25-08-2009, 06:27 AM
Weaponized drugs: armed and delirous
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/weap...d_drugs_ar.html
###
August 17, 2009
Standing together against combat trauma
There is probably no more hostile environment to mental health treatment than the military. Recently, a new treatment method has been widely adopted by the UK Armed Forces and, perhaps for the first time in history, officers are requesting it in droves.
In major wars since the 20th century more fighters have been lost to psychiatric casualties than bodily injuries but psychiatrists and psychologists are still mistrusted by the corps.
It was explained to me rather tactfully that "soldiers are not necessarily the most psychologically minded of individuals" and it is likely a combination of the macho culture and conditioning to deal with discomfort by sheer grit that casts mental strain as weakness in the military.
This has made both mental health problems and their treatment a source of significant stigma in one of the professions most likely to cause trauma and breakdown in its employees.
Trauma Risk Management or TRiM was first developed by the Royal Marines, one of the UK's most hardened battle corps, and trains key members to recognise signs of mental strain in their comrades and provides support at the level of the unit.
It's a wonderfully conceived approach as it takes advantage of the esprit de corps, the intense group bond that forms between fellow soldiers, but which also makes them wary of accepting help from 'outsiders'.
But it also avoids the practice of sending in outsiders to provide 'debriefings' after traumatic incidents which have been found, in many cases, to make the trauma worse.
A recent paper [pdf ... via link below] published in Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps outlines the TRiM approach. Non-medical mid-level soldiers are trained to assess their colleagues after a potentially traumatic event and look for risk factors for poor-coping, provide information on which psychological reactions to expect, give informal support and know when to refer to specialist medical staff.
More widely the approach aims to change attitudes to mental distress by making it both an acceptable topic and another form of operational training.
And it is clear that there is a currently a need for a different approach, particularly it seems, in the US military.
A recent review of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers deployed to Iraq found that, seemingly uniquely, US soldiers show increased levels of the disorder one year after returning from the war zone. This is exactly the opposite pattern to that which is typically seen in other soldiers and civilians.
Science writer David Dobbs has received a lot of flak for suggesting that the system that provides mental health treatment to US veterans is unintentionally encouraging long-term disability but the figures suggest he may be right.
TRiM could be an effective counter-measure to mental illness in the military and it is certainly popular. It is also being adopted widely in the civilian emergency services, but it remains under-researched.
The recent paper on TRiM notes that a trial is currently being run by the UK Ministry of Defence and preliminary results suggest cautious optimism although we still await the first published study its effectiveness when deployed on the ground.
In light of the lack of evidence, it's perhaps a little worrying that TRiM is being increasingly flashed around as a PR-friendly talisman of good practice whenever the military's mental health credentials are questioned and it has also now become the basis of a minor training industry.
Nevertheless, the simple fact that it has been accepted and requested by the armed forces themselves is a significant advance for military psychiatry.
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/stan...ogether_ag.html
###
Weaponizing Psychology
Treating People Like Dogs
By Peter Chamberlin
August 24, 2009"ICH" -- Nearly all of the Pentagon’s counter-insurgency warfare doctrine has been based on distortions of the pirated theories of former president of the American Psychological Association, Prof. Martin Seligman. Now we learn that post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) treatments for war veterans have been developed from his work as well.
The US military has totally embraced Seligman’s controversial theories, twisting them to suit their deadly purposes, basing their computer-modeled psyops plans, plans for homeland security, even their recruitment strategies, upon his theories of “learned helplessness,” looking for ways to bring-about its most debilitating form, learned hopelessness. Every one of these programs is geared towards finding and exploiting the human breaking point.
Seligman’s core observation is that people and animals tend to basically just give-up, when besieged by inescapable pain and cruel, relentless uncertainty—to quote another controversial work, “Silent Weapons for a Quiet War,” they reached a point of “capitulation.” (for those who categorically dismiss this “conspiracy theory” document, because of its iffy history, it nevertheless remains the defining explanation of the theory of econometric warfare and the accompanying psychological concept of “capitulation.”)
Investigative journalist Jane Mayer (author of The Dark Side) has revealed that Seligman’s work also inspired the CIA’s controversial torture/interrogation program. Mayer has traced the lineage of the ideas behind the “water-boarding” mentality (specifically, the electro-shocking of prisoners and treating them like dogs), proving that they were reverse-engineered from Seligman’s work.
In Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side, Scott Horton’s interview with Jane Mayer:
“You have patiently traced the torture techniques used by the CIA back to two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen—you describe them as ”good looking, clean-cut, polite Mormons”—who reverse-engineered their techniques out of the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) program used to train U.S. pilots in self-defense. In Dark Side, you identify an approach called “Learned Helplessness” as the model they used, and you note that its author, Prof. Martin Seligman, made a visit to the SERE school…
Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania pioneered work on a theory he called “Learned Helplessness.” He did experiments with dogs in which he used electric shocks to destroy their will to escape…
He and colleagues conducted experiments on caged dogs, in which they used electric charges to shock them randomly. He discovered that the random mistreatment destroyed the dogs emotionally to the point where they no longer had the will to escape, even when offered a way out.
Seligman’s theories were cited admiringly soon after by James Mitchell, the psychologist whom the CIA put on contract to advise on its secret interrogation protocol. Eyewitnesses describe Mitchell as quoting Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as useful in showing how to break the resistance of detainees’ to interrogation. One source recounts Mitchell specifically touting the experiments done on dogs in the context of how to treat detainees…the detainees have described other ways in which they were treated like dogs—the use of dog cages and of a collar and leash.”
Now the Army has begun a traumatic shock and stress-related treatment program for all servicemen, based on Seligman’s treatment for “learned helplessness,” which basically amounts to a system for teaching auto-suggestion to the troops. It is teaching the opposite of helplessness, teaching the troops and their families to unlearn human nature and the exhaustion brought-on by the siege.
The wise men sitting safely on the Potomac think that real “men” and real “patriots” can just get over the trauma that they have witnessed or inflicted upon others, through a contrived simplistic form of auto-hypnosis. This is the same macho thinking common to all American military leaders and the entire population in general, during World War II and Korea, which led directly to the use of torture methods that were copied from the Nazis to treat ptsd and to break the wills of “inadequate” soldiers.”
Once the Real Warriors Campaign is fully operational, it is hoped, the stigma will have been removed from seeking psyche care and both the unstable as well as the unmanly soldiers who have been traumatized by the shock of modern warfare (organized slaughter) will learn to become “resilient” soldiers and veterans, always able to “suck it up” for God and country. Maybe then, the stain left by weak-willed returning veterans committing suicide and others going on shooting sprees will have been removed from the US Army’s image. Otherwise, our all-volunteer force will find it impossible to meet recruiting the goals required to expand the terror war.
The Pentagon has not had much success with their adaptations of Seligman’s work so far, there is no reason to think that the “resiliency” therapy is any more sound. The torture/interrogation regimen developed by CIA geniuses has produced no revelations or star witnesses to the 911 attacks, just as a large percentage of rehabilitated inmates from Guantanamo have again taken-up arms against US forces.
The bastardization of Prof. Seligman’s work has given military planners either a faulty understanding of the concept of “learned helplessness,” or mistaken notions of turning a form of temporary insanity into a useable weapon. Bringing together two virtual reality engineers from India, Dr. Alok R. Chaturvedi (an early developer of the sims program) and Shailendra Raj Mehta, with an Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman, an expert in behavioral economics, to adapt computer-modeling to the weaponized theories of Seligman, the result was SEAS, (synthetic environment for anlaysis and simulation).
The SEAS program is a hopelessness predictor. Running scenarios for the military, determining probabilities, it theorizes the outcomes of psychological warfare operations, predicting when people would be ready to break-down emotionally and when they were just borderline unstable.
The Sentient World Simulation (SWS) is a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information.” The SWS computer simulation allows military leaders to:
“develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.”
Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using it to simulate crises. They try to anticipate how stressed-out populations can be manipulated by increasing the fear and anxiety-induced helplessness, through the introduction of panic-causing events, like earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks. Sound familiar, to anyone? Sounds like the fear-mongering basis of the whole “war on terror,” doesn’t it?
“The intent is to ‘…test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors…” They try to anticipate how stressed-out populations can be manipulated by increasing the fear and anxiety-induced helplessness, through the introduction of panic-causing events.
The Pentagon gamers have replicated the entire city of Baghdad in their simulated world. (See: Baghdad reduced to bytes) This program is the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency program administered by Special Forces Gen. McChrystal is being used to anticipate sniper points and blind spots, as well as for predicting the breaking points of local Afghans and Pakistanis. By deftly predicting and avoiding terminal hopelessness in the locals, as well as predicting beforehand change points, when peaceful-seeming actions can be taken that might win over the locals and take advantage of the opposite breaking points by motivating “moderate” Taliban to give-up on the other end of the equation.
American planners would be well advised to take all of these psychological warfare programs that are based on exploiting and avoiding hopelessness a little less seriously. Perhaps they should further consult even more Israeli computer-modeling specialists and psychologists, to see how the computer-based psy-war programs of the IDF have worked-out so far. Both the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and last year’s destruction of Gaza were based on projections made by these experts. Israel failed to decisively win either war and emerged from each of them with their world image darkly stained, the only attainments being a temporary weakening of their adversaries.
Psychological warfare has replaced the need for real total war in the geostrategic calculations. The Silent Weapons technology which has been developed, has been employed as an economic weapon and a psychological weapon of terror, to herd the nations of the earth in America’s direction. A nation that would develop such technology with a malicious intent to use it upon the rest of humanity is capable of unspeakable evil.
This moves us beyond the realm of conspiracy theories into historical reporting of actual unfolding events, documenting crimes against humanity as they are, in fact, taking place. The fact that the beast which gave birth to this abomination allows word of it to circulate in the world airways is stark testimony that the adversary of humanity has grown bold, smelling the blood in the water of our anticipated capitulation.
Either the elite planners of mankind’s future have grown so confident in their coming victory that they have grown sloppy, or the inevitable free-flow of information that the Internet has made possible has become a torrent that they can no longer fully control. If this is the case, then they are running scared, fearful that all that they have invested in controlling the minds of Americans and the world have been wasted. Either truth means that they have become even more dangerous.always intended to create a state of learned helplessness, to be followed quickly by a state of mass hopelessness, the capitulation stage.
The more that we learn about the weapons that have been deployed against us the greater our odds become of defeating those weapons and destroying those who would dare to wage silent war upon us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e23355.htm
###
The Continuing Militarization of Biological Sciences
August 24th, 2009 Don’t miss the last sentence.
Via: Nature:
In 2003, military analysts from the Counterproliferation and Technology Office of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC predicted that emerging biotechnologies were likely to lead to a “paradigm shift” in the development of biological warfare agents. They warned that it would soon become possible to engineer agents to target specific human biological systems at the molecular level.
This idea of identifying crucial biochemical pathways, and then designing compounds to disrupt them is a leap from the traditional model of biological-agent development. It expands the options: there are likely to be thousands of potential molecular targets and numerous ways of disrupting each one.
Frontiers of concern
Concerns about this kind of expansion of biochemical threats have since been reiterated by scientific and medical communities. For example, in 2006, the US National Academies produced a report called Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences. The authors argued that recent advances in our understanding of how bioregulatory compounds work, of signalling processes and of the regulation of human gene expression — combined with developments in chemistry, synthetic biology and in technologies such as nanotechnology — have “opened up new and exceedingly challenging frontiers of concern”.
More recently, a 2008 US National Academies report entitled Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, similarly argued that in cases in which ‘agonists’ of a particular system have been found to enhance some cognitive trait, an ‘antagonist’ might be developed that could reduce it and vice versa. If dopamine agonists enhance attention, say, so dopamine antagonists might disrupt it. They also warned, among other things, that nanotechnologies could overcome the blood–brain barrier and “exploit existing transport mechanisms to transmit substances into the brain in analogy with the Trojan horse”.
Some researchers are actively facilitating the development of new chemical weapons. For example, a research group from Pennsylvania State University in University Park has identified several drug classes as potential non-lethal agents or ‘calmatives’, including benzodiazepines and alpha2-adrenoreceptor agonists, as well as individual drugs such as diazepam and dexmedetomidine.
…
The lack of engagement with this issue among life scientists in general is alarming. Some companies are already marketing oxytocin on the back of studies showing that a nasal squirt of the hormone increases trust in humans. Even though the effectiveness of commercial sprays is doubtful, such research opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people’s emotions in a military context. Discussions with more than 2,000 practising life scientists in 13 countries over the past few years have taught me that few have considered such possible uses of their work.
…
In my opinion, all use of novel non-lethal agents such as fentanyl for law enforcement should be prohibited, or at least heavily restricted. If, instead, we sit on our hands we must accept that new incapacitating agents are just the beginning. We will be, as the British Medical Association concluded in its 2007 study, The Use of Drugs as Weapons, “knowingly moving towards the top of a ’slippery slope’ at the bottom of which is the spectre of ‘militarization’ of biology” including “intentional manipulation of peoples’ emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility”.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=10538
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/weap...d_drugs_ar.html
###
August 17, 2009
Standing together against combat trauma
There is probably no more hostile environment to mental health treatment than the military. Recently, a new treatment method has been widely adopted by the UK Armed Forces and, perhaps for the first time in history, officers are requesting it in droves.
In major wars since the 20th century more fighters have been lost to psychiatric casualties than bodily injuries but psychiatrists and psychologists are still mistrusted by the corps.
It was explained to me rather tactfully that "soldiers are not necessarily the most psychologically minded of individuals" and it is likely a combination of the macho culture and conditioning to deal with discomfort by sheer grit that casts mental strain as weakness in the military.
This has made both mental health problems and their treatment a source of significant stigma in one of the professions most likely to cause trauma and breakdown in its employees.
Trauma Risk Management or TRiM was first developed by the Royal Marines, one of the UK's most hardened battle corps, and trains key members to recognise signs of mental strain in their comrades and provides support at the level of the unit.
It's a wonderfully conceived approach as it takes advantage of the esprit de corps, the intense group bond that forms between fellow soldiers, but which also makes them wary of accepting help from 'outsiders'.
But it also avoids the practice of sending in outsiders to provide 'debriefings' after traumatic incidents which have been found, in many cases, to make the trauma worse.
A recent paper [pdf ... via link below] published in Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps outlines the TRiM approach. Non-medical mid-level soldiers are trained to assess their colleagues after a potentially traumatic event and look for risk factors for poor-coping, provide information on which psychological reactions to expect, give informal support and know when to refer to specialist medical staff.
More widely the approach aims to change attitudes to mental distress by making it both an acceptable topic and another form of operational training.
And it is clear that there is a currently a need for a different approach, particularly it seems, in the US military.
A recent review of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers deployed to Iraq found that, seemingly uniquely, US soldiers show increased levels of the disorder one year after returning from the war zone. This is exactly the opposite pattern to that which is typically seen in other soldiers and civilians.
Science writer David Dobbs has received a lot of flak for suggesting that the system that provides mental health treatment to US veterans is unintentionally encouraging long-term disability but the figures suggest he may be right.
TRiM could be an effective counter-measure to mental illness in the military and it is certainly popular. It is also being adopted widely in the civilian emergency services, but it remains under-researched.
The recent paper on TRiM notes that a trial is currently being run by the UK Ministry of Defence and preliminary results suggest cautious optimism although we still await the first published study its effectiveness when deployed on the ground.
In light of the lack of evidence, it's perhaps a little worrying that TRiM is being increasingly flashed around as a PR-friendly talisman of good practice whenever the military's mental health credentials are questioned and it has also now become the basis of a minor training industry.
Nevertheless, the simple fact that it has been accepted and requested by the armed forces themselves is a significant advance for military psychiatry.
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/stan...ogether_ag.html
###
Weaponizing Psychology
Treating People Like Dogs
By Peter Chamberlin
August 24, 2009"ICH" -- Nearly all of the Pentagon’s counter-insurgency warfare doctrine has been based on distortions of the pirated theories of former president of the American Psychological Association, Prof. Martin Seligman. Now we learn that post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) treatments for war veterans have been developed from his work as well.
The US military has totally embraced Seligman’s controversial theories, twisting them to suit their deadly purposes, basing their computer-modeled psyops plans, plans for homeland security, even their recruitment strategies, upon his theories of “learned helplessness,” looking for ways to bring-about its most debilitating form, learned hopelessness. Every one of these programs is geared towards finding and exploiting the human breaking point.
Seligman’s core observation is that people and animals tend to basically just give-up, when besieged by inescapable pain and cruel, relentless uncertainty—to quote another controversial work, “Silent Weapons for a Quiet War,” they reached a point of “capitulation.” (for those who categorically dismiss this “conspiracy theory” document, because of its iffy history, it nevertheless remains the defining explanation of the theory of econometric warfare and the accompanying psychological concept of “capitulation.”)
Investigative journalist Jane Mayer (author of The Dark Side) has revealed that Seligman’s work also inspired the CIA’s controversial torture/interrogation program. Mayer has traced the lineage of the ideas behind the “water-boarding” mentality (specifically, the electro-shocking of prisoners and treating them like dogs), proving that they were reverse-engineered from Seligman’s work.
In Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side, Scott Horton’s interview with Jane Mayer:
“You have patiently traced the torture techniques used by the CIA back to two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen—you describe them as ”good looking, clean-cut, polite Mormons”—who reverse-engineered their techniques out of the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) program used to train U.S. pilots in self-defense. In Dark Side, you identify an approach called “Learned Helplessness” as the model they used, and you note that its author, Prof. Martin Seligman, made a visit to the SERE school…
Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania pioneered work on a theory he called “Learned Helplessness.” He did experiments with dogs in which he used electric shocks to destroy their will to escape…
He and colleagues conducted experiments on caged dogs, in which they used electric charges to shock them randomly. He discovered that the random mistreatment destroyed the dogs emotionally to the point where they no longer had the will to escape, even when offered a way out.
Seligman’s theories were cited admiringly soon after by James Mitchell, the psychologist whom the CIA put on contract to advise on its secret interrogation protocol. Eyewitnesses describe Mitchell as quoting Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as useful in showing how to break the resistance of detainees’ to interrogation. One source recounts Mitchell specifically touting the experiments done on dogs in the context of how to treat detainees…the detainees have described other ways in which they were treated like dogs—the use of dog cages and of a collar and leash.”
Now the Army has begun a traumatic shock and stress-related treatment program for all servicemen, based on Seligman’s treatment for “learned helplessness,” which basically amounts to a system for teaching auto-suggestion to the troops. It is teaching the opposite of helplessness, teaching the troops and their families to unlearn human nature and the exhaustion brought-on by the siege.
The wise men sitting safely on the Potomac think that real “men” and real “patriots” can just get over the trauma that they have witnessed or inflicted upon others, through a contrived simplistic form of auto-hypnosis. This is the same macho thinking common to all American military leaders and the entire population in general, during World War II and Korea, which led directly to the use of torture methods that were copied from the Nazis to treat ptsd and to break the wills of “inadequate” soldiers.”
Once the Real Warriors Campaign is fully operational, it is hoped, the stigma will have been removed from seeking psyche care and both the unstable as well as the unmanly soldiers who have been traumatized by the shock of modern warfare (organized slaughter) will learn to become “resilient” soldiers and veterans, always able to “suck it up” for God and country. Maybe then, the stain left by weak-willed returning veterans committing suicide and others going on shooting sprees will have been removed from the US Army’s image. Otherwise, our all-volunteer force will find it impossible to meet recruiting the goals required to expand the terror war.
The Pentagon has not had much success with their adaptations of Seligman’s work so far, there is no reason to think that the “resiliency” therapy is any more sound. The torture/interrogation regimen developed by CIA geniuses has produced no revelations or star witnesses to the 911 attacks, just as a large percentage of rehabilitated inmates from Guantanamo have again taken-up arms against US forces.
The bastardization of Prof. Seligman’s work has given military planners either a faulty understanding of the concept of “learned helplessness,” or mistaken notions of turning a form of temporary insanity into a useable weapon. Bringing together two virtual reality engineers from India, Dr. Alok R. Chaturvedi (an early developer of the sims program) and Shailendra Raj Mehta, with an Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman, an expert in behavioral economics, to adapt computer-modeling to the weaponized theories of Seligman, the result was SEAS, (synthetic environment for anlaysis and simulation).
The SEAS program is a hopelessness predictor. Running scenarios for the military, determining probabilities, it theorizes the outcomes of psychological warfare operations, predicting when people would be ready to break-down emotionally and when they were just borderline unstable.
The Sentient World Simulation (SWS) is a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information.” The SWS computer simulation allows military leaders to:
“develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.”
Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using it to simulate crises. They try to anticipate how stressed-out populations can be manipulated by increasing the fear and anxiety-induced helplessness, through the introduction of panic-causing events, like earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks. Sound familiar, to anyone? Sounds like the fear-mongering basis of the whole “war on terror,” doesn’t it?
“The intent is to ‘…test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors…” They try to anticipate how stressed-out populations can be manipulated by increasing the fear and anxiety-induced helplessness, through the introduction of panic-causing events.
The Pentagon gamers have replicated the entire city of Baghdad in their simulated world. (See: Baghdad reduced to bytes) This program is the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency program administered by Special Forces Gen. McChrystal is being used to anticipate sniper points and blind spots, as well as for predicting the breaking points of local Afghans and Pakistanis. By deftly predicting and avoiding terminal hopelessness in the locals, as well as predicting beforehand change points, when peaceful-seeming actions can be taken that might win over the locals and take advantage of the opposite breaking points by motivating “moderate” Taliban to give-up on the other end of the equation.
American planners would be well advised to take all of these psychological warfare programs that are based on exploiting and avoiding hopelessness a little less seriously. Perhaps they should further consult even more Israeli computer-modeling specialists and psychologists, to see how the computer-based psy-war programs of the IDF have worked-out so far. Both the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and last year’s destruction of Gaza were based on projections made by these experts. Israel failed to decisively win either war and emerged from each of them with their world image darkly stained, the only attainments being a temporary weakening of their adversaries.
Psychological warfare has replaced the need for real total war in the geostrategic calculations. The Silent Weapons technology which has been developed, has been employed as an economic weapon and a psychological weapon of terror, to herd the nations of the earth in America’s direction. A nation that would develop such technology with a malicious intent to use it upon the rest of humanity is capable of unspeakable evil.
This moves us beyond the realm of conspiracy theories into historical reporting of actual unfolding events, documenting crimes against humanity as they are, in fact, taking place. The fact that the beast which gave birth to this abomination allows word of it to circulate in the world airways is stark testimony that the adversary of humanity has grown bold, smelling the blood in the water of our anticipated capitulation.
Either the elite planners of mankind’s future have grown so confident in their coming victory that they have grown sloppy, or the inevitable free-flow of information that the Internet has made possible has become a torrent that they can no longer fully control. If this is the case, then they are running scared, fearful that all that they have invested in controlling the minds of Americans and the world have been wasted. Either truth means that they have become even more dangerous.always intended to create a state of learned helplessness, to be followed quickly by a state of mass hopelessness, the capitulation stage.
The more that we learn about the weapons that have been deployed against us the greater our odds become of defeating those weapons and destroying those who would dare to wage silent war upon us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e23355.htm
###
The Continuing Militarization of Biological Sciences
August 24th, 2009 Don’t miss the last sentence.
Via: Nature:
In 2003, military analysts from the Counterproliferation and Technology Office of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC predicted that emerging biotechnologies were likely to lead to a “paradigm shift” in the development of biological warfare agents. They warned that it would soon become possible to engineer agents to target specific human biological systems at the molecular level.
This idea of identifying crucial biochemical pathways, and then designing compounds to disrupt them is a leap from the traditional model of biological-agent development. It expands the options: there are likely to be thousands of potential molecular targets and numerous ways of disrupting each one.
Frontiers of concern
Concerns about this kind of expansion of biochemical threats have since been reiterated by scientific and medical communities. For example, in 2006, the US National Academies produced a report called Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences. The authors argued that recent advances in our understanding of how bioregulatory compounds work, of signalling processes and of the regulation of human gene expression — combined with developments in chemistry, synthetic biology and in technologies such as nanotechnology — have “opened up new and exceedingly challenging frontiers of concern”.
More recently, a 2008 US National Academies report entitled Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, similarly argued that in cases in which ‘agonists’ of a particular system have been found to enhance some cognitive trait, an ‘antagonist’ might be developed that could reduce it and vice versa. If dopamine agonists enhance attention, say, so dopamine antagonists might disrupt it. They also warned, among other things, that nanotechnologies could overcome the blood–brain barrier and “exploit existing transport mechanisms to transmit substances into the brain in analogy with the Trojan horse”.
Some researchers are actively facilitating the development of new chemical weapons. For example, a research group from Pennsylvania State University in University Park has identified several drug classes as potential non-lethal agents or ‘calmatives’, including benzodiazepines and alpha2-adrenoreceptor agonists, as well as individual drugs such as diazepam and dexmedetomidine.
…
The lack of engagement with this issue among life scientists in general is alarming. Some companies are already marketing oxytocin on the back of studies showing that a nasal squirt of the hormone increases trust in humans. Even though the effectiveness of commercial sprays is doubtful, such research opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people’s emotions in a military context. Discussions with more than 2,000 practising life scientists in 13 countries over the past few years have taught me that few have considered such possible uses of their work.
…
In my opinion, all use of novel non-lethal agents such as fentanyl for law enforcement should be prohibited, or at least heavily restricted. If, instead, we sit on our hands we must accept that new incapacitating agents are just the beginning. We will be, as the British Medical Association concluded in its 2007 study, The Use of Drugs as Weapons, “knowingly moving towards the top of a ’slippery slope’ at the bottom of which is the spectre of ‘militarization’ of biology” including “intentional manipulation of peoples’ emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility”.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=10538
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"