Monthly Archives: June 2022

I was fascinated to see this article in WaPo, starting off with:

Charles Komanoff was for decades an expert witness for groups working against nuclear plants, delivering blistering critiques so effective that he earned a spot at the podium when tens of thousands of protesters descended on Washington in 1979 over the Three Mile Island meltdown.

Komanoff would go on to become an unrelenting adversary of Diablo Canyon, the hulking 37-year-old nuclear facility perched on a pristine stretch of California’s Central Coast that had been the focal point of anti-nuclear activism in America. But his last letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in February, was one Komanoff never expected to write. He implored Newsom to scrap state plans to close the coastal plant.

“We’re going to have to give up some of our long-held beliefs if we are going to deal with climate,” Komanoff said in an interview. “I am still a solar and wind optimist. But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing.”

Komanoff’s conversion is emblematic of the rapidly shifting politics of nuclear energy. The long controversial power source is gaining backers amid worries that shutting U.S. plants, which emit almost no emissions, makes little sense as governments race to end their dependence on fossil fuels and the war in Ukraine heightens worries about energy security and costs. The momentum is driven in large part by longtime nuclear skeptics who remain unsettled by the technology but are now pushing to keep existing reactors running as they face increasingly alarming news about the climate.

It’s indicative that, despite the proclamations of some cultural warriors, the left can be flexible when reality gets ready to hit them in the face.

But, of course, that doesn’t mean nuclear energy, even though I’m in favor of exploring it further, is part of the future. Reporter Michael Brooks in NewScientist (28 May 2022, paywall) explores the cloudy future of nuclear energy and comes to an ambivalent conclusion:

It remains to be seen if such innovations can pick up the slack. And herein lies the problem when it comes to making your mind up on nuclear: so much depends on things we don’t know for sure. On the one hand, why bother with it, given its drawbacks, if we can meet our net-zero targets with nothing but renewables? “I tend to believe we can do 100 per cent renewables,” says [M. V. Ramana at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver]. On the other hand, why put all your eggs in one basket? “It’s not an either-or situation: we’ve got to do them both,” says [Jacopo Buongiorno, director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at MIT]. Even among those with all the facts at their disposal, those fault lines remain. Add in the fact that nuclear weapons make things even more complicated (see “The weapons connection“), and it is clear why nothing is clear. Whatever call we make, some people will say it is wrong. The only thing we can do is be sure that we don’t make the call too late.

But the flexibility displayed by Komanoff is key. Nothing is guaranteed, but keeping an open mind and exploring options is part of the overall strategy of survival – not clinging to ideological/theological positions.

No, not that sort – this sort:

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it? That horrible self-consciousness, every sentence comments on itself and comments on itself commenting on itself, and I think it was actually supposed to be funny. And if the poems were so good, why not just give us one or two and shut up, for God’s sake?

Elizabeth Bishop on J. D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction
Letter to Pearl Kazin
9th September 1959

More here at Letters of Note.

You’re an alien ship full of unknown armament. Me? I have a machine gun. Ready, set … run!

Battleship (2012), purportedly based on the old plastic/board game popularized by the admission, You sank my battleship!, is actually a surprisingly good example of the alien invasion genre, by which I mean I thought it would be atrocious, and it actually held my attention, as well as my Art Editor’s.

Why? Partially because the aliens are not entirely inscrutable. While it’s not completely clear why they came in response to signals from Earth, and certainly they shouldn’t have arrived as quickly as they did, when they do arrive, they lose their communications ship to a collision, and that shapes their subsequent actions.

It makes sense.

Nor are they irritatingly impregnable. The three guided missile cruisers that have the pleasure of the first encounter, while not successful in stopping the aliens, do inflict significant damage on the alien ships.

Amusingly – at least for this obsolete old software engineer – their computers have bugs just like Earthly computers have bugs. And misclassification is a bitch.

Finally, the Earth forces, finding themselves at a disadvantage at several turns while on a desperate mission to save the world, find impressively clever ways around their problems.

Sure, this isn’t perfect. Beyond the usual credulity problems associated with the genre, the lead character is an excruciatingly example of the smart guy who makes bad decision after bad decision, and the Why of that is never quite clarified. The actor who plays the lead, Taylor Kitsch, I’ve only seen, to my knowledge, in one other movie – John Carter (2012) – and I didn’t like him in either flick. Not that I need to personally like him, but in both movies he just doesn’t play the role convincingly. But the supporting actors, I felt, did a good job, playing their roles both earnestly and professionally. While a hidden grin or two is sometimes acceptable, I didn’t sense them here. Roles are played straight.

It’s not an awful movie, which makes its nomination for several of Razzie awards puzzling. I’ve sat through some truly dreadful movies, far worse than this or, for that matter, the aforementioned John Carter, and I truly didn’t feel Battleship needed to be dissed in this way. Perhaps some folks objected to its purported and far-fetched origins.

And don’t forget. The original Battleship game had more than battleships. It had subs and cruisers and an aircraft carrier.

And a mighty battleship.

If you like the alien invasion genre, Independence Day (1996) may set the bar, and Battleship doesn’t quite get over it. But on its own it’s a fun little flick to watch.

Robot and Frank (2012) is, despite the robot, a conventional tale of the aging mind, vitiated by a changing focus. Who is Frank? Frank is a retired thief, an expert at lockpicks, especially that of safes.

And Robot? It’s an artificial intelligence paired with a capable body, tasked with helping Frank with the serious infirmities of old age. When Frank indicates that ‘casing the joint’ has enthused him, Robot is willing to help, learning the fine craft of thievery.

Notice I didn’t say Robot was ‘happy to help’, nor ‘reluctant to help.’ Robot is Robot, for what it’s worth, and it’s the escapades Robot enables which function as the cautionary tale considering naive robots.

Until the climax, when the requisite plot twist has nothing to do with Robot, absolutely nothing. This mistaken change of focus leaves the audience dissatisfied, as Robot is reduced from a new societal factor to be considered to merely a prop.

And that makes Robot and Frank disappointing.

And discover the American President and their Administration are not the Overlords of the Universe:

Then there is the weather. It is only May, but already China has warned that its winter wheat crop could be the “worst in history” due to heavy rains, the US winter crop has been affected by drought, there have been floods in Australia and South Africa, and extreme heat in India, Pakistan and most recently Spain.

There is no doubt that global heating is making such extreme weather events more common. According to the UK Met Office, for instance, climate change has made record-breaking heatwaves in north-west India and Pakistan more than 100 times more likely. [“Global food crisis is leaving millions hungry, but there are solutions,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (28 May 2022, paywall)]

In other words, food prices will remain high for at least another year. People will scream for relief and blame Biden, when the problem is weather and the loudest hidden problem that the American public never seems to notice in connection with what we call inflation:

This makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a double whammy. It is leading to direct shortages, because Ukraine produces, among other things, 9 per cent of global wheat exports and 40 per cent of sunflower oil exports. The invasion is also causing global energy prices to rise further, which will push up food prices indirectly.

And Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports adds to the problem in a world where humanity’s transportation capabilities has transformed food supplies from local-only to fungible status – which means disruption in one part of the world can impact nations thousands of miles away.

And banning Russian exports cuts both ways:

Even if no more extreme weather events hit yields this year, there is another crucial factor at play: high fertiliser prices. Fertiliser prices started rising in 2020 along with fossil fuel prices, and have gone up even further because Russia and Belarus are major exporters. They now cost three or four times as much as they did before the pandemic.

Long-time readers are well aware of my belief that we’re badly overpopulated. Is this the beginning of some sort of population adjustment, if I may indulge in a droll euphemism for mass death?

No, I don’t think so. I suspect humanity’s cleverness will see us through this mess, and a few others as well. Efforts to minimize the overuse of fertilizer, already under way, will be driven harder by the higher fertilizer prices. Genetic engineering to produce more food stuffs from fewer inputs will become more acceptable as people discover empty bellies are not compatible with today’s lifestyles – that is, European opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will fade, much to the consternation of the leaders of anti-GMO organizations, who will find their positions and prestige threatened.

But, at some point, a crisis will precipitate some sort of adjustment. It’s barely possible we’ll employ the Roman interim solution, which was to find more land: discovery of and mass transportation to an inhabitable, empty planet.

But I won’t have fantasies about it. Moving to Mars is not a solution. The Roman implementation, land via victorious warfare, seems improbable today. And the Dutch solution, recovering land from the ocean, is a slow process and inhibited by rising ocean levels. Other ideas?

But the ongoing and singular focus on packing the sardine can with more sardines is disconcerting and real, as population adjustment is not acceptable to most people – and rightly so. We evolved in a context lacking medical capabilities, and therefore offspring production reflects the reality, in the past, of pre-maturity high mortality rates. This has also lead to the adoration of life, without which humanity might have been extinguished. And while, yes, more education leads generally to a lower birthrate, numerous institutions, primarily of the religious class, oppose lower birthrates, because, of course, a smaller group reduces the prestige and influence of the group, from the leader on down.

I queasily look forward to the future, and hope to be proven wrong.

Actually, a bit mediocre. The hail storm and the wind have been unkind to the orange azalea this year.

Given that theology is really little more than fan fiction …
– Kyle Morrison, OpenSky

That can be weaponized and used to deadly effect, though. I can’t say that for the fan fiction of most topics, like, say, Fifty Shades of Gray.

Our latest nominee to be Earl is Rep Billy Long (R-MO), running for the open Senate seat in Missouri:

My #MOSen platform 1.) Get @KamalaHarris to resign 2.) Have @POTUS appoint #Trump as VP 3.) Get @JoeBiden to resign 4.) Finish #KeystoneXL 5.) Finish the wall

— Billy Long (@auctnr1) June 2, 2022

Rep Billy Long (R-MO), from Ballotpedia.

The noteworthy part of this tweet is: Have @POTUS [that is, Joe Biden] appoint #Trump as VP

Does he think that any of this, excepting #4, has any chance of happening?

Really?

Or is he just brown nosing the former President and his waning endorsement powers?

Judging from his picture, Rep Long should refrain from the necessary contortions to effectively brown nose, for, at his age, he might not survive the experience, if only metaphysically. But points for putting his soul in this much danger in pursuit of worldly influence.

Good thing I’m an agnostic and don’t know if there are souls or not.

While watching an obscure episode of The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978), in particular one of the As The Stomach Turns skits, today’s audience noted:

SHE: They’re really broken canon in this one, haven’t they?

HE: Uh?

SHE: That, that’s really not how this goes. The daughter leaves after bringing home a baby. She doesn’t go upstairs back to her room.

HE: I didn’t know Carol dated Napoleon.

SHE: Uh?

HE: Sure. Napoleon was an artillery officer. You say she broke the cannon. That is, she broke it off with Napoleon, the guy who ran the cannons.

SHE: Oh.

And that, folks, is how QAnon works.

Gotta love how Republican legislators put, ah, regulations in your way – at least in South Dakota. This is from last year, but I can’t resist:

In the lingo of South Dakota petition circulators, it’s called the “beach-towel effect.”

The term describes the massive, folded-up sheets of paper that petition circulators carry as they gather signatures to put a proposed law on the ballot.

The Secretary of State’s Office says the full text of a petition and its signature lines must be contained on a single sheet of paper. For complex proposals, those single sheets of paper may grow to several feet wide and tall.

Now those sheets of paper might get even bigger. This winter, South Dakota’s Legislature passed a bill requiring the font size on petitions to be at least 14 points.

Republican Sen. Al Novstrup, of Aberdeen, said the font on medical marijuana petitions last year was too small. He estimated it was 6 points.

“I was just unable to read it,” Novstrup testified, “and I would estimate that approximately half of South Dakotans were unable to read that particular font size.” [South Dakota Public Broadcasting]

So bloody well authorize multiple pages, Senator Novstrup! But seriously, you need to follow that link, above, to see what a petition looks like, as it’s carried around to citizens to sign.

This’ll slow down those damn citizens and their citizen legislating, now won’t it?

And that word is sharing. Way overused. Please, everyone just stop using it. It’s not clever, it’s not supportive, it’s just a really bad cliche.

Just Stop Now. Stop Sharing.

SCOTUS has told Texas that it may not regulate global social media platforms – at least for the moment:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped a Texas law that would regulate how social media companies police content on their sites, while a legal battle continues over whether such measures violate the First Amendment. …

Two Washington-based groups representing Google, Facebook and other tech giants filed the emergency request with the Supreme Court on May 13. The Texas law took effect after a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit lifted a district court injunction that had barred it.

The appeals court’s order, which provided no legal reasoning, shocked the industry, which has been largely successful in batting back Republican state leaders’ efforts to regulate social media companies’ content-moderation policies. …

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Republicans who crafted the law have argued that it will prevent conservative viewpoints from being banned on social media.

Alito said the issue deserves the court’s review: “At issue is a ground-breaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” [WaPo]

It’s an interesting issue, and I’ll be eagerly waiting to find out if SCOTUS comes to the same conclusion so many social media proprietors^[1], including myself, came to years ago, and that’s this:

People can, and will, vote with their feet.

Which is to say, the history of social media, from BBSes to MySpace to blogs to Facebook to TikTok to Mastodon is not that of stasis, of neverending dominance. It’s of change, change in features, change in capabilities, change in platforms, change in administrative philosophies.

Enhanced features attract people. Bad administration? It repels them.

Disregarding the horrific thought that the States, individually, can possibly regulate a national, nay, international platform, and all the legal mayhem that would result from conflicting State laws, here’s what we, back in the 1980s, observed in a day when we were overlooked by most legislative & regulatory bodies.

A social media platform was popular or unpopular in proportion to several factors: stability, features, availability, social atmosphere, and administrative style. The last area is the area of interest here. What does it encompass?

It was often defined by the edges of acceptable conversation as defined by the platform. On one end were those systems which essentially did not exercise any restraints. Even calls contaminated with static were considered valid contributors to discussion.

And on the other end were authoritarian administrators who tightly controlled subjects of discussion and would delete public correspondence that didn’t meet their high-handed standards.

And, most importantly for SCOTUS, I’ll tell you what: people didn’t hesitate to walk when they felt administrators behaved in an unfair manner. Someone had a viewpoint and presented it, and so long as it was presented honestly and didn’t touch on a few high-voltage subjects, it was resented if it was deleted. If this happened more than a few times, people walked.

And then new social media sites would go up in response to sites run in an authoritarian manner.

Put together the willingness of users to move on to other sites, such as is happening with Facebook right now as they lose the younger generation to TikTok and other platforms, which I probably have not yet heard, and the solution to the problem appears to be self-regulation, much like most private enterprise.

And this is a far better solution than government-specified speech requirements. If Facebook is required to specify Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid, however futile it is, because someone says that’s a conservative viewpoint and shouldn’t be repressed just because no scientific studies support it, and other studies suggest Ivermectin has its own dangers for the human organism, well, take a deep breath, who the hell should be held responsible when people start dying?

Facebook?

Faceless, if you’ll excuse the ineluctable wordplay, conservatives who proclaim this grift to be a legitimate conservative viewpoint?

SCOTUS??????????????

Small government conservatives asking for more government that will be ineffectual because there’ll be no useful metric for measuring its worth. That may be the pinnacle of irony. Watch out for avalanches.

I sure hope SCOTUS figures this out. There’s nothing necessarily permanent about any of these social media companies; if they make enough chronic errors, they’ll be out on their noses.

¹ Also known as BBS operators, sysops, etc.

At least, I suspect this honeysuckle would relish a Sasquatch.

It’s just a bit ridiculous otherwise.

Lt. Governor Mark Robinson (R-NC) is running for Governor of North Carolina against current Governor Roy Cooper (D-NC), who chose not to run for the Senate because he wanted to keep Robinson out of the Governor’s office.

Great system there in North Carolina.

But Robinson, who claims to be a classic pro-gun, anti-abortion, has quite the grifting ways:

“God gave the garden slug a way to defend itself,” he continued. “Now, if God gave the garden slug a way to defend themselves, what makes you think he didn’t give man, who he created in his own image, a way to defend himself? Those AR-15s and Glock 9mms and .45 calibers; where do you think they came from? Who do you think inspired them? God knew the world he was putting us into, so he formed in our mind the ability for us to be able to defend ourselves from anybody who may threaten us.” [Right Wing Watch]

Satan for all questions? Seriously, those questions can be answered by Satan one and all, and quite plausibly for the religious. Otherwise, his God appears to be a God of War, not peace, who inspires weapons rather than ploughshares, and likes to pluck wings off humans and throw them into a hellish world where the hand of every man is against them. Great place, eh?

But will his audience pick up that? Or are they too full of testosterone to figure out they should question what he says?

Someone knows what they’re doing:

Wow. Probably the most powerful ad I've ever seen. @Booker4KY is the real deal. pic.twitter.com/lNNCwdUH1v

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) June 1, 2022

A reader comments on the latest Word of the Day, Cheems:

And then some fool invented a cryptocurrency based on that meme, Doge Coin.

It’s the sort of thing that sounds like an extended, distributed joke, doesn’t it? Algorithms then exaggerate the entire joke, giving someone quite the profit:

Source: CoinMarketCap

Someone held a lot of Dogecoin, no doubt, and waited patiently for the credulous “crypto-investing community” to discover or remember them. They sold out at or near the top of that peak.

I am glad I was on neither side of those trades.

There’s a class of political attacks that consists of embarrassing the targets. Here’s a very recent example:

We spoke directly to Wayne LaPierre at the NRA Convention and thanked him for all his thoughts and prayers. pic.twitter.com/EfdDrgD4Af

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) May 29, 2022

WaPo provides a summary:

“You heard [the criticism] after Las Vegas, you heard it after Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, you heard it after Columbine, you heard it after Parkland, you heard it after Virginia Tech, you heard it after Sandy Hook, you heard it after El Paso, you heard it after Buffalo. You kept hearing that Wayne LaPierre isn’t doing enough.”

But that’s not true, [Jason Selvig] said. The NRA, under LaPierre’s leadership, had given victims’ family members thoughts and prayers, “and maybe these mass shootings would stop happening if we all thought a little bit more and we prayed a little bit more.”

Then he addressed a confused-looking LaPierre.

“I want to thank you … for all your thoughts and all your prayers — thank you.”

It’s the sarcastic attack.

But do these things ever work? Maybe they’re targeted, much like debates, on the audience and not the apparent target.

But it almost seems like art in a very macabre context.

Another chisel working on that crack:

A candidate for the GOP nomination for governor of Georgia refused to concede defeat even though she received only 3.4% of the vote on Tuesday.

Kandiss Taylor, a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump, came third in the race.

She received significantly fewer votes than David Perdue, who had Trump’s formal endorsement, and incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp, who won by 73.7% and secured the nomination.

After the results were clear, Taylor complained that the election was “rigged” against her, The Daily Beast reported. [Business Insider]

Rather amazing how Taylor comes across as a crackpot, isn’t it? But maybe she has reason to disbelieve her failure:

“Given that my vote total currently lags my number of volunteers by nearly 20,000, I do not trust these election results and neither should any supporter of either of my opponents or candidates in any other races,” Taylor said in a press release.

Taylor received 41,027 votes.

And why does Taylor think she had 60,000 volunteers? That sounds hefty enough to have gotten her some national attention, yet I hadn’t heard of her.

If she can’t provide evidence, then to me she’s just another ME! ME! ME! candidate, despite her slogan, Jesus, Guns, Babies.

But I must say, this comes across as incoherent:

“We are the church! We run this state,” Taylor said.

The crack in the GOP widens.

Spaceweather.com has an implicit warning today:

FARSIDE SUNSPOTS: Right now, there are sunspots on the farside of the sun so big they are affecting the way the sun vibrates. Helioseismologists have detected their echoes in the latest farside map from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Don’t be surprised if we see CMEs billowing away from the farside of the sun in the days ahead.

It may sound all fine and abstract and far away – and, at nine light-minutes, give or take, it’s a long ways away.

In human terms.

But another Carrington Event would leave our power grid virtually – or possibly physically – aflame.

A latest image from SDO, not in visible spectrum: