The Wavelet

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Getting old makes everything, if not worse, then definitely harder.  I had the two younger grandsons over and one of them wanted to have a baseball catch.  And that is one of my favorite grandson activities.  But what I didn’t reckon with was the fact that he was now entering high school and had become much stronger.  So that meant we were standing about twice as far apart as we used to and that if he threw the ball a little too far or too far left or right, I would have to break into a full run to catch the ball on the fly.  And at first this was exhilarating and made me feel like a kid again.  But it was 85 degrees out and after about twenty minutes I was sweating and puffing like an old man (which I am!).  But it was great.  I think that was the most fun we ever had together.  And I was so proud to see how athletic he’d become.  His fast ball was a rocket.  It stung my hand through the glove!

But right now, work stinks.  I’ve got all these extra hours and it’s ruining the summer.  I want to hand the job over to someone else but no one else is stupid enough to accept it.  So, it’s me.  End of job rant.

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows the communists are making major inroads against “moderate” Democrats in the urban centers.  This reflects the voting pattern of millennial and zoomer radicals and includes their embrace of the whole Gaza “genocide” claim.  And this is causing a noticeable collision between Jewish Democrat politicians and their constituencies.  We saw this with the New York City congressional races but it’s happening elsewhere and it doesn’t spare Jewish candidates just because they’re “diverse.”

Here’s Scott Weiner, a Jewish San Francisco LGBTQ hero, who is running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, being hounded out of a trans-parade because he won’t call Gaza a genocide.

The unhinged behavior of the three gatekeepers chasing him off the parade ground is indicative of the primacy of the Gaza genocide plank of the communist movement.  Regardless of what other causes you can point to on your political grievance bingo card if the Zionist spot isn’t covered you lose and no election win for you!  Now this is going to cause some problems for these people when we get to the general election.  First off, they’re going to have trouble raising money for their campaigns.  A lot of the big donors are Jewish and they’re most probably not loving all of this.  And they’ll be expressing their unhappiness by closing their check books.  And in some cities like San Francisco, the older voting population has a much more nuanced position than Gaza = Israeli genocide.  So, if, for instance, Scott Weiner wins Pelosi’s seat I wonder just how friendly he’s going to be with the Mamdani mafia that will be installed next year.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about how this schism on the Left will affect the 2026 midterms but I’ll be surprised if we see a blue wave.  I think it’ll be a much less impressive wavelet than promised.

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 2

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Alright, so I got the no-brainer out of the way.  I identified a critical technology that’s been allowed to languish for sixty years.  Now let me look at actual innovation.

Probably the most powerful new technology is the current ability we have to modify the living genome.  This is the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology.  With this set of tools or techniques we can replace genes inside of living organisms and even produce gene lines that include or exclude traits that biology identifies for these changes.  This kind of control over the machinery of life is unprecedented.  Currently it is being used to create treatments for everything from genetic diseases to cancer.  In the future once the risks have been measured it may be used to edit the genes of human embryos to eliminate disease.  And obviously, as much as the idea is currently denounced by medical ethicists, in the future it will be used eugenically.  In some future time, in the same way as we currently inoculate our children against measles and chicken pox, we will modify our children’s genes against cancer and other diseases.  And after that we will alter their genetic code to make them more intelligent and longer lived.  And finally, after that we’ll use this technology for trivial purposes like making them taller and better looking.

And these things will happen because they can happen and because some of them will make human life better and happier.  Of course, sometime far in the future we may regret tampering with our DNA.  But the same can be said for all of the changes that man’s ascent out of the jungle have created.  These will be just the most premeditated.

And this CRISPR technology can also be used to modify all the other plants, animals and microbes that share the planet with us.  Imagine designing an insect whose only reason for existing is eating ticks so that they won’t have a chance to bite humans and spread disease.  Or how about a robber fly that is designed to eat specific mosquitoes that transmit malaria or even just live in my backyard in Dunwich?  Or how about a caterpillar whose favorite food is poison ivy?  And these are just parlor tricks.  The plant side is where the real benefits accrue.  Currently we have to plant grain every year.  This is expensive and fraught with problems.  What if corn and wheat and rice weren’t annuals but perennials.  What if we could chop the tops off of these plants and leave the root and the stem to grow again next year?  What if all plants could fix nitrogen from the air and thus reduce their need for fertilizers?  What if we could come up with microorganisms that attack the pathogens that cause tree blights like the ones that have decimated chestnut, elm and ash trees?  We can build living things that do a lot of the things we currently use chemistry to do.  And they’ll be a lot better at it.  Pesticides and herbicides can be biological.  We can even design creatures that excrete octane (well, maybe something a little less volatile).  Now that’s a trick I’d like to see come to fruition.

Anyway, you get the idea.  Biology is the next frontier.  But what will the third post in this series be about?

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 1

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We’re in an odd moment technologically speaking.  The only thing anyone talks about is AI.  It’s the alpha and the omega.  It will bring on the singularity or it will usher in a golden age where we all live like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.”  On second thought maybe that would be the singularity since being lunch for troglodytes doesn’t sound like much of a golden age (unless you’re a troglodyte that is).

But I think it’s time to start looking beyond the glory of AI and begin to think of what comes next.  After all, in a manner of speaking AI is kind of like this century’s electronic calculator.  It made engineering work much more efficient but it didn’t eliminate the need for humans to look for answers to problems that needed to be solved.  It just made the process faster.  So once all the tech companies get through firing their engineers and computer scientists the industrial world is going to find that they’re still going to need to design “stuff” and solve new problems that are supposed to make the world a better place.

And contrary to present expectations AI isn’t going to plan and design the next bridge that spans a couple of miles across a bay or between mountains.  Sure, the engineers will use AI to find out the state of the art in civil engineering but eventually a human being will have to sign off on the drawings and take the legal responsibility that the bridge won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people.  And only an idiot would assume that the answer that AI gives him is worth risking prison time without making sure that he knows that the answers are correct.

So, let’s put AI into the category of modern tools and instead look at what problems are in our near future to solve.

Regardless of what everyone has said for the last thirty years, solar and wind energy are not the future energy sources we need.  But there will come a time when hydrocarbons will not be sufficient.  So, I would say that a replacement for oil and gas is the largest technical problem that humanity will face toward the end of this century.  But that means it’s already long overdue to start working out the details of what that will look like.  There may be several technologies that will exist.  I’ve questioned (and not just in a fictional setting) whether geothermal might become a significant source of global energy but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that nuclear fission will be the main energy source.

But just because fission has been a stable part of the energy grid in places like France for more than half a century doesn’t mean that the form currently employed is even close to what will power the world for the next century and more.  The science and technology of fission power is in its infancy.  The research in the United States that was going on in the 1950s and 1960s was strangled in its crib by the whole anti-nuclear movement of the time.  There will need to be a rebirth of nuclear power technology that will combine government, industry and academia.  And it will require energy policy to be handled by intelligent people in government.  And that is something we haven’t seen in half a century in this country.  Because it is a massive effort.  Eventually we will have to decide whether battery technology is a better storage medium for things like transportation than something like synthetic hydrocarbons or hydrogen.  And these questions should be answered based on efficiency and other important factors like safety.  But definitely not decided by idiots like Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Let’s see what’s next after power in Part 2.