It starts out like a Jason Bourne movie. There’s a plane. A body. And mountains of cash (67 tons of it) on pallets running the length of a cavernous wide-body cargo plane. The MD-11 wide-body cargo…
Source: Dripping blood, a severed arm, & 67 tons of cash on a CIA plane | MadCowNews
Sometimes I’ll meet someone who mentions having written a book, and who then adds, ‘… well, an academic book, anyway,’ as if that didn’t really count.
Source: The 20 Most Influential Academic Books of All Time: No Spoilers | Open Culture
An evolutionary burst 540 million years ago filled the seas with an astonishing diversity of animals.
Source: What sparked the Cambrian explosion? : Nature News & Comment
2015 saw a record rise in homegrown violence and extremism that matched the rise of discriminatory and hateful rhetoric from mainstream political figures., Domestic terrorism, extremism, hate groups, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC,
Source: 2015: The Year US Political Leaders Fanned The Flames Of A Nation ‘Awash’ In Hate
A new study suggests there’s some science behind the claims made for mindfulness meditation.
Source: How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body – The New York Times
With technology that had never been seen before, the U.S. Air Force went to amazing lengths to keep the stealth F-117 Nighthawk program under tight wraps during the 1980s. As the program matured into an operational force, deploying F-117s in small numbers became a real possibility. But maintaining the aircraft’s veil of secrecy while doing so was uncharted territory. Enter the “Klingon Cloaking Device,” a ruse that would help prove such deployments could work.
Source: The F-117 Stealth Fighter Program Actually Had A ‘Klingon Cloaking Device’
Alfred Muller — Plaza Juarez, Mexico City 2006
The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense)
Gilles Deleuze’s indication of a certain affinity between technocrats and dictators seems prescient. By Postscript on Control Societies the new realities resonating between society and its machines, in the middle of technological acceleration and social upheaval, have become so intense that every interior is in crisis, and the entirety of society has to be organized to resist the eruption of these dreams into reality.
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