Category: Current Events

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.

What Could a Coalition on the Right Look Like?

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According to Joe Biden in his famous 2020 election message to black voters Republicans want to, “put y’all back in chains!”  Well, how could anyone doubt the accuracy of statements by Joe (Cannibals ate my Uncle Bosie) Biden?  But to be fair to Dementia Joe, even with the economy cratering in front of us no one thinks that Donald Trump can get more than a maximum of twenty percent of the black vote.  So, I guess Biden’s strategy isn’t uninformed.

But regardless of how durable the Democrat coalition seems to be, the thinking that needs to be done on the right is what kind of coalition can be created that will last for more than just the disaster that is 2024.

And I’m not thinking of a, “the enemy of my enemy” kind of situation.  I think it’s time to find commonalities with whoever is out there that isn’t diametrically opposed to us.  And I guess I better define who, “us” is.

Well, that’s easy.  Us is anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of the leftist project.  Well, maybe it’s actually easier to say who it isn’t.  It isn’t feminists.  They want to dissolve the family.  It isn’t the LGBTQ.  They want to outlaw normal.  It isn’t the anti-white coalition.  They want to erase me.  It isn’t the climate warriors.  They’re nuts.  It isn’t the communists.  They want to steal our money.  And it isn’t the globalists.  They hate this country.

So, anyone who’s not a part of these groups is “us.”

You might think that eliminates a lot of people.  I’m not so sure.  I don’t think that the “normal” people in this country are outnumbered.  I just think they’ve never been allowed to think of themselves in that context.  For the first time, maybe ever, a Republican presidential candidate may win the Hispanic vote.  Now think about that.  If the Republicans manage to hold onto the majority of the white vote, namely men and married women and also win the Hispanic vote it’s got to be pretty hard for the Democrats to win elections.

And it can get even worse than that.  Democrats are currently winning the “women” vote.  But the amount of fuzzy thinking that is currently going on about abortion and the whole “Handmaiden’s Tale” nonsense that the Democrats feed women is ripe for some pushback.  Young women are finally realizing that they’ve been sold a bill of goods by the Left.  Their dreams of having it all have turned out to be a pretty hollow fiction.  Squandering their twenties and thirties as corporate middle-management drones and then spending their forties desperately trying to find a husband and start a family is hardly, “having it all.”  Of late the talk about a “trad-wife” movement is a little bit overblown but there is definitely something going on that makes me think that organizing young women to join the normal coalition could pay big dividends in the future.

In a way, the hardest group to get on board is the most surprising one too.  It’s the Dissident Right.  These are people that have become so embittered by the consistently anti-white and anti-normal actions of the United States government that they refuse to believe that they can find common cause with anyone but their own ethnic and political grouping.  And from what I’ve read, they’re pretty adamant in their opinions on this.  And I can sympathize with their point of view.  But I think that a situation could arise where they could find some kind of common ground with a broader grouping of people that contains ethnic groups that they are unfriendly with.  Now this won’t happen until this broader coalition begins to poach away parts of the leftist coalition.  And once it does it can begin to prove its usefulness as a vehicle for promoting traditional values across ethnic groups as a strategy for attacking the leftist positions.  So, if you can get multiple old and new constituencies backing up family values as opposed to the feminist/LGBTQ anti-human values it would help to show the dissidents that there are practical, concrete advantages to making common cause with other groups based on cultural and philosophical commonalities.

What sparked this chain of thought was a post that the ZMan put up about a moderate group on the right that he characterized as the Cosmopolitan Right (Cosmo Right).  This includes people like Auron MacIntyre, Lomez and the others on the moderate right who include some of the people in the orbit of the Claremont Institute.  The interesting thing about the post was that as opposed to most other moderate right groups or entities, ZMan was guardedly positive about this group’s agenda and capability.  I’ll have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  Who knows?  Maybe one day we can, “all just get along” on the Right.  But in the meantime, it gave me food for thought.

The Science is Settled; the World Will End by 2050

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I was reading an article by two doofuses named Peter Watts and Daniel Brooks.  Watts is a science fiction writer and I think Brooks is a biologist in academia.

Here’s a sample:

“We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.”

And this is the optimist of the pair.  The other guy is cheering on the collapse because he wants to clear the path for the few deserving humans to restart human life solidly in the pre-industrial era.  He kind of equates his role in all this as something like Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” stories.  Gee, I wonder if I can try out for the part of the Mule?

Apparently civilizational collapse is settled science.

Who knew?

You know, if I were a young person being fed this line from kindergarten to grad school I might be as crazy as the Zoomers appear to be.

So, the world is coming to an end and even the climate warriors say it can’t be fixed.  Okay, then maybe they’ll just shut up now and let us live out our lives while the world burns.  But of course, as every supposed end of the world date passes without, you know, the world ending, they just screech louder and become even more annoying.  Now the dimwits are gluing their bodies to roadways and destroying works of art.

So far normal people have reacted by dragging these human traffic cones off the road, sometimes by their feet and comically, sometimes by their hair.  But you wonder when the first of these activists will become a road pizza.  I’ve watched a lot of these road block videos and I’m waiting for the motorists to start bringing zip ties and pepper spray to these events and tie them to a light pole and mace these clowns good.  I think they richly deserve it.

For their civil disobedience, if I were the judge I’d sentence them to one year without electric power and all the things associated with modern life; clean water, refrigerated food and hygiene.  I’d let them rot in a hovel and subsist on putrid food washed down with water from the nearest rain puddle.

Look, the world isn’t going to end in 2040 or 2050, just as it didn’t end in 2024 as predicted twenty years before that.  We should be so lucky to see this clown show end!  Why shouldn’t a world that wants Joe Biden to be its leader collapse?  Collapse would be the reasonable response to such a wholly stupid system.  But it won’t end.  We all need the exercise too much to just roll over and die.

There’s an even chance that I will still be around in 2050.  And if I do, I may go hobbling around looking for Watts and Brooks and if they’re still alive I might just punch them both in the nose and tell them to apologize to the world for being so stupid.

THE END IS NIGH, REPENT!!!!!!  But can you give me a lift to the highway blockade?  It’s pretty far by bike.

Breaking News: I Have Joined the Princeton Hunger Strike

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After nine days of a liquid diet the awesome hunger strikers of Princeton collapsed.  Immuno-compromised, ethically compromised and feeling both hot and cold at the same time, they threw in the towel.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/princeton-anti-israel-hunger-strike-collapses-solves-its-problem-by-rotating-in-new-strikers/

But good news, they’ve come up with a daring new concept in hunger strikes; relay-hunger!  That’s right, just like in relay-races where one runner hands over the baton to the next runner, relay-fasters hand over the fast to a new faster at each (convenient) step in the hunger strike.

It’s brilliant and also allows each of us strikers to employ our own lived experience of what defines starvation.  For instance, personally, I always find that the period between 10:33 am and 11:17 am is a crisis time for me.  At that point my energy reserves from my 9:30 snack are completely gone and the forty three minutes until lunch are literally (figuratively?) torture.  And so that is why I have designated 10:33 am and 11:17 am my leg of the relay hunger strike.  I feel that I am almost dying for my beliefs.

But luckily I won’t have to die.  And the best part is I’ll be able keep this hunger strike going for twenty or thirty years.  Now that’s what I call progress.

Actual Progress

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Over the last decade or so Peter Thiel has made a point of claiming that other than computer automation, technological progress has been at a standstill.  And he’s essentially correct.  From about 1900 to 1960 we went from horse power to nuclear power.

From 1960 to 2020 we went from nuclear power to wind power.  This is not technological progress.  It’s surrender.

And this is mostly a psychological problem we’re facing.  We haven’t hit any quantum barrier that forbids us from improving almost every aspect of our technology.  Even the make-believe problems we create have solutions that are neglected by the dim-witted “technologists” that preside over our decline.  A good example is the farce called recycling.  Currently we are all forced to dutifully separate “recyclables” in a separate pail from the rest of our trash as if this was a magical process that allowed these paper and plastic waste products to somehow become usable materials.

But in reality, the majority of this material is landfilled along with the non-recyclable garbage that we collect in the other pail.  And the reason is simple.  Crude oil is a cheaper and better raw material for making plastic than plastic scrap.  Maybe in the far future when petroleum runs out, our landfills will become plastic mines that we’ll tap for a feed stream in our manufacturing process.

Of course, another thing it’s good for is as fuel.  Paper and plastic are mostly hydrogen and carbon and as such they make incredibly good combustion fuels.  Buring these materials in a garbage incinerator associated with a turbine generator would be the most efficient use of these waste materials.  But, you know, Gaia.

But let’s assume that at some point in the next twenty years, first world people are going to get tired of being forced into third world squalor.  At that point I’m guessing that the first direction selected for energy production will be nuclear fission steam turbine generation plants.  Sure, maybe they’ll have to pay lip service to global warming pieties.  Maybe they’ll even build solar powered carbon sequestration projects to please Gaia.  But at some point, people will demand to have the amenities they’ve become accustomed to; reliable electrical distribution and convenient transportation.  In the long run what the source of that power will be is yet to be determined.  My theory is that geothermal energy will supplement and maybe replace nuclear in the long run.

One thing I’m not sure of is what will be the fuel for transportation.  Many people have said that hydrogen is too hazardous.  Maybe they’re right.  It does tend to go boom when trapped in an enclosure.  Well, it’s cheaper and easier to make than octane but with unlimited electrical energy from something like widespread nuclear or geothermal I don’t see a problem with an octane synthesizing plant.  Carbon dioxide and water are available in endless supply so all that’s needed is cheap power.  And there’s a lot to be said for a really well-built internal combustion engine car.

But this is all just getting back to where we were in 1960.  What will real technological progress look like?  Ironically, I think that there will be an emphasis on Gaia!

I think quality of life innovation will be the future.  Research into the detrimental effects of all the chemicals that we add to our foods and come in contact with our bodies will begin shaping the products our industries produce.

And likewise with containers.  Maybe bottles will start being made of glass and metal again.  Some of the older materials were safer and newer alloys and other materials can be tested and whatever the healthiest choices can be substituted for things that may be harming us.

So better living through chemistry may become something more than just an empty slogan.

With all the talk of AI I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the progress, we can expect from the ongoing computer automation revolution.  Eventually all automobiles will be subject to traffic control in densely crowded traffic.  Despite our strongest resistance, this will happen in many jurisdictions.  The nanny-state is just too strong in places like California and New York.  For many people this will be welcomed.  It will relieve them of the responsibility of driving.

Artificial intelligence will eventually make large scale industrial economic planning much more efficient.  Supply chain coordination for a whole network of companies producing a multitude of products will be optimized and trends and changes tracked and compensated for.  How this will effect capitalism remains to be seen.

Maybe the greatest use of AI will be in bioresearch and medicine.  The enormous complexity of living systems and the almost infinite number of chemicals that need to be tested for toxic and other detrimental effects cries out for the brute force that artificial intelligence can bring to bear on bioresearch and development.  I can see a future where the oncologist is a computer that scans the DNA of a cancer cell and chooses a custom antibody coded precisely to attach to and kill only the cancer cells and nothing else.

And the final area of progress is a sentimental one for me and one I’ll never see.  Mankind should send an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri.  I guess HAL 9000 will be in charge of this mission.  It will require an enormous tank of water that will be used as rocket mass.  A fission reactor will be used to boil the water as a jet to provide acceleration.  Maybe it can get up to .3c and so the round trip will be something less than a century.  It can take readings and photos and see if there are any little green men there and come back and let us know.  Now that’s progress.