Category: Current Events

And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die

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“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

 

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

 

After yesterday’s post I received several communications from readers outraged at the manner in which such a venerable and iconic entity as the First Selectman could be allowed to leave this continuum.  Many simply refused to believe the facts such as they are and hang onto hope that Cthulhu lives.  As the quotes above attest there is a tradition that Cthulhu can remain inert for literally billions of years and still reanimate and wreak a terrible vengeance on mankind when the stars align just right (or just wrong).

Well, I will not speculate at this point on the Great Old One’s chances of resuscitation.  As Hamlet very cleverly noted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And if we add to heaven and earth the depths of hell, then we begin to list the span of infinities where knowledge of the First Selectman can be hiding.  And since I already miss the old villain a little bit, I’ll keep an open mind as to his chances of reintegration.  Let’s leave it there for now.

I have finally completed the herculean task to which I was yoked.  My spirit, such as it is, has rebounded measurably and I look around me to see the state of life in the here and now.  I note the same stale prattle about polls and bickering with the names Trump, Harris, Vance and Walz attached.  Frankly all of this is too tedious to even consider.  Let all of that stew for a while.

The summer wanes and school children are already frozen with existential dread at the approach of Labor Day.  But, this time of year is not without its charms.  I was forced to rise hideously early Tuesday morning and so I was out and about before 4:00 am when I happened to look up at the sky and was struck by the brightness of the stars and planets and their inspiring beauty.  If I had not been on an unavoidable mission, I might have stood there for a quarter hour and marveled at this arresting vision.  At that moment I was reminded of this aspect of reality and how these incomprehensible phenomena we call stars can be both the source of our lives and these beautiful beacons that light up the night sky that we so rarely bother to view.  So out of the most tedious and soul-crushing activities it is possible to experience a moment of primal joy and wonder.

But now I’ll spend a day or two catching up with my various duties.  Bear with me as I take up again the reins of my daily routine and restore order to my life.  I must write and trim some posts and schedule them and I must read up on any “news” I might have missed and try to draw inspiration from my surroundings and the important things that need to be said and done.

So good morning!

Cataclysmic Pep Talk

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Imagine if Kamala Harris becomes president. Some people might think that things will actually run better than when Joe Biden was in charge because she’s even stupider than he was and won’t attempt to run anything at all and so the “geniuses” in charge of the deep state will manage all the decisions of the federal government and everything will be coordinated to the nth degree.

And maybe to some extent this will be true.  But I don’t think the various bureaucracies of the federal government can be allowed to run their little satraps indefinitely without supervision by someone who understands reality.  I’m imagining the State Department and the CIA explaining to Harris that it’s going to be necessary to return to Afghanistan to prevent homophobia and transphobia from threatening the LGBTQ population there.  And Kamala would immediately approve of such a plan.  Or suppose the EPA talks her into banning fossil fuels altogether.  Or the Justice Department easily convinces her that reparations for slavery to the tune of $45 trillion dollars can no longer wait.  You can see how having a complete moron as president could lead to extremely unfortunate decisions being made.

This kind of analysis goes along with the accelerationist theory for destabilizing the current regime.  Specifically, if the terrible people in charge of the Left are allowed to follow their inclinations without a brake from the Right, eventually they’ll damage the system so much that it will cease to function.  I think this is a simplistic version of how things will go but essentially it is correct.  This is what happens in a blue state like Massachusetts for instance.  The Democrats will assume complete control of the legislature, governor’s mansion and the courts and they will run hog wild and vote themselves anything and everything.  And then they go broke and everything stops working.  And they will vote a Republican governor in to fix the budget and return at least a modicum of sanity to the state government.  And of course, a Massachusetts “Republican” means William Weld or Mitt Romney.  Basically, they’re middle of the road Democrats anywhere else.  And as soon as this Republican has balanced the budget he is immediately cast into the outer darkness and replaced by a lunatic lesbian who wants to fund on-demand gender affirming surgery for toddlers and cradle to grave benefits for illegal aliens.

So the problem is how to avoid the return to power by the Democrats?  I think part of the answer is to take a page from Milei’s book.  Radically reducing the size of the federal government would reduce the power and control of the deep state.  And it would make policies that favor private sector job creation critical.  Of course, most of these laid off bureaucrats will be at a distinct disadvantage in the real world of the private section but I’m sure a few of them will survive.  So, it would be a win/win, sort of.

But I’m not trying to paint the accelerationist model as a pain free scenario.  In order to get to a place where a solid majority would be willing to let the Right have their way, there will have to be economic chaos unleashed on our society, the like of which hasn’t been seen for over a century.  We’re talking 30% unemployment or runaway hyperinflation.  That kind of stuff.  So, shock therapy.  Anything less than that will be tolerated by the schlubs who now populate this sad benighted world we live in.

I’ll be honest.  Having this be the path forward is a pretty depressing plan.  But I now doubt anything less will shock this nation out of its addiction to infantile socialism.  So that’s my pep talk!

Plan B

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President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador declares martial law and arrests tens of thousands of gang members.  In Argentina President Javier Milei is taking “a chain saw” to the bloated federal bureaucracy both to reduce the budget deficit and inflation and to scale back the over-regulation of life in his country.

Why do I see these actions as significant?  Because both of these countries are poster children for the abuses that their present leaders are trying to address.

El Salvador has been struggling with violence for many decades.  After a thirteen-year civil war gangs ran wild over the countryside and the murder rate was astronomically high.  Bukele has cut the murder rate by at least 50%.  As draconian as the method he used to accomplish this clean-up was, the people support his results.

In Argentina rampant hyperinflation has been going on for decades.  Milei ran on the promise that he would fix the economy.  And the people of Argentina elected him because at this point no one else has spoken the truth about why their country which has so much potential is an economic basket case.

Latin America is supposed to be hopelessly corrupt and unfixable.  Well, maybe things can change.  When the basket cases of the world start getting their acts together, maybe something is happening to the old world.  Maybe there is even a little hope.

It’s certainly true that some of these actions aren’t particularly legal.  Bukele used martial law and unconstitutional powers to arrest the gangs.  There is talk that many innocent men were swept up in this dragnet.  Well, maybe what we are looking at is the rise of the strongman.  Could this lead to dictatorship?  Maybe.  But when democracy fails you spectacularly you have to try something.  You go to Plan B.

And what does this tell me about the world at large and the United States in particular?  It may mean that results are beginning to outweigh lofty ideals and good intentions in the minds of the people.  After all that is sort of how Donald Trump and Brexit got their victories.  People want results and they want the truth.  Both of these seem to be in very short supply from the politicians and bureaucrats that rule in the Western democracies.  Now, the United States isn’t as chaotically lawless as El Salvador was nor as economically mismanaged as Argentina.  But we’re headed in those directions at a brisk clip.  Maybe a sea change is in the cards.

And maybe it won’t be that long.  2024 will be an important election.  If Trump gets elected there’s still a small chance, he can purge the bureaucracy of its deep state cronies in order to restore control over the government to the duly elected officials.  But if Kamala Harris is installed in the White House, then we can say definitively that United States is no longer a functional republic but rather an oligarchic junta that cares almost nothing for the welfare of the people.

If Harris is running this country, even as a puppet of the oligarchy, I assume the country will suffer a catastrophic decline with rampant violence and economic and fiscal instability at a level that will spark essentially a popular upheaval.  And regardless of how it is clothed in constitutional language, there will be revolutionary changes in how things get done.

Of course, I could be completely wrong and Kamala could turn out to be a wise and effective ruler who turns her term into a golden age.  But after enough yellow school bus speeches and other brilliant clap-trap, I kind of doubt it.

We seem to be speeding toward destiny.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 10AUG2024 – Sergeant Tim Walz

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I have served in the Army, and understand what a conditional promotion is. You get the rank without the full set of qualifications, and promise to complete them within a specified time frame or lose the promotion.
My problem is Walz refers to himself as a retired command sergeant major E-9, but his actual retirement rank is master sergeant E-8. He did not hold the rank long enough or complete the requirements to keep it. He reenlisted for 4 years in 2003, promoted conditionally in 2004, rumour has it learned through the grapevine about an upcoming deployment, and jumped into retirement. This means he could state ” I was a command sergeant major, and I am a retired guardsman” both of those statements are factually correct. He is not a retired command sergeant major, but a retired master sergeant. In 24 years of service according to his Wikipedia page he has 1 army commendation medal, that seems kinda low, I served 4 years active duty, and got 2 ARCOMS, as a Spec-4, I now have 40 years of service total, and my highest personal award is a meritorious service medal, gotten for 26 years in the Air Force reserve, when I transferred to the Air Guard. I saw no overseas service or combat campaign awards, this looks suspicious, because that means he never carried anything in any war zone, because he was never there. This seems like a minor distinction, but it gripes me to hear someone self promote and then try to weasel their way out of an exaggeration by claiming to be a higher rank than their ID card shows.

Update:

TomD commented:

Walz’s military record, or lack of it, is entirely peripheral to me. The core issue, and this is indisputable, is that he has governed as a hard left radical, adopting and enforcing every leftist position right down the line.

He could have been the Commandant of the Marine Corp with 9 combat deployments and it wouldn’t make a whit. The fact of his deception is just carrying coal to Newcastle for me.

 

War Pig commented:

I agree. Sort of fishy. I do not mind him not having served in actual combat as relatively few service members realy do fire a weapon in anger or are in an area where they can be bombarded. But, look at the man and two women killed in the drone strike. Death can find you. I know of a couple of sergeants major who never fired a weapon other than on a range but were in the artillery and air cav, respectively. Both served I think it was 32 years active, but had several medals and badges. Then there are those who manage to serve 20 and not actually perform their MOS except in training. They go off into “temporary” duty as a special services NCO or one of a hundred other make work jobs. They found out how to work the system. I’m pretty sure you knew of various NCOs assigned to your unit you never saw except at quarterly recall formations. Could be he was one of those soldiers. Nothing dishonorable, just nothing special. He may have heard about a deployment and took the easy way out. Not illegal, just not someone I’d want to be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office and the Football.

War Pig commented:

This is true. He’s in Soros’ pocket and all his thinking is done by Obama. He joined in with the Defund the Police movement, which hurt minority citizens the most. Martha’s Vinyard is not effected by Defund the Police, but inner city families in blue cities sure are.

Thursday’s Surcease of Sorrow

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I had today off.  Ah, the glory.  But I still had to get up early because we had visitors and as pontifex maximus I have prescribed duties that include invocations and vague mumblings that render me canonically relevant but still slightly insane.

But it was good to be free for the day.  I spent time with the grandchildren and Camera Girl as she presided over mass quantities of juvenile comfort food (macaroni with cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches) and really bad kids’ movies (the 2021 “Tom and Jerry” movie and that monstrosity, “Ants” that Woody Allen, of all people, was in).  They taught me a game called, “Swim, fishy, swim” which is basically a version of tag or red light, green light.  Then we broke out the card games but other than war I didn’t know these other games.  They used non-standard decks of cards and weird rules.

While playing war I discovered that their reaction time is a lot faster than mine is now.  It is humbling to be in the presence of neurons that fire perfectly.  Old age is not for sissies.  But at least I was able to correct them in their use of the subjunctive mood.  Of course, I don’t think the subjunctive is still acknowledged anymore in grammar school.  In fact, I don’t think they teach grammar in grammar school anymore.  But I digress.  It was good to be among the young and away from Dunwichian responsibilities.  I still have five or six days of horror beginning tomorrow but a day off was great.

Of the various things going on I thought the most interesting development was the background on Gov. Tim Walz’s military service.  From what I read Walz retired out of his National Guard unit after he was notified that his unit was being deployed to Iraq in 2005.  And at the time he was the ranking non-commissioned officer in the unit.  I listened to a video where Megyn Kelly interviewed Tom Behrends, another non-commissioned officer from Walz’s National Guard unit, and he basically called Walz a coward for refusing to lead his unit into combat.  Never having served myself I’d be very interested in getting the opinions of those on this site who have served as to whether what Behrends says is reasonable.  What is the moral responsibility of a National Guard leader when his unit is called up for war?  How prevalent would this kind of reaction to deployment be?

Now I dislike Walz because he was the governor during the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis and he never ordered the National Guard to halt the rioting, arson and plain murder that went on during those riots.  I think he should be prosecuted for that.  But apparently in Minnesota they’re alright with that sort of thing.  So, they should get as much of that as is humanly possible.  In that sense it’s like California or New York.  But if Walz is running for Veep then his actions as governor should be fair game.  So, reviewing what he did during the Floyd riots makes perfect sense.

As for his refusal to be deployed to Iraq, I’m interested in what knowledgeable have to say about it.

Well, I better get some sleep.  More fun and games tomorrow.

CNN Parent Company’s Accounting Shows Negative Value for the Cable Channel

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Warner Brothers/Discovery took a $9.1 billion write-down basically to write off the abysmal loss of value in their cable channels for which CNN is the poster child.

“Warner Bros. has eliminated more than 2,000 positions over the past year and slashed 100 jobs at CNN last month.”

I think they should cut a little deeper. Look at the names of some of the people they haven’t fired yet:

  • Jim Acosta
  • David Axelrod
  • Christiane Amanpour
  • Dana Bash
  • Wolf Blitzer
  • John Berman
  • Anderson Cooper
  • Chris Wallace
  • Jake Tapper
  • John King
  • Van Jones

Some of these people are making eight figure salaries.  But what value do you get from Anderson Cooper, David Axelrod or Van Jones?  And why would anyone pay Jim Acosta anything?  And who knew that Wolf Blitzer was even still alive?

They should probably keep the guy who sprays the roaches and cleans the toilets but that’s about it.  No one else is providing value.

Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe

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The horror continues unabated.  Thursday will be a respite, and I will use that day to try to reestablish my sanity (whatever that might be).  We have corroded away the first inch of the First Selectman’s outer scale layer.  This will allow the boiling sulfuric acid to percolate through and diffuse into his circulatory system and act as a revivifying tonic.  This is an especially dangerous part of the procedure.  The effect of the tonic is to pique his appetite.  In years past we have lost several members of the de-lousing team at this point in the procedure.

Of course, he’s always very sorry afterward and apologizes profusely to the surviving members of the crew and speaks very appreciatively of the dearly departed and of all their good qualities; their diligence, their team spirit, their crunchiness and full-bodied flavor.  He never stints on praise.

Because of this unfortunate tendency during this part of the procedure I find myself unconsciously moving toward the First Selectman’s left side.  It’s a little-known fact that he’s blind in that eye and so less likely to reflexively snap his jaws and swallow someone standing near that side of his head.

In the big, beautiful world outside of Dunwich all sorts of unimportant things are going on.  The Olympics grinds on with no detectable interest by most of the population.  Kamala and her new running mate are making the rounds of the friendly news shows and touting their wonderfulness.  But I don’t know.  This guy seems to have a bunch of skeletons rattling around in his closet.  Did he refuse to serve in Iraq?  Did he normalize pedophilia.  This guy may be a disaster waiting to happen.  Well it couldn’t happen to a nicer gal than Kamala!

The Ukrainians have opened up a new front in their war by invading Russia on the northern front to the west of the Kharkiv area.  And some of their new F-16s have been spotted flying in the western Ukrainian skies.  There looks to be a major event in Ukraine very soon.

During a particularly slow point in the work, I was talking to a co-worker and he was talking about raising a family in the early 1980s.  A lot of what he said rang true for me too.  There were major financial problems like the very high mortgage rates but people went ahead with their lives taking risks and betting on their luck.  That’s how I remember it too.  The first time I got laid off with a mortgage to cover it was pretty scary.  But if you looked around, something would turn up even if it was only contract work.  The difference between then and now is there is a culture that discourages optimism.  Nothing can be done and nothing is anyone’s fault.  The default assumption is that it’s society’s fault and it’s not worth trying.

This attitude is a death sentence.  The world is the same as it ever was.  Effort and extending your reach beyond the minimum are rewarded.  Regardless of recessions and inflation, striving for what you want isn’t an extraordinary idea.  It’s the normal circumstance for Americans.  This has always been the land of opportunity because it’s the land of hard work that rewards the achiever.  So let the young ones you talk to know this.  Struggle and survive is the order of the day.  And they come from ancestors that did just that.

Now back to the vat.  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.  Oh well.

Tuesday’s Take

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Another day in purgatory.  But I heard the news that Kamala picked Walz.  Ah, the perfect choice.  This was the guy who allowed Minneapolis and St Paul to burn down while the Summer of Floyd was just getting started.  What a perfect symbol for the American people to choose.  The final capitulation of our freedom would be choosing a low-grade moron to be our leader while her stooge will be the man who decided that trumped up racial grievance supersedes law and order and justifies unleashing a murderous mob on innocent people just trying to live their lives.

Today I was trapped in an area where two true believing women were listening to Kamala’s introduction of Walz as her running mate.  They were enraptured listening to the Dunce reading a speech off of the teleprompter.  Kamala was singing his praises both as a high school coach championing some gay/straight alliance group in his school and as a member of the Army reserve.  It probably ended with Walz announcing that he had begun a course of trans-affirming hormones enroute to putting on a wig and dress.  But luckily the two listeners had to get back to work and turned off the show before that point.

If Trump is looking for a perfect symbol of what’s wrong in Joe Biden’s America, he couldn’t ask for a better example than the Harris/Walz ticket.  Both of them stand for a definition of justice where the criminal is protected from prosecution and the victims are criminalized.  Let Walz explain how he allowed the looting and arson to spread across the twin cities and held his state hostage when he could have had the National Guard stop the lawlessness and prevent the rioting from spreading across the country.  That should be Trump’s headline tomorrow and the basis for a whole host of advertisements targeting Walz and his woke running mate.

But what was really interesting about this little tableau, was the comments by the listeners.  They were trying to convince themselves that Kamala was a new woman.  She was no longer a babbling idiot spouting trite pablum about yellow school buses and futures unburdened by something or other.  She was a mighty orator like Obama who would captivate her audience and inspire the nation to support her to victory in November.

They were trying to convince themselves of this narrative.  But it didn’t sound like they were quite convinced.  It seemed like they were pinning their hopes on Walz being the adult in the room to convince the country to ignore reality and put this overwrought nut in charge of our lives for another four years of bad economy, rising crime and moral confusion.

My takeaway was they’re really scared.  The Joe Biden debacle was an existential crisis and they’re still slightly giddy from dodging that bullet.  But now they’re looking around at where they are and realizing that their hopes are pinned to another candidate who is also constrained to reading from a teleprompter.  And unfortunately, there is an enormous amount of recorded video of her talking utter nonsense.

They’re scared.  And they should be.

Monday’s Done

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

After a hard day of de-lousing a 600 ft tall squid-headed dragon you’d think I could relax and eat my supper in peace.  Instead, I’m confronted with a thousand-point drop in the Dow.  Back during the Black Monday crash in ‘87 a five-hundred-point drop was a catastrophe of mammoth proportions (about a 20% of the Dow).  Now double that drop is just a few percent of the DJIA.  But it certainly makes the talk of recession sound a lot more ominous.  I have to assume that Kamala, Queen of the Cat Ladies, will throw a hissy fit and demand that Dopey Joe threaten to fire everyone at the Fed if they don’t lower interest rates.  Well, sure.  That will fix things up, won’t it?  Well at least until November anyway.

Everybody is thinking that Iran will attack Israel and we’ll get dragged into it.  Well, I hope not.  I’m guessing that Iran will work through Hezbollah to harry the Israelis in the north, but not attack them directly.  Netanyahu has quite a problem on his hands to neutralize Hamas.  It’s almost as if his only option is to separate the women and young children from the adult make population and fight the men without inflicting casualties on the innocent.  Well, if he figures that one out, he deserves a Nobel Prize for War.

The Ukrainians have installed their new F-16s in Odessa and I guess hope to use them to attack Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and maybe elsewhere.  It remains to be seen if Ukraine can change the status quo of Russian dominance in air defense over Eastern Ukraine.  The F-16s are supposed to be superior to the Russian fighters.  But ground-based defenses are a serious threat to even an advanced aircraft like the F-16.  We shall see.

I saw that Real Clear Politics has shifted the polling to a Kamala Harris lead of a point or so.  Well, never underestimate the number of blue-haired cat ladies in the American population.  Imagine Commander in Chief Kamala Harris reviewing the troops in Iran or Venezuela or Mexico by Zoom call and giving a rousing speech about the new battery driven aircraft carrier painted green and “manned” by a wholly trans crew.  Or imagine Kamala giving a speech at the United Nations outlawing “whiteness” and pointing to the success of post-white cultures like Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Or just imagine Kamala dedicating the addition of George Floyd to Mount Rushmore.  Well, not exactly an addition.  More like replacement.  Those dead white guys would have to be erased to make room for Floyd’s head.  Now that’s progress alright.

Looking around at what’s going on so far this week makes me nostalgic for my time at the de-lousing procedure at the boiling acid vat of Cthulhu.  Sure, the sulfuric acid fumes are lethal and the parasites are the size and ferocity of wolverines but the mission is simple and words still have their real meaning.  The same can’t be said for the “real world.”  In what universe is Kamala Harris a world class leader?  By what objective standards are the results of Bidenomics prosperity.  By what double-speak was Kamala’s handling of the border crisis a success?  Bring on the acid vat!

Is a Hive Existence the Future for Humanity?

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You could say that socialism is the evolution of human society.  Ever since the Neolithic larger and larger groups of humans have been adapting their lives to the advantages and disadvantages of “civilization.”  Other than some tribes living in the Amazon jungle or the New Guinean highlands humanity has abandoned the hunter gatherer and nomad lifestyles for civilization that allows for agriculture, permanent settlements, scientific innovation and the joys of income tax.

Ever since the first “city” in Sumer began dictating how the fertile crescent would be fertile and how the Sumerian farmers would pay their tithe to the great god Enki we have lived in a continuously more regimented society that slowly but surely has begun to resemble an ant hive.

Now, from time to time there have been revolts.  Chiefly these have consisted of nomads swooping down and ransacking the ant-hive.  The last big example was the Germanic sack of the Roman Empire.  The various Goths, Vandals, Franks and Lombards turned the checker board of civilized life over for good and proper sometime in the mid-400s AD.  These pastoral barbarians not only burned and pillaged the various cities of Western Europe but they set the cause of insectoid existence back a thousand years.  But here we are fifteen hundred years later and evolution has made incredible strides.  The hive has been modernized, mechanized and now automated beyond the wildest dreams of priests, bureaucrats, or even Aldous Huxley.  Even in his science fictional brave new world Huxley at least maintained the conventional male/female dichotomy and sex roles.  In our factual brave new world, the “scientists” aren’t as technically proficient as the ones in Huxley’s tale but they can still do a lot of damage with some hormones and a scalpel.  And since the objective isn’t to build a functional genetically engineered human ant hive but rather to cull the herd down to a controllable size, the results of their modifications don’t have to be eugenic, just not immediately lethal.  And add in all the other programming that has been used to discourage the young from family formation and you have a considerable effort being expended to make this a truly brave new world.

But is this really our future?  Are we going to be whittled down to small “sustainable” population of “alphas” to be the royal caste and the rest of the population will be a manageable number of workers who will toil their lives away without leaving a trace after them?

Despite the resources and organizational control that our betters possess I find it improbable.  I think it’s more likely that some less advanced but more motivated people will manage to upend this system just as the tribesmen did to the Romans all those years ago.  Maybe it’ll be the Mexican cartels or maybe it’ll be some nation state that doesn’t want to be globalized out of existence.  But whoever it is, the imperative to be human will outcompete the logic of the hive.  Turning humans into cyphers may work for Amazon.com and Google but only because we haven’t been driven to the wall yet.  There will come a time when it becomes apparent to the more intelligent that we are being driven to extinction for the sake of the convenience of the few.  At that point, resistance will occur and hopefully the insects will lose.  If not, “Long live the Queen!”