President Donald Trump's fantasy war parade will come to life on Veterans Day, and you're paying for it.
Trump's military parade planned for Veterans' Day. No tanks. And, no thanks.
DARPA wants to slow down the human body to save lives
According to Engadget, America's futurist military think tank, DARPA, wants to figure out the means to slow down the biological functions of the human body to provide more time for medics and doctors to treat their wounded patients.
If the notion of biostasis sounds like the stuff of science fiction to you, that's because it totally is – at least for now. While some creatures are able to regulate the cells in their body to the point where they can survive long-term freezing or dehydration, humans are, comparatively, delicate little snowflakes. We bleed out, we die. By finding a way to slow down or freeze the functions of our bodies, combat-injured soldiers could have more time to make it to life-saving treatments away from the front lines. Were DARPA to find a way to do this for soldiers, the rest of us could likely wind up benefiting too. In the past, other medical technologies, antihemorrhagic compounds, like those found in QuikClot bandages, found their start on the battlefield, but have made their way into the civilian market.
If you're interested in seeing how DARPA's biostasis program pans out, you'd best get comfortable. DARPA won't even start answering the questions from companies looking to throw science at the problem until later this month.
Image via Military.com Read the rest
The Internet Archive's Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: eyeball-lancing collection of terrible US military slides
The Internet Archive celebrated its 20th anniversary with a variety of special events and collections, including the cleverly named Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex, an archive of US military bureaucratic slide-decks that are as cringey as they are hideous. Read the rest
Stop charging AT-ATs (What the Rebellion should do in order to improve its anti-Empire tactics)
When I nerdpick a movie, I usually criticize the stupid computers, but I was fascinated by the angry nerding of Angry Staff Officer, a member of the Military Writers Guild, who picked apart the Rebellion's outrageously dumb military tactics (some spoilers). Read the rest
Navy admits its pilot sky-wrote a giant cloud-wiener
A spokesman from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Ault Field, WA, said of the unnamed crew behind the giant sky-dong, "we find this absolutely unacceptable, of zero training value and we are holding the crew accountable." Read the rest
Pentagon mass surveillance slurped up the world's social media traffic; then they dumped it on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server
The Upguard Cyber Risk Team has found three Department of Defense mass-storage "buckets" on Amazon that are world-viewable, containing 1.8 billion of social media posts that the DoD scraped from social media over 8 years as part of its global surveillance program. Read the rest
A quarter of US military "sees white nationalism" in the ranks
A survey by the Military Times found that nearly a quarter of US servicepeople see "white nationalism" among their peers, and believe that the white nationalist agenda is more of a national security threat than "Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan." Read the rest
Lousy tank driver swerves into car on public road
The Russian army clearly needs to teach its tank drivers not to text and drive.
OCTOBER: China Mieville's novelistic history of the Russian revolution
China Mieville is an unabashedly political science fiction writer, an avowed Marxist whose fiction is shot through with politics in the very best way; however, Mieville's politics are generally kept below the surface, influence rather than central fact -- that is, until the publication of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, a masterful, novelistic nonfiction history of the year preceding the Russian revolution one century ago.
Watch a chef try valiantly to make military MRE rations appear gourmet
New York chef Chuck George gathered up military MRE (meals ready to eat) rations from different countries, then tried to present them as gourmet meals. Videographer Jimmy Pham and photographer Henry Hargreaves recorded his efforts. Read the rest
Company's dystopian promotional video for drone armed with machine gun
What a time to be alive.
Duke Robotics brings a fully robotic weaponry system to an airborne platform. TIKAD, which is a proprietary development of Duke, uses the delivery of a unique suppression firing and stabilization solution. TIKAD allows governments to utilize completely new capabilities against terrorist groups and reduce the number of deployed ground troops, and therefore, the number of casualties.
(via Daily Grail) Read the rest
Trump's proposed transgender ban slammed by 56 retired U.S. military officers in open letter
Fifty-six retired U.S. generals, admirals and other senior officers today voiced opposition to President Donald Trump's proposed ban on transgender military service. Trump attempted to justify his bigotry on the bogus grounds it would be disruptive and harm readiness.
Leaked transcript: US soldier and security advisor aghast at Trump's reckless Syrian strike
In April, Donald Trump ordered a massive strike against Syria to retaliate for an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians, despite widely circulated US intelligence that said that no chemical weapons had been used. Read the rest
Chelsea Manning is a free woman
Today, the whistleblower Chelsea Manning stepped out of the Military Corrections Complex at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, having served the longest sentence in US history for whistleblowing; for the duration of her ongoing appeal, she is on "excess leave in an active-duty status" which entitles her to access to military health-care insurance and other benefits. Read the rest
Gentleman smokes 75-year-old cigarette from military rations
Military ration historian Steve1989 cracked open a real gem: a 1942 World War II K Ration by Doughboy Mills, which contained a package of Chelsea cigarettes. Read the rest
How to defend yourself from hostile consumer drones, US Army Edition
The US Army has released "Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System Techniques," a manual for soldiers and commanders who find themselves in the field fighting forces that use modified consumer drones to gather intelligence and project force against them. Read the rest
Global spy agencies meet for "Five Eyes" intel-sharing network in New Zealand, including U.S. FBI, CIA, NSA
Intelligence officials from the so-called "Five Eyes" network, which includes the United States' FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, are gathering for an annual intelligence-sharing exchange today in New Zealand. Reuters confirmed the get-together, at which spy agency reps from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will also gather.
