Divided and Conquered

Opinion by Arash Azizi

Ask most Americans what DSA stands for and they are unlikely to know the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, with about 92,000 members. But ask about AOC and they are likely to be familiar with DSA’s most famous member: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx-born socialist firebrand known for her fierce advocacy of trade unions, universal medical care, tuition-free university, migrant rights, and pro-environmental policies. So why did DSA’s national leadership recently decide to withdraw its conditional endorsement of her?

For any sane organization, the 34-year-old lawmaker would be a treasured asset. She is principled, politically talented, and able to make national headlines on a regular basis. Her victory in 2018 led to the most significant single-day membership increase in DSA’s history. She has a grassroots background and knows how to talk to ordinary people, but she is also an agile political operator. In the space of a few short years, she rose to the vice ranking position of the House Oversight Committee and made herself a unique place in the Democratic Party.
But Ocasio-Cortez has one important failing in the eyes of DSA’s leaders: She is not sufficiently anti-Israel. As the organization declared its non-endorsement of her, the only rationale it cited was disapproval of her position on Israel.

Democracy is about to die. It has never been a healthy entity since it became the benchmark for new governments in 1789 with America. Over the course of the last two centuries democracy has been slowly but surely corroded into a new form of monarchy with the super-rich invisibly controlling the world. Chaotically, as if the invisible hand of the market were real, but actually just groups of predators fighting over their territory. Like lions and hyenas.

The mechanisms to nullify any actual democratic control of nations are now so well-known and fully developed that voting for a representative will soon become meaningless. We are divided and conquered by any means imaginable. By the best imaginations money can buy.

Three years ago I wrote this and nothing has changed: “A couple years ago on a break I disagreed with a coworker on some political issues and the question he asked, “do you believe in America?… keeps haunting me. I did not realize at that time he was actually inferring I was not really an “American.” I believed we were conversing in good faith as concerned citizens. But now I understand that clearly there was no good faith then and there is none to be found on the right now. Those of us who see through the big lie and see the right working to end democracy face a looming catastrophe. The right has devolved over the last half a decade into a closed culture, a cult, of borderline fascism. They believe in a different America than I and the majority of the population do. The question that follows is which America is going to exist five years from now? Again, there are two contrasting worldviews in direct conflict and our divided nation may actually enter into a civil war over them in the near future. Since the Reagan Revolution the belief system called Neoliberalism has been the operating system of the human species on planet Earth. Money is the god of this world. There is no argument about this…it is the truth. A truth the right has propagandized in an Orwellian fashion into the greatest good when it is of course fundamentally evil. Neoliberals do not recognize any inherent good in telling the truth and lie like the rest of us breathe. The only good, the only sacred activity, is acquiring wealth. It is an absolutely amoral philosophy of Market Fundamentalism deifying profit as the singular holy and all-powerful force. We are now dealing with the consequences of four decades of this satanic religion corrupting society. – Destroying the truth just happens to be the best cover for maintaining obscene wealth. Nobody has the time to vote for progressive taxation when the communists are coming to eat your infant. The masses have been manipulated by the one percent to the point where there is a real danger of a fascist overthrow of the government and where that leads nobody can predict. Reading The Turner Diaries, racists will say a likely outcome of their white nationalist coup will be “The Day Of The Rope.” White grievance is the underlying driver and will spin out of control. Any who doubt this is a possibility should consider the laws being passed by red states blatantly arranging for their coming election results to be thrown out. It is transparently obvious the only way for conservatives to stay in power is to end democracy. Anyone can see it yet nobody knows what to do about it. And when it happens only one avenue will be left. Violence.”

Brad Nails It

He really nailed it- the “sell” is to rely on the strong white male keeping us all safe from everything…not that. It is fear and bias used by those who are, except for a very, very few, not any us.


It is, in a very interesting Orwellian way, the opposite of trickle-down economics. The efforts of the rich to evade taxation and regulation trickle-down into this far-right cancer ending America. The super-rich are not concerned with the gamble they are taking on burning it all down; they can just get on their jet and fly to Switzerland. This gamble may end horribly.

I think the first thing is to establish a simple truth on which to build: Everything in politics, EVERYTHING, can be traced back to the rich evading taxes and regulation.

The trolls, the trolls, the trolls

The thing is, there is really only one problem in regard to storing cryogens in space and cislunar infrastructure, and that is high thrust burns for Lunar Cyclers. It may be problematic keeping them cycling with only low thrust electric propulsion.

There is actually no need for propellent transfer or depots….it is simply NewSpace dogma adapted by Elon so the shiny could get the HLS contract….with the help of Kathy of course. Who now works for him.

Depots were originally the miracle that would allow the hobby rocket to do all things and they made SHLV’s “dinosaurs.”

Until Elon announced his BFR and they finally shut up. Just like they were not Moon people. Until somebody high up in NASA who wanted a job approved the shiny as a lunar lander. Blatant corruption.

One More Speculative Futurist Comment

A SHLV, like the shiny, can put a sphere a little over 30 feet in diameter into GEO. Perhaps stacking this on top of a stubby shiny with no payload bay and/or bigger tanks. For the sake of argument, let’s say the interior of the sphere is 26 feet in diameter. Mounted on the outside is a collapsed Hoberman sphere and bladder modeled on these inflatable Max Space designs.

Once in GEO this sphere is docked with another identical sphere and an unspecified number of other lesser payloads. Then the water starts arriving. It could come from a couple different sources other than Earth but let us leave that for now. Eventually, about 6000 tons of water is transferred to the two spheres, 3000 in each, and the Hoberman spheres with their bladders expand to 60 feet in diameter. With larger outer spheres the interior space becomes geometrically larger as the outer sphere stays 5 meters thick. An 80 foot diameter sphere, with a 46 foot inner sphere, would provide about 5 times as much crew space as the 60 foot sphere. Bigger SHLV’s likely needed for that. Water is transparent so a soon-to-be-slowly-rotating-view outside would be available with some clever optical design.

A mile long multi-tether system then unwinds with the two spheres at either end with the lesser masses between them. It is then spun up to one revolution per minute. This would result in a pair of Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) crew compartments with about 9200 cubic feet of pressurized space each. With a view and with a long enough tether to eliminate centripetal induced nausea and vertigo.

This is a basic true Space Station. Depending on how much support equipment was required inside the pressure sphere it would likely have three or four astronauts in each sphere. The multi-tether system would allow the various masses and the spheres to change location. To some extent. One sphere or both could travel to the center of the system for microgravity and docking with spacecraft and then return to full gravity when desired.

That is a Space Station. Substitute a Nuclear Electric Propulsion system (maybe available soon) for one of the spheres and this would be a true Spaceship capable of year-long or longer voyages to places like Ceres or possibly farther out…with no dosing or debilitation. Much better with bigger spheres of course. That is the future.

Space Safety Plea

Setting aside the megaconstellation frankenstein being created, which never should have been allowed to happen, the first problem to address is tourism.

There is nothing more counterproductive and corrosive to any progress in Human Space Flight than billionaut joy rides. That these oligarchs are subsidized in their obscene spending displays with tax dollars is poison to public support. NASA should curtail any kind of support for these launches, which would effectively end them.

The second problem is the dual purpose systems on the two American LEO taxis, dragon and starliner. The hypergolic escape systems used are inferior to the traditional escape tower, as used on Orion and others, and are more likely to cause a loss of crew than prevent such an event. That NASA allowed these systems is a red flag that the same flawed thinking that led to two shuttle disasters never left the space agency.

The third problem is the elephant in the room NASA refuses to acknowledge. Dosing and debilitation must be addressed with a requirement for a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) environment for any long duration missions. A massive water shield and tether generated artificial gravity system is the basic requirement and is being ignored.

The NASA Space Solar Power report:

Three problems-

  1. It is essentially about profitability and not about the environment.
  2. It ignores any calculations based on industrializing the Moon.
  3. It acknowledges no bias or influence in regard to industry.

Helicity

The video spokesperson said they are a decade away but in reality, this was available a half a century ago. Star Wars directed energy research likely increased the efficiency greatly, but that data is of course, classified. Helicity knows this and the fusion reactor stuff is all fundraising when it is actually going to be used for what works…bombs.
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion by another name. They are trying to make a tiny fusion explosion without using a fission explosion to create fusion.

The original concept of Stanislaw Ulam was pure genius. He did not just think outside the box, he threw the box away. Pulse Propulsion is understood in three different ways.

First, nuclear energy cannot be used efficiently in a rocket type engine because it is difficult enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting. Nuclear energy is, literally, a million times hotter. Like a piston with no cylinder around it, Pulse momentarily hits the piston with plasma from a nuclear reaction. Not long enough to melt it, exactly like an internal combustion engine…an external engine.

Second, a nuclear device can be designed to focus most of the energy in one direction, like a conventional shaped charge. Directed at a slug of material the resulting plasma Pulse pushes the Spaceship.

Third, while a jet fighter is catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier, a pulse driven Spaceship is akin to an aircraft carrier catapulted by the jet fighter. This is accurate as Nuclear Pulse becomes extremely efficient the larger the plate, or piston, becomes. Using a multi-thousand ton plate several hundred feet across uses the same small device an order of magnitude more efficiently.

Helicity is likely going to use nuclear devices and this whole internal fusion design is a facade.

No Starship to Mars

I call it the Parker Dyson Spudis Continuum. All of them died recently. Eugene Parker determined that a 5 meter layer of water is required to shield space travelers from cosmic radiation. Freeman Dyson validated the concept of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion with his work on Project Orion. Paul Spudis discovered the first real evidence for ice on the Moon. The thousands of tons of water lifted from the Moon and Nuclear Pulse Propulsion is the only practical way to push that massive radiation shield around the solar system.

The ocean moons of the gas and ice giants are the places to take submarines to explore. Mars is a rock, and like LEO, a complete dead end.

The big engines are about getting to the Moon to get the water, or rather, getting double-hulled wet workshops (“Fat Workshops”) to the Moon to fill their cosmic ray shields, which is step one.

The Moon was thought to be dry during Apollo and this was one of the reasons a Moonbase was not considered feasible. What my psychopath cyberstalker is forgetting is that there IS ice on the Moon. Estimates have gone up and down over the last decade. Perhaps not enough to build propellant factories but more than enough to support a base…and provide shielding for Space Stations, Lunar Cyclers, and true Spaceships.

Mars, on the other hand, may have ice, but it is far away and at the bottom of a gravity well twice as deep as the Moon. It is not a second home for humankind because we evolved in one gravity. It also has less than half the solar energy resources of the Earth Moon system. It will require massively shielded nuclear propelled (not nuclear thermal) artificial gravity equipped Spaceships to get to Mars. The shiny is not going and we are not going to live there anyway.

With over a hundred thousand satellites in LEO, in various megaconstellations, “conjunctions”-as a certain percentage malfunction, or are commanded to reenter and do not do so precisely, or various other scenarios, are why this whole mess should never have been allowed.

As satellites go up to replace or service this enormous number or come back down they must cross the orbits of the ones in orbit. This means inevitable collisions and an increase in debris as more collisions happen. Not sustainable. Strike one.

Strike two is the militarization of these constellations which will radically increase the likelihood of conflict and escalation and the risk of nuclear war.

Strike three is the amount of contamination from rocket exhaust and reentry byproducts in the upper atmosphere.

The best possible scenario is severe restrictions on the number of satellites in Earth orbit before the situation becomes disastrous. Megaconstellations will go down in history as the worst idea of the early 21st century, from the guy who called Space Solar Power “the stupidest thing ever”, advised not panicking over COVID or Climate Change, and set loose not-seez on Twitter.