Lesson Learned: 2023 Not Like 1936. So Far.

Chinese balloons crammed with electronics all over. The US shoots down four in ten days. What’s going on?

US Department of Defense confirmed that on two occasions F-22 jets took off from Anchorage, Alaska and objects were shot down, one with a Sidewinder AIM 9X missile.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton#FreeUkraine@philosophybites asked: What’s going on?

What’s going on is that tyrannies keep pushing, to see how far they can go. A tyranny makes war to its people, inside, and justifies that by claiming it is saving the people from a war, outside… which it self-engineered. As tyrannies get away with some aggressive actions, going further than any before, they feel encouraged, and encourage each other. Thus ever more excited, tyrannies repeat the process. This is what happened in the 1930s, after the invasion of Manchuria by a rogue Japanese army: Mussolonini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and their ilk felt encouraged. It was truly the start of World War Two… because the military reaction, the declaration of war of Britain and France, waited until 1939, when the alliances of the tyrants Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Franco had been made official… And because, as late as 1940 and even 1941, the USA was de facto allied with the Axis powers (for example by fuelling the Japanese army invading China). 

 

What’s going on now is that what’s going on is not like what happened in 1936: instead of letting tyrannies fly from success to success, insolence to insolence, testing new weapons, and tactics, expanding territories, democracies have learned something from the 1930s and thus, woken up this time, and are fighting back, in a timely manner.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/world-wars-are-culminations-of-brutish-processes-wwii-started-when-a-rogue-japanese-armyinvaded-manchuria-in-1931/

F22 high altitude interceptor, balloon killer.

Scott Kelly, US Senator ex International Space Station Commander, wrote February 10 to @elonmusk:

“Ukraine desperately needs your continued support. Please restore the full functionality of your Starlink satellites. Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost. You can help. Thank you.”
Elon Musk replied, with some condescendence: @StationCDRKelly: “You’re smart enough not to swallow media & other propaganda bs. Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed.

But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.“

This is a problem with endowing single individuals with so much power. SpaceX is a sort of second foundation of NASA… As I pointed out long ago, it would not exist without the largesse of the US government. SpaceX was actually saved by US government contracts when it was so close to bankruptcy, around 2009, in spite of injection of funds from Tesla, that Musk had only a few hundred thousand of dollars left, and he had to meet payroll, let alone pay for equipment! Landing rockets was researched and done by NASA, starting in the mid-sixties.  

Musk: elite entrepreneur and engineer. He also has apparently diversified to historian of war, and knows what escalates conflict. How does one escalates when one has been attacked by a bear? Should one defend oneself just so, but not too much? However bear only fears personal injury. Passive defense that doesn’t look as if it were going to hurt doesn’t work.

Zelinskyi has compared in 2023 Putin to a dragon who muster devour. But Putin’s behavior is more reminscent of that of an aggressive bear. Musk has probably never fought a bear. Yours truly actually has had several confrontations with bears, caused by wandering unarmed many times where bears are found in abundance. I had to threaten very aggressive bears both brown and black. Hitting a proximal surface with stones was often enough of a deterrent. But I had to hit a charging bear (who had just attacked a dozen high Sierra campers, and was now interested by the food I was carrying) with a (very large) stone, once… Bears fear stones, because they have been hurt by them and they have respect for those who can muster stones… In any case, that bear fled for dear life. But that bear attacked people again, wounded a grandmother, and three weeks later, rangers executed it.

Putin will not stop. Like a serial killer, one who has killed now more than 200,000 people, for all to see, his only hope to survive, or to justify himself, is to keep on going, as Hitler once did. So he has to be stopped. World War Two would have been aborted if, even as late as 1940, the USA had stood with France and Britain. 

So this time is different. But this time the stakes are also higher…

So it is good that the US is not playing games, this time.

As in the 1930s, though, tyrannies have their agents. In the 1930s, many intellectuals were following either Hitler or his ally Stalin. This had disastrous consequences on the war readiness of France (new planes were not equipped with guns, from fear that workers, aligned with Stalin, thus Hitler, would seize them and make a revolution… As a consequence Nazi Germany was able to acquire air superiority over France where it needed it!) 

Putin knows all of this, and that makes him hope that he will be able to change public opinion. After all, he has just three democracies’ public opinion to work on….

Patrice Ayme  

Twitter, Isegoria, Parrheisia, Democracy

One of the advantages of democracy is debate, which brings a higher intelligence to the collective. What Musk can do at Twitter is to elevate the debate, while making Twitter a trusted source, a necessary condition. 

Here is an example of outrageous error which sets up an erroneous mindest. Stephen King wrote a sexist tweet alleging that Ukraine would not have been invaded, had Putin been a woman. That’s in complete contradiction with history; it’s Czarina Catherine II who invaded the five regions of Ukraine which Putin annexed, and then in her 1785 Charter of Nobility, imposed abject servitude to all peasants. This is an extremely important point of Russian history, and also even deeper, a crucial example of how perverse systems of thought can become. Catherine had tout pour plaire: but she was a horrendous human being… Early on, she had to… But later on she was fully basking in the Dark Side. 

Correcting these sorts of errors can set up the correct mindsets: elimiste errors to get at the truth, and eliminate especially facile, seductive errors. Truth in emotions is also important: top US politicians made often, quite deliberately, and for quasi-racist reasons, life very difficult in cities, but them we are supposed to cry in the loudest manner when they get hurt by the crime they fostered.

A way to do this is to correct immediately false or erroneous tweets with “community notes” statements which are false or out of context, and which Twitter is rolling out.  

This is not censorship. Correcting an error requires to exhibit it. Censorship is what the New York Times, when it blocks comments that its editorialists use later to write their own stuff.

The Greek term for citizenship is πολιτεία [politeia]: one could be called a citizen – πολίτης [polites]from πόλις[polis], the city-state. The Greek term for constitution is also politeia. In contemporary fake democracy, one equates politics with having an elected representative, but savage Germanic tribes had that already when they invaded and destroyed Greek democracies. One US “representative” “represents” 770,000 people, which seems several times klarger than the largest German tribes when they invaded the Greco-Roman empire.. 

Civilization Means Debate, Not Censorship

The next step for Twitter could be to rate with a star system various shades of truth, potential truths, inspirational truths, and truths which would be highly significant if there was something to them. It’s not just that statements could be more or less false, but also of more or less significance, potential or otherwise. Most of history is the fruit of conspiracies, too, and those need to exposed, past, present and future. That refined reputation system would allow in particular to extract out of extinguishing obscurity propositions which would otherwise never be seen and thus considered, by the public at large. 

The Greeks correctly thought that Isegoria (everybody has the right to address assemblies) and Parrheisia (everybody should be able to talk without self censoring) were pillars of democracy. That has been forgotten.

Isegoria and Parrheisia can be achieved with some sort of Twitter like system… which would then become a treasured public utility. So, Musk could succeed, should he succeed to install a system as sketched above, making truth and significance foremost. Truth is not made just of true propositions, but also of significant errors on the way to that truth, and how to detect them. 

Patrice Ayme

Greek temples divinized the city-state… They also were painted in vivid colors and came sometimes with up to nine disability ramps per temple. What is there not like?

Hyperloop Lie From Ukraine Enabler

Elon Musk proposed to send people in evacuated tubes at more than the speed of sound. The idea is not new… it was proposed for Switzerland long ago… And it was used in pneumatic systems all over major cities, a century ago. Strictly speaking the accelerations would be unbearable, and Musk obviously knows this, so, as it exactly stands, the idea is a lie.

Already 40 years ago, French high speed trains could induce nausea for the reason of acceleration as they crossed gentle mountain ranges such as the hills of the Morvan. They now go at 350km/h. If the speed of an object around a curve of radius R is V, the acceleration goes according to VV/R

In Europe 400km/h very high speed lines come with vertical radius of rises of 56 kilometers (35 miles). Such is the case of (under construction) High Speed 2 in the UK, At three times the speed, that is, the speed of sound, the radius would be above 500 kilometers (as the square of 3  is 9…) In other words, Hyperloop as proposed would have to tunnel from San Francisco to LA, all the way… A strange experience at great cost necessitating a minimum of three tunnels, with the maintenance tunnel, etc…

Thus the natural domain of hyperloop would rather be subway systems… But then people want to be able to come in and out… Etc. But then again, accelerations would be unbearable if speeds were much higher than present systems… Plus air would come in…

The reason for evacuated tubes, or fast planes flying high, is to reduce air resistance. At 11 kilometers high, flight level 360, air pressure is a fourth of that at sea level. But there are other methods to reduce air resistance, including forward spikes used by French and US sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles… This is an active field of study, to reduce the shockwaves of supersonic jets…

Could evacuated tubes still be used for merchandise, say between the port of LA and Las Vegas? Of course…

New style TGV reduces aerodynamic drag by 20% relative to preceding versions (red thing behind is an original TGV from 1980). A deployable spike in front may do better…

Musk is a great engineer, and inspirational. But he is also a great businessman: both Tesla and SpaceX have leveraged government financing… Perhaps the best thing Obama did… Here it is, from six years ago:

“Tesla, the poster concept of present-day American mercantilism. It is flooding the world with luxury electric car of dubious ecological merit. All the way to Norway, huge government subsidies are piled up on it (and I would be very interested to know the details on the mortgages and conferences various officials involve take). Thanks to well-organized propaganda and financing by the US government. In truth, Tesla and the other companies of Elon Musk (Solar City, Space X) are companies massively financed by the US governments“

Now SpaceX provides with (not enough!) secure links for the Ukrainian military, which has serious communication problems…New York Times in “On Front Lines, Communication Breakdowns Prove Costly for Ukraine. The Ukrainian Army has tried to modernize, but still falls short in coordination among units, so they often fight independently of one another — with sometimes deadly results.”…

The General faced similar issues during the defense of Sievierodonetsk when his platoon was on the front line near a small river. On the opposite bank was another platoon with which he had no way to communicate. So almost every time the enemy attacked, the other unit would not just shoot at the Russians but also, unknowingly, at the General’s men who were in the line of fire — with everything from rifles to heavy machine guns.

“Nobody knew how to connect with them,” the General said. “Every day as we were standing there, for over 20 days, as far as I understood, nobody could connect to that unit next to us and let them know they were firing on their own.”

Ukraine needs plenty of Musk wares. “Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they’ve received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.” High output encrypted US military radios’ locations get detected by the Orcs (who are busy destroying just arrived US howitzers, and their crews; so far the French CAESAR guns, which are highly mobile, shoot and scoop, have escaped lethal battery counterfire, but there are not enough of them…).

The tech supremacy successfully achieved by business men is not to be frown on: tech supremacy is how civilization is saved, and progresses, time and time again…

So Musk knows what Musk is up to with Hyperloop… besides gathering money from gullible investors… But it’s hyperloop is not for transporting people.

Patrice Ayme

Billionaires Avoid Taxes By Borrowing Their Life Style, So Tax Their Borrowing!

Tax the personal borrowing which sustains the billionaires’ lifestyle… as if it were income… because it is! (Put a cap to avoid taxing personal borrowing below the .1% elite, say… Also that does not mean that borrowing for growing a business should be taxed; so for example SpaceX could borrow, not be taxed, but Musk buys for himself a 100 million dollars palace with borrowed money, tax…) OK, I have been saying this for more than a decade and last with:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/a-smarter-suggestion-to-tax-hyper-wealth-tax-borrowed-money-used-as-income-for-consumption/

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren@ewarrenDecember 13, 2021: When someone makes it big in America—millionaire big, billionaire big, Person of the Year big—part of it has to include paying it forward so the next kid can get a chance, too.

Elon Musk childishly replied: “You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” he wrote.

“Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” he also said. (“Karen” is slang supposed to indicate racist white woman).

Paying taxes is serious business. Civilization depends upon taxation. Because the cancer which kills civilization ifs plutocracy (for example when Rome got infected by plutocracy, it turned from republic to monarchy, and died…) Thus I claim that the fundamental reason for taxation is to PREVENT THE APPARITION OF A PLUTOCRACY (Rome had 100% tax above 50 million dollars).

As it is, Musk could become a trillionaire in dollars, thanks mostly to government subsidies, while paying basically no taxes… and then transmit the whole thing to his armada of children, still paying basically no taxes. And this has already happened: these armadas of descendants of children of billionaires are constituting the core of the Deep State. Example: Anderson Cooper, one of the US TV most celebrated talking head, for years at CNN, is directly descended from what was once the wealthiest family in the US. This sort of inherited money is hidden in plain sight in foundations, anonymous companies, Delaware, etc… Bill Gates’ mom, while a director at IBM, made her son’s, and her family’s fortune by giving Bill the monopoly while contracting with IBM of something the US Federal government funded universities had developed… Etc. Musk’s own fortune has much to do with NASA and then Obama’s policies. NASA basically did much of the fundamental research on landing rockets (see the LEM, Lunar Exploration Module, a Moon landing rocket…), and then gave the contracts…

A gigantic Hawaiian island was bought on 350 million dollars of borrowed money of a billionaire notorious for paying no taxes. Ultimately the non tax paying plutocrats will expropriate us all, and reduce us to living below bridges.

In this exchange, the inability of the otherwise brilliant Musk to raise above primary school level is a very clear example of what happens with oligarchy and plutocracy: individuals who are highly successful in some domain (say milking the government), and thus deduce they are gods of understanding, and the atlases on which Earth rests…. So their very power, which is already too big, feeds their hubris, turning it apocalyptic.

Putin is an example of that hubris characteristic of those who have way too much power: Putin wrote, he says by himself, a 5,000 words historical essay… which brings Putin to the conclusion that whatever is happening in Ukraine is… genocide! Millions of Russians killed! No less! Nobody is going to dare contradict the Czar: world war, here we come! Don’t laugh: the AXIS Beijing-Moscow, although not formal, is a de facto reality…

Musk between 2014 and 2018 made around 15 billion dollars and paid 455 millions in taxes, a tax rate of 3%… More recently he paid ridiculous amounts of taxes, one year just $68,000, while owning an archipelago of palaces (one of them worth around 50 million next to San Francisco), and his private jets, paid by the always generous taxpayers…

This is not just a question of equity for the world population, but of sanity of the world population: the plutocrats, worldwide, as in Russia, control the media, thus cognition, information, deliberation, reflection, even meditation… and of course their own opposition, which the meticulously financed, as George Soros himself explained painstakingly many times over many years…. to his fellow plutocrats, telling them that their own world order depended upon total mastery of all those aspects of their freedom.

History shows vast spans of time, with subjected population, slowly sinking until an adversary invaded and finished the dying civilization.

Musk pretends that he wants to save civilization, and SpaceX, basically the for-profit part of NASA, is a crucial part of this. Musk is a great innovator, like the brilliant Nazi engineers who made liquid hypersonic rockets fly… after nine centuries of solid fuel rockets which could only fly a few miles. But such engineers, in the end, are highly replaceable. If the US government put as much faith and vigor in a controlled thermonuclear fusion research program, we would have such a reactor connected to the grid in a decade (the financial effort on controlled H fusion is certainly of the order of 1.2% of the effort on rockets… And financial, not technological or scientific constraints have been primary, say with ITER, and other H program, and this is why China has caught up…)

What is deadly, for civilization, thus all of us, is the leaders of the world, the plutocratic influencers, a la Musk pushing their oligarchic agenda. For all of Musk’s and his sibling genius, they would have been nothing, had their father not been extremely wealthy… And Obama and before him, the Silicon Valley’s venture capitalist mafia. The latter financed Musk and his brother while they were… illegal aliens. No reconduction to the border, as for normal folks. Instead, they were given US citizenship. We will not say that South African racial masters have little problems finding friends in the US… Oh, well, here I go: I know women of color, and I have myself observed tremendous racism in Stanford, Silicon Valley and Palo Alto, places which I have frequented for much longer than Musk…

But we will say that, be it Soros, Or Musk, or Putin, or Xi, too many individuals with little cognitive power have way too much influence. Primary school with nukes…

Patrice Ayme