“-Stevens argued that the unique qualities of corporations and other artificial legal entities made them dangerous to democratic elections. These legal entities, he argued, have perpetual life, the ability to amass large sums of money, limited liability, no ability to vote, no morality, no purpose outside profit-making, and no loyalty. Therefore, he argued, the courts should permit legislatures to regulate corporate participation in the political process.”
“Full Orwellian Inversion” is a good term to describe the revisionism being attempted. What Mika’s father talked about long ago was “Balkanization”, and every day I am more and more afraid of America melting down. Very few people believe it can happen but some millions want it to happen and that is incredibly dangerous.
A fairly bad sci-fi movie…but this scene has much in it to, as the talking heads say, “unpack.”
America is involved in an invisible civil war right now the rest of the world is very much aware of. Other nations are looking on and talking about it but here we cannot see the forest for the trees. Since 1945 the human race has collectively trembled at the thought of nuclear war and a new dark age, if not extinction. Just when it seemed the threat of nuclear warfare was diminishing we are now faced with civil unrest and the possible unraveling of democracy.
I tend to blame it on smart phones. I do not own one but I have certainly been a witness to the effects of this technology. The worst feature is the time that was previously used watching and contemplating the news from a few trusted sources is now…a thing of the past. There was a time not so long ago that a significant percentage of the population had some knowledge of the history of our species and how the different systems of government mostly have not succeeded. The single most successful attempt at a government seeking to do the most good for the most people as I have explained it to some of my coworkers is incomprehensible. They simply do not have the foundation to understand it. The history of Embedded Liberalism, which sustained America before and after World War II, is now almost completely unknown. Demagoguery has become the new guiding light. Guiding us off a cliff.
Donald Trump took his campaign against American democracy to North Carolina on Saturday and offered a rambling, grievance-laden harangue that ought to catalyze Republican leaders to repudiate a man whose lies, bigotry and irrationality are turning their party into a moral sinkhole.
Fat chance, I know. But Republicans should watch Trump’s 90-minute diatribe in its entirety. They might realize that tying their fate to a washed-up demagogue and the extremists he cultivates is not only an affront to decency. It could also be a colossal political mistake.
Most Washington Republicans say they want to “move on” from Trump. But they avoid anything that might offend his delicate sensibilities or those of his supporters.
Sorry, guys, but you won’t be able to “move on” to the responsible governing you purport to believe in until you confront the anti-democratic virus in your party and the vile man spreading the contagion.
And spread it Trump did during his 90-minute soliloquy at the state GOP convention in Greenville, N.C. Almost everything he said drew raucous cheers — except, curiously, his taking full credit for the pandemic-ending vaccines.
Now, I suspect that a substantial majority of Americans — certainly this one — would prefer to ignore Trump and let him rave into a void.
Alas, there is no void, as his adoring crowd demonstrated Saturday.
They warmed to his staple attacks on “criminal aliens” and “murderers, drug dealers”; his calls for China to pay $10 trillion in global “reparations” for covid-19 damage; all of it peppered with distorted critiques of President Biden’s policies. To cover up his own pandemic failures, he joined his allies’ escalating campaign against Anthony Fauci, whom he called “a hell of a promoter” but also “a radical masker” who had been “wrong on almost every issue.”
Trump’s most energetic moments came in service to two of his favorite causes: the “disgrace” of the 2020 election and defending himself.
One falsehood followed another about “thousands and thousands of people, dead people” casting ballots, dropboxes as tools of fraud in “the most corrupt election in the history of our country” and the supposed manipulation of mail ballots by Democrats.
And referring to the ongoing investigations of his business activities, Trump denounced New York’s “radical-left prosecutors” and their “crusade to inflict pain on me.”
You might dismiss it all as a nostalgic road show but for this: Polls show that most Republicans believe Trump’s preposterous election claims. Republican politicians in at least 14 states have deployed Trump’s fantasies as excuses to pass voter-suppression measures, some of which read as if they were translated directly from the Russian or the Hungarian. Imitating the efforts of strongmen abroad to undercut free electoral competition, some of these laws empower partisan bodies to set aside honest ballot counts.
And while Washington Republicans coddle Trump or fall silent, many in their party embrace the lunatic fringe.
Take the bizarre QAnon conspiracy. Pollsters at PRRI recently asked Americans if they agreed or disagreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
An astonishing 23 percent of Republicans agreed, and 28 percent of Republicans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Not being a rocket scientist myself, it might be well to try and effect that old liberal saw and actually educate the average person (with an IQ of 100). This needs to be done in a reasonably short period of time (45 minutes is, if I recall correctly, how long the average person can pay attention). Unfortunately, as I mentioned, smart phones have chopped that 3 quarters of an hour down to likely less than ten minutes. I suspect four “episodes” of about ten minutes and not too densely packed with information, is what might work. My father once told me there is a “rule of three” that can be applied to most things and three points to each episode seems to be a good idea. So I am going to try and do that…and as my daughter urged me, put it into a podcast.
One Dash One
Communism is an ideology whose main feature is the abolition of private property.
Capitalism is an ideology whose main feature is the unalienable right to private property.
Socialism can be seen as a system utilizing both features in the most utilitarian (the greatest good for the greatest number) way possible. It is not that hard to understand.
There is socialism that leans way to the left and socialism that leans way to the right.
Much of the political violence that has brought down empires through the centuries and is presently plaguing America in the form of Trumpism concerns these three principle talking points- Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism. One of my wife’s teachers in seminary, very famous in theological circles, taught her- and she taught me- about “latifundialization”, and in this first episode I want to talk about the term latifundialization. I believe it is the best way to understand the three principle political talking points in our society today, which are Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism.
Historians have a saying that we are all children of Rome because much of the way the modern world works can be traced back to ancient Rome. Our representative democracy is an example of this. Rome, like most Empires, started out as a rural community of farmers that banded together to collectively protect their individual parcels of land. Collective and individual are two key words here that are often spun and misrepresented by politicians and demagogues. The term “collective” is endlessly demonized as just another word for the great satan known as communism but it is really an idea that must NOT be demonized. Cooperation as a collective operation is what makes human society possible. A poem written in1624, “No Man is an Island”, explains this quite well. No house stands divided against itself.
As Rome became an empire through the centuries the small farmer gradually became no more as rich and powerful individuals and families acquired and combined all the land into giant estates called Latifundia. This same story plays out in the bible and in almost every nation across history. Capitalism is essentially about ownership of land, and in the modern world, possession of that magical property called money. In the ancient world it was also ownership of other human beings. Slavery was the civilization-building fossil fuel of the ancient world and it was slaves that worked the great estates of the rich. In 1917, as the first world war raged, Russia’s impoverished masses, many who were essentially slaves in everything but name, rebelled. The corrupt Czarist regime fell and thus the evil empire known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Union, was soon to be born. Communism was on the march.
The story I am telling leaves many details out of course. How much this misrepresents depends on the preexisting bias of the writer and reader. My favorite telling of the story of the American New Deal is damned as pure nonsense by those on the far right and is also maligned by the left. I have related it on this blog before and it goes like this:
The greatest danger to democracy after the civil war (until recently) was generated by technology. Fossil fuel fired factories and steam engines in ships and locomotives began to pour wealth into individual pockets in amounts never seen before in history. The legend is that Teddy Roosevelt saved America from the Robber Barons at the turn of the century but the corruption they had created finally destroyed the U.S. economy in 1929. The communists and labor unions suddenly became quite powerful as near-starving soon-to-be homeless people tend to come together “in solidarity.” The second President Roosevelt, FDR, was approached and told if he did not fix the problem then another Russian revolution was certain- this time in America. Thus was born The New Deal with progressive taxation as high as 91 percent on the top earners, social security, jobs programs, and unemployment insurance.
This system is called Imbedded Liberalism. The term liberalism here actually has the old meaning which is the opposite of what people think of as liberalism today. It is essentially socialism that leans way to the right. It allows people to be relatively rich and keep a certain amount of the wealth they acquire. This is absolute blasphemy to capitalists and very unsatisfying to communists. It is about redistributing a “fair” part of the wealth from the few to the many by way of progressive taxation. The more you make the more you pay. Capitalists call it blatant theft from the individual and communists consider any private wealth to be theft to start with. See how that works? What this system seeks to accomplish is to prevent a few percent of the population from impoverishing the rest or overthrowing democracy by way of their obscene wealth.
The rich pursue propaganda and demagoguery as the path to preserving their vast wealth while the poor pursue…getting a job so they can pay their bills.
It is the demagogue-
(noun “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.” a gifted demagogue with particular skill in manipulating the press“)
-and the new technology of algorithms used by social media companies that have pushed the mightiest nation in history to the brink of a second civil war.
Out of control capitalism with a few living in luxury owning everything while the many labor in squalor with nothing is nothing new and goes back thousands of years; latifundialization. To manipulate the wage slave into being “happy” and worshipping their semi-divine masters is the oldest game of all. We are told we too can be gods with a little g if we work hard enough. The reality is that only a tiny fraction of our labor is returned to us. Most of it goes in the pockets of those in the layers of control above us who do very little except make decisions. The decisions that benefit us least of all. That is the truth about greed and amassing wealth- it is a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest game and almost all of us are born into the bottom of an artificial food chain. In reality we are not lions and lambs; we are all human. Some are smarter but not deserving of 740,000 times more than the rest (Bezos fortune upon retiring at age 57).
They will tell you they do deserve every penny and the rest of us do not. You decide. In 1789 the French, inspired by the American Revolution, decided the rich did not deserve to own everything while they went hungry and soon after there were many Guillotines.
The anarchy and chaos of revolutions often result in something far worse than the original injustice. The odds are not good. Fascism is not good.
We all seem to have forgotten about Oklahoma City. As Afghanistan is abandoned and about to plunge back into tribal warfare, the U.S. is now facing an army of McVeighs all considering a path to realizing their own destiny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
“Jesus Christ would have to come down and tell me that Biden won before I would ever believe it,” one Donald Trump supporter said at the former president’s first rally of 2021.
Barr is not Christ…but he was Trump’s boy and I have to believe him I guess.
It has happened over and over again over the last eight thousand or so years…but this time might be the last. In the 21st century our species may not survive a descent into the chaos at the end of empire again.
Trump thinks he will be overthrowing the government in August. Gaetz says we should exercise our 2nd Amendment rights and Flynn says we should have a military coup. “This has become an actual viable threat to our democracy-.” The Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, The Boogaloo Boys, Qanon, etc. etc. are ready to go to war and there are millions, tens of millions, of Trumpists who think violence is the only way to make America right again.
It is crazy. We were in trouble, we are in trouble, and it is not going away. If the left does nothing then Fascism is in our future. We could be looking at a new flag:
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour
Nobody is visiting MY blog either. Too bad, they don’t know what they are missing.
But…enough about blogging, on to my futurist agenda. To dive right into that let us go back to a paper written in 1998:
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07jones.pdf Both of these approaches do away with the intermediary of lasers and particle accelerators, using instead very large electric current pulses generated by pulsed power sources to implode a fusion target. The current pulses may be generated by large capacitor banks or by the compression of magnetic fields with high explosives (Appendix A), a technique pioneered by Andrei Sakharov at Arzamas-16.9
-the most powerful chemical explosive known (equivalent to 2.38 kg of TNT per kg)[3] and its detonation velocity of 10100 m/s[3] also the fastest. There’s just one small problem with it: Its price. Because the only known method of synthesizing it is so long and difficult, each gram of octanitrocubane is actually more expensive than gold[4]
High temperature superconductors for plasma confinement and the magnetic nozzle that result in drastically reduced cooling requirements
A hydrogen bomb essentially uses molecular energy (high explosive) to compress highly enriched uranium or plutonium enough to produce a nuclear fission explosion (splitting large atoms) which is then used to light off a fusion explosion (fusing small atoms). Reorganizing molecules gives off a little energy, splitting large atoms gives off about a million times more, and fusing small atoms quadruples that energy, producing four million times more than the original chemical reaction. Splitting those big atoms comes with the most baggage so going from a relatively infinitesimal amount of molecular energy straight to four million times more is a far larger gain than just fourfold.
The trick is to produce the energy of a fission explosion with molecular energy on a much smaller scale and then use that to produce a fusion reaction. The analogy that comes to mind is using a kitchen match to start a forest fire instead of dropping a thousand pounds of napalm. The original concept was researched by the Russians but the explosives and magnetic field generation technology available was not capable of making it happen. Not only those factors but manufacturing tolerances and computing power are also critical. Technology has advanced so fast that I would bet some money we may now be able to make it happen.
Much of the fusion energy research of the last half a century pursuing “commercial” applications has been a cover for weapons research. A dirty little secret and one of those few “true” conspiracy theories. What the “clean fusion bomb” represents is a nightmare for the superpowers. It is simple enough to identify those seeking to possess nuclear weapons because fissile material is required and that means Uranium 235 (or Plutonium derived from it – those “big atoms”). But, and this is the whole point, NOT requiring fissile material to generate fusion also represents a way to travel throughout the solar system with great economy and efficiency using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. So this is a conspiracy I may wish was true, and may actually be true.
Fusion bombs require a fission bomb to light them off- which is a huge drawback if you want to use fusion explosions for propelling spaceships. Fissile material comes with a great many problems attached but if you have a way to light off an H-bomb without a fission bomb- all those problems magically go away. Unfortunately, one very big problem rears it’s ugly head- Nuclear Proliferation. Concerning Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO), or, “Interplanetary Travel”, the original problem remains. The solution was found over 60 years ago by one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, Stanislaw Ulam. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion eliminates the problem of confining nuclear reactions which makes all other nuclear schemes impractical.
“It is much more than that-” Today was a big deal. Democracy continues to be in great danger.
“The reason our party is growing with minorities and with working men and women is because president Trump appears to be on the side of people working really hard-” Lindsey Graham
My coworkers are blue collar and none of us are college graduates- we are classic white grievance fodder for Trumpism. I, as my big five personality profile would predict, am NOT a Trumpist… but so many others who have different character traits were sucked into the alt right alternate reality by satanic algorithms. And here we are, millions of us on opposite sides of a fence constructed of greed and propaganda.
“Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) told The Daily Beast that Cheney had thrown GOP lawmakers “under the bus” precisely because she called out those actively questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.
“If we say we have questions about the 2020 election, then you’re somehow enemy to democracy,” Loudermilk said.”
This is the Orwellian playbook that Trumpist’s are now completely relying on- denying reality and saying the lie must be the truth and the truth must be the lie because the Cult Leader says so. “Questioning” an election that was endlessly investigated and found to be a fair and legal election by every state election official and court of law, those courts packed with republican appointed judges, is…..in fact….being an enemy to democracy. There is no “somehow” about it.
The simple story that so many on the right simply refuse to believe is that the Republican Party is the party of the rich, and has, for over a century, worked to increase the wealth of the one percent while doing as little as possible for the ninety-nine. When pressed they present trickle-down economics as the true faith and everything else as godless communism. This is their true identity and yet so many people I know have a completely different view. Fox News is the surreal faux reality TV portrayal of a right-wing fantasy. It poisoned my father’s last years, as he loved Bill O’Reilly and considered Donald Trump the best candidate because he was “a successful businessman.” I even considered voting for Trump just to honor his memory, but I could not and so did not vote at all. I certainly voted after the four year trainwreck that ensued. And now it seems it is not over and could actually get worse. If this is the death of truth in America then our days as a functioning nation are numbered.
White grievance, fear of “replacement” – The more the white population had declined the greater the number of insurrectionists came from those counties. 4 percent, or 10 million, believe the election was stolen and would willingly participate in violent protest. The most common characteristic was fear of replacement. The clear core belief is the “rights” of non-whites rising above whites.
Trumpism (fascism) is infecting the right and fear of white replacement is being exploited (with social media) to manipulate the masses. Neoliberalism has no problem with this dynamic and has in fact enabled it. Inequality has driven white grievance and resulted in Trumpism. The worst part of all of this is the one third of the insurrectionists who are veterans or active duty military and law enforcement.
Parabolic Arc, the last forum where I was allowed to comment, has banned me. No criticism of the NewSpace flagship company (or it’s founder) is tolerated on any of the popular space forums. The intense and incessant harassment I have experienced over the last decade anywhere I have attempted to express my views was never something I tolerated and I gave it back…and was banned. Over and over again. And now, once again, my voice, my “vote” in the public forum of ideas, has been silenced.
The Trump Cult and the Musk Cult are in many ways very similar, though the two seem to agree on only a few issues, such as COVID denial and the rich getting infinitely richer. While Musk professes to be all about working to mitigate climate change, his position on Space Solar Energy, the only real solution available, is “Space Solar Power- the stupidest thing ever.” The most pernicious idea spread by the NewSpace Mob has been that the space agency and government contractors (that is everybody) are corrupt, incompetent, and that NASA should be dismantled and it all (presumably tax dollars also) “handed over to Musk.”
Handing over all power to a totalitarian dictator and accompanying oligarchs is nothing new. The sociopaths who crave power and wealth turned the 20th century, which I was born into the middle of, a genocidal bloodbath. I can only assume what has ended my participation in public discourse on that last forum I was commenting on was this view, which was posted and then quickly removed shortly before I was banned:
“Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon. He emigrated to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford Site did so the next year. At Los Alamos, he headed F Division, part of which worked on Edward Teller’s thermonuclear “Super” bomb. He was present at the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, where he used his Fermi method to estimate the bomb’s yield.”
They call it “Edward Teller’s- Super” but it was really Stan Ulam that created the H-bomb.
Fermi wondered why we were not detecting other intelligent beings beyond Earth and this became the Fermi Paradox and THAT is actually what space is all about….not tourism. It is about us collectively, as a species, and not about individual ideology. It is interesting that “heaven” is also about survival and those other stars in the heavens are the only way “we” are going to be here for more than a tick of the relative clock.
Some people are fine with Human extinction and consider it, like their own death, to be inevitable and focus on having their fun- and to hell with everything else. Some people even profess an interest in the survival imperative as long as it benefits their hobby or tourism agendas. They make up a conversation inferring only the profit motive and personal greed is going to save our species from itself. Very clever.
Only the massive resources of a Superpower like America, committed to a decades long public works project in space, can expand humankind into the cosmos. Anything else is a scam. Not only that, but a scam working directly against the survival of the human race. The NewSpace scam. NewSpace delenda est
Ice on the Moon 