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Zombie apocalypses are for real. Those who study world threats can imagine zombies updated, alive and kicking.

In a recent lecture “Obama’s Second Term: Issues and Challenges Ahead,” Thomas Hanson, UMD Alworth Institute Diplomat in Residence revealed several existential threats involving forces as threatening as if living dead were advancing toward us. As Yeats asked, “What rough beast slouches from Bethlehem to be born?”
Hanson knows the shapes of what Yeats called “mere anarchy.”
Hanson, a retired Foreign Service diplomat, keeps up with diplomats and other sources in and out of government and shared the bad news of what’s ahead.
After noting UN progress on millennial development goals involving the eradication of poverty, primary school education, gender equity, child mortality and maternal health, Hanson systematically horrified the crowd with the facts of our increasingly dangerous and ill-governed world.
And governance is at the root of the problems, here and abroad.
Although the Obama administration has valued diplomacy more than the Bush policy of “shoot first and don’t ask questions” mentality, Hanson noted that diplomatic budgets are routinely slashed by Congress.
We know budget cuts to the State Department didn’t cause the Benghazi attack, but the fact that Congress has given less funding than requested every year since fiscal 2007 certainly didn’t help. Plenty of money for Benghazi inquiries though.
Though even Bush requested more spending on foreign aid and State Department foreign operations, according to Philip Crowley, former State department spokesman cited in the Washington Times, “Congress has always cut it back.”
And of course, we have a Congress that reliably takes the country hostage by shutting down governmental agencies to make political points demanded by an ill-informed electorate largely sprung from the bad information its political leaders encourage. Even Homeland Security wasn’t safe for a while. Which brings us to zombies.
What better trope than zombies to describe leadership so fossilized and errant? Many of them are well past their expiration date in body and soul.
A committee of concerned citizens worked for the right to impale ex-President Nixon. They would wait until he died, but they wanted to make sure he stayed that way by driving a wooden stake through his heart.  
So let’s list the threats.
Ebola, a harmless way for Africans to figure out they shouldn’t eat bats, turned into a national security bloody issue. Hanson notes that despite the conviction of so many that only market forces work, Ebola had no market solution. It required, as Obama recognized, state organization and health procedures, not private for profit solutions. And the United States led the way to stanch the outbreak.
And there’s ISIS, which seeks to eliminate the artificial borders set up by foreign powers after the world wars. Using weapons liberated from the corrupt Shiite Iraqi army, ISIS runs amok, killing for cheap thrills and propaganda. Hanson notes that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is being invoked in connection to these fundamentalist Sunnis.
Having broken Iraq in the fond hope that we could realign it, the region is functioning quite well as a war torn meat-grinding pit.
Hanson notes that John F. Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August and sent copies to all his military leaders and Congress. Rather than send in troops to Vietnam, JFK sent advisors and cautioned against the sort of folly that destroyed European civilization in WWI and its tag team of doom, WWII. Over 8.5 million killed, 37 and a half million total casualties in the one to end all war. We chalked up 60 to 85 million deaths (including 45 million civilians) and 25 million wounded in battles in WWII, the sequel.
Quite a price to pay for what Hanson noted Christopher Clark characterized as sleepwalking into war in his book on WWI The Sleepwalkers.

Call it sleepwalking, call it zombie apocalypse, call it what you will, but like a certain Terminator robot from the future, they’re back!
During WWI, diplomats Sykes and Picot privately made the deal that began to carve up the Middle East our way. Thanks to similarly ambitious administrative folly on the part of Bush neocons, it’s being carved up again and these guys are good with knives.  Like Iraq, WWI was supposed to be short, but it ground down into a slaughterhouse followed by a holocaust.
Hanson notes that rather than reshaping Iraq, we shattered it, and it has come undone.

But as with all infomercials, wait!  There’s more!

There’s Putin. And there’s China. And there are our job creators, the Plutocrats and the Drug Cartels! (more on the 1% and cartels later)
Hanson notes Bonn and Washington miscalculated on the Ukraine, and Putin’s fear of an expanded NATO led him to orchestrate the events in the Crimea and other areas of the Ukraine. We’ve sanctioned him up one side and down the other, but he’s a stubborn guy whose love of judo involves holding on. Kissinger says the West must make a deal ASAP, but we’re stuck on sanctions because our Congress sees fit to make it law. The EU sanctions are likely to end because they require a unanimous vote. Then what?

And China too is kicking our ass. Hanson notes most of the Chinese leaders are engineers. Most of ours are lawyers. They build while we talk and disagree and work to reduce rather than make effective government.
China is building three new “Silk Roads,” and we can’t even fix the bridges and other infrastructure of our highway system. Three land bridges like our Interstate system will connect Eurasia. A total of close to 40 thousand kilometers of roads will link Berlin, Moscow, and China.
Russia and China are also building something we can’t manage to construct—a high speed Magnetic Levitation train system. Imagine, Hanson asks, if we had high-speed trains crossing our North American region. In other words, what if we took an engineering approach to the future rather than a polarized, narrowly focused agenda involving discredited economic theories championed by plutocrats who are largely supportive of the GOP but actually don’t want good governance.
They want out of governance. Don’t tax them, don’t touch their great wealth, and what’s good for them in the short term is good for everybody. In China, 40 or 50 members of Congress are billionaires. They know governance is important and work to slowly democratize.
 In our country, forces are at work that do not want to take over the government so much as weaken it.
As anti-tax maven Grover Norquist dictates, we must reduce government to the size of a baby so we can drown it in the bathtub. Baby?  Bathwater? Huh?
Hanson says Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman of UC Berkeley is recommended reading. (I’ll review it in a later issue.) In Deviant Globalization and its Microsovereignties, Gilman cites twin insurgencies that are destroying government. We have both here in the states.
The Plutocratic insurgents are the globalized elites who want no responsibility or national obligation for governance. They want no regulation and no taxes, gated communities, private islands and suites, and hire their own doctors that are dedicated only to their health. Sort of Michael Jackson without the theme park, unless they can turn national parks into private concessions.
The criminal insurgencies are those groups of interconnected enterprises dealing in drugs and money laundering. Our banksters have been caught and slapped on the wrists for the latter because they’re too big to do time. Mexican drug cartels alone employ close to half a million people. Our NAFTA policies have put many small farmers out of business down there, so they either starve, come here, work for the drug lords, or perchance become drug lords themselves!  
Badges?  They don’t need no stinkin’ badges.
To put teeth into our apocalypse, Obama has signed onto a new weapons system that is getting very little notice in this country. Hanson argues that if it were a nuclear weapon, we couldn’t develop it, but it’s literally and figuratively something else.
Even though China’s research and development spending is set to overtake ours in creating scientists and research facilities, we can be happy that we’re at least working on these Prompt Global Strike (PGS) weapons.
Familiar with the Siberian Tunguska event of 1908? An asteroid flattened close to 800 sq. miles of forest by simply entering the atmosphere at a rate of speed similar to the PGS’s. We’re imitating nature with this new weapon, which can hit any target on earth from space within an hour. These computerized vehicles carry 6’ tungsten rod “bombs” that don’t even require explosives to blow things up!  The Mach 12 speed they hit the target with will have the effect of a tactical nuclear weapon without the messy nuclear byproducts.
Grand Marais resident, Hyla Napadensky, National Academy of Engineering fellow, was called on during the BP oil spill. She’s also an expert on the type of engineering it takes to blow things up. She corrected Hanson on the speed with which these weapons arrive, citing a much higher velocity than he’d thought.
Try not to imagine the sleepwalking government hawks in Congress and future administrations that could use these to bust bunkers or generally start new wars while idealistically or cynically trying to resolve old conflicts.
 Sweet dreams citizens!