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the fear of the balloons is going to make the pentagon budget balloon...


UFO defense: Washington turns to sci-fi to boost military spending

On the heels of the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ scare, the US is now being invaded by unidentified aerial craft – just in time for the new budget bill

After the so-called “Chinese spy balloon” passed over the US last week and was shot down, the US claimed that multiple “UFO’s” have since appeared in its airspace, as well as above Canada.

 

By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst 

 

Without blaming these so-called UFOs on a certain country, the US has continued to shoot them down, arousing mystery and suspicion over their origin. Whatever their origin and purpose, the (intended) end result for Washington will be increased mass fear, a boost in military spending, further escalated tensions with both China and Russia and the manufactured compliance of Washington’s allies. The rest of 2023 is going to be a bumpy year.

As argued in an earlier piece, Biden is not like Trump, he is much worse. Trump’s was a mercantilist presidency owing to his business-like and transaction-based mindset, and his decisions were not militaristic at root. Trump disliked China for economic and commercial reasons, while he also took pragmatic positions on negotiating with Russia and North Korea. This pragmatic stance earned him the contempt of the US establishment, who sought to undermine him where possible, blocking his withdrawal from Syria or playing down his rhetoric on NATO.

Biden, on the other hand, is a highly militaristic neoconservative President who has unleashed a titanic geopolitical struggle. He has dramatically escalated tensions with China and Russia, in an attempt to advance the US military’s presence and alliance system wherever possible, with little thought of the costs of such policy decisions. His leadership is the opposite of Trump’s inward-focused rhetoric. While Trump enjoyed hypothetical, rhetorical notoriety on social media, such as by threatening Kim Jong-Un with “fire and fury,” Biden gives no second thought to actually creating military crises and using them to forcibly reassert power over American allies in a zero-sum manner.

Here we see a contrast between the methodologies of both presidents in relation to these so-called “spy balloons” or UFOs. The Trump administration reportedly had to deal with them too but chose not to publicize it. The Biden administration has decided to do so because it has spotted a golden opportunity to dramatically escalate global military tensions and, in turn, provide additional justification for increased defense spending. The Democrats will still have to push the policy through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but drumming up the China threat will be just what they need to persuade the anti-Beijing hawks among the GOP’s numbers.

This has been done before. Think back to the boom of UFOs as a science fiction trope, or the craze of UFO sightings in the United States which emerged in the 1950s. Believers will tell you that the US government has long known about extraterrestrial ships visiting Earth and has been covering it up. This has caused long standing theories and speculation about events such as the Roswell incident in 1947 (which, as it happens, was explained as a high altitude balloon), or the true nature of places such as “Area 51” in Nevada. However, the disappointing reality is that this whole sub-genre of fiction owes a lot of its popularity to the Cold War, its politics, and certainly the military exploits of the time.

After all, the 1950s and 60s were landmark decades when it comes to space exploration and new aerial and rocket technology. The United States was locked in a tense competition with the Soviet Union and tested many kinds of aerospace vehicles. It was public sightings of these strange and new phenomena, combined with the military-grade secrecy that surrounded these programs, which ultimately fed the public imagination of the time with an atmosphere of mystery and paranoia.

Now, history is repeating itself. The US government primarily wants you to fear Russia and China. It wants you to think that they have secret and cryptic surveillance capabilities which are infringing upon Americans, and that taxpayer dollars are being well spent in a dramatically increased defense budget. The US is actively manufacturing consent for military tensions. Not only is it trying to use Ukraine to destroy Russia on its own doorstep, but it is eyeing a dramatic escalation of tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, making every effort to recruit allies into a military struggle on its own terms, increasing the number of military bases, and essentially looking to “NATOize” the entire world.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/571482-ufo-sightings-us-china/

 

 

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automated wars......

Former Google and Alphabet boss Schmidt is working with the military to change the face of modern warfare with advanced AI weaponry, which he likens to the significance of the atomic bomb in WWII. He has also emerged as the heir apparent to Henry Kissinger, a founding member of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. — Technocracy News & Trends Editor Patrick Wood

By: Will Knight via Wired

Expensive military hardware like a new tank undergoes rigorous testing before heading to the battlefield. A startup called Istari, backed by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and chair of Alphabet, reckons some of that work can be done more effectively in the metaverse.

Ishtari uses machine learning to virtually assemble and test war machines from computer models of individual components, such as the chassis and engines, that are usually marooned on separate digital drawing boards. It may sound dull, but Schmidt says it can bring a dose of tech industry innovation to US military engineering. “The Istari team is bringing internet-type usability to models and simulations,” he says. “This unlocks the possibility of software-like agility for future physical systems—it is very exciting.”

 

The company reflects Schmidt’s unique position as a link between the tech industry and the Pentagon. Virtual replicas known as digital twins are common in manufacturing and could help the Pentagon develop hardware more quickly. And Istari is a building block in a wider project in which Schmidt is attempting to bring Silicon Valley technology and thinking to the US military.

That quest has roots in the shock Schmidt experienced in 2016 when he first glimpsed the state of Pentagon technology up close. He was still chair of Alphabet but accepted an invitation from President Obama’s defense secretary Ashton Carter to chair a new Defense Innovation Board trying to modernize the DOD. Schmidt’s new post began with an eye-opening tour of US labs and bases.

“I got to run around with Eric and look at how the department was engaging on commercial technology,” says Will Roper, who was then an assistant secretary of the Air Force focused on technology and is the founder and CEO of Istari. “It was evident that the entire Department of Defense was developing software the same way it was done in the 1970s and ’80s,” Roper says. He was one of many Pentagon leaders who were impressed by Schmidt‘s diagnosis of the department’s problems and willingness to try to solve them.

Schmidt became CEO of Google in 2001, when the search engine had a few hundred employees and was barely making money. He stepped away from Alphabet in 2017 after building a sprawling, highly profitable company with a stacked portfolio of projects, including cutting-edge artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and quantum computers.

Schmidt now sees another opportunity for technological reinvention to lead to domination, this time for the US government in competition with other world powers. He may be uniquely well positioned to understand what the Pentagon needs to reach its technological goals and to help the agency obtain it. But his ties to industry raise questions about how the US should aim to align the government and the private sector. And while US military power has long depended on advances in technology, some fear that military AI can create new risks.

Speaking over Zoom from his office in New York, Schmidt lays out a grand vision for a more advanced DOD that can nimbly harness technology from companies like Istari. In a cheery orange sweater that looks like it’s made of exquisite wool, he casually imagines a wholesale reboot of the US armed forces.

“Let’s imagine we’re going to build a better war-fighting system,” Schmidt says, outlining what would amount to an enormous overhaul of the most powerful military operation on earth. “We would just create a tech company.” He goes on to sketch out a vision of the internet of things with a deadly twist. “It would build a large number of inexpensive devices that were highly mobile, that were attritable, and those devices—or drones—would have sensors or weapons, and they would be networked together.”

The problem with today’s Pentagon is hardly money, talent, or determination, in Schmidt’s opinion. He describes the US military as “great human beings inside a bad system”—one that evolved to serve a previous era dominated by large, slow, expensive projects like aircraft carriers and a bureaucratic system that prevents people from moving too quickly. Independent studies and congressional hearings have found that it can take years for the DOD to select and buy software, which may be outdated by the time it is installed. Schmidt says this is a huge problem for the US, because computerization, software, and networking are poised to revolutionize warfare.

Read full story here…

Sourced from Technocracy News & Trends

 

READ MORE:

https://www.activistpost.com/2023/02/trilateral-commissioner-eric-schmidt-is-building-the-perfect-warfare-ai.html

 

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the cool heads....

Hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington, DC for the ‘March Against the War Machine’ rally, with a number of prominent speakers from across the political spectrum calling on the US government to end its military support of Ukraine in favor of diplomacy, and slashing the Pentagon budget to address numerous domestic issues.

The anti-war event held at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday marked almost one year since the start of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, and featured a wide range of public figures, journalists and former politicians, including several US presidential hopefuls.

Former US Congresswoman and presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, addressed the crowd of several hundred people with a reminder of what caused her to run in 2020, and how there was “no other candidate willing to talk about… the dangers where this new Cold War and nuclear arms race would eventually lead.”

“And so here we are. Two short years later what I warned about then is now a reality. This proxy that we are fighting against Russia right now could turn at any moment into a direct conflict between the United States/NATO and Russia,” she said, warning that “anyone with a little bit of common sense” knows that a Cold War can at any moment turn into a hot war against a nuclear-armed country.”

And here is the insanity of it all: we have talking heads on TV, we have politicians, we have very powerful people here in the United States and all around the world speaking with a straight face… about ‘how we gonna fight and win’… as if such a war could ever be won. It cannot be won,” she stated.

Whether intentional or accidental, there is only one destination for such war, and that is a nuclear holocaust.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein called for slashing the Pentagon’s enormous budget, arguing in her speech that even the “$100 billion we are spending to support war in Ukraine” could help mitigate a whole range of domestic problems.

“This murderous military spending consumes resources desperately needed here at home: by 70,000 people who die each year for lack of health insurance; for a half million homeless people on any given night out in the street; for 33 million marred in student debt; a 100 million in medical debt, 22 million impoverished children and on and on..”

Former Congressman, Dennis Kucinich, who fought for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and 2008, cited a bombshell report by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to demand accountability from the US government.

“In blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, this government… has used illegal and unconstitutional means to destroy the energy resources needed to protect millions of people in Europe during the winter, and then to profit from its illegal actions by selling energy to Europe at a four to six times markup,” Kucinich said.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/571747-rage-military-machine-rally/

 

 

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HERE'S AN INDICATOR OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE NASTINESS: 

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