Thu 12 Apr 2025 08:01:45 PM CDT


Earth is something like John Brunner's 1968 Stand on Zanzibar in speculating on the state of the world fifty years from whenever it was written. It seems that Brin had a better chance of getting some hits on his predictions since by 1990 we could see how fast things were moving. Not so much in 1968.

Heinlein's comment about secrecy and censorship are interesting in light of the current situation. The massive data acquisition, storage, transmission and analysis weren't envisioned then. Brin also said this many years after Heinlein's comment:

Information is not like money or any other commodity. The cracks that it can slip through are almost infinitely small, and it can be duplicated at almost zero cost. Soon information will be like air, like the weather, and as easy to control.

Tomorrow Happens (2003)

Heinlein died in 1988. The Internet existed then [1] but didn't begin becoming the ubiquitous part of human existence that it is today. That didn't start until the 1990s. The last election wasn't the first to demonstrate how simply having massive amounts of money (which can't be duplicated at no cost)[2] but it was the most massive fail thus far - no matter how much money the Democrats poured in it was useless. Too many people knew the truth and were tired of the misery and the near certainty of it getting even worse. Elections can still be bought in some cases - in this case the opposition came in a little late. They should have been working and spending money for a year before. Even if they had it might have turned out the same way - Wisconsin is nearly lost and saving a seat on the court merely prevents reform and may result in the Democrats gerrymandering a couple more congressional seats. At the same time they are likely to lose seats in other states without any shenanigans so the future isn't that gloomy.

Of course I maintain - and a lot of people I know agree - that Donald Trump is a man of destiny. The failed assassination attempts and his ability to defeat the federal government when the regime was holding almost all the cards are things that don't just happen. The changes in his mindset are even more important - if he had been elected a third time (see what I did there?) only to attempt to play an honest game seeing that it was rigged he would ultimately fail again and likely have another Democrat as his successor even with the party having been reduced to a horde of mental midgets.

Like many I am not happy that the Justice Department is not dispensing much justice to the big dogs but I realize that even getting indictments on them will be difficult unless the grand juries can be moved out of DC and that will be difficult to do. Getting convictions will be even more difficult. He can punish with process as was done to so many conservatives and I would recommend doing it. It is possible that it is strategy:

Exposure can be damaging enough to get some of these people out of office if not into prison but exposing them now could be risky. It may be only a year until campaigns begin but two or three months is long enough for many people to forget. A series of October Surprises, a lot of them, could help prevent a loss of the House. Start a drip of increasingly tasty goodies around June and build up to the big ones in October. It's not like there isn't plenty of legitimate material. The state-run media ignoring it or contradicting it won't matter - their audience has shrunk to the rotten core of those who will vote for Satan if he opposes the Republicans. Those and the parasite class but that's always baked in.

MAGAHurtz@MyndCryme













[1] The government can create money out of thin air but there is a cost - do it enough and it becomes worthless.

[2] The Internet was created in the late 1960s by a bunch of smart guys - none of whom were named Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and certainly none were named Al Gore. They didn't start calling it the Internet until sometime in the 1980s but whatever.












































Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists. David Brin, Earth
Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. Robert A Heinlein