I believed MAGA is actually a small select movement that is loudly amplified by billionaires and their huge propaganda machine. Although FOX News is leading in viewership and Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are all usually in the top ten podcasts.

It’s not Americans really want to lose all their benefits and give all their money to rich people. It’s just that a big machine (that might as well have wah-wah-wah sound effects and brain beams) has convinced a lot of people to disregard their eyes and ears and faculties and vote for the blonde orange god-king dude.

77 million voters voted for Trump. I lost my mind to that revelation. Rich people literally made a zombie machine, and they’re already zombieing at victims and killing them, and putting captives in internment.

I think if we can counter this, we can actually move towards community-based societies and reach for the stars. I also think if we can’t do it in a timely manner, we’ll choke ourselves out as greenhouse emissions light more and more of the world on fire.

I’ve never used AI, even when wanting to give it a try. There was either a queue or a fee, or must click-wrap agree to terms and conditions for free two months and I wasn’t going to do those.

I never did an NFT either.

As I note above, there are success stories with NGOs. The Zapatistas are still active and going strong. Also the Black Panthers in the US before they were massacred in an FBI operation.

When a society is annexed or wiped out, it can’t really be said to be fault of the governing system that it failed.

< nerd-moment rant >

CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.

And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.

( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )

Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they’d otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.

Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to… Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.

Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.

The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge – she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.

Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts – FISA – for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama’s kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.

And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren’t as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)

In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy… CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn’t handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it’s no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.

< /nmr >

By then, Stalin had seized power. Again, as with democracy, there’s a difference between the model of government and the

And it’s not like containment was passive. In fact, the US notoriously put down democratic states to erect autocratic regimes that were aligned with US based companies American interests, sparking the development of NGOs who resort to terrorism to fight oppression by NATO-aligned interests. Again, if we’re going to compare actual nation states, let’s compare actual nation states. Wilson supported the White Army (the monarchists) so there were ill feelings between the Bolsheviks and the US, but Wilson didn’t even try to negotiate with the nascent Soviet Union. He just decided (in line with his corporate buddies) that the notion of Marxist communism was evil, and USSR was by fiat.

When we get to strategic nexus regions like Poland or Korea, yes, all the major powers that surround them end up fighting over control of the territory, which sucks when you’re indigenous to that borderland. We’ve yet to establish and enforce the right of sovereignty of weaker nations.

If you want to compare command economics, you contrast it to capitalism. If you want to compare USSR, you do so to USA. The point isn’t that they suck, the point is that we need to work out how to get them to suck less

In Das Kapital Marx gets into the weaknesses of capitalism, in which those with power will exploit it to consolidate more power, which is what we’ve seen.

If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to preserve a public-serving (not commerce-serving) government, that regulates products so that they are safe to use, are offered in good faith (counter-example: AAA games that are really just micro-transaction market fronts), are made without abuse of labor, resources, or environment, and are priced based on their value rather than their scarcity.

If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to get upper management to regard its laborers as human beings rather than props or parts of a machine. (Not just because it’s moral, but because well-treated workers are productive beyond the additional cost).

If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to assure a minimum standard of living for everyone in the state, whether they allegedly work or don’t work. (The US relies on a lot of labor that is not compensated for, and fails to recognize skills and services that are essential, as we discovered at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown and after it was lifted.

If you want a capitalist system, solve the problems that are consistently endemic to markets. Likewise, if you want a communist or socialist system, you have to solve the problems that come with those models.

Or we can wait until the fascist autocrats of the US purge everyone else (likely into mass graves or ash dumps) and starts cutting into itself. Or until they go to war, and ultimately Chinese bombers blot out the sun over Washington.

If a system ultimately leads to negative outcomes, either you fix it, or you turn to other systems. But saying that we’ve tried something in the past and it didn’t work is not a cause to rule it out.

It’s not baseless speculation, and it’s not a little bit of pressure. I’m saying it was a lot of pressure. And I’m saying we don’t know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.

I’m not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever

Regardless, it appears that we’re just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.

I know. This XKCD is from the 2013 government shutdown.

I get it’s wishful thinking, and while I can appreciate conspiracy theories fringe hypotheses, I don’t believe them to be true (unless it eventually comes out that they are).

I am failing to find either a list of ICE abduction / detention victims or a list of ICE officer-involved homicide.

In 2015 police officer-involved homicide (that’s a euphemism for when a law-enforcement officer kills someone) averaged four victims a day, and those are the ones uncovered by activist groups who tracked incidents through news and obituaries.

So I cannot imagine a quota of 3000 abductions a day is going to proceed cleanly. Technically, they’re succeeding at about 1100 abductions a day on average. We’ve seen their violence discipline and deescalation skills are wanting.

The only news I can find about ICE killing someone is from the Biden era, and only a few are reported.

So if anyone knows how often ICE pulls the trigger and kills (or seriously hospitalizes) members of the public, and can find me sources, please let me know. We should be tracking them, and we should be saying their names.

I should clarify, we haven’t seen public-participatory communism in state governments, but we have seen it in NGOs, such as the Black Panthers and Zapitista Army, the former of which was massacred by FBI hits, and the latter which is still active in the Chiapas territory of Mexico. And they’ve been around since 1994. < does a websearch, > It appears the ZA controls a not-insignificant amount of territory.

But then we’ve so far seen all forms of government are unstable, with the current standard being a 1000 year peace. (Maybe the ancient Egyptian empire, but I don’t know its history). Many regimes have risen and shown hubris that their rule should last so long, and have fallen to corruption or annexation by other states. Capitalism and authoritarianism facilitate the return of autocracy which, when it exists for long enough, becomes monarchy. The Kim family ruling DPRK (North Korea) serves as a modern example, and Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Jong Un, has been deified to continue the culture of personality.

The US began destabilizing almost immediately. Remember the Constitution of the United States was the second draft, after the Articles of Confederation led to violent disagreement between the colonies. And still, after that the plantation barons introduced backdoors into the Constitution that figure specifically into the current crisis of tyranny, today.

Capitalism gets introduced because the rest of the world uses capitalism. We’ve seen plenty of communal efforts who provide socialized services within the commune, but will export product to trade with the outside. Middle Ages historians believe villages and hamlets shared openly without concern for parity, and would take their surplus (and cash crops) to towns to be traded or sold at market. But we didn’t call this communism we called it subsistence agriculture They’d also reserve a portion for tribute to their liege lord, who kept order, protected against foreign enemies and maintained stores of goods for crisis (specifically, runs of bad winters and short crops).

It’d be nice if Kings governed fairly and compassionately, and corporation upper management could run their companies truly to facilitate long term company growth, but eventually you get a Joffrey Baratheon or IRL, a John of England, a Nero Caesar, or a Vlad Țepeș that brings ruin to the legacy their ancestors have built.

If you’re going to denounce government models because they’ve never worked before, you have to apply the same standard to all other models you contrast it to.

We don’t know what works, on account that none of them we’ve tried so far have succeeded for very long. This is why we need to see them as skeletal models and not as immutable ideologies nor as devices by which to manipulate the public into tolerating autocracy.

The Constitution of the United States has baked-in ownership class superiority coming right out of the gate, thanks to pressure from slave-owning interests.

Capitalism can be done so that it’s way more fair than Obama era capitalism¹ but it requires a bulwark of oversight and uncaptured regulatory agencies to preserve a narrow wealth distribution.

Even in Europe wealth disparity is corrosive to the institutions.

I’m not interested in a specific model of not-capitalism. I’m interested in systems that support the public. And capitalism is demonstrably antithetic neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to that.

What we’ve seen in China and USSR is party-centric communism (soviet — lower case — communism). We haven’t seen public-participatory communism.

1 Im not looking at Trump ere because we’re already mired deep into an autocratic takeover and policies that work to dismantle institutions and engage in humanitarian wrongdoing.

It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it’s treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.

And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.

I don’t know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).

So that’s, just, like, your opinion, man.

Private Equity is super evil, and uses business law loopholes in order to make sinkholes out of large companies, leaving the debt for the state to manage when the insolvent company goes bankrupt.

Right now all the AAA game development companies are getting the private equity treatment.

Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP candidate for President, was president of Bain Capital, a private equity company.

I am a bad person.

I kinda hope the hits are connected, and not just a series of coincidences.

But then after the November 24 general election, I kinda hoped there was overwhelming evidence of election fraud, as I want to believe 77 million Americans are not that unprincipled / credulous / bigoted.

I want the ownership class worried.

How strong is Fair Maps Texas? Assuming it’s sincere in its effort to redistrict Texas fairly, Maybe they need more brickthrowers saboteurs sign wavers and clerical volunteers.

So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.

This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.

This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon’s rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).

Historians can’t really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.

Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.

So communism was really unlucky and didn’t get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don’t really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.

In the meantime, check out what’s going on in Cuba, which isn’t perfect, but is interesting.

Oh he’s retired now. He worked on CloudSat (and just retired it; it served a long time to scan storms and hurricanes even after it started malfunctioning). He also worked on OCO (Orbital Carbon Observatory), and its successor, but the faring on the rocket failed to disconnect both times and it fell into the South Atlantic. Launch vehicles don’t come with a warranty, I learned.

Fixed but still funny.

During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.

They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.

So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we’d repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.

We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.

This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.

It’s still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he’s still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster’s Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California’s general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I’m on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)

Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙

So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it’s something to get active about.

I think the problem is the intrinsic enemy within rhetoric that is used to keep the public willing to tolerate draconian measures. Also the draconian measures, themselves.

It’s like the thing with cults (which I thought about looking to start a good cult or two): The basic cult template is to create an us vs them mentality against the rest of the world so that the followers can be exploited as cheap labor, easy sex or sexual labor.

(I wanted to created the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a means to allow gender redefinition and gay marriage. But cults have the evil pre-baked in.)

[ now I’m just ranting ] This is also the problem with the (blackboard hypotheticals) of the Christian Nation or the Islamic State. Either one, assuming they want a peaceful thousand-year reign needs to embrace enlightenment values such as liberty, social equality, short or no hierarchy, rule of law with no selective enforcement and sustenance guarantees. And by then, the conservative faithful might feel there’s not much of the religion left.

But without these concessions, the government is at odds with the public. It’s less of a problem if your society is under a population of one-thousand, but then larger societies will dominate your society with culture, if not a massive army.

It’s bonded servitude with extra steps.

Feudal serfs were more valued than we are, but then they had a (dire) labor shortage. Now the system is maintained to assure there’s a surplus.

At least until AI and robots take our jobs.

Speakibg of which, autonomous freight trucks are being tested in Texas. Talk about great replacement