I am feeling the need to make a statement regarding my analysis of the geopolitical state of the world.
It's a phraseology and a framing that I haven't been hearing a lot recently but I wanna comment on it. I'm trying to avoid current events and make more perennial content but this is a time where maybe the kind of research that I'm doing and the kind of analysis that I'm doing might actually be more timely than ever, at least in my lifetime.
I'm going to allow myself a bit more current events based processing , but not too much, because I like just focusing on the practical things that I can do, and that can be done with permaculture in a defensive and strategic manner.
This phraseology that I'm feeling is the idea of organized war crime and the moral hazard of warlord immunity from prosecution.
Moral hazard is a very interesting concept and organized war crime makes it seem like it's not an accident. Sometimes it is an accident, if it is an accident, then maybe you'll get a lighter sentence in front of the world courts that adjudicate the rules of war, there are things that happen by negligence or by accident.
Then there's more sinister acts that are not only deliberate and conscious, but actually conspiracy, in a sense of a crime occurring with the collusion of other people who are conscious and aware that they're colluding at whatever scale, playing whatever part in the commission of a group crime.
There is a very methodical organized war crime agenda across conflicts in the news.
There are things going on right now that people have a lot of cognitive dissonance around and as much outrage is being expressed, it's certainly not slowing things down. It's the grim, gruesome grinding machinery of death and destruction. The meat grinder of the battlefield that was almost a century old in terms of the technology.
It turns out there are some more sophisticated technological implements but the brutality and the horror seems to be at a scale not seen for quite a while.
Now you're supposed to be a little more shy about blood lust and being warlords and building imperialist empires.
You're supposed to be in polite company in the modern world that's supposed to have put the barbaric chapter of civilization behind us.
Only what remains is to be conflicts that are low intensity or covert or black ops or whatever sort of corporate security detail for just managing the resources of the globe.
The so called backwater warlords don't seem to pose a threat severe enough to be taken very seriously. But sadly, the more barbaric pattern is re-emerging.
If you're a leader, a head of state of some kind, then there's this expectation that if you wanna stay in power, you can forestall the machinations of election, if you're subject to that, if you're not a total dictator, then some form of force other than your pure autocratic will is gonna be the force that gives other leaders a chance, a turn to rule.
Without a revolution and without a coup, there are a lot of places in the world where there are different forms of machinations, whether the electorate is the masses, or some sort of smaller group of other warlords, or elder priests or elder tribes people...
But the idea that you can forestall the changing of the ruling person or persons by either starting a war or having war begin and occur so that you now have an excuse to stay to in control by law, not just by the fog of war and the necessity to put normal operations of government in a martial law limbo.
But then there are also these legal carve outs that say, not only will we expect that, but we're gonna grant that, you can rely on it, that you will not be ousted by normal means, by the rule of law.
So that leads me to defining the term of a moral hazard, which is a great term that's very useful. It's very hidden in plain sight.
I started hearing it more in recent times. I didn't hear so much in my coming of age years of becoming a critical thinker and activist.
But I'm sure it was out there. I don't know who coined it or how long it's been around, but it is a great term.
If it's not in your vocabulary, I wanna do my best to bring it to light. Because it it applies at all scales. It can apply at any scale, but it's happening at the biggest scales right now in a big way.
It makes it an appropriate moment to have a reference to help define it, and then be able to guard against because it's so insidious.
So think about a moral hazard. I'm not reading a dictionary definition I'm just gonna try to verbalize it to the best of my ability.
First thing comes to mind, you give someone an inch and they take a mile.
That's a useful existing metaphor or figure of speech, give an inch and take a mile but there's more to it. It's almost like you're trying to solve a problem, but in doing so, you create some kind of a flaw, or a loophole in the incentive structure, so that there's a backfiring or a counter intuitive ironic effect.
It's definitely a form of irony. It's definitely a moral hazard for you to get the opposite effect of what's desired by having a policy such as oh, if war breaks out or if you start a war, you'll be able to stay elected forever. You'll stay in office forever. You'll stay in power forever, as long as there's a war.
The incentive structure, there's leakage in that attempt to do the right thing or to do the prudent thing or the strategic or tactical thing.
You're giving too much faith in humanity, and you're not being cynical enough to not think that would immediately create a moral hazard for people to want to abuse that and have carte blanche to do so because it's baked into whatever legal terminology is in place.
It's been a fear knowing that exists. It's always been the fear, if your leader doesn't wanna leave office by the normal means of the expiration of their term, or seeing the writing on the walls, literally, that people are gonna vote you out...
Or by whatever means legal or not, legal voting or by some other not so legal means, your time is up and you wanna prevent it from happening.
It's always been a great fear of people who are cynical, who look at that moral hazard and think, I really hope that they don't pull that card.
It's a card that has been created. I don't know how widespread.
It would be interesting to know what that map of the moral hazard of organized war criminals would be, using this legal immunity to stay in power by declaring war or by prolonging war.
That's the real, the worst case scenario of the moral hazard. Maybe there is some reason for a war to occur by whatever legal or moral justification, there is a just war to be fought. Now the question becomes, what criteria exists clearly, for that war to be considered a success, for it to be won?
Obviously, both sides are gonna say it's our moral and righteous duty to win the war by whatever logic and reason they feel superior in their morality.
Very few people throughout history have been pure evil or pure good.
Normally there's a narrative to get people willing to die in battle. That's some sort of nationalistic narrative that places them in the position of being, if not the liberator, they're the hero, and they're liberating their own people, or whatever it is.
It's some kind of heroic narrative, even though history may judge it otherwise later. But that's the frenzy that has to get worked up. That's what the propaganda is all for.
But either side has got to have some notion of what the end game is. What is victory? How would it be defined? Forever wars are bad for economies. They're bad for business. The population cannot sustain it.
Maybe the moral hazard would be minimized if there were constraints put on the duration of a war and/or clear criteria. It's not just any war for any length of time.
You have a hall pass to stay in power during a war, but only for one year, or only until some measurable criteria, whether it be a time limit or some other metrics of success that aren't time based, but this much territory, or this clear achievable objective, not a blank check to fight wars forever.
So I'm just working out, in my mind, this very loosely defined privilege to allow war to continue without these constraints, that being a perverse incentive and a moral hazard.
It's contagious. The idea that it would be very dangerous in the world if it became of an established precedent that the way to stay in power is to engineer the beginning of wars, and engineer the prevention of ending wars.
Now everyone's diplomatically walking on egg shells to hopefully prevent regional escalation. But it only takes one leader in that tug of war of power politics to go rogue, not play the game of walking on egg shells to maintain some semblance of stability, knowing full well that war is bad for everything.
That sounds trite, but it's not good politics. That's probably the better way to say it's not good business, it's just security theater.
Some of my most treasured former military commentators now are enlightening me and making me aware of this sort of boondoggle that's so much of the military is because the contractors wanna sell the Department of Defense new shiny things that have a huge maintenance contract and an arc of end of life that gives this blank check to them to make things that are untested. They're extremely expensive. It made sense to have artillery, bullets, training, more propaganda to get people to join. So to me, this bloated farce of a military industrial complex, it's not even tactically correct. It's not even strategically correct. It's just a boondoggle.
So all that money, it's being spent on weapons of war that are in this fantasy realm. We're starting to realize that and realize the defense industrial base is deprecated.
The maintenance of a robust defense industrial base, it's the bread and butter artillery.
Why be a conscientious objector or a war tax resistor? Maybe it's not even because you're anti war, it's because you would spend the budget differently. You would arm the troops differently. You would have different agendas.
This wild card of war legal immunity, war legal immunity for war lords. So long as a war is perpetuated, then that throws off that balance of power.
So excuse the logic of the game theory of deterrence and deterrent capacity, which is a term I just learned today. They do try to measure it. People in their right minds, don't want to escalate. But if you have a perverse incentive to remain in power, then you're going rogue, and you're doing geopolitics and war to save your self.
If things really kick off in world war 3, there are a number of theaters of war brewing right now...the key factor in their being restraint between and among the leaders of nations not to pull the trigger on deploying full scale military action of conflict.
If that is the prudent, reasonable, rational deterrent game theory...that delicate balance can be undermined by even just one warlord who's trying to stay in power because they want to avoid pending prosecution.
That is a crazy train to be on, that we're all on now.
We are being held hostage by the moral hazard of warlord immunity.
I'm gonna call that a form of organized war crime.
It's very much a mafioso kind of game theory that doesn't really have a kill switch on taking things too far and risking your own survival, your own community, your own nation.
It's just so trigger happy and willing to really having nothing to lose, or being willing to gamble everything.
I say organized crime because it's methodical and it's planned out.
I'm not trying to stretch this metaphor with how the mafia operates. But if I did have to draw some parallel, it would be that, there appears to be very little restraint and very volatile egos. That's probably the way to put it.
So the volatility of egos and the lack of a real moral restraint, it's a Mexican standoff. There's no way anybody's gonna back down because of volatile egos and a power trip that is worth dying for, call it honor, or call it just the nature of feuds over time.
Whatever it is, we're definitely in a world now where cooler heads are not prevailing, and the hostage negotiation that is the entire world's survival at this point.
It's a very precarious place, volatile egos with a lot to lose if wars end, that perversely incentivize the continuation of war with a nebulous outcome defined.
I wish we could just invent a time machine so that the warlords could go back to the centuries in the past, they would flourish when there was no shyness about genocide.
There was no shyness about war crimes. There was no shyness about just massive rape and pillage and slaughter.
That's the earlier centuries of the history of civilization on Earth.
The one thing to be a little bit hopeful and optimistic about is that if you take the horrors of technology out of the picture for a minute and just ask, is human civilization writ large, moving over time in a direction of at least masking its barbarism? As opposed to not masking a barbarism? Yes, it is attempting to trick and fool people more about how barbaric it still truly is.
I've always had weird dreams about the end of the world in World War Three. But the Doomsday hour clock for me is getting damn close.
All of the peacework and activism that I've done in the streets and in organizations and all kinds of different forms of working to bring more peace to the world as anti war activists in a lot of different campaigns for a lot of different causes and conflicts...
This wild card factor, it's really scary, scarier than anything else, because of this moral hazard loophole.
It doesn't require being a charismatic populist. You could be the most despicable ruler who your own people are sick of and wanna throw out. But if you can ride the the legal immunity and keep a war going, or wars going that prevent your unpopularity from being realized in the form of being ousted, then all bets are off.
Because you don't have to please anybody. You don't have to promise anyone anything, you don't have to create a nationalistic narrative. All you have to do is somehow maintain enough cronyism among oligarchs to remain untouchable and to hide behind legal or illegal, formal or informal.
Extension privileges that may have been crafted with the best intentions, but end up becoming the moral hazard that makes us all into hostages.
It could be the wild card that brings about the end of the world as we know it.
So as a survivalist, a permaculturist, there's a scary election coming up in the US, and there's all these other warlord personalities colluding, taking us for a ride straight to hell, and that's very scary.
I'm gonna do my best to continue to be positive and maintain a positive mental attitude and just promote and teach to the best of my ability.
What I studied about how to become less and less dependent on systems of support that can be disrupted by natural disasters and by political and economic disasters...
If Y2K didn't turn you into prepper, if 2012 didn't turn you into a prepper, if 2008 didn't turn you into a prepper, if 2020 didn't turn you into a prepper...
Something to feel positive about, in the community emergency response team training, they teach you about the ethics and the procedures and protocols of triage for mass casualty events.
The mantra is, do the most good for the most people.
There's a whole system of sorting people out based on whether they're even gonna survive, whether it's possible for them to survive.
How much time and effort do you give to someone who is not gonna make it? And you've already fully assessed that, versus if someone is in a severe condition, in a critical condition, and you can save their life, then they get more care and faster care than someone who you assess to be able to hang on a little bit and be okay until more help arrives.
So that process of triage for a mass casualty event and that do the most good for the most people mantra...
I'm not going back to the city to try to convince people and proselytize people to be preppers and to do permaculture and to wanna survive and go back to the land.
There are many who are stubborn and don't wanna hear it. They wanna be in denial and have cognitive dissonance about the need to follow the permaculture prime directive of taking responsibility for our existence and that of our children, the people who wanna remain dependent on the globalized system...
I certainly don't wanna argue with them. I wanna be organizing, networking with like minded people who already understand whether they're in the city or the suburbs, or rural or wilderness, wherever people are at in terms of the geography, the state of mind and the mindset is let's be resilient so that we don't become someone else's problem.
Other people who we know are not gonna be resilient, they're gonna depend on us, and we're gonna be dependable for our own survival and for the people who we care about, who will look to us. We try to get as many people as we can to be onboarded who are open minded, but to not burn out and expend all of our own energy trying to save others. Don't make the wrong maneuvers in the triage because the people who want to get out of the system, they're the ones who my energy, my efforts, will be best served. For us to work as a team to get ourselves to a more secure, more sustainable way of life, where we're working in partnership with, with the forces of nature, not the forces against nature...
That's the positive way to look at it. If every other potential end of the world as we know it scenario since, let's say World War 2, or even since the Cold War, let's just say, since the Cold War, if every end of the world scenario was kind of hand wavy, that you could dismiss it and then the moral hazard has been that things have not gotten better.
But since the world didn't end, it's okay to continue acting like it's never gonna end as a result of the decisions that we're making in actions and inactions. That's another moral hazard. Let's go back to business as usual.
That's scary. Let's be less dependent on technology that can fail us. 2012 didn't happen well, there are geophysical things to be aware of that maybe make you want to grow some food.
Okay, that's proactive. Not. Oh, 2012 was nothing so let's keep business as usual going. I think more people had a little bit of attitude adjustment after 2008 because they actually felt something, it wasn't just a potential or hypothetical. It was real for a lot of people. Really terrible things happened to a lot of people.
Unfortunately, due to all the "conspirituality" around social media, I don't think we learn many lessons. We certainly didn't come together to find common ground understanding as a result of the 2020 scare. I haven't gone back to Babylon since 2020, there were a few excursions to resupply, but that's all I did.
I've only gone back to Babylon since 2020 to resupply my preps, not to party, not to hang out, not to go and be re absorbed into the urban matrix, or even do what I love to do, which is help people grow food and be of service as a designer and installer, a permaculture designer.
I've even sacrificed what I love to do. Because for me, this is real.
How about do the most good for the most people who care to do good for themselves and others? Get serious about survival and get serious about the potential that it won't just be people far away who are victims of war and displacement and diaspora and genocide and becoming refugees, that could happen to anyone anywhere.
For a lot of us outsiders, outlaws, underground rebels, we've already been displaced. We're already living like refugees just to have dignity and to avoid being victimized, brutalized and poisoned.
I'm not trying to give anyone nightmares, but I'm certainly on high alert. I'm planning to add to my security, add to my preps, and do so with like minded folks, and have the time of my life doing it. Feel great about it. Enjoy life thoroughly.
I don't feel like it's a sacrifice. I feel like it's a trade and I feel like it's a good trade. It is for me, it's not for everybody. If you're on the team of survival, then great. We're friends. If you're not on that team, god help you. Good luck. Pay attention and don't be surprised if the moral hazard I'm talking about disrupts business as usual for real this time.
Let's hope not. Expect the best and prepare for the worst.