Showing posts with label long tail of brand communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label long tail of brand communication. Show all posts

Monday 10 June 2013

Drone operator who killed 1626 Doesn't Want To Do It Any More


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A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen -- including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.

"The guy that was running forward, he's missing his right leg," he recalled. "And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot." As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

"I can see every little pixel," said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, "if I just close my eyes."

Bryant, now 27, served as a drone operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan and taking part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals. .In an interview with NBC News, he provided a rare first-person glimpse into what it's like to control the controversial machines that have become central to the U.S. effort to kill terrorists.

He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. "You don't feel the aircraft turn," he said. "You don't feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that's definitely not the same thing."

At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.

"People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks," Bryant said. "Well, artillery doesn't see this. Artillery doesn't see the results of their actions. It's really more intimate for us, because we see everything."

A self-described "naïve" kid from a small Montana town, Bryant joined the Air Force in 2005 at age 19. After he scored well on tests, he said a recruiter told him that as a drone operator he would be like the smart guys in the control room in a James Bond movie, the ones who feed the agent the information he needs to complete his mission.

He trained for three and a half months before participating in his first drone mission. Bryant operated the drone's cameras from his perch at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada as the drone rose into the air just north of Baghdad.Bryant and the rest of his team were supposed to use their drone to provide support and protection to patrolling U.S. troops. But he recalls watching helplessly as insurgents buried an IED in a road and a U.S. Humvee drove over it.
"We had no way to warn the troops," he said. He later learned that three soldiers died.

Saturday 8 June 2013

I Heart Monsanto




I don't agree with Dusty but he makes good arguments against some anti Monsanto myths and we should be better at arguing against the corporatization of monocrop foods. Prepare to be annoyed but do something about it. Learn more.

Tuesday 17 July 2007

Insider News

Picture by holyfucking shit

I've long been a fan of Mohammed Iqbal of O&M Bangalore. Not just because he's bright and writes really interesting papers such as the origin (and resiliance) of aphorisms or the long tail of brand communication, but because there's nothing more exciting than when an agency hires some top thinking talent outside of Europe or the States for rapidly growing markets.

Well, more than this, Iq has just posted a vertical Google search engine for all the blogs on the plannersphere which means that I can now find those posts that I failed to bookmark. I've already checked it out and it worked a treat for some posts I was hunting down about Nicolas Taleb's Black Swan. Well done and thank you Iq for doing something really useful. Go check it out, add your blog if you're not listed and make time to read his blog archives too!