What can we learn from Sun Tzu about our time?

 When we look at desperation as a factor (real or created) - it has an amplified impact on resource dependent Europe. The European Environmental Agency claims that 60 to 70 percent of their soils are degraded.  Energy costs are now double the costs in the US and they have had to pay a debt that amounts to a trillion dollars in extra spend since 2022, manufacturing is now just too expensive to deliver a sale-able product to the normal population.  So agriculture and manufacturing are feeling real pressures. The knock on effects are making wider populations feel real pain. Manufacturing pain if you will... that along with the constant humming of propaganda everywhere. Looks like a re-run of an old script.

This situation appears to be the arrival of a long predicted storm which places the EU at a crossroads in my humble opinion. Locked into a backwards looking paradigm the options are running out.   

Sun Tzu had a name for the extreme case, "Death Ground."  The place where no retreat was possible because there were no options left. In this fight for survival all resources were committed to a fight to the end.  You didn't get a choice or a voice in the matter. Are we really there, or are the powerful so invested in old ways that they are convinced there are no options?

Are all of the options really exhausted?  What about a return to normalcy with its power to the East? What about integration to a rebalanced system of trade? It seems like trading the internally generated threats of vulnerability to geopolitical manipulation read: my brokers don't like it, for the collision of a very real conflict which could escalate into profound losses is the question at hand, and nobody seems to care about what the people caught in the middle of this really want.  By the way, whomever is the provider of resources to enable such a dependency will always be capable of lording that over your head.  So this is a specious argument based on who stands to benefit or is too frightened to risk exposure financially - again my simple minded view of the way things work.  

Meh, Nothing new about this show down except one should be careful to realize through whom's lens you are viewing this situation.  Watching events unfold around the world has suggested that there are many miscalculations afoot and the recalcitrant resolve demonstrated suggests that all of the combatants have read Sun Tzu and understand what is at stake.   The worlds stockpiles of once and done stuff is indeed running low.  Adaptation, conservation and perhaps new ways of dealing with our realities are what is required. That would be evolutionary, but alas it seems we are on track to be historical instead.  

Sun Tzu did say "The Supreme art of war was to subdue the enemy without fighting" that is another way of saying diplomacy and intellectual discourse aimed at getting along made more sense than wasting lives and resources in a physical contest.  In our time there are many ways to accomplish either option that don't involve conventional approaches.  That is both the danger and the promise of our times. 

Another summer has passed - goodbye 2026 what a great summer it was...

 The yearly migration of the loons, the leaves are falling and my new antennas are set up!

2 knots - just a lovely slow pace to the ramp on an amazing fall day! The '59 Larson purred all the way. Somehow I did manage to shear the com line to my depth transducer... A little repair project for this winter. I am re-purposing the screen off of an old Panasonic Toughbook as an instrument cluster for next season.  It will display all of the motor ECU data with a touch screen on a wireless connection. 

It always happens so fast. Beautiful colors and then... no more until next spring. Soon the ground will be covered white with snow.

Addition to the antenna farm. Satellites are new to me and I look forward to some long distance QSOs!

If the drought in our area continues, and I don't think it will El Niño won't last for long. But if it does, next spring the lift will get pulled ashore and we'll moor the boat off of the dock with bumpers and anchor lines. I'll need to add a few cleats on the dock though and switch to an auto start/stop sump pump to keep the summer rain pumped out.

So very beautiful! 

How many different ways did we manage our trade long ago?

 This struck me as interesting question.  So much of what we get used to and perceive as "that is how we do it." has a lot to do with what era in time you lived in.  Your experience was very different then than it is today.

If we go back far enough and observe the world as highly fractured desperate groupings of people coalesced around some favorable sustaining food stock we see barter with things like food and perhaps simple tools.  Traded on the basis of human and animal physical energy exerted to plant, nurture,  harvest and the storage of these most important resources that your life depended on.  If we had something extra, perhaps it could be traded for something the next village over had that you didn't.  If we think of the Earth at a time with less than a million inhabitants, sparsely distributed and pretty much each on its own cultural trajectory... that's how life was.  Steady state was a pretty small population.

When populations grew larger and urban groupings formed  more sophisticated ideas developed. The silver standard did the trick for a very long time.

In order to effectively use such a physical medium of exchange an intermediary called a "bank" was created that could hold a buffer stock of silver. This popped up out of necessity to keep the wheels spinning.  Often ran by a government in the management of its resources, labor, educational aspirations and technical growth. So the need for a buffer stock went away when the metal was made a proxy by some words on a piece of paper.  LOL, so those fortresses with big vaults on main street turned into atms and common storefronts over time. Banks are conveniences not fortresses these days.

From a few thousand years BC to up to the 1800s; silver was it.  

Note:  As populations grew the finite resource problem began to exert itself.  Silver mines were getting tapped out, the logical next step was bi-metalic.  Gold and silver and eventually the new kid on the block GOLD was looking good and in 1873 it was made the standard in the US.  Then in 1933 poof.  Onto a silver standard.  Volatility sort of went along with the concept of mineral depletion.

By 1971 it was over. Richard Milhous Nixon declared the US would not back the dollar with any precious metal.  I have never known anyone with that middle name, it was his mother's maiden name by the way.

Before RMN's advisors prepared him to announce that decision, discussions were going on with energy dense countries to agree to trade their energy feedstocks exclusively in US dollars.  A new idea, borrow, pay interest and profit on energy sales with the primary media of conversion being the US dollar with the caveat of supplying a defensive shield for all the players - like it or not it grew to be the cornerstone of energy trade which underpinned nearly every economy - so much so that as growth stalled or notions of avoiding the US dollar surfaced they were squelched quickly.  This became known as the petrodollar.  An interesting thing to do, couple managing energy with banking profits and fuel the military industrial complex (which needs to have a raison d’être to really drive the spend - as a side note the threat can be real or imaginary as long as contracts get awarded, and if everything looks good today - what about that eminent threat TOMORROW!? cha-ching) whilst managing who is in and who is out. The leverage of a sanction for the players grew into a formidable threat. I'm sure Admiral Rickover who died in 1986 by the way, was not too happy with this decision, because he believed such an arrangement couldn't last for any significant length of time...read on for context. 

As time went on, populations grew - enabled by the extraordinary activity all this low cost energy provided.  It looked like the sky was the limit in 1970.  But wait a second, just a couple of years later a handful of analysts couldn't let go of warnings given in the 1950's about the finiteness of the planetary energy supply. Rickover was convinced the US Navy needed an alternative to oil and championed nuclear propulsion to escape the depletion trap.  He saw depletion of oil as a threat to mobilizing the fleet and being able to keep on doing what it was chartered to do.  He feared the end of mobility fuels in a generation or two.  He didn't know about the last couple of major discoveries, nor the fracking stuff, so he was operating from a position that we are now in. Correct, but ahead of his time by a couple of generations.  

Like every resource man has ever dug up, cut down, pulled from the ocean or plunked with an arrow... the sink (the supply) is finite.  There may be a lot of it, it may be part of some million year old cycle, or maybe it's made geophysically in the deep earth - whatever your opinion is, the oil "make rate" does not keep up with the consumption rate of our modern world.  So what of the petrodollar in an age of depleting petroleum? What of all the other chemistry interwoven in this feedstock?

Those are interesting questions aren't they?  With this physical limitation comes the inescapable reality that low cost energy is a very finite commodity and therefor consumption must eventually reduce so; A. Something new or something old needs to be adopted, and B. Whatever that something is needs to be robust against energy scarcity to be a sustainable replacement, or C. mayhem will ensue.  

Have a listen to this narration of the Rickover speech linked above at minute 33 and beyond.  This awareness was evident in the 1950's and reenforced in the published research known as the Limits to Growth MIT models in the 1970's and again just a few years ago when the LTG models were updated.  Yep right on track with the business as usual projection.   That's a sobering fact. It portends collapse is much faster that growth.  No matter what the talking heads say, or what crazy notions are floating around out there. The limits to growth curves are starting to bite down hard.  The implications are wide, diverse and demand attention.  

So a lot of voices prattle on about climate change, sure the planet has a lot of features that come and go with an impact - sometimes a very big impact.  Stuff can come flying out of the ether and make enormous extinction event craters... the whole cosmos is a dynamic system.  Steady state is actually an anomaly in the cosmic experience. But take a moment to ponder a near term fact; what does energy scarcity mean?  Spoiler alert:  It does not support increasing consumption very well. LOL but burning the last btu acquired by the highest bidder or grabbed up by the nastiest thug only makes the old systems keep on going for a short while longer. That is, until we are forced to confront cold and dark as an unhappy outcome.  The quandary of our time.  If it doesn't happen in the span of one lifetime we just don't seem to be able react. If the necessary reaction is fundamentally opposed to our wealth generation machine - it ain't gonna happen even with dire warnings and solid research.  Sadly.  As a rule we're not very good about paying it forward.  But we sure are a greedy bunch!

That is why societal behavior based on intelligent leadership and in spite of ignorant leadership is much more important than technological profit driven adventures.  It's so simple.  System burn from start to reclaimed end needs to be understood and baked into some new behaviors that defy our old notions of economics.   Conservation, simplification and regional economies must supplant expansive and energy wasteful supply chains. 

Get out your popcorn and find a comfortable place to sit. The curtain has lifted and the first act of the show has began.  Rickover was right.

How wealth generation favors class structures, boundaries and why the dynamics of our world are the way they are.

 It takes a lot of trust and mutual care, understanding and compassion to work together and put away our apprehensions and dismantle our power centers (often political and financial as in oligarchical) as there are winners and losers in such a leveling.  In our history as small groups we easily merged resources and human endurance to better our chances of success. But behavior that seems to stop when power gets aggregated in any group.  That group may think they have worked harder, perhaps won life's lottery by being born in the right place or in the fortunate family.  There's a lot of reasons divergence in society eventually propagates.  Scale limits of resources, favoritism of one clan over another, mutual support might not be exhibited in kind... lots of ways we fracture and reject civil discourse in favor of brute force.  

Dunbar claimed we as social humans can only handle a group as large as perhaps 150 people before we seek abstractions like a common belief system, maybe a central government and of course symbols like their own flag.  Upon which lore and praise is constructed as boiler plate to insulate the survivability of the institution(s).  We seem to be self limiting that way. So up go the borders "mine NOT yours" and up goes the defense of those borders.  Mythology and "traditions follow closely as they define "us" from "them".

Extreme wealth aggregation is just one of the more powerful forces that erode social cohesion and often wants to see divergent class interests.  Those dividing forces insulate that group from the small tribal structure that more or less wants to get along.  If you look around you will notice even within your own world, gated communities, exclusive resorts and clubs, private transport etc.  Couple these trappings with political influence and you have a very comfortable place for the most influential to hang their hat.  

What we have stumbled into these days - in my humble opinion anyway, is an era of extreme wealth accumulation enabled by a fiat currency scheme.  Probably never understood or anticipated back on August 15th of 1971, I think of some of the more famous individuals in this world as projects, not people.  Some of these entities possess enough financial power to flip any stock market on its head, or drive commodity prices where ever they may want.  So the artificial mechanism of extreme wealth has created a multinational clique that can suborn any institution anywhere with complete immunity.  They can just buy the rule makers.  LOL, with a limit on a fixed asset like gold for example, this aggregation just couldn't run away as it has now in todays world.  A monetary standard is then a mechanism that puts a cap on run away financial aggregation.  I would expect that no clan who has achieved uber wealth would be in favor of going back to system that forces players to play by the rules of governments as a hard boundary condition.  Today the concept of governance is weakened if not totally abrogated by this phenomena,  Can't see this situation ending well. This also explains the unusual fealty to the billionaires. 

Energy, monetary realities and many resource scarcities are challenges that effect us all. We need to work on them together in order to evolve a better way of life rather than bludgeon each other in a race to a dystopian techno jungle - that can't by the way be sustained.  If you consider our hard wiring, this is really a difficult behavior to change, but people are capable of extraordinary thoughts and actions when things get bad. Our future depends more on societal evolution than on technology my friends. Hopefully we can grasp that difficult lesson and debate, as well as adopt the new ideas that will drive change in a positive way. Something tells me we need to hit the wall first in order to break free from the captured institutions we now all share, I hope I'm wrong.  

Do you hear an uncomfortable beat of a distant drum?

Perhaps you "feel" it, but can't quite put your finger on it.  That's because you we never taught in your young education how wars of conquest were created.  Probably never read about what happened to the conquered people in the war. You were "taught" just how wonderful the victor is and how beneficent they are.  So you probably have an incomplete cerebral foundation to work from on why such horrible things ever happened.  That's not your fault, it's how selective propaganda works and everybody does it! These days Edward Bernays would be proud.  He just convinced women to smoke cigarettes - a piker by today's standards.  But yet a founding member of the psychological warfare pioneers who studied just what to say and how to say it convincingly to dupe the unsuspecting to achieve profitable result$.  What a guy, Cornell should be proud of the contribution their alum has made to society. 

Lets deconstruct a couple notable wars:

WW2 was in large part motivated by a drive to secure resources.  Never hear about that? Well it's true. Both Germany and Japan were trying to solve access to vital raw materials but alas, nobody wanted to negotiate a competitive position.  Read: It's mine and you can't have it at any price!  What was "it" - they were things like certain minerals, energy - mostly oil or both.  Japan eventually invaded SE Asia and the Dutch Indies to get rubber, oil and some other resources.  Germany, well the Caucasus had that irresistible oil patch and Ukraine had, and still has some of the best agricultural fields in the World.  Anything sound familiar to today's headlines?  Ever read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent?  I recommend it.  

Not just a European fixation... Chile and Bolivia had a spat over nutrient rich coastal lands and don't forget - possibly you never knew, nitrate deposits and guano harvested from the Atacama Desert.  Yep, failure to reach a compromise led to "just try it" with misery to ensue.  Such was the War of the Pacific.

Looking towards today's bubbling caldrons of unrest - The Persian Gulf War lit off when Iraq and Kuwait had a difference of opinion on the ethics of horizontal drilling - more precisely on the profits to be made thereby. You know generally, the rest of the story. How the two warring nations got to that point may never be revealed, but again, I digress, that's a whole other post.

Too numerous to mention are the European exploits of the era from the mid 1400's to the late 1800's.  All the cool kids in Europe wanted a subjugated summer home where they could talk the locals into mining gold, silver, diamonds, yummy crops and of course drilling for oil and later on stuff like mining uranium and cobalt.   The vestiges of this projection of imperial power sanitized as "colonialism" are still simmering although now defined by other words usually chosen by mother ship.

It isn't hard to foresee future dust-ups over fresh water, rare Earth minerals and of course cheap energy of any kind.  "I want it, too bad for you." is a common thought process on this planet that we seem to trot out over and over again.

Incredibly, deadly force, coercion and color revolutions seem to be the favorite methods of acquiring stuff that isn't theirs.  So tit for tat policies are popping up constantly probing for a crack in the armor to take advantage of. You have the stuff but I can refine it... etc.  Meh, that at least may open the door to fair trade and civil negotiations.  Oddly, Asia seems to have won the mineral lottery with regard to REEs, Cobalt, Lithium and even Nickel.  Lucky I suppose.  But watch out!  World history is replete with envious and underhanded interlopers who want your stuff without being nice about it.  LOL, the jails are full of 'em.  

That's just the tippy top of a mountain of "I want it, gimme or else -" bloviating statements we have read about lately - nothing new, just a sad reminder of how little we have evolved as a population.  What seems to drive it all is an insatiable need to GROW wealth to feed the crazy economic systems we have that need to churn money to produce profits AND deliver monetary growth on "investments".  Well this hive mind  cannot visualize the inevitable collision of finite resources with infinite growth. There isn't an answer to economic liking so the fact is to be ignored that promises made yesterday are eventually not possible to keep.  Virtually all wealth generation systems depend on appreciation either through interest rates, scarcity driving price or complexity (when nothing else works) complexity by the way just drives cost increases in a pretty thin veil of perceived value for money.  Thinly veiled because complexity also drives obsolescence, reduced reliability and waste - good for the balance sheet, but bad for you.  Not a good way to consume our once and done depleting resources. Rather we need high reliability, long product life and ease of repair.  But those attainable attributes all degrade the efficiency of the wealth generation machine.  So they won't happen, and don't happen, not yet anyway. Physics will see that gets corrected sooner rather than later. Physics is a harsh teacher who will not go away even for those who refuse to understand. 

We know the World is said to be far more complicated - at least that's the cover story we all read about and what the universities all profess.  Simply put, a gang of influential folks convinces themselves that their ideas are much superior to yours and your stuff is better off in their hand$.  Then if and only if (iff) the locals can be stirred up into a frenzy of anger against some objectified and properly demonized foe, we have all the necessary ingredients to put the main dish into the oven for cooking.  Thanks to the international cadre of chefs in the kitchen who you never nominated and shall remain nameless.  But just like that gift that you received with a tag that says "EBH" Everybody Helped... the feast of famine and horror can be made ready for the serving.  Iff.

Lessons learned? We know how this works, but the levers that commit the plans to action are never in your hands. You, by design, don't have agency but will be expected to own it.  You do have a voice - it wouldn't hurt to use it so we might learn at long last to get along with each other and to solve our challenges with mutual collaboration, not by good old fashioned exploitation and oppression.  

Think that could happen?  Perhaps that is an after dinner discussion for this planet.

A trip down memory lane as this old engineer sees it...

 In the interest of a short re-cap of what the idea of colonialism has brought to the world, lets take a spin through our world's historical log book.

Notable achievements for the mother ship is usually the economic exploitation provided by labor and resource pillaging. All of this is induced by physical violence which also tends to stomp out cultural identity. None of these heinous attributes seem to have much room in the history books.  The old adage "History is Written by the Victors" is true.  The conquering team doesn't like to recored the double standards associated with subjugation, dispossession, cultural erasure and good old decimation. Other words that mean the same thing are genocide, terror, violence and trauma.  Meh, different words - same oppression.

The notion that kingdom z wants what kingdom y has and they want to get it without being a friendly neighbor is as old as dirt.  Looking at the current situation in Europe we can read about The Time of Troubles (1598 to 1613-ish) Back then King James and the Muscovy Trading Company put a plan  together to take advantage of the opportunity! Yep, got to create a honey hole and of course dominate the trade routes.  Sound familiar?  What went wrong with that plan? Seems like a leader by the name of Romanov stabilized the country and oops, not so vulnerable any more.

Then came The Great Game.  Now Britain began to see Russia as threat to its "Territories".  Wether the people in those territories actually liked their lot in life is another matter - but I digress. So containment was the new call to propagandize,  Along came the Crimean War.

So the mental construction of a threat to my wealth and my happiness (from the British point of view) has lingered.  This fear has also manifest itself as "we should never let the Russians and Germans (Germany was another peer getting a little too powerful in the early 1900's) get too chummy".  To prevent a German-Russian Economic Axis old enemies became friends with both becoming allied before and after WW1.  That war would kill something like 20 million people - lives lost because of a collision of imperial ambitions, inflexible alliances and failed diplomacy - again history sort of rhymes with today don't you think? The Treaty of Rapallo signed in 1922 got things stirred up again and this time the circle of fright ensnared France as well as Britain in the post WW1 "order".  Order in who's mind you may ask?  

All of this posturing and conniving brings us up to 1939 and The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  Oopsie, the wrong countries are trying to align and now they have colonial ambitions!  Not satisfactory - only Britain and France are allowed!  Meh, it all went ka-blewie in 1941. That war (WW2) took almost 80 million lives (26 million Soviet lives by the way) in a genocidal campaign of conquest. 

Tick, tick, tick time rolls on. Cold War tensions formed around the same fault lines.  This contest for somebody else's stuff has a very long history.  Looking at the reasoning one might think, what a contradiction. the idea of security became the banner of hegemony.  Policy planners embraced paranoia because that wins contracts. LOL, My opinion of course.  Energy in post WW2 becomes a geopolitical weapon,  Oddly, keep the Russians out fueled the economic engine. Lord Ismay the First Secretary of NATO famously said "...keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down."  Hmmm, not very open to evolutionary thought or diplomatic progress.  Unfortunately these old ideas run deep. They support the economics and oligarchical influencers - who really have no interest in change. When you sit on top of the pyramid everyone else is a minion and who listens to minions?

So let's jump ahead to our current time.  If you have your head bolted on backwards, you are a philosophical Realist.  Interdependence is a weapon - economics is leverage, resources are a knife to the throat.... If you dare to think about change, you may dabble in Liberalism where war is an expensive waste our Japanese friends would call it muda, cooperation is better than conflict but hey - borders are an obsolete idea.  KABOOM, that's a collision.  The underpinning of old school thinking insures the existing oligarchy - it's their happy spot. 

Clinging to old ways suppresses innovation, is forcing deindustrialization and making the people caught in the middle pay the price. This is wrapped up in a manufactured security blanket - we love tho$e.  

Adam Smith, who we claim has it right, espoused free trade.  So just pretend global politics don't interfere with Adam Smith's theory.  Wait a second... it seems like there are rules for thee but not for me.  Let me explain. All of this free trade theory is great when Western interests have unmatched financial power, industrial might and favorable labor,  But when a competitor arises with a better resource base, labor and financial power - we don't like that!  These days a pivot to protectionism is a feeble way of suppressing free trade and trying to make tomorrow just like yesterday.  Not gonna work. Tariffs, restricting technology, blocking exports... it just isolates the head bolted on backwards people from the rest of the world and illustrates the double standards IMHO.

So where do we go from here?  Let us hope that ethical frameworks can be promoted - else a global class of ruthless elites will arise to replace those we have today.  Nothing improves.  So we need cooperation, we need true democratic processes rather than lobbied and deep state driven veneers. So old structures need to morph, but they lack trust.  That's a problem we have never been able to overcome. That's why the West has always favored fascism over communism.  Trust is hard, thuggery is easy and it's profitable too...

Maybe we can reach a collective (global) security policy.  Maybe we can do away with geopolitical partitions based on  the old ideas. Maybe we can achieve a type of renaissance.  We need transparency in our motives and actions, not deep state games. We need a democratized economy which looks like a multipolar system IMHO.  We need to think realistically too. Energy depletion will create a chokepoint with big tech. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, this will matter.  We need to look at history and appreciate centralization never works. It is fragile, usually morphs into tyrannical rule and suppresses enlightened solutions from arising.

Resilience, simplification and analogue redundant philosophies should be re-discovered and embraced.  So far we have failed to evolve, can we do it this time? 

My 2 cents.  

Trust and trustworthiness

Are simple behaviors and yet are widely recognized as important to the successful functioning of society.  This is not a revelation, but a well documented fact.  Surely they should have monetary value?  LOL...

What then of governments and privileged citizens that abrogate and destroy these attributes in order to selfishly insulate themselves from the hard work of consensus building, kindness, honesty and empathy extended to all? Hard to go colonizing with these credos.  Perhaps that is why institutions and people alike who espouse these attributes always seem to disappear.  Kind of a battle of good vs evil actually.  

The short answer in IF THEN format is: IF there is no money to be extracted or made, THEN there is no reason to care say those who derive their power and influence with currency.  Small group, greed driven and full of hubris, this is a one dimensional world view and has dangerous long term outcomes for all, the small group who by whatever luck or cunning finds themselves insulated from the rest of the population has always used manipulation and force to maintain their status and get what they want. This gang has no particular affinity to a flag, just to an ego driven lifestyle. But history reveals that this IF THEN statement never works if iterated enough times.  The Western Roman Empire, Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Han Dynasty and many many more examples exist of collapse when the legs of this stool are weakened. There are tipping points that are thought to be understood - until they are not.  Much like there are experts who get it wrong all of the time, mostly because they are mis-directors and paid dupes with credentials of some kind.  Anyhow they serve a purpose, even it that purpose is nefarious.   

1. Erosion of trust through deceit: Fool me once shame on me fool me twice - shame on you! Honestly, people know when they have been hoodwinked and although they may calculate it is better to go along than to refuse to, but there is a point out there that the latter over takes the former. 

2. Amoral behavior of various kinds: Corruption, weaponized power and statecraft that delivers outright theft and fraud... it's all been done before and it always ends in the same results. Every time. 

So when the balance of these two factors gets a bit too out of whack, other chaotic forces tend to build momentum, accumulated cultural and societal decline drives a rebalancing eventually. 

So government is the de-facto maintainer of the balance.  With all of the tools and measurements around these days it's hard to imagine lack of awareness of the interplay of factors that move the center of balance. So we must ask ourselves; who stands to gain by toppling, disrupting or re-inventing our systems?  The small circle of endless promoters of the next biggest thing seems to be the only clique that is profiting and they aren't a very transparent bunch.  They don't feel secure in public debates or in transparency either. The interesting revelation that seems to be surfacing more and more is reality and awareness of just how limited future adventures really are. This has translated into a smoke and mirrors detection sensibility that appears to be growing world wide.  

LOL, indeed. As mentioned in earlier posts,  even the largest data center with the most highly developed LLM cannot predict the future.  Looking backwards and making warnings doesn't seem to be in the algorithms.  At least not in your version.