NeuroWeapons

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/air-force-looks-to-artificially-overwhelm-enemy-cognitive-capabilities/

Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds

How our military innovation is like a bedside alarm clock

Dear Hank,

I’m sorry I haven’t written much but I’ve been busy. Your last message to me about the airforce using neurowepons to, as they say, “overwhelm enemy minds” has given me pause for concern about your welfare.

I think you need to re-evaluate your position. You seem to be fearful about what will happen if we allow some kind of death ray to be shot at our opponents or perhaps use some mind altering techniques to keep our military personnel, as their report suggests, focused on the task at hand.

Let me break this down for you in simple easy to understand terms - many of our military personnel have been fucked up for a long time, those in charge are just now getting behind the effort to make it mandatory.

This off course only deals with one side of the equation – our soldiers. What about their soldiers? Wouldn’t it be great if they were as screwed up as ours, or even more so? And maybe there’s a way that we can make ours better and theirs worse, wouldn’t that be useful?

Okay, let’s take a longer view of this. Of course there are going to be those non-believers who will point most recently to “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and all that, but how would we have know how useful it would be without trying it? Then there’s the LSD experiments – that didn’t do what we thought it would but it did give us the hippies and free-love, which led to acid rock, which led to heavy metal, which we now play before battle and football games to get pumped up. So, it wasn’t all bad. And lets not forget the various sexually transmitted disease experiments like to our own black population and to the poor people of Guatemala.

All those experiments are on the biological, psychological side of things there’s also the mechanical side to consider and that comes in two flavors. I’ll call them Terminator and Star Wars. Remember that idea of Reagan’s to create a shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Hasn’t worked out yet, but we bought an old oil platform from the Russians loaded it up with missiles and technology and dragged it out somewhere in the Pacific Ocean up near Alaska so that when Sarah saw those Russkie missiles flying over she could push the button and send up other missiles to shoot them down. Didn’t work, hadn’t been tested, not part of any branch of the armed forces but part of the military budget, deployed anyway by W – but he kept it kinda quiet, didn’t want anyone to know what we were up to. I’m sure the Russian satellites wouldn’t pick up their old oil platform floating in the ocean.

Okay so here’s where the bedroom alarm clock comes in and where we, as the people in this country watching have to adjust our thinking because we got it, not all wrong, but not all correct either. Remember years and years ago you used to have an alarm clock on your night stand and every night you had to wind it up and set it? No? Young puppy. Well, it’s true. There use to be clocks that you wound up at night. There were no electric wires to them. Well, then we got electric clocks so we didn’t have to wind them. Then we got a radio and we kept that by the bed. Then the clock and radio melted into one unit. Then the whole progression took off and got crazy. We got radio alarm clocks built into coffee pots and cd players. We added remote controls and had them talk to us. All kinds of mashing together of things that used to be stand alone items.

Now here’s another part to the puzzle. Humans will not be the most intelligent beings on the planet by the end of this century. You might argue with this but so says the guy who developed speech to text – Ray Kurtzweiller. He ought to know a thing or two about mechanical and biological interfaces, he developed the synthesizer. What Ray is saying is that we will add little things to our bodies to make them better, an artificial arm, a new hip, etc. So that we will become big better stronger faster that what we currently are. No one seems to have a problem with that, until he points out that we our doing things to our brains to make them work better. Things like putting shunts in the brain to stop seizures. Again, no one has a problem with that. How about putting an interface to a unit that can hold lots of information? Certainly someone is working on that. Then we’ll be able to learn the vocabulary of a language in the time it takes to make the data transfer.

Let’s not forget that we are now developing ways to grow human organs. Remember the human ear on the back of a mouse? How long will it be before we clone or grow a human being? Let’s put aside the messy question of whether they are human and have rights and all that “soft” stuff. Let’s think about modifying and engineering these things to what we need them to do, like housework and weed pulling. Let’s keep their brains small so they don’t wonder why they are doing this shit.

So what’s the military doing? Well, as you probably know either NASA or the military has led the way in innovation for decades. NASA gave us Tang and Velcro; the military funded the development of radar and the internet. We also have spy satellites and drones so we can find, target, and destroy things like wedding parties and family reunions in remote areas.

So now we’ve got something that I think will be the blending together of much of what we as a nation have learned over the years, much like the alarm clock/radio/cd player/coffee pot we will develop whole new ways to wage war, kill people and destroy things. Heck, we’ll be able to destroy things we haven’t even thought of like the cloned human/alarm clock/AM-FM/cd/dvd-player/coffee-pot. Imagine our soldiers grown in our own farms raised on cat food and fish waste genetically engineered to kill the bad guys locked in battle with a bunch of rag heads from wherever with drones raining death from above. We can program these fellows to follow simple rules. Maybe, we can get Bill O’Reilly to give us the “pin head” evaluation in some easy to follow heuristics that can be programmed into our biological bots and they can destroy anyone or anything that meets the pinhead criteria.

Okay, so the goats, the VD, the LSD, and the rocket shield didn’t work out. This is progress and I’m for it.

Onward. Upward.