Category: Miscellaneous

Space – the final frontier.

Because apparently we keep coming back to it.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Its premature mission – to journey to strange new worlds

To seek out new actors with new forehead makeup

To boldly go where we’ve already gone before.

Well, an Internet friend of mine pointed out that YouTube was given the rights to show the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so I didn’t have to pay for Paramount Plus to watch it. And from what I’ve seen, it lives up to the hype.

It starts with Captain Christopher Pike still trying to process the mental fallout from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, which has put a touch of grey into Anson Mount’s All-American Hero persona. When Admiral Robert April shows up at Pike’s ranch and orders him to get back on the Enterprise to rescue his Number One (Rebecca Romijn) from a first contact mission gone awry, Pike is reluctant to go. He’s going through what might be described as pre-traumatic stress syndrome, in which he keeps reliving the vision of the future where he sees his own death, “or as good as.” Spock (Ethan Peck), the only other crewman he can discuss those events with, quickly deduces what’s going on. Spock and a new crewman (Christina Chong) give Pike new and unique perspectives on living with the knowledge of death, and he reaches a kind of Zen approach to accepting his fate.

The problem that I (and a bunch of other people) had with Discovery (aka, DISCO, STD) is that it wanted to be all “progressive” and different even as it insisted on being set in the Star Trek history before Kirk. The much-maligned Enterprise series at least tried to appear as though it were part of the setting’s pre-Original Series past, but Discovery never bothered, creating all kinds of setting anachronisms that could only be resolved by chucking the entire cast and ship into the next millennium.

Strange New Worlds really isn’t that much like the Original Series. Unlike the James Cawley and Vic Mignogna fan projects, they don’t try to make the sets look just like the ’60s Enterprise, and the established characters don’t look or act like the original actors, even to the extent that the JJ Abrams cast did. But I think they’re getting the right tone. The cast has the kind of camaraderie and heroism that I remember from the original show, including Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who looks nothing like Nichelle Nichols but is immensely charming, especially in the pilot episode’s last scene.

But even if this cishet, conventional Star Trek goes in the opposite direction of Discovery, it confirms that old-school Trek was always more liberal and less conservative than some people want to believe. Because in the pilot episode, Strange New Worlds went there. When Pike rescues his Away Team they tell him that the natives of the planet in question reverse-engineered antimatter tech when their astronomers observed the Discovery’s warp jump into the future. And rather than use it to develop space travel, they’re using it to make strategic weapons. So Pike just says “screw General Order One” and appears at the peace talks between the squabbling factions. And he shows them footage from Earth’s history immediately after the 20^th Century, including real footage of people marching on Washington with signs like “AUDIT THE VOTE.” The writers have retconned Trek’s Eugenics Wars to be just one stage of a larger conflict that included a second American Civil War and culminated in a nuclear exchange that led to the extinction of hundreds of animal and plant species and 30 percent of the human population. And Pike tells the diplomats that that’s where they’re headed.

I mean it seems like crazy science fiction, but when the main sponsor of fascism around the world just started a genocidal war, and threatens to launch nukes if the international community doesn’t let him win, cause apparently he’s deathly ill and doesn’t have anything to lose, and meanwhile his main protege in the United States makes his master look like Bertrand Russell, and he’s STILL got at least even odds of getting re-elected president, well, who knows what could happen?

With Strange New Worlds, what we’ve got so far is good enough that I want to see where it goes next. I’m still not sure I want to pay for another streaming service when I can’t make the time to watch what I have. If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch the show but you still have to get an add-on subscription to Paramount. However they do have a 7-day free trial offer. After a few weeks I may check that out to see some more episodes. I may also binge Discovery Season 4 and Star Trek: Picard Season 2, if only to see if they’re AS bad as everyone says they are.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

…We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

-Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

Well, in actual news this week, somebody decided to leak Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which political observers predicted was going to be the case where the conservative majority finally got rid of the Roe v. Wade right to abortion one way or another. The text indicates that this is not merely a technical restriction of abortion rights but an active assertion that no such rights exist.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Alito passes over certain legal justifications for an abortion right, such as the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Which among other things would flip the argument: Not, why is there a right to abortion but why is there a state interest in preserving a pregnancy prior to fetal viability? But he says that the Ninth Amendment was not the basis of pro-choice arguments and points to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause regarding its Section 1. He then asserts that such pro-choice rulings did not establish that a right to abortion was confirmed by the Fourteenth, even as he goes over how it applies in other cases.

Alito points out that while there had been no asserted right to abortion in national law prior to Roe, 30 states still prohibited abortion at all stages. As though the Roe case were not about addressing that fact, going on from Section V, and whether such laws should be valid or whether the Court should assert a different standard. In Section B of his opinion, Alito pronounces “Until the latter part of the 20^th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.” As if emotional emphasis were necessary, he follows by saying, “Zero. None.” Apparently the fact that a right did not exist prior to being asserted by the government, as if that were not the reason cases are taken to court, means that such a right cannot exist. After all prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, what support was there in American law for the belief that a Negro had more than three-fifths the value of a human being?

The gist, highlighted in the Politico article, is on page 4: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Truly, the implications of such a ruling are staggering and encompassing. So encompassing, in fact, that I am not sure the author himself is aware of them.

Here are several other words that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.

By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.

Basically, the premise of this decision only works if the Right assumes that the Left won’t end up commandeering the legal system in the blatant and partisan manner that they have. Which is a laugh given that most of the reason for “conservative” bad-faith arguments against the Left is the manic fear that liberals will take over government and do to conservatives what they’ve been doing to the rest of the country all along.

It should be telling that conservatives’ main reaction was neither opposition nor support of the decision so much as shock and indignance that the decision was leaked and “decorum” was violated. After all, that’s more important than human rights. You would think that if abortion is so terrible and the need to protect life is so sacrosanct that they would be rushing to release the news as soon as they could, or perhaps they did and suddenly found out that other people didn’t like it.

It’s almost as if Republicans think that the purpose of government is to act explicitly against the will of the public.

Some commentators thought this leak was some “last-ditch effort by the Left to stir up yet another culture war in the hopes it can save them from utter obliteration in November.” (In which case, Mission Accomplished.) Some thought this was more a conservative attempt to shore up a wobbly conservative justice who might possibly back off of Alito’s opinion. I don’t think so. You already have Justice Thomas who if anything is more reactionary than Alito, and then you have the three Justices that Viceroy Trump appointed, implicitly and explicitly to take out Roe v. Wade. They would not have a draft listed as a Court opinion if there was not a solid majority behind it. It’s been pointed out that after Chief Justice Roberts, Clarence Thomas actually has seniority among the conservative justices and therefore he would have had first right to pen the decision. The fact that Alito took it up meant that an internal deliberation was already made. And the fact that his language directs to strike down Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (when the Dobbs v. Jackson case in question does not specifically require it) seems to indicate that Alito doesn’t particularly care what anyone thinks of the opinion or has any fear of defections. As he says, “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.” I’m sure King George III would agree.

Perhaps the leak was some clerk or Court insider who might actually be pro-life in broad terms and against widespread legal abortion but who is also conservative in the practical sense and realizes that pushing the issue too hard in one direction will lead to a radical backlash and a liberal effort to undermine the entire conservative project in the same way that the radical Right sought to undermine the previous legal tradition immediately after Roe v. Wade. And given the changing demographics of this country it is hard to say that such an effort would not succeed.

And then ask yourself who such an insider might be.

Perhaps this was said moderate conservative’s attempt to say: Are you SURE you want to do that?

Are you SURE you want to do that?

Samuel… Samuel… Are YOU SURE you want to do that?

I am not a huge fan of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, because it leads to taking absurd hypotheticals to impractical levels, but if one is determined to assert an absurd hypothetical, it is still a good rule for determining the consequences of treating your desire as a universal law. At one point Alito said “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.” This is of course an attempt to pretend to objectivity and to wash one’s hands of consequences for a decision that are likely if not inevitable. One could argue, as many scholars over the years have, that Roe v. Wade was ambiguous in its reasoning and difficult to defend. One could argue, as Rehnquist did in his dissent with the original decision, and as Alito does now, that federally the decision ought to be state by state. And federally, it should be the Congress’ power to determine the protections of the federal government, rather than having the Supreme Court making the decision for them and “legislating from the bench”, as conservatives put it in 1973.

There are of course reasons why that did not happen and why Roe lasted as long as it did. The Politico article quotes: “In the main opinion in the 1992 Casey decision, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Davis Souter warned that the court would pay a “terrible price” for overruling Roe, despite criticism of the decision from some in the public and the legal community.

“While it has engendered disapproval, it has not been unworkable,” the three justices wrote then. “An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe‘s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions; no erosion of principle going to liberty or personal autonomy has left Roe‘s central holding a doctrinal remnant.”

Whatever philosophical matters concern the status of unborn life, when the state gets involved in the matter the practical result is to assert that the rights of a woman to her own body are trumped (so to speak) by the existence of a pregnancy.

(Alito, incidentally, had previously said that the government’s pandemic policy led to “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” While he was busy citing all the cases in which abortion was not guaranteed and a state’s right to prohibit abortion was a precedent, he could have looked up all the restrictions on individual liberty that government imposed over the Spanish Flu.)

On Facebook, writer Thomas Clay posted: “All women in the United States are now second class citizens who do not get to enjoy the bodily autonomy we grant a corpse because we still respect the right of a corpse to keep its organs.” You basically have a situation akin to the build up to the Civil War in which some states were “slave” and some were free, but the divider in this case is genitalia and childbearing age rather than racial origin. Although some would argue it’s not much of a difference. While in the abstract it might be better to leave the matter to the states, “conservatives” like Alito and Thomas elide the point that their decisions do not have an impact only in the abstract. It is a good question whether the state of Missisippi would have proffered its case, or whether Alito would have written this opinion, if a majority of state governments were pro-choice or if there was a US Congress motivated to federalize the provisions of Roe.

And one of the reasons that old-time general conservatives, like O’Connor and Kennedy and to some extent Roberts, were loath to mess with precedent even when it goes against moral conservatism is to preserve what one might call the mystique of their institution. Jack Shafer: “The court has long feared that if the nation knew how its decisions come together — if its members dared to wear human faces, if it appeared as anything but a sacred tribunal — its decisions would carry less weight. It’s that easy to lose the mystique built up for centuries. The POLITICO piece reveals a court-decision-in-process as a purely political document that aligns five conservatives against the court’s liberals and, presumably, the chief justice. That accurate portrayal might take decades for the court’s myth-makers to erase.”

We take the Court as Supreme not just because there needs to be a final authority but because that authority is supposed to be outside politics and a balance on the legislature and executive. The decisions of the Court are assumed to have an almost supernatural authority, as if they were written by God on stone with fire. And instead the bias displayed here reveals that any given Court decision has no real need for precedent or constitutional grounding, all you need is a grudge and four other justices to go along with you. And now that Democrats know this, they’re going to do everything they can to just shove through their agenda and shift the balance again, decorum and precedent be damned. And they need a bigger majority in Congress to pull that off. And since Republicans know that, they’re going to do everything they can to make sure they never lose elections anywhere they can help it.

Fortunately for them they have the courts on their side.

To cement that, Republicans would need to build up even bigger judicial majorities in the states during this year’s election to change the election laws for the next national election. And at that point Trump and McConnell’s court majority will be able to do for the 2024 Republican nominee what they did not do for Trump in 2020, perhaps because at the time they thought they wouldn’t be able to force the issue. But apparently now they think they can.

There’s only one thing that could stop that.

The next two elections are Americans’ last chance to determine their own future.

ACT LIKE IT.

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But nobody can handle that other trip – the possibility than any freak with $1.98 can walk over into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The big super-important story in the news last week was that Elon Musk, after over a week of playing games with the board at Twitter, finally decided to buy the social media outlet outright. And if I seem blase’ about how important this actually is, well, yeah. I seem to notice that the people who are most upset (or elated) about how important this change actually is are the same people who are most invested in spending time on that indulgence.

Of course a lot of the implicit and explicit fear (and elation) is the idea that once Elon Musk comes in to restore “free speech” to a site that actually started taking its own user rules and policies seriously after January 6, he’s going to let Donald Trump, the once and future Viceroy of Russian North America, back on. But in reaction to the news, the Sovereign of Subnormal told everybody that he wouldn’t go back on Twitter even then, cause he’s got this brand new site called… Truf Censhal. Yeah, that’s it.

My take, which I have gone over at least once, is that Twitter’s format is deliberately intended to blast unconsidered opinions and emotional hot takes, that this is the very nature of the format which Musk’s liberal critics are patronizing and posting on and using as a professional community, and if they have a problem with that potential, then they have a problem with the site itself, because that “abuse” of the medium is the very nature of the medium. People like Donald Trump were the ones using the Twitter format in the manner that it best works. And if liberals have a problem with someone buying out the site so that it can be used in such a way, their problem is with the site itself, and if you want a private actor to buy it out, or want the government to regulate it, you might as well have a private actor or the government shut it down altogether, because that is the only way to solve the problem.

But the fact that I don’t loathe Musk doesn’t mean that I’m a huge fan either. I liked the one take I saw recently where somebody called him “Tony Stark without the redemption arc.” One of the other whines about this whole deal is that (supposedly) Musk had pledged to the World Food Programme that he would pledge almost $6 billion dollars to end world hunger if they presented a plan to do it, and he didn’t follow through. I don’t think this is so much because he cares less about world hunger than about letting Trump and Nazis back on Twitter, it’s just that he seems to have the priorities of a fruit fly. At least to judge from his last few tweets where he said he would next buy out McDonald’s to fix the shake machines, buy out Doritos to make sure the chip bags are actually full, and buy out Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in the cola, all three of which are goals I would support more than buying out Twitter.

And yet while liberals were panicking about the unaccountable decisions of a super-billionaire and “conservatives” assume that said unaccountable rich person is defending free speech, there’s another big story which shows how quickly the script changes when you switch the sides.

Over the last few months, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron “Mini-Trump” DeSantis has been trying to one up his former mentor in his appeals to the MAGA cult in what might be a serious effort to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. It’s doubtful Trump will just roll over and let him take it, after all, he needs the potential of being president again to stay out of jail. But it’s not like DeSantis can sit around and wait for Trump to die, either. My guess is Trump will die of natural causes in three years then spend the rest of the century as a lich while he’s in litigation with God.

For instance, DeSantis’ administration decided to ban a set of math textbooks that supposedly included questionable ideas. Not that they gave any details. Apparently Arabic numerals are part of a Muslim conspiracy against Christianity.

But the most controversial and consequential act of mini-MAGA was where DeSantis signed what liberals call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents public schools from holding discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that lessons “may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards”. This law also allows parents to sue school districts on those grounds. If you’re wondering how the Right is defending free speech here, well so am I.

The Disney corporation, which just happens to own a massive chunk of real estate in Florida, had at first tried to remain out of the debate, but the leadership ended up siding with “progressives” due to massive public pressure. Well, of course the modern Republican Party is focused on making sure that government is never subject to public pressure again, so DeSantis decided to declare war on Disney. On April 19, DeSantis extended what was already a special session so that Republican legislators could sponsor a bill removing the Reedy Creek Improvement District which the state had outright given the Disney company in 1967 to build Walt Disney World, so as to take away its special privileges and tax status. On April 22, DeSantis signed the bill into law, and admitted that this would cause Disney to pay more taxes as a result.

Let us stand back and commemorate the moment in which a Republican politician actually said that raising taxes on a corporation was a GOOD thing. Y’know, as if this were a principle that “conservatives” would actually hold to even if it inconvenienced their patrons, as opposed to a needledick bugfucker move to punish any deviation from right-wing political correctness.

But as it turns out, the special district arrangement meant that Disney was paying all the infrastructure costs for Reedy Creek and removing their authority would mean that the state or the county take over those costs. Now you know why they agreed to that deal in the first place. Which probably doesn’t concern DeSantis because in his epic quest to impregnate a molecule, the neighboring counties are Democrat-majority. However, “The resort complex’s governing board says that when Florida created the Reedy Creek Improvement District decades ago, the state pledged to protect the district’s debt holders — and not to alter its status unless all debts are paid off.”

In another post, I’d also said that it would not be a good thing if Elon Musk could just buy the 1-15 roadway and start charging tolls for himself, “But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.” Well, as it turns out, something like that was already happening in Florida.

Both libertarians and liberals think (in theory, anyway) that we shouldn’t be giving businesses too many breaks, and on that level it seems like a good idea to take away a corporation’s legal authority over a territory. If liberals and libertarians agree on anything, it is that government has a monopoly on force. That is the defining feature of government. It cannot have final authority otherwise. In a way the idea of whether one man should have all that power over Twitter is the same issue as one company having so much control of a public infrastructure.

Do we seriously want the Disney corporation to have more power in Florida than the Florida state government? In a way, the question is moot: the controversy arose because, in fact, Disney DOES have more power in the special district than the state of Florida, and the state of Florida finally decided to object.
Nobody in the state even questioned whether it was a good idea for Disney to be in charge of the Reedy District, because (in contradiction to normal cheapass corporate policy) they actually spend money to get the best work, because they know that the work reflects on them. The only reason anything changed is because the state government decided to punish what counts as heresy this week. And that ought to be a lesson to any liberal who is hoping the Federal government will look at Twitter and save them from capitalism and freedom of choice.

Why, it’s almost as if all the people wailing about “the rule of law” just meant it as “the way we’re accustomed to doing things”. And almost as if liberals mean “free speech” in exactly the way conservatives do: It only means the stuff they like.

It all comes down to the fact that libertarianism is limited and yet everything still comes back to libertarianism. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which does not hold that government exists a priori – because existentially, nothing else does. As I say: A collective without its individual components is an empty set. A government cannot exist without individuals. Individuals CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. The Constitution was not handed down by Jesus or Moses (no matter what some professional Christians think), it was a product of its time, and while it’s still superior to a lot of the alternatives presented, we are seeing that it has problems because not every decision the Founders made could be perfect, and every decision has consequences. This means, among other things, that government doesn’t HAVE to do everything we can imagine, and a lot of the duties we ask of it were only applied recently because we only recently thought they were government’s purview. It doesn’t have to grant a huge corporation its own real estate to privately manage, nor does it have to take that territory back. Nor does it have to regulate a “free speech” site that has been unregulated by government precisely because we had not had a precedent in social media to do so.

People keep calling Twitter the modern equivalent of a “town square.” Would you be allowed to go to the town square in your community and scream the things in person that people do every day on Twitter? Christ, this is a site that is too rude and profane for ME. Such restrictions that it has on free speech were put in place mainly by user demand. Half of the reason Viceroy Trump was cut off from twitting is that the Twitter staff might have revolted if he wasn’t. It remains to be seen how well the staff will put up with Musk. And then there’s the point that the site never has been profitable, which is why Musk had to put up so much of his own stock to finance the deal. Given that the site is both too big to buy and not turning a profit, certain bankers surmised that when Twitter resisted Musk’s initial offers to enter into partnership, they put out feelers to every other potential buyer and got turned down because it wasn’t worth the deal. Which might be why that Tesla stock took a double-digit plunge in the week after the sale announcement.

As a financial investment, Twitter isn’t worth it. It doesn’t charge for subscriptions. Its advertiser base might not cover expenses. It only matters because of its base of users. Fact is, the social media mavens and other liberals who made Twitter what it is made it huge, and became dependent on it in the process, because they wanted the same freedom that Trumpniks did: The freedom to spout catty, mean-girl opinions to other people without getting punched out like they would for mouthing off to the same people face to face.

Look, as galaxy-shattering catastrophes go, Elon Musk buying out Twitter is less of a problem than Republicans buying out state government, because liberals can give up on Twitter, even if apparently they don’t want to. They can’t give up on government, even if apparently they have.

If you are a history buff, then what we are seeing in Ukraine is not exactly news to you. Indeed, it may be depressing how much history does repeat itself. And yet, looking at history does mean that you can look at the past and see the parallels to today and decide not to make the same mistakes. It also means that those who do choose to repeat the same mistakes are doing it because they are under the same delusions as their forbears.

And if you play computer games on Steam, you’ve probably at least heard of the Hearts of Iron series, and the last few times I’ve played that game I’ve noticed that the loading screens feature a lot of historical quotes that have at least ironic value, and some of them seem to be that much more ironic in the wake of the first large-scale war in Europe since 1945.

Gaiety is the outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

-Joseph Stalin

This is an example of how “truth” works in a totalitarian universe where everybody HAS to believe the government line (on pain of death) and so politicians don’t even need to lie well. It’s of a piece with the Winter War against Finland, where Finns invented the phrase “Molotov cocktail” but also invented the phrase “Molotov’s breadbaskets” because Foreign Minister Molotov insisted that Soviet bombing runs on Finnish cities were really just dropping food parcels for Finland’s starving masses.

Alternately, it could be that this phrase is just an example of Stalin’s famously dark sense of humor. But as Stalin was (inaccurately) quoted as saying, “Dark humor is like food. Not everybody gets it.”

Certainly not the Ukrainians.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.

-Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris

Harris was a leader of the British Royal Air Force Bomber Command in World War II, and like America’s General Sherman, he had a single-minded focus on destroying the enemy’s home ground as the most quick, efficient, and therefore humane, means of ending a war that was thrust upon his country.

In World War II, this led to the outright destruction of cities like Dresden from conventional bombs.

It’s been slightly less than two months, and already there are reports that Ukraine has been able to target supply depots in Russian territory with air attacks. Recently Vladimir Putin’s government acknowledged that the economic sanctions from the West would have an effect on his economy, contradicting previous government remarks. Which is funny, given that shortly after the invasion started, Putin’s main protege (or perhaps ingenue) told his own fan club that the invasion was a genius move because Putin got access to all that territory for maybe $2 in sanctions. But that’s understandable, given that said protege launched his own half-assed attack on a national capital over a year ago and hasn’t even paid two dollars for it yet.

Yes, despite all the carnage in places like Yemen and Palestine and all the violence previously committed by Putin, the attack on Ukraine was what finally got the world’s attention. Even then, if Putin had succeeded in taking Kyiv in the first week and sweeping through the east, the international community probably would have had to take it as a fait accompli like his other aggressions. But then, the feat has not been accomplished. Because Ukraine fights back, it exacts a price for aggression, and that makes it a lot easier for the rest of the world to do likewise.

It brings to mind a much more famous quote by wartime prime minister Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

That’s the part of the speech most people know. The part that isn’t quoted as often is: “Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”

People don’t matter, only what they represent.

I would rather live in a swamp of Greater Romania than a paradise of small Romania.

-Ion Antonescu

Ion Antonescu was a general in the Kingdom of Romania leading up to World War II, at a time when the political spectrum there ranged between pro-German and people who thought the Nazis weren’t anti-Semitic enough. Antonescu’s faction ended up winning control of the government by 1940 and Romania ended up joining the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union next year. Part of this was to take back territory that the previous government had conceded to Stalin, even though Romania had also surrendered Transylvania to Hitler’s other ally Hungary. The rearranged borders were defined by Antonescu as “Greater Romania.” Of course the Axis lost that war and Romania ended up losing that eastern territory again.

Antonescu’s quotes above reflect the philosophy of collectivists, whether they be left-wing socialists or right-wing fascists. They don’t see people as individuals. They don’t think that individual lives matter, or even the collective impact of government decisions. All that matters is the collective – the State, or the race. Any deprivation the individual people suffer is irrelevant to the goals of the state (or rather, the people who currently own it).

Which is why, contrary to some analysts, I don’t think that Putin is going to acknowledge a timeline. They say he only has a few months worth of supplies and financial reserves to wage a war, but that assumes he actually cares about the discomfort of the civilian population, or even his elite allies. So of course he’s going to let the government default on its debt, of course he’s going to create a national draft, of course he’s going to institute rationing and of course he’s going to come up with even more restrictions on public activity that would make all his “freedom-loving” fellow travelers in the US howl and scream if they were enacted by a Democrat. I mean what else could he do, back off and admit he made a mistake? See, that’s the beautiful thing about fascism. Fascism means never having to say you’re sorry.

Germany will either be a world power or it will not be at all.

-Adolf Hitler

In review of Putin’s career, there are a lot of quotes that indicate certain ideas are consistent in his mind even if he has not always been so reckless in pursuing them. The press has brought up where he said that the death of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.” More recently in December 2021, Putin did an interview and said that the event was ” the disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union”.

Further back, Putin made a speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007 lamenting the “unipolar” state of the world, namely a world in which America and the West were dictating terms without Russian influence. A few months after his Munich speech, Putin spoke at a meeting with members of the Valdai International Discussion Club. In that speech, he elaborated: “I know that, unfortunately, in some Eastern European countries, not just the candidate for the post of defense minister but even candidates for less important posts are discussed with the U.S. ambassador. Is this a good thing? I do not think it is very good for all the countries concerned because sooner or later it will provoke the same rejection that Soviet domination once provoked in these countries. Do you understand? It might seem welcome today, but tomorrow it could lead to problems. Even old Europe is obliged to take NATO’s political interests into account in its policies. You know how the decision-making process works. There is probably no need to explain. Sovereignty is therefore something very precious today, something exclusive, you could even say. Russia cannot exist without defending its sovereignty. Russia will either be independent and sovereign or will most likely not exist at all.”

Similar to the quote about Greater Romania, the status of the nation is more important to the fascist than its living conditions. In the case of World War II, it’s worth noting that the main nations of the Axis Powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – were all latecomers to empire after the great powers of Britain and France had already taken the best colonies in the undeveloped world. Germany had lost World War I while Italy and Japan were on the winning side but both thought they didn’t get enough spoils from the war, and both (like later Nazi Germany) wanted to re-assert themselves via imperial expansion at the same time that Britain, France and the United States were seeing colonial empires as not only contradictory to their humanist ideals but more hassle than they were worth. The Axis nations’ struggles against not only the West but neighboring nations endangered their economies and in the long term lowered daily living standards. And that of course was before full scale war in 1939, which ended up with the Axis being bombed into the Stone Age and occupied. And yet Germany and Japan in particular recovered from that occupation and became economic powers with an arguably better standard of living than America or Britain.

Germany ended up losing its colonial empire and Great Power status, just as Britain and France did, and had to suffer a lot more for it on the way because it decided to force itself on the rest of the world rather than adapt to it. Now, maybe Russia isn’t going to be fucked in the way that they (literally) fucked Germany after World War II, but like them they might find out that in the long run, plain old market liberalism is better than empire after all. But in the immortal words of Wesley Snipes, “Some motherfuckers just gotta ice skate uphill.”

GIRAFFES ARE HEARTLESS CREATURES

Well, yes.

It was recently announced that Norm McDonald died after fighting cancer for years, which no one knew about cause he didn’t want to tell anybody. But don’t worry folks, I’m sure that’s just his idea of a joke.

Okay, that wasn’t very funny. Here’s a better joke. My best friend is dead.

It’s been about two months since September 14^th. That’s when I found out. I am still trying to process it.

Don Garner has been a friend of mine since… I can’t even remember. More than 30 years. I was still hanging around UNLV and met him through one of the Dungeons & Dragons groups, along with at least one other close friend and a few other guys that I’ve run into a few times since then. And even more than most of those guys, I had a lot in common with him. He knew that much more about Star Trek, and about naval history, than I did, though I think a lot of that was precisely because he’d researched the military history of every US Navy ship named “Enterprise.” He had a great sense of humor. I’ve posted some of his stuff on Facebook. Like: “In the news this week… Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos into outer space by nine days… and Richard Branson does NOT have over 56,000 people’s names on a petition to not allow him to return to Earth the way Jeff Bezos does”.

But Don had been in a decline for years. And years. Such that when I learned for sure that he had died, it was sort of like how my roommate’s cat passed away. He took him to the vet and they found out the little guy had lung cancer, and they told my roommate that the cat maybe had weeks to live and it turned out to be only a few days. So it was sad, but we knew it was going to happen at some point, we just didn’t know when. The difference being you expect your pet to be completely dependent on other human beings, and you don’t think there’s anything else you can do if the pet goes terminal. When you’ve got somebody who’s otherwise able to take care of himself and who doesn’t do so, it’s that much more perplexing.

When I said recently on a completely different subject, that I had told someone “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do”, that was Don I was referring to.

For example, Don was the guy who invented the sixburger. That is, you go to Wendy’s, you order two Triple cheeseburgers, and you put them on one bun. I mean, I weigh over 300 pounds, and I couldn’t compete with this. The thing is, for whatever reason he didn’t even have the same work ethic I did. I don’t see why anybody actually wants to work, but this was different. Like, years later when he was on SSI, he frequently seemed surprised that I couldn’t put him into my schedule cause I had a job. It was like, Don was intellectually aware that other people had to work for a living, but that wasn’t really part of his reality. It would have gotten in the way of his hobbies.

And as he aged, his metabolism slowed and he was less able to absorb the results of eating like Dagwood Bumstead. And if you, like me and Don, are on the Standard American Diet (or what Penn Jillette calls ‘SAD’) it’s that much more likely that you’re going to end up with heart disease or Type 2 diabetes and then you’re that much more likely to need consistent long-term medical coverage. And in this country, if you don’t get that coverage through your employer, you need to rely on the generosity of the state – or lack thereof.

If I can think of a point of real divergence, it was around 2006 or so. Prior to that Don had been going from job to job and eventually wound up living with me and my Mom, and we eventually had to kick him out cause he was unemployed and we needed a roommate who could support the household. Don ended up moving in with Jason, a gamer friend of ours down in Henderson. In the summer Jason referred us to jobs with the call center where he worked. It sucked, frankly, but I stuck with it, because it paid for medical insurance and I could see where I was going downhill and how Mom was going downhill with old age. This is how I got to see a regular doctor and how I got diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. That sucks, and I can’t tell you I have been good with my diet, but I have been eating less sugar than I did before then, and smaller portions. I have also been given prescriptions that have kept my blood sugar under control.

Don meanwhile quit the call center job after only a few weeks cause he couldn’t handle the work. He stayed at Jason’s and gamed with us, but spent a lot of his time asleep. He wasn’t looking for work, or looking into the issues with his health. And when I talked to him about Jason’s place, he would always grumble and complain about his living circumstances (living not only with Jason but his mom and other relatives), but would always move to whatever room they put him up in, as long as they gave him a place to stay, and food to eat, and they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t make him get up and look for a job. His illness was getting to the point where he had band-aids on his toes all the time, and one of his legs looked like a rabid wolf had ripped it up then pissed on it. And because Jason was at that point living with his sister and her two young children, she started to object. His other sister was a social worker who had tried to get Don to get some kind of public assistance and help with his issues, but he had refused. Eventually they forced the situation, and by that time, my roommate had moved out, and then my older brother, so I was once again asked to move Don in. I told him at that time, “Don, the only reason that I am taking you in now is because this is your LAST CHANCE to not die on the street homeless.”

In fact now that I recall, it was my mother of sainted memory who really saved Don’s life, or least gave him more years than he would have had. A couple days after he came back in the house, it was about 2 am or so and Mom had gotten up and noticed Don on the couch and saw that he was unresponsive. She eventually got him up, but from her own experience with Type 2 diabetes realized he was going into a coma. She immediately got me up (even though I had to work in the morning) and take him over to Sunrise Hospital to be checked in. I dropped him off for the ER overnight and they decided his condition was bad enough that they were going to take him in with no questions even though he had no insurance. That’s when Don was first diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But that was the good news. It was good news in that at least we knew what was going on. But then he had to proceed from there.

After being at Sunrise about 5 days, he got a veritable grocery list of prescriptions and other scripts he had to take to the UMC (University Medical Center) hospital, because that was the only place where he could get those prescriptions filled with no insurance and only state support. So one day I took him over at 11 in the morning, thinking it would be a couple of hours. They told him that in order to fill the prescriptions from Sunrise, he would have to go through the whole admissions process again at UMC. So I dropped him off. He was there til about 9 pm.
This involved going through several hours of admissions procedures at the ER, going into the Pharmacy line several times- where they had only ONE teller processing orders for a line that (not coincidentally) averaged over 20 people deep, finding out that the doctor at Sunrise who made the prescriptions was not listed in the UMC roster of doctors authorized to prescribe, and in any case they had to change at least one of the prescriptions because they didn’t actually have the brand of pain medication the doctor wrote. While waiting, my friend also went through blood sugar crash at least once BECAUSE he was waiting for the prescription to regulate it, and in direct contrast to the Sunrise staff, no one really bothered to do anything for him at the time.

Compare this to my barely-adequate insurance from work where at most of my jobs I’ve been able to schedule an appointment with a doctor, get regular checkups, the doctor will fill out a prescription with a pharmacy I specify and I can go to the drive-thru and pick it up less than an hour after the fact.

But we eventually managed to get that prescription regimen, and Mom and I both told Don that one of the conditions of him staying with us was that he had to do SOMEthing to support himself. And in a couple weeks we got him to go to the welfare office down the street and got him on food stamps/EBT. And that’s ALL he did. Even after Mom died from her own various co-morbidities he did not do anything to support the household other than get the EBT, which was often not enough to cover his usual diet (which hadn’t changed all that much). So I had him living in the house, I was still paying rent to my sister who has been managing the house ever since, but I was the only person making money and Mom’s Social Security was gone. (If I made enough money to live by myself, I wouldn’t have been in my Mom’s house.) I knew by now that Don was really not able to hold down a job even if he’d wanted to (which he didn’t), but he should have at least been able to call someone to arrange social services and expanded coverage. He did not do that. There was no way I could babysit him or get him to do what he needed to do if I had to work full time during the day. Meanwhile I still had to cover bills by myself on ten dollars an hour even as he jacked the air conditioning up and pushed the power bill past $200 a month because his circulation had made him intolerant to heat. After a few months of this, I told him, flat-out, ‘I don’t care if you get a job, get on welfare, or suck cocks on Boulder Highway, you are GOING to do something to pay your way here.’ He did not. He didn’t want to admit that he needed to be on government dole, but at the same time he had absolutely no problem with couch-surfing at my place, or Jason’s or anyone else and expecting us to cover his upkeep on our budget while he did the absolute bare minimum to maintain his own life. So again, a few months after the ultimatum I had him move out.

And at that point, he really was homeless. He’d been at Catholic shelters for a few weeks and that basically convinced him that he needed to actually get some professional assistance and support. He was in this flophouse downtown at Ogden for a little while but eventually after getting SSI the state moved him to the apartment in Henderson where he stayed for the rest of his life. Once he’d gotten that much stability, we were able to resume social activities again, see movies and play role-playing games with our friends again. And it mattered a lot to me that we just managed to get together, tell jokes and have fun, even if it was just the two of us and a couple other guys. He wasn’t in the same game group with Jason, even though Jason and his sisters did ask if he wanted to come back. I guess in retrospect Don didn’t want them to see what happened to him. Among other things, he lost both legs over the years, mostly due to diabetes but partly because the people tending to his various infections were no more attentive than the people at UMC.

My current job obliges me to work graveyard (just about dusk to dawn) and September 12, I got a call from our mutual gamer friend Hugh just before I was about to get ready for work. He normally helped Don with rides to games (since he lives on the other side of town) but his truck broke down and he hadn’t heard from Don in about a week and he feared the worst. Unfortunately I had to work Sunday and Monday and I had no time to get out to Don’s place, which is over 13 miles away. Not only that, on my next day off (Tuesday the 14^th) I had two doctors’ appointments set up back to back starting before noon when I only left work Tuesday at 4 am. So I was already on the other side of town from where I live, that much further away from Don’s, and had barely gotten any sleep.

At this point I had every expectation that Don was dead, but I didn’t know. I also knew from experience that he could sleep for over 24 hours and not respond to the phone or even to a knock at the door. So as I drove across town, needing to move yet getting caught behind every construction cone, red light and dumbass driver in Vegas, Don’s status was unknown. He could have been dead. He could have been alive. Schrodinger’s Don.

I was on the road stuck between lights and I was scanning rock radio. It started with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” I thought not. I turned to another album rock station and got Alice in Chains:

I believe

Them bones are me

Some say

We’re born into the grave

I feel so alone

Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones

I got to the apartment complex after 3 pm or so, went upstairs and the first thing I noticed was all the empty paper bags left out from Amazon’s delivery service. So clearly Don hadn’t left the apartment, or he would’ve taken them to the garbage. I hit the door several times, and called on the phone, and when I got no answer either way, I warned him I was calling 911. So I did. The Henderson Police came out 20 minutes or so later and interviewed me for what little I knew, then they had me go to the ground floor to talk with one of the cops while another one got the superintendent from the office. Then they opened the door, and as I was talking about the situation with the cop and Don’s downstairs neighbor, we smelled it. All the way from upstairs.

You know that weird combination of stale locker and festering wound? That’s the first time I’d ever smelled that.

The neighbor told us that he’d smelled something odd in the pipes in his bathroom for a few days, which supported my suspicion that Don was dead even before Hugh called me.

My friend Hugh is one of those Trump guys who considers Don’s treatment to be an example of state “death panels” deciding who gets to live or not, and I kind of agree that this is what happens if you rely too much on the government, or on anybody. But that just raises two points: One, the alternative to Nevada’s indigent health care system would be to sink more money into the state government to establish reliable care for everyone, including the indigent. But that would be socialism. The only other option is to go back to the previous American standard which is that everybody only gets health care depending on the plan given by their employer, and Don was already psychologically unable to hold down a job even before he was physically too sick to hold a job.

Two, if there is no collective system of care, that just brings the issue back to individual responsibility. If there is no socialized system, that means you are solely responsible for your own upkeep, and that means holding down a job to get medical benefits whether you like working or not. Because again, no one is going to care about your own life more than you do. Even if they’re paid to care.

Don was not of subnormal intellect. He knew what day it was, at least when he wasn’t zonked out on painkillers. He, like me, and many of our gaming friends, started off as politically right-of-center, and like me but unlike most of those friends came to realize that voting Republican these days is like sticking your dick in a drum of radioactive waste. I’m saying, he wasn’t an idiot. On some levels, he was one of the smarter people I knew. But even more than those guys who want to court Trump Virus to own the libs, it felt to me that there was some broken gear in his system that I didn’t know how to fix.

A few days after the event, my sister suggested I post on Don’s Facebook page to find his next of kin, and his cousin in town managed to reach his sister and brother who both live out of state. The next week I had a long talk over the phone with his sister, who confirmed that all of the issues that my friends and I had noticed with Don’s behavior were no news to her.

This Monday, November 8, would have been Don’s birthday, which is just a week off from mine. And every time that holiday season rolled around I was always wondering if Don would survive for another Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I was always kind of impressed that he did. And that won’t be the case anymore.

There will be no real funeral. There will be no formal obituary. It took over a month for Don’s sister to get a cause of death from the Henderson office. After all this, I have taken it upon myself to summarize another person’s life, and as before I ask myself what more I can do, and again reach the conclusion that no matter how much it is, it will never be enough.

Don had a lot to offer. And like a lot of people I’ve known, he deserved a lot more out of life than he got.

If I can’t do anything else, I can at least speak here. So, Goodbye, Don Garner. You were my best friend for over half of my life. Your life mattered. To me and to those of us who saw the best of you.

You are still remembered.

You are still loved.

So the latest uproar being generated on social media is the left-wing attempt to cancel the capitalist space race in which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon Musk seem to be in some kind of competition to get themselves in orbit with various private space programs. The Left’s opposition to this is almost as superficial and useless as the billionaires’ own publicity efforts, though to be sure, bitching about them on Twitter costs a lot less. And that is kind of the point. Robert Reich on Twitter: “With just their increased wealth during the pandemic, America’s billionaires could pay for 10 years of the Child Tax Credit that goes into effect today for one year, cutting child poverty by half. And they’d still be as wealthy as they were before the pandemic. “

Ha Ha Ha. Right.

The budget bill for fiscal year 2021 – passed under a Republican president, mind you – was 4.829 trillion dollars. Now never mind the deficit this causes, because deficits clearly don’t matter to either ruling faction. A trillion is a million million. As in, one trillion of a quantity is one followed by twelve zeroes. A billion is a thousand million. As in, one billion is one followed by nine zeroes. A trillion is a thousand billion. As Nathan Lane might say, “do the math.”

The level of money that government, specifically the US federal government, operates with is an actual exponent of what most billionaires get to work with. Even the richest guy on earth, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is worth $214 billion, at least according to USA Today. Forbes puts it at “only” $193.5 billion. Let’s say we round to $200 billion. Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God (and probably more than the Catholic Church) would need to multiply his wealth almost by 25 to get as much as Washington already has.

So if we’re not feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and solving climate change and all the other stuff, it’s because of the government we have now, because that government could be doing all those things right now cause it already has more money than Jeff Bezos will ever have, and if for some reason it actually needs more it can just rocket the deficit farther past the stratosphere than Richard Branson will ever get. And that would be the case whether we had a 90 percent tax rate on the upper class or not.

I had mentioned a while ago that there was one event in my life that had as much to do with me becoming a right-libertarian as anything Ayn Rand ever wrote. Believe it or not, it was Live Aid. To briefly recap: I like a lot of young adults at that time contributed to the Live Aid fundraising campaign to get food and support to the starving in Ethiopia, because Bob Geldof and the other organizers of the Live Aid campaign did make a convincing case that enough people working together could solve the world’s problems. But then after the money was raised and the food was delivered to the Horn of Africa, Geldof and his people found that a lot of it was left to rot on the docks while some of it was actually confiscated by the Ethiopian government to use as leverage against its own people.

The lesson I got is that even when there is collective action from private actors, and even when that is backed up by some governments, the government on the ground can burn all that altruism and effort to dust. Because if government has far more scale to do good than any one philanthropist, it has far more scale to do evil than any individual criminal.

In the case I mentioned, the people getting in the way of feeding the world were the Communists running Ethiopia, but in the modern day the obstacle is a faction that is even more vicious, collectivist and devoted to Russian ideology: The Republican Party.

This is especially obvious in regard to their state voter suppression efforts, but I have already touched on those to some extent. With regard to the subject at hand, it was indeed a liberal (Jack Kennedy) initiative that got America first to the moon. It was the government, under NASA, that first had to get us to space. According to Wikipedia, NASA’s share of the total federal budget peaked at around 4.41 percent during the Apollo project, but by 1975 (after we’d reached the moon more than once) it declined to 1 percent and actually decreased from there. “Despite this, public perception of NASA’s budget differs significantly: a 1997 poll indicated that most Americans believed that 20% of the federal budget went to NASA.” In a March 2012 hearing of the United States Senate Science Committee, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that “Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.”

But for practical purposes, our government doesn’t really have a space program.

Oh, but it has Space Force. Yes. Cheeto Jesus himself, our small-government, tax cutting, regulation cutting Greatest President Capitalism Ever Had decided to add a bureaucracy to our already bloated government for reasons I still cannot explain. It’s not like Trump seems to grasp Gene Roddenberry’s message of peace, reason and infinite diversity, much less George Lucas’ moral that maybe turning a flawed Republic into a blatantly evil Empire isn’t such a good move in the long run. But in any event, we now have a Space Force, even though in five years no one has told me what the fuck it does.

What, are we handing out parking tickets to Martians? Are we busting the illegal smuggling trade in Green Orion Slave Women? What is this?

Now given that there is a real national security interest in protecting our satellite network and responding to any Russian or Chinese attempts to weaponize space, you would think this alleged branch of our military would have some kind of military shuttle program. A monitoring system. But have they explained what we’re actually spending the money on? As far as I can tell the US Space Force’s only official expenditure is for the field uniforms that are done in standard BDU/desert camo, y’know, cause apparently that’s the color pattern you need to camouflage yourself IN FUCKING SPACE.

If you wonder why these nose-in-the-air billionaires are investing their wherewithal in space exploration, well, it’s because we used to have a government that did that for the country, and we don’t any more. So why not them?

Now, there is one aspect to this leftist complaining that is completely legitimate. To such extent as NASA actually exists, it seems to exist to outsource its former charter to these guys for their space side projects. NASA provided $2.9 billion to Musk’s Space X to build a moon lander. New Mexico, “one of the poorest states in the US”, paid $220 million to build “Spaceport America” for Branson.

However, I don’t see government spending taxpayer money for billionaires who could pay their own way as a big endorsement for more government spending. It does however help explain why things are the way they are. Libertarians have been pointing out for years that the problem with our government being as big as it is is that its power and money makes it a more attractive target for business to manipulate. But the other side of the matter is that government would rather hand out money to billionaires and corporations than homeless and powerless people because the corporations and rich guys can actually do something for them. In the Business Insider article, they focus on the small town of Truth or Consequences (which, ironically, took its name to attract publicity from the audience of a then-famous game show that has long ago left the air) which has yet to see much trickle-down from Virgin’s use of the area, even as the town’s mayor assumes that the town will get more business once Virgin’s commercial space travel service becomes fully operational.

Personally, I would think that a real laissez-faire policy wouldn’t punish businesses and rich people just for being rich, but neither should it give them unearned rewards when they already have natural advantages and the resources to develop their companies without government help.

It’s not that there aren’t infrastructure and other projects that need a government to execute, and it’s not as though those shouldn’t be under a public authority as opposed to an individual, otherwise Elon Musk could just buy I-95, call it private property and then charge a subscription fee to drive on it. But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.

If you want to avoid that state of affairs and actually have an activist government, you need to get involved and be an active watchdog on that government. Billionaires or no billionaires (which is what most socialists want), you’re not going to have that activist government unless you consider that the Democratic Party is failing to apply even the technical majority in the Senate that they currently have, and maybe you should start investigating exactly why that is.

Not like any of these billionaires need me to defend them, and not like they’re really going to be hurting if we rolled back most of the Trump-Ryan tax laws. But if you really think we can solve all our problems by soaking the rich, first you’re going to have to convince me that government at all levels is not lazier and piggier than any zillionaire in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. And when the government includes people like Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert, that’s gonna be pretty hard.