Humpty Dumpty's Orbital Wall

A month ago I wrote that a Chinese friend of mine who is an English-Mandarin practice buddy with me mentioned that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire.  I pointed out that many rich and powerful people in the West (particularly in the U.S.) have skillfully constructed a set of larger-than-life myths and narratives around their own supposed awesomeness, and that too many people in the rest of the world have fallen for these myths and narratives.  I'd like to suggest that the reality of both Musk and of his notional wealth is far less impressive than the myth.  Musk is a major mouthpiece of aspirational propaganda, boasting that he is a self-made man who earned his wealth solely by means of his own vast capabilities and intelligence.  (Oh, if only you imitate and emulate his "atomic habits", you too can become just as rich!  Or maybe not...)

But the actual foundation of Musk's wealth rests on five less than praiseworthy pillars, namely:

• Wealth inherited from a family that got rich and made itself great by exploiting defenseless human beings;
• Monopolistic and monopoly-building practices;
• Corrupt and misanthropic friends in high places (such as his former BFF Donald Grump);
• Corporate welfare obtained via those friends in high places;
• And taking credit for technologies he did not himself invent.  (See also "Tesla Existed Before Elon Musk: Founders On How They Pitched The Idea," Green Car Reports, February 2021.)

One of those technologies is spaceflight, specifically spaceflight via reusable rockets.  It is not surprising that Musk would seek to take credit for this achievement, as doing so would boost his prestige as a supposedly brilliant man who is able to solve problems that no one else can solve.  But the reality of things is very different.  Indeed, anyone with a functioning memory who was born in 1970 or who knows how to read a history book will remember the Space Shuttle developed by the United States in the 1970's, and which first flew in 1981.  It should be noted that all of the components of the Space Shuttle were fully reusable except for the main fuel tank for the liquid-fueled engines on the orbiter portion of the Shuttle launch vehicle.  In addition, the Soviet Union developed its own mostly reusable shuttle, named the Буран (Buran) which flew one mission in 1988.  Yet it is true that SpaceX and other private companies developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  However, please note that for a given payload mass launched into orbit, a fully reusable launch vehicle saves only the expense of the launch vehicle.  A fully reusable launch vehicle which launches a given mass into orbit will actually use more fuel than a fully or partially expendable launch vehicle launching the same mass.  So there is a certain unavoidable price to be paid for spaceflight even when using fully reusable launch vehicles.

Now let's zoom in on a particular example of the use of spaceflight technology: namely, the launching of swarms (or "constellations") of satellites into Earth orbit (or LEO, for those who like acronyms).  Some of the purposes of launching such swarms include accurate mapping and building of geographic information system (GIS) models, military spying, weather mapping and forecasting, and telecommunications.  Elon Musk's company SpaceX has for several years been building its own proprietary swarm of satellites in low-earth orbit.  Its swarm is, of course, the Starlink "constellation".  But we must note once again that Musk is not the first person to come up with this idea, nor is his company the first to try to implement it.  The first telecommunications satellite constellation was actually conceived by Motorola in 1987 and launched into low Earth orbit from 1993 to 1998 by rockets commissioned by Motorola.  This network is known as the Iridium network, and it is still operational. The only innovation which Musk has brought to the field of launching swarms of LEO satellites is the attempt to use such privately-owned swarms as a tool of monopoly-building.  Toward this goal, Starlink currently has 10,413 satellites in orbit, with plans to increase the number of satellites in its swarm to 42,000 satellites, with the ostensible goal of providing "fast internet service anywhere on earth."

There are just a few problems with Starlink, however.  One such problem is the obvious fact that in order for satellite operators to get along peacefully with each other, there must be rules and approvals to determine the altitudes at which satellite swarms can operate.  The Starlink swarms operate in two shells, one at altitudes of between 525 and 614 kilometers (326 to 332 miles), and a lower shell altitude of between 340 and 360 kilometers (210 to 220 miles) above earth.  With so many Starlink-owned satellites operating in these altitude bands, other satellite operators are increasingly being squeezed out.  Thus Musk is constructing the first space-based monopoly.

Is his monopoly sustainable?  I would argue that in the long run, it is not.  Why?  First, because spaceflight in its present state of development is inherently unsustainable.  This is especially true of chemically-powered spaceflight.  Every launch of a launch vehicle represents the consumption of a certain quantity of nonrenewable resources.  This consumption includes the propellants used in chemical rockets as well as the dry mass of rocket and satellite structures that are eventually launched into orbit.  If the satellite is launched into a high enough orbit (or worse yet, into an escape trajectory), in most cases both it and the final stage of the rocket that launched it are never coming back to earth.  If on the other hand the satellite is launched into LEO, sooner or later the materials of which the satellite is made will be turned into a thin cloud of gaseous metal oxides when the satellite's orbit degrades due to atmospheric drag and the satellite burns up in the earth's atmosphere.  This means that most satellites can never be recycled.  If moving to a circular economy is the key to building a sustainable industrial society of the future, then commercial LEO satellite swarms like Starlink are like a hole in a bag of sugar carried outdoors during a rainstorm - a leakage of something precious, a leakage which can never be recovered.

This is true especially because the materials used to make satellites include rare, high-value strategic minerals which are also sought after by nations who want to use these materials to develop other advanced technologies.  As commercial operators of LEO satellite swarms gobble up increasing amounts of these minerals, they will find themselves in increasingly direct conflict with other actors who also want to use these minerals for their own purposes.  They will also face worsening shortages.  I have mentioned that when a LEO satellite burns up in atmospheric re-entry, its materials are turned into unrecoverable smoke.  Because Starlink satellites operate at such low altitudes, they don't last long in orbit.  (See "Decay time estimate for LEO spacecraft", Niccolai and Mengali, Acta Astronautica, December 2024, and "Starlink Constellation: Deployment, Configuration, and Dynamics", Ali, et al, arXiv, March 2026.)    According to at least one source, one to two Starlink satellites burn up each day.  These satellites must be replaced with new ones in order to maintain the desired number of satellites in the swarm.  This replacement represents yet more consumption of nonrenewable rare strategic resources.

Lastly there is the ever-increasing risk of collisions between satellites when a multitude of satellites has to operate in a very narrow altitude range close to the Earth.  Please note that a collision between satellites moving at a relative velocity of thousands of miles per hour with respect to each other is not the same as a collision between two cars driven by a couple of impatient boneheads on the 605 freeway in Los Angeles County.  In the case of the road-bound speedsters, the collision debris will be spread over an area of perhaps a few dozen yards at the very worst.  But a collision between satellites can produce tens of thousands of small fragments, each of which is traveling at orbital velocity, and each of which is in turn able to destroy or seriously damage other satellites which have been placed into the same orbital zone.  These small collision fragments can stay in orbit for much longer periods than the original satellites involved in the collision.  And as these fragments strike other satellites, they can in turn produce an increasing number of high-speed clouds of debris whose fragments strike still more satellites, in a chain reaction that eventually renders LEO unusable for satellites and unsafe for manned space flight that operates in the LEO altitude region.  Such a scenario is known as a Kessler syndrome.  Should the world experience a Kessler syndrome, either gradually or suddenly, it would be game over for Starlink.

The only reason why Starlink is valuable is because it has built a near-monopoly on satellite internet.  According to one source, SpaceX (the parent company of Starlink) loses money every time it launches a rocket.  Musk's status as a trillionaire is built largely on a foundation of attempted monopolization of space in order to deliver a service to people who have been tricked into believing that they need this service.  We have seen that this foundation itself rests on some rather shaky ground.  What we can do is to give a bit of a shove to this foundation - namely, by learning not to need Elon Musk.  This should be a key strategic objective of strategic nonviolent resistance - namely, the destruction of monopolists by learning ways to stop needing their monopolies.  Once a sufficiently large number of people figures out how to make that happen, the monopolists will fall.  Then all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put them back together again.

An End To World Cup 2026, Thankfully

I have an upcoming post which will describe what I believe to be the near-term prospects for corporations that make their money by launching swarms (or "constellations") of low Earth orbit satellites.  This post will be a follow-up to a recent post of mine about a man who claims to be the world's first trillionaire.  But right now I'm very, very busy with work, so I don't have time yet to finish writing that post.  Oh, if only I were a house cat!  Then I could get some human to feed me for free...

Anyway, here's a short post for today.  I haven't watched most of the World Cup.  The only footage I saw was this past 4th of July when I was in a hotel restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia.  But I was glad when the U.S. was eliminated from the competition.  Now I'm glad that Spain beat Argentina to win the 2026 World Cup.  Spain's victory is sweet for the following reasons:

• Spain played better football (soccer for us American boneheads) than Argentina.
• Spain's team was vastly more sportsmanlike and civilized than Argentina's team.  Argentina's team acted like a bunch of thuggish toddlers - especially after the game ended.
• Over the last year and a half, Spain's national leadership has courageously stood up against Trump in the realm of geopolitics.
• Both Argentina and the United States have aligned themselves with the goals of the Global Far Right in their zeal to prop up white supremacy and their zeal to Make Themselves Great by violently trashing their fellow human beings.  Therefore they (along with Russia) should properly be regarded as rogue nations.  Such nations are psychically incapable of bringing themselves to share the world equitably with their fellow human beings.  They refuse to follow the Golden Rule.
• The 2026 World Cup was a slap in the face of Trump in that it showed him the limits of his power.  It became yet one more arena of conflict in which he has begun to lose.  I don't have a TV, but it must have been a moment of rich enjoyment to watch him having to hand the World Cup trophy to Spain!

And now let's look at the 2026 World Cup in its historical context.  In that the U.S. was one of the nations hosting this year's World Cup, the event has become for many observers similar to the 1936 Summer Olympic games which were held in Berlin in Nazi Germany.  As Trump sought to turn the 2026 World Cup into a playground for American exceptionalist narcissism, so Adolf Hitler tried to turn the 1936 Summer Olympics into a supposed showcase for supposed Aryan racial superiority.  But athletes such as Jesse Owens did significant damage to Hitler's narcissistic moment.  Then Nazi Germany began to lose in more substantive and self-destructive ways in the ensuing years, even though they seemed to be riding high at the outset.  I wonder what losses lie in wait for the United States in the months and years to come.  Surely those losses can't be very far away.  And they will be far more substantive than merely losing a football match.

A Soccer (Futbol) Game As An Object Lesson

Those who regularly read my blog can tell the ways in which the dominant holders of power in the U.S. have influenced any patriotic spirit I may have had in my younger days.  To be quite blunt, that patriotic spirit has largely been rinsed out of me in the same way that new blue jeans lose their color after several minutes in a bleach bath.  In my case, it's taken years for the spirit of American patriotism to be leached out of me.  This country has done horrible things in its bid to enrich a small cadre of rich parasites at the expense of all the rest of us.

So I spent this most recent 4th of July in Canada, in Vancouver, B.C. to be specific.  I slept well on the evening of the 4th, as there were no boneheads shooting off fireworks all hours of the day and night.  And the person who watched my cats while I was gone told me of at least two other people she knew who had made the same decision to spend the 4th in Canada.  Donald Trump's pre-4th speech was also sparsely attended.  Many millions of Americans decided not to celebrate the 4th this year.  I can definitely tell you that there were no flags flying at my house.

And now there is a very sweet icing on the cake of my antipathy toward the country of my birth.  The U.S. soccer (football for everyone else) team was eliminated from the 2026 World Cup, in spite of attempts by Donald Thump to interfere in the adjudication of the game between the U.S. and Belgium.  This makes last night's World Cup match into a very interesting illustration.  It shows how a group of people with guts, determination, and skill can prevail even in situations where powerful agents attempt to stack the deck against them.  Thus it should inspire those of us who have dedicated ourselves to the use of strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of fascists like Chump.  (Or is it Bump?  Maybe Dump?)

P.S. I'm working on more posts on the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance, with a special focus on economic noncooperation and the building of parallel institutions.  Stay tuned.

Podcast Recommendation: The Cult Vault Episode - "Get Away, Amway!"

In my most recent post I wrote the following: "... I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like."  

This week I stumbled across a particularly destructive example of aspirational propaganda as I listened to an episode of a podcast which deals with the cult phenomenon in the U.S. and in Britain in the 21st Century.  The name of the podcast is the Cult Vault, and the name of the particular episode is "Get Away, Amway!"  (Amway is a particular example of what is known as a "business cult.") Feel free to check out the episode; it's quite instructive.

The Fallacy of Aspirational Propaganda

I was recently talking with a friend who lives in eastern China.  I am helping her with English vocabulary and grammar.  她也帮我练习中文的生词，语法，和发音。During the course of our conversation she mentioned to me that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, as a result of the most recent valuation of Musk's company SpaceX.  I had not known this, as I don't usually pay attention to Musk.  I find Musk to be rather emetic.  

My friend told me that many people in China are quite impressed by Musk because of his achievements.  I told her that it seems to me that many people throughout the rest of the world ought to view the richest and most famous people in the U.S. as a collection of crazy folks.  But afterward I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like.

But I'd like to say that these rich people are on their way to hell, because the foundation of their wealth is evil, since they have made themselves great by exploiting their fellow human beings.  And what they promise through their aspirational propaganda is impossible.  There is no way we can all be rich - especially not obscenely rich.  Why?  Because the earth is a finite planet.  And no matter how much Elon Musk boasts of how he's going to open up outer space as a "final frontier", at present neither he nor anyone else is even close to colonizing Mars, let alone anywhere else.  So why the aspirational propaganda?  It serves merely as a means of normalizing and legitimizing the really horrible behavior of the world's richest and most powerful people.

What is the implication that the earth is a finite planet?  Simply this: that anyone who wants to get really, really, really rich can lay claim to only a finite amount of stuff as long as they are limited to living on earth.  Once such a person actually lays claim to those resources, there are far fewer unclaimed resources available to the rest of us - even for those of us who wish to imitate the first person who successfully made himself really, really, really rich.  Once a second person succeeds in obtaining wealth similar to the first guy, the remaining unclaimed wealth shared by all the rest of us shrinks drastically yet again.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that once a certain mass of rich people comes into existence, all the rest of the world must subsist on mere crumbs.

To put it another way, imagine a group of ten neighborhood kids who are trying to split a pound cake between them.  The biggest, greediest, and most aggressive kid bites off a 7 ounce piece of the cake.  Then the second most greedy kid manages to bite off another 6 ounce piece.  A fight breaks out between the remaining kids for the remaining part of the cake, and in the process the rest of the cake gets torn to crumbs.  However, one other kid manages to snag a 2 ounce piece.  What will the remaining seven kids eat?

At The Crossroads

For the king of Babylon stands at the mother of the way,

at the head of the two ways, to use divination; 

he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, 

he looks at the liver.

- Ezekiel 21:21

"'We do all agree that Tianming's final words are very important.'... He then went on awkwardly. 'Then let's pick a spot to meet - somewhere other than the Earth.' ... Yun Tianming had very little faith that the Earth would survive."

- Death's End, Liu Cixin

I must report a rather sad fact.  The two cats who first came to live in my present home have died.  I believe one of them (Vashka) succumbed to feline leukemia virus (FELV) and the other (Koshka) began to suffer from severe edema and possible organ damage.  Both of them passed in 2024.  I now have two new cats.  The name of one of them is Paka and the name of the other is Neko.  However, from time to time I do think of Koshka and Vashka as I remember what cool cats they were.

The passing of Koshka was especially significant, as I was intimately involved in the process.  When I returned home from a trip out of state to visit family, I discovered that Koshka had not been eating, and that he was unsteady on his feet.  I put him into a cat carrier and took him to two vets on a Saturday evening during a snow/ice storm.  Those visits forced me to make some difficult decisions, although I was not without a bit of wry irritation during the first visit.  I did not realize it, but that first visit was to a vet from what I would call a "boutique" clinic, who started off by calling me a "pet parent."  He suggested a number of very expensive tests, but I did not have "pet insurance" and was unable to afford his suggested regimen.  What I felt I was getting was someone who wanted to use emotional manipulation to bleed me dry.  What I needed was someone who would do the necessary work to give me a basic diagnosis along with a reasonable prognosis given my limited ability to pay for my cat's treatment.  

The second clinic I visited specialized in emergency veterinary care, and when I brought my cat to them, they told me straight up that he was basically on his last legs, and that even drastic interventions would probably not lengthen his life more that several months.  Thus I made the decision to have him put to sleep.  That decision felt weird - both at the time I made the decision, and on and off for a long time afterward.  Here after all was a cat who had entered a trusting relationship with me, and yet now I was deciding to do this to him.  I seem to remember trying to second-guess my decision on more than one occasion afterward.  Yet objectively, my decision had to be constrained by such facts as my cat's condition, his prognosis, and my ability (or lack thereof) to pay for a heroic intervention.

I think many people can relate to the experience of being in a potentially emotionally charged situation, yet being forced to think objectively in order to make a rational choice.  So we come to the consideration of the United States in these present days, and the consideration of how we who are in the U.S. should choose to live in these days.  And to be a person of conscience in these days will inevitably lead to psychic distress as we see how the rich and powerful are preying on those who are weak.  For instance, the entire foreign policy of the second Trump administration has been and continues to be one long, violent, murderous tantrum against those who are not rich, not white, and not Western.  And Trump even sought to extend that tantrum to Canada, Europe and Greenland.  Trump's domestic policy is similarly poisonous.  And Trump is but the most prominent symptom of a greater American psychic disease, a disease shared by a majority of America's richest and most powerful citizens.  (Note that when I use the word "psychic", it means "pertaining to the soul."  I am not talking about supernatural or preternatural powers.)

Faced with this late-stage American pathology, many people of conscience are grieved.  This is especially true of those who have embraced the narrative that the United States once stood for a great and lofty ideal, and that Trumpism is merely an unfortunate aberration in its departure from that ideal.  Therefore for these people, "resistance" or "civil resistance" or "strategic nonviolent resistance" consists of trying to re-unite Americans around that higher ideal in the hope that those who are promoting the departure from the ideal might reform on their own initiative.  Such people place great hope in "advocacy" and mobilizing (as defined by the late Jane McAlevey).  But I think most objective observers would say by now that mobilizing and "advocacy" have not thus far been able to secure lasting beneficial change in the U.S.

Maybe the best thing then is to ask what is the current condition of the U.S., and whether it is even possible anymore to change that condition for the better.  I believe our condition has the following characteristics:

• Most of the flow of commerce and economic power is concentrated in a very small number of hands.
• Most of us who are not among the privileged live lives of great precarity and inequity.
• To be perfectly blunt, a majority of the members of the dominant culture are radically devoted to the promotion, maintenance, and re-expansion of white privilege.
• This has distorted our view of human rights and of basic morality to such an extent that a large number of Americans no longer wish to treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated, but seek to do the exact opposite to their fellow human beings.
• The vast majority of mainstream American media outlets (yes, including the New York Times and the Washington Post) have shifted and are continuing to shift ever farther to the right.
• The rich and powerful have shifted the political process to such an extent that it will be very hard for ordinary people who are not rich and powerful to use ordinary channels to shift the process back to a more equitable foundation.  Those who seek to restore a right balance will increasingly have to work outside of established systems to do so.
• The moral distortions of the most powerful members of our society are leading to the kinds of distortions of thinking and reasoning that may well destroy the nation.

Can this condition be remedied?  That depends on whether or not there are sufficient numbers of people of conscience in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states.  How many people are there in your locality who possess a working moral compass?  The essence and starting point of a properly working moral compass is this: "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 7:12.

It also depends on whether it is possible to eliminate the continuation of sources of toxicity in our culture.  I am thinking especially of the overwhelming promotion of right-wing, selfish, libertarian, supremacist propaganda through American mainstream media, and the rabid anti-tax rhetoric that is destroying all the publicly-funded instruments of the public good in this country.  Trying to repair the damage done to our partially-destroyed society while the organs of right-wing media continue to pump out their message is like trying to clean up a basement that has been flooded by a sewage spill even while the broken sewer force main that initially caused the flooding continues to pump sewage.

Faced with the challenge of trying to repair our partially destroyed society, some have concluded that repair and healing are impossible.  These people hold out very little hope for the long-term survival of the United States.  Thus many people are choosing to try to emigrate.  It will be interesting to see how many of them succeed, and what they will find in their new homelands.  Emigration is an extreme example of the withdrawal of economic and political cooperation which I have been promoting in my remarks on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, I can still see other ways of achieving nearly the same level of withdrawal.  What a person chooses will depend on the diagnosis, and hence the prognosis of the American condition which he or she is able to construct.  Here's a hint to my prognosis: I think that there are still many steps of withdrawal that can be taken by people of conscience who must still live in the United States.  But we'll have to be willing for some hard work.

Blog Post Recommendation from "Diary of An Autodidact"

I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to write a new blog post, but I do want to recommend a post from another blogger.  The name of the blog is Diary of an Autodidact, and the post is titled "Underground by Haruki Murakami".  Like me, the author of this blog is a survivor of an American white supremacist fundamentalist/Evangelical cult, and he has noted several similarities between present-day white evangelicalism and the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which perpetrated a massive terrorist attack on Japanese subway commuters in March 1995.  I have myself commented on the lessons which I learned from reading (or in my case, listening to the audiobook version of) Haruki Murakami's book Underground, with its detailed description of the process by which many Aum participants lost their souls to the delusions of the evil man named Shoko Asahara.  It is interesting to see how others are drawing the same lessons in order to understand the present partly destroyed state of much of mainstream American culture.  To quote from the author of Diary of an Autodidact, "In the end, this is the legacy [of cults of narcissism] - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion."  These sentences give us some idea of the final outcome of Trumpism.

And as for white evangelicalism/Protestantism (particularly the American flavor) - which has been the enabler of slavery, attempted genocide, and wars of conquest for centuries - I too am struck - as the author of Diary of an Autodidact was struck - by this quote from Underground:

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, 

where are they to go for salvation?”