Posted on 08/27/2013 9:28:45 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
I’ve sent the link to some of my friends, and one of them is going to send the link out to her e-mail tree. It’s going to go viral.
Now I have to kill him.
Asteroids?
and a natural disaster — the likes of which the nation has never seen — is also likely on its way.
Kinda made me think of that scene in Deep Impact where the reporter is trying to get info from a politician loading stuff on his boat and she discovers boxes and boxes of some brand of “food in a can”. And he spills the beans.
(This was just sent to me by a very smart guy.)
I just found the time to breeze through Alas, Brave New Babylon. That suggested something to pass along to you.
Several years ago, my youngest son took a class called Chaos and Complexity. I got interested, read his textbooks, and a bunch more books on the subject.
We’ve long know that there are complex systems all around us - weather, the power grid, ecosystems, the human body, the stock market, and many more. We’ve never had a way to study complex system dynamics until the advent of the Internet. Since the Internet, those who study complexity have learned some interesting things, including what is unknowable.
Those who study complexity speak of an analogy, the Sand Table Game. This is called a game because it is a thought experiment, run under artificial rules. It works like this:
Imagine a table, say a 4 X 8 foot sheet of plywood, sitting on sawhorses. Imagine you rig a device to trickle grains of sand from four feet above the table, onto the center of the table. You watch to see what happens.
The first grains of sand will hit the table and bounce around in random fashion. Eventually, the grains will come to occupy the center surface of the table. Falling grains will hit and dislodge other grains. The sandpile will grow. As the sand pile grows, once in a while one grain will dislodge a bunch of other grains and cause a sluff on one area of the sand pile. The sides of the sandpile will grow steeper and the top taller.
Eventually, one falling grain of sand will cause a cascading, catastrophic rearrangement of the entire sandpile. Eventually and ALWAYS.
This catastrophic rearrangement, the thinkers say, always happens in every complex system. It’s one of the characteristics of complex systems. It is impossible to predict which grain of sand will cause this catastrophe - only that it WILL happen, eventually, with every complex system.
Think, for example, of the Archduke Ferdinand’s driver taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo, a wrong turn that coincidentally placed the Archduke in the path of an assassin’s bullet, triggering, probably, two world wars.
Back to the sandpile analogy. Although it’s impossible to know exactly which random grain of sand will cause the catastrophic rearrangement of the sandpile, we can observe the growing potential for disaster as the sides of the sandpile get steeper and the top gets higher.
As you express in Alas, Brave New Babylon, I see the sandpiles of our economic, social and technical complex systems getting very steep and tall.
I guess she is predicting a natural disaster like happened on 9-11-01.
sounds like she does
or a deep space telescope
She is predicting a natural disaster? That’s pretty fascinating, coming from a member of the “pro-science” party. Liberals are idiots.
Thanks. And the email that I received and posted at #25 also explains a lot.
And her possible replacement is worried about our base on Mars.
if there were they would be assuring us it will pass over the north pole the end of this year and have no effect on our atmosphere or on crazy acting-out lunatics who see it as a prophetic sign
pronounced nuh-pol-eh-TA-no-dumb-ass...
Hell, we've been dealing with an unprecedented UNNATURAL disaster since January 20, 2009, with no perceivable end in sight.
My eyes are rolling to the next planet....
Salvage the rifle scope after the ammo is gone...
Um, what the hell!?
What is Big Sis trying to tell us??
I am slowly joining the ranks of the conspiratorially minded and this is part of the narrative. I would love to build a search algorithm that finds and analyzes the usage of many of these phrases. But the one thing the power mongers in Washington need is an excuse to use their power at the ‘next level’.
I think that Syria and/or other events could spiral into a global cyber war. We are all extremely vulnerable. Have you read “Alas, Brave New Babylon?” Or just read reply 25 on this thread, and think about what happens if we lose our computer networks and electrical grid even for a few days.
I think she’s pointing to a cyber attack that takes out our grid and computer networks. Other top govt wonks have also been whispering dire warnings for a while.
That was an excellent, dark and chilling piece, Matt. Hardly anyone understands just how fragile our civilization has become, and how easy it would be to initiate a broad civilizational collapse.
Unfortunately for the West, many of our enemies understand just that.
When this starts, events will take on a life of their own. The planners plans will be undone. Very Bad Things will follow.
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