Category: Current Events

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

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When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.

Moving on to Something Better

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With millennial women writing articles called; “The Death of Millennial Feminism” and; “Millennial Feminism Is Undead” I guess the patriarchy and I really did win!  Does this mean all the girl bosses and Karens are going to put on their Handmaiden outfits and start making sandwiches for all of us?  Well, not exactly.

These people will always be the most annoying insufferable weirdos they’ve always been.  What it does mean is that they’re reaching their forties and they’ve realized that they’ve run out of time to have normal lives.  They’ve traded in the chance at love and family for lower middle management careers and mean tweets.  And, as it turns out, for women that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Reading through the first article is pretty awful.  All the “body positivity” and “polyamory” nonsense that this crazy woman spouted did nothing to save her from ending up enormously fat and saddled with a husband who she had to allow to bring a normal weight woman into her bed as her way of sticking it to the patriarchy.  The just plain craziness of all the “everything is just a social construct so we can’t invent our own rules” is on exhibit here.  They talked themselves into believing that the differences between men and women were just tools of patriarchal oppression and now that those differences are becoming impossible to ignore, they are panicking.

And so, these articles are the admission of what has been going on for the last few years with the endless YouTube and TikTok videos of thirty something and forty something women shrieking their shocked anger that their thirty something and forty something male equivalents aren’t interested in marrying them or even dating them.  Some of these women do break down and cry.  And I find that sad.  But most of them are just angrily indignant that these men don’t know what they’re missing.  Now, those I find hilarious.  I’m guessing the sad ones are just the angry ones after a few more years of loneliness.  As it turns out the female biological clock isn’t a “social construct.”  It’s a ticking time bomb that every woman ignores at her peril.

So, here’s hoping that the millennial feminism actually is dead.  All it ever brought was anger, confusion and dysfunction into the world.  Let’s hope that the women of Gen Z learn something from their older female relatives that fought the patriarchy and lost their happiness doing it.  Maybe they can find a way to embrace the full reality of being a female human (a woman!) and learn to enjoy the rich heritage that our species has inherited from the biological world we were created within.  The war between men and women is a real thing.  It’s always existed and it always will.  But it’s also just the dance that goes along with sexual reproduction and the rules of our species.  Men are what they are because of their role in the family and so are women.  Sexuality and family are the most rewarding parts of being human.  Let’s hope feminism stays buried and we can move onto something better.

The Serenity Equation

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Modern human life is the story of increased efficiency.  Harnessing ever increasing amounts of energy and directing our enormously expanded knowledge of the physical world around us we have been able to change the way humans live.  We have produced enough food to make the whole world obese and we have created industries that provide modern wonders like cell phones and computers to virtually every man, woman and child on the planet.  We have invented medicines and treatments that have increased the average human life expectancy by decades.

But there is only one commodity that we haven’t been able to increase and that is peace.  And I don’t mean the cessation of war.  I’m talking about tranquility or spiritual serenity or call it just plain peace.  The amount of peace in our lives has been whittled down over the years until presently it’s only experienced for short periods when we are cut off from the world around us.

And that is profoundly wrong.  Human beings need peace to thrive.  And the way the modern world works is to strip away inefficiency from our lives.  But along with the inefficiency, we have stripped away the things that gave our lives meaning and a sense of belonging to something permanent and valuable.  We’re expendable and obsolete almost as soon as we’re grown.  And every day machines are produced that make us even more obsolete.  This isn’t progress.  It’s a death cult.  And it’s the thing that is convincing me that we’re approaching a breaking point.  If this goes on, we will very soon reach a point where human beings will have to destroy the system that is trying to declare them superfluous or they themselves will be destroyed.

Now that sounds melodramatic and apocryphal but I actually believe it to be true.  And it doesn’t mean we’ll have to rise up and smash the factories and eliminate automation with sledgehammers.  Political action is much more efficient.  The people who are automating out of existence the careers of everyone will have to retool to alter their projects so that their products provide resources for humans in their careers.

Now, you may ask how that’s supposed to work.  I really don’t know but that’s what has to happen.  Human beings will not go quietly into that good night.  This is our world.  Being replaced by AI isn’t something we should just sit back and watch happen.  And that is why populist politics is growing in strength.  Everyone is sick of the elites pushing for some sort of feudal future with AI replacing the middle classes and serfs kept around to cut the grass of the rich.

You know come to think of it, maybe sledgehammers are the answer.  A crowd armed with pitchforks and torches showing up at the headquarters of Google and burning it down would go a long way toward changing the way things are done in this country.  Or maybe we institute a “progressive” tax schedule.  It works like this.  If a tech company’s products increase the number of middle-class jobs in an industry within a certain salary range your taxes go down.  If they decrease the number of those jobs they go up.

There, that’s not so hard.

Pass the Paschal Lamb

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Well, Easter has arrived and Camera Girl is killing the fatted calf (well, she’s serving beef anyway).  She’s going all out and in addition to the roast beast there will be lamb and a pasta course with the requisite meatballs and sausage, and various other paschal delicacies like stuffed mushrooms, rice balls and so forth.  So that means we’ll be stuffed to the gills by the time dessert is served.  She’s serving four different homemade cakes and various ice cream flavors along with Klondike Bars which are an especial favorite of several individuals (including me!).

All of this food will incapacitate some of the attendees (including me!).  Probably the girls will avoid the worst ravages as they are more moderate in their grazing and sluicing habits.  Whereas all three generations of men will be fighting over possession of the recliners in the living room to better accommodate their bulging stomachs and comatose brains.  I don’t assume there will be any great demand for movies from this tranquilized crowd but just in case I’m trying to decide what classic cinema I should have queued up for their viewing pleasure.  I think when I was a kid the choices were “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben Hur” or “The Wizard of Oz.”  Now “Ben Hur” is easily lined up with Easter.  “The Ten Commandments” also is linked since the Last Supper occurred on Passover and the movie chronicles the occasion of the first Passover.

But exactly what is the link between Easter and “The Wizard of Oz?”  I guess back in the 1960s the television networks must have had to pay top dollar to air that children’s favorite and they must have thought it would seem even more special if it happened when families gathered for a holiday.  I guess I can continue the tradition this year.  Well, unless the kids stage an insurrection and demand some vapid modern show.

Of course I could go another direction altogether.  A double feature of mid-century science fiction (let’s say “Them!” and “The Thing from Another World”) or W. C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  Both of these options would provide entertainment that greatly exceeds what would typically be found on the cable channels today.

But maybe what we should do instead is even more revolutionary.  Maybe we should sit around and talk.  After all, how often does the family all get together in one place and find out how we’re all doing?  There’s a lot going on in the family.  Businesses are being started, students are entering the work force.  There’s even a romance that will be represented at the table I believe.  That’s a lot to discuss.  Maybe that’s what we should do.  After all, pretty soon those finishing school will start dispersing far and wide and since I’m getting up there who knows how many more times, we’ll meet face to face.  So, I should take the opportunity to spend some time talking to them while I can.  I think that’s what I’ll do.  Let’s see how that works out.

Alone or Unique?

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There are several YouTube channels that use an AI generated voice and image of Richard Feynman (Feynman Reborn, Think Like Feynman, Physics with Feynman) to discuss scientific topics; physics, astronomy, technology, etc.).  Now this does seem a little weird.  Why use the AI simulation of a scientist whose heyday was eighty years ago?  But if you watch a few of them you realize that Feynman’s voice has a very natural and unpretentious style and the authors have tried to match his approach of making the mysteries of science accessible to people who don’t possess sophisticated technical expertise.  Whether he’s explaining quantum mechanics or the impact of mass to energy conversion in a fission reaction, his reasonable, clear speaking style is highly engaging.

Today I was watching a video in which he took the position that the chances of us ever receiving a message from another intelligent civilization travelling around another star was basically zero.  Now, he wasn’t dogmatic.  He freely admitted that the calculations involved contained at least four or five variables that no one really knows the correct probability of.  In other words, how do you determine what the “average” length of time that a technological civilization lasts?  Ours has lasted at most a few hundred years.  But even that is not a real data point.  We still don’t have a way to “send” a signal out to other star systems powerfully enough to be heard.  And we definitely don’t know how long our civilization will last.  So, each of the “factors” for figuring out how many interstellar civilizations there are is either somewhat speculative or just plain guessing.  And by the end of the video, he was championing the case that we will never “hear” from anyone “out there.”

But what was nice was that he openly admitted that he had no authoritative proof and in fact negative proof would always be inconclusive.  And he also said he would love very much to be proven wrong.  I guess I’m really saying I like the way that the maker of the video remained humble in making his case.  Of course, you could say he’s hiding behind the great man by using his image.  But I will admit he’s picked a very good “spokesman” in Feynman.

And of course, this is all very timely with the recent opening of the very popular movie “Project Hail Mary.”  Right now, “Rocky” is a box office star and everyone’s favorite intelligent extraterrestrial rock crab.  But the fact that “Feynman” just told me that Rocky doesn’t exist and that we could never meet him doesn’t destroy the fun and excitement of the story.  Because at the end of the video “Feynman” sums up the situation by saying that even if we are the only intelligent life in the whole cosmos that in no way takes away from the wonder of our existence.  In fact, he counters that if we are unique that makes everything about us more astounding and everything around us more precious; the air, the warmth, the miraculous mechanism of life itself.

02APR2026 – This’N’That

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So, Trump gave his war update.  Well, he’s still the king of hyperbole.  Everything is the biggest and the greatest.  All the damage to Iran is total and catastrophic.  And he went through the length of all the wars the US has fought in from WWI on and after mentioning how many years each of these wars lasted, he said that this war has been going for only one month.  And then he said that it will only take another three weeks to finish bombing Iran into the “stone age.”  Hmmm.

I hope he’s right.  I don’t think staying in Iran for more than a few more weeks is going to help us.  The financial damage will start to build up.  And the chances of large-scale casualties keep growing.  At this point if there is no interest on the part of the Iranian population to rise up against their government by armed insurrection then there isn’t a realistic way of ending the current regime that doesn’t involve an American ground invasion.  So, blast all of the targets we can find and then declare victory and step back to our Middle East bases and block Hormuz and let the Iranians and the Chinese do without their money and oil respectively.  In the meantime, the Europeans can buy Venezuelan oil (at an elevated price of course) and do without their cheap Chinese crap for the time being.

I saw that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the psychiatrist in Colorado who was practicing conversion talk therapy on LGBTQ adolescents versus Colorado’s ban of the procedure.  Now that is interesting.  That’s going to cause a lot of problems in blue states for sure.  Good for the Court.

Now Trump is going to visit the Court during its consideration of whether his executive order banning citizenship to the children of illegal aliens (so-called birthright citizenship) is forbidden by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  I wonder if Trump will request to address the court during these procedures or whether he just wants to show solidarity with his legal team defending his executive order.  Reading the news sites they all stress the fact that the initial questions from the Justices seemed extremely skeptical of the administration’s justification for the executive order.  Well, of course the news sites are.  They all lean to the Left and so they exhibit their preference in every way they can.  But I’m not pessimistic about our chances.  It’s pretty easy to see that the 14th Amendment was enacted to handle a very specific class of people, the former slaves and their descendants.  How this would be relevant today is not in any way clear.  Following the obvious intent is simple and if the Justices use logic, they can easily see that this intent does not extend to the children of people breaking the law by illegally entering this country.  Of course, I may be overly hopeful about the courage of some of the Justices but I’m willing to hold onto my optimism until the decision is handed down.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Time to Make the Donuts

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So, I’m busy, busy, busy with my giveaway on BookFunnel (here’s the link).  I’m also seeing if I can put part or all of it up on a site called Royal Road.  And I’m posting links on my X feed to try to connect with the wider world.  And if any of you want a free copy or have any friends who might like the story, please pass the link along to them.

Well, in addition to all this I’ve been drafted into a publicity campaign for the Dunwich Republicans.  I’ve got to awaken a “sleeping giant.”  But it’s more like a geriatric midget in a coma.  So even if I can drum up new blood, I’m afraid they’ll just show up, hear there’s work to be done and say, “Looks like you’re doing a great job.  CARRY ON!!!

But one must do the best one can.  As old TR used to remind us it’s “The Man in the Arena” that counts.  Unfortunately, I feel more like the Christian being fed to the lions in that arena.

Well, the weather is just as uncertain as ever with one day being seventy degrees and the next day featuring snow flurries but we’ve definitely turned a corner and the Great Southern Ice Sheet is barely a foot thick and receding rapidly.  All the spring flowers are budding and the turtles are sitting on the dead log in the swamp.  The mallards must be awaiting the hatching of their eggs and even the local pair of hawks seem to be hyperactive, probably getting food for their nest.

Listening to Andy Weir talk to the Critical Drinker about his book “The Martian” was kind of exciting.  I think anyone who writes a book secretly desires to be that guy who hits the jackpot and has the world beat a path to his door.  I mean, I know it’s ridiculously unlikely for a number of reasons for my book to be a big seller.  It’s in a very restricted corner of the marketplace based on politics and demographics and trying to get advertising is like pulling teeth.  But I confess I not-so-secretly dream of the book going viral and selling tons and tons of copies.  I guess when the dust settles, I’ll probably be in a funk for a while but I think it was still a good experience to try my hand at something I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager.

And I’ll say that I don’t think that writing a good book is beyond my talents.  But self-publishing and self-marketing is not for the faint of heart.  It takes money and a lot of hard work to promote a book in the current marketplace.  And that’s the part I don’t enjoy at all.  Playing cat and mouse with the Amazon algorithm isn’t my idea of a fun occupation.  It’s more like going to the dentist’s office than something associated with creativity.

Ah well.  Whine, whine, whine.  Time to make the donuts.  Onward and upward.  Excelsior!

Book Funnel Sniper Giveaway

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That’s right get your free pdf copy of “The Sniper.” All that’s needed is to provide your e-mail address and view my harrangue at the end of the book to leave a review on Amazon. What’s fairer than that? Don’t answer that! It’s a rhetorical question as part of my sales pitch.  Let me know if there are any problems with the download.  This is my first attempt to use BookFunnel.

 

Click Here for Link to Sniper Giveaway

 

 

The Reckoning

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I am fascinated by the spectacle of the deep blue states like California and New York.  These places are something like 60% Democrat, 40% Republican so there is no meaningful hope of conservative policies being enacted.  Even when they elect a Republican as governor it’s with a Democrat super-majority in the legislative houses.  So, nothing will change the social policies and even the ruinous fiscal policies can only be tweaked slightly because the public sector unions won’t allow their gravy trains to be interfered with and these entitlements make up an enormous part of the state’s fiscal burdens.

And with all that said, it looks like the days of reckoning may finally be upon these places.  I watched the New York State Governess Hochul begging former New York billionaires who’ve moved to Florida to forgive her and her exorbitant business taxes and ruinous environmental policies and absurd energy costs and come back to New York.  Pretty please with sugar on top.  This was during an interview on Politico about the eroding tax base and its impact on the progressive agenda that New York City Mayor Mamdani was proposing and for which he needed Hochul to approve even more ruinous increases in taxes on corporations and the wealthy.  She tried to explain to the doofus from Politico that places like Florida and Texas don’t have state income taxes and lure corporations like J P Morgan and Tesla out of New York and California by letting them keep most of their money in exchange for bringing jobs and prosperity to their neighborhoods.

And I noted that the two highest ranking candidates in the field for the California governor’s primary are both Republicans.  And since they’ve combined all parties in the primary and then allow only the two highest vote getters into the general election it’s possible that no Democrats will get on the ballot.  Now of course the Democrats in a place like California will do whatever they have to do to rig the election so I’m sure they’ll have a Democrat on the ballot.

But that’s neither here nor there.  The interesting situation is that both of these states (and several other deep blue states) are staring down a complete fiscal meltdown of such mammoth proportions that junk bond status for their state debt is the least of their worries.  And honestly if the Republicans had any brains at all they would refuse to even run any candidates for state office at all.  They should just walk away and let this catastrophe hit their states right between the eyes.  There are so many facets of their situations that are dysfunctional that the next four years may finally wipe out all trace of credibility for the Democrat party.  With the banks leaving New York and the tech companies abandoning California I foresee all those public union retirement funds going completely unfunded very soon.  And with all those baby boomers retiring it will sound like a convention of scorched cats outside the offices in Sacramento and Albany for the foreseeable future.

So, Republicans, get wise to the situation and just step back and watch these bozos get what’s coming to them good and hard.

The American Path

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I was thinking about some of the comments on yesterday’s post “Persistence of Memory.”  It was about detachment, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”

And I replied, “You are correct about the path. We’ve atomized our existence. We’ve monetized our lives to such an extent that we almost don’t exist except as consumers. We’re just cogs in the machine. It’s inhuman.”  And that stuck in my mind.

And today I got a call from a friend whom I knew from high school.  He lives in Hawaii and only comes home to Brooklyn once a year at Christmas.  And we talked about meeting up next Christmas.  Now I haven’t seen him in thirty years.  I wonder if he would even recognize me.  And we’ve managed to speak on the phone every Christmas but we haven’t interacted other than that.  Well, I sent him a copy of my book and he called me up today and it was like a time machine.  He was laughing and saying how he always thought one day I’d write a science fiction story.  He was very complimentary and said he really liked the story and of course that was very gratifying.  But in the back of my mind, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  Here was one of my best friends in the world and I hadn’t seen him for almost half a lifetime.

And so that conversation reinforced the statement, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”  Our way of life is somewhat related to the nomadic existence of herders.  They move to follow the grazing grounds of their herds.  There is no one home.  But our way is even worse.  Because the herders live in tribes or at least extended families that move together from place to place.  But we separate into at most nuclear families and often just single individuals, moving from job to job and city to city without anyone permanently included in their “tribe.”

I’m pretty sure that none of this is sustainable.  And maybe that’s why corporate America is backing a policy of wholesale immigration to provide a steady supply of new workers that Americans are no longer providing from their own descendants.  After all, how do you produce a family when all you are is a nomad living from job to job without a family to prop you up and give you help when things get tough or you need the resources to get married or buy a house or pay for expenses associated with children?

And this gave me an idea for my next book after “The Sniper.”  It should have to do with the smartest and richest guy in the world trying to fix “the American path.”  If someone powerful enough wanted to restore our country to viability, what would he think to do?  Maybe he’d redefine the partnership between communities and corporations.  Would it be a feudal system or a socialism?  Or neither.  I haven’t figured out what my “utopia” will be based on.  Maybe I’ll wave “artificial intelligence” around as my deus ex machina.  But I do want to think about it a little.  How do you go about fixing the world?