1. HAIL MARS! WHO IS CRAZY HERE? 36 articles

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1. HAIL MARS! WHO IS CRAZY HERE? 36 articles

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by by Niels Engelsted 2025 - link only works, if you are embedded on Fake Book

Mysterious and mysterious it becomes. Stranger and stranger. It is as if the era into which my generation of boomers was born after World War II has expired and is about to be torn apart in the great shredder of history. The end of the old and the new times are heralded by signs and portents as in the time of Julius Caesar, when lions roamed the streets of Rome, owls hooted at noon, and statues spat blood, if Shakespeare is to be believed.

Blood is still being spat. A genocide, unstoppable, obvious to all, but to which good people and the authorities turn a blind eye, is a fateful warning that a line has been crossed, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Owls also hoot for those who manage to listen. A democratic election in Europe is annulled because the wrong candidate won. It has never been seen before, but no one flinches.

Roaring lions are also not lacking. To an unprecedented extent, superheroes, cartoon characters and aliens are taking over our Western society, which with its Mad Hatters and Red Queens is increasingly resembling Alice's Wonderland.

And when you learn from a drama documentary that American astronauts on the far side of the Moon have discovered a colony of Nazis who have escaped after World War II and are planning to regain world domination, and then see the world's richest man salute the spacemen with an outstretched arm, the question inevitably arises: is it you or the world that has gone crazy?

Before you are sent to a psychiatric nursing home, should you, for the sake of your mental health, try to answer that question by investigating where the world is actually heading? I will try to do that here.

An old teaching experience tells us that you learn best by teaching it. That you only understand the story when you have told it to others.

The learning method basically requires that there is someone at the other end. This can be imagined to be the case on Facebook, which makes Facebook a suitable instrument for this kind of self-education. I have previously used Facebook for this selfish purpose, and will now shamelessly do so again with a series of hopefully coherent chapters. About a dozen, because there is a lot to understand.

Of course, there must be method in the madness, so before we dive down the rabbit hole after the Nazis in space, let us remember blessed Hegel's warning about impatience demanding the impossible, achieving the goal without the means.

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2. HAIL MARS! INTELLIGENCE ON THE EDGE

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by by Niels Engelsted 2025 - link only works, if you are embedded on Fake Book

Every investigation must follow a path. In our investigation of where the world is heading, there are many paths to choose from. We choose the paths and detours of intelligence as our common thread, and see where it leads us.
Intelligence can best and most simply be represented as the letter T.

The vertical stem of the T can thus be high or low, indicating that people are born with greater or lesser intelligence resources.

Of course, innate intelligence resources are far from the whole story. As in sports, lots of training is needed, and a great talent without sufficient training soon becomes a wasted talent. As all teachers know, great intelligence can actually develop into a handicap. If the student with the high IQ is never tested on the material – ‘he can do it all without reading’; ‘she never has to make an effort’ – that person quickly becomes a wasted talent, soon overtaken by the less intelligent but more industrious student.

In this way, you can even end up with a person who, for all to see, is both highly intelligent and unnecessarily stupid. Which, of course, will be almost impossible for the person in question to recognize.

The crossbar in the T can be long or short, indicating that people come with a greater or lesser mental span. Some are more open-minded and curious; others are more narrow in their focus. Although natural differences cannot be ruled out here, early upbringing is probably the most decisive factor. Children who grow up in threatening circumstances will often have to be so vigilant that they develop tunnel vision instead of wide-sightedness. Fortunately, the world can find a use for all kinds of vision.

The crossbar in the T can tilt like a seesaw on a playground. In our picture, this expresses that the person's intelligence resources may be divided between the two hemispheres of the brain.

If the bar tilts up to the left, it means that the majority of the person's intelligence resources have gone to the left hemisphere at the expense of the right hemisphere, which has had to make do with less.

Which in turn means that the left hemisphere, where the more atomistic, instrumental and mathematical intelligence resides, has received a surplus of resources, while the right hemisphere, where the more holistic, social and emotional intelligence resides, has received a deficit. And vice versa, of course, when the right side of the bar tilts up.

The presentation here is inherently VERY simplified, but if you want to pursue the theory of the different tasks of the two hemispheres further, Iain McGilchrist's excellent book 'The Master and his Emissary' is highly recommended. It is one of the best psychology books I have ever read.

In our study, it is the left-uppers that interest us. They come with an increasing degree of imbalance between an elevated instrumental and atomistic intelligence and a reduced social and holistic intelligence and range from the almost-normal citizen over a wide spectrum of well-functioning autistics and ‘Aspergers’ to Rainman and the absolutely incredible idiot savants. The three greatest chess world champions of modern times, Bobby Fischer, Gary Kasparov and Magnus Carlson, could be examples of this imbalance.

The three chess champions are also men, and some argue that men are by nature at least a little left-handed, while women are by nature at least a little right-handed. The reason for this difference is as follows. For all mammals, the survival of the species is entirely dependent on the females of the species succeeding in the complicated and selfless task of giving birth and, for a period, nursing, protecting and raising the next generation.

Natural selection has therefore endowed mammalian females with the social and emotional instincts and hormones necessary for the task, which males do not need to the same extent, because males only have to master the much simpler selfish task of obtaining food, impregnating females and fighting off enemies and rivals.

The biological evolution argument is also simplistic, but in principle cannot of course be wrong, it simply overlooks the extent to which the natural limits of biology with humans have been exceeded. Men can be just as good at everything as women, and women can be just as good at everything as men. For example, women can be just as good at Asperger's as men. Yes, in some cases better. Our school example must therefore be a woman.

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3. HAIL MARS - Little Alisa

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by by Niels Engelsted 2025 - link only works, if you are embedded on Fake Book

Little Alisa was a difficult and stubborn child who caused her mother constant worry. She was certainly bright enough, could read early and all that, but Alisa wanted to go her own way, caused discord, did not want to wear nice clothes, did not want to attend children's birthday parties in the homes of the better bourgeoisie in St. Petersburg. Yes, she would rather not have anything to do socially with other children.

When she was 12 years old, Alisa and her younger sisters could watch the February Revolution unfold from the Rosenbaum family's large balcony with the crowds of demonstrators on the boulevard below the family's mansion, and this of course became a turning point in her life.

Her father's pharmacy was nationalized when the Reds came to power, they had to share the large apartment with several other families, and the servants disappeared. The family therefore fled to the Crimea, which was occupied by the Whites for a time.

Soon back in the capital, the mother adapted to the new times with alacrity and took on the task of, for example, the leader of a Red youth club. The father, on the other hand, sat in a corner and brooded over the injustice of the world; often in conversation with his eldest daughter, whose favorite topic was the little men who ganged up to keep the big men down.

With the victory of the Reds, women could now go to university, and despite her bourgeois background, the intelligent Alisa was one of the first. She loved film, so she concluded her university studies in philosophy and history with a year at the State School of Performing Arts, where she wrote her graduation thesis on the Polish silent film star and femme fatale Pola Neri, who from a youth filled with hardship and pain became the first European Hollywood star and celebrated as the great sex symbol of the time.

Alisa clearly recognized herself in the romantic story, so when the Soviet authorities gave her permission to visit her family in Chicago, she didn't look back, and soon she was in Hollywood.

The journey from Russia to America had been made by many Jewish emigrants before her, and Alisa's journey would not have been possible if her relatives had not helped her with lodging, food, and money along the way. But that was of course a given, Alisa thought; she was the star, after all, and to her relatives' astonishment, she never expressed any gratitude.

In Hollywood, luck was on her side. A chance meeting with the film magnate Cecil B. DeMille (the man behind The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra) got her a job as a screenwriter, after which she dropped Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in favor of the artist name Ayn Rand, under which name she later achieved world fame. [Ayn is pronounced as ‘own’]

Her fame was due to two colorful novels that she wrote in the following years. The Fountainhead from 1943 (in Danish Only the strong are free) and Atlas Shrugged from 1957 (in Danish And the world trembled).

The theme is the same: The great one is held down by the collective power and eternal demands of the small people. In Fountainhead, it is an individualistic and innovative architect (in the film adaptation played by Gary Cooper) who must fight against the petty and stifling conformity of the established architectural world. In Atlas Shrugged it is a dedicated and visionary female manager of a large railway corporation who, against the endless demands and excessive regulations of the collective society, fights to keep her business running.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, the great ones finally get fed up with the collective society that punishes innovation and creativity and rewards mediocrity. Persuaded by a mysterious and charismatic figure, John Galt, who symbolizes the ultimate individualist and acts as Ayn Rand's superhero, the big business leaders, inventors and artists go on strike in protest against the society that exploits and oppresses them.
They leave their posts and retreat to a secret valley in the Colorado mountains, where, led by Galt, they build their own utopian society based on freedom, individualism and unfettered market capitalism.

And what happens, of course, when Atlas, who carries everything and everyone on his shoulders, shakes those shoulders (the book's title)? Of course, all the little people fall to the ground as if they were scales, and without the big guys, society collapses with economic collapse, social unrest and human misery in the long run. But then the little mediocrity can learn!

Revenge fantasies with a super avenger are always good material in the hands of a skilled screenwriter, and can always make us childish souls jump in our seats with joy. Think Ayn Rand as Stieg Larsson and John Galt as Lisbeth Salander.

However, this juicy aspect is not the only reason why Rand's books have sold more than 30 million copies and are still selling in large numbers. Behind the colorful drama, the novels are also disguised philosophical treatises, in which the cerebral Ayn Rand presents her philosophy of life and worldview in fictionalized form.

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Rand's philosophy can be expressed very simply: Think of yourself first.

The philosophy has two parts. (1) Think first and (2) Yourself first.

The first part expresses that our actions should always be based on objectivity, logical thinking and rational calculation, not impulsive emotions, subjective sensations and the like. Rand therefore calls her philosophical school Objectivism.

If we use our rational thinking and manage to be objective, we arrive at the second part, which expresses that self-interest or selfishness is the basic law of life. Every person should act according to his own self-interest and not sacrifice himself for others or expect others to sacrifice themselves for them. One must stand alone and be strong, because only the strong are free, and if necessary, one must be ruthless, one owes it to oneself.

This philosophy is of course the gefunden's fressen for both frustrated teenagers who feel inhibited by uncomprehending parents, frustrated sociopaths who lack a good theory to understand themselves in, and frustrated capitalists who feel inhibited by social regulation and taxes, demanding employees and self-serving unions.

But even though the message will never lack subscribers, the gospel of self-interest nevertheless gets a huge boost with the return of the ideology of raw and unbridled market capitalism with Milton Friedman's neoliberalism, which led by Margaret Thatcher ("there is no society, only individuals") and Ronald Reagan ("the most terrible words in the language are, 'We are from the government and come to help!'") sweeps aside the community-oriented social liberalism that has prevailed in Western societies since the Second World War.

Finally, the message also reaches Denmark. According to a biography, Anders Fogh Rasmussen was given Ayn Rand's 'Only the Strong Are Free' by his daughter, believes he recognizes himself in the main character, and is inspired to write 'From the Welfare State to the Minimal State.'

Our local oligarch Lars Sejr Christensen from Saxobank is also enthusiastic and has 10,000 copies of the Danish edition of Atlas Shrugged printed with his own cover and foreword, with his own money, which are distributed to the bank's employees and customers and sent out to various opinion leaders, all ministers, mayors and county mayors, as well as to the business leaders of Denmark's two thousand largest companies.

At the reception in Saxo's auditorium in Tuborg Havn, where the book is introduced in the presence of staff from the bank, members of the liberal think tank Cepos and younger students from the Danish School of Economics, co-director Kim Fournais concludes: "Altruism leads to a poor society." Rand's message should then be clear. Self-interest is the basic law of life and the way forward. Self-interest is death.

The message is still alive and well and continues to speak to young hearts. For example, in the Liberal Alliance, the party that Lars Sejr Christensen founded or bought. In 2024, the Liberal Alliance won the school elections for students in 8th, 9th and 10th grade with 30 percent of the vote.

Intelligent, educated at a Marxist university and with Aristotle as her philosophical guiding star, Ayn Rand's philosophy could not of course be completely and utterly wrong, and it is not. Self-interest IS the basic law of life. Which simply follows from the fact that every animal must die that is not able to acquire food for itself. Even baby animals die if they cannot find the mother's womb and suckle on their own. Life without self-interest is impossible.

But life has another basic law. It says that every species must become extinct that does not reproduce and ensure the survival of the species in the form of new generations. All species therefore spend a lot of time and energy reproducing. If, as Rand prescribes, one is to be objective and not be guided by subjective feelings, it is impossible, however, to find anything self-interested in reproduction and brood care. Objectively, one finds nothing but toil and toil and material self-sacrifice. Reproduction is, in other words, the opposite of self-interest. It is pure selflessness and yet it takes place over long periods in the animal world.

FOOD and CHILDREN are simply the two fundamental ways in which living beings manage to keep the second law of thermodynamics in check and stay alive. That is as fundamental as it can possibly get.

The biological basis of life is binary, but for the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that there is a trance that can be confusing. Namely mutual benefit, which is when you help yourself by helping someone else at the same time – quid pro quo, something for something, possibly offset. Since common interest is the basis of sociality, it plays a large role in social species like ours. Since it is a question of mutual self-interest, enlightened self-interest, if you will, common interest is still self-interest and not a category of the same fundamentally independent character as disinterest.

If Rand's works celebrate self-interest and selfishness, we search in vain for traces of self-interest. Not even the self-interest that is expressed in reproduction. Although children occupy a large place in all societies, there are virtually no children in the more than one thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged. Only a train car full of children that crashes catastrophically as a result of the strike of the big bosses. Ayn Rand did not care for children, neither in the novel nor in reality; not even the children of her relatives, and she had no children herself. In short, Ayn Rand was not for children.

Here, however, we are reminded of the T-theory of intelligence and the two unequal cerebral hemispheres from the second chapter of this series. We remember that intelligence resources are, in very simplified terms, distributed in such a way that the left hemisphere facilitates the rational and instrumental intelligence that targeted self-interest requires, while the right hemisphere facilitates the holistic, social and emotional intelligence that the unselfishness of child-rearing requires.

This naturally leads to the conclusion that Ayn Rand, with her doctrine of objectivism and the primacy of self-interest, must have an overdeveloped left hemisphere, and with her rejection of children and all unselfishness, must have an underdeveloped right hemisphere. In other words, she is a perfect example of a marked left-brain or half-brain.

Similarly, one could say that her philosophy is a half-brain theory. One half is not wrong as such, but the other equally necessary half is missing. Which is actually worse than if it had all been wrong. Now the correct part comes to act as a Trojan horse for anti-human ideologies, and is thoughtlessly dragged into the city by children, half-educated robbers and other unsteady souls.

Of course, there is no shortage of them either. Ayn Rand founded her own small philosophical study group in New York, with the later National Bank Governor Alan Greenspan as a faithful student, and although her little school eventually disintegrated because Rand did not tolerate opposition and became furious when anyone contradicted her, it was not the end.

While Rand sat alone, brooding and angry, her philosophical work continued as an entire movement, which, supported by American corporations and multimillionaires, grew and grew and appeared on both postage stamps at the post office and the curriculum of many American universities. Once you have stimulated your appetite, you can easily find tons of interviews with and material about Ayn Rand on YouTube.

A final remark. Many condemn Alisa Rosenbaum/Ayn Rand for her ruthless selfishness; both her personal selfishness and the gospel of self-interest she preached in her books. But consider that it is actually equivalent to condemning the colorblind who cannot see that the color is red. You can't blame half-brains for missing half a brain.

We are not done with Ayn Rand, but right now we need to meet a more normal child.
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4. HAIL MARS! Boy with the telescope

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by by Niels Engelsted 2025 - link only works, if you are embedded on Fake Book

Little Magnus knew nothing better than the summers he spent with his big red beach ball and his kite on the wide beach by the Baltic Sea in Western Pomerania-Mecklenburg, where his noble family had large landholdings. But Berlin, where his family also lived, also had its attractions for a healthy boy, and Little Magnus – or Wernher as he was called at school – was a healthy boy. Not half-brained like Alisa, but a completely normal child. Except, of course, that Wernher had had a stick in his pituitary gland.

Or rather, a telescope. Because ever since his mother gave him an astronomical telescope at the age of 12 and pointed it at the celestial bodies, Wernher had thought of nothing but space travel, and the favorite readings of all German boys with Karl May's western heroes Old Shatterhand and Winnetou were replaced first by Jules Verne and A Trip to the Moon and then by scholarly treatises on space travel.

The dedication to space was total. Normal children are not usually good at math, and Wernher was not either, but when a cunning teacher told him that space travel was impossible without mathematical calculations of fuel consumption and orbits, he quickly became the best at math in the whole school.

From a boys' club that built model airplanes and small rockets, Wernher soon advanced to membership in the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, an association of enthusiastic engineers and scientists at the Technical University that had devoted itself to the development of rockets and space travel since 1927, and Wernher was soon one of the leading engineers in the space travel association.

But rocket development is expensive, and money was scarce, so if it hadn't been for Adolf Hitler's rearmament in the 1930s, we probably would never have heard more of Wernher and his dreams of space travel. Now he joined the Nazi Party and began lobbying the Waffenamt for money to develop rockets, and with his enthusiasm and his oratory skills he succeeded.

From his childhood on the Baltic Sea, Wernher also knew exactly the right place to start, so in 1937 the Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde was able to open its doors on the island of Usedom with Wernher as head of research. From 1940 also as SS-Sturmbahnführer at the request of Heinrich Himmler, who did not want a civilian at the head of the rocket testing station.

There were of course many military agencies competing for the insufficient German armaments, and for a long time the exotic rockets came behind the queue after tanks, guns, planes and submarines. However, a looming setback for the German fighting forces resulted in a desperate demand for new Wunderwaffen that could turn the tide of the war, and then Wernher's beloved rockets finally got their chance.

After years of development work, the V1, Vergeltungswaffe 1 (Retaliation Weapon 1), a jet-powered unmanned aircraft with an 850-kilogram bomb, was launched, which from 1944 caused terror and great destruction in the residential areas of London and Antwerp.

The V1 was not a real rocket, but a drone. But the V2 was a real rocket. A 14-meter-high beauty of a ballistic missile - similar to the one from Tintin - that, weighing over 12 tons and powered by liquid ethanol, had a range of over 300 kilometers.

Wernher and his team had been working on the V2 rocket since 1936, so it was of course a proud moment for the people of Peenemünde when the first V2 was fired at an enemy target in Paris in September 1944 with an explosive charge of 1,000 kilograms.

Since then, more than 1,100 V2 rockets have been launched at targets in Great Britain and Belgium, and with a speed of up to 5,000 km per hour, the V2 - unlike the V1 - was practically impossible to shoot down for the agile English pilots in their elegant Spitfire aircraft.

But Wernher must have been much prouder when his baby reached an altitude of 175 kilometers above the ground in June 1944, because the V2 rocket thus became the first man-made object to cross the official border into outer space. After all, it was the journey into space that was his great dream, not the spread of death and destruction in European cities.

The 20,000 slave workers who died in the underground factories in the Harz mountains, where the rockets were produced under cover of Allied bombers, were probably not part of Wernher's dream either. But he undoubtedly told himself that once the war was won, the V2 rocket, with all its thousands of victims, would have laid the foundation for humanity's first journeys into space, and that was what it was all about.

And it would be a shame if Wernher was wrong. Once the victory was won, the Americans quickly went out and grabbed whatever German rocket experts they could get their hands on, with Wernher von Braun at the head.

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But the Russians, who had arrived at Peenemünde first, were not lazy either. Using German expertise from the V2 project, the Russians were the first to send a satellite into orbit around the earth, then a dog, and then a human. It was absolutely sensational, and people my age can still remember Sputnik, Laika and Gagarin.

And since this not incomprehensibly gave the Americans a Sputnik shock, the American space program also got underway. Wernher von Braun was hired as NASA's research director, rolled up his sleeves and, based on the V2 results, developed the almost 60-meter-high Atlas 5 rocket, which carried out six Apollo missions in three years, landing astronauts on the far side of the Moon.

It was a massive feat, but Wernher had bigger dreams than just the Moon. He wanted to travel out into the solar system and land on the red planet Mars. Perhaps he would have been able to experience that too, but he died when the American space program, after six moon landings, stopped in 1972 as abruptly as it had begun, and we have not seen anything remotely similar since.

Dreams are states of mind and therefore as strong as spider webs, and if space travel cannot be realized in reality, it can be realized in imagination and fiction, as much science fiction is proof of.

Science fiction can also, as Jules Verne's A Trip to the Moon proves, bring a hint of what will one day come. So it's just a matter of getting started, and Wernher did, of course. He wrote a book first in German and then in English entitled The Mars Project.

With its specifications, calculations and engineering drawings, the book was a recipe for how a Mars mission could be technically carried out. But it was also a science fiction novel that unfolded Wernher's other dream. Namely, the dream of a more rational society and a better world.

In short, the story in the novel is that the astronauts who land on the red planet encounter an advanced civilization of Martians with a completely superior technology. Led by a visionary leader called Elon, the Martian society is governed with the wisdom, rationality and justice that Wernher undoubtedly missed both in the Third Reich and in America. And thus Elon – like another John Galt on Mars – represents the German engineer's dream of utopia.

And with that dream and that journey of imagination, the boy with the telescope still reached Mars.
(To be continued)
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5. HAIL MARS! WITH A VIC-20 ON THE WAY TO MARS

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Muskrat, as his two younger siblings called him, had, as he himself later said, a difficult childhood. One thing was his Asperger's syndrome with over-intense and nerdy behavior, repetitive behavior and inhibited social contact, which of course gave him great social challenges and made him the perfect victim of bullying. But his father's violent behavior towards his mother, whom the five-year-old Muskrat had to defend with his little fists, doesn't sound too good either. His father was 'evil', he said.

Yes, South African Errol Musk sounds like a bit of a black sheep - or perhaps rather a white wolf. Daring adventurer and explorer, incorrigible womanizer and hard-nosed businessman, who in an unexplained way got his hands on a diamond mine in Zambia and the safe was stuffed full of money, shot and killed three people who had allegedly broken into his large house in Johannesburg, presumably black since he was not punished, and at an advanced age had a child with his much younger stepdaughter.

But by then he had of course been divorced for a long time and Maye and the children had moved away from him to much poorer circumstances.

But Errol Musk also had his attractive sides. He was an excellent electromechanical engineer with a great passion for technology and invention, had his own engineering company and a patent for a solar-powered car and a new type of aircraft engine.

This may be the reason why Muskrat chose to move back to his father at the age of ten, because the boy had inherited Errol Musk's interest in technology and space travel, and strongly inspired by the first three Star Wars films, he had just started building his own homemade rockets. It was at this time that his lifelong dream began, namely to spread human civilization into space and populate Mars.

Some say that Errol Musk's interest in space travel was the reason why his firstborn was named Elon (the oak tree in Hebrew), namely named after the great social leader Elon in Wernher von Braun's science fiction novel about the Mars project.

It is not entirely unthinkable, since Errol, with his interest in technology and aircraft engines, would have been familiar with the Mars Book, and since Elon was born in the midst of the much-discussed Apollo missions. It cannot be completely ruled out that the challenged and conflict-filled apartheid regime has given engineer Errol the same vision of the technologically well-organized ideal society that engineer Wernher von Braun placed on Mars.

However, it is also possible, and perhaps somewhat more likely, that Elon Musk was simply named after his maternal grandfather, J. Elon Haldeman, a Canadian rodeo rider, pilot and chiropractor who emigrated with his family to South Africa in 1950. But even this more plausible suggestion actually brings Nazi-Braun in through the back door in a way. Elon Musk's much-loved maternal grandfather also had an interesting story.

In Canada, J. Elon Haldeman was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1940 as a very active member of the Technocracy Movement, which opposed Canadian war participation and agitated for a political system in which decision-makers were not elected through traditional democratic elections, but were selected based on their expertise in science and engineering.

The movement also had radical ideas about the economy. The price system with the market and profit should be abolished in favor of centralized planning and the monetary system should be replaced with a unit based on energy consumption, which would lead to a more rational and fair distribution of society's resources.

The movement, with its anti-capitalism and ideas about the technocratically led society, was inspired by a similar Völkisch movement in Germany, and was therefore suspected of fascism and anti-Semitism, and perhaps not without reason. Grandfather believed that international financiers were to blame for the major economic problems that had led to the Great Depression, and shared, if I can read the sources correctly, certain fy-fy views about the Protocols of Zion with the American technological genius, the giant entrepreneur and automobile king Henry Ford.

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None of this is refuted by J. Elon Haldeman's political views after arriving in South Africa. Elon's grandfather became an ardent advocate of apartheid, was convinced of the superiority of the white race and supported the fanatical retention and violent enforcement of state power and racial segregation.
But none of the sins of the ancestors can of course be blamed on little Elon, who had his 'stargazing moment' when, at the age of ten, his father gave him a then not exactly cheap Commodore VIC-20 computer with a monochrome 14-inch screen.

The computer age was ushered in by the large mainframes Enivac (1945) and Univac (1951) and gained momentum as the radio tube was replaced by the transistor and the transistor in turn replaced by the microchip. The microchip made the small personal computer (PC) both technically possible and commercially available to ordinary people, and with the advent in 1976 of the PCs from Apple, Tandy Radio Shack and Commodore with their software programs and games, development took a giant leap forward.

With the addition of another piece of hardware – the geek – it became a slow-burning explosion, the extent and end of which we cannot even guess.

It goes without saying that the personal computer with its programs and games was a gift to a maladjusted and unhappy Asperger boy, a better world to hide in, so to speak.

However, it was not only an orderly and predictable refuge where his under-gifted right brain could relax from the frightening, confusing and demanding social world that surrounded him. It was also a workshop where his over-gifted left brain could – perhaps for the first time – explore and develop its true abilities.

In this way, the new digital world was not only a gift to the Asperger boy, he also became, with his extraordinary abilities, a gift to the new digital world. There is no better example than Elon Musk, although he was far from the only one among thousands.
(To be continued).
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6. HAIL MARS! FROM GEEK TO THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD

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Little Elon had his ‘stargazing moment’ when he was given a Commodore VIC-20 computer at the age of ten. With an IQ of 156, he quickly learned BASIC programming, and at the age of 12 he created a computer game, Blastar, which was of course about a spaceship, and sold it for $500 to a computer magazine that published it.

The fact that he could create something that people could use and get money for it was a big moment for Elon, he has said himself, and something that became his guiding star for the rest of his life.

At the age of seventeen, Elon left South Africa and traveled to Canada, where he earned a living as a logger and farm laborer while he began his university studies. He continued his studies in the United States, first in Pennsylvania and then at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he never completed his Ph.D., because he was primarily concerned with producing something useful that could be sold.

This was achieved in 1995, when Elon, together with his younger brother Kimbal and a friend, produced an online city guide, Zip2, which was so successful that Compaq bought it in 1999.

With his share of the sales, 22 million dollars, Elon now had money for a larger project, an online payment system, which he called X.com, allegedly because he sees the letter x as a symbol of discovery and innovation. X.com, however, had the problem that Peter Thiel had just launched a similar system, called Confinity, so in order not to share the market, they joined together under the name X.com.

After the older and more experienced, but equally nerdy Peter Thiel had fired Elon as CEO, the name was changed to PayPal, and when PayPal was sold to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars, Elon was able to pocket 180 million dollars as his share.

Elon now had money for his life project and big dream and founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, also known as SpaceX, whose purpose was to make space travel cheaper and thus enable human migration to Mars.

All beginnings are difficult. If the fourth Falcon-1 rocket had exploded on the launch pad like the first three, Elon's coffers would have been empty, and it would have been over. But Elon did not shake his hand, and the fourth rocket did not explode. Instead, Elon received a contract with NASA worth over 1 billion dollars to develop spacecraft that could service the International Space Station, ISS.

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Elon received two hundred million dollars in start-up money from Peter Thiel, who had become a billionaire after founding Facebook and the surveillance system Palantir.

Thus cushioned, SpaceX was able to launch the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, which became the first commercial space capsule to dock with the ISS, and soon SpaceX began regularly delivering supplies and commercial services to the space station.

A giant leap in the development of commercial spaceflight followed when SpaceX engineers solved the problem of safely landing and thus reusing the Falcon-9 rocket's first stage, which was of course a huge saving compared to the past, where the rocket's first stage simply fell down and was crushed to the ground.

In 2018, the giant rocket Heavy Falcon had its first successful launch. Built from three Falcon-9 rockets, the Heavy Falcon could lift a weight into orbit that was three times greater than von Braun's Atlas V, which had sent the first humans to the Moon. Then in 2023, SpaceX tested for the first time the prototype of its Starship, which will fly to Mars.

Five unmanned missions are planned for 2026 to test the landing system and technology, and if all goes well, SpaceX will send the first manned mission to Mars by the end of this decade, with the goal of building an autonomous city on Mars within about 20 years.

With all those SpaceX rockets in orbit, the next idea came naturally, so in 2019 the first operational Starlink satellite was launched into low Earth orbit, and more soon followed. Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service that offers high-speed internet for a fee to areas where traditional connections are difficult to establish, currently has 6,994 satellites in orbit. That’s half of all active satellites in orbit, and if that’s not impressive enough, Starlink plans to expand to as many as 42,000 satellites.

While Elon was waiting for the Mars mission to be ready, he had other irons in the fire, all of which can be related to space travel in one way or another.

In 2004, he bought into the newly formed Tesla Motors, which pioneered the development of electric cars, and when this became a great success, Tesla became the world's most valuable car company in 2022, and Elon Musk the world's richest man.

Or, as evil tongues said, the world's richest boy. Only a boy would let three of his twelve children have names like Techno Mechanicus, Dark Sideræl and X Æ A-Xii? (The first is self-evident; the latter you can go online to decode yourself).

In that case, it was the boy Elon who that same year, in protest against the pervasive political bias and censorship on social media, bought the social media Twitter for 44 billion dollars, immediately renamed the medium to X, and in a dispute used it to challenge Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to an MMA cage fight. Just say so, replied Zuckerberg, himself a nerdy boy, but with a black belt in martial arts, so it never came to anything.

What particularly preoccupied Elon Musk at Tesla was the enormous engineering task of transforming the electric car into a driverless car that could navigate traffic safely, and this also made him deeply involved in artificial intelligence and robotics. For example, Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot that, using AI technology from Tesla's self-driving cars, is designed to perform tasks that are either too boring or dangerous for humans.

Musk invested early on in DeepMind, the British-American research laboratory in artificial intelligence, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and broke through the following year with AlphaGo, the program that was unbeatable in the board game Go. (The AI ​​program Stockfish had already become unbeatable in chess in 2008).

With the nerd Sam Altman and other super brains, Musk also founded OpenAI in 2015, which with ChatGPT has long been at the forefront of the development of super AI. A dispute with Altman, who did not believe that OpenAI needed to be as open source as agreed, nor as non-profit, and therefore Microsoft let him in through the back door, however, caused Musk to withdraw. The latest news is that Musk, together with a group of other investors, has now submitted a bid for OpenAI of 97.4 billion dollars with the aim of bringing OpenAI back to its original form as an open source and non-profit enterprise. As the very, very latest news, Altman has said no for the time being.

In 2023, Musk launched xAI, a new company focused on understanding the true nature of the universe through AI technology. This initiative includes Grok, an AI bot named after the Martian word for deep, intuitive understanding in R.A. Henlein’s science fiction novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, about a Martian who arrives on Earth. [Stranger in a strange land, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, for those who understand Monty Python]. According to Musk, the purpose of the chatbot is to understand "how the universe works, what's going on out there, where the aliens are, and what the meaning of life is." Musk calls the latest version, Grok 3, best in class and "scary smart."

Finally, we must not forget Neuralink, which Musk founded in 2017 and which last year achieved a kind of breakthrough with the Blindsight program, which, using implanted computer chips, was supposedly able to restore some of the sight to the blind.

The idea behind Neuralink, which Musk got from a science fiction author, is to remedy cerebral disabilities by placing a digital network over the brain and thus combining the capabilities of the human brain with that of the computer. Which will of course also be useful for long-distance space travelers, and may even be able to create a higher, transhuman race of superhumans or cyborgs.

The journey from geek to the world's richest man is of course extraordinary. With his very active technical involvement in the development of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborgs and space travel, and ownership of the dominant social media Twitter/X, the car company Tesla, Neuralink with its transhuman promises, Starlink with half the world's satellites and SpaceX, which will probably send Musk's youngest son to Mars in my grandchildren's lifetime, Elon Musk himself is also extraordinary. Not to be impressed would be petty.

But we are not done with Elon Musk and his fellow geeks yet.
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7. HAIL MARS! THE WORLD HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GERKS

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We Marxists know that it is the development of the productive forces in agriculture, mining, transport and industry that dictates the relations of production (ownership and labor relations) and thus turns the wheel of history from epoch to epoch. We also understand, of course, that the development of the productive forces is driven by scientific and technological development, and that clever and innovative minds have had a major role to play in this development since the invention of the wheel.

We do not know who first invented the wheel, but we do know who is to be credited with the start of modern scientific and technological development in the 17th century. Namely, not least the three great mathematicians and scientists Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, who exposed and formulated the mathematical basis and the basic principles of classical mechanical physics.

Less well known is that the three geniuses - Galileo with his counting compulsion, Descartes, who had to think in order to exist, and Newton, who hated and fought everyone with intense energy - with their great brain power, intense focus and challenged social skills all had a clear Asperger's signature.

Peter Theil, even with great brain power, intense focus and challenged social skills, has said that Asperger's is one of Silicon Valley's most important resources. Yes, Theil and the other tech billionaires actually keep them in farms, aka business incubators, as you can see in the 10-year-old Emmy-winning comedy series Silicon Valley on HBO Max, which is both enjoyable and enlightening, and where the character Peter Gregory is a (mild) caricature of Peter Theil.

But the fact that Asperger's is an important resource does not only apply to Silicon Valley. Since Socrates, highly intelligent and well-functioning autistic people have played a crucial role in the history of thought, science and technology.

If we jump ahead to the birth of computer science during World War II, anyone who has seen the film The Imitation Game will understand that the founder, the brilliant mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, had such a signature. So did Turing's two co-founders, Kurt Gödel, whose theorems created the fundamental theory, and John von Neumann, the mathematician behind the first atomic bomb, who created the basic architecture. The adolescent psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald, who in his book "Genius Genes" has placed the latter two on the autism spectrum, even called von Neumann one of the brilliant "Hungarian Martians." Mars is everywhere.

With the new computer science at its back, IBM - starting with the IBM701 machine from 1952 - was able to dominate the market for large computer mainframes, but even though IBM's monster machine Deep Blue was able to beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov almost single-handedly in 1997, it had long since become clear that IBM had been overtaken by the development of productive forces.

IBM's nemesis was the personal computer that two university dropouts with Asperger's syndrome, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, designed in Steve Jobs' parents' garage and presented at a computer club in Silicon Valley in 1976, and then put into production under the brand name Apple. However, IBM was not going to give up so easily and in order to penetrate the personal computer market itself, the computer giant approached Bill Gates.

Small in size, intensely focused and smart, but also socially awkward and an easy victim of bullying, little Billy fit the signature perfectly, and Bill Gates himself has stated that if diagnoses had been used back then, he would probably have been diagnosed with Asperger's.

Now it was his chance, and perhaps his salvation, when the Mothers' Club, which supported his Lakeside private school, bought a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time from General Electric for the school's students at a flea market, and the 13-year-old Billy seized the opportunity. He spent all the time he could get at the terminal's keys, was even allowed to use the math lessons, and soon Billy and his equally clever friend Paul Allen had learned to program and were producing small games and programs for the school. And as it had begun, it continued. In 1975, eight years later, Bill and Paul were able to launch a commercial software company, which they named Microsoft.

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It was Microsoft that IBM approached in 1980 to get an operating system for their new flagship PC, after which Bill and Paul came up with MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System).

The operating system made IBM's model 5150 a great success and established a new standard for personal computers. And not only for IBM's. Bill and Paul had a vision of creating an operating system that could become the standard for computers other than IBM's. And so it happened, and with such overwhelming success that Microsoft, measured by stock market value, came among the leaders on the list of the world's largest companies, and Bill Gates could call himself the world's richest man in 1995, a first place he held for 12 years.

With the cat out of the bag, many other computer companies now began to enter the competition with their own PC models. For example, Commodore with its Commodore 64, which young Peter Thiel started with, or its VIC-24, which young Elon Musk started with; Fountain Technologies with its Quantex 486DX, which young Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook) started with; Apple's Macintosh LC II, which young Sam Altman (OpenAI) started with; Atari Corporation's Atari 800, which young Larry Page (Google) started with; and Tandy Corporation's TRS-80, which young Jeff Bezos (Amazon) started with.

This development had dramatic consequences. When young geeks began to tap away on the slightly oversized keyboards with their boyish fingers a little over half a century ago, no one could have known that it would create a new reality. We know that now. The world has turned. But where has it turned?
(To be continued.)
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8. HAIL MARS! FROM THE STEAM ENGINE TO FRANKENSTEIN?

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The emergence of the new personal computers in the 80s staffed by underage signature nerds can be seen as Ground Zero for a technological development without parallel in world history.

With those little intense programmers, a window was opened with unimaginable civilizational consequences. How often have we heard that the first industrial revolution made many people slaves to the machine, but none has had as great a consequence as the fourth industrial revolution's development of artificial intelligence, which potentially threatens to make all of humanity slaves to the machines.

All technological development has of course opened new windows with major civilizational consequences. It is not without reason that we speak of industrial revolutions in the plural, because when the founders of a window have closed it behind them in an attempt to cement their power, new founders have soon come along with new ideas and have opened a new window.

Most people know the story of the American industrial pioneers who achieved a monopoly in their field and have been called robber barons for good reason. Andrew Carnegie, who got into the steel market, John D. Rockefeller, who got into the oil market, the Vanderbuilt brothers, who got into the railroad market, and J.P. Morgan, who got into the financial market that supported it all.

The companies that the robber barons founded still exist, intact and powerful, although often with new names, but they have of course had to make way at the table for the pioneers of the second industrial revolution's development of chemistry, electricity and telecommunications; names like Dupont, Edison, Westinghouse and Graham Bell will probably be familiar.

And these in turn have had to make way for the pioneers of the third industrial revolution's development of automation, electronics and information technology, where Henry Ford's car company and IBM have long been the stars, but are now being challenged by the pioneers of the fourth industrial revolution. Namely our little signature nerds, who are today tech billionaires with giant companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta/Facebook and Tesla.

The fourth industrial revolution is first and foremost the development of artificial intelligence. This development is now fairly advanced, and there is a fierce race between American tech companies to be the first to come up with the next step. After AI, the next step is AGI (artificial general intelligence) and after that, as the crowning glory, super-AGI awaits.

While the specific AI systems on the scene today can solve this or that specific task as well or better than a human, AGI is artificial intelligence that can solve all tasks as well or better than any human, and super-AGI is artificial intelligence that simply disconnects humans, programs and improves itself, and makes decisions itself.

The dangers are obvious. The fear that drove farm workers to sabotage the self-tiepers and weavers to smash their looms proved unfounded, because in return for the jobs that technological development made redundant, new jobs were always created for the unemployed over time.

The question, however, is whether this also applies if robots and artificial intelligence can do all jobs better than any human?
That question has so far remained unanswered, and probably because the answer would be far too frightening.

Or what if dark tyrannical forces arrive first with the development of AGI and use the head start to make themselves masters of the rest of humanity?

Or even worse, what if the first super-AGI, like another genie, escapes from the lamp and decides that it no longer bothers humanity and continues the development of civilization all by itself? Some say that the robots want to keep us as pets for sentimental reasons, but who believes that?

The idea that artificial intelligence, like another self-created Frankenstein monster, could threaten humanity with extinction is something many find laughable. But not the creators of artificial intelligence themselves.

Not unlike the procession of terrified citizens with torches and pitchforks in Mary Shelley’s novel, in March 2023, 27,565 technology entrepreneurs and computer scientists, led by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak (Apple), signed an open letter appealing to all AI labs to stop training their most powerful AI systems for at least six months.

AI systems with intelligence that rivals that of humans pose a great risk to society and humanity, they wrote, lamenting that “AI labs had entered an uncontrolled race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital brains that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

But of course the labs didn't stop. The payoff was too great. AI development costs enormous amounts of computing power and energy, and the lab that made the breakthrough first would also get all the investor money and thus starve everyone else out of the market and achieve a monopoly. And as the industry's eminence grise, Peter Thiel, told the Wall Street Journal in 2014: "Competition is for losers, if you want to create and maintain lasting value, you have to create a monopoly."

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So now the labs with AI programs like Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama3, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude are fighting to be first, or at least to prevent the frontrunner ChatGPT4 from OpenAI from getting first, which would give Microsoft the promised lead and monopoly.

But as the sudden and shocking arrival in January of the fully competitive Chinese AI program DeepSeek-R1 showed, the competition is not a closed society for the big American tech giants. The Chinese want to be in on it too. And so the race to be the first to achieve AGI also becomes a race for world domination.

Or at least it will be in the eyes of the Americans. When Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that freed American energy extraction from oil, gas and coal from all ties and regulations - drill, baby, drill, even in nature parks - he justified it by saying that if the Americans were to win the "AI arms race", then training the AI ​​alone would require twice as much electricity as the United States currently produces.

It was therefore no coincidence that one of Trump's very first acts as president - in the presence of Sam Altman from OpenAI and two other tech billionaires - was the launch of the Stargate program, which, with an investment of 500 billion dollars in energy, infrastructure, computer chips and data centers, is to ensure the US victory in the AI ​​arms race.

And it was no coincidence that at Trump's inauguration party, among the MAGA people and the billionaires in attendance, one could also find a number of tech billionaires, led by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman.

Trump's genius, they say, is to be able to create a 'big tent' with room for everyone, but the mix in Trump's big tent is explosive.
(To be continued)
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9. HAIL MARS! THE PERFECT STORM - a school feature

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A perfect storm in meteorology is when three deep storm lows meet and reinforce each other. That the mixed crowd on stage, where new and old billionaires and happy MAGA people are celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, is also a perfect storm is best explained if we begin with a mini-course in social theory.

In all societies throughout history, there have been those who rowed, called the people, and those who steered, called the elite. Both have had their important function in the common boat, but from time to time the people have thought that perhaps they should try to switch places or at least take turns. The places where this has been successful can be easily counted, and it has rarely been long-lasting.

This axis of conflict is called class struggle, but there is also another.

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The power of the elite is based on property relations, which in turn are based on the productive forces, and when new productive forces emerge, a new elite also emerges that can challenge the old for the leadership. Everyone knows the story of the emerging middle class, which with commerce, manufacturing, overseas trade, stock exchanges and joint-stock companies challenges the old landowning nobility and eventually sends the stiff-legged knights into retirement and buys their castles.

If the elite fights against the people, it will often be stormy. If two elites fight against each other, it will often be stormy. If all this happens at the same time, we can talk about the perfect storm. The perfect storm is what we are now witnessing in the United States. This will be elaborated on later, but here is an overview for school use.

MAGA is of course the people, who have become more and more impoverished as the elite has become richer and richer. In the United States in 1964, when the Gini coefficient was 34, my classmate's working-class family could have a house with a garden and a swimming pool; today, when it is over 42, a working-class family has to work several - usually poorly paid - jobs just to make ends meet.

Donald Trump is the populist who promises to give the people the good jobs and prosperity of 1964 back, put the self-confident elite in their place and drain the swamp of politicians and civil servants who have ensured the elite's unstoppable rise and also padded themselves along the way.

The elite is the aquarium of billionaires from Wall Street, banks and finance, investment funds, the arms industry, energy extraction, trade, the entertainment industry and technology, thoroughly intertwined with each other, and intertwined with layers of support from the major media houses and top universities and from the deep state, the military and the security apparatus.

It is clear that the elite is not happy with MAGA. No candidate in American history has been persecuted like Donald Trump; not only his political opponents, but also the media, the state, the FBI, the legal system and even snipers have been relentlessly after him.

Donald Trump is a tyrant, the cry goes on and on. Which is etymologically quite accurate, if you remember your knowledge of ancient history. In ancient Greece, the word tyrant (tyrannos) meant a leader who came to power through unorthodox or non-aristocratic methods by channeling the general population's dissatisfaction with the aristocratic families who had all control over the resources and thus all the power.

The word has a bad connotation today, because the thoughts of the ruling class are, as we know, the thoughts of the rulers, but like the tyrant Peisistratos in the 6th century BC, tyrants often protected the general population from the excesses of the elite and introduced reforms that strengthened popular rule and weakened elite control.

In Denmark, in the 16th century, we had a king who was nicknamed Christian the Tyrant because he tried to rein in the nobility for the benefit of the general population. He did not succeed, even though he frequently used the executioner's axe. Only when the time was ripe did his great-grandson succeed in putting the nobility to shame and becoming an absolute monarch.

But if Trump is in this way just another of many tyrants in history who, with the support of a majority of the people, has led a rebellion against the elite, then what is new is that this tyrant's inauguration party was packed with people from the same elite who had even donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his election victory.

And not only that, there were two different and rival elites present, and with this we have the perfect storm.

(To be continued)
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10. HEIL MARS! NEW PEOPLE ARE COMING TO TOWN

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If we look at the Forbes list of the richest people in the US, all the top names from the new tech groups come - led by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg - after we have passed 30th place, we find the first non-tech fortunes, Bloomberg with his financial news service, Dell with his IT hardware group and the Walton family with Walmart.

If we look for oil, energy and dirty production, we have to go all the way down to the Koch family in 17th and 19th place, separated by the Nike sportswear owner. And we only find the line of private equity funds and financial sharks such as Blackstone and Soros, together with the Mars candy group, the Estée Lauder perfume company and the Adelson casino mogul after we have passed 30th place.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly that a new elite has come to town and shaken up the conditions of production than this extremely skewed distribution of wealth with all the new tech billionaires at the top and the old elite of traditional companies at the bottom. But can't the new and the old just be the same elite?

Yes, indeed, and with a common interest in maintaining private property rights, cheap labor, private profit and private monopolies, they are also the same elite for a long time. But apart from the fact that new elites have always clashed with the old elites, the new rich against old money as in Matador, the new ones often come up with new economic models that require space and political room for maneuver.

When the productive forces brought the new bourgeois class to power with its capitalist and liberal market economy, the old feudal class, for example, could not help but feel squeezed, so it took both revolutions and numerous wars before the elites were fraternized - or intermarried - again.

The former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis from the left-wing party Syriza (he's the rebel with the leather jacket and the big Yamaha bike) calls the tech billionaires' new economic model cloud capitalism, where the capitalist tech giants Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon own large data centers with servers, programs and everything – the cloud – and from here, with control over data and digital platforms, dominate the market and reap their profits.

Yes, Varoufakis believes that it is no longer capitalism and therefore not profit, but interest. Tech feudalism, he calls it. Just as the landowners in feudal times earned their income by allowing the peasants to work on their inherited land in exchange for receiving up to half of the harvest, the new tech feudal lords earn their money by renting out access to their platforms and services to users, who in turn must provide a part of their income.

And just as the system then bound the farmers who had nowhere else to get their food and were eventually made serfs, the system today binds the users who, due to the monopoly power of the tech giants, have nowhere else to go and thus also risk becoming a kind of serf. And also much easier to monitor.

The new tech billionaires who own the cloud can thus be compared to the feudal lords of earlier times who owned the land. In this way, they have become like the rentiers that Adam Smith and the new liberal bourgeoisie fought so fiercely against in the infancy of capitalism.

Whether this is more than a good analogy, I am not the right person to decide, but while you sit and type using the Word program from Microsoft that you have had to rent from the cloud, you at least understand what Varoufakis is talking about.

As a shortcut to power, the new elite has quickly joined the tyrant's MAGA banner, and the most radical have become leaders in his court. We will return to the exciting story of how this happened.

Exactly how the perfect storm will play out is of course impossible to predict at this point, when it has all just begun. But if we trust historical experience, the warring elites will eventually unite under the leadership of the new elite, the rich will get richer, the MAGA people - with Steve Bannon at their head - will get a long nose, and the tyrant will probably be worshipped as the great leader until he is overthrown or his mandate expires. But as I said, we don't know, we only know that the odds are extremely good.

To indicate that the new tech billionaires constitute an interwoven group with a common understanding of mission, the media in the United States has invented the word broligarchy, - a contraction of the words oligarchy and brotherhood, as in Shakespeare's and Spielberg's 'band of brothers'.

There is nothing new in this. All ruling elites in history have in this way formed interwoven networks around a common mission, a common culture and a common understanding. For example, the ruling elite of the last half century in the United States and the elite of the United States' Western European vassals can be quickly captured in a sociogram with adjectives such as Protestant and democratic, Anglo-Jewish and transatlantic, capitalist and bureaucratic, plutocratic and hegemonic, globalist and neoliberalist, neoconservative and Zionist, and most people will understand what I mean.

So what is the common mission of the new elite besides making money? What is the common understanding of the tech billionaires? Where will the new band of brothers take us? There may be an answer to that, because the new elite are our signature nerds.

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(To be continued).
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