It was hard to believe that the US would blockade two countries at once, I heard someone say, and quietly pulled my chair closer as surreptitiously as possible so I could hear better, over the clattering of silverware and kitchen noise.
“Doesn't Mr Put know that Russia is still connected to both of these countries?”
“There's already talk that the oil tankers from Russia aren't just carrying oil ... since both Cuba and Iran are the objects of illegal US blockades, the only way that Iran can legitimately threaten the US is via Cuba ... a mere 90 mile away from the USrael mainland. US is planing to attack Cuba anyway, and is starving them, so they have nothing to lose lose anymore, and are quickly becoming enamored of the idea of having a deterrent to US belligerence, and drones from Havana could wreak havoc with US commerce in the gulf ... wanna Blockade OUR gulf, bitches!?, WE'll blockade Your gulf of America! And send drones to destroy YOUR refineries!”
“Perhaps that is the most important development of this week. Not the heat and wars alone, but the moment when a society begins to discover how many of its daily routines depend on a climate that is (not so) slowly disappearing.”
Like a field goal in a tied football game, it is not a foregone conclusion, it is a gone-for conclusion, and we are getting what we have gone for, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when it is gone for good.
By which I mean to say that it would appear to an outside observer that the climate change is a hoax meme may have been articulated by the Furor in Washington, but the world has reacted to climate derangement as if it were true instead of that it is true, opting to pour trillions of capitalism’s “limited time offer” of profitable returns into thousands of tons of armamentaria; to funnel trillions more into R&D on hi-tech weaponry, surveillance systems, and facilities to warehouse human beings; on Rock Candy Mountain dreams of insta-riches that only put on display our real stupidity via artificial intelligence-enabled nightmarish dystopian delusions force-fed to us by techno-bubbleheaded billionaires, you know, “The Smartest Man in the Room”:
Note that the biosphere on which our very existence, the air we breathe and the sustenance we need, have no place in this prioritization scheme: actually eating and defecating, our biology, slows us down. The juxtaposition of the coterie of fascist technophiles propelling the avatar of “Science is a hoax” onto the world’s most powerful ilitary platform is assiduously ignored. Like the housing bubble’s colossal gerrymandering of the truth, done by ignoring the fact that housing prices don’t always rise, all so-called AI scenarios adopt the capitalist narrative that externalities don’t exist, since, for Corporations, they don’t, as they force the public to pay for them.witness the frenetic pincushioning of the entire North American craton by the ultra-powerful, profit windfall enriched oil companies leaving vast plains of seeping methane in their wake for the public to plug or feel the repercussions of seeps igniting wildfires, desiccating topsoil while the chemical soup left underground poisons the water table of every agrarian system in the country.
As we are to discover before summer’s end, the last depression, which we prefer to call The Great Recession, or the Great Financial Crisis, was short-lived only thanks to China, but what the ramifications are of the fact that the Communist regime saved the Capitalist west have been completely unspoken, since the boom/bust cycles of the capitalist economy enriches the only people capable of altering it; the ones who have confiscated all the wealth and resources, so that’s something they will never do as their power, domination and control increases after every bust.
Hence the climate derangement that prevails in the halls of power, it has become increasingly obvious, must be addressed before that of nature will ever be meaningfully confronted. And AI is simply not capable of doing that.
AI melts AI: as in Arctic ice, destroying its reflectivity. As AI algos are built for profit maximization, they will continue to evolve towards energy-intensive, ie fossil-fuel-based solutions, to shed workers, as the tariff regimes fund governments so as to enable continued tax relief to corporations and to make up for the falling tax receipts from a workforce with falling wages and gig-type-constrained work hours.
While the Furor is mocked for raising tariffs on every trading partner, citing their use of slave labor, no one has bothered to mention the flood of FDI into those same countries was done to enable prices low enuf (the I-phone being the prime example) to create a mass-market for what would otherwise have been a niche market of luxury goods affordable only to the well-heeled.
The shipping costs are now eating into those profits, hence the Arctic route which breaks up sea ice, and deposits black residue on the remaining ice, diminishing its reflectivity and thereby increasing the planet’s energy imbalance at the exact point in time when it has more CO2 and methane in its atmosphere than at any time in human history.
The dynamic operating in front of our noses that has accelerated since the turn of the century has been to generate the family joules necessary to get each human through a normal day. The only possible corollary to this dynamic that can balance the equation is less humans. As the energy consumption per person doubles, the number of humans must of necessity halve.
Starting with Covid, that equation has also been exhibited on an ongoing, planetary basis, and AI is set, and in fact already is, accelerating both processes: energy consumption continues to climb while greater swathes of the population are decimated. AI is like War and Capital: it exists only for itself, as evidenced by the nonlinear nature of its energy consumption, putting its own needs, again, like War &Capital, which it is designed to serve, above even the planet’s, which appear nowhere in its formulations.
There is no “cloud”, there are only machines. Interconnected vast arrays of millions of machines programming themselves to sustain their exponential growth with human drones programmed to serve their needs while simultaneously, like USAid, starving millions of their fellow humans to death in order to keep feeding the burgeoning Death Machine Cult of Effortless “Existence”, which is translating sooner than we ever imagined, into extinction.
So the next time you read, “Scientists warn … you should ask yourself, “Whatever for?”
