The Divine Mr. M

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I note that in general the GOP Establishment is being low key about the overturning of Roe v Wade. I suspect they're not happy that those judicial morons 'went nuclear' in the Culture War. They were supposed to just 'chip away a bit at a time' while focusing on their main job of making Business Friendly rulings. Now the 2022 Midterms have taken on a whole new dynamic.

~Half of all gun deaths in the US are from suicide, mostly middle aged rural White males. A bit over a third are Drug War related. Mass shootings account for barely 4%, but they generate ratings for News Organizations. Americans are still ten times more likely to be shot by the police than a mass shooter.

I'm not arguing 'gun rights'. I'm pointing out that all these 'sensible gun control' solutions are fucking useless. 54% of US households own nearly 400 million guns. They are *not* going away ever. Hell, there are 20 million AR clones out there and every time someone says 'sensible gun control' another one flies off the shelf.

Want to reduce gun deaths? Fight for Universal Healthcare and a Basic Income Grant, both of which would cut down on suicides *and* mass shootings. And end the failed War of Drugs, which is racially motivated to begin with.

More and more I get badly depressed after I read my news feed. First though, I get Really Fuckin' Angry. The depression comes after when I realize I cannot say out loud what I want to say because I'd get banned from whatever social media platform and possibly even 'investigated for terrorist threats'.

However, without getting specific, what I still can say [so far] is that I desire terrible and ugly things to happen to The Owners, to their operatives, sycophants and political stooges, hell, even to their families, as well...as terrible and ugly as possible.

But not all this comes from my 'bottomless rage'. It also comes from my awareness that without the real fear of 'terrible and ugly' consequences, The Owners, their operatives, sycophants and political stooges will continue to rape all of the rest of us in any manner that suits them and their vested interests.

"The truth is that this culture is insane. When Derrick asks his audiences, “Does anyone here believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” — and he’s asked it for years, all around the country—no one says yes. That means that most people, or at least most people with a beating heart, have already done the math, added up the arrogance, sadism, stupidity, and denial, and reached the bottom line: a dead planet. Some of us carry that final sum like the weight of a corpse. For others, that conclusion turns the heart to a smoldering coal. But despair and rage have been declared unevolved and unclean, beneath the “spiritual warriors” who insist they will save the planet by “healing” themselves. How this activity will stop the release of carbon and the felling of forests is never actually explained. The answer lies vaguely between being the change we wish to see and a hundredth monkey of hope, a monkey that is frankly more Christmas pony than actual possibility.

Given that the culture of America is founded on individualism and awash in privilege, it’s no surprise that narcissism is the end result. The social upheavals of the 60s split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture that offers workshops on our “scarcity consciousness,” as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux-children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming is treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one but me sees a problem with that." ~Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet Excerpt

I can't remember if I've ever expressed this to you directly, but I'm quite certain that Catastrophic Climate Change will result in the extinction of Baseline Humans [Homo Sapiens Sapiens] aka me and thee over the next century or so, no matter what we do at this point. The Earth's surface is going to become largely uninhabitable for maybe a thousand years, give or take a century.

Our descendants, Homo Transformis [Genetically Modified/Cybernetically Augmented in various ways], will replace us, going both underground and in orbit and beyond. The Rich are already buying their bunkers and peeps like Musk, Bezos and Branson are heavily investing in space travel.

Me, I'm doing my best to enjoy my last decade or two. I have near zero hope that things will substantially improve. So when I look at a second Trump term, the only thing I see is more honesty about the corrupt system that produced him and will undoubtedly still be in place once he's gone. The only change is that the polite political mask will be back on.

~I’ve pretty much given up any hope for a better future, at least in my lifetime. I’ve given up on the hopes and dreams I held on to for the last two decades and have just settled in to enjoy the fairly comfortable life we now have for as long as it lasts. The only wish I have left is that whatever kills us takes our fur babies, too. My fear is that they will be left behind, scared and hungry. /sigh

We humans have at least a century of disaster and collapse ahead of us. Yeah, if Biden gets elected the overt horror and brutality of the Trump White House will abate. But Biden is not going to change the underlying conditions that led us to Trump. He’ll simply be a ‘pause button’. /sigh

Yeah, I’m sighing a lot. I nurtured the idea of The Sisterhood for a long time. It was what got me through much of my fear and worry the past twenty four years. But La Rona has crushed that. And no one has really stepped up to lead it anyway.

What I suspect will happen in the next hundred years or so is that Catastrophic Climate Change will finally break our civilization, which has proved to be quite brittle anyway, and the race will split in two, one group going underground and the other up into orbit and hopefully beyond. Both groups will almost certainly be ‘modified’ – genetically and cybernetically – to adapt to their new environments and each will diverge from the other.

We Baseline Humans will be left upon a ravaged surface and will likely go extinct. *shrugs* Oh well.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’m gonna have some coffee and a banana and take my meds and supplements…and there ya have it. Nebs out…

Pier 1 Imports is calling it quits.

The bankrupt home-goods retailer has asked a court for permission to liquidate its remaining 540 stores once they reopen after coronavirus-driven lockdowns, ending a 58-year legacy of selling glassware, wicker furniture and other home decor.

Pier 1 said it is in talks with several prospective buyers to sell its remaining assets, including its intellectual property and e-commerce business, during a court-supervised auction on July 15. The company has tapped Gordon Brothers to begin liquidating its locations this weekend across the US, according to court documents.

“It is now clear that Pier 1’s future does not involve any brick-and-mortar retail locations,” Pier 1 said in court filings.

The Fort Worth, Texas-based chain — founded in 1962 in San Mateo, Calif., under the moniker Cost Plus Imports — filed for bankruptcy protection in February, pushed to the brink by increasing competition from online home furnishings giant Wayfair, Target and Walmart.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/19/pier-1-imports-to-close-all-540-stores-after-58-years/

"Massive corporations are getting billions of dollars in bailout money, but small businesses like this get zero and have to risk lives to survive. Thanks, #PresidentDeath " ~Nebris
https://news.yahoo.com/had-no-income-michigan-barber-173000322.html

...this is from Jul. 23rd, 2013..I thought now would be a perfect time to re-post it...

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

~Which is why, in the end, democracy fails. Because humans are, as a rule, 'provincial', which is a socio-cultural way of saying that they are primarily concerned with their own immediate sphere of interest, tend to ignore everything outside of that sphere and react with fear/anger whenever the larger sphere impinges. That prevents most humans from thinking 'globally' or even 'nationally'. Now hold that thought...

"Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shit factory at the other." ~Aurelio Peccei, founder and first president of the Club of Rome

In 1972 The Club of Rome published a historical document, “The Limits to Growth,” described by Wikipedia as a “book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.” I remember at the time it generated a lot of speculation and controversy, but for the general population, like so many things before it, it went down The Memory Hole, eclipsed by Watergate and then the Fall of Saigon. [see "All politics is local."]

Aurelio Peccei was one the authors of that report and his sentiments are fairly clear.

“The Limits to Growth,” was also, I have come to believe, a warning to the population of Earth from The Western Financial Elites; “Since you are obviously incapable of controlling your own affairs and managing your own resources, we are going to gather up as much of them as we can lay our hands upon, build ourselves safe havens and let the rest of you drown in your own shit. In fact, we plan to expedite that by making things as bad as possible in order to get this over with as fast as possible.” In other words, a Culling.

I suspect they made that decision not so much because they are evil – though there is certainly some sociopathic reasoning in the mix – but because, seeing that “All politics are local,” they already knew that the solutions required to head off Global Catastrophe would be impossible to implement. Keep in mind that at the time The Cold War was still going strong, America was socioculturally unraveling and China had just wrapped up The Cultural Revolution.

In that context, I really cannot fault the logic, even if I am one of those likely to culled.

I have imagined snippets of conversations such as these, uttered not at secret meetings in darkened rooms, but at bright social gatherings over cocktails:

“Let it all got to hell.”

“They will rebel.”

“We'll make Consumerism ubiquitous and fund their social hatreds.”

“But we cannot control something like that.”

“No, but we can guide it and we can survive it. We'll surf the apocalypse.”

If I were in their position, I'd do much the same thing, though as those of you who know me will understand that my 'grand scheme' is of a somewhat different design. And because of that, while I expect this Culling will more or less succeed, I have my doubts that it will play out at all close to what The Elites hope for.

But the die have been cast and now what shall be, shall be...