* 22 entries including: US Constitution (series) , global supply chains (series), fast radio bursters, RISC-V & nanotube processor, VR sickness, drunk on cola, sodium & aluminum batteries & heat for fast charging, customized immune cells, district cooling & heating, plus interstellar comets & Planet 9 as black hole.
* NEW COMMENTARY FOR DECEMBER 2019: As discussed by an article from CSMONITOR.com ("Kansas in Middle East?", by Scott Peterson, 3 December 2019), following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA, America invaded Afghanistan, overturning the government run by the Taliban, a religious extremist group. US President George W. Bush promised the United States would succeed as nation builders. He admitted that the history of military conflicts in Afghanistan was "one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure," but vowed in April 2002 that America was "not going to repeat that mistake." It would instead create a nation "free from this evil [that] is a better place in which to live."
18 years after they first arrived, US troops persist in the longest war in American history. More than 2,400 US military personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001. In the first nine months of 2019 alone, the United Nations counted 2,563 Afghan civilians killed. The Taliban controls half the country, and is making gains.
America has pumped more than $132 billion USD into Afghanistan; in comparison, the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild 16 European countries after World War II took some $100 billion USD, in today's dollars. Despite the infusion of money, the streets of Afghanistan are not paved with gold: poverty remains endemic, corruption is chronic, and much of the money poured into rebuilding was lost, mismanaged, or spent on dubious projects, while the fighting sputters on.
Has the US failed in Afghanistan? Many Afghans suggest that other, less quantifiable metrics of progress give more reason for optimism. Their nation and society have been irreversibly transformed by the Americans. Vast strides have been made in women's rights, education for girls, and the creation of a middle class that has high expectations for a civil society.
The US did, to be sure, promote dependency among Afghans. Masood Karokhail -- director of The Liaison Office, a Kabul-based group that facilitates peace and rebuilding -- says that American interest and money not only enabled corruption, but also the "thinking that somebody else is going to do your job for you. The Americans are going to come; they are going to build my army; they are going to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda; they are going to fix my country."
Karokhail adds that, at the same time, that efforts by the US and other donors created an Afghan version of the American dream. Afghans now demand more political rights and to live better lives: "Those thousands of workshops that happened across the country on women's rights, on youth, freedom ... each of those have left something in our minds. For a country that had been a very traditional, closed society, suddenly it was exploding not only with cash, but also information."
When the Americans roared into Afghanistan late in 2001, the country had spent five years under austere Taliban rule, which forbade women from working outside the home, banned schooling for girls, and even outlawed photographic images of a human face. Taliban checkpoints were piled with confiscated videotapes and music CDs. Afghans say their world was a "desert" -- hopeless, lost in time. Graeme Smith -- an Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank -- says the USA transformed the country: "Just the level of human flourishing since the arrival of American troops -- you can actually talk about an influx of resources creating babies that don't die, and kids that get educated."
The statistics charting such upward trends are impressive -- but they are smudged by the "waste, fraud, and abuse" that US auditors in 2017 said had swallowed up 29% of the $52.7 billion USD in spending they examined. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, whose office produces voluminous quarterly reports and audits for Congress, says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We can't rebuild [Afghanistan] into a little America. I think that was one of the problems. We wanted to turn this into Kansas. We designed and funded a lot of programs that the Afghans didn't even know about until we turned it over to them. Basically, dollar bills were falling from the sky.
END QUOTE
The effects of the American intervention, both good and bad, can be seen at the Ariana Kabul Private High School in north Kabul, which teaches 350 students on a shoestring budget. It offers a 50% discount for girls, to encourage their attendance, and also takes some street kids for free.
They all share the same classrooms and same desks up to the sixth grade; Boys and girls are separated at higher grades. Such a mixed school was impossible under the Taliban in the late 1990s, when one teacher here organized secret classes for girls. Homira Kohi says: "Officially it was a holy Quran course. Every student carried a holy Quran in their hand, and their [regular] books in their backpack. If the Taliban came, they were to immediately take hold of the Quran."
She says that the official Taliban curriculum "was all about conflict, guns, and bombs," Students recited sentences like, "My father has a gun, and with his gun he goes on jihad." She was excited at the fall of the Taliban, since she thought they would be there "forever". Now, many Afghans expect better of the future.
Getting there is difficult. There is no electric lighting in the school; there used to be power from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but the Taliban sabotaged the transmission lines. The Americans built the Tarakhil Power Plant to power Kabul, at a cost of a third of a billion dollars. It was completed in 2010, but has been largely idle -- since it runs off diesel fuel, which is too expensive.
Large parts of the country are periodically without power because of disruptions caused by Taliban fighters, and dubious project choices made by US and Afghan officials. There was a push to provide diesel generators to villages, but most of the villages couldn't afford the fuel. The irony is that Afghanistan, being mountainous, has plenty of opportunities for hydropower development -- and is also generally sunny, with great opportunities for solar power. However, in the early days of US involvement, solar hadn't caught on in the developing world the way it has now.
Of course, there's also the corruption. Afghan contractors and businesspeople have shipped dark money gains to Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, while ordinary people scratch for bread, or risk their lives on the migrant routes to Europe. For all that, there has been real positive change in Afghanistan. Abdallah al-Dardari -- the country representative of the United Nations Development Program in Kabul -- says: "Donor countries have put blood and treasure into this country, and they have made a lot of sacrifice. Afghanistan today is not the Afghanistan of 2001."
One result, he adds, is that the country "has done a paradigm shift on the road to democracy," which includes political and media freedom. Another is the "resilience" of the society and its institutions. Even though illiteracy and poverty are high, people are much more sophisticated about understanding the importance of development and aid.
A veteran Western official in Kabul says: "For the amount of money, they got very little. ... Their return on investment is very low, but they did achieve something." He adds that the money hadn't been spent to build up Afghan security forces: "We would be worse off, and the Taliban would probably have taken over again by force."
US and other donor funding has also helped build up less visible organizations, such as the Afghan Midwives Association (AMA). Since 2001, it has helped expand the number of trained Afghan midwives from 467 to 15,000. The effort has reduced maternal mortality from 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births, to between 800 and 1,200 deaths.
Fawzia Koofi, a former lawmaker from the province of Badakhshan, has seen positive change as well. Four decades ago, her father set up a local school; girls could not attend, with parents reluctant to even send their sons, lest they be conscripted into the army, and learn things that contradicted their values. She says: "If you go to the same community now, even much more remote areas, people come and ask me to build schools for their girls. That is a transformation in the mindset of people, in society."
There's a wide push to improve the empowerment of women. Zan TV, meaning "Women's TV," broadcasts shows about women's issues. Shogofa Sediqi, chief executive officer of Zan TV, says: "If there were still a Taliban regime, it's clear: There would be no Zan TV, no freedom." She adds that boys forced to wear turbans during the Taliban era are now professors and advisers to the president.
That makes US and other foreign involvement in Afghanistan a tricky issue. The concept of "nation building" has not fared well in recent decades, foundering in corruption and incompetence. Nonetheless, Afghanistan shows that the idea isn't entirely futile, either. Can we afford to persist? Possibly the question is: can we afford not to? Can we let the Taliban take over again? That would reset Afghanistan towards square one, very likely making it a safe haven for Islamic terrorism -- and forcing another intervention in the future.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Mean Streets", 18 December 2019), much of the developed world is suffering from a rise in people sleeping on the streets. Almost every European country is seeing an increase in the number of homeless people, including those who live in temporary accommodation, as well as the smaller number who live on the streets. Across London, the number of "rough sleepers" has more than tripled since 2010. Homelessness across America is in decline, but it is soaring in its most prosperous cities. Roughly 5,000 people live on the streets of San Francisco, a 19% rise in just two years.
On consideration, it doesn't seem there should be a problem. Half a century ago in the US, there was little homelessness -- and even today, some rich cities, such as Tokyo and Munich, have few people living on the streets. These places offer lessons on how to reduce homelessness.
It is a conventional wisdom that homelessness represents a failure to take personal responsibility -- and there is certainly an element of dysfunction among those sleeping rough. Many experts claim, not unreasonably, that it is counterproductive to give money to someone begging on the street. Better, they say, to donate to a charity. However, the underlying problem is housing costs and availability. In the postwar period, few Americans lived on the streets; at that time, only one in four tenants spent more than 30% of their income on rent. Now the ratio is one in two. Studies suggest that a 10% rise in housing costs in a pricey city prompts an 8% jump in homelessness.
The state can help. Cuts to rent subsidies for Britain's poor are probably the biggest reason why London now has so many rough sleepers. The Right grumbles about hand-outs to deadbeats, but housing people with public funds might actually save money, reducing demands on healthcare and police services. Besides, people who are left on the streets find it very hard to get work and become productive citizens. Nobody's suggesting that they get more than subsistence, so they will still have an incentive to better themselves.
Another option is for the state to build more housing itself. In Singapore, another place where there is practically no homelessness, 80% of residents live in government-built flats, which they buy at low prices. While many countries have been privatizing their public housing, Finland has been building more of it, with the authorities putting homeless people in their own apartments. It has embraced an approach originally pioneered in America, which does not demand that homeless folk quit drinking or drugs before giving them accommodation. Instead, the state gives them a home first, and then provides support to help them cope with their problems. In Finland, the numbers of homeless are declining.
However, the biggest reform would be to make commercial home construction easier. In many countries, homeowners and local governments have collaborated on making zoning laws more restrictive: home-owners like to see the value of their houses increase, and don't want high-density housing nearby -- while local governments want to accommodate those voters, and like making more money from property taxes. It must be said that home-owners are not quite so happy about the rising price of homes when their property-tax bills keep going up.
In any case, the problem of rough sleeping in Germany and Switzerland, two countries with minimal real-house-price growth in recent decades, is less acute. Japan has used its fair share of strong arm tactics to deal with the homeless, but then it introduced a big urban reform in the early 2000s. Japan loosened planning rules, prompting residential construction to jump. Since then, housing costs in Tokyo have fallen in real terms, and the number of rough sleepers has fallen by 80% in 20 years.
It has become fashionable, at least among a faction, to say that governments are useless, that market forces can cure all problems, that no pains should be taken to help people who are down and out. That is short-sighted; social problems may not be easy to solve, and it may not be possible to solve them completely -- but it's much less difficult, on the balance, than not trying to solve them at all.
* As for the ongoing political dumpster fire in the USA, the impeachment effort against President Donald Trump continues to roll along. Impeachment having gone through the House Intelligence Committee, it then went to the Judiciary Committee, which started out by bringing in three constitutional scholars to weigh the validity of the argument for impeachment. Not surprisingly, they all stated it was entirely justified -- which is what anyone else with sense would have concluded as well.
Not to be outdone, Republican members of the committee brought in one Jonathan Turley of George Washington University -- who claimed, preposterously, there was no substantial evidence of "high crimes & misdemeanors" that justified impeachment. Turley's phone then began ringing off the hook with threatening calls; that was regrettable, but given how infuriating he was, at least understandable.
The Republican members of the committee didn't even do that well, attempting to smear the three other scholars as "Never Trumpers" -- they almost certainly were, but that was a diversion from the question of Trump's guilt -- and worse, of being "Harvard scholars" -- The horror! The horror! One of the three, Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School, pointed out that the Constitution doesn't give the president the power to do just anything, like give titles of nobility: "So, while the president can name his son Barron, he can't make him a baron."
That led to a noisy collective hissy fit from the Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz of Florida, the pretext that Karlan had no right to "smear" Barron Trump. Granted, it was a labored attempt to be a bit too clever, but the response was like straight out of Monty Python -- by people who didn't realize they were being funny.
In the end, the House Judiciary Committee issued two articles of impeachment -- one for Trump's attempt to get Ukraine's help in smearing Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and one for obstruction of Congress. Neither of them were arguable in any sensible way. The House voted to pass the articles of impeachment on 18 December. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the results, a cheer began to rise from the body of the House; it ended abruptly with a sharp look and a short sweep of the hand from the Speaker. The message was: No gloating, this is trouble we'd rather not have.
In principle, the articles of impeachment were to be handed over to the Senate for workup to a trial -- but as so much else in the Era of Trump, events took yet another bizarre turn, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flatly dismissing the impeachment, and saying that no serious action would be taken on the trial. He all but said: We plan to whitewash the president, and there's nothing you can do about it. There wasn't the slightest subtlety in the message.
That was unacceptable to the Democrats; they have a solid case against Trump, and Trump's refusal to address any of the charges against him all but proves it. Nobody is betting that the Senate GOP will vote to impeach Trump, but the facts have to be revealed. Once they are, action can take place down the road. It's actually Mitch McConnell who's in the bad situation, since he can't make impeachment go away -- and trying to derail the impeachment trial only makes Trump look even more guilty. Why would McConnell resist a fair trial if it might exonerate Trump? McConnell resists it because he fears the facts, and for good reason.
Trump has been saying that he's looking forward to the trial, since he believes it will give him a platform to smear Joe Biden. It is hard to see that as workable: it would be ridiculous, and characteristic, of Trump to offer as a defense of himself, an attempt to spin the trial into one of a political rival. It's unlikely to fly.
Trump fans are gloating that the impeachment will backfire on the Democrats, and ensure Trump's win in November 2020. In reality, the approval / disapproval level for Trump is static, at about 45% / 55%, excluding the few who don't care and don't vote. Nothing that happens changes that ratio. Trump will neither lose nor gain votes from impeachment -- and he lost the popular election in 2016, on low voter turnout. The 2018 midterms had high voter turnout, and the Democrats can bank on high turnout in 2020. It's possible that Trump could win in 2020, but it's not a good bet, there being not one indicator in his favor.
Impeachment will not hurt the Democrats; the only people who hold it against them are Trump fans, who hate them anyway. With Democratic voters overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment, Democrat members of Congress would suffer if they didn't vote for impeachment. Independents are about half and half on the issue, so they're a wash. Impeachment will drive heavy Democrat voter turnout in November 2020 -- definitely above average, possibly record-breaking. What actually happens in the election, of course, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Trump has been on a tear, denouncing wind turbines, high-efficiency toilets and washers, and LED lights. Again, it is possible that Trump will win in November 2020 -- but it's hard to believe the comfortable majority of Americans will vote for someone who can't be taken seriously.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (4): As for the automobile industry, its supply chains have local and global aspects working in tension. Hau Thai-Tang -- Ford's top supply-chain executive -- says: "Except for the jack in the trunk, which everybody gets from China, we've had a distributed global supply chain for a long time." He sees the business as being regionalized on a continental basis, with three emerging hub-and-spoke networks: Mexico as the low-cost spoke for America; Eastern Europe and Morocco for Western Europe; and South-East Asia and China for Asia.
One factor in the push for regionalization is the fact that in the USA, the Trump Administration has been rolling back regulations on fuel-efficient vehicles, with Americans enthusiastically buying more gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sports-utility vehicles -- which aren't popular outside the USA, where governments are not so friendly to cars. Ford has decided to phase out passenger cars completely, while GM has left Europe and is consolidating its North American operations. Of course, the "what me worry" attitude of the Trump Administration is unlikely to survive Trump, so it's hard to say these are long-term changes.
Car firms have invested heavily in Mexico to turn it into an export base. The value of its automobile exports has more than doubled since 2010, approaching $50 billion USD in 2018. The main reasons are not lower labor costs or the North American Free Trade Agreement, but instead Mexico's four dozen free-trade agreements with other countries -- which allow it to export to almost half the world's market for new cars, tariff-free. Those "Mexican" cars contain plenty of value from elsewhere: Mexico's car exports to Germany have nearly 40% German components by value, while those crossing into the US have over 70% American content. With the US engaged in a trade war with China, Mexico is looking even more attractive to Big Auto.
The rise of electric vehicles represents another force for change in automotive supply chains. The Edison Electric Institute, a think-tank, estimates that the share of electric vehicles (EVs) in new car sales in the USA will rise from 2% in 2018 to over 20% in 2030. One aspect of the shift towards EVs is that they are mechanically simpler than cars with piston engines, which means fewer parts, and so a streamlining of manufacturing and supply chains. All cars have also been acquiring ever more sophisticated electronics, shifting the focus for supply chains.
Dyson, a British engineering firm, is now designing and manufacturing its new EVs in Singapore, to be close to the China market. That's not just because China is the biggest market for EVs, but because it is the best source of advanced electronics. Rising Chinese labor costs and trade warfare has driven many firms to leave China -- though it turns out to be not so easy to do.
John Kern -- head of supply chains at America's Cisco, a telecoms gear maker -- says that the company has upgraded its Mexico operations to cater to customers who want non-China sourcing. However, Cisco still has many global customers who don't care if their gear was built in China. It is also possible to look down the road to the era after Trump, which may not be so very far in the future, when the US and China are likely to reach an accommodation. Kern says China is a big manufacturing base for Cisco and "will remain so for many years to come".
George Yeo of Kerry Logistics, which has trucks and personnel all over Asia, has noticed an uptick in clients investing in South-East Asia, with Vietnam and Cambodia being the biggest beneficiaries, he reports. Again, however, Southeast Asia doesn't have sophisticated infrastructure or a highly-trained workforce, and what is good for clothing is not so good for high tech. In electronics, Yeo thinks the switch to Southeast Asia is limited to low-end kit: "Thanks to automation and high value-add, Shenzhen is still king." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (85): Although Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy was primarily focused on the Western Hemisphere in his first term, events across the oceans forced him to broaden his focus. In 1922, Benito Mussolini had become prime minister of Italy, to establish a Fascist regime. Mussolini was not taken very seriously internationally, but in 1933, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, to establish a Nazi regime, partly modeled on Mussolini's Fascism. In the following years, Hitler began to restructure German society on a warlike basis, raising alarms.
In 1931, Japan had conquered Manchuria, to set up the puppet state of "Manchukuo"; it wasn't a big issue to Americans, but the Hoover Administration refused to recognize the legitimacy of Manchukuo, setting relations between the US and Japan on a downward slope. In 1937, Japan invaded China, resulting in a quagmire of a war that did attract unfavorable American attention.
However, there was stiff resistance to getting involved in conflicts overseas, with Congress refusing to accept a military build-up, and tying the president's hands. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia; Congress replied by passing the First Neutrality Act, which restricted the USA from supplying munitions to any nation at war. It was followed by the Neutrality Acts of 1936 and 1937.
The 1937 act did make a concession to FDR, allowing the US to sell munitions to belligerents if they paid cash, and transported the munitions on their own ships -- a scheme called "cash & carry". Since Japan and China hadn't declared war on each other, FDR did supply munitions to China, delivered on British ships, much to the anger of isolationists in Congress.
In an October 1937 speech, FDR attempted to raise public awareness to the threat of the aggressive militarist regimes overseas. Roosevelt said that peace-loving nations should join together to "quarantine" such rogue states, just as doctors quarantine patients with infectious diseases. He warned the citizens: "Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked."
American's isolationists weren't listening. Hitler's Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, setting off World War II; there was no general public enthusiasm among Americans for entering the conflict, but concerns about what happened elsewhere were growing. FDR replied to the outbreak of war by declaring that the US Navy would conduct "neutrality patrols" in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. It was a peculiar sort of neutrality, in that the US Navy would escort British merchant vessels to the mid-Atlantic, where the British Royal Navy would then take over. It led to clashes between US Navy destroyers and German Navy submarines, or "U-boats". They were kept quiet. The Neutrality Act of 1939 did authorize nations fighting the Axis powers to obtain US arms, on a "cash & carry" basis. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("MBDA To Develop Brimstone 3" by Robin Hughes, 26 March 2018), the US Hellfire anti-armor missile has become a popular weapon in Western arsenals. Britain used the Hellfire as the basis for an improved follow-on, the "Brimstone", with the same form-factor, being a 180-millimeter (4-inch) 50-kilogram (110-pound) munition.
The UK is now working on an enhancement to the current "Brimstone 2" variant of the missile, with European defense giant MBDA having been awarded a contract for a "Capability Sustainment Programme (CSP)" to update the weapon. The Brimstone 2 CSP begins with the baseline features of the Brimstone 2:
Brimstone 2 CSP will feature significant improvements, including:
The improvements stretch range by 20%, though the range of the Brimstone 2 hasn't been revealed. Production of Brimstone 2 CSP will begin late in 2019.
* In other news about the Brimstone missile, according to an article from JANES.com ("MBDA Unveils Surface-Launched Brimstone Platform Concepts" by Robin Hughes, 3 September 2019), European defense giant MBDA has unveiled two new high load-out, salvo-fire, surface-to-surface missile platform concepts, based on the Brimstone.
Brimstone was originally devised as an air-to-surface weapon, to engage static and maneuvering targets. MBDA has subsequently extensively trialed the weapon system for surface-launched applications from land and naval platforms, as per the company's "one missile, multi-platform" effort. It is currently supported on the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) Eurofighter Typhoon, is being integrated onto the Protector drone, and may be carried by British Army AH-64E Apache gunships. The idea is, in part, to simplify stockpiling.
MBDA has now designed a cassette of six Brimstone missiles in a modular elevating box launcher, primarily for use with uncrewed ground vehicles (UGV), to provide an autonomous, all-weather, all-terrain, high-volume precision effects capability against heavy armor with countermeasures systems. The company is expected to showcase this solution Milrem Robotics Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry System (THeMIS) UGV. The launcher, which adds about 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of mass to the UGV, pivots up and down, but doesn't rotate, with the missiles able to maneuver to engage off-boresight targets.
* As for the Hellfire itself, as discussed by an article from ENGADGET.com ("CIA 'Ninja Bomb' Replaces Explosives With Six Long Blades" by Jon Fingas, 9 May 19, the US Hellfire missile remains in widespread use, and continues to be refined. One focus is to reduce "collateral damage" -- that is, to make sure the Hellfire kills the people who are being fired upon, and not anyone else.
Now reports have emerged of a new Hellfire variant, the "R9X", AKA "Ninja Bomb", which pops out six blades in a radial fan that simply slice through the target. The Pentagon isn't saying much about it; it's apparently been used only a handful of times, one bit of evidence being a photo of a car that had been carrying terrorist leaders, the vehicle having a relatively tidy hole punched in the roof. The Pentagon had no comment on the matter, so it's not much more than a rumor.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* FAST RADIO BURSTERS As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Astronomers Find Another Source Of Repeating Radio Bursts From Outside Our Galaxy" By Loren Grush, 9 January 2019), since 2007, astronomers have spotted mysterious "fast radio burst (FRB)" sources, with almost 80 found to date.
Researchers not only want to find out what FRBs are, they are also useful probes about matter in the vast reaches between galaxies. As they travel through space, FRB pulses are spread out by the electrons they encounter, providing information about the density of the intergalactic medium, and helping map the large-scale structure of the Universe.
When the FRBs were first noticed, they were rare and transient, hard to spot at all, much less investigate in detail. It wasn't certain that they were anything but instrument glitches -- but enough data was accumulated on them to show they came from distant galaxies. Intergalactic matter will delay electromagnetic waves, with the longer wavelengths delayed more than shorter ones; the lag between the two in the FRBs was too great to be accounted for by events in our own Galaxy.
There were thoughts that the FRBs were due to explosive events in our Galaxy, such as supernovas or neutron star mergers. However, an FRB, designated "FRB 121102" in reference to the date it was spotted, was eventually shown to repeat -- which ruled out "one-shot" events like supernovas or neutron star mergers. Targeted observations with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia indicated that the bursts, known as FRB 121102, came from a highly magnetic environment. In 2017, researchers used the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and the continent-wide European VLBI Network to pin down its location to a small star-forming galaxy 3 billion light-years away. The location of a second FRB, a non-repeater, was pinned down in 2019, this one being estimated to be 3.6 billion light-years away. The extreme distance of the FRBs means the energies released in the bursts have to be tens of millions of times greater than the emissions from our Sun.
There are dozens of theories, in fact almost as many theories as FRBs that have been observed. More data is needed to sort out the theories. That's where the "Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)" comes in. CHIME is part of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory at Okanagan Falls in British Columbia, Canada. It consists of four fixed arrays, laid out side by side, with the arrays in the form of parabolic semi-cylinders 100 meters (328 feet) long and 20 meters (66 feet) wide. The arrays are fitted with a total of 1,024 dual-polarization radio receivers, operating in the band of 400:800 megahertz. CHIME is a transit instrument, scanning the sky with the rotation of the Earth. It is a collaboration between the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory and a group of Canadian universities.
CHIME went into operation in 2017. Its primary mission is to map cosmic hydrogen clouds to investigate the expansion of the Universe, but it has a secondary mission of observing transient radio sources, such as FRBs, and its electronic gear was updated to support that mission. In July and August 2018, while the system was still under test and not fully operational, CHIME spotted 13 new FRBs over 3 weeks, including a second repeater. That was a bit of a surprise, few thinking that the FRBs were visible at the relatively low frequencies in which CHIME operates.
Comparison of the two repeaters showed they had notable similarities, though there were still more questions than answers. For example, might the repeater and one-shot FRBs be the same phenomenon, just at different stages in history? Or are they different things? Obtaining more observations is the key, and CHIME has continued to find more repeaters. Along with repeaters found in the southern skies by the Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder radio telescope in Australia, about a dozen have now been found. Many more single FRBs have been found as well, with enough data available to begin useful comparisons. Those involved in the research are excited, feeling they are well on the way to unraveling the secrets of the radio bursters.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RISC-V: The personal computing world has become largely divided up being the Intel and ARM instruction-set architectures (ISA): Intel's power desktops, servers, and laptops, while ARM has a lock on smartphones and other mobile devices. As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("A New Blueprint For Microprocessors Challenges The Industry's Giants", 3 October 2019), there's a new player in the arena, in the form of the "Reduced Instruction Set Computer 5 (RISC-V)".
RISC-V has one very big thing going for it: anyone can download the spec and implement it for free. The spec was originally devised by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who wanted a computer instruction set they could use in published research. Intellectual-property laws made using the instruction sets of Intel or ARM processors tricky, so the researchers decided to "grow their own".
RISC-V was unveiled to the world in 2014, at the Hot Chips microprocessor conference in California. It is now governed by a non-profit foundation, with funding from donations by RISC-V users. Confronted with the Trump Administration's paranoia about technology exchange -- which is incompatible with open-source -- the foundation is now relocating to Switzerland. The ISA is modular, consisting of base elements, with optional extensions; some of the more obscure extensions are still being defined.
The open-source nature of RISC-V -- no license fees, no time-consuming licensing negotiations -- makes it ideal for low-cost products, designed on an export track. Since it's not under export controls, Chinese firms are adopting it enthusiastically. The major limitation of RISC-V is that it doesn't have as big a set of tools as, say, ARM processors do. It will, eventually; it's obvious RISC-V has a big future. Who knows? It may become the standard.
* NANOTUBE PROCESSOR: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Biggest Carbon-Nanotube Chip Yet Says 'Hello, World!'" by Elizabeth Gibney, 28 August 2019), researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now developed a 16-bit processor, the "RV16XNano", using carbon nanotube (CNT) technology. It was able to execute a program that displayed: "Hello, World! I am RV16XNano, made from CNTs".
Silicon transistors have been reaching diminishing returns, hitting speed and power limits; carbon nanotube transistors have been seen as a way of exceeding those limits. The first CNT computer was built in 2013; it was primitive, with only a few hundred transistors. The new MIT processor has 14,000 CNT transistors. That's still small by modern standards, but it's a big step forward.
The RV16XNano is based on RISC-V. Getting it to work was tricky; for example, the design team had to figure out ways to compensate for the fact that natural defects in the tubes cause some to be metallic, when they need to work as semiconductors to operate as transistors. They used a "complementary" architecture, with transistors coupled in NORMALLY-ON / NORMALLY-OFF pairs, to minimize power consumption.
In principle, according to Max Shulaker -- the MIT physicist who led the work -- a CNT processor could be ten times more efficient than a silicon one, running about three times faster, and using around one-third of the energy. The current processor is slower than silicon devices, but Shulaker says performance will improve, and adds: "The most important thing is that all of these techniques are compatible with existing design tools and manufacturing facilities." Of course, as mentioned above, RISC-V is still somewhat lacking in design tools, but that's a temporary problem.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (3): Globalization is on the fade, but global commerce is not. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, trade continued to grow in absolute terms from 2007 to 2017; however, the "global value chains (GVC)" of 16 of 17 big industries MGI looked into have been shrinking, declining from 28.1% to 22.5% of gross output. The biggest declines were in the most heavily traded and complex GVCs, for example clothing, cars, and electronics. MGI's Susan Lund comments: "More production is happening in proximity to major consumer markets".
A close inspection of the shrinkage of GVCs gives deeply mixed impressions. The notion of China as the world's labor pool is outdated -- but in its expansion out of its cheap-labor era, it has become a manufacturing powerhouse to be reckoned with, with a skilled workforce and good infrastructure. The rise of a Chinese middle class has given Chinese manufacturers local markets.
How the new China fits into the revised plans of MNCs is not clear; different industries will make different decisions. Corporate supply-chain data is often opaque, and official trade statistics typically lag by years -- but studies of firms in three industries reveals different patterns of fragmentation. The clothing sector is globally footloose; the car industry is coalescing around regional hubs; and the electronics business remains rooted in China -- though Donald Trump's assault on Huawei is injecting uncertainty into electronics businesses.
The clothing and footwear business typically involve labor-intensive tasks such as stitching that are hard to automate, so cost-conscious bosses are always chasing low-cost labor. They've been fleeing China, where wages have soared, for South-East Asia and Bangladesh. Nike and Adidas make more training shoes in Vietnam than China.
One of the current hot spots is Ethiopia, which has attracted investment by Calvin Klein and H&M. With labor costs of just $26 USD a month, it might seem a dream destination for the frugal clothier. However, a recent report by the NYU Stern Centre for Business & Human Rights argues that these wages are too low to meet workers' basic needs, even by meager Ethiopian standards. That translates to social unrest, instability, and low productivity. It also means public criticism, the clothing industry in particular having acquired a bad reputation for exploiting the poor. Paul Walsh of Newtimes Group, a clothing supply-chain firm, observes: "We've run out of magic countries."
One of the consequences is that the comparative importance of speed has risen, according to Suresh Dalai, a supply-chain expert based in Asia. He says: "In speed, China still has the edge." The Chinese are innovative and agile, and have to be to chase after demanding local consumers. In contrast, factory bosses elsewhere complain of unreliability and low productivity.
Others point out that, unlike those cut-rate competitors, Chinese factories have the specialized machinery and experienced operators that are needed to make seamless fabrics and other higher-value textiles. Pravin Rangachari of Haggar, a leading manufacturer of men's trousers, has no plans to give up China's highly automated fabric mills, which he finds "very competitive". He adds that compliance with child-labor laws is strong in China, which cannot always be said about other markets. When the Chinese authorities decide that something needs to be done about an issue, they do it. There's the mixed aspect of contemporary GVCs again: while China has been losing export share in finished clothing, its textiles exports have boomed to fuel clothing manufacturing elsewhere. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (84): Franklin Roosevelt won re-election by a landslide in 1936, demonstrating the resurgence of the Democratic Party. The Republicans had lost their grip on power from their failure to deal with the Great Depression, and their indifference to the American lower class and underclass -- notably black Americans, who were beginning to exert political muscle. They were attracted to the Democrats, even though FDR didn't exert himself greatly over equal rights, and wouldn't seriously challenge segregation: he didn't want the opposition of Southern Democrats. Roosevelt did try to be even-handed in government assistance over the racial divide, but wouldn't take on Jim Crow. His wife Eleanor focused on civil rights issues, though necessarily on a largely symbolic basis.
Flush with his victory, FDR then over-reached himself. In early 1937, he began to push a new judiciary bill to Congress, the bottom line of which was that, when a Federal judge turned 70, a younger judge should be appointed to "assist" the judge, resulting in a potential total of 50 new judgeships with six of them on the Supreme Court. In this case, FDR's keen political instincts failed him, with his "court packing" proposal seen as a transparent attack on the judiciary. Many Democrats in Congress opposed the bill.
In the end, the "Judicial Procedures Reform Act" of 1937 was passed -- but it was emasculated, without the court-packing element. However, even as the bill worked its way through Congress to its feeble end, the judicial landscape was shifting, with SCOTUS upholding both the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act. There ended up being no need to pack the court: due to retirements and deaths, FDR was able to appoint seven new SCOTUS justices over the next four years.
Even in 1937, the judicial landscape was shifting dramatically. Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, and her husband sued the parent firm that owned the facility, the West Coast Hotel Company, for the difference between what she was paid, and the minimum wage established by the Washington State government -- a meager $14.50 per week of 48 hours. Parrish had won her case in the Washington Supreme Court, with the hotel chain then appealing to the US Supreme Court, claiming that the law had no right to dictate any terms of arrangements between employer and employee.
In the LOCHNER era, the court would have agreed, but the court now judged in favor of Parrish. In the decision, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... the violation alleged by those attacking minimum wage regulation for women is deprivation of freedom of contract. What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation, the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty.
END QUOTE
The case of WEST COAST HOTEL COMPANY V. PARRISH, but it wouldn't until after World War II that SCOTUS would properly explore the new legal landscape opened by the decision. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for November 2019 included:
-- 02 NOV 19 / CYGNUS 12 (NG 12), ELANA 25 -- An Orbital Sciences Antares booster was launched from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia at 1359 UTC (local time + 4) to put the 12th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 12", into space on an International Space Station support mission.
The launch also included nine CubeSats, flown through NASA's "CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI)", and making up the 25th "Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa)" mission. Five of them were built through NASA's "Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP)", these CubeSats including:
The other four CubeSats included:
The nine CubeSats were deployed after arriving on the ISS. The Antares booster was in the "Antares 230" configuration, with two RD-181 first stage engines, and a Castor 30XL second stage.
-- 03 NOV 19 / GAOFEN 7, SMALLSATS x 3 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0322 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 7" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. It was intended to collect 3D mapping data.
Gaofen 7 had a launch mass of 2,400 kilograms (5,290 pounds). It was developed by the Chinese Academy of Aerospace Science and Technology Group CO LTD, to be mainly used by the Ministry of Natural Resources; the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development; and the National Bureau of Statistics. The satellite was designed to obtain high-resolution optical 3D observation data and high-precision laser altimetry data. The launch also included three smallsats:
The first stage of the Long March booster had grid control fins, intended to make sure that it fell into the proper impact area, and to provide data for development of reusable launch vehicles.
-- 04 NOV 19 / BEIDOU 3 IGSO2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1743 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put a "Beidou" navigation satellite into orbit. The satellite was put into inclined geostationary orbit, being given the series number of "Beidou 49" or "Beidou I3Q".
-- 11 NOV 19 / STARLINK 1 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1456 UTC (local time + 5) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the second Starlink batch launch. The booster first stage was recovered on the SpaceX landing barge. It was the fourth flight of that first stage.
-- 13 NOV 19 / JILIN 1, GAOFEN 02A -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0340 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Jilin 1 Gaofen 02A" commercial Earth observation satellite into orbit for the Chang Guang Satellite Technology CO LTD, a commercial spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The satellite is the 14th to join Chang Guang's Jilin 1 remote sensing constellation since 2015.
The satellites were designed to obtain high-definition video, color pictures, and hyperspectral imagery of Earth, providing data to the Chinese military, civilian agencies and commercial users. The Kuaizhou 1A rocket is managed by Expace, a commercially-oriented subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science & Industry Corporation, the biggest Chinese state-backed aerospace contractor. The Kuaizhou 1A booster is apparently based on ballistic missile technology. It can put a 200-kilogram (440-pound) payload into polar low Earth orbit.
-- 13 NOV 19 / NINGXIA 1 x 5 -- A Chinese Long March 6 booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0635 UTC (local time - 8) to put five "Ningxia 1" Earth observation satellites into orbit. The five satellites were part of a commercial satellite project invested by the Ningxia Jingui Information Technology CO LTD. The Ningxia 1 satellites were developed by DFH Satellite CO LTD, an entity within China's state-owned aerospace apparatus specializing in the production of small spacecraft platforms. Earlier information released on the Ningxia 1 satellites suggest the spacecraft were intended for a military signals intelligence mission.
-- 17 NOV 19 / KL-ALPHA x 2 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1000 UTC (local time - 8) to put two "KL-Alpha" microsatellites into orbit. They were launched as part of an international cooperative commercial project between the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a German company to conduct Ka-band communications tests.
-- 23 NOV 19 / BEIDOU 3 x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 0855 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put two "Beidou" navigation satellites into medium Earth orbit. They were designated "Beidou 3 M21" and "Beidou 3 M22".
-- 25 NOV 19 / COSMOS 2542 -- A Soyuz 2.1v (Volga upper stage) booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1752 UTC (local time - 4) to put a secret military payload into orbit. It was assigned the series designation of "Cosmos 2542". It released a sub-satellite, which was designated "Cosmos 2543".
-- 26 NOV 19 / INMARSAT 5 F5 & TIBA 1 -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at ---- UTC (local time + 3) to put the "Inmarsat 5 F5" AKA "GX5" and "TIBA 1" geostationary comsats into space, both supporting mobile communications. Inmarsat 5 F5 was built by Thales Alenia Space for Inmarsat of London; it was based on the Spacebus 4000B2 satellite bus, had a launch mass of 4,005 kilograms (8,835 pounds), and a design life of 16 years. It was the fourth satellite in Inmarsat's Ka-band Global Xpress network. Inmarsat GX5 had greater capacity than the entire pre-existing GX fleet combined, with 72 Ka-band fixed spot beams and 4 steerable beams providing communications services to those in Europe and the Middle East. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 11 degrees east longitude.
TIBA 1 was built for the Egyptian government by Airbus Defense and Space. It was based on the Eurostar 3000 satellite bus, and had a launch mass of 5,600 kilograms (12,345 pounds); a Ka-band payload, with a secure communications payload supplied by Thales Alenia Space; and a design life of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 35.5 degrees East longitude.
-- 27 NOV 19 / CARTOSAT 3, NANOSATS -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0358 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the first Cartosat 3-series Earth-imaging and mapping satellite for ISRO. Cartosat 3 had a launch mass of 1,625 kilograms (3,580 pounds), and carried an optical imaging payload with a resolution of 25 centimeters (less than a foot). India has launched nine Cartosat mapping satellites since 2005, the first of which had an imaging resolution ten times as coarse as that of Cartosat 3.
The launch also included 13 CubeSats. Twelve were "Dove" Earth observation satellites from Planet of San Francisco, this being the "Flock 4p" batch. They were three-unit (3U) CubeSats, carrying an imager with a resolution of 3 meters (10 feet). This batch of Doves were improved "Superdoves", with a multispectral imager that could obtain imagery in four, five, or eight spectral bands. Planet has launched over 400 Doves, with 120 still operational, including a total of 26 Superdoves.
The 13th payload was a 3U CubeSat named "Meshbed", from Analytical Space of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was designed to test an experimental phased-array antenna, designated the "Frequency-scaled Ultra-wide Spectrum Element (FUSE)". FUSE was developed by MITRE, a nonprofit think tank that works with US government research centers.
The launch bookings for the Planet SuperDove satellites and the Meshbed CubeSat were arranged with NewSpace India LTD, the commercial arm of ISRO. Spaceflight, a Seattle-based company, was the launch broker for Analytical Space's Meshbed satellite. The booster was in the "PSLV XL" configuration, which is the most powerful variant of the family, with six big strap-on boosters.
-- 27 NOV 19 / GAOFEN 12 -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 2352 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 12" civil radar Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. It carried a synthetic aperture radar payload, with a resolution of a meter.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* VR SICKNESS: I was excited to obtain an Oculus GO VR headset some months back -- to have my excitement turn to disappointment when I found I always got "cyber sickness" or "VR sickness" when I used it. Readings told me that people work through VR sickness; since I'm not very prone to motion sickness, I thought I could get used to it. Unfortunately, it only got worse, and I had to give up.
An article from ECONOMIST.com ("Lost In Cyberspace", 23 November 2019) says I'm not alone. There was a push towards VR games in the 1990s, when the technology became available to build VR headsets. Game-makers jumped to the field, with a great deal of hype floated.
Hype is what it turned out to be. The headsets left something to be desired, having low resolution, choppy scene transitions, and clumsy controls; they were also very expensive, with pricetags of up to $70,000 USD. Okay, with maturity, those problems might have been overcome -- but it proved harder to deal with the fact that about 60% of users suffered from dizziness, nausea, eye strain, vomiting, headaches, sweating, and disorientation. VR disappeared from the market faster than it appeared.
In this decade, VR has made a comeback, thanks to much-improved headsets and experiences. Along with games, VR is being used in applications in social media, interior design, job training, and even pain management. Facebook's Oculus, HTC, and Sony are offering affordable VR products. However, VR isn't really taking off now, either. Sales in 2018 were $3.6 billion USD -- which sounds good, but that's only 2.4% of the games market.
One big problem is that VR sickness hasn't gone away, with one study showing that from 25% and 40% of users still suffer from it. The problem turns out to be difficult to solve, particularly because there's no agreement on what causes it. There are two theories:
Both may be factors. There's not much argument that sensory conflict exists. Some game-makers have taken to including a "virtual nose" in VR imagery to track the position of where the user's real nose is. Even with tricks like that, however, when users move their heads, the VR headset tends to lag in updating the view. This problem can be mitigated by improving the resolution of the VR imagery, increasing the frame rate, and reducing the response lag of the headset.
Tracking could be improved as well. A cheap headset just has inertial trackers that follow the movement of the headset. More sophisticated systems are based on VR rooms, with external cameras tracking user motions -- or cameras on the users, tracking beacons in the room. One subtle problem is that the lenses in a VR headset are designed to give the impression of a scene some distance away, when the display is right next to the user's eyes. That makes distortion inevitable -- and it gets worse when users move their eyes. As a result, some headsets now track a user's eyes, with the lenses adjusting to eye motion.
However, nothing that has been done so far has been able to completely defeat VR sickness. This is where the "unstable posture" hypothesis comes in. It has a particular virtue in that it offers an explanation of why women are more vulnerable to VR sickness than men.
Thomas Stoffregen of the University of Minnesota has investigated the issue, and found women four times as susceptible to VR sickness as men. To explain where he believes the problem lies, he points to driving a car. When we're driving, we're often changing direction, and switching our view to new roads, with appropriate changes in posture. People who learn to drive quickly figure out how to maintain a stable view of the world. Stoffregen says: "When you spend a lot of time in cars, you get used to doing that. It's a skill."
In a VR environment, users have much more trouble trying to track changes in motion. When riding in a virtual car, they try to react just as if they're in a real car -- but it's exactly the wrong thing to do, with the users swaying to adjust. [ED: I found that sitting rigidly upright helped, but not enough.] Stoffregen has found that the problem is much worse with women; it's not because of anything much to with their gender, it's because they have lower centers of gravity than men, and sway more.
Bas Rokers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests a simpler explanation of why women suffer worse from VR sickness: the headsets aren't properly designed for them. To work properly, a headset has to be adjusted to the distance between a user's pupils. On examining one brand, Rokers found that the inter-pupil distance of 90% of women examined was less than the default headset setting -- and 27% of women couldn't fit the headset at all. Alas, given the disagreements in the field, it doesn't appear that a solution to VR sickness is right around the corner, and that VR headsets will, for now, keep making people sick.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DRUNK ON COLA? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Microbe That Got Man Drunk Could Help Explain Common Liver Disease" by Jon Cohen, 19 September 2019), a Chinese man found he was out of the ordinary: when he ate high-carbohydrate or sugary meals, he got so drunk he passed out. Researchers investigating the case discovered strains of bacteria in the human gut that may be an important factor of the world's most common liver disease.
The condition, known as "nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)" affects an estimated one billion people worldwide, and almost one in three Americans. The excess fat in liver cells that is characteristic of the disease usually does not cause any symptoms -- but in about a quarter of the people with NAFLD, the accumulation progresses and sometimes causes life-threatening cirrhosis or liver cancer. Obesity, diabetes, and other conditions are associated with NAFLD, but no single underlying mechanism explains why fat builds up in the liver of so many people. Some studies have linked gut bacteria to NAFLD, but that idea is controversial, since it is hard to single out effects and species from the elaborate micro-ecology of intestinal flora.
Jing Yuan -- a microbiologist at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing -- says that in 2014, she and her colleagues became intrigued by a 27-year-old man who sought care in Beijing for unexplained bouts of drunkenness, when he hadn't been drinking. The problem had been going on for a decade, and it was getting worse. Some thought he was a closet drinker, but his mother had him use a breath analyzer, which showed high blood alcohol levels, even when she knew he hadn't been drinking. The man found he could get drunk on a number of colas.
Doctors had earlier diagnosed the man's problem as "autobrewery syndrome" -- an unusual condition in which, yes, people get drunk from starchy or sugary foods. It is thought to be caused by gut fermentation, aided by high levels of yeast; but antifungal treatment did no good. Liver biopsies showed he had "nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)", the severe form of NAFLD. He was placed in the intensive care unit and closely observed. Doctors observed that when he ate a meal high in sugar, his blood alcohol level rose to as high as 400 milligrams per deciliter. Yuan says: "That's equivalent to 15 shots of 40% [80-proof] whiskey."
Since the researchers knew there were microbes that can metabolize sugars into ethanol, they examined 14 of the man's stool samples taken at different times for species-specific bacterial DNA fragments. They found that when he was most intoxicated, almost a fifth of the bacteria were of a species named Klebsiella pneumoniae -- a staggering 900-fold increased over normal. When they cultured these bacteria in a medium of yeast and sugar, they were able to isolate strains of the bacteria that produced high, medium, or low levels of alcohol.
The researchers next analyzed stool samples from 43 patients with NAFLD, 32 of whom had the severe form, and compared them with 48 healthy people. The researchers found high levels of high-alcohol ("HiAlc") or medium-alcohol-producing K. pneumoniae strains in samples from 3/5ths of the controls -- but only about a 20th of the controls.
The next question was: were the bacteria really causing liver problems? To investigate, the researchers fed mice HiAlc K. pneumoniae, alcohol, or a mixture of yeast and sugars as a control. In 4 weeks, mice given the bacteria or alcohol had evidence of liver damage, but the others did not. The researchers also put microbes from the original patient into mice raised germ free, and tests showed the animals suffered liver damage.
The medical literature provides no evidence that people with NAFLD feel drunk when they don't drink alcohol, and mice with HiAlc did not develop measurable blood alcohol levels. The researchers then decided to also give those rodents high doses of glucose; their blood alcohol levels skyrocketed, and the mice acted as if drunk. Giving glucose or fructose to the NAFLD patients similarly produced big jumps in blood alcohol levels that healthy control subjects didn't experience. This result suggests giving oral glucose coupled with a blood alcohol test could lead to a diagnostic for HiAlc K. pneumoniae, and maybe even predict which NAFLD patients will progress to NASH.
Bacteriophages -- viruses that infect bacteria -- could be used in principle to suppress or eliminate K. pneumoniae, but that's merely an interesting possibility right now. Yuan and colleagues report that the initial patient they studied recovered from his bacteria-driven autobrewery syndrome after he began to take antibiotics, and changed his diet; his NASH has abated as well. Her team is now planning to study the gut microbes of a large group of people, including children, over time. "We want to investigate why some people have high-alcohol-producing strains of K. pneumoniae in their gut, while others don't."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (2): In the 1990s, when globalization was all the rage, the accepted wisdom was that the Earth had become "flat", that national boundaries no longer made any difference. Companies, as a result, just built anywhere. Now there are doubts. A survey conducted in April 2019 of 600 MNCs around Asia by Baker McKenzie, an American law firm, found that nearly half of them are considering "major" changes to their supply chains, and over a tenth are thinking of complete overhauls.
There are two big reasons to think that supply chains are starting to contract from global stretch. First, stretching supply chains to manufacture goods turns out to have risks. Second, global trade increasingly includes services, not just manufactured goods.
In terms of risks, MNCs usually do not know who supplies the supplier to their supplier -- and may find themselves in trouble if a distant vendor suddenly can't supply what it is supposed to supply. These vulnerabilities are sometimes revealed by external shocks, such as natural disasters. Following the Japanese tsunami in 2011, a global semiconductor giant, worried about disruptions, attempted to map its linkages to third- and fourth-tier vendors; it took a team of 100 executives more than a year to figure out which firms were in its extended supplier networks.
More recently, shocks have been political. Brexit, Britain's ongoing mad effort to depart from the European Union, of course could disrupt supply lines linking Britain and the continent, and MNCs have made it clear they will trim operations in the UK if it does. A survey by Britain's Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply noted that a fifth of continental businesses would demand a hefty discount from British suppliers for even a one-day delay at the border; while more than a tenth of British exporters expect to see their contracts canceled immediately.
Americans are already seeing the impact of Donald Trump's tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese imports. A paper by Mary Amiti and colleagues published in 2019 by the National Bureau of Economic Research calculated that by the end of 2018, the tariffs had cost American consumers $1.4 billion a month. Retailers are being squeezed, with Walmart and Target warning that prices are going to rise. Caterpillar, a manufacturer of earth-moving and farm equipment, expects tariffs to cost the firm from $250 million to $350 million USD in 2019. Cummins, an engine maker, expects a hit of $150 million USD.
Despite on-again / off-again talk of truces and diplomacy, Trump's trade war with China rolls on -- with the Trump Administration grinding a particular axe against electronic-maker Huawei, accusing the company of selling communications gear that's been compromised to spy on traffic. In response, China has imposed retaliatory tariffs, while threatening to punish "unreliable" foreign firms, and to withhold exports of rare earths used to make magnetic elements for electric motors and generators.
Once the trade war reaches full stride, it will hurt. Moody's, a ratings agency, estimates such a "conflagration" would cut growth in real GDP in America by 1.8% one year into the trade war, and reduce growth rates across Asia by 1% or more. The OECD believes that a trade war between America and China could take 0.7%, or about $600 billion USD, off global growth by 2021.
Even the trade war fades out, it has made MNCs skittish. A recent survey of European firms by Credit Suisse, an investment bank, shows a growing tendency to locate new investments in Europe, not outside it. According to the report, MNCs will "no longer plan and source their supply chains predominantly on the basis of cost", political vulnerability having become an important factor.
Similarly, Apple has reportedly asked its biggest suppliers to see how much it would cost to shift 15% to 30% of its supply base out of China to South-East Asia or India. Liu Young-way, the chairman of Foxconn -- a Taiwanese contract manufacturer that assembles most of Apple's devices -- recently declared that his firm could supply all iPhones for the American market from plants outside China if necessary.
Services are not yet equal in trade value to manufacturing, but they're getting there. In 2017, global trade in goods amounted to $17.3 trillion USD, while trade in services -- such as transport and communications -- had risen to $5.1 trillion USD. The IMF believes that, when measured in value-added terms, the share of services exports in global exports is almost twice as large as what official numbers suggest.
Services are often coupled to manufacturing. According to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) -- a think-tank attached to a consultancy -- services already create about a third of the value going into traded manufacturing goods. Trade in services grew more than 60% faster than trade in goods over the past decade, and two to three times faster in such fields as telecoms and information technology. Services are often best done in close proximity to clients, and there's not such an incentive to chase after low-cost labor elsewhere.
The globalization push meant the "weaponizing of logistics" to obtain a competitive advantage. The bosses of leading MNCs, confronted by a shifting economic and political landscape, are intensively re-examining how exactly their firms "plan, source, make, and deliver" -- the mantra of supply-chain managers across the world. They are finding that "slowbalization" brings challenges of its own. Shorter supply chains, for an important example, are not necessary simpler; in fact, they can be more complications, since getting closer to customers implies expanding customization, accelerating innovation, and speeding up delivery.
Not everyone thinks that globalization is fading away. Frank Appel, chief executive of Deutsche Post DHL Group, a German express-shipping and logistics giant, believes that longer-term fundamental forces -- such as the rise of middle classes globally, and productivity gains from digitization -- still means a drift towards global integration. A study published in early 2019 by his firm found that international flows of trade, information, capital, and workers increased in 2017. Unfortunately, if there's a long-term trend back towards globalization, it's not so visible now.
A more recent analysis by THE ECONOMIST of a dozen factors related to globalization found that eight pointed to a decline in connectedness. Pankaj Ghemawat of NYU Stern School of Business, one of the authors of the DHL report, foresees a "semi-globalized" world in which international threats and opportunities matter, but business activities are consolidated. Firms will increasingly focus on not just making supply chains shorter, but also faster and smarter. Globalization is certainly on the fade; but it is not fading away. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (83): FDR was a master political juggler. His administrative style, however, tended to be exasperating for those who had to deal with it, since FDR was inclined to set up competing agencies with clashing agendas, the ultimate bottom line being to leave him in control. Fortunately, his cabinet secretaries and other lieutenants tended to be very able, and FDR had a knack for synthesizing the best inputs they provided.
While the rate of change slowed after the Hundred Days, the FDR Administration kept up the push for social and political reform. 1934 saw the establishment of the "Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)" -- an independent agency, set up to police the securities industry. In 1935, FERA was shut down, to be replaced by two new Federal agencies:
1935 also saw the passage of the "National Labor Relations Act", which established a "National Labor Relations Board (NRLB)" that enforced labor laws, supported workers' rights, and passed judgement in labor disputes.
In foreign policy, FDR followed up the "Good Neighbor" policy established by the Hoover Administration for US relations with Latin America. The Banana Wars, the era of ongoing interventions south ofasthe border, were over. FDR established a number of trade treaties, as well as non-aggression and conciliation treaties, with Latin American countries. He was fond of personal diplomacy, with an inclination to sideline the State Department. In 1934, he traveled to Cartagena, Colombia, in July 1934, becoming the first US president to visit South America, and he would make later trips south of the border.
Gradually, he drew Canada into the new hemispheric order, establishing trade agreements to the north as well. Independence was also granted to the Philippines, to take effect in 1945. FDR recognized the Soviet Union as well, though relations between the two countries remained far from normalized.
FDR's dramatic and extension actions were generally enabled by a friendly Congress, but resistance was there, and growing. Government spending outpaced revenues, leading to big deficits; FDR raised taxes and sold government bonds to try to compensate. Republicans tended to believe FDR was going too far, Democrats tended to believe he wasn't going far enough.
SCOTUS tended to believe he was going too far. In 1935, a chicken vendor sued the government over NIRA; in response, SCOTUS declared NIRA unconstitutional, striking down the NRA. FDR was most annoyed -- though in modern times, the NRA is seen as an example of executive over-reach, a bureaucratic monstrosity, and indeed the SCOTUS decision was unanimous. FDR grew more annoyed as SCOTUS repeatedly struck down New Deal efforts.
As far the cutbacks to veteran's benefits went, lobbying of veteran's groups against cutbacks proved successful, when Congress passed the "Bonus Act" in early 1936, over-riding FDR's veto. The veterans were supposed to get a bonus in 1945; the Bonus Act, at its core, converted the bonus to government bonds that could be redeemed immediately. Given the still-difficult economic situation, most of the veterans cashed in their bonds immediately. It worked out well, proving a remarkable economic stimulus. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Offshore Wind Could Power The World" by Charles Riley, 25 October 2019), a comprehensive study published by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests that investing a trillion USD in offshore wind turbines could provide enough electrical generating capacity to power all the world's homes and businesses by 2040.
According to Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, offshore wind has the potential to join shale oil and gas and solar power as energy sources that have enjoyed a boom in production following a sharp fall in costs. Birol says: "Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast. More and more of that potential is coming within reach, but much work remains to be done by governments and industry for it to become a mainstay."
Increased government support and new investment would enable new technology, such as floating platforms that would allow turbines to be located much further out to sea. The report says that developing just prime wind sites located close to shore would supply more than the total amount of electricity consumed around the world today -- but the maximum theoretical potential for offshore wind production is 120 terawatts, an order of magnitude more than projected global electricity usage in 2040.
In the European Union, offshore wind capacity is on track to quadruple by 2030 and be the region's largest source of electricity in the 2040s, with growth in capacity far outpacing growth in demand -- allowing the surplus electricity to be used to produce hydrogen or other fuels. According to the IEA, Chinese government policies intended to promote sustainable energy goals will allow the country overtake the United Kingdom as having the largest offshore wind capacity by 2025 -- with Chinese wind capacity rising from 4 gigawatts in 2019 to 110 gigawatts by 2040. The report also states that the United States has good offshore potential near big cities along the northeast coast, and floating foundations would unlock new areas for wind farms off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington.
* As discussed by an article from TIME.com ("Google's Pixel 4 Dominates The Smartphone Camera Battle, But Otherwise It's Pretty Boring" by Patrick Lucas Austin, 23 October 2019), we now live in an age of gimmicky new smartphones, such as foldable phones, that recall the bygone era of rotating, flipping, and docking devices. The new $799 USD Google Pixel 4 and bigger $899 USD Pixel 4 XL don't come across as anything radical, being similar in appearance to the earlier Pixel 3, but they are impressive enough under the hood.
The key to the Pixel 4's capabilities is its software, which makes the best use the phone's cameras to permit users to take seemingly impossible shots, even of stars in the night sky. Display refresh rate has been boosted to 90 hertz. The Android 10 OS for the phone is a clear advance, one nice feature being the Recorder mode, which readily transcribed speech.
There's a square camera array in the back of the phone, with two cameras: a 16-megapixel telephoto lens, and a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens. The Pixel 4 has outstanding low-light capability, while its smart software makes less challenging shots even better. It has a front-facing 8-megapixel camera with a wider viewing angle, and a digital zoom feature. Video capabilities, however, are humdrum. Compared to the iPhone 11, which shoots in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second on both front and rear cameras, the Pixel 4 only shoots 4K video at 30 frames per second on its rear camera, with the front-facing camera limited to filming in 1080p.
Another interesting small feature is the black aluminum band running around the phone's edge, which is pressure-sensitive, activating Google Assistant when pressed. The fingerprint sensor of Pixel 3 is gone, replaced by the Google Face Unlock scheme -- or a passcode, if a user prefers. There's also a new radar sensor embedded in the front of the Pixel 4, which can sense a user's presence, and respond to waves of the hand. It comes across as making access into the phone too easy; right now, Face Unlock can be activated by using it on somebody's sleeping face. Google is now refining it so that the user will need both eyes open.
There's no headphone jack, and battery life isn't great. Android 10 is a big advance, but it could use some further refinements. However, the Pixel 4 is still an impressive product.
* As repeatedly discussed here in the past, last in 2018, parcel-delivery giant UPS has a strong interest in "greener" delivery vans. As discussed by another article on that subject from REUTERS.com ("UPS Hits The Gas On Greener Delivery Truck Fleet" by Lisa Baertlein, 9 October 2019), UPS has now announced plans to obtain more than 6,000 natural gas-powered delivery vehicles over three years, and ramp up purchases of renewable natural gas (RNG) as part of a new $450 million USD investment to update its 123,000-vehicle fleet.
RNG is just another term for "biogas", being methane derived from decomposing organic matter such as cow manure on dairy farms, rotting food in landfills and human waste in water treatment plants, UPS expects to use 31.9 million gasoline gallon equivalents (GGE) of RNG in 2019, with company officials claiming that UPS is becoming the transport industry's biggest user of RNG.
Purchases of the RNG-powered delivery vehicles will begin in 2020, adding to about 10,000 alternative fuel or advanced technology delivery vehicles already in use by UPS. Norway-based Hexagon Composites' Agility Fuel Solutions will fit UPS's new brown delivery trucks, semi trucks and terminal tractors to run on RNG. Along with the UPS announcement, UPS customer and competitor Amazon.com recently pledged to obtain 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from startup Rivian Automotive LLC, with all these vehicles on the road by 2024. Amazon's independent delivery partners currently use about 30,000 conventional gasoline vans.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SODIUM BATTERIES & ALUMINUM BATTERIES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Sodium Batteries Are One Step Closer To Saving You From A Mobile Phone Fire" by Robert F. Service, 19 April 2019), there's been considerable investment in solid-electrolyte batteries, since they promise to reduce the fire hazard of lithium batteries with liquid electrolytes. Now, researchers have created a high-capacity solid-state sodium battery, with a flexible electrode that allows recharging hundreds of times. In addition, the low cost of readily-available sodium, as compared to lithium, could mean cheaper batteries.
Sodium has similar properties to lithium, both being members of the alkali metal chemical family. As a result, chemists have been tinkering with solid-electrolyte sodium batteries (SESB) over the past decade -- but, though they're not inclined to catch on fire, they tend to degrade quickly. In one common configuration:
The problem is that the repeated growth and shrinkage of the cathode can crack the ceramic, wrecking the battery. To deal with this issue, a research team led by Yan Yao -- a materials scientist at the University of Houston in Texas -- fabricated a cathode from a flexible organic compound containing sodium, carbon, and oxygen. The flexible cathode went through 400 charging cycles without cracking, while the battery had a capacity almost as good as that of conventional lithium-ion batteries.
The problem was that the sulfur-based solid electrolyte was physically fragile, and broken down by the cell's operating voltage. The researchers then turned to a new solid electrolyte -- a flexible organic compound named "pyrene-4,5,9,10-tetraone (PTO)" -- can accommodate twice as many sodium ions, with the result that storage capacity of the cell is comparable to that of lithium-ion cells. It also operates at a lower voltage, and so not straining the electrolyte. The flexible cathode can tolerate 500 charge-discharge cycles, and only lose about 10% of its capacity.
The low cell voltage is okay for many applications, but it's not so good for electric cars and the like. Yan's group is now trying to modify the cathode -- for example, by adding fluorine -- to increase the cell voltage.
* As discussed by a related article from ENDGADGET.com ("Eco-friendly Aluminum Batteries Might Power Solar And Wind Farms" by Jon Fingas, 30 September 2019), there's been work on aluminum batteries, but they've never been practical. Now researchers from the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the National Institute of Chemistry, Slovenia, have developed a new aluminum battery design that has twice the energy density of its predecessors.
Earlier designs used an aluminum anode and a graphite cathode. In the new design, the graphite cathode is replaced with one made of anthraquinone, an organic molecule. The new design still has only half the energy density of lithium-ion cells. However, given that aluminum is much more common than lithium, a practical aluminum battery would be potentially cheaper than lithium batteries, and wouldn't be so inclined to catch on fire. In addition, the new aluminum cell charges up in about a minute, and can endure 7,500 charging cycles without appreciably losing power -- twice as much as lithium cells.
* In still more related news from SCIENCEMAG.org, ("New Charging Technique Could Power An Electric Car Battery In 10 Minutes" by Robert F. Service, 30 October 2019), one of the chokepoints in battery technology is that recharging them is time-consuming. One trick for reducing the charge time has been to raise the battery temperature while charging, accelerating the chemical reactions inside the battery. However, the high temperatures tend to degrade the battery.
Researchers have now found they can accelerate charging without degrading a battery by applying heat for short periods. By heating up a charging device to 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) for 10 minutes, they were able to speed the incorporation of lithium ions into layers of graphite that make up the anode, which is the main effect in recharging a battery.
The researchers say that this trick could substantially increase the charge storage of a battery, and permit comparably greater range. The "hot" batteries were also stable, handling 1700 charge-discharge cycles with little degradation. The next step is to cut the charging time in half, which would allow an EV to "power-up" in only five minutes. If this actually comes true -- how practical would it be to heat up batteries at a charging station? -- the range limitation of EVs may, eventually, not be an obstacle any longer.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CUSTOMIZED IMMUNE CELLS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Genetically Engineered Immune Cells Fight Off Deadly Virus In Mice" by Mitch Leslie, 17 May 2019), researchers have devised a new way to defeat viruses: they genetically modified immune cells to generate better antibodies, using the modified cells to protect mice from a dangerous lung virus. The same approach could work in humans against diseases for which there are no vaccines.
Vaccines typically consist of a disabled pathogen, or shards of its molecules. They stimulate immune cells called "B cells" to generate antibodies against that pathogen. Vaccines don't always work, however; for example, some patients don't generate effective antibodies. There are also pathogens that aren't easy targets for vaccines -- such as HIV, and the "respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)", which causes lung infections, primarily in children and people with impaired immune systems.
Immunologist Justin Taylor -- of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington -- and colleagues decided to investigate if they could engineer B cells to recreate an antibody already known to be effective against RSV. Using the DNA-snipping CRISPR genome-editing system, they cut out one of the antibody genes in mouse B cells, then used a virus transporter to replace it with an anti-RSV antibody gene; the B cells then produced the RSV-targeting antibody. Using the same approach, the researchers also tweaked human B cells to create antibodies against three other viruses, including HIV, and one type of influenza virus.
To determine the effectiveness of the procedure, the scientists injected genetically-engineered B cells into mice, and then exposed the animals to RSV. In five days, the lungs of the control group of mice were full of RSV, but the lungs of the mice with the genetically-engineered cells were mostly free of the virus. In addition, when the researchers injected the modified B cells into mice with defective immune systems -- a common problem in human bone marrow recipients, who are susceptible to RSV -- the mice were able to defeat the virus 82 days later.
Although nobody has developed an effective HIV vaccine yet, there are a small number of people who can generate highly effective antibodies against it. Genetically modifying B cells to generate these antibodies might yield an effective vaccine against HIV; the same approach might be used against other viruses that have evaded vaccines to date.
There are concerns, however, of the expense. Genome engineer Branden Moriarity of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis points out that cancer treatments that rely on other engineered immune cells cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moriarity concludes: "People will not be using engineered B cells prophylactically in the near future."
* In related science news, as discussed by another article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New 'Medicine' Could Vaccinate Plants Against Devastating Viruses" by Eva Frederick, 26 August 2019), farmers who raise pumpkins, cucumbers, or melons have learned to fear the "cucumber mosaic virus (CMV)", which can devastate their crops. Now, researchers have figured out how to develop vaccines to protect crops from plant viruses.
When a plant virus infects a cell, the virus often releases RNA -- either in the form of messenger RNA, or double-stranded RNA -- which helps take over the cell, turning it into a factory to generate more viruses. The plant cells have a defense mechanism, being able to recognize viruses from matches with "small interfering RNAs (siRNAs)" generated by the plant. The SiRNAs target viral genomes for attack by cellular enzymes that chop them up.
The scheme is effective, but not particularly efficient, since of the many thousands of various siRNAs made by the plant, only a few actually are any good at spotting viral RNA. Biochemist Sven-Erik Behrens at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and his colleagues decided to see if they could improve on the process.
They developed molecular tests to identify which siRNAs are efficient at fighting viruses. In laboratory experiments with tobacco plants, they demonstrated they could screen for winners and use them as a vaccine against the tomato bushy stunt virus, which slows growth and damages leaves in tobacco plants. The best siRNA, sprayed on the leaves, protected 90% of the plants. All they had to do was spray, making the "vaccine" easy to administer. The scheme does not require that the plant itself be genetically modified -- which not only avoids public concerns over genetic modification, but makes it easier to react to new virus strains as they appear.
The researchers are now working on the optimal way to administer the vaccine to plants, such as a spray that uses nanoparticles to deliver the siRNAs. They're also trying to identify siRNAs to protect against other plant viruses.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (1): A survey from THE ECONOMIST on global supply chains (by Vijay Vaitheeswaran, 11 July 2019) began at The Pulse, the California command center of Flex, a US contract-manufacturing giant. At The Pulse, Tom Linton -- Flex's chief procurement and supply-chain officer -- can track the activities of Flex's 16,000 suppliers and 100-plus factories, which make everything from automotive systems to cloud-computing gear for over a thousand customers worldwide. Linton is an acknowledged expert in global supply chains, which shuttle raw materials, parts, and components across national boundaries, to be then used to produce finished goods. However, he doesn't see the current system as future, saying: "We're heading into a post-global world."
Not so long ago, global supply chains seemed the way of the future. The rise of information technology made international communications cheap, reliable, and capable, while the emergence of China into the world economy provided a vast resource of cheap labor. Manufacturing became a global enterprise. From 1990 to 2010, trade boomed thanks to tariff cuts, cheaper communications, and lower-cost transport.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OEC), a think-tank for the developed world, 70% of global trade now involves global value chains (GVC). The increase in their complexity is illustrated by the growth in the share of foreign value added to a country's exports, which shot up from below 20% in 1990, to nearly 30% in 2011. Western retailers developed networks of inexpensive suppliers, especially in China, to allow them to sell cheap goods. Multinational corporations (MNC) that once kept manufacturing close to home reached around the world for cheap labor and economies of scale. Assuming globalization was here to stay, firms embraced practices such as lean inventory management and just-in-time delivery -- seeking economies, at the cost of taking on more risk.
Globalization, however, is now in retreat, and global supply chains are unraveling. According to the OECD, global trade growth has fallen from 5.5% in 2017 to 2.1% in 2019, while cross-border investment dropped by a fifth in 2018. Global regulatory harmonization has given way to a mindset focused on regional blocs -- for example, Europe's data-privacy laws, which impose a burden on big tech companies, mostly American. With rising wages and environmental costs, China is no longer a bottomless source of low-cost labor.
The immediate difficulties for the global economic system have come from US President Donald Trump's trade war with China, which has done much to sever the economic connections between the two countries. Trump is focused on China right now, but he has threatened Mexico and Europe as well, throwing trade with them into doubt. It seems likely that Trump's trade war will not last beyond his presidency -- and given that voters who dislike him clearly outnumber those who like him, it also seems unlikely, if not impossible, that he will be re-elected.
However, even ignoring Trump, the global model to which the big corporations had become accustomed is in flux. The rising costs of Chinese labor have already been mentioned, but there are other factors involved:
The increasing dominance of information systems and technologies dependent on them does raise issues of security, of making corporations more vulnerable to hacking. Data security is slowly being improved, but the pullback from global supply chains, and the rise of trade frictions, may well divide the world into rival technological camps. One significant example is the emerging 5G high-speed phone standard: what if the China and its allies and Western nations adopt different and incompatible 5G standards? That may be an exaggerated worry: there's always a clash of standards when new technologies emerge, and eventually one predominates.
Nonetheless, the era of agile global supply chains is over; it was ending even before Donald Trump started his trade wars. The new order is likely to be hard on firms that are slow to adapt -- but it provides opportunities to those who can get ahead of the learning curve. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (82): The first year of the FDR Administration saw the passage of two new amendments to the Constitution, the 20th and 21st. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt had nothing directly to do with either of them, since the efforts to establish them predated his inauguration.
The 20th Amendment was intended to reduce the "lame duck" period between the election of a president, and the day the new administration took office. To that time, the date for taking office was 4 March; since elections took place in early November, that meant a lame duck period of almost four months. That was seen as too long a time to leave a government in office that didn't have a mandate. The 20th Amendment moved the date up to 20 January, reducing the lame duck period by six weeks. It reads:
BEGIN QUOTE:
TWENTIETH AMENDMENT: The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.
The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.
Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.
BEGIN QUOTE
Along with moving up inauguration day, the 20th Amendment also moved up the beginning of the congressional session, and stipulated that the vice-president elect would become president if the president were indisposed -- with confusing elaborations for more obscure issues of presidential succession. The amendment by no means resolved that issue.
The 21st Amendment attracted more attention, since it repealed Prohibition:
BEGIN QUOTE:
TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT: The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
END QUOTE
The Beer-Wine Revenue Act of course allowed the government to obtain revenue from the sale of spirits. The 21st Amendment was peculiar, in that it was the only amendment to be ratified by state conventions, not by state legislatures; Congress specified the conventions, the belief being that many state legislators were too much under the control of pro-Prohibition interests. It was also the only amendment to nullify another amendment. It should of course be noted that the 21st Amendment did empower the states, by way of the "laws thereof", to regulate the liquor industry within their borders, leading to convoluted issues of interstate commerce. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Talking To Aliens", 2 February 2019), there have been efforts to search the sky for signals from other worlds in our Galaxy. So far, they've come up zeroes, with some asking: maybe we're looking in the wrong place on the radio spectrum? Hang Shuang and his colleagues at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China think so, suggesting: maybe X-rays would work better?
Radio signals tend to diverge as they pass through the cosmos, and can be blocked by clouds of dust. They also have to be sorted out from a cosmic radio background. X-rays, in contrast, don't diverge much, penetrate dust clouds much more easily, and the cosmic X-ray background is subdued.
The obstacle is that humans haven't seen X-rays as a useful communications band. To show it can be done, Hang and his team have built a prototype of an X-ray transceiver. It is designed to support communications with spacecraft during re-entry, when the hot plasma surrounding the vehicle blanks out radio communications.
The lashup built by the Chinese team was able to modulate digital signals onto X-rays, and then decode them at the receiving end. A practical transceiver system would not communicate with a ground station, since the atmosphere blocks X-rays; instead, communications would be with a relay satellite in orbit that would retransmit the signal in the radio band. This would be workable because the plasma that blocks radio communications only occurs at high altitude, where the air is thin.
Hang suggests that XCOM, as he names the derivative system to hunt for cosmic communications, might be placed on the far side of the Moon, where it would be shielded from confounding signals from Earth. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has put the Chang'e 4 lander on the lunar farside; a similar future mission might well include XCOM. However, the CNSA has not committed to doing so.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Global Map Of Manure Could Help Save Farming As We Know It" by Rachel Crowell, 7 May 2019), it is a truism that the world runs on data. As an example, consider data on the distribution of phosphorus -- an essential nutrient for crop production. Phosphorus has traditionally been obtained from accumulations of bird and bat droppings, as well as rock deposits. These sources are dwindling, so researchers have been considering alternatives, in particular extracting phosphorus from animal manure.
To that end, a team of researchers has come up with a global map of where manure is found. To make the map, they used data on livestock density, to factor in the amount of manure generated by cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats per year, and came up with an estimate of 15 to 20 million tonnes per year. They found "hot spots" of manure concentrations on every continent except Antarctica, with concentrations of up to 130 tonnes per square kilometer. Of course, many of those hot spots are near farming communities and river deltas where agricultural runoff abounds.
Recycling phosphorus is not easy. To process pig and cow manure, farmers must break it down with bacteria or use special equipment to crystallize its "struvite" -- the same phosphate mineral that makes up some kidney and bladder stones. These processes are already in use by many commercial farms, which together help recycle about half the global supply of manure. Unfortunately, they are too costly for the small farms that predominate in the undeveloped world.
The researchers hope their map will help promote phosphorus recycling globally. That would not only help maintain supplies of phosphorus, but would help clean up the water supply.
* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Billion-Year-Old Fossils Set Back Evolution Of Earliest Fungi" by Heidi Ledford, 22 May 2019), tiny fossils obtain from the wilderness of Arctic Canada could put the origins of fungi back to about a billion years ago -- twice as long as had been previously assumed. These microscopic "ur-fungi" are surprisingly intricate, featuring filamentary structures. Chemical analysis suggests the fossils contain chitin, a compound found in fungal cell walls.
Palaeobiologist Corentin Loron at the University of Liege, Belgium, and his colleagues found the fossils while exploring the remote Grassy Bay Formation in Arctic Canada. The study site had to be reached by helicopter, with the researchers sampling the dramatic cliffs there. The rocks of interest in the cliffs, which date back a billion years, formed without high temperatures and pressures, and so the fossils in them are very well preserved.
The samples were carefully sectioned into thin sheets for analysis by an electron microscope. The resulting imagery revealed branched filaments ending in spheres; the filaments were divided into segments by "septae" -- walls found in some modern fungi. The presence of chitin in the specimens further persuaded the researchers that they were preserved fungi that died a billion years ago. The team named the fungus Ourasphaira giraldae
Other researchers are skeptical, one criticism being that other organic molecules could be mistaken for chitin. Loren has replied by pointing to the presence of chemical signals characteristic of chitin, and chitin-like fibers on the fossil surface, saying: "Our results are most consistent with chitin."
The team's findings also match molecular studies that use the rate of DNA changes in fungi to calculate that they did appear a billion years ago. That's encouraging, but "molecular clocks" are known to be inexact, more suggestive than proof. Other critics point out that previously discovered fossils of ancient fungi didn't have the filamentary structures that Loron's team found. Nobody is emphatically rejecting the research -- they're just suggesting that more validation is needed.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DISTRICT COOLING & HEATING: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Decades-Old Technology Offers a Greener Way to Cool Buildings" by Will Mathis, 1 October 2019), the town of Heerlen in the Netherlands, on the German border, takes the idea of central heating and cooling to its limit. The temperature of some 400 homes and a few businesses is maintained by an old coal mine, which now maintains reservoirs of water in its depths -- piping out cool water to the town in summer, hot water in winter.
According to Mijnwater MV, which implemented the system, power consumption is reduced 65%, compared to heating or cooling each home. District heating and cooling (DHC) by no means a new concept -- it was mentioned here in 2011, as a component of the Swedish "green city" of Kristianstadt -- but it is becoming more popular, as countries try to find ways to decarbonize. Demand for power to cool homes and businesses is estimated to more than double by 2050, and account for about 13% of the world's electricity consumption.
DHC makes the most sense in high-density urban areas, where the distribution network is more compact. Some systems have been around for more than a century. Consolidated Edison operates the biggest US system, providing heating and cooling for 1,650 customers across Manhattan. Given worries about climate change, DHC is getting more attention from policy-makers. There's a lot of room for growth: even in highly urbanized Europe, DHC accounts for less than 3% of the market.
At Mijnwater, the European Investment Bank (EIB) is boosting a plan to spend as much as 150 million euros ($166 million USD) to expand the Heerlen system. The French utility Engie SA runs a sprawling DHC network in Paris, and has been granted a 260 million euro loan from the EID to update that network. Engie plans to spend about 3.7 billion USD on DHC worldwide over the next five years. About half the company's expansion will come in North America, where it is working on a 35-year project to expand and operate Ottawa's DHC system.
The United Arab Emirates is one of the biggest recent adopters; of course, the emphasis there is on cooling. Not having any convenient source of chilled water, they use refrigeration plants to cool water. Following a 2017 deal worth $775 million USD, Engie has a 40% stake in the Abu Dhabi-based National Central Cooling Company, AKA "Tabreed". Earlier this year, Tabreed signed a 30-year agreement to build a DHC system for the new capital of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
The start-up cost of a DHC system can be considerable, because of the plant cost, and particularly the sprawling network of distribution pipes. However, give reasonable utilization, it pays off over the long run, because of the energy savings. Even if water has to be cooled by a refrigeration system, a DHC system will use half the energy as conventional individual air conditioners. Heating systems can leverage off waste heat from industrial plants -- or even data centers, as discussed here in 2017.
There remain obstacles to more widespread adoption. Although big players like Engie can tolerate the big up-front costs of implementing a DHC system, developers more generally need to obtain financing -- but without regulatory boosts to development, banks are reluctant to make big loans. There's also the chicken-&-egg problem of getting potential customers to sign up, and abandon their existing individual heating and cooling systems. Birger Lauersen, an official at the Danish District Heating Association. "It is a good idea, but selling good ideas can be difficult."
ED: In an era where energy is becoming more dear, it seems that there's a tilt towards high-density habitation, with the tilt also pushed by rising housing costs. The classic American dream of a suburban home with two cars in the garage is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INTERSTELLAR COMETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Alien Comets May Be Common, Object From Beyond Solar System Suggests" by W. Wayt Gibbs, 29 October 2019), in the dark early hours of 30 August one Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, was searching the skies with his home-made 65-centimeter (25.6-inch) telescope when he spotted a fuzzy object that hadn't been there before.
It was apparently a comet; he dutifully reported it through the global astronomy network. Further observations verified the comet, and also confirmed that it was coming in towards the Sun very fast, on a trajectory that brought it into the Solar System from deep space, and would throw it back out again.
The comet was designated "2I/Borisov" in honor of its discoverer -- it was the eighth he had discovered -- the "2I" indicating that it was the second interstellar comet ever discovered. The first, named "'Oumuamua", was spotted in 2017 on its way out of the Solar System. It was a small comet, no more than a kilometer long, spindle-shaped, and with no gaseous "coma". 2I/Borisov, in contrast, was an order of magnitude more massive, and was generating a distinct coma of water vapor, carbon monoxide, and dust as it came closer to the Sun.
Two months after the discovery of 2I/Borisov, a team of 43 astronomers from 26 institutions in eight countries released a detailed study of the comet. They concluded that the nucleus of 2I/Borisov was no more than 3 kilometers in size, and would make its closest approach to the Sun on 7 December. Other than the trajectory, it was hard to tell from a normal Solar System comet.
The hint is that interstellar comets are actually common, with about a dozen at least as big as 'Oumuamua traversing the Solar System at any one time. Astronomers simply haven't had enough big telescopes to spot them. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a giant telescope in Chile scheduled to come online in 2022, may find the skies relatively crowded with them.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is now working on the "Comet Interceptor" probe, which will be launched in 2028, to park itself in an orbit between Earth and Mars, to wait for a comet to study. The Comet Interceptor research team is particularly interested in observing "pristine" comets, which have never made a trip into the inner Solar System before. Now the mission's scope is being expanded to consider interstellar comets as well.
* PLANET NINE IS BLACK HOLE? In somewhat related news, as discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Planet Nine May Actually Be A Black Hole" by Sid Perkins, 27 September 2019), there's long been suspicions that there's an unknown "Planet X" in the far reaches of our solar system, the clue being mysterious influences in the orbits of the outer planets. Now two physicists, Jakub Scholtz -- of Durham University in the UK -- and James Unwin -- of University of Illinois in Chicago -- have suggested that it might not be a planet, it might be a small black hole.
Studies have suggested Planet X has a mass from 5 to 15 times that of Earth, at a distance of 45 billion to 150 billion kilometers from the sun. It would be a very dim object at that distance, and so hard to spot with telescopes. It could in principle be spotted through "gravitational lensing", the bending of starlight around the object.
Scholtz & Unwin say that if Planet X is actually a planet-mass black hole, maybe the diameter of a basketball, it would probably be surrounded by a halo of dark matter that could stretch up to 1 billion kilometers on every side. Interactions between dark matter particles in that halo, particularly collisions between dark matter and dark antimatter, could release a flash of gamma rays, revealing the presence of the black hole.
The two physicists plan to comb though data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has mapped the high-energy sky since 2008. They'll be after sets of sporadic gamma ray flashes that move slowly across the sky, as Planet X would be expected to do as seen from Earth. There's an inclination in astronomy to "invoke black holes" as a handy answer to any mystery, but it's worth a shot. Even if they don't find any hint of Planet X, the search should reveal more data about dark matter and sources of cosmic gamma-ray flashes.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: REUTERS.com reports that a group of Thai artists have come up with an ingenious traffic-safety gimmick: they paint crosswalks with false shadowing and perspective so that approaching drivers see the crosswalk as concrete slabs floating above the roadway. The illusion goes away at close range, but it has proven effective in making drivers slow down. We'll likely be seeing this meme elsewhere in the near future.
* As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Dentistry For The Undead", 30 October 2019), one Maven Lore of New Orleans has a unique profession: he fabricates prosthetic vampire teeth. Lore used to be a graphics designer, but now he spends his days turning humans into vampires.
His work as a "fangsmith" is a reflection of the popular fascination with vampire stories. It's not a seasonable novelty business; he sells the teeth all year round, for as much as $1,200 USD a set. Most of his clients wear the fangs regularly; 90% of them are women in the age range of 20 to 40. While some are wannabe vampires or cosplayers, others just like the fangs.
Lore begins making vampire teeth by examining a client's face and smile. He then tries to match the shade of the client's normal teeth to one of six acrylic tones. Next, he gets a cast of the client's relevant existing teeth with putty, to use the cast to make the teeth. Most of the time, the fit is so precise that no glue is needed -- except if they're fitted on dentures. It doesn't appear that any of his clients have been staked yet.
* I mentioned wanting to get a new, bigger TV for use with my Xbox 360 / Kinect game machine. I was thinking of getting a 40-inch (101-centimeter) TV -- but then I took a tape measure to the plastic shelving I use as my game station, and realized: "That's HUGE!" I set my sights lower, and bought a refurbished 32-inch (81-centimeter) Samsung TV, for less than $200 USD, including a stand so it could sit on top of the game station shelving.
Once I got it, I set it up and found it very much what I expected; it was a big improvement on Kinect gameplay. It also had, somewhat to my surprise, a preloaded system of online channels; I hooked the TV up over wi-fi, and had access to dozens of channels. The only one of them that amounted to much was the CBSNEWS channel, the rest being definitely low-budget -- indeed, one was nothing but non-stop video captures of computer gameplay.
However, that led me to remember I had a Amazon Fire TV stick plugged into an older TV, which had been gathering dust after I switched to watching videos on my smartphone. I switched the Firestick to the Samsung TV, and quickly got it working. What was lurking at the back of my mind was that I needed a system to check weather and news in the morning. I changed my day schedule so I don't get online until about four hours after I get up -- meaning I didn't get a weather report before I went for my morning walk, and didn't know how warmly to dress. It was also nice to check the news early, in case something big happened overnight. I was using my smartphone to do that, but I didn't find it all that convenient for the job.
With the TV and the Firestick, I could instead turn on the TV to get weather and news, while I went through my wake-up routine. That led to the next question -- how best to get that data from the Firestick? Amazon Fire does offer video news, but local weather was trickier. I concluded, knowing the Firestick is effectively an Android computer, that the best thing to do was download news and weather apps.
That presented a bit of an obstacle, in that Amazon's selection of apps for the Firestick is weak -- and Amazon, not playing well with Google, doesn't make access to the Android Store easy. I did some searching online, to find a website named "firesticktricks.com" that pointed to a third-party appstore, named "Aptoide TV", that was tailored to Amazon Fire. Following the instructions on the website, I got a "Downloader" app -- very plain-vanilla -- from Amazon, and then downloaded the Aptoide TV app. I installed it, set up an account for myself on the Aptoide TV appstore, and then had access to over 900,000 apps. Boggles the mind.
Incidentally, Aptoide is actually a software firm in Portugal that builds client apps and server systems for people wanting to set up their own appstores -- the software firm doesn't appear operate appstores themselves. It does appear that Google, not surprisingly, does things to discourage use of Aptoide appstores, and Aptoide has taken Google to court with the EU for trying to suppress competition. Sounds like Aptoide has a good case.
While I was tinkering with the Fire TV Stick, I found that Amazon had a newer version, that was compatible with Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. On investigating, I found that Amazon had the "Fire TV Cube", which was more powerful than the stick, and looked like the better deal. I switched gears and ordered one. I had plenty of pocket money, and it wasn't very expensive -- about $135 USD, along with an HDMI cable.
After I received the Firecube, I got it running without too much trouble. Now I get up in the morning and ask: "Alexa, weather." -- to get a weather update. That done, I say: "Alexa, TV on." "Alex, flash briefing." -- to get the news. If I want to play my XBox game machine on the new TV, I just turn it on, and say: "Alexa, switch HDMI 1." There's a lot more I can do with the FireCube, but it'll take time to figure it out. I've still got to download Android apps; the first one I did wouldn't work. Fortunately, the Firecube has a settings menu that allows apps to be deleted.
I'll have to get a bluetooth game controller so I can play downloaded Android games. A bluetooth speaker would be nice, too. I've got my house updated with adapters in the dual AC wall sockets, most of the adapters having six AC sockets, the latest also having twin USB sockets. I had to rearrange them so I could make sure everything had power. That's what happens when I accumulate gadgets.
I've had to set up a schedule for recharging my gadgets. I recharge the ones I use regularly -- smartphones, bluetooth headphones, a bluetooth micro-keyboard -- every week, and recharge everything else quarterly. Battery life is a function of the number of charge-discharge cycles, and is also dependent on the depth of discharge. That means trying to balance the number of recharges versus depth of discharge. Such is life in the 21st century.
* The Real Fake News of the month was focused on Congressional impeachment hearings -- which is targeting Donald Trump's attempt to pressure Ukraine helping cook up a fake scandal on Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. There are no surprises so far, because anyone who's has any sense or propriety has no problem believing that he does such things. House Republicans have pushed back hard, but not very effectively -- first, insisting that the whistleblower who first reported what was going on come forward.
House Democrat Adam Schiff, who is effectively directing the impeachment effort, replied that the whistleblower needed to be, and would be, protected from punitive actions -- and that testimony from the whistleblower wasn't needed, because testimony was being provided by people much closer to events. The House Republicans, of course, shifted goalposts and said the witnesses weren't really close to events. That didn't help them at all, because it highlighted the fact that the Trump wasn't allowing his people who were clearly involved to testify to Congress. Testimony by Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer and central to the plotting, would be most interesting.
The case against Trump seems solid, all the more so because the Republican defense was so fatuous, and the refusal of the White House to offer any defense does not suggest innocence. Incidentally, the Republicans claimed they outed the whistleblower; Schiff, who has been entirely in charge, politely told them they were wrong. Indeed, Schiff's control over the impeachment proceedings has been magisterial; one wonders if he'll be the White House attorney general one of these days.
When public hearings began in mid-month, the case against Trump became overwhelming. Gordon Sondland -- a wealthy hotelier, made the ambassador to the EU after giving a million to the Trump campaign -- testified on 20 November, giving a sweeping overview of the entire mad plot, implicating many of Trump's lieutenants: "We followed the president's orders. Everyone was in the loop. ... The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false."
What was particularly surprising, if not so much in hindsight, was that Sondland's testimony indicated the Trump Administration didn't want Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden. All Ukraine had to do was announce they would do so: "The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced."
That makes perfect sense: a serious investigation might get in the way of making stuff up. Incidentally, Sondland seems like a good-natured fellow. One of his aides told the investigation of overhearing Sondland talking to Trump on a phone, and telling Trump that Ukrainian President Zelenskey "loves your ass." On being queried about that, Sondland grinned and replied: "Yeah, that sounds like something I'd say." Good answer.
Other witnesses reinforced the case, with UK-born White House security wonk Fiona Hill blasting the Republicans in a low-key British fashion:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country -- and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.
END QUOTE
Hill did acknowledge that Ukrainian officials had been publicly critical of Trump in 2016, which she called "ill-advised." She also agreed that some Ukrainian officials had tried to "curry favor with the Clinton campaign," partly, she said, because they assumed Hillary Clinton would win. Hill said: "I think it was unfair for people to already call the election and to make attacks, also, on candidate Trump and on President Trump. I don't believe there should be any interference of any kind in our elections."
Nonetheless, anything the Ukrainians did was trivial compared to what the Kremlin was doing, Hill saying Russian interference in the 2016 election was "personally directed" by President Vladimir Putin and involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services. Hill added there was "little evidence of a top-down effort by Ukraine" to meddle in the election.
After the public hearings, fussing over the name of the whistleblower became more half-hearted. As Schiff had pointed out all along, everything the whistleblower said had been corroborated by other sources. In the wake of the hearings, that was too obvious to everyone. The Republicans continued to find other ways to stall and obstruct, with the result of further reinforcing the case against Trump.
In the meantime, Trump greatly agitated the military by pardoning US Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Major Matt Golsteyn of separate war zone murder charges, and to restore the chief petty officer rank of SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was found guilty of posing with a dead prisoner. Lorance had been convicted and had served six years of a 19-year sentence, with a Federal review pending; Golsteyn was to have stood trial in February 2020. This led, by some confused process, the dismissal of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.
It appears troubles between Trump and the military are growing. 2020 is going to be a very chaotic year. One of the many peculiarities of Trump is that, when he gets in trouble, instead of backing up, he charges forward. He believes he can shove any obstacle out of the way, and as long as nothing bad has happened to him so far, he just redoubles his efforts. He doesn't seem to know the First Rule of Holes: "When in one, stop digging."
During the public impeachment hearings, Trump predictably bad-mouthed some of the witnesses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commented:
BEGIN QUOTE:
He made a mistake. I think part of it is his own insecurity as an impostor ... he knows full well he's in that office way over his head. And so he has to diminish everyone else.
END QUOTE
While the impeachment hearings are Schiff's show, Pelosi is the executive director. She has demonstrated she understands Trump perfectly, and speaks of him with understated contempt. She's in control, and has become the first hero of the fight against Trump. Presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar said, on the campaign trail: "If you think a woman can't beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day."
This is the last posting of the Real Fake News. It's going to be incorporated into the end-of-month news survey from now on. Partly, it's because I'm getting numb to the White House dumpster fire.
* Thanks to two readers for donations this last month. They are much appreciated.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE