The Scariest Two-Word Combination in the English Language

Democratic Socialism. This should scare anyone in the free world. Let's get through a few metaphors about this two-word combination. "Democratic" in this case is a cloak to cover the dagger that is "Socialism".  Cloak-and-dagger is indeed what describes an insertion of ideology to destroy the free market system that is the foundation of capitalism. Democratic Socialism is dressing up the socialist wolf with sheep's democratic clothing. It is the virulent agent that will chip away at the health and well being of a country that for the last 250 years was able to withstand all sorts of infectious attacks from within and without. It is an ideological and serial philanderer that over decade after decade made many futile attempts since October 25, 1917 at the then capital city of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) to  seduce society and governments and failed repeatedly but kept trying anyway. Today, its so-called "successes" can be summed up between the old USSR and Cuba and Venezuela and several others in between. And there's a list filled with horrific aftermaths of failed seductions. We'll get back to this later.

The slogans of Democratic Socialism were and are still the same siren songs that in Greek Mythology lured unwary sailors into heading their ships into the rocky shores of destruction.

Harsh metaphors? Perhaps but let's take a quick but discerning look into  what socialism had done in places from Europe, Asia and South America. The photos below show how incomprehensible it must have been that during the pre-collapse era in the late eighties into the final end of the old communist USSR in 1990, citizens of a military superpower lined up for hours everyday at grocery stores nation-wide and scenes even later showed a throng of people lining up at a McDonald's fast food restaurant.

Less than a year ago I wrote on July 21, 2025, "The Mamdanization of America". As much as I had hoped against it happening, the recent primary election in New York just marked the Mamdani effect when three socialist candidates the NY City mayor endorsed won, unseating even a popular incumbent Congressman.

One of the mayor's campaign promises was a "pledge to ultimately open five city-owned grocery stores—one in each of New York City’s five boroughs. His Administration is still examining locations for stores in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and is encouraging property owners to recommend sites to the city online." Further, these will be a “network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit". A totally insane rebuke of the economic system that exists today but how quickly people forget about the old Soviet Union.

Last November 16, 2025, I wrote, "New York City Voted, Was it Murder or Suicide?" where I quoted Ayn Rand:

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”

― Ayn Rand

Are the results of the latest NYC primary election the proverbial canary in the coal mine?

Not quite a national phenomenon yet but the fact that it is gaining traction, albeit slowly, presents a potential to influence the next generation.  A generation, say,  to develop within the next twenty five years which points to the year 2050.  Sounds familiar?  Four years ago, I wrote, "2050: The Ebb of the Tragic Trajectory of a Once Powerful Nation". 

I wrote then in discussing the two challenges that confront the nation then and today, "One is about conserving the ideals and belief systems of what brought this country its decisive success for over two centuries.  The other half is about liberally forging and fundamentally changing the country into something else.  Worse is the slow but almost penetrating allure of socialism". I warned about it in 2021, long before Mamdani was even a politician, nor was socialism even considered a worthy subject in U.S. politics.

One thing that is for certain though is the feel good effect of a promise.  The one doing the promise feels good about it and the prospective recipient of the promises is buoyed up by the thought. But let us not forget that it will take others - the taxpayers - to fulfill the promises and they may not be too happy with the whole idea.

I also wrote, "Anyone Can Promise You a Rainbow" on  01/22/2015, of the then incumbent President and his pledge to continue with his agenda.

The President lives in an island universe where the wealth of the people is represented by bowls of jelly beans.  There are a few big bowls and many smaller and even tinier bowls of jelly beans across the island universe.  The President wants some of the jelly beans from the bigger bowls to be moved to the smaller and tinier bowls even if only for one reason: That those with the big bowls can afford to give away some of their jelly beans.  Without adding a single jelly bean – the President does not create wealth – he wants to redistribute the jelly beans because that is best for the island universe.  Actually the main reason is this: Owners of the bowls of jelly beans, big and small, can cast only one vote each. The displeased owners of the big bowls are smaller in number while those with the smaller bowls are large. As any politician knows, one only has to get the approval of the many (the recipient of the redistributed jelly beans) and it is all right to get the ire of a few.

The above is the epitome of  the socialist politician's mantra of "Tax the rich". The socialist will promise a rainbow that seems to begin bright at one end; but it always terminates in despair at the other.

Read the quote below when Fidel Castro campaigned to oust the then Cuban president Batista.  

 Irony of ironies is that Cuba's government and economy today can only be described as a sad portrait of poverty in the midst of relative prosperity in the Caribbean and a stark contrast to the bright rendering of capitalism just ninety miles away across the straits of Florida, USA. 

Fidel Castro's slogan against Batista was "History will absolve me". History did not absolve him; instead, he made Cuba the poster child of the failure of communism. What was unforgivable was Castro's failure to realize that the country that exported communism to Cuba already failed in 1990 USSR.

The  Bolsheviks and Castro's revolutionaries fought against the monarchy of Tsarist Russia and Batista's oligarchy, respectively; only to replace those with  more repressive regimes, if not even more so, with unwavering brutality against the people in the name of reform.  Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia's society for almost four years between 1975 and 1979. It was all aimed at creating an agrarian socialist society.  Cambodia is still struggling in the aftermath of a genocide perpetrated against close to two million people who died under Pol Pot's rule (Recall  the movie, "The Killing Fields"). But let us not forget that Stalin and Mao caused an even more devastating swath of persecution and death. Stalin's regime may have been responsible for the deaths of close to 9 million people while "Mao Zedong's policies and economic mismanagement, particularly during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are estimated to have caused the deaths of approximately 45 million people".

All abject failures despite socialism's many attempts with new dresses, costumes and facelifts in different places around the world afterwards.  Just to name a few, let's mention a few countries with socialism's ruinous fingerprints: from Hungary to Yugoslavia to Czechoslovakia to East Germany to El Salvador to Argentina to Venezuela and Cuba's attempt to export the brand of social repression in the name of socialism even to places in Africa. 

How often do we hear the same chants today against oligarchy and the rich.  This prompted me to explain the phenomenon and aftermath of being allowed to continue in, "Mountains to Molehills", July 2018.  It was my way of explaining why there is a need for billionaires in a successful  free market system because far from hording their money under mattresses, they provide the fuel for the engines of capitalism.

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/07/mountains-to-molehills.html

America and the whole world must brace for what may come by understanding what the scariest two-word combination will ultimately mean.

We Might As Well Be All Alone

Our sun is just a star, a medium-size one at that. The next closest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri - one of three in the 3-star system called Alpha Centauri (A and B being the other two). Let's for a minute, just for perspective, imagine our sun as a grain of sand on the kitchen table. Proxima Centauri is another grain of sand but it will neither be on the same table nor within the same kitchen.  In fact, it will not be out  in the yard either. It will actually be four miles away.  Our home planet earth, which is one millionth the size of the sun, would be  the size of a virus going around - orbiting - that grain of sand.

By resorting to that analogy we had just put into perspective what it is like to imagine a distance of 25 trillion miles.  That is how far the nearest star is from us.  Our planet earth will then be invisible to anyone, if there is anyone out there around our nearest neighbor-star. Beyond that, from a scattering of six to a dozen stars "nearby", if there are observers from there, our solar system will be viewed by them from 50 to 100 trillion miles away. We,  as they are to us, will indeed be even more invisible from one another.  And, more significantly, by the sheer vastness and emptiness of space in between, earthlings and ETs will never meet. We might as well be all alone.  Why?

This is not philosophical pessimism but a belief that by just its incomprehensible vastness  the universe simply precludes the tantalizing idea that we will ever see ET come by to visit us. Likewise, which is  even more humbling,  we too will never get to visit another world either.  It is true that the possibility of life somewhere else in the cosmos would seem like a statistical foregone conclusion; however,  physical contact between  interplanetary inhabitants would remain technically infeasible if not utterly impossible.  And, even more so, we can forget intergalactic excursions as well.  

We can only realistically imagine it from our perspective because to see it from an extraterrestrial's point of view is pure speculation.  However, the conditions we face are the same to confront ET since the laws of physics should be the same anywhere else in the cosmos. In other words we and ET will face the same insurmountable barriers that  separate us from one another; primarily, gravity and distance.

Any spacecraft, ours or ET's, must first overcome the gravity of its home planet before it is able to leave to travel from points A to B anywhere in the universe; then it must carry enough fuel for a long sustained journey and, critically, enough fuel to slow the craft down before reaching a chosen destination.  So, distance will determine how long it would take to get to any interstellar location depending on how fast any spacecraft can manage.

Let's take a look. The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) launched in 2018 was the fastest space vehicle ever to leave earth and it was sent to study the sun.  It attained a record speed of 430,000 miles per hour.  That is very fast, considering the fastest aircraft - the North American X-15 - could only do 4,520 miles per hour or about 6 times the speed of sound.

Fast indeed, but the Solar Space Probe will have taken 6,100 years to reach Proxima Centauri, if it were directed to travel towards it. 

Light,  the fastest thing in the universe, travels at 186,000 miles per second. The Parker Solar Probe by comparison traveled at a snail's pace,  at a mere 119 miles per second.  However, as fast as light is, it still takes 4.24 years for it to travel from Proxima Centauri to us. 

But let's be ambitious and say that we are able to build a spacecraft that can travel at 10% the speed of light. That's 18,600 miles per second! 10 % the speed of light might seem like a relatively low target but reality is the biggest spoiler. It took 1.5 million pounds of liquid oxygen propellant to lift the Delta 18 rocket to send the Parker Solar Probe, a mere half the weight of a compact  car, on its solar journey.  Imagine how much energy will be needed to send explorers on  a suitably large spacecraft towards Proxima Centauri at 18,600 miles per second. Imagine the stresses the human body or any biological organism larger than a cat can withstand in order  to reach 10% the speed of light. 

But let's imagine that we've done that.  It will take a spacecraft speeding at 18,600 miles per second 43 years to reach Proxima Centauri! For the safety of the astronauts, gradual acceleration and deceleration (upon reaching the vicinity of the destination) would be necessary so that the total trip could conceivably take over 60 years one way.  Therefore, we can forget a round trip.  Astronauts with an average age of 35 to 40 years old at launch date,  will all be centenarians by the time they get to Proxima Centauri if they survive the trip. 

Between our solar system and Alpha Centauri is empty space.  There will be no stopovers and no turning around.  At the halfway point, communicating at the speed of light, it would still take one year for a message to reach the spacecraft and another year to get a response back and vice versa.  It would take two years to complete a single conversation of merely asking a question and waiting for a response. Let that sink in for a minute.

So, even if we've managed to overcome gravity, distance and time are  eternally unforgiving. And to fund such a trip will require perhaps all the resources of the entire planet's economy. We earthlings, who live in a world divided by culture and ideology, a history of constant conflicts, wars and distrust between nations, face an almost insurmountable challenge  to embark on such an endeavor that will require a staggering amount of expenditure and sustained interest across one or two generations of the population. 

Enrico Fermi, one of the distinguished physicists involved in the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb towards the end of WWII, asked in 1950 the now well known question, "So, where is everybody"?  He asked that of his colleagues over lunch one day as they were discussing UFOs, extraterrestrial beings and their potential visitations to earth. That question became the principle behind the Fermi Paradox.  It is worth reading up on it if the reader is so inclined.

Indeed, to this day, scientists and researchers have not come up with any credible evidence of UFOs and UAPs.  Here is a quick thought. We have a sophisticated system to detect asteroids lurking around the solar system that could pose potential dangers to earth.  An asteroid tracker is posted and regularly updated by NASA that cover all near-earth objects or NEOs. There are multiple trackers as well from smaller organizations and private individuals.  Asteroids the size of cars and school buses have been detected and identified.

Notice that grainy videos and photos presented as evidence are all about UFOs or UAPs already flying around "here".  How come, none have been detected before they entered our atmosphere?  If indeed they came from outer space, ground based military radars that watch out for ballistic missiles on re-entry would have detected any extraterrestrial crafts or motherships of interstellar travelers streaking across the sky just like meteorites do.  NORAD and other ICBM detectors have been operating since the 60s.  Such alien visitors would have been detected as near earth objects even long before they enter our solar system.

Perhaps, the Fermi Paradox is right about the idea that the great filter that inhibits contact between interstellar beings, if there are others aside from us, is the vast distances that separate everyone.  So, Enrico Fermi may have been right to ask, "So, where is everybody"?

It is as if The Creator meant for the universe where  every star, every solar system, every galaxy,  exist far enough away in their own individual worlds, separately from and independently of each other. Why?  That we cannot know.  At least, not yet.

The reader may want to read the previous musing to this - "Second to the Last Word on UFO" - for another perspective, albeit a whimsical alternative to space exploration.

Also, on UFO    https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2021/04/ufo.html