Wizards at War - V

quoth True Character;

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment. ~ Norbert Wiener Environment Quotes

It’s the Oil, Stupid! (Hubbert’s Curve and World War III) - 2003 Joseph George Caldwell

Ever since the Immigration Act of 1965, the US has been allowing many more immigrants into the country than ever before. As long as oil was abundant and free (in fact, more than free, since each barrel of oil pumped out of the ground could be used to pump many more barrels out of the ground), there was no economic incentive to restrict immigration. In fact, there was an economic incentive to increase immigration – for every new immigrant, the gross national product increased by an amount approximately equal to the gross national product per capita. Getting the energy to “fund” these new immigrants was not a problem, since global oil production was increasing every year. Because America was addicted to growth, immigration soared to very high levels, to the point where its population was growing by about one percent a year (three million people per year), almost solely because of immigration. (US population in 1950 was 152 million; today it is almost double that.)

But all of a sudden, once global production starts to decline, the situation changes dramatically. As long as America can keep its consumption up by taking oil away from other countries, nothing really changes “at home.” But this can go on for only so long, and it cannot continue without a fight. Finally, the point is reached where, short of war, there is no more production to take away from other countries, and America’s oil supply begins to fall. With no oil to fuel the economy, however, all of these immigrants – and the “natives,” as well – represent a cost, not a benefit – they have no energy with which to produce, all they do is consume. At this point, it is very much in America’s interest to send its bloated population – its immigrants as well as its natives – to war. And the more casualties, the better. Each person killed represents a saving of about 8,000 kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per year. If the war effort brings in more oil than would be consumed by the soldier and the war, then fine, the soldier is “paying his way.” But finally, the point is reached where there is simply not enough oil in the world to support America’s thirst for oil. At this point, the only way to reduce US demand for oil is by global war involving massive US casualties, and the only way to reduce global demand for oil is by global war involving massive casualties in the world’s industrial nations.

But the President cannot say that he is sending citizens to war simply to eliminate them, any more than he could say that he was invading Iraq for its oil. Once again, an excuse will be sought. The President will seek excuses to engage in wars with massive casualties. At the present time, the US has only 140,000 soldiers in Iraq, and about one soldier a day is being killed. Eventually, the US will maintain millions of soldiers around the world, guarding its precious oil supply (both from use by other competing users and from destruction from politics-of-envy terrorists). And the casualty count will not be a cost, it will be a benefit. Eventually, the casualty count will be in the millions every year for the US, and on the order of a hundred million per year worldwide. This is easy to see: Hubbert’s curve falls from its current production level to near zero in about forty years. This means that global population will fall from 6.2 billion to about 200 million in forty years. (See Can America Survive? for discussion of this point, viz., that global population is proportional to global energy availability.) This means that, on the average, about (6 billion / 40 years) = 150 million people per year will die every year, worldwide. In the US, the population will fall from about 300 million to about 100 thousand, so that about (300 million / 40 years) = 7.5 million per year. And they will not die of starvation – they will die by war. (Furthermore, it is not likely that the population will decline gracefully, like Hubbert’s curve; as I have discussed elsewhere, the decline is likely to be catastrophic, for a number of reasons (catastrophe theory, systems dynamics, degradation of our environment, overshoot and collapse)).

Watch closely. These dramatic changes are just around the corner. The first clue that things are changing will be when the President will press for sending more troops to Iraq, despite mounting casualties. And then, he will press to send US troops to any large-oil-producing state, to protect the oil assets from destruction by terrorists. And then, he will send troops simply to divert the oil to the US. And perhaps then, the American and British people will begin to realize that their leaders are doing it for them, and doing it for the oil. Their high standard of living cannot continue without access to much – and soon most, and eventually all – of the world’s oil. From the viewpoint of continuing our industrial society, America and Britain must have access to a greater and greater portion of the world’s diminishing oil supply. All countries will soon move aggressively to acquire and or maintain access to the diminishing supply. Soon, American and British leaders will no longer be able to – and no longer have to – make excuses for American and British actions to acquire oil to maintain their industrial societies and the lavish lifestyles of their populations. For a little while longer, however, Americans and Brits may continue to live the illusion that we are taking these actions for humanitarian and altruistic and defensive reasons. Soon, the only reason will be “defensive.” And then, there will be no need for reasons at all. As General George S. Patton once remarked, “You will know what to do.”

From an astrological viewpoint, it is interesting to note that today, August 27, 2003, the planet Mars, God of War, is closer to Earth than at any time in the past 60,000 years.

The Wizard of Oz

Forget the Straussians, Meet the Marshallites behind them--and note that Straussians are a subset of the Marshallites.

ClimateChange, Pentagon's Weather Nightmare, ANDREW MARSHALL as OZ WIZARD OF 9-11

The link is to a compilation of most if not all significant articles on the web about Andrew Marshall. Marshall himself is not very much of a wizard. However, his influence in wizardly circles is unparalleled. Understand right up front, you're just not going to get to read very much if any of what Marshall has coordinated through the Office of Net Assessment without a hefty security clearance. However, the man sometimes called Yoda or the Wizard of Oz, has lots of Jedi disciples and wizard apprentices whose publications are available in the public domain. Some of the more interesting of these will be the focus of the remainder of the Wizards at War series. I hope you'll read the indymedia link and get a feel for just how profoundly influential this ancient, wizened little wizard has been. Why I've referenced Dr. Strangelove, and when I resume the series, why I referenced Everett and Lambda in particular. Here's a link to the Pentagon weather nightmare scenario report referenced extensively in the Fortune magazine article about Marshall. It's only 22 pages long and an easy enough read.

It seems that Andrew Marshall is the strategist, while front men like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, and others are amanuenses and factotums. In other words, Andrew Marshall is one of the people, like in the Wizard of Oz, of whom you are supposed to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." However, he is pulling the strings and the one making the plans--particularly the plans for the Pentagon's "transformation/revolution" in miltiary affairs, that is moving the US military into a 'quick-global strike in-and-out' organization--using unmanned air vehicles and global satellite surveillance of all kinds. Notice his other concern: global environmental change. The public construction of the 9-11 events as "international terror" link up with the same networks of Marshallites that are concerned with global environmental change. The 9-11 story has provided them with their ONLY justification for the policies they want to implant across the world. Without 9-11, this Marshallite future would be dead on arrival. This is an article about Marshall, from information freely available around the net, with some commentary about connections and appointment in the Bush Administration that were in place for by 9-11-01.

Andrew Marshall "was part of a group formed nearly 50 years ago at the Rand Institute in Santa Monica, California, whose job it was, in the words of a member named Herman Kahn, a model for Dr. Strangelove, to 'think the unthinkable'. In other words, they played war games and imagined horrifying scenarios.

"Since the 1980s Mr Marshall has been a promoter of an idea first posited in 1982 by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then chief of the Soviet general staff, called RMA, or 'Revolution in Military Affairs'. The RMA, in general terms, opines that technological advances have changed the very nature of conventional war. Rather than conflict conducted by ground troops, the new conventional war will be conducted almost like a nuclear war, managed by strategic defence and computers at remote locations targeting missiles at enemies.

"The 'battlefield', as it once was known, would no longer exist. War, in the RMA lexicon, would be conducted by spy satellites and long-range missiles, by computer viruses that would disable the enemies' offensive and defensive systems, and by a 'layered' defence system that would make the US impenetrable.

"For most of the last decade, and certainly under the Clinton administration, Mr Marshall and his protgs, who include both Mr Wolfowitz and the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and secretary of the air force James Roche, languished in various hinterlands, including a stint for Mr Rumsfeld in the pharmaceutical industry. Mr Marshall ran seminars at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. Neither technological advances nor the political climate existed to make the RMA feasible.

Wizards at War VIII - Are Physicists Smart?

Given what we know about the social, energetic, and capital costs of the warsocialist enterprise, the fact for example, that war has driven up the cost of energy by $6 Trillion in the past few years, this is not an idle or superfluous question.

It's been a while since I posted anything to the Wizards at War series. Not for lack of information, it's just that there's been so much "the end of the world as we know it" (TEOTWAWKI) to cover, that I got sidetracked. Prof. Dennis Rancourt posed this question a couple of years ago, leading with the assertion that "80 % of physicists in North America work for the military";

Eighty percent of physicists in North America work for the military, in the world’s largest military economy. But of course physics students are drawn to physics because all can be understood via the physics portal and because worm holes are neat. Students search for meaning and social status and find military and corporate service, often in an environment that maintains the neat-problem mental bubble first cultivated in sci-fi and electronic game land.

If you’re already smarter than everyone else (as is generally the working assumption in most professions), then you don’t really need to venture out into other fields – that are so primitive and qualitative and descriptive in comparison to physics.

Other fields…? Other methods…? Complexity…? Professional physicists have so buried themselves into their culture of the doable, the mappable, the reducible, the solvable, the codable, … that they are largely unable to perceive complexity.

In objective terms, physicists are among the smartest folks in the general population. However, the institutions and acculturation surrounding the professional practice of physics channels and subverts these keen intellects into some of the most destructive and least productive areas of human endeavor.

Wizards at War - IV

Where we get back on track and consider the musings of one of the aforementioned wizards, an actual one in this case, Joseph George Caldwell, who cut his eye-teeth working for Hugh Everett at Lambda Division and whose prolix writings on Minimal Regret warfare makes for some of the most fascinating food for thought about how and why things are unfolding as they are.

I stumbled upon Caldwell several years ago and devoured all of his writings at the foundationwebsite at that time. A powerful influence on my own thinking, Caldwell is very helpful in terms of providing insight into the fact that events are proceeding (for the most part) in accordance with well-laid plans, and, in keeping with systemic incentives designed by an Elite with motives quite different from the civic care and feeding of common citizens that we have been taught to impute to leadership and government.

This miscellaneous snippet written in response to Katrina is profoundly apropos as we watch the slow motion catastrophe unfolding in the Carolinas and Georgia whose major ground zero metropolitan impact point will be Atlanta.

Why Did the US Government Choose Not to Plan to Avoid A Clumsy Response to a Large Hurricane?

In the preceding discussion, I did not address the issue of the government’s slow and bungling response to dealing with the Hurricane Katrina refugees – I addressed just the issue of why it was in the best interest of the government and the oligarchs that control it to allow the destruction to occur (by allowing development in areas that were at high risk of storm damage). Why, for example, since the government’s own studies showed what was going to happen, did it simply let the refugees fend largely for themselves, dependent on the compassion and largesse of the private sector, instead of immediately relocating them in an orderly fashion to other parts of the country? This uncoordinated response does seem a little strange, since the economic activity associated with an efficient and prompt response would not have differed much from the helter-skelter nonresponse that was demonstrated. And why, since the cost of a fully interoperable emergency communication system is about the same as the Tower-of-Babel hodgepodge current system in which different emergency services cannot communicate with each other, did the government not fund the former instead of the latter? These slow, clumsy, uncoordinated, unplanned responses were evidently the result of thoughtlessness, inattention and incompetence – there was no strong economic incentive to respond otherwise. The point is that these two quite-different responses to handling refugees in the hurricane aftermath don’t differ much with respect to their associated economic activity – they differ mainly with respect to the misery of the common masses, and that is not a great concern of the wealthy elite.

From an economic perspective, it was lucrative to let the hurricane destroy New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, so that the country could engage in the economic activity of rebuilding. It was rather irrelevant whether the refugees were cared for and relocated in an orderly fashion, or left to suffer and die on their own, since either one produced about the same amount of economic activity. From the government’s viewpoint, however, there was a major public-relations cost associated with letting the refugees fend for themselves when it would have cost about the same to care for them properly: its total lack of caring has been exposed. This may cause the public to vote for new faces in the next election, but it will not cause any substantive changes to the system, or cause it to try to avoid economic disasters in the future. (Plato’s observation about a democracy’s defect of electing poor leaders who pander to the population are applicable here.)

In the case of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the government claimed that no one could have possibly foreseen an attack of this sort, and it refused to admit that the attack was a direct result of foolish national policies (of open borders, mass immigration, and massive international free trade). In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the government claimed that this is the nation’s largest “natural disaster,” and so it is reasonable to expect that their response to a new situation would be a little slow and uncoordinated. (Moreover, characterizing the disaster as a “natural” disaster absolves the government of any responsibility for it.) As in the case of the 9/11 attack, the political leaders will pat each other on their backs, commending themselves for a job well done, and denying their blatant culpability. The government has consistently condoned or encouraged building in risky areas. It not only does not care that people’s homes in these places will be blown away someday, it looks forward to such events, since they will boost GDP. In today’s economy, they also create more demand for illegal aliens (to help rebuild, doing the construction jobs that “US workers refuse to do”) leading to further weakening and dissolution of the nation’s once-strong culture. From the government’s viewpoint, the human misery and loss of life that accompany these disasters are simply irrelevant “externalities.” Like the soldiers who died in Vietnam and Iraq, they are not included in the GDP indicator that drives the nation.

President Bush may apologize for the bungling lack of coordination in planning for the handling of the refugees. He may even apologize for not building stronger levees. But the fact remains that he and the oligarchs were fully aware of the consequences of allowing the economic destruction to occur (by allowing building in risky places), and they are now reveling in the fat contracts to rebuild New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.

The situation is a little reminiscent of the war in Iraq. The war is very profitable to the US arms industry, but the average American is getting fed up with having his sons and daughters die in brutal combat just to further economic activity in this lucrative sector. As a result, the war in Iraq will probably fizzle out before long, and America will withdraw, just as occurred in the war in Vietnam before it. The war in Iraq was planned from the beginning. Hurricane Katrina was just good luck.

Wizards at War - III

World War II is known as the "physicists war". I believe you can describe nearly the entire subsequent era as the "physicists era" - inclusive of the energy and geopolitical precipice at which we presently stand. I once read an interesting piece of correspondence in which it was asserted that a physicist, working at a high enough level of engagement, with broad and deep enough access and exposure to the "state of the art" really has only himself as an epistemologist;

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?"

The limits of a high-level physicist's philosophy of knowledge will be largely self-determined. Understanding the philosophy, morality, religious convictions, and other subjective points of view of folks with such a deep understanding of reality mechanics can be very illuminating, and, sheds considerable light - IMOHO - on the world view and behaviour of the political power elite. (and by that, I'm not referring to elected officials).

The Elizabethan magus John Dee, for example, basically invented the construct of the corporation, and with that, contributed in HUGE measure to the economic renaissance of formerly impoverished and nativist England transforming it into the Brytysh Impyre. As in the 15th century, so also in the 20th and 21st. This list goes on and on - and of course includes the Nazi scientists exhonerated of Nazi complicity and imported en masse into the U.S. under the rubric of Operation Paperclip, and satirized by Kubrick in the character of Dr. Strangelove.

OK, so this has been a rather lengthy and rambling setup, but there's a method of sorts behind what I'm trying to express. To recap briefly, I've noted a little bit about the life of comparatively obscure but particularly effective and influential physicist (wizard) - because this wizard exerted an exceptional amount of influence. Everett founded and presided over a wizardly think tank for a number of years spanning the middle and end of the Vietnam War;

The four founders of Lambda Corporation were Hugh Everett III, Dr. George E. Pugh, Dr. Lawrence B. (Larry) Dean (who worked on the Manhattan Project), and Dr. Robert J. (Bob) Galiano. George Pugh and Hugh Everett collaborated on extension of the GLM method to the case of two-sided constrained optimization problems, which includes the realm of mathematical games. Their articles on this are found in later issues of Operations Research. Prior to forming Lambda Corporation, these men worked for the Weapon Systems Evaluation Division (formerly Weapon System Evaluation Group, and known as WSEG, pronounced “wessig”) of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), in the “paperclip” building on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. Lambda’s offices were first at 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, and later at 1501 Wilson Boulevard.

Everett became a millionaire thanks to the success of Lambda and the applied operations analysis and game theoretical research he did on behalf of the Department of Defense. Lambda extended the reach of his influence into many worlds. A number of the folks on whom Everett in both his applied and theoretical roles exerted a profound influence have been prodigious writers and have prepared lengthy, detailed, and fascinating expositions on the current state of the world and what's around the signpost just up ahead.

Man DD Him Say: In Investing It's Better To Be Wrong Than Early

Wizards at War VII - January 10, 2008 - I interpreted the current livestock manangement process now underway through a rather simplistic and brutal lens:

Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)

Can America Survive;

The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.

If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)

Can America Survive -May 9, 2014 - my view/interpretation of the exact same material had shifted somewhat, but still nothing remotely approaching the sophistication with which we observe the intentional and systemic deflation of global human civilization by a small minority of global elites.

foundationwebsite | The answer, quite simply, is no – not in its current form for very long, and perhaps not in any form at all for very long.  This book describes why pending changes in energy availability, cultural changes brought about by recent massive immigration, the global population explosion, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, technology and materials will combine to bring an end to the United States as we currently know it – soon.

In the past four centuries, the world human population has skyrocketed, from about half a billion people to six billion at the present time.  Population projections from various sources suggest that, barring a major change of some kind, the population will continue to soar, to nine billion or more by the year 2050.   In the past half-century – less than a lifetime -- the population of the US has exploded from about 150 million to over 270 million.  This explosive growth occurred despite the fact that fertility rates in the US dropped to low levels – it is the result of uncontrolled immigration.

The tremendous global population increase has been brought about by the development of technology to utilize the energy stored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal.  Petroleum and gas reserves will be exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide.

Look around you.  If you live in the US or other economically developed country, every man-made thing you see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is derived from fossil fuels.  To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of oil annually for each man, woman, and child living in the country.  Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the bounty of nature.  Agricultural man could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one calorie of energy.  Industrial man, it has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food!  The present system is not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable.  Most of what you see in the industrial world is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years.  When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.

Whatever age you are, if you were raised in a town or a small city, go back to where you lived as a child and observe what has happened to the nearest natural field you played in.  Chances are it is now urban sprawl – pavement, concrete, and steel.  For each immigrant admitted to the US – legal or illegal – about an acre of natural land is permanently destroyed, by roads, buildings, parking lots, houses, schools, and other structures that take the land out of production – both for wildlife and for agriculture.  Last year the US admitted 1.2 million more immigrants.  That represents the complete destruction of another .6 million acres of farmland, forest, and pastureland.  Who cares?  Certainly not the people in charge – they want more people because it makes more money, and they are not particularly concerned with the concomitant destruction of the environment!

Industrial activity at the massive scale of the present is causing substantial changes to Earth’s environment. By now, everyone knows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity is increasing substantially every year, and that the planet’s climate and weather are controlled by these concentrations.  Large-scale industrial activity is causing substantial changes to the planet’s environment – land, air, water, and ecology.  In view of the established relationship of the planet’s climate and ecosystem to these concentrations, it is possible that man’s industrial activity could cause dramatic changes in the sea level, and trigger another ice age or create a lifeless “hothouse.”  And for what good reason?  What is the good purpose of burning all the planet’s fossil fuels as fast as possible, when it risks the destruction not only of mankind but of much other life on the planet as well?  The answer is “None.”  This activity cannot continue at current levels without risking dire consequences, even apart from the issue of depletion of fossil fuel reserves and other nonrenewable resources.  To continue to do so is the height of folly.

This book describes the current situation and its predicted course.  For the US – and any other overpopulated, multicultural, high-energy-use country -- the future is one of war, social fragmentation, and dramatic population reductions.  Power will consolidate in a single dominant ethnic group; others will be eliminated or reduced to slavery or serfdom.

This book is not “just another book” on the human population “problem.”  Thousands of books have been written on the problems of human population, energy and the environment.  The real “problem” is that everyone is talking about the problem and no one is doing anything about it.  Proposed solutions to date have either failed or been ignored.  Environmentalists and ecologists continue to wring their hands while the planet croaks.  This book identifies a radically new approach to the problem – one that offers the promise of reducing the risk of ecological destruction to a low level.  It identifies an approach to population policy analysis and a course of action that will bring an end to the massive environmental destruction being caused by human industrial activity and significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human and other species.

The author of this book has a career that includes both military defense analysis and economic development.  He worked for about fifteen years in defense applications and about fifteen years in social and economic applications.  His work in military applications includes ballistic missile warfare, nuclear weapons effects, satellite ocean surveillance, naval general-purpose forces, tactical air warfare, air/land battle tactics, strategy, civil defense, military communications-electronics, and electronic warfare.  His work in social and economic development applications includes tax policy analysis, agricultural policy analysis, trade policy analysis, health, human resource development, demography, development of systems for planning, monitoring and evaluation of social and economic programs, and educational management information systems.  He has lived and worked in countries around the world.  He holds a PhD degree in mathematical statistics and is an expert in mathematical game theory, statistics, operations research, and systems and software engineering.  The analysis presented in this book is derived from years of experience related to, and years of analysis of, the population problem.

The organization of this book follows a logical progression, starting with a description of the current state of the planet and human population.  Current trends in human population growth are identified.  The relationship of human welfare to energy availability is described, and the future availability of energy is discussed.  The role of economics to population growth is examined.  Policies for determining what the human population size should be are identified.  A new approach to population policy is introduced; it is called the “minimal-regret” approach.  The likelihood of nuclear war is considered, and the damage that would result from a limited nuclear war is estimated.  The impact of this war is assessed for the United States, Canada, and other countries.  An assessment is made of the likelihood that the United States and various other countries will prevail after a nuclear war.  The relationship of the minimal-regret approach to nuclear war strategies and the postattack environment is discussed in detail.

The main text of the book is generally nontechnical – as much as it can be for subjects (population growth, economics, energy, nuclear war) that are technical in nature.  Technical discussions are presented in appendices.  The appendices include graphs and tables in support of the arguments presented in the text.

The research underlying the population policy approach introduced in this book was conducted over a four-year period.  During the course of doing the research, a large number of books and articles were reviewed and analyzed.  The bibliography includes a list of about 600 books that were reviewed.  To keep the message of this book as succinct as possible, little description is given of the content of these books.  Instead, the most relevant publications are simply listed. Little space is allocated to describing the state of the environment or other population policies – just enough to provide a context for the new material presented.

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Alfred W. McCoy: Pentagon Wonder Weapons For World Dominion

tomdispatch |  Ever since the Pentagon with its 17 miles of corridors was completed in 1943, that massive bureaucratic maze has presided over a creative fusion of science and industry that President Dwight Eisenhower would dub “the military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” he told the American people. “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” sustained by a “technological revolution” that is “complex and costly.” As part of his own contribution to that complex, Eisenhower had overseen the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and a “high-risk, high-gain” research unit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, that later added the word “Defense” to its name and became DARPA.

 

For 70 years, this close alliance between the Pentagon and major defense contractors has produced an unbroken succession of “wonder weapons” that at least theoretically gave it a critical edge in all major military domains. Even when defeated or fought to a draw, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research matrix has demonstrated a recurring resilience that could turn disaster into further technological advance.

The Vietnam War, for example, was a thoroughgoing tactical failure, yet it would also prove a technological triumph for the military-industrial complex. Although most Americans remember only the Army’s soul-destroying ground combat in the villages of South Vietnam, the Air Force fought the biggest air war in military history there and, while it too failed dismally and destructively, it turned out to be a crucial testing ground for a revolution in robotic weaponry.

To stop truck convoys that the North Vietnamese were sending through southern Laos into South Vietnam, the Pentagon’s techno-wizards combined a network of sensors, computers, and aircraft in a coordinated electronic bombing campaign that, from 1968 to 1973, dropped more than a million tons of munitions — equal to the total tonnage for the whole Korean War — in that limited area. At a cost of $800 million a year, Operation Igloo White laced that narrow mountain corridor with 20,000 acoustic, seismic, and thermal sensors that sent signals to four EC-121 communications aircraft circling ceaselessly overhead.

At a U.S. air base just across the Mekong River in Thailand, Task Force Alpha deployed two powerful IBM 360/65 mainframe computers, equipped with history’s first visual display monitors, to translate all those sensor signals into “an illuminated line of light” and so launch jet fighters over the Ho Chi Minh Trail where computers discharged laser-guided bombs automatically. Bristling with antennae and filled with the latest computers, its massive concrete bunker seemed, at the time, a futuristic marvel to a visiting Pentagon official who spoke rapturously about “being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

However, after more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops with tanks, trucks, and artillery somehow moved through that sensor field undetected for a massive offensive in 1972, the Air Force had to admit that its $6 billion “electronic battlefield” was an unqualified failure. Yet that same bombing campaign would prove to be the first crude step toward a future electronic battlefield for unmanned robotic warfare.

In the pressure cooker of history’s largest air war, the Air Force also transformed an old weapon, the “Firebee” target drone, into a new technology that would rise to significance three decades later. By 1972, the Air Force could send an “SC/TV” drone, equipped with a camera in its nose, up to 2,400 miles across communist China or North Vietnam while controlling it via a low-resolution television image. The Air Force also made aviation history by test firing the first missile from one of those drones.

The air war in Vietnam was also an impetus for the development of the Pentagon’s global telecommunications satellite system, another important first. After the Initial Defense Satellite Communications System launched seven orbital satellites in 1966, ground terminals in Vietnam started transmitting high-resolution aerial surveillance photos to Washington — something NASA called a “revolutionary development.” Those images proved so useful that the Pentagon quickly launched an additional 21 satellites and soon had the first system that could communicate from anywhere on the globe. Today, according to an Air Force website, the third phase of that system provides secure command, control, and communications for “the Army’s ground mobile forces, the Air Force’s airborne terminals, Navy ships at sea, the White House Communications Agency, the State Department, and special users” like the CIA and NSA.

At great cost, the Vietnam War marked a watershed in Washington’s global information architecture. Turning defeat into innovation, the Air Force had developed the key components — satellite communications, remote sensing, computer-triggered bombing, and unmanned aircraft — that would merge 40 years later into a new system of robotic warfare.

Wizards at War - VI

quoth Cobb;

I'm a proponent of Dyson's Utopia. But as my friend at BP says, low skill people are always going to migrate towards urbanization. That's the macro trend that we cannot stop, short of convenient genocides. As long as the paradigm of urban living is with us, our energy requirements are going to be high per capita. There is no global decentralization coming.

Neato, but none of the architects of the current political and military administrative regime share your fondness for this unattainable sci-fi theme. Rather, they've been embarked on a global enterprise-wide initiative to get ready for a series of those convenient genocides you mentioned. As a professed Straussian and uberfan of T.P.M. Barnett - perhaps you're already familiar with the Marshallite nougat underlying the politically expedient neoconservative just-so-stories used to grease and sell the GWOT? What, other than provide the means to selectively instigate, manage and utilize "convenient genocides"- is the revolution in military affairs intended to accomplish?

The World Does Not Need More Fossil Fuel, or Alternative Energy Sources to Replace It - 2003 Joseph George Caldwell

While there is much discussion and expenditure of energy on the subject of finding and developing and using oil, there is also much discussion on the topic of alternative energy sources, such as nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and solar energy (including all uses of the current flux of solar energy, such as hydroelectric and biomass, not just solar heating and solar electric). In my book, Can America Survive?, I made the point that these other sources of energy cannot replace the energy of fossil fuels, for a number of reasons. I will not go into those reasons here. The point is that, relatively soon, mankind is going to be restricted to living on the budget of the current solar energy flux. And the salient consequence of this is that the current-solar-energy budget can support at most only a few hundred million human beings. When fossil fuels are gone, the global human population will drop from over six billion to far less than one billion.

But even this is not the point. Even if mankind could find a source of energy to replace fossil fuel, it would be a fatal error to do so. Mankind is currently using an estimated 40 per cent of the world’s biologically useful supply of solar energy, and is using many times that amount of energy in the form of fossil fuel. And it is that high level of energy use that is the problem. Mankind is using so much energy (current solar energy plus the stored energy of fossil fuel) that it is destroying the biosphere. For human beings to survive, and for the biosphere to survive in a condition similar to that in which mankind evolved, it is necessary for mankind’s use of energy to drop dramatically. In other words, if an energy source (e.g., nuclear fusion) could be found to replace fossil fuels, the demise of the planet would be assured. The biosphere cannot continue with the present high rate of energy use. That high rate of energy use is causing mass species extinction, and is destroying the biosphere. The survival of mankind and the biosphere is totally dependent on mankind’s reducing the level of energy utilization back to that level at which the biosphere and mankind evolved.

So what is to be done? All of the industrial nations are seeking to consume fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, and they are also eagerly and urgently seeking alternative energy sources, despite the fact that this high level of energy use is destroying life on the planet. I have two points. First, as I argued in Can America Survive?, it is very unlikely that mankind will find any energy source to replace the energy of fossil fuels. Second, even if it did, to continue to use energy at the current rate would continue the mass species extinction and destroy the biosphere. Such a discovery (although not likely in my view) would sound the death knell for the planet and seal its doom.

Wizards at War - II

Kubrick again, showing it like it T.I.-izzzz.....,



What's most interesting to me is that wizards occupy a special status in the governance calculations of the powers that be. My esteemed blogospheric colleague Mahndisa Rigmaiden has written extensively about the power of wizards and the special status they are accorded and which they must be accorded in the political calculus;

Now, here we are almost two years later and not much has changed. See my WWIII

1. Part I
2. Part II
3.Part III
4.Jihad + Rigorous Science= Big Red Flag!

There were some of you who refused to acknowledge that we are in a war. There was one particular blogger who used my articles to badmouth the United States and consistently diminished the seriousness of the Iranian situation.

All of this to ask you all to check out the Iranian Journal of Physics. If you truly take the time to peruse their titles and read some of their literature, you will realize that an intelligent, highly educated enemy is worthy of respect AND must be stopped is Near series for elaboration: by ANY MEANS NECESSARY. I think their journal is pretty awesome and stand to learn quite a bit from reading their articles. So can the general public. We had better start developing more scientists or bring the Iranian scientists over to our side. Otherwise, we are screwed!

While I believe we disagree strongly about the geopolitics of the situation, (and really don't want to enjoin that discussion here in a partisan way outside the context of the underlying empirical fact of Peak Oil and what that means for us all) - she's absolutely spot on about those Iranian wizards.....,

Wizards at War - VII

Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)

Can America Survive;

The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.

If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)

Wizards at War - I

I'm in the process of gently encouraging and feeding my eight year old son's nascent interest in esoterism. He is a big fan of the "ology" books ever since receiving Egyptology from his aunt Victoria this summer when they visited the King Tut exhibit in Philadelphia. One of the books he received for Christmas was Wizardology. This morning, he spent nearly two hours poring over the first several pages in the Wizardology book, which effort required a dictionary, a notebook, two other reference books, the Internet, and myself for reference.

We wound up discussing Sir Isaac Newton, the Elizabethan Magus John Dee, and ultimately, looking over several pages of the ultra-intriguing Voynich manuscript. All-in-all, time very well spent top-loading the mind of a little boy with infinite puzzles, mazes, and mysteries to solve, all of which will induce him to engage the study of history, science, math, symbolism, and a host of inter-related topics on his own.

Yesterday presented me with an amazing span of uninterrupted leisure time, during which I reacquainted myself with some topics and presentations I hadn't visited in a few years. One of the threads I crossed included the work of Hugh Everett. Everett is notable for a great many things, not least of which is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics - an idea popularized in the 70's and which has had captured the imaginations of many a sci-fi head ever since. In laymen's terms, the MWI is as follows;

In 1957, Hugh Everett III proposed a radical new way of dealing with some of the more perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics. It became known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation.

According to this interpretation, whenever numerous viable possibilities exist, the world splits into many worlds, one world for each different possibility (in this context, the term "worlds" refers to what most people call "universes"). In each of these worlds, everything is identical, except for that one different choice; from that point on, they develop independently, and no communication is possible between them, so the people living in those worlds (and splitting along with them) may have no idea that this is going on.

In this way, the world branches endlessly. What is "the present" to us, lies in the pasts of an uncountably huge number of different futures. Everything that can happen, does, somewhere.

Until Many-Worlds appeared, the generally accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics was (and perhaps still is) the Copenhagen Interpretation. The Copenhagen Interpretation makes a distinction between the observer and the observed; when no one is watching, a system evolves deterministically according to a wave equation, but when someone is watching, the wavefunction of the system "collapses" to the observed state, which is why the act of observing changes the system. The Copenhagen Interpretation gives the observer special status, not accorded to any other object in quantum theory, and cannot explain the observer itself, while Many-Worlds models the entire observer-observee system.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, and pertains to quantum events. But it also has implications for macroscopic systems like you and me. Although you may think that there are certain alternatives you would never choose, can you really be sure of that? There are a practically infinite number of versions of you, who have all split off at some time in the past from the path you are now following. There may be versions of you that split off five or ten years ago, or perhaps five minutes after you were born, to whom those choices may not seem unthinkable. But in a very real sense, those people are still "you" (but it can be argued that we should not use the word "are", or even "were"; we need to invent a new kind of tense...)

Many people find the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and the consequences that flow from it, deeply disturbing. This includes a great many physicists. It is also apparent that many physicists, including many who teach physics, do not have a good understanding of Many-Worlds.

However, polls have been taken among theorists who study such things, and have revealed that most of them believe that the Many-Worlds Interpretation represents, in some sense, an accurate description of the way the world really is. The polls also show that many of them would rather not discuss the subject.

It's not hard to see why so many people find these ideas disturbing. For if they are correct, they have profound implications for our understanding of the nature of the Soul, because the Soul (if there is such a thing) must branch along with the worlds that contain it. It would appear that the writings on which many contemporary religions are based make no mention of such an idea.

As you can see, Everett was one of the seminal wizards whose work exerted a profound influence on thinking and governance behavior in the late 20th century. Oh, and I'm not talking so much about MWI in that regard, that's more along the lines of religion or metaphysics, I'm thinking about his applied and practical work on game theory, operations research and nuclear weapons strategy....,

The Changing Game

quoth Submariner;

By not attacking HRC on her many and obvious personal misdeeds, Obama is already changing the game. These guys, Hannity, Dobbs, Scarborough, and others realize that they are in the process of becoming extinct.[...]

Obama's vision is not MLK's but his tactics are. These white political gangster rappers will persist but they will become minor figures speaking to a marginal and extremist audience. This is why I hope a President Obama would continue his boycott of Fox. As the promoter of this bestiality, to appear on Fox gives white political gangster rappers and their audience legitimacy. Obscured in the current campaign is the considerable courage Obama has shown by not appearing on Fox.

As much as I would enjoy agreeing with your analysis Sub, and I am currently inclined to think that you may be correct as regards Baraka's having outflanked the dominant memetic morphology du jour, methinkst you perhaps underestimate the open-ended and generative metamorphic nature of the beast(s) in question. We are, after all, talking about "conservatism" as identity politics.

Here’s my thesis: Conservatism is a form (indeed the original form) of identity politics. It is expressed through multiple forms of political ideology based on justifying elite rule and the division of the human race into dualized classes (ideal and counter-ideal) in terms of some “natural” moral order.

Conservatism appears in various forms as the rationalizations and dualized classes shift over time, and in three distinct states of realization, reflecting different levels of development of the self. The overt rationalizations commonly mistaken for conservative ideology are, in fact, derivative phenomena—tertiary at best. The primary phenomena is the creation of a conservative identity, the subject of conservative political narratives. The secondary phenomena is the supporting ideology of superior and inferior groups, casting conservative identity as something to be preserved, promoted, and defended against the forces of evil, embodied in its demonized others. The primary and secondary phenomena are relatively constant over time, while the tertiary phenomena vary considerably.

Baraka may indeed have managed to evade tertiary formations in the current, prevailing, collective convervative phenotype. This remains to be seen in the Pennsylvania and Indiana primaries. Let the record show, however, that over the past 7 years, several attempts have been made to reapportion the tertiary characteristics of the conservative narrative in America.

1. GWOT (global war on terrorism)

2. Islamo-fascism

3. Illegal immigration and the Culture War

As I've said previously, progressive/populist movements from William Jennings Bryan to John Edwards have always sought to include outright racists in their coalitions. An Obama victory finally extirpates them from political consideration. For if you tell me, like Howard Dean did during his run in 2000 and Edwards did this year, that I have to get down with a straight up cracker, I say fuck that. I don't give a damn about their economic struggles. Sailors on the slave ship endured high mortality and terror inflicted on them by the captain but they never saw the slaves as human and rebellious slaves took no pity on them.

While tempermentally, I'd be strongly inclined to agree with this assertion, morally and tactically, I am compelled to disagree. First and foremost - I believe that it is imperative that we take into consideration the economic struggles of the poor, white, and pissed - as much as we take into consideration and engage around the economic struggles of the Black underclass - as I wrote at VisionCircle;

Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.

Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.

If the poor in America remain divided, the impending economic collapse will subject all Americans to a political reality and danger unseen since the economic collapse of post-WWI Germany and the rise of National Socialism. The emergence of a genuinely and overtly fascist formation in America would not require significant investment or effort. In fact, it has been a vividly imagined ethnonationalist fantasy now for the past 30 years. While the wizards of minimal regret population scenarios and forecasting had other mechanisms in mind than did the physicist William Pierce - the history of the rise of the Third Reich stands as phenomenally instructive as regards the actual ways in which an advanced democratic society, when buffeted by severe economic privation, can be transformed into a genocidal fascist dictatorship via the rules of the democratic system itself.

Virtue-Signaling Imbeciles Don't Get A WHOLE LOT Of Things...,

kunstler |  You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now, of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone, the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of your monthly income.

Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this: the 20^th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever. The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period — the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.

That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back — and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have any value.

So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.

What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:

OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US

Silver Rule in #SkinInTheGame

Gabish?

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 30, 2018