Ice on the Moon

Keynesian Imbedded Liberalism; this political-economic system was the single most important factor in making America great. The two other factors most important were separation of church and state and unions. I would guess if nine out of ten citizens were asked if they know what Imbedded Liberalism and Neoliberalism are they would either not know or give some kind of free-market-propaganda-nonsense reply.

In this post I will attempt to explain why so many people refuse to accept either ideology for what each actually is, and why explaining what they are so the average citizen understands is so important. Let us begin by stating, yes, it is about “us.” Not “individual freedom” or any of the other popular code words that actually mean unrestrained greed. We all sacrifice for a collective so individuals survive.

Those who have gained so much power or serve those with obscene wealth are playing a historically recent game and threaten the survival of the human race. They have preached their religion of rapacious acquisition of money to the point where a majority of the population is brainwashed into believing in their cult. “They” have managed to gain control of most of the civilized world. “They” as in that 1 percent who own most of what can be owned on this planet.

It must be made clear to as many as can understand that competition must be embedded in cooperation or it is predation. The best and brightest are elevated not so they can live as demi-gods reigning far above the squalid masses, but so they can raise all others up with them. For this they are given fame and fortune and everything that goes with it, but not semi-divine status relegating the rest of us to the category of subhuman.

Neoliberalism is essentially a religion that does award semi-divine status and relegates all but the very few to being not fellow human beings but commodities. We are in fact social animals and live in a society and both words come from the same root word as socialism. It is undeniable that Neoliberalism has accomplished the goal of demonizing the word socialism for a specific purpose. Embedded liberalism is understood as a capitalist (the old meaning of “liberal”) economic system that exists within, and is regulated by, a socialist political system. Regulation is anathema to Neoliberalism and socialism is thus a blasphemy.

It is fundamental that the individual cannot survive without the collective anymore than there can be a collective without individuals. This is the great sin, the primal illusion of pride and optimism bias: that each is his own master and only purpose. We are all slaves and masters to each other at the same time and our purpose is to insure the best for each other as this automatically becomes the best for each of us. Like the arrow of time, it does not work in the opposite direction.

When we take more than we are given we betray the trust we are gifted with by our fellow human beings and if others combine in this treachery at some point there is war. It never fails to amaze me when I see the reaction of those I enlighten with the fact that the only reason they own anything is because the rest of us let them have it. The strongest, cruelest, most violent person is nothing compared to a mob and will quickly be ripped limb from limb. Truth.

We gladly give treasure to the leader who accomplishes complex projects with their organizational genius, the scientist who provides the technological miracles that make life so easy compared to our stone age beginnings, and the doctor who cures disease and saves lives. But when ownership of almost everything is by a few, obscene wealth and corruption becomes all powerful, fantastic fortunes acquired and hoarded while almost everyone else labors in wage slavery and gains almost nothing in comparison- the guillotine is the inevitable consequence.

At some point in our history the medium of exchange called money evolved into a supernatural element. Where only food and shelter and safety had mattered before the magical power of money became a reality and gained ascendance over the necessities of life. It has always been an illusion of course. Something we all must agree to honor and give allegiance to. A piece of paper or rare metal that we cannot eat, will not protect us from the elements, that will not keep us from harm.

And so, the modern human being labors long hours on goods that devour far more time and resources than they provide in the way of what nourishes and protects and promotes health. All those hours they could spend with their community, all the nutritious food and clean spacious climate controlled housing and quality health care is denied them so that a tiny minority can have absolutely anything they desire.

The reason this is so is not some natural law of social and economic Darwinism. Nothing validates the low quality of life of humans who are “unsuccessful” while lavishly providing a thousand times more for a few definitely not a thousand times more intelligent or capable. The reason this is so is simply because we foolishly believe our fellow humans are doing what is right for all of us. But they are not.

Our hunter gatherer instincts drive the majority of us to sacrifice and obey the leaders who we presume want our group to survive. But that small percentage who, simply because of natural variation, are wired for the opposite set of goals, have taken over the world. They do not compete within a cooperative society for the good of all; they are predators and parasites sucking the life out of a mass of individuals who they have conditioned with propaganda and psychological marketing tricks to be their prey. They worship a predator god that has indeed taken over our world.

We must take it back. Want to know how we got here?

Ironic that the title of the book that more than any other successfully promoted Neoliberalism, was titled, “The Road to Serfdom.” It did more to impress several billion people into the 21st century version of serfdom called wage slavery.

Milton Friedman published “Capitalism and Freedom” in 1962 and in the above video at 43:46 the essential points of Neoliberalism that informed the Reagan Revolution are detailed.

Just as money for climate change denial came from the Koch brothers, the seed funding for the Neoliberal movement was the Volker fund, which was started as a socialist charity by a philanthropist and then converted by the relative who took it over as an anti-new-deal organization.

What is the solution? The Green New Deal.

A group of hungry apes is venturing into new territory and they confront a smaller group of apes, perhaps of a different species, perhaps not. In either case the smaller group stands their ground and marks their territory with some kind of visible and/or audible display. The leadership of the hungry apes, considering the fewer numbers of the other group and their own hungry baby apes, have a choice to make. A simple binary yes or no decision. Fight or flight. Are they so hungry and exhausted they will lose a battle even with this smaller group? If they lose they will be in a far worse position being even more exhausted and possibly with injuries and/or fewer numbers.

The leader of the smaller group trying to hold this territory is relying on his group to defend their ground for several reasons. First, the individuals collectively follow the leader because they instinctively believe it will lead to their collective and individual survival. There is some risk if they follow the leader into battle but if they do not there is the risk they will end up as hungry exhausted refugees like the group they are confronting. Second, if they fight well it will raise their status in their group. And third, if they run away they will certainly be punished by their own group later, unless their own group is defeated in which case by running they will have avoided death or life threatening injuries.

All of these survival scenarios are evaluated from either an individual or collective standpoint. The salient feature of social being is the inability to survive individually. This is why it is stated, “The Collective and their Individuals”, rather than the opposite order. Without a collective identity they will not be able to protect each other, successfully reproduce, or enjoy any of the many advantages the group confers and as a species they will cease to exist. For apes in the wild it is a simple matter of being eaten by predators if they are caught outside the collective which will fight to protect the individual. If resources are plentiful groups will multiply and if they become scarce due to a changing environment then separate groups will inevitably go to war.

In the modern world human beings are manipulated psychologically by those who take advantage of instincts going back millions of years. It is faux drama reenacting the eternal struggle for resources and territory, status and reproduction in the group. Changing environmental conditions and competition with other species all drive behaviors in human beings to this day and we are unconsciously influenced by these built-in instincts and behaviors. We are driven, even though as modern human beings starvation, heat and cold, and predators, are no longer life and death evolutionary issues. The lesser problem is both individually and collectively we are largely either unaware or refuse to acknowledge this heritage that drives us to act or not act in certain ways. The greater critical problem is the very tiny percentage of people and entities that are aware and use group and individual psychology to the detriment of the vast majority in pursuit of gross advantage for the few. Due to climate change this is actually a threat to the survival of our species.

The individual or collective view is key in manipulating both individuals and collectives because of an inverse relationship. To influence the collective it is the individual that must be affected (by manipulating their instincts and behaviors). To influence the individual lost in the crowd it is the collective that must be affected (by reaching large numbers in the shortest time with mass media and marketing-so all are exposed to a herd or mob mindset). If the individual logically understands both the smaller and bigger picture of their own world and a larger world including others they are extremely difficult to manipulate and take advantage of. If the individual is limited to only a very narrowly defined scenario where everything is about the individual and a programmed trigger of some kind is programmed in to activate a collective response, it is much easier to control individuals as a group.

Concerning the small group of “rich” apes and the larger group of “poor apes” who are competing for territory, or “wealth”, it may not be a clear binary fight or flight scenario. If some of the poor apes have any affiliation with the rich apes they may defect and turn against their own poor group in the hope of being accepted, even if only as new, low-ranking members, into the rich group. After the prehistoric era, as populations grew, human societies would often use this tactic of “divide and conquer.” In the 21st century, the dominant neoliberal ideology presently employed to transfer vast and almost inconceivable wealth to a tiny fraction of the population is the ultimate refinement of divide and conquer. The majority of human beings in developed countries have been indoctrinated with a set of false ideas they will fight to the death to defend. It is almost impossible to deprogram these beliefs once they are instilled in individuals, no matter what evidence or logical argument is presented to them. In the year 2020 we have the “forever trumper” phenomenon that baffles and terrifies the majority of citizens in America. As of this writing the several hundred year old system of democracy in the United States is in danger of falling apart.

Neoliberalism is the fundamental cause of this possible dissolution yet among another group, the “never trumper”, this fact is denied or ignored. Even among the third group, the “corporate democrats”, the over half a century of free market economic propaganda has had the effect of programming many to recoil in fear and alarm from any ideas promoting a “collectivist” view of society. The fourth faction, the “progressive democrats” are the minority who alone seem to have any idea of the true nature of the problem. Hungry apes.

Actually, this is what they have promoted- to let everyone get it so we end up with herd immunity. They are unashamedly willing to have an American Holocaust with 6 million dead. Since most of those dying will be elderly minorities with pre-existing conditions it is a win-win for the Neoliberals since those victims are “negative revenue” anyway. People just don’t get it: Neoliberalism makes money the god of this world. If you are not rich you are just a commodity and if you happen to be a worthless commodity you can, and should, die in the gutter. That is their religion and they believe it even if they have to deny it to the unwashed masses. And they have no problem at all lying and deceiving the general population as this is an accepted and admirable practice of their faith.

I ate M&Ms and Snickers last night and now I cannot go to sleep again. I googled caffeine in chocolate and….yup. I had no idea (well, I knew it had some but now I know it is enough to keep me from sleeping). Now I know why I could not go to sleep this morning, and I am in for a miserable night tonight. I am getting ready to turn the light off and lay down and try and get 3 or 4 hours of sleep. At least I got in 10 short rounds on the punching bag this morning. I wonder how Trump is doing.

I was not able to sleep and had to call out from work. No way I can pull a thirteen hour all-nighter at my age with zero sleep. I am exhausted and I have no idea what is going on. Perhaps it is cumulative stress… even though I have not been to work in over a week. Is this thing with Trump putting his Nazi friends on standby really driving me this nuts? When I was ready crew on the helicopters I would have nights I could not sleep because I had a premonition something was going to happen but I was much younger then. Sometimes something would happen but not very often. It was just a trick my mind was playing on me. I have been sleeping so well the last ten years or so I thought that misery was behind me but I had trouble a couple days ago and now today. Here I am an old man and it is happening again. Perhaps I just lost control of my hours and have been staying up too late in the morning and that is all there is to it. My plan is to drink some coffee and stay up till after midnight and then take a sleeping pill and hopefully I will lay in bed till nine or ten and that will get me through tomorrow night at work.

In the meantime I have to stay awake or I will be in the same situation tomorrow as I am right now. I posted my thoughts on the Nuclear Thermal Rocket article so I guess I will take a look at some of the popular space sites I have ignored and see what is going on.

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/marina-koren/

Well, I dropped an email to Ms. Koren. See if she sends me a reply. What else?

This is what America has come to… tripling the price of a cancer drug for a bigger bonus.

Trump has the virus. This time my premonition came true.

https://www.space.com/darpa-nuclear-thermal-rocket-for-moon-contract

Stan Ulam figured it out in 1947. He realized that it was hard enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting and trying to contain a reaction one million times more powerful was simply not worth the trouble. At tremendous expense and risk a Nuclear Thermal Rocket would be only a little over twice as efficient as a chemical rocket. Ulam did not just think outside the box… he threw the box away and conceived the idea of a propulsion system an order of magnitude more efficient and one that would become even more efficient the larger the scale used.

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (bombs) has long been the only propulsion system capable of enabling Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). It is the only option for the foreseeable future. Nothing else will work. Nuclear Thermal Rockets are a dead end and always have been.

It just turned midnight here and it is now the first day of October. The coronavirus vaccines are on the way and a few people are starting to predict the end of Trump… or a civil war. I am starting to pay a little more attention to the future and to my calling to write as a futurist. I have been off work for over a week due to a change in schedule but am going back tomorrow night. Started reading Chris Hedges “When Atheism Becomes Religion.”

This support of right wing extremism is not going to end well…but it better end or something very bad is going to happen.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918483794/from-debate-stage-trump-declines-to-denounce-white-supremacy

It is so obvious and yet no one will say it: The President of the United States is courting the Neo-Nazi movement. Proud boys celebrate.

Rachel hit the nail on the head. I just don’t want to watch it. And I have been clicking off news that shows segments of it. Trump is essentially just showcasing the bully he is because in his experience it is what works. It is all just a joke to him because anything or anyone that does not serve him is a joke. And that arrogance attracts his base.

“Defend the system or he will crush it.”

Stand back and stand by can only mean exactly what it sounds like: shut up right now and when I say the election was rigged and I did not lose then fight for me.

https://futurism.com/mit-researchers-fusion-reactor-very-likely-work

When I started this blog I held to some strong positions concerning space travel and the future of humankind. One of those positions was an extremely skeptical view of fusion reactors. I have repeatedly stated over the years the only two places fusion was going to be useful was in a sun or a bomb.

Interestingly, I held the opposite view concerning a technique for freezing human beings without damage. The central idea has always been that star travel will take centuries and only freezing people will enable such missions without constructing “world ships.” It follows that if freezing a human being without damage becomes practical this will have a profound effect on the human race, will change literally everything, and be the most important event in history.

A working revivable freezing process will very quickly make possible a war on death with millions and possibly, eventually, billions at the end of their lifespan being frozen. As soon as this “Great Rescue” begins, the “Great Race” to reverse aging will also begin, with the resources of our entire civilization involved.

Now there appears to be the real possibility of fusion reactors, due to high temperature superconductors, but no progress on freezing people.

A long time ago early humans, or rather, hominids, discovered by smacking rocks together they could make a very useful tool we now call the hand axe (not with a handle as we understand an axe, but a sharp rock held in the hand). We began the journey to our present society with these amazing tools that allowed us to butcher large animal carcasses and crack bones. This was great but we were still getting eaten by predators. We learned to make fire and at the same time to sharpen and harden the wooden tips of spears. This was much better but these sticks and stones were not as good as they could be. At some point we began to lash a stone point onto the spear and this, along with our ability to cook food with fire, suddenly made us the ultimate predators and the rulers of our African environment. All that was left was to remove the skins of animals, shape them into protection for our feet, wrap them around us to protect us from exposure to cold, and humans were on their way to wherever we wanted to go. Where to go? Where there was either more food or nobody else trying to kill us, or both.

From wiki: “Around 200,000 BP Middle Paleolithic Stone tool manufacturing spawned a tool-making technique known as the prepared-core technique, that was more elaborate than previous Acheulean techniques.^[20][21] Wallace and Shea split the core artifacts into two different types: formal cores and expedient cores. Formal cores are designed to extract the maximum amount from the raw material while expedient cores are more based on function need.^[22] This method increased efficiency by permitting the creation of more controlled and consistent flakes.^[21] This method allowed Middle Paleolithic humans correspondingly to create stone-tipped spears, which were the earliest composite tools, by hafting sharp, pointy stone flakes onto wooden shafts. ^[23“

“According to the theory of the recent African origin of modern humans, anatomically modern humans began migrating out of Africa during the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic around 125,000 years ago and began to replace earlier pre-existent Homo species such as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus.”

As humans spread across the planet, they had already developed socials behaviors tens of thousands of years old. And we still carry those nascent urges to organize and function together in certain patterns in our genes.

“There are many theories on the evolution of behavioral modernity. These generally fall into two camps: gradualist and cognitive approaches. The Later Upper Paleolithic Model theorizes that modern human behavior arose through cognitive, genetic changes abruptly around 40,000–50,000 years ago.^[7] Other models focus on how modern human behavior may have arisen through gradual steps, with the archaeological signatures of such behavior appearing only through demographic or subsistence-based changes.” 

“Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos.^[18] Nearly all African hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, with women roughly as influential and powerful as men.^[21] For example, the San people or “Bushmen” of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods.^[22]Karl Marx defined this socio-economic system as primitive communism.^[23]“

The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total, but is striking^{[according to whom?]} when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity’s two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.^[24][25][26]

In other words, humans became egalitarian because they were unhappy about being bullied by alpha males.

“Anthropologists maintain that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.^[27][28][29] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.^[27] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.^[30] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.^[31] Young mothers can enjoy childcare support from their own mothers, who continue living nearby in the same camp.^[32] The systems of kinship and descent among human hunter-gatherers were relatively flexible, although there is evidence that early human kinship in general tended to be matrilineal.^[33]“

One common arrangement is the sexual division of labour, with women doing most of the gathering, while men concentrate on big game hunting. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women appreciate the meat brought back to camp by men. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele’s study of the southern African Ju/’hoan, ‘Women Like Meat’.^[34] Recent archaeological research suggests that the sexual division of labor was the fundamental organisational innovation that gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.^[35]

A 1986 study found most hunter-gatherers have a symbolically structured sexual division of labour.^[36] However, it is true that in a small minority of cases, women hunt the same kind of quarry as men, sometimes doing so alongside men. Among the Ju’/hoansi people of Namibia, women help men track down quarry.^[37] Women in the Australian Martu also primarily hunt small animals to feed their children and maintain relations with other women.^[38]

At the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population. Therefore, no surplus of resources can be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition.

At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society“, in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers lives as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they were satisfied with very little in the material sense.^[39] Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin’s view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, whereas people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.^[40]

Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.^[41] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.

Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies.^[30] Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a “gift economy.”

A 2010 paper argued that while hunter-gatherers may have lower levels of inequality than modern, industrialised societies, that does not mean inequality does not exist. The researchers estimated that the average Gini coefficient amongst hunter-gatherers was 0.25, equivalent to the country of Denmark in 2007. In addition, wealth transmission across generations was also a feature of hunter-gatherers, meaning that “wealthy” hunter-gatherers, within the context of their communities, were more likely to have children as wealthy as them than poorer members of their community and indeed hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate an understanding of social stratification. Thus while the researchers agreed that hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than modern societies, prior characterisations of them living in a state of egalitarian primitive communism were inaccurate and misleading.^[42]

Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on climate zone/life zone, available technology, and societal structure. Archaeologists examine hunter-gatherer tool kits to measure variability across different groups. Collard et al. (2005) found temperature to be the only statistically significant factor to impact hunter-gatherer tool kits.^[43] Using temperature as a proxy for risk, Collard et al.’s results suggest that environments with extreme temperatures pose a threat to hunter-gatherer systems significant enough to warrant increased variability of tools. These results support Torrence’s (1989) theory that risk of failure is indeed the most important factor in determining the structure of hunter-gatherer toolkits.^[44]

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories “immediate return” hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and “delayed return” for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly,^[45] 31).

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.^[47] In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.^[48] This anthropological view has remained unchanged since the 1960s.

Nowadays, some scholars speak about the existence within cultural evolution of the so-called mixed-economies or dual economies which imply a combination of food procurement (gathering and hunting) and food production or when foragers have trade relations with farmers.^[49]

Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. These activities are on an entirely different scale to those associated with agriculture, but they are nevertheless domestication on some level. Some agriculturalists also regularly hunt and gather (e.g., farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter

So…how did we go from people only concerned about Calories to the prosperity gospel and Donald Trump?

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/1/15951874/prosperity-gospel-explained-why-joel-osteen-believes-prayer-can-make-you-rich-trump