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VIDEO: Pentagon warns of "unavoidable" dystopian future for megacities

from Nick Turse’s October 13, 2016 piece in the Intercept

According to a startling Pentagon video obtained by The Intercept, the future of global cities will be an amalgam of the settings of “Escape from New York” and “Robocop” — with dashes of the “Warriors” and “Divergent” thrown in. It will be a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers.
At least that’s the scenario outlined in “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a five-minute video that has been used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University. All that stands between the coming chaos and the good people of Lagos and Dhaka (or maybe even New York City) is the U.S. Army, according to the video, which The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
[….]  The video was used as part of an “Advanced Special Operations Combating Terrorism” course offered at JSOU earlier this year, for a lesson on “The Emerging Terrorism Threat.” JSOU is operated by U.S. Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for America’s most elite troops. JSOU describes itself as geared toward preparing special operations forces “to shape the future strategic environment by providing specialized joint professional military education, developing SOF specific undergraduate and graduate level academic programs and by fostering special operations research.””

Read the full article here


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Secret Agent
Secret Agent
Oct 27, 2016 11:21 AM

That’s the plan. The rest of the planet will then be available for the enjoyment of the Oligarchy. Google agenda 21.

Schlüter
Schlüter
Oct 26, 2016 2:16 PM

Well, the Pentagon will “take care” of the Worid:
„One Thing Must be Clear to the World: The US Power Elite Regards the Whole Globe as Their Colony!“: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/one-thing-must-be-clear-to-the-world-the-us-power-elite-regards-the-whole-globe-as-their-colony/
Andreas Schlüter
Sociologist
Berlin, Germany

binra
binra
Oct 26, 2016 12:21 PM

Imagination projects its future from the fears of a past that is asserted or invested TRUE.
Imagination in itself is FREE, and only limited by current personal and collective investments that demand protection in power to persist.
The ‘unconscious’ has been filled with denied guilt, of fears, hates, rages and powerlessness. Like a Jack-in-the-box that thus seems autonomous – because we do not recognize our own denials coming HOME.
And so we populate our world with demonic intent and reinforce such outsourcing with our defences against it.
The fight of flight mode is not our natural balance of being so much as a very specific subconscious routine for a very specific physical survival response. Yet it is as if all Consciousness is sacrificed to ‘survival’ in terms of fearfully conditioned imprinting that ‘cannot’ be challenged or called into question because the survival sense shuts down any such communication – or subverts it to incorporate defence against it.
Defences DO the thing they protect against. Not unlike accusing your brother or sister of the very thing you are doing to him as an assertion of conviction- redirected. The ju-jitsu of guilting others. Their reaction of defence seen as attack ‘proves’ they are unworthy and ‘justifies’ your attack or denial of them.
Denied self has NEVER really left us – no matter how much ‘consensus’ is generated in believing it put away or erased. It simply operates shadow power. The Unconscious will rise to be integrated or healed for beneath it is the true Impulse of Living – that comes naturally and not as a result of mechanical stimulations in fantasy.
Life wants to be and share in its true nature – but the flow starts out with a backlog of issues. But the key thing is not to get lost in the conditioned reaction – but to abide in the flow. Fear imagines a world of strangers and dangers, but a true acceptance of being can look on fears and look past them to perceive in alignment with a true sense of worth. Don’t get ‘worth’ from ‘fighting evils’ – recognize worth in the act of extending it.
Your fears may be experienced real – but are they true of who you are – do they create and define You?

Greg Bacon
Greg Bacon
Oct 26, 2016 11:26 AM

Must be getting close to budget appropriation time. Give us all of your money and we’ll protect you from the chaos we helped create.

GTFONWO
GTFONWO
Oct 26, 2016 8:06 AM

It wont matter. The MIC are on course for nuclear annihilation before this gets much further.

ultra909
ultra909
Oct 26, 2016 7:16 AM

Propaganda for army grunts.

Jen
Jen
Oct 25, 2016 10:53 PM

The military -industrial complex finds yet another opportunity to profit from the chaos created by neoliberal economic policy , the shrinkage of government and the privatisation of services and infrastructure … by inserting itself into and posturing in the role of guarantor of law and order and security.
Joint Special Operations University??? … so what does it take to enrol as an undergraduate student there: the ability to hit three cans on a wooden ledge with three bullets from a single round?

Kaiama
Kaiama
Oct 25, 2016 10:25 PM

No Judge Dredd?

Dan
Dan
Oct 25, 2016 8:44 PM

Thanks for posting this. This is about more than fighting “terrorism.” It is about the apparent negative deformation of the world’s largest cities into dysfunctional hellholes of the Detroit sort–except I guess Detroit is what is left after the transformation, the ruins. It is hard, given our social, political and economic arrangements, to see a way out. Small and mid-sized cities have a better chance of escaping this grim scenario.

archie1954
archie1954
Oct 25, 2016 10:30 PM
Reply to  Dan

It isn’t that difficult to find a way out. First you must corral the US military and prevent their rapacious ravaging of the countryside. Second you must corral the elites and prevent them from taking all the gravy from the economy, leaving the 99% with nothing. Solve those major problems and the rest can be handled by creating stronger social institutions.

Brian Harry, Australia
Brian Harry, Australia
Oct 25, 2016 10:59 PM
Reply to  archie1954

“First you must corral the US Military”…..Easy to say, but nobody took a bit of notice when Eisenhower raised it in 1960/61, and now, The MIC is in complete control.
“Second you must corral the elites and prevent them from taking all the gravy from the economy, leaving the 99% with nothing”.
Yeah. ‘Let them eat cake’ just doesn’t work.