The progressives, especially the US Democrats are proclaiming that there is a “new authoritarian,” which they see embodied in Donald Trump and populism. The writers here, especially Chris (US expiate) and Charles our American correspondence, and Richard Miller in London, have sought to counter this by articles based on news sources showing the real authoritarians are the Left. This theme, that the Left are the new technocratic authoritarians, has been argued for in scholarly detail in a fantastic, and highly significance book by Australian academic Salvatore Babones in The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2018):
  https://www.amazon.com/New-Authoritarianism-Populism-Tyranny-Experts/dp/1509533095
  https://salvatorebabones.com/
  https://sydney.edu.au/arts/staff/profiles/salvatore.babones.php

Here is part of the blurb for the book:
“Salvatore Babones argues that democracy has been undermined by a quiet but devastating power grab conducted by a class of liberal experts. They have advanced a global rights-based agenda which has tilted the balance away from the lively and vibrant unpredictability of democratic decision-making toward the creeping technocratic authority of liberal consensus. Populism represents, contends Babones, an imperfect but reinvigorating political flood that has the potential to sweep away decades of institutional detritus and rejuvenate democracy across the West.”

     America’s latest scandal may be its biggest ever, which in a truly insane land, is saying something. The short of the long is that 1 percenter Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex offences, but previously got off rather lightly looks like going down big time now. He previously had a sex island in the ironic Virgin Islands, and he had leading world elites go there to allegedly have sex with under-age girls, no doubt filming everything. The conspiracy theories are flourishing about who would gain from this. 
  https://www.theorganicprepper.com/unbiased-epstein-scandal/
  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article221897990.html
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7220951/Jeffrey-Epstein-charged-sex-trafficking-just-days-records-transported-minors.html

“Jeffrey Epstein is facing two criminal charges in the sex trafficking case filed by federal prosecutors on Saturday, according to an individual who is familiar with the proceedings. Those charges were filed by attorneys for the Southern District of New York after they spoke dozens of victims, who had also been interviewed by both the FBI and NYPD. Almost all of these women claim they were underage when they were asked to give Epstein massages at his Palm Beach or New York City homes, according to a law enforcement official. Those women - some of whom were just 14 at the time of these alleged incidents -  claim that these massages would then lead to Epstein asking that they perform a rape act on him in exchange for money. That same official said that the incidents for which Epstein is now being charged all occurred between 1999 and 2005. This is the same time period during which Epstein first made headlines after flying former president Bill Clinton to Africa on his private jet, which was later nicknamed the Lolita Express. Epstein, 66, will make his first court appearance on Monday in New York, less than 48 hours after he was taken into custody by federal agents at Teterboro Airport. It all happened just before 5pm on Saturday, when Epstein reentered the country for the first time since June 16, when he took off from the same airport bound for Paris. Prior to that trip, Epstein had been crisscrossing the US as he moved between his properties in New York City, Palm Beach, New Mexico and the US Virgin Islands. Epstein's arrest was first reported by The Daily Beast, and comes in the wake of a three-part expose in the Miami Herald detailing his settlements with victims and sweetheart plea deal.”

To The Australian        Mark Leibler continues a notable furphy in the current debate about Aboriginal constitutional recognition ("Clear voice without the repercussions of a third chamber", 20-21/7). He writes misleadingly that "the intellectual drive behind the constitutional amendment for an advisory voice emanates from constitutional conservatives, including Liberal MP Julian Leeser." That drive comes from other sources too, but the fact is that Mr Leeser is not a conservative on this topic at all. The real conservatives are Keith Windschuttle, Frank Salter, John Stone and Andrew Bolt (to name just four). Promoting faux-conservatives as conservatives is a devious trick which should be dropped. Leibler is also less than courteous to opponents of constitutional change when he disparagingly refers to them as "nay-sayers" who, he quite wrongly implies, have been proved wrong with their "dire predictions for native title and the apology to the Stolen Generation." The apology never had a genuine popular mandate and was based on an unreliable document ("Bringing Them Home"); and the ongoing saga of "native title", based on the very questionable High Court decision in Mabo, has become a national scandal, tending towards a dangerous separatism, which needs to be halted.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

To The Age        It may be true that former High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson "delivered a landmark speech making the legal and ethical case for an Aboriginal voice to be enshrined in the Constitution" ("Joyce U-turn on Indigenous voice", 20/7), but how successful was it? His distinction between "a voice to Parliament, not a voice in Parliament" ignores the fact that the voice he recommends would have some of the influential power that the present two chambers possess. Moreover, it could be strengthened by future legislation, as he admitted - perhaps by a Marxist-inspired ALP government. It could also lead to findings by a politicised High Court against the true national interest. Gleeson claimed that the dispossession of the Aborigines "underwrote the development of the nation", but it can be said with more truth that their failure to defend their territory caused their loss and that the development was the result of the knowledge, skills and efforts of the newcomers. In general he failed to answer the cogent case that has been put against constitutional recognition by men of the calibre of John Stone, Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt..
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave

     This international bestseller caused a few ripples when it was learned that, for this English language version, some references to the power wielded by the Rothschild family which appeared in the original 2017 Spanish first edition, have been omitted. A storm in a teacup: the author appears genuinely to have avoided negative bias against any political, ethnic or religious group. He is a colonel in the Spanish army and was formerly chief of counter-intelligence and security for the European Army Corps. He is said to be one of Europe’s top specialists in geopolitics, terrorism and intelligence.

     It is a sobering account, drawing from worldwide evidence taken from the near and far past, as well as present time. It is an antidote to much of the half-baked idealism common in Australia among political commentators and agitators. In his introduction Banos remarks: ‘The powerful have always tried to seize control wherever their tendencies can reach…..It’s important that we are aware of these strategies that allow the powerful to rule the world. We like to think of ourselves as free individuals who make autonomous choices about our lives….. However, we are in fact continually being induced to make certain choices, and the same thing is happening at the geopolitical level – countries are manipulated into making particular decisions and alliances, and their populations have no say in the matter.’

     I assume that the US did make it to the moon as stated in the official narrative, since the conspiracy theories on this one has been met with solid replies. Sure, we conspiratorial types can argue amongst ourselves on that one in the pub, but the important question is whether the US could do it today, with all its AI, and IT and other two-lettered pieces of tech magic. The answer is “no”;
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/20/ret-general-robert-spalding-moon-landing-couldnt-happen-todays-deindustrialized-america-weve-lost-all-china/

“Lessons learned from the Apollo 11 moon landing — particularly the need for nationalized industrial policy involving investments in research and development and protective policies for vital industries — are being lost, said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rick Manning. Spalding began by noting China’s usurpation of America’s prior dominance in the realm of telecommunication technology manufacturing and development since the space race era. “Let’s just look at the state of our telecommunications,” Spalding said. “There was such a large industrial effort for the space race. Back then, we were spending two percent of GDP on research and development. We had the industrial base that was the envy of the world. AT&T, at the time, was a monopoly, and with Bell Labs, was the standard for telecommunications.” Spalding continued, “When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.”

     I am not really interested in the moon landing conspiracy stuff, since I am impressed by the fact that lasers can be shot at the moon to hit some object there that reflects them back, presumably, unless the moon object was put there by extra-terrestrials. Anyway, who cares? Man is not going to the moon on a daily basis, so technology seems to have fizzled out:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-17/why-so-many-believe-moon-landing-was-hoax

“If progress is inevitable, why don’t we have hotels on the moon? For some, it is easier to believe that the moon landing was fake than to accept that technological innovation has just stopped. The Hiatus in Progress
But wait, don’t we have smartphones now, the internet, and all sorts of cool gadgets and apps that didn’t exist 50 years ago? True, the fields of electronics and telecommunications have seen enormous advances, but these few hotspots of innovation cloak the fact that, in almost all other areas, technological development has ceased. Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel documented this decline in his book Zero to One, in which he describes several surprising facts:

     We have reported on the politically correct drive to replace 007 with a Black female in the Bond 25 movie. The utterly awful Daniel Craig will still play Bond, but the 007 licence to diversify is given to a Black lady. Many are unhappy about what is being done to Bond, including the first Black Bond girl, so let the white bleeders, bleed about this:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7264887/First-black-James-Bond-girl-blasts-casting-actress-Lashana-Lynch-taking-007.html

“It was bombshell news that left James Bond fans shaken and stirred - a woman will take over the famous 007 code name in the next movie. British star Lashana Lynch will be given Bond's licence to kill in the 25th movie in the franchise, currently being shot in Italy and the UK. It soon became clear, however, that Lynch won't actually be the new Bond, but a new character who takes over his secret agent number after he leaves MI6. But regardless, the decision to give 007 to a woman has divided hardcore fans, and the first black Bond girl to grace the silver screen is most certainly not happy. Trina Parks says she is against the potential plot twist - insisting the Bond movies have already done huge amounts for Hollywood diversity, she said in an exclusive interview with DailyMailTV. Parks famously made history as the first black Bond girl appearing in Diamonds Are Forever as assassin Thumper alongside Sean Connery in 1971. Speaking from her New York home, the 72-year-old actress said: 'Lashana is a great actress, but I don't really agree with her becoming 007. It is not about her color, but just because Bond, the spy code-named 007, was written by Ian Fleming as a man.'”

     I have been arguing that because the Epstein paedophilia sex island scandal involves many 1 percenters and political leaders, something will happen to shut it all down. But like speculating and dreaming about what one would do if one won the X Lotto, it is nice to dream about justice happening for once in the history of the human race:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-17/its-going-be-staggering-epstein-associates-prepare-worst-massive-document-dump

“As Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman notes, "The questions about Epstein are metastasizing much faster than they can be answered: Who knewwhat about Epstein’s alleged abuse? How, and from whom, did Epstein get his supposed $500 million fortune? Why did Acosta grant Epstein an outrageously lenient non-prosecution agreement? (And what does it mean that Acosta was reportedly told Epstein “belonged to intelligence”?)" Also illuminating is a statement by attorney Brad Edwards, who said during a Wednesday press conference seated next to Epstein accuser Courtney Wild that "There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that," adding "In due time the names are going to start coming out." What's more, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release of approximately 2,000 pages of documents, likely over the next several days, which may reveal sex crimes committed by "numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders," according to the court's three-judge panel. The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. “Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.” -Vanity Fair

     I have taken to trying to real articles from the sites that the intellectuals here read, to see if I can understand anything, and maybe bash out something mildly amusing for my fans who eagerly await my hilarious articles, or at least, hilarious in my mind. It was pointed out to me by a little bird that I mangled to contradict myself in my very first sentence, which is, I think, a record for me. Keep up the good work, Uncle Len. Now what is a loser? The following article rips into Jordan Paterson, Peterson, Petersen, whatever, however it is spelt, whom I know little about, not being even able to spell his name, except one minute he was loved, and now that he is rich and famous, he has heaps of critics. I know the feeling, but from the other end of reality, like not being rich or famous, but unknown and poor, but still being kicked in the guts like a dog waiting for its abusive master outside of an 1880 pub. I would even have settled for infamous, but alas. And that brings me right back to the issue of being a loser. Here are some gems of insights that I pulled out of an otherwise critical article that may not get a lot of readings, but it is the most interesting part:
  https://www.counter-currents.com/2019/07/multimodal-ethics/

“First, let’s have a look at who those boys are. By Peterson’s own words in the Introduction to 12 Rules for Life, they are “the low status lobster.” We can call them – with the bluntness characteristic of the radical Right – simply losers. That’s a loaded term if there ever was one, so it bears recapitulating what “loser” really means, what it meant historically, and what it means today. A loser, I’d wager, is not someone who tries and loses (fails), but who shows a consistent pattern of not winning, be it from constant loss or a lack of trying with no sign of improvement; i.e., no antifragility to defeat. Personally, I’ve a long litany of failures and unvictories behind me, but each loss makes me tougher, meaner, and hurts less than the previous one. A guy who gets beaten down time and time again only to get up bigger and badder is not a loser, even if he consistently loses. A loser, rather, would seem to be someone who gets weaker with every defeat – who loses heart, courage, vim, and vigor every time the blows land upon him. And God be praised, the blows do land, each more terrible than the last. I guess the difference between a loser and a not-loser is how one leaves the arena in defeat: whimpering like a whipped cur or with spiteful defiance, vowing vengeance between gritted and broken teeth.”

     Here we all hate centralised power, as represent by the modern state because such power intrinsically corrupts and ultimately self-destructs. But there are other good metaphors for the evil nature of the state, one coming from parasitology, which I particularly like, and share it now:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-20/woke-capitalism-answering-question-nobody-asked
  https://internationalman.com/articles/woke-capitalism-answering-a-question-nobody-asked/

“In theory, the purpose of the State—which itself is congealed force—is to protect its citizens within its bailiwick from illegitimate force. That means police to protect you from force within the country, a military to protect you from outside force, and a court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force. But the State has gone far, far, beyond those boundaries. In fact, it does none of those three things well today. Instead, it tries to control every other aspect of life, at the expense of its subjects. That’s why everything has become politicized in the US. Americans have come to see the State as their parent, so they’re constantly pleading with it, like children, asking it for favors and benefits. Like children, they expect the State to magically support them. They don’t seem to understand that the State isn’t a cornucopia. It’s the opposite. It’s a dangerous parasite. A huge tapeworm in the body of society. Over the last 100 years the average American’s mind has been captured by the idea of politics and the State. It’s the Stockholm syndrome—where people are captured by kidnappers and actually grow to love and support them—writ large. Where's this trend going to go?

     In the New World order regime of total domination, control and oppression, the plebes will probably be offered Islam as the globalist religion, or at least in what remains of the West, where the great payback, and playback, is taking place. As for China, well, who knows, so long as they behave themselves and keep churning out consumer goods, they can pretty much do what they like, as for Africa, where resources are to be surrendered to China and the globalist rest.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2018/08/04/china-is-treating-africa-the-same-way-european-colonists-did/#4f324216298b
  https://www.thecollegefix.com/immigrant-student-loses-miss-world-title-because-she-refused-to-try-on-a-hijab/

“Does pageant ‘advocate for the punishment of women who refuse to wear a hijab’? Beauty pageant officials wanted this outspoken winner to be quiet and submissive. Nevertheless, she persisted. University of Michigan student Kathy Zhu is savaging the Miss World America competition for revoking her Miss Michigan title just a day after crowning her, the Detroit News reports. Zhu, also a College Republicans leader, tweeted an email from Michigan Director Laurie DeJack that blamed her social media posts for the decision to revoke her title. They are “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate,” violating the competition’s boilerplate rules about bringing MWA “into disrepute” through a contestant’s “background,” DeJack wrote, copying National Director Michael Galanes and Chief Operating Officer Robert Gandara on the email. The posts in question came from the past two years. While she was still a University of Central Florida student, Zhu (second from right above) criticized a “Muslim Student Association event that invited students to try on a hijab” in 2018, the News reports: “So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing?”

     One core reason for eliminating the universities as they now stand is that they are the breeding rounds for socialism, primarily from the Arts/Farts, Humanities and so-called Social Sciences. The socialist turn for US campuses, and Australia, in these black magic disciplines of unutterable evil, is likely to be the same or even worse, has been confirmed by a recent survey:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-19/how-leftist-echo-chamber-became-new-norm-campus

“A new study of student attitudes about socialism and capitalism provides strong confirmation of the echo chamber effect taking hold of these same disciplines. College students as a whole have a roughly even divide in their political beliefs, with a clear plurality classifying themselves as moderates and smaller groups identifying on both the left and right of center. In the humanities, however, the political left overwhelmingly dominates the student landscape as well as the faculty. According to a recent survey by College Pulse, 78 percent of philosophy majors, 64 percent of anthropology majors, and 58 percent of English majors state that they hold the economic and political system of socialism in a favorable light. Unfavorable, opinions of socialism account for only 21 percent of philosophy, 20 percent of anthropology, and 24 percent of English majors, with the remainder undecided.

     Northern European Whites (Nordics), simply do not breed well in cities. I think it was Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) who saw that mass urban life spelt the demographic doom for this once great sub-race. South East Asians have no problem having large families in cities, and nor do Africans, but Whites get totally caught up in consumerism and playing with things, so that having children becomes too hard. And, a system has been created with feminism, and tyrannical schools, that are also expensive, so that few want to breed anymore. Best to eat, drink and drug out, and let it all wither on the vine, the decayed fruit of the West.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/

“New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

     Although the deplorables have been getting stirred up by Trump’s empty “send ‘em back” rhetoric, directed to the “Squad,” the real problem is within the ranks, and has been for some centuries. It is as if some virus of the mind has infected the West, so that even though impressive achievements have been made, it has been done in the context of increasing health burden, just as athletes on steroids can perform fine for a time, before dying of strokes and heart attacks.
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/19/white-liberals-driving-democrat-partys-immigration-platform/

“White liberals have been driving the Democrat Party’s pro-mass immigration, open borders ideology over the last few years, research finds. The New York Times‘ Thomas Edsall highlights in his weekly column the growth in support among white liberals over the last two decades for endless illegal and legal immigration to the U.S., a central motivating factor for why elected Democrats have abandoned their past views and favor the donor class approach to immigration and national borders. In 1993, then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) called for an end to granting American birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, saying “no sane country” would allow such a policy.

     When I first said on another site when Epstein was first arrested, and given a sweet heart deal, that he was some intelligence operative of the global Deep State, I got emails mocking me (it was, a now defunct US Christian conservative site). But now this theory is really taking off:
  http://www.unz.com/gatzmon/epstein-007/

“It is possible that Epstein is just an ordinary paedophile, a slave to his own sick depravity. But this now seems unlikely, it leaves too many questions unresolved: why did Epstein build a sex trafficking network? Why did he seek the company of the world’s most influential characters? Why did he schlep all those royals, once and future presidents, Harvard professors and movie stars around the world in his ‘Lolita Express’? And then we get to the big question: how did he get away with it all? Back in 2007, registered sex offender Epstein was supposed to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Instead he spent a mere thirteen months in a VIP prison. The Daily Beast reported yesterday that when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of US labor secretary by the Trump administration’s transition team, Acosta’s conduct in the Epstein affair came under scrutiny. In that interview Acosta allegedly said, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

     First, at least the laws of arithmetic have not yet been rejected by the politically correct. Thus, Cortes and the conquistadors battled the Aztec empire from 1519-1521. However, the events to be described in South America happened in 1450. Columbus only reached the Americas in 1492, so there was no chance that white racism caused this, or is there???
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-07-20-mass-grave-discovered-in-peru-children-animal-sacrifice.html
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6778541/Worlds-largest-mass-sacrifice-discovered-South-America-140-children-slaughtered.html

“The slaughter of hundreds of young children and llamas in 15th century Peru may have been in response to a huge El Nino. More than 140 boys and girls aged between five and 14 were slaughtered in what is thought to be a mass sacrifice to appease the gods of a now extinct religion. Many of the children and juvenile animals had their hearts cut out during the grisly ritual. It is thought a huge El Niño caused major flooding and storms which triggered the bloody sacrifice. Analysis of the remains of more than 200 juvenile llamas and humans dates it to approximately 1450, during the peak of the Chimu civilisation in northern coastal Peru. The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas burial site is a 7,500 square foot area located less than half a mile from the Chimu's capital Chan Chan, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

     Although a Christian, I stopped going to my local church here in Florida years ago, once it got swamped by diversity. In fact, to keep bums on seats, it recruited diversity. This was the church that my parents, who were from Texas, got married in. Thus, it does not surprise me that the churches here, as they would do in your country, have mobilised to defend illegal aliens:
  https://www.apnews.com/e5d8464b18fc4c3e870d6e0a4bbf7490

“As a nationwide immigration crackdown loomed, religious leaders across the country used their pulpits Sunday to quell concerns in immigrant communities and spring into action to help those potentially threatened by the operation. A Chicago priest talked during his homily about the compassion of a border activist accused of harboring illegal immigrants, while another city church advertised a “deportation defense workshop.” Dozens of churches in Houston and Los Angeles offered sanctuary to anyone afraid of being arrested. In Miami, activists handed out fliers outside churches to help immigrants know their rights in case of an arrest. “We’re living in a time where the law may permit the government to do certain things but that doesn’t necessarily make it right,” said the Rev. John Celichowski of St. Clare de Montefalco Parish in Chicago, where the nearly 1,000-member congregation is 90 percent Hispanic and mostly immigrant. While federal immigration officials were mum on details, agents had been expected to start a coordinated action Sunday targeting roughly 2,000 people, including families, with final deportation orders in 10 major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

     With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by Apollo 11, it was inevitable that the radical Leftoids would say the only thing they know; racism, squawk, racism. White privilege. Racism. Squawk.
  https://www.rt.com/usa/464403-nasa-white-men-moon-apollo/

“Attempts to diminish the triumph of Apollo 11 and to reassign credit don’t just taint the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, but presage the technological decline of the US if it persists with identity politics. With the Founding Fathers now rarely mentioned in the media without side notes about their slave ownership, and the Betsy Ross flag offensive to Colin Kaepernick and Nike, there is nothing new about liberal attempts to strike at the very heart of American identity. But – leaving aside the conspiracy theorists – the moment Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the Moon on July 20, 1969 was objectively such a universal milestone that to qualify it seems a fight against human endeavor itself. It would seem like the more logical route, for those who resent that this was a feat of white un-woke America, would be to try and diminish their role in favour of supposedly unsung heroes. Hidden Figures, the Oscar-winning film from 2016 was the perfect archetype of this revisionist history, exaggerating and fictionalizing the role of a cadre of politically suitable black women, who did an entirely replaceable job and were no more important than thousands of others involved.

     Why the interest by the global elite in outer space? Is it that they were Star Trek fans in their larva stage of their metamorphosis, or is there something more?
  https://www.truthdig.com/articles/why-are-billionaires-like-jeff-bezos-so-obsessed-with-space/

“Billionaires like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, among others, are displaying profound enthusiasm in regard to the notion of exploiting space. Their interest appears to go well beyond space tourism for the thrill-seeking one-percenters, even though that’s what gets most of the media attention. As Cathal O’Connell reports for Cosmos Magazine, “Already companies are sending up 3D printers to produce replacement tools in space. Next we could see orbiting factories making products for sale on Earth or automated robots constructing satellites the size of a football field.” If this all seems as exotic as those old 1930s “Flash Gordon” films did to the audiences of the day, recall that the experience of the Apollo 11 moon landing showed that reality has a way of catching up quickly to Hollywood fantasy (it also shows that when sufficient government resources are harnessed to a higher common purpose, good results can happen surprisingly quickly and efficiently). Once the likes of Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others find a way to economically hoist heavy machinery into space (and it is becoming more economic), permanent “off-Earth” manufacturing could become a reality. But this raises an interesting issue: who chooses the technological alternatives that set out our future?