“I wound up briefing the Twenty-fifth by the way of coincidence. No concerted effort was being made to educate the army about the radically new duties that had been thrust upon it. with $178 billion in defense authorizations in 2004, almost nothing was earmarked for the acquisition of knowledge about the place where the troops where the troops would be investing the next year of their lives—about its languages, its history or culture, about what was currently at stake there. None of the GIs I talked to out at the base in Kandahar had received such training.” Continue reading The Punishment Of Virtue-inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (Sarah Chayes):
An excellent, expansive & very well researched forewarning & investigation into an area that promises to develop into yet another mega crisis, source of survival contestation & immense peril (as if we didn’t already have enough severe threats to be consternated by) – automation, robots & specifically artificial intelligence. Whilst the First World populace is atrophying into an alternative sub-species bereft of Homo sapiens core-qualities & capabilities & also struggling to uphold the remnants of their deteriorating humanness & advanced sentience, the “market” thinks it an appropriate occasion to introduce robots to further isolate, impair & discombobulate the ailing species engineered decline & dysfunction. 
Perestroiking like Pinkham! it’s so easy to get hooked on every-day Russo/far Eastern European related reportage & literature. why? well, as Pinkham herself puts it – “My family and friends had trouble understanding why I had fallen in love with Ukraine, a country that most Americans could hardly find on a map, famous only for Chicken Kiev and mail-order brides.