Dark Side of the Moon
The Artemis missions shed light on the dark side of humanity.
From Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here:
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It’s alright, we know where you’ve been
I was born in 1961 when CO2 in the atmosphere was 320 ppm, only eight years until the Apollo 11 mission set Neil Armstrong on the moon as the first to walk its surface. I watched on an uncle’s TV, the type of guy always excited by technology. To be fair, we all were. The post WWII economic boom of the US made anything seem possible. He owned one of the first hand held calculators, a Texas instruments device that he was eager to show off. He owned a Corvette, a second generation beauty, (former car admirer here, over that) and eventually a small, four-seater airplane. His television that day was hooked up to an early remote control, a tethered device that clunked jarringly through all four channels that existed then.
Of course now we have hundreds of channels to choose from, evidence of profound progress. Sticking to the Pink Floyd theme, this time from The Wall:
I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
Poor Pink Floyd. That was a major underestimation of how society would “improve” with so many channels to “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way,” as they sang in the song Time. While we’re feeling sad, let’s lament the demise of The Apprentice, which featured Trump gleefully firing people, on “reality” TV for viewers who appreciated a little weekly cruelty, working-class knuckleheads who couldn’t connect that the people getting hurt were just like themselves. There’s no better balm for low self-esteem than being reassured there’s someone lower than you.
When you’re a loser, one of Trump’s favorite words, that hole can be filled by hatred.
The reasons for Trump’s ascent are numerous, but ignorance and racism are two always present factors. Citizen’s United and a Democratic Party that forgot its identity as fighters for the poor and middle class have been bought and owned by AIPAC and Big Oil.
Believe it or not MAGA’s, I understand your ire. We have all been abandoned.
However, unlike the “freedom” of hundreds of brainwashing TV channels, the accelerating 433 ppm of climate changing CO2 and other GHGs in our atmosphere today was not an underestimate. What we’re experiencing now was predicted with remarkable precision by Exxon’s own scientists in the mid to late 1970s, long before the sophisticated computer models of today. Just like seeing the dark side of the moon we got exactly what we expected. Then the results were buried in the interest of profit. I could provide endless links as evidence of the conspiracy, but perhaps these three from Frontline tell the story best, part 1, part 2 and part 3.
And so it goes
The Exxon conspiracy starkly illustrates the root of our problems: behavior. Heads up, technology won’t save us. What brought us to the precipice marketed in bullshit like carbon capture are just more corporate scams to keep us compliant.
Borrowing from the prescient Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, “So it goes,” is the dry refrain in a story of the unnecessary obliteration of the beautiful city of Dresden. Germany surrendered to the Allies May 8, 1945. Dresden was firebombed shortly before in four raids from February 13 to 15. Germany at that point was reduced to arming old men and little boys when Hitler retreated to his bunker.
The war was known to be won. Vonnegut, a foot soldier became captive in a German prison camp and was shipped in a railroad car to Dresden for forced labor. British and Americans in an act of criminal vengeance carpet bombed the city to fiery rubble, an unconscionable civilian massacre in which 25,000 died. Vonnegut survived, three stories underground in the freezer of a meat packing plant, hence the title of the book. “So it goes,” dryly reflects the violence we routinely inflict on one and other.
Today we have an equally insidious, but far larger version of the same inhumanity. The Nazi gas chambers have been replaced with gassing the entire planet. Victims of those chambers were told they were merely getting a shower. Now we suffer an oligarch owned media and government actively hiding the truth and dismantling science, healthcare, education and environmental protections. Not only are our bodies poisoned, but our minds as well. Solution? Big Pharma to the rescue to sell us more poison for profit. Obese from eating addictive fast food? No problem, we have an injection for that. Depressed by endless concrete and urban decay? Here’s our latest antidepressant.
The Iran “war” is not a war. It’s an illegal attack on a sovereign nation as defined by the Geneva Conventions America was instrumental in writing after the horrors of WWII. My country, the biggest arms supplier to the world by far is also complicit in the genocide of the human beings in Gaza. As evil entities and individuals carry out greater plans to eliminate most of us, my conscience will not allow me to not call out the plot and immorality. Frankly, a Palantir enabled drone blasting my brains out might be a relief in light of what’s coming.
Did I say evil entities and individuals wish to carry out greater plans to eliminate most of us? Surely, I must be paranoid. Sorry, not so much. I have offered some historic and current deliberate human exterminations here. There are far more I could reference.
The Iran War is a calculated play not just to endanger China’s oil resources as American hegemony fades in $39 trillion of debt that now exceeds yearly GDP. It’s a psychopathic response to overshoot which the oligarchs that control our government damn well see. Given the choice of reducing their consumption or reducing the numbers of you and me, the choice is obvious. After all, their wealth and power are a measure of their superiority. And just like the Aryans of Hitler’s time it’s necessary and justified to eliminate those who are inferior.
The entire planet has been made a deadly gas chamber as the accelerating emissions of CO2 and CH4 (and others) trap their waste energy, speed melting polar ice and drying out land, creating volatile tinder. Seasons and predictable weather on which global farming in our hyper-connected world depends is on the verge of catastrophic failure, more now than ever with the loss of nitrogen fertilizer and its LNG feedstock from the criminal attack on Iraq. We have a convergence of crises that add up to death at unfathomable scale in the coming years. No one will be unaffected.
Those that live in the most dangerous places, India and Pakistan for instance are already experiencing wet-bulb temperature deaths. Hell, you can easily find such deaths in the US in places like Maricopa County, Arizona where the homeless have been dying by hundreds. They track this and the numbers are horrifying. And why are they homeless? Because a handful of psychopaths hold the vast majority of the wealth, even buying up housing to jack rents for profit. If you’re on the street you must have a mental problem. No, putting me on the street gives me one.
The same inhumanity that created Nazi death camps and the unjustifiable retribution suffered by Dresden lives on today. We learned nothing from a war that took over six million lives. The malevolence of our “leadership” and passive ignorance of the brainwashed populace enjoying their hundreds of channels of shit that funds their own demise with each Amazon purchase is a synergy of behavioral flaws, a perfect partnership of insatiable greed and ignorance by deliberate, malevolent design.
With the Iran War, the timetable for catastrophic failure that fuels an insidious version of genocide in no need of Palantir AI assisted drones is a matter of months, not years. Agricultural destruction as a result of nitrogen fertilizer loss in addition to farms already going bankrupt due to climate change and endemic corporate malfeasance — held hostage to ever-increasing input costs — undermines your survival and mine, not hypothetically, but in a matter of months or a few short years. This will be preceded be hyperinflation, increasing job loss, failed infrastructure (consider loss of water treatment), and continued degradation of medical care.
It turns out opposable thumbs driven by clever, but woefully short-sighted animal instincts are incapable of wisdom at scale. Even the great Galileo spent the last years of his life imprisoned by halfwits running the Catholic Church for bravely asserting the Earth circles the sun. The same halfwits also favored inquisitions — you know — torture and executions.
We circled the dark side of the moon, so what? Prepare to see the ultimate results of the dark side of human nature powered by the moronic deception of fossil fuels. Our next leap if we are to have one is about behavior, not technology.
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.
~ Sara Teasdale
Great article and a great excuse to listen to some Pink Floyd.
In Eduardo Galeano's book Upside-Down: A Primer into the looking-glass world, he points out that four of the five biggest arms exporters are also the permanent five in the U.N. Security Council, with the fifth largest down in 7th placel. He says something along the lines of "World peace lies in the hands of the same countries that profit the most from war."