May Day And The Immigrant Worker: Chris Mahin in Tribuno del Pueblo

From Pilsen to Pilsen:
May Day and the immigrant worker

BY CHRIS MAHIN

May Day began in the United States, and immigrants played a decisive role in creating it.

On May 1, 2006, more than 750,000 workers – most of them immigrants – took part in a demonstration for immigrant rights in Chicago. They marched past Haymarket Square, the very spot where immigrant workers had rallied in 1886. Many of the workers in the 2006 demonstration lived in Pilsen, a Chicago neighborhood named after a city in Central Europe where many of yesterday’s immigrants came from. The immigrant workers of Chicago had revived the celebration of May Day in the city where it had been created — by an earlier generation of immigrant workers.

On May 1, 1886, workers throughout the United States struck to demand the eight-hour day. Chicago was the strike’s center. At that time, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. Its factories were being filled by workers from England, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, Sweden and many other countries.

Three days later, a rally was held at Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest a police attack on a group of strikers. Speeches were given in several languages. As this protest was winding to a close, cops moved in. They ordered the last speaker – an English immigrant, Samuel Fielden – to stop. Then someone threw a bomb. It killed one police officer and wounded many. The police opened fire, killing many participants in the rally.

The police responded by breaking into homes, wrecking the printing presses of foreign-language newspapers, and beating and arresting union leaders. Immigrant workers were accused of being terrorists.

Eight union leaders were put on trial, charged with being accessories to murder at Haymarket Square. One – Samuel Fielden – was from Lancashire, England. Six had been raised in Germany: George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, and August Spies.

Despite worldwide protests, four of the defendants were hanged. (A fifth, Louis Lingg, died in his cell under suspicious circumstances.) Three were given long sentences.

In 1889, at the International Labor Congress in Paris, a delegate from the American Federation of Labor proposed that the Congress adopt May 1 as International Labor Day.

# # #

This article was originally published in the May 2013 issue of the Tribuno del Pueblo newspaper. For more information, go to www.tribunodelpueblo.org.

Smiley’s People? Or LeCarré’s People?

New Novel by John LeCarre: A Delicate Truth

By OLEN STEINHAUER

Published: May 2, 2013,  New York Times

“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” George Smiley said in John le Carré’s 1974 classic, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the center of things.” This concept of necessary, if lamentable, sacrifice in the face of the Soviet monolith helped define the espionage masterpieces of the cold war. Such statements gave fans a rush of pleasure, partly aesthetic, partly clandestine — the feeling they were gaining a bit of secret Machiavellian wisdom. 

A DELICATE TRUTH

By John le Carré

310 pp. Viking. $28.95.

Illustration by Ben Wiseman

Times changed. The Soviet empire morphed from our sworn enemy into a sordid kleptocracy with whom business could be done, and le Carré turned his attention more fully to the West, which has always been his real subject. The enemies (big pharma, bent banks, blackhearted multinationals and the weak-willed politicians they buy) became less exotic. The old sacrifices — of lives, and of our own ethics — became less necessary. Many critics grew irritated. What happened to the particular pleasure of John le Carré’s moral relativism?

“A Delicate Truth,” like most of le Carré’s recent novels, feels like a rebuttal to George Smiley’s theory. How many stray cats can we allow to be snuffed in order to reach our ends? Or, as le Carré put it in an essay in last month’s issue of Harper’s, “How far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?” Back in 1963, in “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” we watched that novel’s stray cat, Liz Gold, die on the Berlin Wall. A shame, yes, but in the grand scheme of things an acceptable loss. Fifty years later, “A Delicate Truth” suggests that even little Liz Gold would be too much of a sacrifice.

We open in 2008, when a servant of the Crown known to us only by his cover name, Paul Anderson, is going a bit mad waiting in a hotel room in Gibraltar. He’s been sent to be the eyes and ears of Fergus Quinn, M.P., during Operation Wildlife, which aims to exfiltrate a terrorist visiting the British Crown Colony. Wildlife is a joint endeavor between Quinn and a private American security firm called Ethical Outcomes, which “will be providing the full American-style coverage.” Once he’s finally in the field, Paul realizes that “war’s gone corporate.” Although he sees little of the action, he’s told the maneuver went off without a hitch — a great secret success, for which Paul will later, under his real name, Christopher (Kit) Probyn, be awarded a commissionership in the Caribbean and a knighthood.

We next meet Toby Bell, formerly employed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and later private secretary to the “Honorable” (a title that drips with irony) Fergus Quinn, during the period leading up to Wildlife. Toby is the idealist in the room, for he wishes “to make a difference — or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-­imperial, post-cold-war world.” A friend from the Treasury gives him and us a reminder of what this new world looks like: “We’re clever and nice, but we’re understaffed and underpaid and we want the best for our country, which is old-fashioned of us. New Labour loves Big Greed, and Big Greed has armies of amoral lawyers and accountants on the make and pays them the earth to make rings round us. We can’t compete; they’re too big to fail and too big to fight. Now I’ve depressed you. Good. I’m depressed too.”

Toby may be depressed, but he hasn’t quite lost his idealism. Once he realizes his minister is hiding something important from him, he begins to dig until he uncovers some of the machinations and personal interplay that are leading inexorably to Operation Wildlife. He even meets the leaders of Ethical Outcomes, a dodgy British operative named Jay Crispin and Mrs. Spencer Hardy of Houston, Tex., “better known to the world’s elite as the one and only Miss Maisie.” Toby recognizes what Paul/Kit does not: namely that a government minister is embarking on a private military op with the help of mercenaries. Alarmed, Toby shares the news with a trusted ear, but he is working in a sphere in which no good act goes unpunished, and so it goes for him.

These events form the prologue for the action that takes place three years later when a member of the British Special Forces assigned to Wildlife unexpectedly confronts Sir Christopher Probyn — Kit — in the midst of his idyllic retirement in North Cornwall. He’s come to share the darker facts of Wildlife, the operation Kit still holds on to with secret pride, his great act of derring-do for the nation.

The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision once Toby Bell returns, and by the time he’s joined by Kit’s alluring daughter the story settles into classic conspiracy thriller territory, the two of them racing to assemble evidence before they can be silenced by the men who pull the strings. As ever, le Carré’s prose is fluid, carrying the reader toward an inevitable yet nail-biting climax.

This is John le Carré’s 23rd novel, and neither prolificacy nor age (he’s 81) has diminished his legendary and sometimes startling gift for mimicry. More than the inventory of closely observed outfits, chronicles of public schools and slumped, bookish frames, it’s the voices that give the characters in “A Delicate Truth” their most immediate claim to three-­dimensionality. With, however, one exception: Miss Maisie, Ethical Outcomes’ down-home right-wing zillionaire, with a mouthful of accent and affectation to match. Her appearance among the sophisticates of the Foreign Ministry is like a slap in the face, and while she’s ushered offstage quickly, you’d be forgiven for seeing in her caricature evidence of the accusation leveled at le Carré regularly these days: anti-Americanism.

Having lived in Europe for the last decade, I’m particular about how to use that label. To me, “anti-American” means just that: to be contemptuous of Americans, one and all. I’ve met those people. Blinded by their ignorance, they’re to be scorned. But then there is John le Carré, whose January 2003 argument against the Iraq war, printed in The Times of London, was called “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.” He made his ire plain: he was against the foreign policy of an American administration he despised. If this is what qualifies him, then half of our own population is anti-American.

The enemy in le Carré’s universe, both fictional and not, isn’t America. It’s the virus of shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the “post-imperial, post-cold-war world” Toby Bell so wants to help shape. And while the few Americans in “A Delicate Truth” are not to be loved, their British counterparts are even more despicable, particularly the New Labour politicians who have clearly disappointed le Carré the most deeply, having marched willingly with America into Iraq.

Describing a posting to Cairo early in Toby’s diplomatic career, le Carré writes: “At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the superrich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city’s edge.” Here is le Carré with the gloves off, turning his back entirely on George Smiley’s old stray cat theory and aiming his dagger at those who would twist Smiley’s words for their own purposes. Is this what we’ve done with our cold war victory?

The spymaster-as-hero is gone, replaced by the whistle-blower, the outsider who retains enough of his heart to be appalled by the slaughter of strays. In Cairo they’re the young trash collectors living on the city’s edge, but in Gibraltar they’re even more insignificant: one mother and her child, around whom the whole novel rotates, and for whom le Carré’s rage simmers. By the end of “A Delicate Truth,” you either share his anger at the injustices between its covers, or you don’t. If you do, then you’re one of le Carré’s people. If not, you’re one of Smiley’s. It’s up to you to decide which one is more worthy.

Olen Steinhauer is the author of eight novels, most recently “An American Spy.” He lives in Budapest.

Is Poetry in China Vanishing? Zhang Yuchen Writes in the China Daily

Home / China Daily / Top News

Battle of words over the future of poetry

Updated: 2012-01-27 07:27

By Zhang Yuchen (China Daily)

The ability to write verse may be a dying art in modern China but the Internet is providing lines of inspiration for a new generation. Zhang Yuchen reports.

It may mark a turning point for China’s traditional publishing houses that they have no plans to publish the works of last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, despite having printed the collections of previous laureates. Some might argue that it is an indication the world is becoming more crude, more cynical and less appreciative of issues, such as nature, that the 80-year-old focuses on.

It certainly seems in some quarters that poetry has no hold on many people today. A survey in November showed poets are among the bottom three in a list of relationship partners in a country with about 3,000 years of history of writing poems.

“(Modern) poetry in China is dead,” said Wolfgang Kubin, the German Sinologist, in a public lecture on Chinese modern poetry on Nov 24. He then contradicted himself in a carefully phrased way: “It is, however, still living. It lives at the edge of society unnoticed by the majority. Its readers are the few people who really appreciate good literature.”

The young, it seems, are not among the latter faction. As older poets produce and are published less, and some have stopped altogether, some observers say no one is stepping into their shoes.

“I have yet to pay much attention to poets under 30, if that is the younger generation,” Kubin said. Usually Chinese writers and scholars introduce works of literature to him and recommend they be translated. “It seems to me that I have not yet heard a voice that tried to convince me of the high quality of poets under 30,” was his withering assessment.

The decline in China’s poetry is marked elsewhere. “Poetry reading groups have got smaller as good poetry diminishes and the competition falls,” said Xie Mian, deputy director of the New-style Poetry Research Institute of Peking University. “That is something new.”

Many believe that the irrelevance, in today’s world, of traditional motifs and a greater focus on the trivialities of daily life, plus the way language is changing, add to the poor outlook for the less prosaic forms of literature.

Most modern Chinese poets attracting attention are those who emerged in the 1980s, then aged in their 20s, such as Zhai Yongming, Zhang Zao (1962-2010) and Hai Zi (1964-1989). Their works are embedded with beautiful images, an enlightening spirit and perceptive thoughts relevant to the time that captured the imagination of the world when they were younger.

“In the 1980s, college students – even those majoring in mathematics – wrote and read poetry. However, few graduates and undergraduates studying Chinese literature are into poetry,” said Ren Youqun, vice-president of East China Normal University.

Four college poet societies established in the 1980s became famous – the May 4 Literature Society at Peking University in Beijing, Fudan Poets Society at Fudan University in Shanghai, Innocence Poets Society at Jilin University in Northeast China, and Jiangnan Poet Society in Anhui province in East China.

In the 1980s the gathering of a poetry society would attract crowds of college students in and outside the biggest conference hall on campus, said Xiao Shui, a former president of Fudan Poets Society.

If anyone wanted to join Fudan Poets Society they had to sit a test for membership, according to Xiao. They had to write a poem on the spot after being given a set topic. Every year only 10 to 15 college students were admitted as official members. “Now students just need to fill in a form with their name and contact details to gain admission to the circle,” he said. “But they rarely write anything or take part in activities.”

Bei Dao, the pioneer of a new genre of Chinese poetry in the early 1980s, believes that college students and scholars who used to read poetry have lost their enthusiasm for it amid China’s social transformation; now poetry only evokes nostalgia for them.

Since the early 1990s, poets who had previously expressed no interest in making money found themselves caught up in China’s “gold rush”. They headed south in their droves to pursue a much better life of materialism.

Bai Ya, from Anhui, was one of those who stopped writing poetry in the 1990s and joined the exodus to Guangdong, the most economically active province in China at that time, to work.

He spent seven years working in public relations without writing another poem. Even top poets gave it up for a couple of years.

“As far as I know, anyone in the 1990s who carried on writing or reading poetry were teachers,” said Bai.

“In such a populous country, it would only take a niche audience to re-ignite the development of poetry, so it’s a pity that such reader groups have not yet formed,” he was quoted by Xinhua News Agency as saying.

Publishing houses have now lost interest in poetry, said Fan Xi’an, general manager of Sanlian Bookstore in Beijing, “In recent years, there have been no poetry collections that have become bestsellers. For a publishing house in China, if a book sells less than 5,000 copies, it loses money. The payoff for these 5,000 books to the poet is only 7,500 yuan. ($1,190)”

However, with the new millennium came a growth in social reflection propelled by the relatively new medium of the Internet.

“We always suffer under the illusion that young people read and write less poetry but it is not true,” said Wang Xiuyun, editor of Beijing Literature. “Many young people from different backgrounds write good poetry. We just don’t know them because there is less communication between the two generations.”

Many young poets believe it is the best time for China’s modern poetry. “Thanks to the Internet, now students can write their poetry online and paste the verses on different platforms: BBS (bulletin board systems), forums or pure literature websites,” said Yu Huaiyu, the founder of Poetry Paper website, one of the three largest poetry websites, which handles more than 1,000 discussion threads every day online.

Hundreds of thousands of literature-relevant websites have transformed the landscape and given new blood to the medium, say devotees.

Poetry Paper has more than 10,000 active members from home and abroad.

“It is an era of thriving online poetry for ordinary people,” said Yu, speaking about the website he established 10 years ago. “Poets freely share with each other online.”

The people writing on the website are divided equally among those born in the 1960s and 1970s, those born in the 1980s and those born in the 1990s.

Modern poetry pioneer Bei Dao said in an interview with Xinhua that the young generation of readers who grew up in the era of commercialization could not escape the impact of the times.

Nowadays young poets or young people trying to write poetry focus on the pragmatic issues of daily life, among them the great pressures from living an urban life, the high cost of buying a home, and romantic issues.

“Before, poets cared more about social responsibility. Of course, it should have been their concern, but we can see more how much they cared now young people center on their own lives and spirit,” said Xu Demin, who founded Fudan Poets Society in 1981.

“Poetry is more like a pipe transmitting various emotions in today’s society,” said Wang Chenlong, 24, former president of the student poets society at Minzu University of China, Beijing. “In many society members’ minds our society has already been playing a role like other kinds of societies, such as animation groups or skateboard clubs. In their eyes, there is no difference.”

During the worst period of Wang’s presidency, only five undergraduates, including one from the law school, were members of the society. At the time, about 100 undergraduates and postgraduates were majoring in Chinese literature on campus.

“It is OK by me,” said the poetry fan, who is preparing for the entrance examination for this year’s Chinese modern literature postgraduate study. “Reading and writing poetry, as always, interests only a few.”

Every six months, Wang seeks to collect poetry from his friends or fellow students to publish and share.

Although Wang said most of his friends stopped reading and writing poetry as soon as they left university, he and other young poets believe now is the best time for real poet writing from the heart.

“With huge change and new social problems arising, I think young poets can draw on more material for their work,” he said.

Many believe that because the poets have no market, they cannot sell themselves. The corollary to this is that if they go on writing poetry, they can devote themselves to true literature. In this respect a young poet can master the demands that any future potentially excellent work puts upon him or her.

“(Good modern Chinese poetry) might exist,” said Wolfgang Kubin. “I would be glad if someone would one day say to me, ‘See, this young man or woman writes great poetry’.”

There are many who hope he is right.

Mei Jia contributed to this report. Contact the reporter at zhangyuchen@chinadaily.com.cn

Who Is Stealing Our Education? Steven Serikaku and Byron Sigcho Deconstruct UNO

This is the second in an ongoing series, coming at a time when UNO charter schools financial shenanigans are finally being examined.

Just in the last few days the Chicago Sun-Times is finally exploring some issues pertaining to UNO charter schools.  Finally.  Not that much of this information hasn’t been available before.  It’s just that only those willing to dig for it have been able to find it.  Meanwhile, UNO has developed an empire of 13 charter schools while scooping nearly 100 million dollars from public coffers to build those same schools.  Their political connections to the Democratic Party machine flowered under the Daley administration and came to fruition when Juan Rangel, UNO CEO, was a campaign manager for Rahm Emanuel in his successful bid to become Chicago’s Mayor.

This teach in, the second in the “Who Is Stealing Our Education” series presented by Occupy Rogers Park, couldn’t come at a more significant moment, as school closings butt up against a plethora of charter openings;  as public money is used to deplete the neighborhood schools of needed resources.

Automation and Robotics News–Dec. 2012 from Tony Zaragoza

Automation and Robotics News–Dec. 2012

LEADS
Rise of the Robots
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY Times, December 8, 2012,
Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence for “reshoring” of manufacturing to the United States. They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece, however, Rampell cites another factor: robots.

Robots and Robber Barons
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY Times Op-Ed December 9, 2012
The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should – but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense. Wait – are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought; for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers, either on the gap between more- and less-educated workers or on the soaring incomes of a handful of superstars in finance and other fields. But that may be yesterday’s story. More specifically, while it’s true that the finance guys are still making out like bandits – in part because, as we now know, some of them actually are bandits – the wage gap between workers with a college education and those without, which grew a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s, hasn’t changed much since then. Indeed, recent college graduates had stagnant incomes even before the financial crisis struck.
Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy. Why is this happening? As best as I can tell, there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other. …

China: Robotic Growth Tied to Factory Automation Advancements
Automation World-Dec 21, 2012
Morgan Stanley (www.morganstanley.com) recently released a Blue Paper, entitled, China – Robotics: Automation for the People and it includes growth factors, …

Da Vinci Surgery Robot Lawsuits Mount, as Bernstein Liebhard LLP …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release)-11 hours ago
According to a recent report issued by Citron Research, Intuitive Surgical has been named in at least nine Da Vinci Robot lawsuits alleging bad outcomes …

2013: The rise of the robot cars
ZDNet-Dec 21, 2012
The face of today’s robot car owes a lot to the autonomous vehicles developed for Google by Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun. His work on Stanford’s entries in the …

The rise of the robot
Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard-Dec 18, 2012
“In whatever form they take, it’s darned exciting to think that we are not far off from having armies of robots all around us that collectively make it easier to be a …

TERROR, MILITARY, POLICING, SURVEILLANCE

• Berkeley May Create First ‘No Drone Zone’ in U.S.

12/26/12 — The city of Berkeley, Calif., this week took the first steps toward a ban on drones as the autonomous aircraft deployed in the war on terrorism are being embraced for local law enforcement. The debate over creating a No Drone Zone in this famously left-wing stronghold is likely to be repeated across the U.S. as ever-smaller drones equipped with high-definition cameras and sensors take to the skies with the ability to collect vast amounts of data on citizens. While the Federal Aviation Administration is drafting rules for the deployment of drones in domestic airspace the use of drones to collect…

• Get ready: Drones will come to Bay Area – SFGate

Chip Johnson, Chronicle Columnist, Updated 11:22 am, Tuesday, December 18, 2012
If everything goes according to plan, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office will soon have a drone, a small unmanned aircraft, to aid with crowd control, search-and-rescue missions and other law enforcement duties that could use a set of eyes in the air. Think of it as the newest tool for law enforcement. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this. The chief concern of critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the drones threaten the privacy rights of everyday citizens. The Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission went as far as to propose a ban, a “No Drone Zone” in Berkeley airspace for all but hobbyists. But despite the commission’s stern stance, in the not-too-distant future the skies above American cities will host unmanned flying vehicles.

• Alameda County puts the brakes on purchasing drone

By Angela Woodall, Oakland TribunePosted:   12/04/2012
Outcry from privacy advocates prompted Alameda County Board of Supervisors to postpone or possibly scrap plans to purchase a surveillance drone for the Sheriff’s Office.Last minute intervention Tuesday morning by the American Civil Liberties Union prompted supervisors to require explicit authorization to use grant money the Sheriff’s Office received to purchase the drone. Now the proposal will have to go to the public protection committee for approval then back to the full board of supervisors. That is likely to happen early next year. Concern has been mounting among privacy groups for months that Sheriff Greg Ahern was forging ahead without rules for deploying a drone in the skies above Alameda County. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation are concerned about the lack of privacy protections. They were dismayed to find that the Sheriff’s Office was asking the supervisors on Tuesday to approve a $31,646 grant to help pay for a drone, indicating that the department was far closer to acquisition than they had led the public to believe.

• Japanese Security Firm to Start Renting Surveillance Drones

Evan Ackerman  /  Fri, December 28, 2012
We know, it’s Friday. And usually, we post a whole bunch o’ videos on Fridays, but since we’ve done that for two out of our last three posts (!), we figured we’d give you a bit of a break. Instead, we’ve got this little quadrotor from Japan that’s trying to be the next level of paranoia in private security.

• DoD Issues New Directive on Use of Autonomous Drones

12/05/12 — The U.S. Defense Department has issued a new directive on the use of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems, an attempt to regulate a technology that officials say could be years from becoming reality. The directive, released Nov. 27, is focused on systems that can select and engage targets without the…

• New Commercial Aerial Drone Introduced

Posted 10/09/12 at 05:17 PM
… senseFly, a Swiss start-up, launched their new eBee aerial photography drone with funding from a recent equity investment by Parrot (of AR.Drone quadcopter fame). With it’s 3’ wingspan the eBee can fly for 45 minutes in up to 25 mph winds.
… Two kinds of software drive the eBee: one to create a flight path and the other to turn the 2D geotagged images into 3d maps and reports.
… Two videos explain the process.

• Obama’s New Year’s Resolution: More Drone Strikes

By Spencer Ackerman, 01.03.13
It’s barely three days into 2013, and the Obama administration’s lethal campaign of drone strikes has resumed in earnest. Missiles fired by remotely piloted planes struck targets in Pakistan and Yemen three times in the past several hours, killing several people, including two prominent militant commanders. In Pakistan’s South Waziristan province, at least 4 MQ-1 Predators or MQ-9 Reapers operated by the CIA killed a Pakistani Taliban commander, Maulvi Nazir, according to media reports that cite unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. Nazir had struck a detente with the Pakistani government but, according to drone watcher Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal, maintained ties to al-Qaida and attacked U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The drones fired on Nazir’s vehicle, killing him and at least five others.

• Navy Preps to Build a Robot Ship That Blows Up Mines

The Navy’s next wave of robots will take on one of the most dangerous missions on the open water: destroying mines. Anti-mine warfare is a critical mission for the Navy, as nations like Iran can mess with the global economy just by threatening to plant mines in crucial waterways.

• Pentagon Looks to Fix ‘Pervasive Vulnerability’ in Drones

By Noah Shachtman, Monday, December 31
Drones may be at the center of the U.S. campaign to take out extremists around the globe. But there’s a “pervasive vulnerability” in the robotic aircraft, according to the Pentagon’s premier science and technology division — a weakness the drones share with just about every car, medical device and power plant on the planet. The control algorithms for these crucial machines are written in a fundamentally insecure manner, says Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a Tufts University computer scientist and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There’s simply no systematic way for programmers to check for vulnerabilities as they put together the software that runs our drones, our trucks or our pacemakers.

• Here’s How Darpa’s Robot Ship Will Hunt Silent Subs

By Spencer Ackerman, Thursday, December 27
Submariners like to say there are two kinds of ships: subs and targets. The Pentagon’s futurists want to turn that on its head, with a new kind of robotic surface ship that can pinpoint a sub.

• Meet the Grabby, Sugar-Fueled Robots the Navy Wants to Put in Space

By Spencer Ackerman, Wednesday, December 26
They’re grabby. They use microbes as fuel. They’re the robots the Navy wants to send to outer space.

• Air Force May Be Developing Stealth Drones in Secret

By David Axe, 12.08.12
The Air Force’s multi-billion-dollar drone fleets may have helped against the insurgents of Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a fight against a real military like China’s, the relatively defenseless unmanned aerial vehicles would get shot down in a second. So once again, the air will belong to traditional, manned bombers and fighters able to survive the sophisticated air defenses. At least that’s the Air Force’s official position. Secretly, however, the flying branch could be working on at least two new high-tech UAVs optimized for the most intensive future air wars. Ace aviation reporter Bill Sweetman has gathered evidence of new stealth drones under development by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman — the latter potentially armed, and both drawing on classified funds. If these robots are real, the Air Force’s drone era is not only not ending — it’s barely begun.

• 2012 Was the Year of the Drone in Afghanistan

By Spencer Ackerman, 12.06.12
The soldiers and marines are packing their bags. The pilots are sitting on the tarmac. But the armed robotic planes are busier than they’ve ever been: Revised U.S. military statistics show a much, much larger drone war in Afghanistan than anyone suspected. Last month, military stats revealed that the U.S. had launched some 333 drone strikes in Afghanistan thus far in 2012. That made Afghanistan the epicenter of U.S. drone attacks — not Pakistan, not Yemen, not Somalia. But it turns out those stats were off, according to revised ones released by the Air Force on Thursday morning. There have actually been 447 drone strikes in Afghanistan this year. That means drone strikes represent 11.5 percent of the entire air war — up from about 5 percent last year.

• Navy Will Have to Wait Before Amassing Its Robo-Copter Fleet

By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman, 12.04.12
The Navy talks about its drone helicopter the way Apple geeks gushed over the first-generation iPhone in 2007. The MQ-8 Fire Scout does it all, from hunting for drugs at sea to spotting insurgents over the battlefields of Afghanistan. But like that early iPhone, the Fire Scout is seriously buggy — so much so that the Defense Department has conceded it will be forced to seriously delay buying all the robocopters it wants.

• Watch the First Flight of Europe’s Killer Drone Prototype

By Spencer Ackerman, 12.03.12
This drone may have an awkward name. But several European governments think the nEUROn is their ticket to a future of flying killer robots. The video above shows the first flight of the nEUROn, a drone with a 41-foot wingspan and an empty weight of five tons, which on Saturday launched from France’s Istres air base. The takeoff of the stealthy, batwing-shaped drone, jointly developed by six European countries, was nearly a decade in the making, and tests will continue in France, Sweden and Italy for years to come. In fact, the nEURON won’t actually join any European air forces. Much like the U.S. Navy’s stealthy X-47B — which, as David Cenciotti of The Aviationist notes, the drone kinda resembles — it’s just a demonstrator aircraft, meant to show that European companies can successfully develop an attack-sized, stealthy unmanned plane. Concept proven, the follow-on aircraft will

• Munster Police Use Robot To Investigate Deadly Domestic Dispute

CBS2 Chicago-15 hours ago
MUNSTER (CBS) — Police in Northwest Indiana are questioning a man suspected of beating his estranged wife to death, then holding police at bay outside the …

• Better the refusenik than the robot

Haaretz-Dec 26, 2012
Better the refusenik than the robot. ‘What will become of this country if everyone refuses orders?’ ask the hysteria-mongers. Unfortunately, soldiers of conscience …

• DARPA’s latest footage of LS3 robodog astounds

News – Dec 20, 2012, 4:39 PM | By Christopher MacManus
DARPA researchers continue to add new functionality to the four-legged robot originally developed by Boston Dynamics.

INDUSTRY AND MANUFACTURING

• Labour shortages: Double-digit wage increases

December 11, 2012
The weeks after Chinese New Year are typically peak recruiting season for the factories in southern China, which for three decades have produced toys, jeans and electronics for retailers around the world. This year was markedly different. Factory owners in Dongguan, a city a couple of hours drive from Hong Kong that consists of constellations of factories specialising in different products, reported that they were confronted with a labour shortage.

• Control Panel Manufacturing Automation

Manufacturing Business Technology-Dec 21, 2012
Today the manufacturing of control panels is traditionally a labor intensive process with few options for process automation. Most operations are done manually …

• Emerging Economies and Globalization Drives Automation …

ARC Advisory Group-Dec 20, 2012
Automation Expenditures for Discrete Industries Global Business … This environment created tremendous growth opportunities for automation equipment for …

• Automation called key to paring costs, building stronger home base

RubberNews.com-Dec 10, 2012
HEBRON, Ky.—Automating certain rubber product processes once was thought to be unthinkable, but not anymore. Now it’s looked on as a way to minimize …

• Hon Hai Hits Obstacles in Push to Use Robots

Wall Street Journal-Dec 11, 2012
Automating production for such items as television sets, game consoles and Apple’s iPhones could be a game changer for Hon Hai, helping it become more …

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD PRODUCTION

• ABB Robots at Work at Honeytop

The company’s flexpicker robots dramatically impact production and changeover time
By Robotics Trends’ News Sources – Filed Dec 26, 2012
“After three weeks of production, a brand-new product was introduced in less than an hour without the need for any new investment from Honeytop.” FOOD AND BEVERIDGE PACKAGING: Robots help packagers work more efficiently, increasing output and reducing change over time. But they address hygiene concerns too. One company in the UK saw firsthand the benefits of automation, which helped the pancake producer streamline its packaging process.

• Horticulture Specialists and Robotics Engineers Team Up to Automate Australian Agriculture

Perception of Australia as the future “food bowl” for the Asian market is driving innovation
By Robotics Trends’ News Sources – Filed Dec 13, 2012
Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems Salah Sukkarieh at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies leads a team that is developing robotic devices with the ability to autonomously sense, analyse and respond to their own surroundings.

• This Milk Production Was Brought To You By A Robot

NPR (blog)-Dec 28, 2012
We all have an inkling of how our food is grown these days, but increasingly we don’t really know what it looks like. You’d probably recognize a tomato plant or a …

SERVICE SECTOR

• Would You Be Comfortable Trusting Your Health To a Robot Doctor?

December 8, 2012 – Technology is marching ever forward and the medicine is no exception. CNN’s Fortune Tech predicts tech will eventually take over 80 percent of what doctors do today, and that might be great, but would you feel comfortable putting your life in the hands of Dr.

• Mitsubishi’s Remote Control Tankbot Is Yet Another Member of the Robot Clean-Up Crew Army

December 8, 2012 – We may not have had the wide variety of radiation-resistant robots we needed before Fukushima, but we’re certainly getting it now. Following Toshiba’s four-legged dogbot, Mitsubishi is rolling out their own four-tredded tankbot that aims to fix up a disaster site without sending anyone in.

• SkyTender puts automation in airplane aisles

News – Dec 16, 2012, 4:37 PM | By Tim Hornyak
Fresh from its maiden flight, this drink dispenser promises to speed up relief for thirsty passengers.

• Wastewater treatment robot is fueled by human sewage

ZDNet-by Heather Clancy-Dec 26, 2012
Summary: This isn’t just potty talk. The experimental EcBot III uses the microbes in human waste to generate electricity, creating power from the water it cleans.

• The Robotics Company that could Revolutionize Fast Food

12/19/12 — Science fiction has always positioned the idea that one day our human jobs would be replaced by machines. For those working in burger assembly lines, that day might be sooner than you think. Introducing a machine that makes burgers. Literally, it’s a burger making machine, in prototype, that takes unprepared ingredients like whole tomatoes, onions, uncooked patties, untoasted buns, and spits out a completely assembled burger: Momentum Machines, the San Francisco-based robotics company responsible for the concept, notes that they are aiming to have a functional demo model by June 1st, 2012. About a month ago, the company got a quick…

PACKING, SHIPPING AND TRANSPORTATION

• Should Port Workers Be Paid For Work That Disappeared?

By Tom Gara, December 26, 2012
Unions and employees will have one last chance this week to reach a deal and avoid port closures that could cripple trade…

ENERGY AND RESOURCE EXTRACTION

• Petroleum companies install automation machine to ensure pure ...

Times of India-Dec 29, 2012
HUBLI: Hereafter, people can expect to get unadulterated petrol as petroleum companies have started installing automation machines in their petrol pumps in …

• The future of automation

Australian Mining-Dec 10, 2012
For experts at Sandvik and the CSIRO, the future of automation in mining is already upon us. And while we’ve started to introduce this technology on Australian …

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

• Workload Automation Moves Front and Center in 2013

Wired-Dec 11, 2012
Big Data, cloud computing and mobile devices continue to be the business IT megatrends of the 21st Century’s second decade. Intimately linked to all three, as it …

• Automation Will Represent the Next Big Step for Biobanks, Says …

PR Newswire (press release)-Dec 19, 2012
LONDON, Dec. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Every year, nearly 100 million samples are added to biobanks worldwide. Over 1500 bio repositories exist today and …

• IT Automation: What Lies Ahead in 2013

IT Business Edge (blog)-Dec 5, 2012
Click through for six IT automation predictions for 2013, as identified by Ben Rosenberg, CEO of Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. IT environments are …

• Robot Data Collectors: How to Win in a Device-to-Data Center World

Forbes-Dec 18, 2012
Robot Data Collectors: How to Win in a Device-to-Data Center World … You can think of them as robot data collectors—collecting, culling, and sending back data …

JOB DISPLACEMENT DEBATE

• The robot economy and the new rentier class

FT Alphaville, December 10, 2012
It seems more top-tier economists are coming around to the idea that robots and technology could be having a greater influence on the economy (and this crisis in particular) than previously appreciated. Paul Krugman being the latest. But first a quick backgrounder on the debate so far (as tracked by us).

• Robots Don’t Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do

AlterNet / By William Lazonick
Worrying about automation distracts us from the real problem: misuse of corporate profits.

• Automation is making unions irrelevant | Computerworld Blogs

Patrick Thibodeau, December 13, 2012
The problem with unions is they can’t protect jobs. They can’t stop a company from moving jobs overseas, closing offices, or replacing workers with automation. I grew up in Connecticut, a heavily unionized state. In the post-war period, the state’s industries made typewriters, appliances, bearings, locks, tools. None of them survived. Through the 1960s and into the 1980s, thousands of factory workers lost their jobs, including my father. These jobs were lost because of globalization and changes in technology. The unions did not cause these job losses, and IT workers provide a good example as to why. In Connecticut, the big IT employers are financial services firms, insurance companies mostly. These firms aren’t unionized. In the late 1990s, financial services firms began offshoring work and IT jobs were cut. The same forces that dismantled manufacturing jobs were now attacking highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs.

• Will a Robot Take Your Job?

New Yorker (blog)-by Gary Marcus-Dec 29, 2012
Slowly, but surely, robots (and virtual ‘bots that exist only as software) are taking over our jobs; according to one back-of-the-envelope projection, in ninety years …

• Better Than Human

By Kevin Kelly, 12.24.12
Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?
It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

• Robot Workers: Coexistence Is Possible

Businessweek-Dec 13, 2012
The robots are coming. Resistance is futile. From car factories to microprocessor plants to fulfillment warehouses, a single robot can now handle tasks that once …

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

• County upgrades to Accela Automation for land management

Tucson Citizen-Dec 21, 2012
Pima County announced that Accela Automation is its new enterprise software for service delivery to eight Public Works departments.

BUSINESS OF AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS

• Brooks Automation is cutting 100 jobs as it reduces its workforce by …

Boston.com-Dec 19, 2012, By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff
Brooks Automation Inc., a Chelmsford-based provider of automation, vacuum, and instrumentation products for such markets as the semiconductor industry, said it will cut 100 jobs, or 6 percent, of its workforce as it looks to “achieve cost synergies” following an acquisition and to improve profitability in a tough economic environment. The company added that 29 jobs of the jobs being be cut are in Massachusetts. The cuts will leave Brooks with a Bay State headcount of 605 employees. Brooks recently acquired Crossing Automation Inc.

• German Automation Growth Spurt Expected to Slow

Automation World-Dec 4, 2012
The enormous growth spurt a lot of German automation companies—and many of their customers—have been experiencing since 2009 is expected to slow for …

RESEARCH AND NEW DEVELOPMENTS

• Skeleton Muscle Bot Brings I, Robot’s Future One Step Closer

December 11, 2012 – Eerily reminiscent of the design of Sonny and the other NS-5s in I, Robot, Kenshiro is the University of Tokyo’s latest attempt to create a humanoid robot that accurately mimics human movement.

• Swiss aim to birth advanced humanoid in 9 months

Roboy is a tendon-driven robot designed to emulate humans, right down to the gestation period.
News – Dec 19, 2012, 12:19 PM | By Tim Hornyak

To Pay The Piper: Poetry Chapbook by Lew Rosenbaum

This new poetry chapbook (28 pages) is now available, more or less hot off the press.  It can be purchased by sending a check or money order (made out to Lew Rosenbaum) for $6, which includes the cost of  first class postage, to

Lew Rosenbaum

1122 W Lunt 4A

Chicago, IL 60626.

cover illustration by Diana Berek

cartoon self-portrait computer generated by the author

Video: Cheri Honkala Appeared at Mess Hall, Presented by Occupy Rogers Park Saturday, Jan 19, 2013

A Video of the entire teachin can be found here.

Mess Hall had a capacity audience of over 60 people who stayed to converse and share experiences and ask questions.  It was an extraordinary event!  Thanks to all who came!!