Spiralling into a Black Hole

The image you see is of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, in polarized light that shows its magnetic field. Time passes more slowly near a black hole. This phenomenon is called time dilation, and is so pronounced that one year near a black hole could be equivalent to 80 years on Earth. This explains our collective sense of time since November, 2016.

Now set the Wayback Machine for the end of the US Civil War. By the late 19th century the new complexity of modern warfare required large subsets of industry to be devoted to the research and development of rapidly maturing technologies. Rifled, automatic firearms, artillery and gunboats, and later, mechanized armour, aircraft and missiles required specialized knowledge and technology to build. For this reason, governments increasingly began to integrate private firms into the war effort by contracting out weapons production to them. It was this relationship that marked the creation of the military–industrial complex. The first modern military–industrial complexes arose in Britain, France and Germany in the 1880s-90s as part of the increasing need to defend their respective empires both on the ground and at sea. military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex

In 1956, sociologist C. Wright Mills had claimed in his book The Power Elite that a class of military, business, and political leaders, driven by mutual interests, were the real leaders of the state, and were effectively beyond democratic control. Friedrich Hayek mentions in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom the danger of a support of monopolistic organisation of industry from WWII political remnants: “Another element which after this war is likely to strengthen the tendencies in this direction will be some of the men who during the war have tasted the powers of coercive control and will find it difficult to reconcile themselves with the humbler roles they will then have to play [in peaceful times]."

In a figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered the most memorable farewell address by a Chief Executive since another old soldier, George Washington, warned his new nation back in 1796 to stick together always in the cause of its founding principles…Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version to appease the then-currently elected officials.

Linguist and anarcho-socialist theorist Noam Chomsky has suggested that "military–industrial complex" is a misnomer because (as he considers it) the phenomenon in question "is not specifically military." He claims, "There is no military–industrial complex: it's just the industrial system operating under one or another pretext (defense was a pretext for a long time)."

The fossil fuel industry has long deceived the public to prevent governments from adopting science-based legislation. The facts are damning, so they lie to protect their social license to operate. This strategic mendacity was spawned in the 1960s when Big Oil’s internal studies revealed that their core business activities cause climate change. They made a conscious decision to conceal what they knew, and they developed elaborate strategies to obscure the truth and seize control of the narrative. 

New research suggests more than half of global cropland areas could lose suitable crops under a warming scenario of 2ºC. The study mapped how climate change could reshape areas suited for 30 major crops across four warming scenarios — from 1.5ºC to 4ºC.

Michael McFaul describes a socio-political scenario: "Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States.”

Laurence Tribe writes: “Just as Hitler rose from the ashes and grievances of World War I, it looks like Trump’s dream is to reduce the United States to rubble so that he can turn what’s left of our once great country into his base of aggressively expansionist operations in alliance with Vladimir Putin and a few oligarchs.”

Robert Scott Horton agrees: “This has a high likelihood of being correct. It sounds rather insane. But if you understand the concept of ‘derzhavnost' (державность) that governs the Kremlin and that has been carefully sold to Trump and Vance for years, this is precisely what it envisions.”

March 11: More than 30 army chiefs among Washington's closest allies met in Paris on Tuesday without their U.S. counterparts, seeking to take on more responsibility over the Ukraine War, given President Donald Trump's unpredictability and rapprochement with Moscow. The closed-door gathering of 34 army chiefs, including NATO alliance and EU members as well as Japan and Australia, was a rare - and possibly unprecedented - convening without the U.S.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is aggressively collecting every scrap of data the government has on you so he can use for his own business purposes. The data collected and maintained by the government isn't just your name, home address, and Social Security number. Some federal agencies store information that many people don't share even with their closest friends and family: Medical diagnoses and treatment. Notes from therapy sessions. Whether a person has filed for bankruptcy. Detailed income information. And now, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has accessed heavily safeguarded databases that store such personal information, raising deep alarm among federal workers and privacy advocates. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5305054/doge-elon-musk-security-data-information-privacy

Robert Scott Horton: “Former Social Security Administration administrator Martin O'Malley predicts that in roughly 30-90 days, the social security administration will collapse and payments will stop. This is not an accident, but rather a design agreed by Elon Musk and Donald Trump…Brace for market crash… US President Donald Trump has said he will impose an additional 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium imports from Canada, escalating his battle with one of the US’s biggest trading partners…It's extremely important that Trump juxtaposes his tariffs with his demand to seize and subjugate Canada. This of course makes his entire Putin-like action a flagrant violation of international law.”

A Turning Point Looms: the world’s teetering, climate change a howling gale pushing us toward a totalitarian ditch. Resource wars, wealth gaps, ideological crusades—they’re knotted tight. On March 12, Scott Galloway said that one-quarter of Congress, in both parties, want an autocrat. In Canada, Mugsy Magarit speaks of a U.S. memo—Trump eyeing the Great Lakes, Ontario, 13.5 million souls. He and 90% of Canada are, uncharacteristically, "really, really fucking angry." Climate’s cooking disasters this month—la forza del destino—unstoppable, with equity sharks and tech overlords riding the wave. Time’s running out, fast.