DYSTOPIA

What we get after the United States ends has been a staple of science fiction prognostication as long as there has been science fiction. My own book THE PONO WAY describes a balkanized United States, also another staple. There’s the New Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic, Deseret, the Cascade States, whose dissolution drives the action of the book, and the rump end of the old United States in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. I mean, you can see it happening, can’t you? Enough people decide to take a powder on the Union. I don’t know that we’ll fight another horrific war to save it.

Another staple is an American Empire, a paranoid, xenophobic military dictatorship where the President of the United States has the powers of a Caesar. This is positively hoary. I think the movie escape from New York features that. This, too, we can clearly visualize happening: a Potemkin democracy where citizens “vote,” Congress “passes laws,” but the outcomes are predetermined by The Powers That Be.

But I always wondered how we got to that point. When in these dystopias did the American people lose their freedom, and how?

Well now we know how. A corrupt, captured Supreme Court paves the way for it, dismantling the rule of law and the core principle that no man is above it. Stripping citizens of the rights that they enjoy. Forcing their fascist beliefs on the nation under color of law. It’s the consequence when Karl Popper’s Paradox is not heeded: the intolerant use the machinery of tolerance to dismantle a tolerant society. We’re seeing it happen right now in real time. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.

July 4, 2024 0

Changing Vision

If you’re interested in my work, you’ll like this video by the estimable Beau of the Fifth Column

This video comes to me today in a low place. I needed this. Encouragement. Support. Thank you, Beau.

It’s short, and it’s impactful. Do watch it. Fuel for the journey.

March 2, 2023 0

My Thoughts on the Pentagon UAP Report

I’ve always loved weird science. Since I was a little kid reading the TIME LIFE Mysteries of the Unexplained books at the public library. UFOs, Bigfoot, poltergeists, all of it. The Philadelphia Experiment. “Fortean phenomena.” Weird science. I love it! It fires my imagination.

I’ve been studying the UFO phenomenon my entire life.

So I have some thoughts about the Pentagon report on “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena” that dropped last week.

Much of the “UFO community” are infuriated at what they find to be weak tea, after 70 years of waiting.

But really, anyone who thought the report was going to include high-definition video of classic flying discs was letting their imagination run away with them.

If you read carefully, there are two major changes of policy in this report.

First, the report says, “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.” [emphasis mine]

Since the Blue Book era onwards, the official position has been that UFOs/UAP represent no threat to national security.

Second, the report suggests the phenomenon requires actual scientific study to increase understanding.

The conclusion of the Condon Report back in the 1960s stated that there was no scientific value to studying the phenomenon. This gave the Air Force the excuse it wanted to shutter Project Blue Book.

Actually, three policy changes, now that I think of it — there are now formal procedures for the military to report UAPs.

Previously, doing so could end a pilot’s or a scientist’s career through ridicule and ostracization.

This represents a 180 degree turn from previous policy. For generations, the official government position was ridicule and obfuscation. “Swamp gas.”

Now, suddenly UAPs are a threat to national security requiring rigorous scientific study (and more funding.)

Why? What changed?

Mind, I don’t think it’s great that the phenomenon is suddenly being couched as a threat, a potential enemy.

But at least “the powers that be” are taking it seriously.

They’re spoon-feeding us information here. But they ARE feeding us. That is a huge change.

Here is the report, so you can read it yourself. It’s only nine pages. Including two appendixes.

Make of it what you will.

July 2, 2021 0

These past few months I have said, as bad as he is, Donald Trump would probably make a less worse President than Ted Cruz. But given the events of this weekend, I don’t think that anymore.

Donald Trump is genuinely dangerous. He is emotionally unstable. He feeds on this violence and chaos like a vampire, and then bald-facedly denies it when he is pressed on it. He will actually sit there on television and say he does not condone violence, when he has said at his rallies that he would like to “punch [a protestor] in the face.” That he would like to see them “taken out on stretchers.” He has offered to pay the legal bills of any of his supporters who are charged with assaulting protestors. (Of course, he actually won’t if it comes to it, because he is a coward and a liar.) And then he has the nerve to be interviewed on live TV and say he disavows violence. It’s one of two things — either he is so emotionally erratic he doesn’t realize what he is saying when he makes these threats, and so denies them with a clear conscience, because his hold on reality is so slim. Or else he is a stone-cold pathological liar.

Doanld Trump has no character. He has no internal moral compass. He says or does whatever will make him look good or feel good or aggrandize himself at any given moment. This has been obvious to me from the start. He doesn’t have any grand scheme. He’s just playing things along. He responds to stimuli directly in front of him, like an amoeba.

Ted Cruz, as creepy and awful as he is, at least is not emotionally unstable. We know what he is, a Christian Dominionist. We know what he wants to do, turn the US into a theocracy, with a Christian version of sharia law. At least he is predictable. We have an idea of how he will govern, and can plan accordingly.

Ted Cruz also, as far as I know, is the only other Republican candidate who has chastised Trump for fomenting violence. This doesn’t happen at any one else’s rallies, he said, not mine, not Marco’s, not Hillary’s or Bernie’s. So some props to him. He isn’t a complete psycho after all. Maybe only 90 percent psycho. Or at least, he knows if you play with fire you are going to get burned.

There is no telling what Trump will do if he gains the Oval Office. Can you imagine this thin-skinned bully with the nuclear launch codes? He’ll be like General Bat Guano in the movie Dr. Strangelove. If Kim Jong Un makes fun of his short fingers, he is liable to start World War Three. He is a danger to the country and the world.

March 14, 2016 2