Could Somebody Please Tell Me What Year It Is?

To watch the news items filtering past your feed these days is practically to engage in the surreal; it's almost as though what we read today was written originally thirty or forty years ago. We are under the second President George W. Bush; we may soon have a second President Clinton; and it would seem that the Cold War is beginning anew. So again, just to remind you: The year is 2007. I think.

To be fair, though, we'd really have to forgive anyone who made the mistake of thinking it was, say, 1977. Take, for example, this little tidbit of joy in the form of sabre-rattling from Moscow:

On Friday some 14 Russian military planes carried out manoeuvres west of Norway - the biggest show of Russian air power in the North Sea since the early 1990s. Two RAF Eurofighter Typhoon jets were scrambled to shadow one of the patrol planes, a Russian Bear-H, as it appeared on UK horizons high above the North Atlantic.

[...]

The US has shrugged off the gestures, but - combined with claims that Russian missiles would be aimed at targets in Europe if Washington pursues plans to build a missile defence shield in eastern Europe - they will add to concerns about the direction in which Mr Putin is taking Russia.

In and of itself, this wouldn't mean all that much; if Russia wants to play aerial overseer, well -- let them; it's their roubles they're wasting after all. But when it comes to making veiled threats, there's something wrong. From Reuters, via the Canadian National Post:

MOSCOW -- In a warning remarkable for its timing, Russia's military chief of staff used yesterday's anniversary of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia to caution the Czech Republic against hosting a component of the proposed U.S. missile shield on its territory.

The Czech Republic is considering whether to accept a radar station that would form part of the missile shield. The system is designed to intercept and destroy missiles from "rogue states" such as Iran and North Korea, but Moscow sees it as a threat to its security. "We say it will be a big mistake by the

Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," General Yuri Baluyevsky told reporters after meeting a delegation from the Czech Republic.

To be fair; that missile defense shield is Bush's brain-child, and really makes no sense in any terms save "America as Defender Of the World" -- which just plain and simply is not our job. Adding to the surreality of this scenario is the other main player, it would seem, in the game of "Russian Ambition":Canada. Via the BBC (Online, of course):

Melting polar ice has led to competing claims over access to Arctic resources, including the Northwest Passage, a shipping channel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans currently blocked by ice during the winter months.

Mr Harper announced plans last month to build six naval vessels to patrol the passage.

Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway and the United States also have competing claims to the seabed below the North Pole, an area containing as much as 25% of the world's undiscovered oil and gas according to a US study.

The area is not currently regarded as part of any single country's territory and is governed instead by complex international agreements.

A part of me is left thinking: Wait -- Canada has a military? And it's not just a joke? But all jokes aside, none of this is really all that disconcerting: We've gone through wars before -- even cold ones -- and come out relatively intact on the other side. Where the apoplexy of temporal confusion really starts to settle in is when you consider the fact that US Spy Satellites will now be available to local and federal law enforcement agencies in order to prosecute both criminal and civil law; or the fact that the Transit Security Authority (Can you get anymore neofascist than that?) has already begun to train personnel to act as "Behavior Detection Officers". What's so bad about "Behavior Detection Officers"? Well, consider: what is it, really, that these officers are being trained to detect? How far is a "Behavioral Detection Agent" from a "Thoughtcrime Enforcer"? Thoughtcrime, remember, was George Orwell's 'clincher' in 1984; one of the most distopian novels ever written. This is a meme, frankly, that has been abused to death -- so I'll skim over this relatively briefly in summary:

If you find yourself wondering what year it is, don't worry. You're not alone. The world has gone mad -- it's not just you. But don't start taking your soma just yet: there's still time to halt the wheel on this beast; and even if it isn't, it simply cannot last forever. The question of how we got here has already been answered, you see: it's a fairly well documented phenomenon called "rational ignorance". And believe it or not, there is hope for a solution to this problem -- and considering the amount of money and time already being spent on this sort of research, it's actually likely to happen definitly within the infamous 30 year benchmark -- and that solution is found in the Data In/Data Out Brain/Machine Interface. I imagine that many are asking, how is this actually a solution? The answer there is simple; we got here because it takes too much effort to know everything you need to know to make an informed decision. With 'data-in' BMI, all of that literally becomes available with merely a thought or two. Logarithmic decreases in manhours necessary to reach an informed state will result in radical increases in effectively "just" governance. The question then becomes; whose information is right?

Read More:
-- Informational Awareness, Carlin Style: You Are All Diseased
-- Information Suffrage: Why The Lou Dobbses, Bill o'Reillys, Keith Olbermanns, and Glenn Becks of the World are the Enemies of Freedom
-- Ethics of Cyberization
-- The Revenge of the Ovis Maxwellius!
-- Dr. Berger & The 120-watt Sheep
-- Decoding the Brain
-- Engineering A Theory: The Difficulty Of Human Brain Upgrades