The Divine Mr. M

Elon Musk and Yours Truly have a few things in common...

We both had childhood steeped in Sci-Fi, which has profoundly shaped our World View in very similar ways. Makes us both Look to The Future in very radical ways.

We both believe that Accelerating Climate Change has gone too far to be stopped, tho he's dialed back his statements on the subject because he had to get in bed with Fossil Fuel Money to fully get on the Trump Train.

We both have a 'messianic' drive to establish an New Social Order to replace the present collapsing socioeconomic order. Ofc, said 'new orders' are very different at their core, even with some 'procedural overlap'. [see Sci-Fi]

The obvious Big Dif is money. His old man tossed him a few million and said, "Go git 'em." Mine were rather less supportive...yeah, yeah, poor me...

All this gives me an insight into what he's doing. BTW, it's not a unique insight, others see as well. So...

Musk is acting out a classic Sci-Fi trope, the Eccentric Billionaire Genius who fights against the Philistines to Save The World. That's why he's wrecking everything. It's to clear away those he sees as impeding him [the FAA, HHS etc] in his Crusade...and that big ass tax break will help with that, too. Pretty sure he'll fail eventually as he's not really a 'genius'.

Trump doesn't really give a fuck, largely because he's too dim to understand wtf is actually going. He's avoiding prison and is makin' bank. All good...

Even if Musk is somehow stopped, [a military junta, a MAGA upraising] the damage has already been done. The Republic has been badly wounded and will never fully heal.

Personally, the best I now hope for is that our Disability cheques keep showing up...and there ya have.

"All politics is local." ~Tip O'Neal

~I have managed to scrape together some Wisdom in the fifty odd years of my adulthood and that has led me to realize that the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness. That may seem a bit contraindicative, so let me say it again with more emphasis: the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.

Okay, hold on to that thought, we'll get back to it.

There is a man who has demonstrably saved more souls than Jesus Christ ever did or ever will and most of you have never heard of him. His name is Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. He is a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Force.

On September 26th, 1983, Colonel Petrov was watch officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow, monitoring for a US missile attack on the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, the computer-based warning systems reported several US Nuclear Missiles approaching Soviet territory. Colonel Petrov believed the information to be false and did not alert the Kremlin to the data he was receiving. Given Cold War tensions at the time, such information would likely have convinced the Soviet leadership that the US had launched a first strike attempting to "cut off the head" and they would have launched their forces in the belief it was a "counter-strike", not a first-strike.

In other words, he prevented a global thermonuclear holocaust provoked by a computer glitch. [Source]

That could certainly be a good example of 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness,' but that is actually not my point in relating the incident. I relate this because I believe this event was the key, the turning point, to what has happened globally in the years since.

Clearly, this would have scared the crap out of the Soviet leadership and then their American counterparts once they found out about it. But most importantly, I believe it laid the psycho-political ground work that caused the Soviet leadership to reject the Cold War paradigm and that led to the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. And his efforts to reform the unreformable led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Hold on a minute,” you're thinking, “What does this have to do with the title?” Trust me, I'll get to that.

Many had predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, but all those predictions largely cited Muslim demographics as the principal cause and estimated the collapse would take place, well, right about now.

That it came two decades 'too early' badly disrupted American planning on several levels. The key areas of disruption were economic and domestic politics.

The American Economy has been – and largely still is – centered around War Production since World War Two. Having a war that we had been planning to continue for another twenty years or more suddenly just stop threw the war planners and manufacturers into great confusion...and distress. A lot of money was at stake and there was all this talk about a 'post-war dividend'.

The problem for domestic politics was less obvious, but actually more acute. In the later course of The Cold War, The Powers That Be had made alliances with two volatile groups, the Neo-Conservatives and The Religious Right, in order to maintain political control.

With the end of The Cold War, these alliances now become problematic, something that was clearly demonstrated in 1992 with the defeat of George Bush Senior for a second term in the White House and then underscored with the ongoing troubles of the Clinton presidency.

These groups needed to be neutralized and how better than to give them a president they could love who would turn out to be a total dud: Dubya.

Remember pre-9/11 2001? Remember his numbers were in the crappier? Remember “That's My Bush”? He was well on his way to a single term, watched over by a loyal courtier of The Powers That Be: Richard M Cheney.

But Evil Dick was a very resentful man and he had plans of his own.

The vigilance of the Clinton White House regarding Jihadis was defused into wild goose chases after suicide doctors in Oregon and hookers in New Orleans, all in the hope that 'something would happen', maybe on an Oklahoma City scale, and then Dick and Rummy, backed by one faction of The Powers That Be, could proceed with their agenda regardless of what most of the rest of The Powers That Be wished.

We now see how that turned out; two unwinnable wars, the Patriot Act, a global financial meltdown, and the most marketed president in our history. Some days it seems like we've been living out an alternative history scenario. This was not The Future that most of you envisioned ten years ago.

In the context of 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness,' we've done a pretty lousy job, being terrorized and bullied by madmen, ours and 'theirs', into coming very close to destroying our entire country and possibly the rest of global society, as well.

It is out of this decade of madness that both Truthers and Birthers have been born, mirror images of each other, both driven by an existential paranoia and deep seated feelings of impotence, and seeking some reason for that solely outside of themselves. Of course, this type of paranoid thinking is an American tradition, going back to the Masonic Conspiracies of the 1820's.

A key metaphor to explain how this works is the FEMA Concentration Camp meme. Under Bu$hCo, it came from The Far Left. Under Obama, it's now coming from The Far Right. And each is saying exactly what the other said, only the focus has changed, the paranoia simply shifting with 'the party in power'.

That the so-called 'camps' are abandoned military bases 'converted' by KRB, an old Cheney company, is the giveaway; it's a corporate boondoggle. Billions were allocated for “National Security”. KBR ran up some new concertina wire and slapped on a few coats of paint, and 'poof!' new Detention Facilities. If they spent even ten cents on the dollar I'd be surprised. And these joints probably could not keep my cats detained.

But they make a great excuse for freaking out and ranting endlessly about THEM [The Hosts of Evil Motives] and, in the final analysis, really just giving up. “How can I prevail in the face of such concerted evil?” That is NOT 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.'

This brings us to Shit Happens.

Remember Colonel Petrov? In that situation, there were vast amounts of War Panning and Command Structure in place, set up over decades and costing trillions, and in spite of all that is was only the action of a single, and ethical, military professional that saved the world from a disaster of obscene proportions.

I don't know about you, but that turns my bowels to water. So, yes, I abuse the metaphor, but Shit Does Happen.

Most of us cannot face such a random form of terror.

A sociopath games his way into power and randomly allows nineteen lunatics to kill three thousand of his fellow citizens so he can implement his personal political agenda.

A mass marketing blitz propels a highly charismatic member of a traditional underclass onto the presidency, something that tens of millions of the so-called 'Superior Race' will never, ever have a chance at doing.

No, that is a Loss of Control that is utterly intolerable for all too many people. Even if an Evil Cabal is controlling things, well, shit, at least somebody is In Charge!

Funny thing is, the Birthers have a far better case than the Truthers.

Over four or five years all the various documents could have been switched out. That would be an easy low key operation and in venues where no one was really paying attention at the time.

As opposed to running miles of wire and planting tons of explosives in three of the most heavily trafficked buildings in the world, all in utter secrecy and with not a single one of the large crew of highly skilled technicians ever saying a single word about it.

I'll let y'all 'do the math' on those. But both are just delusions used to avoid the far more frightening reality that no one is really in control, that all too often Shit Just Happens.

That certainly does generate "existential paranoia and deep seated feelings of impotence.” To deal with that level of discomfort, one that makes you want to claw your skin off, that requires a lot of Spiritual Work, which brings us full circle: the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.

Most do not have either the Patience nor the Willingness to do that kind of Work. They're much 'happier' indulging in the above types of paranoia. Those have a comfortable structure, much like porn does, and to surrender that would cause both embarrassment and a form of withdrawal, too. Like the addict confronted with recovery, an 'old self' would have to 'die'.

One can change nothing in the thrall of such delusions.

To change the world, one needs Power. To understand your own Power, one must acknowledge one's own Powerlessness. That is a relative, not an absolute, state. When you see what you are Powerless over, then you see where you do have Power.

Then, and only then, can you take Responsibility for your own life and begin to change what can be changed...and being in that place is both terrifying and invigorating.

"The effective employment of Lend-Lease equipment was compromised by the persistent objection of the Soviet side to allowing Western personnel access to help with training and repair or to supply information on how the aid was being utilized. By 1943 large stockpiles of material had accumulated in the Soviet Union but it was impossible to check why this was or to limit further deliveries without Soviet co-operation. Soviet secretiveness made it difficult at the time to counteract the regular criticism of combat failures, while despite promises Soviet officials released little information on the development of Soviet tanks and aircraft, apart from the one T-34 tank sent to the United States in 1942. ‘We still meet their requests to the limit of our ability,’ complained the head of the American military mission in Moscow, John Deane, to General Marshall, ‘and they meet ours to the minimum that will keep us sweet.’[116] Growing suspicion that Soviet requests for Lend-Lease supplies, which reached a peak in 1944 and 1945, included goods intended for Soviet post-war reconstruction led to political pressure in Washington to place limits on Soviet assistance. In August 1945, following the Japanese surrender, President Truman announced the immediate end of all Lend-Lease shipments without consulting either of the main recipients.

Tensions in the Lend-Lease relationship were inevitable given the nature of the geographical scope involved and the contending requirements for urgent supply, but in the end vast resources, chiefly from the American productive surplus, were shared between the Allies. Was this record, in the words of Edward Stettinius, the Lend-Lease administrator, a ‘weapon for victory’? The answer is more complicated than it seems. For years after the war the official Soviet line was to downplay or to ignore altogether the role of Lend-Lease in the Soviet war effort. This was a deliberate act of historical distortion. Shortly after the end of the war, informal guidelines were issued (which no sensible author could ignore under Stalin) that Lend-Lease ‘did not play a somewhat noticeable part in Russian victory’. The official line until the 1980s was to insist that Lend-Lease goods came late, were often of poor quality, and comprised only 4 per cent of the weapons produced by the Soviet Union’s own efforts. During the war, however, Soviet leaders privately admitted how important all the forms of aid were. In the taped interviews for his memoirs, Khrushchev revealed the importance Stalin attached to the aid, but the following passage was only published in the 1990s: ‘Several times I heard Stalin acknowledge [Lend-Lease] in the small circle of people around him. He said that . . . if we had had to deal with Germany one-to-one we would not have been able to cope.’ Marshal Zhukov, victor in Berlin, toed the Party line in his memoirs published in 1969, but in a bugged conversation six years earlier he was overheard to say that without foreign aid the Soviet Union ‘could not have continued the war’. The 4 per cent figure for Allied supplies as a percentage of Soviet output is not wrong, but it entirely masks what Lend-Lease actually achieved. In the early stages of the war, Lend-Lease tanks and aircraft supplied a higher percentage of Soviet equipment because of the exceptional losses in the first months of combat. As the war progressed, Soviet output revived, and Lend-Lease military equipment became correspondingly less significant. Up to the Battle of Stalingrad Lend-Lease tanks amounted to 19 per cent of Soviet production. But by the Battle of Kursk six months later, one of the largest tank engagements of the war, there were 3,495 Soviet-built tanks and only 396 Lend-Lease, around 11 per cent. Tanks, aircraft and weapons, however, were not the decisive factor in Allied deliveries. Of much greater significance was the transformation of the Soviet communications system, support for the strained railway network, and large supplies of raw materials, fuel and explosives without which the overall Soviet war effort and military campaigns would have been less than adequate for the defeat of the great bulk of the German army. One of the major deficiencies in conducting air and tank combat in the early years of the war was the lack of electronic equipment; it was also a major problem for commanders trying to manage a vast battlefield with poor or little communication. Under Lend-Lease the Western Allies together supplied 35,000 army radio sets, 389,000 field telephones and over 1.5 million kilometres of telephone cable. By early 1943 the Red Air Force was at last able to operate centralized control of air combat units, while the simple device of installing radios in tanks proved a force multiplier. Radio also came to play a part in the Red Army’s very effective use of deception and disinformation, which on numerous occasions left the German army unable to guess the size, the whereabouts or the intentions of enemy forces.

The supply position of the Red Army was above all transformed by the trucks and jeeps provided under Lend-Lease, which in the end amounted to more than 400,000, against domestic Soviet production of 205,000. By January 1945 one-third of Red Army vehicles were supplied by Lend-Lease. American aid also broadened the range of vehicles serving the Soviet war effort: scout cars, armoured personnel carriers, half-tracks, the Ford amphibians and 48,956 jeeps, also fitted with radios so that Red Army commanders could control their forces with greater efficiency. Shifting men and equipment by railway was also underpinned by the American provision of 1,900 locomotives (against Soviet output of just 92) and 56 per cent of all the rails used during the war. By late 1942 the Soviet rail system was able to supply front-line forces at Stalingrad with fifteen trains a day where German supply averaged twelve. Finally, Allied aid provided almost 58 per cent of all aviation fuel, 53 per cent of all explosives and half the requirements of aluminium, copper and synthetic rubber tyres. Allied supply on this scale was decisive. Soviet industry could concentrate on the mass production of weapons, leaving the supply of much else in the war economy to Allied assistance."

Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins

~These seemingly endless and exhausting battles over Abortion Rights and Gun Rights are just distractions. Their purpose IS to 'distract and exhaust' us while Corporations devour The Commons. In the mean time, Accelerating Climate Change is relentlessly bearing down upon us.

~Up until last Friday, it was a pretty good bet that the GOP was going to take control of The House and Senate again this November. But after the whole SCOTUS Roe v Wade bombshell, that's not looking so certain now. The GOP leadership is doing its best to 'focus on the leaker' and not on the substance of the leak, but I have no doubt they're well aware of what a likely disaster this is for them.

In the military Doctrine of Force Concentration, it is stated that an attacker needs a Force Ratio of three to one over the defender. Ukraine's armed forces consists of 361,000 troops, so the Russians need over a million military personnel in order to secure its outcome. So far it seems the have only committed to 190,000. This is primary reason why they're being checked everywhere. Secondary considerations are the morale of the respective forces and Russia's so-so logistics.

2020 is not uniquely bad. 2021 will be worse and so-on. It’s not God or your horoscope or mercury in Gatorade or any of that mystical bullshit. There’s this thing called *cause and effect.* It’s literally how everything in our entire universe works.

The civil unrest is a byproduct of the failures of late-stage capitalism; the result, not the cause.

The weather events are a byproduct of climate change, which scientists have been warning us about since the 1870s, only to fall on the deaf ears of greedy opportunists.

Our treading deeper into fascism is the byproduct of electing a fascist in 2016, who was only elected as the result of decades of railroading and policy failure by both parties.

The police brutality is the byproduct of classism and systemic racism that has been around since this country’s inception.

The stupidity and ignorance is the byproduct of underfunding education for decades, and the refusal of television and social media companies to implement any major stopgaps for misinformation and misleading propaganda. Nefarious people benefit from a dumbed down and confused populace.

The paranoia about “socialism” is the byproduct of the aforementioned subversion of education and media literacy as well as post-9/11 xenophobia, McCarthyism, Reaganism and the lie about “the shining city on a hill.”

I understand this is all very overwhelming, but it helps to remember that there are actual, real-world reasons these things are happening. Don’t lose your mind and/or spiral down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole to rationalize it all with false, nonsensical, convenient, feel-good solutions. Everything is happening for a reason, and I mean that in the most literal and least metaphysical way possible.

Stay focused, stay sane, maintain your principles, and be ready for things to get way worse, because they absolutely will. We are heading into the most dangerous years of our lives. There’s no time left to despair. Keep your head up. We will get through this if we all put in the effort.

Originally shared by Cheston Neilson; copied and reposted a whole bunch of times by friends of friends - because that's how social media works.

~My position on the matter: Yes, Israel is the Prussia of The Middle East. And like Prussia it is surrounded by enemies that seek to destroy it. When one's essential survival is at stake, any and all atrocities are justified.

Adolf Hitler is Israel's midwife. He and his many European allies [like the French] taught the Jews in no uncertain terms that they were the Blood Enemies of 'Christendom' and that unless they found themselves a safe place of their own, one day their annihilation would again be imminent.

So, when the smoke of World War Two cleared, they looked to the only real homeland they had ever known; Judea aka The Levant aka Palestine.

The hardened survivors of the Death Camps, of Partisan groups, and of the Armies of the Western Allies, said “NEVER AGAIN!” and swore that upon their millions of dead loved ones.

But what they really said is, “Ok, you goyish bastards, you want an International Jewish Conspiracy? We'll give you one in spades!” And that, my friends, is what Israel became. No quarter given. No quarter asked.

That is why there will never be any resolution that will not level most of the Middle East. The Arabs [and now the Iranians] have totally locked themselves into Jihad and The Jews can never retreat because that means their extermination. One day, it will all come to a head...

...and so it is.

~I voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004...and then I just stopped. That was Obama. He was being marketed as a ‘Liberal Superman’, but I looked at his actual voting record and saw a ‘moderate Republican’...at least what one would call such ‘back in day’. Now we call them Neo-Liberals or Corporatists. ‘Moderates’ no longer exist in the GOP.

I tried to vote for Obama, but simply could not. I had a full blown meltdown outside our local polling station. I lost some LJ friends because of that. But in the end, my 'crisis of conscience' proved correct. Obama was The Drone Strike President, The Deporter In Chief, lied about the Public Option and abandoned the American lower Middle Class.

So I didn't vote in 2008 or 2012. I did get out and vote Bernie in the California primary in both 2016 and 2020, but I stayed home in the General of 2016. Hillary was/is even worse than Obama, which is pretty much why she was beaten by an obvious conman like Trump.

Right now, I'm about to take our mail in ballots to the local drop box. The old lady filled hers in days ago, but I didn't until yesterday afternoon. (it's 2am as I type this) I could not bring myself to vote for Biden. Made me sick to even think about it.

Instead, I wrote in Bernard Sanders. That felt good, even tho it is purely symbolic. I lay down afterward and slept a solid twelve hours.

As California is polling for Biden at 69.7%, y'all can take your "But You're Voting For Trump!" noise and fucking shove it up way your fucking stupid ass. I voted my conscience and you can eat shit.

...and there is is.