Sunday, July 16, 2006

Peripheral Milit_Urb 8

ALL THINGS MILIT_URB


Bush Space.: anArchitecture covers the urban accomodation of George Bush who occupied the city center in Vienna for a summit in June. Google Earthing the barriers and all. Check it out.

As hundreds of National Guardsmen roll into New Orleans to help stem the violence in that hurricane- ravaged city, other cities with large populations of evacuees are managing to control crime without the use of the military. CSMonitor examines the militarization of local law enforcement.

Post-Katrina New Orleans has become a city of firearms, fears and feral gangs. Jim Gabour describes life under siege. Jim Gabour writes in openDemocracy on the state of Urban Renewal in NOLA.

Gangs (primary loyalties) in the US military: Global Guerrillas on the emergence of primary loyalties - gang, tribe, clan, ethnicity, religion, and more - can power a much more cohesive organizational alternative to that of the nation-state. We are seeing this process of fragmentation emerge globally.


Operation Valiant Shield, Joint U.S. Pacific Command operations in the Pacific: The joint exercise consists of 28 naval vessels, more than 300 aircraft and approximately 20,000 service members.

$2.1 billion dollars a year ain't enough for the brains in charge of Los Alamos National Lab, apparently. So the world's most important nuclear research center has turned to the U.S. Postal Service, of all places, to fund its new, 400,000 square foot "Science Complex." - Defense Tech on the ostal Service Funding Nuke Labs


A Hollywood-budget public service announcement aims at discouraging suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere. This Is Your Street Mid-Bombing (via)

United Nations investigators have found most of the small arms fueling the conflict in Sudan's western Darfur are Chinese despite an arms ban on a region where tens of thousands have been killed and 2.5 million squat in squalid camps. Phronesisaical links to a good story.

Password-protected bullets: The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle, is to password-protect the ammunition itself. WMMNA

Lightening Bombproof Freedom: The Freedom Fortress at the former World Trade Center site gets a major change as Childs and SOM cover the bunker base with composite glass panels. NYT (via: Archinect)

The Sierra Club sued the Department of Defense on Wednesday, saying its failure to complete a key study has stopped construction of more than a dozen wind farms in the Midwest.

Shock and awe is coming home. The Bush administration is planning to conduct future preemptive wars with "mini-nukes" and, to that end, wants to set off a nuclear-sized explosion at the government's Nevada Test Site, sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas. So far, the Department of Defense's latest testing plan -- code named "Divine Strake" -- has been thwarted by the organized citizens of Utah and Nevada, but the clock is running out. MoJo breaks it down in Pentagon Fireworks Deferred.

A Nuclear Family Vacation in Russia: Once inhabited by about 50,000 atomic workers, Kurchatov now has only 10,000 residents. By the mid-1990s, things really bottomed out. Almost worthless apartments were going for as little as $200, and no one thought the town had much of a future. Now, the town is being revived. (previously)

Baghdad security plan staggers on. The Iraqi government is to review its much-trumpeted security plan for Baghdad, in the light of Saturday's massive explosion in the mainly Shia suburb of Sadr City. BBC; Iraqis Call State of Emergency in Baghdad; After at least two high-profile incidents of alleged abductions in Baghdad in the space of a few days, BBC News looks at Iraqi officials' outwardly impressive, but often wholly inadequate, security arrangements - Iraq's mixed bunch of bodyguards. More on Bush's Baghdad Palace (earlier on Subtopia)

London’s security architecture: the end of the sustainable city? The intensive anti-terror security measures implemented in London – both before and after 7/7 – are altering the relationship between the citizen and public space, says Jan Willem Petersen. Jan Willem Petersen for openDemocracy. (thanks Rob!)

Wallerstein on Walls: As for effectiveness, walls are effective in the short run to keep many (not all) people out, and to keep many (not all) people in. But in the middle run, walls are politically abrasive and magnify injustice, and therefore tend to force further negotiations. The one sure thing we can say about walls is that they are certainly neither friendly nor charitable nor a sign of freedom. (Space and Culture)


For a 1.5km (1 mile) stretch of highway in Utrecht, Kas Oostherhuis and ONL were asked to design an acoustical barrier and a showroom for Hessing, a seller of high-end luxury and sports cars like Bentley, Bugatti, and Maserati. Their design responds to the speed of movement through a streamlined shape that gradually changes in plan and section across its length. (Daily Dose - Acoustical Barrier + Hessing Cockpit)


The Architecture of Slaughter: The article explains the preference in Hong Kong for "warm" meat and the government's decision to create a central abattoir facility in 1999 in an outlying area near rail and road networks and a sewage treatment plant to help provide for this preference, while also "ensuring the highest international standards for hygiene and safety, operational efficiency and environmental management." "But before you design a slaughterhouse, ya gotta learn how one works." Dose take a look.

Halliburton: No Bid, No Dice: Halliburton's lucrative logistics contract with the US Army is to come to an end, the military has said. BBC.


Northrop to sell laser shield 'bubble' for airports: Northrop Grumman forecast Wednesday a potential "very large" market for a laser-based system it has developed to shield airports and other installations from rockets, ballistic missiles and other threats. More in Gizmag.


INFINITE SURVEILLANCE

The Power of the Eye : The power of the gaze to condition behavior is widely known. From Bentham to Eisenstein to GWB the watching eye has played a significant role in shaping our culture and behaviors. A new study has shown that even photocopied images of eyes have the power to make subjects behave more truthfully...(via: Archinect)


The problem with the American military today is that it doesn't have a giant, robotic airship, two-and-a-half times the size of the Goodyear blimp, that can watch over an entire city at once. The Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, is trying to fix that. Defense Tech on an All-Seeing Blimp on the Rise.


Surveillance light fixtures: Mexican-born Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Homographies combines twisted modernist aesthetics and surveillance technology. WMMNA


Technology for parents to spy on kids: Parents turn to tech toys to track teens, read in the SF Chron.


This Is a Computer on Your Brain: A new brain-computer-interface technology could turn our brains into automatic image-identifying machines that operate faster than human consciousness. Wired


A passport to privacy breaches: get ready for RFID's in your passport.


Eagle Pass, TX Police and UCSD engineers deploy video surveillance system on Caminno Real Bridge along U.S.-MEXICO border.

The Rise of the surveillance industrial complex: by Andrew Lichterman. (via: del.icio.us/mediamouse)


MORE VEHICULAR THAN EVER


Pentagon developing supersonic shape-shifting assassin: For years, the U.S. military has wanted a plane that could loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound. And then level it. CNN


Chinese Death Vans: BLDGBLOG on China's mobile torture/execution chambers.


Police have taken to an unusual form of locomotion in the Brazilian city of Belem. It's law-enforcing buffaloes. (BBC).



The World’s Fastest Police HUMMER
: A Texas sherrif hires a German company to turn his beloved vehicle into the fastest police hummer in town.



Electric military vehicle system of the future
: Swedish BAE Systems subsidiary Hagglunds AB offered a glimpse of the future of military land systems at the recent Eurosatory military equipment exhibition in Paris when it showed a completely reconfigurable electrical vehicle with interchangeable, specialized mission modules, and a choice of wheeled or tracked drives, both electrically driven.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Regarding Hollywood budgets and public service announcements:

From Conglomeration, New Media, and the Cultural Production of the ‘War on Terror’ by James Castonguay, Cinema Journal 43, No.4, Summer 2004:
“Although a great deal of media attention was given to criticism by Hollywood celebrities of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the film divisions of the major media conglomerates expressed their their eagerness to become part of the war effort from the outset. Variety reported in October 2001 that” government intelligence specialists [were] secretly soliciting terrorist scenerios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers’ through ‘a unique ad hoc working group’ at the Institute for creative Technology at the University of Southern California.

http://www.ict.usc.edu/

Its members were U.S. Army officials and writers and directors of Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1998), McGyver (ABC, 1985-92) and Delta Force One (Joseph Zito, 1999).”…

Kiddolizzie

11:20 AM  

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