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Tighten Those Chin Straps Folks Because Here Comes a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD)
Tighten Those Chin Straps Folks Because Here Comes a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD)
By
Cognitive Dissonance
Please stick with this piece all the way through because it does not end on the same path from which it starts.
Being a child of the 50’s and 60’s, it comes as no surprise to anyone from that era that I’m a bit of a space buff. From the moment I saw my first televised rocket launch I was hooked and have never fully recovered from my childhood obsession. Beginning with Project Mercury and the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard in 1961, followed shortly by the three orbits of John Glenn, then progressing through Project Gemini where America practiced the space skills needed to eventually land on the moon and culminating with the Apollo Program and (supposedly) several trips to the moon, one thing they all had in common was the seriousness of everyone involved. Going to space was serious business performed by serious people. There was no joking around because failure wasn’t an option.
Who can forget the early years watching stern (mostly baby faced) engineers hunched over their monitors at the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) and Mission Control in Houston, nearly all wearing the standard dress uniform of white short-sleeve shirt with tie along with the mandatory plastic pocket protector, headsets firmly affixed to one ear while the other was left open to hear those around them.
There were always several huge loose leaf binders at their side, dog-eared and well thumbed, complete with handwritten notations and addendums. And of course, endlessly pacing the back of the room or moving from one monitoring station to another, there was the Mission Director riding herd over his minions. There was no doubt by anyone in that room who the man in charge was and where the buck stopped.
For the Apollo flights a new Houston Mission Control was constructed, complete with a huge front wall covered with screens to display various flight parameters and video, along with a special VIP viewing area in the back sealed behind glass. At that point in the space race NASA had firmly grasped the use and abuse of public relations and propaganda to mold (and hold) public opinion. NASA understood all too well its huge budget depended upon public support, so the launches had become spectator sport and the best ticket in the house was to be seated behind the rocket scientists as they lit off another Roman candle.
Yes sir, this was cutting edge rocket science where nearly everything they did had never been done before. The entire US space program was infused with a can-do attitude where anything can be done if enough brains, brawn and money were thrown at the problem. Failures, while initially expected during testing and development, were not taken lightly and most certainly not joked about. While I feasted on the machines and technology (and still do to this day) it never ceased to amaze me what type of person would willingly strap themselves atop a glorified firecracker and wait for someone else to light it for the ride of their lives.
With this in mind it was extremely refreshing to hear (read actually) Elon Musk’s quip (tweet actually) that his recent attempt to safely land an expended first stage booster (something no one has ever done before) from his SpaceX Falcon 9 International Space Station re-supply rocket ran into difficulty just before touchdown on a drone barge out in the ocean and suffered a RUD, short for a ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’. In other words, it crashed and burned before sinking beneath the waves. Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark, though apparently not much of a mark on the barge itself.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Say or believe what you want about Elon Musk (and there seems to be a huge audience out there who hate Elon Musk for various reasons) but the man is a true innovator and pioneer, someone who radically changes everything about anything he puts his mind to. What he tried, and almost succeeded in doing for the first time the other day, was to launch a rocket and then bring back to Earth (safely and completely intact) the spent first stage.
This is no small task since we are talking about a fragile empty tube (the full fuel tanks add structural rigidity which is no longer there) essentially shaped like a cigarette over 160 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter, and land it intact on its business end on a ship the size of a football field out in the middle of the ocean. And he very nearly did it on his first try. If nothing else the man has balls.
There is a shared understanding in engineering that speaks to the relationship between potential disaster and the complexity of the engineering attempted to solve a complex problem. Essentially a low tech solution has a lower propensity for disaster than high tech when applied to the same problem. While this is a gross oversimplification of a complex situation, you get the idea. Keep it simple stupid (KISS) is a perfect example of this principal.
If you examine some of the methods Elon Musk uses to solve complex problems, clearly he and his engineers understand this principal and practice it in all their endeavors. Outside the box thinking, combined with the hiring of non mainstream consensus thinking indoctrinated talent, consistently puts Elon out in front of the pack. Plus an obvious willingness, and even an affinity, to laugh at his ‘self’ in public when most other professionals would be hiding under their desk or pointing fingers in order to shed any blame for failure. There is no doubt who is in charge here and where the buck stops.
Elon clearly recognizes he is in a high risk business. Rather than fear failure or avoid it like the plague, Musk embraces it for what it truly is, inevitable and survivable if approached in the proper manner and with the correct mindset. What makes a true and consistent winner is honesty first, beginning with the self and radiating outward from there to all s/he touches.
Staying with the space theme for now, let’s briefly look at three examples of RUD within the NASA space program and see if we can find a common theme other than it being serious business. In 1967 three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a fire inside the capsule they occupied during training. While you are welcome to read the entire ‘official’ investigation, which cited all kinds of contributory factors, bottom line the capsule was pumped full of pure oxygen which tends to make nearly everything extremely flammable. While technically not a RUD, that fire was not an accident but rather a certainty just waiting to happen.
The second example; on a cold Florida morning in late January of 1986 the shuttle Challenger suffered an extremely violent and very public RUD shortly after liftoff. While nearly 30 years have done wonders to sanitize the explanation for this disaster, when the decision was being made on whether to launch or not the next morning (there had already been several delays) it was understood it was going to be very cold and the people in that meeting who were responsible for the solid fuel booster rockets (Morton-Thiokol if memory serves correct) clearly stated in the presence of the NASA decision makers there might be problems with seals because of the cold and they urged extreme caution.
They, meaning those who worked for the booster company, were overruled via conference call by those higher up in the company. The pressure to keep the schedule (and the government contracts) was a higher priority than any ‘potential’ problem. The results of that decision, and more importantly everything leading up to that point, are now very well known. The interesting thing about collective decisions and group failure is no one wants to point incriminating fingers since everyone had their fingers in the pie. Such was the case here and the investigation exposed all this in glaring detail.
It was entirely avoidable....and yet it wasn't.
Finally, space shuttle Columbia suffered a RUD upon re-entry from Earth orbit in 2003. While this was a somewhat less public spectacle than Challenger, the root (human) cause was quite similar in nature. While the official explanation was a large chunk of foam insulation detached from the main external fuel tank during the early stage of the climb to Earth orbit, with the foam punching a hole through the thermal shielding on the leading edge of the shuttle wing thereby exposing it to devastating heat during re-entry, the fact is beginning with the very first test shuttle mission chunks large and small had been coming off the external fuel tank and smashing into the orbiter.
This was a very well known and obviously not well understood problem with the space shuttle system. While there were all kinds of issues with this problem, beginning with the original design of both the external fuel tank and the fragile ceramic thermal tiles on the shuttle itself, if you read the actual report (and I did shortly after it came out) in my opinion it all came down to a passage I remember reading. One engineer interviewed by the investigating committee basically said since there had not been significant damage from foam before (Columbia was the 113th flight of the shuttle system) no one considered the real possibility there would be one in the future. It was an ‘acceptable’ risk. Besides, we’re talking about foam insulation here. How bad could it be?
Obviously very bad.
While some might call this a failure of imagination, particularly by those who wish to sanitize their own involvement or that of the institution they are/were involved with, just as it is nearly impossible to get someone to do ‘A’ if they are paid to do ‘B’, so too is it nearly impossible to get someone to critically think about adverse consequences when they are conflicted, subverted or consumed by their own dependency or greed. Which brings us full circle to the coming national, and more likely global, RUD.
Plenty has already been written about the insanity of attempting to rectify a global debt problem with even more debt. Or the stranglehold the wolves have upon the construction of the dinner menu featuring sheep as appetizer, entrée and dessert. So there is no need to repeat it all here. The global economic system is in deep trouble and getting progressively worse.
Of course this doesn’t mean the global economy is doomed to suffer a RUD simply because it is in terrible shape. There is still time to avert complete and utter disaster, though there is no denying we are headed for significant pain and suffering even if ‘they’ somehow manage to avoid the iceberg dead ahead. But of course ‘they’ aren’t trying to avoid the iceberg, just delay the collision in order for the elite to prepare for, and prosper from, the consequences.
And here is where we recognize the true commonality in all the RUD’s described above. While the immediate cause of each disaster is unique in each situation, and the circumstances of each incident are also entirely different, the commonality lay within the organizational cause of each ‘accident’. And by organizational I do not ‘just’ mean the fact NASA was involved in all the above mentioned RUDs.
Step away from the NASA examples and look at any RUD, for instance the breeching of the dikes around New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, and you will find while the trigger for each is unique, the organizational cause for the incident all follow the same basic blueprint. Greed, self interest, broad assumptions, indifference, turf battles, CYA and so on all play a role in creating the organizational circumstances that enable, and even promote, disaster rather than prevent it.
In other words with regard to organizations, particularly public organizations, the cure becomes the disease.
So obviously transparent, and yet so hard to see if you ain't looking.
Wolves Hidden in Sheep’s Clothing
Our socioeconomic system, while purported to have been created in order to benefit all (though not necessarily equally) is in fact used to subvert, exploit and enslave the general population for the benefit of those few at the top of the heap. While the vast majority of us ‘know’ this statement to be true, our conditioning as a slave to the system informs us there is (or at least was) a real chance we can buck the system and ‘prosper’, even if never reaching the highest level of the elite.
The dream of potential ‘freedom’ (ultimately meaning financial freedom for the vast majority, not self rule and determination) motivates us slaves to endure our drudgery. We work and are paid ‘money’, thereby enabling us to eat, sleep and play with a reasonable degree of comfort. The puppet masters make sure just enough crumbs are left on the floor so full scale revolt doesn’t enter the equation. Can anyone say ‘social safety net’ or ‘minimum wage’, both of which support subsistence slave existence?
As I discussed in detail in my “Perception, Inception and the Trojan Horse Money Meme” four part series, the money meme distorts our reality and corrupts the mind and soul to such an extent that for all intents and purposes we become addicted to the pursuit, generation, accumulation, growth and consumption of ‘money’ in all its forms and functions. For those who wish to control the population, the lever effectively used is to control ‘money’ and let the pursuit of the addiction enslave the population. While certainly this is another broad statement which fails to accurately describe anyone in particular, thus enabling all of us to claim ‘I’ am not one of the addicted, the sad fact is much (I would say nearly all in one form or another) of our everyday lives revolve around ‘money’.
None of these concepts are new to those who are most likely reading this and really not the point of this article other than to reiterate the basis for my thinking. While an entirely competent, and most certainly compelling, argument can be made supporting the notion those who administer the socioeconomic system are promoting, or simply enabling, a future RUD as a means to the end of consolidating power and further enslaving those they no longer wish to bestow crumbs upon, a complimentary point of view might be organizational rot and degradation is simply an additional spark to propel the approaching RUD. Houston, we have a problem……and it might just be us.
Those in power set up and/or modify political, economic and social systems to enable the elite, and those who support them, to remain in power. While the narrative we are taught, thus the stories we tell each other, are about truth, justice and the American Way, the ‘truth’ is the American Way is just another experiment in plantation farming following a long line of experiments going back thousands of years. Only ‘ours’ was brilliantly designed to leverage, while simultaneously reinforcing, the master/slave relationship. But of course that doesn’t fit the conditioning, and comforting, narrative we tell ourselves now does it?
While there is no doubt present day living conditions, along with the accompanying bread and circuses, are significantly better than found on 1st Century Roman slave labor farming villas, the Feudal social order of the Medieval Manors or the 18th Century cotton plantations, our productivity, and thereby our profitability to the elite, are also orders of magnitude greater today than the old school plantation slave. A happy self deluded slave is a massively more productive slave. “Sign me up,” begs both master and slave.
The social order never changes, only the narrative and living conditions.
This glaringly obvious ‘fact’ doesn’t alter the reality today’s ‘free’ mind is just as constrained, if not more so, as the mind of the beaten, bloodied and broken plantation slave. Just because we do not acknowledge the binds that tie us to our servitude does not invalidate their existence, but rather significantly strengthens them.
The same can be said about Socialism, Communism, dictatorships, monarchies, the police state and every other modern day plantation hierarchy. The soothing labels we choose to appease our feigned ignorance, if not outright denial, do not shield us from the effects. Rather they wonderfully illustrate our thoroughly broken minds and spirit, with our rapidly decaying bodies the last roadside sign warning of the looming bridge abutment and total systemic collapse.
The present day belief held by many in the alternative community (and increasingly in the mainstream) is ‘Capitalism’, that bastion of free market economic growth and prosperity, has been distorted and hijacked over the last several dozen years or so. This belief implies there was a period of time when ‘Capitalism’ was pure, or at least more pure than it is today.
Believing this forces us to ignore our own history (altered and distorted as it is to help support the narrative we are taught) which shows us corruption, abuse of power, self dealing, manipulation and so on are as much a staple of the American Way as apple pie and Chevrolet……and always has been. While these abuses, along with their duration and intensity, rise and fall over the decades as social awareness and outrage ebbs and flows, the wheel eventually completes its turn and we find ourselves back where we started. While ‘history’ does not repeat it most certainly does rhyme. This is not by accident.
The dog eat dog, or more accurately slave eat slave, adversarial system we are indoctrinated into, and enslaved by, all but assures its eventual organizational RUD. While common sense appears to indicate this makes no sense from the Powers That Be (PTB) point of view, after all stability would seem to be their goal, ‘they’ more than anyone else understand the flaws, intended or otherwise, which are built into this type of socioeconomic system, including its eventual RUD, and assume they will be able to handle just about any eventuality. Besides, it is always better to keep the slave population on edge and fighting among themselves over crumbs and distractions then firmly focused on their true tormentors.
While this might appear to be a huge leap of faith by the elite 1%, a long history of minority rule by generation after generation of elites informs us otherwise. While there are dozens of contributing factors to the elite’s success, their primary strength is their willingness to do ANYTHING required to maintain control, including eating their own by offering up a few sacrificial elite lambs to be burned at the stake.
This effectively serves to sate, even if only on a temporary basis, the angry hoards’ blood lust for someone (else) to be held responsible for their own willing participation in economic and social slavery, thereby enabling the vast majority of the rebellious slaves to return to the more comfortable emotional state of conditioned slavery.
Stated simply we do not cast off our deeply embodied conditioning in a few short days, weeks or even months, thereby freeing our ‘self’ from ourselves. In the ultimate expression of psychological self destruction “We the People” will do whatever it takes to dispel any lingering cognitive dissonance. Above all else, we fear the pain of knowing ourselves. We are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets and those can only be found, and confronted, deep within.
Photo Credit - Inner Demons by Christian Hopkins
This is one of the primary reasons revolutions rarely succeed. Or if they initially do, the revolution itself quickly becomes worse than what it superseded under the guise of carrying out social and political ‘reforms’. If the elite have not already co-opted the leadership of the ‘revolution’ they will soon do so while the revolution struggles to convert to civilian rule. Those who are effective revolutionaries are not necessarily well suited to confront and reform social inequality and strife or create a functioning bureaucracy from scratch.
Knowing this, let me count the number of ways the elite can (re)establish control over the ideologically blind (the revolutionaries) and the emotionally stunted (the recently ‘freed’ slaves) who have now returned to their cages trailing a revised narrative to sooth them back to sleep. It’s like red meat to a starving hyena and the elite are always ready to pounce.
If anything the elite welcome the occasional revolution because it acts as a psychological re-boot for the affected slave nation, encouraging the conditioned to return to their slave quarters while the promised change is never delivered, all while enabling a frenzy of looting by the elite and the revolutionaries while the social and financial order is being restructured. Essentially the conditioned are encouraged to endure even more suffering in the name of change, and many will willingly do so in their desperate pursuit to dispel their recently enflamed cognitive dissonance. The con game changes, but the players remain essentially the same.
While we slaves are preoccupied with local, regional or ‘national’ concerns, the elite see no substantial borders and almost always think and act globally. This is how the 0.1% rules the 1% who rules the 20% who rules the remainder. I do not fear the King as much as I fear all the King’s men, ultimately the better kept and more powerful house slaves who dole out the actual punishment you and I receive.
I am not as concerned with the approaching RUD and the devastation it will bring, for this is inevitable and beyond my ability to control. What concerns me deeply is what will follow. The most powerful opiates and sedatives in human experience do not spring from the labs of Pfizer, Merck or Johnson & Johnson, but rather are produced within the deeply conditioned and pacified minds of the Slave Nation.
The controlling narrative, combined with the need for the conditioned mind to rid itself of all outstanding cognitive dissonance, virtually assures the elite the upper hand regardless of the appearance of revolution, mindless anarchy and mob rule. Rest assured there will be blood, and plenty of it, before the re-boot is complete and the new patsies storm the stage proclaiming ‘our’ victory.
A new set of political patsies, same as the old set of political patsies.
An animal caged all its life rarely ventures outside for long regardless of the ease of egress or the pleasures that beckon beyond. The emotional discord that erupts when the familiar confines are removed is simply too powerful for the vast majority of captive minds to push through, thus the urgent need for control to be reasserted, corralled if you will, if only by a new set of accommodating elites. Power, and a recently ‘freed’ mind, abhors a vacuum.
Therefore, for the elites at least, a RUD, inevitable as it may be, is entirely useful as a reset mechanism and herding mechanism. Put a can of familiar Spam in the back of the cage and the hungry and emotionally distraught will quickly return to the familiar confines of their mental and emotional cages.
This is why time after time I always return to the same beat of the drum. The only way real change will ever be effected is if “We the Slaves” first change our selves. And this can only be accomplished by way of a fearless and thorough examination of our inner fears, triggers and conditioning. To paraphrase Bill W., half measures avail us nothing. To scratch the surface of the ‘self’ and then pull back, either out of fear or shock, only sets us up for more of the same servitude. One must dive in and go deep, returning to the surface often for air and perspective before once again submerging for another scouring of the deepest darkest reaches of the mind and soul.
The next RUD, intentionally planned or organizationally birthed, is just around the corner. Of this I am quite certain if for no other reason than history shows us the well beaten path to the next bridge abutment. Rather than scream my loudest while beating my chest in frustration at my impotence and my fellow slaves’ willingly ignorant servile prostration, I must ready myself and those who wish to join me for the coming winter.
I cannot stress enough the fear and panic which will permeate the global community when the next RUD commences. The herd’s instinct to riot, run and then retreat will be incredibly powerful and will overwhelm all of us even from a distance if we enter the next disaster unprepared mentally, emotionally and physically. And by prepare I do not just mean stacking PM’s, stocking food and strengthening the fences.
The only way to weather the coming storm is to first look deeply within, clean house, become settled with the things we cannot change and busy ourselves with those we can. It all begins with the demons within.
Cognitive Dissonance
01-27-2015
Seconds before disaster.
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Yep. Expressed a similar notion to Ms. Remus just the other day. It's spinning too fast and it's way out of balance - it can't not fly apart.
I can see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
It's show time.
"I can see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Frank Zappa, an unsung genius.
When it no longer serves their purpose or it just doesn't matter anymore, they roll up the fake scenery and curtains and expose the brick wall in the back for all to see.
The real question is simple. What are you/we/us going to do about it? The bet by the eltie is we do nothing. So far they are correct.
"The herd’s instinct to riot, run and then retreat will be incredibly powerful and will overwhelm all of us even from a distance if we enter the next disaster unprepared mentally, emotionally and physically. And by prepare I do not just mean stacking PM’s, stocking food and strengthening the fences."
True and urgently important. We need to get it right this time. We as a civilization, even as a species may not get another chance.
"The only way to weather the coming storm is to first look deeply within, clean house, become settled with the things we cannot change and busy ourselves with those we can. It all begins with the demons within."
Deeply true but there's a missing piece. Generations of millions of people looking within has not prepared us for what's coming. The learning and looking within must happen in the context of struggle - the struggle to learn new ways of working together and cooperating to survive, the struggle to defeat the shape-shifting foe who will try to wrestle us back down and emerge as the masters of the reset.
Look within, struggle for self-awareness yes. But this is no time for a retreat from engagement. And no time to write off the "sheep" who will have to learn a lot, grow a lot, quickly.
While I can state with great assurance that if asked 100% of the population will claim to be 'aware', the number who are actually trying to break free from their life long, even generational, conditioning is less than a few percentage points.
Worse, those who claim awareness, but have taken very few steps towards actual awareness, will not only fail to join the resistance, but will actively support the status quo out of fear of.............fill in the blank. A key tactic of any revolution is to attack the passive people to force them to take sides. When the people realize the status quo cannot protect them, only then do they join the revolution since they now have nothing left to lose.
The time of greatest potential acceptance by the population of actual substantial change, during an socioeconomic collapse when they have very little left to lose, is also the time when they are least likely to preserve through the change without faltering and giving up when someone in 'authority' makes promises, the best promise being to relieve them of the responsibility to rule themselves.
Most people do not desire freedom to rule themselves. They want financial freedom to do as they please within a system that assures them they can eat what they catch. I have the utmost faith in individuals and absolutely no faith in the herd. The controllers always play to the herd and it works every time.
"I have the utmost faith in individuals and absolutely no faith in the herd. The controllers always play to the herd and it works every time."
Gospel.
Thanks for sharing your thought exercises Mr.Cog
Thank you.
And thank you for describing my writing for what it really is....a thought exercise and nothing more. While many others speak as if they know the truth and are acting on it with great success (yeah.....right) I attempt to explain my own weaknesses and mistakes, especially those I discover after the fact when I'm licking my wounds and apply lots of band-aids.
I have always found I learn so much more from my mistakes than my successes.......once I push my huge ego aside and get to work examining the smoking mess on the floor. I speak of cowards, but there is no greater coward than me. I speak of herds and passive minds, but I moo with the best of them. I am no better or worse than any of my readers.
To be quite frank I always find the comment section to be so much better than the articles I write. I only see my point of view. I am grateful for the variety of points of view people are willing to share in a mostly respectful manner. I can't tell you how many times I spent days writing an article only to read a comment that touches upon a point of view I never considered or quickly summaries in a few sentences what I took days to create. Very humbling and quite enlightening.
Thank you to all the readers and commenters for the continuing education.
Great article. I can remember at 10 watching the early missiles blast off at Canaveral from Daytona. I was able to see Apollo 12 and a rare night-shuttle launch at the cape with a buddy who worked on the boosters. When it finally got almost too small to see, the announcer said it had just crossed the African coast!
I was 12 miles away from the Apollo launch. You cannot imagine the sound and the earth shaking from the Saturn V!
I do recall, having the friend who worked at the booster factory, that the solid-fuel boosters for the shuttle parachuted back to earth, where they were recovered and re-fitted.
However, Musk has added a new edge if he was actually trying to steer the booster to a pre-determined spot.
I cannot remember the name, but there was an A C Clarke story about how society was computer organized, but every so often a person was born who was designed to screw up the system in order to keep it fresh.
So, yes, RUD is figured in to some degree. The secret is staying out of the way when it goes 'boom.'
"I was 12 miles away from the Apollo launch. You cannot imagine the sound and the earth shaking from the Saturn V!"
7.5 million pounds of thrust at sea level for the Saturn V first stage did tend to shake the rafters a bit. I never witnessed it but have talked to a few who did. Awe struck perfectly describes their retelling of the experience.
In a rather macabre thought I have recently seen for the first time several photos taken from ground level within 10 or so miles of the Nagasaki explosion in Japan in 1945. I have often wondered what the photographer was feeling and thinking at that moment.
Wonderful read, thanks!
"The present day belief held by many in the alternative community (and increasingly in the mainstream) is ‘Capitalism’, that bastion of free market economic growth and prosperity, has been distorted and hijacked over the last several dozen years or so. This belief implies there was a period of time when ‘Capitalism’ was pure, or at least more pure than it is today."
The core fallacy in the Libertarian doctrine, a clinging to the past.
The rejoinder to that would be the socialist doctrine of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result being called "progress".
Instead of what it really is ;-)
These socialists sell their nonsense as 'progressive'. It is not. Socialism in all of its forms is an attempt to remain as a child, demanding that others fill the same role as their parents.
It is regressive.
The equivalent of socialism in a society is a cancer in your body.
Absolutely, socialism is regressive and thats a very good analogy about the paternalistic nature of it.
I tire of "isms". Just more line drawing to feel righteous.
You left out the best part, which was the next paragraph. :-)
"Believing this forces us to ignore our own history (altered and distorted as it is to help support the narrative we are taught) which shows us corruption, abuse of power, self dealing, manipulation and so on are as much a staple of the American Way as apple pie and Chevrolet……and always has been. While these abuses, along with their duration and intensity, rise and fall over the decades as social awareness and outrage ebbs and flows, the wheel eventually completes its turn and we find ourselves back where we started. While ‘history’ does not repeat it most certainly does rhyme. This is not by accident."
Agreed. That is the best part. But it is not all simply by design. Our masters are engaged in constant combat with us, and the combat of ideas is central. They are more conscious of this than most of us are, but nevertheless their moves can be forced by our responses - and driven by their conflicts with each other and by the unexpected results of their own system to which in some ways they appear to perennially blind.
They do not have a free hand, and for all their Olympian global perspective they too are not fully conscious or able to help themselves even then they see with blinding clarity. If they were, could they be driving our species to the brink like this?
I agree. It could all change in a minute if 'we' decided we wanted it to change. But.......it is obvious we do not.
From the article........
"While there are dozens of contributing factors to the elite’s success, their primary strength is their willingness to do ANYTHING required to maintain control, including eating their own by offering up a few sacrificial elite lambs to be burned at the stake."
Are "We the People" willing to do ANYTHING required to free ourselves from their control? Not even close. The closer each of us are to house slave or enforcer slave status, the less likely we are to do anything that might change our status.
That is the definition of the slave mentality.
Freeing ourselves is a process, over time. Different people engage and change at different paces. And change may be below the surface until events cause it to erupt into view.
I would encourage you to think on the concept "revolutionary patience". Don't have a good reference for you, I know it as an oral tradition.
Certainly we who are on the path have a lot to learn and teach and this is getting compressed into a very short time. Teaching - but more properly fostering learning, where we learn and discover and grow alongside our students.
And there is another concept we must embrace against all reason and experience: "revolutionary optimism". Which flows from embracing the process and accepting all possible outcomes including one's own death and the death of everything one holds near and dear, and then committing to the possibility of a positive outcome and living into it without fear.
Again, I'm sorry I don't have a reference for you. But know that out there among the sheep, here and there, are pockets of those who understand things this way.
America has been instilled with a subtle form of defeatism: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" introduced by Bugs Bunny, no less!
Cheer for the winning team! Go Cowboys! Go Yankees!
Everyone loves a bandwagon to jump on. Extremely low risk emotionally to determine where the herd is before joining. You can never be wrong that way.
Thank you for another really good article Cog.
I do wonder how many will show up in this thread to debate the integrity of the space program(s). This piece really isn't about space, but the way things explode and surprise everyone when it was clearly foreseeable. The old CNBC shuffle... "we never saw THAT coming."
Ask and you shall receive... The focus in comments is on things that don't require deep thought it seems. Easy to miss the point when said point requires some rational thinking.
...(supposedly) several trips to the moon...
The moon landing hoaxFull BBC documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj5r3jXhV2Q
.............................................................
Who Is Cleaning The NASA Mars Rover Curiosity?http://www.ufo-blogger.com/2012/09/who-is-cleaning-nasa-mars-rover.html
NASA Mars rover Curiosity never went to mars and is instead operating from some where in Atacama desert in Chile.
...................................
S.S.D.D. !
In some societies, a fish hook hanging off your mouth is a fashion statement.
Winning for you!!!!
People belive in malarkey, balogna (baloney) and hooey because THEY WANT TO BELIEVE. I believe I'll have a beer and note your post marks you as self-deluded. Just where did the Atlas V rockets, etc go when they launched them? Where did the space shuttles go when they later returned to earth?
I bet a trillion dollars your posts never include notes on Feynman, et al...
I think the moon landings being faked was a scam to make money by selling books claiming the missions were fake.
I have been so fortunate to get inside of a couple of these spacecrafts and watched enough launchings that I don't worry about the 'faked' missions claims.
375 miles above earth
is the van allen radiation belt...
no human could survive passing thru it
unless very heavily shielded ...
just a thought...
Please explain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
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Great piece of writing there. And true.
Richard Feynman's contribution to the Challenger investigation could be summarized :
Back at the beginning, in the Mercury and Apollo programs, the entire project was run by the pocket-protector types with slide rules and engineering degrees, and a passion for the technology. As time went by, they were replaced by people whose careers depended on influencing other people.
Which led to the usual evolution of the bureaucracy. ... Finally decisions were being made by people who did not have such an interest in the technology. Challenger was launched with a Git 'R Done mentality in spite of the engineers' warnings.
By the way, the committee wanted to edit Feynman's remarks out of the final report. They ended up in an appendix...
Cool guy, Mr. Feynman.
Tried pretty hard to get some truth into the report, but was one guy fighting the system.
OT - His lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics are on Youtube.Worth your time if you have a decent science background.
100% true.
Feynman was also smart enough to know that he was used.
The worst precedent he set was the one equating the Noble Prize to being the "expert" especially when it comes to economics (Krugman comes to mind).
They added his findings as an addendum because he threatened to pull his name off the report.
Sorry for the dp.
see relevant photos and more re Columbia is lost...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nasa-vet-shuttle-crew-not-warne...
Ignorance is bliss for those who are about to die? The choice to know how bad things are belongs to those who are about to die. So this type of "What if" discussion should take place on the ground long before the flight.
But real men and women don't talk about those things they are frightened of. And I'm not talking about those who sit on top of the rocket, but those on the ground who will have to deal with the fallout afterward.
From the article.
Cog Dis... I found that article searching for the photo of the re-entry breakup which is in my space and aviation scrapbook. The Chicago Tribune which had that pic on the front page above the fold no longer maintains that AP photo on its online archive, so I found it elsewhere.
The scrapbook was started by my father, with pictures of the first USPS mail flight and dirigibles, etc.
Your remarks on the ethics involved here should be widely reported and repeated. No honest enterprise is ever diminished by the truth.
That must be one hell of a scrapbook.
Thank you for the link. I had not seen it before, though I was aware of the information about NASA suspecting there was a 'minor' problem with the wing halfway through the flight.
All launches were/are extensively photographed and studied afterwards. Usually there was no hurry to look them over unless there was a problem. In this case they were a week into the flight before someone in the back room looked at the tape and still photos closely and saw the foam hit the shuttle.
It was determined little to no damage resulted since it was 'just' a light piece of insulating foam. The thinking was along the lines of something little more than a pound that breaks apart easily hitting the wing. No one considered that the foam was water soaked and then frozen after the external tank had been filled with extremely cold liquid oxygen. We were no longer talking about foam, but a block of ice.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Personally I suspect they came to that conclusion because to come to any other meant the shuttle was doomed. Since there was no way of doing anything about it if the wing was severely damaged, they came to the only conclusion that helped them emotionally deal with the issue. Nothing to see here, move along.
I suspect the true believers at the Federal Reserve are caught in the same cognitive trap.
pop quiz:
explain the purpose of nasa
They own space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF7vt-c2N1g
Dept. of Defense
Pilot should ALWAYS be told the condition of his craft.
Yes, they should have pulled out the stops. A rescue mission was NOT impossible.
Fuck NASA, they degenerated into just another boo-racracy.
It's so bad now Bath House has them claiming Alan Shephard was a moose-lam and A-Rabs invented rocketry.