Apropos of very little…
… a turning point to look out for, is the first anti-drone drone.
We know that this will happen, because we’ve seen it happen before – the first WWI warplanes (which are still made here in NZ as it happens) started out as reconnaissance, then they started dropping bombs, then they found they needed to fight each other… and that’s about as far as it goes. It’s part of the military flying-machine life-cycle.
The WWI scenario was always about more or less equally matched machines for some reason. I’m guessing that the drone-on-drone scenario won’t be like this. It will be ultra cheap against ultra expensive.
The little chopper above is for sniffing out roadside bombs, rendering (presumably) the people we attack even more incapable of defending themselves than they already were. The accompanying article gushes “Roadside bombs are a a source of fear for both soldiers as well as their worried families at home. Thankfully the Pentagon is working on projects such as Yellow Jacket, unmanned helicopters which detect electromagnetic emissions from potential IEDs”
I know I keep harping on about this… but the purpose of these things is not to “protect the children of worried parents in the US” or even to “kill the children of worried parents elsewhere”. It’s to make money… that is what weapons are for. They’re for making money – and the way they can really, really make a hell of a lot of money is if there’s a war going on… and if there’s not a war going on, then just make one up.
A billion, squillion, zillion, fillion, illion, willion dollars is going on… fighting handfuls of religious freaks with beards. Every wonder why the Taliban have taken twice as long to defeat as the Nazis?
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Because they’re they have more time to plot against us? You know, from all the time they save not shaving? I have long felt that grooming is a ruinous activity.
“…and if there’s not a war going on, then just make one up.” And up and up and up. Amen.
If a lot of people are hip to the profiteer pattern at this point, then what’s it going to take to do something else? Bigger question, should we do something else?
I don’t know… I’m feeling with more and more urgency that something more needs to be done.
The thing that triggered it was the recent leaked ACTA document: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html – which is basically yet another act of government collusion in the creation of some sort of global corporate hegemony – or an attempt at it.
My patience with the fact that our elected representatives are clearly not at all interested in OUR interests, and are instead acting purely on behalf of their corporate sponsors is dipping to something well below zero.
I’m feeling like it’s time to mobilize – to get serious… a million people took to the streets in London to protest against the Iraq war before it had happened, and we were totally ignored… but it’s not just war, it’s everything – from the relentless corporate attacks on net-neutrality, to collusion with big-pharma, to the vertigo-inducing heist that was the bank-bailout, to the corporate-funded lack of reaction/leadership on impending ecological catastrophe.
It’s everywhere.
I think we (the people) need to do something else… what that is I don’t know. For the record – violence is not it. But something does need to be done, and I think it’s got to be us that does it.
Me? Right now I’ll pick myself up, go have a shower. Greet the day.
I consider this matter daily as I hear of blatant rampant greed and corruption inflicted via ranks of power on telly watching masses. We definitely are our governments yet we just want to enjoy our lives without paying attention to the governance.
That fact, coupled with the realization that this has always been the case, as far back as groups of man, and the insight that the majority of the masses actually do rely on the instruments of corruption to occupy their days and feed themselves, leaves me wondering whether to leave it lay. Lie?
What would we do actually with several million dim-witted, untalented, lazy people? When I think of it this way, the whole thing seems to operate pretty damn well!
Well… you get the audience you talk to.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about the jellification of the masses – it took 4 years before people started protesting about Vietnam… fast-forward 40 years, and over a million people turned up in Hyde Park protesting Iraq before it had even started.
I think we’re more politicised than we’ve ever been… but looking to the mainstream media to lead us (when as Gen-Xers, the mainstream media never even talked to us)… ain’t going to happen. Looking to them to reflect “what’s going on” isn’t going to tell you what’s going on.
We’re in a transitional phase… and I don’t think things are ever going to be non-transitional ever again.
“…[n]ever going to be non-transitional ever again” is such a smart comment.
I didn’t mean the masses would become useless, rather that I think they already are. I think it’s the highly flawed construct of corporate priorities that provides the otherwise useless masses with occupation and salary. And without the imperfect machinery running, that bulk will be unsupported.
Isn’t it the nefarious underpinnings that keep it all running altogether?