The Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, established by National Defense Authorization Act, concludes that to defend its vital interests and improve strategic stability with China and Russia, the United States and its Allies and partners must be ready to deter and defeat both adversaries simultaneously.
Translation: the weapons industry wants a $2 trillion makeover of every warhead, new "delivery systems" (missiles, subs and bombers) and all the trimmings, to maintain them in luxury until 2080 or so.
This comes way before "corrupt" and "stupid." This is patently batshit.
How are we to deal with this? That ship has already left the dock. The layers of corruption and a parasitic economic paradigm seem to defeat us before we can even get our heads around it.
How do we get rid of these planet-killing things?
Address the cultural structure (seen falsely as natural law) that prevents anything being done without first attracting investors with obscene levels of profit-extraction.
This is our economy in a nutshell. It selects for unlimited greed and cruelty. This is Cultural Selection, which displaced Natural Selection several thousand years ago.
The resulting cycles of collective abuse, trauma, addiction, and denial form an almost impenetrable carapace over this festering hot mess. By now, it is one ancient rhizome of unspeakable pain. A subterranean ocean of molten magma finding release at subduction zones.
It shows up here or there, in this person or community, or that one, and we try to fix that person or community, or blame and punish the other one, if we can raise the funds with promises of profit (sacred vows in our economic logic). There is no ROI on even a moment's reflection; that would inhibit economic "Growth."
Rinse and repeat.
And so, as KV used to say, it goes. Our trajectory is now clear as we accelerate toward oblivion.
How to address it?
We are not helpless, which is why I say we are not evil; this collective behavior, the tight correlate of our dominant worldview, continues in our full knowledge of its self-destructive power. Our denial details our full knowledge. Evil has no more capacity for this awareness than a grain of sand.
This places us slightly ahead: only the living can be cruel. We are not evil, we are traumatized and addicted to ineffective remedies based on the view (which is purest bullshit) that everything has a price the deserving can afford, therefore the impoverished deserve their fate. Only death is free, but we're seeing a breakthrough there.
It's a monkey trap: the fistful of berries will not come through the opening, only the empty hand that reached in. We still have a slim chance to learn this. There is no future in letting it play out.
If we know this now, we are already in a different relationship to it. Opportunities immediately come into view. That's power. It calls us to action, and that puts us in front of a big heap of responsibility. So get off "social" media and collaborate.
Recovery (to use a well-known metaphor) begins with acknowledgement. Truth cannot be told, only recognized. My version only took me seventy-five trips around the Sun, so far. But I've always been hard-headed.
