Thank you for showcasing the G21 and their plans for infrastructure projects to assist our global partners.
We need to get US satellites positioned near Ukraine so that Ukraine no longer has to depend on the whims of Elon Musk. Musk believes Russia’s threats rather than contacting the US government to ascertain the truth.
Thank you for showcasing the G21 and their plans for infrastructure projects to assist our global partners.
We need to get US satellites positioned near Ukraine so that Ukraine no longer has to depend on the whims of Elon Musk. Musk believes Russia’s threats rather than contacting the US government to ascertain the truth.
The top 1% no longer just depend on influencing IRS regulations to attain tax breaks—now they lobby to reduce the workforce to prevent/delay audits to make them follow the rules.—and the Republicans have introduced legislation to do just that. There are basically two ways to balance a budget—bring in more revenue or cut outgo.
As you’ve repeatedly said, the contrast can’t be any clearer—take care of the common man or help the oligarchy get richer. The choice at the ballot box is ours.
I’ve asked this question many times; “How much is enough?” It really boggles the mind especially in light of the extremely well off as compared with those that struggle financially on a daily basis for something so simple as putting food on the table. So…. How much is enough?
It’s not just in the US but worldwide. However in some places outside the US the poverty makes the poorest of those in the US look rich/ well off.
I’ve travelled and seen extreme poverty outside the US. It’s hard to grasp if haven’t actually been there and seen it first hand. Something as simple as a pen has high value! You may ask why? It’s because they are not available much less affordable. And many other small simple basic common things (like that pen) we all have and take for granted simply aren’t available/ can’t be found. We ‘middle class’ Americans have so much “stuff”…. we have no clue how much “stuff” we have and how well off we are.
When it comes to the millionaires and the billionaires….. I really don’t understand their wealth. I don’t understand how they view and/ or would answer the question; ‘how much is enough’. It baffles me even more so how they want more and more wealth.
Good question George....they don't care. But I think a time will come when these rich oligarchs will need people to work for them. No-one can work if they are starving?
"Kenya welcomes the addition of the African Union — the fastest growing continent in the world — to the G20. This will increase the voice of Africa, visibility, and influence on the global stage and provide a platform to advance the common interest of our people.
This fits perfectly with the resolutions of the just-concluded Africa Climate Summit, including the reform of international financial institutions and multilateral development banks."
This was the statement made by President William Samoei Ruto yesterday after African Union was included into G20. This adds another voice to the continent and make African indispensable in matters revolving them. Previously, William Ruto had been critical of the manner in which Africa is being treated by the Global North and was not happy with it.
"We cannot sit in front of one person as African and the best we could get are photographs," he said in South Africa this year. He had complained that
African presidents are given only a few minutes to speak which according to him, it is disrespect and does not amount to anything to African people.
Africa has suggested the desire to relook at the existing global financial infrastructure and loan rescheduling to free them from the rat race.
Africa also complained of stakeholders in the private sectors who make it difficult for the continent to reorganise loans because they aren't ready to discuss with them and agree with a common bargain. Bearaucratic infrastructure has been tainting the whole global financial infrastructure and disadvantaging the continent.
I agree, Edwin. Hopefully with the global changes and assistance in financing infrastructure for the African nations, all African nations will feel welcome in the world. And this could help you avoid the military coups that are so damaging to the liberty of free people everywhere.
Yes, the African Union will voice their concerns in unison without individual countries seeking help from rogue and authoritative regimes like Russia which comes with a package of coup in exchange for resources.
I am thankful for every opportunity for the people of the African continent. Too often we overlook the loving family working hard to survive, We forget or are not aware of the self made and self serving military that can invade a village one day and kill family members, destroying this family....stealing the boys for soldiers, raping the young girls. This is not all of Africa but it still exists.
There are countries that mine the riches of Africa, using the strength of men, women and children as they take from their resources.....leaving behind pain and destruction.
There are places where a son walks miles to a small mission school, taking firewood or fish caught from a nearby stream to pay the teacher who is also living on small resources.
I am thankful for the great and beautiful cities that have been able to grow and thrive.
I am thankful when we are able to communicate and to help one another. It is the right action to take.
We do not need to change the beauty of a loving Africian family but IF HELP IS APPROVED AND SENSITIVE CARING IS MADE AVAILABLE, WE SHOULD BE THERE.
Edwin, I long for needs to be met and opportunities to be made available for everyone....WITH CARE AND RESPECT!
I long for wars to cease....to see a world working together.......we must , because of the condition of us, as humans....have a long view but never give up.
Wooow! What a comprehensive perspective. And true to your word, the African continent needed a space to express and grow themselves and I think it is paying day by day. After that, military coups, poverty, insecurity, unemployment, debts and many more problems will be dealt with until we stabilise ourselves. Thank you Emily Pfaff
I ask myself... would we have today's Russia and its cortege of threatened, damaged neighbors with great bites taken out of their territory if it had not been for the activity of American privateer scavengers attacking the prostrate body of what had been the Soviet empire, determined to ensure that Russia should never recover?
Many scavengers then, vulture capitalists, keen to ensure there should be no new Marshall Plan. Today's investment in Second and Third World infrastructures comes late -- but that's better than never.
Now mankind desperately needs to hang together... but look what the forces of the great Market God have done to us all.
I think there were certainly American "privateers" who swooped in to take advantage of the Soviet collapse. And opportunists from all over the globe. But have you read Bill Browder's "Red Notice"?
My sense of it is that the really big harvesters of the Russian national treasure were the Russian oligarchs. Men who were given control of entire industries by guess who. Putin set up an elaborate web of "private" enterprise where a few buddies got uber rich and hid his own theft of billions.
The Russian nation is essentially a feudal mess run by the ultimate version of a national mafia. And don't mess with the God Father who has convinced the people that he is the strong man who will protect them from the rest of the world. When we look at the history of Russia and all the times it has been invaded and savaged, we can understand their paranoia. And the appeal of a Putin. Who seems to be a role model for Trump.
I am in alignment with you on the role of the "great market God". And I would now put Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Koch and Mercer and Sackler in the same boat as Putin. But Russia is being pillaged by Russians with mega yachts and mansions.
Russia has the land and the natural resources to be a global bread basket and an energy resource for the world. It has the capacity to improve it's citizens well being that could rival most western nations. But the funnel of its natural gifts to a handful of con men is one of history's greatest grand thefts.
Where was it that I read that wealth only drips upward and that even if the poor receive some form of aid in the morning it will already have been siphoned up by nightfall?
Just nice that they should have seen it, however briefly.
That is precisely what happened to shares distributed to employees in newly capitalist Russia... and, of course, Ukraine.
And Putin of course commandeered and sold food aid to Saint Petersburg.
A profitable start to a stratospherically profitable career, making him the ruler with most direct ownership of the Russias since Ivan the Terrible.
Stalin micro-controlled. He didn't own or need to own what he controlled.
Peter, agreed....we are by nature selfish. The truth of who we are is revealed everywhere.
This is one reason we need President Biden. He knows the condition of man....even himself, but he also knows that with work and cooperation great and good things can be accomplished. With like-minded men and women, here and throughout the world, we can see these good plans he\they are steadily working toward.
Peter, I acknowledge that the narrative we’ve been fed in the West is but a version of the truth. Still, I would be remiss were I not to ask whether the perspective you’ve formulated, too, is but a partial truth.
Whether it’s the past or speculative futures . The ‘market’ of truth is a coin toss at best. Hidden agendas manipulate change with the whims of mankind’s worst players.
Mind Boggling reasonings with no principle adherence.
Patricia, Because I won’t settle for a “coin toss,” I choose instead to subject the full range of possibilities to as critical a scrutiny as I can muster.
Patricia, Thank you for writing. I, too, learn and grow from my exchanges with this community and can sense, as a result, that my actions increasingly are likely of having a shot at being impactful.
Obviously, Barbara... My statement was far too vague and unsubstantiated; it was grounded in memories of how I felt in the '90s
Other perspectives might be far more complete, far better founded, but no one's omniscient.
I've just suggested elsewhere that a little more inductive reasoning might help, starting out from real-life observations instead of deductions founded on ideological delusions...
Peter, While I fully agree, admittedly, I find the task of getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth through subjecting a full range of narratives to critical scrutiny somewhat overwhelming, albeit worthwhile.
I have always spent time and energy on questioning all the assumptions that we take for granted, even those that seem axiomatic, probing motivation, my own and that of others and trying to take some account of the complex dynamic factors that make for uncertainty.
Today, I have just been finding justifications for my inductive approach that I had never given thought to.
In a sense, this seems to echo the researcher's work, testing, testing, once an intuitive solution has arisen.
No, I do have Russian sources, but not Kremlin ones. My hang-ups are European ones...
A pity Vladimir Pastukhov's writings are rarely available in English.
And I am going by my memory of what was happening at the time... the chaos of the Yeltsin years... Clinton to Yeltsin on "more shit for your face", etc.
I'm in a rush now, unfortunately, but I do recall obstacles being raised early on to European efforts to assist Russia and the former Soviet states.
Maybe go back to reports on the activities of the Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the early 90s.
Were you referring to ExxonMobil's and BP's forays into trying to develop Russian Oil and Gas resources? That's the only case I know, but what actually happened was transfers of large concession fees to Russia and extensive technology transfers. That doesn't match the description of "scavenger". In not familiar with other industries, but I'm willing to learn.
Instead of relying on memories of how I felt in the 90s, I ought to speak again to my old friend who worked in Saint Petersburg in the 90's for the German Christian Democratic Party's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, trying to promote democratic values and institutions but seeing the murder of one of the country's most promising politicians, Galina Starovoytova, and the beginnings of today's mafia State... under the thumb of a gone-to-seed dictator who began life among backyard thugs, learned the art of systematic lying as a KGB operative, and set out from his role as sidekick to Petersburg mayor Sobchak with one singleminded ambition: to become as rich as Croesus.
I myself didn't travel to an Eastern Bloc country -- Bulgaria -- till 1994, or to Russia and Ukraine until the early years of this century.
But I may be unusual in having expected the collapse of the Soviet empire since the mid-'80s when a Saxon friend gave me a detailed report of his visit to relatives in East Germany. I'd thought until then that Germans could make any system work, even Soviet central planning, but when it became clear that the GDR was literally moribund, it followed that, if Germans couldn't make it function, Russia certainly could not.
The empire was a dead man walking.
I've always been surprised that vested interests in the status quo should have so blinded western politicians and their intelligence services that they couldn't see what was staring them in the face. Everything possible was done to stymie the efforts of friends to send truckloads of food to Solidarnosc strikers in Gdansk... High profile members of the French intelligentsia talked as though the Soviet Union was eternal.
When it did collapse, I started to worry about the supposed victors of the Cold War... and was surprised that the subprime crash was so long coming.
I tend towards inductive thinking -- and am well aware of the weaknesses of that approach and of the need to put intuition to the test.
But it does seem to me, with hindsight, that deductive reasoning grounded in spurious assumptions can be even more pernicious. Habitual prejudices, ingrown ideological delusions, failure to take adequate account of breakneck and accelerating change, these failings endanger us all.
SpaceX StarLink seems to be a relatively unique capability. That said I think other options for satellite internet exist, but maybe not over Ukraine. I do think that the Biden Administration could sit down and have a hard talk with Elon to provide Ukraine internet services, however!
Iridium is a satellite communications company used for emergency communication and geolocation. Garmin uses it for some of their products. Whether they can transmit commands from controllers to drones is another story. I don't have that tech knowledge. However, any gps device can be attached to a drone for automated positioning and navigation.
Biden is in Hanoi right now. Per Hanoi, to form a "strategic security relationship" which I take to mean maritime security in Pacific seas south of China. Biden will speak in the hours ahead.
Bryan, thank you for sharing this info regarding maritime security involving activity around the many small islands near our Asian 'friends'. As a nation we need to be constantly aware and engaged with the security of our neighbors and friends in all parts of the world.
For the safe guarding of the "free world", we cannot "sleep" or assume that everything is going to be OK. Our President is "on guard!"
I concur on all your points Emily. Understand some off these tiny, tiny, shallow "islands" have been dredged by China., militarized & are essentially mini Naval Bases several within the territorial waters of the Phillipines. I expect some postings this week at "Just Security".
The South China Sea is full of the wrecks of Chinese junks.
An original basis for laying claim to a maritime area prima facie in international waters. The ships that went down didn't plant flags on the reefs that sank them or on the sea bed...
Thank you for showcasing the G21 and their plans for infrastructure projects to assist our global partners.
We need to get US satellites positioned near Ukraine so that Ukraine no longer has to depend on the whims of Elon Musk. Musk believes Russia’s threats rather than contacting the US government to ascertain the truth.
The top 1% no longer just depend on influencing IRS regulations to attain tax breaks—now they lobby to reduce the workforce to prevent/delay audits to make them follow the rules.—and the Republicans have introduced legislation to do just that. There are basically two ways to balance a budget—bring in more revenue or cut outgo.
As you’ve repeatedly said, the contrast can’t be any clearer—take care of the common man or help the oligarchy get richer. The choice at the ballot box is ours.
Anyone who can pay $44 Billion in hissy fit revenge for an imagined slight is well past rich enough.
but again, do this kind of people even know the word 'enough'?
No. Never “enough”.
See: "Too Much and Never Enough" by Mary Trump.
I’ve asked this question many times; “How much is enough?” It really boggles the mind especially in light of the extremely well off as compared with those that struggle financially on a daily basis for something so simple as putting food on the table. So…. How much is enough?
It’s not just in the US but worldwide. However in some places outside the US the poverty makes the poorest of those in the US look rich/ well off.
I’ve travelled and seen extreme poverty outside the US. It’s hard to grasp if haven’t actually been there and seen it first hand. Something as simple as a pen has high value! You may ask why? It’s because they are not available much less affordable. And many other small simple basic common things (like that pen) we all have and take for granted simply aren’t available/ can’t be found. We ‘middle class’ Americans have so much “stuff”…. we have no clue how much “stuff” we have and how well off we are.
When it comes to the millionaires and the billionaires….. I really don’t understand their wealth. I don’t understand how they view and/ or would answer the question; ‘how much is enough’. It baffles me even more so how they want more and more wealth.
It baffles me too.
I too have seen extreme poverty having been born in Sri Lanka in 1949.
IF Americans had thought about the rest of the world some time ago maybe they would understand how extreme poverty happens.
Years of corrupt Politicians is the answer. It is no wonder to me that the Chinese have taken over.
Good question George....they don't care. But I think a time will come when these rich oligarchs will need people to work for them. No-one can work if they are starving?
"Kenya welcomes the addition of the African Union — the fastest growing continent in the world — to the G20. This will increase the voice of Africa, visibility, and influence on the global stage and provide a platform to advance the common interest of our people.
This fits perfectly with the resolutions of the just-concluded Africa Climate Summit, including the reform of international financial institutions and multilateral development banks."
This was the statement made by President William Samoei Ruto yesterday after African Union was included into G20. This adds another voice to the continent and make African indispensable in matters revolving them. Previously, William Ruto had been critical of the manner in which Africa is being treated by the Global North and was not happy with it.
"We cannot sit in front of one person as African and the best we could get are photographs," he said in South Africa this year. He had complained that
African presidents are given only a few minutes to speak which according to him, it is disrespect and does not amount to anything to African people.
Africa has suggested the desire to relook at the existing global financial infrastructure and loan rescheduling to free them from the rat race.
Africa also complained of stakeholders in the private sectors who make it difficult for the continent to reorganise loans because they aren't ready to discuss with them and agree with a common bargain. Bearaucratic infrastructure has been tainting the whole global financial infrastructure and disadvantaging the continent.
I agree, Edwin. Hopefully with the global changes and assistance in financing infrastructure for the African nations, all African nations will feel welcome in the world. And this could help you avoid the military coups that are so damaging to the liberty of free people everywhere.
Yes, the African Union will voice their concerns in unison without individual countries seeking help from rogue and authoritative regimes like Russia which comes with a package of coup in exchange for resources.
I am thankful for every opportunity for the people of the African continent. Too often we overlook the loving family working hard to survive, We forget or are not aware of the self made and self serving military that can invade a village one day and kill family members, destroying this family....stealing the boys for soldiers, raping the young girls. This is not all of Africa but it still exists.
There are countries that mine the riches of Africa, using the strength of men, women and children as they take from their resources.....leaving behind pain and destruction.
There are places where a son walks miles to a small mission school, taking firewood or fish caught from a nearby stream to pay the teacher who is also living on small resources.
I am thankful for the great and beautiful cities that have been able to grow and thrive.
I am thankful when we are able to communicate and to help one another. It is the right action to take.
We do not need to change the beauty of a loving Africian family but IF HELP IS APPROVED AND SENSITIVE CARING IS MADE AVAILABLE, WE SHOULD BE THERE.
Edwin, I long for needs to be met and opportunities to be made available for everyone....WITH CARE AND RESPECT!
I long for wars to cease....to see a world working together.......we must , because of the condition of us, as humans....have a long view but never give up.
Wooow! What a comprehensive perspective. And true to your word, the African continent needed a space to express and grow themselves and I think it is paying day by day. After that, military coups, poverty, insecurity, unemployment, debts and many more problems will be dealt with until we stabilise ourselves. Thank you Emily Pfaff
I ask myself... would we have today's Russia and its cortege of threatened, damaged neighbors with great bites taken out of their territory if it had not been for the activity of American privateer scavengers attacking the prostrate body of what had been the Soviet empire, determined to ensure that Russia should never recover?
Many scavengers then, vulture capitalists, keen to ensure there should be no new Marshall Plan. Today's investment in Second and Third World infrastructures comes late -- but that's better than never.
Now mankind desperately needs to hang together... but look what the forces of the great Market God have done to us all.
Peter,
I think there were certainly American "privateers" who swooped in to take advantage of the Soviet collapse. And opportunists from all over the globe. But have you read Bill Browder's "Red Notice"?
My sense of it is that the really big harvesters of the Russian national treasure were the Russian oligarchs. Men who were given control of entire industries by guess who. Putin set up an elaborate web of "private" enterprise where a few buddies got uber rich and hid his own theft of billions.
The Russian nation is essentially a feudal mess run by the ultimate version of a national mafia. And don't mess with the God Father who has convinced the people that he is the strong man who will protect them from the rest of the world. When we look at the history of Russia and all the times it has been invaded and savaged, we can understand their paranoia. And the appeal of a Putin. Who seems to be a role model for Trump.
I am in alignment with you on the role of the "great market God". And I would now put Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Koch and Mercer and Sackler in the same boat as Putin. But Russia is being pillaged by Russians with mega yachts and mansions.
Russia has the land and the natural resources to be a global bread basket and an energy resource for the world. It has the capacity to improve it's citizens well being that could rival most western nations. But the funnel of its natural gifts to a handful of con men is one of history's greatest grand thefts.
Seems to be happening in America?
Where was it that I read that wealth only drips upward and that even if the poor receive some form of aid in the morning it will already have been siphoned up by nightfall?
Just nice that they should have seen it, however briefly.
That is precisely what happened to shares distributed to employees in newly capitalist Russia... and, of course, Ukraine.
And Putin of course commandeered and sold food aid to Saint Petersburg.
A profitable start to a stratospherically profitable career, making him the ruler with most direct ownership of the Russias since Ivan the Terrible.
Stalin micro-controlled. He didn't own or need to own what he controlled.
Peter, agreed....we are by nature selfish. The truth of who we are is revealed everywhere.
This is one reason we need President Biden. He knows the condition of man....even himself, but he also knows that with work and cooperation great and good things can be accomplished. With like-minded men and women, here and throughout the world, we can see these good plans he\they are steadily working toward.
Our deluded superficial nature is selfish and easily confused, our true nature is generous and compassionate.
We need to trust our own better nature and to lend a hand to leaders and fellow-citizens who are striving to do likewise.
IF Biden is that man why is he 'cuddling' up to Modi. This man is a terrorist and won't be happy until all India is Hindu?
Peter, I acknowledge that the narrative we’ve been fed in the West is but a version of the truth. Still, I would be remiss were I not to ask whether the perspective you’ve formulated, too, is but a partial truth.
Whether it’s the past or speculative futures . The ‘market’ of truth is a coin toss at best. Hidden agendas manipulate change with the whims of mankind’s worst players.
Mind Boggling reasonings with no principle adherence.
🤦♀️
Patricia, Because I won’t settle for a “coin toss,” I choose instead to subject the full range of possibilities to as critical a scrutiny as I can muster.
That’s a fair answer too. We do our best Barbara, I enjoy your comments and input. I learn so much here.it’s better than TV and no commercials.
Thanks 🫶
Patricia, Thank you for writing. I, too, learn and grow from my exchanges with this community and can sense, as a result, that my actions increasingly are likely of having a shot at being impactful.
Obviously, Barbara... My statement was far too vague and unsubstantiated; it was grounded in memories of how I felt in the '90s
Other perspectives might be far more complete, far better founded, but no one's omniscient.
I've just suggested elsewhere that a little more inductive reasoning might help, starting out from real-life observations instead of deductions founded on ideological delusions...
Peter, While I fully agree, admittedly, I find the task of getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth through subjecting a full range of narratives to critical scrutiny somewhat overwhelming, albeit worthwhile.
Your approach sounds thorough and painstaking.
I have always spent time and energy on questioning all the assumptions that we take for granted, even those that seem axiomatic, probing motivation, my own and that of others and trying to take some account of the complex dynamic factors that make for uncertainty.
Today, I have just been finding justifications for my inductive approach that I had never given thought to.
In a sense, this seems to echo the researcher's work, testing, testing, once an intuitive solution has arisen.
Who are these privateer scavengers? Without backup info, I will suspect this is Russian-sourced disinformation.
No, I do have Russian sources, but not Kremlin ones. My hang-ups are European ones...
A pity Vladimir Pastukhov's writings are rarely available in English.
And I am going by my memory of what was happening at the time... the chaos of the Yeltsin years... Clinton to Yeltsin on "more shit for your face", etc.
I'm in a rush now, unfortunately, but I do recall obstacles being raised early on to European efforts to assist Russia and the former Soviet states.
Maybe go back to reports on the activities of the Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the early 90s.
Were you referring to ExxonMobil's and BP's forays into trying to develop Russian Oil and Gas resources? That's the only case I know, but what actually happened was transfers of large concession fees to Russia and extensive technology transfers. That doesn't match the description of "scavenger". In not familiar with other industries, but I'm willing to learn.
I think that came later, Jerry.
Instead of relying on memories of how I felt in the 90s, I ought to speak again to my old friend who worked in Saint Petersburg in the 90's for the German Christian Democratic Party's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, trying to promote democratic values and institutions but seeing the murder of one of the country's most promising politicians, Galina Starovoytova, and the beginnings of today's mafia State... under the thumb of a gone-to-seed dictator who began life among backyard thugs, learned the art of systematic lying as a KGB operative, and set out from his role as sidekick to Petersburg mayor Sobchak with one singleminded ambition: to become as rich as Croesus.
I myself didn't travel to an Eastern Bloc country -- Bulgaria -- till 1994, or to Russia and Ukraine until the early years of this century.
But I may be unusual in having expected the collapse of the Soviet empire since the mid-'80s when a Saxon friend gave me a detailed report of his visit to relatives in East Germany. I'd thought until then that Germans could make any system work, even Soviet central planning, but when it became clear that the GDR was literally moribund, it followed that, if Germans couldn't make it function, Russia certainly could not.
The empire was a dead man walking.
I've always been surprised that vested interests in the status quo should have so blinded western politicians and their intelligence services that they couldn't see what was staring them in the face. Everything possible was done to stymie the efforts of friends to send truckloads of food to Solidarnosc strikers in Gdansk... High profile members of the French intelligentsia talked as though the Soviet Union was eternal.
When it did collapse, I started to worry about the supposed victors of the Cold War... and was surprised that the subprime crash was so long coming.
I tend towards inductive thinking -- and am well aware of the weaknesses of that approach and of the need to put intuition to the test.
But it does seem to me, with hindsight, that deductive reasoning grounded in spurious assumptions can be even more pernicious. Habitual prejudices, ingrown ideological delusions, failure to take adequate account of breakneck and accelerating change, these failings endanger us all.
I think your last paragraph is brilliant. I found it because I always look for your comments.
Leaving aside hindsight, my closing paragraph is polite understatement.
Consider.
*
It's a pity the content of this post is so buried in the undergrowth that it's hidden from most readers' sight.
I guess I'll have to resurrect it.
SpaceX StarLink seems to be a relatively unique capability. That said I think other options for satellite internet exist, but maybe not over Ukraine. I do think that the Biden Administration could sit down and have a hard talk with Elon to provide Ukraine internet services, however!
Iridium is a satellite communications company used for emergency communication and geolocation. Garmin uses it for some of their products. Whether they can transmit commands from controllers to drones is another story. I don't have that tech knowledge. However, any gps device can be attached to a drone for automated positioning and navigation.
According to a source quoted by Farrow, Musk wants the world saved, as long as it's saved by him. Yep, that's a Messiah complex, for sure.
Biden is in Hanoi right now. Per Hanoi, to form a "strategic security relationship" which I take to mean maritime security in Pacific seas south of China. Biden will speak in the hours ahead.
Bryan, thank you for sharing this info regarding maritime security involving activity around the many small islands near our Asian 'friends'. As a nation we need to be constantly aware and engaged with the security of our neighbors and friends in all parts of the world.
For the safe guarding of the "free world", we cannot "sleep" or assume that everything is going to be OK. Our President is "on guard!"
I concur on all your points Emily. Understand some off these tiny, tiny, shallow "islands" have been dredged by China., militarized & are essentially mini Naval Bases several within the territorial waters of the Phillipines. I expect some postings this week at "Just Security".
The South China Sea is full of the wrecks of Chinese junks.
An original basis for laying claim to a maritime area prima facie in international waters. The ships that went down didn't plant flags on the reefs that sank them or on the sea bed...