9:05 “If you are talking about democracy over the dining room table, it’s probably because you are not worried about the cost of the food on the table-”
10:40 “We are here to help you become more like us, – we’re going to help you go to college, we’re going to help you get a job like us-“
11:11 “You people who care for us, you folks are less than us, – it’s not what we say, it is not even what we consciously think, but that is the message-“
12:51 “When the pandemic was over, they sort of faded again in our consciousness, they became part of the woodwork again – we as a party and we as a country need to value every person and their role and their place and understand that there’s dignity in that work, it is essential work; we ought to stop being that sort of metropolitan college-educated smarty-pants party, and live our values-“
39:00 “What Victor Orban has done as prime minister of Hungary has turned Hungary into a zombie democracy- he has basically ended an independent media in that country, he has co-opted the courts in that country- it’s Trumps model and he’s going to do that cause he’s going to be as corrupt as he can be. I think, it’s interesting about Donald Trump, he has a different way of looking at the world – he thinks the world is dishonest – he does not have a concept of right and wrong – people who abide by rules and laws and norms and institutions are suckers-“
Abby is right. As a young lady once told me, “the struggle is real.” Everything is a joke except money. Money is the god of this world, what makes the rich richer, the only meaning. The reality is that wealth concentrates upward in a pyramid and to get higher the base must bear more of the burden and get smaller. That essentially means work harder and let the weak die. Eventually this turns into showers and ovens to get rid of those who do not serve the master race. The dream is the last chapter of the Turner Diaries, with all non-whites, jews, and useless eaters exterminated leaving about a billion people on a “White Planet.”
“The Democrats would rather have Trump than an FDR platform, so, they are going so far right because they have no other choice.”
“-the only thing that has ever pushed politics left is the social movements in the streets, the masses that shut down business as usual-“
Democrat/Republic Institutional Politics is over, and that is the end of America. What comes next is either going to be some form of Trumpistan or, hopefully, after a brief and horrible reign of fascism, a “New America.” What would that New America mean? I can think of three things:
No more billionaires. Rich enough to satisfy those with the narcissist genius disease enough to restrain them from overthrowing democracy as they just did. But no more obscene wealth, morbid wealth, whatever you want to call extreme inequality. And…as I wrote not long ago, “The only question in a democracy is how much a person gets to keep, which depends on how much the rest of us are empowered to keep other people from keeping everything.” This means taxes.
Money out of politics. Regulation kept big money out of politics until recent decisions and that brought America to an end. The rule of law is actually the communism the right has always been screaming about…because they know if they can buy elections, they can eventually end the rule of law over them and all taxation and regulation on them, which is, by the way, the ground of democracy. The money to buy media, which turns “free” speech into “paid-for-their-speech” and the money to buy corrupt judges just ended America. Unless money in politics ends, whatever comes next will end again, perhaps in the same cycle in a hyper-accelerated version seen in banana republics.
A mixed economy. The Nordic Model is essentially a continuation of The New Deal. These countries are the best places to live on this planet…what America was at one time. They walk that tightrope between allowing capitalists to create wealth and enabling socialists to redistribute that wealth. The result is a pyramid with a base that encompasses all citizens with none discarded and a capstone that innovators can aspire to ascend to without frustration.
11:25 is where the truth-telling about fossil fuel interests and climate denial really kicks into high gear. “Among the biggest donors to Trump’s campaign.”
Elon Musk called Space Solar Power “the stupidest thing ever.” The reason Musk hates Space Solar Power is because he cannot own it. In a 2012 interview: One thing we learned today: While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there’s one thing he hates: space solar power. “You’d have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What’s the conversion rate?” he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. “Stab that bloody thing in the heart!” His vision is a million people on Mars in a libertarian paradise. He will own that and wants no distractions from how he will pay for this; his starlink megaconstellation of 42,000 pieces of space junk in LEO…which he owns.
Gerard K. O’Neill was the true prophet of space colonization and in 1976 popularized space colonization with his book “The High Frontier.” The military and fossil fuel interests and political parties with their own agendas wanted nothing to do with it. It would be an immense multi-national multi-trillion-dollar state-sponsored energy project. That does not appeal to entrepreneurs looking to emulate the richest narcissist on Earth. Who this should appeal to is Climate Change activists seeking a permanent solution to the greatest threat civilization faces in the coming century. O’Neill mentioned Space Solar as preventing industrial activity from “overheating” Earth in 1976.
The concept is to build orbital Space Solar Power stations using lunar material. Effectively relocating the entire energy industry off-world into space. Hydrogen burning super-rockets causing the least damage to the atmosphere would send the factory tooling Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO). When the stations are in place in Geostationary Earth Orbit, essentially hovering above receiver antennae fields on Earth, they would power civilization. The entire world. This solves the feedback loop of trying to provide a western standard of living to a peak population of 10 billion. The industrial activity necessary to provide the renewable energy is self-defeating. Unless it never happens on Earth and instead in space. Nobody wants Space Solar to happen, and it is not discussed. Why is that?
The naive theory of information: Most information is not truth, it is fictions and fantasies and delusions and errors and lies. Truth is a very rare and costly kind of information…a small subset. Flood the Earth with information and the truth sinks to the bottom. Fiction is very cheap, no research, fact-checking. Truth is complicated because reality is complicated. Fiction can be as simple as you wish. The truth is often painful and unattractive. Every nation has skeletons in it’s closet people are not happy about. Fiction is far more attractive. If we don’t help the truth along with mechanisms to support and promote the truth you get a flood of fiction and fantasies and lies, and the truth sinks to the bottom.
Democracy is a system for deciding desires and not deciding truth. Democracy relies on trust; a dictatorship relies on terror. By sowing mistrust, the path is made for dictatorship. Marx and Trump would agree that the only reality is power, all human relations are power struggles. The truth does not matter, only who gains power by protecting their privilege and interests. Journalists, scientists, Judges, etc. are only concerned about preserving power and this cynical view of humans destroys trust.
To some extent people want power but they also want truth, because the truth is actually what makes you happy. Populism, which does not trust in their intelligentsia, is bound to end in dictatorship. The term populist is from the Latin, the populace, the people. The argument that only “we” are the people, that is, the people in the populist group, is dangerous because the single will of the people defaults to the leader. The mystical connection to the leader is deified and that leader embodies the will.
A democracy is pluralistic, with many different “wills” and discussions between people.
Democracy is a conversation and right now the editors are the algorithms on social media. The algorithms promoted the most powerful triggers of outrage and fear and are manipulating us for profit. This breaks down trust and is destroying democracy.
These algorithms and primitive AI’s are not tools…they are agents. They can create new things. How do we enable the positive side of AI and avoid the destructive side?
We are about to enter a new age of an alien intelligence that we create a non-human culture that all humans will live in. Money as the god of this world has value only because humans share and believe the same story about the dollar. Crypto currency has the potential of collapsing the most successful story ever told. It is just a story.
If everyone stops believing in my god I am in trouble. If everyone stops believing in my money I am in trouble. Money came along and replaced an economy based on personal relationships and favors to strangers not having to trust each other and only to trust money.
America had a good run of 248 years but January 20th that ends. Nothing can save us now short of the military stepping in. The Trumpists are fine with dumping democracy and the Democrats are not going to stop them. Democracy is essentially committing suicide. That the richest man in the world, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, played a major role in ending America is no surprise. As for his dream of saving the human race by building a city on Mars, his shiny rocket is not built to do anything but flood LEO with satellites. His dream is to take over the internet and make himself god-emperor of cyberspace, and in his weird brain, the ruler of the universe.
The more I find out about the cabinet the crazier it all becomes. Insane. I had a bad dream last night about taking my car to a shop and the person was talking unintelligible gibberish and I kept asking him to repeat just the first couple words he was saying because I could not understand, and he kept stepping away. He finally walked away a short distance and stood and looked at me blank-faced. I tried to walk over to him, and he walked away again and stood there and looked at me.
I thought about the dream and how othering works became crystal clear. When I was doing executive protection, the principal was the job. Keeping anybody from getting close to that person was all that mattered. If someone was talking to you it did not really matter what they were saying as long as it did not get that person past you. When fascists other a person or group the purpose is to make anything they do meaningless. I went to the car shop to accomplish something, but the person was simply not going to do it. He would not tell me anything except nonsense and waited for me to leave. Why didn’t he just say he would not help me and tell me to leave? As another human being it would be right to tell me. No right…. just nothing, if I am not another human being. It is the absolute disconnection from another human being or group.
Semiquincentennial, Sestercentennial, Quarter Millennium or Bicenquinquagenary; whatever term you want…America, at 248 years, is not going to make it.
12:50 to 18:45
Hegseth has tattoos that white supremacists also favor. Nazis. He attained the rank of Major, which is between a Captain commanding about 200 and a Lieutenant Colonel commanding up to 3000. He was one of only 12 disqualified from guarding Bidens inauguration because of the tattoos. He was a fox news host.
Like Space Force, which has no combat jobs, a military service with nobody that fights, but enjoys all the prestige and benefits of the other services that send people in harm’s way, making Hegseth secretary of defense is Trump’s way of giving the middle finger to the military he despises as suckers and losers.
His other cabinet picks are equally disturbing. They signal Trumps total disdain for the government that placed limits on his narcissism in his first term. And these people also signal the end of America.
@garychurch9237 Terrifying….slash and burn the U.S. government and hand it all over to crony capitalists. When Trump is sworn in it will be the end of America. Nothing can save us now. The greatest nation in history destroyed by a con man and the price of eggs.
The truth in one minute from 20 years ago. Divide and conquer as old as Rome.
The only question in a democracy is how much a person gets to keep, which depends on how much the rest of us are empowered to keep other people from keeping everything.
Wealth concentrates upward slowly but surely and eventually a small group of people own everything and everyone. This has been going on for thousands of years. Only a few isolated examples of systems that countered this hierarchy exist…and they were almost all democracies.
In the ancient Greek city states the people took power from the rich by combining and making laws limiting the power of the rich to buy whatever and whoever they wanted. The rich had a habit of driving anyone who competed with them out of business and starting wars with other city states. This does not sound so terrible to moderns but in ancient Greece your unpaid debts were paid off by becoming a slave and wars were a flip of the coin if you would come back or not. Democracy was a form of limitarianism in that it kept the rich from enslaving everyone and destroying the state by war-making. It also taxed the rich to pay for public works projects that improved the lives of everyone and also increased prosperity for the rich, who normally worked against each other.
Representative democracy, the Republic, is the best form of government for the citizenry as it provides the greatest good for the greatest number. It is the worst form of the government for the rich and powerful as it necessarily limits their wealth and influence by taxation and regulation. It follows that the rich will never stop trying to evade and end taxation and regulation that limits their acquisition of ever more wealth and power. When they succeed, the Republic dies. If the rich oppress the people, then revolution is inevitable which also leads to destruction. This is the basic understanding of a Republic that needs to be understood by the public.
In America a Democratic party that worked for the interests of the working class, and a Republican party that worked for the interest of the rich, having no third Limitarian party that worked to limit the power of both meant that one would eventually end America.
It occurred to me that what has happened resembles, in some ways, the 30-year-old movie Jurassic Park. The movie’s central character is Alan Grant, who studies dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the central character represents the white male, 60 percent of whom voted for Trump. In the movie the rich guy John Hammond built Jurassic Park to resurrect dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the rich guy is a composite of several supreme court decisions handed down since the Reagan Revolution that enabled a new class of capitalist robber barons (the dinosaurs) to arise. The rich guy represents the rule of law. In the movie the character of mathematician Ian Malcolm is trying to warn everyone that the dinosaurs will get out of control. In the story of the end of America, it is democracy that is the mathematician telling us that the dinosaur robber barons are going to be a disaster.
In the movie the various supporting characters have various adventures, but they are all essentially representations interacting with the three main characters who themselves represent the citizenry (Alan Grant), democracy (Ian Malcolm), and capitalism (John Hammond).
Jurassic Park is America, the great experiment in democracy that ends with the election of Donald Trump. In the movie the computer programmers, one evil, one good, one representing Donald Trump, one representing Kamala Harris, both have bad endings. In the movie the greedy lawyer, representing the mainstream media, is devoured. And the park game warden, representing the U.S. government itself, is also killed. The only difference is in the true story of the end of America, Trump triumphs instead of failing to steal riches as in the movie.
At the end of the movie the rich guy, who in the story of the end of America represents capitalism and the American neoliberal economy, is taken to the escape helicopter last, after the mathematician, who represents a badly injured democracy, and the heroine and two children, who represent the citizens. They fly away and that…is the end of the experiment. And the end of America.
Ice on the Moon 