As a tech-literate reader of hard SciFi, I've always have to "suspend disbelief" about energy density. For a general audience, I call it the rayguns, warp drives, and Terminators problem. The problem is that, for the technology described, you need almost infinite energy density. That is, in the physical space provided for the artifact, there is no known way to store and deliver enough energy for the artifact to do its job, not even in theory. (More on this later.)
Unfortunately, in politics, thanks to Citizens United (CU), certain political actors have SciFi-like weaponry with almost infinite financial density. And, in politics, money is energy. Money is power. Money makes people macho.
In order to understand post-CU politics, we need to first take a tour of the energy density problem in SciFi. Come past the "orange hole" for today's lesson.
Even if you don't read hard-SciFi, you have seen the following disbelief-suspending artifacts, whether in Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Terminator series.
Ray guns: In SciFi, handheld weapons can destroy buildings, burn through feet of reinforced concrete or armor plate. One guy with a ray gun can destroy a 20th century infantry division single-handedly.
Space warps: In SciFi, when you went to get to some hard-to-reach place in a hurry, you use the Warp Drive. The premise of the Warp Drive is that it distorts the fabric of space, or stabilizes a worm hole, or whatever. Every literary justification I've seen just waves a magic wand about how you are going to get the energy to do this. But, its such a useful trope that half of hard-SciFi assumes it. The other half adheres to known physics, setting the speed of light as the speed limit.
But, even that half of hard-SciFi has "the problem" when they talk about providing 1G acceleration for indefinitely long periods of time for miles-long spaceships to reach 99.999% of light speed. For example, in the popular Alistair Reynolds trilogy (spoiler alert):
Conjoiner drives contain a small wormhole linked to the very deep past, through which they draw their propulsion energies from the Quark–gluon plasma created by the Big Bang.
-Wikipedia Conjoiner Drive
Terminators: In SciFi, there are robotic entities that are smarter than humans, stronger than humans, able to absorb immense amounts of physical punishment; and their power source is what exactly? Under the fake human skin, the original Terminator looked like about 40 pounds of titanium skeleton. Pray tell, where was there room for the power source in what looked like a totally optimized musculature? The liquid-y Terminator was even worse. What power source survives being reduced to micron-sized bits, each of which has the brains to stay on task and the energy budget to do the task? The same one that is used in rayguns, of course, silly.
Bottom line: the energy density problem is why no one takes today's hard-SciFi as anything more than morality plays or space operas.
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But post-CU, one person can outgun an army. The Koch Brothers have announced their intention to spend close to $1B in the 2016 election. That is roughly 30% of all the money typically spent in an election cycle. If you consider the number of people employed in political campaigns to be an army and their supplies (video, flyers, phone banks, pollsters) to be the supply corps for that army, the two Koch Brothers can fight the entire political establishment all by themselves.
Their relentless, lying campaign to destroy government regulation of pollution is an infinite energy density raygun that will eventually burn through what little armor is left to protect environmental regulation. We see Scott Walker trying to zero out the budget for his state's EPA. In Canada, Harper has told the environmental scientists to destroy their libraries. We see ALEC trying to cut government subsidies for solar power, while Scott Walker holds hearings about the dangers of wind power.
Now, rayguns are just raw power. They do a familiar job quicker. But what is a political space warp? Well, it's when you twist the law in unbelivable ways to get the political outcome you want. It takes a lot of money, but hey, that's what CU is about.
You take your money and buy the media. You use the bought media to twist everyone's perception about who the good guys are. You get people to elect some Terminator politicians (more on that in a minute). The Terminator politicians, over time, stack the courts with Terminator judges. Eventually, the Terminator judges are in the majority, and they rewrite the country's laws to bring about the ends desired by the people with the money. The whole thing is done with great force, but so slowly that average people do not notice the slow deformation of everything in the society.
What are the hard-to-reach ends desired by the possessors of the political space warp drive? Destroying environmental regulation, denying climate change, ending taxes on rich people and corporations, repealing all labor laws ever passed, eliminating or privatizing social welfare programs, disenfranchising everyone who isn't rich, going back to a world of racism, sexism, theocracy, and anti-intellectualism. etc.
No country would have gone from post-Watergate liberalism to the Roberts Supreme Court in thirty years without an immense twisting of political space. It started with the Powell Memorandum. That led to the massive increase of lobbyists in Washington and the creation of the conservative think-tank complex. With those tools in place and unchallenged, the Roberts Court, or some version of it, was inevitable.
The Roberts Court spits in the face of precedent (CU overturned 100 years of law; ending DoJ oversight of elections in the South overturned 50 years of law). The Roberts Court makes up ludicrous fantasies to support the warped agenda. (You aren't discriminating against breast feeding women because men lactate too. Companies have Religious Rights.) These people are literally ripping apart the political space we are living in. Like the Vogons in the Hitchhiker's Guide, the US is simply in the way of the Koch Brothers Interstellar Bypass, and will have to be destroyed. And they have the weaponry to do it.
Finally, we come to the Terminators. A Terminator politician is invulnerable. No matter how blatant a crook, an asshole, a religious nutbag, a corporate lackey, a racist, a sexist he is, if he can deliver the votes, he will be funded, supported, and helped along in his career.
The Koch Brothers are running a School for Sociopaths contest to see who they will fund. You win the contest by surviving huge political scandals by any means (Scott Walker using corrupt judges to dodge his corruption in Milwaukee. Chris Christie using cutouts to dodge his massive corruption in the Port Authority.), while advancing the corporate agenda. It shows you care about nothing but power. It shows you can outmaneuver mere humans. It shows that you deserve the infinite energy density power supply that makes a Terminator something that is nearly impossible to kill.
The most obvious Terminator judges are Scalia and Thomas. Thomas is a corrupt hack who has taken all kinds of gifts from people with cases before the court. His wife is neck deep in rightwing politics, but Thomas refuses to recuse himself. Scalia makes up stuff as he pleases. He contradicts his own precedents. He is a loose cannon that only rolls to the right. But neither one of these guys can be touched by the only remedy, impeachment. That's because the Koch Brothers own enough of the Congress to prevent that from ever happening.
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At this point, it looks like the only thing that will stop these high-financial-tech invaders from Mars is a virus that kills them in place. I don't see that happening.
The only viable alternative is political guerilla and class warfare. But, they have that covered too. Watch as the GOP tries to pretend it cares about the middle class. You laugh because you underestimate the power of the political warp drive. Besides, the corporatized government has been practicing how to control restive populations for almost fifteen years in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the corporate government is by and for multi-nationals (can you say TPP?), they will have no problem making Philadelphia look like Fallujah, if that becomes necessary.
Quite frankly, the only thing that will stop them is the coming environmental catastrophe they are bringing down on the planet. Too bad that's not a solution, unless you think of it as Mother Nature's Final Solution to the problem of the human race.
If you want some hope, try this scenario:
We piss off everyone else on the planet so much that they ostracize us. The Russians and the Chinese are already avoiding the dollar. The Europeans are restive because our meddling in the Ukraine has hurt their economy. The Saudis have declared oil war on our frackers. The South Americans hate us for two centuries worth of high-handed colonialism and neoliberal neocolonialism.
We sit on a mountain of debt financed by the Chinese. If the Chinese can develop a middle-class internal market (or perhaps help Russia or South America develop one), they could drop the dollar and we would be screwed. That's because the infinite financial energy being deployed by the 1% has been borrowed from the vacuum, and when the vacuum asks to balance the books, the game is over.
You may have heard talk about a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing Axis, based on new high-speed rail lines the Chinese are building. Perhaps the only way to get rid of the Koch Brothers and their plundering bands is to have other large powers fight them for the infinite financial resources.
That's the best I've got. America is inside the financial black hole. Hillary vs Jeb is such a warped non-choice that it is only possible beyond the financial event horizon. We aren't coming out of the hole until we've been ripped to atoms. Perhaps the rest of the world won't get sucked into the black hole with us.
Beam me up, Scotty. And, please, please, don't have it be Scotty Walker running the transporter.