HALF-FULL REPORT 09/08/23
Don’t Banana My Republic!
Environment
In last week’s forum, Norman Chiodras asked an interesting question about spooky actors using directed energy weapons in Maui.
The Maui fire was and continues to be a disaster, with many dead and missing. How many? It all depends on which government agency is asked. The schools say over 1,000 children cannot be accounted for, while the government claims to have recovered fewer than 400 bodies.
FEMA and the National Guard have the fire zone locked down tightly and have installed the typical government solution to information control—a big fence.
Private drones cannot enter the restricted airspace above the site as drones are flown via digital signals from cell towers. The technology to bar the zones is called geofencing.
Four concerns are behind the various fire theories which went viral on social media last week. It has been a month, and the social media companies have programmed their computers to search and wipe Maui-related comments. The vanishing Maui story is an excellent example of modern censorship tools and management in action.
The malevolent use of direct energy weapons to start and direct the fires is based on two observations. First, the Subaru (Japan) astronomical observatory on the nearby Mauna Kea dormant volcano captured green laser bursts from the sky near the time of the fire. At first, they were explained as remote sensing of air pollutants by an American research satellite. However, a look at the satellite position found it over Africa.
The Chinese satellite Daqi-1/AEMS was over Maui at just the right time. Although reported to be another air pollution monitoring vehicle, it is known to emit LIDAR bursts in the blue-green spectrum. LIDAR is like RADAR, except with lasers, and is a routine tool to measure the distance from the ground to a satellite or military aircraft.
A blue-green beam penetrates seawater, making it possible to locate and track nuclear submarines from space. It is not unthinkable that the Chinese government uses its “weather research” satellites to track American submarines with precision.
The big problem is that the LIDAR beam’s energy is too little to start fires.
The United States once built an anti-ballistic missile aircraft containing a chemical laser. It was intended to shoot down North Korean ballistic missiles during their boost phase. The program was well-funded until the first chemical leak in the modified Boeing 747, dissolving airframe parts. (Yikes!).
Such a flying laser requires a titanium, composite, or stainless steel aircraft, not an aluminum 747. No doubt, the concept is viable and waiting for fresh federal financing. The 747 depicted as the Maui Burner is no longer airworthy. The pictures are old.
Can a Naval warship start a fire with a directed energy weapon? Perhaps someday soon. This link Here is to the 2021 Directed Energy Weapon (DEW) and High Power Microwave (HPM) project annual report as sponsored by the Navy. It is suspected that the Zumalt class destroyers were built with a large internal bay to contain the electrical or chemical energy systems a directed energy weapon would need. Work is ongoing to develop direct energy weapons, but this does not mean they were present at Maui.
No such weapon is known in the public domain at this time. If China has such a weapon, then the lockdown and censorship of all things Maui makes some sense. It would be most unusual for China to develop a significant weapon system first. Innovation is too risky in totalitarian systems, and China prefers to copy the tried and true, avoiding the shiny and new.
But still. If Maui were a demonstration project of a new Chinese weapon, then yes, the American Deep State would behave just as they are presently.
Social media claims that Oprah Winfrey started the fire to abduct children and steal land sounds preposterous. The story follows Nero fiddling while the slums of Rome burned to make way for the Roman Collusium construction. It is ridiculous because the Supreme Court has already ruled that land can be taken by eminent domain for higher and better use, including use for hotels and casinos. No fires are needed, no enormous liability overhang. Any white-shoe legal team can manage an eminent domain project without killing children.
The technical and anecdotal evidence supports that downed electrical lines caused the fire during very high winds, gross mismanagement by woke government agents, and police shutting down the exit routes.
No doubt, a woke and unqualified government agent ordered the police to stop traffic. The intent was probably to prevent traffic from entering the fire zone, but the roads were closed in both directions. Many burned to death while waiting in their cars. The few willing to drive around the police roadblocks survived.
Why, people ask, did the fire burn unevenly? Why isn’t nature egalitarian? Social justice types protest that people suffer unevenly in Maui, and the hit-miss nature of the fire violates their core beliefs and neo-pagan values. Much video commentary was produced claiming that nature is always egalitarian, and evidence of the fire being stopped at wide intersections and leaving some vegetation standing means that a modern-day Bull Conner started the fires.
From my experience with emission testing from industrial smokestacks and modeling pollutant movement over terrain, it is clear that nature is not egalitarian. In this case, the airflow down the mountain was not moving with laminar flow, as depicted in official press releases.
The video below is about fourteen minutes long but explains the difference between laminar and turbulent flow within the first few minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-uUG0WR0w
Air flowed down the mountain into the fire zone at an unusually high velocity, and its flow was dominated by inertia. Vegetation, buildings, rocks, and surface roughness created aerodynamic drag at ground level, introducing vortexes and eddies. The disruption and recirculation in the air flow caused by aerodynamic drag is a function of the air velocity squared, and it might have been as great as 100 mph.
The fire had no reason to have burned uniformly, as the air, fuel, and combustion products were not evenly mixed. There is no reason why the fire would have yielded different results than the war fies in Dresden, Hamburg, and Kobe.
Years ago, I had a contract to measure the nitrogen oxide (NOx) plume from a smokestack in Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania, and then model the distribution of NOx over the countryside as a condition for permitting increased production at the Pleasant Gap facility. The EPA mandates a few software models, and these are based on an iterative technique called computational fluid dynamics.
The EPA model did not yield realistic results due to the shape of nearby Nittany Mountain, located between Pleasant Gap and State College. So, I strapped a 75-pound NOx analyzer and sampling system to a backpack, powered the rig with car batteries, and hiked a grid pattern on the mountain. The actual data found airflow over the mountain was very tortuous and could not be modeled per the EPA methods.
After some back and forth, the Pennsylvania DEQ accepted the measured data and permitted the plant to increase production. I did not encounter the mythical Nittany Lion while on the mountain.
The conditions at Maui are similar. From the engineering perspective, Lahaina’s city burned just as expected. No conspiracies are needed.
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BRICS
Much is being said about expanding the BRICS in competition with the dollar and Western influence.
The BRICS have lower economic efficiency than Western nations and lower productivity per person. They use a variety of currencies, with each member unwilling to give up their ability to print more money at will.
The map looks more like a China-centric trading route among the extractive economies than the next threat to Western dominance. Most of the routes are overland, an expensive way to move commodities.
Access to Latin America depends on the United States Navy maintaining freedom of navigation. I was in Caracas the day that Chavez was “elected.” With oilers and ocean-going tugs, the Russian cruiser Moskva arrived in the harbor to fire a deck gun, reminiscent of the cruiser Aurora firing the opening shot of the Russian October Revolution.
The Russian ships struggled to reach Venezuela on time. The BRICS lack a blue-water navy. China is working to employ its workforce; the effect of economic turns in China will affect the other BRICS in the way that the old schoolyard game of crack the whip throws the trailing edge of the human whip to the ground.
Most of the BRICS hype is just propaganda.
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Beautiful Trouble
Initially, I planned to write a four-part series on the left’s new political manual, flashcards, and strategy gaming. This section is part two of the series, but there is too much material to cover in just four HFRs. It looks more like an eight-part series is emerging.
Beautiful Trouble attempts to create the conceptual framework for overthrowing Western society and replacing it with a technocratic, centrally planned, authoritarian government. The objective is to place the treasury of the United States and other Western governments into the hands of an elite central committee.
The framework has many points; they will be recognizable as we go through them. There is not much new thinking in the official dogma, which is attractive as brand-name think tanks, universities, and government contractors oversaw the development. The exception is with the use of mobile phones and messaging.
Actions Should Make Sense to Onlookers.
Trouble Runners are professional agitators tasked with managing demonstrations and events to maximize the opportunity to create videos. Social media, such as TikTok, is essential to the doctrine’s success. The point of direct action is no longer to make a significant spectacle for network television; it is to create thousands of one-minute clips.
Anything that inhibits video recording and promulgation via social media inhibits the movement.
Events are deemed a success or failure based on the video generated. In other words, this is all about theatrics and winning hearts and minds through visual rhetorical tools. TikTok was likely developed to support social revolution within the West.
Trouble Runners start events by violating a law or norm to invite a response. Then, the response is videoed. As Trouble Runners are most often school teachers, the timing and cycle of the Troubles follow the academic schedule.
Alienation.
Theatrical tools are taught to make the familiar seem strange by introducing a jolt to a steady timeline. For example, barging into a corporate annual meeting, loudly quacking like ducks, or throwing paint onto restraint quests is entirely unexpected and causes the victims to respond angrily. The response and perhaps the victim’s call to the police is videoed and recast as calling the police in response to the presence of a minority. The action’s goal was to record someone calling the cops or punching back so that it could be edited with common phone apps.
If a banker is cornered on the street, protestors are urged to kneel as if worshiping an Aztec chieftain. Sarcasm makes excellent video content.
The goal is to make normies shun and alienate the target or fear being alienated and mocked.
Anti-Oppression.
That’s what they call it.
It means radical egalitarianism as defined by the usual yadda yadda about white supremacy, the patriarchy, and heterosexualism. The core concept is to describe the moral high ground and claim it. Only the lowest-level foot soldiers believe in the egalitarian schtick; it is just a practical tool to claim moral superiority.
To have moral superiority when the ends justify the means means to avoid feelings of guilt. Instead, a sense of personal responsibility for vanquishing evil emerges.
Each Democrat political cell is tasked to develop and pursue anti-oppression goals to maintain unit cohesion. Denying the radical egalitarian agenda or failing to create a recordable spectacle by, for instance, feigning over-the-top compassion damages the left to the core.
Eliminating targets is the root cause of why corporations greenwash, and social justice wash their messaging.
Anti-Capitalism through the Four Dimensions.
Central planning with the bureaucrats replaced with the teacher offering teachable moments is the goal of this.
As nature allegedly intended, equality for all means everyone gets a cookie while the teacher gets a paycheck. Anti-exploitation, meaning competition is eliminated, and everyone stays in their lane. Anti-dispossession as debts are not to be repaid because banks are illegitimate and landlords are thieves. Anti-environmental destruction.
Leftist theorists believe the Marxist war between bourgeoise and labor means little in the modern world. The class conflict is replaced with the property owner and tenant or lender and debtor.
Take every expression of class in the Communist Manifesto and replace the bourgeoise with lender or owner and the proletarian with the debtor, and the system becomes visible.
Suppose the reader has tried evading a lousy tenant from real estate. In that case, the reader understands how many revolutionary TikTok videos are out there, arming the tenant to slash and burn everything behind them.
Intellectual property is not even considered a thing by the modern left. Hence, patents are meant to be stolen and work plagiarized. Neither is time. Companies that sell project management services combining intellectual property and invested time, or physicians that spent years learning, have little value under the Troubles system.
Repeated throughout Beautiful Troubles is the old chestnut that capitalism produces for profit while central planning produces for the benefit of all.
They have a word for communist centrally planned economics. They call it sustainability. The conservative must define the term rigidly whenever faced with the sustainability objective. In its ambiguity, it means straight-run communism to the left. Listen for employees using the word in excess to find the subversives.
Commoditization.
Commoditization means anti-property rights. You will own nothing and be happy because no good or property ownership is distinguishable from another. Those are not your children; they are just children, and the kid down the street has the same claim on your effort as your infant son or daughter.
The drug-addicted street person should be hired equally to everybody else because the job setting should not allow any differentiation based on results. The only criterion that sets one person above and in charge of another is their level of academic achievement. All high school graduates are interchangeable parts, as are all community college, bachelor, and so forth within their tiers.
Immigrants from Haiti are equivalent to farm kids from Iowa, as everyone is just an interchangeable part.
The currency should be debased until it becomes impossible to differentiate individuals and results financially. In other words, for everyone to be equal in time of the Trouble, everyone must have a 450 credit score. The only way to differentiate becomes social obedience and academic achievement. This is the root of the social credit score, and the role of the Troublemaker is to collapse businesses from within.
Economic stagflation stops people from working and destroys the system, assuming that change is only possible when the system stops moving. Social relationships dissolve when people are locked down. Therefore, anything hindering mobility breaks social ties and empowers the new sustainability.
The Commons.
Environmentalism is pushed as the global commons surrounding the individual and can be excited to suffocate and choke the private world.
Only the lowest foot soldiers believe in global warming or care. Climate alarmism is designed to increase the regulatory environment to the point where the entrepreneur and business owner can no longer function.
Arguing for or against the technical of warmism serves no purpose when the goal is restricting access to transportation, land, air, water, heat, seeds, animals, and plants. Just as voting means nothing and counting the vote is everything, following the rules means nothing when the rules can be interpreted to suit the daily agenda.
National parks and monuments are no longer unique treasures. They become global heritage sites where one is the same as another, administered centrally through standard rules. Access can be granted or denied based on the need to manage Hearts and Minds campaigns.
Unique cultural elements such as great art, musical masterpieces, statues, and architecture are erased. Culture is to be fungible and upgraded in the way an iPhone is upgraded during the night to meet an emerging political messaging need. Anything preventing the emergence of the global, all-suffocating commons is a security threat.
Access to air, water, space, energy, movement, and information must all be taxed to support the commons. This is why the left does not recognize intellectual property; they see it as part of the commons to be managed by the caretakers.
Why might a local community transfer its parks to a global body or tear down monuments? Because the opportunity to become caretakers of the commons is irresistible to the leftist.
While the conservative debates the validity of environmental projects, the leftist smiles and tightens the noose.
Cultural Hegemony.
Troublemakers appropriate power to the cause by taking control of language, stories, and images. Read new stories to children to change how they make sense of the world. Use the schools to create a new consciousness by changing norms and mores. Create a new common sense, and above all else, recruit the teachers and professors to the cause.
Replace rights of passage and traditional holidays with the celebration of the commons. Burn cities, loot, protest, and introduce addictive drugs to the naïve until they abandon hope and belief in the self.
Once the addict cannot function, move them into a new commons where they can be taught the new values. The sole purpose behind introducing potent addictive drugs to children is to create an addiction that ends in re-education.
Therefore, addicting children to fentanyl fights oppression, and deep satisfaction is earned through every new addiction. This is how the new culture is to replace the old.
Debt Revolt.
Banks took the money they loaned from the commons through their privilege. No actual obligation exists to repay a debt because the source of the money is immoral, as is the concept of money. A debt should only be paid when the system gives the debtor the money.
Student debt is especially immoral because it was used to purchase valueless intellectual property and competency.
Debtors of the world, Unite!
Environmental Justice.
Troublemakers should attack the points of connection, the intersectionality, between the social and the environmental. Pollution alone is meaningless without emphasizing the pollution in poor neighborhoods.
The objective is to combine the social power of envy with the need to expand the commons to the point that individuals suffocate. The aim is to force the suburbanites to react to jealousy by stressing the privilege of a clean neighborhood.
Demand suburban mothers vaccinate and sexually confuse their children in solidarity with the dirty people. Give drug addicts tents and drop them onto city streets to increase—guilt among the clean.
As in everything, the objective is to create and manipulate spectacles to propel the envy/guilt dynamic. Success means expanding the commons. Troublemakers are to be rewarded as caretakers of the commons.
Ethical Spectacle.
Ethical means for the benefit of the commons, while spectacle means visual rhetoric or an appeal to emotions. Do this by drawing attention through signs, myths, stories, and direct action. Success is measured by the number of persuasive short videos produced and uploaded from any event. The importance of pre-positioned videographers cannot be overstated.
Good videos emphasize the creditor/debtor relationship, defined through envy and guilt. The successful Troublemaker is always recording and exists as an actor playing a scene in the spectacle. Rather than the strong-armed leftism of yesterday, the modern Troublemaker is trained to appear weak, naïve, and the victim. Everything is done to manipulate the final scene. It is not the “now” that matters. It is the eventual tomorrow viewed by millions on the internet.
Spectacles should present the normal of today against the fantasized utopian future. Most people live in the world of good enough, as this is the basis of economic man. The utopian perfect is the enemy to defeat economic man.
Instrumentalism.
The real radical cuts his hair, wears a suit, attends meetings as a conservative, spends money on storefronts, and joins the Rotary Club. Professional-level radicalism is not about the agent’s values but what propels the cause.
Actions should be planned and executed based on their expected achievements, not feelings within.
In all things, actions should first be communicative. They must propel the collective through the accentuation of envy and guilt. If a city is to be burned and looted, be sure to burn the premises of those issuing credit first so that the debtors will join in.
Actions should be concrete. They must impact the target such that the action can be turned into a video and scaled up. If a store is to be looted, small bands of thieves lack the impact of sudden mobs of property liberators. This way, the shops and malls will be abandoned and return to the commons. The inability to insure properties and businesses will strangle the capitalists; they will die for lack of air.
Floating Signifiers.
Be the face that hides. Be the Zapatista in the black balaclava; be Guy Fawkes behind the mask. Face coverings symbolize universality and unity because any meaning can be projected onto the faceless.
Tear down statues of unique individuals and replace them with faceless ones so that they stand for the triumph of the commons over the private.
Obama said, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” The emergence of the all-encompassing commons has no individual face—only the collective.
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We will pick this up again next week. Your insights are crucial. Please share them in the forum. After all, the purpose of Beautiful Trouble is to strangle your ability to create unique insights. Don’t let this happen.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineer serving the Iron, Steel, Minerals, Heavy Chemicals, and Fiber industries.