Precarity - My Own Experience

Last week's post presented a few definitions of precarity as a social and economic phenomenon.  Today I'd like to present a definition which overlaps the definitions previously given while expanding a bit on the personal side of this phenomenon.  From the standpoint of those who experience it, precarity is a state of being in which a person can't be sure that they will have enough money each month to make rent or mortgage payments, to go places by other means than walking or riding a bicycle, to keep the utilities connected, or to cover groceries for the entire month.  This can be due to not earning enough each month for the expenses listed above.  It can also be due to having a job which is in danger of disappearing even though for the present it does provide enough money to cover the bills.

Although I am an African-American and my family is African-American, I was not born into precarity, even though I was born into a time in which I and my family had to face an environment of racial hostility which was as bad as or perhaps even worse than the worst which the Trump years produced in this country.  My life from birth to adolescence was relatively secure because my dad was an officer in the military.  However, once I reached adolescence, my siblings and I found ourselves living in a broken home.  It is not my desire now to describe how this happened or who was at fault.  Indeed, at the time our home was breaking, I could not have provided such a description, as a lot of what was happening went right over my head.  All I knew at the end of it was that I was now living with one parent instead of two.  

I do not want to say anything that would be dishonoring to either of my parents.  However, for the purpose of this post, I must say that the parent with whom I ended up living chose to approach the new, constrained life we faced with a rather - shall we say, interesting - perspective.  Looking back, it seems to me that some of the elements of that perspective consisted of the notion that we should live as luxuriously as possible even if it required Divine miraculous intervention, combined with a belief system and theology heavily influenced by holy-roller Pentecostalism.  Mistakes and bad choices were therefore made, and we suffered consequences such as occasionally running out of food before the end of the month, having utilities turned off, having a car repossessed, and finding it hard to buy clothes for rapidly-growing children.  This parent was not the only source of my personal sufferings during that time.  I too was a complete and utter doofus.  To explain this further, I was an underachiever and quite lazy.  Partly this was due to the fact that I could not stand school, although I was able to do well enough when I applied myself.  But I preferred to spend my time either watching TV, listening to public radio, reading science fiction, or just prowling the neighborhood during the hours when my parent was working swing shift.  Therefore I was definitely not on the college prep track.  

During my freshman and sophomore years in high school, this sort of life was tolerable to me.  But as the Good Book says, "Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap."  After a while the reaping grew more and more painful.  I therefore started looking for work at a local swap meet, and later got a job at a local drive-in movie theater.  And I began to worry about my future beyond high school.  I knew that I had not prepared myself adequately for college, let alone for any kind of scholarship money.  So it seemed to me that my best chance for eating and having clothes to wear after high school lay in joining the military myself.  Therefore I enlisted.

Thankfully, during my tour of duty I was never in combat and never had to shoot at anyone.  But I quickly got tired of spending my time sleeping in the woods with people whom I could hardly stand, people who got drunk at every possible opportunity.  So I served only one tour and then got out.  My experiences of adolescence had combined with my military experience to produce in me something that had not previously existed, namely a strong desire to better myself and to leave completely behind a lifestyle of just barely getting by.  So I decided to put myself through college.  My heavy exposure to science fiction moved me to choose engineering as a major.  I knew I was in for a long and hard slog to reach my goal, but now I was determined to get there.

I entered my college years with a certain perspective on the world and on the place of educated people in the world.  Part of that perspective consisted of the expectation that corporations and their white-collar workers would continue the same occupational culture which my dad had experienced during his career.  He had served in the military as an officer until he had reached the point where he could retire, then had switched to white-collar managerial work as an employee of a large defense contractor.  Later he retired from that job also and entered into a well-endowed post-retirement life.  He was part of a corporate and occupational culture in which corporations lasted for decades and entered into what I call long-term care arrangements with their best and most loyal employees.  This meant that those who worked for these corporations for a long enough time could expect a guaranteed pension and the sort of stereotypical retirement send-off in which the boss would give the new retiree a gold watch.

The reality I experienced was rather different from this, to say the least.  When I first left the military and moved back to Southern California, I got a job at a defense plant in order to support myself while I was in school.  This was in the last years of the Cold War, and we thought the Cold War would last for decades more.  Therefore we thought our defense plant and others like it would continue in much the same way that public utility companies continued decade after decade.  But then the Berlin Wall fell, and for a time, geopolitical shifts destroyed the economic security of a number of defense contractors.  The plant I worked for was eventually converted to a shopping center.  Many, many people were laid off.

After I obtained my bachelors degree, I went to work for an engineering firm which had once done cutting-edge work for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA during the space race and the arms race.  However, both national and global political shifts had caused most of that work to dry up by the time I came on board.  The military work never completely dried up.  However, during my first few years at that firm, we worked on prisons (a fact of which I am now ashamed), as well as MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) design for a number of fast food joints (we're talking about places as small as a typical Taco Bell or McDonald's), gas stations, and amusement parks.  When I first joined that firm a new employee could enroll in the company pension program.  But within a few years, the pension program was replaced entirely by a 401k/ESOP program.  Only the old-timers got anything like a gold watch.  And not a few of those old-timers got the ax during one of several down-sizing periods.  There were times when the cubicle farm in which I worked looked to me like a town in Europe of the Middle Ages must have looked after the bubonic plague had swept through it.  Picture a town with lots of suddenly empty houses.

A major factor which began to affect my engineering discipline (and hence the stability of my career) was the beginning and later acceleration of the automation of many elements of the design process.  This took place as design software companies added functions in their software for the rapid performance of both drafting, layout, and computational tasks which had formerly required humans to do things by hand.  Some of those people I knew who got the ax had been among those who refused to learn the new technology.

My first experience of precarity had been due to personal foolishness on the part of myself and my relatives.  This led me to take the path of education as a means of escape.  I do not in the least regret taking that path.  However, in leaving one realm and entering another, I unwittingly entered a realm of accelerating precarity caused by accelerating large-scale economic and technological shifts outside of my control.  Those shifts were driven by the following factors:

• The destruction of restrictions on capital flows as a result of the deregulation that began under former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's.  This led to the following:
• An increasing attempt by corporations to try to grow profits by financial trickery, by mergers and acquisitions, and by cutting costs related to long-standing covenants with workers.
• An increasing volatility in the corporate landscape, with long-standing publicly-traded firms suddenly being threatened by either the consequences of ill-advised decisions, or the threat of hostile takeovers, or by the blowing and bursting of economic bubbles, or by the saturation of existing markets.
• The shrinkage of available resources for large-scale transformative megaprojects.  This shrinkage was driven by:
• The political and economic conservatism of Republican administrations in the United States from 1980 onward.  This conservatism tended to lead to cuts in any kind of programs (such as the space program) which had aspirational goals related to the betterment of humankind, although the Republicans always seemed to be able to find money for national defense and law enforcement.  (Unfortunately, however, due to recent Russian thuggishness, it appears that the generous U.S. outlays for defense have been necessary!)
• The beginning of the actual shrinkage of the resource base available for the global and national industrial economies.
• The beginning and later acceleration of changes wrought in work (both manufacturing and knowledge work) wrought by the introduction of automation, advances in telecommunication technology and artificial intelligence.

These factors include things that society can and should collectively decide to reverse, such as the choices and policies of rabid free-market late capitalism.  However, some of these factors should be regarded as inevitable factors that are leading to inexorable changes in the way we procure a living for ourselves and the landscape in which we earn that living.  Seeing such factors in this way should motivate each of us to make whatever personal and communal changes we need to make in order to survive the coming changes.  The technological changes are especially significant, since those who refuse to adjust themselves to prepare for these will wind up being steamrolled by the technological juggernaut.  Each of us may find that he or she needs to engage in a process of constant personal re-education and reinvention.

As for me, I have worked for a few engineering firms since that first firm I encountered after graduating from college.  Some of their offices have gone out of business due to the flat-footedness of managers who were not able to make the mental adjustment to rapidly changing markets and circumstances.  Some of these firms continue to do well to the present day, although their employees must pay certain costs in terms of extensive travel and sometimes long hours.  The challenge for employees is to find an occupational path which provides economic security without working a person to death or imposing unacceptable costs in other parts of the person's life such as his or her family life.  In a future post I will argue that the Great Resignation has provided a temporary boost to workers seeking to navigate such a path.

The West Must Defeat Russia

Please note the title of this post.  Note that it is not in the passive voice, but the active voice.  Russia has launched repeated all-out assaults in an attempt to break Ukrainian defenses.  The latest assault is against the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  The Ukrainians have repeatedly proven time and time again that they are willing to fight with valor and determination against thuggish Russian aggression.  However, the West has repeatedly been somewhat timorous and restrained in supplying weapons to Ukraine in order that Ukraine might drive Russian thug invaders from its territory.  So the world has had to witness repeated cliffhangers in the story of Ukraine's fight to liberate itself.

This has got to stop.  I cannot believe that we in the West have allowed Russia's dangerous aggression to go on for so long!  The West must have the courage to do whatever it takes to swiftly destroy Russia's military power.  Those in the West who are afraid of what Russia might do if it is defied and confronted should rather consider what Russia will certainly do if it is allowed to win.  Narcissists, bullies and thugs always escalate when they are not soundly and effectively stopped at the first sign of aggression.  Appeasement never works.  We must ask ourselves whether the cowards among us are paving the way for a world in which we allow ourselves to be trashed by Russia.  Russia must be stopped dead in its tracks.  The West must at the very least send to Ukraine whaever weaponry it takes for Ukraine to drive Russian thugs out of its territory and keep them out.  Please write your Congressional representative or senator and write the President also to ask that the United States send whatever weaponry Ukraine needs - including both long-range missiles and heavy tanks - and that this military aid be sent swiftly.  

The Advance of Decompensation

A quick post tonight: there are two things worth mentioning.  First, Russian mercenaries claim to have captured the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  Yet these claims have turned out to be so far from reality that even the Kremlin has denied them.  Putin is perhaps discovering the weakness of relying on mercenaries to win an unrighteous war.  Russia is looking increasingly ill.

Second, the Republican members of the Missouri legislature have introduced legislation requiring women who attend legislative sessions to wear clothing that covers their arms.  These are the same Republicans who threw a wobbly when state health officials tried to impose mask mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19.  These are the same stupid people who applauded the stupid white males armed with assault rifles who stormed state houses in Midwest states with Democratic governors when those governors issued public health decrees that sought to keep these doofuses from getting sick and dying.  Evidently COVID was not as much of an existential threat as women with bare arms.

Both Putin, Russia, and the U.S. Republican Party are examples of people who are at war with reality.  Unfortunately for them, it's a war they're losing.

Precarity - An Introduction

Certain events from the past several weeks have provoked me to think about a topic which I have not studied in depth up to this time.  Those events are largely focused on the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble last year and the corresponding destruction of the "investments" many poorer people made in "crypto" in order to increase their wealth.  (See "FTX Crypto Crash Threatens Life Savings of Working People", Truthout, November 2022, and "The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible", Foreign Policy, May 2022.)  The collapse of economic bubbles in capitalist societies is a worthy topic of consideration in its own right  But my interest now lies in the motives and vulnerabilities of the ordinary people who were led to invest in "crypto" in the first place.  Their choice to invest was one of several coping mechanisms which they employed in order to try to deal with their social and economic situation.  That situation can be described by a single word: precarity.

Precarity is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse," and, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost."  The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."  The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck?  Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"  We who live in the United States may be tempted to look on precarity solely in its American-style manifestations of inequality such as racism and the effects of tycoon capitalism, neoliberalism, privatization, and the destruction of social safety nets.  But precarity is a global phenomenon which can be seen even in ethnically homogeneous societies, as described by Hao Jingfang's "near science fiction" novelette titled, Folding Beijing.  (You can listen to an audio recording of her story at StarShipSofa.)  Precarity naturally arises whenever the people at the top of a society concentrate nearly all of the wealth of that society in the hands of a chosen few, thus creating a massive underclass out of the many who are not of the chosen few.  Those many become the precariat.

It is quite natural to assume that the precariat consist primarily of those historically marginalized populations without access to higher education, whose historical economic and social standing has condemned them to a blue-collar or manual labor or McJob sort of existence.  But while this is true, it is also true than an increasing number of white-collar, college-educated workers have found themselves forced into the precariat due to the destruction of long-standing arrangements between corporate masters and skilled professional labor.  For a recent example of this, consider the large number of lawyers who were laid off in 2022.  This progression of precarity among white-collar workers has been taking place for at least three decades.  (Four decades actually, if one counts the day that former President Ronald Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers who were part of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration staff.)

Precarity is quite naturally a highly uncomfortable way of life.  This discomfort - frequently amounting to great pain and distress - quite naturally provokes a search for coping mechanisms from the people who comprise the precariat.  The usual suspects among coping mechanisms include things like the abuse of alcohol, opioids, and other drugs, or drowning oneself in other passive entertainments.  But my focus is on those more active attempts to cope which members of the precariat employ in trying to transform their situation.  So I am planning to write a series of posts on precarity, on the precariat, and on the attempts by members of the precariat to transform their situation.  A tentative outline of that series is as follows:

1. The Precariat - An Overview (This has been partly covered in today's post.)
2. My own experience of precarity
• As a teen
• As a college student
• Surprising encounters in the white-collar world
3. Origins and Spread of the Precariat
• The Link Between the Origins of Precarity and the Rise of Neoliberal (that is, radical libertarian free-market) capitalism
4. The Composition and Location of the Precariat
• Its global nature
• Its local expressions
5. The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat
• What Doesn't Work
• Unwise "Side Hustles"
• The False Promises of Bubbles
• The Role of the "Advice" (Motivational Speaking) Industry and "Influencer" Culture
• Political Dead-Ends
• What Does (or May) Work
6. The Precariat And the Great Resignation
7. Future Directions Of The Precariat
• As Passive Victims of Forces Outside Themselves
• As Active and Activized Agents Who Take Charge Of Their Own Future
• The Potential for Such Action
• The Possible Constraints Preventing Such Action
• The Precariat in "Babylon"

Each major heading in this list will be covered in a separate blog post.  Each major heading will also require some research in order to do it justice.  But fortunately, the extreme busyness which characterized my life during most of 2022 seems to be easing up.  (I have rediscovered the fact that sleeping, for instance, is delicious!  And I look forward to chillin' with my guitar in my backyard when the weather warms up . . . )  The time taken in researching each of these topics will be time well-spent, and hopefully it will prove useful to the readers of this blog, as I believe that an increasing number of us will be forced to deal with precarity (or even be swept involuntarily into the precariat) in the days to come.

Chastised By A Bursting Bubble

No, the burned hand teaches best.  After that,

advice about fire goes to the heart.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Ours is an age in which there is frequently a great deal of confusion about what constitutes true wealth.  This is especially true in the United States, and has been historically true of this country for at least a century.  Therefore, when I learned about the recent collapse of much of the cryptocurrency "industry", I was not surprised.  A long time ago I started expecting something like this to happen.  (For more information on the collapse, see the Washington Post article "Crypto 'Winter' has come.  Will it become an ice age?" and the European Central Bank essay titled, Crypto dominos: the bursting crypto bubbles and the destiny of digital finance" also.) 

I was slow to hear about cryptocurrencies when they first made waves, and I never really developed any interest in them.  A big turnoff was that they seemed to me to be simply a vastly more complicated way of doing what regular money was supposed to do - namely to act as a medium of commercial exchange.  And the schemes for making money from investing in cryptocurrencies (or as those who were 'hip' and 'with it' called them, "crypto") seemed to me after a while to be more complicated than even fluid mechanics calculations like the Navier-Stokes equation.  I swiftly came to the following conclusions regarding crypto:

• It was a means of promising early "investors" the chance to get something for nothing.
• It therefore had no intrinsic value or essential use in the world.
• It was therefore the perfect material for blowing financial bubbles.
• One day the bubbles would pop.

The recent pop of these bubbles (along with the accompanying pictures of people being led away to jail) has confirmed all of my conclusions.  It has also confirmed my belief and assertion that we live in a moral universe, and that those who violate the moral standard of that universe sooner or later must face the outworkings of their own damnation.  You really do reap what you've sown.  This has been true of the crypto schemers who set up the schemes by which they sought to defraud others.  But it is also true of many of those who were defrauded, for they were hooked by the promise of easy money - that is, by the promise of obtaining something for nothing.  Had they themselves not been led astray by their own evil desire, they would not have fallen prey to those who were more clever in doing evil.  The fact that bubbles like these continue to be blown speaks volumes about our present society - both about its perpetrators and about its victims.  The fact that an entire industry has arisen out of the desire to use mathematics as a tool of swindling speaks volumes about our misplaced collective values.  Bubbles like crypto are an inescapable feature of a society whose economy is built on usury.

So for those of us who seek to build true and lasting wealth in the midst of uncertain times, what should be our strategy?  As I have said before on this blog, our strategy should consist of the following elements:

• Do not desire to get rich.
• Learn essential skills.  Or, to put it another way, learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that you may not be unfruitful.
• Live simply.  Focus on the essentials.

Do these things and you will go a long way toward bubble-proofing yourself.  You will also save yourself from the ravages of late-stage capitalism.

The Forecaster's Eyeglasses

A major focus of this blog has been to try to guess the outlines of the future, and to outline possible strategies for preparing for that future.  People who try to guess the outlines of the future need a certain mindset if they intend to safely engage in the guessing game without making fools of themselves.  One essential characteristic of the required mindset is humility - the kind of humility which keeps the guessers from taking themselves and their guesses so seriously that they are unwilling to take on emerging information which may contradict the original guesses.  Another essential characteristic is curiosity - the kind of curiosity which dedicates itself to observing and tracking emerging trends.  Lastly, what is needed is precision - a rigorous logical precision in evaluating both one's guesses and one's observations, as well as logical rigor in evaluating whether one's observations confirm one's original guesses.  The scientific method is an example of this kind of rigorous precision.  

A large body of guesses about the future has to do with the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation on modern industrial society.  As an example we can consider the many books written on the subject during the first decade of the 21st century.  Spokespersons such as Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Nicole Foss, and Raul Ilargi Meijer promoted the view that the world's supplies of petroleum were on the verge of entering a phase of declining output, and that this irreversible decline in output would trigger catastrophic changes in the world's industrial societies, or to put it more starkly, the sudden catastrophic collapse of industrial society.  Some of the predictions of these people seemed to leave the realm of fact-based analysis entirely and became instead the embodiment of the subconscious night terror of white Anglo-European society over the possible loss of their own dominance and control of the earth.

So how did the predictions of these people fare in the face of events?  The answer is decidedly mixed.  Many of these predictors were able to draw the correct linkage between the impending decline of global petroleum output and U.S. foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush.  And according to the analysis of the German Energy Watch Group, the world has indeed long since passed the peak of global conventional oil production.  However, the predictions of the "collapsitarians" failed to account for the technological innovations which allowed the petroleum industry to temporarily boost output of petroleum liquids by means of fracking, ultra-deep drilling, horizontal drilling and other unconventional means.  (Of course, the use of these techniques also led to widespread groundwater contamination as well.)  These predictions also failed to account for the innovations in solar pv cell production, electricity storage technology, and electric vehicle design which have occurred from 2010 onward.  (However, these predictors of collapse did manage to breathe new life into a genre of literature which had gone dormant after the threat of nuclear war seemed to recede from the 1980's onward - namely the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction!  Move over, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, Pat Frank, Stephen King, and Walter M. Miller - you've got new neighbors...)

In other words, while resource shortages have begun to appear, they have been partially mitigated by technological advances.  Thus, society in general has most definitely not collapsed.  Yet ordinary people - especially those who are not among the privileged - have found that the number of potential threats in their environment has multiplied.  We who are not among the world's privileged therefore must learn to navigate that threat environment.  This navigation will require us to identify both emergent trends and potential risks.  So I'd like to lay out a few of these trends and risks in the remaining space in this post.  Let's consider the following:

• Energy.  The global energy situation is a mixed bag at present.  As mentioned above, global oil production is definitely past peak right now, and I'd like to suggest that this includes not only conventional oil, but all petroleum liquids.  This is why oil prices had begun to rise in 2021 even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  What is more, global production of coal may already have peaked.  According to the Energy Watch Group, global production of uranium has also already peaked.  Therefore the outlook is not good for those societies and industries which rely primarily on fossil fuel.  However, the outlook for renewables - especially solar photovoltaics - is quite sunny.  (Pardon the pun.)  As mentioned previously on this blog, analyses conducted by the German Energy Watch Group show that the transformation of global industrial societies entirely to renewable energy conveyed by electricity is well within the capabilities of these societies.  That transformation was already in progress before the start of this year, and has only accelerated as nations have come to realize that they cannot allow themselves to become dependent on the resources of thug regimes with imperial ambitions such as Russia.

One wild card in the energy mix is the potential contribution from nuclear fusion energy.  Two weeks ago the United States achieved ignition for the first time in a laser-triggered inertial confinement fusion experiment.  What this means is that by using laser light to implode a fusion target, the experimenters were able to produce more energy than the lasers used to initiate the fusion reaction.  However, this does not mean that a practical commercial fusion reactor is just around the corner.  So far, most fusion experiments have focused on the deuterium-tritium reaction, which produces most of its energy in a form that is very hard to harness for electricity generation.  The reaction also produces a very high neutron flux, which tends to destroy reactor materials over time in addition to producing lots of radioactive waste.  The disadvantages of the deuterium-tritium reaction represent a serious engineering challenge.  It remains to be seen whether that challenge can be overcome.

• Material Resources. I don't have time today to do an exhaustive analysis of resource bottlenecks, but I can definitely say that shortages of key materials have begun to appear in a number of industries.  Taking the construction industry as an example, from 2020 onward there have been shortages of lumber and steel.  In addition, there have been increasing shortages and delays in obtaining finished construction assemblies such as electrical switchboards, switchgear and transformers.  The appearance of shortages need not be a catastrophic thing, but shortages will force the world's economies to shift to a more circular model.  This will force a shift in the ideologies of many right-leaning people in the United States, for instance.  The good news is that a number of heavy industrial corporations have begun to move toward embracing the circular economy.  However, the existence and increasing severity of material shortages may prove to be more of an economic constraint than the shortage of energy was supposed to be.

• Climate and Environment.  The events of the past three or four years have provided blatant proof of the accelerating pace of global warming and its resulting environmental degradation.  From the spectacular Russian wildfires (most of which were caused by humans) which took place every year during the last ten years to the massive wildfires and smoke events which occurred in the western United States in 2020 to the horrible extreme temperatures which were seen in the U.S. Pacific Northwest in 2021, we have begun to witness weather events which have not been seen on the earth for millions of years.  Moreover, recent studies show that the melting of the earth's permanent ice is happening as much as 100 times faster than scientific models have predicted.  Many have predicted that increasing alteration of the earth's climate will result in large-scale migration of "climate refugees" from more chaotic or inhospitable regions to more habitable regions of the earth.  The assumption has been that these refugees will be from among the world's poorest people.  But it seems to me - especially given the random distribution of extreme weather events over the last few years - that many of these refugees may come from the world's most affluent populations.  Think of rich retired snowbirds fleeing from Arizona or jet-setters fleeing coastal resort properties in Florida.  Perhaps the best prospects will belong to those people who are wise and savvy enough to make a habitable space wherever they may find themselves - even if it means making one's bed in Sheol.

• Social Justice and Human Rights.  It is in this area that the greatest threats have arisen over the last decade.  The poor and oppressed populations of the earth won a number of significant victories during the 20th century.  Those victories led to such things as the end of the British Empire, the liberation of formerly colonized nations in the Global South, and the establishment of polities of liberated people who were able to begin to build their own collective power in order to fulfill their own human potential.  A number of observers including both social scientists and science fiction writers predicted that this trend would only continue until the entire earth had become an egalitarian society in which each human being was valued equally and in which each human being could flourish.  However, such idealistic thinking failed to recognize the latent power and personality-disordered nature of the oppressors, nor did it take into account the fact that the oppressors began to organize themselves to take back their lost glory.  Thus many of us failed to notice the efforts - at first subtle, then more blatant - which began from 1980 onward in the United States to attempt to reverse all the civil rights gains achieved by the nonwhite in the United States from 1865 onward.  We failed to recognize the emergence of revanchists both domestically and globally.

Now we stand at a crossroads - especially those of us who are people of color in the United States.  Our strategy to date for dealing with the re-emergent threats we face has been inadequate, to say the least.  That strategy has consisted of joining ourselves to a "progressive" agenda which does not place our unique concerns first and foremost, because it was not set by us.  Those who push this agenda on us have instructed us to engage in a "strategy" which largely consists of begging the oppressor to be nice.  This hasn't worked.  We have allowed our struggle to be hijacked by people whose priorities are not our priorities.  And we who are people of color in the United States have allowed ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda, in the hopes that we might be able to receive some of the crumbs which fall from the table of that someone else when they have accomplished their agenda.

We need to start constructing our own agenda.  That agenda must start with us coming together to create our own structures of self-reliance just as Gandhi did in India at the beginning of his struggle against British imperialism.  This will involve struggle and hard work.  We need to stop being afraid of struggle and hard work.  To quote from a certain book on strategic nonviolent resistance, we need to realize that "the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility."  Or, to put it another way, if I get out of bed and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and I find a wolf there, it is 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten by the wolf, since most reasonable people would never have any reason to expect a wolf in their houses.  (That nasty wolf must have sneaked in!)  But if I live in a place where wolves are commonplace and are very vicious, and I know this to be true, and yet I take no precautions when I leave my house, it is still 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten, because the wolf is an evil, predatory beast whose evil nature moved him to start chewing on me.  But in this case, it is also 100 percent my fault, because I knew that there were wolves near my house, and I knew what sort of creatures wolves are, and yet I did nothing to protect myself.  Chew on that for a while.

Note that this list is not exhaustive.  In particular, I ran out of time to discuss the emergence of potential pandemic threats and the threats to public health which have resulted from the spread of disinformation and denialism by the Global Far Right.  Nor did I discuss the geopolitical threat posed by national revanchism, although this naturally follows from a consideration of threats to human rights and social justice.  While Russia is a blatant example of a revanchist threat, it is by no means the only example.  And there is the question of how the emergence of artificial machine intelligence will evolve and how much of an impact it will make on our daily lives.   But I must leave these considerations for another day.

A Story That Illustrates: The Sea Goddess' Bloom

This weekend is once again one of those weekends in which I have very little time for anything except catching up on work.  So today's post will be extra short.  However, I'd like to recommend a story which was published recently in an online magazine/podcast combination known as Escape Pod.  The name of the story is "The Sea Goddess' Bloom" and it was written by Uchechukwu Nwaka, a Ph.D lecturer at the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Nigeria.  To me, the story and character arcs are a beautiful illustration of a point I made in a post on this blog titled, "How The Straight Subverts The Crooked."

The N-Soul Problem

In a couple of recent posts I discussed the phenomenon of megaprojects - that is, those large-scale, costly projects which are undertaken by a society when all of its members become united in the pursuit of  particular goals which the megaprojects are designed to meet.  The pursuit of the goal embodied by the megaproject alters the lives of everyone in the society undertaking the project, because it requires each member of the society to make a sacrifice in order to contribute toward the goal.  Perhaps the earliest historical example of a megaproject is the Tower of Babel mentioned in Genesis 11:1-9.  More recent examples of megaprojects include the war economies which were arranged by the various governments which fought World War Two, as well as the rebuilding of some of those economies which occurred in the aftermath of that war.  The U.S. space program became something of a megaproject in the 1960's when President Kennedy set the goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the decade.  A much more prosaic example of a megaproject is the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system under President Eisenhower during the 1950's.

I'd like to suggest that megaprojects play a key role in the wholesale transformation and advance of a society.  I'd also like to suggest that there are three important conditions which must be fulfilled in order for a megaproject to realize its full transformative potential:

1. The leaders of a society must be wise in their choice of the goal which a megaproject is supposed to meet;
2. The leaders must present the vision and goal of the megaproject in a way that unites the souls of the members of society behind that goal;
3. And, the leaders must be wise in organizing the contributions of each member of the society in fulfilling that goal.

It is at points 2 and 3 that trouble can come.  Point 1 is also a place of potential trouble - if the leaders of a society choose an unrighteous goal, eventually their project will fail, as the builders of Babel found out.  But I'd like to focus especially on the pitfalls contained in points 2 and 3.  The success of point 2 depends not only on the wisdom and persuasiveness of the leaders of a society, but also on all the members of the society itself.  For instance, if the members of a society are generally unselfish and willing to make contributions toward a greater good, they can be more easily united behind a good goal.  If, however, the members of a society are rabidly selfish and individualistic, then it becomes much harder for any leader to unite them behind the sort of transformative goal that requires an unselfish contribution from each member.  The success or failure of point 3 depends on the humility (or lack thereof) of the leaders of the society.  The leaders will have the greatest chance of success if they recognize that the people from whom they are asking contributions bring not only their material wealth and the strength of their bodies, but also their minds (or souls) - that is, their unique ideas and perspectives.  Those leaders who set a goal and then "hire" the members of their societies "from the shoulders down" as mere drones to fulfill the grand plan of the leaders may find their grand plan failing.

Now one way to destroy a society's ability to conceive and implement megaprojects is to destroy that society's ability to combine.  This is what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages of everyone on earth because their unified goal was evil.  But it is also possible for evil agents to confuse the ability of a society to undertake large-scale transformative projects of good.  How is this done?  Simply by teaching or persuading a majority of the members of the society to become selfish, materialistic, and individualistic.  This has been the trajectory of American society over the last four decades under the influence of right-wing American media.  It should be no surprise therefore that the ability of the U.S. to engage in transformative megaprojects has declined as well (at the same time that loneliness and alienation in American society has increased).  There is an urgent need for the kind of transformative megaprojects that can enable the United States to weather the 21st century challenges of declining resource availability, increasing environmental degradation, and a changing climate.  But rigid adherence to free-market ideology and excessive reliance on private-sector solutions is hindering the emergence of the needed megaprojects.  A case in point is the success with which the American Right attacked the Green New Deal.

On the other hand, there are the societies of China and Singapore, in which the coordination between the State and private industry is much tighter, and there is still a fair amount of collective spirit.  As a result, China has the most advanced urban infrastructure in the world, and leads the world in rapid transit technology including high-speed rail.  In fact, China is now a major exporter of high-speed rail technology.  Similarly, the Chinese higher education system is the result of intense, goal-oriented State strategic planning which has begun to produce universities which are among the most prestigious in the world.  (Consider Tsinghua University, for instance, which is among the top twenty universities worldwide according to one metric.)  This is occurring at a time in which many American universities are declining in world rankings due to a lack of public funding for basic research.  And the story of Singapore is no less impressive, as demonstrated by the article cited at the end of this post.  But a problem arises in more collectivist societies if the leaders of those societies become insecure and hence begin to assert an unhealthy level of control over the initiative of their private members.  Hence, Chinese President Xi Jinping's actions and policies have begun to threaten the megaproject of Chinese transformation begun by Deng Xiaoping.

So we have two ends of a continuum: on the one hand, rampant, laissez-faire individualism which prevents people from combining in any way to achieve goals larger than the individual, and on the other hand, a central control which quashes individual initiative and stifles diverse insights.  The United States lies on one end of this continuum and is declining as a result.  China under Xi Jinping has begun to move toward the other end of the continuum and has begun to suffer as a result.  Physicists and astronomers sometimes talk about the n-body problem - that is, the problem of trying to mathematically describe the motions of three or more bodies in orbit around a common center.  I'd like to suggest what I call the "n-soul problem" - that is, how to organize people into groups that most effectively undertake transformative projects for good.  Those who successfully solve this problem will do well.  

For further reading on megaprojects, see "Megaprojects for Megaregions: Global Cases and Takeaways" by John Landis and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The Activizing Literature of Jose Rizal

This is a "quickie" post.  Entrepreneurship is still keeping me very busy, as demonstrated by the fact that I worked straight through last week's holidays.  However, I want to take a moment to mention the Filipino author Jose Rizal, who was a key figure in the birth of the Philippine independence movement against the Spanish empire in the latter part of the 19th century.  Two of his main contributions to that movement consisted of his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.  It was the publication of these novels which led to his arrest and execution by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines.  The novels were also banned by the Spanish Philippine provincial government.  

I recently took a listen to an audiobook recording of both novels.  As I have mentioned before, audiobooks are a good way to consume literature while washing dishes, doing yardwork, brushing teeth, etc.  And if you want to do the same with these novels, you can find a free recorded reading of both novels at the website of a woman named Availle.  (No, Google, I did not mean "available," I meant "Availle"!  Fix your broken search algorithm...)  Some thoughts:

• Jose Rizal has an engaging literary style!  I like how he is able to weave humor into stories about very heavy times in the history of an oppressed people.  (For instance, you will meet a woman who torments her husband by yanking out his false teeth from time to time...)
• I like how he refutes the argument put by oppressors to their victims that the oppression is somehow necessary.
• I like how he illustrates the contradictions that arise in the societies of the dominated.
• I like the fact that his stories have a strong moral point.  His second novel illustrates especially well the main point I made in a post written last year for this blog.

Rizal is one of those authors who have lately illustrated to me the power of literature to make moral points, the power which good literature has to disturb the unjust peace of dominators by illustrating the contradictions in that peace.  This power is best exercised by those who have the talent and ability to skillfully use the tools of good literature in order to make a point with imagination, from unexpected and original perspectives, without falling into banality or dry preachiness.  Other examples of this ability can be seen in the magical realism of authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the "science fiction realism" of the crop of new post-90's Chinese writers such as Chen Qiufan or Hao Jingfang, as well as the social commentary of authors of long standing such as Han Song.  An example from the early 20th century in the United States who arouses my interest is Sinclair Lewis.  I am thinking that the next audiobook I listen to will be his novel Elmer Gantry.

In future posts, I might explore the subject of literature as an instrument of social change, and might also delve into some of the tools of transformative literature.  But if I do, I'll be sure to include a disclaimer that I am not a professional novelist!

Why Russian Power Must Be Destroyed

It's interesting (but hardly surprising) that some of the members of the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing for an end to U.S. aid to Ukraine as Ukraine fights to rid itself of Russian invaders.  What is a bit more disappointing is the presence of supposed voices on the American "left" who are clamoring for the same thing, and who are pleading for a "negotiated settlement" to the war in Ukraine.  

It is because of a failure on the part of decent people in the United States to organize that the Republicans won a majority of House seats in the 2022 elections.  It is because of a failure on the part of decent people in the U.S. that the voices clamoring for "negotiations" and an end to U.S. aid to Ukraine have gained any kind of traction.  But I'd like to remind the owners of these voices of a few things.  First, we can see Russia's invasion of Ukraine as part of a continuum of Russian actions designed to establish a global Russian empire.  Second, although Russia has set itself up as a leader of the Global Far Right and a champion of white supremacy, the invasion of Ukraine should teach those mouthpieces for "negotiation" and isolationism in the West that Russia does not even view all white people as equal.  By making a deal with the devil, these people may find themselves in the shocking position of being low rungs on a ladder whose rungs are stepped on and kicked by Russian feet.  When the deal with the devil sours, and these people feel the need to resist, they may find themselves targeted for mass murder in the same way that Russia is trying to commit genocide in Ukraine.

We must not forget that Russia has had global imperial ambitions for a very long time, and has pressed these ambitions aggressively even though Russia has nothing of substance to offer the rest of the world.  Consider the murderous narcissism of Vladimir Putin and of Aleksandr Dugin, and ask yourselves whether you want to be made into the rungs of their hierarchy.  If being even a Russian citizen is such a painful thing, how much worse would it be to be turned into a Russian subject?  Those who attempt to make deals with the devil eventually become the victims of the devil.

Russia must be driven completely out of Ukraine.  That means that Putin must be denied the chance to turn the war in Ukraine into a waiting game for Russia.  And Russian nationalists must be driven completely from power.  As long as Russia remains unrepentant, Russian power must be destroyed.

Megaprojects And The Curse of Babel

Today's post will be short.  I am zealously trying to guard my schedule because my business has three projects that are due within the next four weeks or so.  (This isn't much fun right now - I long to be an author of fiction sometimes, as I see pictures of authors with relaxed contemplative faces lounging at uncluttered desks...)  But I want to discuss the theme of last week's post a little more and offer a road map for further exploration.  

Last week's post discussed Elon Musk and his boasts that he will establish a colony on Mars.  That post described the physical challenges of trying to get to Mars via rockets whose thrust comes from chemical combustion.  Today I want to mention various estimates of the cost of such a venture.  According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the total cost of developing a manned mission to Mars is $120.6 billion in 2017 dollars.  According to former U.S. astronaut and ISS mission commander Steve Swanson, those costs would run from $100 billion to $500 billion.  Elon Musk is purportedly worth $195.6 billion at present.  He seems to have lost another $100 billion between the start of 2022 and now.  If he were to try to send even one mission to Mars out of his own pocket, I think it's safe to say that he would no longer be a high-flying celebrity afterward.  He might wind up needing to take a job as a shopping cart jockey or shelf stocker at a local supermarket.  (The Winco near my house is hiring, by the way.)

In other words, I don't think Musk has so much as a snowball's chance on Venus of sending anyone to Mars.  So why the hype about Musk and SpaceX, then?  That is a question whose answer will require a fair amount of research.  But its beginnings can be traced to the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to begin to privatize delivery of rocket-launched payloads into low Earth orbit.  Due to Musk's friendship with former NASA chief Michael Griffin, Musk's company was awarded the contract for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to develop commercial resupply rockets for the International Space Station in 2006, even though Musk's company "had never flown a rocket" before, according to Wikipedia.  This award is even more surprising, given that twenty well-established aerospace companies had also bid on the project.  

So it seems that from the start, SpaceX has been a beneficiary of corporate welfare.  And as a beneficiary of corporate welfare, SpaceX may well become a poster child of the effects of privatization on the ability of societies to engage in large-scale, transformative projects.  I'd like to suggest that privatized societies dominated by hyper-capitalists lose this ability over time.  I'd like to suggest further that societies which want to advance in substantive, paradigm-shifting ways need to learn to engage in megaprojects.  These megaprojects cannot be left entirely to the private sector.  Neither can they be entirely the province of governments.  Rather, both government and the private sector must learn to negotiate a healthy balance.  Where this balance is unhealthy, graft and corruption appear and megaprojects do not deliver on their promises.  Crony capitalism is a state of unbalance, and turning free market ideology into a fetish tends to turn societies into crony capitalist states dominated by large players with contradictory self-interests.  

The corrosive effect of crony capitalism on a society's ability to undertake large-scale projects is most clearly seen when a crony capitalist society is hit by a sudden challenge, test, or shock.  One example of this is the botched response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.  Another possible example may well be the botched response of the Japanese government and private industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  (Author Haruki Murakami offers a surprisingly insightful criticism of the response to Fukushima in his book Novelist as a Vocation.)  For an example of the damage which a self-inflicted shock can cause to the systems of a crony capitalist society, we need look no farther than the failure of Russian military hardware and supplies during Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine.  By the way, that failure is a fine example of the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Putin has reaped what he has sown - and he is not enjoying the reaping.  My hope is that things become even more unpleasant for him and for the Russian military. 

If crony capitalism has extended even to space exploration, I imagine that space itself will inflict yet another unexpected shock.  Lives will be lost.  Because Musk seems to want to portray himself as a doer of megaprojects, the rest of us must ask whether he represents a case of healthy balance between the public and private sector, or whether he is actually a case of crony capitalism.

It would be instructive to delve in more detail into the subject of megaprojects, their role in societal development, and the potential for forfeiting this development by means of privatization and crony capitalism.  But I'm out of time today...

You Won't Get To Mars That Way

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Elon Musk has been much in the news lately.  Elon is purported to be the richest man on earth, and his corps of public-relations spin doctors present him as a man whose wealth is largely self-made.  Like Stephen Wolfram, Musk talks much about his supposed "genius."  Not only does Musk appear to be a "cerebral narcissist," but he also appears to be a "somatic narcissist" as well, based on the fact that he posted pictures of himself fighting a sumo wrestler and that he challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight.  When people make such grandiose claims as his, it's only natural for objective observers to want to put such claims to the test.  I'd like to consider myself such an objective observer (although some may disagree).  Today's post will examine the claims of Musk through my particular lens, and will try to show Musk as a typical case of a certain symptom of late capitalism.  Note: I am not interested in Musk's claim to be a bad sumo-wrestling dude.  Maybe he can sort that out with other contestants on some American "reality TV" show.

First, let's consider Musk the late-capitalism phenomenon.  To me he seems to represent the kind of "hero" who would have been quite at home in an Ayn Rand novel such as Atlas Shrugged.  That is to say, he is a poster child for the assertion by many of the wealthiest members of the Right that transcendent projects of human endeavor are best handled by heroes who have enormous wealth and not by governments or the collective efforts of societies.  Such assertions are the basis for claims that privatizing of government services leads to better service for the citizens who depend on those services.  Of course, the actual track record of privatization is horrible, and includes people whose houses have burned down because they could not afford the services of privatized fire departments.  Other notable side effects of privatization include the monstrous expansion of the private prison industry as well as the creation of professional mercenary corporations like Blackwater.  

Those who promote the benefits of privatization claim that it saves public funds.  Yet these are often the recipients of massive corporate welfare payments to rich people, also known as government subsidies.  In this, Elon Musk is no exception.  Musk started life with massive advantages already in place, as he is the wealthy son of a white South African family which built its wealth by means of the apartheid regime during its existence in South Africa.  And the companies which Musk has founded since he came to the United States have all been the recipients of corporate welfare, as documented in the following articles:

• "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
• "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
• "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
• "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015

It is an open question whether most of Musk's business ventures would have survived without subsidies and other corporate welfare.  This is particularly true of Tesla.

Now among the claims which Musk has made, one of his most spectacular is that he will boldly take mankind where no man has gone before.  This claim also includes the claim that he, a private individual with enormous wealth, will manage this feat even though the space agencies of various governments have not managed to do this.  Therefore his claim goes beyond merely putting people into space.  It also transcends merely going to the moon.  Nay, it reaches even to the planet Mars.  It is this particular claim which I'd like to examine in more detail.

First, a bit of background about space travel.  To send a spacecraft from Earth to anywhere else, one must provide that spacecraft with a certain amount of kinetic energy.  That kinetic energy is given by the equation 

Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (spacecraft mass) x (spacecraft velocity squared)

At a minimum, this amount of kinetic energy must be greater than the potential energy represented by the distance from your target to the surface of the Earth (and to a much lesser extent, the surface of the Sun since the sun is much farther away).  Potential energy represents the energy you must supply to an object to raise it a certain distance above the surface of a body that produces a gravitational field.  If Mars was stationary with respect to the Earth, then in order to reach Mars you would need to supply only the minimum kinetic energy required to equal the difference in potential energy of the gravitational field of the Earth and Sun at the position of Mars relative to the Earth's surface.  But it would take you a really long time to get to Mars!  

However, Mars is not stationary, but moving in its own orbit around the sun.  So your spacecraft must have additional velocity in order to catch up with Mars and enter into orbit around it.  Supplying the energy to move from a moving Earth to a moving Mars is an expensive proposition.  If we therefore wanted to supply only the minimum energy required for such a trip, we'd need to inject our spacecraft into what is known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.  A trip from Earth to Mars using a Hohmann orbit would take 259 days, according to the NASA source in the preceding link.  So a manned mission to Mars would require a spacecraft capable of keeping at least four people alive for nearly ten months - unless you wanted to bring those people alive and safe back to Earth again after their mission to Mars was completed, in which case your mission would require another 259 days, plus the time required for the Earth and Mars to align in such a way that a Hohmann transfer from Mars to Earth would be successful.  We're talking about a mission that could last over three and a half years.

That's a lot of time, and thus a manned spacecraft would require extensive life-support systems on the same order of magnitude as the systems on the International Space Station.  But there are two further wrinkles: first, the effects of prolonged weightlessness on human bodies, and second, the fact that astronauts would need to be shielded from lethal radiation from both cosmic rays and solar storms.  It is well-known by now that prolonged weightlessness produces harmful changes in human bodies (see this, this, and this, for instance), so missions that use Hohmann transfers might need some means of exposing humans to near-Earth gravity on a daily basis.  This would require centrifuges, which would add mass to the spacecraft.  Radiation shielding would also add mass.

So let's talk about mass.  The International Space Station has a mass of 450 tons and can support seven astronauts.  But the ISS is also regularly resupplied from Earth.  Let's optimistically assume that a crew of four astronauts would need a spacecraft with a mass of 200 tons for a Mars mission.  How much fuel would it take to get them to Mars?  The answer to that question is found in the rocket equation, namely

Wet mass (that is, rocket + fuel) = rocket mass x exp((change in velocity)/(exhaust velocity))

So for a rocket that had a 200-ton payload and that needed to change its velocity by an amount needed for a Hohmann orbit, we could calculate the fuel required.  I leave that exercise to you, although I will give you the escape velocity of the earth: 11.2 kilometers (or 7 miles) per second.  I'll also give you another hint: Elon Musk has focused on rockets which burn a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.  An optimistic exhaust velocity for such a mix is 3,780 meters per second according to one source.  If you do the math (which I don't have time to do now, but which I may get around to in the next week), you will see what a sizable amount of chemical propellant is required to get your spacecraft to Mars.  And we haven't begun to discuss how to get it back to Earth again!  To get a glimpse of how someone else solved the rocket equation, consider Expedition Mars by Martin J.L. Turner.  He calculated that a spacecraft with a mass of 145 tons would need a total fuel mass of 5,000 tons.  That's 10 million pounds of fuel.  And that's just to get to Mars.  It would take another 400 tons of fuel to return to Earth.

Now you can travel faster than the minimum required velocity for a Hohmann transfer, but that will require more fuel, and the fuel requirement increases exponentially the faster you want to go.  If you switch from chemical rockets to rockets powered by nuclear fission, it is possible to save a significant amount of reaction mass.  But worldwide rates of extraction of naturally occurring fission fuel have already peaked, according to the German Energy Watch Group.  Making artificial fission fuel in breeder reactors has never yet been commercially viable, although the process has been used to create small amounts of plutonium.  But breeder reactors don't last long, as they suffer from neutron embrittlement.  Building a fleet of fission-powered manned spacecraft might therefore not have much of a future.  So Musk might barely be able to send a few people to Mars (although he might bankrupt himself in the process), but it appears that neither he nor anyone else has the ability to establish a colony there.  Speaking of colonies, the colonists would likely need to carry soil or expensive chemical processing apparatus from Earth to Mars if they wanted to live there long-term.  The ground on Mars is toxic to Earth-based plants.  So forget about becoming a Martian farmer.  And Mars has no free oxygen or natural shielding from cosmic rays or radiation from solar flares.  It would be a really hard place to try to colonize.

And Musk's boast has been that he will establish a colony there.  Musk's boast about Mars thus appears to be a boast without much basis in fact.  It may be that during the last ten years we have developed the ability to send a 150-ton or 200-ton spacecraft to Mars - but the journey would have been prohibitively expensive even for governments, let alone individuals, which is why no government has done it.  I think putting humans in such a craft and bringing them back again alive is still beyond our capability.  Making such a mission pay benefits that are worth the expense is even farther beyond our capability.  The challenges of such a journey appear to place a limit on the modern myth of the uber-wealthy hyper-capitalist self-made hero.  These challenges demonstrate once again that there are challenges beyond the powers of any individual, challenges which can only be met by the collective response of societies.  Such a conclusion may cause some of Elon's flying monkeys to choke a bit - but such is life.  As for me, I don't think he, much less "we", will be going to Mars anytime soon.  Maybe Musk would be better off wrestling Putin.

P.S. For more information on the life-support challenges of a manned mission to Mars, please see "Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Mars," Nature, November 2020.

P.P.S Today's post is an example of the kind of post that I can currently write with only a modest amount of pain and suffering, since I already have a fairly large background knowledge of the subject and therefore I don't need to do as much research.  I still owe readers some posts which I promised over a year ago, but those posts will involve high levels of pain and suffering, due to the large amount of research and analysis involved.  Just saying that I haven't forgotten...  Also, I'm really irked by the way so many websites that present technical information have dumbed down their content over the last several years.  (See this for instance.)  Their coverage of many topics has collapsed into mere titillating "soundbytes" full of cute pictures and sometimes baseless hype, and their web pages are now full of paid ads, which reduces one's ability to take them seriously.  This is a crying shame.

Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

A Clarifying of Stance, Part 2

From time to time I check my readership stats, as I want this blog to be informative and I want to gauge its impact.  I noticed that over the last few days, people have been exploring some rather early posts in my back catalog.  I am flattered by your curiosity, although I must warn you that some of my perspectives have changed over the years, due to the acquisition of newer information which superseded some of my early assumptions.  So today's post is a bit of a grain of salt for you who are exploring those early posts.  As a sign I once saw on a co-worker's desk once read, "I don't always agree with everything I say."

Generally, I do agree with everything I have written from the end of 2016 onward.  I also agree with some of the statements of the very early posts of this blog, namely that the modern industrial societies of the First World are running up against limits to growth.  These limits consist of resource limits and the cumulative effects of environmental degradation.  No reasonable person can disagree with this.  There is one other theme that I explored in parts and pieces throughout various posts from the start of this blog until now, namely, that there is a powerful, well-organized movement among the wealthiest and most privileged people to roll back all the civil rights gained by the world's poorer people - especially those who are nonwhite - during the 20th century.  I'd like to suggest that this movement would have emerged regardless of the emergence of resource constraints and their effect on economic growth.  Therefore, those of us who have become once again targets of oppressors must learn to thrive while navigating a threat environment.  My posts from 2017 onward have largely explored the question of how to do this.

One last caution.  Many of the people who were writing about the impacts of resource depletion, climate change, and American fragility from 2007 to around 2015 were actually aligned with white supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the Russian government.  I am thinking of how many of these people aligned themselves with the candidacy and later presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also thinking of how their earlier suggestions for dealing with the emergent crises of the early 21st century all revolved around buying a large-acre doomstead somewhere in the western United States and stocking up on guns, gold bullion, and baked beans in preparation for the zombie apocalypse.  Let me just say straight up that these people were and are dead wrong.  Their hyper-individualist responses have actually made them and their society much more fragile.  Look at the hyper-individualist responses to the COVID pandemic in the United States, and compare our shamefully high death rate from 2020 onward to the much lower death rates in many of the more collectivist societies of the nonwhite world and the developing world.  And as for the Russians, I hope that my posts on Russia from 2017 onward have completely erased any pro-Russian bias that exists in my posts that are earlier than 2017.  Please see my post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance" if you want more detail.  Vladimir Putin is a thieving little man in a bunker, and Putin's regime is a good-for-nothing piece of garbage.