Roger's Blog

The Overview: An all-encompassing Axiom

I used to develop databases in Filemaker, an Apple software product – so easy that it was often the Administrative Assistant who created the organization’s database(s). Except for enormous transactional systems, like those handling the ATMs of large banks, Filemaker was a far better choice, for many reasons, than the clumsy, dysfunctional piece of junk called Oracle, for a tiny fraction of the cost. I bring this up because this is one of innumerable examples of the innate corruption of the Imperialist/Capitalist system, where profit predictably trumps common sense, not to mention simple human decency. Oracle, like Microsoft and many others, had only one kind of expertise – Sales and Marketing. They spent billions on paying top programmers to overcome the deficiencies of their initial products. Then they made many more billions after pretty much cornering the market.

In database theory, one starts with a root directory (aka a folder) and follows with a set of sub-directories. It’s a method that was pioneered in the 18th Century by Carl Linnaeus, also known as the “father of modern taxonomy”. The number of items in the lowest level sub-directories can be very large. It’s the content, aka the data.

Our mother website, ‘Situation Report: The World,’ like pretty much everything else in the digital world, is a database, or part of one. The content is the data, in this case a collection of items – writings, images, video and audio that each reflects a view, or views, of whatever the hell is going on in this crazy world, or some take on how we got here or where we’re going. Collectively, they are “A Chronicle of the Decline and Fall of the Western Empire.”

That sub-title is an adequate term but now I’d like to introduce a name for the root directory , “The Overview.” In this first proper blog entry, I’m going to elaborate on that a bit. Think of a good vantage point from which to see the whole field, like the most expensive seats from which to watch professional football. They’re high up and unobstructed. Or the top of a mountain, from where you can see all below. That’s what I mean by overview. Sorry if all this seems too simplistic – I’m just trying to make sure that everybody’s on board.

A couple of years ago I came up with a term to describe an overview of this time in history. I doubt very much that I was the first to do so. Recently, it has suddenly popped up all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, the redoubtable Vladimir Putin himself used it. It is “a geopolitical tectonic shift,” henceforth GpTS. A lovely simile – particularly apt is what’s occurring along the San Andreas Fault. The Eastern plate is encroaching on the Western one. Note that even among today’s crop of opportunistic $cientists, no one claims that there might be a technological solution. The West is sinking and the East is rising – it is an inexorable process.

Everything that has been happening for at least the last 75 years can only be fully understood in that context. Otherwise, how could we even begin to understand the criminal insanity, or the descent into fascism, of the flagship – the USA – or that of the Eurolemmings and the rest of the “rules-based order” crowd, who blindly and obediently follow the batshit crazy Pied Piper.

We can debate the beginning of the era that is now coming to an end. I opt for the sudden maritime explosion of the Europeans about 500 years ago, all around the world, where a sense of cultural, religious and racial superiority, along with the most advanced technology, made it possible for them to colonize most of it. Thus it has been for millennia. The upstart empire gets more and more arrogant and smug, with corruption and factional rivalry bleeding away their power, while those who were overrun start putting themselves back together and forming strong alliances. And so it goes..

In further posts I’m going to drill down to the sub-directories level, covering how that inexorable process, the GpTS, has been manifesting itself as the new multipolar world begins to take shape. In the meantime, stay tuned to the action via SitRepWorld. It’s something else, living in interesting times, ain’t it?..

(Please take the opportunity to write something, anything, via the Comments section at the bottom of the single page – we’re still testing the protocols. )

2 Comments

  • Ash

    “We can debate the beginning of the era that is now coming to an end. I opt for the sudden maritime explosion of the Europeans about 500 years ago, all around the world, where a sense of cultural, religious and racial superiority, along with the most advanced technology, made it possible for them to colonize most of it. Thus it has been for millennia. The upstart empire gets more and more arrogant and smug, with corruption and factional rivalry bleeding away their power, while those who were overrun start putting themselves back together and forming strong alliances. And so it goes..”

    That section especially got me thinking about two related issues, namely civilizations and their momentum forward and upward or backward and downward.

    What makes a civilization. One could argue about definitions forever no doubt but basically there is something that emerges that is greater than the people themselves, that develops some sort of high culture with sophisticated skills and mores and begins to influence other nations and cultures around it usually utilizing both hard and soft power in so doing.

    Why did the conquistadores prosper and prevail so over what was to become colonized Latin America? How could only a few hundred Spaniards, many of them dirty and semi-literate, conquer millions? Yes, they had horses, pigs, armor, metal weapons and a few guns but again they were a few hundred against millions. It was quite similar further North with the English and French colonizers although it seems that progression took much longer before climaxing with genocide at the end. No doubt the more rapid colonization in Latin America was because of the significant gold and silver found there used in international trade to purchase Asian manufactures given that Europe produced none of interest to Asian buyers. Gold or silver it had to be until some enterprising fellow in England in the late 1700’s invented the spinning Jenny in order to undercut Indian cotton manufacturing (mainly housewives in humble homes) to earn gold and silver with which to purchase manufactures in Eastern Asia, especially China.

    But what gives impetus to one civilization being superior and able to conquer others. Is it purely a technological edge? Perhaps but that doesn’t really explain Latin America. Some say it was disease. A priest with the first Spanish exhibition down the Amazon descrbed horrific scenes of encountering small cities (millions used to live on that river long ago and the forest was a managed farm operation) with 90% death rates simply from the time it took them to travel down river between one city and the next. I find this hard to believe, personally, but something like that seems to have happened. Indigenous immune systems are programmed to resist parasites, not bacterial infections and vice versa for European immune systems. The humans and pigs wiped out huge numbers of natives, basically and the rest, presumably weakened and profoundly demoralized, surrendered to working for a few years in the mines before succumbing to exhaustion from over work, abuse and semi-starvation rations. A nasty business.

    So maybe it’s down to technology and/or pathogens. But I can’t help but feel there is a civilizational momentum at play which we all can feel. I suspect that as Eurasia emerges and their civilization starts visibly rising in Central Eurasia with population and infrastructure growth over the coming decades that their influence will spread greatly. Maybe English will become a minor language and Russian or Chinese come to the fore. But at the same time as gazes turn toward the Central Island – as we are already seeing in conferences like the recent SCO one in Samarkand last week – they will leave off paying attention to the West whose influence will slip away into the gloom, like a smaller boat left in the wake of a much larger one at dusk, soon to vanish from sight altogether.

    For momentum is clearly with the Eurasians right now. Evidence abounds. They enter a proxy war with the US-NATO axis and overall economy is beginning to expand again already after taking a hit for a few months. Many of their major industries like oil, gas, aircraft, weaponry, agriculture and more are on track to expand bountifully for decades to come. Meanwhile the West is cratering with a hollowed out productivity/manufacturing nexus and little else other than Fake News transmission and absorption as their polities self-implode from a surfeit of petty-minded greed, ignorance and clearly corrupt elite leadership class, most of whom are hidden from view.

    And so it goes indeed….

  • Roger Tucker

    Thanks for your well-chosen words, Ash. It also helps us sort out the now obvious bugs in the commenting protocols, which others can help with by making their own comments.