Month: December 2022

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough – Not So Much

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There was a giant uproar, “On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion.”

Specifically, the breakthrough was,

“In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That’s the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.”

But, not so fast!!!!!

“As we noted above, the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.”

So, the real situation is that if we expend 300 MJ of electricity, we get 3 MJ of heat in return.  Then we can take that heat and heat a hot water loop and extract some fraction of that energy as electricity.  Woohoo!

“Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.”

Sixty years of R&D and they’re still two orders of magnitude away from breaking even!  Calling this a breakthrough is beyond pathetic.  But instead, the idiots in charge of our national energy policy ignore fission plants.  Plants that produce gigawatts of electric power day in and out.  Honestly, we’re led by idiots practicing to be imbeciles.

Well, what can I say?  These people are completely predictable and completely clueless.  But at least they keep Ph.D. candidates employed for decades on end.  Well, the road to perdition is at least clearly paved.  Send in the clowns.

What Could Twitter Be?

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All of the revelations about government directed shadow banning on Twitter of conservatives and other opponents of various government policies is very interesting and may help to convince some few remaining idiots who haven’t already seen what’s perfectly obvious to most people of normal intelligence.  But I don’t see that it will accomplish any practical result.

But what would be really useful is if Musk decides that providing a legitimate commercial platform for non-Leftists is a profitable business model.  Of course, this is a question that hasn’t been answered.  Now, Jeff Bezos was eventually able to make Amazon very profitable.  But he had the advantage that he was able for many years to provide his customers with a product line that avoided all state sales tax.  And Google was able to capitalize on government contracts to fund their capture of the worldwide advertising market.

But what’s left for Musk to capture?  Twitter is a political gossip column and little else.  If kept in its current form it’s really not good for much.  So, what was Musk thinking when he spent $44 billion for it?

For that kind of investment, he must be looking at something enormous.  My guess is that he’s looking at some kind of integrated on-line service platform.  The question is how he plans to steal a march on his competitors.  So, if you are eying the revenues that Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal and Amazon have, how do you steal away some of them?

His first step was easy.  Fire the worthless two thirds of your employees that spend their time in yoga and meditation rooms and demand results from the remaining people.  Right there he’s practically made the company profitable.  But after that he needs to find the future of digital enterprise.

And it’s not going to be something idiotic like Zuckerberg’s ridiculous metaverse.  Thinking the world is going to be revolutionized by everybody walking around wearing VR headsets is close to moronic.  It’s going to be something that uses artificial intelligence for something more than advertising.  Currently Silicon Valley has just been shilling for the woke powers that be who are looking to eliminate the great unwashed (meaning us).

A way to utilize artificial intelligence in a profitable and useful way is to provide those who are currently being ostracized and silenced with a platform to organize and accomplish useful things.  And not just political organizing.  In fact, the cultural and commercial aspects are even more important and desperately needed.

In fact, what Musk could make the most money on is streaming entertainment.  There is such a drought of enjoyable content that he could get his whole $44 Billion back on that alone.  When was the last time there was anything actually funny put out on television or in the movies?  Other than Dave Chapelle everyone is so afraid of offending someone by saying something actually funny that they’re reduced to just insulting straight white men, the only allowable target for abuse.

And there are many other forbidden enterprises that Musk and his partners can get involved with.  Being one of the original creators of PayPal makes it certain that he could add financial functions to his platform.  It could include payment processing, crowd funding, and even normal banking services.  Grateful customers would be more than happy to throw their other on-line business his way.  He just has to make it simple to get started.

He could steal a page from Amazon and get into self-publishing.  He could build a better smart phone.  I’ve heard he’s even considering starting his own news network.  There are all kinds of opportunities.  He could even become a site host for all the folks who’ve been de-platformed.

And these are just the things that occur to a regular guy like me.  Surely super-genius Elon Musk can produce ideas that are a thousand times better and more lucrative.  So come on, Elon get cracking, we’re getting tired of waiting.

12DEC2022 – OCF Update – Back in Winter Form

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As forecast we got a couple inches of snow last night and after breakfast I set to work clearing the driveway.  Since it was a small total I decided to forego the snowblower and just use the old snow shovel from last year.  Well two and a half hours later it was done.

So much for that COVID from last week and as far as I know this makes myocarditis or endocarditis from the vaccines I took last year much less likely.  After all a few hours of vigorous cardio-exercise should have induced heart failure if those conditions were present so, take that Fauci and company.

After my morning chore the rest of today was a day for relaxation and enjoyment.  I watched the 1951 British version of “A Christmas Carol” with Alistair Sim and later the 1938 Hollywood version with Reginald Owen.  They were very enheartening.  And I had the Monday zoom call.  The boys were in high spirits and we discussed Christmas menus and the coming gatherings.  We also discussed Elon Musk’s recent releases of transcripts of the plots to shadow ban conservatives.  They felt some good would come from these revelations.  I was less hopeful.  We all agreed that the Democrats would use every minute until the end of the congressional session spending every last penny they could before their loss of the House majority.

So the week begins well.  Christmas approaches and the nonsense in Washington becomes less and less interesting to me.  But of course I’ll follow the news just to see if they can shock an already jaded world.  After all thermonuclear war is still a rabbit to be pulled out of their hat.

Gone With the Wind

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2020 was a watershed year for how Americans thought about their country.  In the same year we witnessed:

  • the government’s tyrannical use of lockdowns over the COVID virus,
  • federal and local law enforcement’s abandonment of innocent citizens to the homicidal mobs that were unleashed by the George Floyd madness and
  • the spectacle of wholesale voter fraud being openly displayed in the Democrat strongholds of swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona during the presidential election.

2022 just reinforced the sense that normal Americans no longer have a say in how their government is run and in fact are viewed as the enemy by the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, the public-school teachers and big business.  If any final proof was needed that there is a far-reaching conspiracy to disenfranchise and discredit normal Americans then reading the reports from Elon Musk on how the government and Twitter management suppressed and silenced any conservative voices over COVID or any other meaningful dissent should cover that nicely.

Before 2020 we thought that we were vying with the Left for control of the levers of power in an America that was troubled but fixable.  After 2020 many, many of us know that the whole political set-up is a sham.  We know that the federal courts and Department of Justice are a sham that provides a two-tier system of justice depending on whether you are a Democrat operative or not.  We know that vote counting can be drawn out for days or weeks in order to “find” additional votes needed to change an election result.

We’ve seen urban crime become a joke with revolving door justice for repeat offenders who commit anything from massive retail theft to gang banging murder.  But we’ve seen political enemies jailed without hope of bail for years at a time for misdemeanors like trespassing.  And we’ve watched a feckless military turn the withdrawal from Afghanistan into a rout while bringing us to the brink of nuclear war in the Ukraine because they don’t like Putin’s policy on gays.  We’ve seen our economy cratered and inflation destroy our standard of living, because nitwit greens think fossil fuels are evil.

We’ve watched all this and we’ve watched half the country approve of all this.

So, what’s my point?

My point is you can’t unsee this.

There are probably at least thirty percent of the people in this country that will never believe in the old concept of the United States again.  That belief has been sand blasted out of them.  All that’s left is the reality of what really goes on here.  Any appeals to their patriotic spirit or their feelings of fellowship with their fellow Americans will at most summon up a feeling of nausea.  All of their loyalty is now for their friends and family or whatever local community of normal people that they belong to.  Their feeling of belonging to a group that includes people who voted for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi is weaker than the bonds they share with Jeffrey Dahmer or some other deranged psychopath.

Their opinion of government organizations like the CDC, FBI and IRS corresponds to what they used to think about the KGB, the Mafia or al Qaeda.  They know they are filled with evil unscrupulous people working against their interests.

And what will be the result of this change in feelings toward this country?

Well, I have to confess I don’t know.  Maybe nothing.  Our enemies may be so much smarter and more powerful than us that our hatred of them is completely meaningless.  They will bury us and change over this country into the global paradise they intend where even our graves will be blotted out when they build back better.  Maybe they’ll go from strength to strength and never even look back.  So be it.

But I tend to doubt it.  For one thing they don’t really seem to be that smart.  They believe in things like green energy that just don’t make any real sense.  And the people they favor (like the trans freaks) are extremely dysfunctional.  And the way they run their cities borders on the insane.  I tend to believe if we leave them to their own devices without trying to fix their mistakes, they’ll run themselves into a pretty deep ditch sooner or later.  My way of thinking is that we should concentrate on the places we control and do our best to exclude the Left and their policies to the best of our abilities.  And when they crash their areas be ready to salvage what can be saved and let the rest sink back into cannibalism.

So that’s my takeaway.  Old America is dead and buried.  We need to take advantage of the real world we live in now without sentiment or false ideas about who our countrymen are.  The Left is our enemy and seeing them fail is a victory for us.  Whatever we can game out of the current system is to our advantage but the idea of being treated fairly by the powers that be is nonsense.  Wake up and see things for how they really are and you’ll stand a better chance of surviving in the world that is.