Plus, don’t miss the RussiaGate Lexicon — and please note these are both works in progress and being updated as new details emerge about the Russia scandal, the Trump family criminal organization, and Putin’s revanchist influence in American politics.
As members of the white male oligarchy fall all over themselves to mock the Green New Deal in their prostrate subservience to special interest lobbyists and Wall Street, there’s an opportunity hanging out in the wind (…but mostly in the sun) for Main Street: invest in solar.
People who claim that solar power isn’t scalable are living like it’s 1999, or 1984, or maybe 1924. Solar power has been shown to so far follow the edicts of Moore’s Law, which describes the doubling of the number of transistors on the same size chip every 18 months to 2 years — leading to predictable cost reductions over time for technologies that exhibit this kind of growth curve.
Meanwhile, the substrates upon which solar photovoltaic cells can be deployed are getting smaller — ridiculously smaller. Thinner than a strand of human hair. Of course those solar implementations are still insanely expensive, but give Moore’s Law and markets some time to work and at some point (and probably in this lifetime, for some of us) we’ll be in a world where PV cells are everywhere — almost literally. We will pass out of the age of fossil fuel scarcity and into an age of true energy abundance, in which power can be harvested from almost any given surface.
So, get yourself a nice little solar ETF and plow some money into it, or squirrel away little bits over time — whatever you can afford. Eventually you’re liable to be laughing all the way to the bank as the dinosaurs cry themselves to sleep at night before the feverish petroleum-soaked nightmares set in.
It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible. Turns out, conflict gets attention.
Anger is also notably the “loophole” emotion — it’s the invisible one men get to have, while claiming for generations upon generations that “women are too emotional to be entrusted” with leadership or anything meaningful, really. Meanwhile male anger and aggression have killed hundreds of millions and wreaked destruction upon the earth many times over, as fragile masculinity is repeatably and predictably triggered over any little old thing.
We need to bring the fire down from the mountain. We are not on that project — we are still on the opposite project: keeping the wizards behind the curtain.
Too many of the wizards are male, and are busying themselves in playing petty economic and status zero-sum power games instead of recognizing the context they are in — we are all in — as an infinite game in which the enlargement of the participant group to include and, not just reluctantly tolerate, but to avidly welcome women in to the club will massively benefit all the players.
Then there are the white wizards who create pseudoscientific rationalizations for wasting time obsessing over 18th century racial animus as a massive distraction from having to do the work of creating anything useful or contributing any value to the world. They’ve taken their centuries of evolutionary advantage and painstakingly developed economic pie to split hairs over who ought to be denied a few of the crumbs, as a cheap method of papering over the deep well of collective insecurity and ego fragility precipitated by a lack of meaningful individuation and their failure to create anything useful or contribute any value to the world.
We could be playing this game together. Instead, we furtively dart about in Plato’s Cave imagining we are still living in a world of scarcity, rather than leveling ourselves up to behold the vision of the new world of abundance we have the capacity to create.
Did Russia hack the 2016 US election? Most certainly. The FBI, CIA, and entire intelligence community is in agreement on this point. Russian information warfare has been infamous the world over for decades — with a recent flare up starting with the Brexit vote as an obvious canary in a larger coalmine, and extending to the proliferation of right-wing movements around the world: particularly in Eastern Europe on Putin’s doorstep.
The following list is an attempt to demystify the language surrounding Russian interference in the election of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine the Western order — in retaliation for the fall of the Soviet Union which happened under his watch as a young KGB agent stationed in Dresden, Germany.
See also: the RussiaGate Bestiary which lists the individuals involved in the Russian 2016 election interference investigation of Trump campaign conspiracy and fraud. Please note: both of these resources are works in progress and are being updated frequently.
Dictatorships generally do not foster, or even tolerate, the kind of creative disruption of the status quo necessary to the existence of a dynamic free market. Plus, the economy of the Russian state can best be described as a mafia state, or kleptocracy. Thus Vladimir Putin needs to find other ways to shore up both the national finances and the support of his cronies (much less so, of his people, who are primarily afterthoughts in the Russian power structure).
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the rapid shift to capitalism was done with little oversight and many hands in the cookie jar. The Russian land’s rich stores of minerals, oil and gas, heavy metals, and other natural resources were rapidly privatized and newly-minted oligarchs flexed wealth and power in a way never before dreamed of in the former USSR.
The combination of powerful new gatekeepers who locked up the Russian economy early via capital flight and never let it go overshadowed the capitalistic transition and, in a very real way, hijacked it before it ever really got underway. The result is, some 30 years on, an unpopular creaking kleptocratic regime reviled around the world for its stubborn aggression, subversion of democratic processes around the world particularly in Europe and the United States, support for organized crime, and significant financial crimes on the part of the state itself.
Putin’s autocratic rule from dull to terrifyingly devious has a chilling effect on hope, self-determination, self-governance, and ultimately — on happiness, freedom, and creativity. Totalitarianism is capable of exerting control, but always fails to inspire anything except for eventual revolution against the oppressors.
Here is a granular look at major indicators of the economy of the Russian Federation.
