Cold War IV
your Maoist-Moment awaits you
Cold War II, [government against the people] the Clintons, gave rise to MAGA. In 2000 the Tea Party confounded the efforts of John Boehner (speaker of the House) and G.W. Bush to utilize their own Republican majority. Ultimately the wheels came off, the memo on Al Qaida flew under Condi Rice’s radar, Bush went Old Testament on the Middle East, [opening the door for Netanyahu] and his “homeowners society” blew up in Wall Street’s basement, the flames reaching the floor of the NYSE. This is an allusion to the first WTC bombing by Al Qaida, and the blind sheik. There was really no reason to ignore the second warning, and none of the Federal Reserve economists saw GFC coming either.* {maybe the CIA did, but what was their motivation?}
Cold War III was rural America versus the A.I. data center build-out, [as your identity is digitalized, extended, you own sense of identity diminishes; artifacts once extended tend to become incorporeal, or less real. M. McLuhan] the raping of the environment {and one newer environment replaces another} on behalf of the new Data Centers, {a misstatement they are decentralized like your identity}; consuming water and electricity and replacing songbirds with high decibel background noise destroying the pastoral quiet in agribusiness America, is no bueno. Nature is the older archetype, replaced by weather now, and ultimately the entire planet is programmed for efficiency, [and climate change becomes the objectification of God’s rage is the hardware version] which now assumes all those romantic qualities we lost, (is there a futurist manifesto to glorify the greatest open air assembly line for food on the planet? [this would be 1930’s social realism in the arts, retrieved archetypes, images of Trump in virile poses] the heartland of America lays waste, the dirt belt in historical exchange for the rust belt, nostalgia, the hub of jobs and people, making things, which were less incorporeal.)
China has very little arable land, no agrarian subculture and hence no culture at all, these outlaws of the American Midwest, such as the Posse Comitatus [anti-government group which mostly expressed its displeasure by blowing up mailboxes] were cultural icons. Bonnie and Clyde were avenging angels after the dustbowl in the thirties, which was a self-inflicted wound on America, (maybe science would have helped, contour plowing was offered as a remedy.) The wavy assembly line.
The urban financial system foreclosed on the rural family farm, and bankers were held in disrepute, and all vice [usuary], as Pope said, “once disgraced, is now embraced.” Financial chicanery {when applied to the farmers own personal finances} became the shibboleth of agrarian tax resistance, [and in the ultra-modern technology the American economy is metaphorically a large circuit board, with inputs and outputs and operating voltages, {even feedback sometimes} a resistor is an electronic component which raises the voltage and converts the current dropped therein into heat]…
and Donald Trump became their financial guru, (circumventing the tax code in rural America is simply another layer of risk, like the weather, [see above] and the rigged New York City commodity markets. Trump ran his NY accounts like a rube who owns a clothing store on Main St., a mistress and a lot of secret debts.)
In the 1970’s rural America defined culture, The Waltons, hippie communes, Bridges of Madison County, Field of Dreams. [see how it evolved] Culture failed to evolve (for reasons directly connected to the opening of trade with China - and the zero cultural gradient in China and exported, led to the demise of the Midwest. Soybeans for Smartphones.) Once the cynical subculture Tea Party took office, in 2000, the Bush II years heralded the great offshoring of American assets.
Nobody believed in the system any longer, especially those who were ripping it off. In middle class suburban seminars held at Applebee’s those who came for the free lunch learned how to buy property in Costa Rica. There is a very delicate mental shift that takes place, which might best be found in the phrase “fear and loathing.” President Trump was literally created by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and his program of quantitative easing. The let’s look the other way on banking ethics.
Then coming late to the proceedings, (not being a senior senator or a titan of industry, and for that matter, not being an experientially vetted symbol of the black experience in America) President Obama looked at it all curiously (while he instructed his own Attorney General to disregard immigration law, he avoided looking into the banking crisis. That planted the seeds of more distrust.) Cold War II ended, we cared about dreamers, and affordable healthcare, {or the media cared for us} what started with the Clintons ended with the Obamas. We speak of them plurally, but not the Trumps. Taking millions from Russia {Melania} is not the same as getting a Beverly Hills break for a margin call on a stinking cattle contract.
Hillary wanted to make the transition to free health care and free college education and she was hoisted on her own petard for being socialist. Trump manages the corporate economy directly and we call it free enterprise. Obama had the genius of being genuinely insincere. {he did nothing about black unemployment, but then he isn’t black and neither is Kamala.} Enter MAGA and Cold War III.
Cold war is a psychological method of mass aggression, [Burroughs saw his cut and paste as individual counter thrusts meant to dislodge the minority from control - McLuhan sees them as technicians, apolitical, agnostic and amoral automatons (engineers) who create the new technologies with little personal benefit or control, and without an accompanying vision of how the world would look with eight billion automobiles. The Dalia Lama and the head of General Motors ask the same question. And McLuhan thinks it is all about asking the right question. hmmm.
They do it for wages essentially. This is not a digression, or a rhetorical device by which you are meant to ponder the imponderable, or an attempt to equivocate on the nature of power or to tell you they are both saying the same thing. “The nuclear scientist is a flunky of the war lord”, MM, which is to say pure science was never the objective, and what does the term flunky mean? If not to succeed at something. The resume of our recent presidents reinforces the notion that to qualify you must never have succeeded at anything. Do we really want Eisenhower again? Ike the architect of the UN action against Nazi Germany in order to defeat the Soviets before they got to Berlin. Spoiler alert, he didn’t succeed either.]
[The palliative, a quality McLuhan calls the anti-environment makes the environment visible, at the deep state level this involves running counter agitprop upon the edifice on which all this is based, an anti-Democratic subculture aimed at channeling the Founding Fathers, their slaves and their lack of sovereign aspirations.] McLuhan ended psychology by connecting the cliche to the archetype, the cliche can be verbal or non-verbal. An automobile engine is a cliche for instance, and when it takes you somewhere, that is real, and not metaphorical, like Disneyland. All the psychology invested in the American love affair with the automobile, rests on mechanical repetition of the artifact. {we never fell in love with the personal computer the way we fell in love with the car, although Apple computers seem to attract people under the spell of that special kind of consumer magic, {and those who buy everything Elon Musk} which explains why they were ultimately so good at smartphones. They had the love baby..]
McLuhan never embraced his world-shattering destruction of an entire ideology, which reverberated through the halls of literature back to the Greeks. The fallacies of this pseudo-science, {economics is another which draws parallels} psychology morphed into single molecule pharmacology, psych meds, and aversion therapy.] Advanced aversion therapy might be the new sound wave weaponry, Havana Syndrome, this being in the greater set of all things covered by preemptive laws, {and statistically measured punishment} like driving and drinking. Why is government turning against it’s own people? 75% of America opposes Trump, how do you think he feels about them?
The individual, assuming they still respond to these psychological triggers, {handed out by Trump like candy} is a subject to be discussed under the heading: Exit Strategies for the Mass Audience - [not a public, which is an aggregate of individual viewpoints derived from the same tiny bit of information] all wars are culture wars, and in a culture war you want to inflate the value and the threat that your enemy poses to you, {xenophobia is often enough} in order to mobilize a reactionary counter thrust.
[It’s very hard to go to war with China since they have no culture, not a living culture anyway, so we have no war plans. Our plan is to classify Cuba as the same sovereign entity as Taiwan, and exchange pawns.] Liberals are archetypally retrieved 1950’s International Communists (The CIA {SEZ} they had no idea the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1989, [a former head of that org was president at the time] and it was a collapse in name only, they {CIA}still promote the Russian threat [nuclear for sure, although removing ICBMs from submarines and arming them with conventional payloads and firing them at apartment buildings in Kiev does not seem like the way to win any kind of war, psychological or otherwise.) The Chinese are winning the Cold War because they never read Freud. The Russians have no plausible basis for denial, they offered Pavlov as counter environment, (laconicism: he cut through the red tape, and being the world’s biggest bureaucracy, at the time, that was no small achievement.)
None of Russia’s superweapons were able to solve their problem with Ukraine {psychologically} [and yet when Iran put their hypersonic missiles into action they had excellent [direct] results. Maybe Russian logistics aren’t very good, certainly US logistics came up short against Iran, the term hypersonic is scary enough, and what are logistics in a battle of wills [Triumph of the Will, means what exactly?]. The Russians have thrown a million young men into a border conflict. Is the national mood in Moscow somber?
The threat of nuclear annihilation has always been the trump card, [pardon the pun] but Iran invites death {martyrdom}. We should be taking notes here, the secret to avoid being psychoanalyzed into extinction [like the Russians] might be the title of the white paper. Trump played the Putin card, (he ran out of logistics and he threw pure terror at Iran, where he ran into an immovable {sovereign object}, an inert non kinetic juggernaut, intransigence in spades.
In terms of schoolyard politics, (the legacy of W Bush II to whom Trump owes everything he has) the big kid who wants the little kids lunch money got kicked in the balls (real psychological terror) and perhaps the bully should wear a catcher’s mask and a hockey cup [sign that says I am a bully] but the rules of asymmetric warfare won’t allow that. The passive investors take sides in all this, so you must look like every other kid on the playground, or risk a group hazing, or a market selloff, which Trump is dangerously close to realizing both, but the man thrives on humiliation, and that is his psychological Achilles heel.
Psychology is no longer a deterrent, {the protection racket run for our national benefit, a strong dollar - which keeps losing spending power, in a hundred years has only a few cents of value left and they stopped making pennies} - this leads us to Cold War IV in which government collapses internally upon itself. [States begin to secede slowly at first, then more quickly - they withhold payments] These people ar the top are menfolk who prefer to fall on their sword (or fake their own deaths). The overt use of force at Waco and Ruby Ridge served to raise the threat level to hyperbolized levels, and Tim McVeigh capped the psyops by bombing a government daycare center in Oklahoma. Those events were secretive and calculated and led to catch phrases like the American Taliban.
We still don’t know what Chandra Levy talked to McVeigh about, [she was intern at the bureau of Prisons with access to McVeigh] she also had deep ties to Israel, the so called affair with Gary Condit was subterfuge, (he had an observers seat on a high level House Intel comm, and they wanted him out.) and he was a Blue Dog, member of the Dems who wanted to reach across the aisle. That was reason enough to hate him. In their world [Zionist], your enemy approaches bearing an olive branch. This is the kind of tribalism McLuhan misrepresents in the Global Village (written a decade after his death with a collaborator who has literally disappeared.) We could call that a psyops done to expand the concept and make it palatable to the masses. Much as the CIA has been accused of creating the Hippie Movement (through music and movies) to distract the public from the anti-Vietnam war protests. This was certainly the case in the early Lookout Mountain days, when John Ford visited the site and then started making ‘conservative’ westerns.
Joe Biden said absently, while president, that we must get internet out to the underserved markets in the Midwest, thus spreading a different kind of light over the poorly served media markets, where the ghostly pall of Fox News spread misinformation through the coffeeshops and bars, like glyphosate to ripen the oats. The rules of Cold War II included the necessary expansion of a large and unmanageable subculture which could enter the political system through the backdoor at the electoral college. Once firmly in control of Washington they were ready to meet the agents of technology (catalyst of wall street speculation and profits) on the battle field at Cold War III, data centers against humanity.
The marriage of technology and agribusiness somehow bypassed the genius of visionaries such as Elon Musk, {likewise the marriage of technology and housing} whose list of inventions is an ode to urban gadgets and fantasies about space travel. The main byproducts of the agricultural technology we presently have are industrial compounds; GMO crops, feedstock for animals, hogs and soybeans for export to China, where they feed the factory workers who are being consumed in Industrial Revolution II. They provided food for the Chinese workers, and in return they supplied Iphones for American teenagers (of all ages).
Industrial revolution II skipped the invention of machines which created healthy and abundant food and housing and went directly to the buildout of these artificial intelligence storage facilities. Maybe the hunger problem was that we just don’t have enough data? The financial environment necessary to fund this new technology promised to require something more like QE than QE. QE lowered the overall economic growth rate, (as Jeff Snider calls it, the economy that forget how to grow) and in the parlance of textbook economics government spending crowds out private spending, and all the AI, ALL OF IT, is a government induced hallucination, which requires lower interest rates and tends to mimic the economic conditions of a perma-recession. [ In the 1930s the technology of electricity introduced new consumer products and services; indoor plumbing, powered water and waste systems, and the result was more than a recession and the biggest achievement of the Great Depression was probably TVA {another rural project opposed by the locals, which included marginally Hoover dam, a president known for allowing the great depression to take hold after the stock market crash, and riding his non-corrective policies into ignominy. So we named the biggest power dam after him. [now some environmental types would like to let the Colorado river run as it once did when they called this place Mojave.] The biggest data center will probably be named after Trump to complete the circle.
It’s all water over the blueberry jam. Cold War IV is the termination of government services, and the psychological punishment of abandonment. Watch how the Brits handle this, they are much further along. While the deep state is watching your every move, there is less data to compile, fewer people to make data, even fewer want to have anything data of their own. Assume that Big Brother is a turnkey system, but it’s not. You don’t need social security, you have a side gig, a hustle, but no job, no driver’s license, cars drive themselves, you own nothing, you rent and you need no insurance. There are no more red-light cameras, no cops, no fire department, and schools out for -ever , Alice Cooper) the ultimate cold war will be the near total cessation of government services. Musk wants to end SSN and replace it with UBI. Payment in kind, the air you breathe.
First they end culture, {media} a term we aren’t really certain what it means. McLuhan replaced it with the term environment and declared that all wars to be aimed at abolishing culture. That’s very scientific (one of the criticisms of his work) all by reducing your window to the world to the size of your wrist. As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Blvd, “I am big, its the pictures that got small..” Life in America becomes our Mao-Moment, done with a peculiar American flair. A national leader turns pop culture into nope culture, and some thought China would become more like Japan, a cultural mirror of America, while in fact America has become a mirror of China.
China turned its back on culture, such remnants which exist are museums to an older culture which was not archetypally realized, maybe because the Chinese never bought into Freud, {a literary construct} {Jung was a pocket philosopher, evidenced by his framing of Nietzche, who certified the twilight of the intellectual demigods,} and frankly no American wants to live in China, no matter who nice and comfortable and safe it is.
China is all society and no culture, America is all culture, very little society, and nothing in the way of native intelligence, only moronic billionaires, CEOs and instant celebrities who shoot them dead in the street when they aren’t doing their job properly. The occasional sniper (Jan 6) does nothing to alter the dynamics (dynamic a word i would vote out of the dictionary) and giving them 1.8 billion dollars after beating up some policemen; no bueno.