Month: May 2024

Sunnyside Saturday

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It’s Saturday and that’s the happiest day of the work week (in my opinion).  And so today can’t be doom and gloom day.  No end of the world stuff or triumphant deep state conspiracy theories for me today.

I was just watching a YouTube video about why commercial nuclear fusion is fifty years away and always will be (ha ha).  And of course there were no surprises there.  The sheer magnitude of the temperatures, pressures, magnetic flux and energy consumption needed to make this process work is beyond daunting.  It’s technical lunacy.  When you look at where nuclear fusion does exist (a star), what you realize is that this is an environment where gravity can compete against the electromagnetic force head-to-head.  That is not going to happen in our labs and factories.  So, we have to pay for magnetic containment and we pay by the gigawatt-hour.  It’s not a good trade-off.

When I try to imagine what practical controlled nuclear fusion would look like I conjure up a tiny gun shooting tritium nuclei, one at a time, into a target of heavy water and boiling the heavy water to make steam.  It’s my version of the “Back to the Future,” Mr. Fusion engine that runs Doc Brown’s time machine at the end of the movie.  The breakthrough is that I’m able (by magic) to keep the energy expenditure for the tritium gun down to the level of what I can extract from a USB cable on my MP3 player.  Of course, where I get the radioactive tritium from and how I keep myself from being irradiated while riding in my fusion powered car are at this point undetermined.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Given a thousand years I think we’ll make real progress on commercial nuclear fusion or find out it’s not feasible.  And I think research on it is a very good idea, if for no other reason than that it will spawn innumerable amazing technological byproducts that may be even more beneficial than the primary problem.  But I think we should all put aside any dreams of living in a world powered by nuclear fusion (unless some wise guy figures out that cold fusion is an actual thing).

But all of this is just the intro to my main thought.  And that is what would life on Earth be like if energy really were essentially free.  Now I don’t mean free, free.  The infrastructure for breeder reactors and handling their waste products will be an incredibly complicated and expensive industry that will employ a good chunk of the technically minded part of the population.  And maintaining a power grid and the other allied industries that will grow up around very cheap electricity (e.g., syn-fuel) has always been a big piece of modern life.

But imagine if you can what kinds of problems would be solvable if essentially limitless power were available.  For instance, what if desalination of sea water could be accomplished at a scale to be able to farm the Sahara Desert?  Think of the engineering projects that become feasible if power is no longer a problem.

And all chemical synthesis is available if the power to provide the potential to run the reaction in your direction is provided.  We could even start making cars out of metal again.  I’ve always dreamed of having a car that was immune to road salt corrosion.  Hastelloy C, Tantalum, or boring old titanium?

But the best part of all is imagining that my electric bill for my home heating and cooling and lighting is zippity doo dah all the way up to some pretty impressive electrical usage.  Hell, even I would give up my oil heat and use resistance heating just for the sake of getting rid of that damn furnace that’s always breaking down.  And I want them to throw in free fuel for my car up to let’s say a couple of thousand miles worth a week.  Ah, what a wonderful world it could be without technophobes.

Alright, all optimism for the week officially used up.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 18MAY2024 – 1914 and Now

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1914 could have been avoided, the use of chemical weapons by the Germans brought the English, and other western countries into what was just another small expansionist move by Germany. They had been going to war appx every 20 years for almost a century, without getting anyone else drug into it, as they slowly nibbled away at the eastern border of France in the purpose of taking the mineral and industrial rich eastern sections of France one bite at a time. These wars were fought mostly to move the border a small amount at a time, in response to past Napoleonic incursions into German territories, and until the use of gas were ignored for the most part by the rest of the world. We have no more right to the Ukrainian conflict than the German had to the French attacks. We have violated all of our promises of no membership to NATO, and no Eastward expansion which would allow us to garrison adjacent to the Russians border. We almost went to war in 62 over Soviet weapons in Cuba, and that was with a 90 mile ocean channel between their forces and ours, would we allow China to build a military base in Vancouver BC, Russia to build a base in Baja California, without protest?

The Biden-Trump Debates

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Donald Trump has agreed to debate Joe Biden twice.  Once in July on CNN and once in September on ABC.  Why would he agree to go on those networks where every moderator they will select will run the debate as blatantly against Trump as they possibly can?  They’ll shamelessly tilt the questions for Biden and against Trump.  They’ll cut out his microphone whenever it might save Biden from an embarrassing moment and they’ll end by declaring that their in-studio polls show that Joe Biden won handily and Donald Trump is Hitler.

Now all of this is true.  And Donald Trump knows all these things.  And yet he accepted the debates immediately.  I’ll assume that he believes that he has more to gain by these debates than lose.  But is that true?  I was thinking about what kinds of things the moderator could direct against Trump and score points against him.  Obviously, they’ll concentrate on January 6th and abortion.  But they might also throw in some COVID questions.  After all, many on the Right are fairly angry at Trump for letting Fauci and his minions make our lives hell even before Biden got into office.  Reminding people of that could be a way to hurt Trump.

Someone in the media suggested that Trump hasn’t completely agreed to all the conditions of the interviews and that he might still refuse at the last minute.  Maybe that’s true and could explain why he has no qualms about being set up by the news channels.  But refusing after the fact would represent an embarrassing retreat.  People might think he’s afraid to debate Biden.

Two possibilities for accepting seem to me the most likely.  The first is that he’s worried about his chances in the race and hopes for some kind of lucky break during the debate that would increase his chances of winning the election.  Although Trump has led almost throughout the election period there are still several swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that are very close.  And Trump needs at least one of these states to win.  Maybe he thinks that these three states are among the ones that will be strongly influenced by a good debate performance.  Because of how much Trump has at stake in the criminal cases against him, winning the presidency is almost a life and death situation for him.  Maybe the extra chance to impress these voters seems extremely important to Trump for this reason.

A second reason why he may be so anxious to debate Biden is that he is convinced that he can utterly humiliate him on the debate stage and this will serve as the knockout punch for Biden’s candidacy.  I think this may be the more likely reason.

Now it remains to be seen how all this turns out.  After all this is a very dynamic scenario.  Let’s start out just by looking at Joe Biden’s health.  Based on how these things are handled by the Biden camp, Dopey Joe will be doped to the gills with some kind of cognitive booster; caffeine, amphetamines, Ritalin, whatever.  Based on no information at all, my guess is Joe stroking out must be at least a reasonably high possibility.  And even if he doesn’t keel over there’s no guarantee that the stuff coming out of his mouth won’t be in the, “cannibals ate my Uncle Bosey” level of daffiness.  If either of those two scenarios play out, I’d call it a win for Trump.

But the opposite scenario can also occur.  Biden could just stand there and spin lie after lie with absolute insouciance.  This would match up to what happened back in the 2020 debates.  The moderators took Biden’s side and his lies ended as the debate’s points against Trump in the press.

But things have changed quite a bit since 2020.  Regardless if the moderators throw softballs at Biden, I assume Trump will go off script and attack Biden on all the various failures of his administration; inflation, immigration, crime and war.  And Trump is one of the most vindictive guys around.  With a little luck he’ll sting him enough so that Biden will take off on some self-justifying lie that will amaze even the moderators in its stupidity and obvious unlikeliness.  Maybe that’s Trump’s biggest hope in all this. That he can wind up Biden enough to make him act like a nut on stage.

So, I’ll be watching in July.  Should be interesting.

What Will We Stumble into Next?

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What if the Europe of 1914 had figured out a way to avoid the Great War?  What would European civilization look like today?  Would the colonial empires have maintained their existence and by now have coalesced into a world completely dominated and controlled by Europe and its descendants?  Would the scientific and commercial progress of this civilization have produced the first truly global state?

It’s an interesting question.  But I think very mistaken.  World War I (and World War II) happened because they had to happen.  Humans (and Europeans specifically) have been struggling for the last five hundred years with the results of the Enlightenment.  Enormous technological and sociological change have engulfed the world and we are nowhere near figuring out how to harness these changes safely.

And just in time to finish off what’s left of western civilization, we have Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland playing nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin.  For eighty years the existential nature of the nuclear threat has kept both the Americans and the Russians on their best behavior when it came to serious escalation.  But all that has changed over the last decade or so.  The CIA and the State Department have been embarked on a progressively more provocative series of “color” revolutions.  And now they’ve culminated in the Ukraine War as the capstone.  At least a hundred and fifty billion dollars of American aid and billions more euros have been transferred to Ukraine and something like a half-million Ukrainian lives have been sacrificed in this endeavor and now the neo-cons have pulled out all the stops and will allow the Ukrainians to use F-16s and long-range missiles into Russia proper.  And Putin has responded with statements to the effect that tactical nuclear weapons will now be on the table if western offensive weapons are used in Russia.

It doesn’t appear that we have many more tosses left before something pretty bad is going to happen.  If I were to guess what will precipitate the escalation, I’d say that it will be a major missile strike on Moscow.  The Russians will respond with a major attack on the western cities in Ukraine and I assume they’ll attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian military along with killing Zelinsky.  The question is whether they think they have to use a tactical nuke to achieve this.

But either way, the escalation will be extreme and the number of civilian deaths will be measured in the thousands.  Now, it’s somewhere in this part of the escalation that I think we could see this whole thing spin completely out of control.  Direct attacks on Moscow will eventually radicalize Putin’s reactions to this strategy.  And especially if the civilian casualties are high, we run the risk that the attacks on Western Ukraine could spill over into Eastern Europe and trigger a retaliatory strike from Poland on Russian territory.  And from there we have a direct path to a nuclear exchange.

Biden and Blinken seem to be the caliber of idiot that we could expect to bring on a nuclear war for absolutely no good reason at all.  When people look back on this, they’ll probably try to identify the ideological reasons why war broke out at this time.  What they should look for are Joe Biden’s college transcripts and Antony Blinken’s psych evaluation.  For once the villain won’t be artificial intelligence.  It will be lack of intelligence.