GRETA: Globalization Reduces Everything To Ashes.

While Saudi oilfield were still billowing black plumes of acrid smoke into the atmosphere, the world was treated to the Cassandra-like apparition of Greta Thunderberg booming ominous prognostications as lightening bolts flashed in her adolescent eyes.

The two may not be as unrelated as you think.

This is how our military "protects" us:

The WW2 generation saw its own War bonds used to finance the design, building, and deployment of nuclear weapons that would, from the day they were born, be held over the heads of their children  as an existential threat to their existence. Citing Communism as the reason for the necessity of this dire knife's-edge existence,  the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan then moved the most vital parts of our industrial infrastructure to China, the world's largest Communist nation. Then upgraded the nuclear arsenal.

Remember, WW2 ended in Europe before the bomb was even tested. And it was ETO, not Edo, the bomb was designed for. Hitler, so said the German refugees to the USA who had worked with his Nazi regime, was supposedly on the brink of making one of his own (he never even came close). So the US was held hostage to the tune of billions of dollars in ransom to develop and use a technology it never needed. One that was subsequently used much more against its own citizens in peacetime than against those of any other nation even in times of War (with one very notable exception, of course).

This was the start of the new US military. A military bent on protecting us by developing systems, usually in secret, that were magnitudes more threatening to our own security than anything any adversary had ever devised. A military that would metastasize into being the foundation of the US Capitalist model of military Keynesianism: reduce or threaten the mere expansion in military spending, and, first the USA's, then the World's, economy goes into a tailspin. A military so enamored and dependent on the combustion of fossil fuel that it would in time come to depend on the annual incineration of so much carbon-based fuel that the nation of Miss Thunberg's origin can and does run its modern economy by burning a lesser amount.

The next generation saw their tax dollars go toward development of Darpanet, the technology that would network defense industries' labs, military branches of government, and research libraries of American Universities together to form the basis of the Internet: a system that would reduce the various enterprises that formed the entrepreneurial backbone of the economy to dust. Industry after industry was disappeared from the US landscape, to be replaced with tattoo parlors, hair and nail salons and earth-fracturing equipment with its interminable miles of pipelines, now needed to feed the server farms that fed the streaming video to the select citizens that had the wherewithal to afford private streaming. No longer was data broadcast to anyone who had a radio/TV, but would only be fed to those "in the club".

Then, as the World Trade Center was reduced in seconds to a heap of smoldering rubble, we became privy to the enormity of what the defense department had unleashed on us, as it handed the fruits of our development dollar to anyone who could buy a PC ... no matter where they lived. Because the attacks were orchestrated by that ultimate gift to terrorists, The Internet. Cyber Warfare, identity theft, data-hostages made of entire municipalities, all were non-existent until the US Armed Services wrested billions of tax dollars from the declining wages of its workers to "protect" them by connecting the world of communication to its array of "Smart" weapons.

Now,  for the new generation, the US military  has once again used the funds provided it by American taxpayer to develop yet another technology, as its gift to yet another generation, that has upped the ante of the ability of other nations to threaten not only an attack on the US but its utter desolation.

That gift, as we were made privy to via the attack on the Saudi oil facility, is Drone Warfare.


                                               



As I mentioned in a previous posting, and evinced by the ad in the above GIF, the US military has planted for this generation the seeds of its own destruction. Even as the current administration has put all its eggs in the fractured basket of LNG production and exportation via enormous ships costing multiple billions of dollars, the military has gifted every terrorist and adversarial country with the cheap, easily deployed technology of drones, making every one of those floating bombs a threat to the very customers it needs to pay for the loans made to assemble, fill and launch them. But what that strategy has baked into it is the need of our hapless customers to be willing to allow a potentially deadly firebomb right into their ports to endanger shipping and lives and the environment. None of which costs are in any way a deterrent to the industry that would have had to flare all that gas anyway. One would think that terrorists using our own planes as missiles launched from inside our own country would have given us a clue to avoid making portable bombs that any terrorist can easily follow and, once again having been handed a remarkably cheap method of doing so, attack. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase self-defense, making it synonymous with self-immolation.

What we will see soon enough will be drone swarms. Not of the kind that bombed the Saudi warmonger's facilities, but of the smaller, cheaper variety. Picture the Allied invasion of Iraq under the auspices of Bush had the Iraqis had the cheap drones to deploy to flash lasers into the eyes of our terrorist bombers as they flew toward their innocent targets of unarmed civilians to drop chemical weapons of mass destruction onto their heads and on their power plants and hospitals. Instead of  the wanton destruction of their civilian infrastructure, American jets, made blind by cheap drones, would crash with their millions of dollars of munitions; $35billion jets taken down by cheap, 3-D printed, off-the-shelf, Drones-'R Us buzz-bombs our flyboys must hit with hardware costing thousands of times as much to produce and fly. The economics of modern warfare will bankrupt modern economies built on the false premise that the more costly it is, the better. Such high-flying theories will be brought back down to earth with the ease of shooting fish in a pork-barrel.

Entire fleets of aircraft carriers could be immobilized by swarms of the technology the same Defense Department developed so as to invade other counties' sovereign airspace in order to assassinate selected victims and whoever else happens to inadvertently get in the way. The technology that shows the utter lack of any so-called "Honor" of being in the service, or the "Valor" of soldiers used as remote snipers, even more than the cowardice than aerial bombardment on unarmed citizens, which at least  requires pilots (the real method we used to win WW2, not nuclear bombing: carpet bombing and the resultant firestorms, planned down to the last detail to engulf and incinerate civilian populations).

And now, the marriage of drones with AI is already taking place. Similar to how fictional Transformers build themselves, or more accurately, rebuild themselves, drones, copying Mathias Rust, who evaded fighter jets and the world’s most sophisticated air defense technology to land his light aircraft in Red Square, right in the heart of Moscow, will be able to evade radar better than any multi-billion dollar stealth aircraft, to then do what no Stealth plane could ever do, and, perhaps carrying the disassembled parts of a launcher, for example, could, using AWAC-style technology, such that one of the drones is the AI queen bee directing the AI-enabled squadron under her command, assemble the disparate parts into a whole and commence bombardment, intelligence gathering, or grid sabotage. All thanks to our own tax dollars and the wisdom of allowing life-long generals who've never seen combat, to dictate how US policy is run.

In this scenario you can see the next generation of defense department-developed technology ready-made to be used against us: AI.

But using the production, deployment and sales of arms as the leverage upon which the rest of the economy is built means that you have no choice. We will, because we must, sit idly by distractedly staring into our portable computer screens for the next tidbit of trumpery, while our every nibble of sent data is monitored and recorded (every time anyone fires up their "communication" device, it should flash the reminder that, "Anything you say or download can and will be used against you in a court of law"), every cent spent registered in a book of accounts, and every step we make mapped by Google Earth to be sold to the highest bidder, all courtesy of the Department of War, euphemized as defense, so as to assuage any misgivings about running the economy on the same basis as the Wehrmacht of Germany we supposedly defeated (Do you really "Win the war" when your way of life is obliterated and replaced by the one your opponent in the War espoused? So much so that your citizens put into office a man from the same country as the one you defeated? Hitler wanted to "Make Germany great again" by imposing a "New World Order" ... Sound familiar? Do the millions US citizens of Irish descent who voted to put this Aryan Supremacist in the Whitehouse really think he doesn't consider them to be one of the inferior races to be throttled? "First they came for the Socialists, and we did not speak out ...).

Yet it is the future climate that's the most alarming?

Most of the world's children live in intractable poverty, even as the world's GDP rises above any it has ever seen before; its wealth  piled up to unfathomable heights; amassed under the control of an ever-shrinking minority of multi-billionaires intent on nothing more than growing their own hoards to even more obscene dimensions, while billions sludge through the depths of despair. It is nice that white teens have time to ponder the future. The reason they have a well-cosseted present to take for granted is precisely the same reason they chastise the adults for. Profligate energy consumption regardless of the consequences, the one Greta cites being but one of those consequences. It seems her message would have had more power and a far better reception had she at least mentioned the country of Yemen; if she had least intimated the slightest bit of concern for all the other children her own age and younger who have neither the time nor space to worry about what the future might hold, because the only future they ever have the energy to think about is their next meal and where it's to come from.

Thanks to fossil-fuel combustion, Greta has none of those worries. She is, and has been her whole life, well fed and well-housed. Somehow she thinks, not knowing the energy-intensive basis of her well-being (every calorie we ingest, for example, takes ten calories of oil-derived energy to get it onto our plate), that the murderous ape called man has her best interests at heart, or at least should have her best interests at heart. Yet nowhere in the history of mankind is there even the slightest indication that humans, when organized into nations or empires, act humane (Well okay, they may act humane, but they never are). Slavery was the foundation of Capitalism and it, like modern economies, relied on violence and the threat of violence, joined at the hip with the innate feelings of superiority of one people over another such that they felt absolutely zero compunction about flogging them, torturing them, separating them from their families and selling them like livestock, to then be driven like livestock until they dropped. Is it any wonder the military is now the foundation upon which modern society is built? And the military lives on fossil fuels. So the world will continue to burn fossil fuels until it roasts itself like a pig on a spit.

That's not the Future, Greta.

That's the Present.

 It's the Past.

 It's Humanity welded to a cross of Iron ...

Where've ya been?