This one was just too good to pass up. I thought I was going back to writing about space but just one last goodbye…please.
Oceans
“Mission scientists determined the deposits originated in a deep, global underground ocean of salty water. Based on Ceres’s gravity, they analyzed its internal structure and concluded its subsurface ocean is several hundred miles wide and around 25 miles (40 km) deep.”
“Oceans should be common features of dwarf planets based on what New Horizons learned at Pluto and Dawn at Ceres,” Dawn project scientist Julie Castillo-Rogez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in an interview with Astronomy magazine.”
Bush and 911
It is being inferred that Bush did not have a smooth transition due to the troubled election. And that this contributed to 911. Now we have Trump making this scenario happen again except it will be much worse.
I dearly wanted to stop writing about politics and return to space exploration and life extension. Not quite yet I guess.
Trump is out…Thank God, Now the Rest
It was shocking to me and many others how many voted for Trump. This means 4 years from now will be the most dangerous election in U.S. history. Trump was incompetent and incapable of really converting the government into a dictatorship. The next time we will not be so lucky.
Interesting how this is being framed in terms of race and communism. The reality is those with white grievance and those in minority groups don’t realize they are on the same side and it is the one percent who have everything they want redistributed. So the entire issue is a concealed inequality that is kept misunderstood and misrepresented by monied interests. The truth is exactly what Trumpism works to destroy first of all as the primary tactic.
I strongly believe the way forward is to explain it to the public; start with what Imbedded Liberalism and Neoliberalism are.
This is it…The Day Has Come
https://theweek.com/articles/947244/final-election-prediction-reality-wins
I want the last four years of crazy to end so I can go back to writing about space and life extension.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/?cid=rrpromo
As of 1634 hours Arizona time it is looking good.
We may win it all…the house, senate, and presidency.
Plausible Deniability
Almost there and hopefully no storm is coming.
Magical Thinking
I am hoping and praying Trump loses and we can start repairing the damage done by a half a century of Neoliberalism next year. My experience over the last four years with my coworkers, who are with only one or two exceptions, all conservative, has not been encouraging. I have tried to explain the history of our country and just get blank stares as the propaganda instilled into their being over the last couple decades or longer kicks in and blocks whatever I am saying. Like a brick wall.
I call the primary block “The Red Block” and it is the technique of equating anything characterized as “free” as being “communist.” The secondary block is “The White Block” and it is about appealing to whatever prejudice has been instilled into individuals from their childhood. The general purpose block is “The Blue Block” and plays on the anxieties most of us feel over our financial insecurity. The ways I relate these terms have to do with the “Red” in the Red Block as blood spilled in violent tribalism and this also connects with nationalism and other aspects of human nature. The “White” in the White Block is the blank piece of paper our minds are when we are children and how what we are taught in our early childhood is extremely hard to change later on. And last the “Blue” in the Blue Block is about blue blood showing in the arms of those who stay out of the sun and do not engage in manual labor. The hereditary rich in most cases.
My allusion to the flag is due to the conservative hijacking of all things patriotic.
Why the U.S. Flag is Red, White and Blue
“Heraldic devices such as seals have specific meanings for each element and color, and the U.S. Seal was no exception. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, explained the significance to Congress when he presented the seal. “The colors,” Thomson said at the time, “are those used in the flag of the United States of America. White signifies purity and innocence. Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue… signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice.” Mike Buss, a flag expert with the American Legion, says that the most obvious reason for the flag’s colors is that they were simply taken from our mother country’s flag — the Union Jack of England. “For us veterans, the flag represents why we served,” Buss says. “We were there because the flag represented our freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion.”
That was the 1st Amendment, how about the second?
https://www.livescience.com/26485-second-amendment.html
“He wants to criminalize the news of the day if it is not flattering to him.”
The Elephant in the Room
“More than 700 esteemed economists, including more than a half dozen Nobel Prize winners, have signed an open letter urging voters to reject Donald Trump at the ballot box in this election. ‘In just one term in office, Donald Trump has rendered the United States unrecognizable, and has faced no consequences for doing so,’ the letter reads. ‘He has carried out a sustained assault on democratic institutions, put his family members in charge of critical government functions during a pandemic, called for his political opponents to be thrown in prison, normalized corruption, and weakened the economic recovery with selfish and reckless behavior. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that the electorate do what no one else can: reclaim your democracy by voting to remove Donald Trump from office.”
The Republicans are the radical Neoliberals who have made money the god of this nation and by extension of the planet. The Corporate Democrats are only a lesser evil and might, by great effort, be steered back toward the Imbedded Liberalism of The New Deal. Trumpism is the Dunning-Kruger version of Neoliberalism and a clear and present danger to our species. It is fairly simple to discern who is crossing the line into fascism by statements such as “America is not a democracy, it is a Republic”, and terminology like “the radical liberal mob.”
The cult of the self is in biblical terms a form of idolatry.
Exactly how much of the profits made are you entitled to as a worker? The Neoliberal answer is zero. You get what the owner in an ownership society decides to pay you and if you don’t like it you are free to seek other employment. No entitlements. The Neoliberal believes this is all you get and it is absolutely fair because you are not a slave and have the freedom to leave just as they have the freedom to pay you whatever they want to. Neoliberals see this as the only exception, the only necessary restraint, on their absolute greed- that if they are not paying their workers enough then they will not have enough workers and will have to pay more. Any taxes are theft and an infringement of their freedom. When all the land and water become the property of the few this quickly becomes a bizarre game and exposes the hypocrisy and true thieves. In theological terms this is called Latifundalization.
In laymen terms it is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The golden rule for Neoliberals: those with the gold make the rules.
Manipulating the F-Scale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-scale_(personality_test)
It seems there is a personality type the fascists seek to radicalize because they are fairly sure to succeed. Trump, perhaps because he is somewhere on the sociopath scale, knows how to manipulate this percentage of the population who are vulnerable. With about 30 percent said to be supporting Trumpism, Plato’s assertion that democracy cannot work may have some validity. Disenfranchising one out of three voters because they are gullible and cannot think critically does not seem very Democratic.
However…just as Imbedded Liberalism has elements of two adversarial systems- socialism and capitalism- it may be that only qualifying the non-psychopathological part of the population to vote is the best solution. We weaponized IQ tests for war…why not optimize personality evaluations for voting?
Explaining Trump and Evangelicals
I had to explain why conservative Christians are voting for Trump to my wife after we came back from voting. This article helped.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/jerusalem-trumps-gift-to-evangelicals/