Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit
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.
Almost there and hopefully no storm is coming.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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?
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stochastic_terrorism
Two weeks left and this nightmare will be over- hopefully. And I can go back to writing about life extension and space colonization.
Trumpism is a lesson to the human race, not just America. It may be our last chance to change course away from the looming disaster Neoliberalism is steering us toward. Those of us who have some ability to think critically have witnessed the Trump cult firsthand and now see clearly the sickness that caused so much destruction in the last century. Not that we fully understand it, but identifying the enemy is the first step.
George Santayana’s most famous quote is so often misquoted by conservatives it is important to revisit in this context:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“
Often the last sentence is used alone to justify burning a system to the ground and starting from nothing. Inferring that we must remember how bad this or that was and destroy it. In fact the meaning of the whole quote is exactly the opposite. The New Deal, Keynesian Imbedded Liberalism, from approximately 1930 to 1980, was the system of mixing capitalism and socialism that made America great. The history has been largely rewritten or taken off the library shelf regarding how The New Deal lifted the United States up and then how the “monied interests” finally brought it crashing down so they could once again attempt to install an autocratic oligarchy. Trumpism is the natural progression of Neoliberalism- as the originators of the ideology clearly leaned in the direction of fascism and promoted it in South America.
The numbers are fairly clear on letting the virus “wash over” the United States- around 6 million will die. Those who believe vaccines are “around the corner” and the pandemic is over are in for a big surprise.
Trumpism is sociopathy applied to politics- and nobody will ever forget what it has now done to the United States. The profound and unrealized damage will linger for decades.
Algorithms were used to steer the citizenry away from the truth, from the content that exposed and criticized the corporate oligarchy and inverted totalitarianism.
The Neoliberal fantasy is slavery- then your workers cannot cost you anything but the bare minimum you have to expend on food and shelter. When something generates a profit it no longer costs you anything and becomes “free.” So…everything must generate revenue and profit or it is useless. The extreme expression of this ideology is branding people as “useless eaters” and then exterminating them as in Nazi Germany. It is no coincidence.
Not-for-profit is the key term. Non-profits are the nightmare of the rich since it is the opposite of their ideology. Everything MUST generate a profit or be eliminated from the economic “gene pool.” It is actually their religion, the fundamental feature best summarized as social Darwinism: only the rich matter. Non-profit to Neoliberalism is as Satanism to Christianity. And the whole point of socialism is to do what is best for the public without regard for individual profit. Again, what is best for Neoliberals is what is best (profit) for the individual without regard to the public. See how that works?
That is the invisible war being fought and the Neoliberal frame this in terms of collectivism (as satanic socialism) vs individualism (the sacred free market). The Neoliberals consider the word freedom to be interchangeable with the word greed- they want no taxes, no regulation, and none from the lower classes able to sue them. In reality a mixed system like The New Deal is the only system that works without falling apart. The guillotine and totalitarianism and chaos is the inevitable consequence of the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. Neoliberalism is an “inverted totalitarianism” that seeks wage slavery as the status quo. It is not working. Pray for The Green New Deal.
My YouTube comment on the Salon article: “He is a Narcissist/Sociopath draft dodging tax dodging 6 time bankrupt 3 time married failed rich boy reality tv insulter who calls vets and Killed In Action suckers and losers, Christians are fools and schmucks, calls the news fake and the enemy of the people while he lies endlessly. All of this is true and yet he has a cult, and I know some of them, that will vote for him even though his incompetence has caused the deaths of, by most estimates, over a hundred thousand Americans. The last 4 years have disturbed and depressed me about the future of America and this creature, who is blatantly trying to steal reelection, has damaged the nation for decades to come.”
And after reading the Salon article I asked myself, “Is it really possible the forever trumpers have some kind of psychiatric disorder? All those millions of people?
And then I remembered a picture I came across not long ago of Evita’s funeral.
And now we see the violence beginning:
I was talking with a coworker last night, one of those people I would never think of as a rabid forever trumper, and he made references to the only two people he can stand to listen to on TV as being Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. This, despite his seeming to be fairly moderate in his views. He derided AOC about causing Amazon to abandon their project in New York and I then expressed my view- that it was a headquarters for executives that would do nothing for AOC’s constituents except cost them money due to gentrification. He seemed to take it well. Then he talked about “the riots” and I expressed my view that they were not really riots. He argued they were and I stated a riot generally involves hundreds or even several thousand people and watching the videos it is obvious this is only a few lawbreakers using the protests as cover. And he seemed to take that well also. Interestingly, another coworker, overhearing our conversation, refused to take any directions from me later in the evening. Since we usually work well together this was telling.
We have millions of people that have been conned, and once they are hooked, having invested, or “bought in”, they are extremely unwilling to cut their losses. This is because it is not money they have invested, but emotions and their own self-perception as being smart enough to know what is right and wrong. Part of the game is this loyalty to the cult figure fueled by a persons own self-image and self-esteem. Whatever terminology is used it is essentially about not being humiliated. Many forever trumpers, having expressed their views to the people around them for the last couple years, are afraid they will be seen for the rest of their lives as fools for promoting Trumpism.
Neoliberals have spent hundreds of millions in propaganda and far more in political funding over the last half a century to demonize “socialism.” The left, because of communist regimes being painted as the inevitable end result of socialism, have never been able to effectively reply and the extreme right triumphed in this winning of hearts and minds. The story is not being accurately related to the American people that The New Deal, from the 1930’s all the way up to the early 1980’s, used Imbedded Liberalism as the operating principle, and this system was essentially socialist. Liberalism, the old term for capitalism, was placed inside, or imbedded, in a socialist political system.
The history is fairly clear on this to anyone who takes some hours to read up on it. From the 1870’s all the way up to the crash of 29, the super-rich consistently worked to take over America and make it an Oligarchy (like Russia is right now). The United States reorganized after the civil war toward industry and expansion all the way west. Within a few years the new mega-industries of railroads, fossil fuels, steel, and factory mass production made certain people super-rich. These individuals were immediately identified as a serious threat to the democratic system and the corruption their obscene wealth generated was fought against all through the half a century leading up to the stock market crash. Politicians who were not bought and unions were the main stumbling blocks to those seeking absolute power. Eventually, as it always does, this predatory rule by greed fell apart and The New Deal came into effect.
The Neoliberal movement worked against The New Deal from the start. The failure of soviet communism enabled the demonization of socialism by rebranding it as communism by way of ceaseless propaganda. The left could thus mount no effective defense of The New Deal- which mixed together capitalism and socialism to form the most functional system the world had ever seen. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s saw the end of Keynesian Imbedded Liberalism, that is, the end of the New Deal, and wages immediately flattened and have never come back for the middle class. The result has been a slow redistribution of wealth upward to the present situation of astronomical wealth inequality. It is ironic that the Americans in the picture flying their “Socialism Sucks” banner are actually promoting a system that is impoverishing them and is working toward taking away everything “socialist” policies have given them.
Trumpism is a reality TV show featuring no social security, no government medical assistance, and the privatization for profit of all federal safety net programs. The propaganda endlessly promoting Neoliberalism has been the same for the half a century since it began to change America: wealth trickles down, the private sector can do it better, and anything free is satanic communism. Everyone has to pay and pay. And it is of course all a lie. The rich do not pay. They are paid by our labor and we are now exploited by super-corporations as wage slaves. The right is fundamentally pushing one basic theme- the rich not paying taxes or paying a fair wage or pollution being regulated. To them this unrestrained greed is called “freedom.”
In conclusion, U.S. history can be divided into four approximately half century long eras after the initial quarter century of revolution and post-revolution formation up to the war of 1812: in the early 1800’s the industrial revolution kicked in and westward expansion began the first era. This culminated in the end of slavery with the Civil War. The second era was the “gilded age” as never-before-seen-in-history wealth was concentrated in a few individuals and American Democracy fought for existence against a creeping Oligarchy. The third era began when “the free market” collapsed, as they always do, and The New Deal made America great. The fourth era began in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution and we are now experiencing the end of that…or the end of Democracy. It could go either way. Truth.
I am praying for a Green New Deal.
6:13 “The Jewish question.” The real fascists are not on Trumps side- they see Trump as a Jewish tool.
“It is sad that veterans are used as props by this president.”
Sadder still that many veterans support him. 15:15 “-why is there still such strong support for the president inside the military, inside law enforcement-” ?
Actually, the perceived support for Trump is propaganda. Joe Biden has a plurality (officers and enlisted) of support in the active duty military.
The Great Danger is lone wolf fanatics like Timothy McVeigh.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-bans-qanon-across-its-platforms-n1242339
“Of course, this all could have been done sooner, before Q factions aligned with militia groups and anti-vaxxers, to curtail the spread of medical misinformation and the mobilization of vigilante groups,-”
Ice on the Moon 