Apocalypse

Three things point to apocalypse in the near future.

First, there is the world of my occupation, journalism (distinct from blogging). I have been reeling ever since May 31, when I heard that the New York Times Will Offer Employee Buyouts and Eliminate Public Editor Role. In my own less august journalism world, things have not been going according to plan either.

This is the kind of gutting of the invisible people who make a well-written, well-researched news medium possible. It happened to The Washington Post several years ago and only the calamity of Trump was temporarily stayed the executioner. The Post was never the Times, but it could be a reliable source of information, sometimes written decently. I explained it in The Information-free Society.

Second, my eye caught a business story in the Post, Why Apple is struggling to become an artificial-intelligence powerhouse, that made the Newtonian apple hit my head. AI explains the socioeconomic future!

Put simply, it is this: the elites, the unknown "they" who have their hands at the levers of society and the economy like the Oz wizard, behind the curtain of government, have decided to decimate the population. There are too many people, they fight too much, they want wages and rights and all sorts of things humans want but can't all have. Solution: starve 80 percent of humanity and leave a thin layer of highly educated people who can live off the goods and services produced by AI. (I would hope that me and mine are among the privileged 20 percent, but I can't be sure.)

Third, there's climate change. No further explanation is needed.

This may reflect the realization of my own personal apocalypse, as I approach my 65th birthday, but I honestly just don't see a better future.

The Dead are not heroes, they're victims

Once again we come to Memorial Day and its orgy of militarism and the propaganda schmaltz. What else do you call "honoring" the dead, essentially people ordered to go get killed for the profits of the war making machine?


Make no mistake about it. They didn't die for our relative "freedoms" (we are no notably freer than Britain or France or Sweden). No soldier dead since World War II gained us any. They died for Boeing and Grumman and Lockheed.

Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.

Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:

A Greatful Nation

Dulce et Decorum Est

War is the fault of all the soldiers who wage it

Let's not forget: Osama had a point

Defying militarism

Let's stop, please. Let's honor people by staying out of war and stop bombing countries with which we are not at war.