Freesteel Blog » The apes look up

The apes look up

Friday, November 18th, 2016 at 11:23 pm Written by:

Well, it happened. Donald Trump got elected. And into the hard vacuum of his political philosophy, he’s sucked in all kinds of plague carrying rats.

Rats like Myron Ebell.

People ask me if I am going to restart my proxy blog for Ebell, which I wrote from 2004 to 2011, called The Myron Ebell Climate chronicling his part in the suicide of the human species.

But there’s no point.

Not only is it too late, but everyone else is covering this walking cancer now.

Where were you folks when it mattered? Back in 2004 I said we should run a proxy blog for each one of these think-tank bastards and form a shadow network for this corporate funded disinformation infrastructure. It was required to correct the reputations of these monsters who were constantly popping up on the TV and in the newspapers carrying out lies and damaging all of society. It would have been easy. They’re slippery pricks, but one could systematically keep their record alive to make sure some of it sticks.

These days such an activity would be called “internet trolling”. The Russian government pays for such services and directs it against independent reporters and truth-tellers in their sphere of influence.

Technology is neutral and can be used for good or evil. But evil has the advantage because the ends do not need to justify the means. Both can be evil.

We have for some time been living in a Philip K Dick/John Brunner dystopic future novel. A cross between The Sheep Look Up and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. As such, if you want to imagine what’s going to happen in the coming years, simply follow the plot train.

We have a cadre of compulsive liars and very bad characters with an innate disregard for anyone not in their inner circle. They have links into Russian state/mafia where there are people with real experience of playing dirty who are not amateurs. They will pass on their know-how about what you can really do when you are in charge of a nuclear armed state with the biggest military and the most comprehensive surveillance capabilities in the history of the world.

No Science Fiction plot would fail to bring these three explosive ingredients together by the end of Chapter Two. It would be a waste not to. That’s why Trump’s victory was as inevitable as Romeo falling in love with Juliet.

Chapter one would open with the foreshadow. The US President is holding a press conference, telling people not to be worried about the fact that Pakistan has the bomb. It’s a country that’s run by a benign military dictatorship that came to power through a coup. But they are our friends, and they can be trusted to act responsibly.

“Yes, but what happens if there’s a revolution and those crazy Islamists get into power?” the last reporter in the room asks.

The President laughs and and shakes his head at the ludicrousness of the question. He goes back to his office and signs off on another list of drone assassination targets in Yemen or Somalia.

A sensible author would then skip past all the made-up boring stuff detailing the process by which this cabinet of criminals starts wrecking and selling off everything to oligarchs. We made it happen in Russia in the 1990s, and it’s now their turn to make it happen in America.

A vicious hurricane causes a meltdown of the creaking Indian Point reactors upwind of New York City. The politicians deny that they have ever heard of the word Fukushima. Then an oil pipeline spills crude into the Mississippi for fifty days straight. Over this time Congress holds two years of hearings into the fate of one stillborn baby with three heads and a pair of horns, and declares that they support the culture of life.

The reason why you have to skip over this part of the plot and not narrate it is that there is no character interest. Instead, the way you would tell it (beginning in Chapter 3) would be to focus in on a road trip taken by a father and daughter combo, fifty years hence. Maybe they are escaping from a famine in the rust belt. We’d have to work on the motivation a bit. But the important part is that they are traveling through the landscape and experiencing history at the same time. See: here is where they wade through the stinky oily swamps around the Mississippi. Later, they steal some electricity from a solar panel to charge their portable Geiger counter. And every night the daughter is listening to Dewilingi tapes so she can learn to speak Russian. It’s only fair after so many years when Russians have had to learn English all the time.

Often these novels have two subplots, existing on either side of the period event. So in Chapter 4 we go back to the fateful Obama-Clinton presidential campaign of 2016 where it all went so badly wrong.

There was something familiar about this election, when I remember back to the UK General Election of 2015. In both cases the leader of the moderately sane political party (Labour in the UK, and the Democrats in the US) entered the evening with about a two percentage point lead, convinced they were going to win.

Why only two percent?

Well, folks, that’s because they believed in the “centre ground”, what is known as moderating a balance between doing nothing and what would otherwise be called “populist policies”.

We get this yarn from the politicians that, while more radical “left-wing” policies might sound nice, realism requires us to moderate these objectives to appeal to a huge bulk of voters in the so-called middle ground in between the political extremes.

This is, of course, bullshit. There is no one voting in this middle ground, as Owen Smith now knows. All the votes are at the so-called extremes.

The middle ground is actually about balance. The balance between giving away as little as possible to the people to just barely win an election, and the instinct to do nothing. That’s why both Milliband and Clinton ran their campaigns with half-arsed measures and weasel words on every issue, trying to aim for that two percent margin of popularity to just squeak though to victory. Anything wider than that would be seen by their business backers as giving away too much.

Had Mrs Clinton known she was actually behind in the polls, she’d have started pulling some more radical maneuvers in her campaign. What is there to lose? She’d have desperately latched on to whatever issue was out there at the time to make her point. She’d have gone to Standing Rock and brought the cameras to witness the police brutality and listen to the pipeline protesters. She’d have stood on the steps of Wells Fargo with representatives of Occupy Wall Street and said it was time to put prosecute the CEO and make him pay back the money to the laid off workers [link]. She’d have gone to a supermax prison and condemned the prison-industrial complex and told people that we should aim to provide free education for all instead of free criminal incarceration for all.

All of these campaign stops would have been worth a shot had she known she was cruising for a losing. But instead she thought she had a two percent lead and sat tight in the belief that she had given the people just enough, but no more than necessary.

Unknown to her, the polls were fickle, and she’d foolishly put herself square into the danger zone.

Chapter 5, Father and daughter are being followed by a surveillance drone armed with high-tech needle-gun nano-missiles, patrolling to make sure they don’t steal so much as a single potato from the farmer’s field. They are starving. The drone knows this and prints out strips of coupons for a fast food joint nearby that is willing to feed them on credit.

Chapter 6 and we’re back with Obama fending off the Snowden revelations about the vast illegal NSA spying program that exists outside the law, beyond all accountability to the judicial branch, and at the sole discretion of the President.

Chapter 7: Dr Gill Jones, psychologist, presents a paper about the pathology of attention spans and goal horizons. When a goal is desirable but not certain, then there is zero consideration paid to the consequences of what will happen after the achievement of the goal. Attention spans therefore are not short, per se. The goal exists and displaces all other matters on the mind. Including what will be the consequences of achieving the goal. The mind gets boxed in on all sides. Therefore we should be more considerate of goal selection and be capable of unhooking. If we don’t we’re doomed.

As the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Chapter 8: President Trump is using the machinery of National Security Agency to hit back at the twelve women who alleged sexual misconduct during his election campaign. Their bank and medical details mysteriously get published on the internet. He also watches through secret camera grainy video as goons rough them up in their own living rooms. One of the women has connections and gets her story to the press, and the consequences of this petty vindictiveness rumble on as an unnecessary scandal — a scandal which at least has some substance. Unlike, for example, the Governor Chris Christie’s traffic jam scam on the George Washington Bridge, which is the very definition of petty. This matter has escalated to the extent that by the end of the chapter he is sentenced to execution over this incident by lethal injection.

Sitting on the couch with his syringe, a thin and grey Mr Christie speechifies about how his death is not going to undo the damage of those thirty minutes of unnecessary delay that happened on the daily commute for three thousand New Jerseyans ten years prior. But then, of course, nor does an execution bring back the dead killed by a murder. So what? This is the culture of life.

Chapter 9: A wall is built along the state boundary of Florida to save the rest of the lower 47 states and its culture. The Floridians are pay for it through the theft of their portion federal social security funds. Following the fifteenth hurricane of the season to have buzzsawed the peninsula, major parts of the coast are underwater. The rest of America cannot now afford to take in these refugees who happen to live on the wrong side of the artificial border. Nationalistic sentiment is whipped up against these millions of new foreigners to distract from the accidental detonation of a nuclear missile in its silo in Nevada.

Chapter 10: Mikhail Putin, grandson of Vladimir, is sworn in as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He celebrates with a speed boat race on the Potomac River and crashes into a floating tree.

Chapter 11: The plot has deteriorated into a series of pointless clashes and conflicts with no direction at all, much like real life. It is technically possible for humanity to be organized to provide a reasonable level of comfort and security to every living human being on the planet, but the elite has been carefully educated in the most exclusive schools to not even consider providing such an option. Instead they spend billions deluding themselves, their children who are to inherit and preserve their wealth, and the rest of society that it is not ever going to be possible. And, even if it were possible, it is not desirable. Because, Freedom.

Chapter 12: An attempt is made to pull it all together by returning to the future sub-plot where the father and daughter have made it to the coast, which is on the slopes of the Appalachian mountains. They gain passage on a carbon-fibre and gossamer fully-automatic sail-boat that threads its way through the barrier islands and tops of skyscrapers capped by golden statues of Trump, until they reach into the old Atlantic open sea. Ultimately there is nowhere to go because the world is round, but we can pretend they are heading towards somewhere meaningful out there across the water, because this is the end of the book and there is probably not going to be a sequel.

The End

1 Comment

  • 1. Aaron Todd replies at 27th November 2017, 1:36 am :

    …dark & appropriately so…

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