Preparations for Possible Future Conflict
Traditional, kinetic-based physical wars cast their shadows beforehand in the civil-military and defence / national security preparations that are made.
A. You might not be interested in war, but real estate will be interested in selling your defence properties for the commission fees. The budget process and its rank ordered priorities are a leverage point in contemporary defence bureaucracies.
B. In 2001, Metallica recorded some officially unreleased songs at an old US Defence barracks in the Presidio in San Francisco. This is briefly referred to in the documentary Some Kind of Monster. Here are some of the bootleg quality recordings: they are (essentially very raw) riff tapes.
C. How PTSD differs from other mental health conditions.
D. How and why tabloid newspapers were a keystone to Rupert Murdoch’s expansionary media empire.
E. When information is declassified and made public (such as the Epstein Files), you have an observational, natural experiment in what people behaviourally do with these disclosures.
F. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Working in a Global Economy, created by Dr Serenella Sferza and Professor Suzanne Berger.
G. The Atlantic Monthly’s Tom Nichols sees a revival underway of arms races.
H. RAND experts ask: How can the United States survive in the AI era? Use your favourite Generative AI tool to assess the scope / inclusion conditions of this potential research question.
I. Soft power is often portrayed in diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME) terms. It is used in the entertainment industry to mobilise audiences, too. However, your average AOR exec is unlikely to have read Gustave Le Bon’s classic The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) from the fin-de-siecle era.
J. The Guardian’s Greg Jericho argues that financial market speculators have captured the Reserve Bank of Australia (whose current Governor Michelle Bullock announced yesterday that the RBA has raised the cash rate). Jericho discusses this outcome also in a podcast. For readers of post-Veblen institutional economics, this outcome is no surprise, whatsoever.
K. Finland has just released a new film called Conflict that has cognitive warfare; leadership targeting; kinetic and non-kinetic elements; deception; and irregular warfare using private military contractors. As with last year’s UK independent film The Days Ahead (trailer and full film) - which revived early 1980s nuclear attack and catastrophe tropes - we are being primed cognitively and emotionally for Russia to potentially invade the Baltic States. Whilst this is just entertainment it can also be viewed via a PSYOP informed sociological propaganda lens as well. Here is Conflict’s trailer.