...we'll have some rousing images of some flag or other being hoisted on Mars and be able to witness the collective head explosion of all the flat earthers, so there's something.
Well, that didn't take long. You'll recall that it was mere weeks ago that I predicted that the trend of 2020 would be "The End of the Internet (as we've known it)," and, sadly, before 2019 was even finished a steady stream of stories flooded the newswires to prove me correct.
Morocco has sentenced a YouTuber to four years in prison for daring to insult the king.
The Singaporean government has forced Facebook to publish a "correction" on a post that they deemed to contain "fake news."
Four townships in northern Myanmar remain under one of the longest internet blackouts in the world for daring to assert a desire for ethnic self-determination.
And Russia and China have teamed up on a new convention that will empower the UN to convene a panel of "international experts" to determine how best to combat online thought crime.
And all of that was just in the past week. Imagine what we have to look forward to throughout the rest of 2020. Not pleasant, is it?
Now imagine what we'll have to look forward to through the 2020s. Even worse, huh?
Yes, as bleak as things seem at the moment, there are any number of reasons to believe that things are going to be that much worse a decade from now. And I'm not just talking about internet censorship here, either. After all, as dedicated Corbett Reporteers will already know, the technocrats are all on board for Agenda 2030.
So buckle in, folks. Let's take a ride through the next ten years of technocratic tyranny . . . and see if there's a way we can derail this agenda before we arrive at its final destination.
TRANSHUMANISM
A pair of stories book-ending the 2010s give us an insight into the breathtaking changes we're likely to live through in the 2020s.
The first story started in 2011, when 18-year-old hacker Palmer Lucky, working in the garage of his parents' house in Long Beach, California, put together a prototype for a virtual reality headset called Oculus. In 2012, the prototype started making buzz at trade shows, and by 2014 it had enough sizzle to catch the eye of the billionaire charlatan Mark Zuckerberg, who ended up buying the company for a cool $2 billion. That, of course, led to that creepy, iconic photo of ZuckerBorg himself—sporting the only genuine grin he's ever cracked in his life—striding through a crowd of Oculus Rift-wearing Matrix-dwellers.
The other story brings us to July 2019, when billionaire charlatan Elon Musk presented the fruits of his "Neuralink" venture, first launched in 2017 with the promise to bring "a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence." At his presentation, Musk expanded on that vision, detailing how his company is working on brain-computer interface technologies and is looking to begin its first FDA-approved human tests in 2020.
These stories highlight the incredible strides the technocrats have taken in the last decade toward realizing their long-held transhumanist dream of merging man with machine. Submersed in digital worlds, with brain chips allowing people to jack themselves directly into the matrix ("have the option of merging with AI" in Musk's formulation), it's safe to say that if these trends continue the very question of what it means to be human is going to have a very different answer in 2029 then it does today.
And, wouldn't you know it, 2029 just happens to be a very important year for the technocrats. As dedicated Corbett Reporteers will have known for at least the last nine years, 2029 is the year that famed "futurist," singularity promoter, and Google stooge, Ray Kurzweil, predicted will see the first machine passing the Turing Test. And for those who aren't up on their very old Corbett Report podcasts (tsk tsk), the "singularity" is the name given to the predicted point at which "the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won't be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating." (Don't worry, though; Kurzweil doesn't predict that happening until 2045.)
But note the way this conversation is being introduced to the public: Artificial Intelligence is almost here. When it comes to such technologies as autonomous weapons, this AI threatens the future of humanity itself. But don't worry, the Silicon Valley billionaire types have signed open letters warning governments about the threat and now they're going to deliver us from this scourge . . .
. . . by telling us to merge with AI.
Excuse me? What? In order to combat AI we have to . . . merge with AI? In other words: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"
This is on its face a ludicrous proposal for the very real problems that the developments of these technologies are going to raise in the next decade, but it is being propounded by all of the transhumanists, from Kurzweil and Musk to Sam Harris and many others.
Hmmm. Let's think. All these terribly bright, rich, well-respected thinkers coming to the same conclusion about this existential threat at the same time from seemingly different angles. It's almost like they're approaching this challenge from the perspective of a shared agenda. Whatever could that be?
While we contemplate that, let's look at:
THE WEAPONIZATION OF SPACE
Speaking of billionaire charlatans, have you heard that the era of space tourism is nearly upon us? That's right, billionaire internet mogul (and cartoon villain impersonator) Jeff Bezos is promising to send the first space tourists up in Blue Origin's suborbital vehicle, New Shepherd, sometime in 2020.
. . . Unless billionaire media mogul (and James Bond villain impersonator) Richard Branson beats him to it, that is. Branson's Virgin Galactic became the first public space tourism company last year and is planning to launch the first space tourists up in their own suborbital vehicle, SpaceShip Two, in the first half of 2020. (They've even got their spacesuits and space tourist lounge ready to go.)
But space tourism on suborbital vehicles is child's play. Launching people into orbit, now that's a feat. Just ask billionaire conman (and possible cyborg) Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is set to launch its first crewed mission to the International Space Station this year. And merchants of death Boeing are hot on their heels, also prepping their crewed launch vehicle to take some astronauts up to the ISS in 2020.
And that's just the start. 2020, we are already being told, is going to be the year of the trillion dollar space economy, with not only the big billionaires getting in on the act, but companies like Planet, Hawkeye360, Spire, Capella Space, BlackSky and a slew of others you've never heard of looking to get in on the space bounty.
In fact, this is going to be a space-crazy year all around, with a planned test of NASA's new Space Launch System for the Artemis missions, a planned test of Musk's Starship, and no less than four missions to Mars planned for this summer: One American, one Chinese, one a joint venture of the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, and one put up by the UAE (yes, you read that correctly).
So if I know my Star Trek this is the point at which humanity transcends all its petty conflicts and explores the stars together in peace and harmony for the rest of time, right?
Sigh.
No, despite what the predictive programming of our future space utopia would have you believe, this is not a sign that nations are putting aside their differences for the peaceful exploration. Actually, quite the opposite. In reality, this surge in space tourism and flashy exploration projects are, as usual, the shiny gloss designed to distract us from the much darker agenda that the powers-that-shouldn't-be are planning for the 2020s: the weaponization of space.
We already have rods from god and satellite shootdowns and classified space missions, but lest there be any doubt about this agenda, just look at the latest news: With the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act on December 20th of last year, the US Space Force became the first new branch of the US military since the Air Force was created in 1947. This helps flesh out the newly minted Space Command ,which was rolled out by the Pentagon last August.
It doesn't take a Nostradamus to figure out where this is heading. As one perfectly straightforward headline from the Indian press puts it: "Eyeing Combat In Outer Space, US Creates Pentagon Space Force." In that article, they quote Defense Secretary Mark Esper as saying: "Our reliance on space-based capabilities has grown dramatically, and today outer space has evolved into a war-fighting domain of its own."
As usual, the Pentagon will say they're just reacting to a trend toward the weaponization of space that is already taking place, and, also as usual, the fig leaf of justification is there.
As we examined in these pages just last month, NATO is now claiming that the North Atlantic now effectively includes outer space, or at least NATO has taken it upon themselves to declare outer space one of its "operational domains."
And, as The Daily Beast points out in a typically sensationalist headline: "China’s Space Force Is Way Ahead of Trump’s." They note that not only have the Russians had some variant of a Space Force in their military since the 1990s, but China's People's Liberation Army has had their equivalent—dubbed the PLA Strategic Support Force—for the last four years.
These major military powers are not organizing and funding space forces to engage in a spirited game of micro-G Parcheesi. They are taking the age-old military strategy of "gaining the high ground" to the next level. The military that dominates space will by default dominate the earth, and this is the logic that will justify the trillions of dollars that will be spent there in the coming years.
But hey, we'll have some rousing images of some flag or other being hoisted on Mars and be able to witness the collective head explosion of all the flat earthers, so there's something.
Still, mark my words: By 2030 the space race of the 2020s will leave the space race of the 1960s looking quaint by comparison. And the average pawn on the grand chessboard, as always, will be mere play toys for the elitists who will be surveying, controlling, and (as necessary) killing them from above.
To be continued next week…