Lucretius, -75, via

In ancient times the arms with which one fought
Were hands, nails, teeth, stones, branches which were sought
From forest trees and broken off, then flame,
Then iron and bronze both came

Into man’s ken – bronze first, since it was more
Easily worked, comprising a greater store.
Men tilled the earth with bronze, with bronze as well
Stirred up the waves of war and rushed pell-mell,

Inflicting dreadful wounds, and took away
Cattle and lands. Men readily gave way,
When naked and unweaponed, to a foe
Well-armed. The iron sword would slowly grow

In stature, while the scythe of bronze would fill
Mankind with scorn, and they began to till
The earth with iron, and the odds of war
Were equal, as they had not been before.

People been throwing rocks at each other for millions of years, but now the rocks throw themselves. Rock-throwing has evolved from stones to copper, from copper to bronze, bronze to iron, and iron to steel. Now it's gone, via a nuclear dead end, to rare earths. The latter are effectively magic rocks, ferocious dust which – when sprinkled upon weapons – makes them fly wherever you want, like Uber for bombs.

In this, the Rare Earths Age, dumb rocks have turned into smart rockets and left the White Empire at a loss. They call this the nuclear age, but why name an age after two bombs when there are millions of the other sort? Using sophisticated but cheap drones and rockets, Iran, Yemen, and Russia have outflanked (and spanked) the heavy Empire in West Asia, and East Asia cannot be attacked without attacking their own supply lines (because China controls the dust).

Historically, when the ground shifts this much under one's feet, empires fall. And it's happening once more. To paraphrase Lucretius, "they began to till, The earth with [drones], and the odds of war, Were equal, as they had not been before."

Historical Digression Which You Can Skip

The paradigm shift in rockery is as momentus as the transition from the bronze to iron. As Patrick Fitzsimmons said about that, "This new technology had momentous political implications. Since iron could be smelted locally, previously peripheral communities could arm themselves with weapons that were, for practical purposes, comparable to the weapons of the elite in the empire’s core. In contrast to bronze, iron democratized violence." And, connecting it back, "the violence potential that had been concentrated in palaces was distributed to the lowest farmer, ending the equilibrium that had sustained imperial lineages for a thousand years. The next millennia [now, bro] will be similarly shaped by the military technology of today."

Of course, iron worked weapons are worse than bronze, but quantity is its own quality, as Stalin showed though perhaps didn't tell. The difference was that iron could be worked by villages or city states, while bronze required importation at an imperial scale. As the Material Sciences coursework at Penn State states,

Bronze weapons were indeed of higher quality than the common iron weapons typically produced. However, tin, which is required for the production of bronze, is not abundantly available [had to be imported from as far as Cornwall]. As a consequence, bronze weapons were the weapons utilized by nobles, royalty, pharaohs, etc. The common foot soldier was not going to possess bronze weapons; there were not enough to go around.

Unlike tin, iron ore is readily available. So, although inferior to bronze, an army of hundreds or thousands could be equipped with iron weapons, which was not practical with bronze weapons. So, the ability to produce large numbers of iron weapons overcame the advantages of bronze.

One may, at this point, ask whether man is evolving through metals or metals are evolving through men. To an alien anthropologist looking through our graves, they would see the metal evolving and the bones staying dead still. We have discussed this before, but it's simplest to understand such commodities as artificial life, certainly when they're taking human lives. No point debating the existence of a tiger when your head is in its mouth. Artificial life has evolved the way evolution goes, through competitive adaptation to its environment, ie people throwing rocks at each other until the rocks themselves evolved. Since artificial life, like virii, depends on human beings for reproduction, that has been through human intercourse like war.

For whatever reason (call it materialist dialectics), materials seem to evolve in an oscillating pattern. Like the clash between prey and predator. One get ahead of another for a while, but things balance out by wobbling back and forth, violently of course. As Fitzsimmons says,

History has seen the ebb and flow of centralized and decentralized technologies of warfare. Castles allowed barons of medieval Europe to subjugate the peasantry while also contending with their kings, until the gunpowder revolution eventually made castle walls obsolete. Gunpowder led to firearms, which strengthened states while they were new, scarce, and expensive, but then became cheap and easily accessible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shifting power to peripheral groups of soldiers and rebels.

This is the classic battle between sword and shield, predator and prey which, since the artificial form cannot reproduce itself, is played out through human class struggle (ain't it the way?). As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The boys in red said, "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat," and, to be honest, things haven't changed that much since. The material conditions (the centralization of production) lended themselves to centralized power. The monopoly of capital was the monopoly of violence, or vice versa, whatever. Like evolution, who knows where dialectics starts?

For centuries the bougies (I cannot spell bourgoisusie, sorry) were "an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune," and it was private mercantile armies like the VoC and British East India Company that conquered people like me (shout out Sri Lanka). These captured politics so much that, as Frank Zappa said, "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex." Marx and Engels called it in 1848 saying, "since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market [via America], conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway." The modern representative state is pay-to-prey and their calling card is 'Free Trade' at gunpoint, like 'freely trade our opium, China, or we'll bomb it in your face.'

The Relevance To Rocks

Blah blah blah, why am I getting into this, well, because I like it, and because it's pertinent. The mercantile rule of the Bougies (Sri Lankans still call them aers**) has been characterized by a material production which required a certain rocky substrate. Colonialism was of the Steel Age, or more specifically steel and gunpowder (if you KNO₃ you KNO₃). This was the material foundation of their monopoly of violence which enabled them to build a world empire (the White Empire). Steel and salt peter are the rocks they threw at us in their 500 years of war on the world, and then at each other in what they deign to call World Wars™, because it affected White people for once, and they need to make a million films about it. But it's always been war on us across most of the world, if words mean anything.

From the Portugeuse blasting their way into Hormuz in the 1500s to the Americans attempting to blast their way back in now, the chemical composition of our oppression hasn't changed much. They added a bit of computation and electrification, but the bombs mostly stayed what they now call dumb. Dumb because the system of production has moved on, but good enough for terrorizing poor people. If it ain't broke, keep breaking things. The European great powers minus Russia coalesced into one great power after their World Wars™ and they still base their power on the same base elements. Guns, germs (they love bombing hospitals), and steel.

The material conditions of power are the raw materials in your power.

If you see that dickweed Alburquerque standing there in his ermine and mink, pointing to a cannon and saying 'this is how we pay our taxes' you can see the material basis for the colonial domination of the last 500 years. These cannon were the beginning of rocks throwing themselves, though they were still dumb as rocks. It was still more than enough to blast their way onto our shores, and their steel was more than a match for the obsidian of the Americas, and this basic formula of steel plus gunpowder was what they used all the way up to Vietnam and beyond. That is still what they're still largely using on Palestinians, dumb bombs, in the expectation that, as Lucretius said, that by,

Inflicting dreadful wounds, and took away
Cattle and lands. Men readily gave way,
When naked and unweaponed, to a foe
Well-armed.

But times have changed. Meaning rocks have changed. And Hamas and PLFP and the nascent Palestinian military has showed that they are well-armed with the new rocks, and will not give way so easily. They are still undefeated which means, for a guerrilla army, strategic victory. And now Iran and Yemen are following up, following the same trajectory. Throwing smart rocks at dumb people who still don't get it. The 500 year siege of Hormuz and most of humanity is being broken by new rocks entirely. Magic rocks, essentially. And again, it's not that the Empire doesn't have them, they do. The game changer is that the Resistance does too.

Rare Earths

Rare earths, like iron, are not actually rare, they're just obscure. In the periodic table game I play with my son, they're not even there. For our purposes, as dialectical dilettants, it is more than sufficient to consider them magic rocks. That's basically how they work. Rare earths are trace elements – like eye of toad or wart of newt – which, if sprinkled upon silicon runes in the right proportions, give intelligence to dumb brutes. They take rocks from things you throw in some general direction to rocks which can follow the command of a general to a dot.

The issue here is, again and again, not that the ruling Empire doesn't have rare earths. They do, a lot. The issue is the same the Hittites had, that other people have these rocks too. And that, as Robert Frost said, has made all the difference. The issue is that rare earths are not actually rare and have been made incredibly cheap by the communist system of production (China). Or they were incredibly cheap until China said the Whites can't have them anymore, making them (to them) incredibly dear. China is running the Empire from pillar to post while they exhaust their stocks bombing the other side of Asia, lol. Thus you have a situation where the historical haves become the post-historical have-nots. That is to say, the White Empire is missing the current materials revolution and revolutionary movements against them are sprouting, like weeds from weathered rocks, eventually breaking the whole power structure apart.

Fitzsimmons points out how rock shifts can fracture power in the same region during millenia past. Round the time iron became plentiful and bronze remained elite (correllation isn't causation, or is it?), the great empires of the time disappeared. As FS said, "On maps of the eastern Mediterranean before and after the spread of iron, the difference is stark. There are no early Iron Age empires as large as their Bronze Age predecessors. The collapse of the Hittite Empire left a political vacuum in modern Turkey and Syria, but instead of another empire emerging in its place, we see a patchwork of smaller states."

Today, again, you can see the break from global unipolarity to multipolarity as the literal magnets realign. China (obvs), Russia, and Iran have plentiful access to rare earths and have pioneered the best weapons of the new category, ie magic rocks that throw themselves at the target. Which now, finally, after like 5,000 years, we'll discuss. Let us return to modernity (or is it post-modernity, or post-post-modernity?) now.

Historical Progression Which You May Be More Interested In

Modern ICTs means the IEDs fly themselves, and this means RIP* for the USA, inshallah. Cheap computation of vision, location, and destination (the I) plus satellite, internet, and/or fiber optic communication (the C) have enabled a quantum shift in throwing-rocks-at-people (the T). In what is best described as Uber for bomb delivery, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) now function like delivery services. An operator can input a 'delivery' location, and the 'package' either flies their autonomously or can be guided there from a safe distance. This is also often recorded, making it a social media revolution as well.

This magic rock technology, which I'm grouping somewhat arbitrarily, ranges from missiles like Oreshnik that can only be assembled by sophisticated states like Russia to effectively IKEA drones that groups like Hezbollah can assemble in the field. What unifies them is that the missiles largely guide themselves with a human controller appearing, if at all, only virtually. I group this as rocks-throwing-themselves. Or as the Axis of Resistance says, it was not you that threw, but Allah who threw, quoting the Quran quite pertinently. That is one corner of the intercontinental title fight now proceeding.

In the other corner, in the red and blue shorts that go back to the Dutch, we have the White Empire still throwing rocks at people using people, like the medieval warlords they are. The US military is still primarily geared towards dropping dumb bombs on poor people without air defenses. They have a huge stockpile of these 'rocks' and precious few of the modern stuff, which require lots of magic rocks (rare earths). The US, ideally, flies over its targets and throws its rocks. They have very little self-guided rocks, certainly compared to its rivals, and theirs take years to produce and cost way too much.

On the other hand, the Axis of Resistance is native to both the land and this technology. After the AK-47, they evolved in this milieu almost exclusively, enabling them to defeat navies without navies and air forces without air forces because they're on another evolutionary plane entirely (one that doesn't require a plane, cheekily).

The not-so-ancient Persians have become the masters of self-guided rocketry, creating the Shahed drone as a category, and fielding a varied and agile range of solid-fueled, liquid-fueled, ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles. And the reincarnated Red Army now exceeds the White Army in every military category except navy (you can't even play as the Soviet Navy in Axis and Allies, which seems accurate). Among other things, Russia is far more advanced in guided missiles and drones than the White Empire. At this point you could say that their Geran is not a copy of the Shahed but a vast improvement. And China is the base supplier and unproven master of all of the above. I've only seen Chinese drone shows for entertainment, ie what they used gunpowder for, but I'd hate to see those pyrotechnic dragons coming at me. The 21st century of war belongs to Asia, certainly in Asia, as the White Empire is FAFOing now.

The Empire, today, is the definition of throwing rocks from glass houses. They built all their bases out in the open and their launch platforms are fragile and irreplacable. And yet they're still throwing rocks at people with superior technology in overpowering quantities who can hide beneath mountains. This isn't like iron vs. bronze, where bronze was better but the empires just had less of it. Iranian (for example) missiles and drones are better than the American ones, and they have effectively infinite amounts of them. The technological shift today is like going straight from bronze to steel. That's the scale of the rockery revolution.

It's not that the White Empire doesn't have this technology, or even that theirs is inferior and underproduced. It's A) that its enemies have more and B) it also depends on its (self-created) enemies as suppliers! It's like the Bronze Age Egyptians attacking their neighbors while simultaneously threatening their tin suppliers (France, Iberia, Cornwall, Afghanistan). The White Empire uses fragile, expensive, and irreplacable platforms (aircraft, carriers, bases) to throw rocks at people, the definition of glass houses and these crumple at the first punch, the definition of a glass jaw. I say irreplaceable because tonnes of magic rocks would be required to rebuild what they've lost in the Iran War alone, and China ain't selling them stones. Thus the White Empire is up shit creek without a paddle, and the natives are relentless in their pursuit. We're Captain Cooking them, bro.

The Empire crowing about the budget of its military at this late date is just bragging about corruption and waste. It's like bragging about how much your taxi medallion cost right before ride-hailing. And bragging about their big, beautiful military today is like a dinosaur preening its feathers after the asteroid came. The Iranians and Yemenis are the equivalent of squirrely mammals, surviving by hiding underground and eventually chewing the dinosaurs bones. That's how big the paradigm shift is, this is an extinction level event for the historical extinctors.

I repeat that the rocks throw themselves now and this is overthrowing the White Empire. It is Allah who throws, of course, and brave men who must go meet Them first, but thet are changing the course of history in the only way it's recorded. Blood and rocks. Or to put it in post-post-modern terms, it's like Uber for bombs.

If you'd like a bonus ending (Coda) and if you care about the two asterisks (asterii? asterixes?) in this article, that's for paying subs. Also, bonus (double) bird photo. Two birds for the price of one.