Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Robotics?

We are faced with a challenge, but it is clearly one that must be confronted. The adoption of the all-volunteer force in the early 1970s implicitly meant that we were transitioning from a military model that had been labor-intensive to one that would be capital-intensive. The manpower of today’s force is a fraction of that of the past — a tenth that of World War II, less than half that of Vietnam, and seventy-five percent that at the end of the Cold War. Yet our military has, especially since the end of the Cold War, successfully faced enemies that are different in composition and much more widely dispersed across the globe than ever before. How has this been accomplished? Simply put, by substituting on an enormous scale technology for manpower.

So this substitution is not only inevitable, it is also essential. In the not so distant future we will see aircraft that are fully autonomous — capable of all types of missions. Ground combat, which presents the most complex operational environment, will see battles between robotic systems, and logistics delivered by convoys of robotic trucks and robotic aerial systems — of the type Amazon is experimenting with today. Command decisions will be facilitated by information mined and fused from enormous databases, and then presented for decision in the most basic form, attached to detailed steps that must be taken for successful execution. It will be a very different sort of combat, but it may regrettably be no less deadly.

There are many who remain uneasy about this evolution, and for many good reasons. As we move to a more automated and robotic force, many questions will have to be addressed — some practical, some philosophical, some even ethical. But we will have to have these discussions for I see no possibility for going back. Our manpower has become more expensive and dear over the past half century, while our technology has become less expensive and more pervasive.

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org ... operations

This is the kind of article that was most prevalent around 2010, if I recall correctly. How much it may have influenced policy is hard for anyone on the outside to know. But what I seem to recall reading was something like this article. Along the lines of we have an all volunteer force and there will be advances in robotics that will continue to make that possible and it's all good.

One from the year 2000.

This was PNAC's speculation in a report published in September 2000.

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes. Air warfare may no longer be fought by pilots manning tactical fighter aircraft sweeping the skies of opposing fighters, but a regime dominated by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft. On land, the clash of massive, combined-arms armored forces may be replaced by the dashes of much lighter, stealthier and information-intensive forces, augmented by fleets of robots, some small enough to fit in soldiers’ pockets. Control of the sea could be largely determined not by fleets of surface combatants and aircraft carriers, but from land- and space-based systems, forcing navies to maneuver and fight underwater. Space itself will become a theater of war, as nations gain access to space capabilities and come to rely on them; further, the distinction between military and commercial space systems – combatants and noncombatants – will become blurred. Information systems will become an important focus of attack, particularly for U.S. enemies seeking to short-circuit sophisticated American forces. And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

https://cryptome.org/rad.htm

[APR]

Okay, so your BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrant army can massacre disarmed people, but can it fight China and Russia?

So antifa seems to have vanished of twitter and everywhere, in a puff of glitter.

Prepare to drafted white boys...

[aeden]

"Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...”

- Jean Raspail

https://www.jns.org/the-prophet-unhonored/

Mine is Maple and installed in 1912. The gal we know is marked for death leaving the clan from the Sandland thought maps of Ishmael. Hers is a composite steel door rather new. Delores is from South of the Mexican Border. I will ask what Hers is as over time and we laugh at our accents. Kids will be Kids. They understand also borders do mean more than these uniparty skunks more than think lately as drugs and trafficking.

Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:10 pm Lotus corniculatus for these times. As long as the soil stays moist and the plot doesn’t become overrun with weeds, the crop is carefree. Contributes nitrogen to the soil as it rests. The cattle had two choices. They picked ...
The Senate needs to grow a set and deal with ag issues now impressed from outside influences.

10 countries with 3 billion are walking away if you see it or not.

[Higgenbotham]

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: ... 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/28/2 ... s-politics

[Guest]

Can confirm, the West today feels like the Soviet Union in the 80s. A ruling class who's been in power for decades, espousing an ideology that's lost its vitality, assuring us that everything is fine in paradise (save for a few naysayers), all while the cracks and decay become impossible to ignore. For the Soviets, it was a combination of factors that brought them down, including the arms race, Chernobyl, getting bogged down in Afghanistan, and so on. Likewise, our troubles are not only internal, there's also the external challenge of the rise of BRICS. Personally, I think a decisive Russian victory in Ukraine, combined with BRICS wins elsewhere, may be enough to cause collapse, or at least greatly accelerate it. The perception of Western power & prestige is a pillar of the Regime's legitimacy, and that pillar will soon be toppled by global events, driven by factions with greater energy & vitality than what's left here.

[Higgenbotham]

Can confirm, the West today feels like the Soviet Union in the 80s. A ruling class who's been in power for decades, espousing an ideology that's lost its vitality, assuring us that everything is fine in paradise (save for a few naysayers), all while the cracks and decay become impossible to ignore. For the Soviets, it was a combination of factors that brought them down, including the arms race, Chernobyl, getting bogged down in Afghanistan, and so on. Likewise, our troubles are not only internal, there's also the external challenge of the rise of BRICS. Personally, I think a decisive Russian victory in Ukraine, combined with BRICS wins elsewhere, may be enough to cause collapse, or at least greatly accelerate it. The perception of Western power & prestige is a pillar of the Regime's legitimacy, and that pillar will soon be toppled by global events, driven by factions with greater energy & vitality than what's left here.

I think Fukushima was the West's Chernobyl moment. The response was to crank the hell out of the printing presses and do "Whatever it takes." Five years after Chernobyl the Soviet Union collapsed. Five years after Fukushima we got Donald Trump. So I think the US (and the West) went further past the stale date than the SU.

[Higgenbotham]

Marc Widdowson has a new book out this year.

An introduction to theoretical history
By Marc Widdowson

The last few decades have seen the emergence of theoretical history as an academic discipline characterised by conferences, journals, and an international community of researchers. It is about a scientific search for patterns in history, using quantitative data and formal, often mathematical models to understand the past, interpret the present and shape the future. This book is a comprehensive survey of the new discipline's themes and participants, including its early roots. The first two chapters define the scope of theoretical history and present some background knowledge and assumptions. This is followed by a review of mathematical methods, covering topics like calculus, network theory, statistics, and time-series analysis. Three chapters cover respectively socio-cultural, economic-technological, and military-political processes in history. Cities and urbanism, historical cycles such as in war and the economy, and the impact of the environment on social change also each have their own chapter. The final chapter provides a guide to data sources. There is an index and bibliography.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/marc-widdowso ... pageSize=4

He discusses it on his Dark Age Theorist youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F52YB-P-Ll8

[Guest EDO]

I still don't see how America will be reduced to medieval England or Edo Japan and yet China won't bomb and enslave us.

Are you saying they will collapse at the same time?

[Higgenbotham]

I still don't see how America will be reduced to medieval England or Edo Japan and yet China won't bomb and enslave us.

Are you saying they will collapse at the same time?

In the Western mind warfare means you bomb someone to oblivion basically and then declare a winner. About 2004, I was having an email exchange with a former coworker who had just retired. I told him we were (are) at war with China. I said it is a low level economic war now, it just started, but it will progress into something more with time. In this email exchange, as I recall it, he replied repeatedly that, "We are not at war with China." That was all he could say. Also, in the Western mind, if someone was benefiting from the war, they could not conceive of it as a war because they were not losing. If his neighbor lost his job because of this war, or his wages didn't keep up with inflation, it was not a war. It just means your neighbor was stupid or unlucky. What's interesting about this right at the moment is BYD, a Chinese company, now has a EV for $13,000 and change that just came out and BYD has overtaken Tesla as the largest seller of EVs in the world. Also, the US has slapped a 100% tariff on these vehicles so effectively the US consumer can't buy them. We don't know if these vehicles are any good, but probably with time they will be. Meanwhile, Tesla stock has been plummeting and now both Republicans and Democrats think these tariffs are a good idea. In the economic war, China appears to be winning so far. Maybe they can keep on with the economic war and crash our markets. Then we'll see if a winner emerges out of that; probably not in my opinion.

I think one characteristic of this dark age is that nobody knows what's really going on. We're in this massive ocean of information without a drop of good, verifiable information. You have to take what anybody says with a grain of salt. There are people trying to take advantage of this and convince others that they are the ones who have good, verifiable information in this ocean of poor, unverifiable information when they actually don't. Yet we still have a need as humans to use our senses to determine what is really happening in our environment. So having said that I look at covid as the ratcheting up of the war with China. I believe covid was released from the Wuhan lab, maybe by accident before it was developed to their satisfaction but, once released, China had a wartime reaction to the release because that's what covid was intended for anyway. That didn't work out well for anyone and there was no winner. That will continue to be the case.

Tesla Stock Price



https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/30/tech/elo ... index.html

[Higgenbotham]

Military.com | By Thomas Novelly
Published September 28, 2022

A new study from the Pentagon shows that 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, using drugs or having mental and physical health problems.

A slide detailing the findings from the Pentagon's 2020 Qualified Military Available Study shared with Military.com shows a 6% increase from the latest 2017 Department of Defense research that showed 71% of Americans would be ineligible for service.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... 20problems

This should probably be repeated in the dark age hovel. A lot of this type of thing is indicative of a continuation of a trend of declining life expectancy, also demonstrating reduced quality of life.