I was wide awake dreaming. I sat up in the bed and there at my feet was a TV. I hate TV. But I dreamed that it was on and I was watching the news. I kept dozing off and woke up to different stories. I swear the newsreader was some annoying fellow I knew from my childhood in Alaska, still sporting his 1970s hairstyle and trendy clothing. Here is a digest of what he told his audience in my dream…
The 2016 Elections swept in a fresh Republican majority, including the White House. It was the ultimate Neocon Tag Team, hard core Zionists. Christian Zionists were dancing in the streets as the atmosphere changed in the US. How do you describe religious fascism? From a thousand pulpits thundered the message that it was God’s work harassing and jailing folks who were insufficiently enthusiastic about the State of Israel. The usual social predators took this as their cue, an excuse to vent their hatred all around. There was bloodshed, the victims accused of being too Pro-Palestinian. News of what was happening to the actual Palestinians feel behind a curtain of silence, with only rumors and jerky video escaping the censorship. The newsreader didn’t offer much about it.
If ever Israel had much influence in the US up to that moment, they were now firmly in control. At the cost of nearly every single social welfare program, the military was spun up with all the newest and latest gadgets, more than the even the Pentagon dreamed they could use. We were treated to the spectacle of Air National Guard units struggling to find pilots for the new F-35s, while recruiting for all the services shot up with enlistment bonuses and pretty sloppy concealment of officially disqualifying factors. When that didn’t bring in enough warm bodies, a new conscription law was passed, and even felons were shipped off for training.
But the biggest clamor of all was for hackers, skilled cyber technicians of any sort. Every branch of government it seemed had instituted a new program for cyber warfare and it was a highly competitive field, in the sense that every agency was fighting over a small pool of willing applicants. You see, every agency was enthusiastically planning to hunt down everyone online who was any flavor of anti-Zionist. The Internet was the one means of communication that most resisted censorship.
First, Israel sold the US government several types of network surveillance devices, but some of the info-guerrillas were using Tor, VPNs and open wifi mesh networking. So various NATO governments presented a united front with Israel and demanded that Microsoft and Apple provide some kind of monitoring data. A short time later they upped the ante and demanded some kind of “front door” access through the standard telemetry mechanisms. But too many savvy users were learning from underground sources how to counteract these measures. So a couple of months later — someone suggested it was Mossad and NSA working together — a virus swept across the Net. It required jumping through all kinds of hoops just to stay online. None of the AV vendors were permitted to block or remove it on pain of being shut down entirely, or at least boycotted from selling inside Western markets. It installed itself on Windows computers, routers, Macs, smartphones, everything.
That is, everything except those few computers running Linux, BSD and other “hobby” operating systems. While they did begin finding ways to break into Linux some, it was too costly because there were too many flavors and high variation in software configurations and so forth. Nothing worked on enough of the different flavors to justify the expense. So it became illegal to install Linux on certain classes of computers, mostly home PCs and laptops. There way too many operations that relied on it for their servers, including lots of government agencies. But such a program worked about as well as gun registration, because detecting and then locating such systems became nearly impossible with any degree of reliability. People kept slipping through the loopholes and new technologies to mask and avoid detection and location proliferated quickly. It was especially difficult to get judges to hammer folks who had been using it from any time before the law was passed.
Meanwhile, people started going to jail just for writing anti-Zionist sentiments in emails, blog posts and comments to any other form of media. Lots of false positives there, but it didn’t matter because the laws said you had to prove your innocence.
But that was all just background to the main event: Israel very publicly demanded the US and NATO attack some alleged nuclear facilities in Iran. It wasn’t just the F-35s, but a whole range of military equipment was just a bunch of junk, so the attack failed in the most mind-blowing cluster f*** you can imagine. A large portion of the troops and equipment never even got that close in the first place. All sorts of electronic sensing devices kept going blind and leaving large transports and attack craft to collide or simply wander off course and run out of fuel. Oh, it was such a huge mess.
Israeli officials screamed in rage as the Iranian defenses had little trouble handling what was left. Yes, it was obvious they had gotten some help with very new and frankly effective missile and radar systems that wiped out almost the entire range of threats to them.
And then almost the entire collection of Western governments simply went flat-out broke. The debt had piled up so high that there was nothing left to loan. Outright confiscation of goods and services only goes so far before it costs more in the life of cops and troops and corruption than it’s worth. As governments fell apart on the TV screen, I woke up.
