Ice on the Moon

To understand Trump, read the journalist who saw Hitler coming
Story by Braulio García Jaén

The Austrian journalist, playwright, poet and satirist, Karl Kraus, published 922 issues of a magazine called Die Fackel, or The Torch, most of them produced by him alone, convinced that a misplaced comma conceals the catastrophe of an era that consents to it.

Over the course of the past 100 years, his underground influence has been far more important than recognized in the cultural arena. In fact, it is reflected in works from his Nobel Prize-winning compatriot Elfriede Jelinek to the last poet to win the Cervantes Prize, the Venezuelan, Rafael Cadenas. Now, 150 years after his birth and 125 years after he started his magazine, his thinking continues to be relevant. If the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, recently recalled that “The New York Times overlooked the Holocaust,” it is worth remembering that Kraus saw it coming via the newspapers circulating in Vienna 10 years earlier, including foreign ones.

The influence of Kraus and The Torch was acknowledged openly a century ago by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin. Between 1899 and 1936, Kraus dissected some of the contemporary evils in The Torch “simply by opening the newspaper,” as the political scientist Eric Voegelin pointed out in Hitler and the Germans. Three years before Kraus’ death, in The Third Walpurgis Night, which he wrote just after National Socialism came to power in Germany in 1933, “he accurately described and revealed [the] true nature [of Nazism].” He was “the first great critic of propaganda, anticipating Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian society dominated by doublethink and newspeak,” as his biographer Edward Timms wrote in Karl Kraus Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna.

Language was the main occupation of Kraus; his main concern was life, and he perceived the degradation of life in the degradation of language. This intimate and tragic relationship, and his unwavering commitment to fight it, makes his analysis of Nazi propaganda not only “a must-read for every student of political science,” according to Voegelin, but for all of us. Perhaps that is why a new edition was published in the U.S. at the end of Trump’s first term. Four years later, and with the prospect of a second Trump term looming, Kraus’ voice should still be ringing in our ears.

Early this summer, Madrid’s cultural center, La Casa Encendida, included Kraus in one of its programs. The far right had not yet had their victories in the European elections, but Trump’s return to the White House was looking increasingly viable. “It’s impossible not to remember Kraus regarding current affairs, where responsibility for the public word has completely lost its value. We began to see it very clearly in the elections that Trump won in 2016, where cynicism and lies were validated as political tools,” Sandra Santana, professor of Aesthetics at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, tells EL PAÍS.

“When words deviate from their meaning,” explains Santana in a reference essay on Kraus, titled El laberinto de la palabra or The Labyrinth of the Word, “imposture begins to reign.” According to Adan Kovacsics, a translator of works by Kraus, when it comes to the fusion of information and spectacle, Kraus warned: “It is essential to understand what the spectacle is and that politics has fused with it.” The paradox, for Kovacsics, is that, as with Trump, “everything was in plain view,” but given the machinery and skill with which Nazism hollowed out language, the era was left without words or imagination to see what it was promoting.

Trump uttered over 30,000 lies in his first term, according to The Washington Post. To understand how he has dissolved the relationship between accountability and public discourse, no need to look further than the Financial Times which quoted what an evangelical leader said about Trump days after Biden’s catastrophic debate on CNN: “As President of the United States, he kept every single promise he made to us.” The next day, FT journalist Martin Wolf pointed out that Trump’s ability “to define the truth for his followers is an example of the Führerprinzip — the idea that the leader defines the truth.” Wolf is alluding here to German jurist Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential thinkers on the new right, and his essay, The Fuhrer Protects the Law. Whoever believes that the analogy is an exaggeration, and that Trump does not even have a Schmitt, should know that perhaps Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard professor who promotes an “illiberal legalism” will suffice. The Supreme Court has already said that Trump is above the law.

Kraus understood that the aim of the message relayed by Nazi propaganda was not so much to appropriate “the atrocities as the clarifications,” just as Trump does not seek to appropriate anything in particular, except media attention, i.e. everything. When the real world ceases to be the reference, and speeches are only compared to each other, the triumph of truly self-referential politics becomes inevitable. The news is not that his running mate baptized him in 2016 as the “Hitler of the United States,” but that, if it was a criticism back then, today J.D. Vance could repeat it as praise and still appear coherent, because denouncing contradiction in Trump’s world makes no sense — contradiction is Trump’s modus operandi.

Voegelin argues that it was against this background of indifference that National Socialism also triumphed, and relies on Kraus, and his dissection of the “doublespeak of Germany,” to try to “refute all the lies that have been told about [the concentration camps], that is, the second reality elaborated by (…) the German episcopate.” Hitler’s rise to power also highlighted the failure of Social Democracy, including Austrian Social Democracy which, even when it witnessed German comrades tortured and murdered, still preferred to oppose the Austrian Christian Democratic government rather than the German National Socialists.

“Devoted to the pastime of palaver and tactics, they have lost almost all material gains,” Kraus wrote of the Social Democrats and the Social Democratic intellectuals, who believed “they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.” Consequently, Kraus supported the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor: anything other than Hitler.

SLS and Orion are needed to provide single launch heavy lift capabilities and cislunar crew transportation for NASA.
Right now the only equivalent capabilities to both vehicles are being developed in China.
It is baffling how many supposed space fans are actively advocating for the death of the public US human spaceflight program that traces its roots back to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

Not baffling at all…it is the Reagan Revolution that made money the god of this world. Google “Market Fundamentalism” and all will be revealed by Naomi Oreskes.
Only a democratic government cares for all of it’s citizens instead of only a tiny minority of “wealth creators.” Only a democracy can legislate taxing and regulating the super-rich and enable an immense public works energy project like Space Solar Power.

The path we are on is likely to burn civilization to the ground. Climate Change may kill half the people on this planet by way of war, famine, and disease….and hero to zero Elon and his fanboys will share responsibility for this catastrophe as they could have gone far to stop it. In fact, several silicon valley types are all about a partial genocide as an “adjustment”….they are called accelerationists.

NewSpace is about making money….not really about space except as a means to that end. Conflating satellite entrepreneurship with space exploration and colonization is a NewSpace marketing ploy. Not Space Exploration Technologies; Satellite Exploitation Technologies corp.

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The problem the Spruce Goose was designed to address existed alright.….

“Elon is a genius and has no fantasies about the internet.” Well, 44 billion for twitter would tend to contradict that portrayal of your Tony Stark/John Galt/Howard Roark fantasy. The rest of your musings on history and China are similar. You simply demonstrate how unacquainted with reality you have become.

We are presently, I hope, nearing the end of the Reagan Revolution and may soon be going to a more “Nordic Model” of mixed economy policies. The list of best places to live on this planet, that America continues to slide down, are more like “The New Deal” than Ayn Rand’s sci-fi invisible rich people paradise. Even better than Musk City on Mars. Neoliberal propaganda is wearing thin as citizens cannot afford groceries, but billionaires can literally go on recreational space-walk missions burning hundreds of millions of dollars for their hobby…while paying little or no taxes.

A “mixed economy” walks a tightrope between capitalist competition and socialist cooperation and in the last century, due also to favorable geopolitical circumstances, created the wealthiest middle class in history. I know this because in the 60’s my father was an aircraft mechanic with no college degree, and supported our large family on one income, owned a house and two cars, and retired with a generous pension. You will find those countries high on the list of best places to live are comparable to our golden age. America is no longer high on that list but is high on the list of billionaires…a new gilded age that regresses to a previous century. Those very few demi-gods who pay millions, pennies to them, to convince the rest of us that greed is good.
Which brings us to the Moon.

The only path to humankind expanding off-world and thus lessening our risk of extinction, is an imperative similar to the soviet threat to American capitalism signaled by Sputnik. That clear and present danger, the greatest existing threat to civilization…Climate Change. Any of the favorable geopolitical circumstances previously mentioned are fast evaporating. The only path to expanding into space is Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources as the solution to Climate Change. By de-industrialization; relocating almost the entire energy industry to the Moon. An immense project similar to fighting fascism in World War II. The ROI? Civilization does not melt down into a dystopian nightmare. Not even farmers being able to play video games in Nebraska can beat that.

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Gary’s expressed beliefs are essentially religious in nature. He has conjured up an entire fantasy future – from which he brooks no deviation – based on worship of the late Dr. O’Neill. O’Neill is God and Gary is his Prophet.

Framing this as the Musk Cult vs the O’Neill Cult is….not really going to fly. There is no O’Neill Cult because his concept was sound and unfortunately went against fossil fuel interests and an emerging neoliberal wave that became the Reagan Revolution. The resulting second Gilded Age has allowed the rise of multi-billionaires, one of whom happened to make rockets, satellites, and gaming the government for corporate welfare his forte.

I did not conjure up any of that.

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And it’s also why we haven’t been back in a half-century. Politicians, as a class, are vision-less and fickle. The settling of the American West was largely done by private sector actors. The settling of space will be as well.

The settling of the American west was enabled by genocide and military force. Landing on the Moon was enabled largely by technology created by a genocidal fascist dictatorship. “Vision” is seeing history for what it is and learning how to not make the same mistakes over and over. You do not get that. Politicians as the enemy is classic totalitarian propaganda. Orwellian reverse-speak like war is peace, slavery is freedom…. your democratically elected government is actually the opposite. Riiiight.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2019 (Creative Commons)
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2019 (Creative Commons)
© provided by AlterNet
When a reporter asked 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris if she still considered herself the “underdog” despite polls showing her with small single-digit leads over Republican Donald Trump, the vice president responded, without hesitation, that yes, she does. Harris cautioned that it’s still a close race.

Nonetheless, Harris is quite competitive in many of the national and battleground state polls released in mid-August. And her supporters are hoping that the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago will increase her momentum.

But in an op-ed/guest essay published by the New York Times on August 19 — the opening day of the convention — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow lays out a troubling scenario in which Harris wins the electoral vote and MAGA Republicans do everything they can to overturn the election results.

Maddow notes that back in December 1960 — three weeks after Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated Republican Richard Nixon in that year’s presidential election — far-right white supremacist Gerald L.K. Smith proposed a “nutball campaign to overturn the 1960 election.”
Smith’s message only had a small fringe audience, but in 2024, Maddow warns, many Trump supporters at the state, federal and local levels are determined to try something similar if he loses.

“Election boards across the country now include Republican officials who have not only propounded Mr. Trump’s lies about the last presidential election being ‘stolen,’ they have tested how far they can go in denying the certification of the vote,” Maddow explains. “Republicans tried this ploy more than two dozen times in at least eight states since 2020.”

Maddow fears “legal challenges” and “certification refusals” from MAGA Republicans if Harris wins key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Michigan.

“The point of these certification refusals may not be to falsify or flip a result, but simply to prevent the emergence of one,” Maddow warns. “If one or more states fail to produce official results, blocking any candidate from reaching 270 electoral votes, the 12th Amendment prescribes Gerald L.K. Smith’s dream scenario: a vote in the newly elected House of Representatives to determine the presidency.”

Maddow continues, “Each state delegation would get one vote; today, Republicans control 26 state delegations; Democrats control 22; and two are evenly divided…. No one should be surprised when certification refusals happen or when they are then exploited to try to maximize chaos and upset.”

I don’t quite get this article because Peter Thiel, last I heard, is a Trumpist….so how is it that the CEO of his company is “progressive but not woke”…whatever that means. Thiel might have stopped giving Trump money, but he has not denounced him. Maybe his ego will not let him admit he blew millions like a fool.

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Palantir CEO Alex Karp says Donald Trump’s political rise is linked to the ‘excesses of Silicon Valley’
Story by William Gavin

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Capitol Hill for a forum on artificial intelligence.

Former President Donald Trump’s political success — and widening class divisions — was enabled by Silicon Valley, according to Palantir (PLTR) CEO Alex Karp.

“I don’t believe you would have a Trump phenomenon without the excesses of Silicon Valley,” Karp told The New York Times.

“Very, very wealthy people who support policies where they don’t have to absorb the cost at all. Just also the general feeling that these people are not tethered to our society, and simultaneously are becoming billionaires,” he added.

Karp pointed to a lack of support from wealthy tech entrepreneurs and executives toward law enforcement agencies, such as the Department of Defense. He himself is a strong supporter of the U.S. military and Palantir (PLTR) makes much of its money by supplying data-mining and analytics software to government agencies. The firm has faced criticism and protests over its work with police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multibillionaire and you won’t supply your product to the D.O.D,” Karp said. “It’s jarringly corrosive.”

Karp, who describes himself as “progressive but not woke,” said Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver in 2020 because of the “regressive side” of progressive politics. He also cited issues with political correctness and the nation’s focus on racism, as opposed to classism, telling the Times that the “primary thing that’s bad for you” is to be born poor.

“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” Karp said.

Karp’s comments on Silicon Valley somewhat echo those recently made by Cost Plus Drugs founder and “Shark Tank” star Marc Cuban, who has been a staunch critic of some in Silicon Valley’s push to back Trump’s re-election campaign. While speaking with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart last week, Cuban said much of tech executives’ support comes from their overwhelming wealth and belief they know what is best for the country.

“They’ve gotten to the point now where they feel like they should control the world and that there should be a CEO in charge of everything,” Cuban told Stewart. “Because they’re rich as f—k,” he added.

Cuban added that “you get to that point sometimes where I think they’ve lost the connection to the real world,” before pointing to Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ambitions to reach Mars and, what Cuban calls, his attempts “to be the most influential man in the world.”

Several prominent tech leaders, many of whom have ties to crypto, have recently said they would support Trump’s re-election campaign. Besides Musk, that list includes Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, billionaire Winklevoss twins, and David Sacks, among others.

Story by David Ingram

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has repeatedly prophesied a future civil war related to immigration.

Musk has posted about the subject on his social media platform X at least eight times in the past 10 months, according to a review of his posts by NBC News. And his posts usually include a specific prediction: He thinks that Europe in particular is headed toward a “civil war” due to the arrival of refugees from other continents.
Musk’s interest in the subject of a civil war poked into public view earlier this month when he weighed in on anti-immigration street riots happening across Great Britain. “Civil war is inevitable,” he wrote on X.

The post received 9.8 million views and it caused a furor among some in the U.K., initiating a heated back and forth with the office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was dismissive of Musk’s prediction, saying there was “no justification” for such comments. Other U.K. critics said Musk was only inflaming tensions by making such a dire prediction.
Musk’s rhetoric is unheard-of for a corporate executive speaking in public, but the prediction of a civil war has become a frequent talking point among some far-right activists who view a civil war in Europe or the U.S. as not only unavoidable but also as something to be welcomed.
“What you’re seeing in these calls for civil war is a white supremacist clarion call. It is a dog whistle,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Musk has stopped short of issuing a call to arms and has not mentioned the race or religion of refugees arriving in Europe, but Lewis said that Musk doesn’t need to be explicit to get his message across. He said he sees similarities between Musk’s posts and the language in white supremacist chat rooms where commenters are obsessed with changing demographics.

“Rhetorically, there is very little difference, and at this point it’s barely coded language. It’s everything but explicit incitement,” he said.

“It’s only a matter of time, unfortunately, before someone listens,” he added, warning that Musk’s words could inspire violence by others.

Musk did not directly respond to questions about his civil war predictions in an email to NBC News.
Hyperbole about civil war is common on the far right. White nationalist Nick Fuentes said last year that Ireland was “on the brink of civil war” because of immigration, and followers of the “Boogaloo” anti-government movement have for years called explicitly for civil war.

The far-right’s rhetoric around a future civil war is part of a philosophical framework referred to as accelerationism. Extreme practitioners of the philosophy believe that stoking tensions around topics like immigration could lead to wars and hasten a larger societal collapse, creating an opportunity to reformulate society in a way that’s more favorable to extremists. A gunman who attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, in 2019 said his goal was to hasten the start of a “civil war” over religion, race and firearms. While some progressives also talk about dismantling existing systems, predictions of a civil war are less common on the left.

Katie Paul, who tracks online extremism as director of the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, said that many Boogaloo adherents are now active on Musk’s app X after other social media apps kicked them off.

“They all share this interest in the dismantling of the systems that we currently live in,” Paul said.

Musk’s profile gives his civil war predictions unusual reach. One of the world’s wealthiest people as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, he is an increasingly influential media figure as the owner of X. On Monday, Musk hosted a conversation on X with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and he has invited Vice President Kamala Harris for a similar event. She has not accepted.
Musk has received encouragement on X for sharing the idea of a civil war, including from prominent figures.

“Not inevitable…it’s underway,” wrote Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration, in response to a tweet from Musk about civil war earlier this month. Flynn was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian diplomat. Flynn did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about his civil war statement.

Musk has invoked the idea in relation to numerous conflicts. Last October, days after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, he responded to pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe with a call for reduced immigration onto the continent.

“If current trends continue, civil war in Europe is inevitable,” he said on X. It was a reply to Konstantin Kisin, an author, podcaster and Russian-born immigrant to the U.K.

Kisin responded to Musk: “Civil war implies someone will fight back. Based on current evidence, I’m not even sure that will happen.”

In a phone interview, Kisin said he does not favor fighting back in a literal sense, and he said it was “preposterous” for anyone to suggest that Musk’s prediction is a dog whistle that encourages violence.

“What Elon Musk is doing is pointing out the fact that Europe is moving in a particular direction on demographics, on economics, on multiculturalism, and these are all perfectly valid points,” he said.

Asked about his views on demographics, Kisin said that, with migration at current levels, “the inevitable outcome is inter-ethnic tension.”

Immigrants to Europe come from many places. In the U.K., four of the top five non-E.U. countries of origin are former British colonies, according to government statistics: India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

Musk repeated his forecast four times in October, writing that mass migration “lays the groundwork for civil strife, if not war”; that Europe “is trending towards civil war”; that Europe “is headed for civil war”; and again that it is “trending towards civil war.”

In November, Musk continued his prophecy of a civil war but pivoted his rationale. In response to an article about Germany rearming its military after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he wrote, “Civil war is brewing.” Then, several days later, he returned to the subject of immigration and posted, “Europe appears to be headed for civil war.”

A civil war, though, has not come to pass.

A civil war is different from terrorist attacks, violent street demonstrations or other political violence. It is usually defined by the emergence of an organized rebel army engaged in armed conflict seeking to overthrow a government. Some researchers argue that a conflict should have at least 1,000 battle deaths before people label it a civil war.

In his X posts, Musk has not gone into detail on how he sees a civil war playing out. Does he think, for example, that migrants will form a rebel army to overthrow Westminster? Or that native Britons will? Or is he using “civil war” as a catch-all term for street violence?

Experts in civil wars said that Musk is out of his depth on the subject. They said it’s very unlikely that Europe will experience a civil war due to immigration, and they said Musk appears to greatly overestimate the power and organization of people arriving in Europe.

“Immigrants are not an organized rebel group ready to commit violence,” said Megan Stewart, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan who studies political violence.

“They are often fleeing dire and dangerous situations and just trying to live their lives,” she said.

She said that, historically, the much more common dynamic in the U.S. and the U.K. is that immigrants are victims of violence perpetrated by right-wing extremists with white supremacist ideologies.

In the past two weeks, far-right activists in Great Britain have used misinformation about an attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class as a pretext for anti-immigrant demonstrations. There have been mob attacks on mosques, immigrant-owned shops and hotels housing asylum-seekers. The suspect in the dance-class attack in which three children died is a 17-year-old who was born in the country, according to police.

Thomas Zeitzoff, an associate professor of public affairs at American University who studies political violence, said that Musk’s prediction of war is likely to feed into false fears about immigrants.

“It amplifies this misperception that these groups are wanting to fight,” he said.

Zeitzoff said he believes Musk’s posts could encourage some anti-immigrant forces to take up arms.

“If you start thinking that they’re ready to fight, then maybe we need to be, too,” he said.

Some of Musk’s posts about “civil war” have received thousands of replies. The sentiment has been split, with some X users agreeing with him and others accusing Musk of “fear mongering.” Still others say they wonder why he’s spending his time on social media. At least one account said they were ready to fight.

“Yep, ready cocked n loaded,” one X user responded to Musk last year, referencing firearms.

Musk used similar “war” language when talking about immigration Monday with Trump in a live joint event on X.

“We don’t have a secure border, and we have people streaming over. It looks like a ‘World War Z’ zombie apocalypse at times,” he told Trump. He was apparently comparing immigrants to zombies and referring to a 2013 action movie starring Brad Pitt.

Musk has a record of spreading false information that could stir up fear of immigrants. Last year, he embraced the debunked “great replacement” theory, which says that there is a top-down plot to replace the white population with nonwhite “hordes.” He has smeared Haitians as cannibals, and he has boosted false claims that non-citizens are registering to vote in the U.S.

After those claims were debunked, Musk has had various responses. He said he was “sorry” for his post about the great replacement theory but left it online. After criticism of his Haitian posts, he said he wanted to “screen immigrants for potential homicidal tendencies and cannibalism.” And after his claims about immigrants voting were found to be false, he has repeated them.

Last year, the Justice Department sued Musk’s rocket company SpaceX saying it had discriminated against refugees in hiring. Musk called the case a “weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes” and said the company had been warned that hiring people who were not permanent U.S. residents would violate the law. SpaceX countersued, saying the regulatory system violates the Constitution, and it has won a temporary stay.

Musk’s posts about civil war typically have a racial dimension. One of his posts came as a reply to an account criticizing “demographic pressure” from immigrants. Another time, Musk responded after the same account expressed dismay at the lack of assimilation by immigrants.

“They are not there to be part of French or German or Italian or Swedish culture. They are there to replace you,” the account wrote.

“Europe is trending towards civil war,” Musk replied.

Musk’s adult daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson said in a recent post on the app Threads that her father once called Arabic the “language of the enemy.” She told NBC News that Musk made the comment after she said she wanted to learn the language when she was 6 years old.

Asked for comment about that episode, Musk replied in an email to NBC News that Wilson “was killed by the woke mind virus. Now it will die.”

Musk, a U.S. citizen who was born in South Africa, sometimes visits Europe including for business reasons. His companies including Tesla have operations there.

But there are now calls for Musk to be held accountable in Europe for the impact of his words. British lawmakers told Politico they want to haul Musk before Parliament to answer questions, and some British columnists have suggested that Musk should face an investigation over his comments.

“Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind,” wrote Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, which is now the Musk-owned X, in The Guardian on Monday.

Musk reacted to Daisley’s column on X, calling him “insufferable.” He said in response to a separate Guardian column that the newspaper “should be on trial for aiding & abetting the destruction of Britain.” He also accused the British government of failing to guarantee free speech.

In a different context, Musk once celebrated the idea that the U.S. could devolve into civil war, with him emerging in the end as president.

In an end-of-year set of predictions on X in December 2022, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev forecasted that California and Texas would break off from the U.S. and that Musk would win the presidential election “after the new Civil War’s end.”

Musk replied to Medvedev: “Epic thread!!”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

What will happen is being talked about just like they talked about whether Trump would transfer power in 2020. He tried to take power then and he will try again. While the media is fairly clear on what is happening and even mentions themselves as part of the problem, this is not really doing anything to prevent what is going to happen. And as the closing talking head explained, “-it’s really troubling, harrowing possibility that we will find ourselves in something even worse potentially than what we experienced on January 6th.”

“Even worse” is that the election will be called invalid and congress and or the supreme court will make Trump president. The threat from the MAGA AR-15 army in the streets will so terrify the public that what we think cannot happen, just as we thought a confederate flag carried through the Capitol after rioters took it over could never happen, will happen.

The Russian disinformation tactic of the firehose of falsehood has become the nuclear weapon of the 21st century. It is almost certain, at this point, that it is going to go off.

Musk, Thiel, and the Koch network….the clear and present danger to humankind that needs to be taxed into oblivion.

Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources as the solution to Climate Change is the most logical path as it deindustrializes the energy industry on Earth by relocating it off-world. The only valid argument against it is that it is more expensive than fossil fuels but….that is circular logic as fossil fuels are likely to burn civilization to the ground. The main obstacle is ironically the person controlling the company that is developing the spacecraft that can enable Space Solar calls it “the stupidest idea ever”…because he cannot own it.

“They are afraid of being called “alarmist” and they’re afraid of giving anyone reason to dismiss their conclusions and that creates incentive to make the situation less scary and to underestimate uncertainties. Basically, it is right that you shouldn’t trust climate scientists, but the conclusion from that isn’t what climate change deniers want it to be. It is not that climate change is a hoax…it’s that it is almost certainly worse than the impression they raise.”

I don’t care if you do lean toward neoliberalism (even though it drives climate change)…you are now one of my heroes Sabine.

As a young helicopter mechanic in the military I spent several years in the mid 80’s on a hangar deck turning wrenches listening to Art Bell. I am immune to any conspiracy theory after listening to every crazy scam and hoax imaginable. It is of course about money. Follow the money and you find everything reduces to the rich evading taxation and regulation. That would be climate change denial. Science needs to have checks and balances just like government.

Taxing the super-rich into oblivion is on the horizon which is why fascists are trying to take power all over the world. It is becoming crystal clear that the right is the party of me and the left the party of we. And we are becoming committed to ending these creatures among us that think they are gods.

‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” The delusions of entitlement – that the rich deserve their wealth, privilege and the right to transgress social mores as they choose – are ever-present. In their eyes, wealth can’t just be a by-product of luck, can it? It must, one way or another, be deserved.

Among the great deformations of the four neoliberal decades through which we have lived are not just the policy catastrophes – monetarism, financial deregulation, austerity, Brexit, the Truss budget – but also the way that wealth generation and entrepreneurship, so crucial to the capitalist economy, have been ideologically framed. Instead of being recognised as a profoundly social process – in which great universities, the financial ecosystem and the runway provided by large and sophisticated markets support entrepreneurship – enterprise, and the wealth it produces, has been characterised as wholly attributable to individual derring-do in which luck plays little part. Hence the obsession with shrinking the state to reduce “burdensome” tax.
Individual agency is part of the story but, as Warren Buffett acknowledges, so does the “ovarian lottery” – being born in the US where its system favours the skills he possesses. One of the richest men in the world believes in capital gains and inheritance taxes – and paying them. Riches are a privilege: taxing them to contribute a fair share to society’s wider health – from which the rich benefit too – is the obligation that comes with being privileged.

But decades of being congratulated and indulged for the relentless pursuit of their own self-interest has turned the heads of too many of our successful rich. They really believe that they are different: that they owe little to the society from which they have sprung and in which they trade, that taxes are for little people. We are lucky to have them, and, if anything, owe them a favour. There is a long list of challenges confronting the new Labour government but one of the most overlooked is the need to start challenging this narrative.

Too many have bought into the lazy Trussite syllogism that low taxes for the rich means more enterprise and growth

The initial skirmishes foretell what lies ahead. A number of cabinet members told me that, in the months before the election, the fiercest and most consistent private lobbying of shadow ministers was to reverse Labour’s commitment to suspending VAT relief on private schools. Education should not be taxed as a matter of principle, they were told. State schools would suffer a vast influx of former private school kids putting intolerable pressure on the state system; it was a tax on aspiration; it represented social engineering and class envy. The proponents were oblivious to the notion that Britain’s private school system is itself a gigantic exercise in social engineering – sophisticated queue-jumping on a mass scale – that offers additional privilege to the already privileged. To sustain this advantage when the state system was in dire need was outrageous. Indeed, advocacy for private schools is itself class war. A largely state-educated cabinet so far has held the line. The relief will go.

Similarly, we are warned of an exodus of the non-domiciled rich as their tax privileges are removed. So far, Labour is holding the line – the cash is too desperately needed. But, while the attacks mount it needs the strongest possible story about why it is reasonable that the rich should pay their proper dues.

This has to have a moral dimension. Keir Starmer has made much of the duty that elected MPs and officials have to serve – but service and duty are not confined to those in the public realm. If Britain is to lift and sustain its growth rate decisively above the grim forecasts of little more than 1% next year and afterwards, the country will have to start looking and feeling more like a development state in which everyone puts their shoulder to the collective wheel – the rich included. We are all “fellows” in this common endeavour. President John F Kennedy’s inaugural address asked his citizens not to think of what their country could do for them, more what they could do for their country. Britain needs that spirit now.

There are encouraging straws in the wind. The Confederation of British Industry, our leading business lobby organisation, nearly driven to extinction by ethical lapses, believes that its path to recovery has been greatly helped by the advice of Principia Advisory – a consultancy that conducts ethics audits informed by the moral philosophers Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant and Aristotle. Entrepreneur Julian Richer’s Good Business Charter is attracting growing adherents. At the launch of the National Wealth Fund last week, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was accompanied by business leaders who believe that delivering a great purpose should be at the heart of their business.

Research reveals that most fast-growing tech businesses are typically driven by such commitments to a great purpose. One new secretary of state told me that a phone call to business leaders who don’t recognise trade unions brought immediate change. The appointment of James Timpson, standing down as CEO of the eponymous shoe repair and key-cutting business to take the job of prisons minister, was inspired: one in 10 Timpson employees are ex-offenders, a tribute to the family firm’s longstanding belief that its societal obligation is to play its part in prisoner rehabilitation.

But decades of wrong thinking won’t die easily. Too many have bought into the lazy Trussite syllogism that low taxes for the rich means more enterprise and growth – backed up by an unregulated lobbying industry that is the third largest in the world. Growing a great business in the teeth of intense international competition is tough. For that to happen, the rich and enterprising must stop believing they are different – and lead the change by putting their shoulders to the shared task. Growth is best achieved as a collective endeavour. It is a civilisational moment – and Labour needs to develop the language of fellowship, obligation and common good that pitches it in those terms.

• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist