I don’t know about you but the military and national security are no place for a high school level social experiment. All this brought to you by Marxist Dems and Lame RINOS. Pax
The powers that be disagree, unfortunately. This isn't a new conflict, in a 2015 article examining the appropriate level of political engagement for military officers Mackubin Owens notes "In The Soldier and the State, [Huntington] argued that a major source of American civil-military tension is the clash between the dominant liberalism of the United States, which tended toward an antimilitary outlook, and the “conservative” mind of military officers. Part of this conservative mind-set is a focus on military effectiveness, or what Huntington calls the functional imperative, which stresses virtues that differ from those that are favored by liberal society at large. He called these latter virtues the societal imperative."
Huntington wrote that in 1957. I'd argue it applies to all federal bureaucrats as much as it applies to officers since we all swear essentially the same oath to the Constitution. That is the standard by which our functionality should rightly be measured (successful support and defense of the Constitution). Nair and her co-author's tacit admission that they view the Constitution as a challenge explains a more disturbing reason they've abandoned the functional imperative. Not because they prioritize the societal imperative as their DEI advocacy might suggest, but because they oppose fundamental American principles.
The fact that they see the Oath Keepers as violent extremists is extremely revealing. The Constitution is a problem for them; those who take their oath to uphold and defend it are therefore their opponents.
Yes, but liberalism, as demonstrated by the Biden Harris regime is NOT anti military as they promoted war in Ukraine. Many politicians love breaking things and destroying lives. It is how power and control is achieved. Doesn’t matter what party they choose to run in. Conservatism is Reaganism, peace through strength. Liberalism is Teddy Roosevelt talk softly and carry a big stick. Don’t forget that Teddy Roosevelt formed the “Progressive Party” before he ran as GOP. Don’t confuse politicians who are war profiteers with a political philosophy.
More recently I've come to view liberalism as particularly well suited to providing rhetorical justification for graft of all kinds, including war profiteering. Easier to justify intervention on the grounds of protecting and serving the oppressed vs straightforward defense of American interests. They of course equate a liberal world order to serving American interests which justifies limitless intervention both economically and militarily...
The term “classical liberalism” has been hijacked by radicals to mean exactly the opposite of what it once defined. Your explanation is right on target for what liberalism means today. They pervert everything they touch in their quest for control.
Trading with the enemy act of 1933 defined american citizens as the enemy and installed an emergency powers dictatorship. You have lived under it ever since.
I was a nuclear weapons maintainer at Minot AFB during my time in the USAF. This was in the mid 90s thru 2004 when I transferred branches into the Army. I transferred before the incident in which live warheads were accidentally loaded onto a bomber during a weapons test and flown across the country to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. This extreme lapse of security ultimately ended SecDef Rumsfield's career.
Back then, almost all of the fellow maintainers and missile maintainers I worked with were white, with a sprinkling of minorities and women. The biggest obstacle to getting into those AFSCs at that time was the ASVAB aptitude test. Only the highest scorers on that test were permitted to enter those jobs. Hence the mostly white and male individuals working in those jobs.
Even then, there were quite a number of airmen who made it into the job who were screwups who couldn't be trusted around nuclear weapons for incompetence or trouble they got into off-duty. They were usually shuffled into non-critical jobs outside the weapons storage area. It was from this pool of incompetents that the individuals who failed to ensure the correct test weapons were towed to the flight line instead of live warheads came from. I, of course, was not shocked at all when I heard news of the incident since many of us in bull sessions over the years of my time there had discussed just how easy it would be to sneak weapons out of the storage area, and then a team of clowns unintentionally did exactly that.
I doubt in the 20 years since I left my job as a nuclear weapons maintainer the situation has improved much if at all. Especially in the last few years as the Great Wokening and the crisis of competence have infected all institutions, including the military.
I know of an incident where a truck carrying a nuke was abandoned in a snowstorm. When the military noticed later the truck had been unsupervised for some time. This one never made the media but I knew one of the EOD guys that had to go into the truck to ensure that the device was still there and hadn't been tampered with.
I had never heard of it so perhaps it was after I had left the job. Perhaps it was one of the transport containers we used for unassociated warheads. Those were the topic of discussion concerning how easy it would be to smuggle one out since while the security police (can't spell stupid without SP) ostensibly "searched" every vehicle entering and exiting the WSA, they couldn't search something like one of those transport containers and wouldn't know what they were looking for even had they been allowed to.
We routinely loaded them into the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck with a forklift and took them out to a facility at one of the hangars for sandblasting and repainting. The pylon with cruise missiles with live warheads involved in the other incident was visually identical to pylons used for training handling crews with dummy missiles and warheads.
The first part of almost every task involving handling or maintenance operations was a weapons safe status check which involved visually verifying every position on the pylon for the presence of warheads and the status of those warheads; ie safe or armed. This involved crawling around with a crappy inspection mirror on one's back in subzero temperatures trying to angle it just right with a flashlight to see through a tiny inspection window on the bottom of a missile to verify. If one was on the team that unlocked the structure, they were supposed to do this for every pylon and launcher in the storage structure, which could involve up to half a dozen pylon or launchers and possibly up to fifty warheads in total. The temptation to blow this off or skip the most difficult to check positions was very strong, especially the colder it was or if only a single item was being removed. Add to this the fact that many of those working in handling who would have been the ones to unlock the storage structures and then transport the weapons with their handling trailers and tow vehicles were in that job because they weren't considered competent or trusted enough to work on actual weapons, and you had a recipe for disaster.
The funny thing is, many of us junior and mid-level enlisted personnel were quite aware of all of this and where the vulnerabilities were but no one ever asked us or was interested in what we thought precisely because we were so junior compared to the senior NCOs and officers who made the rules and policies. It is a problem with institutional culture and those who desire to be in charge or seek power that they usually lose whatever little common sense or ability to see the logical consequences of their policies by the time they get to the position to exercise any influence over policy and procedures.
I apologize for the lengthy response to your observation; its just that the original article from John Carter of Barsoom (great literary reference BTW) has awakened a lot of memories from a previous part of my life.
I couldn't help reading this with a huge grin on my face.
Not because I wish harm on the US. Not do I wish any nuclear calamity - and since more than 2 000 nuclear weapons have been set off since 1945, the danger of "Nuclear Winter" is about as accurate as the experts' assertion that Chernobyl would be uninhabitable for centuries at the very least.
No, because a bugbear for people in political sciences is our inability to test things in laboratories.
Now, the USA and to a lesser extent the EU, provides such a laboratory in real time.
South Africa provided a similar proof of that concept, not that anyone paid attention.
Quite skeptical of nuclear winter myself, although this scenario is highly dependent on how the weapons are used. If they're exploded in the air, as EMPs for instance, there's no fallout. I suppose there's probably also a question of frequency: a large number of weapons at once is likely to have a much larger climatic effect via dust cooling than the same number over many years.
Notice how mentions of SA in the press drops of consistently trending towards zero by 2000.
Conceivably, hundreds of simultaneous blasts would have some effect, but the material becoming soot must come from something being burnt, and particles tend to cause moist to condense around them, leading to rain/hail.
Most of the energy of a nuclear blast goes up into the air above the target anyway; that was one of the many reasons the russians didn't try to build another Tsar Bomba with a 100mt yield - no point. Most of the blast of the one they did test went out into space.
What I find a scarier prospect is using nuclear weapons for terraforming here on Earth: imagine 100 5mt warheads being emplaced in the Mid-Atlantic ridge to set off dormant volcanoes in order to try and create a new landmass.
But the odds of that is probably along with winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
In 1990 Sadam Hussain's troops set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields on their way out. The fires burned for nine months. The smoke went up and came down a few hundred kilometers to the east. Even the collapse of the World Trade Center didn't generate much smoke. The explosion of Mt Saint Helen in 1980 produced dust visible on the east coast of the US, but no noticeable drop in temperatures. Massive forest fires in Canada reduced visibility on the US east coast, but did little else. Realistically, if Russia nuked the US they would probably attack military installations, not cities. Nuclear winter was a Carl Sagan conjecture, and I think it's been demonstrated to be incorrect.
This brings up a question I have often asked myself: Is culture near 100% contexual, or is there a racial component? Is so, then how important is the racial component? If you ask a black academic why blacks don't make up 12% of nuclear scientists and technicians, they will blame racism. But if you ask why blacks make up 80% of Pro basketball players in the US, they will say that blacks are just better at basketball. If I said that whites are just better at science, there would be hell to pay. We don't bring up this topic because the Left wants to have its cake and eat it too. But a real investigation into these factors concerning competency in different fields vs race would be very enlightening, though highly controversial.
It's considered impolite to point out that Whites have certain genetic advantages, but practically mandatory to highlight the genetic advantages other races possess.
Blacks don't make up 12% of nuclear scientists because they have a mean IQ of 83, vs. 100 for Whites, and that makes a huge difference at the right tail of the bell curve where qualified applicants come from.
Why? Is it an inferior education? Is it racism? Is it cultural? Or is it biological/racial. If any of them are true, and it's likely that they all are, how much does each element contribute?
I started to reply, but each of your points requires a book-length answer. Those books are out there. The statistics are out there. The videos of black student behavior are out there. Seek them out, and with an open mind, draw your own conclusions.
We can either look at empirical reality, with all potential sources of errors when gathering material, or we can imagine some kind of experiment where groups A, B, C ... Ö are placed in identical environs with identical everything, and then come back ca 25 years later and see how each island is developing.
So reality it is then.
Easiest answer to your initial question:
Compare Northern Europe with Central Africa. If there's no racial component, then why couldn't any central african people develop a technologically superior civilisation at any point of time, when the Scandinavian peoples could go from being among the poorest, most technologically backwards regions of Europe in the 1400s, to a military superpower in the 1600s, to one of the most highly developed regions on the planet in the 1900s (outstripping even the USA in many metrics, no mean feat that)?
All the materials, resources, et cetera needed exist in Africa. Contact with older civilisations such as Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek/Greater Hellenic, and Roman was normal over several centuries, so all ideas and thoughts were available to the leadership-caste of any specific people - yet they remained at borderline Neolithic levels for millennia.
Only among the Europeans, especially to the West and North, was technology continously improved upon, and ideas could be more-or-less freely debated (despite the best efforts of the Catholic church) and distributed.
It does not hold water to me, to argue that is was random chance that enabled our ancestors to pave the way for us the way they did - not when the same or similar enough sets of circumstances were present in so many other places.
Therefore, assuming a racial component, an inheritable one at that, is the most reasonable assumption. The right race(s) in conjunction with the right circumstances yields one set of results: change either, and the result(s) must also change.
One might also point to the fact that the Africans never settled Madagascar, despite it being right on their doorstep for tens of thousands of years, and that the moment Europeans withdrew the infrastructure we built fell into nonfunctional disrepair.
Many other behavioral factors - their natural mating behavior, extremely high time preference, and so on - lead me to think that they are a completely distinct species from Eurasian Homo sapiens.
People regularly mistake my lab/border collie mix for a wolfhound even though she is about 1/3 the size. I suppose if you mated a wolfhound with a chihuahua you could produce something like her but I am not sure how you would do that.
That island experiment exists. On one side is the Dominican Republic, populated by Hispanics, and on the other side is Haiti, populated by the descendants of African slaves who overthrew and murdered their French slave masters. A wall divides the two countries. The Dominicans are relatively prosperous. Haiti is a shit hole.
That's a good argument, however there are also counter-arguments. The first is that civilizational achievement is temporal. At different times, different peoples advanced to the pinnacle of global civilization. At one time, your ancestors and mine where considered backwards barbarians, while others who in the past dominated technologically and culturally are considered somewhat backward. The only exception to this being Sub-Saharan Africa, which never acheived much of anything. I don't think the average intelligence of Europeans vs. Asians varied wildly, even though they both have had periods of cultural and technological dominance. Second is that culture (and technological achievement is highly culturally dependent) is contextual. Location and limited resources were a factor that pushed nations like Britain and Japan into early industrialization in their regions. Culture is essentially a social adaptaion to your particular environment. Jarod Diamond is probably the best known proponent of this idea (Guns, Gold, and Steel). The third is that certain factors must be in place culturally. Nails Ferguson expounds on this in Civilization. So, I am not arguing that race/biology is not a factor. I'm saying that it's not the only factor, and may not even be the the most important factor. The most highly educated ethnic group in the US, is surprisingly, Nigerians. What makes them successful in the West vs. African Americans are the same characteristics that benefit Asians in the US, namely the belief in the importance of education and a strong sense of responsibility to the family.
All very true points. What I will quibble about is the one about nigerians and achievement. The reason virtually all migrant groups coming legally into the USA do well, is because the legal way includes very heavy vetting of applicants, giving a very skewed sample.
Look instead at Germany or Sweden or the UK, where the conditions for residency and citizenship for ca 20-25 years now have been "bothered to cross the border and claim asylum".
Unemployment among non-white migrants to Sweden is about 20%, and that's using the heavily doctored data (attending a 1 hour/week course in Swedish means you "count as" employed f.e.). The real figure is well beyond 50%, bordering on 80% for somali men and 100% for somali women.
Then there's how you measure "highly educated" - PhDs or years in school total, or other? Sweden, as does most EU nations, uses "years spent in education" which means that an afghan man with 13 years of Quoran-studies at a Madrasa "counts as" highly educated.
As I don't know how the US defines the terms used in data collection/presentations, I can't comment on those.
The question of where asylum seekers fall on the intelligence and achievement scale is what I would quibble about. Those in the US who seek social handouts or asylum are usually at the bottom of this scale. The IQ 140 Somalian will be coming to Sweden to get into University. The IQ 80 Somalian will go to take unfair advantage of the system. The statistics on Nigerians in the US is based on percentage of advanced degrees, i.e., Masters and Ph.Ds..
Nuclear winter is supposed to come from soot from cities burning at high temperature. The high temperature makes the soot rise into stratosphere, where there is no rain to wash out the soot, so the soot circles the globe for a long time and blocks out the Sun. To make nuclear winter, you need burning cities, and lots of them.
That's the hypothesis sold as fact, yes. The largest burning of cities at the same time, in the same general area, ought to be German cities and related targets during WW2. If we want any semblance of an actual empirical data-point giving us an inkling of what might happen, it'd be weather-data from that (or trying to find a year with severe enough volcanic eruptions, of the right kind for ash clouds, around the planet).
As far as I'm aware, the burning of Germany's major cities didn't affect climate and weather either way.
I'd say the hypothesis of nuclear winter was launched to add another layer of hesitation and cause for pause to decision-makers during the Cold War (not blaming anyone for trying to do so either, if that should turn out to be the case).
Reason I'm skeptical is all the other sure thing, will happen, guaranteed by scientists, things that have turned out to be less-than-true, to put it charitably:
Potable water would run out before 2000.
Oil would run out before 2000.
All rainforests would be clear-cut before 2000.
A new Ice Age would engulf us before 2000.
Acid rain would make it impossible to go outside unprotected before 2000.
And so on. Each time, scientists gladly stated their pet hypotheses as factual truths, based on no evidence but "it stands to reason" and "in the future we'll be able to".
It's the scientific opposite of prophesying earthquakes in Japan; those will happen and so often your prophecy is useless. Proving nuclear winter true would mean global thermonuclear war needs to happen first, making the hypothesis pointless as well.
Remember the warnings that the world post-2000 would be so overpopulated there'd be no room to grow food?
Or that the Gulf Stream would stop/reverse prior to 2000?
Or killer diseases?
Or WW3?
Or a total breakdown of social order making Mad Max look like a documentary?
All before 2000. Something about big round numbers make us go soft in the head, I think. Possibly because we really cannot understand large numbers/amounts of anything. Ten matches? No problem. 100? Maybe, with difficulty - your brain will automatically try to see one unit of '100' instead; uses less "bandwith". 1 000 000? Fuggedaboudit.
Large vulcanic eruptions are certainly known to cool the planet. See the list at the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer So the general link between soot or other blocking matter and cooling is real. The question is how much soot do you need to obtain the effect. Clearly not as much as you get by occationally burning this or that portion of German cities.
> Oil would run out before 2000.
OG prediction by Hubbert was that worldwide oil production would peak around 2000-2010. Which it did - conventional oil production peaked around 2010 if I recall correctly. What Hubbert didn't predict, because he couldn't, was tight oil extraction.
The prediction (not specifically Hubbert but a general consensus-according-to-media) was oil running out, as in no more oil. As if there was a huge slurpee of oil in the ground and we were slurping up the last dregs of it.
Truth is, how much there is, is not /known/ but speculated about based on a great number of factors. And how much there is, is of course not the same as how much is reachable, and that in turn isn't the same as what is commercially viable at a given moment.
(Then there's the old russian hypothesis about oil too, but so far evidence seems to be lacking.)
That being said, not using it up just because it is profitable money-wise would probably be a good thing overall.
I am aware that volcanoes can affect things - but note that the linked article also mentions the Solar minimum the series of eruptions coincides with.
I'm afraid abiotic oil is a pipe dream. All oil plays discovered so far have had biotic signitures. You can check this on The Oil Drum archives.
There are abiotic processes that do create methane and other hydrocarbons (Mars and Titan), but the hydrocarbons foundin Earth's crust have biotic signatures across the board. Earth will make more, but not at the rate that we are using them.
You are correct. The media did do this: "The prediction (not specifically Hubbert but a general consensus-according-to-media) was oil running out, as in no more oil."
But it was never based on the science. There were numerous disingenuous media reports that blew things out of proportion, but the biggest one was a particularly sloppy read of the The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. LtG was the first computer simulation how the industrial revolution would play out and it had 'resources' peaking in 2025 to 2030, but the chart in the report was from 1900 to 2100 and quite a few people who should have known better put that before 2000. LtG remains one of the best long term forecasts ever done, see their 30 and 40 year recaps. The Club of Rome, in conrast, went on to produce a bunch of political garbage that is strikingly similar to today's WEF.
The Club of Rome is just the usual pack of unimaginative Malthusians, incapable of conceptualizing the effects that technological change have on resource exploration, utilization, and obsolescence.
Their MO is always the same. They start from the desire for top-down, centralized technocracy, and then work backwards from there to develop whatever justifications they can come up with.
I thought it was supposed to come from trying to dig ICBMs out of their silos in a conjectured first strike. That would certainly put a lot of (radioactive) dirt in the air. Potentially lethal fallout but also the scenario for nuclear winter.
Have you heard the theory that nuclear bombs don’t actually exist, and the bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945 were just (just!) very very powerful fire bombs that did very similar damage to the bombs dropped in places like Cologne and Dresden. There is a very sober German man who gives a long talk on YouTube about this - he’s convincing to a lay person like me.
If one believes that there were no moon landings as I do, it doesn’t seem such a huge leap to consider that they are lying about nuclear bombs too, another way to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars (and pounds and euros) lining the pockets of those in the industrial military complex. It’s another way, too, to keep us all scared and clamouring for our money to be spent on ‘deterrents’. And of course, just like the moon landings and ‘Covid’ the elites of the world are all in on it because…lots and lots of money for them, lots and lots of frightened people keeping them in power. Anyways, food for thought…
There's some irony in the fact that the National Nuclear Security Administration are writing tedious reports warning against the danger of employing white people at nuclear plants in case they're Nazis, while our pet Nazis in Ukraine continue to try their best to damage nuclear plants in Zaporozhia and Kursk
Since all - ALL - current social pathologies are based on empathy voters, voting empathetically for “Oh, that poor___” illegal alien, fatherless thug, incarcerated violent criminal, post-partum child murderer, crappy teacher “doing her best…” to say nothing of below-replacement fertility of the only culture acknowledging human rights …. The only solution is to acknowledge and then act on the fact that we can have an educated, safe, secure and prosperous culture… OR … women’s suffrage. And repeal 19A.
Well, here's my proposed Constitutional Amendment:
1) The right of a woman to obtain an abortion shall not be infringed. This right is absolute, and no Federal, State, or local laws may restrict the right to abortion. No consideration by other parties is permitted to interfere with this right.
2) No woman may hold public office, whether elected or appointed.
3) The 19th Amendment to the Constitution is repealed.
If the people who ratified the 19th Amendment were alive to see the results of their actions, they might go for it. Today, anyone who actually proposed it would be crucified.
We're finally here: the decades-long march of post-modern, Marxist vacuous sewage has now attained its pinnacle achievement: infesting the very systems that maintain - and threaten - the very existence of Earth itself. From Oppenheimer to Dr. Strangelove to Yas Queen Annihilation in one living lifetime. God help us.
"The one thing all of these groups have in common is that they are overwhelmingly White. Thus, the traditional image of an American – a White person who speaks unaccented English – no longer defaults to ‘safe’, but becomes immediately suspicious. Because White people cannot be relied upon to police other White people, a new political zampolit of DEI officers, principally composed of non-Whites, must be imposed at every level in order to continuously scrutinize White employees for red flags that might indicate they are being radicalized by online information terrorists..."
Yeah, I was thinking, right at the first section, that what they're doing is switching out "Homos are a security risk" for "White people are a security risk." The security set-up is no longer "evil oppression" because now it perfectly legitimately targets the "real bad guys," and the theatre kids are now wearing the uniforms.
This seems to be a widespread trope on the Left (or what was the Left and is now the Woke): what was denounced as "oppression" etc. as if it was bad in itself, is now revealed to be OK once the targets are readjusted. Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" might be the key text here. Bad thinking needs to be repressed so that good thinking achieves "true freedom."
(Marcuse's PhD was directed by Heidegger, but I'm sure Heidegger is a sure guide to the solution to all modernity's problems).
I’ll care about what the anti-white (and anti-male) crowd thinks & feels when they demonstrate the courage of their convictions by removing from their lives all creations of white men:
Refrigeration
Mechanical transport - planes, trains, automobiles, steel-hulled ships, steam-powered ships
Beyond-aural-range voice communication
Beyond-visual-range image communication
Air Conditioning
Phosphate fertilizers (the first “green revolution”)
Electronics - computing & communications
Photography
Post-iron-age metallurgy
Literacy
Modern medicine
Water purification
Etc.
Until then these people are nothing more than ignorant parasites on the body politic.
Heck, we even invented the morals we let these people use to judge us.
HR policy is the ultimate means of disrupting jnstitutions. It is therapeutic Maoism that wrecks everything. Perfect for the apex predators who fill the top level networks that form the top of the regime, but a burden or danger to everyone else. Obama clearly used HR policy to purge conservatives from the most senior ranks of the military.
Part of me suspects that this nyclear HR madness may all have begun as a means of prepping us for nuclear themed psyops, that it is an opp prepared and managed by the intelligence services. But it is obviously much, much, more than that. The regime has deranged itself by sponsoring chaos.
This Nair woman doesn't strike me as an operator. More an opportunist. She sees the direction the regime has moved and seeks to advance her career; the regime, caught in its own logic, must then move in this direction.
Yes, she is merely an opportunist but what horrifies me is that the regime incentivises garbage thinking in even the most sensitive areas, where sanity alone demands clarity, rigour and seriousness. The regime's priorities reveal why its survival is a risk to life on earth.
In 1978, TSR hobbies published GAMMA WORLD, a post-apocalyptic TTRPG set in a future aftermath of a cataclysmic war. The intro to that game, setting the scenario for the players, is now taking on highly ominous plausibility, gnarly mutant mind-powers excepted.
The introduction:
"Man, from Australopithecus africanus and homo erectus erectus to homo sapiens sapiens,
may have existed on earth for hundreds of
thousands, perhaps millions of years. During this time, one skill,
one particular talent has set him apart from every other creature --
the ability to conceive and create tools. Indeed, man has
been defined as the "tool-making animal".
From chipped rocks && polished bones to neutron bombs and
computers, man has constantly been redesigning, improving, and
refining his tools to meet his ever-changing needs. Some have been
toys for children. Some have improved his life style. Others have
been necessary for his survival. A few have nearly caused his extinction.
Early in the 24th century, mankind's existence was unparalled.
The rape of the earth's beauty and resources in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries had been halted and reversed, due to man's
tools. Yet, in spite of these tools (or perhaps because of them),
the idyllic life of the 24th century came to an abrupt end.
Having conquered the rigors of simple survival, man was able to
turn his energies to more esoteric considerations -- theology,
political ideology, social and cultural identification, and development
of self-awareness. These pursuits were not harmful in themselves,
but it soon became fashionable to identify with and support
various leagues, organizations, and so-called "special interest groups."
With the passage of time, nearly all the groups became
polarized, each expressing and impressing its views to a degree
that bordered on fanaticism.
Demonstrations, protests, and debates became the order of the day.
Gradually enthusiasm changed to mania, then to hatred of those who held opposing views.
Outbreaks of violence became more frequent, and terrorists
spread their views with bombs && guns.
Reconstruction of the events from 2309 to 2322 has been difficult
due to the lack of intact records, but historians now generally mark
September 16, 2309 as the beginning of the period now commonly
known as the Shadow Years. On that day, some 5000 members
of the League of Free Men were staging a demonstration for the
purpose of promoting their concepts of a united world government.
At the height of their demonstration, a small neutron bomb was
detonated in their midst, killing most of the demonstrators. Rumors
held opponents of world government, a group known as the Autonomists,
responsible for the terrorism, but no guilt was ever proved.
The League of Free Men made no formal accusations, but three
months later, on December 23, several hundred known Autonomists
were assassinated in separate locations. In addition, the three
main offices of the Autonomists were the targets of the release of a
newly developed nerve gas. The nerve gas was responsible for approximately
3000 deaths, the majority of which were Autonomist
office personnel, but many of those killed had no connection with
the Autonomists. Blame for the killings was placed on the League,
but there was no proof. The failure of official investigations to
convict the perpetrators of these mass murders created a wave of
vigilante actions; retaliation followed retaliation. The problem was
compounded as the terrorism spread across national boundaries,
engulfing the world with bloodshed.
As the vigilante actions continued, various governments
attempted to prohibit and disband suspected terrorist organizations
, but these attempts only drove the groups further underground
and polarized their supporters. This led many countries to
declare martial law in a last desperate effort to control their populations,
but the warring groups had grown too powerful. They had too
many resources (both economic and political) upon which to draw.
Although there are no records to substantiate the accusations that
governments gave covert aid to certain groups in order to change
the balance of power, circumstantial evidence seems to indicate
that this did occur.
In the final months of the Shadow Years, a new organization
calling itself The Apocalypse, announced its xistence w/ the
now famous Ultimatum:
Peoples of the world -- you appear bent upon the
destruction of a civilization that has taken centuries to
build, and the extinction of life on earth.
If that is your will ... so be it!
We, the Apocalypse, demand an immed. cessation
of this insane violence, or we will end it for you
... with a force you cannot conceive.
We have the power!
The choice is yours!
The exact identity of The Apocalypse was, and still is, unknown.
Some have theorized that the group was composed of scientists.
Some believe it was a special military group. Whatever its
constituency, few believed the ultimatum when it was issued, and
the fighting continued. Five days later, on April 17, at exactly 1200
GMT, the capital city of every nation in the world was turned into a
crater of radioactive slag.
The Apocalypse spoke to the world one more time:
People of the world, you have been warned.
We have the power!
The choice is yours!
Again, due to the lack of records, it is not known how the location of
The Apocalypse base was discovered, or who initiated the attack.
Some evidence indicates the action was a joint effort by nearly all
the surviving terrorist factions and vigilante groups -- united for
the first time in the Shadow Years. In the end, though, a massive
attack was mounted against The Apocalypse base. In TURN, The Apocalypse
retaliated with a fury never b4 witnessed on the face of the Earth.
Oceans boiled,
continents buckled,
the skies blazed with the light of unbelievable energies.
Suddenly it was all over.
The civilization of man had been slashed, burned, crushed, and
scattered to the four winds. Whether The Apocalypse had intended
to completely destroy all life on the planet and had failed, or if they
simply had not enough power, is debatable. Some scholars
contend that The Apocalypse voluntarily stopped their promised
destruction when they witnessed the horror they had unleashed
and then destroyed themselves. At this time, and even now, the
question is moot.
What did matter was that man survived. The Black Years that
followed the Shadow Years were spent struggling to survive in a
suddenly savage and vastly changed world. The process was a
painful one, filled with nearly as much terror and violence as the Shadow Years.
The devastation wrought by The Apocalypse had changed
the very fabric of life on earth. The weapons and devices they used had
completely obliterated some forms of life. Others were mutated to
the point where they could not be recognized as what they had once
been. Man was not immune to these changes.
Through it all, the death, the pain, the horror, and facing the
prospect of an unknown future, man searched for his lost knowledge,
and struggled to regain his tools . . . to rebuild a self-destroyed civilization.
During the Black Years, those who held the tools, held the power . . ."
I think the 4 decades from the Shadow Years Black Years is the pre-cataclysmic build up. It's the future; things go faster. Consider: 1960 to present. 64 years. 4 decades wasn't a bad guess, not when you were alive in the 1970s and saw firsthand the foaming-at-the-mouth radicals. I was alive in those days; I recall my father carrying a loaded SMG he brought back from Viet Nam when we went camping. He was not going to see us join the police blotter statistics, victims of radicals or bikers or nutters. BTW, prior to 1968, one could bring back weapons like that legally.
Later, in the game's premise, it was a long time for nascent stone-age tech to regain a footing in the ruins of fantastically high tech world. It would likely take 4 centuries for a civilization to restart.
Besides the "Enola Gay", the two bombs dropped on Japan: "Fat Man" and "Little Boy", were named after two criminal "fey" characters from the 1941 film noir The Maltese Falcon, while a third antagonist Joel Cairo (played by Peter Lorre) is openly homo in the book, if not the film. The bomb has been a sick gay joke from the very beginning.
"Gunsel" is the term, I think Bogart uses it in the film when he's hired on, and he deploys it to rattle one of the guys who are sent to intimidate him in the first place. I think Huston definitely knew he was utilizing a sly subtext where "fey" characters were inherently unstable and prone to low-impulse control (which, to be honest, matches my real-life experience). Incidentally the "homophobia" in Chandler's writing would make a current first year literature student cower in a corner with an emotional support animal.
I mean, there *is* a good reason why homosexuals were singled out by intelligence agencies and targeted for blackmail operations, and history (the Cambridge Five, etc.) gave good reasons to do so.
Of course that's stupid too. But I don't think they can inject enough diverse slop into the system without imploding. Sam Brinton is a great example for this. On paper, he was the best they could have. And I still knew right at the moment I saw him, that there is a meltdown on schedule.
Their people are almost completely unsuited making a system like this work and it maybe just be a cope from me, but Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov in the end had belief in the world. So I still have some belief left on the man(or women) who get's to be there, to make the right decision.
It's easier to have faith in such men if they are being selected on the basis of their ability. And when it comes to nuclear reactors and strategic weapons, faith is not the thing I want to rely on.
Obviously. And there are some concerning stories from the soviet times when people as simple as the Ceasescu pair reached unprecedented heights. And even in such a repressive environment, the people whose job it was, managed to cut off some of their idiocy.
As things stand, it is still required to have some relevant skills to the job. If there is any similarity to my experiences, these are highly selective programs...the quality ensurances are still there as the teachers themselves also know the risks. So you'll be hardpresses to find enough diverse candidates and even they will be under Conquests first law of politics. ("Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.")
It appears the Trojan horse of DEI operatives and political officers is the clear and present danger.
Shooting an unarmed woman because she was white and scaring the black police officer is not a reason for DEI operating systems to be imposed and forced on to all.
They are the group prone to terrorism .
Look at how hooked they are on Scientism and Lysenkoism .
Denying science with unfalsifiable hypotheses.
Implementing whole new bureaucracies filled with the same thought types.
Curiously that woman’s name anagrams as Ashen Rain. Quite appropriate for nuclear fallout!
The simulation is fucking with us.
lol, yes-yes, they are
I don’t know about you but the military and national security are no place for a high school level social experiment. All this brought to you by Marxist Dems and Lame RINOS. Pax
The powers that be disagree, unfortunately. This isn't a new conflict, in a 2015 article examining the appropriate level of political engagement for military officers Mackubin Owens notes "In The Soldier and the State, [Huntington] argued that a major source of American civil-military tension is the clash between the dominant liberalism of the United States, which tended toward an antimilitary outlook, and the “conservative” mind of military officers. Part of this conservative mind-set is a focus on military effectiveness, or what Huntington calls the functional imperative, which stresses virtues that differ from those that are favored by liberal society at large. He called these latter virtues the societal imperative."
Huntington wrote that in 1957. I'd argue it applies to all federal bureaucrats as much as it applies to officers since we all swear essentially the same oath to the Constitution. That is the standard by which our functionality should rightly be measured (successful support and defense of the Constitution). Nair and her co-author's tacit admission that they view the Constitution as a challenge explains a more disturbing reason they've abandoned the functional imperative. Not because they prioritize the societal imperative as their DEI advocacy might suggest, but because they oppose fundamental American principles.
That's exactly it.
The fact that they see the Oath Keepers as violent extremists is extremely revealing. The Constitution is a problem for them; those who take their oath to uphold and defend it are therefore their opponents.
Beat me to it.
Thanks for the elaboration. Seems like we’re at an inflection point. No bueno. Pax
Yes, but liberalism, as demonstrated by the Biden Harris regime is NOT anti military as they promoted war in Ukraine. Many politicians love breaking things and destroying lives. It is how power and control is achieved. Doesn’t matter what party they choose to run in. Conservatism is Reaganism, peace through strength. Liberalism is Teddy Roosevelt talk softly and carry a big stick. Don’t forget that Teddy Roosevelt formed the “Progressive Party” before he ran as GOP. Don’t confuse politicians who are war profiteers with a political philosophy.
More recently I've come to view liberalism as particularly well suited to providing rhetorical justification for graft of all kinds, including war profiteering. Easier to justify intervention on the grounds of protecting and serving the oppressed vs straightforward defense of American interests. They of course equate a liberal world order to serving American interests which justifies limitless intervention both economically and militarily...
The term “classical liberalism” has been hijacked by radicals to mean exactly the opposite of what it once defined. Your explanation is right on target for what liberalism means today. They pervert everything they touch in their quest for control.
The worst thing about all this is that it can get worse.
These insane zealots are so in love with diversity that any diverse opinion is cause to jettison the Constitution.
As bad as things get, they can always get worse. And, as a rule, they do.
Like.this:https://x.com/DavidPoulden/status/1830190167161753796?
The cop in the background though 😂
The CRA jettisoned the Constitution in 1964
Trading with the enemy act of 1933 defined american citizens as the enemy and installed an emergency powers dictatorship. You have lived under it ever since.
I was a nuclear weapons maintainer at Minot AFB during my time in the USAF. This was in the mid 90s thru 2004 when I transferred branches into the Army. I transferred before the incident in which live warheads were accidentally loaded onto a bomber during a weapons test and flown across the country to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. This extreme lapse of security ultimately ended SecDef Rumsfield's career.
Back then, almost all of the fellow maintainers and missile maintainers I worked with were white, with a sprinkling of minorities and women. The biggest obstacle to getting into those AFSCs at that time was the ASVAB aptitude test. Only the highest scorers on that test were permitted to enter those jobs. Hence the mostly white and male individuals working in those jobs.
Even then, there were quite a number of airmen who made it into the job who were screwups who couldn't be trusted around nuclear weapons for incompetence or trouble they got into off-duty. They were usually shuffled into non-critical jobs outside the weapons storage area. It was from this pool of incompetents that the individuals who failed to ensure the correct test weapons were towed to the flight line instead of live warheads came from. I, of course, was not shocked at all when I heard news of the incident since many of us in bull sessions over the years of my time there had discussed just how easy it would be to sneak weapons out of the storage area, and then a team of clowns unintentionally did exactly that.
I doubt in the 20 years since I left my job as a nuclear weapons maintainer the situation has improved much if at all. Especially in the last few years as the Great Wokening and the crisis of competence have infected all institutions, including the military.
I know of an incident where a truck carrying a nuke was abandoned in a snowstorm. When the military noticed later the truck had been unsupervised for some time. This one never made the media but I knew one of the EOD guys that had to go into the truck to ensure that the device was still there and hadn't been tampered with.
That is interesting.
I had never heard of it so perhaps it was after I had left the job. Perhaps it was one of the transport containers we used for unassociated warheads. Those were the topic of discussion concerning how easy it would be to smuggle one out since while the security police (can't spell stupid without SP) ostensibly "searched" every vehicle entering and exiting the WSA, they couldn't search something like one of those transport containers and wouldn't know what they were looking for even had they been allowed to.
We routinely loaded them into the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck with a forklift and took them out to a facility at one of the hangars for sandblasting and repainting. The pylon with cruise missiles with live warheads involved in the other incident was visually identical to pylons used for training handling crews with dummy missiles and warheads.
The first part of almost every task involving handling or maintenance operations was a weapons safe status check which involved visually verifying every position on the pylon for the presence of warheads and the status of those warheads; ie safe or armed. This involved crawling around with a crappy inspection mirror on one's back in subzero temperatures trying to angle it just right with a flashlight to see through a tiny inspection window on the bottom of a missile to verify. If one was on the team that unlocked the structure, they were supposed to do this for every pylon and launcher in the storage structure, which could involve up to half a dozen pylon or launchers and possibly up to fifty warheads in total. The temptation to blow this off or skip the most difficult to check positions was very strong, especially the colder it was or if only a single item was being removed. Add to this the fact that many of those working in handling who would have been the ones to unlock the storage structures and then transport the weapons with their handling trailers and tow vehicles were in that job because they weren't considered competent or trusted enough to work on actual weapons, and you had a recipe for disaster.
The funny thing is, many of us junior and mid-level enlisted personnel were quite aware of all of this and where the vulnerabilities were but no one ever asked us or was interested in what we thought precisely because we were so junior compared to the senior NCOs and officers who made the rules and policies. It is a problem with institutional culture and those who desire to be in charge or seek power that they usually lose whatever little common sense or ability to see the logical consequences of their policies by the time they get to the position to exercise any influence over policy and procedures.
I apologize for the lengthy response to your observation; its just that the original article from John Carter of Barsoom (great literary reference BTW) has awakened a lot of memories from a previous part of my life.
I couldn't help reading this with a huge grin on my face.
Not because I wish harm on the US. Not do I wish any nuclear calamity - and since more than 2 000 nuclear weapons have been set off since 1945, the danger of "Nuclear Winter" is about as accurate as the experts' assertion that Chernobyl would be uninhabitable for centuries at the very least.
No, because a bugbear for people in political sciences is our inability to test things in laboratories.
Now, the USA and to a lesser extent the EU, provides such a laboratory in real time.
And so far, the result is an overwhelming:
Keep it whites only, or it turns to crap.
South Africa provided a similar proof of that concept, not that anyone paid attention.
Quite skeptical of nuclear winter myself, although this scenario is highly dependent on how the weapons are used. If they're exploded in the air, as EMPs for instance, there's no fallout. I suppose there's probably also a question of frequency: a large number of weapons at once is likely to have a much larger climatic effect via dust cooling than the same number over many years.
Notice how mentions of SA in the press drops of consistently trending towards zero by 2000.
Conceivably, hundreds of simultaneous blasts would have some effect, but the material becoming soot must come from something being burnt, and particles tend to cause moist to condense around them, leading to rain/hail.
Most of the energy of a nuclear blast goes up into the air above the target anyway; that was one of the many reasons the russians didn't try to build another Tsar Bomba with a 100mt yield - no point. Most of the blast of the one they did test went out into space.
What I find a scarier prospect is using nuclear weapons for terraforming here on Earth: imagine 100 5mt warheads being emplaced in the Mid-Atlantic ridge to set off dormant volcanoes in order to try and create a new landmass.
But the odds of that is probably along with winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
In 1990 Sadam Hussain's troops set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields on their way out. The fires burned for nine months. The smoke went up and came down a few hundred kilometers to the east. Even the collapse of the World Trade Center didn't generate much smoke. The explosion of Mt Saint Helen in 1980 produced dust visible on the east coast of the US, but no noticeable drop in temperatures. Massive forest fires in Canada reduced visibility on the US east coast, but did little else. Realistically, if Russia nuked the US they would probably attack military installations, not cities. Nuclear winter was a Carl Sagan conjecture, and I think it's been demonstrated to be incorrect.
Carl Sagan was wrong about a lot.
What else was he wrong about, out of curiosity?
Atheism.
This brings up a question I have often asked myself: Is culture near 100% contexual, or is there a racial component? Is so, then how important is the racial component? If you ask a black academic why blacks don't make up 12% of nuclear scientists and technicians, they will blame racism. But if you ask why blacks make up 80% of Pro basketball players in the US, they will say that blacks are just better at basketball. If I said that whites are just better at science, there would be hell to pay. We don't bring up this topic because the Left wants to have its cake and eat it too. But a real investigation into these factors concerning competency in different fields vs race would be very enlightening, though highly controversial.
It's considered impolite to point out that Whites have certain genetic advantages, but practically mandatory to highlight the genetic advantages other races possess.
Blacks don't make up 12% of nuclear scientists because they have a mean IQ of 83, vs. 100 for Whites, and that makes a huge difference at the right tail of the bell curve where qualified applicants come from.
Why? Is it an inferior education? Is it racism? Is it cultural? Or is it biological/racial. If any of them are true, and it's likely that they all are, how much does each element contribute?
I started to reply, but each of your points requires a book-length answer. Those books are out there. The statistics are out there. The videos of black student behavior are out there. Seek them out, and with an open mind, draw your own conclusions.
Believe me, I've pondered this question since I read "The BellCurve" by Charles Murray.
We can either look at empirical reality, with all potential sources of errors when gathering material, or we can imagine some kind of experiment where groups A, B, C ... Ö are placed in identical environs with identical everything, and then come back ca 25 years later and see how each island is developing.
So reality it is then.
Easiest answer to your initial question:
Compare Northern Europe with Central Africa. If there's no racial component, then why couldn't any central african people develop a technologically superior civilisation at any point of time, when the Scandinavian peoples could go from being among the poorest, most technologically backwards regions of Europe in the 1400s, to a military superpower in the 1600s, to one of the most highly developed regions on the planet in the 1900s (outstripping even the USA in many metrics, no mean feat that)?
All the materials, resources, et cetera needed exist in Africa. Contact with older civilisations such as Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek/Greater Hellenic, and Roman was normal over several centuries, so all ideas and thoughts were available to the leadership-caste of any specific people - yet they remained at borderline Neolithic levels for millennia.
Only among the Europeans, especially to the West and North, was technology continously improved upon, and ideas could be more-or-less freely debated (despite the best efforts of the Catholic church) and distributed.
It does not hold water to me, to argue that is was random chance that enabled our ancestors to pave the way for us the way they did - not when the same or similar enough sets of circumstances were present in so many other places.
Therefore, assuming a racial component, an inheritable one at that, is the most reasonable assumption. The right race(s) in conjunction with the right circumstances yields one set of results: change either, and the result(s) must also change.
One might also point to the fact that the Africans never settled Madagascar, despite it being right on their doorstep for tens of thousands of years, and that the moment Europeans withdrew the infrastructure we built fell into nonfunctional disrepair.
Many other behavioral factors - their natural mating behavior, extremely high time preference, and so on - lead me to think that they are a completely distinct species from Eurasian Homo sapiens.
There are dog breeds that have less genetic diversity than what exists between europeans and africans.
I don’t know about you but i’d never mistake a golden retriever for a pitbull.
People regularly mistake my lab/border collie mix for a wolfhound even though she is about 1/3 the size. I suppose if you mated a wolfhound with a chihuahua you could produce something like her but I am not sure how you would do that.
Latin america joke
I would. I'm not a dog person. I'm partial to cats. Excuse me, but I think this lion wants me to pet him.
That island experiment exists. On one side is the Dominican Republic, populated by Hispanics, and on the other side is Haiti, populated by the descendants of African slaves who overthrew and murdered their French slave masters. A wall divides the two countries. The Dominicans are relatively prosperous. Haiti is a shit hole.
That's a good argument, however there are also counter-arguments. The first is that civilizational achievement is temporal. At different times, different peoples advanced to the pinnacle of global civilization. At one time, your ancestors and mine where considered backwards barbarians, while others who in the past dominated technologically and culturally are considered somewhat backward. The only exception to this being Sub-Saharan Africa, which never acheived much of anything. I don't think the average intelligence of Europeans vs. Asians varied wildly, even though they both have had periods of cultural and technological dominance. Second is that culture (and technological achievement is highly culturally dependent) is contextual. Location and limited resources were a factor that pushed nations like Britain and Japan into early industrialization in their regions. Culture is essentially a social adaptaion to your particular environment. Jarod Diamond is probably the best known proponent of this idea (Guns, Gold, and Steel). The third is that certain factors must be in place culturally. Nails Ferguson expounds on this in Civilization. So, I am not arguing that race/biology is not a factor. I'm saying that it's not the only factor, and may not even be the the most important factor. The most highly educated ethnic group in the US, is surprisingly, Nigerians. What makes them successful in the West vs. African Americans are the same characteristics that benefit Asians in the US, namely the belief in the importance of education and a strong sense of responsibility to the family.
All very true points. What I will quibble about is the one about nigerians and achievement. The reason virtually all migrant groups coming legally into the USA do well, is because the legal way includes very heavy vetting of applicants, giving a very skewed sample.
Look instead at Germany or Sweden or the UK, where the conditions for residency and citizenship for ca 20-25 years now have been "bothered to cross the border and claim asylum".
Unemployment among non-white migrants to Sweden is about 20%, and that's using the heavily doctored data (attending a 1 hour/week course in Swedish means you "count as" employed f.e.). The real figure is well beyond 50%, bordering on 80% for somali men and 100% for somali women.
Then there's how you measure "highly educated" - PhDs or years in school total, or other? Sweden, as does most EU nations, uses "years spent in education" which means that an afghan man with 13 years of Quoran-studies at a Madrasa "counts as" highly educated.
As I don't know how the US defines the terms used in data collection/presentations, I can't comment on those.
The question of where asylum seekers fall on the intelligence and achievement scale is what I would quibble about. Those in the US who seek social handouts or asylum are usually at the bottom of this scale. The IQ 140 Somalian will be coming to Sweden to get into University. The IQ 80 Somalian will go to take unfair advantage of the system. The statistics on Nigerians in the US is based on percentage of advanced degrees, i.e., Masters and Ph.Ds..
Afghans, Arabs, Turks and Persians are all white people.
Ha, no. None of them are.
Wat
White-ish.
Nuclear winter is supposed to come from soot from cities burning at high temperature. The high temperature makes the soot rise into stratosphere, where there is no rain to wash out the soot, so the soot circles the globe for a long time and blocks out the Sun. To make nuclear winter, you need burning cities, and lots of them.
That's the hypothesis sold as fact, yes. The largest burning of cities at the same time, in the same general area, ought to be German cities and related targets during WW2. If we want any semblance of an actual empirical data-point giving us an inkling of what might happen, it'd be weather-data from that (or trying to find a year with severe enough volcanic eruptions, of the right kind for ash clouds, around the planet).
As far as I'm aware, the burning of Germany's major cities didn't affect climate and weather either way.
I'd say the hypothesis of nuclear winter was launched to add another layer of hesitation and cause for pause to decision-makers during the Cold War (not blaming anyone for trying to do so either, if that should turn out to be the case).
Reason I'm skeptical is all the other sure thing, will happen, guaranteed by scientists, things that have turned out to be less-than-true, to put it charitably:
Potable water would run out before 2000.
Oil would run out before 2000.
All rainforests would be clear-cut before 2000.
A new Ice Age would engulf us before 2000.
Acid rain would make it impossible to go outside unprotected before 2000.
And so on. Each time, scientists gladly stated their pet hypotheses as factual truths, based on no evidence but "it stands to reason" and "in the future we'll be able to".
It's the scientific opposite of prophesying earthquakes in Japan; those will happen and so often your prophecy is useless. Proving nuclear winter true would mean global thermonuclear war needs to happen first, making the hypothesis pointless as well.
You left out the hole in the ozone layer. We were all supposed to have been fried by UV radiation by this point.
Oh that's not the only one I left out.
Remember the warnings that the world post-2000 would be so overpopulated there'd be no room to grow food?
Or that the Gulf Stream would stop/reverse prior to 2000?
Or killer diseases?
Or WW3?
Or a total breakdown of social order making Mad Max look like a documentary?
All before 2000. Something about big round numbers make us go soft in the head, I think. Possibly because we really cannot understand large numbers/amounts of anything. Ten matches? No problem. 100? Maybe, with difficulty - your brain will automatically try to see one unit of '100' instead; uses less "bandwith". 1 000 000? Fuggedaboudit.
Speaking of 2000: Y2K.
So many examples.
I was told the rainforests would have gone by now
Global temperatures did drop after WWII.
https://www.co2.earth/global-warming-update
Of course, this is far from conclusive. A lot of things changed abruptly during and aftwer WWII.
Large vulcanic eruptions are certainly known to cool the planet. See the list at the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer So the general link between soot or other blocking matter and cooling is real. The question is how much soot do you need to obtain the effect. Clearly not as much as you get by occationally burning this or that portion of German cities.
> Oil would run out before 2000.
OG prediction by Hubbert was that worldwide oil production would peak around 2000-2010. Which it did - conventional oil production peaked around 2010 if I recall correctly. What Hubbert didn't predict, because he couldn't, was tight oil extraction.
The prediction (not specifically Hubbert but a general consensus-according-to-media) was oil running out, as in no more oil. As if there was a huge slurpee of oil in the ground and we were slurping up the last dregs of it.
Truth is, how much there is, is not /known/ but speculated about based on a great number of factors. And how much there is, is of course not the same as how much is reachable, and that in turn isn't the same as what is commercially viable at a given moment.
(Then there's the old russian hypothesis about oil too, but so far evidence seems to be lacking.)
That being said, not using it up just because it is profitable money-wise would probably be a good thing overall.
I am aware that volcanoes can affect things - but note that the linked article also mentions the Solar minimum the series of eruptions coincides with.
The abiotic hypothesis is something I often wonder about. Titan comes to mind….
I'm afraid abiotic oil is a pipe dream. All oil plays discovered so far have had biotic signitures. You can check this on The Oil Drum archives.
There are abiotic processes that do create methane and other hydrocarbons (Mars and Titan), but the hydrocarbons foundin Earth's crust have biotic signatures across the board. Earth will make more, but not at the rate that we are using them.
You are correct. The media did do this: "The prediction (not specifically Hubbert but a general consensus-according-to-media) was oil running out, as in no more oil."
But it was never based on the science. There were numerous disingenuous media reports that blew things out of proportion, but the biggest one was a particularly sloppy read of the The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. LtG was the first computer simulation how the industrial revolution would play out and it had 'resources' peaking in 2025 to 2030, but the chart in the report was from 1900 to 2100 and quite a few people who should have known better put that before 2000. LtG remains one of the best long term forecasts ever done, see their 30 and 40 year recaps. The Club of Rome, in conrast, went on to produce a bunch of political garbage that is strikingly similar to today's WEF.
The Club of Rome is just the usual pack of unimaginative Malthusians, incapable of conceptualizing the effects that technological change have on resource exploration, utilization, and obsolescence.
Their MO is always the same. They start from the desire for top-down, centralized technocracy, and then work backwards from there to develop whatever justifications they can come up with.
I thought it was supposed to come from trying to dig ICBMs out of their silos in a conjectured first strike. That would certainly put a lot of (radioactive) dirt in the air. Potentially lethal fallout but also the scenario for nuclear winter.
Have you heard the theory that nuclear bombs don’t actually exist, and the bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945 were just (just!) very very powerful fire bombs that did very similar damage to the bombs dropped in places like Cologne and Dresden. There is a very sober German man who gives a long talk on YouTube about this - he’s convincing to a lay person like me.
If one believes that there were no moon landings as I do, it doesn’t seem such a huge leap to consider that they are lying about nuclear bombs too, another way to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars (and pounds and euros) lining the pockets of those in the industrial military complex. It’s another way, too, to keep us all scared and clamouring for our money to be spent on ‘deterrents’. And of course, just like the moon landings and ‘Covid’ the elites of the world are all in on it because…lots and lots of money for them, lots and lots of frightened people keeping them in power. Anyways, food for thought…
There's some irony in the fact that the National Nuclear Security Administration are writing tedious reports warning against the danger of employing white people at nuclear plants in case they're Nazis, while our pet Nazis in Ukraine continue to try their best to damage nuclear plants in Zaporozhia and Kursk
Kek
What to do about it? Well… let’s see…
Since all - ALL - current social pathologies are based on empathy voters, voting empathetically for “Oh, that poor___” illegal alien, fatherless thug, incarcerated violent criminal, post-partum child murderer, crappy teacher “doing her best…” to say nothing of below-replacement fertility of the only culture acknowledging human rights …. The only solution is to acknowledge and then act on the fact that we can have an educated, safe, secure and prosperous culture… OR … women’s suffrage. And repeal 19A.
Well, here's my proposed Constitutional Amendment:
1) The right of a woman to obtain an abortion shall not be infringed. This right is absolute, and no Federal, State, or local laws may restrict the right to abortion. No consideration by other parties is permitted to interfere with this right.
2) No woman may hold public office, whether elected or appointed.
3) The 19th Amendment to the Constitution is repealed.
“You can have abortion, or the vote. Choose one.”
Go for it. If you can get it ratified, it’s the will of the people. If you can’t, it’s not. Pretty simple, really.
If the people who ratified the 19th Amendment were alive to see the results of their actions, they might go for it. Today, anyone who actually proposed it would be crucified.
Those people would be all men.
“Will of the people”
Hahahahahahahahaha, good one.
We're finally here: the decades-long march of post-modern, Marxist vacuous sewage has now attained its pinnacle achievement: infesting the very systems that maintain - and threaten - the very existence of Earth itself. From Oppenheimer to Dr. Strangelove to Yas Queen Annihilation in one living lifetime. God help us.
"I don’t have any idea what you can do about any of this, unless you happen to work inside the nuclear industry"
Writing this essay itself is something you could do, and did.
Spreading it will also help.
I'm doing my part Starship Troopers dot gif
"The one thing all of these groups have in common is that they are overwhelmingly White. Thus, the traditional image of an American – a White person who speaks unaccented English – no longer defaults to ‘safe’, but becomes immediately suspicious. Because White people cannot be relied upon to police other White people, a new political zampolit of DEI officers, principally composed of non-Whites, must be imposed at every level in order to continuously scrutinize White employees for red flags that might indicate they are being radicalized by online information terrorists..."
Yeah, I was thinking, right at the first section, that what they're doing is switching out "Homos are a security risk" for "White people are a security risk." The security set-up is no longer "evil oppression" because now it perfectly legitimately targets the "real bad guys," and the theatre kids are now wearing the uniforms.
This seems to be a widespread trope on the Left (or what was the Left and is now the Woke): what was denounced as "oppression" etc. as if it was bad in itself, is now revealed to be OK once the targets are readjusted. Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" might be the key text here. Bad thinking needs to be repressed so that good thinking achieves "true freedom."
(Marcuse's PhD was directed by Heidegger, but I'm sure Heidegger is a sure guide to the solution to all modernity's problems).
Bingo. Whitey is the new bad guy, and needs to be watched.
Problem being that whitey tends to be the one who knows what he's doing…
I’ll care about what the anti-white (and anti-male) crowd thinks & feels when they demonstrate the courage of their convictions by removing from their lives all creations of white men:
Refrigeration
Mechanical transport - planes, trains, automobiles, steel-hulled ships, steam-powered ships
Beyond-aural-range voice communication
Beyond-visual-range image communication
Air Conditioning
Phosphate fertilizers (the first “green revolution”)
Electronics - computing & communications
Photography
Post-iron-age metallurgy
Literacy
Modern medicine
Water purification
Etc.
Until then these people are nothing more than ignorant parasites on the body politic.
Heck, we even invented the morals we let these people use to judge us.
HR policy is the ultimate means of disrupting jnstitutions. It is therapeutic Maoism that wrecks everything. Perfect for the apex predators who fill the top level networks that form the top of the regime, but a burden or danger to everyone else. Obama clearly used HR policy to purge conservatives from the most senior ranks of the military.
Part of me suspects that this nyclear HR madness may all have begun as a means of prepping us for nuclear themed psyops, that it is an opp prepared and managed by the intelligence services. But it is obviously much, much, more than that. The regime has deranged itself by sponsoring chaos.
Words fail me.
This Nair woman doesn't strike me as an operator. More an opportunist. She sees the direction the regime has moved and seeks to advance her career; the regime, caught in its own logic, must then move in this direction.
Yes, she is merely an opportunist but what horrifies me is that the regime incentivises garbage thinking in even the most sensitive areas, where sanity alone demands clarity, rigour and seriousness. The regime's priorities reveal why its survival is a risk to life on earth.
That is the essence of what I was trying to illustrate in this article. These people are a dangerous menace.
There's a very good reason people are "othered" and it's typically because of how their group behave
Steve Sailer calls it "noticing" (which reminds me, I need to order his book) and he's absolutely correct.
In 1978, TSR hobbies published GAMMA WORLD, a post-apocalyptic TTRPG set in a future aftermath of a cataclysmic war. The intro to that game, setting the scenario for the players, is now taking on highly ominous plausibility, gnarly mutant mind-powers excepted.
The introduction:
"Man, from Australopithecus africanus and homo erectus erectus to homo sapiens sapiens,
may have existed on earth for hundreds of
thousands, perhaps millions of years. During this time, one skill,
one particular talent has set him apart from every other creature --
the ability to conceive and create tools. Indeed, man has
been defined as the "tool-making animal".
From chipped rocks && polished bones to neutron bombs and
computers, man has constantly been redesigning, improving, and
refining his tools to meet his ever-changing needs. Some have been
toys for children. Some have improved his life style. Others have
been necessary for his survival. A few have nearly caused his extinction.
Early in the 24th century, mankind's existence was unparalled.
The rape of the earth's beauty and resources in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries had been halted and reversed, due to man's
tools. Yet, in spite of these tools (or perhaps because of them),
the idyllic life of the 24th century came to an abrupt end.
Having conquered the rigors of simple survival, man was able to
turn his energies to more esoteric considerations -- theology,
political ideology, social and cultural identification, and development
of self-awareness. These pursuits were not harmful in themselves,
but it soon became fashionable to identify with and support
various leagues, organizations, and so-called "special interest groups."
With the passage of time, nearly all the groups became
polarized, each expressing and impressing its views to a degree
that bordered on fanaticism.
Demonstrations, protests, and debates became the order of the day.
Gradually enthusiasm changed to mania, then to hatred of those who held opposing views.
Outbreaks of violence became more frequent, and terrorists
spread their views with bombs && guns.
Reconstruction of the events from 2309 to 2322 has been difficult
due to the lack of intact records, but historians now generally mark
September 16, 2309 as the beginning of the period now commonly
known as the Shadow Years. On that day, some 5000 members
of the League of Free Men were staging a demonstration for the
purpose of promoting their concepts of a united world government.
At the height of their demonstration, a small neutron bomb was
detonated in their midst, killing most of the demonstrators. Rumors
held opponents of world government, a group known as the Autonomists,
responsible for the terrorism, but no guilt was ever proved.
The League of Free Men made no formal accusations, but three
months later, on December 23, several hundred known Autonomists
were assassinated in separate locations. In addition, the three
main offices of the Autonomists were the targets of the release of a
newly developed nerve gas. The nerve gas was responsible for approximately
3000 deaths, the majority of which were Autonomist
office personnel, but many of those killed had no connection with
the Autonomists. Blame for the killings was placed on the League,
but there was no proof. The failure of official investigations to
convict the perpetrators of these mass murders created a wave of
vigilante actions; retaliation followed retaliation. The problem was
compounded as the terrorism spread across national boundaries,
engulfing the world with bloodshed.
As the vigilante actions continued, various governments
attempted to prohibit and disband suspected terrorist organizations
, but these attempts only drove the groups further underground
and polarized their supporters. This led many countries to
declare martial law in a last desperate effort to control their populations,
but the warring groups had grown too powerful. They had too
many resources (both economic and political) upon which to draw.
Although there are no records to substantiate the accusations that
governments gave covert aid to certain groups in order to change
the balance of power, circumstantial evidence seems to indicate
that this did occur.
In the final months of the Shadow Years, a new organization
calling itself The Apocalypse, announced its xistence w/ the
now famous Ultimatum:
Peoples of the world -- you appear bent upon the
destruction of a civilization that has taken centuries to
build, and the extinction of life on earth.
If that is your will ... so be it!
We, the Apocalypse, demand an immed. cessation
of this insane violence, or we will end it for you
... with a force you cannot conceive.
We have the power!
The choice is yours!
The exact identity of The Apocalypse was, and still is, unknown.
Some have theorized that the group was composed of scientists.
Some believe it was a special military group. Whatever its
constituency, few believed the ultimatum when it was issued, and
the fighting continued. Five days later, on April 17, at exactly 1200
GMT, the capital city of every nation in the world was turned into a
crater of radioactive slag.
The Apocalypse spoke to the world one more time:
People of the world, you have been warned.
We have the power!
The choice is yours!
Again, due to the lack of records, it is not known how the location of
The Apocalypse base was discovered, or who initiated the attack.
Some evidence indicates the action was a joint effort by nearly all
the surviving terrorist factions and vigilante groups -- united for
the first time in the Shadow Years. In the end, though, a massive
attack was mounted against The Apocalypse base. In TURN, The Apocalypse
retaliated with a fury never b4 witnessed on the face of the Earth.
Oceans boiled,
continents buckled,
the skies blazed with the light of unbelievable energies.
Suddenly it was all over.
The civilization of man had been slashed, burned, crushed, and
scattered to the four winds. Whether The Apocalypse had intended
to completely destroy all life on the planet and had failed, or if they
simply had not enough power, is debatable. Some scholars
contend that The Apocalypse voluntarily stopped their promised
destruction when they witnessed the horror they had unleashed
and then destroyed themselves. At this time, and even now, the
question is moot.
What did matter was that man survived. The Black Years that
followed the Shadow Years were spent struggling to survive in a
suddenly savage and vastly changed world. The process was a
painful one, filled with nearly as much terror and violence as the Shadow Years.
The devastation wrought by The Apocalypse had changed
the very fabric of life on earth. The weapons and devices they used had
completely obliterated some forms of life. Others were mutated to
the point where they could not be recognized as what they had once
been. Man was not immune to these changes.
Through it all, the death, the pain, the horror, and facing the
prospect of an unknown future, man searched for his lost knowledge,
and struggled to regain his tools . . . to rebuild a self-destroyed civilization.
During the Black Years, those who held the tools, held the power . . ."
You're right, the opening seems prophetic. Aside from that it took a mere 40 years to get to the Shadow Years.
Heinlein’s prediction of the Crazy Years also comes to mind.
I think the 4 decades from the Shadow Years Black Years is the pre-cataclysmic build up. It's the future; things go faster. Consider: 1960 to present. 64 years. 4 decades wasn't a bad guess, not when you were alive in the 1970s and saw firsthand the foaming-at-the-mouth radicals. I was alive in those days; I recall my father carrying a loaded SMG he brought back from Viet Nam when we went camping. He was not going to see us join the police blotter statistics, victims of radicals or bikers or nutters. BTW, prior to 1968, one could bring back weapons like that legally.
Later, in the game's premise, it was a long time for nascent stone-age tech to regain a footing in the ruins of fantastically high tech world. It would likely take 4 centuries for a civilization to restart.
I liked playing that game.
Besides the "Enola Gay", the two bombs dropped on Japan: "Fat Man" and "Little Boy", were named after two criminal "fey" characters from the 1941 film noir The Maltese Falcon, while a third antagonist Joel Cairo (played by Peter Lorre) is openly homo in the book, if not the film. The bomb has been a sick gay joke from the very beginning.
"Gunsel" is the term, I think Bogart uses it in the film when he's hired on, and he deploys it to rattle one of the guys who are sent to intimidate him in the first place. I think Huston definitely knew he was utilizing a sly subtext where "fey" characters were inherently unstable and prone to low-impulse control (which, to be honest, matches my real-life experience). Incidentally the "homophobia" in Chandler's writing would make a current first year literature student cower in a corner with an emotional support animal.
I mean, there *is* a good reason why homosexuals were singled out by intelligence agencies and targeted for blackmail operations, and history (the Cambridge Five, etc.) gave good reasons to do so.
Of course that's stupid too. But I don't think they can inject enough diverse slop into the system without imploding. Sam Brinton is a great example for this. On paper, he was the best they could have. And I still knew right at the moment I saw him, that there is a meltdown on schedule.
Their people are almost completely unsuited making a system like this work and it maybe just be a cope from me, but Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov in the end had belief in the world. So I still have some belief left on the man(or women) who get's to be there, to make the right decision.
It's easier to have faith in such men if they are being selected on the basis of their ability. And when it comes to nuclear reactors and strategic weapons, faith is not the thing I want to rely on.
Obviously. And there are some concerning stories from the soviet times when people as simple as the Ceasescu pair reached unprecedented heights. And even in such a repressive environment, the people whose job it was, managed to cut off some of their idiocy.
As things stand, it is still required to have some relevant skills to the job. If there is any similarity to my experiences, these are highly selective programs...the quality ensurances are still there as the teachers themselves also know the risks. So you'll be hardpresses to find enough diverse candidates and even they will be under Conquests first law of politics. ("Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.")
Herr Carter:
It appears the Trojan horse of DEI operatives and political officers is the clear and present danger.
Shooting an unarmed woman because she was white and scaring the black police officer is not a reason for DEI operating systems to be imposed and forced on to all.
They are the group prone to terrorism .
Look at how hooked they are on Scientism and Lysenkoism .
Denying science with unfalsifiable hypotheses.
Implementing whole new bureaucracies filled with the same thought types.
Retching…
Ikke sant?
Jon
Exactly. DEI nuclear security is a clear threat to nuclear security. This shit needs to get shut down hard.