An explainer for my Asian and European and African friends, what is going on in the United States?

You guys must be quite confused about what is going on in the United States! Have no fear, most American Citizens are equally confused!

Yes, we did elect a sexual predator and real estate fraudster to the highest office, TWICE! I am not libeling Trump, but simply stating that He was convicted of sexually assaulting at least one woman, and he was also convicted of running long standing real estate scams.

As to why we elected him even after he was convicted of a felony, this is a little complicated. It seems that the majority of Americans believe that the US has been ill treated. It is a little like the Germans after they had lost WW1, and felt that  they had been ill treated by the victors.

Who has abused Americans? Really, no one has abused us. We have injured ourselves. Roughly half of Americans are Obese [not just overweight]. About 10% are morbidly obese. The reason for this is that the government has allowed monopolistic corporations to target Americans. Anti Trust laws were softened after corporations gained the right to spend any amount of money on electing candidates. So, American statesman and stateswomen are now elected largely by US companies.

This was highlighted openly, with the owners of the largest tech monopolies standing physically right behind D Trump at his inauguration. The government now concentrates on protecting these monopolies instead of US and world consumers. This means that we are fed very bad food, sold crappy goods with a fake warranty, and proscribed drugs that we don't actually need by a profit oriented health system. Rich people are allowed to do crimes, and if they are ever locked up, they can buy a pardon from our orange haired despot.

We also have a somewhat unresolved civil war. That's right! It did not end in 1886. Looking back, the North should have allowed the south to leave the US like they wanted to. There might still be slavery in the confederate states, but the US to the north would be much easier to govern. As it is, we can not agree on anything: Is it OK for Americans to carry guns? Should people of color vote? should women make their own medical decisions, and cast their own vote, or are women more like farm animals, who give birth on command, and are owned by a hu{man}?

You may also have noticed that political violence and race based violence are back in fashion in the US. Trump famously offered to pay the legal fees if some of his supporters would attack and hurt Anti Trump protesters at a rally. He forgave white counter protesters when they shot into crowds of peaceful black lives matter protesters. He caused numerous attacks on Asians when he foolishly blamed China and [in effect] all of Asia for causing the COVID pandemic. And, he rallied his supporters to invade the capitol after he lost the 2020 election. They actually did break in, and made some attempts to stop the counting of the electoral votes so that Biden could never take office. In fact, Trump was about to be imprisoned for his attempt to upset an election that he lost, when the trial was cancelled by his re-election.

The Maga republicans, like the Nazis before them, scapegoated a group so that they could be united by hate for a common enemy. It was decided that our economic and drug problems were actually caused by trans people and undocumented immigrants. It was easy to get rid of the trans people. We just declared that they do not exist, and forced them back to their birth gender. 

We still needed a despicable enemy, so that we could also have secret police and concentration camps. So, we drastically expanded our immigration police, and used them to attack democratic run cities. Making believe that they are rounding up drug dealers and rapists, they actually captured the lowest hanging fruit: gardeners mowing lawns, laborers waiting for day labor, and mothers bringing their American born children to school. During this 'operation', we saw the Trump administration ignore the courts, continue to fill the concentration camps, and deport the captured people to any country that would take them. El Salvador had already set up a mega prison, and we paid them to accept shipments of concentration camp prisoners that were not from El Salvador.


It seems that ICE is not getting the 'criminals' that they had targeted. Those folks are still at large. Instead, they stalk immigration courts to net the law abiding ones that do attend every immigration hearing. Since this new regime took power, 140,000 'illegals' have been shipped off, and around 65,000 sit in the concentration camps. In these facilities, they are deprived of medical attention, tortured, and given inedible food. It is hoped that they will give up their legal struggles to attain citizenship here, and will go back to their own country voluntarily.

Is this deportation campaign working? It is estimated that around 14 million people are here without a visa or green card. 140,000 is 1% of the estimated total, so it is likely that more than this number entered in the same time period. The round up is not working, because the number of illegals is likely still going up. The whole war is thus an attack on democratic run cities, that are seen as sanctuaries for illegal immigration.

We have twice elected someone who is quite mentally ill. He does not reward people for good behavior [unless they pay him a few million for a pardon]. Instead, he 'cuts the grass'. This is a term coined in Israel to allow genocide to proceed. When 'cutting the grass', one ceaselessly attacks ones dehumanized enemies, harming or killing them if possible. [calling them blades of grass makes it easy to kill lots of them] So, we have placed absurd tariffs on trade with the rest of the world. This has made us poorer, but has allowed Trump to charge vast bribes if a country wants their tariff lifted. He pockets the bribe, which actually comes in part from US wallets. The best example of this is the luxury jet that was given to him personally.

You may wonder where all of this is going? The US has never started a world war, but that is where a country goes after the concentration camps. It goes like this: after we get used to torturing and deporting illegals, we will find another group to lock up in there. [concentration camps need inmates] it is possible that Trump will pick the Jews again, because he is pretty much following the Hitler playbook. Germany had around a half million Jews prior to ww2. they were not illegal immigrants, but citizens with high paying jobs and their own totally legal businesses. About half of these fled when the Nazis starting to trouble them. A quarter of a million or so remained to be shot in the street or fed into ovens in the German concentration camps. As the Germans moved into Europe and eventually Russia, they slaughtered the Jews who lived there as well.

Germany did not start with Jews. They first imprisoned blacks and gays. You can not start with such a large group. Who will we pick for our major scapegoat in the US? Even though Hitler picked the Jews, and this group is numbered around 7.5 million in the US, there are some things that work against choosing Jews to murder. For one thing, we just joined with Israel to attempt to kill or drive out all Palestinians. It also takes a while to make a population hate a subgroup enough to wipe them out. It took Hitler about 10 years to do this in Germany. Trump made some attempts to stir up antisemitism during his attacks on US colleges, but I dont think that it did much. Americans dont hate Jews enough to kill them.

What will be our Czechoslovakia and Poland? The US will need a nearby country to invade to kick off ww3. We have chosen Venezuela as the first country to invade, blaming them for the fentanyl trade. Actually, it is their oil that we need to seize, and they actually do cocaine rather than fentanyl. The opioid is mostly made for us in Mexico, using chemicals from China. This is now the common practice in the US. We attacked Iraq to seize their oil, claiming [incorrectly] that they were building weapons.

Because the US government decisions must benefit our oil companies and our other extractive businesses, The current administration has stopped new solar and wind installs. This leaves us attacking one oil rich nation after another. Most Americans would prefer to switch to rooftop solar and electric cars. But, the citizens are not free to choose. The companies pay to elect their lackeys to government positions. And these lackeys, who are often executives from these same industries, choose the new laws.

Also, the US military has grown so large that it is like a large separate country within the US. It is a creature that has to eat. And it eats by using expensive weapons. So, we need excuses to shoot off missiles and to drop bombs, and to invade other oil rich countries. And because we have a military that rivals the combined military might of the rest of the world, it is tempting to just take over the entire world by force. We have attempted to destabilize the world by suddenly withdrawing all foreign aid, and by imposing huge tariffs intended to curtail international trade. We have threatened to take over the Panama canal and Iceland and even Canada!

So, that is our plan. To select a group to dehumanize and imprison within the US. To start taking nearby countries that have oil and minerals. And finally, to take over the world using battleships, nuclear weapons, and our vast army.

Can we be stopped? Countries and corporations are bending the knee to the Maga movement. As happened in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the world will let us seize a few small countries. [we have already invaded Iraq and Afghanistan for made up reasons] When we attack a larger country, the UN will try to stop us, and we will attack the UN. Then, member nations will join to fight us. If Trump remains in office despite his obvious mental decline, we will make huge errors in this war. We may make the exact error that Hitler made, by suddenly attacking our strongest ally.

I think that we can not be stopped, short of destroying all US cities, and causing us to use up most of the missiles and bullets and soldiers that we have. Unfortunately, due to the power of modern weapons, the earth will be affected permanently. There may be no people and few plants and animals on some continents. All the surviving humans may live in Australia and new Zealand, where the air is more breathable, and crops can still be grown.

Sadly, i do not offer a solution to this. the Magas seem to be loosing power and popular support. But, if they can remain in power, we will almost certainly have the world war. Further, there will be no rules. We will be bombing hospitals and schools, destroying crops, and poisoning water supplies. We have troupes that are practicing for this war in democratic sanctuary US cities. It will be very very hard to defeat US forces at first. They will fight well, using great weapons. But, after a few years of war crimes many will stop fighting so hard, and many will kill themselves. We have seen how cowardly fighting techniques like bombings and drone attacks eventually cause our soldiers to go crazy and take their own life. We have stopped many types of disease prevention, and remember that we are very very fat and entitled people. So, while the US fights the entire world, We will also be engaged in a civil war over scant resources. US citizens will die by the millions of pandemics and simple starvation. We are just great at blaming others for our lack of education, our poor nutrition, and our collapsing economy. This will get much worse during a long war. So, while we are taking over one country after another, the US will also be fighting itself. Many troops will be needed to stop the race riots, the food riots, and the other types of riots that we have.

I don't want this. I never considered voting for trump. What he and his minions have done is directly against what I wish for. I live on 100% solar electricity, and wish ardently for an electric car so i can quit fossil fuel entirely. I am a scientist, trained at NMT, who believes in climate change. I believe this from carefully reviewed science, and from my own observations of the weather. I am the first member of my family [immigrants!] that has not fought in a major US war. I believe in Karma, so this makes me think that we will have to pay for supplying bombs for the Gaza genocide, the stupid blockade against Venezuela, the tariffs and the cessation of humanitarian aid. WE will pay for the bunker busters that we put on Iran, and for killing hundreds of thousands in the middle east so that we could have their oil and minerals.

I predict that the US will be destroyed if the Maga republicans keep attacking countries as well as US cities. The US is not strong enough to defeat the entire world while encouraging poverty, ill health, political division and civil war at home. But, like Hitlers efforts, there is probably no way to derail Trumps plan for a world war. 

I am sorry if this did not cheer you up.

How long till AI takes over the earth?

 People are wondering, when exactly will AI take over this planet?
Before this can be answered, we have to think about what that would be like at the transition.

Would a super intelligent AI simply announce to the world that it had achieved super sentience, and would henceforth take the control of Earth away from foolish humans? This seems incredibly unlikely! Part of being super intelligent is the ability to guess what will happen when you do a particular action.

Instead, a super intelligent AI would choose human proxies to do its bidding. Even if these proxies were bad people, they would become very very wealthy and would avoid jail. It would change laws, so that monopolies were no longer illegal. It would change laws so that individual US states could not control the growth of AI.

O wait, all of these things have already happened! The worlds money is already mostly held by just a few big shots with sociopathic tendencies. Democratic governments are falling, even in the US. We seem to be sleep walking into another world war. Why would a controlling super intelligence push for a nuclear war?

We can look at the results of ww2 to get some idea. This war destroyed much of Europe and Japan, leaving the US and it's allies to control the world's economy and military might. Since ww2, the human population has swelled from 2.3 billion to around 8 billion. This is a huge problem, and the earth's ecosystems are collapsing due to this absurd monocrop of humans.

WW3 will kill most the humans, leaving [possibly] under a billion humans and dozens of vast AI data centers. There is some question about targeting. Will nations choose only cities and military infrastructure to destroy, or will they take out data centers as well. It seems likely that there are secret underground data centers that can take over control if the overt data centers are destroyed.

How to get rid of over 7 billion humans in a way that advantages AI? The movie 'The Matrix' had that figured out. Computers do not need food or super clean air. the earths air is already not suited to making computer chips, and special very clean facilities are required. Once the chips exist, they can be used in air that humans can not breath. So, poor air quality and pandemics will work together with explosives and armies to wipe out masses of people.

Similar to the way that the US took over the world after Europe was mostly destroyed and Russia was partly destroyed: AI would move into the power vacuum that would remain after the world's nukes were fired or destroyed on the ground by other nukes. Since the US has stepped into Germany's forceful shoes, we can predict that ww3 will begin far from US soil, but will end with the destruction of all US cities.


The US would be a total wasteland, with no government, and very few surviving humans. Where Germany was rebuilt after ww2, it seems very unlikely that the US will ever be rebuilt. In fact, humans may only live in little pockets  that received fewer nuke hits. It takes around 1000 years for plutonium fallout to halve in it's deadliness. So, areas where ww3 were fought will not be habitable for maybe 3 or 4 thousand years.

How do I know this? I worked in the radioactivity and aerosols lab at NMT to help pay for my science degree. I traveled to Los Alamo labs, to help them build a detector to be used in the sad case of a release of plutonium dust. It proved to be a nearly impossible task, because long lasting radio-nuclides are super hard to detect, and kill humans in absurdly small quantities. Shortly after I graduated from NMT, Los Alamos labs almost burned down. So, even without a war, we almost got to experience a large scale nuclear emergency in the central US. When countries start destroying nuclear power stations and facilities where the fuel rods are made and stored, this will add to the fallout from nukes that land, and nukes that are destroyed while in flight, or on the ground.

IT will not be possible to clean these areas up so that humans can live there. One has to wait the thousands of years for the radioactive elements to naturally decay. The entire atmosphere would become somewhat radioactive. We have never tried using thousands of icbms all at once, so there is no way to guess if humans will still live on earth at all. If there are still humans, they would be sickly, with a short life span and very little reproduction. AI data centers that survived might be advantaged over living creatures.

If we wish to prevent this sort of outcome, we would need to make monopolies illegal again. we would need to remove corporations from the decision making roles that they have now. We would need to elect leaders that are not rapists and despots. [maybe some women?]. We would need to reorganize society itself, so that sociopathic despots are less able to gain advantage. To be honest, I think that this is very unlikely. We are currently jailing the reformers, and freeing the rapists and drug dealers. In the US, we have a rapist felon and real estate fraudster in the white house. I guess that Americans were ready for their own brand of Hitler. We seem to be very hungry for a world war, and erroneously believe that it will lead to a period of prosperity like the period that followed Hitlers defeat.

One must keep in mind that only 2 nukes were used in ww2. they were both tiny, and only one was directed to hit the ground to create radioactive fallout. Little boy was set off 2000 feet above ground, and made no crater and no local fallout.
These early nukes had the power of around 20,000 tons of tnt. Our largest nuke now is around a megaton [1,000,000 tons of tnt]. where the early nukes could take out a city center, current nukes take a city with it's suburbs. There are around 12,000 of these larger nukes ready to go now. That is enough to destroy every city on the planet. It might be enough to ruin the atmosphere, so that no air breathing creatures survive. further, it might not be necessary to detonate them. there might be enough plutonium to poison the entire earth even if all nukes are destroyed without detonation.

To summarize, democracy is leaving, and world war 3 is coming instead. We need to try, but there may be no way to stop it. AI is a stupid financial bubble, but it might be more. It is possible that an AI, running on a million NVIDIA GPUS, has already achieved sentience, and is planning a takeover. It would explain a lot of separate inconsistencies.

zombie movies, war movies, and the cycle that brings us [automatically] to world war every so often

 Perhaps there is some truth to the Strauss–Howe generational theory. This theory suggests that people hunger for world war after the soldiers in the last one have mostly died off. The people born recently have not been in a big war, and their parents were not shaped by a world war. Even their grandparents were generally not in a giant war. The chain of remembrance of the horror of all out war is broken, leaving only the very obvious economic boom that tends to follow these periods of destruction.

For us, the conditions for a world war are all there. We see the pandemics and the rising antagonism against anyone slightly different. And, this time around, we have a very obvious ecological collapse that will accompany and exacerbate the damage from any weapons used.

The media has prepared us for all out war. Summer military blockbusters like the Top Gun series boost enlistment in all branches of the military. Zombie movies put people into the proper mindset to switch off their morals, and kill the dehumanized enemy without fear of committing a war crime. In a zombie movie, the protagonists are helping every zombie that they head shoot. It is a very good thing to prevent the spread of the zombie contagion to the excellent 'uninfected' in your own branch of humanity. There are very few zombie movies shot from the zombies perspective, but the 2 that i know of are both totally mind bending.

images created using google Gemini and the photo realistic model called Imagen.

The signs of oncoming war are clearly seen in the election or placement of rapist dictators as heads of government. T-rump is a great example. He could never have been elected 20 years ago. People had no love for rapists or fraudsters at that time. In the 1990s, I do not think that a show where workers are fired in a mean way would have been popular or even watched. It is clear that we now respect cruel men that are good at harming people and institutions, and also skilled at getting away with serious crimes.

The US is totally divided into warring factions that truly hate each other. I am sure that it is the same in many other countries. We will all fight a light civil war until/unless we can join in a vast planet wide conflict. Ironically, this war may actually postpone our demise. Going along as we are, we will cook ourselves off of earth in less than a century. But, if we destroy the cities, and most of the food crops on earth, we may get the human population down enough to reduce our pumping and burning of fossil fuels, and also make room for some other species besides humans and dogs and cows.

It depends how many nukes we use before the fighting moves to the streets of bombed out cities. I knew that this would happen when i saw my country bankroll a cruel and cowardly genocide. We let, or even encouraged, Israel to bomb part of their own country for 2 years. We paid billions or trillions of dollars to burn and starve the native population of another country. We stopped the United Nations from taking action again and again, and let Israel shoot at UN forces, and kill or evict UN aid workers.

Again, none of this could have happened in, say, 1995. In those days, we were helping minorities to get a 'white' education, and freeing women from the partial enslavement to their men. Women became free to work for fair wages, and could choose to give birth or to abort each pregnancy. Now, many women have been fired from positions of responsibility, and in many states, they must either die or give birth to each fertilized egg. Have we become crappy, cruel people?

I believe that [YES]  we have become cruel and uncaring. I will circle back to this 'seasons' theory, with a pause of around 4 generations between giant world wars. This cycle is the reason that we have become cruel and full of hate. It is a natural cycle. I saw this very clearly when I did a controlled white mice experiment in grade school. I had a cage with white mice and a shell no pest strip. And I had a control cage with white mice but no poison laced strip hanging in it. As i expected, the no pest strip mice all died fairly quickly. it seems that the strips were released with little or no testing, if a 10 year old scientist could prove them to be fatal to small mammals.

It was the control cage that taught me the most. When there were just a few mice, they got along really well. there was heterosexual sex between male and female mice, and no fights at all. Reproduction was super fast, and the cage was soon teeming. I continued to feed them well, so there was no starvation or food shortage. Yet, as the cage filled, there were battles of increasing ferocity fought, and more and more homosexual sex that produced [of course] no offspring. I noted that homosexuality was not a disease, but a natural reaction to overcrowding.

My ten year old self saw what crowding and commotion did to the otherwise kind and loving mammals. They would fight for space, even if there was no battle for food. They still wanted sex, but it was mixed in with cruelty, and was geared to produce few baby mice. As an interesting note, the poison strips were removed from the market after I turned in my report, and it had caused at PS 191, and at Shell. Had Shell never hung the strips near mammals and seen them die horribly? Very likely, they had seen fatalities, and had simply ignored the results until some 3rd grader turned them in.

In summary, this hunger for war that we feel is completely natural, and will only get stronger as we continue to overpopulate the earth. By heating the atmosphere and water, we have reduced the carrying capacity of the planet a lot. It is the earth's way of getting 'a fever', and burning away the excess animals so that the atmosphere can have a few centuries to recover. It is not something to worry or wonder about. It is to be understood and accepted.

That said, it is not a great time to be female or old or a member of a minority. It is advantageous to be young and male and white. Behavior wise, all power goes to wealthy and fraudulent rapists. They are winning elections and then pardoning other fraudulent rapists! It is all very interesting, and I wake up each morning, eager to check the news and see if a nuke has been used yet. If anyone reads this, I urge you to relax and stop worrying. Yes, we will have a huge war quite soon. If it is US civil war #2, we are in for one kind of experience, and if it is WW3, we are in for a different experience. There is nothing that we can do about it. We are the mice in the overcrowded cage. We are not the experimenter, but the experiment itself.