I figured out what I'm going to talk about at the Prime Minister's conference in Singapore next month: the automation of terrorism. Here's the outline of what I'm going to discuss (I already have most of the thinking on this topic already done and the trend is already in motion).
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Mass killings in London, Portland, and Orlando over the last seven days (occurring at an increasing rate). We have categories for each type of attack:
If we examine each category by itself, it's hard to determine any underlying factors common to the attack of that type. Jihadi terrorism has lots of contributing factors.
Here's an indicator that Americans are suffering from deep psychological distress.
Americans are killing themselves in record numbers.
The method of choice? Overdose.
In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche's proclaimed "God is dead, and we have killed him, you and
"I was only following corporate algorithms"
Testimony given at a future war crimes trial (riff on the Nuremberg defense)
Here's a new drone (warning, acronym creep) called the CICADA, or Close-In Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft.
It appears that neo-conservatives are now in control of the Trump White House.
The bombing of the Assad regime in Syria announced to the world the US was still in the business of micromanaging global political outcomes through the selective use of violence (a profoundly anti-conservative notion).
That's bad news. The US record on military adventurism and regime change over the last few decades has been stunningly bad.
Jewish Community Center Bomb Threats
Here's some more thinking on how Trump (with Bannon's help) could (~will) use social networking to turn the populist insurgency that got them into the White House into a dynamic (or extremely dangerous, depending on your perspective) political force.
We live in a world where we can get nearly everything instantly.
Instant information. Instant entertainment. Instant communications. Instant transactions.
Simply and rightly, we have come to expect our decisions to yield instant results from the systems that serve us.
Well, that's true for every system except our political system.