First an announcement:
TASAT is here! Are you a sci fi nerd who remembers lots of old stories, plot twists and such? Ever wish you could apply all that expertise to something useful?
How about a project that leverages your memory bank of old stories, toward a slim but real chance of saving the world?
We're spinning out (at last!) a beta of TASAT or There's A Story About That, a community where scifi plot-geeks like you -- (or maybe (one day) some desperate government agency!) -- get to ask: "What if this particular strange thing ever happens? (Maybe something like it is happening now!) Has anyone ever thought it through, in a story, across the last century of science fiction tales?"
We've designed TASAT with that question in mind. Want to see how it works? Visit TASAT.org... and maybe sign on to be one of the beta members. (We've designed it to be a minimal use of time!) And maybe - just maybe - your recollection of that obscure Andre Norton or Pohl or Vance twist might someday save the world!
== Can we defeat the defeatist cult against modernity? ==
Okay let's get back to our politically-fraught year, starting first with something fundamental.
Ensure your basic rights! Check your voter registration, especially if you live in a red state, where lots of suppression and cheat-schemes to purge voter rolls are already going on. Check several times!
And yes, in Polemical Judo I have a further recommendation: Because the Grand Cheat of gerrymandering has rendered the General Election moot in many congressional districts, the smart move is to re-register into whichever party rules the district you live in! That lets you vote in the primary, the only election that matters anymore, when it comes to Congress or the Statehouse.
Even if it means holding your nose and accepting a label that you loathe, you'll reclaim at least a part of what was robbed from you. Moreover it will protect your registration from being purged! Word to the wise?
== Seriously? This flies with... anybody? ==
Former U.S. President Donald Trump blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately "have that settled."
Sure, big boy. Pretty much everyone by now can see: there are zero differences on overall agenda between today’s Foxite/MAGAs and Vladimir Putin -- who, along with his Kremlin staffed by 5000 “ex” commissars -- grew up reciting Leninist catechisms, five times a day. Only then they swapped their hammer-sickle pins for czarist symbols -- and suddenly the U.S. right fell in love with them! (Like Don and Kim.)
Dig it. Putin called the fall of the USSR ‘history’s worst tragedy.’ He openly swore revenge vs. all US fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service …
…to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror… the heroes who are now raged against by Kremlin stooges in the USA. Putin’s quisling Fifth Column in America. Today’s commies.
Again. Today's 'conservatives' rail against... the FBI? The Intel agencies and military? Now, who would want this situation more than giggling Putin? Tell me how the MAGA enemies list differs, even slightly from that of the slightly relabeled KGB?
Today's GOP is Vlad's dream come true. And we know who the real commies are.
== Immature speculation? ==
Though one wonders about competence when the recent Trump rally shooter climbed to a roof in plain sight of shouting onlookers. Never mind that. From initial appearances (“he was bullied every day”) the fellow is most likely just another white weasel with a gun and desperation to be somebody.
Which is one more argument for my longtime suggestion: that dopey, attention seeking monsters should be punished in the best way, by name-erasure. See my "Erastratos Effect" proposal.
Bill Maher also riffed on this, less informatively but with wider circulation.
(In comments I will cite a scenario for the barely-touching 'graze' wound suffered by Donald Trump. Physically this alternative is vastly more plausible than such a grazing bullet wound would be. But is it more plausible as a real-life theory? No, I think not. Still, a close examination of the wound...?)
== A Sunflower for Ukraine! ==
Oh, but here’s my response to DT’s proposed – Putin-ordered – betrayal of Ukraine. See the sunflower I grew? Close to 6 meters (20 feet) tall. Slava Ukraine! Long live the brave and free Ukrainian people.
And may peace and freedom and light come to all Russians, as well.
Which may happen, if WE choose sanity, first.
== What’s fundamental about the treason alliance against the Enlightenment Experiment… and hence America ==
The confederate coalition against everything the Enlightenment West stands for has two components. The oligarchs who own the movement … and the masses of what we now call 'MAGAs' and who Robert Heinlein described as ‘know nothings.’
The first component consists of the elites who control – or who think they control - today’s undead monster that’s taken over the Party of Lincoln. These elites are a mélange of inheritance brats, casino mafiosi, hedge lords, incest CEOs, "ex" commissars and openly avowed commissars (differing only in their lapel pins) and murder sheiks. All of them are united in one goal: restoring 6000 years of dismal feudalism. They’ve had a lot of victories along this path. For example, the chief outcome of “Supply Side” never-ever-once-correct “voodoo economics” has been skyrocketing wealth disparities around the globe. Now surging past French Revolution levels. (Learn the word 'tumbrels,' guys.)
Despite their many victories, these elites know that world citizens could wake up, at any moment. They must complete their conversion of the globe back to inheritance status before all the world’s young people fully acculturate with rambunctious individualism. Moreover, the oligarchs know there is one major obstacle blocking their full takeover.
Rule of law, enforced equally and governed by facts. Hence, in order to achieve their goal, they must suppress the defenders of fact-based rule-of-law. The nerd castes.
They must stir all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on Terror. (All the western strengths who Vlad Putin openly blames for the fall of the USSR.)
Which brings up the second component of the anti-modernity cult. This one is vastly larger… the MAGA /confederate ground troops in their millions. They share the same agenda, only in the opposite order. Their top wish (as Robert Heinlein explains) is suppression of nerds, not out of self-interested rivalry, like the oligarch masters, but out of basic, cultural hate. (Not all of it unjustified! As I describe elsewhere.)
The want to humiliate the university, fact-wielding smartypants! And in order to get that, they’ll gladly help the oligarchy achieve restored feudal rule by inheritance brats. Same goals, in slightly different order.
I just explained for you the devil’s bargain between our would-be lords and their vassals. It is exactly the same as in 1778 when Cornwallis went South to find more tories who supported the King… or in the 1860s when a million poor whites marched off to fight and die for their plantation lord class oppressors. Or when Appalachians - who owe FDR and the Democrats absolutely freaking everything - now spit in the eyes of those who helped them out of Deliverance hell.
As Heinlein describes, it's a cultural thing. And yes, you nerds out there simply cannot grasp why – using facts and logic and appeals to common decency and progress – you can accomplish nothing against this devil’s alliance.
== Notes from Civil War Phase 8 ==
Miscellaneous addendum to the first part of this missive... another of my wager challenges. This one demanding MAGA support their incessant jeremiads against universities. And wow, on social media that campaign is at full throttle!
Sean T. Smith's novel Tears of Abraham is a terrific and scary novel about a US civil war, far better than the recent movie Civil War, by Alex Garland. I touted it before and will again.
In the wake of Donald Trump's ear-clipping, if anyone, anyone, tries to accuse Dems of “inflammatory language” – read to them aloud from this volcanically horrific call by Alex Jones for this own leader’s violent demise. Then demand a wager with your MAGA, whether his side only spews violent yowlings ten times as much, as opposed to (actually) 100x, than democrats or even ANTIFA.
And bet over compared death rates wrought by their cult vs those few (any?) actually caused by US leftists.
Or by vaccines.
== Want even deeper fundamentals? ==
My general political essay in four parts is about - among many things -- the insipid/lobotomizing left-right “axis”- how history betrayed competitive creativity...
...and what libertarianism might look like, if it ever grew up.
Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors:
Part 1 followed by....
Part 2. and Part 3. and Part 4.
== A script for a killer advert ==
Hey Lincoln Project! Want a script for a potentially powerful ad vs. Mafia Don?
2014 – He promised proof – “Next week!” - that Obama was born in Kenya. Week after week, for years. Then stopped. Did any of you ever ask… “Well?”
2016 – He promised “great financials!” and tax returns “as soon as the audit is done!” There was no audit. And it’s been 8 years.
2017 – He vowed to end terrible Obamacare and replace it with “wonderful, perfect healthcare!” A plan that he promised to reveal “in a couple of weeks.” He repeated that promise every month for years… then went silent when Obamacare proved popular and worked! Have YOU ever seen Trump’s Great New Healthcare Plan? Has anyone? Maybe ask for it now?
2017 - He promised to “Build the Wall!” Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch… every lever of power! They could have built the wall. They didn’t. Did you ever ask why?
2018 – He ‘fell in love!’ with murder commie tyrant Kim Jong Un. (We want those love letters; they’re public documents!) All the remaining communist despots on Earth support him, along with all the “ex” commissars and “ex” KGB agents in today’s Kremlin, who grew up reciting Lenin and working for America’s downfall… who then changed a few lapel pins and took over the Republican Party.
2020 – He pooh-poohed Covid 19, predicting it would not come to America… and later that it would ‘pass naturally in a little bit’ … then bragged when scientists and civil servants delivered vaccines! … then swerved to anti-vax and back and forth amid calls for swallowing bleach and lasers… while the economy tanked and a million Americans died.
2021 – “I wuz robbed!!” Oh, the whining about losing by 8 million votes! Especially in six Red States that had Republican governors and officials running the election. Always promising ‘evidence’ of a ‘steal’ but never ever delivering any. No real evidence at all! Not to a single judge, jury or grand jury across the nation… while refusing to cooperate with independent investigation panels.
The biggest single tantrum in the history of our Republic… until 2024, that is.
2016-to-now – A firehose, a tsunami, a supernova of lies! Over 100,000 of them, according to one ongoing list. Naturally, he won’t revisit or explain even one of them. And his followers are fine with that, fleeing or distracting, when you bring up any of the lies.
(Let’s pick a dozen from that list and bet $$$ on them! Got guts?)
And now… - almost without exception, Republicans wage all-out war vs all fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.
Now who (*cough-Vladimir*) would want Americans to do that?
We could go on with more examples, you know we could.
Only here’s the deal. If any one of these are true, then many of our neighbors are in a mad cult.
And gently - with malice toward none - we need to wrest power from what Heinlein called the worst, dark streak in American nature.
