Category Archives: Dystopia

America’s Painful Self-delusion

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By Allen Marshall

Source: Information Clearing House

America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America – that “brand” – is incredibly strong.

However, there’s a very large gap between that long-held image and the reality of America today. What was once a government built for the people is now a government run for the rich and powerful, one that throws the people under the bus whenever their interests differ from those of the corporate and political leaders who run the show.

And living in one world (the corrupt) while stubbornly believing you live in another (the ideal), despite mounds of evidence, causes a distinct kind of stress, often called cognitive dissonance.

Psychologists suggest that when people are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they’ll search for a way to resolve it, either by rejecting one view or the other as either wrong or unimportant. If you’re a smoker looking at the link between smoking and cancer, for example, you’ll either quit smoking or decide that the research is biased, wrong, or doesn’t apply (in other words, that you’re smart enough to quit before the long-term damage is done).

But what happens if you can’t resolve the two?

For most of us Americans, resolving our cognitive dissonance would mean either accepting that we’re impotent and living futile (and feudal) lives, or rejecting our lifestyles and actively fighting the rot in the system. If we’re not willing to do either of those, the dissonance stays – and eats at us.

People carrying this kind of ongoing, underlying stress find ways of coping with it; in America we’re doing it with self-medication, compulsive behaviors and distractions. Consider the following examples of the way we cope with the ever-present stress in our lives:

  • Drugs – Our country is awash in drugs, both legal and illegal, that keep us numb. In 2014, there were 245 million prescriptions filled for opioid pain relievers. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has risen from around 30,000 in 2005 to 64,000 in 2016. And communities across the country are being devastated by the opioid epidemic, as explained in this in-depth reporting by Cincinnati.com.
  • Drinking – People don’t only use drugs to self-medicate; drinking does the trick as well, and we’re doing a lot more of it than we used to. According to a new study in JAMA Psychiatry, overall drinking in the US increased by 11% between 2002-13, while high-risk and problem drinking rose even higher: high-risk drinking rose by 29.9%, while problem drinking rose by 50%.
  • Mental Illness – In 2015, 17.9% of adults held a diagnosis for a mental disorder, while a 2010 study found that 46.3% of children ages 13-18 had a mental disorder at some point in their young lives, and the majority of those adults and children are given prescriptions. This includes a dramatic increase in ADHD diagnoses for children: According to SharpBrains, “Among children aged 5 to 18, between 1991-92 and 2008-09, rates of ADHD diagnosis increased nearly 4-fold among boys – from 39.5 to 144.6 per 1000 – and nearly 6-fold for girls – from 12.3 and 68.5 per 1000 visits.”
  • Obesity – If drinking and drugs aren’t your thing – or even if they are – more of us are coping with stress by overeating, and it’s showing up on our waistlines. From 1990 to 2016, the average percentage of obese adults increased from 11.1% to 29.8%; when you add in the number of people who are overweight but not obese, it rises to more than two in three adults.
  • Sleeping problems – Sleep has a significant impact on our physical and mental health, and in America we’re not getting enough of it: The CDC states that 50-70 million American adults have a sleep or wakefulness disorder.
  • Media Usage – Is there any better distraction from life’s problems than media? We certainly spend a lot of our time being passively entertained: In 2016, Americans consumed an average of 10 hours of media per day, compared with 7.5 hours per day globally. Nielson reports that lower income adults spend much more time with media than do affluent adults, with adults in households with include under $25,000 watching 211 hours/month of television, versus 113 hours/month for adults in households earning $75,000 or more. (The trend is similar across other media as well.)
  • The Disease of Debt – According to the New York Fed, household debt reached a new peak in the third quarter of 2017, at $12.8 trillion. Part of our debt problem comes from the compulsive shopping we do as a distraction; the other results from denying the reality that our wages aren’t keeping up with the increase in the cost of living, meaning that we use debt to plug the gap rather than reducing our living standards to align with our reality.

We’re collectively doing so much damage to ourselves, solely to protect our psyches from the reality that the America that used to be is no longer the America we have. And who does that help? As you can see from the points above, it doesn’t help us: Instead, it helps the rich and powerful who are subverting the system. They’re corrupting everything this country once was, and by willfully refusing to acknowledge that reality, we’re inadvertently helping them to do it.

The best thing we can do – for our mental and physical health, as well as for our country – is to open our eyes to what America has become, not what we wish it still was. It’s time to face reality and take action.

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

What about internally, then?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became enemies of each other, but neither of them had ever really been a friend of the American public: both of them were instead liars who would, and did, do everything they could to grab control (on the aristocracy’s behalf, who financed their respective campaigns) over what is supposed to be our Government, in a democracy. That’s just a sad fact about reality, which both of America’s political Parties deny (because they both need those voters, not merely those mega-donations; they need the public to believe that the Party cares about them).

Most of the American public have been successfully deceived by the ‘news’media, and by the ‘history’-books (likewise published by agents for the aristocracy), to believe that the U.S. Government serves the public-interest, and not the interest of the centi-millionaires and especially billionaires, who finance political campaigns. But it’s no truer than it’s true that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend: both enemies of each other can be your enemies, too. The difference here is that the enmity between the aristocracy and the public is basically intrinsic, whereas the enmities between (Republican versus Democratic, or any other divisions between) aristocrats, are basically personal — these are matters of business, instead of matters of state. They are, in a sense, different business-plans — competing business-plans. But they are all assisting the aristocracy, to control the public, so as to advance the interests of the aristocracy. They’re all competing for the aristocracy’s support, and deceiving for the public’s support. Two blatant recent examples displaying this were America’s invasion in 2003 that destroyed Iraq, and America’s invasion in 2011 that destroyed Libya. Did either of those invasions advance the interests of the American public? But the owners of Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’ contractors blossomed after 9/11. In fact: U.S. arms-exports are at record highs.

The now-proven reality in America is that the U.S. Government really does represent those billionaires and centi-millionaires, and not the public. It’s a now-proven reality, that the U.S. isn’t a democracy but a dictatorship — albeit, a two-Party one, with a real competition between billionaire and centi-millionaire Republicans on the one hand, versus billionaire and centi-millionaire Democrats on the other. But all billionaires and centi-millionaires are takers (that’s how they came to be super-rich, even the ones who didn’t inherit it from their parents), who (notwithstanding any ‘charity’ they may establish to avoid taxes while extending their control) receive from the public far more than they give to the public; and, so, there is actually an intrinsic class-war — not at all like Karl Marx famously said, between the bourgeoisie (including small-business owners) versus the proletariat (including some centi-millionaires and billionaires who became super-wealthy from being movie-stars or athletic stars and who don’t necessarily actually control any business at all, and so they’re “proletariats”), but instead between the aristocracy versus the public: the ancient and permanent class-conflict. It’s the entire aristocracy-of-wealth (which is maybe half of the nation’s wealth) that’s arrayed against the public (the poorer 99+% of the people). (In fact, Marx — the promoter of the view that the bourgeoisie are the public’s enemies — had aristocratic sponsors, and he would have remained obscure and died poor, if he had instead blamed the aristocracy, not “the bourgeoisie” — which is mainly the middle class — as being the exploiting-class. Marx, too, was an agent of aristocracy. He succeeded and became famous because he had aristocratic sponsors. Otherwise, his name would have simply been forgotten.)

Anyway, the American public are now alone. No Government represents our interests. It’s now been proven that America’s Government doesn’t represent us; and it’s not even the business of any other Government in the world to represent us; so, no foreign government does, either. No Government represents us.

In order to understand any aristocracy, one must understand what gives rise to almost all wars, because almost all wars throughout history have been between contending aristocracies — between the aristocracies of different nations. Each aristocracy needs to be able to fool its national public, to believe that they’re fighting against the foreign public, when, in fact, they’re fighting against the foreign aristocracy, and they’re fighting for the home-nation’s aristocracy — they are, almost always, fighting for one aristocracy, against another aristocracy. Any public who would know that this is the reality, would just as soon commit a democratic revolution, against the local aristocracy, as go to war for the local one, against the foreign ones. This is the reason why, in every dictatorship, the local centi-millionaires and billionaires buy up all of the ‘news’media that inform, or (on essential matters) misinform, their audiences about international relations, and about who did what to whom and why. They hire only ‘reporters’ who comply with whatever deceptions the owners feel to be necessary, in order to be able to attract sponsorships from other aristocrats’ corporations and ‘charities’. But, the aristocrats themselves are actually all in this together, because their mutually shared enemy is the public. Without deceiving the public about essential matters, no national news-medium would be able to attract the sponsorships it needs in order to grow, or even to survive.

The public thinks it’s fighting an international war, when, in fact, they’re fighting for the local aristocracy (and its allied aristocracies), against foreign aristocracies (and their allied aristocracies). This has been true since the dawn of human civilization. Only the weapons are bigger now, and the alliances (in the World Wars) are now global. (But, of course, if there is another World War, then all of human civilization will immediately end, and not long thereafter, all human and most other forms of life will also end.)

An excellent example of the real class-war, and of its international nature, is James Bamford’s 3 April 2012 masterful and pioneering article in Wired, “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA”. He documented that even very high-up people in America’s NSA were kept out of the loop when joint U.S.-and-Israeli intelligence-agencies and private corporations were creating the present 1984-ish, “Big Brother” reality, in (at least) those countries (but, actually, the Sauds, and probably a few others, were also on the inside — the aristocracies not merely of those two countries, U.S. and Israel, are in the alliance).

The “Deep State” isn’t merely one nation’s aristocracy and its agents; it is basically a form of actually international gang-warfare. That’s what got us into invading and destroying Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, Ukraine (by coup 2014), and so many other nations. It wasn’t done in order to serve the American public’s interests. That’s just the standard lie — and it keeps going on, and on. Maybe until we invade Russia.

A Tale of Two Americas: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Jail

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela

This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.

Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.

Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

Now Sessions has given state courts the green light to resume their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. In doing so, Sessions has once again shown himself to be not only a shill for the Deep State but an enemy of the people.

First, some background on debtors’ prisons, which jail people who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines imposed on them by courts and other government agencies.

Congress banned debtors’ prisons in 1833.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.

“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludes The Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”

Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”

By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”

Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”

Follow the money trail. It always points the way.

Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.

The same goes for the war on crime.

At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.

Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Review recounts:

On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.

This is not justice.

This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.

As the Harvard Law Review concludes:

[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.

Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.

All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.

Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.

And for those who can’t afford to pay the court fines heaped on top of the penalties ($302 for jaywalking, $531 for an overgrown yard, or $120 for arriving a few minutes late to court), there’s probation (managed by profit-run companies that tack on their own fees, which are often more than double the original fine) or jail time (run by profit-run companies that charge inmates for everything from food and housing to phone calls at outrageous markups), which only adds to the financial burdens of those already unable to navigate a costly carceral state.

“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”

In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Review documents in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:

In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.

Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?

The prison population continues to grow because of a glut of laws that criminalize activities that should certainly not be outlawed, let alone result in jail time. Overcriminalization continues to plague the country because of legislators who work hand-in-hand with corporations to adopt laws that favor the corporate balance sheet. And when it comes to incarceration, the corporate balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of locking up more individuals in government-run and private prisons.

As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”

It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.

According to The Atlantic, “America spends $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.4 million people.” But the costs don’t end there. “When someone goes to prison, nearly 65 percent of families are suddenly unable to pay for basic needs such as food and housing… About 70 percent of those families are caring for children under the age of 18.”

Then there are the marked-up costs levied against the inmate by private companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Cereal and soup for five times the market price. $15 for a short phone call.

The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”

Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:

Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.

This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.

This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.

This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.

Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.

There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.

Boobs on Credit

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From BreastImplantFailure.net

By Jim Quinn

Source: The Burning Platform

Do you ever hear something so startlingly mind numbingly ridiculous you realize it must be a sign things have gotten so fucked up something has got to give? As I was driving to work yesterday morning on the Schuylkill Expressway a commercial comes on the radio from a plastic surgeon advertising for anyone looking for a better set of boobs. I had never heard a plastic surgeon commercial before, so I thought that was unusual. But, that wasn’t the best part. This plastic surgeon was offering no money down 18 month interest free financing on your new boobs.

I wonder if they are moving boobs with subprime debt the same way the auto companies have used subprime debt to move cars. Of course, when a deadbeat defaults on an auto loan the car is easily repossessed. What happens when a bimbo defaults on her boob loan? How narrow minded of me. What happens when some dude who wants to be a bimbo defaults on his/her loan? I guess it was just a matter of time before breast enhancement met debt enhancement in this warped world of materialism, narcissism, financialization, and delusions.

Now that revolving credit has reached a new all-time high of $1 trillion and total consumer debt outstanding has exceeded it’s 2008 peak at $12.8 trillion, the Fed has completed its job of helping the average American again in-debt themselves up to their eyeballs. This is considered a success story in this twisted, perverted, bizarro world we call America today. The solution to an epic debt induced global financial catastrophe caused by Federal Reserve easy money, Wall Street fraud, and Washington DC corruption has been to increase global debt by 50% since 2007, with virtually all of it created by central bankers and the governments they control.

In what demented Ivy League educated academic mind would piling $68 trillion more debt on the backs of taxpayers as a cure for a disease caused by the initial $149 trillion of debt be considered rational and sustainable? It’s like having pancreatic cancer and trying to cure it with a self inflicted gunshot. And no one seems to care about or even notice the coming reset when this mass debt induced hysteria of delusion turns into the biggest financial collapse in the history of mankind.

This entire ponzi scheme edifice of debt is nothing but a confidence game. When people begin to realize they can’t repay their own debts, start to understand their governments will never honor their debt based promises, and realize central bankers are nothing more than pretend wizards behind a curtain, the confidence will evaporate in an instant and a collapse which will make 2008/2009 look like a walk in the park will ensue. That’s when civil and global war will engulf the world and teach people real lessons about the real world.

The boobs on credit commercial I heard this week is just another example of Wall Street and their Deep State crony co-conspirators completing their scheme to financialize every aspect of our lives and entrap us in chains of debt, beholden to these modern day Wall Street slave owners. When you see the record number of retail bankruptcies and store closings happening when GDP is supposedly rising by 3% and witness with your own two eyes the number of vacant storefronts and restaurants across our great land of materialism, you might wonder why revolving credit card debt is at a new all-time high.

The answer is Wall Street has successfully financialized virtually every aspect of our day to day lives. Consumer and taxpayer transactions which required cash or check ten years ago can now be paid with a credit card. You can pay your IRS bill with a credit card. You can pay your real estate taxes with a credit card. You can pay your utilities with a credit card. You can pay your school tuition with a credit card. You can pay your rent with a credit card. You can “buy” furniture and appliances without paying for seven years. And guess what? That’s what millions of average Americans are doing. In addition, they are driving “rented” $35,000 automobiles on seven year nothing down payment plans.

This massive debt induced fraud of a recovery gives the appearance of normalcy and stability. The stock market is at all-time highs is used as the narrative of central banker success. We’ve experienced extremely low volatility as the central bankers around the world have coordinated their money printing/debt creating schemes to purposely elevate financial markets to give the masses confidence that all is well. Anyone with critical thinking skills knows all is not well. The longer this fake stability is maintained the greater the collapse. Success breeds disregard for the possibility of catastrophe.

So you can call me the boy who cried wolf, but our Minsky Moment is approaching. Sometimes they do ring a bell at the top. In this case they are shaking fake boobs at the top.

“Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.” – Hyman Minsky

 

Mainstream Media & FBI Push Fake Terror Attack Even After Their Patsy Refused to Do It

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The mainstream media is praising the FBI after their agents targeted a “terrorist” who refused to go through with an attack they were attempting to set up.

By Rachel Blevins

Source: The Free Thought Project

It is no secret that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation often look for and take advantage of vulnerable individuals on the internet by gaining their trust and convincing them to carry out attacks—but even in a case where the “terrorist” backed out of the attack, the mainstream media is still celebrating the FBI’s diligence in the War on Terror.

“FBI thwarts alleged plan to carry out terrorist attack in San Francisco on Christmas,” the Washington Post reported, claiming that the agency was able to prevent “a possible terrorist attack at San Francisco’s Pier 39 after arresting a man who told undercover agents he wanted to carry out an Islamic State-inspired suicide bombing at the popular tourist destination on Christmas Day.”

The New York Post joined in with the headline “FBI thwarts ISIS-inspired Christmas terror attack on San Francisco,” and the claim that the suspect was “former US Marine sharpshooter” Everitt Aaron Jameson, 26, who was discharged from the military for fraudulent enlistment, and now works as a tow truck driver.

The Department of Justice released a statement confirming that Jameson has been arrested for “attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.” If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

“According to court documents, Jameson had several online interactions with a confidential source in which he expressed support for the October 31, 2017, terrorist attack in New York City and offered his services for ‘the cause.’  In subsequent communications with an undercover agent, Jameson referred to his training in the U.S. military and noted he had been trained for combat and war.  Jameson later met with another undercover agent whom he believed to be associated with the senior leadership of the foreign terrorist organization, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIL).  During his interactions with this undercover agent, Jameson offered to carry out violent acts and to provide financial support for the terrorist organization.”

Now, the question is—how did FBI agents find Jameson, and did he actually pose a threat of carrying out a terrorist attack?

The Los Angeles Times reported that Jameson began studying Islam one year ago, after he became “depressed and even suicidal over losing custody of his children.” However, his family insisted that he did not have violent tendencies, and had never mentioned anything about becoming involved with the Islamic State.

“He just ain’t no terrorist, no way,” Jameson’s father said. “He would never hurt people. Not ever. It’s just unbelievable. That’s not who he is.”

The criminal complaint filed against Jameson claimed that he first caught the agency’s attention when a “credible FBI Confidential Human Source” flagged his Facebook account as suspicious on Sept. 19, for “Liking” and “Loving” posts that were “pro-ISIS and pro-terrorism.”

“To provide an example of the types of posts Jameson was ‘Liking’ and ‘Loving’ during this time period, the CHS reported to the FBI that Jameson “loved” a post on November 29, 2017 that is an image of Santa Claus standing in New York with a box of dynamite. The text of the post reads, ‘ISIS post image of Santa with dynamite threatening attack on New York.’ The Propaganda poster shows Santa Claus standing on a roof next to a box of dynamite looking out over a crowd of shoppers with the words ‘We meet at Christmas in New York… soon.’ Under this post, Jameson selected the ‘Like’ option and then selected the “Heart” option to signify that he ‘Loved’ the post.”

However, the fact that Jameson “liked” a post on Facebook about an ISIS attack in the United States on Christmas day, does not guarantee that he would have actually carried out such an attack by himself.

While the complaint does detail the conversations Jameson had with FBI informants, and it shows that he appeared eager to provide supplies for an attack on a crowded area, and willing to carry out, he was never in contact with a suspected member of ISIS.

It is also important to consider the context. FBI informants were holding bait in front of a depressed, suicidal man, and were giving him a sense of attention and companionship that he was likely lacking in his own life. Ultimately, two days after meeting with FBI informants in person, the criminal complaint noted that Jameson sent a message on Dec. 18, saying, “I don’t think I can do this after all. I’ve reconsidered.”

It was too late. Even though he had not harmed anyone, and had declined to carry out the attack the agents were trying to talk him into, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Jameson’s home the next day. They seized a letter signed by “Abdullah Abu Everitt,” a last will and testament, and a series of weapons including “a Winchester .22 caliber rifle, a Ruger M77, a Ruger 9mm handgun, magazines, ammunition and fireworks.”

Everitt Jameson now faces up to 20 years in prison for engaging in conversations online with FBI informants who intentionally targeted his weaknesses, as the mainstream media celebrates the fact that the FBI has foiled yet another FBI terror plot, and the agents who are responsible for ruining an innocent man’s life, look for their next victim.

If Jameson never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the entire idea was forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken, mentally ill men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Jameson would’ve actually carried out this attack that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit their role in his life at all?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

 

$21 Trillion of Unauthorized Spending by US Govt Discovered by Economics Professor

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Source: Covert Geopolitics

he US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was announced.

Two departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as $21 trillion on things they can’t account for between 1998 and 2015. At least that’s what Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.

They came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of Defense (DoD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as repots of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) over summer.

The research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush administration, saying the Inspector General found $6.5 trillion worth of military spending that the DoD couldn’t account for. She was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought she must be mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous experience with public finances, he thought the figure was too big even for an organization as large as the US military.

“Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don’t have adequate transactions… so an auditor would just recede. Usually it’s just a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that you just can’t account for,” he explained in an interview with USAWatchdog.com earlier this month.

After discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated with a pair of graduate students to comb through thousands of reports of the OIG dating back to 1998, when new rules of public accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to 2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The research was only for the DoD and the HUD.

“This is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the Army,” Skidmore said.

The professor would not suggest whether the missing trillions went to some legitimate undisclosed projects, wasted or misappropriated, but believes his find indicates that there is something profoundly wrong with the budgeting process in the US federal government. Such lack of transparency goes against the due process of authorizing federal spending through the US Congress, he said.

Skidmore also co-authored a column on Forbes, explaining his research.

The same week the interview took place the DoD announced that it will conduct its first-ever audit. “It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer dollar,” Comptroller David Norquist told reporters as he explained that the OIG has hired independent auditors to dig through the military finances.

“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” Skidmore commented.

Interestingly, in early December the authors of the research discovered that the links to key document they used, including the 2016 report, had been disabled. Days later the documents were reposted under different addresses, they say.

This is probably where the Deep State government called CIA and State Department took their extra fund to topple uncooperative governments around the world. The bulk, of course, may have gone to the military industrial complex.

The United States has double the military budget of the combined military spending of Russia, China and G7 countries. Said military spending remains unauditable due to “widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations” according to a GAO report in 2010.

So, how can a government spread its wings beyond its own borders, and demand democratic ideals elsewhere when it is not practicing the same values at home?

The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion

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Or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

By Alfred McCoy

Source: The Unz Review

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper readers across America were captivated by a brand-new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It offered the country its first images of space-age death rays, atomic explosions, and inter-planetary travel.

“I was twenty years old,” World War I veteran Anthony “Buck” Rogers told readers in the very first strip, “surveying the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh… when suddenly… gas knocked me out. But I didn’t die. The peculiar gas… preserved me in suspended animation. Finally, another shifting of strata admitted fresh air and I revived.”

Staggering out of that mine, he finds himself in the 25th century surrounded by flying warriors shooting ray guns at each other. A Mongol spaceship overhead promptly spots him on its “television view plate” and fires its “disintegrator ray” at him. He’s saved from certain death by a flying woman warrior named Wilma who explains to him how this all came to be.

“Many years ago,” she says, “the Mongol Reds from the Gobi Desert conquered Asia from their great airships held aloft by gravity Repellor Rays. They destroyed Europe, then turned toward peace-loving America.” As their disintegrator beams boiled the oceans, annihilated the U.S. Navy, and demolished Washington, D.C. in just three hours, “government ceased to exist, and mobs, reduced to savagery, fought their way out of the cities to scatter and hide in the country. It was the death of a nation.” While the Mongols rebuilt 15 cities as centers of “super scientific magnificence” under their evil emperor, Americans led “hunted lives in the forests” until their “undying flame of freedom” led them to recapture “lost science” and “once more strike for freedom.”

After a year of such cartoons filled with the worst of early-twentieth-century Asian stereotypes, just as Wilma is clinging to the airship of the Mongol Viceroy as it speeds across the Pacific , a mysterious metallic orb appears high in the sky and fires death rays, sending the Mongol ship “hissing into the sea.” With her anti-gravity “inertron” belt, the intrepid Wilma dives safely into the waves only to have a giant metal arm shoot out from the mysterious orb and pull her on board to reveal — “Horrors! What strange beings!” — Martians!

With that strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century moved from Earth-bound combat against racialized Asians into space wars against monsters from other planets that, over the next 70 years, would take the strip into comic books, radio broadcasts, feature films, television serials, video games, and the country’s collective conscious. It would offer defining visions of space warfare for generations of Americans.

Back in the 21st Century

Now imagine us back in the 21st century. It’s 2030 and an American “triple canopy” of pervasive surveillance systems and armed drones already fills the heavens from the lower stratosphere to the exo-atmosphere. It can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out enemy satellite communications at a moment’s notice, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. It’s a wonder of the modern age. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated military information system ever created and an insurance policy for global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.

That is, in fact, the future as the Pentagon imagines it and it’s actually under development, even though most Americans know little or nothing about it. They are still operating in another age, as was Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates when he complained that “our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917.”

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed… the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.” Obama then offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Indeed, working in secrecy, the Obama administration was presiding over a revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the future full-scale weaponization of space. From stratosphere to exosphere, the Pentagon is now producing an armada of fantastical new aerospace weapons worthy of Buck Rogers.

In 2009, building on advances in digital surveillance under the Bush administration, Obama launched the U.S. Cyber Command. Its headquarters were set up inside the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwar center staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees was established at Lackland Air Base in Texas. Two years later, the Pentagon moved beyond conventional combat on air, land, or sea to declare cyberspace both an offensive and defensive “operational domain.” In August, despite his wide-ranging attempt to purge the government of anything connected to Barack Obama’s “legacy,” President Trump implemented his predecessor’s long-delayed plan to separate that cyber command from the NSA in a bid to “strengthen our cyberspace operations.”

And what is all this technology being prepared for? In study after study, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and related think tanks have been unanimous in identifying the main threat to future U.S. global hegemony as a rival power with an expanding economy, a strengthening military, and global ambitions: China, the home of those denizens of the Gobi Desert who would, in that old Buck Rogers fable, destroy Washington four centuries from now. Given that America’s economic preeminence is fading fast, breakthroughs in “information warfare” might indeed prove Washington’s best bet for extending its global hegemony further into this century — but don’t count on it, given the history of techno-weaponry in past wars.

Techno-Triumph in Vietnam

Ever since the Pentagon with its 17 miles of corridors was completed in 1943, that massive bureaucratic maze has presided over a creative fusion of science and industry that President Dwight Eisenhower would dub “the military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” he told the American people. “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” sustained by a “technological revolution” that is “complex and costly.” As part of his own contribution to that complex, Eisenhower had overseen the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and a “high-risk, high-gain” research unit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, that later added the word “Defense” to its name and became DARPA.

For 70 years, this close alliance between the Pentagon and major defense contractors has produced an unbroken succession of “wonder weapons” that at least theoretically gave it a critical edge in all major military domains. Even when defeated or fought to a draw, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research matrix has demonstrated a recurring resilience that could turn disaster into further technological advance.

The Vietnam War, for example, was a thoroughgoing tactical failure, yet it would also prove a technological triumph for the military-industrial complex. Although most Americans remember only the Army’s soul-destroying ground combat in the villages of South Vietnam, the Air Force fought the biggest air war in military history there and, while it too failed dismally and destructively, it turned out to be a crucial testing ground for a revolution in robotic weaponry.

To stop truck convoys that the North Vietnamese were sending through southern Laos into South Vietnam, the Pentagon’s techno-wizards combined a network of sensors, computers, and aircraft in a coordinated electronic bombing campaign that, from 1968 to 1973, dropped more than a million tons of munitions — equal to the total tonnage for the whole Korean War — in that limited area. At a cost of $800 million a year, Operation Igloo White laced that narrow mountain corridor with 20,000 acoustic, seismic, and thermal sensors that sent signals to four EC-121 communications aircraft circling ceaselessly overhead.

At a U.S. air base just across the Mekong River in Thailand, Task Force Alpha deployed two powerful IBM 360/65 mainframe computers, equipped with history’s first visual display monitors, to translate all those sensor signals into “an illuminated line of light” and so launch jet fighters over the Ho Chi Minh Trail where computers discharged laser-guided bombs automatically. Bristling with antennae and filled with the latest computers, its massive concrete bunker seemed, at the time, a futuristic marvel to a visiting Pentagon official who spoke rapturously about “being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

However, after more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops with tanks, trucks, and artillery somehow moved through that sensor field undetected for a massive offensive in 1972, the Air Force had to admit that its $6 billion “electronic battlefield” was an unqualified failure. Yet that same bombing campaign would prove to be the first crude step toward a future electronic battlefield for unmanned robotic warfare.

In the pressure cooker of history’s largest air war, the Air Force also transformed an old weapon, the “Firebee” target drone, into a new technology that would rise to significance three decades later. By 1972, the Air Force could send an “SC/TV” drone, equipped with a camera in its nose, up to 2,400 miles across communist China or North Vietnam while controlling it via a low-resolution television image. The Air Force also made aviation history by test firing the first missile from one of those drones.

The air war in Vietnam was also an impetus for the development of the Pentagon’s global telecommunications satellite system, another important first. After the Initial Defense Satellite Communications System launched seven orbital satellites in 1966, ground terminals in Vietnam started transmitting high-resolution aerial surveillance photos to Washington — something NASA called a “revolutionary development.” Those images proved so useful that the Pentagon quickly launched an additional 21 satellites and soon had the first system that could communicate from anywhere on the globe. Today, according to an Air Force website, the third phase of that system provides secure command, control, and communications for “the Army’s ground mobile forces, the Air Force’s airborne terminals, Navy ships at sea, the White House Communications Agency, the State Department, and special users” like the CIA and NSA.

At great cost, the Vietnam War marked a watershed in Washington’s global information architecture. Turning defeat into innovation, the Air Force had developed the key components — satellite communications, remote sensing, computer-triggered bombing, and unmanned aircraft — that would merge 40 years later into a new system of robotic warfare.

The War on Terror

Facing another set of defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the twenty-first-century Pentagon again accelerated the development of new military technologies. After six years of failing counterinsurgency campaigns in both countries, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to help pacify sprawling urban areas. And when President Obama later conducted his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, that country became a frontier for testing and perfecting drone warfare.

Launched as an experimental aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was deployed in the Balkans that very year for photo-reconnaissance. In 2000, it was adapted for real-time surveillance under the CIA’s Operation Afghan Eyes. It would be armed with the tank-killing Hellfire missile for the agency’s first lethal strike in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in October 2001. Seven years later, the Air Force introduced the larger MQ-9 “Reaper” drone with a flying range of 1,150 miles when fully loaded with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing it to strike targets almost anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia. To fulfill its expanding mission as Washington’s global assassin, the Air Force plans to have 346 Reapers in service by 2021, including 80 for the CIA.

Between 2004 and 2010, total flying time for all unmanned aerial vehicles rose sharply from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. By 2011, there were already 7,000 drones in a growing U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft. So central had they become to its military power that the Pentagon was planning to spend $40 billion to expand their numbers by 35% over the following decade. To service all this growth, the Air Force was training 350 drone pilots, more than all its bomber and fighter pilots combined.

Miniature or monstrous, hand-held or runway-launched, drones were becoming so commonplace and so critical for so many military missions that they emerged from the war on terror as one of America’s wonder weapons for preserving its global power. Yet the striking innovations in drone warfare are, in the long run, likely to be overshadowed by stunning aerospace advances in the stratosphere and exosphere.

The Pentagon’s Triple Canopy

As in Vietnam, despite bitter reverses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s recent wars have been catalysts for the fusion of aerospace, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence into a new military regime of robotic warfare.

To effect this technological transformation, starting in 2009 the Pentagon planned to spend $55 billion annually to develop robotics for a data-dense interface of space, cyberspace, and terrestrial battle space. Through an annual allocation for new technologies reaching $18 billion in 2016, the Pentagon had, according to the New York Times, “put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power,” exemplified by future drones that will be capable of identifying and eliminating enemy targets without recourse to human overseers. By 2025, the United States will likely deploy advanced aerospace and cyberwarfare to envelop the planet in a robotic matrix theoretically capable of blinding entire armies or atomizing an individual insurgent.

During 15 years of nearly limitless military budgets for the war on terror, DARPA has spent billions of dollars trying to develop new weapons systems worthy of Buck Rogers that usually die on the drawing board or end in spectacular crashes. Through this astronomically costly process of trial and error, Pentagon planners seem to have come to the slow realization that established systems, particularly drones and satellites, could in combination create an effective aerospace architecture.

Within a decade, the Pentagon apparently hopes to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via a triple-canopy aerospace shield that would reach from sky to space and be secured by an armada of drones with lethal missiles and Argus-eyed sensors, monitored through an electronic matrix and controlled by robotic systems. It’s even possible to take you on a tour of the super-secret realm where future space wars will be fought, if the Pentagon’s dreams become reality, by exploring both DARPA websites and those of its various defense contractors.

Drones in the Lower Stratosphere

At the bottom tier of this emerging aerospace shield in the lower stratosphere (about 30,000 to 60,000 feet high), the Pentagon is working with defense contractors to develop high-altitude drones that will replace manned aircraft. To supersede the manned U-2 surveillance aircraft, for instance, the Pentagon has been preparing a projected armada of 99 Global Hawk drones at a mind-boggling cost of $223 million each, seven times the price of the current Reaper model. Its extended 116-foot wingspan (bigger than that of a Boeing 737) is geared to operating at 60,000 feet. Each Global Hawk is equipped with high-resolution cameras, advanced electronic sensors, and efficient engines for a continuous 32-hour flight, which means that it can potentially survey up to 40,000 square miles of the planet’s surface daily. With its enormous bandwidth needed to bounce a torrent of audio-visual data between satellites and ground stations, however, the Global Hawk, like other long-distance drones in America’s armada, may prove vulnerable to a hostile hack attack in some future conflict.

The sophistication, and limitations, of this developing aerospace technology were exposed in December 2011 when an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel drone suddenly landed in Iran, whose officials then released photos of its dart-shaped, 65-foot wingspan meant for flights up to 50,000 feet. Under a highly classified “black” contract, Lockheed Martin had built 20 of these espionage drones at a cost of about $200 million with radar-evading stealth and advanced optics that were meant to provide “surveillance support to forward-deployed combat forces.”

So what was this super-secret drone doing in hostile Iran? By simply jamming its GPS navigation system, whose signals are notoriously susceptible to hacking, Iranian engineers took control of the drone and landed it at a local base of theirs with the same elevation as its home field in neighboring Afghanistan. Although Washington first denied the capture, the event sent shock waves down the Pentagon’s endless corridors.

In the aftermath of this debacle, the Defense Department worked with one of its top contractors, Northrop Grumman, to accelerate development of its super-stealth RQ-180 drone with an enormous 130-foot wingspan, an extended range of 1,200 miles, and 24 hours of flying time. Its record cost, $300 million a plane, could be thought of as inaugurating a new era of lavishly expensive war-fighting drones.

Simultaneously, the Navy’s dart-shaped X-47B surveillance and strike drone has proven capable both of in-flight refueling and of carrying up to 4,000 pounds of bombs or missiles. Three years after it passed its most crucial test by a joy-stick landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush in July 2013, the Navy announced that this experimental drone would enter service sometime after 2020 as the “MQ-25 Stingray” aircraft.

Dominating the Upper Stratosphere

To dominate the higher altitudes of the upper stratosphere (about 70,000 to 160,000 feet), the Pentagon has pushed its contractors to the technological edge, spending billions of dollars on experimentation with fanciful, futuristic aircraft.

For more than 20 years, DARPA pursued the dream of a globe-girding armada of solar-powered drones that could fly ceaselessly at 90,000 feet and would serve as the equivalent of low-flying satellites, that is, as platforms for surveillance intercepts or signals transmission. With an arching 250-foot wingspan covered with ultra-light solar panels, the “Helios” drone achieved a world-record altitude of 98,000 feet in 2001 before breaking up in a spectacular crash two years later. Nonetheless, DARPA launched the ambitious “Vulture” project in 2008 to build solar-powered aircraft with hugewingspans of 300 to 500 feet capable of ceaseless flight at 90,000 feet for five years at a time. After DARPA abandoned the project as impractical in 2012, Google and Facebook took over the technology with the goal of building future platforms for their customers’ Internet connections.

Since 2003, both DARPA and the Air Force have struggled to shatter the barrier for suborbital speeds by developing the dart-shaped Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet, it was expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in 2010 and 2011 crashed in midflight, they did briefly reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound.

As often happens, failure produced progress. In the wake of the Falcon’s crashes, DARPA has applied its hypersonics to develop a missile capable of penetrating China’s air-defenses at an altitude of 70,000 feet and a speed of Mach 5 (about 3,300 miles per hour).

Simultaneously, Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” experimental unit is using the hypersonic technology to develop the SR-72 unmanned surveillance aircraft as a successor to its SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest manned aircraft. When operational by 2030, the SR-72 is supposed to fly at about 4,500 mph, double the speed of its manned predecessor, with an extreme stealth fuselage making it undetectable as it crosses any continent in an hour at 80,000 feet scooping up electronic intelligence.

Space Wars in the Exosphere

In the exosphere, 200 miles above Earth, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Defense Department launched the robotic X-37B spacecraft, just 29 feet long, into orbit for a seven-month mission. By removing pilots and their costly life-support systems, the Air Force’s secretive Rapid Capabilities Office had created a miniaturized, militarized space drone with thrusters to elude missile attacks and a cargo bay for possible air-to-air missiles. By the time the second X-37B prototype landed in June 2012, its flawless 15-month flight had established the viability of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft.”

In the exosphere where these space drones will someday roam, orbital satellites will be the prime targets in any future world war. The vulnerability of U.S. satellite systems became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites in orbit 500 miles above the Earth. A year later, the Pentagon accomplished the same feat, firing an SM-3 missile from a Navy cruiser to score a direct hit on a U.S. satellite 150 miles high.

Unsuccessful in developing an advanced F-6 satellite, despite spending over $200 million in an attempt to split the module into more resilient microwave-linked components, the Pentagon has opted instead to upgrade its more conventional single-module satellites, such as the Navy’s five interconnected Mobile User Objective Systems (MUOS) satellites. These were launched between 2013 and 2016 into geostationary orbits for communications with aircraft, ships, and motorized infantry.

Reflecting its role as a player in the preparation for future and futuristic wars, the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, established in 2006, operates the Space Surveillance Network. To prevent a high-altitude attack on America, this worldwide system of radar and telescopes in 29 remote locations like Ascension Island and Kwajalein Atoll makes about 400,000 observations daily, monitoring every object in the skies.

The Future of Wonder Weapons

By the mid-2020s, if the military’s dreams are realized, the Pentagon’s triple-canopy shield should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike or, with equal ease, blind an entire army by knocking out all of its ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation. It’s a system that, were it to work as imagined, just might allow the United States a diplomatic veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of international influence.

But as in Vietnam, where aerospace wonders could not prevent a searing defeat, history offers some harsh lessons when it comes to technology trumping insurgencies, no less the fusion of forces (diplomatic, economic, and military) whose sum is geopolitical power. After all, the Third Reich failed to win World War II even though it had amazingly advanced “wonder weapons,” including the devastating V-2 missile, the unstoppable Me-262 jet fighter, and the ship-killing Hs-293 guided missile.

Washington’s dogged reliance on and faith in military technology to maintain its hegemony will certainly guarantee endless combat operations with uncertain outcomes in the forever war against terrorists along the ragged edge of Asia and Africa and incessant future low-level aggression in space and cyberspace. Someday, it may even lead to armed conflict with rivals China and Russia.

Whether the Pentagon’s robotic weapon systems will offer the U.S. an extended lease on global hegemony or prove a fantasy plucked from the frames of a Buck Rogers comic book, only the future can tell. Whether, in that moment to come, America will play the role of the indomitable Buck Rogers or the Martians he eventually defeated is another question worth asking. One thing is likely, however: that future is coming far more quickly and possibly far more painfully than any of us might imagine.