[Skybird]

Drone warfare is a double-sided thing.

You can monitor for very long time a suspect and an area, and if what you have seen, and gained also from other intel, makes you think you are dealing with an enemy,you can take the target out of play.

The easiness of operation lowers inhibitions, I can imagine.

However, "suspected militant" is a technicality in term only. As long as the other is not shooting at you, you can argue you never know for sure whether or not he/she is a real militant/enemy. But wars do not get fought out in courtrooms, not the shooting part of them at least.

Drones leave no resting areas and no timeout to the enemy. They also save own troop'S from taking risks. That is good. But still not easy: some may recall that over a year ago I linked an article I do not find again anymore, about the stress level for drone pilots. Surprisingly, it is as bgreat for them and sometimes greater than for fighter pilots coming from combat missions. That is because drone pilots see in detail anbd from close range (via camera) what is going on. They are with there troops when they get ambushed. They see what their pushing of a button does on the ground. They are closer to it than real pilots. And after their shift the leave the office, open their doors, and immediately are back in another world, a totally different world, they go home to their families and it is as if they were coming from an alternate reality. Some pilots said that this extreme changes from here to there, and back, also is stressful to their psychic wellbeing.

Anyway, if the place would not be so totally FUBAR, and if these regimes and people wouldn'T jhave breeded and tolerated these ideology-driven stoneage fanatics, we would not be there to fight a war. Mind you, Pakistan complained over the the chase for Bin Ladne in the end haviung been successfulk, and it took revenge against the informant giving the Amerians the needed info.

On drones in our own homes, well, we are all steering into a total surveillance society, and you all know that since long, and you do not react,m you just accept it since it promises to come with so much consummation candy, video gimmicks, and fun stuiff, as many of you see it. You know that your governments are your enemies, and that democracy for powerhungry people is nothing toi crave for, but is an unwanted annoyance. You let yourself getting trcked via your smartphones, you let others collect charcater profiles and consumer behavior profiles of yours, an d when oyu read that there are visions of iris-scanners in shopping malls that send you individualised adverts every 20 meters, you think it is cool technology and what good the future holds. Apple and Facebook and Google get you all used to letting all this happen, and make you allowing to be turned into a glas person that can be scanned and seen through in all detail. Government offices also will combine their computer networks and allow "officials" legally or illegally to access this database to learn more about you by their own random decision. The perfect computer world is the world where total surveillance not only is possible, but even unavoidably takes place. And since you have accepted before to let it come so far, and the young ones have been trained to even like it since they are uzsed to it by their living style from teen years on, even childhood on, it is no surporise that these things will come.

Drone traffic in our own home countries is just one small piece in the great puzzle.

Think of these things next time you applaud somebody wants to lower street crime or tax evasion by banning cash money and make it mandatory to use plastic money for every buy you do, from chewing gum to Ferraris. It means that every buy you ever do, will get recorded, will get saved and later can be tracked, even decades later. The big fishes of tax fraud, companies and the like, will find ways to beat the system, they can afford hackers and the like - you cannot. The ordinbary man will find himself living a life where he more and more gets strangled, supervised, and monitored.

And I do not even touch the issue of thought crime and political correctness here, the tyranny of the crowd sending you to the stake or criminalising you if you do not think ther way you should, in their opinion. I also do not mention the future riot control when life in the cities becomes grim and ressoruces became rare and the places will be overcrowded and street crime will skyrocket.

As you have learned to expect from me, I'm full of lovely expectations for our future. But what goes up, must come down again, and everything in life runs in cycles, it rises, it culminates, and then it falls again. What once was in your favour, later will turn against you, and the force you inflict, inevitably returns.

It seems this does not make us act with greater foresight and care. Not at all. Seen that way, we just fulfill our self-made karma, then. So what'S our complaint?