Civilization's Waterloo

There's a weird kind of insanity sweeping the world.  It's a feeling of extreme anxiety.  Everyone seems wildly impatient, yet profoundly apprehensive about getting started.

The feeling seems to be coming from the top down.  Leadership, and by that I mean the "elite" power behind the babbling faces in the media, appears to be itching for a fight, yet terrified of getting one.  It's like a heavy-weight prize-fighter going up against a bantam-weight challenger and feeling dread that this may be the mouse that roared.

In the late 1600s and early 1700s, a group of French, British and German philosophers devised a rather amazing set of concepts that became the Enlightenment.  They proposed that a well-educated populace was more than capable of leading itself without the need for "divine" monarchies.  They also proposed that individuals were endowed at birth with rights that were above human ability to amend or edit.

Governments, they said, were devised by the masses to protect those basic rights from any individual or group that wanted to take them away.  This included secular and religious leaders and institutions who claimed "divine right" to do so.  In effect, every single person was his or her own "sovereign" within the confines of his or her property, which included one's self.

I am convinced that a group, founded in Ingolstadt, Germany in the late 1700s, that called itself the Bavarian Illuminati (lit. the Enlightened Ones), was founded based on the ideals of the Enlightenment and charged with undermining social institutions, especially the Roman Church and the various European monarchies, in order to bring about the Great Awakening, the New Atlantis or Golden Age, that they believed was possible using this revolutionary new philosophy.

Certainly, the US and French Revolutions can be traced directly to the work of this group.  World Wars 1 & 2, which did away with most of the monarchies and left the Roman Church severely neutered would easily fall within their charter.

But then the backlash happened.

The Bavarian Illuminati were infiltrated by loyalists and conservatives who liked the Old World Order.  They thrived using complete control and "divine right," especially the Roman Church, which under Pope Bonaface VIII, had declared dominion over the entire world and everything in it in the form of the Unam Sanctam.  They didn't take kindly to having all that wealth and privilege swept out from under them, and sovereign individuals in no way fit their worldviews.  As Mel Brooks so aptly put it, "It's good to be da king!"

Seeing their thousand-year reign of absolute power and privilege slipping away, these desperate folks made a deal with the Devil, so to speak.  They allied with forces that had no one's interests at heart.  As Alfred put it in The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to see the world burn."

These deposed kings made a deal with forces whose only motivations were to destroy everything.  They didn't want power or wealth, they wanted death and destruction.  The great kinds of old didn't understand this mentality and thought they could easily control the dark forces with carrots and sticks.

It didn't work and it set up an epic battle that began in the 20th century, with deeply entrenched forces on both sides that would never give up until they were ultimately victorious.  The dark forces infiltrated every secret society on both sides of the battle, and like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, each time one of these dark minions were cut down, the pieces would animate and come back in greater numbers.  And just when either side thought they had things under control, and would make their next move, everything would spiral out of control, making any plan, any action a parody of itself.

Thus, we find ourselves in a world no one understands.  We normal folks can't comprehend forces that do not have any motivation other than utter destruction.  The Old Powers and the New Powers unleashed something they can't control, and all their intricate and centuries-old plans fly quickly out of hand any time they try to advance their causes.

So here we sit, caught between two entrenched forces, one trying to reestablish "divine right," and the other seeking the "sovereign individual."  Both sides think their goal is to bring about the Great Rebirth of the Golden Age, yet both have built their redoubts on the foundation of a dark force neither can control.  Every attempt they make to advance their cause results in several steps backward.  It's a Chinese Finger Puzzle of massive proportions, and what was ultimately a European battle has now engulfed the world.

Suppose every act of kindness you made resulted in death and destruction.  Your natural instinct is to help people in need, but every time you do, you cause unspeakable pain and suffering.  How would you react?

That is where we stand.  Civilization is fighting its own greed and lust for power.  Two formidable and diametrically opposed ideals went to war with each other.  Out of desperation, one or both of them made a deal with a third force that neither could control, and which wanted neither to win.

It's as if we face another Tower of Babel.  Seeing that humanity will join together to "achieve whatsoever they imagine to do," the gods have stepped in, by our own invitation, to scramble our efforts and reduce everything to rubble once again.  It at least explains a great deal of the insanity and anxiety that we see in the world now, and to an even greater extent the insane brinksmanship that is evident in global events.

Everyone is gearing up for a war no one wants, with goals no one understands, using weapons and tactics that are doomed to fail.  It's the proverbial rock-and-a-hard-spot writ large.

If you've got a better explanation, I am all ears.

A Dish Served Cold

I've decided that the reason the US is so damn belligerent is because there hasn't been a real war, or even attack on the US mainland in living memory.

Oh sure, there was Pearl Harbor, a few minor fire balloon attacks on the West Coast, and a battle or two in the Aleutian Islands during WW2, but there really hasn't been a major war or attack on the US mainland since the US Civil War.

It's easy to go to war when all the damage is on someone else's home turf.  The two world wars chewed up most of the face of the Earth, but the US mainland was unscathed.  All of America's big battles have been elsewhere for far more than a century.

Americans, at least anyone alive in the past 60 years, has never seen war come to their homes.  They have all been radio and TeeVee events shipped overseas.  Americans have never experienced someone dropping bombs on their houses, destroying their cities, rolling tanks through their streets.  It's all a kind of fantasy/theoretical thing with shell-shocked soldiers coming home, but that's about it.

You can point to 9/11, and we can argue over who done what, but the fact is those folks who were there that day experienced what the US does to dozens of other nations on a daily basis.

Imagine a 9/11-type attack once a month for years.  Remember the shock and disbelief when that happened?  Suppose your daily life felt that way.

I suspect that Americans would be a lot less gleeful about waging wars on other people if they ever experienced what it is really like. I bet they'd be a lot more reticent to invade and bomb other countries if they had living memories of their neighbor's house vanishing one night, or dodging bodies in the street, or sleeping with weapon-fire all around.

I bet they'd stop all this nonsense if death squads roamed their shopping centers and foreign soldiers set up check-points every mile or two, and gangs of military thugs busted down their doors once a month to search for _______ (fill in the blank).

Yes, American love war because they've never dealt with the consequences.  America is a superpower today because it was one of the few nations on Earth that wasn't reduced to rubble after WW2.  America has been lucky...so far.

But America, with all it's self-righteous meddling and destruction of other nations will eventually piss off enough people that it will get a taste of it's own export.

Russians are delightful people with a kind of no-nonsense attitude, when it comes to how other treat them.  A Russian will defend you to the death, unless you do something to cause them harm - like surround his country with foreign militaries and threaten his economy with sanctions and invade his neighbors on false pretenses.

The Chinese are wily folk.  They are all business and rarely let their hair down.  Chinese especially like order and predictability, and spend a lot of time trying to build businesses and ensure a steady flow of income.  Until you start messing with his trade flow and blocking his customers and making business less orderly and predictable.

We could go on discussing all the other countries, like Germany and France, who like their lives pretty much the way they are, and don't take kindly to folks who disrupt the status quo.

Assuming that the old saying about the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then what's to stop all these folks from banding together to kick a little American ass so they can all get back to business without all the damn interference?

US foreign policy and intervention is based on the fact that the American people have never had their collective asses thoroughly whipped.  Like the neighborhood bully, the rest of the kids will go along for a while, but not forever.  Eventually, the bully will go too far and the rest of the kids will gang up on him.  What's worse, when the bully is shown to be vulnerable, a lot of other kids join in just to ensure the bully doesn't stir shit again.

I don't think it's a matter of "if," but rather "when."

The US has spent the last two decades dropping bombs and rattling sabres all over the world, and at some point, the world will return the favor.  What's more, with today's technology, a lot of folks can sit at home and launch all kinds of stuff, like drones and missiles, and go home for dinner, just like those good folks at the Pentagon.

There are two things the US policy makers have been counting on: the fact that the US is fairly isolated, and that it controls the world's financial system.

In the first case, nothing is too far away to attack now.  A dozen nations have fairly advanced space programs, and a dozen more have drone technology.

As for the second issue, eventually folks will get tired enough that crashing the global economy will seem like a small price to pay to shut the bastards up.

If you think it would never happen, then I suggest pulling out a good book on world history.  Better yet, how about The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?  It can happen.  It has happened.  I will happen again.

The question is, will the American people take control of their government before it's too late?

As the old proverb says, "Vengeance is often more satisfying if it is not exacted immediately."  And the longer it waits, the more destructive it gets.

Oh Joy.

Update:

fas·cism

   [fash-iz-uhm]  Show IPA

noun

1.

(sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce,etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism (unless the leader is any color than white).

Hillary goes to Myanmar to brow-beat them into submission, I mean open trade talks and get warm and fuzzy.

It wasn't Drudge's snappy headline, "Empire Strikes Back!"  It wasn't the news that a quarter of all US women (admit) are on psycho-tropic drugs.  It wasn't all the fun concerning Penn State and the rest of the university sex trade called 'athletics'.  It wasn't all the frolicking on Wall Street with NYPD wearing Halloween costumes to look like Nazi storm-troopers.

Nope, it was Bammy's whirlwind tour of the Asia-Pacific territories, and his stationing of a couple of thousand marines in Australia that got my attention.  Apparently, it got the attention of China and Indonesia, as well.

Yes, now that the Anglo-American Empire has conquered north Africa and the Middle East (except Iran, of course, but that's next).  Now that regional governors are being set up in Greece and Italy (bankster overseers of receivership).  Now that China's western and eastern sides are hemmed in (Fukishima keeps them away from Japan).  Now that all that is done, there's only the Asian-Pacific rim to sew up.

Right on cue, Bammy sticks his big cod-piece in the Northern Territories, placing Indonesia in the middle of the US pissing match with China.  This is an overt militaristic move on the US's part with long-range implications for Indonesia.

You see, Indonesia is a prime supplier of coal to China, which powers hundreds of generators around the country.  Indonesia has also been reticent to allow US military bases in the country, and rightly so.  The US response was to support Timor L'este's independence, in order to gain a foothold in the archipelago.  It's quite possible that the US is covertly supporting Papuan uprisings for the same reason.

Perhaps Bammy's little spin through Bali recently was to take in Kuta beach and see the sights one last time before he levels them in the quest for empire.

You see, the real news is this high-stakes poker game going on at the summit of Olympus.  There is a major push on the part of the Anglo-American empire to shut down its only viable rival, China, as fast as possible.  They are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, that Nixon let out back in the 70s.  Powerful entities don't like challenges to their hegimony, because it shows up their weaknesses.  If your whole PR game is to play like everyone loves you, then you can't allow anyone to NOT love you.  Just won't do.

If we project this game out a little bit...just play 'what if' for a minute.  What would China's natural reaction be, other than, "Oh no you don't!"

Well, first off, China owns America, which is the US's major Achilles' Heel.  Wally-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, is China Inc.  China has also been snuggling up to Central and South America, Africa, India, and Russia for a long time, embedding itself in the blindspots of US policy.

China bought the Panama Canal after Carter let it go.  It has been on Goodwill missions in South America and Africa, making friends with public works projects and economic exchange.

The US's policy has been one of militaristic bombast.  It has demanded and traded weaponry, and its sole economic offering has been to set up military bases and offer its sailors and soldiers a place to rape and pillage, and drop a couple of bux on shore leave.

Naturally, the world is looking at the two options and figuring China makes the better bargain.  At least they can keep their souls after the papers are signed.

What does this all mean?  Well, Africa and South America are major suppliers of US oil imports.  China is offering more lucrative deals to the locals, that include infrastructure and trade, while the US offers, "Take our dollars or else."  Natually, folks are liking the Chinese plan.

South America has lots of psychological victories in waiting.  It is historically the US's backyard, and any dog that gets in to piss on the fence posts stirs up a problem or two.

After Carter gave away the Panama Canal, the Chinese bought the company that operates it.  A ship doesn't pass through the canal without approval, and if it doesn't play by the rules, your ship can get stuck up in the mountains of Panama...literally.  If you think I'm kidding, look up how the canal works.  Most people don't have a clue, really.  Needless to say, one flip of the switch and all trade between the east and west coasts of the US is toast, since truck and train just don't have the capacity that ships do.  The only options are the Northwest Passage and Tierra del Fuego.

Next in line?  China is in every home and office in the US.  All those gee-gaws and trinkets that folks can't get enough of all come from China, or at least through China.  A little rise in prices or slow-down in production and  POOF!  No more gee-gaws, like iPads and plasma TeeVees, and all that crap folks need so bad.

China has invested a lot of time and effort in its PR game.  It has possitioned itself as the good guys, coming with money to spend and hand-shake deals and consumer products to sell cheap.  The US, on the other hand, has chosen the route of bully.  If a country doesn't take the lousy rip-off deal offered, then the back-up is endless sorties of bomber wings until you like the deal.  If you were Generic Country A, which offer would you find more appealing?  China, which offers goods and services flowing INTO your country, or the US, who takes everything OUT of your country and gives you debt paper in exchange?  I know, tough choice.

The US has enjoyed a fairly good reputation in Indonesia for a long time.  After WWII, the US made it part of the Marshall Plan to tell all European empires to pull out of Indonesia and let the country grow on its own.  After a 40-year struggle for independence, that would tend to make you look good in the local's eyes.

Also, because Indonesia is so far away, not many American tourists get here, so Americans still have a fairly good reputation, unlike other places where the ugly underbelly of American culture has trashed the local neighborhoods.

Furthermore, Indonesia has centuries of history with China shoplifting around the archipelago, and there's little or no love lost between the two.  So when both China and Indonesia turn together to face the US in common cause, you know the 'war for hearts and minds' is being lost on the spot.

It's quite obvious that the US intention in Australia is to place a boot in the region, and most especially within striking distance of China's major power supply (not to mention cheap labor outsourcing supply).  The US move is a loud diplimatic knock on the door, and China will no doubt answer.  It must, if it wants to maintain its relative distance from the A-A empire.  Such a menacing move can not be ignored, from a geo-political standpoint.  The question is how China will respond.

With the installation of banksters at the tops of Greek and Italian governments, the whole Euro crisis is showing its true colors.  The plan is obviously to crash the continent and take over the pieces with the iron fist that couldn't be achieved any other way.  The whole purpose of the euro was to undermine the national sovereignty of the European nations, and once their economies were toast, the banksters could quietly move in and do what centuries of war and bickering could not, at least not since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

In fact, if you squint just right, you can see the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, with its subsidiary, the Anglo-American Empire rising across the pond.  Once the two are firmed and running nicely, it's a simple matter to merge them.  With that done, it leaves only Asia to conquer, and to that end, US marines are being placed in Australia, which is Holy Roman Empire-Eastern Division.

The two big wild cards in this game are Africa and South America.  Where those two cards land will tell the tale.  Either they land in China's hand, and the global empire is put off for a while, or they land in the A-A hand, and the global empire is at hand.  It seems that in the absence of will and fore-thought on the part of people of the world, that one of these two conclusions is inevitable, unless the deus ex machina shows up in short order.

It's a tough call which is the likely outcome.  If I were a gambling man, I'd have to lay odds at 50-50 about now.  Both sides have cards to play.  Both sides have allies, political will and economic where-with-all.  Since the audience (us) doesn't seem too keen on upsetting the table, then all that remains is to watch the action.

It's China's move now.  We should keep our eyes peeled for some kind of action in Africa or South America, and most probably the latter, since it is in the US's backyard, much like Indonesia is in China's.  And Venezuela supplies 20% of US oil with Chavez dying rather dramatically from cancer.  That will leave a power vacuum that leans in China's favor at the moment.  The only thing more ferocious than a cornered beast is a man with nothing to lose and history to write.

Anyone for a trifecta wheel?

The Game's Afoot!

I have known people who knew Qadafi.  To a person, they all describe him as a personable man, erudite and a congenial host.  He had a penchant for Chivas Regal and a deep sense of history.  His vision built one of the shining jewels of Africa: a country without debt, a well-funded social services program and modern creature comforts.  He made one fatal mistake, though.  He dared to sell Libya's oil, some of the lightest, sweetest crude on Earth, to the Chinese, and not exclusively to his neighbors across the Mediterranean Sea.

For that, he was shot like a rabid dog in the street and his body dumped in a grocery store freezer to be displayed like a prize buck at the end of the hunt.

We should all take one lesson away from this: if the US feral gummint will do this in broad daylight, in front of the whole world, who is safe?  Answer?  No one.  There is no status that ranks one above being mowed down in the US lust for global domination.

That is one lesson, but there is another.  The US feral gummint has tipped its hand and shown us some cards. Though the strategies are different, both the Republicrats and the Democans are thirsting for another Cold War.  They are deathly afraid of China and are doing everything in their power to pinch off China's energy supplies and markets.  There is now a clear set of dots that lead to this conclusion.  In fact, any power that doesn't play by the Anglo-American rule book is in imminent danger.  Get out your world map and do a red/blue election-night display.  Color all the countries the US has brutally attacked in the last decade red, and all the countries where China has gone in with gifts and money to get trade agreements in blue.  A pattern clearly emerges.  All the countries with strong ties to China are red

You'll also notice that the blue countries are in the so-called Third World.  You see, in all its hubris and bluster, the US ignored the little guys.  They were nothing but slums where corporations could set up sweat shops and produce Nikes for the self-absorbed, fluoride-swilling masses back home.

China, on the other hand, went in with offers of technology and infrastructure and strategic partnerships.  Where the US carried a stick, China planted carrots.  China developed mutually beneficial trade partners, where the West put their door mats.

In fact, China is the living embodiment of Lenin's famous quote, "The West will sell us the rope by which we will hang them."

It's the inevitable downfall of empires to stretch themselves so thin defending what they stole in the first place, that ultimately they collapse under the sheer economic weight of projecting power.  It is also the hallmark of empires to fight their wars by proxy.  It's the scene from 'Braveheart' where the king says, "Send in the Irish.  They cost us nothing."

We saw it during the First Cold War.  The US fought Russia via the Koreans and the Vietnamese.  Cuba and Central America became pawns in the Grand Game.  The war even moved to the ultimate high ground in orbit and beyond.  You can see it even now.  China's manned space program is growing, with the first part of their own space station already in orbit.

Russia is blowing up their rockets to put the US in a position of having to abandon the ISS.  Once it does, the Russians can simply move it and take over.  Law of the Seas.  What can America do about it?  It has abandoned its manned space program, at least in the public sphere.  A move like that would certainly force any black programs into the open.  Should be interesting to watch.

The US has scattered its pieces all over the board.  It can't muster decisive force in any one place, but must constantly thrust and pare, using its strength and resolve with each step.

The Chinese are fighting a war of attrition.  Realizing that the US can only see the world in two dimensions, it has moved into the third.  It is slowly bleeding off the West's power like a small, wiry boxer wearing down a larger and stronger opponent.  In fact, the Chinese even have a name for it: The Death of a Thousand Cuts.  There's no swift and costly death blow, there's only a protracted series of small hits that take more and more of the opponent's strength to fight off.

Think of it as geopolitical AIDS.  The virus (China) doesn't actually kill the host.  It cripples the immune system so that the host dies from repeated opportunistic infections.

Ultimately, we are looking at Reaganomics come home to roost.  The plan of leveraging future wealth against an enemy with a far smaller economy, and forcing them into collapse by trying to maintain, seemed like a great idea at the time.  The problem was that it created a massive debt pile in the middle of the US economy, and shifted so much industrial production into military build-up, that now the US is sitting on a rotting pile of paper with an economy that can only create more military.  It is incapable of doing anything else without a massive shift that would be a death blow.

Now the US is in a classic case of haing a hammer, and only seeing nails.  Remember all the happy talk about a 'peace dividend'?  So much for that, eh?

It's only a matter of time.  China can afford to sit back and let the US spend itself into oblivion.  It things get too dicey, China need only whip out its one trillion dollars in US treasuries and dump them on the market.  The US goes down by the bow, just like the Titanic.  The one major concern in that scenario is that desparate creatures do desparate things, and the US has a lot of nukes.

And that's why the America people need to get a-hold of the feral gummint lickety-split.  For the ten thinking people left in that country (the readers of this article), the only thing worse than destroying the world one country at a time, is toasting all of it at once.

At this point, Iran is the only wild card left in the Mideast.  All the remains after that is Central and South America.  The Chinese own the Panama Canal, thanks to Jimmie Carter, and they've been making a lot of friends down there with money and trade deals.  Two can play at the international 'buy-a-friend' game, just as easily as one.  It would be interesting to see Ron Paul get elected.  Once aid is cut off to all US 'friends,' it will be telling to see who sticks around.

And so, here we sit, spectators in a 3-D game of Risk meets Chess.  The US has lost a lot of key positions and is now in the position that it must attack or lose.  Or...lose anyway.  With nothing left to throw away, global destruction becomes an option, and one which the Man of Peace and his controllers seem more than willing to take.

The thing the American people refuse to recognize is that the feral gumming is no longer theirs.  It has been co-opted by elements unknown, and now no one, including its own citizens, are safe.  Not even the Nazis did what has just been done to Qadafi. Some would rant and rave about holocausts and all that, but even the wildly inflated figure of 6 million doesn't compare to what the US has inflicted with its economic sanctions and merciless bombing.

If Americans were serious about taking their country back, they would be spending a lot of time worrying about who to elect sheriff, than the clown in the White House.  If just 25% of the counties in the US elected the right sheriff, most of the immediate problem would be solved.  Then take back the White House.  If you scoff at such a thing, just read up on the power sheriffs have in the US.

Sadly, most Americans don't know how their system works, and the majority are too blasted on Xanax to care.

By the way, FEMA will conduct a nationwide test of the national emergency broadcast system.  Since recent history shows that major attacks happen on days when there are tests of the system, one ventures to guess that it would be a good day to be vigilant.  Especially since the date is 11-9-11.  Just a word of caution to the aware reader.

So there we have it.  The outcome seems written in stone, though the means to the end may fluctuate a bit.  How many hopeful detours there will be remains to be seen.  Mankind, it would seem, is incapable of learning a lesson without a good club over the head.  One hopes this time is different, but one dasn't allow optimism to blind the soul.

The future, for now, is lying in a freezer in Sirte, Libya.  Choose your steps carefully.