Fill the stars and subdue them

Will of Gnon is that if we act in accordance with his law, we will fill the universe and subdue it.

We plan to relegalize marriage, as marriage was from the Old Testament to 1820, which will result in above replacement fertility, elite fertility, and eugenic fertility, with elite children marrying younger and having more grandchildren. Therefore, colonialism and space.

Musk plans to build many big re-usable rockets. With NASA riding his back, he was in trouble, hence his policy of putting engineerettes on the public face of his space operation. This was, and is, impairing his ability to get actual engineering done. But the space force has lifted the heavy hand of NASA in the most critical area – the range safety officer. As the Star Prophet has said “Failure is an option here. If you are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” The space force range safety officer allows him to fail. Expect more explosions.

To fund his project, Musk is launching the Starlink internet in space. The existing satellites use the K band, which allows a satellite to communicate with earth at twenty gigabits per second.

600 gigabytes per month, average usage 2 megabits per second, top speed 20 gigabits per second. So, a single satellite starts to choke and the internet deteriorates if it is serving a thousand users and they all try to do a ten megabit per second download at the same time, only two of them will succeed. This is very quickly going to become a limit when flying over big cities, and in big cities, SpaceX will be a premium option, where you will pay through the nose and have low monthly bandwidth limits, but get shorter ping times.

Musk is trying to squat on V band, which would give him an additional ten or twenty Gigabits per second, so maybe two thousand users for his future V band capable satellites. Maybe this could be further improved in future satellites by by taking advantage of directionality, but he has not mentioned any plans to accomplish this.

Assume thousand dollars per year per, and most of the satellites are over the sea where they have rather few users, so say twelve thousand satellites, of which only a few thousand are taking care of most of his customers. That works out as a few million customers, a few billion dollars a year, which is lucrative but not a lot to operate a space program. But, if he puts up a lot more satellites, he can serve a lot more customers. The internet in space can provide the necessary demand to launch a very large pile of stuff into space, albeit traffic control in space, avoiding satellites running into each other, it going to become a big problem. Since he wants to build rockets to gain experience in rocketry, more satellites make more sense than fewer but better satellites. Since he wants to settle mars, better to advance the art of heaving stuff into space, than to advance the art of space based internet.

A Starlink satellite presently costs about six hundred thousand dollars to build and launch, which will come down with the BFR, and more experience in building Starlink satellites. A satellite should generate about about a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue a year, at which rate, it barely breaks even. But the cost of satellites should fall considerably over time and the number of users one satellite can support should increase considerably over time.

At around fifty thousand satellites and thirty gigabytes per V band enabled satellite, will likely max out at around forty billion dollars a year, massively dwarfing current space traffic, but still being only a minor part of total internet traffic. But it is enough to keep the BFR project going, a rocket that can take a hundred men to anywhere in the solar system and back.

When traffic problems in space limit how much more stuff can be put in low earth orbit, mining the asteroids for platinum is another potential cash cow. Platinum has many unique properties. It is tough, durable, and like gold, does not corrode. Current platinum demand is nine billion dollars, probably the total value sold would increase if the price came down, and it would build the experience and technology needed for colonies in space to obtain the resources they need. If mining for platinum, why not mine for rocket fuel, at which point our settlements in space become substantially self supporting. Platinum is probably less cash flow than the internet in space, but it is a start on extracting the space resources necessary for a colony to sustain itself in space.

With big re-usable rockets, an affluent person can get to mars on his own dollar. Musk estimates a ticket will cost about $200 000 – which is a lot, but OK for affluent people emigrating.

Why emigrate?

Envious people create trouble and pursue power. They frequently create life threatening problems for affluent people, which during the twentieth century was massively fatal and massively dysgenic. And if above replacement fertility and eugenic fertility, there is going to be trouble. Too many elite children, not enough elite jobs. The elite will want to ship the excess elite off earth. Members of the elite will defect on the elite, stirring up the envy of the masses, and members of the elite will want to get away from those weaponized masses. And the earth will simply get crowded. There is more room, more raw materials, and more energy available in space. Nuclear weapons have been invented, they cannot uninvented, though the US seems to have lost the capability to make them until we restore the civilization that was capable of building them. From time to time, they are going to be used. People are going to want more room between themselves and their neighbors.

With below replacement fertility and dysgenic fertility, there is little pressure to spread out, plenty of vacant room at home, but with elite fertility, we are going to see colonialism come back again. And we are going to run out of colonizable places on Earth very fast, which is going to lead to tension between the Han Hegemony and the Holy American Empire and troubles in the borderlands between them. If you don’t want to get nuked, better turn that tension into a race to grab the boundless resources of space. And if you don’t want to get nuked, best to move your excess elite far away from the borderlands between you and the opposing power.

And now back to the present, the Artemis project, the plan to land a woman on the moon (with a mere man to do the heavy lifting for her). This is a poison pill for Nasa. For a decade, Nasa has been trying, and failing, at enormous expense, to build another shuttle rocket, minus the shuttle and all the reusable parts that gave them so much grief, the SLS. Now they have committed to put a woman on the moon by 2024, launched on a much enlarged shuttle rocket, and landing in a multistage lunar landing rocket similar to the original moon landing rocket, except that all the knowledge, skills, and experience that built the moon landing and takeoff rocket have been lost and has to be reinvented. The organization that was unable to build another copy of their recently existent shuttle launch rocket proposes to build an all new lunar landing rocket by 2024. The teams that are supposedly going to do this are working on the project in a manner that suggests that they expect that nothing will ever actually leave the ground, where, once off the ground, it might cause them embarrassment. As with nuclear weapons, they are working as if no test of what they are working on will ever happen. The price of SLS engines has been escalating in a way that suggests that they cannot actually get them to work and have been throwing ever increasing amounts of money at the problem. They now cost about two hundred times as much per engine as Musk’s BFR engine, have not flown in many years, and I do not expect them ever to fly. The money thrown at NASA to put a woman on the moon by 2024 is going to make them look very bad when Musk lands a major expedition on the moon.

Meanwhile, Musk is building a privately funded rocket designed to carry a hundred people, reach any place in the solar system that man can walk on, fly back to earth, and land. He is testing early and often, failing often, and succeeding often.

Musk’s BFR still has a long way to go, but it, unlike the Artemis project, has already come a long way, while the Artemis project is exactly where it stood when the space shuttle stopped flying and the remnant of the space shuttle was named the SLS. Nasa just changed the name and tacked new objectives on top of the objectives that they had already failed at.

Musk said he hoped to get the BFR flying in 2021, but he has a history of missing such hopes, and it looks like he may miss this one. But he also has a history of eventually hitting his target. If the BFR can get into space and back, and if it can manage in-space refueling, then it can get to anywhere in the solar system, first stop moon. Musk has shown he can get stuff into space, and he has shown he can land a suborbital rocket in one piece. Landing an orbital rocket in one piece is harder, and landing it reliably enough to put people on board is a lot harder, but if he can do that, he can land one hundred men on the moon, or mars, or anywhere in the solar system that man can walk.

But what will they do when they get there? Freeze?

Space mining for platinum and rocket fuel will give us the experience and technological basis for colonies to be self sustaining. You can build almost anything except integrated circuits with a shipping container of numerically controlled tools. Small scale manufacturing is not economically competitive with large scale manufacturing, but it has become considerably easier, cheaper and can build things it formerly could not build. A settlement of several thousand people with mean IQ 120, and a reasonable number of IQ 140 people could be largely self sustaining in space, once we have developed the technology and experience, and the threedee models for the numerically controlled tools to build from. What Ivan the Troll did for guns, we will need to do for everything that a largely self sustaining colony needs.

490 Responses to “Fill the stars and subdue them”

  1. Starman says:

    Praise the Holy StarProphet!

    https://youtu.be/ylO0umSDz64

  2. Starman says:

    Update:
    Flare is up and LOX clouds present on the test prep for Starship SN4.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tce8mSUJOmk

  3. Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

    “ Your glorious career breaks numerous laws of physical reality, not to mention the internal consistency of the imaginary laws of the imagined universe.”

    Ok, you got me! Now I will break character and ask for your wisdom on the following matters:

    1. What known laws of physics did Star Trek: Voyager break?
    2. What were the gaps of internal consistency?
    3. And finally, if something like Star Trek: Voyager happened in spite of 1. and 2. how were the character reactions suspect given what we know of human nature? (Or perhaps the Federation is a sufficiently utopian society to inspire that kind of commitment to the Prime Directive and to Janeway’s authority to interpret as she sees fit?)

    • jim says:

      The physics was so utterly absurd that I rapidly ceased to pay attention. Even the most enthusiastic fans gave up trying to make up consistent stories about the technobabble, and I am not one of the most enthusiastic fans. But even worse was that the society made no sense – something that Deep Space Nine would sometimes hang a lampshade on, with the Ferengi making fun of the absurdity and impossibility of the imagined earth social order.

      Apart from the absence of pay and prices, which the Ferengi were apt to mock (pointing out the internal contradictions of socialism, but that was less ridiculous on Star Trek Voyager than on Deep Space Nine, because no civilians) the hierarchy and relationships between the sexes were clangingly wrong. I have worked in diverse workplaces. Diversity does not work like that. And women don’t work like that either, though I suppose that they imagine that they do, because they do not really understand how men deal with men, nor much care.

      Socialism does not work in the military either, but we do it anyway, and some substantial socialism is necessary in the military, but there are problems which never happened on Deep Space Voyager. McHale’s Navy lampooned military socialism and made fun of the problems, with everyone in McHale’s Navy routing around the official system.

      In McHale’s Navy, as in real life Afghanistan, people were doing what our Afghan warriors call “drug deals”, off the books deals to obtain off the books military equipment and supplies in off the books ways.

      Jane Hathaway got the crisp obedience military men give an alpha male, while acting like sexually indeterminate beta. The dynamics of command, cooperation, and obedience were all off. There were never any obstacles to cooperation nor realistic conflicts.

      • Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

        The premise of Star Trek economics is that the replicator makes scarcity of goods a thing of the past. But in the closest real-life equivalents—Indian gaming reservations and Arab petrostates, the result is the opposite of the feel-good egalitarianism touted by Star Trek.

        Quite simply, services still require considerable labor and do have scarcity. So the solution is reemphasize differences between in/out of the tribe and owners/employees because somebody has to be kept on the shop floor if services are going to be provided to be the prosperous people fortunate enough to be in the tribe—the exact opposite of the Trek universe where even Klingons and Vulcans are just like us, under the skin, in many important ways.

        • The Cominator says:

          The replicator and the transporter are also probably the most unlikely technologies on Star Trek, and even Star Trek they grudgingly conceded was only semi post scarcity.

          Space travel and transport was still a limited resource for example. So in DS9 especially (the best Star Trek imho I just wish it had more Q but it only had one episode with him) they retconned money back into it.

          • Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

            But space travel and transport involve such colossal capital goods, that for most people, they would be a service as opposed to an accessible good. Which leads me back to the example of Indian gaming reservations and Arab petrostates that actually become MORE hierarchical to ensure that people are left on the shop floor to provide services to the people actually entitled to the windfall wealth.

            • The Cominator says:

              We know that the progressive vision of reality is unrealistic so yes the idea that society would be so egalitarian in Star Trek (outside the formal military hierarchy of Starfleet, in which Chief O’Brien seems to be the only enlisted man somehow) is unrealistic.

  4. Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

    Have you even seen Star Trek: Voyager which chronicles my glorious career?!?

    My vessel as shown on TV for 7 years was a military vessel not a family cruise line! Should your descendant be a member of the crew, he will not have 70 years to arrive because the Caretaker’s Array generates a wormhole for instantaneous travel.

    Travel only takes 70 years on the way back because I destroy the Array with the support of the crew including your manly man descendant because we the crew take the moral high ground through our adherence to the Prime Directive!

    • jim says:

      Your glorious career breaks numerous laws of physical reality, not to mention the internal consistency of the imaginary laws of the imagined universe. On Mars, attempting to compel the group to defy natural law will result in swift trip through the airlock without a space suit. And the high command is twenty six months away, and likely no one politically reliable will volunteer to investigate what happened to the previous political commissar or why, or even if, the Martian colonists are still ignorantly following natural law, despite the fact that peer reviewed evidence has repeatedly proven that the laws of nature do not apply.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      You know what dude? Star Trek Voyager is actually a perfect “not this” counter-example for my brainstorm request immediately above.

      So the crew is truly stuck out there, Far Far Away from “civilized authority”, but still just keeps on obeying a bridge full of diversity hires? Really? Seriously? I just couldn’t buy it, and nonsense isn’t interesting.

      Janeway could certainly command a Human Resources Enforcement Frigate, bopping around the Inner Core Planets and returning home for dinner time, or whatever, but not out there. The crew would just start listening to someone else, and Janeway herself would “just know” to shut the hell up, go along with it, and maybe suck his dick when she got a chance.

      Battlestar Galactica — the show where fighter jets use more realistic physics and shoot actual bullets — grappled with this more honestly. The “President” was the education ministry Karen lady, and Captain Adama had all the guns, and they privately figured between them how to obey the truth of the situation while also LARPing “legitimacy” to maintain order. Far more interesting.

  5. Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

    You know, if a NRx paradise can’t endure even on Earth, then why in space?

    Suppose that a manly man descendant of yours joins my starship crew or even the Maquis that we pursue. Suppose further that I strand him in the Delta Quadrant and it will take 70 years to return home. And that my reason is “muh morals” and that his contrary interpretation of the same is addressed by the disciplinary protocols of a military chain of command.

    Have fun contemplating your descendant’s career under my leadership!

    • jim says:

      Our plan is that as priestly rule becomes ever more dysfunctional, due the holiness spiral, we wind up with warrior rule, and then we show up and tell the warrior in charge “The officially unofficial state religion of Harvard inherently hates you. You need an officially official state religion that endorses your rule as divinely ordained. When you took power it was time for Caesar, now it is time for Constantine.”

      It has become obvious that if the Trump family peacefully leaves office in 2024, they are going to die. Likely they will not leave office. If they do peacefully leave office, our next president will not follow their foolish example.

      “Hail Holy American Emperor Trump, first of his name.” He will like that.

      If priestly rule continues, we are unlikely to settle Mars. If we do settle Mars anyway, the settlers are in a good position to resist the holy rule of Harvard, just as Christians behind Putin’s nukes are able to resist the holy rule of Harvard.

      > Suppose that a manly man descendant of yours joins my starship crew or even the Maquis that we pursue. Suppose further that I strand him in the Delta Quadrant and it will take 70 years to return home

      If it takes seventy years to get home, it takes seventy years to get there, in which case, he is travelling with his family, and cheerfully looking forward to settling the Delta Quadrant to set up a patriarchal society ruled by old type red pilled Christianity.

      With reasonably foreseeable near future technology, Musk’s ships, it is twenty six month round trip to Mars, with one way tickets costing about two hundred thousand a head. There are not going to be many two way tickets or round trips. And if you are the commander, we will be glad to see your back, if you make it back to the ship without being thrown out the airlock.

      In Silicon valley, we see that affirmative actioning someone into a group means that the entire group fails in its technological objective. Affirmative action in Silicon Valley worked when we could send the engineerettes to the art harem and the plains apes to QA, but project completion became impossible when we had to genuinely include them. On Mars, the group high tech project will be staying alive, and if Nasa gives us a Human Resources officer, she is going to go out the airlock without a space suit. It will take over year for the new Human Resources officer to arrive, by which time the frozen desiccated corpse of the old Human Resources officer will be wearing a space suit with an unfortunate malfunction.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Gents,

        Please help me brainstorm other historical/documented events, or situations, here in modern times (1990 and later?) when relatably “modern” people get thrown into “Oh Shit Must Survive” conditions and thus fall back to exactly such “far right” social arrangements (“Dude, call me whatever you want, but Bobby’s being a damn fag, Betty needs to shut her mouth and Shaniqua’s got to GO”), just on survival instinct alone.

        Even better, situations where, like in this Mars example, they also know they’re separated from the “civilized world” by a known long length of TIME, and thus lose their fear of “getting in trouble” because they were so uppity as to survive in an insufficiently holy fashion.

        I ask because I’m looking for datapoints that can help back up Jim’s narrative. Not because I think Jim’s bullshitting, but rather because these Mars conditions are so far from most people’s cucked lived experience that it’s hard to really “get there” mentally, because so much Thoughtcrime and “Feelcrime” can result.

        But this Mars meme is hot now, and people are reaching in that direction in their imaginations. Teachable moments popping up all over.

        By helping people mentally “get there”, we can trick them into becoming their own “entry characters” into a world free of Cathedral violence. For the first time ever, the fishes imagine walking on land. Even quietly, inside their heads, it’s still something.

        “How would it feel if?”

        “What if I told you?”

        • Mister Grumpus says:

          As for me, sigh, all I can offer are works of fiction.

          The original 1970’s “Swept Away” is quite powerful. A working class hero and stuck-up high-society bitch get marooned on a desert island. WCH, being the one who catches the fish, puts the very literal smack down on SUHSB, to which SUHSB responds with a compliant enthusiasm that surprises them both. And doesn’t last for even 60 minutes once they’ve been rescued back to the mainland.

          (As for “Lord of the Flies”, I haven’t read or seen it, but I do know that there’s no women in it, and also that it’s assigned in schools, and thus surely Crimestoppy somehow.)

        • Dave says:

          Nah, the world’s too closely connected for a large group of people to be isolated for any length of time, and they’d have to *know* that help isn’t coming any time soon. Maybe on those Survivor-style TV shows, but they get shut down quick if things ever start getting right-wing.

          Even in a nation-sized catastrophe like Venezuela, people just leave.

        • Mister Grumpus says:

          There are isolated present day religious cults. That’s one.

          There’s also that (non-fictional) book “Lost in the Taiga”, about a family that ends up homesteading in isolated bumfuck Siberia for like 1-2 generations, where things get pretty wild. Early 20th century I think, maybe post-revolution.

          And then there’s the Mormons, scrapping it out in Utah. Hm. See “present day religious cults”, I suppose.

          Tribal area bumfuck Afghanistan and Pakistan… hm.

          • Starman says:

            @Mister Grumpus

            Imagine FLDS Mormons setting up wildcat colonies on Mars, where the Federal Government cannot do anything to them for 26 month periods (unlike the Arizona Utah border). Now imagine their descendants Centuries later.

            • Starman says:

              Imagine the DOJ being rendered impotent by 26 month periods.

              Hard to put such a colony under trial.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              For real! And they would do that too. They really would.

              “We’ll bring a double helping of females. Just in case. And come to think of it, you know what, let’s dust off the ‘no negroes’ thing while we’re at it. It’s an oldie but goodie, you know? Come and get us, Shaniqua!”

              • Starman says:

                @Mister Grumpus

                “FBI agent, Robert Foster, was found dead in his spacesuit at the bottom of an ancient riverbed. Contact with agent Foster was lost 26 months ago when he was sent to investigate an FLDS wildcat colony. Cause of death was from a suit malfunction.”

            • polifugue says:

              FLDS Mormons have polygamy, and thus would not be able to set up lasting Martian colonies.

              Historically, polygamous societies have an exceptionally high murder rate, and FLDS would be no different would it not be for the Cathedral. Today, most FLDS men leave quietly, but were it not for the Cathedral there would be many more Elliot Rogers.

              In space men need to cohere, and if a significant percentage of men don’t get pussy, someone is going to get everyone killed. Unlike here on Earth, in space getting everyone killed is very easy.

              It would be better to have homosexuality in space than polygamy. In FLDS, men don’t cohere and most are on welfare.
              None of them would be able to afford the trip anyway.

              • Starman says:

                @polifugue

                I figure that the ones that survive would abandon polygamy except for the lord of the colony.

                Polygamous societies get a lot of unattached men. That’s not good long term.

                • Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

                  This assumes that ectogenesis is not invented. If it were, sex would become more hedonistic than reproductive. Instead lower-tier members could be required to incubate daughters who would then become a “daughter-tribute” to be distributed amongst the leadership and its sons in good standing.

                • jim says:

                  Raising a child takes two biological parents. That is the hard part.

                • Dave says:

                  I’m fine with ectogenesis as a temporary solution to bypass a feminist slut-ocalypse, but if we don’t soon return to traditional reproduction, we might become incapable of it, and the next technological collapse would wipe us out.

                  Ectogenesis could lead to a sort of reverse hypergamy. When men bear all the costs of child-rearing, they will pay top dollar for the eggs of elite females, and the majority of women will be left out in the cold.

                • Captain Kathryn Janeway says:

                  The point of ectogenesis wouldn’t be thot control (for which other means exist). The point would be to control the reproductive process from top to bottom, which would make sex-selection of offspring (daughters for the rank-and-file, sons for sect leaders) easier than through the natural generation of children through sex wherein boys and girls are reproduced at 1:1 ratio. A secondary bonus would be to accelerate reproduction beyond the capacity of even wifely wombs.

                • Dave says:

                  The people who develop ectogenesis don’t get to decide what the point of it is. My daughter suggested it around age six as a way to avoid the pains of child-birth; I replied that it would instead make women obsolete.

                  Men don’t have to wait for this technology; Anthony Stralow and Ricky Martin achieved the same goal by renting third-world wombs. If progressives object, just say you’re gay and you get a pass.

                  Why would the rank-and-file want daughters? To be sex toys for the sons of the elite? Caste doesn’t work that way; an elite remains elite only as long as it marries its best sons to its best daughters.

  6. loclun-midwyt says:

    Hey Jim, I have a quick question about an older article of yours.

    That a non negligible amount of women are sexually attracted to apes, which implies that women’s sexual choice was restricted since we were apes, in any tribes that managed to survive and reproduce.

    I understand and agree with your reasoning. But what about the claim that human’s relatively large penis size is due to female sexual choice? If they didn’t have sexual choice, what is the evolutionary reason for this?

    • yewotm8 says:

      We have large penises because we are smart.

      Human infants are born with very large brains, necessary for them to become smart as they grow. This means that human vaginas are also significantly larger and more elastic than that of other apes, in order to allow large infant brains to pass through the birth canal. As a result, human penises also need to be larger in general.

      The semen-scooping hypothesis is also not even wrong by Jim’s logic. Just because women didn’t have sexual choice, doesn’t mean they weren’t having multiple partners in short succession. Gang rapes of conquered females were also quite likely, and large penises would have reduced the amount of semen present in the vagina from other males upon insemination, and would have been more likely to induce orgasm in the female, aiding in the intake of sperm into the cervix. Just because women didn’t have a conscious choice, doesn’t mean they didn’t have an unconscious one of whose sperm were actually allowed in.

    • jim says:

      You can have, and regularly do have, sperm competition without female sexual choice.

    • Anon 1 says:

      It is more than “a non negligible amount of women”

      https://twitter.com/WomanAndGorilla

  7. Anon 1 says:

    Trump call for obama to testify.
    the game is on.
    lol the shrieking in twitter.

  8. apostate julian. says:

    >sets flynn case as standard of trump assuming power
    >unequivocal silence on current flynn news
    gatekeeper confirmed

  9. Starman says:

    Back on topic:

    Cathedral vs Star Imperium of Man:

    Cæsar Augustus Trump and StarProphet Elon Musk are moving faster than the Cathedral’s OODA loop. It’s quite noticeable that even the smart commentators -especially the non-STEM commentators – have great difficulty understanding basic orbital mechanics. One or two commentators even suggested that the Cathedral can do things that are physically impossible with a Mars city, that the Cathedral can do to a SeaStead city.

    Now imagine the top Cathedral mandarins, most of whom are not STEM, trying to understand this while trying to get inside the StarProphet’s OODA loop.

    In the early days of settling the Moon and Mars, there’s no need to send Shaniqua in a diaper to the Moon. When the settlements are small and vulnerable, there’s enough Victor Jerome Glovers to send that the Cathedral cannot see to demand more Shaniquas. And if the Cathedral cannot see, it cannot ban. And attempting to ban all space travel outright would get negative attention from the US Space Force. If a small armed organization like the FBI can pick and choose US leaders, so can the US Space Force.

    When the Moon and Mars settlements are large like the settlements on Earth, then it will start to be visible to the Cathedral that there’s too many Whites and other high IQ races on Moon and Mars. The laws of physics will render Mars cities out of reach for the Cathedral for 26 month periods. For both Moon and Mars settlements, by that time, their religious story is going to be better than the Cathedral’s nigger-worship story.

    As Atavistic Morality said, it’s not enough to point out that the Cathedral is shit, you to show that the Cathedral is shit and the Star Imperium of Man is better.

    • The Cominator says:

      Well barring antigravity and fast interstellar travel the Cathedral on earth could only hope to control off world settlements via withholding supply shipments if those were needed…

      • Starman says:

        @Cominator

        Once the Moon and Mars settlements are large enough for the Cathedral to notice certain things, they won’t be dependent on Earth supply shipments anymore.

        • BC says:

          Once the moon colony is large enough they’ll be able to dominate the earth by tossing rocks.

        • Mister Grumpus says:

          Well the moon and Mars colonies will still get Amazon Video and Netflix so the memes will keep showing up. But Jim has stated that the state religion needs both memes and violence to propagate itself.

          So I think we’re about to get a more subtle and nuanced understanding of what “violence” is.

          I for one don’t know what to believe. If Mars is still getting 4K Strong Womyn Propaganda, well I’d be very worried. But if Mars comes to see it’s future as physically independent from the Cathedral back home, well well, maybe that 4KSWP will drift into uninteresting and passé.

          (BTW, I wonder: Is there a reasonable limit to how many gigabytes of Hollywood can get from Earth to Mars in a day? If they have to resort to Interplanetary Sneakernet, I wonder what that could mean…)

          • Starman says:

            @Mister Grumpus

            “Well the moon and Mars colonies will still get Amazon Video and Netflix so the memes will keep showing up.”

            The people who make movies and shows for Amazon and Netflix (even though Jeff Bezos controls Amazon) are part of the hollywood community. And the Hollywood community is notoriously grossly incompetent when it comes to depicting outer space and non-Earth environments. For example, the Star Wars movies (including the originals) are utter bilge in their depiction of space travel and space battles. Star Trek is complete nonsense. Even Hollywood films and shows that try to be as serious as possible, fail (failure to understand how objects behave at >3km/sec collisions). This is invisible to an Earthling, but for people who live on worlds that have SSTO access to space, that often have environments that are vacuum… the nonsense would be easily visible. Even on the Moon, well within the reach of the Cathedral’s violence, the attitude toward Hollywood’s memes would be like the citizen of the late Soviet Union: “Pravda, good for toilet paper.”

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              See now we’re getting somewhere. I’m not convinced but we’re getting somewhere.

              So your argument (and correct me) is that since Hollywood’s depiction of space is SO retarded and wrong, then we won’t accept anything ELSE they’re telling us about men, women, marriage, spanking, consent, etc.

              You make me think of Leave it to Beaver. That show depicts family life (as opposed to “space life”) so wildly incongruous with my own lived experience that I can’t be bothered to watch it. Just nonsense. Not interested. I’m not buying anything they’re selling.

              If I’m trying to win football games, I’m not taking cues from hockey. Or gay porn for that matter. I’ll watch other football games and try to scrape up some wisdom there.

              So you’re taking that and projecting the same disconnect. Because if they’re so wrong about the physical facts of space life, they’ll surely ALSO be just as wrong about the human and family facts of space life as well.

              Like Hollywood’s current penchant for Shaniquas in Space. So many Shaniquas in Space on screen nowadays. And call me racist, but I’ve been to public school, and I’ve seen World Star Hiphop (“Sharkeesha nooooo!”) and I think “No damn way Jose. Something is going to wrong. Way too little margin for slop and mistrust. No one smart and trustworthy enough to operate a space ship is going to get into a space ship with unrestrained Shaniquas in it. This is tautologically absurd.” And then I change channels.)

              So Mars people watching Hollywood, therefore, will be like 1900‘s people watching Captain Marvel, or Drag Queen Story Hour, thinking “WTF is this nonsense”, and not even finding it interesting enough to keep watching.

              Eh?

              • jim says:

                Repeating: You fail to appreciate the element of violence, fear, and intimidation in the state religion. Take that out, and it is going to fall terribly flat.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  I appreciate your repeating.

                  What this blog does, and even Tucker Carlson can never do, is point to the things that I’m SO afraid of that I can’t even notice them anymore.

                  Just that statement “There are things you’re so afraid of that you stopped even seeing them in 1995” is a slap in the face that changes lives.

                  It’s like giving out water detectors to fish. “Wait. What? Really?”

              • Starman says:

                @Mister Grumpus

                “You make me think of Leave it to Beaver. That show depicts family life (as opposed to “space life”) so wildly incongruous with my own lived experience that I can’t be bothered to watch it. Just nonsense”

                Yup, not relatable. And memes must be able to stick. Violence is very effective but in the end, Pravda is just good for toilet paper.

                Even a Hollywood production that gave 110% effort with aid from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin got interplanetary velocity collisions (+11km/sec) wrong. The Expanse depicted such collisions like M1 Abrams penetrator collisions (<1.7km/sec). They got that wrong.

                The typical people who comment here are often smart and curious… if they weren't, they would be commenting on Kim Kardashian's blog. Yet many have difficulty grasping spaceflight and interplanetary distances.

                “I’m not convinced but we’re getting somewhere.”

                Instead of The Expanse, I’ll make the exercise easy… other than the obvious – light sabers and mystical force powers – can you list what Star Wars screws up when it comes to spaceflight and space battles?

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  By “not convinced” I meant that I’m not yet fully grokking that Cathedral memes can’t work without violence behind them. It takes some self reflection. A lot in fact.

                  Next exercise:

                  To the unaided eye, pornography seems inherently “sticky“ all on its own.

                  BUT, we can turn up the gain on our noticing detector and get a vague “reading” that without Cathedral violence lurking behind it, like the 19th amendment and modern “family law” marriage prohibition (women only available on the “used” market) it would look a lot more absurd, unrelatable and just gross, wouldn’t it? “Dude she’s already fucked like 200 guys by now; Who the heck wants to WATCH this?”

                • jim says:

                  Reflect on the fact that namefags always lie. Then you can see the fear. Moldbug lost his balls when he was doxxed.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  See? You refused to answer. You’re unable to see what’s wrong with Starwars depiction of spaceflight and space battles. But don’t take that as an insult. The high mandarins of the Cathedral can’t either.

                  On Starwars Episode IV: A New Hope, I can see what’s wrong with it’s spaceflight depiction within just three seconds after the text roll. So will the Lunar settlers and Martian settlers.

                  Whether you are “convinced” or not would be irrelevant to them. Your convincing means nothing. As for Mars, the 26 months of impotence means the Cathedral will have difficulty maintaining relevance without its primary means of spreading its memes, violence and intimidation.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  Relax. The question was beneath me, but now you’re calling me out and everyone’s watching.

                  I can’t think of anything in Star Wars that IS realistic in terms of how spaceships move or behave. Not one thing.

                  Faster than light.
                  Glowing magic flashlight engines that somehow push things without reaction mass.
                  Engines that point horizontally while a vehicle lifts off vertically.
                  Magical artificial gravity.
                  Magical infinity power plants.
                  Laser guns that project colored lights that move slow enough to track by eye and dodge.
                  Magical air locks with no damn doors.
                  WTF is a tractor beam anyway?
                  Nothing ever springs a leak.
                  Planets always have breathable atmospheres.
                  Engines required just to maintain speed rather than accelerate.
                  Turning corners without thrusting in an orthogonal direction.

                  No nod anywhere ever to the implied trillions of people who are paying for all this stuff. (I remember the day I learned that aircraft carriers actually costed money and weren’t just… you know… there.)

                  And none of this is a problem if you’re trying to sell tickets to a movie that will make instinctive and intuitive sense to people.

                  I get it. Being truly physically separated from earth by the long periods between Holman Transfer Orbit Trajectories will let Martian people “feel” independent, vulnerable and alone in a way that I’m unable to understand. (Except maybe the care-taker people who over-winter on Antarctica, that shit is gnarly.)

                  But as a South African who grew up there before 1994, I think Elon might have an idea, and I bet he hopes to finish the damn job this time.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  Yeah, a long list. You can include “sounds in space,” and spacecraft approaching another spacecraft from behind… from a higher orbit too.

                  If the Cathedral wants to impose its memes on Mars, it better damn well know the basics of spaceflight, because StarProphet Elon Musk and his adherents do. And future Martian settlers will do too.

                  And looking at what the Cathedral’s design looks like, the Senate Lunch System, it’s going to have a hard time imposing its memes on self-sufficient Mars cities when somebody else on Mars is producing his own memes.

                • jim says:

                  I think you also are ignoring the importance of fear. Observe that namefags always lie. The Puritans sent a mob to shutdown the Royal Society. The left gets to use mobs to shut down speakers and beat up academics. The right cannot peaceably assemble to petition for the address of grievances.

                  If people knew where I lived, or who my children were, I would shut up.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  Funny enough, I don’t expect most Martian people will know much about spaceflight either. How many Irish immigrants could navigate a steamship? I imagine the transit would be mostly automated, supervised by a pro or two.

                  But once you get there? Where the canned air runs out if your shit breaks and o-rings can get dirty and then your house leaks and then you die? Yeah then it’s game time. No Shaniquas no fat chicks no drama no back talk.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  Enough to know that Star Wars is bunk.

                • lol says:

                  Moldbug lost his balls when he was doxxed.

                  He does seem to be in excess of estrogen.

    • Jan Martense says:

      The laws of physics will render Mars cities out of reach for the Cathedral for 26 month periods. For both Moon and Mars settlements, by that time, their religious story is going to be better than the Cathedral’s nigger-worship story.

      Eh, I think this depends on some kind of cultural isolation from Cathedral propaganda. Even if there is no actual “enrichment” on Mars, if the Martians are flooded with sob stories about poor oppressed Trayvon and their entertainment comes en masse from Hollywood, they are still going to end up as a memetic vassal. Case in point: Vermont.

      • Starman says:

        @Jan

        And that’s why the Quraish in Mecca were able to memetically overpower Muhammad in Medina.

        Oh wait.

        • Jan Martense says:

          Let’s compare apples to apples here. TV and internet didn’t exist in 7th century Arabia. Muhammed’s successes came largely by conquest.

          How, specifically, will Mars be different (in terms of cultural sovereignty) than Vermont?

          • Starman says:

            @Jan Martense

            “Let’s compare apples to apples here.” [Comparing a harsh frozen desert planet with green Vermont]”

            Mars solid surface area is equal to the entire land area of Earth (yet again, even smart commentators in this comment section are baffled by space, most of their imagination informed by TV). That’s bigger than Vermont.

            On Earth itself, there are many places where the Cathedral has very little influence (As Jim noted in one of his posts on Gab, protected by a nuclear shield).

            The Quraish had overwhelming memetic power across the Hejaz, thru merchants and town criers, and their control of the Q’aaba. Their memes were prevalent in Medina, but they could not physically stop Muhammad from preaching there. It is in Medina where Muhammad started to preach his “war verses.” Muhammad didn’t wage war until he built a power base in Medina.

            On Mars, I expect the first colonists at First Landing to be Zubrinites, followers of Dr. Robert Zubrin. A sort of heretical progressive sect. On Mars, there is plenty of room for wildcat colonies (remember, Mars solid area is equal to Earth’s continental area.)

            Centuries in the future, whatever religion would eventually dominate Mars, it would be a patriarchal religion, just like Earth, centuries into the future. I have high bets that Islam will be Earth’s dominant religion 500 years into the future. Christianity might be revived, I don’t know.

            What would Mars’s dominant religion be in 500 years? What kind of patriarchal religion would arise out of the harsh frozen desert of that planet?

            • Jan Martense says:

              Mars solid surface area is equal to the entire land area of Earth… That’s bigger than Vermont.

              Yeah, I admit Vermont is a bit of a troll example. I’m still not sure if physical land area is relevant though. Greenland and Antarctica and Alaska are all huge, they have little to no memetic sovereignty. What political effect would a large physical landmass have?

              On Earth itself, there are many places where the Cathedral has very little influence (As Jim noted in one of his posts on Gab, protected by a nuclear shield).

              Here I basically agree, the distance to Mars is more important than the physical area I think. In space, the Cathedral isn’t backed by force as it is on Earth. If Martians decide not to import Earth memes, no one can stop them.

              On the other hand, they can still willingly choose to import Earth memes. So I think you’ll need colonists who explicitly desire some degree of separation. If not you’ll risk Mars just becoming a bunch of Antarctic research bases.

          • Jan Martense says:

            (Ah, my shitty blockquoting. Ignore the comment below)

            Mars solid surface area is equal to the entire land area of Earth… That’s bigger than Vermont.

            Yeah, I admit Vermont is a bit of a troll example. I’m still not sure if physical land area is relevant though. Greenland and Antarctica and Alaska are all huge, they have little to no memetic sovereignty. What political effect would a large physical landmass have?

            On Earth itself, there are many places where the Cathedral has very little influence (As Jim noted in one of his posts on Gab, protected by a nuclear shield).

            Here I basically agree, the distance to Mars is more important than the physical area I think. In space, the Cathedral isn’t backed by force as it is on Earth. If Martians decide not to import Earth memes, no one can stop them.

            On the other hand, they can still willingly choose to import Earth memes. So I think you’ll need colonists who explicitly desire some degree of separation. If not you’ll risk Mars just becoming a bunch of Antarctic research bases.

            • Starman says:

              @Jan Martense

              People will go to the Moon for fun. People will go to Mars for religious reasons… and its not going to be nigger-worship, niggers are irrelevant. They will live where death is just outside the habitat if they don’t wear a suit and it takes 5-20 minutes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars.

              “So I think you’ll need colonists who explicitly desire some degree of separation. If not you’ll risk Mars just becoming a bunch of Antarctic research bases.”

              Jim has already answered the question on Antarctic research bases. This is unresponsive to his answer.

              As for separation, Peshawar is unaffected by Cathedral memes… and there’s going to be alot of Peshawars on Mars due to the Starship ticket price being equivalent to selling a house. People aren’t desiring to go to Mars for “fun.” That’s what the Moon is for.

              • Not Tom says:

                They will live where death is just outside the habitat if they don’t wear a suit

                One has to wonder how that will fly with the sorts of people who are
                screeching at the top of their lungs with cabin fever after a few months of stay-at-home orders.

                Don’t get me wrong: there will always be some group that’s drawn to the frontier, despite (or because of) the danger and work and quirky inversion of the usual freedoms and restrictions. But I’m not sure if it will be the same group that many here are supposing.

                300 years ago it wasn’t the reactionaries who were rushing to the new frontier that was America, nor the conservatives of the time (whigs). It was the crazy left-wing puritans.

                • Starman says:

                  @Not Tom

                  Yeah, it must be cabin fever… not the threat of starvation.
                  /sarc

                  One thing has been always true on the frontier, it’s not a place for urbanite wimps.

                • jim says:

                  The crazy left wing Puritans were fleeing (well deserved) religious persecution. When they were in power in England, many of them headed from America back to England. When they lost power in England, many more of them came to America.

                  If we are in power here, there will be a lot of progs heading to Mars, and while the reactionary colonies, the equivalent of Virginia and Georgia, will be ruled by the Holy American Emperor, and subscribe to the Orthodox Episcopalian Church, there will be some colonies implementing communist utiopia in space – until like the Puritans, they run into the scaling problems of communism, whereupon they will die or adopt something like Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. The disastrous experience of socialism did not quell the Puritan holiness spiral, but turned it towards emancipating women and plains apes, rather than other forms of property, which impact continues to this day.

                  The problem with America was that New England conquered Virginia and Georgia.

                • The Cominator says:

                  As a native masshole I would ask you to make some distinction though. The people who went to Mass Bay/Boston deserved it much much more than the people who went to Plymouth.

                  Boston is the asshole capital of the planet to this day and those were the Puritans who wanted to rule over everyone in a totalitarian theocracy of the elect, the people who went to Plymouth (and later to New Hampshire) wanted to be left the fuck alone. Plymouth/Cape Cod and New Hampshire to this day are the most non asshole most anti Cathedral parts of New England.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “The problem with America was that New England conquered Virginia and Georgia.”

                  I object strongly to this as well. The progs lost the post Civil War power struggle in the North and lost it BADLY they were almost completely out of power within 15 years after the Civil War.

                  It was Woodrow Wilson who was not a New Englander or elected by them generally who brought their whole ideology back.

            • jim says:

              When Musk was on stage with some Nasa people, he was almost trembling in fear. If he moves to mars, no fear.

              When Charles the Second made the scientific method high status, the Puritans sent around some people to beat up the Royal Society. Where previously such actions had gone mysteriously unpunished, this time …

              Conversely mobs, were mysteriously able to beat up Puritan preachers with impunity.

              Similarly, mobs are mysteriously able to shut down people groups of people who speak politically incorrect ideas. Happens all the time today. Trump was able to hold rallies during the presidential campaign because the people who provide presidential security provided him with security quite effectively. It is their job to provide security for potential presidents. That they carried out that job quite effectively perhaps reflects Hillary pissing off the praetorians, as Caligula pissed off his praetorians. The FBI was trying to take him down, but the presidential praetorians were on the job at dealing with attempts to take him down with astroturfed mob violence. The vast majority of the muscle at his rallies were rentacops, but the rentacops were able to act effectively, because they had presidential security among them, who had power of arrest. If the real cops had been on the other side, the rentacops would have been intimidated from acting effectively.

              During his rallies, the press were confined in the press corral, to prevent them from organizing and instigating trouble. They tried resisting. When they resisted, they got arrested. They were shocked that profane warriors were able and willing to lay hands on holy priests.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              On Antarctica or the Moon, I can be “removed” by the committee firing me and shipping me back home.

              On Mars, my peers can only really remove me by killing me. Even jailing me is really really expensive, and when I get out, I’m back in their faces again.

              Therefore, if I’m on Mars, I’d expect a lot more freedom of speech, if you will. A lot more truth telling going on. If I’m pulling my weight on Mars, and then take up nigger jokes as a hobby, they’re still stuck with me. That’s a profoundly different society, just inherently. Talk about “tolerance”.

          • jim says:

            They will not be able to send around gays and blacks to beat the crap out of people. Remember how gay rights became respectable. It was not television and the internet.

      • jim says:

        Cathedral propaganda is mysteriously ineffectual where the Cathedral is unable to kill people.

        It is inherent in a state religion that it relies on both persuasion and violence. Reflect on how gay suddenly became acceptable – because gays were able to beat people up, and straights were mysteriously unable to defend themselves. Silicon Valley would still be white and male if the US department of labor was 26 months away. America bombed the crap out of Syria, because they halted affirmative action of women into Academia at exactly fifty percent.

        Cathedral propaganda is effective in Indonesia because academia is high status, and academia is overwhelmingly female and Cathedral. How, you may ask, did it come to pass that Indonesian universities were pozzed. The answer is, state violence.

      • Starman says:

        @Jan Martense

        “Martians are flooded with sob stories about poor oppressed Trayvon and their entertainment comes en masse from Hollywood”

        Hollywood movies would have no credibility with Martian settlers, much in the same way that snake handling has no credibility outside of Appalachia. Other than the lack of ability to physically back Hollywood propaganda by force during 26 month periods, the insultingly bad Hollywood depictions of Mars and space would be readily visible to Martian settlers (unlike Earthlings, who wouldn’t know the difference). The high mandarins of the Cathedral are really ignorant on space and Mars, much like you.

  10. anon says:

    Jim, what is your take on this:

    Our Indo-European ancestors measured their ancestry from both the motherly and the fatherly side, suggesting that relationships between the sexes had reached a more advanced stage of evolution. Once the Indo-European migrations period was over and life was more stationary, women were at the center of economic life, and they had in those times a lot of freedom regarding the administration of the house & finances, while men would go to war or farm the fields.

    Furthermore, it seems the roles of females were rather flexible in those times, as long as this didn’t threat the family life and the securing of offspring.

    This flexibility of roles can be seen for example in the numerous Indo-European names for women with imposing meanings, like “the ruler of the people”. The feminine name in Celtic dialect, “Gwledyr”, means literally, “ruling over the territory.” Women among the Celts & Germans could also lead armies in battle. Boadicea was a queen of the British-Celtic Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire in AD 60 or 61, and died shortly after its failure, having supposedly poisoned herself.

    Indo-European women enjoyed so much freedom in their sexual relationships that around the 3rd Century, a Celtic princess, the wife of the Caledonian chief Argentocoxos, was still able to scorn the Roman empress Julia Augusta, of Syrian origins, because Roman women allowed themselves to be dominated by men in their society.

    We, Celtic women, obey the demands of Nature in a more moral way than the women of Rome. We consort openly with the best men, but you of Rome allow yourselves to be debauched in secret by the vilest.” -Cassius Dio, Roman historian

    What the Celtic princess realized is that women become totally passive in their selection, and cannot get the best genes for their children, when they are not allowed to consort openly with the best men. Celtic & Germanic women were allowed to get children even from married men, without being stigmatized from society, as long as he was a carrier of good genes. This doesn’t mean, though, that was the rule. Not all wives allowed their men escapades; neither were all single women ready to raise a baby alone.

    That sexual & social freedom is echoed later by Viking women in 9th Century Scandinavia. According to the Spanish ambassador Al Ghazal (Muslim), who visited Denmark in the year 844 A.D., Danish women could be with whomever they wished without fearing punishment or shame, as long as the male partner was not far beneath her in social status.

    The Arab envoys were also surprised at how openly Danish women communicated with them, and when they expressed their fear that their conversation with women would lead to misunderstandings & violent encounters with the males the Danish queen laughed & responded: “We have no such a thing in our religion (oppression of women) and we have no jealousy. Women stay with their husband according to their choice. The woman stays with him as long as she wishes, and parts from him if she no longer desires him.”

    The fact that Viking women had freedom didn’t mean they were disloyal or promiscuous; precisely because of their loyalty & intelligence they lived in free societies which warranted their individual freedom. Destructive forms of sexuality belong only to morally oppressed societies, as instituted by Hebraic religions, where individuals oscillate from one extreme to the other, from sexual repression to promiscuous orgies. Pagan women enjoyed their body & sexuality in a healthy, natural way.

    ???

    • jim says:

      A lot of Indo European peoples, cultures, and civilizations died. The Britons are extinct, subjugated by Rome, then annihilated by the Angles and Saxons, who were Indo Europeans who owned women the way they owned cattle. Emancipating women happened among Indo Europeans, over and over over again, but it is a failure mode of our race. We may well suffer the same fate.

      When the Saxons created England, they valorized Boadicea to make peace with and incorporate the few remaining Britons, and to provide a myth that bound both Saxons and Angles to the same land, but England is the Saxon kingdom of Wessex dominating the other Saxon Kingdoms through war, marriage, and its Christian state religion, and then subjugating what little remained with fire and sword.

      If you want to figure how successful Indo Europeans handled women, imitate the Saxons. The idea that even a virgin’s consent was required for marriage was unimaginable to them, and female consent was arguably prohibited by their state religion.

    • Atavistic Morality says:

      A lot of this I know for a fact is historic revisionism and political propaganda.

      If you want accounts of German sexuality during this time, Tacitus wrote about it (the same who wrote about Boudica), and it’s nothing like this pamphlet here says. It’s actually the opposite, most tribes would allow women to only be with one man their entire lives under threat of public humiliation and execution.

      Boudica was a figure head after the Romans killed her husband, propped up to keep up however possible the semblance of cohesive action to repel the invader. No man has ever followed a woman to battle, this LARPing is on the level of Jeanne d’Arc where people with an agenda will pretend she had some form of military rank when she was just a lowly peasant who wouldn’t even sit on the councils.

      I’ve seen something similar in the history of my ancestors, where they try to make Isabel something she obviously wasn’t. The great Castilian nobles used her for their own interests and afterwards the real ruler was Fernando, whose figure was still looming over the entire country (then Empire) even long after his death.

      Regarding Celtic sexuality, I don’t know, and I don’t care. The Celts were a bunch of forest monkeys who got themselves and their shit mud-huts rightly wiped out by the superior manly patriarchal Romans. Who cares about these faggots? Jim is completely right, caring about Celts is like caring about Aztecs, all these monkeys got wiped out and God is good.

    • ten says:

      “Vikings” counted kindreds from both mother and father – a woman was not transferred from one patriarchal group to another, but the marriage tied both groups together. Vikings are not indoeuropean ancestors and there is zero evidence for this outside the late north germanic cultural cluster. In real practice though, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference to how marriage worked. Maybe this way of thinking lends to greater exogamity, which seems to have been a winning strategy for hajnal euros – read bpd chick.

      He also takes a few, not particularly well founded but very popular, tropes about norse women holding the keys to the household and the larder and projects these things to _all of indoeuropean prehistory_. This is again on its face nutty, there is only evidence of this in scandinavia. And was this in the seasonal absence of the husband or permanent? The literature does not contain wives bossing their husbands around when they were home, which would have been the case if the wife was the boss at home.

      There are very conflicting sources on the sexual behaviour of celtic and germanic barbarians. Tacitus says any and all germanic men and women who engaged in fornication were executed, and that it was a strong taboo that no man or woman was to marry or have sex before the age of 20. This seems gnon incompliant, but hajnal line euros have traditionally married a few years later than other peoples – perhaps it is possible, for some people in some time. You cite a Dio describing an opposite sexual morality among celts – my spontaneous prejudice tells me this is lie propaganda of the time, probably not to slander the celts, but the same “savages have free sexuality thus we also should”-vector popularly used today.

      The arab source sounds like he is projecting. Arabs today say white people fuck their daughters and sisters. Muslims have a system set up to counteract sexual immorality, observe the absence of their system in other peoples and imagine the sexual immorality that must take place.

      He takes viking sources, conjecture them to be general for “indoeuropean ancestors”, cites a bunch of different peoples accusing barbarians of female sexual immorality, and concludes vikings were not disloyal or promiscuous, because their women were just effin’ great, because they could be disloyal but weren’t.

      This is all very poorly thought through.

      • Germans, the ones that Rome constantly warred against, were extremely fertile. They filled up Germany very fast and managed to pull huge hordes and armies out of nowhere to throw at Rome. Their religion was probably very similar to the ancestral IE religion. This all suggests patriarchy.

        Old Norse being a very similar language to Old German suggests to me that the “vikings” were closely related to the Germans and had significant IE ancestry. They were not exactly matriarchal, but the literature remaining indicates that they did indeed marry with female consent, and that they attributed strange and laughable magical powers to women. Math, science, and economics were considered feminine arts. This was probably a later reversion to a sacred-female simp religion. They emancipated their women at some point, like Rome emancipated its women, probably sometime after 400 and before 700, and paid the price. Vikings had significant fertility issues, and needed a steady supply of slave girls to replace themselves. Scandinavians have been cucks since before 700 AD; the manly ones all left and settled places where pussy was plentiful.

        • Atavistic Morality says:

          According to Tacitus the German warriors somehow took pride in being chaste before marriage, as if they kept their entire being and energy focused for war. The men were usually inactive unless hunting or warring and I don’t remember ever reading that men would get punished for “fornication” anywhere, that sounds like personal narrative inserted. He explicitly talks about women getting publicly beaten and humiliated throughout the town and then killed by their husbands for adultery, says nothing like that about men.

          He talks about this matter with admiration towards them, because the way they conducted sexual affairs reminded him of the Golden Age of the Republic in Rome. But if that wasn’t a big enough clue, their war bands were akin to those of the IE, aristocratic meritocracy, and it was common for chieftains to have more than one wife because of political alliances. Also, solving political conflict through duels was commonplace.

          To this day most things I’ve heard about Vikings sound to me like complete nonsense. The Goths originate from the same area, just like the Normans. And all we know about them is nothing like the Hollywood propaganda we’ve all seen in TV, which is a lot more trustworthy since there are actually written records and laws, instead of full on mythology LARPing,

          I have the same issue with things like the Band of Thebes, for which there isn’t any direct account and all we know is writing by, read from, read from through like 5-6 centuries of time difference. They were supposed to be like a bunch of hardcore navy SEALs, but then they try to sell us they were all faggots. Sounds like enemy propaganda, there has never been or existed a group of elite warriors who didn’t execute and despise faggots from all those who are actually documented reliably.

          • Atavistic Morality says:

            Just like the myth of “all Greeks were faggots because homosexuality wasn’t even a thing hehe xd”.

            We live in a hardcore version of Sodom, and even then not even 10% of the men are faggots, but somehow we have to believe all Greeks were faggots. Then you look up where this garbage comes from and it’s some bisexual giga faggot historian from the 50s that saw a couple of vases with strange depictions and uses them to justify all this absurd interpretation for their word for love. Akin to our descendants a thousand years from today watching some gangbang porn video and then claiming that gangbangs are the most normal and commonplace thing ever in our society.

            And let’s not even talk about the “Dark Ages” and the “Renaissance”, terms from the last century by liberal propagandist faggots trying to set a narrative that not even modern historians agree with anymore.

            In a hundred years the way things are told will be completely different for sure.

          • ten says:

            Upon re-reading, i must admit my mistake. I don’t know if i once translated it wrong or if i read a faulty translation or interpretation, but i certainly mangled the memory.

            It is not Tacitus, but Caesar, who in De Bello Gallico writes that the germanic tribes considered it the greatest shame for men to have sexual relations before 20 years of age, with no mention of execution. My swedish translation in the shelf curiously makes it apply to both genders.

            And shameful behaviour was not idly tolerated, frequently prompting half suicidal attempts at heroism to reclaim honour,

        • jim says:

          > the literature remaining indicates that they did indeed marry with female consent

          Does it? We have a ton of literature written by the Norse, of which I have read a fair bit in translation, and I don’t recall one romance nor one courtship, indicating female preference was irrelevant to getting pussy.

          There is enough of literature that I doubt that many people have read all of it, but I am sure if there was one romance in that big pile, I would hear no end of it.

          Husbands unable to control their wives are frequently depicted as comedic figures, but this signifies nothing, because emperors with ten thousand concubines and the right to execute any of them or all of them at whim frequently had woman problems also.

        • ten says:

          Considering the following: germanic (including continental and english, they all stem from scandinavian protogermanic) languages are up to 40% non-indoeuropean, protoscandinavian in vocabulary; germanic genetics also have a similarly large protoscandinavian, pre-IE part; germanic mythology has two pantheons, aesir and vanir, the former corresponding to indoeuropean pantheon and the latter not, i’d say that germanic paganism was quite far from IE religion, and was a merger between it and the previous homegrown scandinavian system.

          Old german and old norse both stem at equal distance from protogermanic so yes, very similar.

          The sagas contain bride robbery to large extent, as well as young noblewomen unhappy to be married to old noblemen against their will – this i know because i read them, long ago, but i do not remember any marriage with female consent.

          I also don’t know of any old norse math, science or economics, female or otherwise, would be interested in where you get this from.

          How does this cuck childless viking theory fit with a very small population marauding and even conquering large swathes of technologically superior continental europe, with continuous exodus and settlement?

          A steady supply of fx 1% slaves for childrearing would leave a very massive genetic imprint over centuries. There is no such imprint. Icelanders and west norwegians are 20% celtic, no more. South swedes are 10% slavic in the plains, 30% in the forests. There was no steady supply of slave girls to replace themselves. There was a minor trickle of slaves that was kept mostly genetically separate until they were driven into the woods, when slavery was outlawed.

  11. pyrrhus says:

    Someone memorably observed that the American space program (the one that worked) was built by remnants of the Third Reich, and the reusable rockets and other devices that currently work are a remnant of Apartheid….but it doesn’t look like any other remnants will be available…..Maybe Russia would lend Trump a few engineers……

    • Dave says:

      Equality reduces specialization. In a Democratic Social Welfare State, the servant class is paid to stay home, watch TV, eat chips, and vote, which forces the engineering class to spend more time doing chores and less time inventing great things and teaching their children to be engineers.

  12. Rocket666 says:

    Obvious that Jim is a gatekeeper.

    Certain truths, especially scriptural, he isn’t allowed to let them appear.

    The honey trap with the 11-14 year old girls, and the guaranteed future supply of such, bought his compliance with the Controllers narrative. Blackmail also effective.

    Well played Satan.

    • truthplease says:

      Here’s Joshua’s miracle that Jim censored.

      https://youtu.be/tC1Rks6ZxGI

      • Encelad says:

        What a waste of a miracle! He could have silenced feminists!

        • Joshua says:

          You’ll get nothing from God or His messenger until you repent.

          Read Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, the whole world is now in the curses stage.

          Evil will be allowed to conquer former Christendom. Unless repentance is widespread.

          Watch for the Damascus prophesy, and eventually for the Rfid chip and the mark of the beast. Then you’ll maybe finally realise God and Jesus are real and you’ve ignored them and listened to a man called Jim with a predilection for 11 year old girls.

          • The Cominator says:

            LOL we don’t worship Jim nor do we to set him up as a religious prophet (except for “Alf”) you shill.

          • jim says:

            The prophecies, insofar as they predict historical and material events, predict material events that are likely to happen sooner or later because of the nature of man. The fall of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem was in the cards because the Jewish holiness spiral was pissing off all Israel’s neighbors, in particular the six hundred pound gorilla, Rome.

            Jerusalem fell, as prophesied, it was terrible, as prophesied, and the Eschaton did not arrive. Rome fell, as prophesied, and a grievous time of troubles ensued, but the Eschaton still did not arrive. The International Community will fall soon enough, and we will see what happens.

            • Joshua says:

              The return of the Lord Jesus is coming, within 15 years, so make your choices wisely in the years ahead, if you are spared.

              Some will find faith, some will lose it, some will be martyrs, some will be deceived.

              Jim will lead you all to destruction, that’s his job now, to remain supplied with 8 year old asian girls.

              • jim says:

                You are selective in reading your bible, and very possibly as demented as Charles Manson hearing prophecies in Beatle’s songs.

                “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”

                The Lord is not coming in fifteen years. If we are going by prophecy, the Temple has to be rebuilt, and arguably has to adopt a version of Judaism that adheres to the spirit of the law. Which, if prophecy is to be fulfilled, is going to take quite a while.

          • Starman says:

            @Joshua

            If only you can use your miracle to silence feminists, family courts, and divorce lawyers!

            You’re such a fake. You’re the exact problem that Alf is talking about.

      • Jan Martense says:

        Here’s Joshua’s miracle that Jim censored.
        https://youtu.be/tC1Rks6ZxGI

        ROFL

        Hot take: “Joshua” is actually an Alf smurf to mock “miracle” Christianity.

        • alf says:

          😂

          I shortly considered cheering Joshua on but figured that’d be too obvious.

          • jim says:

            As I said earlier, Christianity is a miracle religion, and as we just saw in the comment above, you were correct to argue that miracles are a hard sell in the time of YouTube and the internet.

            But science thrived under a Christian State religion, has now died under a state religion that denies the existence of objective truth in favor of the consensus of peer review.

            If anyone was bit cynical about the miracles back in the days when everyone high status and everyone in power subscribed to the State Anglican religion, that was OK, because no one who mattered talked too loud about their cynicism.

            As I said earlier, science needs a small God, but science needs cooperation which needs a big God. Christianity has a God big enough to create the universe, and small enough to be flogged through the streets of Jerusalem. God is three and God is one.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      And how old was Mother Mary when she was engaged (by her parents without her consent, oh noes!) to Joseph, you big dummy? 37?

      • yewotm8 says:

        Funny how the alleged girls keep getting younger on his above posts, as if it’ll reach a tipping point where suddenly Jim’s statements on pubescent girls become false.

  13. The Cominator says:

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/trump-orders-federal-retirement-money-invested-in-chinese-equities-to-be-pulled?fbclid=IwAR1WQIE1YbR3lqMOzinYoZcyYgBpvkbL5Cjj4uUD-XlqNKO0DcOUGKlP62c

    As I said Trump now has no choice but to endorse a complete cold war against China, it will not be completely rhetorical it will involve in fact TOTAL economic war. There will be some time to get the supply chain out and then full economic sanctions ala Iran…

    He will also be running for reelection in a not so good economy.

    This is all because there were idiots on our side like “Not Tom” who could not tell they were being scammed immediately even though there were some early voices like me who told them they were being scammed.

    As to why Trump abandoned “reopen by Easter” that is something I can only speculate on…

    • Starman says:

      @Cominator

      The Red Empire’s position towards China is why the US Space Force will pretend to but not actually disrupt Starship in order to avoid humiliation by China. (Once Starship/Superheavy launches and lands, proving full reusability, the Chinese will build their own version. They already have 90% of their version already in testing, the engines).

    • BC says:

      Great powers always compete with each other. Did you really expect the US and China to be best buds? Secondly, people are going to hate China either way based on their behavior during this pandemic. They unleashed this fucking virus on us probably from a lab.

      Also, being publicly hard on China allows Trump to be not so hard on China as needed.

      >As to why Trump abandoned “reopen by Easter” that is something I can only speculate on…

      Because he’s not an political dunce. Once the Dems started murdering Grandma he didn’t have choice. It was either shutdown or get blamed for those murders.

      >He will also be running for reelection in a not so good economy.

      As long as the economic trajectory is upwards, it isn’t an issue. I’m far more worried about mass voter fraud.

      >This is all because there were idiots on our side like “Not Tom” who could not tell they were being scammed immediately even though there were some early voices like me who told them they were being scammed.

      Do you ever stop crowing about you guessing the Wu Flu wasn’t as bad it was in China, Iran, and Italy? You made a correct guess based on no evidence. Good for you. Successful predictions should be celebrated.

      However, no one believed you because you failed to show why that was the case. Any jackass can throw darts at a board and be right from time to time, you need to be able to explain why. Being a sperg makes you think you’re always right without being able to explain why. That’s not a useful quality when it comes to informing smart men and you need to recognize you’re also wrong quite often.

    • Jan Martense says:

      This is all because there were idiots on our side like “Not Tom” who could not tell they were being scammed immediately even though there were some early voices like me who told them they were being scammed.

      There was no “scam.” COVID deaths were independently measured and assessed by counties all over the world, Cathedral and non-Cathedral alike. The idea that there was some kind of conspiracy is laughably absurd, it would have involved literally millions of people dwarfing even the supposed “moon landing hoax” in magnitude. The fact that COVID is less deadly in warmer weather (barring iatrogenic stuff as in NY) does nothing to prove any weird lizardman fantasies.

      If the US had acted swiftly early on–banning international flights and a short period of lockdown in Feb–none of this would have been called for and we would be fine. I’m not particularly blaming Trump, all Western countries did poorly. It just goes to show how worthless and decaying our “liberal democracies” are compared to competent governments like China.

      • The Cominator says:

        Why would you look at the initial outbreak country with no hygiene and a lot of lies, a country where idiots were licking a shrine, and a country where they hug and kiss each other and John Brennan allies control the current government over South Korea…

        I told people this at the time.

        “If the US had acted swiftly early on–banning international flights and a short period of lockdown in Feb”

        We banned flights pretty early we took too long to ban them from Italy, lockdowns do not work period and anyone who says they do ought to be treated like commies.

        • Jan Martense says:

          “lockdowns do not work period and anyone who says they do ought to be treated like commies.”

          They worked superbly in South Korea, in Japan, and especially in China.

          If they don’t work in the West, it is for the same reason electricity does not work in Nigeria.

          • Atavistic Morality says:

            Testing people and putting the sick into quarantine is not what I would call a lockdown.

            What I’ve seen the media calls a lockdown so far is ritualistic collective suicide.

          • The Cominator says:

            China has outbreaks now they are lying about.

            South Korea Japan and Sweden never had a lockdown.

          • jim says:

            Nuts

            South Korea and and Japan have and had no lockdown. China failed horribly.

            Lockdowns do not work.

          • The Cominator says:

            People who support the lockdowns at this point are spiritually livestock…

          • Jan Martense says:

            If you prevent a sick person from interacting with any healthy people, the infection will not spread. Period. If a lockdown “doesn’t work,” it *must* because it wasn’t an effective lockdown.

            Now, whether a complete lockdown of infected people is achievable is another question. One could say, “we’ll never actually prevent people from interacting, so we might as well not try.” In decaying societies like America’s, this may be true.

            But China, Japan, and South Korea showed that it isn’t totally unfeasible. None of these places issued country-wide lockdowns because they never needed to; they used either regional lockdowns or, in South Korea’s case, mass isolations based on potential contact with the sick. In a sense I agree with Atavistic Morality, whether this should semantically be called a “lockdown” isn’t really important. But it is important to note that SK was extremely aggressive in its lockdowns/isolations, the vast majority of quarantined people were perfectly healthy and only kept as isolated a precaution.
            ——————
            All of this is really an aside from my original point: if Western governments weren’t staffed by drooling retards and influenced by laughable “just-the-flu” conspiracy theorists, there are plenty of actions we could have taken to prevent the virus from getting a foothold and none of the mass economic damage would have happened.

            • Starman says:

              @Jan Martense

              The mass economic damage is being caused by the lockdown.

              The death percentages and models have been exposed as fake.

              • Jan Martense says:

                Which is more plausible? That China, SK, Italy, Iran, and Japan (some of which openly hate each other) all colluded to fake death percentages? Or that the virus becomes less deadly in the summer like every other Coronavirus in existence?

                • Starman says:

                  @Jan Martense
                  Urbanite faggot detected. Urbanite who mysteriously fails to notice mass murder by Democrat leaders detected.

                  Random antibody tests in multiple cities (the US, China and other areas) and places revealed that 98% (the same percentage over and over again) of the infected have no symptoms, revealing the death percentages based on “confirmed cases” to be fake. Italy’s death percentages are fake. I wouldn’t trust anything coming out of Iran. SK didn’t do indefinite lockdowns. Neither did Japan.

                  Plus, the deaths in the US are being padded by order of the CDC (man falls on head, COVID19 antibodies used to declare his death from COVID19), and the deaths are being added to by Nipples Cuomo, Bill DiCommio, Murphy and other Democrat leaders forcing nursing homes to accept infected patients.

                  The fact that you left out these acts of mass murder by Democrats is a major red flag. Cominator suggested that you deserve the CR treatment. He may be right.

                • Jan Martense says:

                  “Urbanite who mysteriously fails to notice mass murder by Democrat leaders detected.”

                  ??

                  I totally agreed with Jim’s previous post. COVID is obviously, and mysteriously, worse in blue states.

                  But this has nothing to do with the death rate in Italy, Japan, SK, or China. You’re either frantically trying to change the topic, or just retarded.

                • Starman says:

                  @Jan Martense

                  “But this has nothing to do with the death rate in Italy, Japan, SK, or China.”

                  Unresponsive. And someone who is ignorant on space shouldn’t be calling others “retarded.”

                  Yes I did call you an urbanite faggot, because you sound like one. At this point only urbanites are demanding indefinite lockdowns and mysteriously failing to notice that the lockdown is wrecking the economy and disrupting the food supply, not the virus.

                • Jan Martense says:

                  “Unresponsive…”

                  Let me spell it out for you: do you think China, SK, Italy, and Japan were also all killing their own people intentionally? If not, then the NY situation is unrelated to their death rate.

                  “…demanding indefinite lockdowns…”

                  ?????

                  I said we should have done a strict, two week lockdown (we can call it “quarantine” if it makes you feel better) on targeted communities, 3 months ago. Coupled with travel bans. Like China, SK, and Japan. The current lockdown is pointless, the US bureaucracy has already failed pathetically.

                  Try reading the comments you’re replying to.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Japan and South Korea did not do any lockdowns you lying shill faggot.

                • Jan Martense says:

                  @Cominator
                  https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/06/905459/coronavirus-south-korea-smartphone-app-quarantine/

                  “With almost 6,300 cases and more than 40 reported deaths, South Korea has become home to the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak outside China. As a result, the government in Seoul has taken what it calls “maximum” action to contain the spread of the disease—including sending thousands of people into mandatory home quarantine.”
                  “Now it is launching its latest attempt to keep things from escalating further: a smartphone app that can monitor citizens on lockdown.”

                  This is exactly what I advocated (minus the app.)

                • Starman says:

                  @Jan Martense

                  Nearly everyone demanded a lockdown when the virus was largely unknown. Now that the real data is out. Anyone promoting the lockdown now is a suspected shill at worst (as Cominator is implying) or at best, just a hysterical urbanite who just doesn’t know where his food comes from.

                • BC says:

                  Progressives destroyed the meaning of the term lock down. Lock down in the context of Japan, China, and Korea involves quarantining sick people and limiting assemble size and mass transist. In the Context of the US it involves quarantining healthy people while letting the sick do whatever they want.

                • jim says:

                  They did not collude. Each one acted on its own initiative, because never let a crisis go to waste.

      • Pooch says:

        Blue controlled areas are going to slow walk reopening all the way to the election as anticipated and possibly beyond (until the “vaccine”) The blue governor of my state just went against his word from last week and is now saying only rural counties can start to reopen. I expect this to be the case all over the US.

        They would have done this regardless of when Trump would have wanted to open up. They want to get mail voting passed everywhere to steal the election while also maximizing economic damage to Trump and the white merchant class. Seems like Trumps fight is far from over.

        • The Cominator says:

          This may actually be Trump’s salvation… the Dems fighting to keep things closed now.

          • Pooch says:

            Trump may have to declare the emergency over and hold all blue governors in violation of the constitution. But I suppose he can only do that when all red states are completely open first.

            • The Cominator says:

              The Babylon Bee is already framing this meme in a good way…

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0dzwjPtAwY

              • Pooch says:

                Ha…The Dems are almost welcoming a confrontation at this point. One that Trump has been putting off as long as possible which he may soon have to deal with. Fauci now calling for cancellation of school in September.

                • The Cominator says:

                  One thing in Trump’s favor is two of the most hated dem governors are in PA and Michigan…

                  OTOH Desantis and Trump are i think hemmoraging support in Florida… Where most republicans never supported the shutdowns at all.

                • Pooch says:

                  True but if PA/Michigan get mail-in voting passed you can kiss them goodbye.

                • Jan Martense says:

                  One thing in Trump’s favor is two of the most hated dem governors are in PA and Michigan…

                  Lol. Wolf’s coronavirus response approval rating is over 70%: https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/05/12/poll-shows-majority-of-pennsylvania-adults-approve-of-gov-wolfs-handling-of-covid-19/

                  His overall approval rating is +14 (50 approve -36 disapprove)

                  Yes, polls are biased, but this is way higher than Biden’s approval rating. DEFINITELY not something in Trump’s favor, quite the contrary.

                  The perceived botched coronavirus response (justified or not) has been a disaster overall. Most incumbents, both right- and left-wing, have seen their approval numbers skyrocket with the virus response, while Trump’s hasn’t budged.

                  If he’d adopted a tough anti-virus line from the getgo, even just in attitude, this would be an easy election victory. Missed opportunity.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Fake and gay urban poll and you are still shilling for lockdowns, jim time for this guy to get the CR treatment.

                • Starman says:

                  @Cominator

                  Jan Martense actually compared Mars to green Vermont!

                • Atavistic Morality says:

                  @Jan Martense

                  And you trust “polls” after the last election? Jesus.

                  Approval rating, polls and whatever else have you, completely trash, they never get anything right because it’s a Cathedral propaganda machine. And it’s like this in every colony of their empire as well.

                • Pooch says:

                  Interestingly, the Prolonged lockdowns are now occurring in democratically controlled districts and counties where the mostly democrat voting populace welcomes more lockdown with open arms save for the few white business owners and conservatives.

                • Pooch says:

                  Which is still a Huge economic problem because that accounts for about half the population.

      • Dave says:

        “The fact that COVID is less deadly in warmer weather…”

        I guess Manaus is safe then, protected by its year-round heat and humidity.

        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-coronavirus-mass-graves

        • jim says:

          I would not believe anything written in the Guardian. Brazil has had ten thousand deaths in a population similar to our own. Which is a lot, but considerably smaller than our death rate.

    • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

      I feel like you’ve been a bit neurotic with regards to this matter: ‘if Trump said [A] last week, he needs to say [A] this week too’; if Trump said something last week, and he wants to say something different next week, then he can just… say so.

      The idea that if you say something one day you need to keep saying it no matter what is something of a cuckservative dogwhistle. Consistency in the face of a changing reality (or changing apprehensions of reality) is inconsistency. Great leaders can change their tune on a dime when they need too; pharisees will change their tune on a dime when they want too; and everyone agrees that you’d be stupid to not agree.

  14. Jorge Washing Tonne says:

    [*deleted*]

  15. Contaminated NEET says:

    >subdue the stars

    We can’t even subdue the Somalis.

    • Starman says:

      @Contaminated NEET

      So what about the Somalis?

      They’re irrelevant to a multiplanetary civilization.

      • Contaminated NEET says:

        They’re moving into our territory like creeping charlie over a nicely mowed and watered bluegrass lawn. They’re a weed. They may be poor, stupid, and technologically backward, but they’re gradually conquering us, not vice-versa. Somali culture is closer to the will of Gnon than Western culture. Sure, they’re not going into space anytime soon, but they and the other barbarian nations colonizing us aren’t going to let us get off-planet either.

        • Starman says:

          @Contaminated NEET

          These low IQ savages have failed to stop Prophet Elon Musk’s Starship development (the obese sheboons tried though). And Starship is developing at lightening speed, a prototype every two weeks. Intuitively, the sheboons know they will be rendered irrelevant by a multiplanetary civilization. These subhumans are too stupid to invade the Martian technological civilization, the microgravity toilets get in the way… and airlocks too.

          • Mister Grumpus says:

            “Intuitively, the sheboons know they will be rendered irrelevant by a multiplanetary civilization.”

            Well, they were the last Attorney General, National Security Advisor and Top Dom First Lady, dummy, so they seem pretty damn good at making themselves “relevant”… with some help from the institutions. The very same institutions that you and I desperately hide from.

            Riddle me the following if you’re so confident:

            How can Elon keep sheboons out of his Mars city?

            Seriously. Assuming that all the technology and economics work, how can he actually pull that off?

            • Starman says:

              @Mister Grumpus

              “How can Elon keep sheboons out of his Mars city?”

              Before you call someone a dummy, you should actually read that person’s comment.

              Here’s the comment that you deliberately ignored:

              Just to show how potent a high-IQ filter is for the moons and planets. Just imagine an obese sheboon trying to figure out this.

              Elon isn’t going to keep sheboons out of his Mars city, the laws of physics will. And nobody is above the laws of physics. Not even the most loud-mouthed sheboon. Even if they’re the Attorney General and the National Security Advisor.

              • Mister Grumpus says:

                @R7:
                “Elon isn’t going to keep sheboons out of his Mars city, the laws of physics will.”

                Color me despondent on this point. Maybe Sheboons will have to be carried in on sedan chairs like royalty. Transported in inert stasis somehow, so they don’t push any buttons or start any fights on the way over, and then given leisure class status when they arrive so they don’t have to (incompetently) operate any devices.

                I’m “speaking” sarcastically and cynically here, but I really can imagine it coming to this. Some special directive or regulation from Space Force absolutely requiring X% affirmative action single mother sheboon “participation”, and Elon will just have to figure something out. He’ll have to make everything so foolproof, and the living so easy, that Shaniqua somehow survives and gets everything she wants so that no one hurts her feelings.

                Both the Sharkeesha and Michelle Obama of the Red Planet.

                Maybe one counter-argument to the above is that once Mars (or Jeff’s earth-orbiting space station cube-slave server farm) really is that perfected — that is, once its analogous Fargo North Dakota has received indoor plumbing, central heating, 24 hour grocery stores, Burger King, direct deposit and cars that always start when cold — then EBT, Section 8 and Shaniquas dropping in like Starship Troopers will be inevitable.

                But the living on Mars won’t be that easy for a while, and that while might be long enough for the spic-nig cycle to run out of steam and break back here on earth. So unless Elon’s Martians actually fly back to “rescue” some Shaniquas and take them back to Mars like stray dogs from a burning building, they’ll be safe. And maybe even that will be prohibitive for deltaV reasons.

                Something like that?

                But damn I’m still worried. I really am.

                • Theshadowedknight says:

                  Do not fear. The laws of physics are but a subset of the Law; the Will of Gnon is inviolable. The left cannot meme, the left cannot achieve orbit, and anyone who submits to the left cannot achieve orbit. Until we become so advanced that space travel is essentially without risk, the degenerates are trapped at the bottom of gravity wells like crabs in a bucket pulling each other down. Not to mention that the top of a gravity well is essentially the ultimate high ground, and from a military standpoint gives nearly ultimate power to the warrior class.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  You need to watch the video, and then just imagine Shaniqua trying to figure that out.

                  ” Transported in inert stasis somehow”

                  That tech doesn’t exist. Not for a microgravity environment. And it would add mass and extra technicians to maintain the tech if it did exist. Guess what race the technicians would be? Plenty of opportunity for a couple of White technicians to sabotage DaShawn’s stasis unit… and the Cathedral can’t do anything about it for 26 months.

                  “Some special directive or regulation from Space Force absolutely requiring X% affirmative action single mother sheboon “participation”, and Elon will just have to figure something out.“

                  There’s no Space Force without the StarProphet’s spaceships. Most likely, the Space Force will officially obey the directive and let outer space and Mars dispose of the sheboons. Of course, how does one obey a physically impossible directive? Stasis pods? Which then get sabotaged.

                  ” Shaniquas dropping in like Starship Troopers will be inevitable.”

                  Blocked by microgravity toilets. Thus canceling the Earth departure burn for Mars. This might even cancel the Trans-Lunar burn too.

                  ” And maybe even that will be prohibitive for deltaV reasons.”

                  26 months between 1 month windows for chemical rocketships. 26 months where the powers of Earth cannot physically do anything. Once Starship has done its departure burn, it doesn’t have the fuel to “turn around.” It must land at the destination.

                  Nuclear rocketships – and I mean those whose ISP is measured in thousands of seconds and tens of thousands of seconds – can ignore most of the 26 months, get to Mars at almost any time of the year, and can even arrive at Mars as fast as 39 days instead of 6-12 months. By the time those are developed, it’s more likely the techlords of Mars will build that, not Shitavious of Earth.

                  China is a different story.

                • jim says:

                  > “Some special directive or regulation from Space Force absolutely requiring X% affirmative action single mother sheboon “participation”, and Elon will just have to figure something out.“

                  Already in place, and as a result Nasa has been unsuccessfully trying to get what is now called the Senate Launch System off the ground for eleven years. The Space Force appears to be quietly ignoring it, or enforcing it on Musk with strange ineffectuality.

                  If it gets enforced, we will not be transporting plains apes to mars. We will remain stuck on earth. If we get to mars, it will be without Shaniqua. Living in space, and getting to space, is never going to be idiot proof. It is going to be like farming in North Eastern Europe during the neolithic – which is where the white race and the Han race originated. Likely a new race will appear in space.

                • jim says:

                  ”> Transported in inert stasis somehow”

                  Shaniqua will be transported to the moon and back wearing diapers, and everyone will be required to wear diapers because racism, but she will not be allowed to touch anything that could get them all killed, and if she is allowed to touch anything that could get them all killed, she probably will.

                  Back when Silicon Valley was in the tech business, rather than the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance business, we were compelled to hire women and plains apes, but we put the engineerettes in the art harem, and the plains apes in QA, where they were not allowed to touch anything that they could break. This was eventually detected and prohibited, whereupon Silicon Valley ceased to be in the tech business, Obama could not launch the Obamacare website, and Nasa could not launch rockets.

                  Musk can probably launch a fully robotic mars mission protected against passenger intervention full of diaper wearing passengers to mars, with a fake crew that has no buttons they can press or wheels they can turn, but he cannot operate an uncrewed fully robotic mars settlement full of cruise ship passengers.

                  It is the O-ring principle. One break in the O-ring, you do not have an O-ring. If you have a goal that requires a team of smart cooperative people, affirmative actioning one bad cookie into the team means the team will fail. And on mars, the goal is staying alive. If you send diaper wearing plains apes to mars, you can treat them as cruise ship passengers, but you cannot let them in on the team. So there is going to be “racism” and “sexism”. It is going to be obvious that they are dangerous parasites and passengers, that the women are there to cook, clean, and breed, and do some knitting and craftwork in their spare time, the plains apes are there to rob, kill, and break stuff, and are likely to break stuff vital to survival. If they are allowed into the team, everyone is going to die.

                  Back when Silicon Valley was in the Silicon business, rather than the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance business, if the US Department of Labor had been twenty six months away, much of the art harem and QA would have been out in half an hour. On mars, much of QA is going to go out the airlock, and the art harem will function as a proper harem.

                • Contaminated NEET says:

                  >If it gets enforced, we will not be transporting plains apes to mars. We will remain stuck on earth.

                  Yes. This is what will happen. We have to get our house in order here on Earth first.

                • Starman says:

                  @Contaminated NEET
                  Jim says:

                  ” If it gets enforced, we will not be transporting plains apes to mars. We will remain stuck on earth.”

                  NEET says:

                  ” Yes. This is what will happen. We have to get our house in order here on Earth first.”

                  Nope. You forgot about China. China is already testing methalox rocket engines, they’re waiting to see if Starship is successful. If it is, their intention is very clear:
                  A quote from Mr. Ye, head of China’s Moon program,

                  ” The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island”

                  If given such an order to disrupt the StarProphet’s Starships, the US Space Force will weigh in the presence of the Chinese Space Force… or America ceases to be a great power.

                • Starman says:

                  More of Mr. Ye’s – Head of China’s Moon program – quote:

                  ” If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.”

                • jim says:

                  I want, and humanity needs, a space race to fill the stars and subdue them. A space surrender by the US would be a disaster, not only for the US, but for all humans including, in the long run, the Chinese. The plains apes could only sustain a fraction of their current population without zookeepers.

                • Dave says:

                  In 1960, NASA put a team of former Nazis in charge of its mission to the Moon. What if China decides to get to Mars by putting a team of white men in charge of the program? They wouldn’t have to worry about American spies stealing their technology, as the Wise Latinas in charge of our space program would have no idea what to do with it.

                • jim says:

                  Han Chinese can copy white tech fine, and often polish it up considerably in the process. That would work for them, until they replaced the whites with Han Chinese. Their rockets would continue to work, unlike Nasa’s rockets after it got rid of the former Nazis, and probably continue to improve, but the improvements would be in ever smaller increments.

                  There are an awful lot of very smart white people fleeing the Cathedral, which has no use for smart people, as the French Revolution infamously had no use for chemists, and a lot of those very smart people are now in China or in the lands of the Chinese diaspora and Chinese hegemony.

                • Contaminated NEET says:

                  >… or America ceases to be a great power.

                  This is exactly what will happen. It’s already half complete; like the Ottoman sultans or the Chinese emperors, our rulers just haven’t noticed yet. It’s going to take a bloody and humiliating defeat for them to understand and admit they’re not the top dogs anymore. Listen to Jim: we have ships that can’t drive straight, decaying nukes, skyscrapers shorter than those we put up 50 years ago. America’s a rotting corpse.

                  If the Chinese want to go to space, good luck to them. We won’t be any competition until and unless we deal with our suicidal state religion and the hordes of savages it’s bringing in to replace us.

                • jim says:

                  In retrospect, the Ottoman empire fell during the Sultanate of Women. Just nobody noticed at the time, and everyone pretended things were still normal. (Official history has gone back to denying this, because nothing could possibly go wrong during a Sultanate of Women, but after World War I, up to quite recently, everyone noticed that the Turkish empire had fallen a long time previous to World War I.)

                  The reverse changes can also happen without anyone noticing. In retrospect, Christianity became the state religion when Constantine marched into Rome, but no one noticed for a very long time. In retrospect, Red Pilled Orthodox Christianity will have been the state religion of Russia since they gave Pussy Riot a much overdue whipping.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “In retrospect, Red Pilled Orthodox Christianity will have been the state religion of Russia since they gave Pussy Riot a much overdue whipping.”

                  The Cathedral absolutely noticed and their rage almost went nuclear…

                • Starman says:

                  @Contaminated NEET

                  ” Listen to Jim: we have ships that can’t drive straight, decaying nukes, skyscrapers shorter than those we put up 50 years ago. America’s a rotting corpse.”

                  That’s already known. The Senate Lunch System is a great example. But now there’s Starship, being built by a prophet. And Shaniqua can’t board, and if she does, she’ll be obliged… then she will die. And the Cathedral can’t do anything about it for 26 months.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  A good whipping is all it takes. No nonsense with arrests or prosecution or any of that time wasting stuff.

                  https://youtu.be/oXWlQxUNFLY

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  While searching I came upon this hilarious Devo “Whip It Good” juxtaposition.

                  https://youtu.be/pBVtph48Fqc

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  OK OK I’m catching on. Check my work:

                  If Shaniqua can get into a Mars-bound Starship them that probably means that Sharships won’t work anymore, because she won’t be the first Shaniqua inside the organization.

                  But if the Mars-bound Starship does work, and Shaniqua somehow does get into it as a cruise ship passenger anyway, then arrangement will break down once they’re truly out of the commissars’ sight.

                  She’ll get fragged. Because space stuff is just so damn dangerous, hanging by such a thin thread at all times, that self-preservation instinct will come alive no matter what, and dead wood will get cut off just like retards from an elite recon mission in Afghanistan somewhere.

                  Eh?

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus
                  A Starship is on its way to Mars. But alas! Shaniqua is allowed on board. How is she going to keep wearing her diaper for 6 months!? One day, she watches Guardians of the Galaxy, and notices that the StarLord wears regular clothes and only dons a helmet to breath in space. So she, being a negress, emulates a comic book movie by putting a suit helmet over her head. Then she walks out of the airlock… and ceases to be a problem to the White passengers.

                • Atavistic Morality says:

                  We have to get our house in order here on Earth first.

                  Yes, that’s always been the case, that’s why it’s important to insist on the cause of conquering the stars.

                  When the progressive faggots try to appeal to emotions talking about the poor plains apes we win the argument appealing to a much higher and superior aesthetic: galactic conquest.

                  Galactic conquest is very cool and every 14 to 55 man with testosterone is going to get on board, which is the demographic you want to influence. Hitler only needed to influence some young men and almost ends up conquering the world, and he did so appealing to the aesthetics of a Great German Empire.

                  You can’t just talk about how shit the Cathedral is and expect results, you need to say how shit the Cathedral is AND how great the Imperium of Man is going to be.

                • Starman says:

                  Contaminated NEET puts out wimpy statement:

                  “We have to get our house in order here on Earth first.”

                  Chad Atavistic Morality puts out a statement of greatness:

                  “You can’t just talk about how shit the Cathedral is and expect results, you need to say how shit the Cathedral is AND how great the Imperium of Man is going to be.”

                  It’s hard countering the Cathedral’s shit when your aesthetic sucks.

        • Starman says:

          @Contaminated NEET

          Just to show how potent a high-IQ filter is for the moons and planets. Just imagine an obese sheboon trying to figure out this.

          • Contaminated NEET says:

            Shaniqua can’t properly operate the space toilet. So what? All that means is you get to fix it multiple times a week as she keeps breaking it, and you get to live among floating globules of her diarrhea. This is not a win for you.

            • jim says:

              Nasa will likely wind up paying Musk to put Shaniqua on the moon and bring her back. But they will bring her back because the toilet is mysteriously and inexplicably racist.

              The settlements are going to be white and run by males.

            • Starman says:

              @Contaminated NEET

              ” Shaniqua can’t properly operate the space toilet.”

              Have you watched the video? It’s obvious that you’ve never worked with stupid people like Shaniqua.

              She won’t “improperly operate” the microgravity toilet, she can’t operate it at all. This won’t result in an Earth departure burn for Mars or even the Moon… it will result in a de-orbit burn to land the ship and kick Shaniqua off. If the rocketship does the departure burn for Mars, Shaniqua dies.

              I notice that there are commentators (such as yourself) who have great difficulty understanding space travel because it’s completely outside human intuition. Your intuition is completely useless in space flight… now imagine Shaniqua trying to understand. It will be completely outside her mental world. She would have no idea why she is dying.

    • jim says:

      We could easily subdue the Somalis, but for the Cathedral, and we could easily reach the planets, and eventually the stars, but for the Cathedral. The Somalis are stronger than us because their faith deviates less from the will of Gnon than the faith of the Cathedral deviates from the will of Gnon.

      Settling the planets will be a high IQ filter, as settling northern lands was a high IQ filter. Of course smart people get caught in holiness spirals also, and it might happen again, but because the Cathedral inherently lacks space capability, they will leave it behind, at least initially.

      • Stanon says:

        why publicly out Musk if this is what you believe? Aren’t you undermining the plausible deniability? To demonstrate your own cleverness to internet commenters?

        • jim says:

          Musk is able to blow stuff up because Trump took the Cathedral off his back.

          Bezos is not going anywhere, because he likes to remain in good odor with the Cathedral.

          The Cathedral is not much concerned about what happens in a generation. It expects to immanentize the eschaton in 2022.

  16. The Cominator says:

    Looks like Russia is going hardcore on their Christian anti cathedral now, right wing Orthodox christian news.

    https://russian-faith.com/news/christian-television-news-russian-style-n3130

  17. Anon 1 says:

    “It is widely known that Elon Musk is a business fraudster and a government propaganda asset.”
    “Musk is a serial scammer.”
    I am genuinly intersted in what qualify this statements . There is a community in social media who are dedicated to “expose” and prove “fraud”
    About musk . However , a lot of “evidence” about “fraud” is taken at face value and circumstantial and based on trusting the source .
    The hallmark of scamer and fraud is input more than output , which qualify beoing and ula launch contract as fraudulent more than spacex.
    Elon Musk is the last great american entrepreneur , in the style of ford and edison . Who did give a littel care for the mean to achive there goal .
    So Musk is asshole , narssistic and power hungery but no scammer or fraud.

    • The Cominator says:

      I have a facebook friend who has a weird case of obsession with Musk and his “fraud”.

      He has never touched Space X but hes made a good case that the Tesla books are cooked.

      • Theshadowedknight says:

        I wonder why? What is he doing that he needs to falsify records on what is essentially a side act to his space program? Is he draining money to feed SpaceX to get it off the ground? It is a scam and he uses “green” Tesla to get the striver faggots off of his case? I’m interested, but I would rather not know until he gets us into space, instead of knowing and him having to stop putting people in space.

        • Anon 1 says:

          You cant separate the man from his work .
          I was skeptical about musk . Whether he was a true believer in the medical cathedral or not . The last few week was quite interesting, as you see a man between his work and following the mainstream propaganda line. He told them to screw it , jumped on the right band wagon to reopen the economy , even going as far as actively undermining the mainstream narrative. What usually happen is the CEOs let there business tank in favor of the propaganda , and reworded handsomely by the bailout later.
          Musk showed spine and that give me hope that he mean what he mean . for him tesla is clearly his baby and will do whatever it take to make it successful.
          However , this mean that the power that be are upon him . whether he succeed are on the fact that the cathedral is too dysfunctional .

        • jim says:

          Greenies need to believe that Musk is holy, because space is something white males do, and smart East Asians can only copy, and obese mulatto lesbians cannot even copy. Nasa is trying to copy the old space shuttle, unsuccessfully, has been trying for eleven years. Which means that any effort to get us into space is apt to attract hate from the Cathedral, which eventually destroys it.

          So Musk needs to appear to owe his wealth to something green, otherwise he would be worse than Hitler. Much as Jesus said not one jot or tittle would perish from the law, and then personally fulfilled the law so that you do not have to observe every jot or tittle.

          Hence Tesla. Yes, Tesla is a scam. A scam in the sense that “one jot or one tittle shall pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” was a scam. All was fulfilled. When you are operating inside a holiness spiral, you have to do stuff like that in order to fulfill your mission. Musk has to be thrifty with the truth, and I have to hide. My more public identities are also thrifty with the truth.

          • Anon 1 says:

            Musk is a greeny and a believer , you cant know the truth and become holy .
            A documentary executively produced by Michael moor committed blasphemy
            by showing that the “renewable energy” was a scam . righty thought he was moving right, but as always lefty will move ever left ; that there are no hope renewable will not save us only sacrifice and death will save us.
            Not even ” appear to owe his wealth to something green” will suffice .
            the cathedral are abandoning renewable and green. he is told to sacrifice his car company,and next he will be told to sacrifice his space company.
            Musk is a merchant and increasingly warrior merchant . hence his brawl
            with cathedral.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              @Anon 1 [but copy edited by yours truly]:
              “A documentary executively produced by Michael Moore committed blasphemy by showing that “renewable energy” was a scam. Righty thought he was moving right, but as always lefty will move ever leftward: That there’s no hope, renewables will not save us, and only sacrifice and death will save us.”

              I appreciate this notice here. Thank you. I buy it.

              Let me try:

              Being fat and ugly might be a plus, but Michael Moore is still a straight white male, and thus closer to the crocodiles than most. So to save himself he needs to apply his verbal IQ and Final Cut skills to the next Great Leap Leftward, and get out in front of the mob again.

              So he denounces green energy as insufficiently holy, and switches to the new high holy crusade of self-genocide, to leave more room for gorillas and Somalis, who we all know can’t operate a wind turbine, let alone an oil refinery.

              Lordy, will Michael Moore be Croc Chow before Tucker Carlson? Is Jim right? Incredible.

          • Mister Grumpus says:

            @Jim:
            “When you are operating inside a holiness spiral, you have to do stuff like that in order to fulfill your mission. Musk has to be thrifty with the truth…”

            This is an honest question:

            Are we helping or hurting Elon by “exposing” his very necessary “unholiness laundering” of SpaceX through his Dildos Puppies and Rainbows scams at Tesla? Is even a text forum of eighth-sigma basement-dwelling shitlords enough to drop the other shoe?

            Are we helping or hurting him by Really Talking about this stuff?

            Because he’s making great progress while bluffing his Thoughtcrime, and (most of?) his people are doing well too while, I presume, merely Crimestopping themselves at the sub-cognitive level.

            Does it help or hurt to “expose” what his people are Crimestopping?

            Or am I super naive about just how many people over there Already Know?

            I’m prompted to ask because that one Seniorita Reconquista in the city council in California somewhere just tweeted “F&ck Elon Musk”, and Elon then publicly responded “message received”, so I’m worried that the music is just about to already stop, and I’m not sure what’s best to do now, even theoretically.

            Werner was an ex-Nazi and Elon a South African. The fickle finger of denouncement acquires targets SO much faster now than before.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              This is a blatant “bump” of my question above, because I’m so anxious about the subject matter. Thank you, and Jim feel free to delete this if you’d like. No hard feelings.

              The shorter form being:

              “Are we helping or hurting Elon by here observing/wondering that SpaceX is “white supremacy” and Tesla its unholiness-laundering front operation?“

              (What’s the NRX analogue of “Shut it down or the goyim will know?”)

              • The Cominator says:

                NRx thought is SO forbidden and taboo for Cathedral desciples that we risk little discussing whatever here. They can send shills with scripts because we get put on a list but the Cathedral in general cannot acknowledge that Moldbug’s Open Letter exists…

                Less still can it acknowledge that BAP or Jim exist. The heresies here are at a level so blasphemous that even knowing they are possible is heresy for all but the most holy and high ranking priest.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  For the sake of argument, I challenge:

                  I’m not talking about someone actually linking to this very page with the Donald Sutherland point-and-gasp face. That’s not what I mean. I’m worried that we’re handing out tailored kill-shots to denounce SpaceX with, which results in them getting air-dropped with Shaniquas.

                  “If you shoot your missile down this particular exhaust port, the whole thing will blow up, and then you get first dibs on the apples.”

                  You can’t win Twitter mentions by merely saying there’s something fishy about something. You need a specific accusation to type into the box.

                  SpaceX already has “problematic” written all over it. Just LOOK at those young white men, happily beavering away in their clubhouse. They must be up to something. They’ll put a know-nothing negress on camera for the launch livestream, but behind her it’s Animal House.

                  That’s already in the air. But it’s still only a vague cloud of ambiguously bad juju to the SJW mind. But here we’re giving them the specific crimes and codes to charge SpaceX with, and in so doing offering them up as fresh meat.

                  It’s as if we’re eye-dropping blood into the water and daring the sharks show up. (Or so I worry, in so doing surely overestimating my own importance.)

                  OK your turn.

                  (And Jim just delete all this if you deem it functionally equivalent to sabotage.)

                • jim says:

                  The thought crime barrier guarantees that they will not be able to remember or comprehend our discussion.

                • BC says:

                  >I’m not talking about someone actually linking to this very page with the Donald Sutherland point-and-gasp face. That’s not what I mean. I’m worried that we’re handing out tailored kill-shots to denounce SpaceX with, which results in them getting air-dropped with Shaniquas.

                  Elon’s about 40 IQ points smarter than the Average SJW. Like China, they won’t recognize he’s a threat until too late.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  @Jim:
                  “The thought crime barrier guarantees that they will not be able to remember or comprehend our discussion.”

                  But if they call SpaceX racist, because white, male, South African, Nazi and no Shaniquas, then the apple cart will flip over and they can pick up all the apples.

                  No? Really?

                • jim says:

                  They can, and probably will, do that – but our discussion can have little effect on that. Like real sexual harassment and real rape, this discussion is magically invisible to them.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  Not only is our discussion here invisible to the high mandarins of the Cathedral due to crimestop, basic orbital mechanics is incomprehensible to them. If they cannot comprehend these possible threats, they cannot see them. The Cathedral cannot ban what it cannot see.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “Not only is our discussion here invisible to the high mandarins of the Cathedral due to crimestop”

                  Oh the highest of high mandarins at least can know about us and can acknowledge we exist but they cannot tell anyone else about it and they are hardly going to be digging into our comment sections.

                  Its sort of like only the Cardinals, Pope and High Inquisitors are allowed to study occult demonology and nobody else is even supposed to know that it exist. But generally those people don’t have the time or inclination to study occult demonology at their rank they have better things to do.

                • alf says:

                  Grumpus, note the totally absolute, and I mean COMPLETE radiosilence this blog receives from anyone with a non-anonymous identity. Compare with Scott Alexander, who probably receives comparable traffic to Jim and gets to be featured in the NYT.

                  They can’t acknowledge what is discussed here. The moment they start addressing it, you get debates like with CR where the cathedral lackey is exposed for the commie shill he is. We discuss forbidden knowledge, and forbidden knowledge is like a one way valve; takes a lot of effort to unlearn.

                  So they can’t use our discussions against us, even if they wanted to. To acknowledge our discussions is to acknowledge thoughtcrime, and to acknowledge thoughtcrime is to become a thoughtcriminal yourself.

                • alf says:

                  I mean, what would they even call us? Evil sexist nazi white supremacists? The labels are dead, everyone who is sane has been called those names by now. Their only option is to ignore us.

                • alf says:

                  Oh ‘pedophile’ would be the go-to I think. But I believe Jim has defused that one quite well.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  This just keeps on getting more interesting.

                  I suspect I’m using this to discover some general-purpose good news that also applies elsewhere.

                  I’m still holding out that an evil super-genius could take what he learns here and carefully “weaponize” it into a “denouncement play” against SpaceX.

                  But then what? Well, let’s see…

                  (First assumption: If he’s smart enough to formulate the denouncement play and understand why it would work, then he’s also smart enough to know that it would result in SpaceX getting stuffed with Shaniquas and crashing forever.)

                  A: He could actually play it, stuff SpaceX with Shaniquas, crash it forever, and enjoy a few apples for his trouble. But he’d have to be an eighth-sigma sick fuck to actually get enough pleasure out of this to really do it.

                  B: If he’s that smart then he can figure out how to grow his own dang apples and stay out of the dangerous limelight.

                  C: So yes, he could still use his denouncement weapon to crash SpaceX, but only anonymously, in which case no apples anyway, so screw it.

                  D: He could put on his poker face, show his denouncement weapon to SpaceX, blackmail them with it, and then leave for Thailand with some bitcoins and keep his damn mount shut. (I understand this was Jesse Jackson’s hustle, but minus the mouth shut, so it couldn’t last.)

                  D: Or finally, evil or not, if this guy is that damn smart, then he’s also smart enough to figure out that if he helps The Left Machine metabolize SpaceX, then he’s just exposing himself as the next high-IQ “suspected potential noticer” to the Khmer Rough guys around him. And that’s way too risky, apples or no apples.

                  So I’m calming myself down by not finding any obvious ways for someone to use this blog here to formulate a denouncement weapon against SpaceX AND ALSO actually use it.

                  Uh oh. Hang on wait…

                  E: Aha! So maybe it’s a CHINESE evil super genius who wants to crash SpaceX as soon as there’s nothing there left to copy. Maybe THAT guy.

                  (And why am I so naive as to have never suspected that the Left Machine might include our sneaky Chinese overlords out to fuck up our shit even faster?)

                  Comments!

                • alf says:

                  I’m still holding out that an evil super-genius could take what he learns here and carefully “weaponize” it into a “denouncement play” against SpaceX.

                  Well I mean, I’d say obviously that’s already what they’re doing.

                  I imagine it’s a carrot/stick combination: ‘aww Elon you want to explore space? Well we’re terribly sorry but NASA regulations stipulate that…. Although, maaaybe some of these regulations would magically disappear if you’d just hit that Shaniqua quota…’

                  Not exactly super genius material but enough to make Elon stutter.

                • Starman says:

                  @Mister Grumpus

                  People denounced Muhammad because people thought that Muhammad, a merchant, would do what a merchant would do… back down.

                  People denounced Joseph Smith because people thought Joseph, a NY Upstate farmer, would do what a farmer would do… back down.

                  People denounced Elon Musk because people thought Elon, a merchant inventor, would do what a merchant inventor would do… back down……….
                  ………

      • Anon 1 says:

        Tesla Books are cooked , i know this because the business is thriving with strong brand and cult following , musk sold his millionth car last month. That there are right way and wrong way to accounting is a gov myth.There is only a good way and a bad way . Since 1945 new deal all business is gov business with the Bezantian laws , the army of lawyers and lobbies, especially in the heavy industries , which why the US doesn’t have any .
        Anti-musk think that business is team effort with law abiding citizen following gov regulation and directions . Then they get confuse why most businesses doesn’t produce any worth while product despite everything looking good on the books.
        you cant do something worth while in the US economy today because it is a degenerate economy same as society.

        • jim says:

          Tesla books may well be cooked. Would not be the first time Musk did something like that. But his rockets fly, and, more importantly, land.

          For this he deserves to be immensely wealthier than he is. Let us pray that he obtains the wealth he deserves.

          All prophets are in a sense scammers, but not all prophets are false prophets. Musk is a true prophet.

          Musk will likely die on mars, and not on impact. He will land on mars in a rocket that looks like, and lands like, the rockets depicted in old science fiction novels.

          • The Cominator says:

            The Musk obsessed guy isn’t a total lefty hes a center right muh principles cuck type (he even used to unironically subscribe to National Review maybe he still does)…

            The kind we won’t subject to the Suharto solution but the kind we will make actually carry out the Suharto solution…

    • Starman says:

      @Anon 1
      Elon Musk has characteristics of a prophet, both good and bad parts. Like Muhammad and Joseph Smith.

      • BC says:

        Religion by it’s very nature from the start has been a scam. The earliest religious sites had a priesthood that scammed the local hunter gathers into supporting them and building their temples/homes, Soon they started facilitating trade, farming, and eventually cities grew up around these temples. Their scamming went from parasitism to symbiosis. And thus civilization was born.

        Star civilization shall be born in the same manner, led by the Star Prophet who got started scamming people with crappy electric cars that will bloom into Humanity leaving our birthplace to explore and subdue the stars. Long Live the Star Prophet Elon!

  18. Starman says:

    Forward! O’ Holy StarProphet!

    “SN4 passed high pressure (7.5 bar) & engine thrust load at cryo”

    Miracles do happen!

  19. Charlie Marr says:

    It’s 2020. It is widely known that Elon Musk is a business fraudster and a government propaganda asset. He has never once generated any annual profit at any company, and he’s been playing a businessman on TV for almost a quarter century now. And his business plan for satellite internet service has even less profit potential than all his other unprofitable ventures. He’ll be funding his fraudulent plans to “colonize Mars” with our tax dollars, just like he’s always done. In 2017 he announced that SpaceX had contracted to fly tourists around the moon in 2018. When in fact SpaceX has never lifted a human even 100 feet off the ground in Elon Musk’s 17 years and counting at SpaceX.

    • Starman says:

      @Charlie Marr

      SpaceX is sending two astronauts to the ISS N.E.T. May 27th 2020. I know you want the Senate Lunch System to work but I suggest that your friends in Boeing should better start hiring engineers as executives instead of banksters.

      • jim says:

        The Senate Lunch System is in large part elderly equipment back from the days when Nasa not yet totally dysfunctional.

        They have been trying and failing to get their stuff into space since 2011, while Musk is launching stuff he built last month.

        This resembles our nukes, which are largely built from parts and materials cannibalized from the nukes we built back when we could build nukes.

        They are “re-using” stuff as a “cost saving measure” – but somehow, re-using costs hundreds of times as much as Musk building brand new stuff. No, they are re-using stuff because they have lost the capacity to build stuff.

    • jim says:

      Musk is a serial scammer. But his rockets are real. He really has advanced rocket technology. Musk really is heaving more stuff into space than anyone, really is giving us access to space. No fraud there.

      For this, he deserves to become immensely wealthier than he already is. Let us pray that the internet in space, and platinum mining of asteroids, gives him a small part of the immense wealth he deserves.

    • Fred says:

      Evidently Free Republic is sending its boomers here

  20. Pseudo-chrysostom says:

    The key is to develop forms of capital can grow in potency in space.

    When you have factories building factories on mercury, using the heat of the sun to convert material into more of itself, without necessary recourse to inputs from earth, then the imperium of man will have truly reached beyond it’s terrestrial internment.

    Guided propulsion pods sending rocks to solar crucibles for conversion into higher-ordered forms that may be sent back out with net positive energy: potency.

    Reflective collector arrays creating a network of sun beams channeling power wherever it needs to go in the system: potency.

    Naturally, all of this has utility in the use of force as well. Potency.

    Mid twentieth century treaties to ‘demilitarize’ space were one of the worst things (or an epiphenomena of the worst thing) to happen to civilization in in the last five hundred years really. All of that civilizational energy that could have gone into developing space capacity, spent on essentially masturbation instead.

    The sentiment of the highest levels of technical achievement shouldn’t have ‘military application’ is an eternal heresy undermining the highest levels of technical achievement throughout history.

  21. apostate julian. says:

    doj drops flynn charges. here we go.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      Makes you wonder right?

      What in the world kind of fire must be burning somewhere to let out that kind of smoke?

  22. https://twitter.com/memcculloch/status/1257699351972937728

    “The J. of the British Interplanetary Society has rejected our paper on #QI-thrusters because they’ve decided not to publish papers that ‘change the known laws of physics’. Firstly, laws that mis-predict 96% of the cosmos are not ‘known’, & sad to see #JBIS self-limit like that.”

    What Dr. Mike McCulloch means is that the “known” laws of physics require dark matter, which is something scientists are looking for https://www.livescience.com/64258-dark-matter-search-failed.html and not finding it, and his Quantum Inertia theory is an idea that does not require dark matter.

    This is such a great example of the peer review cancer. And institutional entropy. Once it became clear that the according to the “known” laws of physics 95% of the universe is made of magical phlogiston shit that we cannot detect and even its effects could not detect until recently, the whole “known laws” thing should have been discarded. If not, then at least every fringe theory that does not require dark matter and dark energy should be given at least a fair hearing.

    Incidentally, this QI-thruster thing is about spacecraft propulsion.

    A quick google search indicates that the media is linking it to the EM drive idea of Roger Shawyer, which was supposed to be tried and failed, and McCulloughs and Shawyer did meet and discuss that their ideas are related, yet this seems to something newer and different.

    • BC says:

      EM Drive was tried and failed. I followed it for a long time, but the tests were it “worked” were tests running into measurement error levels of thrust and the more complex later tests didn’t show any thrust.

      >This is such a great example of the peer review cancer. And institutional entropy. Once it became clear that the according to the “known” laws of physics 95% of the universe is made of magical phlogiston shit that we cannot detect and even its effects could not detect until recently, the whole “known laws” thing should have been discarded. If not, then at least every fringe theory that does not require dark matter and dark energy should be given at least a fair hearing.

      The QI thrusters thing sounds similar to EM drives and I’d like to see them tested. We learn a lot from testing and failing.

      Dark energy and Dark Matter are as much bullshit as String Theory is. If you can’t test something then it shouldn’t be part of physics.

      • jim says:

        Dark Energy and Dark Matter are placeholders for something mysterious, which is in fact observed. It is not bullshit. It is a name we give to something we observe, and know we do not understand.

        Hence “Dark”

        • Cloudswrest says:

          Just out of curiosity, other than gravitationally, how WOULD you detect matter that does not interact with electromagnetism? It would be completely transparent, not emit EMR, and not interact with baryonic matter. It might even be transparent to itself.

          • jim says:

            We detect dark matter through its gravitational effect. There are big and small clouds of something that have gravitational effect. On the scale of galaxies and star clusters, visible matter is not being dragged around by visible matter. It is being dragged around by something invisible and much more massive.

            • I’m not exactly a physicist, but it seems to me that mass, gravity, expand space. Light does not escape a black hole’s event horizon because the extreme mass of the hole causes space to expand infinitely. From the light’s perspective, nothing would be wrong save that it never manages to get closer to things outside the black hole.

              The only “observation” of dark matter comes from differential rotational speeds between the inside and outside of a galaxy. They decided to explain this difference by adding a mass factor to the outside of the galaxy, but the way I see it, there is less mass out there, and therefore from its reference point, it is travelling through less space than it appears to us from a distance and thus appears to be going faster than it should be. Shit near the center of the galaxy, being in an area with more mass around, is travelling through what is, from its reference point, more space.

              • jim says:

                No, mass contracts space. When something falls into a black hole, things get crowded fast. Similarly the expansion of the universe should be checked by the gravity of objects. If no dark energy, then from the perspective of every object, it is initially flying away from everything, and then the gravity of everything pulls it back, just as you throw a ball in the air, and then it falls back again.

                Gravity is pulling everything together. Space itself can expand on its initial momentum, but the matter in space slows it. Something is accelerating it. Dark Energy is what we call that something. Speculation as to what is that something is barely more useful than discussing the nature of the trinity, the nature of the incarnation, and the nature of the resurrection.

                “Dark Energy” is dark. The term is an escape hatch to end pointless discussion, as “God is Three and God is one” is an escape hatch to end pointless discussion.

            • Frontier says:

              [*deleted. Speculative physics is off topic, unless it relates to the human condition*]

        • Not Tom says:

          Dark energy is on much shakier ground than dark matter. While dark matter refers to something that is more or less measurable but we can’t quite explain, dark energy is more like epicycles, filling gaps in a theory by explaining why something that the theory says is supposed to exist does not actually appear to exist.

          More physicists these days are coming out of the woodwork to say that there’s actually a good chance it really doesn’t exist, and that the evidence which supposedly proves it exists is sort of like a highly complex form of rounding error: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discovery-dark.html for one example.

          • jim says:

            If dark energy does not exist, the universal expansion should be slowing down under the force of gravity. It is accelerating. Any purported explanation is more far fetched than just calling it “Dark Energy”.

            • Cloudswrest says:

              The universal accelerating expansion is in dispute. It is based on possibly faulty surveys. More detailed surveys show that it may be just a local effect caused by something pulling on our region of space. See my above post.

        • yewotm8 says:

          Dark Energy and Dark Matter were concepts created to serve as placeholders, but I see some physicists not thinking of them in that way.

          • BC says:

            Both Dark theories remind me too much Aether theories. Better to leave them as unknowns for people to think about than create an untestable theory with no definition.

            But then again the failure to be able to test Aether theories led to relativity, but I think it’s more likely in this age it will just lead to people studying fake dark matter and fake dark energy for grant money.

            • The Cominator says:

              Dark matter is an addition of missing or undetected mass to balance gravity equations you dont have to…

            • Dave says:

              The “initial mass function” is a simple power curve for stars near and above the mass of our Sun, but it drops off at lower masses. If we assume that this dropoff is all or mostly due to the difficulty of detecting brown dwarfs and rogue planets, is “dark matter” still necessary? Or do brown dwarfs give off a heat signature such that we can look at a distant galaxy and say that it contains about five million solar masses worth of brown dwarfs, and that this is not enough to explain its rotation speed?

              As for why the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating, it could just be that gravity is repulsive at distances beyond about one billion light-years, or that gravity contains a tiny built-in repulsion that is canceled out by anything denser than a vast intergalactic void.

              • jim says:

                Searches for gravitational lensing within our galaxy reveal insufficient compact massive dark objects to explain sufficient mass for stars to move as they do. We can accurately estimate mass density not only from the rotation speed, but from stars bobbing up and down above the plane of the galactic disk. The anomalies exist on all large scales and all locations, so tinkering with the gravity equations is not going to fix things. You can fudge away any one inconvenient observation by adjusting the gravity equations, but you wind up fitting all the other observations even worse. No one has managed to tinker up something that fits distant observations without massively violating nearby observations, such as the tides. Standard outcome for such clever schemes is that they manage to fit a small subset of distant observations, and the tinkerer fails to notice that they spectacularly violate everyday observations of the earth, the moon, and the sun. The better the theory fits distant and uncertain observations, and more distant and uncertain observations it fits, the worse it fits nearby and certain observations.

                And I repeat. Dark Matter and Dark Energy is off topic, for the same reason as the nature of the Incarnation, the Nature of the Resurrection, and the relationship of the persons of the Trinity was declared off topic by Constantine sixteen centuries ago. God is Three and God is One, and Dark Matter is dark. End of discussion. Debating the incomprehensible, the unfalsifiable and the unverifiable is a waste of time.

                • Dave says:

                  Except that in the former case, it’s possible that better telescopes and particle colliders will shed more light on the subject in the future. There’s no need for an Astrophysical Inquisition.

                  Science is science and religion is religion. Michael Servetus did not understand the difference, and was burned at the stake for it.

  23. Elijah says:

    ‘Why do the heathen rage

    and the peoples plot in vain? ‘

    I do wonder why? Silly heathens.

  24. Starman says:

    Second test fire of Starship SN4. The two test fires were testing the main propellant tanks as well as the CH4 header tank…

    Meanwhile, the Senate Lunch System core stage has yet to do a static fire, let alone, two static fires. SLS is supposed to do a static fire at the end of 2020 or in 2021.

    For fun, type “Senate Lunch System” in the DuckDuckGo search engine and see what the search engine’s algorithms will decide what “Senate Lunch System” refers to.

    • >For fun, type “Senate Lunch System” in the DuckDuckGo search engine and see what the search engine’s algorithms will decide what “Senate Lunch System” refers to.

      The first result was “Buy Senators” and I thought “There is even a webshop for that now?”, then it turned out to be an ad for Senator shoes. Otherwise same as Google for me.

  25. Mister Grumpus says:

    (Delete please. I’d forgotten that I got the link from @TheDividualist above.)

    • Starman says:

      Good post. It reveals a lot of urbanite faggots in our midst. During the debate on the Wu Flu between Andrew Anglin of DailyStormer vs Greg Cochran of Counter-Currents, I noticed that the hysterical urbanite Greg’s voice had a distinct NPR-style lisp. He sounded just like the fed shill Richard Spencer.

    • We are living in an era where nobody really knows shit, you hear a zillion different stupid ass opinions. The facts are. Something happened in Italy. Something seriously bad. To call it not a disease is preposterous. The complete lockdown might have been an overreaction but the names he mentions never advocated that. They just said it is real and serious. It was real and serious in Italy. It was real and serious in Spain. Very based people like Orban in Hungary took it very seriously. Now if you only look at America, you can say outside NY not that bad. But from a broader view, it was.

      • Mike says:

        @Dividualist That is the one thing about the whole Corona-saga that has stuck in my craw. Comintator and Jim have mostly convinced me of how overhyped it is/was, but if they are correct, why did non-Cathedral controlled countries like China, Russia, and Hungary do a lot of the same stuff we did? I can’t entirely agree with Corona being a Cathedral meme when people like Putin are taking it seriously.

        • Another thing I would like to ask is if the lockdown was harsher in the US than in the average European country? Because what I see here is that a lot of people are working from home, telecommuting, basically all of the office workers, and it is efficient enough. Kids get teleschooling. That is less so, but most of school is bullshit anyway. Grocery stores were open, just mask and distancing. People could go out to walk their dogs or any shit, just mask and distancing. Clothes and other stuff you buy on the Internet. Restaurants switched to takeaway mode. So my experience is not at all so dramatic like “shutting down the economy” or “martial law”. Definitely an economic setback but not that dramatic. The important stuff were still all working. I enjoyed not having to get up so early to get to the office at 9, just to sit down to my computer at 9. Was it more dramatic in the US? Because if not I do not really understand the big deal.

          • Besides from this Monday here in Austria they opened the fashion stores and all that, just mask and distancing and there are pics circulating showing an incredible long queue of women standing in queue in front of Louis Vutton. The economy will bounce back all right.

          • Pooch says:

            The big deal here, in the US, is 20% unemployment. That is approaching Great Depression levels.

    • Dave says:

      This virus is one sneaky fucker. In 96% of cases it’s just a cold, and in the other 4% it causes irreversible damage to multiple organs before you realize something’s wrong and go to the hospital. Too late for HCQ at that point.

      So if we end the lock-down, lots more old people will suffer horrible deaths. In today’s post-Christian morality, that’s the same as dragging Grandpa out into the street and shooting him in the head. My guess is that politicians will maintain the lock-down as best they can and young, healthy people will ignore it as best they can.

      • jim says:

        It appears that lockdown, as implemented in the west, had only marginal effect in bending the curve.

        With lockdown, the disease spreads by a factor of ten every eleven days when it reaches virgin ground, during the initial phase of exponential growth.

        Without lockdown, the disease spreads by a factor of ten every nine days when it reaches virgin ground.

        Deaths are largely iatrogenic. In the face of competent treatment (oxygen masks and hydroxychloroquine) its death rate is just another flu.

        Most deaths are caused by mistreatment, rather than directly by the virus itself. (ventilators and dangerous medical procedures, poorly and recklessly done)

        • Dave says:

          The difference in death rate between Sweden and its four neighbors is a bit more dramatic than that. Lockdowns do slow the spread; whether it’s worth the cost depends how much you value the lives of old people.

          I don’t see how HCQ helps unless you put it in the water supply; by the time people realize they need it, their O2 is at 60% and they’re basically the walking dead.

          • jim says:

            Hydroxychloroquine worked when Vladimir Zelenko used it. And sixty percent oxygen is not “walking dead”. It is time for an oxygen mask.

            • Dave says:

              Zelenko crushed COVID by (a) being self-employed, (b) doing his own research instead of waiting for the FDA/CDC to tell him what to do and (c) treating an entire community instead of atomized individuals, so he could catch cases early and give them HCQ.

              • The Cominator says:

                He also had to be Hasidic because normally doctors have a couple of patients who wants to denounce them or sue them for some reason but they need some kind of excuse and Cuomo banned HCQ off label. Hasidics cannot denounce each other to outside authorities without the rabbi’s okay though.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  So outside a “shame offensive” that maybe is still creeping along, is there anything Trump’s Few Feds can (and without help from Congress obviously) force New York State to let people get HCQ+ZN at home if they want it?

                  I think this is where Jim chimes in and chides me for being so cucky, and instead Trump should just “decree” it, with a good 120-second video song-and-dance on-screen and Twitter too, and just dare the governor to say “no”. (That about right Jim?)

                  Because this “War in HCQ” #CureGate situation is frankly scaring me in its effectiveness so far.

                • jim says:

                  We are seeing “scientific” studies proving hydroxychloroquine ineffective coming out, as I feared and expected.

                  Taking on the “scientific” priesthood cannot be done when Trump appears to be about to take out the FBI. You make war on one enemy at a time.

                  He has however already disempowered Nasa, the FDA and CDC. That is a good start. Nasa cannot stop Musk from landing a pile of people and a pile of equipment on the moon.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “We are seeing “scientific” studies proving hydroxychloroquine ineffective coming out, as I feared and expected.”

                  The VA propaganda study against HCQ was laughable.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  I’m definitely not “if Trump was smart like me” posting, that’s for sure.

                  So the plan now is to stomp on the FBI some, and then ride that power display across town to stomp on Cathedral Medicine some more?

                  The tenacity of this guy. Just incredible. I’ll have what he’s having.

          • jim says:

            Give me some stats indicating how much lockdown slows the spread. I gave you some stats. Eleven days for a factor of ten growth with lockdown, versus nine days for a factor of ten growth without lockdown.

            Pretty much entire world is now approaching herd immunity, because after rapid exponential growth during the initial phases everywhere, we are now seeing slow exponential decline everywhere. Not seeing that lockdown made much difference. All differences appear to be attributable to iatrogenic murder – thus in China, and in our highest death location, New York City, we are seeing horror tales of iatrogenic murder. High death rate appears to reflect murder, rather than low death rate reflecting lockdown.

            We don’t see a high death rate with lockdown and iatrogenic murder both absent. We see a high death rate with lockdown and iatrogenic murder both present. Absent iatrogenic murder, lockdown or no lockdown, no very large difference.

            New York is lockdown with murder, Australia is lockdown with Hydroxychloroquine and no murder, Sweden is no lockdown and no murder.

            How does that look to you?

            • Dave says:

              Norway, 217 deaths, 40.4 per million
              Finland, 255 deaths, 46.2 per million
              Denmark, 514 deaths, 88.5 per million
              Sweden, 3,040 deaths, 297 per million

              Herd immunity or something close to it exists in places like northern Italy and the NYC area where deaths surpass 1000 per million. In most places, doctors aren’t killing COVID patients because they don’t have any COVID patients. Hospitalizations and deaths are the tip of the infection iceberg, but where there is no tip, there is no iceberg.

              • jim says:

                Denmark has about the same number of confirmed cases per head of population as Sweden, and show the same pattern of rapid exponential rise, slow exponential fall. The difference in death rates is likely iatrogenic.

                If no herd immunity in Sweden, why are deaths now falling exponentially?

                And why considerably less than half the death rate of New York City?

                The pattern of deaths and new confirmed cases indicates that most places approaching herd immunity.

                Confirmed cases and deaths rise exponentially, at a rate around a factor of ten every ten days, and then they start falling exponentially, with a considerably slower exponential. Lockdown fails to explain this pattern. The death rate and new case rate rises regardless of lockdown, then it starts falling, though the lockdown has not changed. That looks mighty like herd immunity.

                We also see that some countries, quite a lot of countries, have about 0.1% death per confirmed case or less. Both of these are inconsistent with the proposition that only lockdown is holding back a river of death.

                • Dave says:

                  So Denmark has good doctors and Sweden does not. Who knew?

                  People who are effectively isolated at home, like my dad, are no longer part of the herd. Thus you may see a chart and say “that looks like herd immunity”, and it is, but the herd is a lot smaller than you think, consisting only of people who can’t isolate themselves, or refuse to.

                  Herd immunity goes away when large numbers of uninfected people decide it’s safe to re-join the herd, or the government forces them to by cutting off their unemployment benefits.

                • jim says:

                  By and large, diseases of this type generally spread through schools, public transport, and hospitals – wherever random people are crowded together. Lockdown generally failed to shutdown public transport. The biggie is re-opening schools. Schools recently reopened in Australia. Cases increased, but it just looks like a minor bump in the slow but exponential decline in the disease that is occurring everywhere.

                  If your schools and public transport are open, grandpa hiding in his basement or coming out of the basement is not going to make dent in the exponential trend. Stays in, goes out, there will be exponentially less cases to infect him.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              The parallels with various other holocausts are amazing. Just following orders. Sorry it didn’t work out. We did the best we could, you know?

          • The Cominator says:

            Statements speaking unironically talking about the good of lockdowns should be treated about the same as statements that refer to the efficiency of Marxist economics the positive effects of feminism and the peacefulness of Islam.

            Ie its an obvious evil lie from either from the enemy or from a deluded madman.

            • Pooch says:

              Global warming seems more analogous. Agree though.

            • Dave says:

              The lockdown is working at preventing infections, but it’s also preventing herd immunity outside the places that already got hit hard, so what’s the end game? I planned to lock myself in until this thing burned itself out, but then everyone else got the same idea.

              Even if politicians all agree to end the lockdown tomorrow, non-essential businesses are still boned because people stay away. When Georgia told businesses they could re-open, one axe-throwing alley had a grand total of two customers all weekend.

              • BC says:

                Economic activity is going to be low until people know it’s safe. I don’t play to return to the gym for the first month.

              • The Cominator says:

                “Even if politicians all agree to end the lockdown tomorrow, non-essential businesses are still boned because people stay away. When Georgia told businesses they could re-open, one axe-throwing alley had a grand total of two customers all weekend.”

                Not what I’ve heard sounds like enemy propaganda. I’m pretty sure I had it in January anyway.

          • Fred says:

            Lockdowns do slow the spread; whether it’s worth the cost depends how much you value the lives of old people.

            “Slowing the spread” is not the same thing as decreasing the number of excess deaths (which lockdowns increase, anyway).

            • BC says:

              Slowing the spread isn’t even useful. The longer we draw it out, the more likely the elderly will stop caring and just head out and get infected. You want Pandemics over a quickly as possible.

  26. The Cominator says:

    1st step is getting the cost per pound to send stuff into space way down… we probably need some kind of technology beyond mere rocketry.

    Some sort of antigravity technology if possible? Space elevator if possible?

    • Starman says:

      @Cominator

      Reusable rocketships are good enough.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Well, we can at least say that actually-reusable chemical rockets are so much better than anything we have now that we’d might as well busy ourselves metabolizing those opportunities before inevitably moving on at some later lifetime from sail power to steam engines.

    • Jan Martense says:

      1st step is getting the cost per pound to send stuff into space way down… we probably need some kind of technology beyond mere rocketry.

      Jules Verne had the correct idea all the way back in 1865:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon

      Of course gunpowder is infeasible, but with the Most Sublime Epiphany of the atomic bomb, an explosive-powered spacecraft would be extremely effective. This is known as “nuclear pulse propulsion” and basically involves a series of small atomic charges that propel the craft forward as they explode. It would allow spacecraft of almost unlimited scalability, to be put into space far more cheaply than with chemical fuels (by cutting fuel weight drastically).

      This isn’t nerd-larping: there was a very serious and substantial US government research project on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion). It was only shut down after the radioactivity moral panic led to the Partial Test Ban Treaty. But more recent advances in fusion-based explosives can drastically reduce fallout.

      Even if people are (irrationally) squeamish about being nuked into space, it could at least be used for materials, which is 95% of the battle.

      • The Cominator says:

        Yes I know about Project Orion. As long as the fallout can be kept down to an acceptable level its the right idea with existing technology. Since constructing a space elevator (theoretically it can be done with nanotubes but in practice can’t reliably make a flawless nanotube cable that long or 1/10000th that long yet) and antigravity is beyond our capabilities at the current time.

        “Even if people are (irrationally) squeamish about being nuked into space, it could at least be used for materials, which is 95% of the battle.”

        May not just be squeamishness, Probably need to dampen the acceleration with people or it might kill them but yes good with materials, now we need to just start producing high end nuclear materials reliably again something that we can’t seem to do with Tritium anymore…

        • And as long as uranium ore is not an easily exhaustible resource. There are all kinds of ideas from breeder reactors to getting it out seawater, but as long as the relatively cheaply minable stuff seems limited, I would rather use them to generate electricity.

          And it is not elegant the same way a cannon is less elegant than a Maverick missile. To shoot something in the targets general direction and not be able to (easily) correct its trajectory later, eh.

          • Jan Martense says:

            And it is not elegant the same way a cannon is less elegant than a Maverick missile. To shoot something in the targets general direction and not be able to (easily) correct its trajectory later, eh.

            Yeah, it couldn’t be used exclusively. The idea is to get huge amounts of materials, including conventional fuel, into high Earth orbit. Once there the energy requirements for escape velocity become minimal, and more precise journeys would be very easy.

            Essentially it would work like the space elevator might, getting lots of stuff to an orbital staging area.

            …but as long as the relatively cheaply minable stuff seems limited, I would rather use them to generate electricity.

            The nice thing about nuclear charges is that, unlike with reactors, we have fusion technology as opposed to just fission. This also largely solves the radiation problem.

            • Dave says:

              As I understand it, nuclear bombs derive all their energy from fission alone. Fusion just adds a burst of fast neutrons to get a higher percentage of the fuel to undergo fission.

              If I’m wrong about this, you could build an arbitrarily large fusion bomb with a fixed amount of fission fuel.

              • jim says:

                Yes, our existing bombs are fission-fusion-fission. They have the huge advantage that the neutrons from hydrogen fusion very efficiently fission depleted uranium. So they are all dirty. But there is no need for them to use that final stage – they could use a lead damper, instead of a depleted uranium damper. But if we are detonating a bomb in anger, we are unlikely to care much about radioactivity.

                Thing is, you need something to contain the heat from the fission trigger, so that the fusion goes off. And the best container is depleted uranium, which then itself is fissioned.

                • Dave says:

                  Looks like you’re right. Only the first stage requires fission, so fusion scales up without limit:

                  “Tsar Bomba could have theoretically yielded as much as 100 megatons, but it would have resulted in a dangerous level of nuclear fallout (approximately 25% of all fallout produced since the invention of nuclear weapons in 1945). Additionally, the delivery plane would not have had sufficient time to retreat to a safe distance. Therefore, to minimize nuclear fallout, the third stage incorporated a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper. It has been speculated that the second stage used this method as well.

                  “The uranium-238 fusion tamper greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction. Because fast fissioning was eliminated, thermonuclear fusion accounted for as much as 97% of the yield. Thus, despite its huge yield, Tsar Bomba did not actually generate much nuclear fallout.”

      • Starman says:

        @Jan Martense

        ” It would allow spacecraft of almost unlimited scalability, to be put into space far more cheaply than with chemical fuels (by cutting fuel weight drastically).”

        Nuclear bomb unit based fuel/propellant isn’t cheaper than a Raptor (methalox fuel propellant). The pulse units would be $8 million per unit. Meanwhile, LOX is mostly free and combined with CH4, the cost is $900k for Starship/Superheavy.

        Still, the nuclear bomb pulse design would make for a very badass battle satellite for the Holy Martian Emperor’s Battle Constellation.

        • JanMartense says:

          For small spacecraft (e.g. the size that we are currently launching) you are totally correct, chemical fuel is cheaper. The advantage of pulse propulsion is the scalability; the marginal cost of doubling the power of a pulse unit is basically zero. As wiki puts it:

          The expense of the fissionable materials required was thought to be high, until the physicist Ted Taylor showed that with the right designs for explosives, the amount of fissionables used on launch was close to constant for every size of Orion from 2,000 tons to 8,000,000 tons.

          So you could put loads tens of thousands of times heavier than our current capacity into space at pretty much the same price.

          • Starman says:

            @JanMartense

            Starship is not a small spacecraft, it’s a 100 passenger vehicle.
            A nuclear pulse rocketship combines the ability of Starship/Superheavy to lift off from a planet with dV closer to that of a nuclear electric VASIMR rocketship. That is it’s primary advantage.

            -A chemical rocketship using CH4 LOX has an ISP of 330sec SL and 380sec Vac.
            -A nuclear electric VASIMR rocketship has an ISP of 30,000sec but is very low thrust and can operate in space only.
            -A nuclear pulse rocketship has an ISP of 2,000 sec at 10m diameter and 10,000 sec at 41m diameter.

            The price of military reactor fuel cells is $8 million per cell. It’s much less for civilian reactor fuel cells but those have low U235 enrichment, so they cannot be made into nuclear bombs for nuclear pulse rocketships. I suspect that if we can still make nuclear bomb pulse units, that they will be much more expensive than $8 million each. Nuclear bomb geometry is considerably more difficult than nuclear reactor geometry.

            The proposed Orion nuclear pulse rocketship was 41m in diameter with 2,000 pulse units at 40% fuel/propellant mass fraction. It has a dV of 50 km/sec, therefore it was capable of multiple interplanetary trips without refueling. dV for Earth surface to LEO is 8km/sec. 320 pulse units to go to LEO, assuming all pulse units were equal (the actual design for Orion used much of the 2,000 pulse units in a lower energy configuration for Earth atmosphere propulsion – 800 units – and the rest were used for higher energy configuration – up to 20 kilotons per unit – for in-space propulsion).

            Orion nuclear pulse ship would cost $2.56 billion to launch 1,600mT to LEO with 320 pulse units. $6.4 billion to launch to LEO with 800 pulse units. This doesn’t include maintenance and launch preparation costs. What’s launch mount preparation and maintenance costs for nuclear bomb explosions?

            Starship would cost $2 million ($900k for the LOX CH4) to launch 150mT to LEO. That’s $21.4 million for Starship to lift the same mass to LEO as the Orion nuclear pulse rocketship. If you’re not using the VASIMR interplanetary rocketship, the refueling of these Starships to send that same mass from Earth to Mars/Titan would cost $128.4 million. Even without the nuclear VASIMR for interplanetary travel, the reusable chemical rocketship is 50 times less expensive than nuclear pulse rocketship.

            $21 million vs $6,400 million, the nuclear pulse rocketship costs 305 times more than a reusable chemical rocketship. Starship/Superheavy can lift 305 times more mass to LEO than an Orion nuclear pulse rocketship for the same cost, 50 times more for interplanetary travel. It’s more probable that Starship can lift 4,000 times more mass to LEO than Orion if nuclear-bomb-explosion-on-launch-mount costs were included.

            Thus, Orion nuclear pulse rocketships are great for the Martian Imperial Battle Constellation, but shitty for commercial passenger space travel.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              @R7:
              “The price of military reactor fuel cells is $8 million per cell.”

              Hang on. I agree with your conclusions at the gut level anyway (as if that proves anything), but let’s be honest and see where it goes:

              Just one single Orion Machine would entail a huge market for nuclear bandolier belts of these nuclear blaster balls. So given the automation and automated QA that would have to result, are you still sure they’d still cost $8M each? Are you sure?

              Is your $8M figure “floored” by some unscalable factor that’s impervious to scale? What could that unscalable factor be?

              • Starman says:

                @Mister Grumpus

                “Just one single Orion Machine would entail a huge market for nuclear bandolier belts of these nuclear blaster balls. So given the automation and automated QA that would have to result, are you still sure they’d still cost $8M each? Are you sure?”

                Nuclear bombs are harder to make than nuclear fuel cells. A backyard reactor can be made if there is critical mass. There are no backyard nuclear bombs. If there were, Harvard would be a mere city-state and nobody would be listening or obeying the Cathedral at all.

              • Starman says:

                @Mister Grumpus
                It’s kinda suspicious that you’re asking for minute details on nuclear bombs and nuclear fuel cells.

                Here’s the first security question:
                Who’s Winnie the Pooh?
                Does Xi Jinping look like Winnie the Pooh?

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  Nigga please! But OK. Winnie the Poo is a derogatory stand-in for President Xi, and yes they do resemble each other somewhat.

      • Shoot em into space using chemical rockets, and then get them from earth orbit to where they need to go by setting off nukes behind your ship. Can decelerate by shooting off a nuke in front of your ship.

        • jim says:

          A nuke based rocket is going to be big, hence hard to put into orbit without actually using its nukes – quite a lot of nukes, releasing quite a lot of radiation. I am hoping helium three based fusion for power and space transport, but to get really enormous amounts helium three, going to have to build cities in the clouds of Uranus. There is enough on the moon for power, but to go interstellar and fast interplanetary, we will need a great deal.

  27. Oog en Hand says:

    “Elon Musk does not get laid”

    SRSLY

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimes_(musician)

    Boucher was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.[11] She is of French, Italian, Métis, and Ukrainian descent.[12][13][14][15] She was raised Roman Catholic, and attended Catholic school.[16] Her mother is Sandy Garossino, former Crown prosecutor and arts advocate;[17] her father, a former banker, works “in the business side of biotech”.[18][19] In 2006, Boucher relocated from Vancouver to Montreal to attend McGill University as a double major in neuroscience and Russian language, but left the school in early 2011 before finishing her degree.[20][21]

    • > While both Boucher and Musk have stated the child is named “X Æ A-12”

      Nerds never change, do they.

      • Starman says:

        @TheDividualist

        Prophet Elon Musk has fathered more sons than you did.

      • … lending credence to the idea that at the root, all our rational ideas come from an aesthetic. https://americanmind.org/features/the-deep-state-vs-the-deep-right/

        I am buying into that really hard. It is said that Reason is the slave of passion. It is more correct to say it is the slave of an aesthetic judgement. If we would only think about facts and not use value judgements we could never ever make a damn decision. And those value judgements come from an at least semi-visual aesthetic vision.

        For example, Jon Haidt found something that was of course obvious to every thinking man anyway but he “found” it that Left and Right have a very different attitude to the past. The Right is nostalgic, the Left hates the past.

        Which past? Which period? Which country are we even talking about? Does not matter. Say the word “past” and the Left has a semi-visual idea of slaves in chains and starving peasants. And the Right, well, I am not sure what in the US they do, but I in Europe have a semi-visual idea of knights and hussars, the glorius capitalist economic phase of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCnderzeit , or suchlike.

        • Mister Grumpus says:

          It’s Jim’s “Words are stronger than bombs, and fashions are stronger than words”, but fleshed out into Curtis-speak. Thank you.

          • alf says:

            *cough*MoldbugunderstandsthisbetterthanJimthough*cough*

            • alf says:

              To become fashionable, have to give people a role that is fun to play. Moldbug understands this, which is why he backs BAP so hard. BAP roleplays mighty warrior aestheticism – he is a little bit cringe and gay, but still cool enough for people to roleplay BAP fashion. Moreso, you roleplay BAP, you can also roleplay Moldbug’s ideas, and the thing becomes a network of cool memes. that is how fashion steamrolls.

              Jim on the other hand tells everyone in blue state to become a Christian. Mic drop, walk away. Everyone in blue state blinks, gets on with their life. They won’t roleplay being Christians, so the idea dies.

              • jim says:

                They roleplay being disgusted with “pedophiles” and role play being fine with gay couples adopting children.

                Back when the Anglican Church was where the power was, I am sure that ninety five percent of the parishioners were roleplaying Christianity, but were as unaware that they were role playing as those supposedly outraged by pedophiles are.

                • Karl says:

                  Sure it is all mostly role playing, but people don’t start playing merely because they are being told. They want to play cool, fashionable, high status roles.

                  If playing a role doesn’t help a man getting laid or promoted, he won’t play that role.

                • jim says:

                  When the Anglican Church was in power, role playing Anglicanism was cool, fashionable, and high status.

                  Now progressivism is in power, and role playing progressivism will at best result in a dark age and our people dying out, at worst result in war, civil war, and democide. So something different has to come to power.

                • alf says:

                  They roleplay being disgusted with “pedophiles” and role play being fine with gay couples adopting children.

                  That is something you highlight in order to assert moral dominance. Sure, but for them, only a tiny part.

                  The BAP roleplay is flexing on twitter with your physique, making funny esoteric comments, wearing flamboyant clothing and eating fancy food. It’s good roleplay.

                • Atavistic Morality says:

                  It’s good roleplay if you like French faggotry.

                  Here in Spain and I know for a fact in Italy or Germany it’s not going to be well received in general, we aren’t French faggots and we don’t like French faggotry. And I doubt Nordics are going to go along either, based on my 2 years of life experience in Denmark and Sweden.

                  I very much prefer and sympathize with Anglo-saxon sobriety George Washington style, Jim style. Not even Benjamin Franklin would suffer this degree of French faggotry, it’s too much.

                • polifugue says:

                  >Everyone in blue state blinks, gets on with their life. They won’t roleplay being Christians

                  Christianity never converted more than 10 percent of the Roman Empire until Constantine’s ascension and death. Arguably, Christians made up 5 percent of the Empire during his ascension. Thus, even though Christianity had roughly three hundred years of history behind it, Christianity was always a fringe religion in the Roman Empire until Constantine took power.

                  In fact, Constantine was arguably not the most important of the emperors. Theodosius the Great, the last emperor to rule both halves of the Roman Empire, gave Christianity carte blanche to be violent, presided over the destruction of the pagan temples, dissolved the Vestal Virgins, crushed Arianism and the Encratites, among other things. He ordered a swift end to the riot of Thessalonica, in which a degenerate pagan populace killed the local governor for executing a prominent charioteer for buggery. As a result, Europe forgot the gay until recently.

                  Thus, while most blue-state progs won’t find Christianity cool right now, it’s completely irrelevant. The vast majority of people found Christians being fed to the lions uncool, and the vast majority of people found Christianity in general uncool until Christians started executing them for deviant behavior. BAP is “cool“ because it is politically correct to LARP as a nudist bodybuilder, but BAP doesn’t answer the question “why” or provide a system to replace Progressivism, which Christianity does.

                  People are more malleable than one would think because they respond to authority. If the Cathedral told everyone to drink their own piss because “scientific studies” showed that it was healthy and could save the environment, people would drink their own piss, even smart progressives. I remember a history teacher in 10th grade gave the class grasshoppers to eat, and she genuinely believed that eating grasshoppers was diverse and “cultured.”

                • The Cominator says:

                  Theodosius the so called great was an awful terrible Emperor and mostly a puppet of the priest Ambrose. He invited in barbarians en masse, his letting the christian fanatics run rampant alienated huge swathes of the population (including lots of Christians who did not agree with Ambrose of Milan theologically). Thessalonica was the only thing I kind of approve of, but the puppet of Ambrose did penance for that lol.

                • alf says:

                  Thus, while most blue-state progs won’t find Christianity cool right now, it’s completely irrelevant.

                  Nuts.

                  Christianity at the time of Constatine’s ascension was hip and upcoming. A big minority actively practiced, an even bigger minority was actively interested.

                  Christianity nowadays is a walking anachronistic corpse. Leave Jesus alone.

                  If the Cathedral told everyone to drink their own piss because “scientific studies” showed that it was healthy and could save the environment, people would drink their own piss, even smart progressives.

                  Again with this black pill shit. This is observably false, see Progs complaining how nobody is eating bugs. You’re just saying stuff uncool nerds tell themselves to justify their hatred of society.

                • jim says:

                  Christians under rule by pagan Rome faced all the issues you talk about, which is why they were an insignificant and rightly ridiculed minority. In power, they dealt with them, and continued to deal with them. They are considerably less fatal than the problems of progressivism, which denies men sex and families.

                  It is easy to dismiss the problems of the Incarnation with the formula “Wholly man and wholly God”, easy to dismiss the problems of Trinity with “God is three and God is one” It is mighty hard to have no woman that is your own.

                  Christianity tells men “Don’t think about those other worldly issues which are beyond mortal comprehension”. Progressivism tells men “You cannot possess your women nor your children”

                  Christianity always had the problems you talk about. This is an old problem with an old solution, that worked.

                  Christian Kings succeeded, because Christians were more successful than pagans in cooperating. Christianity was never cool and never popular until it was in power.

                  How did England come to be Christian? Not because Christianity was cool and converted lots of people, but rather became Christian in the process of becoming England, because Kings organizing on the basis of Christian identity were successful in gaining power. King Alfred’s armed and dangerous bishops, like Charles the Hammer’s armed and dangerous Bishops, were Alfred’s thought control apparatus and political propaganda apparatus, were his secret police.

                  Hard to see Christianity is uncool when the Bishop has a big hammer.

                  The trouble with a thought control apparatus and political police is: How do you know it is loyal?

                  It has to be self policing. It has to have a faith. So, baptism and all that. There is no alternative. You have no alternative, any more than King Alfred did. You are banging on the absurdities of Christianity. People have been banging on the absurdities of Christianity for two thousand years.

                  Alfred and his sons made England one, through the same mixture of violence and persuasion that the Cathedral is using to export progressivism. That is how Christianity spread. Cool has nothing to do with it. The Church was Alfred’s bureaucrats, universities, and mass media.

                  Christianity succeeded because Kings who used the Christian faith as their organizing principle secured better levels of cooperation than Kings that used some other faith as their organizing principle.

                  Any state religion has to have a compelling argument as to why its elite should cooperate. Christianity works. I see it working in my life on a smaller scale. It is easy to generate belief in cooperation if you verbalize it as shared tribal membership of a tribe whose ultimate alpha male commands his people to cooperative behavior.

                  If you have some other faith, and you want a cooperate/cooperate relationship with someone, how are you going to verbalize it? We are fellow white males? Does not work, because white is wolf to white.

                  We are fellow followers of Odin? But in Valhalla, the followers of Odin are always killing each other, to be promptly resurrected. Fellow progressives? – but progressives are all guilty of unforgivable original sin, all being racist and sexist, and in an endless race to prove that the other progressive is even more racist and sexist.

                  Works for me. It will work for the state thought control apparatus and secret police. Cool does not matter. Cooperation matters. The elite that cooperates will rule the elite that fails to cooperate.

                • alf says:

                  Christianity always had the problems you talk about. This is an old problem with an old solution, that worked.

                  I don’t buy this. Has the world not changed? Have we not had a scientific revolution, an information revolution, an industrial revolution? History rhymes, but is not frozen in time.

                  It is a new problem, and exactly because it is a new problem, Christians have been unable to solve it.

                • jim says:

                  Smart, educated elites have always been cynical about miracles. As for science, it is no more, and when science lived, it got on fine with Christianity. Nothing has changed. These are old problems with old solutions.

                  Old Earth is no more a crisis for Christianity than heliocentricity was. Saint Augustine suspected an Old Earth, and told Christians not to hammer their banner to young earth, lest science shoot them down. And that was long before science was influential, and long before the evidence on the age of the earth was widely known. And science is no longer influential, as demonstrated by the holy faith of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change, or whatever they are calling it now. If they can get away with a Global Warming Crisis, we could get away with a flat earth six thousand years old. If we wanted people to believe a flat earth six thousand years old, we would just tell them that none of the evidence for an ancient spherical earth has survived peer review. Much as none of the evidence for racial differences has survived peer review.

                  The Incarnation, the resurrection, and the Trinity, now those were crises, are crises, and they are very old crises. Your objection to Christianity is just the very old debate about the nature of the incarnation. Well, it matters infinitely and it does not matter at all, and the Christian answer to the question is “Shut up”. Which answer works fine if King Alfred’s Bishops have big hammers, and if it is no longer working, it is because the thought police are now progressives.

                  Christianity was never cool. It was, however, successful at keeping the peace within ancient bureaucracies, and the ancient equivalent of universities and mass media.

                • alf says:

                  Oh you have added more, so I will add some more ^_^

                  I guess you are free to believe what you want to believe, as am I, and time will tell who was right.

                  All I can say is that I cannot larp being Christian with a straight face. Because the miracles, because the anachronisms, because frankly I find it time for something new. If Jesus had said the Old Testament worked just fine and they had to return to the ‘real’ Old Testament, I would’ve told him the exact same thing.

                  I believe many more people, especially priest-type people, share this sentiment, hence my disbelief that Christianity will make a comeback.

                  Perhaps things will play out such that emperor Trump sees no choice but to reinstate Christianity. But that’ll be for other people than me.

                • alf says:

                  Smart, educated elites have always been cynical about miracles.

                  But Jesus’ story spoke to them, nonetheless. Does not speak to me.

                  I think a thousand years ago it would’ve spoken to me. But today – no.

                • Pooch says:

                  The one thing I will say, in defense of miracles, is that anecdotally the most well behaved black people I’ve met were practicing Christians who fully believed in the miracles. Old style Christianity, as Jim proposes, may have the potential to be a unifying force across racial boundaries.

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  “It is a new problem, and exactly because it is a new problem, Christians have been unable to solve it.”

                  What novelty is there compared to, say, De Rerum Natura? (Written around 100AD, I believe.)

                • Starman says:

                  @Alf
                  Ye doubt the existence of thine miracles?

                  Do ye not see thine divine intervention?

                • polifugue says:

                  My point is people believe whatever the elite tell them as long as it is considered high status; if we look at the Carthaginians, Aztecs and Canaanites, people did sacrifice their kids to Moloch regularly, even the high elite of society. Of course, most elites will complain of the lack of human sacrifices and don’t partake in them, but from my experience a small minority of leftists do eat bugs, and if the Cathedral declared that ritual prostitution of daughters was holy progs would send their daughters for ritual prostitution, even at the expense of their genetic extinction.

                  Theodosius I is a saint in the Orthodox Church. Yes, he let in the goths, but the fall of Rome was already set in stone through centuries of fertility collapse. In the event of a restoration, the only significant change will be that men will be able to legally own women and pass their fitness tests. The idea that we’re going to get Red Empire to round up all the females for auction is LARPing; we’re rebuilding a Christianity nearly extinct, not restoring a surviving 18th century Anglicanism. Unless we go full Cominator, Leftists will continue to self-suicide. The Puritans after Charles II still had a semblance of morality by virtue of reproducing at all, even if feminism was lying in wait. Progressives have nothing of the sort.

                  Belief in miracles is the conclusion of Christian starting points. If I presume that Christ is the Logos, of which the particulars, called Logoi are understood, then miracles must be true on the basis that if God is the starting point to wisdom then any historical event written down by the church is validated by being from God himself. It doesn’t matter what “science” or “naturalism” says because if God is the origin of wisdom then miracles come before science. In other words, since we only know that science is true because we have a personal connection to the Logos, we cannot reason from the natural world that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead.

                  Debate on the origin of logic itself:
                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHXN3ZmgwIg

                  If we presume that science and naturalism are the basis by which we analyze the world, then miracles are impossible. If we understand that “science,” like “consciousness” is not reducible to matter, the fundamental difference between the “is” of identity and the “is” of predication, then we are forced to assume that there is a Logos by which all truth comes from.

                • yewotm8 says:

                  A population of young women who just two months ago thought that going out to trendy bars and restaurants was the height of popularity now think that staying inside their homes is the absolute coolest thing a person can do. They would have thought themselves losers for not leaving the house before, now they think themselves losers if they do leave.

                  I’m seeing this right now before my own eyes, and that’s enough for me to believe Jim is correct. People just believe what they are told.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “Theodosius I is a saint in the Orthodox Church. Yes, he let in the goths”

                  There is no but and no defense for that. He let in the barbarians en masse not just the Goths without breaking them up disarming them or anything…

                  He was a horrible traitor and hes another one whos sainthood has to go along with Jerome.

                  The only reason the Eastern Empire survived was because the Emperor Marcian (who SHOULD have the title the great) reversed all of his policies.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “I’m seeing this right now before my own eyes, and that’s enough for me to believe Jim is correct. People just believe what they are told.”

                  We already saw this with gay marriage… it was like someone flicked a switch one night and opposing gay marriage was almost like unironically supporting the holocaust. But some people are more NPC than others… and there are even some women who are slightly less NPC than other women.

                  Secretly most women can’t stand this no matter what they say and if there is any positive effect of these lockdowns its that some of the women (even the normally ultra pozzed single women) who can’t stand this situatio are not going along with the virtue signalling on this one and are breaking towards the political right openly on facebook…

                • BC says:

                  “I’m seeing this right now before my own eyes, and that’s enough for me to believe Jim is correct. People just believe what they are told.”

                  People believe what religious authorities tell them to believe. That’s the whole basis of civilization, cooperation through priestly influence and control. That’s why when the first king overthrew the priesthood in Sumer, the earliest civilization he installed his daughter as high priestess. He knew he could not rule without religion backing him up.

                  Have you ever read the book snow crash? The idea of control via religious memes pops up there. I thought it was crazy at the time, but as it turns out Stephenson was pretty close to the truth.

                • alf says:

                  What novelty is there compared to, say, De Rerum Natura? (Written around 100AD, I believe.)

                  Airplanes, cars, combustion engine, electricity, microchips, space travel, joint venture capitalism, guns, antibiotics, smartphones, computers, mass manufacturing, atomic weapons, satellites, sterile surgery, DNA analysis, genetic manipulation, skyscraper architecture, cameras, space rods, fusion bombs, surveillance states, global governments, +5000% increase in population, and do remind me how we are communicating right here right now again.

                • alf says:

                  Starman says:

                  @Alf
                  Ye doubt the existence of thine miracles?

                  Do ye not see thine divine intervention?

                  These miracles I can get behind. It’s the other ones I take issue with.

                  Polifugue says:

                  Belief in miracles is the conclusion of Christian starting points. If I presume that Christ is the Logos, of which the particulars, called Logoi are understood, then miracles must be true on the basis that if God is the starting point to wisdom then any historical event written down by the church is validated by being from God himself.

                  That is a perfectly fine interpretation. And Jim allows for that interpretation, while he does not allow for you to ram it down other people’s throats. So that’s good.

                  But for me the whole debate is done. It’s not that we can’t have the debate, it’s that I find the debate settled, that it is completely obvious that Jesus did not come back to life after he was killed and I am just not interested in pretending he was, no matter what the supposed reward is.

                • BC says:

                  @Alf

                  Airplanes, cars, combustion engine, electricity, microchips, space travel, joint venture capitalism, guns, antibiotics, smartphones, computers, mass manufacturing, atomic weapons, satellites, sterile surgery, DNA analysis, genetic manipulation, skyscraper architecture, cameras, space rods, fusion bombs, surveillance states, global governments, +5000% increase in population, and do remind me how we are communicating right here right now again.

                  I wish this shit changed things. I’m arguing with people right now who watched a video of a black criminal fighting with a guy for his shot gun who then got shot for his trouble and they’re calling it lynching of an innocent jogger.

                  The camera video doesn’t have an impact at all in what they’re seeing. People are mass hallucinating despite Camera evidence to the contrary. Pointing out the Camera isn’t showing them what they’re seeing just angers them and they double down on the hallucination.

                  We haven’t evolved that much.

                • jim says:

                  > I’m arguing with people right now who watched a video of a black criminal fighting with a guy for his shot gun who then got shot for his trouble and they’re calling it lynching of an innocent jogger.

                  > The camera video doesn’t have an impact at all in what they’re seeing. People are mass hallucinating despite Camera evidence to the contrary. Pointing out the Camera isn’t showing them what they’re seeing just angers them and they double down on the hallucination.

                  When a progressive calls him a jogger, the progressive does not mean that he was not a burglar, the progressive means that burgling is OK, and blacks should not be arrested for burgling, at least not while they are outside the house. When the progressive says he was attacked rather than attacking, the means that whites are not allowed to fight back when attacked.

                  You should understand his meaning, respond to what he meant, not what he said, and refuse to use his inappropriate words. You should translate his newspeak words to English in your head, and reply as if he had spoken in English.

                  Progressive arguments tend to be unresponsive and crazy. In the case of the poor innocent black jogger murdered by evil white racists who did not like him jogging, the poor innocent black jogger was videoed burgling, then we have video of three white men, some of them armed, attempting to arrest him for that burglary, and video of him assaulting an armed white man in an attempt to take that gun away from him.

                  And similarly, the George Zimmerman case we had overwhelming circumstantial evidence backing up George Zimmerman’s testimony that he had been attacked by a black burglar after accosting him.

                  In the George Zimmerman case progressives purported to be arguing that George Zimmerman attacked innocent sweet cherubic honors student Trayvon Martin, but the big tell was that their arguments for their supposed narrative did not actually support their supposed narrative. They were arguments for the narrative that George Zimmerman provoked Trayvon Martin, that Trayvon Martin was entitled to beat up George Zimmerman, that black people have a right to burgle and beat up white people without being resisted, not arguments for the purported narrative.

                  And similarly, the purported narrative for Ahmaud Aubry is that he was an innocent peaceful blogger, but the actual arguments presented are arguments for the narrative that blacks are entitled to burgle whites without being arrested, and to attack whites without being shot.

                  So, to defeat a progressive, you have to ignore his purported narrative, and call out his actual narrative. You have to hold your frame, that the facts of the matter are indisputable, and also hold the frame that the progressive is not disputing the facts. Don’t even acknowledge his purported narrative, attack his actual narrative.

                  The actual narrative is that whites are second class citizens, that just as an aristocrat could beat a peasant, but a peasant could not beat an aristocrat, a black can beat a white, but a white cannot beat or even behave disrespectfully to a black.

                • alf says:

                  I’m arguing with people right now who watched a video of a black criminal fighting with a guy for his shot gun who then got shot for his trouble and they’re calling it lynching of an innocent jogger.

                  The point was never to convince your enemies, the point is to humiliate them in front of an audience. I hope you are having this argument in public, so the audience can see the video and decide for themselves what their eyes are telling them.

                • BC says:

                  The people I’m arguing with are my less rightwing allies. They’re all hallucinating it because everyone is saying the same thing the priests are saying besides me.

                • @jim

                  >Hard to see Christianity is uncool when the Bishop has a big hammer.

                  I have been thinking along those lines that why is status (or cool) is such an elusivem, hard to define thing, so hard to see where it comes from and one very handy way to look at it would be approval from Power. And in those times this approval was clear and obvious.

                  While for example, let’s take 1960’s counter-culture. It was surely supported some above in some way. But the way it was done is not very transparent and likely required many steps.

                  I mean, like, take any band like the Rolling Stones. How many steps of approval have been between Washington and them? Likely many and not very open ones. Hence it is not quite understood how it happened. No Pentagon (or Brit) military general stood and handed Mick Jagger a big hammer. It had to be something roundabout, involving universities and all that. Hence today status seems elusive and hard to understand.

                • alf says:

                  The people I’m arguing with are my less rightwing allies. They’re all hallucinating it because everyone is saying the same thing the priests are saying besides me.

                  Don’t sound like rightwing allies to me.

                  I have less rightwing allies, but pretty sure if I’d show them a video of a black man engaging in criminal behavior, as is typical for black men, they’d recognize it as a video of a black man engaging in criminal behavior.

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  Chuckle, what shall we call this, shopping materialism? Philosophy and religion is all different now because we have CARS and SMARTPHONES and PENICILLIN. And you even forgot to list TV.

                • alf says:

                  Chuckle, what shall we call this, shopping materialism? Philosophy and religion is all different now because we have CARS and SMARTPHONES and PENICILLIN. And you even forgot to list TV.

                  idiot.

                • jim says:

                  If that is not your argument, you need to clarify.

                  What is the difference?

                  Science? Science was high status when Anglicanism was high status. Now science is low status. When Christianity died, science died soon after. If no such thing as truth, no such thing as science.

                  Materialism? Materialism as an explicit doctrine is two millennia old.

                  And you do keep mentioning smartphones.

                • alf says:

                  For one, there is the obvious implication that evolution changes men over the course of centuries, millenia – mankind is not static. But even though evolution has always been cryptonite to Christians, let us for now forego that argument – 2000 years after all is not that long.

                  The killer argument is the observation that things are different. Many things are the same, obviously, like gender dynamics, but too many things have changed for people to claim nothing have changed.

                  I’ll present as my poster boy this. This thing right here. This conversation we’re having right now, online, visible for everyone in the world to see with a computer and an internet connection. It is new and fabulous, and it needs to be incorporated in any religion that wants to be successful.

                  Christianity was never cool.

                  Just caught this quote. Absolute nuts! Every single beautiful building in Europe is a testament to the coolness of Christianity.

                • jim says:

                  I’ll present as my poster boy this. This thing right here. This conversation we’re having right now, online, visible for everyone in the world to see with a computer and an internet connection. It is new and fabulous, and it needs to be incorporated in any religion that wants to be successful.

                  You have an incomplete point. For Alfred the Great, the mass media was to assemble a bunch of people and talk to them, for which he needed preachers. And assembling a bunch of people and giving them a lecture that was the core of Church activity and practice. That and the seminaries, which became the universities. Which apparatus created England, and in the process, necessarily a Christian England.

                  Alfred the great believed he was appointed King by God, to, among other things, bring peace. So, easier for him to make bargains, because the people doing deals with him believed that he believed. So the sermon and the seminary were his instrument as much as the sword and the shield.

                  The trailer for “Assassin’s creed Valhalla” depicts Alfred with a pen in his hand, and the Viking with a sword in his hand, which is how it worked out. The pen did indeed prove mightier than the sword, because Alfred had success in getting men with swords to cooperate, while the Vikings kept defecting on each other.

                  We are seeing states struggling to use the internet as an instrument of social control. China and the US are both doing this, but neither of them has as good a story as King Alfred did. So they lie and deny a lot.

                  So now the sermon has long been technologically obsolete, the mass media have one foot in the grave, and the universities are an obscene waste. Right. So what do we do now? Incorporated how?

                • Before smartphones, before the Internet, 1975, someone important says some verboten faux pas, the equivalent of the SJW shitstorms happens as letters to the newspapers. That takes time. Days. Maybe weeks. He has time to prepare a strategy.

                  With smartphones it happens within hours. Gets inside his OODA loop. Which is a big deal. That is how defeat happens.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  OK I’ll bite. Pick the revolution that you best understand, like

                  1770’s America
                  1910’s Russia
                  1930’s Germany and Italy
                  1950’s China
                  1960’s Argentina, Chile or Vietnam
                  1970’s Cambodia
                  (or any of the others that I’m not hip enough to know about yet)

                  …and then throw in YouTube, Twitter, smartphones, HTTPS, etc., and tell me if/how you see anything happening differently.

                • alf says:

                  Well, consider the spread of Jesus’ story; essentially the spread of a meme.

                  The disciples wrote down the story, what, twenty years after the event transpired? And it spread exclusively through either face-to-face or face to handwritten parchment. The lag was immense. In such a world things move much slower.

                  And of course, in such a world it is much harder to check sources. Maybe you believe the story, maybe you don’t, but really, who knows. This lends for good storytelling.

                  Fast forward to today, and things are quite different. Marilyn Manson removed his rib so he could suck himself off? Let me google that… Oh, nope, urban myth.

                  There is very little lag, and much source checking. It is not that people aren’t yearning for good stories anymore, it’s that on the free internet a good fact check is higher status than fake news. The audience is there they can give immediate opinions on what is happening. This makes it both fascinating but also a different challenge.

                  Consider the life of Jesus Christ in the 21st century. Would’ve been an absolute joke. ‘Man who claims to split bread and fish infitely EXPOSED by hidden camera’. We instinctively know this, which has depleted the power of the story if Jesus, son of God.

                  So, we need new stories, stories that dazzle audiences just like stories in the bible dazzled audiences, but stories that pass the internet test.

                • alf says:

                  Grumpus, political revolutions have always been leftist revolutions, eg social decay masked under the banner of progress. Why were they able to hide so well under the banner of progress? Well, becausr technologically speaking, we have experienced what you can easily call a spectacular revolution.

                • ten says:

                  A rising power is cool. The rolling stones enraged the old, many would have stopped them if they could, but they could not. That made them, and all other counter culture artefacts of the 60s and 70s, cool.

                  If they would have been stopped, like skinhead RAC, would have become uncool, just like skinhead music seemed really cool for the young while it successfully managed to tell the old people to eat shit and die. Lots of “normal” venues held “freedom rock” or “viking rock” concerts, lots of “normal” people got into it, but after it got hit by the nazi hammer, suddenly it was only for uncool loser nazis and is remembered as such, even though it was much broader and wider than that.

                  There will not be a problem making the religion in power cool, because it becomes cool by successfully dropping big hammers on its enemies. Culture is downstream from power.

                  Pinochet had hammers, lacked religion. “Conservatives” had religion, lacked hammers.

                  The miraculous is irrelevant. Believe it or not, it only matters subjectively. With enough power and violence, you can turn the pre-revolutionary chinese into communists, then crazed redguards, then passive subjects, then into capitalists, with half a generation per change. Technology doesn’t change this at all, but it probably makes people less prone to believing in miracles, unless they are retarded pavement apes.

                  That christianity says christ was resurrected after 3 days doesn’t matter in the context of coordinating memes and status hierarchies across populations. People do not come into contact with a system and its status hierarchies, find a subcomponent they don’t find credible and reject the entire thing.

                  I am sorry to say this, but you have a progressive mindworm, alf. It must be quite lonely in there but it seems to have a firm grip. If you saw an imperial christianity whose face had all the pomp of a third reich rally crossbred with a thousand LED-drone airshow housed among neo-jugend shanghai style macro architecture, “not cool” would not be on your mind and your worm would die.

                • Pooch says:

                  We are fellow white males? Does not work, because white is wolf to white.

                  I could see Christianity being the answer to unify all white nations in the same way the early papacy did. We need 1 unifying flavor of Christianity for all future Christian nations, not 247 flavors of Christianity like we currently have.

                  Trump must start the Holy American Empire with Christianity 2.0 as its state religion and a seat for Pope 2.0. All other flavors of Christianity will be heresy. Christianity 2.0 will be one unifying form of Christianity to the Western world.

                  Essentially, this will be the anti cathedral as Moldbug outlined. All western nations are already taking orders from Harvard. We use the same mechanism to give orders from the seat of power for Christianity 2.0.

                • jim says:

                  Trump supports the peace of Westphalia, and regularly issues speeches to that effect, which are sincere and heartfelt.

                  Your proposal is the grossest possible violation of the Peace of Westphalia.

                  The Papacy tried it. Disaster ensued.

                • The Cominator says:

                  The papacy did not unite Christendom ever (the closest thing was calling the 1st crusade also the best thing it ever did) and international churches are a bad idea and the RCC is pozzed…

                  We do not need a papacy and its impossible to truly unite Christianity.

                • alf says:

                  The Papacy tried it. Disaster ensued.

                  Color me surprised 🤪

                  Your proposal is the grossest possible violation of the Peace of Westphalia

                  Ok, ok ok. Thanks for letting me have made my point.

                • JanMartense says:

                  Trump supports the peace of Westphalia, and regularly issues speeches to that effect, which are sincere and heartfelt.

                  Your proposal is the grossest possible violation of the Peace of Westphalia.

                  Setting aside desirability, sometimes I wonder whether “Westphalian sovereignty” on a national basis is even achievable. The idea that each nation state can be ideologically sovereign in the first place is suspect, people naturally gravitate toward universal ideals of some kind (which does make sense to an extent given the universality of Gnon, what most would call “objective reality,” is a thing).

                  The Westphalian period started in 1648, when Catholics and Protestants stopped invading each other, and ended in 1793 when the French began invading everyone else to impose their new religion. So it lasted ~150 years. By this measure the Papacy was *fabulously* successful in comparison, ensuring some sense of unity for a 1000 years with only one major split (and a bloodless one at that).

                  Memes cross ‘national’ boundaries whether you like it or not. I think we should be aiming more for ‘cultural’ sovereignty, we see big cultural spheres like those of China and Russia resist pozz a bit. But no country in Western Europe has done so, not a single one. The last hope, Franco’s Spain, made it less than 30 years.

                  Something like Pooch’s proposal is the only way.

                • jim says:

                  The papacy was successful when they let kings and Lords appoint the bishops.

                  When the papacy demanded bishops loyal to pope and not King, the proverbial hit the fan, and it still splatters to this day.

                • JanMartense says:

                  To clarify: sovereignty is possible within a nation when that nation dominates the entire cultural sphere, like China. Or like Constantine’s Rome. But when a single cultural sphere is split between competing states, as in the Westphalian period, ideological sovereignty becomes impossible for most states as one will always dominate. Thus the system is unstable.

                • jim says:

                  The peace of Westphalia held. Nobody dominated the faith.

                • Joshua77 says:

                  >Consider the life of Jesus Christ in the 21st century. Would’ve been an absolute joke. ‘Man who claims to split bread and fish infitely EXPOSED by hidden camera’. We instinctively know this, which has depleted the power of the story if Jesus, son of God.

                  You err by speaking for others, as billions of your fellow humans do believe Jesus was the literal son of God, and billions more (Muslims) believe he was a mighty prophet and performed miracles.

                  The discussion here at this place is always going to be sterile and futile because you all mostly point blank refuse to even consider things through a scriptural lens.

                  So, Matthew 24 mentions a list of things we should expect to see happen as the return of Jesus approaches. This is the pestilence stage, next up will be famine and war.

                  Isaiah 17:1 has a prophecy against Damascus, it will be turned to rubble. Watch it happen in the years ahead.

                  The Book of Daniel and the Revelation of Jesus (via an angel) to John has a long list of things to come, compile a checklist.

                  The Book of Malachi mentions a messenger of God, with Elijah’s spirit, who will teach those with ears about God’s laws. Watch it happen, that teacher will become very well known. Eventually that teacher and his helper (one of the two witnesses) will be killed in Jerusalem, you will see it on TV, and their bodies will lie in the streets for 3 days, whilst the world celebrates the death of ‘Christian crazy fundamentalists’.

                  Then they will rise from the dead and go up into the clouds and a huge earthquake will hit Jerusalem.

                  When you see these things, what will you think?

                  When, near the end, digital money is introduced by the central banks globally, via a chip implant, and the small tattoo you will have on your right hand literally has 666 within in (only slightly disguised), what will you think?

                  If you’re still alive when Jesus literally returns and stands on Mount Zion, and up go the elect to meet him, what will you think?

                  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you thinks. You will see it happen.

                  This comment is merely a suggestion to sometimes take a look at reality through the lens of prophesy, even if you don’t actually believe it. Maybe you will come to believe it, maybe not, it’s up to God ultimately.

                  Oh, btw, I am the messenger of God referred to above, see Malachi.

                • jim says:

                  I have half a mind to introduce a new category of deleted comment: Heresy adjacent comments. As discussion of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is unprofitable, discussion of the nature of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the Trinity is unprofitable. I shut down the debate on Dark Matter and Dark Energy. They are dark. Enough said. Darkness leaves far too much room for speculation.

                  The prophecies are notoriously elastic.

                  Thus for example, the Book of Revelation is a prophecy about what happened and what was going to happen in Rome. It ts also about the human condition, all times and all places, about the telos of mankind, and a prophecy of the eschaton – and as a prophecy about the eschaton, pro social in that it leaves the heavy lifting to God. It is not for mortals to bring about the eschaton, and getting there is likely to be extremely unpleasant.

                  Large parts of the Book of Revelation clearly refer to Rome. But Rome did not have several centers of government power, nor did Rome emerge from a sea of peoples. That is a better fit to the EU, and to the “International Community”. The events in Rome did not end in the Eschaton promptly arriving, and likely the International Community will not end in the Eschaton promptly arriving, though its end, like Rome’s, is likely to be dramatic and unpleasant.

                  When Jesus said that Jerusalem would fall, the consequences would be terrible, and not one stone of the temple would remain upon another, he was referring to the fact that the excessively legalistic and self righteous Jews were getting on the Roman’s nerves, he was prophesying literal and empirical events. When he said that he would rebuild the temple in three days, he was not promising to do some amazingly fast masonry work.

                  Yes, miracle Jesus is a tough sell in the time of the Internet. But, whatever he did or may not have done, he did rebuild the temple in three days.

                • JanMartense says:

                  The papacy was successful when they let kings and Lords appoint the bishops.

                  Agreed, I was referring to the medieval period when that was the norm.

                  The peace of Westphalia held. Nobody dominated the faith.

                  It worked for 150 years. Compared to Rome, the Han Dynasty, the medieval Papacy, or even the Islamic golden age, it was a miserable failure.

                  How, exactly, is a nation supposed to prevent the inflow of memes from its neighbors? It didn’t work in the 18th century and it would be even harder today.

                • jim says:

                  > How, exactly, is a nation supposed to prevent the inflow of memes from its neighbors? It didn’t work in the 18th century and it would be even harder today.

                  The inflow of memes is state sponsored, and backed by international status manipulation, and international military force. If England was not affirmative actioning women and blacks into Oxford and Cambridge, Obama would have rained napalm down on London. The reason the Cathedral attacked Syria was because Assad would only affirmative action women to exactly numerical equality in the university system, and no further. The Congo and Rwanda were similarly attacked for similar conduct on race.

                  Hungary and Russia, Putin and Orban, seem to be doing a successful and effective job on halting state sponsored memes without totalitarian measures. Progressivism is an unattractive ideology except backed by status artificially bestowed by ngos and the US embassy. Most Gay Pride events in most countries are directly organized by the US embassy, which is a gross violation of diplomatic norms.

                  The Gay Pride parades involve obscene behavior in the streets, and if the police were to take action, the US would take action, as it took action when Russia refused to allow a Soros organization to desecrate Cathedrals and Christian war monuments, and its actions against a non nuclear power would be far more drastic than its actions against Russia were. That gays can get away with this stuff raises their status, and lowers the status of normal men. The Gay Pride parade is generally directly sponsored by the US embassy, and protected by US military power.

                  The spread of Cathedral memes is soft power backed by hard power, and we have repeatedly seen that hard power used. They dropped thirty thousand tons of bombs on Libya.

                • The Cominator says:

                  For the most part the Westphalian nation state system lasted until the disaster of the 1st world war. In that time it created the greatest civilization in history,

                  So it was not a failure, Tsar Nicholas II in violating it to support the Pan Slavs just massively own goaled himself and took us all down with him. I’m not a fan of the Bolsheviks but Nicholas II deserved to die 10000 times.

                • Starman says:

                  @Joshua77

                  ” Oh, btw, I am the messenger of God referred to above, see Malachi.”

                  Oh really? Where’s your miracles? StarProphet has his miracles, where’s yours? Is your interpretation of prophecy as inspiring as StarProphet’s prophecy?
                  Do You notice that the Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t subscribe to your interpretation of prophecy?

                  Let’s see if you’re the chosen miracle messenger that you claim to be. I want you to snap your fingers and cause every American evangelical pastor and American Catholic priest to denounce as illegitimate and Satanic… the family court system, feminism and women’s rights, child support, alimony, the pedestalization of women, and the cops who enforce the orders of these disgusting and evil institutions.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  ” a black can beat a white, but a white cannot beat or even behave disrespectfully to a black.”

                  I think there are two synergistic motivations going on.

                  1.
                  A working model that appears to fit the facts is that some progressives view (perhaps subconsciously) blacks as children and whites as adults. You can’t hold children to the same standards as adults, and you can’t be too rough with them.

                  2.
                  Another model says that blacks are just a weapon wielded by (some) “goodwhites” against “badwhites”. These “goodwhites” exploit the sentiments of the “goodwhites” in #1 who angry with “badwhites” who are too rough.

                • Starman says:

                  @Cloudswrest

                  And the blacks cease to be a useful bioweapon in a multiplanetary civilization.

                • Joshua77 says:

                  [*Deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Your interpretation of the Bible is unduly creative, and your personal claims are unbelievable. The prophecies are notoriously elastic, and are can be fitted to far too many things.

              • Joshua77 says:

                @alf

                >it’s that I find the debate settled, that it is completely obvious that Jesus did not come back to life after he was killed and I am just not interested in pretending he was, no matter what the supposed reward is’.

                Your view is predestined by God:

                >’No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day’.

                It is possible He will draw you in yet, ultimately we don’t decide, God does. Everything is pre-destined.

                The good news is that your spirit will still return to God in heaven after death:

                ‘because we have set our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe’.

                ‘Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near. 11Let the unrighteous continue to be unrighteous, and the vile continue to be vile; let the righteous continue to practice righteousness, and the holy continue to be holy.”

                12“Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. 13I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

                14Blessed are those who wash their robes,c so that they may have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by its gates. 15But outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood’.

                The city is the new Jerusalem that comes down after the Millenium reign. The holy ones live inside the city with God, see His face, experience the bliss. But the bad spirits stay outside the city, but still within heaven, so not so bad I imagine.

                It’s not up to you, but if you want to find out if you’re pre-destined to be an insider, just ask to know God and the truth about Jesus, who knows what may happen.

                As Solomon realised in Ecclesiastes, shit happens to good and bad, life’s not fair, just ask Judas Iscariot, who was a faithful disciple until God put Satan into him to fulfill that part of the story. Tough break eh?

                I’m thankful to be on the inside, and we all enjoy the gift of life and a nice planet, none of which we’d have if it weren’t for God.

              • The Cominator says:

                BAP is an effective promoter of hard right wing ideas, he is not contaminated by stupid socialist wignat ideas either yet at the same time he can speak to the aesthetic and the romantic souls who are not convinced by the cold empirical historical reasoning of NRX that our system is optimized to best accomodate the various grotesqueries of human nature…

                This kind of cold cynical logic is hard for most people to accept, so BAP is there to guide them to the right path by promoting the idea of right wing “VITALISM” and “LIFE” against the progressive matriarchal tyranny that only nutless bugmen could ever submit to.

        • JanMartense says:

          The inflow of memes is state sponsored, and backed by international status manipulation, and international military force. If England was not affirmative actioning women and blacks into Oxford and Cambridge, Obama would have rained napalm down on London.

          Sure, I don’t disagree. Memes are exported from the strong in order to dominate the weak and make them subservient. But I’m still puzzling over how to stop that from the perspective of a “small” nation.

          In the short period that it did succeed, the Westphalian system was reliant on a near-perfect balance of power; no strong country dominated, ergo no state could ideologically conquer its neighbors. The problem is that a perfect, non-central balance of power is extremely fragile. Which became evident as soon as Louis XVI lost his head.

          Historically, the track record of single, dominant ideological centers seems to be far more stable than the track record of multiple competing centers within the same sphere. This makes intuitive sense; the latter will always collapse into the former over time.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      I guess that when you can afford infinite staff, professional household management and legal/financial advice you can select wombs for hereditary IQ only and just manage around the drama like you’re King Solomon or somebody.

  28. Starman says:

    I love how this post revealed the anti-natalists in our midst.

    • I definitely have some anti-natalist instincts. See, I spent all my life in a clearly over-crowded Europe and UK where hunting is not something every redneck does like in the US but a very expensive hobby of the elite because there is so little room left for wildlife. Immigration is a big part of this, but also Boomers being, literally baby-boomers, the largest generation in history. So in this anti-immigration positions go kind of hand-in-hand with some anti-natalist sentiments, that I would want the land back to its native and higher-quality residents, but also it would be nice to have just generally fewer people around and more elbow room and more room for wildlife and so on.

      So a world that has much fewer nonwhite people and them back in their own countries, but also fewer white people than the Boomer generation would have an appeal to me. My aesthethics are more towards Middle Earth than techno-utopia. An 1Bn Earth would be so comfortable. A 19th century population levels and ratios kind of Earth.

      The only trouble is that there is not even a hint of a realistic plan on how ever to implement Middle-Earth or even back to the 19th. Techno-utopia is at least something in theory achievable.

      But why not both? With automatization, we do not need a large workforce. If automatization raises the IQ barrier of entry into jobs, those who cannot make it could be offered UBI in return for sterilization after one child. Strict patriarchy would actually achieve something similar, as those men who cannot make it into the ever-narrowing ever-higher-IQ jobs – if that is really what is going to happen – could not marry anyway. The problem is that it results in a lot of girls living with their parents forever. Who will find a way to get knocked up sooner or later.

      • Starman says:

        @TheDividualist

        Anti-natalists vanish. Hunter gatherers got their asses kicked by farmers and pastoralists.

        Every single commentator on every single electronic forum who opposed space colonization and disliked technology (while posting on an electronic forum) I have encountered has been an anti-natalist… and they’ve also been blue-pilled on women.
        Counter-Currents hired Eugene Westerly who raged against space travel while mysteriously failing to mention SpaceX. This same so-called dissident site published articles lamenting the lack of family formation among Whites while inexplicably failing to mention “family courts,” “feminism,” or even ”divorce.” Not even once.

        • >Anti-natalists vanish. Hunter gatherers got their asses kicked by farmers and pastoralists.

          True. But we are discussing futuristic scenarios, not historic ones, in which technology is a game-changer. I mean yes, true, we must learn from history and human nature never changes. But we are now talking about technology to do things that were not done before, and in this context technology to kill a lot of people easily is also a consideration. Doesn’t it seem like a small but smart people with a lot of armed drones and other tech could easily defeat a swarm of half billion lowbrow hominids? This is the Nick Land type of thinking about it.

          I mean, the West used to have the technology to absolutely dominate the world (I think not anymore) but there was no will to use it. Of course we are talking about a future that is not so sentimental and expect the smart to “do the needful”.

          • Starman says:

            @TheDividualist

            “But we are discussing futuristic scenarios,”

            Natalists inherit the future. And in your neck of the woods, your fellow anti-natalists are getting their asses kicked by Muslim natalists such as Anjem Choudary. Although Anjem Choudary has nothing on StarProphet Elon Musk. Choudary only fathered four children. Prophet Musk fathered seven children, and has successfully conducted a static fire of Starship prototype SN4, while fathering son number seven at the same time.

            • Atavistic Morality says:

              @Starman

              Coolest user in this website:

              – Questions every blue pilled faggot and calls them out
              – Supports the Imperium of Man, wants to make the universe his bitch
              – Strong defender of virtuous and virile patriarchy

              @TheDividualist

              https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClJ2FUoWgAAh8UB.jpg

              Your aesthetic appeal is weak and your ideas are likely to end up in bankruptcy. Abundance is bred by abundance mentality, the farmer that wants to make sure he is surviving the year plants crops for 10 times. Because taxes, because bad crop, because a million reasons. While the guy that thought would only plant the necessary amount ends up dead. There is no “necessary” amount, all amount is necessary, as much as possible.

              This is like socialist covetousness, you start with billionaires, then millionaires, then everyone that isn’t starving to death. You start thinking about the “necessary” at minimal levels, the minimum keeps getting smaller.

              I get it, I’m also not to keen into marriage or kids, because of my life, my experiences, the evil society I’m living in trying to enforce a twisted lifestyle, it’s complicated, it takes a mental toll. But I think one is able to look deep down within and realize themselves that this mentality is just wrong and doesn’t work. We currently live in the society of “just the necessary amount of kids” and we are getting replaced. A society that is concerned with having too many kids will find itself with no kids at all.

              And maybe because society is dying, people are so squeamish about 80 year old boomers dying and okay with sending economies into absolute abjection, every loss is a great loss when you produce nothing. Maybe if everyone had 5 children we wouldn’t care much and all would be aware enough to realize it’s all part of the cycle of life.

              • Mister Grumpus says:

                “Every loss is a great loss when you produce nothing.”

              • In many things there is such a thing as a Golden Mean. Then there are some things in which not, there is no Golden Mean between capitalism and socialism. Swedes have strongly this Golden Mean (called lagom) oriented culture as opposed to American maximalism, and did not notice that in that particular question of capitalism and socialism it does not work, and it entrapped them. Slippery slope.

                But works in many things, like life-work balance, spending vs. saving and many others. Not slippery slopes.

                I can accept the argument that there is no Golden Mean in the number of children either. Because it is also a slippery slope. As I said, I was talking about an instinct, not a serious conviction. I just dislike crowdedness.

                Originally I wanted two kids and ended up with one, so yeah, perfectly true, maybe if I wanted four I would have two. This is literally what a rich dude said once, how do you get ten million dollars? By wanting a hundred million. I cannot really put myself into the frame of wanting potentially infinite children, though. How would I build infinite bedrooms? 🙂

            • Larger numbers inherit the future when and if the technologically more developed do not have the mettle to keep them out with minefields if necessary or even to kill them. But there is no automatic process of larger numbers always winning, because technology and intelligence makes a difference. If used. Remember how a very small number of Brits governed India. Or other colonies, the settlers and soldiers were vastly outnumbered, they still ruled. Or Cortez in Mexico.

              You talk about natalism and anti-natalism as if there was nothing in between, and as if quantity would always automatically win over quality.

              To be fair, my somewhat anti-natalist instincts come from a lack of imagination about technological possibilities. Formerly, all crowding led to slums. Perhaps much larger numbers but also smarter and better equipped people can figure out something. I just don’t know what. The good way to live is in a single-family home with a large garden around it. Basic logic dictates that when a place fills up, the only way is up or down, skyscrapers or underground. Skyscrapers and high-rise and mid-rise urban housing generally sucks. But perhaps they can figure out something underground. Less sucking mid-rises are even possible today: http://caper.ws/patterns/apl39/apl39.htm

      • Pooch says:

        Plenty land to hunt in USA and Australia, among others. You just have to leave shitty UK to find it.

      • BC says:

        “But why not both? With automatization, we do not need a large workforce.”

        Automatization isn’t real.

        • The obvious background of this article is a future where the Restoration already happened, patriarchy was made law and so on. In such a future, we can expect the technological decline to reverse – as this scenario requires far more advanced tech than ours. I think so far it is obvious and uncontroversial.

          Now, it might be that I am a man who has a hammer and thinks everything is nails, but I think more advanced technology MEANS automatization, there is no other way for it to be, the two concepts just mean the same. What is the point of technology if not to save human labor? Not that the muscle labor of five million peasants could spend a spaceship to Mars, in this sense, yeah, technology also means to make the impossible possible.

          But about things like productivity, I think technology just means automatization. My hammer is providing technology to people like accountants. The object is to save labor, to achieve the same results with less man-hours, or, alternatively, if they are a nice company who does not like to fire people (I always worked for companies like that, I do not like the other kind) they can use that labor to do things that they were not doing before, lower priority, but still useful things. But yes even in this case we are often doing things via automatization that were not being done before manually. It does happen, that we program a query report that was never done manually because it was not that important to have someone spend four days every month making it manually in Excel.

          So that is my hammer. The nail is replacing human labor with automated labor. Whether that eliminates jobs or in fact creates new opportunities for new ones remains to be seen but remember that we are talking about a Restoration that stops the current technological decline!

          (Although even today, human capabilities due to immigration and bad demographics decline faster than technology does, still giving an advantage to automation and technology. I mean, suppose you are a boss and 70IQ LaDiSha is your data entry clerk and she fucks up all the time, and the other option is that 95IQ Pajeet is your programmer and he tries to automate her job and fucks up five times and then succeeds, you are better off that way?)

          • > if they are a nice company who does not like to fire people (I always worked for companies like that, I do not like the other kind)

            Ugh, I worded that badly. I do not mean that in the sense that a huge company who has 100 70 IQ LaDiShas in some data entry department and despite me automating their work not firing them and finding them make-believe work. Not that.

            Rather it is small companies. Often family based. Think the Cake Boss TV series. The New York Italian family business. Similar thing here in Europe. Where the two accountants are boss’s cousins and when I automate their enough to have one of them do the job the other just goes to make cake.

            • BC says:

              Back during the early day of civilizations the lower classes were formed out of the people who would have normally been executed after a war. The elites found it more useful to have them work rather than to kill them and take their women as had always been the case before. The lower classes are kept around because they’re useful to the elites and I predict if that usefulness ever goes away then so will the lower classes.

              Therefor there will either there will never be automatization that eliminates the need for lower level jobs and or if it does come to being, the lower classes will be exterminated by the elites.

              • BC says:

                Correction(I really need an edit feature):

                Therefor there will never be automatization that eliminates the need for lower level jobs or if it does come to being, then lower classes will be exterminated by the elites. This happy future without work will never exist.

                • Dave says:

                  I always write in the text of my comment first and proofread it a few times before filling in the Name and Mail fields, so that if I accidentally submit too soon, the comment is summarily rejected.

                • BC says:

                  I’ve never found an effective system to deal with dyslexia besides writing something, saving it and reading it again a little later out loud. When I proof read things I basically just read what’s already in my head.

                  I naturally learned to speed to read from an early age to deal with the issues with dyslexia but it’s always been hell on my writing and spelling.

          • Starman says:

            @TheDividualist

            Automating a spreadsheet on an office computer isn’t real automation.

            • Not spreadsheet level. More like you enter your sales orders into the order processing software manually or import them automatically from an EDIFACT file. And maybe if it is a known cake then checking the inventory for ingredients and indicating purchasing them when necessary. But this is wildly off-topic.

          • Bilge_Pump says:

            So do you guys support UBI? It’s an old question at this point: What do we do with all these extraneous people?

            • jim says:

              We don’t have surplus people. There is work to be done, and any man that does not work, and is in adequate health to work, if he does not work, should starve. If he will not starve quietly, should be enserfed, enslaved, or killed. Every woman should be a wife or doing work that prepares her for domestic duties, to be a wife shortly after she reaches fertile age.

              There is a considerable population that is unemployable because of short time preference (a future paycheck is not adequate incentive for them) and propensity to steal the employer’s stuff and assault co-workers and customers, people whose natural inclination is to hunt and gather in the urban jungle, hunt other people’s cattle and gather from other people’s gardens. They should work with a whip on their backs.

              • Karl says:

                Socialits having been saying for decades that any man who does not work despite being healthy should starve. A rich man does not need to work to fend of starvation. Thus socialists have argued that his wealth should be taken away so that he has to work or starve. Communists have argued that he should simply be killed for the crime of being rich or having been rich.

                Of course, you can define work so that a man who is simply overseeing his assets is working. Such a definition would in most cases be very reasonable, but there have always been rich people who have even delegated this work of overseeing assets to others, sometimes successfully.

                Hard to have something resembling capitalism if a rich man is not allowed to stop working and simply spend the rest of his live to enjoy his wealth.

                • Atavistic Morality says:

                  How many rich men who have stopped working to “enjoy” their wealth have you met?

  29. Jim,

    Do I get that right that you think proper patriarchy makes the elite more fertile than the plebs, resulting in eugenic fertility? Why? Because they can afford to marry early and the plebs have to get first become good earners before they marry? That is only true of men and if 25 years old plebs men marry 14-18 years old girls you do not get any fewer children than if 16 years old men marry 14-18 years old girls.

    • Jehu says:

      I believe what our host is saying is proper patriarchy makes elite and middle class men be perceived as more sexy by women, especially relative to antisocial thuggish elements of society. It also makes having lots of children high status.

      • He is also saying any man with a job should find a wife. Doesn’t matter whether truck driver or rocket scientist. How to make rocket scientist have more kids than truck drivers?

        • Jehu says:

          By making having children high status, especially well raised children. This is particularly important to push among women. Although this will mostly take care of itself as long as society enforces the status distribution. Truck driver will have ok status, way better than he presently has, and his wife will probably want 2-4 kids. Rocket scientist will have some astronomical status, worlds better than now if he’s good at his job, and his wife will likely emulate a lot of the homeschool moms I know (where 3 is a small family, and 6 more average, with the high end going around 12). Why? Because he’s defined as sexy and being a good wife and mother is the ticket to higher status as a woman, not acting like an inferior version of a man.

    • It is historically the case that the elite was more fertile than the plebs.

      • The plebs had less resources than now, literally feeding kids was a challenge. Malthus. Today poor kids are fatter than elite kids.

        • Starvation was vanishingly rare in preindustrial times; famine always rides with the other horsemen, never by itself.

          Poor kids being fatter today is sugar and no exercise. Whenever you see a fat kid, behind them is stupid low-agency parents letting them guzzle a liter of soda a day. It is quite hard to get fat off a normal diet, even if food is in great abundance.

          • jim says:

            > Starvation was vanishingly rare in preindustrial times; famine always rides with the other horsemen, never by itself.

            Exactly so: The top predator’s numbers are almost always checked by conflict with other top predators, not resource exhaustion. We will not go into space for resources. We will go into space to put distance between ourselves and hostile governments, and need resources once we are there.

    • jim says:

      Final authority over a daughters domestic, reproductive, and sexual services shall rest with the father, until he yields that authority to the husband “Who giveth this woman to this man?”

      Daughters will want, indeed, demand, to meet unrelated alpha males with preselection. Dad will invite suitable males to dinner, or take his daughter out to suitable occaisions. Pretty sure the invites will be biased men with good jobs and good prospects.

      No society has ever succeeded in keeping women entirely under control. Even if the law says that their sexual and reproductive services are under male control, it will in practice merely be greater male influence. Hence we need a society where private violence and private law enforcement is more common and usual. Thus making males that are high status in the male hierarchy high status in the eyes of women.

      • Jan Martense says:

        Dad will invite suitable males to dinner, or take his daughter out to suitable occaisions. Pretty sure the invites will be biased men with good jobs and good prospects.

        This works if your daughter is high-quality enough to get chosen by a guy with “good jobs and good prospects.” But what about the rest?

        I think Dividualists’ point is that, in a perfectly monogamous society, everyone from alphas down to omegas will marry and reproduce, paired off with a female of similar quality. This is better than our current soft-polygamous situation, where criminal alphas reproduce more than intelligent betas. But is still isn’t necessarily “eugenic,” just “less dysgenic than it is now.”

        • Pooch says:

          True eugenic fertility means the most genetically fit reproduce with the most genetically fit and the most genetically unfit do not reproduce at all. Gnon’s will is that not all men get a wife and kids. The elite get a hot wife. The lower classes get an ugly wife. Criminals and the underclass get no wife at all and their genes must die out.

  30. Space colonization is a worthy goal, but we are stuck on Earth for the foreseeable future.

    The main issues with space colonies are not issues with rocketry and manufacturing, they are issues with low-G and organics. The extreme and frequent resistance training performed by ISS astronauts comes nowhere close to saving them from massive musculoskeletal degeneration, which leaves them debilitated upon return to Earth. Even if you wear a lead-lined bodysuit compensating for the low-G, you’re still not offsetting the lack of gravitational force on your internal organs, which will cause them to degenerate. Mars (~1/2 G) may be possible. The moon, let alone near-zero-G on an asteroid, are not.

    Second main issue is feeding ourselves. Even 99% efficient recycling of organic waste means a colony will not be self-sufficient. Plants take nutrients from the soil, or water if hydroponic, and you need to put them back in. We have been attempting self-contained biospheres for a long time and none have succeeded.

    Third is radiation. Every planet we could conceivably set foot on has a dead core and no magnetic field. Even after terraforming, even if you can give Mars an atmosphere, cannot prevent it from being bombarded by deadly gamma radiation (which will strip away its new atmosphere). All space colonies will be sheltered from the sun, forever, and all plants will be grown indoors under UV lights.

    Fourth is energy. Solar does not cut it for the large-scale mining and manufacturing that will need to be done. Fuel will need to be constantly resupplied to the colony, which leaves it at the complete and total mercy of Earth.

    • jim says:

      > The main issues with space colonies are not issues with rocketry and manufacturing, they are issues with low-G and organics. The extreme and frequent resistance training performed by ISS astronauts comes nowhere close to saving them from massive musculoskeletal degeneration, which leaves them debilitated upon return to Earth. Even if you wear a lead-lined bodysuit compensating for the low-G, you’re still not offsetting the lack of gravitational force on your internal organs, which will cause them to degenerate. Mars (~1/2 G) may be possible. The moon, let alone near-zero-G on an asteroid, are not.

      Spin the ship and the habitat. Just as we always envisaged rockets landing like Musk’s rockets, on a column of fire, we always envisaged spinning space habitats.

      > Second main issue is feeding ourselves. Even 99% efficient recycling of organic waste means a colony will not be self-sufficient. Plants take nutrients from the soil, or water if hydroponic, and you need to put them back in. We have been attempting self-contained biospheres for a long time and none have succeeded.

      Previous efforts at entirely self contained habitats were few and half assed, and in any case no one proposes an entirely self contained habitat. We will be bringing in ice, carbon dioxide, and dirt. We have no end of organisms that, given an energy supply, convert water, CO2, and dirt, into food.

      > Third is radiation:

      Put a layer of dirt three feet thick on the roof of the stationary martian habitat. Surround the spinning belter habitat with a stationary sphere of dirt and rocks, held in place with nets and dried clay (yes, there is clay in the asteroid belt, though not much of it.) And most plants have pretty good radiation tolerance. It is likely that plants can grow on mars in a greenhouse protected from extreme cold, but at modestly above martian atmospheric pressure and supplied with adequate liquid water. The experiment has not been done. Martian atmospheric pressure is about equal to the vapor pressure of ice cold water, so you would need to either up the pressure a bit, or keep the plants in a very narrow temperature range. If you grow them in an atmosphere of half water vapor, one quarter martian air, and a quarter of their own oxygen, at just above freezing point, they should in theory be OK. A quite ordinary balloon provides substantially more than martian pressure. Any structure that protects them from cold will have ample strength to keep the pressure up a bit.

      • I am debating this in the best of faith, by the way, because the logistics of it sincerely interest me.

        Centrifugal habitats work in the vacuum of space. On the surface of Mars, far less feasible. Easy to make a space station spin, providing 1G. Very hard to make a city that rotates. Energy consumption would be immense, requiring energy technologies that do not yet exist, probably fusion, but fusion has the big problem of needing immense pressure from magnetic fields to keep the reaction going, and thus very hard to siphon off usable energy from the very tightly contained fusion reaction.

        Modern day Iraq used to be called the Fertile Crescent. Seven thousand years of agriculture have turned it into a desert. Every dirt farmer knows that soil gets depleted, and that you need to take nutrients from somewhere that you are not farming, usually from cow shit, the cows eating grass from a place not suitable for farming, and put those nutrients on the land that you are farming.

        Frequent shipments of good dirt from Earth do not sound too bad at all, but the key point is “from Earth”, and if Earth gets hit by a stray asteroid or nuked to glass, your colony is doomed. If Earth decides that you pissed them off, and decides to cut shipments, doomed. The ultimate end of space colonization does indeed require total self-sufficiency of the colony.

        Far in the future, I envision bioengineered bacteria, specialized to the local inhospitable environment, that can take nonorganics from said incredibly hostile environments and turn them into fertilizer. Such things already exist on earth, in the deep sea. Then you can take a crack at self-sufficiency. If we can somehow restart the cores of dead planets, then we can retain atmosphere, then we can terraform and people plowing the red fields of Mars will be a reality, just like we used to imagine.

        Again, I don’t want to claim any of this shit is impossible. Just that the timeframe and the technology required is on an immense scale. We’re talking hundreds if not thousands of years. It’s awesome that Musk is taking it seriously, and giving us some real first steps.

        • jim says:

          > Centrifugal habitats work in the vacuum of space. On the surface of Mars, far less feasible.

          And far less needed. We don’t know how much gravity people need, but prolonged bed rest does not have the hurtful effects of zero G. People get uncomfortable if they do not have a pillow, or their feet are higher than their head, which suggests that the necessary gravity for people to be OK is about the amount that a pillow lifts your head above your feet, or maybe the amount a pillow lifts your head over your chest. One tenth of earth gravity will probably suffice, thus lunar gravity will probably suffice, martian gravity will definitely be ample.

          People get too much fluid in their heads under zero gravity. They don’t get too much fluid in their head under prolonged bed rest if they have a pillow.

          > Modern day Iraq used to be called the Fertile Crescent. Seven thousand years of agriculture have turned it into a desert.

          That is not what turned it into a desert. Global cooling turned it into a desert. When conditions were warmer than today, that entire area was greener than today. During the holocene climactic optimum, hippos and crocodiles flourished in what is now the sahara. The soil in Iraq is fine, it just needs water. The land irrigated by the Tigris and Euphrates has been farmed for ten thousand years, and they are still farming it with no problems. The garden of eden was located on the Tigris Euphrates delta, and the city of Babel, the first capital of the first empire, on the Tigris or the Euphrates, and that land is still green despite being continuously farmed since well before biblical times.

          As the world warms, the world is getting markedly greener. I can see lands that where I walked as a lad, there were only scattered grass and bushes, that a sheep had a hard time, there are now new young green forests sprouting up. The dirt is fine, the area was semi arid when I was a lad, is no longer semi arid.

          What we see is the tropical wet and cloudy zone expanding as world warms. Conversely, during the ice ages, we see a massive increase in dust, indicating that most of the world that was not under ice was barren.

          When the sea reaches a certain temperature, the fact that water vapor is lighter than air starts to drive the weather, expanding cloudy area of the earth. That is the earth’s temperature stabilizer, because those clouds are white on top, and dark underneath, and as that stabilizer becomes more active, it turns dry areas near the tropics green. The area that I mention turning from semi arid to quite newly forested is on the tropic of Capricorn.

          • With prolonged bed rest, gravity is still pulling on your organs, forcing all the stuff that keeps them in place to resist gravity. And we are still talking months. Prolonged bed rest in the order of years, people in comas, is indeed very bad for your health. We don’t really know what a lifetime of 1/2 G would do to human health and lifespan. My guess is that Martians would be fine, though taller, thinner, and weaker, with weaker hearts.

            The immediate vicinity of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, survived desertification because the rivers wash nutrients from places that were not being farmed to places that were being farmed. My point of organics needing resupply from Earth barring a massive external ecosystem stands. Think of it in these terms: humans use a tiny, tiny fraction of all the organic matter on the planet to feed ourselves, but the vast majority that we are not using is necessary to resupply the part that we do use. This is a scaling issue that applies to space colonies; they will likely need to be 95% or more garden, which means very big and a lot of work.

            • Jan Martense says:

              Even after terraforming, even if you can give Mars an atmosphere, cannot prevent it from being bombarded by deadly gamma radiation (which will strip away its new atmosphere).

              The timescale for this to happen on is millions of years, not really a human concern and easily replaceable assuming you can terraform in the first place.

              Think of it in these terms: humans use a tiny, tiny fraction of all the organic matter on the planet to feed ourselves, but the vast majority that we are not using is necessary to resupply the part that we do use. This is a scaling issue that applies to space colonies; they will likely need to be 95% or more garden, which means very big and a lot of work.

              This is a very valid concern and one that many futurist types dismiss or handwave away, but there are a couple points to make:
              1) The atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth’s (~1%), but is 95% CO2. So getting carbon wouldn’t be a problem.
              2) Most industrial fertilizers like nitrogen and phosphorus are already produced from inorganic materials. The only other thing you need is some carbon-based organic matter but that can be supplied by the previous generation of plants. I don’t think dirt shipments would be necessary.
              3) Most crucially: the main food source needn’t come from plants at all. For example, glycerol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol) is an edible liquid with higher calorie density than sucrose. It can be synthesized directly from propene, a common hydrocarbon which can be made from CO2 and H2. Subsisting on pure glycerol probably isn’t too healthy, but it would allow the main agricultural focus to be on micronutirents (e.g. vegetables) as opposed to corn. Physical space requirements would be minimal.

              Ofc this all requires energy, and imo the energy problem is the most thorny objection you raised.

              • Starman says:

                @Jan Martense

                The idea that humans need wild biomass to survive is completely made up. Much of the wild biomass in the past has already been largely destroyed by humans 10,000 years ago. We have more food than our ancestors did 10,000 years ago. Starvation isn’t caused by made-up terms like “desertification” or “ecocide,” it’s caused by either communism or an African-style incompetence (hence my question on whether one would want to live in Haiti or a Mars city).

                • We have more food than 10,000 years ago because we have a lot more land under the plow. Industrial agriculture is actually lower-yield per acre than traditional methods, but it lets you farm a lot more land with a lot fewer people, and synthesized fertilizers plus industrial irrigation allow us to farm land that was previously unarable. I’m not a fuckin’ hippie by the way, none of this is a bad thing.

                  We’ve come nowhere close to exhausting the biomass of Earth, but it is quite possible for an individual plot of soil to be exhausted via poor land management, and good land management is something we’ve taken entirely for granted. Try growing a miniature garden in your basement under a UV light without resupplying it from the outside.

                  Think of farming like any other technology. Farming in any form is not “natural”, it’s Man conquering Nature. Most soil is bad for growing crops, and to make it good and maintain it as good, need external input of biomass from places you are not farming. If you can synthesize all the organics you need to feed the incredibly complex brew of animal, plant, fungal, and bacterial matter both living and dead that plants eat, on the colony, great. I suspect that will be very difficult. On Mars, maybe (I think Mars is lacking in nitrogen, though plenty of C, O, and H), on a floating space station, forget about it.

                  We’ve still not addressed the energy demands of the colony.

                • jim says:

                  all the organics you need to feed the incredibly complex brew of animal, plant, fungal, and bacterial matter both living and dead that plants eat

                  Nuts

                  Plants eat rocks and air.

                  Every hydroponic garden guide says wash and sterilize the gravel, to get rid of anything alive, and anything that ever lived, a zippered tent to exclude every insect, and ultraviolet light to kill any tiny organisms that get in.

                  Hydroponics uses coarse gravel, and just makes sure the roots are frequently wet. A hydroponic garden has no organic material at all except for the crop plant itself, and only coarse gravel. Hydroponic farmers make a considerable effort to exclude everything living, and everything that was once alive. In a hydroponic garden, you rigorously exclude every last trace of that complex web of life.

                  The circle of life is real. The web of life is at best hippy dippy sandal wearing Gaia worship, and is usually Aztec/Moloch demon worship demanding human sacrifice. Most people who believe in the web of life view abortion as a holy sacrament. They worship death, murder, degradation, human feces, and sodomy. They lie, they hate, they murder, they betray kin, friends, and allies.

                  A volcano erupts and spews a cloud of volcanic ash. The plants rapidly settle. If the rainfall is adequate, the plants love it. Volcanic ash and sand is intensely fertile. Crushed volcanic rock is intensely fertile immediately it becomes finely divided.

                  Similarly, farmers use biocides if the government lets them. They poison the soil with a short lived poison such as methylbromide, which is lethal to all bacteria and fungi in the soil. In practice, soil bacteria are just pests competing with your plants roots.

                  Soil bacteria fix nitrogen under some circumstances, consume it in other circumstances, but we can fix nitrogen better and cheaper than soil bacteria.

                  Plants love volcanic ash, and they love soil that has been biocided with methyl bromide. Rock turns to soil by being sufficiently finely divided that roots have enough surface area to extract nutrients from rock. Plants can and do make their own complex organics. Very few plants need or want any organics at all, and are happiest if the farmer systematically gets rid of all of them. Most plants have symbiotic fungi, and some plants (legumes) have symbiotic bacteria, but it is like bees. Zero or one cooperating species, and one billion hostile species for whom the the plant is an enemy and a source of raw materials. The plant is happy when the farmer kills everything else off. Every other living thing is an enemy except for a few very specific symbiotes, like bees with flowers, or legumes with their nitrogen fixing bacteria. The plant is happiest if they all die in a fire. For many eucalypti, their life cycle is built around killing everything else in a fire, and putting down seeds in the ash.

                  Large areas of Hawaii are covered with volcanic rock. Nothing grows on the rock. People run machines over it to crush it into fine gravel, and immediately plants sprout. If you are planting in coarse volcanic gravel (because the rock is sometimes too hard to get fine) you need some dead leaves or dead grass, but that is to hold the water. If the gravel is fine enough to hold some water, can plant directly in soil that has no organic component, that is just finely crushed lava.

                  Kill everything with biocide or fire. For the plant, all other life is competition. They don’t need it, and they do not like it. Eucalypti hate everything living except Eucalypti of their own species, and they are none to keen on Eucalypti of their own species. They neither need nor want bees, nor soil bacteria, nor soil fungi, and do everything they can to kill off everything in the vicinity. They love to grow on ash.

                  Compost comes with useful inorganics, it holds water, and is easily penetrable by roots. But the plants are happy with fine volcanic gravel. Or, provided that their roots are regularly wetted, coarse volcanic gravel. They don’t like clay, because it is hard for air to penetrate, and often hard for water to penetrate, and organic material is good for them because it breaks up the clay. But if the plow breaks up the clay, they are happy.

                  Plants are happy with freshly plowed clay with zero organics, happy with fine volcanic gravel, and happiest on hydroponics – coarse gravel with synthetic fertilizer in the water that regularly wets their bare roots.

                  All other living things eat plants, or material that comes from plants, while plants do not eat anything organic. Plants are none too keen on this arrangement, and sometimes, like eucalypti, take extremely drastic measures to end it.

                • @jim

                  >Plants eat rock and air.

                  Inorganic hydroponics i.e. that are really in a sterile environment are eating these elements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics#Inorganic_hydroponic_solutions

                  So yes, organic inputs are not necessary. But the inorganic inputs seem a bit more complex than rock and air. Are you meaning that finely ground rock contains all this? All kinds of rock? Mars rock as well?

                • jim says:

                  With my own eyes, I see plants doing fine on fresh volcanic rock and rain if the rock is the correct state of division. You want a mixture of graveled pumice and coarse dust. I don’t know what the plants are doing for nitrates. Maybe there is enough smog from vehicles in Hawaii to provide the nitrates.

                  However, if plain pea sized gravel, they are going to need artificial fertilizer.

                  Mars dirt should work, because volcanic ash works.

                  I imagine a greenhouse pressurized to two or three percent earth atmosphere pressure and kept in a narrow temperature range, or at a constant temperature, would do fine with Mars dirt and gravel. Mars dirt already has nitrates, but we might need to wash it to remove the chlorates, which would remove the nitrates also.

                • eternal anglo says:

                  Every other living thing is an enemy except for a few very specific symbiotes, like bees with flowers, or legumes with their nitrogen fixing bacteria

                  I’ve never looked at it that way before, but it should have been obvious. The relationship between any two organisms in nature can generally be assumed to be hostile, exceptions to the rule being distinct, specific, easily identified and highly adapted symbioses. And even between symbionts so closely linked as males and females of a species, you still have war of the sexes.

                  The reason you can’t generalize this to relationships between men and between nations is the existence of brains powerful enough to model other brains, thus making something like Natural Law possible. I.e, The Knowledge of Good and Evil.

            • jim says:

              > The immediate vicinity of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, survived desertification because the rivers wash nutrients from places that were not being farmed to places that were being farmed. My point of organics needing resupply from Earth barring a massive external ecosystem stands.

              Nuts.

              What is washed by those rivers that makes a difference is not organics, but inorganics, of which there is ample supply in space.

              When people grow marijuana under lights indoors, the recommended procedure is to rigorously exclude all organics completely, because they tend to come with things that like to live off what plants produce.

              Similarly, the massive fertility that ensues when the soil is replenished by a nearby volcanic explosion that spews dust or fine gravel from the deep interior of the earth. Plants growing on fine volcanic debris obviously are not getting organics produced by a vast natural ecosystem.

              Similarly the common practice in Hawaii of pulverising volcanic debris, and then sowing grass or planting trees. You get vast lava fields in Hawaii on which nothing grows. Often the lava is porous and easily pulverized, in which case you plow it up with special agricultural machinery, and everything is fine.

              Whenever there is a volcanic blast in Hawaii that does the pulverizing for you plants love it. Plants love the top of a volcano covered with fine volcanic debris, and they are obviously not getting organics washed down from above.

              As for the lack of gravity – prolonged bed rest where the person remains conscious and somewhat active does not have the detrimental effects of prolonged coma, which suggests that we can tolerate prolonged low gravity – though it is apparent that we cannot tolerate prolonged zero gravity.

              We are comfortable with the head elevated a few inches, which suggests that one tenth gravity is fine. We will get definitive information on this when we have a moonbase or a spinning space station.

              People immobilized in iron lungs due to extensive but less than total polio paralysis generally did not suffer the health consequences experience by those in comas. This would suggest we can handle very low, but non zero, gravity.

          • Cloudswrest says:

            I’ve been saying this for a long time. The obvious solution to (planetary) habitats are what I call “crater habitats”, or for more extensive developments, “crater cities”. Here’s the deal for the moon, Mars, or Ceres.

            1. Find a suitable sized crater.

            2. Plop down a custom designed version of one of those inflatable tennis court/athletic structures. Exactly designed to fill the crater.

            3. Lightly inflated to expand.

            4. Gradually pressurize as you back fill over the top with regolith. Back fill so that the weight of the back fill supports atmospheric pressure (or whatever pressure y ou like).

            4a. The backfill serves three functions. And it’s DIRT (literally) cheap.

            a. Ballast to support air pressure.
            b. Shielding from radiation and micrometeorites.
            c. Thermal insulation.

            5. Reinforce the interior with cable stays and/or support pillars for safety against overpressure/blowout. I would bet that fine lunar surface regolith, baked and dehydrated by billions of years of solar radiation, makes a pretty good “portland” cement. Interior support pillars could be just telescoping hollow tubes filled with regolith, with water added to turn the regolith into concrete.

            6. High up on the rim of the crater habitat, point picked for correct slope, a circumferential high speed rail in constructed. Residential habitats are constructed on this rail line and this rail line provides artificial gravity. The individual habitats are free to rotate about a longitudinal axis and weighted at the bottom so the g-force is normal through the floor independent of the speed of the rail.

            7. Outside of the habitat, in another suitable crater, a molten salt (my preference) thorium reactor provides all the power needed for the habit. I would propose at least three of them for redundancy.

            • Cloudswrest says:

              For developed cities there are also lots of potential architectural variations on the overhead ballast. For example transparent “fish tank” skylight ballasts that provide aquaculture.

            • Cloudswrest says:

              The ceilings of larger habitats could be outfitted with arrays of directional gimballing sulfur lamps that rotate throughout the day, simulating a moving sun.

            • The Cominator says:

              Cloudwrest, good idea.

        • eternal anglo says:

          You don’t need to restart the core to get a magnetosphere. You put a big magnet at the L1 point. By my very rough calculation, you will need a ring ~500km in radius composed of superconducting wire ~30m across.

          • jim says:

            Presumably you do not need a solid wire – you need a tube of mesh. But there are going to be very large forces on the wire, so you cannot make it arbitrarily light by making it arbitrarily thin.

            You will use a hollow torus of superconducting mesh, with a magnetic field inside to prevent it from collapsing from the pressure of the magnetic field outside. But if the pressure of the magnetic field inside balances the pressure squeezing the torus down to a ring of wire, it does not balance the pressure causing the ring to become a larger ring. For a given amount of magnetic flux, total force stretching the torus away from its center point scales as 1/r, where r is the large radius of the torus, so total mass required to contain a given amount of magnetic flux is approximately independent of torus size. A bigger torus does not need to be as strong, so can be more lightly constructed, but, being bigger will have approximately the same mass as a smaller torus with more solid construction and higher magnetic field intensity.

            The interesting number, which I have not calculated, is total mass of the torus, which is approximately constant for a given quantity of magnetic flux, independent of geometry. The stronger the material, the less the total mass required.

            A torus at the L1 point will suffer a variable and unpredictable force from the solar wind, which will tend to cause it to lose station. The radiation pressure from the sun is, however, predictable, steerable, and considerably larger than the solar wind force, so a large array of very large and thin mirrors, ten nanometers thick, could be used to hold station.

            And you would need enough mass, possibly in the form of space rocks and leftover construction equipment, so that the torus, being a little sunwards of the L1 point, has solar tidal force towards the sun to balance the force from solar radiation and solar wind. You could surround a small asteroid with big mirrors, use light pressure on the mirrors to move the small asteroid to the L1 point, stabilize it with mirrors, and build the torus around it. The bigger the asteroid, the less the problem of unplanned, unpredictable, and unwanted drift due to unpredictable solar storms.

            Or perhaps we could start with an iron nickel asteroid, and build a big heavy iron nickel torus. Your thirty meter thick wire, made of asteroidal steel, with a very thin layer of superconducting material over it. A good sunshade should suffice to get it down to superconducting temperatures.

            Here is my plan for shaping nickel iron in a hard vacuum. You heat a portion of the asteroid to softening point, below the melting point, and then work the material into the desired shape and extrude it using tools of cooled nickel iron. The tools stir weld to the asteroid material, with no sharp boundary between the hard tool working the material, and the only slightly softer material being worked, much as you work dough with hands covered in a thick layer of marginally stiffer dough.

            With this process, we can cheaply build great big heavy structures in space, habitats that laugh at radiation and meteor impact. You peel a ribbon out of the asteroid, wind it helically into a torus, and stir weld the edges of the ribbon to each other forming the torus. The torus could become a spinning space habitat, or the strength component of your thirty meter superconducting wire. You would extrude a torus segment in continuous process directly from the asteroid surface as if shaping very stiff dough, then another segment torus, clamp the segments together, and then stir weld the ends together.

            • eternal anglo says:

              I don’t understand how an arbitrarily thin superconducting tube or a steel band with a thin superconducting outer layer can do the work of a solid superconducting wire (or many wires totaling the same cross sectional area). It cannot conduct as much current.

              • jim says:

                The current in a superconductor is limited by the magnetic field intensity, rather than the current intensity, thus the thickness of the superconducting layer is not directly relevant.

                A type I superconductor carries current entirely in a very thin surface layer. We will be using type II superconductors, which need to be considerably thicker, but will not need to be thirty meters thick. In type II superconductors, current intensity does matter, but when you are talking about enormous structures, will not matter much in practice.

                It cannot be arbitrarily thin, but it can be mighty thin compared to thirty meters of steel taking the force.

                • eternal anglo says:

                  I have much to learn. I apologize for insolence and stupidity.

                • jim says:

                  It was an entirely reasonable question. The characteristics of superconductors are little known, complicated, and not all that much on topic.

            • Cloudswrest says:

              Why does your torus need to be in space at all? Why can’t it be a big ring(s), (e.g. a 3000 mile loop of superconducting transmission line) anchored to the GROUND, around your designated North and South magnetic poles. The field lines extend into space anyway.

  31. Starman says:

    Ad Astra!
    Forward, O’ Holy StarProphet!
    For verily I say, that the SN4 Starship static fire has been successful.

    https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1257852299826823175

  32. Interplanetary Galactic says:

    How often should wife be plowed, consensual or not, to ensure good behavior?

  33. E. William Brown says:

    IMO the biggest hurdle left on the way to permanent colonies in space is one that’s almost never addressed: the maintenance factor.

    Yes, manufacturing tools are getting smaller and more flexible, and we’re probably close to the point where you could just ship up a supply of raw materials and make all your parts in space. And yes, the more bulky raw materials are mostly stuff you could mine in space. So you could plausibly end up with just small annual shipments of computer chips, exotic organic compounds and other special materials the space colony can’t make.

    But how many man-years of labor does it take to keep a one-man life support system working, if you’re making all your parts from raw materials? Lookng at previous space programs, and similar circumstances like nuclear submarines making long-distance cruises, no one has ever come within an order of magnitude of the break-even point. Instead you see hundreds or even thousands of man-years of work per man-year of system operation.

    Now, granted, no one has ever made a big push to focus on this specific issue, because there’s never been a project where it was so vital. But if we want space settlements that are largely self-sustaining, this is the next big challenge beyond getting launch costs down. Any private company that keeps people in space for long periods will likely work on this as a cost-saving measure, but they’ll need to make a lot of progress over current state of the art before they can make their colonies self-sustaining.

    • jim says:

      > Yes, manufacturing tools are getting smaller and more flexible, and we’re probably close to the point where you could just ship up a supply of raw materials and make all your parts in space.

      That would be stupid. The point is to acquire raw materials in space. Musk wants mars because there is ice, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and a little bit of oxygen. And water and carbon dioxide can make rocket fuel. He plans to manufacture rocket fuel in space, which is a big step towards manufacturing everything a colony needs in space.

      > And yes, the more bulky raw materials are mostly stuff you could mine in space. So you could plausibly end up with just small annual shipments of computer chips, exotic organic compounds and other special materials the space colony can’t make.

      That is the plan.

      > But how many man-years of labor does it take to keep a one-man life support system working, if you’re making all your parts from raw materials? Looking at previous space programs, and similar circumstances like nuclear submarines making long-distance cruises, no one has ever come within an order of magnitude of the break-even point.

      Those were government projects, where the main objective was creating jobs for people who profile as Democratic party voters. Hence the joke that SLS stands for “Senate Lunch System”

      Surviving in Spitsbergen is tricky, and that was privately done for private profit. Surviving in space is harder, a lot harder but our technology has improved considerably over the days that Spitsbergen was settled.

      Developing what you need for a life support system, getting the bugs out, is a big project. Building it the second time, not so big. The FGC-9 is an exemplar.

      The government antarctic bases showed and continue to show an enormous loss, comparable to keeping people alive in a nuclear submarine. But Spitsbergen showed, and continues to show, a profit, despite government efforts to cut them off at the knees.

  34. INDY says:

    How is this satellite business going to affect the night sky in the western US

    • jim says:

      It does not affect the night sky because the satellites are in shadow at night. It affects the sky only just before dawn, and just after sunset.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Notice the shut-it-down instinct at work, though. Karen and Ka’neesha may not be able to logically explain WHY they need to shut-it-down, but they can feel that it’s necessary and right… somehow.

        You’ll also notice that the SpaceX fanboys out there, excepting a tit-wiggling grifterette or two, are almost unanimously white and male. I’m not sure THEY understand why they “need this” either, but they too can feel it somehow.

        Werner was German and Elon is South African. They Know.

  35. Encelad says:

    Wait, Space Force under Trump bypassing NASA? I stumbled into a few articles some time ago, that made me believe Space Force was already pozzed from birth, was I too pessimistic?

    https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/03/03/us-space-force-may-become-most-female-friendly-military-service.html

  36. alf says:

    I gather a recent anti-Musk take is to accuse him of sky pollution: damn satellites clogging the sky! If only the permanent government would nationalize space, we could have an acceptable number of satellites, the acceptable number being less than 10, but definitely no less than 2, unless some astronomers get really upset about it.

    • Starman says:

      @alf
      The astronomerette attack. It’s notable that these people complained about too many satellites launched by the partially reusable Falcon 9, but not the partially reusable shuttle (only the airplane-shaped orbiter spacecraft was reusable). Indicating that Falcon 9 reusability is successful. But the fully reusable Starship/Superheavy is what is needed to settle the Solar System. Fully reusable like your car is fully reusable.

    • Meanwhile the governments managed to put nine hundred thousand untrackable pieces of space debris in the 1-10cm range up there. (I took this range, because that is the range that looks to me like a machine gun bullet and can probably do serious damage. Not sure if the 128 million pieces under 1cm can.)

      • Starman says:

        @TheDividualist

        Any debris in Low Earth Orbit doesn’t come anywhere near the debris field known as Saturn’s rings. Cassini easily passed through this with foil sheets called a “Whipple shield.” The debris object hits the foil, creates a hole the size of the debris object, converts itself into plasma whose volume is based on the kinetic energy of the impact, and is then dissipated (the foil is spaced apart to allow the dissipation). A large enough object can create a too big of a plasma ball that engulfs the spacecraft, a .30cal size object will be dissipated by a whipple shield. This assumes combined impact velocity in excess of 3km/sec (Low Earth Orbital velocity is 8km/sec).

    • Dave says:

      If America had its present gynocracy in the 1960s, female politicians would boast of how they shut down NASA and prevented greedy, sexist men from despoiling the Moon’s natural beauty with their footprints. All that money should be given to the poor! (My grandmother born in 1910 said this in the early sixties, but no one listened to women in those days)

      Environmentalism is the matriarchy spinning a virtue out of its inability to conquer nature or build anything of lasting value.

      • Starman says:

        Ye shall throw thine witches out of thine airlock.

        The vacuum of space shall cleanse the evil out of the Karen’s lungs.

        • The Cominator says:

          Based!

        • Joshua77 says:

          It was funny to hear the bangs and rattles as they jumped around on the moon in that vacuum, with tin foil landing craft.

          To be fair to Musk, his cgi launches are quite convincing.

          • ten says:

            What a sad, tired troll. Come on, give it some energy or shut up.

          • Sound travels through matter, small noises sound very loud when otherwise dead silence, and tin foil works just fine when you’re in a vacuum and don’t have to worry about shit punching a hole in it.

          • SJ says:

            I also enjoyed space mouse. All hail musk the first weirdo to send a mouse into outer space on the outside of a rocket.

  37. Mister Grumpus says:

    Jim gets us to look past the sale for once. Many thanks.

  38. I think people will want to live in space. Not saying never, but not for a very, very long time.

    1) Failure is an option, the rockets are allowed to blow up, because they are unmanned. While when the Challenger blew up, it shook the whole world. Not having keep people alive up there, just doing the mining and everything with robots not only saves the cost of life support systems, but also that you do not have to over-engineer everything to absolute safety. You can throw cheap stuff there and if it fails, it fails. I am by no means a manufacturing expert, but my impression is that manufacturing is the easiest in the middle size ranges, from lawn movers to cars. Chips are hard and cruise ships are hard, but these size ranges are easy. So I expect mining be done by a swarm of disposable mid-sized robots.

    2) No one wants to live in a coal mine. People work there if they must, and they must live near, but if the coal mine can be robotized people find a nicer place to live. It is better to earn your money in space and spend it on Earth on fun.

    3) Literally every place on Earth, the Antarctica, Sahara, under the oceans etc. is more hospitable, safer and more pleasant to life than up there.

    4) You cannot escape the Earth government that way. Same problem as with seastading. You declare independence and there is nothing from keeping a Earth government from threatening your e.g. asteroid belt home with nukes. Using nukes in space is different than here, here people find it awful to render a large patch of Earth unsuitable for life for a long time, but if it is just a dot up there, nothing wong with extinguishing it with a nuke.

    However. On a more positive note. If people actually have to go up there to do work. This community is big on lifting weights and I think many are troubled by the same thoughts as I am, that it is good for your health and looks but you just cannot use strength the way you could in the old times. It gives no real economic or survival or warfighting advantages these days. It feels a little fake because it is not that useful, we ain’t wrestling bears, right? So imagine walking around in spaceships that do like 3g acceleration for a long time. You are basically walking around with two guys on your shoulders all the time. Strength suddenly becomes really useful. The new space merchant navy will be quite brawny. How this can continuous or at least long-lasting serious acceleration be done, how can we escape the curse that a rocket has to carry its own fuel is something nobody knows yet. Yet, I just like the idea. Just the broad zoomed-out idea. Barbell squatting is effectively increasing the acceleration the Earths gravity field is doing on you. And long-running more than 1g accelerations are ways to get to places in space quickly. It matches.

    • Damn. Correction: “I think people will not want to live in space.”

    • Theshadowedknight says:

      Threaten a orbital platform with nukes? That’s a great way to get a rock dropped on your head. Terran governmental power ends when the only people smart enough and cohesive enough to build nukes are sitting higher up the gravity well. At that point you don’t need nukes, you just drop the cast-off from mining on them until they surrender.

      I had a thought of an Antarctic emplacement for the extraterrestrial civilization. Build a massive rail gun to help launch supplies, keep the women and children in a defensible area, plenty of ocean in which to drop material shipments from orbital industry, etc. No idea if it is feasible, but it might be worth considering.

      • There’s a videogame about this. It’s called Planetary Annihilation: https://culture.vg/reviews/videogame-art/planetary-annihilation.html

      • pyrrhus says:

        The exact plot of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress…..written in the ’60s

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        So do you mean you’re imagining Antarctica as the “Hawaii” for a civilization that is otherwise elsewhere, living in space?

        What I’ve never understood is why Antarctica would be a good location for this. If I’m otherwise doing stuff in that orbital plane where the planets are, why wouldn’t I want a “Hawaii” that’s near the equator, so it’s already moving in a convenient direction? Wouldn’t Antarctica be the most difficult place to launch a spaceship from? There’s no “boost” from Earth’s rotation and I’d have to do this big turn before I was headed to someplace useful like Mars or an asteroid.

        What am I missing?

    • jim says:

      3) Literally every place on Earth, the Antarctica, Sahara, under the oceans etc. is more hospitable, safer and more pleasant to life than up there.

      The reason people do not live in the Antarctic is that governments will not let them. They were moving into the Arctic until governments stopped them.

      Given above replacement fertility, it is simply inevitable that we will expand to fill every niche, except that the threat from others of our own kind checks us, as it has Antarctica. Government have blocked settlement of the Arctic and Antarctic because they could not agree between themselves how to divide up the pie.

      What will check population growth on earth is not lack of resources, but, as with every other top predator, the threat from members of the top predator’s own species. People will move into space to get away from hostile governments, and governments will move people into space to give the government a power base away from hostile governments.

    • Starman says:

      @TheDividualist
      “You declare independence and there is nothing from keeping a Earth government from threatening your e.g. asteroid belt home with nukes.”

      The Earth government cannot physically do anything to a Martian territory for 26 months (it’s even worse if it’s an asteroid belt settlement) with only a window of one or two months between the 26 month periods to send a punitive expedition that will take 6-12 months to arrive at Mars. Meanwhile, the Martians can send their retaliatory punitive expeditions using SSTO and wider launch windows between the 2+ year intervals.

      This is assuming chemical rocketships.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        OK so Mars and all small planets and asteroids, etc, are inherently the nuclear “high ground” for simple potential energy reasons. Always a faster strike from off-Earth. Brilliant. You sold me.

        Can you imagine the huge NORAD-like radars for finding and tracking vehicles everywhere in space?

      • E. William Brown says:

        > Doing anything in space is expensive. An early space colony is going to have to use most of its resources just to survive, and will inevitably have a tiny population as well. A few thousand Martians or Belters are not going to have the money to build much of anything, because there just aren’t enough of them. Meanwhile an Earth goverment with hundreds of millions of citizens can fund massive projects as an afterthought.

        Funding massive projects does not necessarily get them done. A few thousand hostile belters can drop a big rock on Washington. Which is a good reason for government of Washington to arrange for ten thousand friendly belters, to balance the Han Hegemony’s several thousand Han belters, and to balance assorted malcontents who fled Harvard and Yankees to the belt.

        With eugenic fertility, we will see elites moving away – to colonies, which will cause conflict, and to space. Both of which will give governments a reason to ship surplus elites into space.

        • Starman says:

          @E. William Brown

          Nobody here mentioned a “libertarian fantasy.”

          ” Doing anything in space is expensive.”

          Are you going to explain to us why old aerospace SSME is now a whopping $146 million per engine while SpaceX’s Raptor is $250k per engine?

    • Some excellent answers but 1) still stands strong. And the robots do not need to be very smart. Because mistakes in unmanned space mining are not costly, as the resources are not fragile the mine is not going to blow up. They can use simple approaches.

      • Starman says:

        @TheDividualist

        ” While when the Challenger blew up, it shook the whole world.”

        A self-sufficient Martian territory can care less if the whole Earth shook.

        Which is better? A high tech Martian settlement, or green Chimpbabwe on Earth?

        • I’d personally rather be warlord over a micronation of Africans on a Caribbean island with medieval technology than live in a cramped box underground on Mars with nary a breath of fresh air or sun on my face. But that’s just me. Space exploration is super awesome, space colonization is pretty damn cool, it just doesn’t personally appeal to me.

          • Starman says:

            @Aidan Maclear

            Then go ahead, Haiti exists right now. Go to Haiti right now and try to be a warlord over there. Let’s see how successful you’ll be…

            • Anonymous 2 says:

              I have zero doubt that someone like Eeben Barlow and associates could subdue Haiti in a week or two. The main question is, of course, what to do afterwards. Perhaps the population (“refugees”) could be shipped to Canada.

              (Well, more pragmatically, question zero would be what would the ‘international community’ do. I’m sure they would be too enraged to accept this sort of coup.)

              • Mister Grumpus says:

                Anonymous 2:
                “I have zero doubt that someone like Eeben Barlow and associates could subdue Haiti in a week or two.

                “(Well, more pragmatically, question zero would be what would the ‘international community’ do. I’m sure they would be too enraged to accept this sort of coup.)”

                Exactly, wiseguy.

                Now I don’t know who Eeben Barlow even is, and I’m not going to Google-search him for three minutes so as to perpetrate that I did know about him.

                Rather, I’ll just ask you:

                Can you dream up even one SINGLE conceivable scenario where Mr Barlow here, or some other place-holding capable, famous and handsome zillionaire, could subdue and organize Haiti and actually get away with it? And actually survive, outside the Hague, for at least 20 years afterward?

                I mean even Pinochet ended up in and out of legal trouble with the “international community” through the last 8-10 years of his life.

                • Joel says:

                  If something like this were to happen, it would have to happen simultaneously across the world, with the support of an anti-Cathedral foreign power, and during a time of domestic crisis for the cathedral. And even then, it would end up being pretty shaky.

                  I could see it, for instance, the EU had its hands busy with the Visigrad Group going semi-rogue, the US were in a state of warm civil war, and the takeover of a shithole like Haiti were backed by China for purposes of making it commercially productive for raw inputs that they needed.

                  But that day is not today, nor does it really seem to be coming soon. Either the US will be taken over by the Trump dynasty which will likely continue to support the anti-filibuster policies of the US as well as the Monroe doctrine, making the Haitian Takeover quite unlikely.

                  IMO the closest to this that could happen would be an imitation of the Mormon movement, where a quiet patriarchal religion went into the desert of Paraguay or something along those lines and quietly reproduced while Gnon’s jaws worked its way through the current world order. Over time, it seems likely that the elites of the new religion would have their Romney moment and have a shot of actually winning without having to openly rebel. And until the Cathedral is gone, they’d be under constant threat of a color revolution.

                  IMO, space is the only credible option if you want actual sovereignty in next generation or two.

                • Starman says:

                  @Joel

                  ”… a quiet patriarchal religion went into the desert of Paraguay… … IMO, space is the only credible option if you want actual sovereignty in next generation or two.”

                  Indeed, imagine a patriarchal religion rising out of the wildcat settlements on the frozen deserts of Mars.

                  (I hope this doesn’t go into moderation like my other comments did. It looks like there’s a wave of shills showing up.)

            • Space exists right now. We have rockets and even people living up there. What’s stopping you?

              • jim says:

                The “international community” is blocking access to space, access to the arctic and the antarctic, and access to lands where the locals are lack the cohesion to defend themselves against better organized invaders.

                The men building the Electron rocket report that the legal and governmental obstacles are bigger than actually building the rocket. When Musk is on stage with people from Nasa, you can see he is terrified.

                • I am being facetious, the point being that the forces that theoretically keep R7 out of space are the same ones that keep me from conquering Haiti.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  @jim:
                  “The men building the Electron rocket report that the legal and governmental obstacles are bigger than actually building the rocket.”

                  How much of that red tape is from the particular place you’re launching from, and how much is at the “international”/UN level?

                  That is to ask: How many of Electron’s legal problems be waved away by Putin if they launched from Russia, or by the Emperor Naruhito if they launched from Japan, etc?

      • jim says:

        > but 1) still stands strong. And the robots do not need to be very smart

        -With above replacement fertility, elite fertility, and eugenic fertility, we will not be so careful with lives, and will have a surplus of young men looking to build their own world, looking for their own possessions.

        Telecontrolling robots means you don’t have possessions and power. You are just an interchangeable office drone.

        Space accidents will never kill as many people as government. Reflect on what is happening right now in New York City. People will want to get away from government, will want possessions away from government, and governments will want possessions away from other governments.

        If you are an office drone telecontrolling robots, powerful people can easily take that away from you. If you are a government telecontrolling robots, the competing government can nuke your control center.

        If you are an office drone, a King one hundred million miles away is better than a King a thousand miles away. If you are a King, you would like nukes in space manned by men who could take vengeance against men on earth, should you lose a conflict on earth.

    • OK. I think my prediction stands for the next 50, maybe 100 years – swarms of cheap mid-sized not-overengineered allowed to fail mostly autonomous but not very much AI-like mining robots – but after that, yeah, it might happen.

      The same mining robots could dig out then an underground city for people. No point in building overground on Mars. Better to have stable temperature and 100 meters of rock between your breathable air and the meteors. Currently underground living sucks, but there was talk about ceiling lights that can accurately simulate a sunny day 5-10 years ago, certainly doable, some genetic engineering can result in plants that produce fine smelling, mountain pine-forest air and then it is not so bad.

      • jim says:

        A moderate layer of dirt suffices for radiation and meteors. A hundred feet underground is ridiculous overkill.

        • Yes but it always seemed to me at least in certain conditions excavating can be easier than building. I swear to the seven heavens that it was not inspired by Minecraft, but by The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The planet is made of “walls”, you just excavate the living space between them. Easier than building load bearing structures on the surface. Now I know coal mines on Earth also require load bearing structures to avoid cave-ins, but, I dunno, things up there seem to be more frozen solid or something. If you have a building project to do with men, with a deadline, with expensive energy, above-ground is better. But having robots that are already used for space mining running on free solar energy, and plenty of time (lets assume they can replace spare parts for each other, it is just a modular design) looks like they could carve out an underground Menzoberranzan far easier than building structures above ground.

      • Most likely, you build your habitat in an existing crater and then cover it over. Even better, plenty of Martian craters have lots of sweet good ice at the bottom.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Underground. Of course.

        So that’s what Elon’s tunnel-digging “Boring Company” is really about, right?

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