3:00 “-When we were kinds, we saw the close-up shot of those NASA rockets going up, the country coming together-”
I was going to try and lay off the politics and get back into the original mission of this blog but…I cannot seem to do that when the space age is being referred to in this manner.
Whose country is this? The aging white males with no education, a low-paying job, and no hope of living the life their parents did are going to burn it all down out of sheer frustration and rage. It is true. And why is this? Greed. The homeowning 40 hour a week citizen with job security, medical care that will not bankrupt them, with one breadwinner and one homemaker…that seems gone forever. Wealth has been transferred upward from the middle class to the wealthy since the Reagan Revolution and now it is all about to melt down.
My aging white male poorly educated coworkers have been so propagandized they are now living in an alternate universe.
Hadfield talks about how great spacex is but then talks about what a big problem space junk is. Ridiculous. He then goes on to talk about space tourism being the next big thing and how it will “free up NASA to explore.” Ridiculous.
The ISS never should have been built. Of the many paths Human Space Flight could have taken the most efficient, in terms of Low Earth Orbit, would have been to use the space shuttle to better advantage. The shuttle orbiters could have stayed up for close to the standard 6-month tour by either loading up on life support or being resupplied or a combination of both. The orbiter would have had to be landed by remote control or by a pilot transferred to the orbiter from another orbiter…or a combination of both. The fantastic sum of money squandered on the ISS should have been spent on semi-expendable robot lunar landers. This, however, is after the fact that the shuttle program itself was a mistake.
The best course, in hindsight, would have been modifying the Saturn V into a reusable system over the course of several decades. The first stage, capsule and tower being the first reusable components, followed by different iterations of the second and third stage. With a reusable, or partially reusable Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) sending robot landers to the Moon the key piece of hardware would have been next. The critical missing piece of the puzzle was the “Fat Workshop.” This double hulled wet workshop would have been the basic crew compartment for everything to follow.
Before continuing, a review of the terms used on this blog concerning space-
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Humans in LEO or below Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) are not technically engaging in Human Space Flight (HSF) but instead Orbital Flight. Space is generally defined as in or beyond GEO and below this as simply Earth Orbit.
Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) This is catch-all term applying to any craft that flies above LEO and even above GEO but is still in Earth Orbit, often in an eccentric orbit.
Beyond Low Earth Orbit (BLEO) This is the “cislunar sea” found between GEO and Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) and generally refers to transits between the Earth and the Moon. This is where Lunar Cyclers operate.
Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO) This generally refers to interplanetary flight.
There were many possible paths to establishing a permanent human presence in space. At every opportunity the U.S. went cheap and sabotaged any prospect of a successful program.
My comment on this YouTube video: “I was writing about this in 2015 on my wordpress blog “Ice on the Moon” and wrote an article for space science magazine titled “Water and Bombs.” I have since refined my view into what I call the “Parker-Dyson-Spudis-Continuum” (PDSC). This states that a massive water shield derived from lunar ice and Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (bombs) is the only way we are going Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). The best first destination is NOT Mars, which is a dead end, but Ceres. That is, after we have created a cislunar infrastructure to support constructing “true” spaceships providing a Near Sea Level 1 Gravity environment (NSL1G). Along with the PDSC I believe the critical piece of missing hardware is the “Fat Workshop” which is a double hulled wet workshop to facilitate shielded crew compartments for spaceships, lunar cyclers, GEO telecom platforms, etc. and…I am not a Musk fan.”
Another danger sign. These creatures are an abomination…they represent, literally, genocide of other races, of women and children, of the disabled. They support that as an ideology. And they are starting to show up on the streets.
4:50 “-racism is a mechanism of power, which is why you see many people who aren’t personally racist at all, who are simply…want their taxes cut, don’t want government regulation, exploiting any means they can, supporting any kind of mass panic, be it a racial panic, be it a panic about COVID, to push people to vote for an extremist movement that is going to pad their pockets.”
5:25 “-many business elites, particularly in the hydrocarbon business, they recognize that their work is against the public good. So…they need to support a movement that will split apart the public and result in a system that they can control.”
The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public goodis an impediment…” Jason Stanley
Paraphrasing Kathleen Belew: All of us are more violent in the aftermath of war (Afghanistan)…Certainly, we are experiencing one of these historic peaks. “We are at a crisis point that just boggles understanding.”
The one percent sowed chaos to keep eyes turned away from taxes and regulation and may well have burned this nation to the ground.
“The 400 richest families in America pay about 6 percent income tax.”
They used to pay 91 percent and that 85 percent is paying for this insurrection. It is not over and the crescendo has not yet come to pass.
Ethnic Entrepreneurs…in an “anocracy.” We are in big trouble. What is so bizarre is my black and hispanic coworkers who are conservatives or evangelicals and their cognitive dissonance regarding what is going to happen to them when the Fascists take over. I know what is going to happen but they do not seem capable of understanding it. My uncle fought at the battle of the bulge.
Most Americans don’t even understand what democracy is; the elected few governing according to the wishes of and serving the many. The autocrats are the wealthy few governing according to their wishes and served by the many.
In the YouTube Video below the term Neoliberalism does not come up, and that is a shame. However, the idea of progressive wages, of a maximum allowable wage being connected to a minimum wage, IS mentioned. That a successful company would have to pay the lowest paid employee some set percentage of the highest salary would terrify Neoliberals. Reagan and Thatcher would have advocated for death camps instead.
EO Wilson taught me that we are driven by unseen forces and for most that lesson is refused. We are not the captains of our fate except perhaps in that tiniest detail of sentient existence; realizing that we are not the captains of our fate.
“Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and a fear of biological determinism,[a] accusing among others Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of being “radical scientists”, whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science,[26] while Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin, who drew a distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity,[27] argue that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds. Gould grouped sociobiology with eugenics, criticizing both in his book The Mismeasure of Man.[28]
Noam Chomsky has expressed views on sociobiology on several occasions. During a 1976 meeting of the Sociobiology Study Group, as reported by Ullica Segerstråle, Chomsky argued for the importance of a sociobiologically informed notion of human nature.[29] Chomsky argued that human beings are biological organisms and ought to be studied as such, with his criticism of the “blank slate” doctrine in the social sciences (which would inspire a great deal of Steven Pinker’s and others’ work in evolutionary psychology), in his 1975 Reflections on Language.[30]“
Interesting to sort out where Mammon supernaturally enters into this argument. I say this as lately I am more and more convinced that greed is the force that drives all things now in the modern world. There is nothing left but greed, which is really just what passes for faith when money is the god of planet Earth.
There is a dividing line between two types of human being. This is not an appropriate statement to make in almost any context imaginable. But in this case…I feel justified in doing so. I listened to the linked Tech Nation podcast the other morning on the way to work- it was a repeat from several months ago- and it was both exhilarating and infuriating. Near the end the scientist being interviewed explains there is just not enough of a market for big pharma to fund a cure for spinal cord injuries. Not enough profit. Though they make, literally, countless billions in profits (pharma revenues worldwide, those reported anyway, totaled 1.27 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020). There are those who believe, and will tell you this in so many words, that there is a dollar price for everything that exists, and to pose that some things are not to be bought and sold is to go down the road of socialism and this “evil” should not be entertained.
The language in this argument has been carefully engineered over the last couple centuries to produce, again, literally, libraries full of dense, endless, misinformation and counterarguments and obfuscations. It is the bible of Mammon, one of the seven princes of hell and the canon of Neoliberalism. I am not saying people cannot change their views, but the last couple years have led me to believe it is very difficult. Neoliberalism is a mindset, and ideology, that is a cancer on the human race and if not treated will ultimately lead to our extinction. The spinal cord example is a good way to explain to people that Democracy is the enemy of Neoliberalism. We in America are locked in an invisible unspoken struggle for the soul of humanity. Very few people understand this.
“We are locked in an invisible unspoken struggle for the soul of humanity.”
Notice I refer to humanity as having a soul. A collective soul. There are certain words and categories of words that have been demonized and made into blasphemies by the right. Collective, community, redistribution, social, etc. Any terminology that is used when describing large groups of people has been targeted in an Orwellian manner. I am in the process of leaving a job I have struggled with for the last 6 years. In the course of my life, I have belonged to a few professional organizations that treated their people well and I always took this for granted and thought, surely everyone must understand how this works! I was incredibly naive and foolish to think those few good shops were the norm of course. But I wanted to believe that people are basically good- and maybe they are…except for the few that abuse their power and contaminate the world with their predatory ideology. In fact, one of my coworkers told me, as we discussed my exit, that now I have learned something new and am better for it. I have learned from seeing the best and the worst- and my real job, in the last years of my life, appears to be to explain this so all know the truth. Which is actually my favorite verse in the Bible, the words that inform what I consider my essential quest for knowledge of this life; when Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?”
As a systems troubleshooter I understand the basic problem. Humans are faced with a profound desire to succeed and to dominate. They also have the opposite drive built into them- to cooperate instead of competing when required. When assaulted with variations of FOMO and NIMBY and the other weapons in the culture war arsenal, people generally surrender to the manufactured complexity of it all. When tasked with making choices between fight, flight, or freeze, the masses really have no choice but to freeze their routine into conformity. Often not for themselves but for the sake of their children or family or extended family. It comes down to fear, to Terror Management. To conform, cooperate, and consume, equates to survival. Those who have a natural ability to bypass primal fear, related to narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy, seem most equipped to place themselves in positions of power. Not that all those who control our lives are narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths…
Which brings us back to that dividing line between two types of people.
The spinal injury example is not a one off. It is common, as this other Tech Nation podcast tells us. Money is the god of this world and more important than human life. And now for some more truth:
Ice on the Moon 