Category Archives: Uncategorized

But when President Trump

… demands ‘unconditional surrender’ in warning to Iran

[CNN headline] … it’s really hard not to see Trump frantically scrambling to remain relevant to the world stage. His poor management of the United States government continues to drive away casual supporters, his immediate reaction to the conflict was to claim the United States was not part of the conflict and had not coordinated with Israel, and now he wants not only a piece of the pie, but the entire pie and anything else he can scoop up through this demand.

And, meanwhile, it’s not even clear he can control his subordinates. From rumors that Stephen Miller is a loose cannon …

This shift makes it seem as if White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a white nationalist who insists that the U.S. must deport a million immigrants this year, is determining White House policies, just as he did on the Signal chat about the military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen when his statement that Trump wanted a strike appeared to shut down any further debate of the question.

… to RFK, Jr apparently taking the overpopulation issue into his own hands by sabotaging vaccines, Trump’s legacy is right at the bottom of the list of Presidents – and sinking fast.

It’s a very serious demand, to be sure, but it’s not driven by strategic considerations, but the fears of a man-child who should be in a rest-home – not the Oval Office.

Ever wonder how groundwater losses, or gains for that matter, are measured? WaPo mentions it in passing:

NBC News notes the staggering casualties suffered by Russia in Putin’s War:

The Russian military will likely surpass 1 million casualties in its war on Ukraine this summer, according to one of the world’s leading think tanks, reflecting the staggering human toll of President Vladimir Putin’s assault on his neighbor.

Around 250,000 of these Russian soldiers have died, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a report Tuesday.

Surpassing 1 million killed and wounded would be “a stunning” and grisly milestone for Russia and showed “Putin’s blatant disregard for his soldiers,” according to the report. To put this figure in historical perspective, it is five times as many deaths as all Soviet and Russian wars since World War II.

It’s also worth remembering that President Trump has expressed frustration with President Putin’s continued prosecution of his war. So my proposal integrates these two observations, adds in Trump’s sneakiness, and is this:

The Trump Administration should leak that its plans for the partitioning of Russia by United States grifters is nearing completion.

That might get Putin to sue for peace.

Communications is the transmission of concepts from one group to another group. This is accomplished mostly via words, with some support from, in print, from font modifications and pictures, and in spoken language the use of body language, and other modalities.

Quick! Did you wonder at the word modalities?

For example, if I were giving a speech and used the word secular^[1] in its tertiary sense of Greater than 100 years, without explaining that alternative definition, the confusion that would follow during the speech might easily anger some of the audience.

My point is that using words unknown, or at least unfamiliar, to your audience can result in failure; worse yet, in the social tableau of humans, it can result in alienation, anger, and frustration. In fact, it can be perceived as exclusionary, and those who are excluded in a society in which groups are rivals to each other often migrate to the rival regardless of fundamental disagreements.

So I was surprised when this very conclusion was not mentioned in this WaPo article that opens with:

Maybe it’s using the word “oligarchs” instead of rich people. Or referring to “people experiencing food insecurity” rather than Americans going hungry. Or “equity” in place of “equality,” or “justice-involved populations” instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly — hardly a formula for winning people over, they say.

It’s worth remembering, too, that politicians of all stripes, as well as top military brass, corporate leaders, religious leaders, and even leaders of non-profits, are considered liars^[2] by varying segments of the citizenry. Using fancy-schmancy words that are puzzling and even misleading can pave the path to lying by everyone from military leaders to tobacco company CEOs – or so it’s perceived by the audience.

In the end, using sophisticated, unfamiliar words to communicate simple, familiar concepts is an exclusionary practice, which is precisely contradictory to the goal of the Democrats. They remain arrogant and too impressed with themselves, with a few exceptions.

Too bad the Republicans are even less acceptable. My guess is that we’ll be seeing most members of Congress replaced in the near future by an electorate that is tired of all the lying and abuse, regardless of the source.

¹ As in Secular Cycles, by Turchin & Nefedov.

² My nickname for President Trump is The Mendacity Machine; mendacity is a sophisticated way of saying he has a habit of lying, and it seems like another lie comes crawling out every time President Trump waggles his tongue.

Bourse:

The term bourse refers to the French word for the stock exchange. A bourse was traditionally organized as a place to buy and sell securities, commodities, options, and other investments. The word is commonly used in Europe where it is used to describe the Paris Stock Exchange and other Euronext exchanges, including those in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. The word bourse as it is used today traces its roots back to 13th century Belgium. [Investopedia]

Yep, I’ve been investing for forty years and did not know that. Noted in a piece of promotional mail from AL-Monitor:

Investors around the world this week have been anxiously awaiting the outcome of trade talks between the United States and China. Gulf bourses, along with the price of oil, have been rising at the prospect of an agreement — which was finally announced on Tuesday — that takes the sting out of the trade war. President Donald Trump said the pact would see China supplying rare earths and magnets and the United States allowing Chinese students into its colleges.

Please don’t snog the murder suspects.

The Oxford Murders (2008) is a sophisticated and slightly gamy murder mystery that, for audience members who like to actually try to solve the mystery du jour, unfortunately uses stochastic forces to obscure the mystery.

Stochastic. Yep, sophisticated.

A new mathematics student at Oxford, an American named Martin, wants famed Professor Seldom to be his thesis advisor, although Seldom no longer accepts PhD students for supervision. His landlady knows Seldom, and her husband and she worked with him at one time on the Enigma machine, along with Alan Turing. Oh, he wants Seldom, doesn’t he.

And then the landlady turns up dead. Her body is found by Professor Seldom and Martin.

From here we’re on a gallop to figure out not only who did this, but who’s leaving clues in the form of logical series pictures. Why would they do that?

I dunno.

As I mentioned, stochastic forces appear to cloud over the mystery’s clues, not to mention a couple of young ladies interested in Martin. The end is quite exciting, if perhaps a trifle incoherent.

It’s fun, if a bit unbelievable. Enjoy it, but you won’t remember it after a week or so.

Of course this could happen – but those cemeteries spilling into the sea took the limelight:

To the already very long list of problems caused by global warming, add toxic waste in old landfills exposed by coastal erosion and polluting beaches and seas.

“There is not lots of toxic waste spilling out at the moment, but there will be in the future,” says Andrew Russell at Queen Mary University of London. [“Toxic waste is spilling onto beaches as rising seas erode landfills,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (24 May 2025, paywall)]

Glug.

In Britain alone, the team has now identified more than 1000 old landfill sites at risk of eroding, Russell told a recent meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

I doubt litigation will help with this. Another item for the long list of things to cleanup.

In case you’re not keeping an eye on the news, Israel hit Iran’s nuclear program today:

Israel is at “full-up war” with Iran and will be expecting a “massive” retaliation, said CNN’s security analyst Beth Sanner.

Israel has been targeting key officials in Iran by starting from the very top, she added.

“They started very, very seriously removing the chief of the general staff, in other words like our chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,” she said. “You can imagine what Americans would do.”

On early Friday, multiple Iranian state media outlets reported that General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed during Israel’s overnight attacks. [CNN/World]

From the same link,

On Friday, Israel struck. The strikes hit dozens of locations across Iran, targeting the nuclear program and its long-range missile capabilities, according to an Israeli military official and an Israeli military source. “This is not a one-day attack,” the military source told CNN.

In January of 2016, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated over the previous two years, came into effect. Signed by Iran, the United States under the leadership of then-President Obama, China, France, Russia, the U.K., and Germany, the Trump Administration then withdrew from it in 2018, for no particularly good reason.

And now I wonder if that withdrawal had not occurred, would we still be standing at the brink of full-scale war in the Middle East? Should we be visualizing President Trump as covered in blood, along with the anti-Obama bile that seems to have motivated the withdrawal?

This is foremost in my mind, overshadowing such questions as how President Trump will respond to being eclipsed, possibly without notice, by Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, and how Saudi Arabia, et al, will respond to this attack on an old rival of their’s. Will this entice them into recognizing Israel, or will they veer off from such a course? Netanyahu, of course, is dancing like mad with corruption charges threatening his freedom, just as is President Trump.

The future’s interest level keeps increasing.

Yeah, yeah, sounds like my efforts in the fiction realm. Good joke.

No, I’m talking about my favorite tackling dummy, Erick Erickson, who has an explanation for the California mess protests from the Democratic side:

Here’s what is really going on.

Under the United States Constitution, all persons in the United States, whether or not citizens, count for congressional apportionment. California is projected to lose between four and five seats in Congress after the 2030 Census. …

California needs as many illegal aliens as possible both as a source of cheap labor and as a way to offset projected 2030 census losses.

Because the Electoral College is calculated by adding together a state’s two senators and the total number of its House members, if California loses five congressional seats, it would go from 54 Electoral College votes to 49. Those five seats will go elsewhere, most likely to Republican-leaning states like Texas and Florida.

It is why George Soros is pouring tens of millions of dollars into turning Texas blue by 2032 — the first presidential election after the 2030 census.

It is also why California is so invested in the continued protection of illegal aliens. They need them for national political power through congressional seats and the Electoral College.

It’s a story I’ve not otherwise run across. And this snippet from one of his sources is interesting:

By either 2030 projection, were the 2032 Democratic nominee for president to carry the same states that Harris did this year, he or she would win 12 fewer electoral votes.

But so far as the balance of power goes nationally, Erickson’s making a common mistake: presuming everything else is not going to change.

But it is. How can it not?

• Trump’s reaction of sending troops in has alienated much of the nation.
• Trump’s unforced error of tariffs has alienated much of the nation.
• Trump’s implementation of the 2025 Project has alienated much of the nation.
• The rampant corruption of the Republicans is sickening to many.
• A source Erickson uses believes the Electoral votes will move to Texas and Florida, two States highly vulnerable to climate change. They may, instead, move to more lightly populated States, such as Minnesota or the Dakotas, where the climate is less cold than of old.

Still, it remains an interesting view of the real reason for the protests, verging on riots. Is it accurate? Beats me. Mobs rarely function on rational analysis. I see them more as reaction to the vicious tactics of ICE.

But show me an email with the cited strategy elucidated involving relevant parties and I can believe. Insofar as conspiracy theories go, this one’s believable.

For those motorcycle fans out there:

I noticed Erick Erickson’s having to pick his words carefully in the context of the two putrid Parties making up our political system these days.

Law and order is a winning issue for the GOP.

He says that about a President with 34 convictions and lost two civil suits for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Does he really want to remind folks of the guy who keeps losing in Court? And then there’s all the pardons he’s handing out to embezzlers, violent insurrectionists, corrupt politicians, and what have you. President Trump is fully bought into doing favors for criminals who’ll then owe him, and that’s a terrible look.

But people could see the videos online for themselves. People could see the weak local response. People could see the harassment and violence of those hoisting the Mexican flag. And most Americans support deporting illegal aliens.

Could they? Speaking from long observation, the answer to Erickson is a horse’s laugh. The films could be edited, they might not be recorded in Los Angeles, what happens across a set of streets is easily non-linear.

We are witnessing events that, through the narration of the national press corps, do not watch what our eyes have seen.

An extraordinarily ugly, confusing sentence, and a reminder not of the alleged perfidy of the national press, but of President Trump’s own words in 2020. Which, it turned out, was bad advice.

In an exchange with Jim Acosta, McEnany said, “So let me first address: No tear gas was used and no rubber bullets were used.” Acosta pushed back, “Chemical agents were used.” McEnany doubled down, “So, again, no tear gas was used.” Acosta asked McEnany why she was drawing a distinction between the use of pepper balls and tear gas canisters – since both have the same effect of causing burning and irritation of the eyes. “Well, no one was tear-gassed,” McEnany insisted. Except that viewers saw it happen. And reporters tasted it in their throats and felt it in their lungs. The AP published a fact-check on Wednesday that said “any difference is semantic.” So why is the WH arguing semantics? Perhaps to spread seeds of disbelief…

Erickson has this right, at least.

And if you can’t understand the American public is on the side of law and order, you are going to miss what happens next.

But law and order is not a winning issue for the GOP; it is a losing issue for the Democrats, who, convinced that blind, performative passion will overwhelm their adversaries, cannot bring themselves to sit down, think, and ask if they’ve made any major errors recently^{[1 – yes, go read it!]}. They run around, screaming at the top of their lungs about their goodness and their adversaries’ evil, and, for all we know, have sabotaged their own cause, even their own nation.

Meanwhile, both Parties lose out. How so? Displaying their indiscretions, perfidy, lack of standards, and a dozen other mistakes made by both Parties, these Parties become less and less appetizing. Will, for example, a sincere church-goer continue to buy into the despicable behavior of President Trump, former Rep Gaetz, Justices Thomas and Alito, Secretary Hegseth, the corruption of which a number of former GOP Representatives have been convicted, and then were forced to resign? How about Rep Ogles (R-TN)? Sincere and theologically knowledgeable church-goers should be fleeing all them, and the profound corruption of the prosperity churches should have them screaming in horror.

For the Democrats, Erickson’s point concerning riots may come true; the corruption of the BLM leadership; the defunding the police debacle; the botching of the management of the transgender issue; the appointment of Harris as the nominee for President, rather than running a primary. It can be argued that their autocratic inclinations, while not of the same magnitude as the Republicans’, are there to be seen.

Perhaps leading to implicit disqualification of both Parties from candidacy for running the American government.

Erickson wants to bury the Democrats because they’re “baby-killers,” but his side is arguably even worse. Neither side is appetizing, the Sullivan interview of Tapper and Alex Thompson suggests that both sides are unworthy of our votes.

¹ Which is, not so incidentally, a flaw they share with the Republicans.

Having just finished listening to Andrew Sullivan interview Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson concerning their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, I came away simply more convinced that our political system’s denizens have become dangerously ossified and cancerous. Tapper and Thompson, of course, concentrate on Biden, but implicitly indict the balance of the Democrats for not interfering (with kudos to exception former Rep Dean Phillips (D-MN), who took the Nikki Haley role as wannabe spoiler) with Biden’s election run. Add in the alleged manipulation of Biden by his Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, keeping in mind Sullivan’s loathing for the DEI way of doing things, such as identitarian reservation of positions, and the Democrats come off looking very bad.

And then they lost to that other Party which, for the good of the United States, should be replaced, the Republican Party. I’m inclined to say the entire Democratic Party, from Senator Klobuchar (D-MN) to the State legislators, really should go.

But the media also comes in for some well-deserved kicks, too. I know that I was taken in by their refusals to report on Biden’s true condition, and I’m not altogether happy about it.

I’m not a real fan of Sullivan’s interview technique, but it’s not awful, and he elicits a lot of information from these subjects. But you do have to pay for it – which is only right.

So here’s to getting rid of the Republicans and the Democrats, and their awful autocratic inclinations. Salut!

I’d sure like to view Senator John Kennedy’s (R-LA) flow of thoughts right at the moment, in view of this exchange with Commerce Secretary, and billionaire lacking any sort of link with reality, Luttnick:

KENNEDY: If Vietnam came to you and said, ‘You win. We’re gonna remove all tariffs and all trade barriers. Would the US please do the same?” Would you accept that deal?

LUTNICK: Absolutely not. That would be the silliest thing we could do

KENNEDY: What’s the purpose of reciprocity then?

Judging from the Senator’s line of inquiry, he’s rapidly finding himself separating from the Trump Administration. Keeping in mind that Senator Kennedy was once a Democrat and he’s an old-line politician, I have to wonder if he’s considering his next move.

Return to the Democrats? Seems unlikely. He left for a reason. Stick with the Republicans? While it seems the easiest, if his constituents begin to hate on the Republicans, then his seat may be endangered.

Become Independent? He’d be joining King and Sanders, and possibly Murkowski, in this category. That’s make for a fascinating mess.

I think he’ll quietly stick with the Republicans or retire, as he’s in his early seventies now and his body probably detests the long hours of politics. But it’s worth keeping an eye on his guy.

Here’s why science isn’t really for the “common sense” types:

2023 smashed the record for the hottest year, but it might have been even hotter. The entire northern hemisphere would have been nearly 1°C warmer on average during its summer without the cooling effect of smoke from massive wildfires in Canada, a climate model suggests. The smoke may also have led to the driest August in India on record.

“I think it’s really hard to comprehend how gigantic the fires were. It was insane,” says Iulian-Alin Rosu at the Technical University of Crete in Greece, who presented his team’s findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

The emissions were around five or six times higher than those during any previously recorded wildfire season in Canada, estimates Rosu. The carbon dioxide from these fires is having an ongoing warming effect, but in 2023 this warming was outweighed by the cooling effect of smoke blocking sunlight. [“Massive wildfires in Canada helped keep the world cooler in 2023,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (24 May 2025, paywall)]

There’s always something waiting around the corner to trip you up on your triumphal trot to the finish line.

Professor Richardson summarizes the appointment of Thomas C. Fugate to head the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the United States Department of Homeland Security, as Wikipedia reports:

Hannah Allam of ProPublica reported on Wednesday that the White House has put a 22-year-old recent college graduate with no experience in national security in charge of overseeing the government’s main center for preventing terrorism. Thomas Fugate’s main credentials for his position in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes overseeing $18 million in grants to local authorities to combat violent extremism, appear to be his time spent as an intern at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and his loyalty to Trump.

The Professor misses one qualification:

That’s a TV-ready face if I’ve ever seen one, and that’s an important aspect of the Trump vetting process.

Which is as much an indictment of the Trump Administration as any.

The silly shit pulled by politicians frantic to move up the Trump power ladder:

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced a bill Thursday to rename the Washington, D.C., subway system after President Trump and his MAGA slogan.

The Make Autorail Great Again Act would withhold federal funding to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, known as WMATA, until it rebrands as the Washington Metropolitan Authority for Greater Access, or WMAGA — a similar acronym to the Make America Great Again slogan — and renames the Metrorail the Trump Train. [The Hill]

Steube’s supporting statement is a mishmash of Republican boilerplate and sheer gibberish. I haven’t gone looking, but this self-serving piece of crap is probably the high point of the Representative’s political career. And will remain so.

In case the phrase Reverse Discrimination animates you … oh, wait. If you’re puzzled, here’s Wikipedia:

Reverse discrimination is a term used to describe discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group. Reverse discrimination based on race or ethnicity is also called reverse racism.

OK, so what happened a while back at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals?

… decision that placed a heightened burden upon a plaintiff who is a member of a “majority group” in discrimination cases, requiring that the plaintiff shows “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.” [USA Today]

In other words, that court claimed it was harder to prove reverse discrimination than discrimination. So what did SCOTUS say about this?

There is no such thing as reverse discrimination. There is just discrimination. It doesn’t matter if someone is White or Black, straight or gay, male or female. It only matters if they’ve been discriminated against.

On June 5, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision removing barriers for members of majority groups to file anti-discrimination suits. In this case, Marlean Ames, a straight woman, filed a suit against her employer, which she said denied a promotion in favor of a gay woman, and later demoted her in favor of a gay man filling her role. [USA Today]

Bold mine, because it matters. Compensatory discrimination – my phrase – for past discrimination against members of targeted groups doesn’t make for justice, and both wings of the Court agree on this conclusion, or at least that’s how this software engineer sees it.

The left may flutter about it, but the left wing of the Court, to reiterate, made it a unanimous decision – and implicitly rejects identitarian politics. As identitarian politics is one of the factors damaging lefty, and Democratic, politics, this is actually a good thing. The faster it’s expunged from the intellectual arguments of a substantial portion of the population, the better off we’ll be.

Erick Erickson has an uneasy feeling concerning the Trump-Musk whatever-it-is:

Oh, and Trump just alienated Leonard Leo, who has over a billion dollars to spend advancing the right.

In both the case of Elon Musk and Leonard Leo, I suspect a few too many grifters have whispered in the ears of those around the President to help poison the well for their own advantage, not for the rest of us or even the President.

I assume, because of their mutual interests, Musk and Trump will ultimately kiss and make up and everyone will insist it was all staged. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some peace offering of some kind today, probably a meme on Twitter from Musk. Neither man wants to give the left a win, and both men share a list of common enemies.

If this is not a scripted event to con the left, and everyone else, then Erickson’s worries about grifters is fully justified. The near-absolute individualism of the United States has a popular attribute: avarice. That’s the teachings of the United States, after all, and why the financial industry is huge.

But avarice is not an attribute of the cooperative, such as Trump/Musk. Avarice justifies theft, betrayal, and many of the other behaviors not desired in cooperatives. Avarice and self-sacrifice are immiscible over the long term, unstable over the short-term.

The left, less wed to individualism than the right, tends to be unstable due to autocratic tendencies exacerbated by the skepticism of independents and the right concerning lefty proposals that impinge on individualistic rights. Just sayin’.

If you’re not a politics nor tech watcher, you may have missed the war of words between President Trump and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, uh, and other companies. CNN/Politics provides a running report here.

Tesla stock soared in the months after the presidential election because investors were convinced Donald Trump was about to do massive favors for his largest financial backer, CEO Elon Musk. But Trump can also do great damage to Musk’s many business interests.

The risk of that damage is one reason Tesla shares tumbled 14% in trading following their public spat yesterday.

But it’s not just Tesla that could be at risk. SpaceX depends on government contracts for a significant share of its revenue. And Musk’s companies all face government regulation.

My reaction, though, is Really?

I could interpret this clash as the collision of two titanic egos, or as an example of Mr. Musk’s political inexperience and naivete, as he objects to the Big, Beautiful Bill that has already passed the House sans full review, as a bloated disaster.

Or is this, and I use this word in respect to President Trump’s former career as a TV actor, a scripted event, designed to distract the chattering classes from something of far more importance? It would certainly fit right into Mr. Trump’s conman approach to life, using one hand to distract his audience, while stealing their wallets with the other.

If this feud suddenly disappears, we’ll know it’s the conman approach.

Apophenia:

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the list Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in “Highly Effective Thinkers: Critical Thinking for Teens,” Timothy Redmond, Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2025, paywall). A lovely article on strategies for communicating survival skills in the Digital Age to teenagers, or, as I think of it, skills for self-awareness.

Professor Richardson mentions the apparent intent of the right to impose a narrow theocracy on the United States:

The use of the government to impose evangelical beliefs on the country, even at the expense of lives, also appears to be an administration goal. Yesterday, the administration announced it is ending the Biden administration’s 2022 guidance to hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare—which is virtually all of them—requiring that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act they must perform an abortion in an emergency if the procedure is necessary to prevent a patient’s organ failure or severe hemorrhaging. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients.

Skipping over the obvious objections where militant Christianity tends to exterminate its rivals in various ghastly ways^[1], I think it’s more than word trickery to notice that just a few word substitutions results in the arbitrary and relatively-undiscussed ideology of transgenderism being the imposed ideas, rather than those of evangelical Christianity – all without implying obviously wrong assumptions or assertions. While advocates for either side may object to this description being applied to their beloved ideology, particularly when it comes to proof, neither has a convincing case.

Keep in mind Professor Turchin’s observation^[2] that the first generation, following the expungement of an existential enemy, to find itself at loggerheads with itself over one or more pointless ideologies that inspires adherents and serves as a cloak for those who seek power, does not know the horror of internecine strife; it’s the next generation, bruised, bleeding, and battered, that cedes to the assertion that Compromise is a good thing, and engages in negotiations rather than war. But with the power of our weapons nearing that of the power of Gods of whatever mythos you prefer, will America survive that first generation’s war?

All this leads to the observation that the Evangelical right and the Radical Left, the latter defined by ‘open borders’ and blind support, sans convincing evidence, for transgenderism and sexual or gender fluidity, may be considered more primitive segments of American society, disdaining those who suggest doubt and compromise are attributes of true adults.

Pick your position wisely, and if a new political party becomes available that you find attractive, then pick them. While the ethicists will argue that it’s an inferior ethic to do so, when both sides advocate fascism, it’s better to walk away from them.

¹ For those who prefer more specificity, the usual approach is to burn their rivals at the stake. However, in this age of automatic weapons, each side may prefer indiscriminate, if unsatisfying, slaughter.

² Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin (2016). Almost certainly found in Chapter I, as that’s the extent of my reading, so far, of this book. I also recommend his Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, both of which are less an exposure to technical aspects of his theory.

“Yeah, my parents sent me to finishing school to learn how to use sandpaper and stick my thumbs in my armpits elegantly. See?”

The Rogues’ Tavern (1936) is a B-lister, as they used to call them, a murder mystery with indistinguishable characters whose actions seem unmotivated, a woman who puts up with her fiancee’s patronizing attitude and supports him, again for reasons unknown, and a dog that seems to have committed the murders.

Poor dog.

It’s bad, it’s boring. Don’t bother.

What’s the trigger?

The Labor Department on Wednesday yanked Biden-era guidance that strongly discouraged employers against offering cryptocurrency in workers’ 401(k) plan options.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the policy was an attempt by the previous administration “to put their thumb on the scale” against cryptocurrency investments.

“We’re rolling back this overreach and making it clear that investment decisions should be made by fiduciaries, not DC bureaucrats,” she said in a statement. [Politico]

That statement doesn’t bother me that much, actually. But then the evil side whispered in my ear:

What’s to stop the Trumpie’s from reversing that statement, to encourage 401(k) investors to buy crypto as an investment?

Sure, we can go full evil – change encourage to require!

Yeah, think about that – a requirement that each 401(k) account invest .5% of its funds in $TRUMP.

It makes my skin crawl, but I suppose that would ensure Trump’s place on the right hand of God. Cthulhu. Whatever it happens to be.

Mechanochemistry:

Mechanochemistry refers to the coupling of chemical reactions with mechanical forces. [“Mechanochemistry: Fundamental Principles and Applications,” Wiley Advanced]

Noted in “How an ancient alchemy technique is transforming modern chemistry,” Hayley Bennett, NewScientist (24 May 2025, paywall):

Chemistry creates many of the wonders of modern life, from the medicines that heal us to the screens with which we communicate. When researchers want to make these things from scratch, they often start by assuming they must dissolve their materials. But mechanochemistry, the burgeoning field [Tomislav Friščić of the University of Birmingham, UK] is fascinated by, shows this isn’t always necessary. “Mechanochemistry gives you the intellectual freedom to think: ‘Let me just try this reaction by grinding it’,” says Friščić. “And, in many cases, it works.”

Bonus!

As well as creating new chemicals, mechanochemistry can be destructive – in a good way. At Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Ina Vollmer’s lab has been meticulous in trying to work out what happens when plastic waste is broken down in a ball mill. Vollmer came to mechanochemistry looking for a greener way to take spent plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene and turn them back into their chemical building blocks. “We were really thinking about it for circularity and recycling, to make these polymers again,” she says.

Such chemical recycling is already possible, but it requires temperatures of around 300°C (570°F), meaning plastics are usually melted and reshaped instead. However, Vollmer’s team recently succeeded at doing it at room temperature using an ingenious milling system in which the catalysts driving the reactions are stuck to the balls themselves. They can throw in pellets of plastic – from old garden chairs and toys, for example – and get out hydrocarbon gases like propene. According to Vollmer, the team is now building a bigger ball mill and founding a start-up to commercialise the process. It is a stunning example of what mechanochemistry can do, says Friščić.