Still, I don't personally see that democracy will make a renaissance comeback like They Say by 2040. Because we, the people is daft. Why do we keep proudly voting for the lesser of two evils? Because we're daft. And assassination is out of fashion. Maybe if Robert Kennedy, Jr. gets elected we'll bring it back. 2023 is the 60th anniversary of the Dallas conspiracy theory. Someone has to stop him from talking about vaccines. BTW, what's with his voice, and can an empathetic AI text-to-voice app pave his way to the White House? Ich bin ein Babylon Berliner, sieg heil!
The other thing about Milley's Report, other than the bad news, is the implied Good News. The Report inexplicably drifts to what seems like irrelevancies after establishing that soon you could be shat at a roadblock for bustin' the curfew. Now, we're told that the good news about the Arctic's meltdown is that new oil fields will reveal themselves and fresh wars with the Chinese and Russians can be had.
And then in a brazen nod to the DARPA technologists all around us, the Milley Report offers up Appendix: Weather Control. Out of the blue, we gotta hear about how this is new area of conflict between us and the Chinese, who want to own the weather and how, like with getting ahead of the game on gain-of-function research (speedbaggin fuckin viruses til they sing their poetry to Mama), we, the people have to take to the skies and own the clouds and fix the ozone and block out the sun's rays and everything. The Appendix even crows about how "we" seeded vicious monsoons to wipe out the soft targets manning the rice paddies. Fuckin Ay, we screamed from helicopters. How do they put it? It's worth quoting their mentality at length:
Weather control is a fascinating and worrying potential technology. If used with intentionally nefarious intent, its effects could be catastrophic. It is not exactly climate change in the sense that we define it here, but it brings many of the problems of climate change, with the prospect of these problems arising at the time and place of an adversary's choosing.
Naturally occurring terrestrial and space weather events constitute only one set of challenges to national security. The concept of weaponizing the natural environment is nothing new. Congressional testimony dating back to the early 1950s recommends approval of research and development funding for weather modification experimentation. This in response to concerns Russia was beating us in learning how to control the weather and the potential threat that posed to the United States.' The United States has already demonstrated the potential to modify the weather in support of combat operations through its efforts in Vietnam. United States' cloudseeding techniques used aircraft to disperse lead iodide into the atmosphere above portions of Southeast Asia to create a Super-saturated environment during the Vietnamese monsoon season. The increased precipitation produced significant degradation of Vietnamese logistic capabilities as vehicles, carts, and men remained bogged down on certain roadways and paths soaked by nearly continuous rainfall.
When a reporter asked LBJ why we were in Nam if we're certain to lose, he purportedly pulled down his zipper and pulled out his johnson and said, That's Why. No mention of democracy at all. Mao, reportedly, almost choked on a dumpling when he heard of this demonstration of chaos by the guy who replaced JFK in Washington.
And a while back I wrote a review of Astra Taylor's recent book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Catchy title, sums it up nicely. Basically, she opines that we, the people don't really have a functioning democracy. She splendidly attempts to bring in the Ancients by alluding to Solon's debt relief program for the masses, the cynic Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to get the f*ck out of the way of his view, and by pointing out the dearth of counterculture clowns, like we used to have, who could lay into the self-seriousness of our executive leaders and light 'em up with lampoon juice. (Abbie purportedly once gained entry into the White House, hair shorn for the occasion, to spike Nixon's punch with El Cid, but was caught before he could strike.) Taylor, the Occupy Wall Street veteran, wrote:
The history of democracy is one of oppression, exploitation, demagoguery, dispossession, domination, horror, and abuse. But it is also a history of cooperation, solidarity, deliberation, emancipation, justice, and empathy.
Then some citizen hollered through a megaphone: "Sit down. My turn to demogag." Democracy is indeed messy.
In his 'facilitated' discussion with the dean, Chomsky presses his dismay at the existential crises we, the people of America (and, by imposed extension, the world) refuse to face. He cites polls that suggest that, well, we're collectively daft. He addressed the need for educating people, and cites dread stats:
The Pew Research Institute, which comes out regularly with extensive studies of popular attitudes. The last one a couple of weeks ago gave people 21 choices and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Which ones do you think are the most important? Well, nuclear war was not even listed among the choices considered so remote from concern that we don't even ask people. It's only the most important issue that's ever arisen in human history. Do we need some education? You bet. Climate change was listed. Do you know where it was ranked? At the very bottom. 21st out of 21.
Well, I counted 23, but, yes, climate change is near the bottom and nukes are missing from the list.
Nuclear war used to be well up there during the Reagan years. But now that we're comfortably numb, as Dylan would say. Beware the dark side of the moon. Not all that glitters is gold. And only half of what you see. I recall another book I reviewed a couple of years back now, Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Specifically, in his Cuban Crisis chapters, he reveals that the Event was even edgier than we've been told. It might even be the One Time that the Big Guy Up There actually got off His Ass and pulled a deus ex machina on humanity's behalf, because Ellsberg wrote the missiles we worried about down there weren't the only things to worry about. As worriers and warriors moved toward an invasion of Cuba:
First" the number of Soviet troops'! in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. (Internet Archive)
Boom! had "we" invaded, says Ellsberg. Chomsky is right to be concerned, and we should be right there with our Socrates in questioning the Crazies in Charge and their plans. Democracy, huh?
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