- WEAPON TECH 2

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Chapters

• 0:07 pre-industrial high tech
• 4:31 sport
• 8:10 military new tech
• 11:25 public relations

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- WEAPON TECHNOLOGY (II) -

The first assembly line using interchangeable parts wasn’t the Ford Motor Company in the early 1900’s, it wasn’t the Springfield Federal Arsenal where muzzle-loading, spiral-bored rifles were assembled from nearly interchangeable parts for the American Civil War — under the tutelage of Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame. Much earlier, as far back as the 2nd Century BCE (Before Christian Era), Chinese arsenals turned out crossbows by the hundreds of thousands. These eventually evolved into cut-down, repeating crossbows with twenty-round magazines and twin barrels, (i.e.: pre-gunpowder semi-automatic pistols). Their industrial tolerance rivaled those of Civil War percussion locks; their influence on a swordplay battlefield, just as lethal. 

During the 15th Century CE, the first metal reduction gears were painstakingly carved from bronze ingots to create cranequins: ratchets used to cock state-of-the-art crossbows.

Yet the Antikythera mechanism, raised in 1901 (why hidden for so long since?) from a merchant ship that had gone down in the Mediterranean two thousand years prior, leads us to presume that at least some workshops and technicians did such high-precision work.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism. 

Also, some of the oldest known world maps trace the coastlines of Antarctica and the Americas with a precision inconceivable at the time. Barring, perhaps, equivalent but unknown navigational charts traced by the navigators of the great Chinese fleet built, deployed to the seven seas and abandoned during the 15th Century.

Around the same time, the Arsenal at Venice set up a channel assembly line to provide reserve squadrons of bare galley hulls with equipment, rigging, armament, provisions and crew — at the rate of one ship per hour for days on end. 

Venice had to send far off for good naval timbers. Ancient Rome had already razed all the regional forests. Every oar-and-sail naval power executed the same mayhem against the World Forest. Imagine the great forests chopped down to build imperial fortifications and galley fleets!

Iron and bronze smelting required that hardwood trees be charred into charcoal by firing cordwood by the cubic yard in a low oxygen environment and the resulting charcoal burned in high-temperature kilns along with metal ore. Entire forests were leveled around these kilns; their smoke poisoned the soil and inhibited regrowth. 

In 1997, one of America’s last great trees was cut down to re-mast a rotten naval hulk commemorating the War of 1812. Nowadays, some businessmen earn tidy sums by cannibalizing old buildings for precious, mainframe timbers. Mature, fully developed trees no longer exist — except in a few deep forest sanctuaries the Bush/Reagan/Trumpoids haven’t gotten around to devastate yet. 

The military might of Venice lasted until its Arsenal blew up under fishy circumstances, permanently removing that great city from the roster of first-rate powers. 

Spectacular advances in ship design and navigation arose from war fleets. World War II (sic) amphibious assault craft evolved into container and RoRo, Roll-On-Roll-Off ships. Only weapon technicians could raise enough funds to develop ships’ end-castles, multiple decks, full rigging, steam boilers, screw propellers, iron plating, gas turbines, submarine hulls and nuclear reactors … Not to mention aircraft and their attendant ironmongery.

 M. S. Anderson, in War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime 1618-1789, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, England, 1998, pp. 142, 143, 152, 153, describes the byzantine organization required to build and maintain grand fleets of sailing ships of the line at great remove from their home port. Those ships were the most complicated machines of the era (as are aircraft carriers today).

The Manhattan Project was history’s greatest technological development scheme up until then. Its workers handcrafted humanity’s first atom bombs. Other countries have called this ante about a dozen times, since, to home-brew fission weapons in furtive secrecy. Hydrogen fusion weapons required much more filth and wastage, seen in turn by every venerable weapon tyranny. 

Imagine that kind of research devoted to rational population control and elegant life-support. How unrealistic of me to even suggest such a thing! Learners shall insist upon it. At present, breakthrough civilian technologies are at the mercy of the “free market” — secret code for corporate suppression of valid peace technologies and the strangulation of small business in favor of their weapon monopolies much less rewarding.

Team sports ritualize infantry combat drill, especially among the young. Sports statistics clutter billions of minds, as well as the media tasked with feeding those minds. Precious airtime, print space and academic funding go to waste to display a glut of sports statistics of no significance whatsoever. Some of the best journalists are tasked with sports journalism. This says three things about our culture. 

• How much we distract ourselves from important matters by not publicizing them. 
• How much we make the trivial seem important by publicizing it too much.
• Finally, how much talent and effort are required to make interesting reading out of the stylized muscular twitches of the nth mesomorph. 

Fine journalists are well paid to turn the track of an inflated ball into musical prose that readers by the million read every day (even if that’s the only thing they read, those millions). Meanwhile, I must mumble to myself about World Peace for no pay, as if it were nothing. Day in and day out, we are crushed under wide-screen technologies of monologue sports babble in every public space. But let no one speak of Peace!

The love most info proletarians feel for sports can be explained by the fact that, in a weapon state, athletics is one of the only institutions that works in a reassuringly predictable and harmless manner, at least for spectators who are not psychopath hooligans, financial brigands or bloodthirsty patriots.

Michael Murphy’s text, The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature collates endless sports anecdotes to demonstrate meta-normal human talents. He ignores wartime equivalents. 

Everyone can recall the hard-nosed gym coach who urged us to never give up, never quit, never turn quitter. 

The most dim-wit policies of the Western world (like renouncing family planning on a global scale, not to mention staging useless wars, famines, etc.) have been legitimized by victims of concussion undergone as young participants in Rugby in Europe, diverse Footballs on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and martial arts everywhere, as well as by young veterans who survived close proximity explosive concussions during intermediate wars. War mass-produces enough dumbed-down leaders to generate more war and more stupid leaders down the line.

If you think about it, every crime against humanity, every massacre, battle and war was started and drawn out by sinister people who refused to quit gracefully, even after all reason and common sense had bled white from their motives.

Those are our rotten priorities. Feel guilt and remorse.

There was a time when religion was “the opiate of the people” (paraphrasing Carl Marx). Nowadays, professional sport is their heroin — and advertising, their crack cocaine, in sophisticated imitation of roman arenas that exhibited cruder human entertainment.

Homelessness and malnutrition fester unattended across the planet, yet our cities vote themselves shiny new sports stadiums quite costly and redundant (to the ka-ching profit of irresponsible elites), great at worsening urban traffic jams. Wise commentary is drowned out in sports babble while everything worthwhile decays in a venerable hush. Sis, boom, rah!

In The Evolution of Civilization, Carroll Quigley described the steady decay of college football — from sunny afternoon frolics between study-dazed frat brothers, into mercenary confrontations of Byzantine complexity, steroid-soaked doggedness, cerebral concussion and Mammon lucre. A fine illustration of institutional bloat over time. 

For an extreme example of this madness, take a look at soccer riots. The El Salvador-Honduras Soccer War, that Ryszard Kapuscinski described so tellingly, was a shocking prelude to the Salvadoran civil war during which Ronald Reagan used his trademark, debonair charm to cluster bomb unarmed peasants and their children by the thousands. 

 The British Admiralty commissioned the first exact chronometers so its captains could locate themselves at sea. The land battles of Frederick and Napoleon were more “sophisticated” than preceding ones because regimental colonels could consult a good pocket watch and get from point A to point B on schedule. The first maps, compasses, celestial navigation and global positioning technologies served similar purposes. 

Cartesian geometry first described the trajectories of cannon balls, not planets. Those were priceless battlefield predictions, later refined by trigonometry, calculus and Newtonian physics. You can’t build an atom bomb without Einstein’s formulae and those of quantum mechanics, even though those weapon dogmas contradict each other and even though they require that 96% of the Universe be made up of nothing we can see, called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. In addition, they require that the primitive universe must have magically “expanded” much faster than the speed of light. Presto! Talk about pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The first telescopes weren’t built to satisfy the stargazers of Galilean mythology, but to serve as spyglasses so rich generals could oversee their massacres from atop hilltops and church spires, tucked well in the rear with the gear.

High-energy industries first evolved to cast and bore out cannon. Most church bells were cast by civilians and then melted down by tyrants to make more cannon. In perfect irony, European Protestant Iconoclasts pulled down many church bells so that the Catholic nobility could buy them up cheap, melt them into cannon and gun down those same Iconoclasts.

During World War I, Glasgow, Scotland made the greatest donation to a special, fund-drive to send more tanks to the Western Front. Some tanks Glasgow had paid for were sent into the city to stifle its great, post-war demonstration for improved living conditions. Age of Tanks, Netflix, 2017 

Lewis Mumford speaks of cannon as the “first reciprocating engine.” He mentions preliminary attempts to motorize vehicles using gunpowder as fuel. From page 81 to around page 101 of his book, Technics and Civilization, he reviews the influence warfare had on technology. 

 “Anderson wrote,

“’Thus in England Henry Cort began his experiments on wrought iron, which culminated in the ‘puddling’ process of 1784, largely to achieve a higher quality of metal for the production of guns and anchors for the navy; later the Admiralty would accept only iron produced by his methods. The development in 1774 by the industrialist and inventor John Wilkinson, of the cannon-lathe, the result of a decade of work in the production of artillery, made it possible to bore reasonably accurate cylinders and thus did more than anything else to make Watt’s steam-engine a practical proposition.” M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime 1618-1789, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, England, 1998, p. 182.

The British engineer Bessemer produced steel from molten iron and coke (coke: coal vacuum-cooked to purify its carbon content). That molten mixture was then bubbled with oxygen, exclusively to produce military ordnance. 

Stainless steel was a top-secret military invention in 1917 during the First (sic) World War. Its first civilian application wasn’t capitalized until 1928, per Buckminster Fuller. 

Public Relations didn’t become a “respectable” profession until a flood of reactionary cash engaged copy-write barkers to shout down the American Progressive Party. Thus were Americans pressed to join the First (sic) World War: the least popular of America’s many unpopular wars; at least until Vietnam, not to mention never-ending follow-up wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the wars of corporate convenience and national disgrace soon to follow. 

“The more democratic a state, the more unpopular its wars.” Machiavelli, The Prince. 

Public Relations experts made sure that the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 would become a footnote in the margins of history, even though it killed several times more people, during the last year of World War I (sic) and the year thereafter, than did four years of meat-grinder combat. Fever casualties were so staggering that the authorities censored all reporting of it. “Make more coffins” was the only practical advice sent to officials of communities as yet untouched. Allied newspapers called it the Spanish Flu because Spain was neutral during the war, and its Press had the gall to report the pandemic without censure. By striking down mostly young and fit adults, it exhausted everyone’s reserve of military manpower and thus ended the War to End All Wars. Otherwise, there was more than enough institutional stupidity to prolong the World Bloodbath we dare call Number One. 

The 1918 Armistice came as a real surprise to soldiers in the trenches. They believed there would be nonstop trench warfare for at least another generation, until all of them and their sons had been massacred. Both side’s leaders had lost so many of their own children that they could never allow themselves to back down. 

Indeed, Allied armies were shipped off to invade Soviet Russia just before the 1918 Armistice with Germany, until they mutinied en masse and demanded to be sent home. Or, in the case of British and American troops, their mothers and political allies demanded it. A French battle fleet sailed home from the Black Sea, manned by mutinous sailors sickened by their shore bombardment of civilians, every officer locked below-deck. 

Finally, Public Relations professionals quashed the idea of World Peace as President Wilson had articulated it and the whole world yearned for it. World peace was not profitable enough for a new generation of weapons industrialists, their stay-at-home lackeys in Congress and serried ranks of combat-virgin weapon mentors who had taken over academia, politics and the media during the war — while their betters marched off to die in it. An equivalent cabal of chicken hawk, draft-deferred sociopaths (what’s more, great admirers of international fascism) took over American politics after Roosevelt’s death at the end of World War II (sic). 

They’ve never let go since.

... 

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- WEAPON TECHNOLOGY (3) -