Inside 61, 600 sq. ft.

So, about 70 people made it out today to protest Blackwater's new border facility in Otay Mesa, Ca., an old warehouse that's been converted into a shooting range and training grounds. Currently, it's been configured to mimic a small ship in order to prep the Navy with better counterterrorist tactics. NBC was there and produced this quick video with a special peak inside. Check it out.





On that note, here is an extract from a forthcoming collaboration Angela (archive: s0metim3s) and I have been working on that seems appropriate for the moment.

"[Preemption] ... Around 1,000 square miles of the Californian desert is given over to modeling the warzones of the Middle East. Here, as with other police/military training environments, they tackle calamity in an amusement park of unrest, insurgency and its abatement, architectures both elaborate and artful, designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered. As the accessories of the doctrine of preemption, these spaces are accompanied by a growing number of university research laboratories which engineer preliminary superstructures suspended in conjectural disaster, or simulate emergency landings and training flight paths under fake duress, or teach of non-linear dynamics and Deleuzo-Guattarian war machines. These arcade-labs of war prepare for conflict under the principle of continuous adaption, train flexible military units moving not only to protect boundary lines but through terrains marked by the threat of catastrophe. These are instructional handbooks of preemption made manifest as simulated cities, malls and oilfields, aiming to transform soldiers from grunts to self-managed risk-assessors, to move the border with them through chaotic environments. Seeking to relocate warfare within the paradoxical condition of preempting the emergence of the unpredictable they, as with recognition technologies, are elaborately armed and lethal signals of failure."

[Previous coverage of Blackwater here, here, here, uh... here, and here... oh and here, too.]