Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit
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.
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.
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.
Ice on the Moon 