Your tax dollars at work
Ready to serve! (Photo: www.instructables.com)
You’ve heard of those remedies that supposedly improve your memory, focus and thinking ability, right? Sometimes they’re natural substances like berries and roots, other times they’re not so natural (pharmaceutical would be the operative word). Whatever the case, these brain-boosting supplements are frequently expensive, so much so that using them long-term could eventually put you in a situation where one little emergency could put your budget in territory where no fax payday loans and cash advances are necessary to keep you on your feet.
However, if you’ve already given your life to the military by enlisting, I suppose they would consider that ample payment for them to experiment on you with the very latest DARPA technology that fosters brain optimization and synchronizes brain function. In a way, it’s mind control on the part of the military leaders enlisted men and women are programmed to trust. Once the sanctity of the mind is breached, however, you trust no one.
Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy
Katie Drummond reports for Wired that the U.S. military is determined to crack the mysteries of the human mind open like an egg. In 2008, your tax dollars funded Pentagon research into replicating the function of a cat’s brain. Why? So they could move on to higher levels, such as reproducing a monkey mind! Ostensibly, it was so that they could further understand how brain damage works, or so that the connection between thermodynamic energy and brain function could become more understood.
But what are they REALLY after?
Here’s what the Pentagon wants to do with DARPA’s help: they want to turn soldiers’ brains into hard drives. No, not exactly like Johnny Mnemonic; the military wants to “optimize human memory storage and recall by synchronizing neural brain waves.” Not only would syncing they up possibly bring about better retention, but it may also make troops EASIER TO CONTROL. Yes, I’m talking mind control, people. As if troops don’t give their country enough.
Looking at the scientific details
Forming memories and recalling them from long-term memory storage in our brains are both functions that depend upon how brain waves work together. First of all, Gamma waves facilitate help us make memories, while Theta waves write the immediate short-term memories into lasting information in our long-term memory. If they were to simply throw in some Alpha waves synchronization, we could be looking at the rudiments of mind control.
Apply Now!Where DARPA wants to mess around with this system is as follows: they want to use technology to burn orders directly into brains via taking control of the Gamma and Theta waves. Their stated theory is that this would “optimize” brains and give troops the ability to absorb larger bits of information during stressful situations. DARPA, according to Drummond, wants to “increase the total quantity of information reliably recalled from a given learning session over a minimum of three durations – 24 hours, one week, and one month, post exposure.”
What will this do to jobs?
DARPA is doing this to improve the efficiency of military forces. If fewer people are required to process large blocks of information, that means staff will be let go. If the technology were to reach beyond military sectors, a similar problem would occur in the commercial workforce. Better brains mean fewer employees.
But here’s one of my biggest problems… how much money is being spent on all this research? It isn’t entirely clear, as some of the applications would be rather black ops classified. It’s a large amount, I believe it’s safe to say. This reminds me of what Barney Frank had to say recently about the F-22 jet fighter on “The Rachel Maddow Show.” President Obama recently discontinued production of it, largely because it was designed for Cold War combat. We no longer live in that era, and warfare has changed. Discontinuing the F-22 will likely save America a great deal in its defense budget, which prompted Frank to tell Maddow that if we were to cut out all of the extraneous projects from our defense budget, the money left over would be more than enough to ensure that every person in this country has good health insurance.
What do you say, Pentagon and DARPA? Drop the thinly-veiled brain optimization/mind control experiments and give back all that money? I’m sure you won’t need payday loans and cash advances afterward; you’ll still be sitting pretty.
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Thanks. Ruhlly! The more people know about this hsti, the better. We Amurikins are wunderfill about fergetting importunt details of the passed. Puhleeze help edjucate the yung masses//
10thh M.
These are the kinds of things our military is spending money on? OK, I hate to bring this up, but one of the biggest contributors to budget deficits and also the national debt in this country is, and always will be, military spending. Social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. pale in comparison to the amount of money we’ve spent on how to blow people up that live too far away to do us any real damage and far too poor to do anything otherwise. (What most of our wars, post WW2 have amounted to – get over it.)
This isn’t anything new – a ridiculous program that isn’t going to do anybody any good in the end being done by the research wing of the defense community. There was a little known CIA project called MKULTRA, and MKULTRAII, that were essentially about what we could do to people using LSD. What it amounted to in the end was a bunch of CIA guys running around bars all over the East Coast dosing people in pubs and taking them places to observe their behaviors. They also used the drug to incapacitate women, in order to…I think you get the idea. That was a government run program. Just like this one. And it did no one any good whatsoever. Just like this one won’t. And we will not see that money back, which we could have put to a far better use.