“It’s OK to be white….left on the internet to be found and taken down the rabbit hole with.”
“The thing about any kind of conspiracy theory, or an idea, or any of these things is, they work, they go viral, when they play on something that feels true. Right? You don’t get conspiracy theories that don’t resonate in some way with some kind of part of someone’s experience…. what happens is, when it resonates online, then, if the resonance gets strong enough, they’ll go into the real world and do something. -And this is where…in order for it to…lead to something like January 6th, you need, in real life, there to be some kind of spectacle, or violence.”
The air we breathe should be free of course. Enough clean water to drink and for minimum sanitary needs should be guaranteed. A certain area of land that is free for anyone to walk on and pedestrian paths connecting the world should be a basic feature of human existence. The key to not freezing to death in northern latitudes and not dying of heat stroke in equatorial climes is energy. Electricity provides heat and light in the winter and air conditioning and food preservation in summer temperatures. Growing food everywhere possible and converting all biological and material waste into benign compounds that can go back into the environment is a prerequisite. People have to understand these things are just the bare essentials for humankind to survive. Climate change remediation, a basic living stipend, rent control, and free education and universal medical care are what follow. These things make up the only civilization that will not self-destruct.
If the million or so hard-core right-wingers think they can get away with it they are going to start murdering people in the tens of thousands and then the tens of millions if they win the initial battles. They want an all-white planet. It is as simple as that. Who started this?
“Twitter is a cauldron of elites, in a lot of ways…Elon Musk represents a kind of technocrat…and there is a growing number of folks who have this idea that, as technologists, they know more than other people. -I can tell you a lot of people in Silicon Valley have this sense that, hey, we are the ones that made this world the way it is and we know how it works and the government is broken, and the system is broken and this is a techno-monarchist mindset that is insurgent in certain very powerful circles.”
These neoliberal technocrats are not new. The super-rich have just repackaged themselves.
My comments on YouTube:
For me, personally, the most heinous example of the influence of technocrats was Elon Musk, some years ago, calling Space Solar Power “the stupidest idea ever.” This was because beaming solar power down from space to cure climate change is a project that is so immense it can only be undertaken by governments and is thus unattractive to “entrepreneurs” who cannot own it all. His plan to take over the internet with his own 40,000 pieces of space junk was the goal. Very sad in that space solar power is likely the only guaranteed solution to climate change IMO.
16:30 I have commented on popular space forums for years and finally gave up after being repeatedly banned from forums for simply criticizing spacex and “rocket jesus” as he has been called. The fanboys dogpile anyone not in the Musk cult relentlessly and hound them into silence, or, failing this, they email campaign moderators to ban critics. These Ayn-Rand-in-space toxic trolls, many of them also Trumpists, have essentially hijacked all the forums discussing space exploration.
The Republican base is highly motivated by the Big Lie and its ongoing hatred for what they perceive as the forces that are destroying American culture — immigrants, Black people, “cosmopolitan” city dwellers (often meaning Jewish people), feminists, liberals (aka “communists”), LGBTQ people and so on. The proliferation of crazy conspiracy theories feeds this hate and leads to the kind of violent attack that severely injured Paul Pelosi on Friday, as well as the ongoing threats against Democrats and civil servants. Republican officials, by and large, cannot quite bring themselves to condemn this. If anything, they wink and nod and suggest that it’s all part of the game: Democrats deserve this at least a little, they are prepared to win by any means necessary and, anyway, both sides do it too. No, not really. In fact, not at all. And on the vanishingly rare occasions when that may happen. Democrats step up and strongly condemn any such actions.
I do not see a clear message being sent containing the truth about America: Everything comes down to the rich evading taxes and regulation. The right-wing has spent, literally, billions over the last century to brainwash the public into voting for policies allowing the super-rich to become wealthier than they have ever been in the history of humankind. Absolute greed has made money the demon-god of this world and American democracy soon to end. Unless the neoliberal agenda is stopped, and reversed, less than one percent of the population will soon own everything. The 99 percent will be reduced to living in relative squalor as wage slaves.
Progressive taxation, financial and environmental regulation, and social safety nets, to include universal medical care and free public education, are the minimum requirements if America is to survive. We the people must decide if Democracy is the strong eating the weak or the greatest good for the greatest number. It is a choice that can only be made by way of the truth. Trust that a society is providing the truth and not lies to its members is the only ground on which any good thing can stand. Without this trust, without the truth, a society will inevitably descend into chaos and self-destruction. Those wishing for the “freedom” to become ultimately powerful first seek to destroy the truth and divide and conquer with lies those who would keep them from preying on others. And that, is the truth.
Minimum wage should be considered a “first job wage” for teenagers working part-time over the summer break. If wages had kept pace with productivity instead of flatlining during the Reagan Revolution the minimum wage would be 23 dollars an hour. That would be what teenagers working over the summer would get.
We are failing. By every measure. Capitalist Scott Galloway says we can fix it all. Can we? Stupidity killed the dinosaurs, and it looks very likely that greed will end our species.
A new series of nine experimental studies indicates that “discordant knowing”, certainty about something one perceives as opposed by the majority of others, predicts greater fanaticism. The studies showed that experimental manipulation of participants’ views, i.e. putting them in a situation where they are set to see their views as being in opposition to the majority, increased behavioral indicators of fanaticism, such as aggression, determined ignorance and wanting to join extreme groups in service of one’s view. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Dogmatic beliefs, fanaticism and similar phenomena have been attracting interest of social psychologists for a long time. Tendencies of some people to maintain their beliefs in opposition to the views of the majority of people in their environment has been linked to these phenomena. Some studies proposed that people adopt such isolating behavior in an effort to satiate desires for certainty, control and uniqueness.
One concept proposed to explain this is “discordant knowing”. It consists of “felt knowledge” – being sure about an opinion or viewpoint – and “opposition” – perceiving one’s claim as being generally opposed by other people. While previous studies have focused very much on “felt knowledge”, a concept associated with dogmatism, rigidity, overclaiming and similar traits, psychological processes linked to holding minority viewpoints have not attracted much research attention.
To study discordant knowing, study author Anton Gollwitzer and his colleagues designed a series of nine social experiments. They recruited a total of 3277 people through Mechanical Turk [MTurk] and Prolific platforms as participants in these experiments. The first six experiments included 450-700 participants each, while the numbers in the last three were lower.
In the first five experiments, participants were randomly divided into a number of groups each of which was assigned a different experimental condition. In some of the experiments, researchers would ask participants about some of their beliefs and then, depending on the condition, asked them to imagine being in situations that regarded their views in a certain way. Participants were thereafter asked again to express the degree of endorsement of beliefs in question.
Experiments 6-9 included testing the generalizability of detected psychological mechanisms to beliefs about presidential candidates from the 2020 US elections, attitudes towards abortion, antivaccination beliefs, and on a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom authors included in the study as “members of a fanatical religious group” and thus a group holding “their religious claims in a discordant knowing framework” as compared with non-fanatical religious individuals.
Results obtained across these multifaceted experiments supported the authors’ hypothesis that discordant knowing underlies fanaticism. Experimental manipulation of participants views to fall under the discordant knowing framework heightened all aspects of fanaticism. They found that: this effect is based on mechanisms for responding to threats; it depends on the strength of opposition to one’s views; it differs from effects of extremism and extends to the way one sees oneself.
This series of studies highlights new ways in which fanaticism can be studied. However, authors note that many details about these psychological mechanisms remain unknown and should be explored in future studies. Notably, it remains unclear “whether the observed effects are temporally stable” i.e., “does inducing discordant knowing heighten fanaticism only temporarily or over a longer time-period”.
The study, “Discordant Knowing: A Social Cognitive Structure Underlying Fanaticism”, was authored by Anton Gollwitzer, Irmak Olcaysoy Okten, Angel Osorio Pizzaro, and Gabriele Oettingen.
Nasa emailed asking for more input and a link to register for their “Moon to Mars” town hall. I responded with this.
I provide input and now I am being solicited to do the same for “Moon to Mars.” Except…I don’t want America wasting money on going to Mars. My position on Ceres being the place we will land humans on while Mars is bypassed goes like this:
1. The raison d’etre for human space flight is space colonization as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, which ruled out human colonies on any natural bodies due to the requirement for one Earth gravity as necessary for humans to thrive. Artificial gravity is of course possible using centrifuge type constructs on natural bodies but true colonies with large populations are not practical except with miles-in-diameter artificial hollow spinning moons. Planetary defense can be argued to be equally important and being part of colonization. Human exploration Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO) can take place using craft designed for carrying nuclear weapons to deflect impact threats.
2. Human exploration of the solar system is possible and desirable but will require a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment. These NSLR1G crew compartments will have cosmic radiation shields likely containing over one thousand tons of water even for a small crew on an interplanetary mission. Spinning this compartment with a near mile long tether system with an equal mass on the other end will likely come about by way of “Fat Workshop” double-hulled upper stage wet workshops. The water shielding would be brought up from the Moon using approximately 20 times less energy than from Earth.
3. Such a “true” Spaceship, with artificial gravity and massive shielding, will not be propelled by chemicals but must necessarily use nuclear energy. Pulse propulsion using bombs is presently the only practical system, but recent technological advances make some form of nuclear electric propulsion a possibility. An interplanetary exploration mission would probably number several such Spaceships traveling together in case of emergencies. Such a fleet of Spaceships is likely several decades away. Once this fleet is available then the question becomes whether to send them to Mars or to bodies with oceans that might have life and can be explored with submarines. Since the icy bodies with oceans are all low gravity and far easier land on then Mars, Ceres becomes the logical first destination. Not Mars.
When Black people were slaves, white people were free. When Black people were free, white people were slaves. Slavery wasn’t just the basis of the plantation economy. It was the basis of democracy for the well-mannered overlords of elite southern society. For them, without slavery – without suffering – civilization would collapse.
Among the many obvious problems with this way of thinking is something less obvious. If you believe that what’s bad for Black people is good for white people, what do you have when they, through means internal and external, achieve their freedom?
The answer is nothing.
There’s no there there. There’s no moral constitution that can go on in the absence of a social and political order built on Black bodies. Yes, not just slavery. Black bodies stacked up over centuries – were the foundation. Take them away? Civilization really does collapse.
Now apply this binary mode of thinking to a subject much in vogue these days thanks to redhat propagandists like Tucker Carlson. Of course, the subject I’m talking about is “The End of Men” or, as David Brooks put it more mildly, the “Crisis of Men and Boys.”
At the root of this subject is an assumption that, if given a hard look, would be seen as gonzo nuts. Anyone with eyes that can see – or senses that can sense – can discern that men, especially white men, are doing fine. To be sure, problems remain, societally and individually. But relative to others, white men are still on top.
Here’s an example: I’m 48, white, tall, bald. (Not bad looking.) When I go to pick up my daughter from school, where she’s in the racial minority, nonwhite parents, especially mothers, see me coming and hustle themselves and their kids out of the way, even apologizing as if they’ve done something wrong by standing still in public. This … just happens. It’s not natural, though. It’s a culture white men created.
That culture is complicated, but I think it boils down to this: white men deserve whatever they desire – money, sex, power, whatever.
This is somewhat scandalous to talk about openly, so we invented all sorts of ways of pretending that white men work as hard as other people do; that we aren’t the center of a political culture built for us centuries ago; and that we don’t accept at birth a rich inheritance.
Of course, we do.
The question is whether we want to know that we do.
Because if white men don’t know, what happens when they don’t get their heart’s desire? Some men turn inward to religion. Some to politics. But others don’t have what it takes to reconcile themselves to the consequences of democratic politics. So they reach for a gun.
Still, others discover ways to profit from telling these white men that democratic politics has cheated them of their birthright – that when women gain a fraction of an inch of political power, it’s castration; that when Black people succeed, in business or sports or politics, that’s a sign of societal disease and rot. It wasn’t this way back in the day. Something’s gone terribly wrong. We gotta do something.
To be sure, propagandists like Carlson influence these men in various and sundry ways, but propaganda doesn’t work unless there’s already a kernel of truth to build on. In this case, there are two kernels.
One, as I said, is a political culture telling white men that they deserve everything. But the other is perhaps more important: an understanding, though likely unconscious, that if white men do not dominate – that if women and nonwhite people have equal political power as a consequence of democratic politics – what do they have?
Nothing.
They don’t have moral cores that exist independently of the lives and fortunes of their supposed inferiors, because the political culture permits them to grow up without bothering to develop moral cores. What do they have when women are strong and independent?
Due to either-or thinking, nothing.
Worse, they are nothing. Zeroes, ciphers, blanks.
That’s so terrifying, you’ll believe anything.
The reaction among Democrats and liberals, to things like the funny recommendation for men to beam red light onto their genitals, is by now conventional. We say that this wouldn’t happen if these men weren’t so sexist, so racist, so something-ist. If they only sought to be as “enlightened” as we are, this farce would be self-evident.
What some Democrats and liberals – especially Twitter hard*sses – don’t account for is that this reaction feeds into the either-or thinking that seeded a political culture at the root of the problem.
We keep telling them to not be something. But not being something terrifies them. The more we say don’t be X, the more they double down on being X. We see the former as the solution. They see the former as the problem. Either-or thinking becomes a vicious cycle.
Instead of telling them not to be something, we should tell them to be something. In other words, we should admonish them to develop a moral core – a rich inner life – that can exist independently without being conditioned on democratic politics. Instead of sharing power being seen as losing power, it would simply be seen as sharing it.
Over the past several decades comic books have gradually evolved from a niche hobby into the most valuable intellectual property in Hollywood. One person who has been around the industry during every step of that evolution is Alan Moore, who wrote landmark comics like “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta,” and “Batman: The Killing Joke.”
While Moore was an essential figure in the artistic legitimization of comic books, that doesn’t mean he’s thrilled to see what the industry has turned into. In a new interview with The Guardian, Moore expressed his concerns about our culture’s newfound obsession with superheroes.
“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see ‘Batman’ movies,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”
He continued: “Hundreds of thousands of adults lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys—and it was always boys—of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s—to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional—when things like ‘Watchmen’ were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’.”
Moore gets plenty of credit for turning comic books into an art form adults, but he’s not sure that’s what they actually are.
“I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up,” he said. “There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”
While Moore is proud of the work that he’s done in comic books, his distaste for everything that surrounds them prompted him to move on to other kinds of writing.
“I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”
A Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) environment is the prerequisite for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO). A massive cosmic ray water shield (CRWS) and Tether Generated Artificial Gravity (TGAG) system are the only practical ways to provide this.
The keys to providing NSLR1G crew compartments are double-hulled “Fat Workshops” lofted as the upper stages of Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV’s) and the ice at the lunar poles, which can be lifted into space as cosmic ray water shielding using 20 times less energy than from Earth.
The salient feature of HSF-BEO is “The Parker Minimum” of 500 tons of water shielding for a small capsule as specified by Eugene Parker. This is generally rejected as impractical but, in reality, is the single determining factor.
Nothing stops the heavy nuclei component of galactic cosmic radiation except mass and distance. The 2006 Scientific American article “Shielding Space Travelers” by Eugene Parker remains the classic popular guide on this subject and no technological miracle is likely to change the conclusions made by Parker. “Reflecting cosmic radiation” with “a strong ion field” is pure fantasy.
The particular terminology and acronyms I have used over the years have changed a little, but they are a fairly consistent lexicon of my particular view on the future of space exploration.
Better not to do a spacex and blow it up. A ULA perfect record is preferred.
The question is what will future iterations look like? The desired design philosophy, in my view, is that of the original Shuttle which the boosters and engines come from, which is a Saturn V class launch vehicle that expends one tank on the altar of the rocket equation and reuses everything else. The Shuttle accomplished this in the most inefficient, expensive, and risky way possible- in the interest of going cheap. We see the SLS as what the Shuttle might have been, except now they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and made it all expendable, as well as even more expensive. Why did this happen? Not, as the spacex fanboys scream, due to satan-as-cost-plus. It was due to political uncertainty and lack of funding. Without a long-range commitment, a plan, and funding, the cost over-runs were a certainty. What is the solution? NOT the shiny. That thing is intended to make a certain entrepreneur the owner of cyberspace, not “expand the light of consciousness into the universe.” They are not Moon people.
In my view liquid landback boosters to replace the SRB’s (two New Glenn first stages would seem to be what is needed) and recoverable pod for the RS-25’s (studied long ago) are the correct path. Reusing the escape tower and capsule, the boosters and core engines, and expending the core tank, leaves what is between the core and the capsule to be decided.
Increasing launch cadence to four to six launches a year would enable a permanent human presence in cislunar space and bring costs down. The how and where of that presence also yet to be decided. My recommendation would be to first bring water up from the lunar poles robotically for cosmic ray shielding in “Fat Workshops” and then send people.
Hydrogen is tricky stuff. von Braun really did not like it but was finally convinced it was how to get to the Moon. The only reason it happened was a top secret failed reconnaissance aircraft called “Suntan.” The hydrogen was available in quantity because they had already built the plants to supply the airplane that was finally cancelled as impractical. Air refueling became a requirement and….you can’t air refuel liquid hydrogen.
Handling and especially the turbopumps are expensive, which is why rocket jesus would not use it, but if we are going to be launching hundreds of times a year then hydrogen is what you want, instead of kerosene or methane byproducts in the upper atmosphere.
They were working on an integrated power head demonstrator for a full-flow hydrogen engine some years ago but ran out of money. It was too small anyway. What is needed is an engine in the 2 million pound thrust range like the Aerojet M-1, except full flow. Never big enough though and something with double that amount of thrust would make the most sense. A first stage with 4 such 4 million pound thrust engines and a central variable thrust engine, sized to land the first stage back, would be the way to go.
It might even be possible to use a turbo pump system to supply two of the thrust chambers, like the RD-180, and this would make for fewer components and in a sense be akin to a modern jetliner with two engines and third smaller one as the landing gear.
While the Trump Force gets funding close to NASA’s entire budget next year to weaponize Earth orbit with megaconstellations in a new cold war money scam, the spacex fanboys wail and gnash their teeth over SLS. While the Navy gets their new missile submarine and the Air Force gets their new stealth bomber, and the Army is offering a 20,000 dollar enlistment bonus to privates because they can’t find enough people who can pass the drug and physical fitness tests.
But somehow the SLS has to make “economic sense” and be “sustainable” and provide a “ROI.”
The damage done to the public perception of space by NewSpace fanboys, who are not really about space, but about an ideology, is profound.
There is no cheap. The way to keep corporations from making too much profit off cost-plus is the same way they did after the Apollo 1 fire, with draconian oversight. The way to lower the cost of the SLS per flight is to fly it more. The scam by the NewSpace Mob has been in progress for a decade. To make space “pay for itself”, which had already killed two shuttle crews. For-profit is the opposite of what Human Space Flight does. It does not generate revenue or sell anything. The small rockets used to launch satellites are useless for Beyond Earth Orbit Human Space Flight. The death-to-SLS comments, literally libraries of them, and the NASA-bashing, is about a cult of personality and a pernicious right-wing libertarian ideology.
Why NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
NewSpace is mostly about spacex, as most people can clearly see. I know you see that. Rocket jesus built a small rocket to start with, essentially a redux of the 1961 rocket NASA called “clusters last stand” because they knew it had too many engines, which violated a fundamental design principle. Musk’s manic groupies screamed bloody murder at any hint of the hobby rocket being deficient in any way. I remember it well. Even ten years ago they were shouting the miracle of Musk from the mountaintop and calling for the dismantling of NASA so it could all be handed over to the magic entrepreneur. Elon called Mars the second home of humankind…when it is not suitable for colonization. And there is the divide between the true prophet of space colonization, Gerard K. O’Neill, and the false prophet Elon Musk.
The far-right libertarian whackjobs that have taken up the torch for this billionaire grifter have influenced the public perception of space much like Trumpists have now driven democracy to the edge of the cliff. It is crazy. It is ALL 50 year old technology. That we never built any engines in the same class as the F1 after Saturn is clear proof that Human Space Flight has been at a near standstill for that long. If Human Space Flight and space colonization had been a national goal then we would have engines an order of magnitude more powerful than the F1 and would have been landing them back by the early 90’s.
So, I don’t understand how you can say the SLS has “no redeeming virtues.” It will get us out there and nothing else will. And it has an excellent escape system. And that is more than we have had since 1972. “Commercial” rockets are sized to make money with satellites, not send human-crewed spacecraft to the Moon. It is a case of go big or stay home and the SLS is the only big thing going.
Well, the difference is that I understand that humans require a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment to thrive. Not visit. To live there. But the price tag exposes who wants to exploit space and make a buck and who wants an insurance policy for our species.
Orbital assembly and refueling is incredibly inefficient and this can be seen by looking at a single example- the Saturn V. If von Braun had been given a couple million more dollars to make Skylab a true wet workshop instead of a dry one, that first space station would have had more interior space than the ISS. It went up on one rocket. We landed on the Moon with one rocket and dozens of orbital refuelings were not required.
Ice on the Moon 