Category Archives: social criticism

Freedom versus Slave Mind

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Mejor morir a pie que vivir en rodillas

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Freedom versus Slave Mind

White Supremacy will end with human extinction. The angry rage of conservatives and fundamentalists, in the face of godless skepticism, is really an anguished cry of: “don’t make us question our bigotry!” For working class people who can’t think better, White Supremacy is a psychological compensation for an inferiority complex. That complex is learned from infected parents, and indoctrinated into one by a capitalist class society intent to exploit and enslave people by controlling their minds with a programming for obedience to higher authority, a sense of inadequacy and neediness, and with race- and ethnicity-based prejudice, to cause disunity among the great mass of the working class. Working class white supremacists are simply abused children passing on their abuse to younger generations and lower seniority workers and employees: ignorant slaves seeking to compensate for their hidden lack of self-respect by trying to depreciate and enslave others “below them”. The capitalist upper class propagates this mass psychology illness of low self-esteem, neediness and bigotry, because it is the method by which the union of the rich few control the disunion of the poor many. “Divide and conquer” was how the Roman Empire was ruled, and so with America today. Ending White Supremacy before human extinction occurs would require a Marxist Revolution to full Communism. A first step to that political goal is Labor Union organizing so the Labor Union Movement expands to the point of controlling the national economy. Then a Social Revolution can occur, which ends all interpersonal prejudices. Such a political-social progression is the only way militarism-imperialism can be overcome, and Climate Change finally seriously confronted. Such a Paradigm Shift is deemed “impossible” by capitalist indoctrination in the Slave Mind. And it may be unlikely in your lifetime, but that does not prevent you from working toward that Paradigm Shift — The Revolution — beginning with your own transformation out of Slave Mind, and then with the activism and organizing you may choose to do. The Revolution is not merely a desired socio-political event at some time in the future during the course of human history, it is a living process carried within the individual lives of people who have freed themselves from Slave Mind, and by their living examples push back against the oppressors’s imposition of Slave Mind and its White Supremacy illness, even onto the last day of human existence if that is to be our collective fate. Be joyful in your freedom.

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Remembering 4 Nuns Martyred in El Salvador

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“Today marks the 41st Anniversary [of 2 December 1980] of the Martyrdom in El Salvador of Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and Lay Missioner Jean Donovan. We also remember the 70,000 Salvadorans who lost their lives during the nation’s civil war.”
https://www.facebook.com/NetworkLobby/photos/a.166039868572/10159950595368573

Stan Goff, who was a Special Forces soldier for the U.S., alerted me [MG,Jr.] to this sad anniversary (weblink above), and reports:

I have a very creepy story from when I was in El Salvador (1985): we found their bloodied clothes bagged in our tool shed (the house was leased by the US Embassy). The US Embassy then was staffed mostly by people who heartily approved of their killing. God bless America.

The Embassy apparently didn’t know what to do with the clothes, so they just shunted them off to the TDY house, where someone stuffed the garbage bags in the shed. The shed sprung a leak and the stuff got damp and mildewy and began to stink. That’s how we found it. The groundskeeper telling us, “El cobertizo heule mal.”

I won’t even repeat the horrifyingly callous, hateful, and misogynistic remarks that I heard from the Embassy folk . . . about the women who were killed, and admiration for those who did it. But then we were in the Reagan era. I also saw Felix Rodriguez directing chopper traffic at Ilopango Airport while he chatted with the Ambassador (presumably about what they were shipping, weapons to Nicaragua and dope [cocaine] to the US).

The Zona Rosa massacre, the kidnapping of Inez Duarte . . . shit was kicking off then. Corr, the Ambassador, was drunk most of the time I saw him (also true of the Ambassador in Guatemala a couple of years earlier), and everyone just acted like the whole country was their own little macho playground. One of my political turns happened there . . . a little one but important later. I figured out that it was all about money.

Manuel García, Jr. responds:

The whole thing made me sick, sad and angry. By then (1980) I was ready for a full on communist revolution — and still am. But, I had a budding family to support, no power, no wealth, only a fresh Ph.D. diploma, so I took Reagan’s blood money and tested nuclear bombs for the paychecks. I wanted to help develop alternative energy: fusion, solar, “green”, conservation/energy efficiency, whatever, but there was no money in it and no public desire for it: then or even now, really. My retirement pension comes from that: nuclear bombs. I was very good at it.

I’m sorry you, Stan Goff, had to witness such cruelty, and very glad you survived to be the man you are.

This country peaked in 1977 (its year of greatest potential was 1968), and started plunging in 1978, abysmally so after November 1980. Nixon was the first Confederate president of the U.S.A. (1968-1974), and with Reagan on (1981->), the Confederacy took over all branches of the U.S.G.

Climate change will eventually defeat our Neoliberal Confederacy (white supremacy capitalism), but unfortunately, like Moby-Dick to the Pequod, climate change will see all hands (even Ishmael), regardless of their culpability or innocence, swallowed into oblivion to achieve a terminal justice.

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On the Rittenhouse Acquittal

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American criminal law trials are decided in favor of whichever of the competing attorneys spins the most compelling story that resonates with the consensus bigotry of the jury. Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted of three shootings with two murders of unarmed Black Lives Matter protestors, it is time for the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to file a federal civil suit against Rittenhouse, for violating the civil rights of the people Rittenhouse shot and killed. This is how the Ku Klux Klan killers of the four Voting Rights Workers, in Mississippi in 1964, were finally successfully prosecuted, after being acquitted of murder, which is a state charge. It is also how O. J. Simpson was successfully prosecuted to win large damages for the families of his murder victims. The previous criminal trial, even with an acquittal, establishes the fact of the taking of the lives and with them their civil rights. Why should the U.S. Attorney General do this? Because it would signal that the Federal Government is not irredeemably White Supremacist, and that it actually wants to be representative of all Americans. Allegiance is only justified to the extent this is true, and that extent is sorely lacking today.
(19 November 2021)

In a statement released today, President Biden said: “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.” This seems a pretty clear signal that no Civil Rights suit will be filed by the US Attorney General.
(19 November 2021)

The purpose of the American Police and Justice/Legal System is to preserve and protect the status quo of a white supremacy racist and patriarchal country. Besides outright oppression, there is much deception and P.R. applied to this purpose. But, it is also important to remember that though “villains” come in every shape, age, color, ethnicity and socio-economic ($) class, there are also “heroes” and “good people” from every one of those categories as well — just not enough of them by a long shot.
(17 November 2021)

Another triumph of American White Supremacy: the 14th Amendment (“equal protection”) is voided by the Color Line. I do not pledge allegiance, and I will remember all of this when next drafted into jury duty.
(19 November 2021)

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My wife and I have been binge watching the ABC series (2014-2020) ‘How To Get Away With Murder’, streaming on Netflix (a new thing for us, in 2020, after no TV of any kind since about 2004).

What I find intriguing about this show is that it is a chained murder soap opera heavily laced with extensive social justice stories and courtroom speeches, all made commercially viable and popular by liberal use of hyperactive sex scenes, fast-paced hyper-dramatic emotionalism, cast inclusivity by all parameters (black, white, Latino/Latina, Asian, Muslim, gay, straight, bi, every possible permutation of those), fast-paced “gritty” violence, glitzy ‘hip’ (sic) modernism/colloquialism/argot, with a crew of millennials front and center, along with an Academy Award winning actress (Viola Davis, the lead) who is also producer/executive producer (which undoubtedly was essential to getting the original ABC approval and funding), and – excellently – a large number of African-American actors/actresses who are: strong, pivotal, quick, sharp, superb with language (from the King’s English all the way to ghetto, downhome and jailhouse argot), eye-appealing when that is necessary for the stories, and both “heroes” and “villains.” Even with the many exaggerations and razzmatazz for commercial appeal, the show has managed to really blast away (mercilessly) at many injustices in American society. I think the show is a good example of the entertainers behind it using their professional skills to really put out strong and timely social justice messages while simultaneously cutting good paychecks for themselves. Of course, one could instead argue that they are somewhat cynically exploiting popular social justice hopes (of the Barack Obama type of “hope and change” longings) to capture “audience share,” but I don’t think that is the case.

Because of our binge watching of this show (6 seasons of 15 episodes each = 90), those social justice issues (as expressed really vividly in the show) have been much on my mind.

Viola Davis is the star and standout performer, the whole series is built around her as an actress, and around her character. She’s phenomenal. Excepting her, my favorite characters are “Frank Delfino” and “Bonnie Winterbottom,” they have enviable fortitude. My favorite hairstyle for “Annalise Keating” (Viola Davis) is her last one.

I’ll be thinking of this show the next time I’m called to jury duty.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80024057

(16 November 2021)

One of the biggest and recurring targets of the ‘Murder’ show was the large over-representation of African-Americans in America’s jails, and as America’s victims of homicide by police (and framing by the Justice system: local, state and federal).
(19 November 2021)

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How to Get Away With Depicting Social Justice in Hollywood
19 November 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/19/how-to-get-away-with-depicting-social-justice-in-hollywood/

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Action and Non-action at a Distance, versus Moral Magnetism

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Americans are fascinated by and obsessed with guns because they give the illusion of allowing one to work one’s will by action at a distance.

Americans are mesmerized by and obsessed with handheld ‘telinternet’ electronics because they give the tenuous illusion of shielding one’s non-action, and of being insulting, from a distance.

Both of these fetishes are indictors of the lack of social cohesiveness among Americans. We separate ourselves by fear and shame. Hence, our society is fractious, disunited, weak. Our politics fully conforms to Ambrose Bierce’s definition of that word: “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

It is then no mystery why, as Daniel Warner bemoans (https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/25/collective-responsibility-and-our-moral-compass/), random collections of Americans are consistently morally irresponsible by failing to stop injustices occurring right before their eyes.

Behind the belief in an ability for action or non-action at a distance rests the illusion of having a store of personal power: each of us a little Zeus with a quiver of thunderbolts to hurl at offenders from our safe remote clouds. We cherish this illusion because it is how we stifle the voice of gnawing fear at the root of our behavior: in truth we are powerless individuals among uncaring people in an uncaring world.

While it is comforting to complain about being in a “99%” victimized by the leading actors in our national political stage play, the soap opera they put on accurately reflects our consensus about what kind of society we are willing to accept, and what kind of individuals we allow ourselves to be. While American democracy is blocked from implementing the populist socialist aspirations of the American public, by the Fort Apache attitude of our political advantage-takers, it is still true that American government reflects the general character of that American public. In this regard our government remains representative. So, we both are and are not victims of our political managers.

Individual reactions to our societal mediocrity can include: charitable action intended to ameliorate suffering and inspire wider imitation; activism intended to promote greater justice and inspire others to similar activism; a disdainful loss of pity for the crowd because its individuals are seen as too easily and ignorantly allowing themselves to be exploited and enslaved by their political gullibility and lack of social solidarity.

Fortunately, there remains a portion of the population that is clear-eyed about our fractious social reality and yet makes the individual effort not to acquiesce to it but instead “do the right thing” as a matter of principle, and of personal pride, even if convinced that life is intrinsically absurd and the idea of any future “triumph of good” is an illusion. Probably most of us think we are in this group, but of course most of us are not (as our society shows). Probably all of us can recall some instance in our lives (and perhaps many) when we have been lovingly and generously touched by the consequences of kind acts by people, known or unknown, who were trying to inject goodness for others into our times.

In his article, Daniel Warner repeats the falsehood (widely publicized by the New York Times in 1964) that the assault on and murder of Kitty Genovese proceeded without anyone seeking to stop that crime while it was in progress. From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese):

“In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens in New York City, New York, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid.”

For the full story about the tragedy of Kitty Genovese, the responses of neighbors who tried to help, and the disgusting duplicity of the newspaper writers who jumped with alacrity to social criticism — “the bystander effect” — while ignoring investigation of the facts, see ‘The Witness’, the 2016 riveting documentary movie produced by Kitty Genovese’s younger brother, William (http://www.thewitness-film.com/).

I lived in Jamaica, Queens, just east past Kew Gardens until 1962 and then further east in Suffolk County into the late 1960s. I remember the shock, dread and sadness of the Kitty Genovese murder as a local current event, and always thought about it when the Long Island Railroad train I was taking to or from Manhattan would stop at the quaint Kew Gardens station whose small parking lot was where Kitty Genovese had left her little FIAT sports car, which she never returned to after the early hours of 13 March 1964. Kitty Genovese bled her life out in the arms of a neighbor woman who rushed to her aid while waiting for emergency services to arrive.

While I believe that American society is corrupt, and perhaps even irredeemably so, I also believe we will always have individuals who will instinctively embody goodness and selflessness for the sake of others overwhelmed in crises of pain and sorrow. This is taking action at hand, of human connection and of solidarity, without concern for feeling powerful.

The natures of our national and world societies are reflections of the (deficient) proportions of their populations who take the risk of adopting that altruistic attitude. The “risk” to the individual, of trying to live by some standard of communal altruism, is of failure at advantage-taking, as evidenced by the counterexamples of “the winners” in our world, who achieve their “successes” (money, status, de facto legal immunity, the envy from the multitudes) by taking the exact opposite attitude: being parasites.

Daniel Warner quotes Virginia Held, that “a random collection of individuals may be held responsible for not taking collective action,” and he concludes that “a universally accepted institutional moral magnet no longer exists” for remagnetizing the failed moral compasses of a people who in random groupings fail (or will fail) to take collective action to stop moral outrages that erupt directly in front of them.

I see the failure to ‘take collective action’ against the moral outrages of the obvious victimization of others, and the evasion of responsibility to do so, as the unspoken design criterion of American society. It is a labyrinth of advantage-taking designed by and for moral evasion. My attitude here is like that of Jonathan Swift: I can condemn human society as a whole, as a fractious collection of competing parasites, while simultaneously prizing those many individuals — few of whom I can ever know — who contribute what goodness and beauty and compassion and connection are available for experiencing when we need them.

Also, a ‘universally accepted moral compass remagnetizer’ does exists. Put yourself in the place of the victim you see before you and ask: minimally, how would I want those who see me in this crisis, to help get me out of it? That then is the personal remagnetization challenge. It is for me, too.

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’Stateless’, an Australian Television Drama about Refugee Detention

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’The Trojan Women,’ a play by Euripides, was first performed in Athens 2,436 years ago at the height of the disastrous Peloponnesian War. It is considered a commentary on the capture of the Aegean island of Melos and the subsequent slaughter of its men and the enslavement of its women by the Athenians earlier that year, 415 BCE.

This play focuses on four women awaiting their fates after the fall of Troy (~1,200 BCE, in northwest Turkey near the Dardanelles): Hecuba (the wife of the slain king, Priam), Cassandra (the beautiful virginal daughter of Priam and Hecuba, who was blessed and then cursed by a lustful Apollo, with having a gift of prophesy none would listen to), Andromache (the wife of the great Trojan hero, Hector, who was slain by Achilles), and Helen (the Achaean queen and wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who ran off with Paris to Troy, and which elopement was the purported cause for the Achaeans’s war against Troy).

The three Trojan women would all be made concubines and slaves by the Achaeans (mainland Greeks), and Helen returned to Menelaus. Because the Greeks wanted to ensure there would be no surviving male heir to the Trojan throne, they took Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and Andromache and the grandson of Priam and Hecuba, up to the high parapet of Troy and tossed him down to his death on the rocks below.

In 5th and 4th Century BCE Athens, the playwrights were known as poets and called teachers, and in ’The Trojan Woman’ Euripides was desperately and dramatically striving to teach the Athenians that the horrors of the Peloponnesian War were destroying the soul of their society, and that they should find ways of extricating their city-state from the war. His vehicle to convey that larger message to the Athenians was this dramatization of the final days in the death of the Trojan city-state eight centuries earlier (if in fact it was a single real historical event), as told in Greek myths recounted by legendary poets like Homer and his many forgotten colleagues.

’Stateless’, an Australian 6-part television series that was launched in 2020, is about a refugee and ‘illegal immigrant’ detention center, and strikes me as being similar to ‘The Trojan Woman’ as a societal teaching drama. It is both a searing depiction full of human and political insights about the current refugee crisis in Australia, as well as a close analogy for similar tragic realities along the US-Mexican border, in Libya and southern Italy, in Syria and the Greek Islands; and in other places where minorities and disfavored ‘others’ live precariously without stable statehood and are internally displaced or incarcerated, as in Syria, ‘Kurdistan’, Palestine, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The writers of ’Stateless’, Elise McCredie and Belinda Chayko have done a magnificent job. The directors, Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse have made an absorbing and compelling visual work (https://www.netflix.com/title/81206211).

How many refugees are there around the world? The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR (https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html) states that: “At least 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26.4 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement. At [this] time 1 in every 95 people on earth has fled their home as a result of conflict or persecution.”

We must add that the deleterious effects of climate change — crop failures and lack of drinking water from extended droughts, and the loss of land, housing and employment due to violent weather and flooding — has also spurred refugee streams.

Those refugee streams flow out of the tropical and sub-tropical latitudes: from Africa northward across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, up from Central America and Mexico and across the Caribbean Sea to North America, southward from Eastern Asia to Australia, and from the arid interior of the Middle East westward toward the Mediterranean Sea and Europe.

Americans, Europeans and Australians see these refugee streams as incoming waves of impoverished humanity comprised of dark-skinned people with cultures, mind frames and languages vastly different from their own, and thus a threat to American, European and Australian prosperity, and their existing ethnic balances, if too large an influx. We must realize that these refugee streams course back up along the gradients of wealth leading from the Global South to the Global North (and Australia), propelled by the pent up pressure of economic disparity created by over half a millennium of conquest and imperialism with over three centuries of slavery, by the White people of the north: the Europeans and the descendants of their American and other colonists.

The Australian television series ’Stateless’ is composed of a weave of four sub-plots, each about a person caught up in and then piteously twisted to the breaking point by the day-to-day reality of escalating crisis in the asylum-seeker Braxton Detention Center. All these stories are based on actual case histories. Threatened men and women become refugees and are driven to acts of desperation, they are victimized, families are torn apart, some eventually find sanctuary while many others languish indefinitely or perish. Low-level workers in the host countries looking to hang onto paychecks are shoved by higher level bureaucrats and policy-makers to go in and do the dirty work of “keeping a lid on” and also “making it look good for the public.” And the sanctimonious of all stripes on the outside are more often than not “virtue signaling” for their own ego boosts, than having any useful empathy for all the individuals mired in the toxic tangle of “the system.”

One story in ‘Stateless’ is based on the real case of Cornelia Rau, an Australian woman citizen who was emotionally disturbed at the time and who was inadvertently — and unlawfully — incarcerated by the Australian government’s Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA), and held for 10 months during 2004-2005 under the country’s mandatory detention policy for refugees, until Cornelia was traced to Braxton by a relative, and correctly identified and released to a hospital.

Another sub-plot focuses on an Afghani family fleeing the Taliban, being cheated and robbed by criminal human traffickers in Pakistan, being separated while attempting to make the perilous sea voyage to Australia in rickety boats, with the survivors eventually finding each other at Braxton. But the effort of the Afghani father to gain entry visas for his surviving family proves to be a very heartbreaking and essentially impossible effort. Despite some commendable humanitarian impulses by Australian workers tasked with maintaining the day-to-day operations of the center, and of some right-minded procedures embedded in the immigration policy, that policy is nevertheless largely fueled by a great deal of officially mandated bigotry and prejudice.

The conflict between offering a welcoming humanitarian response to the desperation of the trapped refugees terrified of being deported back to certain death, and the politically motivated mandates from the central government to maintain this bureaucratic structure for continuing exclusion, and without arousing public attention to it, is personified by the story of the woman appointed as the new director of the center. She is emotionally torn apart by the inherent cruelty of the job, and her political expendability to the remote higher-ups.

The last of the four sub-plots in ‘Stateless’ centers on a local rural freelance mechanic who seeks to leave precarity behind and support his young family with a steady paycheck earned working as a ‘prison’ guard at the detention center — though he is instructed that it is a refugee center and not a prison since its residents, despite having no freedom of motion, have not been placed there for the commission of crimes. This individual is a good-hearted fellow who quickly comes under unrelenting strain because of his repulsion at the cruelty toward unruly refugees by a sadistic guard, and because of the numerous requirements for him to perform rough enforcement actions on people exhibiting outbursts of anger, fear and madness. Both the emotional and physical traumas sustained in doing his job while trying to thread the needle between the frayed edges of UNHCR compassionate supervision of a precarious population, and the barbed razor sharp edges of bureaucratically enforced nationalism, nearly deaden his heart and rip apart his family.

Each of the four sub-plots in ‘Stateless’ is populated with many supporting characters who enrich the presentation, and the entire ensemble presents the full spectrum of human experiences that take place in the turbulent focal point of mixing-nonmixing between Australian society and Asian refugees at the Braxton Detention Center.

The ultimate solution to the world’s refugee crisis is so far out of view: ending all wars to establish a lasting world peace, and ensuring intelligent economic development up to decent standards everywhere so that people can remain in their countries with their families experiencing physical and economic security and good health down through the generations. Achieving these conditions would obviate the need for anyone to become a refugee and seek foreign asylum.

Yes, this is idealistic (naïvely so?, impossibly?), like wanting equitable worldwide cooperation to stop anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions so as to tamp down the acceleration of global warming. But neither of these ideals is intrinsically impossible to actualize, and that is why the continuation of the refugee and climate crises are such tragedies: they are fundamentally unnecessary sorrows, open and festering wounds on the body of humanity.

What we have today is a compounded system of exploitation through tiered victimhood, a system commanded by über capitalists and nationalistic warlords living luxuriant lives, and served by hierarchical cascades of lower level petty boss bureaucrats, their functionaries, and in turn their laborers and armed enforcers. This system is so abhorrent that Nature itself has abandoned us, and is trying to burn us off the land and wash us away into the seas and oceans we have thoughtlessly poisoned with our wastes. An added cruelty to this accelerating rejection of humanity by Nature is that those who are suffering now, and first, and will suffer the most from the increasing hostility of Earth’s climatic conditions to human life are the people of the Global South (the Third World), the regions from which today’s refugee streams emerge, the poorest of Earth’s people, those who lead the most precarious lives, and those who contributed the least to the creation of the global climate crisis.

Coda: a Meditation on ’Stateless’

Must I have a stone heart to preserve a sane mind in a world of pure suffering I am luckily insulated from — for now? How does one combat compassion fatigue and empathy burnout? Does one sink into survivor’s guilt for blamelessly being born lucky?; for living in a bubble of comfort, freedom and justice that is much rarer than one had previously imagined?; and that seems to be diminishing by national policy out of view of its lucky inhabitants confident in their unawareness? But of those lucky people who do become aware, how do they survive and stay human without deadening their souls? We have become a race of monomaniacal blind cyclopses raging about our freedoms because we cannot conceive of anything beyond our own frustrated infantile selfishness. Becoming aware of the sufferings of others is the first step in the very long journey of personal redemption. That journey has many perils, and no one completes it unscathed.

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Why Blast Off Into Space?

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The fantasy of rising above the surface of the Earth and flying out among the stars is as old as the human imagination itself. After Marco Polo brought back Chinese gunpowder to the 13th century Europeans, they were able to militarize it into firearms, and the technology of chemically-propelled ballistics took off so that by the early 20th century rockets intended to fully penetrate Earth’s atmosphere and drift out into Outer Space were being visualized and tested.

William Leitch in 1861 and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903 expressed the idea of using rockets to enable human spaceflight. From 1920 Robert Goddard proposed improvements to rocket design, and in 1926 built and launched the first modern rocket. That modernity was marked by the first use of a converging-diverging exhaust tube — known as a de Laval nozzle — which enabled the hot exhaust gases emitted by the combusting rocket fuel to convert their heat energy into outward unidirectional motion at supersonic speed: thrust!

But with the exception of tinkerers like Goddard, rockets were used as military weapons — artillery — most dramatically by Nazi Germany from 1943 with its V2 ballistic missile rocket-bombs. The American space program began in 1945 with the use of captured German V2 rockets to send cameras and scientific probes into the upper atmosphere. The USSR’s independent space program began in the 1950s, making a dramatic breakthrough — shocking Americans — with the lofting of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, which was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It orbited for three weeks before its batteries died and then orbited silently for two months before it fell back into the atmosphere on the 4th of January 1958.

The major thrust of both American and Soviet rocket development throughout the 1950s and 1960s was to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, and have such capability presented as a threat display to deter aggression by other technologically advanced and militarily powerful adversaries: the Cold War. Putting men as the payloads in such large rockets and blasting them into Earth orbit, and eventually out to the Moon, was primarily a flagrant display to all, signaling the possession of awesome military power. Science exploration was a minor byproduct of the space race, but ultimately some of that scientific curiosity yielded the most beneficial results from the entire rocketry endeavor.

Now, 52 years after Neil Armstrong first set a human foot on the Moon, propelled by American public funding, at least three of our attention-seeking Billionaire Boys are competing to burn up disposable bundles of their money to launch themselves into space joyrides, and to then exploit the technology they have paid to have built as the basis of “space tourism” businesses.

On Tuesday, 20 July 2021, Jeff Bezos and three others were blasted in his rocket up to an elevation of 106 km above the surface of the Earth, for a two-way trip totaling 10 minutes and 10 seconds. To some this is a laudable achievement of the free market system, while to others it is a pathetic expansion of conspicuous consumption to a new exorbitant level. Many ask: could the billions extracted from the labor of Bezos’s exploited and precarious workforce not have been better spent to alleviate hunger and homelessness?, and could the massive amount of chemical energy expended to pull off this stunt not have been better used with much greater efficiency to power broadly beneficial purposes on the surface of the Earth? But such questions mistake applying standards of human solidarity and social responsibility to seek understanding billionaire’s egotistical behavior. Here, I will provide one answer to the energy question.

The minimum energy needed to loft any mass up to 106 km above the surface of the Earth is 1,022,842.066 Joules per kilogram (J/kg). So, for the total energy expenditure in any specific case, multiply the mass of the fully loaded rocket (in kg) by 1,022,842.066 Joules/kg. One joule is the energy required to lift a medium-sized tomato up 1 meter (3 ft 3 in), assuming the tomato has a mass of 101.97 grams (3.597 oz). Lofting a mass up to 106 km above the surface of the Earth requires as much energy as lifting it only 1 meter above the Earth’s surface 104,265 times.

Outer Space is considered to begin at elevation 100 km, which is called the Von Karman Line (after a renowned aerodynamicist). Satellites in Low Earth Orbit have elevations between 180 km and 2,000 km; in Mid Earth Orbit, 2,000 km to 35,780 km elevation; in Geosynchronous Orbit at 35,780 km elevation; in High Earth Orbit beyond 35,780 km; and the Orbit of the Moon occurs at a distance of 378,032 km from the Earth’s surface.

It requires 9.81 Joules of energy to lift a 1 kg mass 1 meter above the surface of the Earth (or 9.81 of those 3.597 ounce tomatoes, all at once). In terms of “g’s” pulling a mass “down” toward the center of the Earth, the g-force at the surface of the Earth is 1g, the g-force at 106 km is 0.968g, the g-force at 180 km is 0.946g, the g-force at 2,000 km is 0.579g, the g-force at 35,780 km is 0.023g, and the g-force at 378,032 km (the distance to the Moon) is negligible at 0.0002747g.

Satellites in stable orbits around the Earth need an additional energy to accelerate them up to an orbital velocity, and it is this boost to lateral momentum, in combination with the “centrifugal” (radial) pull by Earth’s gravity, that results in the curved trajectory that describes the satellite’s stable orbit, which can be either circular or elliptical.

I do not know the weight of Bezos’s rocket (I have not seen it published), but IF I assume it weighed as much as a fully loaded Boeing 707 jet airplane, 150,000 kg, then the total (minimum) energy to lift it up to 106 km would have been 1.534×10^11 Joules = 153.4 gigajoules (GJ). Whatever the actual weight was, lofting it to an elevation of 106 km requires at least 1.023 megajoules/kilogram (MJ/kg).

I am guessing that small rockets, perhaps comparable to Bezos’s, could weigh half as much (or less) as a Boeing 707 airplane (~10s of thousands of kg), and I am certain that Bezos’s rocket was much smaller than the the Saturn V rockets that lofted the Apollo Moon missions, and which initially weighed about 2.8 million kg.

The real issue is that blasting stuff up into space — away from Earth and against its gravity — is immensely energy intensive. Given that one has that energy in the first place, why use/waste inordinate amounts of it to loft small payloads into space? For a few items like weather and GPS satellites, space telescopes, and tiny robotic planetary probes, I think it is worthwhile for the expansion of scientific knowledge and the physical improvement of social conditions. But for almost all else, and most especially manned space flight, it is the total waste of space junk littering militarism and propaganda.

And now, symptomatic of our dysfunctional economics, manned space flight has also become just another item of supremely exclusive and very showy personal conspicuous consumption. As Eeyore would gloomily intone in the Winnie-the-Pooh books: “Pathetic.”

A short report in PDF form is freely available to anyone interested in the details of my calculations, at

Rockets Against GravityDownload

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Even Noah Would Be Amazed

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A extensive televised BBC News story of 16 July 2021, titled “Catastrophic flooding across western Europe as politicians blame climate change,” showed the devastation caused by the rapid massive flooding in the region of Western Europe at the confluence of the borders of Germany, Belgium, France and Luxembourg during the third week of July 2021, when three times the monthly average of rainfall was dumped in only a day or two. In that report, the likely next Prime Minister of Germany forthrightly assigned blame for the catastrophe to global warming climate change, and urged serious and immediate national, European and world action to counter it by reducing anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. (https://youtu.be/8A65JzDltY4)

If this flooding in Germany and Belgium this last week, and the vast fires and massively deadly heat in Northwestern USA and Canada, and Siberia the previous week, can cause such devastation despite occurring in the most technologically sophisticated and economically advanced and developed countries on Earth, how do you think such similarly “natural catastrophes,” amplified and accelerated by global warming, would affect (and are affecting) the hundreds of millions — even billions — of the Earth’s poorest and most vulnerable people — as in Sub-Sahara Africa, Amazonia, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Pacific Islands?

This is real life Apocalypse Now. It will continue to “explode” much more slowly than the pacing within our very short attention spans — of seconds to maybe as long as months — and that explosion of catastrophe will continue for decades and even centuries if humanity continues to remain inert before this planetary reality.

The problem — that millions and billions more people have not yet been spurred into action by the all-too-obvious degradation of the climate-weather-biosphere interlocking systems — is far beyond the simple confusion of a deer-in-the-headlights problem. Fundamentally, it is the human inertia of the retreat into reassuring habit to mask the denial of existential fear, rather than a forthright confrontation of it with intelligent action.

Our destiny has been handed to us: either we exhibit triumphs of the human spirit by acting vigorously and cooperatively to counteract global warming, or we perish ignominiously in a degrading piecemeal fashion as willfully ignorant victims of our own stupidity, narcissism and witless folly.

What amazes me is how, in the face so such evident and advancing climate catastrophes, so many can be so enveloped in their illusion bubbles and remain completely blind to the ongoing collapse of the world, both natural and human: bubbles of greed illusions in desperation to acquire more exclusive corporate and “insider” subsidies in order to “compete”; bubbles of bigotry illusions ever in search of public affirmation and normalization of their favored brand of supremacist apartheid; bubbles of fear illusions ever in search of more armed protection from other “types” and “classes” and “foreigners”; pathetic bubbles of self illusions ever in search of “power” by phishing telemarketing of fake automobile warranties and “free money,” and hacking websites large and small and Facebook pages; and the narcissistic illusion bubbles of billionaire boys trying to explode mass media paroxysms of stupidity by ejaculating their ego rockets into space; and the hubristic bubbles of unmoored superpower illusions ever seeking to project power “geo-strategically”, to monopolize hydrocarbon deposits and trade, and to stifle small countries with marginal economies, as with Cuban socialism just south over the Caribbean horizon from a sinking, collapsing and sea-level-rise-flooding Miami.

In that BBC report, Britt Blom, a café owner helping to clear the masses of debris clogging her village streets after the flood waters had receded, said: “We need to stay positive, we can cry all day but this will not help anything. So, better smiling and keep working.”

And for the rest of us in this ever shrinking wide world, that “working” means: to help clean up after the tragedies “here,” to help other victims of tragedy both near and far, and to face up to global warming climate change and biodiversity collapse, with real and cooperative action to help slow the pace of our expanding planetary catastrophe.

Wake up, people.

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On Sports

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I have played many sports, mainly as a boy but also as a young man, playing them entirely as games with other amateurs: for fun. The most fun I had was when the games were only trivially competitive, and the least fun I had — and even hate — was when I was in competitive leagues run by “sports fan” adults. I have not followed professional sports for decades, but I thought I would express myself here on competitive sports anyway, because I know there is a huge, huge international obsession with them, such as with the World Cup (football = soccer), the Olympics, the National Football League (American football), the National Basketball Association (male ballet in the U.S.A.), and the National Baseball League (baseball being the most game-like and least warlike of American sports; fun on a summer day with hot dogs and beer — even though that makes for sloppy playing!).

There is always great controversy and outrage when an elite athlete is disqualified because one or another chemical trace was detected in their bodies, in a concentration above some arbitrary amount (such as marijuana in anybody, and testosterone in women); or when a referee make a “bad call” affecting the subsequent competitive rankings of teams; or for stupid and violent behavior by a player frustrated at not getting what he or she wants.

Why so much public outrage over such incidents? Because “sports fans” are overwhelmingly obsessed with the competitive aspect of sports, with “winning,” and thus: status, notoriety, fame, money; and the fans’s vicarious association with their revered “winners.” There is much less interest — I think basically none — in the beauty of movement, the dance of the sporting activities: the grace of lithe bodies in peak physical condition artistically expressing skills of coordination and timing, and thus being elegant dynamic displays of the human form. But, nope, it’s all about “getting ahead.”

Professional sports organizations (which includes the Olympics and college leagues) seek to maintain the illusions of the “purity” of their sports, so they have many regulations and invasive testing procedures to try to ensure none of the athletic competitors “cheats” by boosting their performance abilities with supplements (hormones, chemicals) or other technical methods of enhancement (a la Frankenstein to their bodies, or by technological enhancements to their equipment).

But competition remains the real focus of everyone’s attention, so there is an eternal conflict between keeping the sports “pure” as “games”, and running them as what everyone really wants: unapologetic all out wars where all is fair in order to win. And so, there is much much hypocrisy around every cheating, disqualification, injury and abuse incident in professional sports; and in professionalized “amateur” sports by people like sports fan dads, and college donors.

That conflict catches up many athletes, and ruins their careers — which is to say their quests for records, glory, status, notoriety and most importantly wealth — because those athletes made one or another little slip in trying to thread the needle of their career along the ragged edges of the nonaligned complexes of “pure sport” and “competition.” The supreme hypocrisy of both the professional sports organizations and the sports fan public is that any athlete’s failure to perfectly suture pure sport with competition is put on them as a personal failure, rather than a systemic one. I find that hypocrisy detestable and, along with the obsession with competition, has turned me off to sports beyond the level of games children engage in and run for themselves without any adult involvement.

So I have a proposal to eliminate that chronic and endemic sports hypocrisy: eliminate all the restrictions. That’s right, unleash sports from the illusion they are fun games, and let them be all out wars: pure competition. Let athletes do to themselves whatever they think will help them win, by: ingestion, injection, implantation, surgery; anything. Test no one for anything: no drug tests, no sex tests, no behavioral reprimands; nothing. Let the games begin! What sports fans really want is gladiatorial contests: winner take all, losers die. So, free it all up and cut all the hypocrisy. We really don’t care if athletes ruin their health, or steal team signals, or surreptitiously enhance their equipment, or gamble on the outcome of matches. Winning is the only thing.

Horrors!, some will say, won’t that ruin the sports? No, it will purify them. Those people who want to engage in sports as just games to play for fun will form their own noncompetitive leagues. And they will then play with vigor but no obsession about the final score: they will play for enjoyment and without any prospect of money rewards. So such sporting activity will be inherently amateur, and entirely community: festivals instead of wars. No TV broadcasts, no multi-million dollar contracts, no big business, no celebrity culture, no national and international spectacle and drama: boring as entertainment. But fun for the festival participants.

Then the full scale big business industrial war of professional sports can really go all out to the maximum thrill of its enthralled fans, and to offer the maximum possibility of competitive (i.e., status, money, power) success for its driven careerist individuals: modern gladiators. As stories of successful intrigues and spying for advantage become known, they will enhance the sports fan public’s delight with the competitive spectacles they are devoted to.

The small number of sports afficionados who would like to see graceful game-playing on TV from the comfort of their couches, by enthusiastic and vigorous athletes who are nevertheless intrinsically noncompetitive and playing from pure joy, may possibly have some community access TV channels broadcasting local game-festivals, and even possibly internationally over the internet. In that way such fans may be able to find opportunities to watch “pure play” by non-enhanced athletes remotely, as well as by actual physical attendance at local game-festivals: hence socialist sports. All sports fans will certainly be guaranteed the ability to see all-out big-money professional sports anytime anywhere on broadcast and internet TV, and such broadcasts will be lushly garnished with corporate advertisements — which is the whole point of capitalist sports. And therein is an abstract of the politics of sports.

So there you have it: hypocrisy-free sports are possible as purely amateur socialist intrinsically noncompetitive (i.e., money-free) game-festivals, and professional sports will be liberated to carry on as their hardcore fan base and careerist athletes truly desire: all out wars for glory, fame and money.

I would see any outrage at this proposal as a de facto defense of the bloated hypocrisy enveloping all professional and professionalized sports organizations and their ‘fandoms’.

Finally, as a note of full disclosure, I have played my sports with sufficient competitive vigor to get numerous sports injuries, on: feet, ankles, legs, knees, hands, fingers, and torso.

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House Upon The Sand

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This is my two-part rant of 30 June 2021.

Andrew Bacevich writes:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/29/the-passing-of-the-present-and-the-decline-of-america/

This is the kind of commentary, and commentator that pisses me off. Yes, an honorable, intelligent, patriotic former career soldier, and highly respected military-political commentator comes to forthrightly state that the war-crazed dysfunction of the American state now seems fatally terminal, and one might have found glimmers of that realization as far back as 1969, such as in Kurt Vonnegut’s new book that year Slaughterhouse 5, though Bacevich finally acceded to it in mid-Trump Administration.

WOW! I fucking knew this in 1968 as an 18 year old! I read SH5 in 1969, and Catch-22 in ’68, and had read Helen Hunt Jackson somewhere between 1963-1967 (which was before Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” was published).

Okay, so now the old West-Pointer Bacevich has finally read SH5, and published his erudite books on the stupidity of American militarism, and been forthright about his previous white American exceptionalism careerist wrong illusions, and made sincere and public efforts to advocate for an inclusive, just, “progressive” America, and write as here about the complete toxicity of Trumpianism and the Republicans, and the pathetic flaccidity of the less than B-minus grade Bidenites — great, all welcome and good (and Stan Goff would tell me to be accepting of anyone’s personal redemption — okay), but DAMN! it took long enough!

The whole damn Vietnam War genocidal catastrophe wasn’t enough to wake you up by 1975? by Reagan-time? by Bush II time and the Iraq War? How come so many of us dumber unimportant people can figure this stuff out decades before you super-informed, super-plugged-in brainiacs and lever-pullers?

Well, okay, you’re good now Bacevich, and thanks for the accurate insights about today. I’m guessing that just as (some) serious people like Bacevich have woken up to the evils of American militarism 50 years after the Vietnam War, that equally in 50 years time we’ll see a heartening swelling in the ranks of today’s serious lever-pulling people who have woken up to the Planetary Crisis encompassing global warming climate change, collapsing biodiversity and its attendant social inequities. And then (forgetting about all the bodies buried since then) they’ll want to do something about it. By then palm trees might sprout in Greenland, and we may even have a smaller world population (involuntarily).

Okay, rant, part 1, is over. Now for part 2.

From Wikipedia: The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on Wednesday, April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing happened at 9:02 am and killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished.

From Wikipedia: On June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:30 a.m. EDT, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium building in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, experienced a sudden partial collapse. At least 12 people died, and 11 others were injured.[as of 30 June 2021] About 35 people were rescued from the uncollapsed portion of the building, 2 people have been rescued from the rubble, and 149 people remain missing as rescue operations continue… As of June 28, 2021, 12 people are known to have died during the collapse, and 11 more have been injured. 11 of the 12 fatalities have been publicly identified, including two Venezuelan nationals and two Cubans. Up to 149 people remain unaccounted for.

So, it looks like the Champlain Towers South will have snuffed out 162 lives. “Missing” and “unaccounted for” are the terms used to describe people that have been killed but whose bodies have yet to be recovered, and for whom, illogically, their loved ones hope (and who can blame them!) that they will miraculously return alive.

So this building collapse — in all probability — nearly equals the death toll of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, though it did not cause any noticeable number of other injured. But the Oklahoma tragedy was “terrorism” and required a swift and vigorous government response, both to care for the victims and to apprehend and punish the perpetrators. But the Surfside (Miami) building collapse tragedy is not “terrorism” by rising seawater intrusion climate change undermining heedless shoreline real estate development, so: hold your horses!, let’s not rush to judgment!, let’s not act hastily — meaning at all — about that uncertain “climate change” scare tactic. Yeah, sure Gomer.

The mainstream finger of blame is pointing to faulty building construction and maintenance — which is undeniable — but that mainstream public consent-directing ministry (“of Truth”) has a massively pregnant silence about (the unthinkable!, the unmentionable!, don’t “politicize” tragedies!) CLIMATE CHANGE! But, well, “the possible excessive ingress of salt water” MIGHT have also been involved.

The bottom fell out and has been falling out not only of the Champlain Towers South, but of the whole damn Idiocracy clinging to and dangling from their high hopes of exponential prosperity for the ‘serious’ and ‘worthy’ (a.k.a. “exceptionalist”) denizens of the United States of Amnesia. Victims R Us.

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.” — Matthew 7:26, King James Bible.

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Deadly Collapse Of Illusions In Miami

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Here is video of the Miami beachside condominium that collapsed at ~1 AM on 24 June 2021 (https://youtu.be/KR29pLccutY). There are many news stories about this now.

An engineering professor at Florida International University has used satellite data on ground elevation (a measurement technique used since at least the late 1970s) to write about the steady sinking of land in Miami, including the site of the condo, since 1990. There is a lot of beachside construction in Florida on landfill. This condo was actually built on sturdier ground (I’m guessing an ancient barrier island), but landfill is right next to it on the west side, where other similar buildings are located (and thus a bit further from the shoreline).

In 2018, a building inspector engineer issued a warning that there was serious damage to the building stemming from an inadequacy of foundation integrity. Nothing was done. In another report, I read that the development-friendly local and state authorities had freed the Miami real estate industry from “excessive” regulations by only requiring building inspections every 40 years! (I find this hard to believe, but it was a news report posted on the internet).

By now it is clear that the cause of the collapse was the softening of the ground under the building by the infiltration of seawater over the years since the building’s construction. Because such a large building is very heavy, especially in comparison to a simple beachside bungalow, the weight of the structure put tremendously higher downward pressure on the ground below its foundation, diminishing the integrity of the increasingly soaked soil, and thus speeding its ultimate loss of cohesion.

Now, some words about structural stability in a gravitational field. Earth’s gravity arises from its huge mass (compared to anything else humans are used to) and it points toward the Earth’s center, which means “down.”

Buildings, bridges and many other structures erected by humans on the surface of the Earth are designed to remain stable by having rigid vertical structural members (i.e., columns) to transmit the weight of the structure into the ideally “solid” ground below, which in turn distributes the pressure of the building’s weight (as mechanical stress) into the body of Planet Earth. The contact zone between the building and the Earth is usually a cross-braced foundation structure.

Those weight-bearing vertical supports are cross-braced by horizontal rigid structural members (i.e., beams, and in stronger designs by triangular frames: trusses). This way the entire building has the structural integrity of a “block”: the Earth holds it up, and its cross-bracing holds it together.

Essential to the building’s stability is the integrity of the earth below it: its solidity. When that solidity is lost, such as by water infiltration softening, and becomes nonuniform, then the building can begin to sink in a lopsided manner. Such tilting means that now gravitation forces no longer align perfectly with “vertical” columns (since they are tilted) but also has “lateral” components of force directed along the cross-bracing (which is also tilted).

Such new lateral forces transmitted by the cross members against the sides of the columns add a sideways momentum now pushing to tilt the building over, and are also forces working to tear the building apart from top to bottom.

At some point of building tilt, such unevenness of the distribution of gravitation stress throughout the structure, now no longer strictly vertical, puts more tensile or compressive stress (depending on the orientation of the member) than one or more of the structural members can sustain without buckling; or some of the bolted, riveted or welded joints between members can sustain to keep from ripping open.

Such structural failures remove pathways for the building’s gravitational stress to find its way to ground. So the structural members of the building’s frame that are still connected see an increase in the stress they must contain and transmit to Earth to hold up the building.

This takes those still intact members and joints more quickly toward their failure points, and the weakest among them give way. In this way an accelerating cascade of structural failures occurs, and the entire building can seem to suddenly “deflate” and collapse.

Such a collapse will be seen to propagate through the building as a wave of “deflation” from the regions of first failures to last failures, which, depending on the configuration of the undermining forces, can be left-to-right or vice-versa, and bottom-to-top or vice-versa.

The World Trade Center Towers building collapses of 11 September 2001 occurred from the top down: the dynamic force of collapsing mass above any given floor (the conversion of gravitational potential energy into mass acceleration) being beyond the yield strength of the vertical columns and cross-bracing joints at each floor-level, which were only designed — with a significant safety factor — to withstand the static stress imposed by gravity. The collapse of the smaller World Trade Center Building 7 proceeded from the left to the right because of a buckling of a column weakened by fire softening.

The Miami condominium collapse of 24 June 2021 progressed from bottom to top, first on the “left” side, and then on the now laterally unsupported “right” side (as seen in the video captured by a surveillance camera).

I would guess that what is happening now in Miami — and elsewhere — is a scramble to point fingers assigning blame and to evade responsibility; people seeking to sue somebody for losses of relatives, property and illusions; to get insurance payments, or to avoid paying them; to protect their money, investments, property and advantages of location; and to run away from their fears and hide from facing up to the realities of implacable Climate Change (in the form of sea level rise for Miami) plowing steadily into the American “good life.”

Climate Change is like an enormous steamroller that is inching slowly but implacably along the open road of our projected expectations, to roll over and flatten our comfortable situations.

Since we are all “cemented in place” in those personal comfort situations, that steamroller is bit by bit squashing us: first ‘here’ then ‘there’; some by sea level rise; some by hurricanes razing all; some by wildfire; some by deepening and eternal heat and drought; some by waves of disease pathogens sprung from out of formerly deep recesses in the wild; some by the increasing withdrawal of food availability; and some by the infighting all this sparks among us and that causes casualties from our war with ourselves.

First we lose our illusions, then we lose our money, and finally we lose our lives.

Those who refuse to face reality and relinquish their illusions will cause the most damage to their fellow human beings, by being rabidly competitive, as they slide down the cascade of suffering longer and ever obsessed to the death with their unrelieved anxieties of avoiding losses and pain. Those who jettison their illusions and face reality will a least gain the comfort of finding the company of similar people.

Even as the steamroller inches forward toward us, for everyone “the future is uncertain, and the end is always near.” One can pin oneself to an obsession with “the end,” and its avoidance; or one can open oneself to an appreciation for the processes of life, and to the sharing of such appreciation.

Climate Change is now our great teacher, and its lessons range from stark terror to transcendence. We have no choice but to live out those lessons, but we do have some choice in which of those coming experiences we can aim our personal selves to.

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Photos from the news story (series) linked in two comments, below:

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The beachfront looks like an ancient barrier island to me (my guess). The “flats” behind it look like landfill (“reclaimed land”). I suspect all this land is “wet” below a shallow depth from the surface. I also suspect that depth has been decreasing with the sea level rise over previous decades, and which continues.

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27 June 2021, using Picture #1 for reference:

The surveillance camera that took the video of the collapse is located at the left-most, furthest ‘up’ seaward-side corner of the blue pool seen to the left in this photo, just below the large area of greenery. The camera was pointed diagonally across that pool, straight at the central portion of the building that collapsed. That central portion collapsed first, from the side closer to the surveillance camera and then dragging its backside (the side furthest from the surveillance camera) down. To me it seems that “the bottom dropped out” and not that the roof collapsed and pancaked down pulverizing the building. After that central section was all down, the squarish tower portion closest to the beach tottered, twisted ‘slightly’ clockwise as viewed in this picture, and then also collapsed by “the bottom dropping out.” You can see the higher pile of rubble left by that tower section collapse. I would guess that the section of ground (subsurface) between that outer tower section and the part of the building still standing, and aligned parallel to the shoreline, is the area of greatest weakness and loss of integrity. It is also possible (as others are commenting) that there had been a weakening of the reinforcing steel inside the concrete columns of the building because of the corrosive action of salty sea air and underground flooding since 1981 when the building was constructed. The conclusions of the forensic engineering reports, which will doubtless take many months to finally arrive at, will be interesting — if they are not distorted by CYA.

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