that stretches across into Pakistan and India. Hence, although extreme, the Taliban will appear to many Afghans to be fighting for their traditional values and society against those imposed upon them by force by the western invader. They have also been given support, supposedly, by elements within the Pakistani military. The Pathan tribe, I believe, form the core supporters of the Taliban, and their tribal territory extends across the border into Pakistan. They thus receive cross-border support from their fellow tribesmen over there.
Besides which, I don’t believe that the western occupation has done much to win hearts and minds. Hamid Karzai’s government was massively corrupt, and this corruption extended all the way down to the local level, where the police and government officials tried to find every way they could extort more money out of the ordinary citizens. The drone operations in the region have also done much to generate discontent. I recall reading cases where wedding parties were slaughtered in anti-terrorist drone strikes. However, instead of only killing the terrorist targeted, they also killed innocent people who just happened to be present.
A second invasion of Afghanistan would also be extremely expensive. And as this is a Conservative government which is already protesting about the expenses of dealing with the Covid pandemic, the funding for it would be through further cuts in welfare spending and the privatisation of whatever’s left of the state infrastructure. Which means the NHS. This will mean more poverty, starvation and misery for Britain’s great working people, and poor health as more services are given to private healthcare providers. Who will start cutting their provision so they can make a profit.
The Taliban are a deeply unpleasant organisation and their attitude towards women is particularly misogynistic. There have been reports that wherever they have taken over an area, they have gone to the local mosques to compile lists of the unmarried girls. These are then forcibly married, even though they may be barely into their teens. They do, however, have an age limit of 12. When the Taliban were in power, women were not expected to leave their homes except when they had. If they were out of the house, they had to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. This meant that they had to be silent. I’ve read reports in the papers of Afghan women, who’d lost limbs during previous fighting, being beaten because their artificial legs made a noise. And this is apart from the ban on art, music and television, the restrictions on non-Muslim religions, the closure of football stadiums and their conversion into arenas for mass public executions.
Our invasion and attempts at nation-building have failed, and there are dangers in this. Al-Qaeda were encouraged to launch their attack from Afghanistan on 9/11 because of the success the Mujahideen had achieved fighting the Soviet occupation, although much of that was due to covert funding from the West and Saudi Arabia. I am very much afraid that with the withdrawal of western troops and the fall of the democratic Afghan government, the Taliban or some other Islamist terror group will similarly feel empowered and that they can launch another attack to destroy the west.
But Afghanistan is the proverbial ‘graveyard of empires’. We found it impossible to occupy the country in the 19th century, as did the Russians a hundred years later. Any further invasion is likely to fail again. As repulsive and dangerous as the Taliban are, we should not go back. We would not be helping its people, only the oil industry and big business who seek to exploit it. And the costs of the occupation would be borne in the lives and limbs of the servicewomen and men sent out to fight, and by Britain’s working people as the government slashes more services.
We should not go back to invading countries simply to make massive multinational corporations even more obscenely rich.
I’ve put up a number of posts commenting on videos produced by right-wing internet radio Alex Belfield. Belfield is a working class. He says he was born and raised in a pit village, never went to university and was therefore sneered at and looked down upon by his co-workers and superiors in local radio. He has a real chip on his shoulder about this, and is constantly denouncing the BBC and its staff, who are supposedly very middle class ‘Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping left-footers’. He hates the affirmative action programmes for Blacks and modern media identity politics, describing the Blacks and those of other ethnic minorities, as well as the gays, who fill them as ‘box-tickers’. He is particularly scathing about BLM, though there are many reasons why people, not just on the right, should despise them. He’d like the lockdown lifted, Priti Patel to start taking tougher action on the ‘dinghy divers’, the illegal immigrants coming over the Channel in leaky boats. I think he also thinks that many disabled people are just malingerers, and would definitely like the NHS privatised and handed over to private management.
But in this video, Belfield is exactly right. Tesco have announced that they are launching stores that don’t have tills. Instead, it seems, people will just pay for what they want using an app on their mobiles or other device. I can remember something about this on the BBC news a few months ago. In these stores there are to be no, or hardly any, serving staff. You simply walk in, take what you want and leave. There are cameras mounted around the store watching what you pick up, which is automatically deducted from your account.
Obviously there are a number of major issues with this idea. One is privacy. Everyone who comes into the shop is under electronic surveillance, another step towards the kind of totalitarian surveillance society that’s been introduced in China, as very chillingly described in the Panorama documentary ‘Are You Scared Yet, Human?’ a few weeks ago. Another major issue is joblessness. People are naturally worried about the effect further mechanisation is going to have on jobs. Despite assurances that the robot workers in car factories, for example, have created as many jobs as they’ve replaced or more, it’s been predicted that 2/3 of all jobs, particularly in retail, will be lost to technology in the coming decades. It looks frighteningly like the employment situation in Judge Dredd’s MegaCity 1, where, thanks to robots, 95 per cent of the population is permanently unemployed.
In this video, Belfield concentrates on another issue, loneliness. He points out that many people, especially older people, go to the shops because their lonely. These people are going to be made even lonelier by the lack of human contact with shop staff in these places. And this is apart from the fact that not everyone – again, particularly older people – don’t have mobiles or the other gadgets that will supposedly allow the stores’ computers automatically to make the transactions when you use them.
I’m not a fan of self-service tills for the same reason, although I admit that I do use them if there’s a queue. And to be fair, they’ve also been denounced by the Daily Mail, which called them ‘Daleks’ and demanded a return to human service staff when they first came out. I’ve therefore got absolutely no problem with putting this video from the mad right-winger up. He’s saying something that both left and right should agree on.
I’m also sceptical about these stores’ chances for survival. People need contact with other humans, and those businesses that have tried to remove them completely in favour of robots have come crashing down. A few years ago a Japanese businessman proudly opened a hotel operated by robots. There were robots on the welcome desk, including an animatronic dinosaur. I think your luggage was taken to your room by an automatic trolley, and you got your meals from a vending machine. A few months or a year or so later, the whole idea came crashing down. No-one wanted to stay. When journalists interviewed some of the few guests that actually stayed there, they said that it was actually very lonely. There were no other humans about, apart from the maintenance and ancillary staff. At a much less elevated level, a Spanish brothel that had opened with sex robots rather than human sex workers also closed.
It also reminds me of an episode of the revamped X-Files when that came back briefly a few years ago. This had Mulder and Scully eating in an similar automatic restaurant. Problems start when one or the other of them is unable to pay their bill. The automatic till demands payment, which for some reason isn’t going through. The machines working in the kitchen behave ominously. The two paranormal sleuths leave without paying, but they’re followed to their homes by a flock of angry drones. Meanwhile, their phones are continuing to demand the payment they owe the restaurant. Their fully automated, computerised homes start to disobey them and behave awkwardly. The domestic robots also start rebelling. And it looks like the duo will be on the receiving end of the anger of a full-scale robot attack force. Fortunately, this is stopped by one of the two finally getting the payment to go through. It ends with Mulder writing on his report that it matters how we treat our machines. Because how we do will determine how they will treat us in turn. It’s another example of Science Fiction as ‘the literature of warning’ and the threat of the machines taking over. But it does seem to be a reasonable treatment of the fears that such fully automated restaurants and stores provoke, as well as the frustration that occurs when the technology that takes your payment doesn’t actually work. I doubt that Tesco’s stores will automatically send squads of robot warriors after customers who have similar problems. But there will be problems when the machines make mistakes, and don’t charge people for the goods they’ve bought, or charge them the wrong amount, or otherwise go wrong. Which could lead to perfectly innocent people being wrongly accused of shoplifting.
Belfield is right about the threat posed by Tesco’s brave new stores without tills or attendant humans. This will lead to further unemployment, and a lonelier, more alienated society.
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