Talk about psychic warfare...

This has been around for a bit, but I thought it was interesting when thinking about the psyop stuff brought up in Jon Ronson's documentary.
While encouraging prisoners in this sort of display is interesting and relatively harmless, I wonder what the folks in charge of Gitmo thought when they watched this for the first time.
I really like Chris Nakashima-Brown's post about this same clip. This seems to be something that was ripped right out of one of his stories.
I've always thought that this kind of stuff would be the next tool in the "War on Some Terror".
Create a better memetic WMD.
Who has time to make an IED when you have to win that Macarena contest?
Get the enemy to plug into the pop cultural group mind.
Move your ass and your mind will follow...
Or is it the other way around?

I knew you were going to say that...

Getting warmer on the psychic warfare search...
I definitely see... wires?? And the name Alex or Alexander keeps coming up.
Does that mean anything to you?
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/dinner-with.html
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/new-correlation.html
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/psychokinesis-a.html
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/cyberwar_panic_.html

Photo courtesy of sharprichard under a creative commons license.

Getting face'd

I'm making another venture into the social network world with a facebook page.
I have a bunch of mixed feelings about this.
It's great connecting with all of these people that I've met in the past few years.
But I can't help wishing for the days when I was just a ghost in the machine.
Part of me wants to just remain a "Whatever happend to..."
Design is fairly clean and the apps aren't too obnoxious.
We'll see.

Better this than myspace.
Remember web design in 1994?
It's like taking this horrific journey back in time and then getting stranded there.
Then you become your own grandpa.

Freestylin' with Punkin...

Just finshed watching David Choe train hop, hitch, float, and gently con his way across the United States in this amazing and disturbingly sweet web documentary.
You see this outlaw artist in the middle of a very Gummo landscape at times.
Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended.
But, for every venture into near Springeresque territory, their are these little poignant moments of dark beauty.
He seems to sum it up all so well at the end of his journey when he says "The good, the bad, and the ugly... It's all America."

80 thousand volts of rock to the brain!!!

Electric Dragon 80000V
Wow...
How do I describe this?
Sex Pistols meets Power Rangers?
Amazing visuals with a visceral hypernoise rock punch.
Definitely need to hunt down some more Sogo Ishii flicks.

Spoonbenders unite!!!

So not to lose this psychic warfare momentum, but I'm having some trouble tracking down any great sources for evidence that other governments engaged in this sort of research.
Apart from just pop culture hearsay about Russian psychic weapons, Nazi occult rituals, etc., the evidence seems to be a bit more sparse.
If anyone comes across any good books and/or movies dealing with these subjects, let me know.

Image courtesy of iguana_nirvana14 under a creative commons license.

Be all that you can be!

Crazy Rulers of the World (1/3) - The Men Who Stare at Goats
Jon Ronson's documentary Channel 4 documentary on high weirdness in the U.S. military.




How does this blow my mind? Let me count the ways...
1, 3, 4??
Let's say at least 7. Nice round number.

While I've read and heard about the government's dabbling in the paranormal, this weird little "what if" branch of history is completely new to me.
I'm still trying to wrap my grey matter around this.

I haven't done any more research beyond stumbling upon this vid on a site devoted to collecting interesting videos and documentaries online (Good call T!), so the jury is still out in my mind.

I'll probably do a number of posts on this theme, but here are just a few points that I'd like to explore:

-Given how much of world politics is tied with religous belief, is it that unbelievable that some leaders would carry their own wacked out ideas about the nature of reality into their day jobs?
-How common is this in other parts of the world? It seems Russia dabbled in similar operations during the cold war. Who else had their own Miss Cleo on the payroll?
-Probably the most sobering intellectual snack that I'm still chewing on is how much Vietnam really screwed us up. I don't mean just the physical number of dead, but the loss of that war is like this super sharp splinter that has been driven into the American psyche. 30 years later, and we're still digging at that sucker. What will my kids think of this new improved "war on some terror" 30 years from now?

Where did I put those tweezers?