On Plantation Politics

Got this link off Free Republic and followed it to National Review.  Williamson, the author, makes an allusion to who owns the term "plantation".  It sort of looks to me like the left is trying to appropriate that term for their own uses.

The use of the word “plantation” to describe the relationship between black Americans and their political patrons is an unfortunate staple of contemporary rhetoric. Professor West’s remark is unusual in that “plantation” rhetoric usually comes from the Right

Williamson goes on to warn the white folks not to use the term loosely.

With that in mind, I'll throw my own two cents in.

White liberals run the Democrat party.  This may be changing, but for the most part, those in leadership positions are mostly white.  Thus, those in the rank and file are not white, by and large.  Isn't that what the plantation system was all about?  All blacks working for whites for little profit or gain?  Isn't that the case today?  What good has the Democrat party really done for the black people?  It seems to me that they've done a lot of harm.

Most of the money is still coming from rich whites.  Guys like Soros and Buffet.

Again, who's working for who?  Are the white folks in the Democrat party working for blacks or against them?

How does it really help the black folks to be united in their enthusiasm for a party that doesn't advance their interests?  Isn't that the question that is usually thrown at white guys like me who aren't rich, but vote for Republicans?

The Republicans, judging from what I have seen, tend to get their support from the middle class.  It is the very poor and very rich who tend to vote for the Democrats.  It's the very poor and very rich dynamic that defines what the old Plantation system was really like in the Old South.

Nuclear cannon to the planets

Here we go on an imaginative cruise into insanity here, but that's okay.  The world is already crazy, so a bit more craziness won't matter much.  An adaptation of a proposition made by Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture and posted here awhile back for your amusement, consternation, or whatever the case may be.

Actually, it is a mash of a number of ideas gleaned from various sources.  The title, for instance, is an adaptation of the Quicklaunch concept.  Quicklaunch was itself an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, From the Earth to the Moon.  Verne described in detail the plan to set off an explosion that would send a spaceship to the moon.  The nineteenth century novel was technically correct up to a point.  The explosive materials wouldn't have been powerful enough and nobody inside the craft would have survived the g forces.  Besides that, there was no way to soft land the thing once it got there, anyway.

Wang's idea is to set off a nuclear explosion in order to send up to 200k tons of cargo only to the moon or elsewhere.  He doesn't describe how to soft land the thing either.  That and a few other thoughts, led to me try to improve upon the concept a bit.  In the link above, I suggested using nukes to soft land.  But that may run into opposition.  Okay, can you land it another way?  Sure, why not?  As long as we go small ball.  Trying to stop 200k tons would require powerful rockets and a lot of fuel.  A smaller payload and careful planning would reduce that substantially.

To get from lunar escape velocity to a soft landing would require more than half of the launch mass to be fuel.  Not so good, but that's the price to pay for a soft landing on the moon.  Let's say you were to launch 1000 tons with a nuclear blast.  Then, you may get upwards of 500 tons to land softly on the moon.  Not an insignificant achievement.

What could you do with 500 tons?  Well, a 100 megawatt LFTR would weigh in at about 50 tons or less.  A railroad locomotive weighs about 200 tons.  You could substitute several "earth" movers and diggers for the weight of one locomotive.  Various equipment and supplies to support a crew could fill out the rest.  With all this equipment, you can construct a moon base with in situ materials.

The purpose of the moon base would be to begin development of the moon by using the moon's resources.  Thus, the equipment mentioned above would be tailored towards that purpose.  The equipment would have to survive the launch, too.

As Wang mentioned, none of the technology for the launch itself is new.  Nor are the concepts.  Radioactivity can be contained, as it has been in underground nuclear tests in the past.  It wouldn't violate any treaties, and it could be done quickly and cheaply.

A thousand ton device isn't as massive as a Saturn V rocket, nor a Space Shuttle on a launch pad.  It could cause quite a boom when it hits the atmosphere at escape velocity or higher.  But there are plenty of remote sites where this wouldn't be a problem.  The boom would be a lot less than it would be if the boom occurred above the ground, don't you know.

The hard part may be the landing.  The rockets would have to solid, I would think.  That's because liquids have to be contained in a tank, which may not hold up in such a launch.  Besides that, solid rockets have to burn up completely because they can't be stopped.  In answer to those problems, here's a proposition.  Carry more than enough rockets and use only what you need.  That will cut into payload though.  But payload won't be a problem because you can just send more with a bigger blast.  Careful planning can reduce any overage to a minimum.

Assuming all goes well, you can begin building the moon base.  Perhaps you wouldn't need to land a crew.  Using teleoperation, just operate everything from the Earth.  Once everything is set for the crew, then people could land and begin using the facilities.

In the long run, you could build space stations that could be placed at EML4 or EML5.  These could be used as way stations to Mars.  That facilities would be used for the transport of people, and the transport of goods for interplanetary trade.  Now to set up the Mars base, you would just lather, rinse, and repeat.

Once completed, a chain like series of stops would be in place for the long transit to Mars.  Starting from Earth, you reach orbit.  From orbit, you would proceed to the moon.  From the moon, you could proceed to EML4 and finally from there, to Mars.  People could collect on the station and go to Mars in large groups every two years.  In a decade, several hundreds to thousands could be on Mars.

The Fish Rots From The Head Down

Message from me:

Quote:

national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19th century.

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

Comment:

The fish rots from the head down.

Bottom line:  We need new and better leadership.  We need the molten-salt reactor.  The rejection of it, even though it was proven in the lab, has coincided with the failures cited in this article.  This is no coincidence.

Published on Zero Hedge (http://www.zerohedge.com)

Home > Guest Post: Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World - Part 1

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Guest Post: Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World - Part 1

By Tyler Durden

Created 07/23/2013 - 19:56

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we'll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system. This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche [1] observed the same spectacle in the 19th century: "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

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Source URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/node/476758

Links:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140150625/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=thebur01-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0140150625&adid=1NMDDJ8JZYT63EXTVTP9

Gold prices should be $15000 oz., or the Dow should be 1300

Why?  According to the chart I made yesterday, gold prices reached a peak in 1980 or thereabouts.  At that point, the Dow Jones was at its low point having been in a bear market for over a decade.  So, if the economy was doing poorly, as indicated by the double digit inflation and double digit unemployment ( that was to follow shortly), and the gold prices; and the gold prices being equal roughly to the Dow, that condition should obtain today as well.

But the Dow today isn't in a bear market and is a bit overpriced.  Also, there are those who say that gold is in a bubble.  With gold at $1300 oz and the Dow at over 15k, there's a 10 to 1 ratio between the two.  How can gold be in a bubble and the Dow is not?

As mentioned in an earlier post, the economic statistics are just as bad as they were in 1980.  Maybe even worse.  But the numbers are not reported the same way as they were in 1980.  If the numbers were reported the same way, the numbers today would look like 1980 all over again.

How does the same report technique if used as in 1980 support a Dow at 15k and a gold price less than 10% of that when the two numbers were equal back then?  The Dow should be lower or gold should be higher, or some combination of both.  Or something is definitely out of whack.

Tragedy of The Commons

This is a pretty standard concept and isn't new to me.  I'm putting it up in connection to our government.  Just replace the pasture in this example with the government and you get the same kind of results.  Nobody owns the government.  So, the government gets overused and abused, just like the pasture that gets overgrazed.  That's my theory.

This is not to suggest that somebody should own the government.  Only that the government isn't the solution.  Just making government bigger only makes the problems bigger.  That's due to this phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons.

You see, nobody seems to give a damn that the government is crapping out big time.  It is easy to rationalize too, based upon the systematic deception that promotes its continual overuse and abuse.  Nothing gets done about it because nobody recognizes or wants to recognize how it is going to impact us all.  Environmentalists like to talk about sustainability.  I am here to tell you that a big government is unsustainable because of the tragedy of the commons.

Why the government is systematically lying to us

In connection with the price action of gold, the thought occurred to me that we are being lied to systematically.  It's being done for political reasons.

At the bottom of the page, there is a link to the site that publishes government statistics that were used in the past.  If these same statistics were used today, the reporting would be much more negative than it is.  The rosy numbers would not look so rosy, and the smell would be much more sour.  For the government wants everything to appear better than it really is.  That is so as to keep themselves in power and to keep the population quiet.  Another technique is to provide bread and circuses.  But, in order to do this, it requires massive government spending; which is being financed by printing money out of thin air.

Gold prices are being suppressed as well.  Any sign of gold rising is a negative sign that must be suppressed.  After all, the government doesn't want anyone to get the notion that the government's own policies are failing.  With alternative stats showing inflation at 1970 levels instead of the near zero levels, the general mood would be much more negative than it is.  Instead of zero interest rates, there would be political pressure to increase rates to a higher level.  A rising gold price, therefore, shatters the myth making created with manipulated government statistics.  News of rising gold prices must be suppressed, and so it is.

How do gold prices get suppressed?  My theory is that gold is being leveraged like the paper based debt system is.  Consequently, there's more paper gold than actually exists.  If this isn't leverage, then it must be something else.  Fraud, perhaps.  Whatever it is, it isn't based upon the truth.

So, the government has most people believing things are better than they really are.  This charade can continue as long as the dollar maintains its reserve status, but that is in increasing jeopardy.  Other nations, in particular those doing trade with China, are seeking to do trade without using the almighty dollar.  Once enough nations do that, the dollar's reserve status will have been effectively ended.  If the dollar's status is lost, it will be harder to maintain the fiction that all is well.  But by that time, damage will have been done, and it will be impossible to reverse it.  For we are headed towards a one-party state.  The practices of deception are necessary in a totalitarian state in order to keep the people in line.

Rep. King Creates Furor With Remarks on Immigrants

wsj

comment:

Representative King of Iowa made the claim that there's 100 drug mules for every valedictorian amongst the young undocumented illegals.  The left is all in a snit over this claim.  Here's a question for you:  Is it true or not?  For the left is claiming that there's valedictorians amongst the illegals and that opens the door as to how significant this number is in comparison to the others who are less desirable.

Common sense, which is uncommon these days, would suggest that King has a point.  For a  valedictorian is rare in any case.  Probably even more rare amongst illegals because many of them don't finish school.  Their graduation rates are lower than average, if my information is correct.  The odds are that there will be significantly fewer scholars amongst them.

But the complaint is that King isn't being nice.  What obligation does King have in being nice if the truth is being suppressed?  Does political correctness count more than accuracy?  This is the kind of thing that is killing this society.  I hope that the opponents to this proposition will continue to supply the facts to a nation even if it hurts to do so.  There can be no justice without the truth.  There's no justice in flooding this country with undesirables just because we don't want to look like we're not nice.