Author: photog

The Putin Interview

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I’ve previously read a transcript of Putin’s apologia for the Ukrainian war so I’m relatively familiar with his thesis.  Now without a doubt he frames it all to put Russia in the most sympathetic light and there are obvious chapters where he is painting some actions, like Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler over Poland, in a false light.  But I guess there are plenty of chapters of American history where one man’s patriotic battle is another man’s shameful massacre.

But what he does successfully demonstrate is that Kiev was the original home of the Rus, or as we call it now the Russian nation.  And that Ukraine has been an integral part of Russia for longer than the United States has been a nation.  And although countries do split and become separate nations the Ukraine contains millions of people who have always considered themselves Russians and who were disenfranchised by the government in Kiev when the anti-Russian coup took over in 2014.

It’s also clear that Putin believes that the history of Russia and the West since the fall of the Soviet Union is dotted with promises that were made by the West and broken whenever it was convenient.  And I have read many American accounts that confirm the specific assurances that the West gave to the Soviets and the Russians and their eventual abandonment.

With respect to what Putin wanted to say I think he succeeded in speaking his mind.  But from a communications perspective there are definite weaknesses in this event.  First of all, the interview was translated from Russian by an interpreter.  Secondly, the speech was two hours long.  In the third place, the first half hour was a Russian history lesson beginning around the year 800 AD and extending down to 1992 before it even began to touch on the relevant causes of the present war.

I mean I found it fascinating but I’m a weirdo who loves ancient history and was impressed how he wove in the ethnographic origins of the people currently inhabiting the various areas of Ukraine.  So, the propaganda value of Putin’s explanation of the origins of the war won’t reach the folks on TikTok with three second attention spans.

But one thing it did do was demonstrate to anyone with a brain that Vladimir Putin is a highly intelligent individual who believes that he has taken the only reasonable course available to him to defend his people from attack by the West.

Parenthetically, I was evaluating the style and substance of the words and ideas that Putin used; both the history lesson which is clearly something that he has worked over previously and his extemporaneous answers to some of the interrupting questions that Tucker Carlson asked along the way.

One of the interrupting questions in particular elicited a very interesting response.  When Carlson asked Putin whether the fracturing of the monopolar world, we lived under during the American hegemony meant that the two hemispheres would diverge, Putin amusingly noted that the human brain has two hemispheres that have separate functions but that unless they work together the mind becomes severely dysfunctional.  This struck me to be the response of a very lively intellect.

In general, I got the impression of a man who is a realist that has seen some of the worst disasters befall his country.  But at the same time, he appears to be an optimist about the future.  It’s an interesting combination.

I don’t completely discount the possibility that the whole performance was a cynical charade disguising an evil monster whose real intent is to conquer the world.  But I wouldn’t pick that as the more likely choice.  I think what we saw was pretty close to who Putin is.

And as leaders go, he’s a lot more interesting and formidable than someone like Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau.  I suspect that Putin will be remembered as being an important leader whereas Biden will be declared a disaster in American leadership.

Another thing that I noted is how strange Tucker Carlson looks while listening to interviews.  His expression is extremely strained.  But I give him full marks for setting up this discussion.  I hope he sets up a permanent news and opinion service.  I’d happily pay a reasonable fee to follow it.  Kudos Tucker.

Fusion Versus Fission, The Sad Story

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science ,

Joe Biden loves windmills and solar panels.  He’s happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building them and hiding the actual costs associated with creating and maintaining them and hiding the actual real-world electrical capacity they represent.  And he underwrites temporary discounts to power companies and private citizens who fall for his grift.

But on a much smaller basis Joe Biden loves him some nuclear fusion.  And the basis is smaller because all the fusion he can buy is laboratory fusion.  Laboratory fusion is a research and development creature.  Large universities with generous DOE and DOD funding get millions (not billions) of dollars to build very powerful lasers to shoot at really tiny pellets of various isotopes of hydrogen and lithium and helium, trying to get them to fuse together to form heavier elements and thereby releasing relatively large bursts of fusion energy.

In 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was able to get more energy out of a fusion event than the amount of laser energy put in.  I believe the ratio was 1.5/1.  So, it got out 50% more energy than it put in.

And of course, the crowd went wild!  Yay!!!!!!  Unlimited energy!  Almost for nothing!

Yeah sure.  What is neglected isn’t mentioned until the end of the article:

“Plenty of other obstacles remain than those noted above, too. Current calculations compare energy generated against the NIF laser’s output, but that brushes over the fact that the lasers draw more than 100 times the power from the grid than any fusion reaction yields. That means either energy gains or laser efficiency would need to improve by two orders of magnitude to break even in any practical sense. The NIF’s fuel pellets are also extremely expensive, says Kritcher, each one pricing in at an estimated $100,000. Then, producing a reasonable amount of power would mean dramatically increasing the frequency of NIF’s shots—a feat barely on the horizon for a reactor that requires months to load up the next nanosecond-long burst.”

So, let’s review.  They put in a hundred times more energy than they produce.  Each tiny pellet costs $100,000.  They only fuse a few atoms every few months.  The infrastructure is state of the art “giant lasers” that probably cost a cajillion dollars to build and ten cajillion dollars to maintain.

Based on these “obstacles” my engineering intuition says the likely date of commercial implementation is about five years after the heat death of the universe.  Give or take.

Joking aside.  Give me a break.  This is right up there with world peace and practical communism for impossible dreams.  But the author ends off this depressing list of obstacles by saying:

“Those are the biggest challenges,” Mordijck says. “But I think if we overcome those, it’s really not that hard at that point.”

Here he sounds like every crackpot who wants money to invent time travel or faster than light space craft or perpetual motion.

In the far future I think we’ll extract energy from geothermal sources.  In the immediate future we’ll use fossil fuels and nuclear fission reactors.  Nuclear fusion will require breakthroughs in physical science and engineering that currently aren’t even imagined.

When I was a kid, the Scientific American articles said we were fifty years away from commercial nuclear fusion.  That was fifty-five years ago.  I’m still waiting for my cup of fusion.

Bad is Good

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I’ve read article after article by economists and lefty pundits screaming from the rooftops that the economy is phenomenally good.  It’s so good that only a partisan hack would deny that things are so great that we should skip the election and Joe Biden should be re-elected by acclamation right now.  Chris Hayes had a video in which by turns he was pugnaciously certain that very soon all the gloom and doomers would come around, followed by angrily exasperated that so many people keep expressing dissatisfaction in Biden job satisfaction polls.  “Who are these Putin stooges?” he seems to imply.  “How dare they complain about this incredible “all boats floating” Biden high tide?”

The last guy I read seemed to land on the idea that since the country is riven by dissent and partisan hatred that this is producing a climate of uncertainty that, in turn, leads to unhappiness with the economy and everything else.  It’s interesting that partisan hatred is the problem; not streets full of homeless squatters and rampant crime.  That’s just a rumor.

Now, all of this is just the political theater that goes on in a presidential election year.  When a Republican is the incumbent the media tells us the world is coming to an end.  And when the incumbent is a Dem then all they can say is that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world.  Huzzah!

And usually a goodly number of “moderates” will read these things and say, “Hey, these are smart guys.  This must be true.”

But not this time.

There is a very perceptible change in the mood of the country.  Joe Biden’s approval rating has been flirting with 30%.  That’s disastrous.  Now whenever that number is approached the Dems contract with one of the pliable polling companies to come up with a number closer to 40%.  And no one believes it, but if they do this a few times, it nudges the Real Clear Politics average safely away from the low 30’s.  But as I say, no one believes it.  The changes to the cost of living; food, shelter, fuel and general items has been disastrous for anyone not in the upper, upper middle class.  And for young people hoping to buy a home and start a family it’s apocalyptic.  Everywhere you look you see videos of despairing young people saying they had to give up their apartments and sometimes jobs because they can’t afford to live in the cities.  And young people have been Biden’s and the Democrats’ most reliable voters.  So, there’s no doubt about why this wonderful economy hasn’t been wowing the people being polled.

Okay, so what?

So, nothing maybe.  We know the Democrats can fabricate an enormous number of additional votes by fortifying democracy in urban centers like Philadelphia, Madison, Atlanta and Detroit.  Chances are that’s what they’ll do in November.  After a week or two of discovering bags of votes in the most unlikely places, they’ll wheel old Scranton Joe Biden out for his acceptance speech and Washington DC will get back to business as usual.  So that 30% approval rating might seem to have no practical meaning for us.

And in a sense, it doesn’t.  No one is going to storm the Capitol or the White House.  We’ve seen what happens to those people.  They’re sent to the gulag.  Nope, things are locked down.

And yet.

This is a different country.  Nobody believes the narrative any more.  Even the kids are waking up.  Everything is fake.  And that knowledge and that way of looking at the world will change the way this country performs.  We are becoming a low trust society (at least concerning the federal government and the blue states and cities).  And that changes things like armed forces enlistment and what kind of charities get supported and what organizations people volunteer for.  And it will have a huge impact on where people go to live.  The exodus from California and New York is just the beginning.  All of the states that have pushed the pediatric transgender “affirming treatment” will find that people with kids will think twice before moving there.  And all of the cities that now suffer from endemic theft and violence won’t be seeing much in the way of new residents (except of course for illegal immigrants looking for the expensive benefits of sanctuary).

So, a lot is going to change.  In fact, a lot has already changed because it had to.  The less stupid or less greedy Republican lawmakers already realized that the forever war grift no longer commands the reflexive patriotic approval.  Mike Johnson understands that even if Mitch McConnell is too ossified to see it.

So, things are going to be bad for Dementia Joe.  And that’s good.