Toys

"[to Lois Cummings] Y'know, I-I-I just—I'm just thinking about just how lucky we are to have a kid, y'know? I mean, I, it's, just take it for granted, but, it's a miracle when you think about it. Idn't it, y'know? This, this whole, this-this "birth" thing. Like, I mean, y'know, wha-what happens? I unload, uh-uh-uh—a whole batch of this—these, uh, these little reproductive apostrophes in-in-into your, uh, y'know, uh-uh-uh "miracle bucket," and then, nine months later, Milt comes out, y'know? I mean, it's-it's—it's-it's-uh, for me, it's got the same kind of, uh, uh, y'know, awe-inspiring mystique as-as-as, like, Shrinky Dinks."

"To test her idea, she [Michelle Khine] whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal."

"Amazon says in the patent: “As the use of UAVs continues to increase, so does the likelihood of hostility towards UAVs. Such hostility may come in the form of attacks brought for any number of purposes (e.g., steal the UAVs and their payloads, crash the UAVs, and otherwise cause disruption to the operation of the UAVs).” It continues: “Using these attacks, nefarious individuals and/or systems may be able to obtain control of the UAVs by hacking the communication signals being sent to the UAVs from a controller and/or being sent by the UAV to the controller.” Amazon says such attacks “could cause the UAVs to operate unsafely and could also result in considerable financial loss for their operators.”"

"The e-commerce titan recently received a patent for product-distribution warehouses that float in the sky, and are carried and held aloft by blimps. It's part of Amazon's grand plan to move from ground-based deliveries into the airspace above our heads, where drones would zip quietly overhead, carrying our paper towels, toasters and printer cartridges to us in record time, and generating substantial cost savings for the $887 billion company. The heavenly warehouses, or "aerial fulfillment centers" as Amazon describes them, would be serviced by a fleet of drones, which the company likes to call "unmanned aerial vehicles." "An AFC may be positioned at an altitude above a metropolitan area and be designed to maintain an inventory of items that may be purchased by a user and delivered to the user by a UAV that is deployed from the AFC," the patent document says."

"While we do not believe that UAV strikes cause disproportionate civilian casualties or turn killing into a "video-game," we are concerned that the availability of lethal UAV technologies has enabled US policies that likely would not have been adopted in the absence of UAVs. In particular, UAVs have enabled the United States to engage in the cross-border use of lethal force against targeted individuals in an unprecedented and expanding way, raising significant strategic, legal and ethical questions."

"To the best of our knowledge the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool."

"It is not clear where the White House will come out," Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign relations, tells me. "The nonproliferation folks, centered at [the State Department], do not support liberalized armed drone exports," he wrote over email. "On the other side are [Defense department] folks, and some State regional bureaus, who want to export this capacity to allies, like Turkey, and non-allies like Singapore, as part of 'building partnership capacity.'"

"The proliferation of military robotics ... is likely inevitable," says Michael Horowitz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies military technology. "Much better for close allies and partners to get systems from the US and learn to use them responsibly than to build them themselves or buy them from other countries."

"I think it is entirely sensible. Whether it is foreign citizens who are involved with Al Qaeda or American citizens, we are in a war. They have attacked us. We have a congressional authorization to use military force in response. And that’s what’s at stake here."

"I think it’s a good program and I don’t disagree with the basic policy that the Obama administration is pursuing now in that regards."

"Curbing the proliferation of Weapons of mass destruction and their delivery vehicles is a challenging task. Many potential proliferators are convinced they need to develop WMD and their associated delivery systems to protect their national security. It is estimated that some nations will begin exploiting the full range of UAVs, including delivering WMD in the next decade."

"Commercial drones can travel at up to 100 mph and deliver goods under 5 lbs (2.3 kg) - and according to ARK Investing Group, potentially each trip could occur at a low cost of $1 per shipment."

"“Drone strikes outside a declared war by a state on the territory of another state without the consent of the latter or of the UN Security Council constitute a violation of international law and of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of that country.”"

"In some respects it’s a perfect assassination weapon. . . . Now we have a problem. There are all these nations that want to buy these armed drones. I’m strongly opposed to that."

"I think this idea of being able to execute, in effect, an American citizen, no matter how awful, having some third party being – having a – having a say in it or perhaps some – informing the Congress or the intelligence committees or something like that, I just – I think some check on the ability of the president to do this has merit, as we look to the longer term future."

"It just makes me uncomfortable that the president, whoever it is, is the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all rolled into one. So I’m not suggesting something that would slow down response. But where there is time to submit it to a third party, a court, in confidence, and get a judgment that, yes, there’s sufficient evidence, that feels to me like that’s, its not full compliance with the Fifth Amendment … but some independent check on our executive is healthy for the system."

"To the United States, a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain. At the receiving end, it feels like war. Americans have got to understand that. If we were to use our technological capabilities carelessly—I don’t think we do, but there’s always the danger that you will—then we should not be upset when someone responds with their equivalent, which is a suicide bomb in Central Park, because that’s what they can respond with."

"Although US armed drones are made by private firms such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, sales would be made through government-to-government negotations. Mr Williams said strict US State Department rules on who could buy armed drones meant the new market would not be a free-for-all. New customers will have to satisfy the US they will comply with international humanitarian and human rights laws. Countries applying to buy drones would be subjected to a "strong presumption of denial", meaning that they would have to make a strong case for needing the weapons. Successful countries will need to prove that their applications constitute the "rare occasions" set out in a 1987 treaty signed by the G7 - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States - known as the Missile Technology Control Regime. This includes assurances they will only use the weapons for the stated purposes, will not modify them without America's consent, and will not transfer the weapons (or replicas of them) elsewhere."

"Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it has to be the Department of Defense."

"What I think is absolutely true is it’s not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we’re doing the right thing. … There has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. We respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States. The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States."

"That's something that you have to struggle with, if you don't, then it's very easy to slip into a situation in which you end up bending rules thinking that the ends always justify the means. That's not been our tradition. That's not who we are as a country."

"No second thoughts."

"When children from other countries are telling us that we've made them fear the sky, it might be time to ask some hard questions."

"Drone strikes are one of those things that it's really convenient not to think about that much. Like the daily life of a circus elephant or that Beck is a Scientologist."

"The president, a politician, Republican or Democrat, should never get to decide someone’s death by flipping through some flash cards and saying, ‘You want to kill him? Yeah, let’s go ahead and kill him’."

"Blood is "expensive, lifesaving but doesn't last very long," Zipline co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo said. "So traditional supply chains do a very poor job of distributing it. Using drones, we can deliver blood 10 times as quickly as cars, on demand.""

"The reason Zipline has raced ahead in Rwanda is because the government has been more flexible than many other regulatory regimes around the world. That's also why Google is piloting drones in Australia and Amazon is working in the U.K. But the United States is finally taking steps to allow drone business models to experiment and develop on a local level around the country."

"Reuter said Zipline is communicating with blood banks, health systems and clinics and learning how to most effectively communicate with clients. "It's difficult to do that at scale," he said. "The hard part of drone delivery is not making a drone that can carry something. It's building a service that can run every day, making thousands of deliveries in a reliable manner, and do so in an economically sustainable way," said Reuter, who has been to Zipline's first distribution center in Rwanda. "We believe Rwanda can serve as a model for the rest of the world in how to enable drone delivery.""

"Here you have something truly chilling. Here you have the United States government saying, we can kill you, American citizen. You have no constitutional right to a jury by your peers. You have no constitutional right even to probable cause or to due process. You have no right to a lawyer. You have no right to counsel. You have no right to anything. If we suspect you, just suspect you, without evidence, that you were thinking about committing an act against the United States of America, we can kill you."

"“Given that countries are getting access to larger drones that can operate with larger payloads, and some of those countries have nuclear weapons, how should we be reacting?” says Paul Scharre, project director for the 20YY Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It hasn’t gotten much attention in the U.S. defense community because it’s considered a crazy idea, but other countries may think about this quite differently.”"

"In a new report called “Limiting Armed Drone Proliferation,” published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko and Sarah Kreps argue that the time has arrived for the U.S. to set regulatory limits on the use of drones. Because drones do not have pilots, they write, the threshold for launching war is lower -- and the planes cannot avoid sudden danger as easily. Countries may also fire on manned fighter planes -- confusing them with drones."

"Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it. I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims.”"

"“We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes."

"In a statement to the Guardian, Daniel Schwarz, the senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said: “Deploying surveillance drones over New Yorkers gathering with their friends and families to celebrate J’ouvert is racialized discrimination and it doesn’t make us safer.” Schwarz also accused police of “playing fast and loose” with New Yorkers’ constitutional rights to due process and to freely hold peaceful gatherings. He added that the drone ploy was also antithetical to the 2021 Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, which requires New York police to publish impact and use policies on its surveillance technologies. “As the NYPD keeps deploying these dystopian technologies, we must push for stricter guardrails – especially given the department’s lengthy history of surveilling and policing Black and brown communities,” he continued."

"Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, called the decision a “terrible plan that should never have gotten off the ground”. “We see that there’s a real pattern with the NYPD and with Eric Adams (the New York City mayor) – whenever there’s a risk of bad headlines, they’ll turn to the next technology gimmick,” Cahn told the Guardian. “They did this when they rolled out drones in the middle of Times Square; they did it when the mayor was being attacked for failing to respond to the Canadian wildfire smoke; and he announced that they will be using drones as a public announcement system for emergencies,” Cahn said. “It’s just a clear pattern that they use technology as a PR stunt, even when it means breaking the law, as it does here.” Cahn went on to explain the difference between airplanes and helicopters compared to drones, which he said are “even more invasive because they can fly at such low altitudes”. “I’m also worried about not just video recordings but potentially audio recordings,” he said. “No one should have to worry that they’re going to be surveilled by the police on their own property or that they’ll have the NYPD showing up unannounced to their weekend barbecue.”"

"Hannah Zhao, a staff attorney at the nonprofit digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said drone surveillance should require warrants. “Our position is that aerial surveillance via drones should require a warrant because drones are fundamentally different from helicopters or planes,” Zhao said. “They are smaller, easier to maneuver, and cost a minute fraction of the price to purchase and operate. It’s also much harder to surreptitiously spy on people with manned aircraft because of their size and the amount of noise they make.”"

"The casual observer’s understanding of what drones can do is mostly informed by the way they’re used to make movies, television shows and commercials. Since 2014, when the use of drones in filmmaking became legal (it is still highly regulated by the FAA), aerial footage captured by drones has become so common that we barely notice it. In the early days of drone use, filmmakers quickly realized how useful these nimble devices were for close-up action shots. Drones proved especially handy for filming chase scenes, like the opening motorcycle sequence of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. In Martin Scorsese’s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street, drones were used to shoot a raucous party scene from above, allowing audiences to peer voyeuristically into characters’ lives. Cinematographers are finding increasingly creative ways to use drone technology: in the 2015 Jurassic World, a drone-mounted camera swoops low over a crowd of people who are being attacked by pterosaurs to mimic the movement of the flying reptiles. But if drones are becoming ubiquitous, they’re also still somewhat controversial, and some filmmakers are turning their cameras on the machines themselves. On an episode of the sci-fi show Black Mirror, for example, characters lose their privacy when a blackmailer films them with a drone. The audience sees the scene through both regular cameras and through the drone’s lens, underscoring the ways in which these devices make us vulnerable."

"Although drones can be extremely cost effective for certain applications—in place of, or in combination with, dollies and jibs, for example—when it comes to aerial views, they haven’t fully vanquished the use of helicopters and cranes. Their limited battery life still makes some uses impractical, and they can be flown legally only at relatively low altitudes. But when they can be used, the savings are significant."

"The aerial perspective—of sheep or anything—is liberating precisely because it’s destabilizing, Biro says. “Drone vision allows us to see that there are multiple ways of seeing ourselves and seeing the rest of the world. We step out of ourselves to some extent. That’s its positive potential.”"

"In a 2012 report that was based on nine months of data analysis and field interviews, a team of law students from New York University and Stanford concluded that the dominant narrative in the U.S. about the use of drones in Pakistan—“a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the United States safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts”—is false. The researchers found that C.I.A.-operated drones were nowhere near as discriminating toward noncombatants as the agency’s leaders have claimed. Various estimates have put the civilian death toll in the hundreds. An analysis of media reports by the New America Foundation concluded that drones probably killed some two hundred and fifty to three hundred civilians in the decade leading up to 2014. Researchers working under Chris Woods at the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism conducted field interviews to supplement a separate analysis of media reporting. They estimated that American drones killed between four hundred and nine hundred and fifty civilians."

"The total death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan is estimated at between two thousand and four thousand. Even if one accepts a civilian death toll of nine hundred and fifty-seven—the highest nongovernmental estimate—drones have probably spared more civilians than American jets have in past air wars. And if the numbers Feinstein cited are accurate, drones killed more than twenty fighters for every civilian—a huge leap in precision."

"In 2008, the last year of the Bush Administration, at least one child was reported killed in a third of all C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—a shocking percentage, if it is accurate. In Obama’s first year in office, the figure was twenty per cent—still very high. By 2012, it was five per cent."

"On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a new counterterrorism M.O.N., partly based on Rizzo’s input. It was “multiple pages” in length, according to Rizzo. He had worked at the C.I.A. since 1976 and he regarded this document as the “most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or M.O.N. I was ever involved in.” Among its provisions, “one short paragraph” authorized targeted killings of Al Qaeda terrorists and their allies. “The language was simple and stark.” That paragraph became the foundation for the C.I.A.’s drone operations. George Tenet, the agency’s director at the time, supplemented the M.O.N. with internal guidelines that set down in greater detail how an individual believed to be actively involved in terrorist plots could be nominated and approved for capture or killing. Among other things, the guidelines instructed drone supervisors to avoid civilian casualties “to the maximum extent possible,” according to a former senior intelligence official. It was a decidedly lawyerly and elastic standard."

"Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to operate drones out of a Pakistani base in Baluchistan. He told me that he often urged Bush Administration officials, “Give the drones to Pakistan.” That was not possible, he was told, “because of high-technology transfer restrictions.”"

"In July, 2008, President Bush approved a plan, proposed by Hayden, to increase drone strikes on Pakistani soil, mainly in North and South Waziristan. Taliban fighters were pouring into Afghanistan from FATA, without much interference from Pakistan, to attack American troops. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough,” Bush told Hayden, according to Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” (2010). No longer would the United States seek permission from Pakistan to strike or notify Pakistani generals in advance."

"After mid-2008, the drone program changed quickly into a more conventional, if unacknowledged, air war. In the three months between August and October, drones struck North and South Waziristan at least twenty times—more strikes than in the previous four years."

"In 2009, Panetta oversaw some fifty lethal drone attacks; more than half of them produced civilian deaths, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “American policy was to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible,” Panetta wrote in his recently published memoir. An operation that deliberately targeted women or children alongside terrorist suspects “was to be authorized only under extraordinary circumstances.” Panetta described cases in which he gave such permission, while seeking to “balance duty to country and respect for life.”"

"Being attacked by a drone is not the same as being bombed by a jet. With drones, there is typically a much longer prelude to violence. Above North Waziristan, drones circled for hours, or even days, before striking. People below looked up to watch the machines, hovering at about twenty thousand feet, capable of unleashing fire at any moment, like dragon’s breath. “Drones may kill relatively few, but they terrify many more,” Malik Jalal, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, told me. “They turned the people into psychiatric patients. The F-16s might be less accurate, but they come and go.”"

"North Waziristan residents and other Pakistanis I spoke with emphasized how difficult it would be for a drone operator to distinguish between circumstances where a Taliban or Al Qaeda commander had been welcomed into a hujra and where the commander had bullied or forced his way in. If the Taliban “comes to my hujra and asks for shelter, you have no choice,” Saleem Safi, a journalist who has travelled extensively in Waziristan, told me. “Now a potential drone target is living in a guest room or a guesthouse on your compound, one wall away from your own house and family.”"

"The C.I.A. has never explained the criteria it uses to count a drone victim as a civilian. Nor has it described what sort of interviews or field research, if any, the agency’s analysts undertake to investigate possible mistakes. According to a May, 2012, Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” In briefings to congressional intelligence committees, the C.I.A. has disputed that characterization, saying that any person deliberately targeted must be associated with a known fighting group or enemy facility, or else be observed preparing for violence."

"Historically, the greatest use of UAVs has been made in the areas of intelligence gathering, surveillance, and battle damage assessment (BDA), where they allow armed forces to avoid placing pilots at risk. They have also been used to gather nonmilitary information in environments that are hazardous to human beings. For example, B-17 bombers were adapted to fly by remote control during the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests. The Israelis have also used UAVs extensively for reconnaissance purposes. During the Gulf War, the coalition allies used them for intelligence and BDA purposes. In fact, the Pioneer UAV was praised as "the single most valuable intelligence collector" in the war against Iraq. They have proved to be extremely reliable and have had high mission completion rates. During the Gulf War, only one UAV was lost in more than 300 missions."

"…as US experiences hunting Scuds in the Gulf War showed, it is almost impossible to locate and destroy a small mobile system that is covertly deployed. In fact, the Gulf War intelligence community never could furnish reliable information on the number and location of Iraq's Scud launchers. This forced an intensive anti-Scud campaign that seriously reduced the number of Scud firings, but never totally ended them. UAVs should be even harder to find than mobile Scuds were, given their smaller size and reduced maintenance and support requirements."

"With ideal conditions (a clear, calm night) a single aircraft (or UAV) using an aerosol generator to dispense a 100 kg anthrax payload (99 percent of this weight being the suspension material that allows the anthrax to be dispensed in this manner) could adequately cover a 300 km2 area (about the size of Washington, D.C.) and inflict between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 deaths (assuming a population of 3,000 to 10,000 people per km2). According to a 1970 report by the World Health Organization, "Inhalation of one microscopic (anthrax) spore will result in death within 48 hours. Distributed appropriately, one gram would be enough to kill more than one-third of the population of the United States.""

"In this hypothetical example, assume that the nation or group has access to anthrax spores and also has the capability to produce the chemical agent Sarin. It determines that in order to achieve its objectives, it needs to deliver at least a 50 kg payload (including liquefied biological or chemical agent and the spray equipment) sprayed on a target at least 150 km away. This system would be adequate to disseminate the agent over a battlefield, a water supply, or a small city. An example of a complete UAV system that meets these requirements would be the Pioneer UAV. This system has a payload of 50 kg and a nominal range of 185 km, with a loiter time of nine hours. It has the necessary payload capability to carry the agent and the spraying system. It has the basic range (which could be more than doubled on a one-way mission because the return trip and extended loiter time over the target would not be required), and costs about $500,000 per vehicle (not including the payload)."

"As little as one or two kilograms of biological agent dispensed with a commercial crop sprayer can cause devastating results. It would take substantially more chemical agents to have the same effects. However, in quantities of 50 to 150 kilograms (well within the carrying capability of many low cost UAVs), chemical agents can be very deadly. The research also shows that both chemical and biological weapons are relatively easy to obtain and do not require great technical knowledge to produce, store, or use. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, present greater challenges for employment on UAVs. Acquiring a complete nuclear weapon or the material and technology to fabricate one is extremely difficult and expensive. Additionally, the size and weight requirements for even a small weapon (about 200 kilograms) is right on the edge of the payload capability of all but the most capable and expensive UAVs."

"… the dual-use nature of UAVs (intended to be reconnaissance/ surveillance vehicles but possessing the capability for strike missions) and chemical and biological production facilities (which are used for medical purposes as well as weapons) makes detecting their development as weapons extremely difficult."

"More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation. Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned in myriad ways, plummeting from the sky because of mechanical breakdowns, human error, bad weather and other reasons, according to more than 50,000 pages of accident investigation reports and other records obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act."

"“Flying is inherently a dangerous activity. You don’t have to look very far, unfortunately, to see examples of that,” said Dyke Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare for the Pentagon. “I can look you square in the eye and say, absolutely, the [Defense Department] has got an exceptional safety record on this and we’re getting better every day.”"

"Pent-up demand to buy and fly remotely controlled aircraft is enormous. Law enforcement agencies, which already own a small number of camera-equipped drones, are projected to purchase thousands more; police departments covet them as an inexpensive tool to provide bird’s-eye surveillance for up to 24 hours straight."

"The military owns about 10,000 drones, from one-pound Wasps and four-pound Ravens to one-ton Predators and 15-ton Global Hawks. By 2017, the armed forces plan to fly drones from at least 110 bases in 39 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico. The drone industry, which lobbied Congress to pass the new law, predicts $82 billion in economic benefits and 100,000 new jobs by 2025. Public opposition has centered on civil-liberties concerns, such as the morality and legality of using drones to spy on people in their back yards. There has been scant scrutiny of the safety record of remotely controlled aircraft. A report released June 5 by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there were “serious unanswered questions” about how to safely integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, calling it a “critical, crosscutting challenge.” Nobody has more experience with drones than the U.S. military, which has logged more than 4 million flight hours. But the Defense Department tightly guards the particulars of its drone operations, including how, when and where most accidents occur."

"Air Force leaders circulated briefing materials that quoted an unnamed general as saying, “What I worry about is the day I have a C-130 with a cargo-load of soldiers, and a [drone] comes right through the cockpit window.” The general’s worries were well founded. On Aug. 15, 2011, a C-130 Hercules weighing about 145,000 pounds was descending toward Forward Operating Base Sharana, in eastern Afghanistan. Suddenly, a quarter-mile above the ground, the huge Air Force plane collided with a 375-pound flying object. “Holy shit!” yelled the Hercules’s navigator, according to a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder. “We got hit by a UAV! Hit by a UAV!”"

"Inside ground-control stations, drone pilots sit with binders of checklists that guide them through every conceivable scenario. But costly errors are still easy to make. One recurring mistake: forgetting to turn on the Stability Augmentation System, which prevents the drone from going wobbly or into a spin. In at least five cases, pilots did not switch it on, or accidentally switched it off, then sat perplexed as the aircraft went into a nose dive."

"Unlike the Air Force, the Army does not make the argument that its drones are nearly as safe as regular planes. In June 2013, Army safety officials posted a bulletin noting that their drones had crashed at 10 times the rate of manned Army aircraft over the previous nine months. As bad as that number sounded, the officials said it actually understated the problem. Commanders were not reporting many drone mishaps, as required, to the Army Combat Readiness/Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala. About 55 percent of the Army’s MQ-5 Hunter drones, which can carry weapons, have been “lost for various reasons” in accidents during training and combat operations, according to Col. Tim Baxter, the Army’s project manager for unmanned aircraft systems."

"The accident investigation reports describe a profusion of emergencies in which drones swerved so far out of control that crews had to resort to extreme measures to prevent catastrophes. On six occasions between 2006 and 2012, records show, pilots intentionally flew straight into the side of a mountain after their aircraft’s engines began to fail. Under military guidelines, it was considered safer to ram a remote peak on purpose than to risk a drone falling on someone during a Hail Mary landing attempt at an airfield. “He smashed it to smithereens,” an Air Force mission supervisor reported approvingly after a pilot struggling with a broken propeller motor commanded his Predator to strike a mountain in eastern Afghanistan on Oct. 26, 2012. In several other cases, drones simply disappeared and were never found."

"The links can be easily interrupted by various forms of interference. Usually, the outages last only a few seconds and are harmless. Just in case, drones are programmed to fly in a circular pattern until the links are restored. In worst-case scenarios, they are supposed to return automatically to their launch base. Records show that does not always happen. In more than a quarter of the accidents examined by The Post, links were lost around the time of the crash. Several pilots told investigators that they were so accustomed to lost links that they tended not to get nervous unless the disruptions lasted for more than a few minutes. “I’d say after the three- or five-minute period, you sort of get the feeling that the plane just stopped talking to us and we may not recover this one,” a Predator pilot testified after an April 20, 2009, crash in Afghanistan."

"The use of unmanned aerial systems—commonly referred to as drones—over the past decade has revolutionized how the United States uses military force. As the technology has evolved from surveillance aircraft to an armed platform, drones have been used for a wide range of military missions: the United States has successfully and legitimately used armed drones to conduct hundreds of counterterrorism operations in battlefield zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It has also used armed drones in non-battlefield settings, specifically in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines."

"Persistent media attention tends not to differentiate between armed and commercial drones, but rather homogenizes all types, despite the fact that armed drones will be more destabilizing. Though the armed drones acquired by states in the near term likely will not have capabilities equal to those of the United States, their effects will still be destabilizing. States that acquire armed drones will likely use them as probes and for limited attacks in international waters and across borders, against domestic threats, and, potentially, for even more lethal missions, including delivering weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Although other vehicles, such as trucks and manned civilian aircraft, can also be used to deliver WMDs, the ability of drones to hover and wait for the opportune moment in which they can produce maximum effect confers uniquely lethal capabilities."

"Analyzing which countries are pursuing armed drones is difficult, as their development is shrouded in secrecy and misinformation. Some countries, including the United States, hide certain programs to protect sensitive information and capabilities, while others, such as Iran, boast of armed drones to garner national prestige, despite the fact that they have not been demonstrably tested or used. In addition, government announcements of deadlines for internal drone development often go unmet, and publicly proclaimed export orders are never fulfilled."

"Senior U.S. civilian and military officials, whose careers span the pre– and post–armed drone era, overwhelmingly agree that the threshold for the authorization of force by civilian officials has been significantly reduced. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates asserted in October 2013, for example, that armed drones allow decision-makers to see war as a “bloodless, painless, and odorless” affair, with technology detaching leaders from the “inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain” consequences of war. President Barack Obama admitted in May 2013 that the United States has come to see armed drones “as a cure-all for terrorism,” because they are low risk and instrumental in “shielding the government” from criticisms “that a troop deployment invites.” Such admissions from leaders of a democratic country with a system of checks and balances point to the temptations that leaders with fewer institutional checks will face."

"Domestically, governments may use armed drones to target their perceived internal enemies. Most emerging drone powers have experienced recent domestic unrest. Turkey, Russia, Pakistan, and China all have separatist or significant opposition movements (e.g., Kurds, Chechens, the Taliban, Tibetans, and Uighurs) that presented political and military challenges to their rule in recent history. These states already designate individuals from these groups as “terrorists,” and reserve the right to use force against them. States possessing the lower risk—compared with other weapons platforms—capability of armed drones could use them more frequently in the service of domestic pacification, especially against time-sensitive targets that reside in mountainous, jungle, or other inhospitable terrain. Compared with typical methods used by military and police forces to counter insurgencies, criminals, or terrorists—such as ground troops and manned aircraft— unmanned drones provide significantly greater real-time intelligence through their persistent loiter time and responsiveness to striking an identified target."

"Deterring such drone-based attacks will depend on the ability of the United States and other governments to accurately detect and attribute them. Technical experts and intelligence analysts disagree about the extent to which this will be possible, but the difficulties lie in the challenges of detecting drones (they emit small radar, thermal, and electron signatures, and can fly low), determining who controlled it (they can be programmed to fly to a preset GPS coordinate), or assigning ownership to a downed system (they can be composed of commercial, off-the-shelf components)."

"Drone strikes conducted by the United States require actionable intelligence (from human, signal, and imagery sources), sophisticated beyond line-of-sight communications, access to satellite bandwidth, and systems engineering—from internal fire control to ground control stations—that are presently beyond the reach of most states. Several countries with relatively advanced aerospace programs, including Russia, France, and Italy, have not been able to develop and deploy these capabilities."

"Drone strikes in foreign countries that allow for target intelligence collection necessitate a safe air environment and overflight rights, and require bilateral relationships to obtain host nation basing rights for noncontiguous countries. U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, for example, require airfields in Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, the Seychelles, and Ethiopia, secured with covert and overt aid and security commitments. (The United States does not conduct drone strikes from U.S. Navy ships, though it should be able to within five years.) Few other countries will have reliable access to foreign airbases in coming years from which they can conduct lethal operations, and no other country will develop a [[w:Blue-water navy|blue-water navy capable of supporting intercontinental drone strikes for decades to come. Therefore, it is likely that most drone operations conducted by other countries within the coming years will be across borders or internal."

"To the extent that U.S. policy sets precedents for subsequent drone use, the lack of clarity about U.S. targeted killing policies should be addressed. For example, the Obama administration will not identify which terrorist groups can be lawfully targeted—only that targeted individuals are members of al-Qaeda or “associated forces”—because doing so would enhance the credibility of named groups, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. Identifying these groups would increase transparency, reassuring other countries that the United States can justify who it targets. Additionally, this would give the United States leverage to call on other countries to explicitly define who they are targeting, rather than settle for vague descriptions, such as “associated forces.”"

"Some U.S. officials and analysts contend that the widespread proliferation of armed drones is inevitable, and that any efforts to influence their use will fail. This assertion disregards the diplomatic, domestic, political, and, for some, technological restraints that have limited the spread of other military capabilities, and the logistical, normative, and legal principles that affect whether and how they are used."

"In spring the little boys look up and stare To see me ride so proudly in the air. My strength all goes when once the bond is parted, And on the wind I drift off broken-hearted."

"Children return home in haste after school, Eager to fly kites when there is yet wind."

"I think it’s massively important for children to see diversity in the toy box, for disabled children to see themselves represented positively. It’s very affirming for them to see that they can be a fairy, they can be a wizard in a wheelchair, and all that kind of fun and possibility is open to them as well, and it’s also really important for children without disabilities, to see disability as a normal, fun thing, it’s not just something that exists in hospital or medical settings, it exists everywhere, and its time that thee toy manufacturers started to take note and include disabled children in their products."

"In this connection we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with artificial imitations of the human body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin's glans is imitated, by means of a "pneumatic tube" filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of "Parisian rubber articles.""

"Rosie Eggleston, from the National Deaf Children's Society said: "Deafness is often misunderstood and deaf children usually grow up knowing few people, with first-hand experience of what they're going through. "It's so important for them to see deafness represented in as many areas as possible, because it helps them understand that there are other people just like them.""

"We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on."

"The Toy Story movies are true to the toys they represent, as we learn from the movies the kind of lessons we learn in life, and work though emotionally and intellectually with action figures: learning our place in the scheme of the world through self-knowledge, the choice between protecting our hearts by isolating ourselves emotionally from others or risking heart-break, accepting abandonment, old age and death. My own realization of growing up came when I realized that my huge Lego diorama, much like the one the dad has in The Lego Movies was not something adults had, and that in growing up I would have to give it up. But in the modern world the toys we play with are not faceless dolls. The toys are G.I. Joe and Barbie, Pokemon, Batman and Superman, The X-Men and Spiderman and The Hulk, all owned by a handful of megacorporations. For many Americans childhood imitations are not of weddings and festivals, but of things seen on screens, TV shows and movies, things also owned by that same handful of mega-corporations. The blockbuster film industry, with its endless parade of nostalgic heroes from childhood and an attendant emotional maturity, is the playground for 35-year-old- ticket buyers who are told they never have to leave these things behind."

"Wordsworth's child plays with his toys in a world unconcerned with brand power, and he tells his own stories, using public domain situations. Star Wars was not designed to sell toys, but Lucas was smart enough to keep the merchandising rights, and, with help from Kenner, a toy empire was founded. The story came first, but the merchandising threatened to takeover. In the case of Transformers, the action figures were absolutely primary, the show was made to drive toy sales. But as the generation raised on Star Wars and Transformers became filmmakers in their own right, the primary-secondary relationship became blurry. In an interview with filmmaker Kevin Smith, Paul Dini, who created the cartoon Young Justice among other, talked about a problem he had with the executives at the Cartoon Network. They cancelled his show, Tower Prep even though his audience was on the rise. The reason: the audience numbers were on the rise because girls were watching the show and that's a problem because girls don't buy the toys, and the money comes from the toys. Because the relationship between action figures and movies and television are symbiotic it is hard to know if this is a case of the tail wagging the dog. When a 37-year-old director, whose childhood bedroom was littered with Transformers and Star Wars figures, steps up to direct the latest feature from Marvel, to what extend is he simply playing with action figures on a gigantic budget? To what extent is Chris Pratt a very expensive action figure, to be posed and moved around with the other toys?"

"Before Barbie, dolls were babies, to be fed and burped and bathed and wheeled around in prams and put down for naps."

"As Kozinski would write in his opinion in Mattel v. MGA, it’s possible to make dolls that don’t look like porn stars but “there’s not a big market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier”—a reference to Lisa Simpson’s big-nosed, wide-waisted, thick-ankled aunts."

"Empowerment feminism is a cynical sham. As Margaret Talbot once noted in these pages, “To change a Bratz doll’s shoes, you have to snap off its feet at the ankles.” That is pretty much what girlhood feels like. In a 2014 study, girls between four and seven were asked about possible careers for boys and girls after playing with either Fashion Barbie, Doctor Barbie, or, as a control, Mrs. Potato Head. The girls who had played with Mrs. Potato Head were significantly more likely to answer yes to the question “Could you do this job when you grow up?” when shown a picture of the workplaces of a construction worker, a firefighter, a pilot, a doctor, and a police officer. The study had a tiny sample size, and, like most slightly nutty research in the field of social psychology, has never been replicated, or scaled up, except that, since nearly all American girls own a Barbie, the population of American girls has been the subject of the scaled-up version of that experiment for nearly six decades."

"It’s no accident that #Metoo started in the entertainment and television-news businesses, where women are required to look as much like Barbie and Bratz dolls as possible, with the help of personal trainers, makeup artists, hair stylists, personal shoppers, and surgeons."

"Japan’s oldest “love doll” manufacturer wants to strip the sex toys of their seedy image and encourage people to see them as works of art instead. “Even now there is still a stigma,” said a spokesperson for Tokyo-based sex doll maker Orient Industry, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a three-week exhibition showing the evolution of its dolls that drew over 10,000 visitors. “But at our exhibition there were lots of men and women visitors — more women than men, in fact,” he said. “There were young and old, men and women, a really wide range of people. I think people came because they had heard the reputation of how beautiful our dolls are. We want to get rid of the stigma.”"

"Noted photographers such as Laurie Simmons and Kishin Shinoyama have made the company’s dolls the subject of books and exhibitions, with the latter showing his work at Orient Industry’s anniversary event that ran from May 20 to June 11 at Shibuya’s Atsukobarouh gallery. The spokesperson believes that validation from the art world is helping to shift attitudes toward sex dolls. “We get a lot of different customers,” he said. “Some are only interested in buying dolls for sex, some want to buy them so they can take photos of them, and some want to take them out and about with them. Some have blogs where they write about living with them."

"حَدَّثَنَا مُحَمَّدٌ، أَخْبَرَنَا أَبُو مُعَاوِيَةَ، حَدَّثَنَا هِشَامٌ، عَنْ أَبِيهِ، عَنْ عَائِشَةَ ـ رضى الله عنها ـ قَالَتْ كُنْتُ أَلْعَبُ بِالْبَنَاتِ عِنْدَ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم وَكَانَ لِي صَوَاحِبُ يَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي، فَكَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم إِذَا دَخَلَ يَتَقَمَّعْنَ مِنْهُ، فَيُسَرِّبُهُنَّ إِلَىَّ فَيَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي‏.‏"

"In Shinto, everything has a soul. Even if you don't want the dolls anymore, you can’t abandon them. There is a special ceremony that is performed for them at a shrine. It’s like a ceremony for a dead person. Since dolls have a human form, they must be treated as such."

"It is a common belief in Japan that dolls are mirrors. The dolls show their owner’s true self."

"Competition from video and mobile games has diminished the interest in action figures, allow a child to fantasise about taking on the role of a heroic character. Video and mobile games greatly enhance that ability. The age appeal of action figures has been declining for decades due to the rise of video games."

"In 2000, only two films in the top 10 US box office hits would have been likely to generate a licensed character toy, X-Men and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, perhaps Mission: Impossible II. But in 2017, nine out of the 10 top films had licensed characters associated with them, from Star Wars to Beauty and the Beast to Wonder Woman to Thor. So, consumers are spending about the same amount of money on toys in total, but now they have far more choices to spend it on. The battle is over the share of a parent’s pocketbook."

"From my experience, kids are most interested in movie merchandise from about three to eight years old,” says Lisa Wragg, who worked in children’s licensing for many years. “At about eight, it tends to wane as they get more into music, artists and social media."

"How exactly, in the last half decade, has the "action figure", in all of its myriad cross-marketed incarnations, captured the imaginations of children and adults? What "discrepancy" of scale, schema, sex, and spirit thus makes miniaturized men, women, and monsters of resin, plastic, lead, rubber, or wood so functionally prevalent in global commerce and individual fantasy? In Sherry Turkle's view, "evocative objects" such as action figures "bring philosophy down to Earth. When we focus on objects, physicians and philosophers, psychologists and designers, artists and engineers are able to find common ground in everyday experience" (Turkle 8). Applying Levi-Strauss' notion of the bricoleur, or a "practitioner of the science of the concrete" who "manipulates a closed set of materials to develop new thoughts" out of bricolage in tandem with Piaget's assessment of instructive play rooted in "close to the object thinking" meant to heighten awareness of the "number, space, time, causality, and life" of things, Turkle provides a profoundly simple perspective on how "object play-for adults as well as children-engaged the heart as well as the mind" (Turkle 308-309). How can we examine our unique attraction to miniature plastic effigies and their contexts?"

"To start, the most abject Happy Meal toy lost in the deepest layers of the toy bin still signifies the epitome of polysemic postmodern participatory commodity culture. At the same time, the expertly-graded, mint-in-blisterpack Star Wars rebel of Ideal Posin' Supergirl cocooned for eternity within its EcoStar PC50 Recycled PET acryllic clam shell against all possible risk, play, or abuse can command thousands of dollars on the collector/investor/speculator market. From garage sales and Goodwill fodder to certified collectibles and international Internet auction houses, the action figure circulates through complex aesthetic, psychological, and socio-economic conditions of unusual scope and power. Its defining characteristics seem obvious enough. An action figure is generally a manufactured personality or character built to a diminished scale. It is usually, though not necessarily humanoid, and often designed to encourage manipulation, posing, or play including movable body parts, interchanging costumes, accessories, weapons, prosthetics, and related apparatus. At times, these accoutrements can expand to include elaborate vehicles, carrying cases, and playsets so ingeniously and engineered that they are sometimes more engaging in their miniaturized discrepancy than the figured body or character itself. Certain bases, expanded worlds, and microcosmic mock-ups tend to develop their own specialized mythologies. Iconic examples include Shredder and Krang's Technodrome of mechanized evil from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and G.I. Joes remarkably Space Shuttle Defiant. From the figures themselves to the gear, couture, and conveyances that enable and transport them, the action figure always signifies a larger spectacle well beyond its tiny idealized body."

"The modern sex doll may has a direct antecedent in the cotton sex doll created and used by sailors on long voyages, referred to as dames de voyage (Bloch, 1908; Ferguson, 2010; Wolf, 2010). These dolls were created by French and Spanish sailors during the height of their naval empires in the seventeenth century (Ferguson, 2010). The navies of Imperial Germany and Japan reportedly sanctioned the widespread use of dames de voyage, as preferable to homosexuality. Both navies reportedly manufactured their own versions of the dames de voyage (Wolf, 2010)."

"A popular urban legend claims the German Navy became the first creator of the modern sex-doll, Model Borghild (Ferguson, 2010; Lenz, n.d.; Pulham, 2008; Wolf, 2010). According to rumor and urban myth, the doll was part of the Nazi’s “field-hygienic project,” initiated to counterbalance the sexual drive of storm troopers (Lenz, n.d.). However, the existence of the author, “Lenz”, and the reports on the so-called Borghild doll are unverifiable, and are possibly hoaxes (Ferguson, 2010; Schewe & Moreno, 2011). The Japanese had a version of a dames de voyage, called a do-ningyo. A description is cited from a Japanese work titled “The Art of Quickly Seducing a Novice” in Tabori’s book, The Humor and Technology of Sex (1969): A man who is forced to sleep alone can obtain pleasure with a do-ningyo. This is the body of a female doll, the image of a girl of thirteen or fourteen with a velvet vulva. But these dolls are only for people of high rank. (p. 337) Dolls and statues created and used for sexual purposes are cross-cultural phenomena in various forms for centuries. The absence of historical information about production, distribution, and sales, or customer satisfaction data on sex dolls leaves the history of sex dolls open to considerable speculation. Until the emergence of the modern sex dolls, records of sales are found only in rumored accounts of sex doll use, and antique advertisements, such as the one translated by Henry Carey from a Paris circular in 1902. It advertises the sale of a complete, custom sex doll made to fit customer specifications: “All moves, arms, legs, buttocks, head, eyes; a perfect likeness of the person whose photograph is sent...the complete apparatus, guaranteed against breakage, man or woman, 3000 francs” (Cary, 1922, p. 50)."

"According to Orient Industry, the company sells approximately 50-80 dolls per month and estimates there are over 20,000 doll-owners in Japan alone (Galbraith, 2008; Maeda, 2007). A spokesman for Orient Industry reports that nearly all of the people who buy these dolls are single men and about 60 percent of them are over the age of 40 (Maeda, 2007). "Nowadays, women are sometimes more dominant than men in the real world, and they don't always pay attention to men," said Hideo Tsuchiya, the company's president. "More and more men are finding themselves miserable so we're making these dolls partly in support of men" (Maeda, 2007). Since the 1950’s the Japanese government began using sex dolls to enhance the lives of its workers in remote outposts such as the South Pole (Galbraith, 2008)."

"The Sex doll industry has been transformed by advances in computer generated images (CGI) and silicone technology. Hollywood special effects technicians began using advances in these technologies to create realistic corpses for films. (Ferguson, 2010). These mannequins were the beginnings of the realistic, functional sex doll."

"Political fascism in Europe, beginning in the 1930’s, affected German and Austrian sex researchers, forcing many to shut down research and development institutes and flee their countries. The Berlin Institute for Sexual Science was destroyed by fascist gangs in 1933 (Meyenburg & Sigusch, 1977). The psychological community has contributed little to literature on the sex-doll phenomenon. The sex research at the turn of the 20th century described the use of sex dolls and statues as a pathology, without supporting empirical evidence (Schewe & Moreno, 2011). Iwan Bloch and Havelock Ellis likened statue love to necrophilia: “Closely allied to these necrophilist tendencies is the remarkable ‘Venus statuaria’...apart from certain aesthetic motives...we have to do, for the most part, with the same motives that give rise to necrophilia—sadistic, masochistic, and fetishistic” (Bloch, 1908. p. 467)"

"In an interview by Scott for Metro Online, forensic psychologist and Leicester University lecturer Vincent Egan commented on doll-owners: “They need to think more about their relationships with the people they say they find sexually exciting,” he says. “Perhaps they can't fantasize easily themselves and the dolls help.” When contacted via email by this author to clarify his statements Dr. Egan said: Any prosthesis is an adaptation to a problem (or perceived problem). Some people may use sex dolls due to disturbed attachments; others may simply not have attachments to start... For men, who may program their sexuality to rely on appearance via pornography, the appearance of the doll will become the key to the eroticism, rather than the (sometimes) emotional, playful, dynamic and interactive physicality of sex (Dr. Vincent Egan, personal communication, July, 2011)."

"My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices."

"I enjoy getting dressed as a Barbie doll. ~ Vanna White"

"The original of the yellow rose is clad (you've guessed it) in canary yellow. The lemon-meringue confection has been poured into yellow slacks and yellow shirt, an immaculate yellow-blonde barbie-doll with 'EFG- Follies-Girl' written all over her."

"I love having a kid [...] They don’t let you think about yourself. [The one drawback of being a mum in America is that] Mabel wants Barbie, one of those bloody awful dolls. No vaginas, no nipples and they're bulimic. This is what femininity is? [...] Ever tried to assemble a Barbie barbecue stand? [...] Fortunately, Mabel already knows that Ken's just Mr. Barbie. She already cut his hair punk style. She knows that ... Ken's an idiot."

"You are so plastic you could be a Barbie Doll. You walk you talk just like them all."

"I hate men. They're stupid, ignorant animals with stupid ignorant hobbies. And they hated me. But I didn't need them. I had Barbie."

"But ultimately Barbie is like the Disney princess, an unshakeably enduring childhood fantasy that is impervious to feminism and reality, the ultra-processed food of children's toys that creates an insatiable appetite for more. Arguments about whether she teaches girls how women should look, or whether girls are instinctively drawn to blonde and pretty representations of femininity, are chicken-and-egg arguments. Or rather, they’re irrelevant, because both statements are true."

"Of draughtmanship – the draughmanship of movement, the draughmanship of the colourists – there is no question; the limbs of all his little figures behave for all the world like bundles of rags, or like arms or legs scattered in a railway accident. I would rather have a kaleidoscope... It is true that M. Diaz is a colourist; but enlarge his frame by a foot, and his strength will fail him, because he does not recognize the necessity for general color. That is why his pictures leave no memory behind them."

"Picture yourself in boat on a river, With tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, A girl with kaleidoscope eyes."

"you show me The world as it could be Through your kaleidoscope It's beautiful"

"Human affairs are wonderfully like a kaleidoscope, with its combinations of colours constantly changing."

"I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colours on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of colour are pounding to get in. After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but it was well worth getting through, for I found that when it stopped I was high above earth in an universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being dragged or tired had dropped away..."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds."

"Our goal is to familiarize children with the hospital environment so that they can experience the doctor-patient relationship without anxiety and distress. As a result we also hope our students improve their communication skills and learn how to interact with children."

"The object was to help these young students to not be fearful of medical procedures if they have to visit the hospital. And I hope we were successful."

"the kids come up with ideas on how not to be scared"

"In a way the establishment in 1760 of what, as , was to become the world's most famous toyshop, symbolised the new world that opened up for British toy makers from the middle of the eighteenth century. It was only one of a new toy outlets established in London in the years after 1750. By 1822 the capital possessed no fewer than seventy-one retail toy shops and thirteen wholesalers. ... Such was the proliferation by 1800 that some degree of specialisation emerged, with at least two concentrating solely on ."

"Children of my day, even in s, had very little in the way of toys. Toy shops were almost unknown; modern mechanical playthings, which furnish their own activity, had hardly come into existence. One might, of course, buy oneself a hobby-horse, but generally speaking an individually selected knotty stick from the woods, upon which imagination might work freely, was dearer to the heart. We were not observers, as children today seem to be from birth, of their own accord; and not utilizers, as they are brought up to be; we were creators. Our knotty stick, for all working purposes, in appearance and as far as actual horsepower went, came nearer to and eight-hoofed , or to himself, than any magnificently decorated horse from a smart store."

"I don't remember ever going to a toy store as a child. Although specialty toy stores existed in major cities like New York and Chicago as early as the 1860s, in the towns and suburbs where I lived no store had the primary purpose of selling toys to kids. ... I remember s that sold electric train sets and model-building kits, s where you could buy bikes and baseballs, and s and s that had toy departments, but these stores sold merchandise primarily to adults, not to children. Something radical happened in the intervening thirty-pls years in the marketing and selling of toys. Giant toy stores now dot the landscape, offering huge selections and low prices on toys made all over the world."