Statics and Dynamics

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Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.  We took an EE (electrical engineering) course and an ME (mechanical engineering) course or two were equivalent to some of ours like thermodynamics and heat transfer (although usually our sections had some additional requirements that were specific to chemically reactive systems.  And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course.  I think the text I used for the CE course was called “Statics and Dynamics.”  Here we talked about stress and strain and the different forces that needed to be calculated in order to specify the required strengths of materials used to design and construct a structure like a bridge or a dam.  And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed.  Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations.  You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor.  And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be.  So, if you’re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn’t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don’t skimp on the materials of construction.  Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.

Now as complicated as a bridge or a nuclear power plant design is imagine designing a global nuclear deterrence system based on mutually assured destruction with something like ten nuclear nation states all of which are in various uneasy states of enmity and competition with each other and three of which possess very large stockpiles of nuclear ICBMs.  The policies needed to maintain this balanced system mostly requires that the major players do not willingly attempt to destabilize the status quo through direct confrontation with each other.  And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states.  A miracle.

And probably the reason it all worked was because, for the most part, the system was a defensive crouch that provided a nuclear tripwire that the Soviets were afraid to cross and at the time we were still too smart to try.  But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay.  And that got us to 2000.  But then 9/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they’ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs.  So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.

Well, here’s the thing.  Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing.  Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal.  In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it’s a powerful destabilizing one

The analogy that is the basis of this whole essay is the difference between the strength of concrete in compression as opposed to against a shearing force.  You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building.  This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for.  But take that same pier and mount it sideways and try to use it as a beam with the same weight cantilevered and it will fail.  That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression.  It will fail catastrophically.  So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.

And that’s what we’re doing.  We’re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon.  It’s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts.  We’re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we’re playing it badly.  We’ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own.  Possibly Hamas is the first of these.  Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border.  And maybe that’s what the neo-cons are hoping for.  But it’s a stupid play.  We did the Middle East invasion game after 9/11.  It was a disaster.  If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster.  The nuclear deterrence won’t deter the conventional wars.  But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen.  Brilliant political malpractice.

So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you’re building something that your life depends on.  In our case don’t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden.  They’ve got collapse written all over them.

New Zealand Comes to Its Senses

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After five years of Jacinda Ardern’s Karen-in-Chief act with the COVID uber-lockdowns as the straw that broke the camel’s back, New Zealanders have come to their senses and voted out Labor and brought back the conservatives.

This horse-faced harpy was constantly on display to the American news watcher as a paragon of the progressive future we could all someday hope to emulate.

But now the NZ conservatives have to deliver on their promises; lower taxes, lower prices on food and fuel, law and order.  Well, that’s what they better do or the voters will put another annoying woman with monstrously large teeth back in charge.  No normal person wants that.

Clarity at Long Last

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This essay is from Ilan Benjamin, whose cousin Daniel Pearl was a journalist that was beheaded by islamist terrorists in Pakistan during the “War on Terror” in 2003.  He narrates how Pearl’s murder did not destroy the family’s idealism and devotion to peace and the whole progressive agenda:

“In 2012, I returned to the States to study film at University of Southern California, and published a book about my military service that criticized the Israeli government. This didn’t win me many friends, but I continued to advocate for nuance regardless. I proudly supported Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, and feminist causes. I called myself a progressive Jew.”

But over time he couldn’t fail to notice that this didn’t buy him any points with the Left with respect to Israel:

“I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.

How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.”

And now he has learned a lesson:

“To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language.

…

Unlike our enemy, I feel no joy at the prospect of going to war. But if our people’s existence is at stake, I will do what I must. I will be the world’s favorite villain: the Jew who has the audacity to defend his people.”

Mr. Benjamin has learned that the Left has a hierarchy and regardless of what he would wish he is near the bottom of that hierarchy because he belongs to a branch of western civilization.  He is a straight Jewish western man.  The only thing below that on the hierarchy is a straight Christian western man.  And of course a Palestinian is much, much higher up in that hierarchy.

But the true revelation is not where he stands in the hierarchy but what actions this organization; the Left, will condone by those it favors.

Literally anything.

Their favored partisans can rape women next to the bodies of their slaughtered friends.  They can saw the heads off of infants.  They can film these atrocities.  And the Left will still proudly trumpet a full-throated harangue that these psychotic murderers are the real victims.

Mr. Benjamin at long last has had his eyes opened to the truth about his progressive friends.  Basically, they are either evil or insane or both.  Possibly going forward he should examine the people who are the enemies of these “friends.”  He might find additional clarity and maybe some more reliable friends.

Genesis and Crickets

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I think it’s interesting that the people who run the western world have decided that life as we lived it is no longer acceptable.  The old status quo won’t do.  Here was the old contract.

KJV, Genesis, Chapter 1

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

BlackRock and friends disagree.  And they’ve got lots of money.

 

Rank Company Managed Assets (USD trillions) Country
1 BlackRock USD 7.43 trillion USA
2 The Vanguard Group USD 6.2 trillion USA
3 Charles Schwab Corporation USD 3.3 trillion USA
4 UBS Group USD 3.26 trillion Switzerland
5 Fidelity Investments USD 3.2 trillion USA
6 State Street Global Advisors USD 3.12 trillion USA
7 Allianz USD 2.36 trillion Germany
8 JPMorgan Chase USD 1.9 trillion USA
9 Bank of New York Mellon USD 1.9 trillion USA
10 Capital Group USD 1.8 trillion USA

 

Now I don’t see God’s ranking in the above table or how many googolplex US dollars He has under management but I’m guessing it’s way up there.  And I don’t remember the Almighty saying that BlackRock shall inherit the Earth.

But howsoever the management changed hands, the new model doesn’t include us being fruitful and having dominion over much of anything.  And instead of the fish and the fowl and the cattle being ours, those of us that will be allowed to hang on for a while under the new arrangement will have to subsist on crickets and meal worms.  I may be behind the times but that used to be what you fed a pet anole lizard, not the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.  So, it seems to me that at least in the United States the deal has been broken and not by us.

Granted, evil men have enslaved humans for millennia.  Every free society has eventually succumbed to feudalism.  Athens did.  Rome did.  We will.

But today isn’t necessarily the day it has to happen.  And we don’t have to make it easy for them.  The globalists have screwed up the economy and everything else in this country over the course of the last decade or two.  And they don’t seem to be all that popular with even the people who are supposedly their bought and sold constituencies.  So, whenever we have the chance to screw with their plans that’s what we should do.

And you can usually see what they’re trying to pull over on us from a mile away.  They’re hardly subtle.  The Global War on Terror, the Patriot Act, BLM, COVID, the George Floyd color revolution, Climate Change, the Ukraine disaster, transgenderism, the list goes on and on.  Well, look at what the Bud Light revolt did to the transgender scam.  It taught Anheuser Busch (and Target and Disney to an extent) that American families don’t want to be lectured about men in dresses.  A similar thing happened in Virginia when the schools tried to impose critical race theory on the public schools.  People said no.  And then they voted against the guy who wanted to be governor but said parents shouldn’t have a say in what their kids are taught.

You get the idea.  Pick your battles and hurt them whenever you can.  Guerilla warfare.  They’ve got the money.  We’ve got the numbers.  And even their “friends” don’t really love them.  There are all kinds of problems within the coalition of the aggrieved.  Traditional societies like those found in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia don’t really support the sexual deviancy that the Left has made the most celebrated part of their coalition.  This has been showing up more and more.  Using it as a wedge issue is a winning strategy in some areas like recently in Michigan.  And with the issue of pediatric transgender affirmative care becoming a flashpoint even in places like California all kinds of unlikely alliances might pop up in the future.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m not ready to give up yet.  Local battles can be won.  Many smaller victories can add up to larger ones.  Idiotic young people can grow up and become wiser, at least slightly so.  And our enemies aren’t geniuses.  They can make mistakes and they can have a run of bad luck.  And stop waiting for miracles.  Two steps forward and one step back.  That’s how it goes.

So, hang in there and don’t eat the crickets unless you’re related to that GEICO gecko.  Have a little pride.