(X-post on Culture of Life News)
I just figured out a sure-fire conspiracy that will enable us to take over the entire US of A, lock, stock, and barrel! It’s so simple I don’t see why I hadn’t thought of it before! Here’s the deal:
We buy up the entire military side of the Military-Industrial Complex. Then we sell off or tear down all other parts of the US Aggregate Productivity System (APS). We then have a population of lawyers, accountants, arms manufacturing workers, and drug addicts, who couldn’t build a bicycle if their lives depended on it.
What we have then is a US population of crypto-mafia stooges that can support itself only by threatening the APS-bearing nations with nuclear weapons. We could even privatize the military itself, so we’ll own that too! (A “protection” racket.) This would require a lot of “whiff of the grape” exercises to show the APS-bearing nations that we are actually insane enough to wreck the earth, but you have to break some eggs to make an omlett… The helpless and useless surplus US population then becomes a big barracks of nuclear hostages — OUR HOSTAGES! We Win!!!
The New York Times
October 2, 2007
Obama to Urge Elimination of World’s Nuclear Weapons
By JEFF ZELENY
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism, aides say.
Well… I’m holding out ’till he promises a private jet plane for every US family.
Tom Noonan said
I think I know where you are coming from, indeed I feel a bit low myself. I am annoyed by people who imagine that mechanical skills are magical, like the Fonz in “Happy Days”, and imagine that terrorists have access to that magic.
However I take issue with the statement: “…arms manufacturing workers, … who couldn’t build a bicycle if their lives depended on it.” I went to my bookshelf and among others are HP Books, Tucson AZ. (1985) on hobby metalworking. Also I have been to country shows where enthusiasts do old fashioned blacksmithing, and wagon-wheel making.
If there was a general social collapse, and people’s lives depended on it, we might be surprised at what would come out of the woodwork. This work is not easy especially if practitioners are undercut by the system at every turn, but were the system to breakdown… but it would be no cakewalk.
blues said
Well, Tom, I worked in electronics for years and years. Everything from aviation X-rays (looking for wing cracks) to spectrum analysis (deciding where to put microwave towers) to fixing police radios. And I worked in parts fabrication (a nasty business, for sure) for awhile. There are still a few of us left. But somebody had better come out of the woodwork real soon.
I didn’t learn to do all that stuff in some two-hour seminar.
TKN said
I pick up on your: “someone had better come out of the woodwork”.
Many people, especially Australians, think that the Mississippi and the Darling rivers are comparable, but they aren’t.
[QUOTE]
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=1219
A tale of two great rivers
By Eric Rolls – posted Thursday, 31 May 2001 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
I’ll tell you a story about two rivers, the Murray and the Mississippi. Mississippi – the word brings thoughts of Ol’ Man River. But the Murray is the old man, the Mississippi is young. When thousands of metres of ice slid over America’s ancient mountains three million years ago, it so tore them about that the present great Mississippi valley was not formed until the ice began to melt only fifteen thousand years ago.
Big floodplain rivers are highly productive. The upper and middle reaches of the Mississippi and its tributaries were alternating areas of prairie, even more open than Australia’s grassy woodlands, and forested wetlands. Species richness was high, so was the diversity of age groups.
…
The source of the Murray River was defined 20 million years ago when a few million years of heavy rain weathered the raw line of mountains pushed up from underneath, then built on by volcanoes. Fingers of rushing water, one of them the Murray channel, carried sediment into the ocean that then covered the Murray Basin.
During the Great Ice Age which began three million years ago, this sea dried up, leaving a deep deposit of salt. The Murray River covered the salt with water, mud and sand, leaving a flattish plain with rivers meandering through it. It did the work that is still being done by the Mississippi. Furthermore there is deep salt under all the northern section of the Murray-Darling Basin which had been covered by another sea. Australia’s salt is under farmland, not safely under the sea like America’s salt.
…
[END QUOTE]
The Mississippi is Snow fed and flows through rich farming country; the tributaries of the Darling arise in sub-tropical ranges, on the rain shadow side, and flows through sandy country, except for a narrow crescent of tableland black soil. Australia is essentially desert country, 100 km. from the coast 800 mm of rain, going down. That is, beyond the fringing ranges, the annual rainfall is 30 inches and goes down to not much more than 10 inches beyond the Darling. These Rivers are not much more than creeks. There was shipping from Bourke down to the coast before the railways, but the boats were little steamers, say 18 ft by 12 ft beam. (The Murray River may have been bigger.) Carry down a wagon of 10 or 12 bales of wool and stuff them into the hold of a barge.
That’s the point. Australia was wool country, because like goats sheep are tolerant of fairly brackish water, and will eat fairly rough herbage if necessary. Also in the 1950s plenty of people wore flannel next to their skin. It apparently has good water properties in hot and cold, and is fire resistant. Today I think proper flannel is virtually unattainable.
From the 1960s Americans invested in cotton growing in Australia, and Australians welcomed them and probably invested jointly with them. Who wants to live like a Central Asian when they can live like an American? Right, make level fields for flood irrigation, store large amounts of water off stream, exploit water rights to the limit. Now for twenty years there has been mostly drought or below average rainfall. The water has not been reaching the lower Murray, the orchards; and it is saline, and Adelaide depends on it in part for drinking.
This is the story. Nothing has been resolved. Politicians posture. Some kind of local Armageddon will probably force us back to the old ways. They were not easy – “out were the dead men lie” – so no pre-emptive action is likely. See in hard countries there is a kind of de-facto socialism that people take for granted, until some great power comes along to tell them that it is evil; or some academic spreads the word that the “integration of tribalism” is a lesser state than the “differentiation of civilization”.
Anyway I’m thinking.
blues said
No time for a proper reply, NTK. My heart goes out to the Aussies, because they are getting hammered hard by global desertification (much of the Middle East is in far worse shape, I read). The oceans are rising while the aquifers are dropping.
This could make the simplified narrative of global warming look like a cake walk, pretty soon. New York City gets permanently flooded, but Las Angeles looses all of its tap water! The earth is getting used up by profligate children. They even are using the precious fresh water to grow corn for fuel! Nitwits!
TKN said
The scenario you describe in the original post is the entrepreneurialism we experienced in the 1970s. Structures such as Australian National Industries, and other individuals, bought up, for debt, small manufacturers of all kinds, such as brass foundries making plumbing fittings, which were essentially debt free then. They said it was for consolidation but they essentially stripped them for profit. I think this is the USA rust belt experience also. So what you are describing satirically has kind of been done but has not run its full course yet.