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Comments on: US says the next war will be all in our minds

I knew that. 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:19 GMT

Black Helicopters

........or did I dream it?

Jedi mind tricks 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:22 GMT

Black Helicopters

~~~ These are not the terrorists you're looking for.

Typical US 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:25 GMT

Dead Vulture

Sorry but the US gov/military has failed to predict it so far what right to they have to go predicting the future war method.

Typical...

Presumably 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:29 GMT

the US will use Palestine as its testing ground as usual? They'll know they're on to something when they can convince the gentiles that their land WASN'T stolen and that Israel isn't racist.

How effective? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:39 GMT

Will this be against that most wily of the USA's enemies; the difficult-to-spot peasant with the robust, cheap, produced in its millions assault rifle? Being as insurgents with Kalashnikovs and pointy sticks have trounced them once in Asia, and will again in the Middle East, is this anything more than military-industrial-complex porkbarrelling at its most esoteric?

Harsh Realm 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:44 GMT

Black Helicopters

Sounds like Chris Carter's Harsh Realm to me

Is anyone called Santiago involved with the project?

Be afraid, be very afraid.

The "War on Terror" 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 13:49 GMT

Boffin

is all just in our minds anyway.

Put there by THEM.

In order to control US.

No surprise 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:07 GMT

The US looks on thought as a weapon. So much for the right to bear arms.

Microsoft have been doing this for years... 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:13 GMT

Gates Horns

... how else could they get 95% of computer users worldwide to accept the shoddy bloatware they call an operating system?

McDonalds-eating Paris-tards as a prelude to a new era of Pax Americana. 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:16 GMT

Thumb Up

I for one intend to BE one of your new psycho-pharmacological overlords . . . !

Just think - a cheap, harmless pill/gas/food additive that:

1) Convinces religious fanatics of all flavors that peace and love-thy-neighbor is actually much better than killing them in the name of (fill in the deity of choice).

2) Convinces scammers of all kinds that honesty really is the best policy (all 419ers and their buddies would instantly be out of business).

3) Convinces democrats that Obama is NOT the Messiah, and will NOT be able to cure all the ills of the universe, real or imagined, .0000001 microseconds after he is annointed, er, elected, uh appointed.

4) Convinces OPEC that it is their duty to the human race to give away the oil to anyone who needs it, need being defined by desire.

5) Beautiful women . . . free love . . . the mind boggles . . .

6) That everyone should patronize MY business and give me ALL their money because I am such a nice guy . . . Muhahahahah!!

I could get really used to this stuff - I just need to make sure to lay in a good supply of the antidote in advance. Who's with me?

I had a war all in my mind. 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:19 GMT

Coat

I won.

Dirty nukes 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:20 GMT

Dead Vulture

blown up a few miles high, EMP takes out all US gadgets including mil-apendages. All their soldiers are now just flaying around cos they can't walk unaided anymore.

Vlad has another easy invasion. And he has alot of dirty nukes.

The corps 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:40 GMT

Boffin

is mother, the corps is father.

Lazy journalism 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:41 GMT

Thumb Down

"And once you understand brain states, you’ll of course want to be able to alter them – theirs and yours of course."

Ug. Just ug. I'd be embarrassed to write that in a tweet. Not that I tweet.

I sense a great disturbance in the force... 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 14:50 GMT

Flame

...the last great bastion of human dignity, privacy, is about to take a final step over the precipice. "I think, therefore, you know."

US says the next war will be all in our minds 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 15:12 GMT

Well, I should be alright then (according to my ex-wife that is).

Great idea 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 15:13 GMT

Flame

This is definitely needed. How can you possibly defend freedom if you can't control people's thoughts?

and the British? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 15:48 GMT

Linux

Due to budgetary constraints, the British military are unable to keep up with the U.S R&D - so the MoD are planning to get Korea to clone Paul McKenna and send him in to battle. It's predicted that smoking rates amongst Iraqi insurgents will drop by 75%.

Still staring at goats then ? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 16:00 GMT

Black Helicopters

"The report says this will be achieved with new drugs."

The 1960s are on the phone, they want their science back.

Don't the US military ever learn from _anything_ ? MKULTRA, Vietnam, ring any bells ? No ?

Anybody remember Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 16:47 GMT

Everybody walking around nuts/ deluded/ paranoid. What's this world coming to?

Cold War continues 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 16:51 GMT

And so does the requirement to put lots of $$$ into circulation.

Meanwhile smarter countries might take a leaf out of the Russian's book - a chess set, and someone to play with.

As for anthropology, that has been fecked in the USA ever since Margaret Mead.

dreams are for sissies 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 18:01 GMT

i gnt so many projected visions to my brain i know i wouldnt pay attention to a state of mind created by a drug, they should use theyre brain to create a injected vaccine for and rid the cell creatimg pills that just makes death take longer

@Seán 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 18:08 GMT

Unhappy

If thought was a weapon, the right to bear arms wouldn't matter much anyway.

Most of our fellow Americans are unarmed.

"O brave new world that has such people in it." 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 18:12 GMT

Flame

One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

Deja vu 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 18:31 GMT

Black Helicopters

Reading this has given me an idea - by creating special 'adverts' you could undermine the rational thinking of normal people by keying into subconcious fears and so bypass reasoning skills.

These 'adverts' could be deployed by electoral candidates in the run up to 'democratic' elections so as to bypass any intellectual or carefully considered preference any member of the electorate may have to voting for the other guy. Any political weakness, ideological unpleasentness or policy vacuum that may make you unelectable can be hidden beneath a false facade of attractiveness that subverts the electorate without them understanding why their voting intentions have changed.

Thus, a well planned campaign of adverts (esp. when supported by the popular press) can unjustly win you an election without having to go to all the effort of threatening people with guns.

It's a good job they didn't know about this stuff in the US for the last couple of elections - who knows who they would have ended up with as President!

Oh... hang on...

What? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 18:50 GMT

Like the war on terrorism?

Been there , done that .

Could make a brain 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 19:19 GMT

search for bigfoot all your life and find him dead under a tree

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813175509.htm

Big Brother meets Total Recall... 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 19:38 GMT

Dead Vulture

nuff said.

Obvious counter measure 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 19:45 GMT

Tinfoil hats.

Doubleplusungood: Thoughtcrime, here we come 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 20:58 GMT

Black Helicopters

Orbital mind control lasers, anyone?

What do you do with voters who cannot pay their mortgages? 

Posted Thursday 14th August 2008 22:24 GMT

Give them a happy pill.

Give them a pill that makes them feel warm when sleeping on the street.

Give them a pill to convince them the government is doing a good job.

Give them a pill to make them vote for more government spending new pills.

how amusing 

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 00:03 GMT

People who are the first to rip the US for announcing such projects are the first to ignore the fact that their own countries are either in kahootz with the US or are secretly working on their own little black projects. But the rub is their governments aren't telling them about it.

One of the classics has to be the Echelon project. The UK, Australia, and possibly New Zealand all have data "welcoming/reception" centers. My guess is that every country that maintains a permanent position on the UN security council is now or has conducted testing in these areas. But only the US is fessing up.

"Advances here are likely to come in the form of ... robotic assistants." 

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 06:52 GMT

"Advances here are likely to come in the form of ... robotic assistants."

Finally, my robot butler :)

Has any commenter actually studied the advances in neuroimaging? 

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 07:17 GMT

Boffin

I actually have studied some recent results, and one of the things we know is how little we actually know (corny but true). Yes, methods such as diffusion tensor imaging allow better insight into the wiring of the brain, and functional MRI does let us know where activity takes place if you perform certain yasks (as do several other techniques, such as EEG and MEG). The resolutions of these techniques are really still very coarse (in the order of milimeters for fMRI, and worse for many others), and unlikely to reach into the cellular level resolution to capture real, lowest level brain states.

There are these pesky limitations physics imposes on things, but the "planners" do not want to let these get in the way of a juicy report.

Worse, thought the bulk anatomy and major wiring schemes are similar, even the details we see show large inter-individual differences, and changes in time within an individual. At finer levels of detail this gets worse. It is very likely that similar brain states in different individuals encode different infomation at a detailed level. Add to that that the brain is a chaotic system, and you will understand that it is impossible to derive information such as e.g. passwords from directly studying brain states. You might well be able to tell someone is lying from brain states, but if the subject stays silent, waterboarding is the better way to extract the information than any brain scanner.

But of course we can alter brain states at a distance already. Two common methods are:

(i) talking to people

(ii) shooting them in the head

I always prefer the former

Never mind the neuro-crap... 

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 12:33 GMT

Alert

...wheres the frickin' lasers?

Scheduled Events 

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 15:40 GMT

Stanislaw Lem will be conducting a seminar on this very topic during the next session of the Futurological Congress.

We'll run out of oil 

Posted Saturday 16th August 2008 15:06 GMT

...long before any of this stuff becomes viable - although Watashi makes an important point: "Mind Control" for military purposes has been around at least since World War I, Goebbels and Bernays, not to mention the Roman Catholic church in the middle ages and the sophists of ancient Greece. Been there, done that.

a consistent approach by the US government - how quaint 

Posted Monday 18th August 2008 09:28 GMT

IT Angle

after all, the last couple of "battles" fought by the US military were also purely "in the mind".

hmmmmm new?! 

Posted Wednesday 20th August 2008 12:10 GMT

Thumb Down

Yup - I watched "Ghost in the Shell" Too - new research?

Re Typical US 

Posted Wednesday 20th August 2008 23:56 GMT

Joke

Oh c'mon. The U.S. is the only one qualified to predict where the next battlefield will be.

We'll be the ones starting it. We might even pretend the rest of the world exists when we do. You'll be able to tell, we'll have an excuse first.

Whatever it takes to teach us americans geography.

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