War Drums

What the heck people? There's been a lot of chatter on the Internet about rising US/Russia tensions. Russia just did a public defense test involving 40 million people. They've instructed their citizens to come home immediately.

We are dangerously close to having US and Russian forces come into direct conflict in Syria. There's threats of cyber war. I'm just skimming the surface here. A little research will reveal some serious crap going down.

It's easy to ignore the threats as posturing and saber rattling. That would be a mistake. Normal rational people would not even think of starting WWIII. Unfortunately, there are people in positions of power who think such a war is winnable.

. . . and all the troops will be home by Christmas. That was the promise of WWI. It had been a long time since there had been a serious conflict. Politicians had ambitions. Generals had outdated ideas about what it would take to win a war. Instead of a short war it dragged on and on destroying some of the best and brightest of that generation. It ended badly enough that it set up the conditions that lead to WWII.

Now we come to a time when the remaining WWII vets are quite ancient. Few are in positions of influence. We have a generation of leaders with no personal memory of world wide hot conflict. It's said that generals always prepare to fight the last war. That kind of thinking isn't good enough.

We think cyber war involves the hacking of e-mails. That's trivial. Now imagine all the computers in the world's banking systems going down. GPS satellites turning off. Power and water plants shutting down. All communications going down. The military losing control of its assets like drones.

That's only the stuff I can imagine happening. History has shown that in war time weapons are used that no one has ever seen before.

It used to be that our fear of nuclear weapons kept all sides from using them. There are people in power who fully believe a nuclear war is winnable. Are they crazy? Delusional? Is their hubris so great they cannot see how dangerous that is? Could they be so evil they don't even care?

Even something like a cyber war, where no shots are fired, could kill millions. If a country is in complete upheaval from all their electronics shutting down, going nuclear might seem like the only way to go. Scary stuff.

Whatever the happens, it won't hurt to able to take care of your basic needs on your own. Theres not much of a downside being prepared and huge upside if things go sideways. If things really get crazy we end up with the whole northern hemisphere as a radioactive wasteland. Know anyone in Patagonia? I don't, so I'm stuck riding out this mess. Crazy times.

-Sixbears