New day, new rule

Science, during it’s golden age, was the pursuit of the idle rich. In the late 20th century, science was professionalized and became the domain of people who saw science as a means to become idle rich.

I can intuit that this rule is related to the process resulting in The Iron Law of Religion.

Mark Andreesson was recently on the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), and talked a lot about the current systems of control that the government uses to persecute it’s adversaries, more or less as it pleases. One thing that surprised me was the reaction to it. It seems there are very large numbers of people who might otherwise be considered informed, who were simply unaware.

I won’t catalog all of the revelations as there was nothing most of us haven’t heard before, but I figured I’d publish a quick article talking about some of the deeper lore of what used to be the stuff of late night talk shows, but is now so pedestrian it’s openly discussed on CSPAN.

Back in the 80s and 90s, besides aliens and Area 51, there were occasionally things that referenced Echelon, which was kind of ambiguously described as CIA, but these days it’s roughly a group project of the Five Eyes (US, UK, CA, NZ, AU), NSA, NRO, FBI and probably a dozen other TLAs whose names are classified. For reference the NRO – National Reconnaissance Office was considered classified until the end of the first Bush administration, and wasn’t often discussed until the latter parts of the Clinton admin. Even if you were really into Tom Clancy novels at the time, this name may still have escaped you.

The old Bogey Man of Echelon was supposed to be listening to your phone calls, and listening for key words, I even know a guy who wouldn’t use a payphone in a city that had a mint in it. What’s maybe a little sad, is in the intervening 30 years, bulk collection, warrantless wiretapping, CARNIVORE, raptor, Big Data, and a whole constellation of programs both government and commercial have turned the internet, which was once a wild and free communications medium into a panopticon.

What’s maybe newer to most people is the use of both the IRS, and other investigative agencies to audit organizations, and force banks to “de-bank” certain people. These tools had often been used against international terrorists for decades, when this started happening under the Obama administration it was being used against american citizens, first the Tea Party, then individuals within the Tea Party, and other right of center political organizations.

One thing that was a little new in this discussion is AI. AI has been with us in rudimentary forms for decades, however, there’s now more money behind it than ever. As much as I view AI as the god that never will be, the use of the data science that goes along with it would allow anyone with some power, to gain a lot more. Being able to map social networks in real tie, pull up call and communication histories, etc. This almost makes the threat of pre-crime possible, without even having to harness the brain of an orphan.

The last thing brought up was NGOs. This was something that wasn’t on my radar until recently, but it also seems like these have proliferated in the last ten years. Nearly every bit of software or software project in the open source is usually owned or managed by some kind of “foundation”. These foundations may be more or less successful in producing the end product, however when the product gets to a point that it’s of a certain utility a lot of these foundations will find this same cast of characters on their boards.

All in all, none of this is really new, it’s good to see more people becoming aware of it. As much as these kinds of surveillance systems are not so great for free thinking people the chances of surveillance being limited due to democratic change are incredibly unlikely. That said, all of these are not a trivial threat, they are very real and have already been used to get people fired from companies they founded, told to take their money and accounts to some other bank, and not only do we face threats of this from the government, but also a complex of NGOs doing the bidding, or at least following the same ideological goals as the bureaucrats who started it.

This is a dangerous time. From an evolutionary standpoint, we must evolve. The government is a predator and we are it’s prey, and when in doubt remember the moscow rules, may they be of no use.

Assume nothing. Never go against your gut. Everyone is potentially under opposition control. Do not look back; you are never completely alone. Go with the flow, blend in. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover. Lull them into a sense of complacency. Do not harass the opposition. Pick the time and place for action. Keep your options open.

A recent discussion of the growing domestic activist conflict that has been part of Hamas’ greater lawfare and PR blitz among western liberals. Groups like Neturei Karta, JVP, and SJP, are pushing a number of points of argument that somehow the Israelis should simply forgive and forget the atrocities of 10/7.

There also seems to have been an explosion lately of people online demanding an embrace of gay and trans issues. If we are to take the group alignments at face value, this is the QED of the Iron Law of Religion.

Eventually, every religion will create factions of itself, that oppose the religion on religious grounds

To borrow from Nietzsche “God is dead, and we have killed him”.

On Oct 7, 2023 Hamas launched one of those very significant terrorist raids against Israel, that will likely be memorialized as being definitional nightmare scenarios we have seen a few of in the last 25 years (9/11, Madrid, Bataclan, Mumbai, etc). These types of raids are typified by their absolute ruthlessness and the opportunism of the attackers. As sensational as this attack was, it is not new, it maybe represents some new TTPs, some novelty when it comes to insertion, and strong coordination between units. But it’s not new.

In the west, to those who pay attention to the radical political petri dishes our left-wing inner cities, and college campuses, there has been the growth of movements such as BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) which encourage those actions to be taken against Israeli interests, as a means of supporting the Palestinian cause. Confusingly, BDS and other movements are generally non-specific about support of the Palestinian cause, or the desire for mid-east peace, and increasingly BDS and other movements populated mostly by the over-socialized college students and their busy-body professors have largely dropped any pretense of being anything but anti-Israel, and very often anti-Jew.

Movements like BLM (Black Lives Matter), antifa, gay, trans, groups frequently cross pollinate, as such there tends not to be a lot of variation in ideology and beliefs amongst these groups, also, some of these groups share not just ideas, but membership. The cross-over with BDS, and pro-Palestinian groups with these other groups, means international events in the middle east, can easily turn into civil unrest in the US, and many large cities in Europe.

Since Oct 7, there have been a number of pro-Palestine rallies, most have been peaceful and rather unremarkable. However, a number have resulted in differing levels of violence, including exchanging gunfire. One event that stood out, was on Oct 22, in Minneapolis, MN. A major street was blockaded, and some retiree weaved his way through the crowd, got maced, chased, his car pounded on. The level of organization was rather impressive, vehicles were driven in to blockade the street, drones were flying overhead, and there were essentially roving QRFs (Quick Reaction Forces) on motorbikes and quad bikes. (I will not link the video, but search on youtube). The display was at the very least iterative, of tactics seen at previous protests where bicycles would be used to control access of the police to areas where “direct actions” were happening.

Not all marches have resulted in kinetic street take-overs in the same way everywhere. A number of very large rallies and marches have taken place in Paris, London, and many cities in the US. However, it seems generally that western support is tepid in the face of so much at home opposition. The alignment of so many affinity groups, the slick media releases, has certainly made Hamas’ jihad the cause celeb.

There have been a number of reports, and warnings repeated by the media that there remain the possibilities of attacks in the US on specific days approximately every two weeks. No attacks have yet materialized, but certainly more reports and notices are sure to follow.

Pro-Palestine protests, marches, and rallies, in the west should be taken as a show of force by Hamas, Iran, and their allies. Backlit against the recurrent threat of terrorist attacks in the US and elsewhere put out by the government show that the threat is being taken seriously however, it does not rise to a level where action can be taken.

“War is politics by other means” – Carl von Clausewitz

A lot has been written about the nature of war, Sun Tzu penned his tome 6 centuries before Jesus walked the earth. Man has been fighting man since the beginning and a lot of selection pressure has been expended making sure those who are good at war, (or good at avoiding it) have more children. The Generational Warfare Model was discussed in an earlier re-posting of a Marine Corps Gazette article The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.

Wars are only fought for two reasons: to impose one’s will on another, or to preserve one’s ability to exercise his will. The scale at which any of these happen can be changed, the motivations, and even some rather complex plays of will and exercise, but the distilled essence is this, everything else is abstraction.

5th Generation Warfare (5GW) has been presented as a new doctrine for non-kinetic war, where the battlefield leans on “information and perception” as a means of shaping behavior. While this is a novel concept, information warfare, propaganda, subterfuge, and deception have been the bread and butter of conventional forces for centuries. The major limitation of any 5GW theory is the at times willful ignorance towards the previous generations and it’s ability to define itself as being distinct.

During WW2 leading up to the D-Day landings, the allied militaries had engaged in a task of convincing the German leadership that a major offensive was coming up, with large amounts of men and materiel, lead by a legendary commander, and would be preceded by a smaller attack in a different place to draw away important resources. While Allied Command spoon fed the information to the Germans, they did so in a way that the German Command ignored their perceptions long enough that a decisive advantage was gained. This was a decidedly kinetic movement, decidedly within the realm of a third generation war, and it was devastating. Under a 5GW approach, would the goal be to just keep the Nazis occupied preparing for an assault that would never come? Continuing to ratchet up the tension?

War will always be kinetic, things will always be damaged. Manipulating the available information, and feeding in other information may shape perception, however the most effective way to do this, is to feed information the confirms existing biases and feeds into the existing perception of the opponent. That Clausewitz quote was a tell.