From Stephen Hawking:

“Although the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,” he said in November.

As a result, he has advocated colonizing both the moon and Mars.

Nonsense. Civilization will cease when one person ends up with all the money.

Likes Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, Elon Musk is producing tehno porn.  We might be able to land on Mars, but colonizing the Moon is impossible for a civilization worshiping materialism.  And such a goal is laughable to those profiting by it.

For the ne’er-do-wells in Liberty, civilization effectively ceased with the signing of NAFTA in ’94.  Things had been getting progressively worse for twenty years, but that put the kibosh on jobs.  Now, the people get by the best they can on public assistance, which apparently means lots of beer and cigs.

How is environmental calamity going to marginalize these people any more?  They have nothing left to lose and anybody who could leave has done so.  No, economic and societal collapse has occurred and they are living in a dystopia completely barren of hope for opportunity.

And suppose Mars or the Moon are colonized.  Do you think this will have any impact on these doomed unfortunates?  No, all disruptive technologies are for an ever-decreasing number of wealthy people.  It’s like the fantasy of having sex with an incredibly beautiful woman: ain’t gonna happen.

Our corporatized government has decided that it is more profitable for millions of people to die.  Inverted Totalitarianism means that prison awaits anyone who resists, and jail looks pretty good to some of the people in Liberty.

You are welcome to dream of beautiful women, new cars, nice houses and trips to Mars, but for most of the people in Liberty, these are wildly unrealistic expectations.  Unfortunately, as religion is an opiate for the masses, these folks have lots of access to the real thing.  And rather than rise up, they will slowly self-medicate into oblivion.  The delusion of techno porn merely helps pass the time.

I’m a capitalist, but not a corporatist.  It is the latter which has given the former a bad name.  Bigger is not necessarily better.  Newer is not necessarily improved.

“Progress is the enemy of prosperity.” – John Michael Greer

Like the forgotten people of Liberty, we must learn again to make do with less.  This is a country where a homeowner with even the smallest yard often owns a John Deere riding mower.  We are literally dying of covetousness by squandering meager resources on lavish toys we can’t afford.

Like the pay day lender, companies prey on these poor choices by renting furniture and appliances at exorbitant weekly rates.  Where one grocery store monopolizes a small town, dollar stores now predominate offering products with even less value.  The race to the bottom in Liberty is so strong that a Walmart convenience store closed after six months.

America’s talent is no longer in building things or expanding scientific frontiers.  Nowadays we excel at the neoliberal art of selling nothing for something.  Globalization perverted the national passion for makings things bigger and better by outsourcing to those who could do the jobs cheaper, if not better.  That is neoliberalism.  It has destroyed business, education. healthcare and science.  The bean counters finally won by wringing the last possible amount of profit out of the marketplace.

And so naturally we descend into psychotic delusion where ads for abused pets are more effective than those for starving kids.  Truth based in fact long ago lost precedence over delusion as Libertarian Visigoths allowed Christofascists to subvert the Constitution with magical thinking and xenophobic hatred.

The abolition of liberalism by the Left produced a political vacuum capitalized on not by the Right establishment, but a pornographer who, like Musk and Holmes, caused us to dream of fantastic solutions to intractable problems.  Prospects like going to Mars or getting a job are just as unlikely as Trump fixing healthcare, the economy or whatever other promises he made.  Notions of tearing it all down appeal to the anarchist in all of us, but what is one billionaire against Deep State, after all?