Lebens Raum Ad Astra

It is a great moment to see private enterprise loosen the iron grip of the State on spaceflight.  If Elon Musk and SpaceX are allowed to continue pushing the boundaries of commercial space access, we may yet get to see space tourism - a decades-old dream - come to life.

I stayed up late into the night to watch the Crew Dragon launch, and I admit I got a little choked up to see private enterprise finally succeed in an endeavor previously reserved for the exclusive use of government operators and political entities.

The Dragon's gleaming interior and ultramodern design mark a stark break from the bleak, utilitarian cockpits of the defunct space shuttle, or the cramped confines of Soyuz.  Sleek couches, spacious interior, a couple of touch screens, and a handful of buttons were all that didn't clutter the sci-fi environment of SpaceX's minimalist design.

Though I was moved by the launch and fascinated by the engineering and design work, I couldn't help thinking that I've been watching this exact scene play over and over for the past 60 years - since the days of Yuri Gagarin (or was it Vladimir Ilyushin?) and Alan Shepherd.  Even more, chemical rocketry is a century old - almost as old as the automobile, rockets in general have been around for 2,000 years celebrating Lunar New Year.  Let's no forget that a number of dogs and monkeys preceded humans into space, as well.

The first iron tube rockets were invented Mysoreans in India in the 1700s.  A British officer named Congreve stole the idea for his rockets in the 1800s. American Robert Goddard is generally credited with inventing modern chemical rockets, though he was standing on the shoulders of many a giant.

In other words, SpaceX is just one in a long line of rocketeers who have refined the physics and abilities of rocketry, but the craft is almost as old as written history.

Sure, I applaude the milestone set by SpaceX, of commercial human spaceflight.  It is a significant achievement, even in the long, storied history of rocketry, especially getting one of the (ahem) pioneering nations back into orbit after a decade of bureaucratic bumbling.

The question I have, though, is where are all the real toys?  Are we really to believe that the 100 years of intense rocket development, the trillions of dollars in research, the many nations involved have only achieved something slightly more advanced than Chinese fireworks?

With all the decades of development on ion, microwave, nuclear, and electro-gravitic propulsion, the best humans can do is fart flaming gas out of a tube?  Why aren't we using aerospikes and EM Drives and spin-stabilized LASER launchers?  How is it, with the vast sums of money and millions of hours of research, we still can't do better than bottle rockets?  Why is it that spaceflight hasn't changed much since the Nazi innovations of the 1940s?  And why are their REAL advances listed as hoaxes?

Given all the possible reasons to riot, one might think that having a century of our savings stolen for projects and technology that we're not allowed to see, much less use, would be chief among them.  We the people are owed a huge debt and we are being deprived of collecting on it by a group of people who are hording our property from us.

Instead, we are told to be proud and joyful at yet another rocket launch, a feat nearly as old as civilization and one which the Russians and Chinese have been happily doing for the past decade while the US was grounded and begging rides.

I want the real toys.  I want to see the man behind the curtain.  I want all the things that were promised decades ago in the blush of human spaceflight adolescence.  We paid for it, we deserve it.  It is our heritage and achievements that are being robbed from us under our noses.

Way to go Elon and SpaceX!  Great job!  Nice design work!  Outstanding attention to detail.  But it's time your partner NASA gave us the goods that we've paid so dearly for - and farting tubes ain't it.

Fear And Loathing In Madrid

I was backpacking around the world at the tender age of 18, back in 1980.  As was the custom among backpackers at the time (dumbphones have completely replaced such antiquated pastimes), folks would trade books at campsites while trading war stories of the road and hard-learned tips for survival.

It was during this adventure that I was introduced to such great works of literature as The Women's Room, The Other Side of Midnight and The Way to Dusty Death.  Though I occasionally lucked into the rare bit of Poe or Kant, for the most part my reading list was uninspired and uninspiring.

At one point, I was en route to Spain, mostly to experience the brand-new French TGV, but also because I spoke fluent Spanish and wanted to go somewhere other than an Anglophone country where I could communicate effectively.

At that time, the French trains stopped at the northern side of the Pyrenees mountains, and one had to board a coal-burning relic of a previous century for the arduous crossing.  This turned out to be one of the most memorable legs on my European trip.

Imagine the Hogwart's train after 20 years of ill-repair.  The wood used to finish out the interior had petrified in place.  Each car had a line of 4-person cabins lining one side and a narrow walkway down the other.  You could not pass another person in the walkway without one of you ducking into one of the cabins to allow the other to pass.

Along the outer edge of the walkway was a gutter, of sorts.  In this gutter, urine from the overflowing toilets would run first one way going uphill, then the other going down.

There was six of us backpackers crammed into my cabin (did I mention they were designed for 4?).  One of them, Tim, turned out to be the first fellow Texan I had met in nearly a year.  He was a student at Baylor University studying literature and on summer walk-about in Europe.  He also had the first peanut butter I had seen since leaving the US nine months before.

We became instant friends, partly because I had La Vache Qui Rit cheese and a baguette with olives and a few precious slices of luncheon (mystery) meat.  He happily traded a generous portion of his peanut butter for a quarter of my rations.

We both learned valuable lessons on that journey, such as don't open windows for a breath of unurinated air when riding on a train with a coal-burning locomotive.  We spent several minutes clearing out the thick, acrid smoke, then shared a crushed, filterless Gauloise cigarette from my dwindling supply.

The subject in the room eventually turned to books, as it always did.  A Swede, a German, two Spaniards and two Texans began the complicated ritual of swapping our libraries.  I don't recall what I had to offer, but it attracted the German's attention, and the book he offered attrated Tim's, who in turn gave me one of the most influential books I have ever read.

Up to this point, I had lived a fairly sheltered life.  I was blissfully unaware of Gonzo journalism and this guy - Hunter S. Thompson - peering at me with aviator glasses and a foot-long cigarette holder looked vaguely dangerous.  Despite my naivete, I had read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (another profound moment in my life), and Time said that if I liked Breakfast of Champions, I would love this book.

This was a mighty big claim, but I took it on faith from my fellow Texan and dutifully stashed the book in my pack.  Attractive German girls were far more appealing at the moment.

As is the custom in Spanish culture, the entire nation shuts down mid-afternoon for siesta.  As luck would have it, there was a tavern a short walk from the hostel that stayed open, primarily preying on journeyers who were unused to a relaxed lifestyle.  Tim and I quickly became regulars, bringing our books and ordering copious amounts of lukewarm cervesa to while away the lugubrious afternoons.

No more than three pages into the well-worn paperback, I was hooked.

Here was a journalist, a profession I associated with Walter Croncite, being sent to the Kentucky Derby, the Superbowl, political conventions, and never actually making it to the assigned events.  Instead, he and his Polynesian lawyer sidekick were transporting suitcases full of booze, pills and weed, and trashing hotel rooms during paranoid hallucinations of bats and narcs, while occasionally watching moments of the events on television - at least until the TV was destroyed.

I gobbled down the yellowing pulp like Mother's Milk, while single-handedly expanding the marketshare of Estrella Galicia one liter at a time.  I vaguely recall one such day sitting down at around 2 in the afternoon and being asked to go home at closing time some 12 hours later.

During that week that Tim and I wandered around Madrid, discussing the finer points of Thomspson's symbolism, we stumbled into a medieval castle with the massive wooden doors slightly ajar.  There was just enough room for us to sidle into the empty courtyard.  Tim, being still partially tourist, took out his camera and began snapping away.  I, being a journeyer, began committing various still images to my long-term memory.

I don't know how long we stood there, but it couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes.  At some point, Tim and I both heard the unmistakable (to any real Texan) sound of a hammer being pulled back.  Michelangelo would have been inspired by our poses as we froze solid in mid-action.

As we stood there, a man in the uniform of a guardia civil strolled slowly around in front of us.  He was about six feet tall, wearing aviator glasses and sporting a foot-long cigarette holder clenched in his brown teeth.

At that precise moment, Tim and I both simultaneously burst into hysterical laughter.  Within seconds, tears were streaming down our faces, as a bizarre mixture of terror and irony tightened its grip on our funny bones.  Though one of the most terrifying sights in all of post-Fascist Spain was yelling at us and waving a .45-caliber pistol, locked and loaded, in our faces, we couldn't stop laughing.  Trying only made it worse, and as anyone who knows Thompson will tell you, having a man in uniform who looks like Hunter Thompson waving a gun in your face and yelling incomprehensibly only served to push us further to our certain doom, laughing uncontrollably every step of the way.

As I write this, I am stroking the scar on my left temple where the generalissimo struck me with the gun sight on the business end of his cocked and loaded .45-caliber pistol.  The warm, sticky feeling running down the side of my face sobered me up, but only slightly.  I still had a powerful sensation of someone poking my long thoracic nerve, causing my abdomen to convulse involuntarily.

I held my hand up...slowly.  "Wait, wait," I pleaded.  "May I show you something?"

He appeared to gaze intently at me, though it was hard to tell behind the limousine-tinted aviator glasses.  "What is it?" he demanded.

"A book, here in my pack.  I think you will understand when you see it," I said in a voice verging on fresh paroxysms of laughter.

The generalissimo yanked the day pack from my hand and gave it to a subordinate who had mysteriously appeared at his side, while the pistol never strayed far from the centers of Tim's and my chests.

The subordinate opened the bad, looked inside, then reached in and pulled out the slowly disintegrating copy of The Great Shark Hunt.  He showed it to the boss man, who glanced quickly at it then back at us.  "So what?" he growled like a pit bull on crack.

"Turn it around, please," I said.

The subordinate looked down at the back of the book, then started laughing.  The generalissimo snatched the book, thankfully dropping the ugly end of his pistol down to the ground.  He flipped the book over and stared silently for what seemd like minutes

"Who is this?" he demanded.  At that point, he flipped the back of the book towards Tim and me, and held it out to us.  From our perspective, there on the left was a mean, nasty, armed holdover from Spain's Fascist past, and on the right was Hunter S. Thompson's visage staring at us from the liner notes on the book.  The two of them were posed almost identically.

Tim tried so hard to stifle a guffaw that he blew a week's worth of snot down the front of his face and shirt.  I was on the verge of fainting, working so hard to stifle a fresh wave of hysteria while standing in Madrid's legendary summer heat.

"His name is Hunter Thompson," I managed.  "He is a famous American writer."  A week before, I wouldn't have known who Thompson was, but I figured the "famous" part couldn't hurt and might stroke the generalissimo's ego a bit.

The generalissimo turned the book around again and stared at the image.  After a moment, he tossed the book at the subordinate, who grappled with it then shoved it back in the bag.  He rummaged around a bit and took out my passport.  He opened it and held it up for the Big Guy to see.

The generalissimo grunted and said, "Americano."

After a moment's pause, he looked at us again.  "What are you doing here?"

"We were walking around and saw this castle.  The gate was open, so we came in to look around," Tim said through strands of drying snot - he hadn't moved his hands in several minutes now.

The generalissimo barked something at the subordinate having to do with puerta and abierta.  The subordinate stuffed my passport bach in the bag and tossed it on the ground, then ran off towards the entrance where Tim and I had come in.

The gneralissimo appeared to glance over our shoulders at the subordinate, though it was hard to tell behind the inscrutable eyewear.  After a moment, he holstered his pistol and took the camera from Tim's hands.  He opened the camera and pulled the film out, exposing its entire length, which he threw on the ground.  He motioned me to pick up my bag and waved towards the massive wooden doors.

"Go," he barked.

We didn't stop running till we were back at our tavern.  We drank heavily the rest of that day, and tossed uneasily that night while visions of bats and narcs haunted our dreams.

Doublethink In The Days Of The Comet

The very nature of being social is coming together as a physical group.  The concept of "social distancing" is thus one of the most Orwellian Doublethink terms I have ever seen.  It's right up there with "peacekeeper missile".

Social distancing, to my mind, is even more distasteful than the term "social media," in which no one has physical proximity, and thus cannot be "social" in any normal sense of the word.

While I find the term "herd immunity" disgustingly distasteful when referring to human beings, I nevertheless can't help but see the inherent contradiction of promoting group shared immunity while forcing people to avoid groups.  More of that wonderful Doublethink.

For those dwindling few who still have not read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Google oracle defines Doublethink as "the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination."  If the current Fauci Flu Plandemic isn't a glaring example of this phenomenon, then none can be found.

Even as recently as when I was parenting, the practice of putting all the kids in a room with one who had chicken pox or mumps was a common practice.  The children would thus exchange the viruses and develop life-long immunity to those relatively common childhood maladies.  This was also done with influenza and other seasonal discomforts.

Many people are under the mistaken belief that the practice of immunology began with the creation of the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk, in the 1950s.  The concept of inoculation has a long and storied history using some distasteful methods to our modern minds, but effective nevertheless.

The practice of inoculation, or variolation as it is referred to now, came to the attention of the Anglosphere in the 1800s, when British doctors brought the practice back from India, and added it to Edward Jenner's own work in this area.

Inoculation involved rubbing the pus from smallpox sores into pin pricks in the skin of healthy people to generate antibodies to the disease.  Louis Pasteur had the bright idea of using a relatively harmless virus called cowpox to achieve the same result.  To Westerners, the concept is just 200 years old, but in India, the practice had been used for at least a millennium, and not just for smallpox.

The idea of "herd immunity," or what I prefer to call "community immunity," is an ancient idea.  One imagines the practice evolving out of animal husbandry and inoculating one's farm animals by placing them all in the same barn and letting Darwinism run its course.

What was new to the 19th century was the idea of microbes being the cause of disease.  Humans intuitively understood that proximity spread disease, but thanks to Aristotle, could not conceive of an unseen creature jumping person to person.  It wasn't until Zacharias Janssen developed the microscope in the 16th century that humans could conceive of anything smaller than the width of a hair.

Janssen's fellow Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ran with the microscope's new revelations and created the entire science of microbiology.  He was the first to posit that these tiny creatures were the culprits in spreading disease, and not the mythical unbalanced humours that required bleeding out patients.  It seemed logical, he thought, that inoculating healthy people with the pus of sick people was in fact using these tiny creatures against themselves.

The idea of quarantining sick people is far older.  The use of leper colonies dates back thousands of years, and was also used for a number of diseases in both farm animals and humans.  Isolating the sick is probaably one of the oldest forms of medical practices and seems almost intuitive or instinctual.

All this being said, the idea of isolating the entire population of the planet to fight what amounts to a severe cold or flu was developed in AD2020.  Never in the history of humanity has anyone thought to quarantine every single human being on Earth in order to fight a disease.  In fact, the very idea flies in the face of common sense - though certainly no one ever accused the political classes of possessing such innate reasoning capabilities.

First off, someone needs to produce the necessities that maintain both the sick and the well in society - an idea that seems to have escaped the Powers That Were.

Furthermore, having those individuals who aren't sick roaming around would seem to spread whatever immunity they naturally possess, even if that immunity is little more than good fortune.  After all, they are apparently doing something right and should be emulated, insofar as they don't later become ill themselves.  Either way, it's a learning experience for all of us.


The very idea of global social and economic shutdown as a means to fight an illness is itself the most vile example of Doublethink ever devised.  The whole concept places the entire human race at risk of starvation and economic ruin in order to prevent some small fraction of humanity from getting sick.

Even more absurd is the notion that isolating those who have survived the virus, thus depriving the rest of us from sharing their immunity.

Immune systems develop and harden through contact with the outer world.  We pick up viruses and bacteria by the millions in just an average day, rubbing them into our eyes, sinuses and mouths with completely automatic motions.  It's almost as if our deeper minds are trying to ingest as many pathogens as possible for target practice.

Those of us who still consume the Geezer Media are literally being conditioned to deny our common sense and thousands of years of human experience.  We are being told that vaccines are cures, which they most definitely are not.  We are being told that we must wait in isolation for community immunity to kick in, which defies logic.  We are being flooded with insane ideas that we know are wrong, but that we must believe at the point of a gun.

Classic Doublethink.

When what we instinctively know to be true is contradicted by the politically motivated messaging of our supposed authorities, it is our sacred duty - both to ourselves and our species - to ignore those edicts en masse and get back to the business of living.

We are each given a finite time in this life and we are literally being robbed of it by actors who are self-serving liars.  We know that in our hearts, but we must elevate that knowledge to our conscious minds and take action based on it.

If one prefers to live in fear and huddle in one's cave until madness or starvation takes the only real possession we have, then so be it.  But to inflict fear on others in order to rob them of their lives is a crime so heinous, so despicable, so egregious that to not fight back is itself a crime - one of acquiescence to evil.

Doublethink is a cognitive virus that has infected us all at some level.  Like any other virus, we must isolate it  and mobilize antibodies against it.

The real threat to our health is in our minds, not our bodies.