Most militaries are functions of governments. They are the thugs that enforce the government's will on perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic. At a local level, the military is usually called "police," at a state level its the "national guard" or "state police," and at a national level its called "army" or some variant thereof depending on medium over which it seeks dominance (the elements of earth, air, water, space, etc.).
Sometimes, the military serves the public interest, be it good, bad or indifferent. Most of the time it is out of control and either covertly or overtly runs the civilian powers. In the covert function, we commonly call it the Military Industrial Complex. Overtly, we call it "junta" or "martial law," or similar epithet.
Most people think the military serves a valuable function. They have been trained since birth to "support the troops" or "bend the knee," but in any case they bow to force of any kind. This is because people think of "life" as a limited commodity, thus they will cower behind any entity that promises more of it.
A military runs on strategy. If you've ever programmed in the archaic FORTRAN language, then you have a deep understanding of how military thinking works. Everything in the world is an IF>THEN statement or a DOLOOP. You either respond and advance/retreat, or you get bogged down in a morass.
To game out these situations, militaries create War Colleges. This is a collection of a nation's best strategists, who pull out a piece of paper, make two columns (OFFENSE and DEFENSE) and proceed to think of every possible scenario and how to respond to it with any given set of resources.
I assure you, the current global situation has been gamed to the Nth degree for decades, down to air pressure and wind direction. The creation of AI and supercomputers has made it all the more complex, adding dimensions of timing, stellar alignments and (based on your Amazon buying habits) the projected behavior of billions of people at any moment.
What it boils down to, is that we are being gamed by someone. Our collective response is already known. The headlines are written to extract the exact reaction from a precise demographic. Every news outlet knows who is watching and what they want to hear, and the information put out is tuned to their sensitivities.
No matter how smart you think you are, you are susceptible to this Beast. Even though I know how it works and why, I fight a continuous battle to break out of the programming and think clearly. When you know precisely how an atomic clock works, it doesn't stop you from being amazed by the unerring vibration of Strontium-50.
In our modern world, everything has been gamed. Information has been weaponized. The human condition has been modeled down to being able to predict your behavior by your purchases. If you have any social or economic habits of any kind, someone can predict how you will behave in any given situation with a fair degree of accuracy. There are a finite number of personality types, and you are one of them.
We have reached a point in our collective development that most of our deepest thought processes are now algorithms. I can determine your profile, enter it into a computer, adjust the conditions, and be fairly certain you will do anything I predict with a table of uncertainty built in.
With a big enough computer (think super or quantum), I can load in demographics for any given population, feed in a set of external conditions, and get a table of likely outcomes with their associated percentages of certainty. And they are pretty damned accurate, with the outcomes plotted on a candlestick graph showing the likely range of reactions.
Add to that the ability to control what the individual knows in any given population, and now I can predict what you know and how you will react. With sophisticated media, I can even control how any given group will react by sensitizing that group over time with certain views and beliefs. In other words, by controlling how groups interpret religious beliefs, I can control how they will react to specific inputs based on their programmed worldviews.
Given that most of the world has some type of religious belief system and has been educated in a certain curriculum, I now have the ability to tailor information to get any group of people to behave a certain way.
There is nothing magical here, in the strictest sense. These techniques have been studied for the better part of two centuries, with religious tool sets stretching back into antiquity. These tools have been developed and refined for millennia.
With all that said, do you really think a novel virus has to be released into a global population? How many people reading this can verify information coming out of China or Italy or Spain or New York? How many of us just accept the infection and death tolls without calling a colleague in another country or hot spot to confirm? How many of us choose an "authority" and just follow that without question? Do you reject Trump but like Fauci? Do you accept the Pope but reject the Dalai Lama? Do you listen to the CDC but dismiss the WHO? Does the FED have more weight than the IMF? The UN over your personal governmental agencies?
Whichever set of "authorities" you choose will determine your outlook on the current situation. That is predictable. Whatever viewpoint you adopt based on those "authorities" will color your responses and activities based on the information packet you ingest. That much is predictable. At some level, someone can predict at a global, regional, national, and local level just how any group of people will react to any given set of headlines.
And now back to the military.
In this brave new world, there is no need to bomb, strafe, invade, or even fire a single bullet. The most advanced war colleges have already gamed this situation. They know what it would take to start it, what every possible response will be, and have some means to counter it.
You are not reading headlines or listening to reports. You are being attacked by one group, and covered by another. It makes no difference who/what you believe. Whoever wins this war will decide what was right and what was "enemy".
At a certain level, we are all pieces on a game board being advanced and withdrawn in a game we did not sign up to play, but that we support with our undying allegiance to governments and militaries.
All of your possible responses have been modeled and anticipated. You have been sensitized to follow certain "authorities" since birth. There really is no way out, because even if you call bullshit on all of it, you are part of a demographic that will carry you along with it willing or not.
There is/isn't a new virus. It is/isn't infecting/killing people. Your "authorities" are/aren''t responding appropriately. Civilization will/won't survive.
It doesn't matter what you or I believe/don't believe. We are surrounded by billions of preprogrammed automatons and our habits and resources have been duly noted and modeled.
The war began before you or I were even aware of it. The game is already well under way. How you and I respond is inconsequential.
With that set of conditions, where do we go from here?
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