I’ve got a simple idea to mitigate and prepare for climate change that would create jobs, new industries, improved living standards in Appalachia and accelerate our ability to colonize Mars.

Our planet is heating up. Politicians ignore it in favor of the mining and extraction industries while billionaires fantasize about escaping to Mars.  Neither is a survivable future but I think both could be put to work for us to prosper.  All it takes is a little redirection.

Giving in to mining and extraction interests will make the people of West Virginia happy in the short run but the Earth inhospitable in the long run.  Shutting down these industries will destroy not only the jobs of tens of thousands of American miners but all the subsidiary engineering firms, equipment manufacturers, required infrastructure, suppliers and, most importantly, knowledge base.  If the American TV manufacturing industry is anything to go on, once the industry dies, you have none of the component parts left alive to restart it.  We will need to restart it, which I’ll get to later.

Going to Mars will require living permanently underground as its atmosphere is too thin to shield us from cosmic radiation, to say nothing of breathing. Perhaps we should attempt underground living on Earth before trying it out for the first time on an alien planet.

Scientists tell us our temperatures may increase by four degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  Given what we’ve seen with a less than one degree Celsius increase the last couple decades, this four degree increase is going to have a huge impact on hurricanes, food production, refugees, drought and literally surviving the summer in places like Phoenix.  A few days of 120 degree heat on American crops in August and we’d have mass starvation followed by the Road Warrior, an entertaining movie but not how I want to live out my retirement years.

We’ll need somewhere to shelter and grow crops away from the heat that’s more cost effective than powering air conditioning for millions of separate above-ground structures on a landscape that will be increasingly catching fire. As the mean Earth temperature is lower below the surface than above, why not find out if we can live underground before we’re forced to?  We can call it a dry run for colonizing Mars if it makes people feel better.

Why can’t we take the thousands of men trained to hollow out mountains for coal to hollow out mountains for research facilities, indoor robotic farming, and eventual residential living? It’s not like it would be that big a step for many of us considering 1 in 4 Americans remain indoors all day long.  I mean, come on, we spent a lot more evolutionary time living in caves than condos and the outdoors would be just an elevator ride away.

NASA spawned multiple commercial technologies and industries because they were presented with the challenge of getting to and functioning in a hostile environment.  We could expect some similar outcomes in different fields directed to living in the hostile environment below our feet: industrial mycology, water purification, indoor farming, waste recycling, cyanobacteria manipulation for oxygen production to name a few. These would be the kinds of technologies that could help us in the outside world just in case 97% of scientists are wrong and we’ve got nothing to fear from anthropomorphic climate change.

We need to focus on the future instead of being chained to the past.  Our political leaders still fight over social issues left over from the 60’s and 70’s while our military leaders strategize on how to control the liquified remains of life from the Cenozoic Era to fuel our war machine.  It’s a colossal waste of our civilization’s time and resources when we need to concentrate on surviving the pickle that fossil fuels and industrial agriculture have put us in.  It’d be best not to try and figure this stuff out when people are starving and civilization collapses.  Now is the time for bold experiments and preparation.

Here’s how it could evolve. Government agencies are given the mission and funding, engineers draw up the plans, miners get to work, research personnel and their families arrive in West Virginia (boosting income and education), research conducted, expansion continues with each success.  A best case scenario would have thousands of people happily living and working in the complex in 20 years, bolstering the surrounding economy, providing both an example and numerous lessons learned in case mankind has to make the move underground at some point to shrink our physical and ecological footprint, allowing the biosphere to regenerate after the thrashing we’ve given it the last couple centuries.  Added bonus, we’ll have bought out the coal business, decreasing our carbon output and environmental pollution.

This may sound impossible but it isn’t.  All it takes is direction and funding.  The coal industry operates off a measly $32 billion in annual sales. just barely edging out pet food.  Why not buy it out and put it to work doing something that will give us future value instead of future poison.  That sounds like an awful lot of money until you realize that our government just gave a trillion dollar tax cut to the super wealthy who don’t need it.

Billionaire Peter Thiel won’t survive climate change in his New Zealand underground bunker and Billionaire Elon Musk won’t survive it on Mars.  The tiny group of people they’d take with them wouldn’t have long term viability based on their scant numbers alone. It takes a lot of us to maintain a technological civilization.  Humans are weak apes who have only gotten this far because we can cooperate toward common goals. The more people involved, the more amazing stuff we can accomplish, from hunting mastodons to landing on the moon.

We can do better than the Road Warrior.  Let’s go underground.

Going Underground – The Jam

In the past couple of years we’ve been getting a lot of World War Three apocalyptic doom hurled at us. Russia, North Korea, and Trump have all threatened to use nukes while the Chinese are content with bragging about their ability to atomize anyone from the front page of their newspapers. The poor people of Hawaii were alerted to prepare for an incoming nuclear strike just last January.  Thanks to modern technology and clickbait news, we can all share in the mortal fear of nuclear annihilation.

Welcome to the club.

It was December 31st, 1978. I was nine years old. My father was on General Haig’s staff when he was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander. We were in Merano Italy because General Haig wanted to go skiing after Christmas and he always needed his staff nearby.

Haig was one of those generals who works their people to death. It was a sore spot for the wives as they saw their husbands less than when they were in front line battalions on the West German border. The families drove down from NATO headquarters in Belgium to meet Haig after Christmas for a couple days of skiing and a New Year celebration.

We skied the mountain during the day and retired to the hotel at night. I spent time playing with an erector set and re-reading Avenger’s #178 even though I really wasn’t into it as I never considered Beast a real Avenger. I’d already bored myself reading Archie on the drive down. The wives were upset as General Haig ate up what little family time they were expecting with constant meetings.

Here’s what the mind of a nine year old army brat was aware of in 1978: the U.S. lost the Vietnam war and evacuated the embassy when I learned to ride a bike, we waited in long lines for gasoline on specific days of the week with special ration coupons because OPEC was putting the squeeze on ‘the West’, a Soviet-backed coup happened in Afghanistan, the Shah of Iran’s government was collapsing, the new Pope was Polish, Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO forces in tanks and artillery, and that in case of war military dependents should make a beeline for France to escape murder by Spetnaz or obliteration via tactical nukes.

What I wasn’t aware of was that the Soviet Union, China and France had all detonated atmospheric nuclear weapons that December. The U.S. had the common courtesy to carry out both its nuclear tests that month underground in Nevada.  I didn’t know Pope John Paul II made the Soviets anxious about Poland.  I didn’t know the Polish economy was collapsing, making the Russians even more antsy.  I didn’t know the Soviets were reinforcing units in East Germany and Poland, then deploying them to the field.

It was New Years’ Eve, the staff families were all in the hotel’s cellar restaurant. The men kept getting up and leaving the table, pissing off their wives  Words like, “control freak,” were used, prescient words apparently as Haig’s career ended after he claimed he was in “control” of the government when Reagan was shot. Dinner abruptly ended before midnight as General Haig ordered the staff to pack and depart to NATO headquarters immediately.

Families argued in the rooms on either side of us as I shoveled erector set pieces into my backpack.  We would be driving through the Alps during heavy snowfall on a night with good odds of encountering drunks behind the wheel.  Why, everyone wanted to know, did we all need to make such a dangerous trip?

The short answer was that General Haig thought the Warsaw Pact was about to invade West Germany and start World War Three – Happy New Year!  I lay in the backseat, as the Fiat wound around mountain curves. The highway lights kept the car’s cabin rotating through alternate bands of dark and bright. I fell asleep in an Austrian tunnel wondering if the world would be there when I woke up.

Daylight revealed Germany and snow.  I guess the Russians didn’t think catching General Haig skiing on New Years’ Day was enough of a strategic multiplier to risk launching World War Three and ending most human life.  Fourth grade got back underway the next week.

Nothing changed on New Year’s Day, only my awareness, which felt like a curse as there is nothing a nine year old can do.

Expect more threats of nuclear war and brinksmanship as Trump gets increasingly backed into a legal corner.  It will dramatically increase the odds of miscalculation and accidental war which we almost got to experience on January 1st, 1979.  The United States is on an unnecessary and dangerous trajectory.

We’re not children and we can do something about it.  We can put a stop to a blundering foreign policy that’s equal parts blood red pride and white hot fear.   All it takes is to vote Democratic for Congress on Tuesday, November 6th.

They’re not perfect, nobody is, but at least they won’t get us all killed.

New Years Day – U2

I worked as Director of New Business at a small ad agency in Manhattan at the turn of the century.  The pair leading our agency were old school – our artistic director designed the Evian bottle while our creative director coined the phrase, “Meow Mix – tastes so good cats ask for it by name.” The client roster was loaded with internet and financial companies and we were getting crushed by the collapse of the first internet bubble. Al Qaeda then crashed an airliner into the office of our best client, Cantor Fitzgerald’s E-Speed, located at the top of the World Trade Center.

You learn a lot about how the system works from inside an ad agency.  You get all the basic financial, product and sales data from whatever company and industry the agency works in or pursues.  You learn how the sausage is made because you’re stitching the casing together with art and words.  Using the technology of the time, a good campaign that grabbed the consumer by the emotions would result in a 20 percent increase in sales whether the product was life insurance or beer.

At the turn of the century, Americans were absorbing about two thousand advertising messages per day. We are now battered with more than ten thousand advertising messages per day by technology aimed straight at us using our search history, purchases, demographic data, physical location (down to the specific aisle in the supermarket), psychological profile and even our personal conversations (Hi Alexa!).

Even if you choose not to use the internet, you’re still peppered with junk mail disguised to look like it might be from the government, phone calls from robots, and exposing young children to the nightmare-inducing billboards (the latest ultraviolent movie, TV show or videogame) which loom above our streets and shopping centers.

The end result of this constant attack on our minds is a profound warping of our society as we’re surrounded by ad fictions everywhere we look.  Let me state, for the record, that the more soft drinks you consume, the less you will look like the people in the ads, that buying a new pickup truck will not make you a man, it will make you a person who has an average monthly debt payment of $515, and that large oil companies are not trying to speed the transition off fossil fuels, they’re simply trying to keep us from hitting the political panic button on climate change.

The strange reality of modern life is that the advertising now watches us back with greater clarity and precision than we watch it.  We need spaces free of marketing other than the woods, which are currently on fire in much of the country.

The modern world is incredibly complex and it’d be nice to navigate it without an ad attempting to interrupt our focus more often than every other breath we take. Seriously, we take about sixteen thousand breaths while we’re awake and receive about ten thousand brand messages during that same time.  If you don’t think that is messing our heads up, turn on the TV and look at who our President is.

Every Breath You Take – The Police

I had a buddy who inherited millions in the 90s. He insisted whenever we met up for dinner it be at Hama Sushi.  I’m not a sushi fan but whatever. I’d order a California roll and a Bud Light while he ordered Sea Urchin sashimi, Dragon rolls, Soft-shell crab and a couple of hot sakis. The bill would arrive and he’d insist we split it equally.

He would do this with a straight face.

When it was just the two of us I’d tell him no, forcing him to pay his share of the meal. However, the larger the group of people meeting out for dinner, the more successful my wealthy friend would be in passing the cost of his exorbitant meals onto others.  Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. I call it entitled multi-millionaire cheapskates and it’s what’s driving our country down the toilet.

I’ve heard, “If you want to be rich, you have to do it with other people’s money,” from many successful businessmen, lawyers, real estate magnates, bankers and movie producers in my life.  It’s their most common advice.  The truly rich don’t risk their own money, they risk yours: your pension funds, your mortgages, your city, state and federal tax dollars.

It’s an ugly truth that O.P.P., Other People’s Property, is what built this country.  “Free land,” taken from natives and “Free labor,” taken from Africa with investment capital supplied by Europe drove American expansion and industrialization. We deal with the repercussions to this day.

Now our elite hoard their money like dragons, underpaying their workers in the companies they own and letting the government pick up the slack in food stamps, welfare and medicaid.  They slash education and protections for the American people.  Trump, his cabinet and his wealthy supporters are a perfect example of this – they’ve driven the federal budget over a cliff with the expectation that you, the American people, will be left holding the bag for trillions in debt they’ve accumulated in order to further enrich themselves.

The money they seem willing to part with (aside from massages, gurus and helicopter skiing) buys politicians, which appears to be cheaper than a two bedroom home in Modesto.  But even that seems too great an expense lately as the moneyed elite behind Trump are so tight-fisted with their cash they allowed the Russians to buy the election for what appears to be less than the cost of a mid-budget studio feature film – they used other people’s money and got to reap the profits.

My friend, twenty years later, still tries to stick people with the bill but we know better now.  We all band together and keep him from getting away with it, no matter how large the group, because we’ve come to expect his predictable behavior.  It’s like a financial version of Naughty by Nature’s song, right down to somebody getting screwed in the end.

It’s time we as a society say we’re not down with O.P.P. and that we’re tired of getting cheated.

O.P.P. (Naughty by Nature)

Imagine this.

We’re on a spaceship traveling between the stars, it’s bigger than the Millennium Falcon, The Enterprise or the Battlestar Galactica.  It’s a generation ship, a massive behemoth meant to sustain us for multiple human generations as we move at sub-light speed toward our final destination.

The ship’s systems are so complicated that none of us completely understand how it functions, which never seemed to be that big of a deal because we’ve each got our own little jobs to keep us busy during the journey.

The ship has been in space for so long the crew has different ideas about our destination – most people think we’re headed to Kepler442b while a minority believes we’re headed to Kepler452b.  I don’t think it matters much as we’re still probably a thousand years away.

People get crazy ideas in space and recently one of those ideas is that our ship’s purpose is to provide fun for the officers, most of whom inherited their positions instead of earning them like the rest of us. It’s practically a non-stop party for them down on deck 47 – life support.

The party has been going on for quite some time. Lately our senior leadership has joined the festivities, spending less time on the bridge and more time on Deck 47, passing out extra rations to their favorites.  Many of us are hopeful that we’ll get an invite to the decades-long celebration but I’ve been there and seen it first hand when I was part of a conduit repair team.  I feel it’s my duty to tell people what’s really happening.

Deck 47 used to be automated. A few generations back, our ship’s officers unlocked it and discovered that the automated systems had produced a huge surplus since departing the Sol system six thousand years ago.  Our officers spend their time eating, drinking, and playing in what I can only describe as an orgiastic atmosphere. When I worked on Deck 47 as part of that repair team, I saw them, and I’m not kidding, wheeling in a rhino stolen from the zoo on Deck 23 for a bacchanalian feast. I’ve got a buddy who works on Deck 23 that confirmed dozens of our breeding pairs have simply “disappeared” in the last 20 years.

That’s not the worst of it. Lately, the officers have been restricting access to Deck 47. It’s like they don’t want us to know what’s going on even though it’s been clear to some of us for a while.

I’ll just come out and say it: the Deck 47 surplus is gone and they’ve dipped into the life support system feed stock.

What that means for us is less food in the short term and less air in the long term.  There is a very high likelihood that the entire system will break down, killing all of us and turning our vessel into a ghost ship.

Now I’ve told you the truth and with that information we’re all going to have to make what should be a simple decision.  Are we going to let our drunken, over-sexed leaders kill us all or are we going to end the party and repair the life support system?

The imaginary choice we have is obvious.

Now turn your imagination off.

The planet you are standing on is a generation ship that circles the galaxy every 250 million years with no final destination or even a port of call.  The life support alarms are blaring.  Our leadership in America denies there is a problem.

We need new leaders.

I remember the first time I saw The Apprentice in 2005. My first wife and I had two children under the age of two and, with no relatives for a thousand miles, were under virtual house arrest.  The reality show tropes of sluts, nuts, pettiness and catfights were all on display with the added bonus that MBA grads (which neither of us were) would get humiliated and fired after screwing up basic tasks their uneducated audience could easily accomplish. At the end of each episode, Donald Trump (who I knew from reading newspapers to be a lying, debt-riddled conman) would pass judgement on the contestants and fire one.

“Fuck this shit, they’re training us to be slaves,” I told her. She accused me of over-reacting, which I probably was. As a member of the Writer’s Guild, the move to reality television bothered me because people believed it was real even though the shows were clearly scripted by unacknowledged writers. Like other Mark Burnett productions, Survivor and The Bachelor,  The Apprentice shared the same plot mechanism to drive their stories forward – people must be eliminated each week.

The show cross-pollinated with gossip magazines, creating an endless loop of vapid drama which could surround the audience from the supermarket checkout lane to a dentist’s waiting room.  People could be surrounded by unreality everywhere they went, until it soaked into their consciousness.  All of it geared to one over-arching goal –  make  money by encouraging the worship of the rich.

It’s no wonder this unreality merged with the other great unreality in America, the evangelical prosperity gospel, where Christ is portrayed as somebody who can help you get rich, a  belief system where prophets are used to generate profits despite Christ proclaiming  in the actual gospels that “the meek shall inherit the Earth,” and a “rich man can enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a camel can fit through the eye of a needle.”  The Prosperity Gospel preachers edit gospel reality out of their sermons the same way The Apprentice edited Trump’s reality out of the show. In another great matchup with reality TV, the prosperity evangelicals plot is also driven forward with a belief in elimination – the end times.

These unrealities, a more sophisticated word for lies, reinforced each other for almost two decades before peoples’ perception of reality was warped enough for Trump to be “elected” President.  The delivery instrument for both was television – a light broadcast into our homes.

I find it fascinating that these lies are transmitted to us via light, to distract us with money and power, as the real world literally burns from what scientists, who study the observable truths of God’s creation, predict will be our end – climate change.

I published an essay on Friday describing my CTE diagnosis.  Many people wrote that I was brave for admitting and sharing this. I would argue that it is not brave, it’s simply accepting reality. I grew up in an analog world where privacy existed and secrets could be kept. That world no longer exists but most of our society is under the mistaken belief that it does. The sooner we let go of that fiction, the sooner we can evolve as a society and as individuals.

Almost every interaction we have in the modern world leaves a data trail. Our purchases, our likes, our friends, our locations, our medical records, our porn tastes, our emails, our texts, our phone calls and even our private conversations (thanks Alexa!) are all digitally mapped, sold and analyzed.  Corporations, nation states and organized crime are the primary purchasers of this information which is used for marketing and control. The process is just getting started.

This transformation to digital reality informs our perception of the real world and we don’t like what we see. Minority communities have spoken of racism and police brutality for decades to an unbelieving general public –  now we see the proof and can watch it happen in real time. We’ve often heard our politicians were corrupt – now we see the money move between shell companies.  People have said the press is manipulating us, now we can do a few Google searches and discover that Maggie Haberman, the New York Times’ White House correspondent and one of their chief political reporters for the 2016 campaign, has a mother whose company handled public relations for the Trumps and the Kushners.

Shame is the most effective tool to control human beings because we want to present ourselves to the world as perfect. We are conditioned by it almost from birth. Our heads are pumped full of thousands of messages a day telling us we are fat, ugly, uncouth, friendless, incompetent and smell bad unless we pony up the cash for whatever is being sold.

Politicians are likewise controlled through shame with sexual and financial indiscretions, as the President of Cambridge Analytica admitted on secret camera this year.  Why else would our Congress act against the interests of the American people on such issues as climate change, taxes, financial regulations and national health care?

As algorithms and AI advance, everything we’ve ever said, written or done in life will be used against us for further control by the corporations, nations and criminal enterprises that possess our data. I’m not brave in admitting I have CTE because it’s a pre-existing condition that every employer will be aware of the moment I submit my resume.

We are faced with a choice as we move forward, to be controlled through our fear of shame for being imperfect or to accept that we are flawed and try to be better.  I choose to accept that I am imperfect.

I choose to be human.

It’s July and it’s hot in the northern hemisphere, which isn’t unusual.. What is unusual is 90 degree days in the arctic circle and forest fires bordering it. Drought stretches from Ireland to Poland as well as swathes of the U.S. and Canada. Temperatures are reaching all-time highs in locations worldwide. The permafrost is melting and there’s a lot of bad under the ice. We are experiencing climate change as 97% of Earth’s scientists predicted based on accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere produced by human activities.

Scientists have warned us the effects will become quite severe, possibly an extinction level event.

Despite the disaster unfolding before our eyes,  oligarchs plot and scheme against each other for more wealth and power.  It reminds me of Game of Thrones – a scout has reported a white walker, but the noble houses are too busy murdering each other for money and power to see mankind’s approaching doom. Truth being stranger than fiction, in our case 97% of our scouts (scientists) have reported white walkers (climate change).

The noble families of Westeros believed they were safe behind the giant ice wall protecting their realm without realizing the Night King had an undead dragon which would blast the ice wall apart and unleash the army of the dead upon Westeros.  The oligarch families of Earth don’t even realize they’ve been protected by ice (polar icecaps and permafrost) which seals off gigatons of methane from the atmosphere,  When that methane gets into the air, it will supercharge climate change and cook the Earth.

Oligarchs have paid more than $2 billion dollars in climate denialism, to say nothing of their control of the governments which set policy.  They do this because they think they will survive.  They won’t and I’ll give you two reasons: 1) Carbon dioxide takes about 10,000 years to naturally work its way out of the atmospheric system – ain’t nobody got that much food and water in their underground bunker.  2) The construction workers, engineers and security personnel who built and guard the oligarch bunkers also have families, know the bunker locations and how to operate the heavy machinery necessary to dig the oligarchs out like truffles.

If you could travel back to some earlier GoT book/season and give advice to the leading families of Westeros, it would be to band together to fight the white walkers, as they are the real threat.

There is only one way to survive climate change: deal with it head on with the same societal mobilization we used during World War Two. This will require a plan (there are many), capital (there is more than enough) and collective will (everyone wants to live, right?).  The technology we need already exists.

Unlike Westeros, we the people have access to information and the ability to vote.  It’s time we do something about the trouble brewing in the north.

The White House released the official transcript and video from Trump’s Helsinki news conference with Putin.  In the “official” transcript and video, Reuters’ reporter Jeff Mason’s question to Vladimir Putin asking if the Russian leader wanted Trump to win the 2016 election has edited out Putin’s answer, “Yes I did, yes I did.”  Millions of people around the world saw it on live TV, myself included.

Altering the historical record  was pioneered by the Soviet Union during its many purges. It was used to make people disappear from the historical record and typically involved air brushing them out of photos with Stalin or Lenin. If the state could control the past, they can then control the present.

As if to emphasize Trump’s descent into Stalinism, yesterday the President told the VFW’s National Convention in Kansas City yesterday, “What you are seeing and reading is not what’s happening.”  Those words should scare the hell out of any decent American that believes in truth, freedom and the Constitution.

Given what you’ve just read, I’d like you to think about the power of historical negation combined with social media.  Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and others have shared your data with Russia and China – all of it.  Altering and negating your own history is simply an algorithm away.

Now you know why I stopped posting on Facebook and started this site.

White House edits official transcript of Helsinki press conference

Trump tells veterans not to believe their eyes

Censorship of Images in Soviet Union

You are currently living through World War Three, the first global hybrid war, pitting oligarchic authoritarians and organized crime against crippled democratic states and institutions that have been eaten away from within.  If we’re to take a passing glance at Ukraine, the most recent testing ground for hybrid war, it’s a safe bet to say our grid and communications infrastructure will be attacked electronically at a critical moment to throw the U.S. into chaos and paranoia for a few days.  Please don’t panic when/if it happens as that is one of the objectives of an infrastructure attack.  Keep food/water on hand and be friends with your neighbors.

In the meantime, ask yourself (and your elected representatives) why did the President eliminate the post of cyber security coordinator in May of 2018?  Why has he vilified the very intelligence and law enforcement institutions who are tasked with defending us from this threat?

Russian hackers penetrate U.S. utilities