Spendthrifts of War

Wasting resources to global extinction

Imagine sharing a lifeboat with someone who is secretly obsessed with poking holes in the hull. You notice the water rising as the boat sinks, but you don’t understand why.

After more than thirty years as an environmental activist, that’s how I used to feel. No matter how dire the problems and obvious the logical solutions, there was invariably very little institutional interest in them.

In 2023 it has become obvious who is poking holes in our collective boat. Too many holes have become too big to ignore. Humanity’s boat is sinking at an accelerating rate. The hole-pokers are insatiable.

“Military industrial complex” describes a vast network of economic relationships shaping human social evolution, toward foreseeable global extinction. There is an alternative scenario, but the inertial momentum is strong and time is running out at an accelerating rate.

Many people have already written about the billions upon billions of US dollars sent to fund NATO’s proxy war against Vladimir Putin. Costing hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine and Russia; trillions of dollars in weapons, armies, destruction of cities, farms & regional economies. The impact to date is growing beyond numerical calculations. The moral cost to civilization, the environmental costs that will never be fully assessed, the mental health impacts, too many to bear.

Global despair is cumulative. At some point individuals and society will lose control.

Certainly the US and it’s allies undermining of peace negotiations make egregious, profiteering motivations for the war apparent.

The accumulated trillions spent on wars are only a small fraction of the cost. Human lives lost or otherwise destroyed; unrealized human potential, cut short or disabled; the beauty and joy of a peaceful world that might otherwise have been are incalculable, unquantifiable casualties of war.

The dream of world peace has been lost as an unrealistic, utopian fantasy. Endless wars and environmental destruction seem increasingly inevitable.

In some cases, the waste of precious, evermore limited resources is breathtaking in its audacious, institutional and individual stupidity. The cost of such unbridled recklessness is far greater than mere dollars, and loss of society’s common sense. Trust in the future has been eroded to the point of generational despair.

This morning I read ‘The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”.’ Such a colossal waste of time, money and human effort warrants at least a stark reality check, if not in-depth Congressional hearings, followed by multiple prosecutions for gross negligence, abuse of public trust in positions of strategic influence and fiscal accountability.

The “short story” is simple & tragic. Over about ten years, a relatively few people in government and industry wasted $100 billion taxpayer dollars; humiliated US military, crippled a critical component of the US Navy’s defense capability; and wasted countless man-hours spanning a decade of fruitless, frustrating human effort.

Wasting vast amounts of time and money is bad enough. Ordering people to exhaust themselves in pursuit of impossible objectives is a type of conglomerate evil, founded in egoism, fear & ignorance. The costs of such misdirection include the things that could have been done with all that time, talent and money, that was not done or even considered.

In the pork-barrel case of the Defense Department‘s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) boondoggle, there is significant impact on more than just US national defense. National security is threatened by such massive waste; particularly if there is no accountability in the wake of it, as is typically the case.

Remember the real estate “bubble” of 2008 inflated by Wall Street bankers — who then got bailed out by taxpayers, paying themselves fat bonuses, instead of going to prison? The film “The Big Short” does an excellent job of breaking that debacle into indigestible pieces. Accountability has been sidelined because criminals are running the shit show.

The scale of these crimes makes them difficult to comprehend because there is nothing to compare them with. It’s easy to say $100 billion, but impossible to conceive of, unless you’ve had a hundred billion of something, or even a billion.

Most of us haven’t, so unless we make an effort to wrap our brains around such numbers, the whole idea of what has happened is impossible to grok.

What’s been lost is much more precious than just the money, time & human effort. If all of that value had been invested toward practical improvements in the global energy infrastructure, one of the primary causes of war would have been rendered obsolete.

Consider that a Hemp BioRefinery, producing an abundance of clean, cellulosic hydrogen energy costs about $100 million. For the $100 billion wasted on the LCS, a thousand BioRefineries could have been built.

That works out to 20 biofuels energy production complexes for each of the fifty US states; also yielding complete essential nutrition; multiple “Gaiatherapeutic” industry feedstocks, and several critically important, time-limited environmental services; in more countries in less time than any other energy production model.

Eighty billion dollars wasted here, one hundred billion wasted there, the overall impact is “death by a trillion cuts” until time runs out on mankind’s ability to avert irreversible, global systemic collapse.

That is the ultimate cost of war. No winners, no losers, just death, illness & hopelessness. Don’t think it can’t happen. It has already begun. The initial stages of systemic collapse can be plainly seen, accelerating toward inertial inevitability.

“Solutions” to global problems, being proposed by Gates, Soros, Musk and other global oligarchs take advantage of uncoordinated global confusion, wasting more time and money, poking holes in everyone’s lifeboat.

Solutions are simple & efficient. It’s the problems that are wasteful and complicated.

Organic farming of Cannabis hemp is uniquely capable of providing essential nutrition, abundant clean energy, safe & effective herbal therapeutics and global healing of atmosphere, soil, water, air & wildlife, all from the same harvest.

Why aren’t we spending $100 billion building Hemp BioRefineries and farming organic Cannabis for fuel? Because problems are profitable, in the short-term.

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Ref:

The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship” Joaquin Sapien Sept. 7, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship