{"id":66970,"date":"2024-03-12T07:25:09","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T12:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66970"},"modified":"2024-03-12T07:25:09","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T12:25:09","slug":"twilight-of-the-blobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66970","title":{"rendered":"Twilight of the Blobs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Twilight of the Blobs<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cRespect the blob, learn from the blob, love the blob.\u201d \u2014 Robert Kagan, Arch Blob Monster, Brookings, 2020<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 HG Wells concocted a marvelous trick ending to his classic tale The War of the Worlds<\/em>\u00a0(1897). Remember: the colossal Martian tripod \u201cfighting machines\u201d swarm all over the planet zapping cities with \u201cheat rays\u201d. . . it looks like all-is-lost . . . but finally the darn things just quit marching, stop zapping, and stand down . . . the alien protoplasms at the controls (surprise ending) turn up dead and rotting inside from the action of our tiny invisible allies: the earth\u2019s one-celled, disease-causing bacteria, to which the Martian blob creatures have no immunity!<\/p>\n

The Gaian overtones in that story resound today as we Earthlings devise ingenious new methods to wreck terrestrial life, including ourselves. The planet seems to have some teleological drive to save itself, a kind of immune system. Notice: in all the ongoing debates about the wonders and dangers of A-I, and Bitcoin, and suffocating surveillance, nobody ever talks about the sketchy condition of the electric grid that all these worrisome phenomena utterly rely on. In our chatter over Peak Oil, there\u2019s little awareness of oil production\u2019s utter dependence on steady capital flows. In all the guff about centralized control emitted by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, there\u2019s no mention of the centrifugal forces driving human affairs to re-localization, dis-aggregation of large states, and down-scaling of many activities. In our zeal to become Gods, we miss a lot.<\/p>\n

Imagine: Bitcoin shoots up to a million dollars. You\u2019re a zillionaire! Uh Oh. . . somewhere outside Zaneseville, Ohio, a squirrel takes a final chaw through some old insulation on a wire coming out of a transformer. His head blows up in a blue arc flash, and in a few seconds all the electricity goes out from Chicago to Boston…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twilight of the Blobs \u201cRespect the blob, learn from the blob, love the blob.\u201d \u2014 Robert Kagan, Arch Blob Monster, Brookings, 2020 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 HG Wells concocted a marvelous trick ending to his classic tale The War of the Worlds\u00a0(1897). Remember: the colossal Martian tripod \u201cfighting machines\u201d swarm all over the planet zapping cities with \u201cheat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[34169,14964,449,17970,536,617,1574,889],"class_list":["post-66970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-blob","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-modern-monetary-theory","tag-money","tag-peak-oil","tag-power-grid","tag-world-economic-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66970"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66971,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66970\/revisions\/66971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}