DayVectors

* 22 entries including: capitalism & socialism (series), liberal agenda (series), defending Taiwan (series), Cretaceous extinction, Putin's desperation | Tish James takes on Trump | CNN falls, RQ-21 carries drones | Smash sight | VAMPIRE rocket launcher, Germany goes for heat pumps, Garland runs a tight ship | my COVID booster | Pandora gamebox, Resistance Operating Concept, Ukrainian northern offensive | Russia's disintegration, LinkNYC_5G | pay with implant | Ox Truck, US hypersonic missile efforts, Biden takes on MAGA | Ukraine hackers at work, UN weather warning system | asteroid warning system | Earth Trojan.

[FRI 30 SEP 22] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (14)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (14): The notion of marginal utility also applies to producers. If a manufacturer makes a low profit from a product, the manufacturer won't be in as much of a hurry to expand production for that product as for one with a high profit. The manufacturer would also know that, sooner or later, the market for any product saturates, and would be reluctant to expand production to a level that risks excess capacity.

William Jevons died before he completely filled out his ideas, with that exercise left to another British economist, Alfred Marshall (1842:1924), to think things out further. One of his ideas was the "law of supply & demand", inherent in the notion of marginal utility, and which would become the simplest rule in economics:

   supply HIGH relative to demand:  price LOW
   supply LOW relative to demand:  price HIGH

This leads to the "supply-demand curve", with price on the vertical axis and product quantity on the horizontal axis. There are two curves on the chart:

• A declining demand curve, with high demand when prices are low.
  
  
• A rising supply curve, with plentiful supply when prices are high.

The two curves eventually meet an "equilibrium point" on the curve, at which the suppliers can't accept selling at a lower price. If a supplier tries to raise the price, that supplier will lose sales to competitors, with the price equilibrium point maintained by the capitalistic "invisible hand". The law of supply & demand is so fundamental that it is said a parrot could be trained to be an economist just by programming it to say: "SUPPLY & DEMAND! SUPPLY & DEMAND!"

Of course, the law of supply & demand is a simplification -- models are like that. As Adam Smith pointed out, the capitalist system has an inclination towards monopoly; one supplier may drive the others out of business, or the suppliers may conspire to fix prices. In modern times, there are laws against these sorts of things, though they may be hard to enforce. There's also the reality that it is generally seen as unconscionable to deny anyone vital necessities of life, such as water or life-saving medicines, with governments providing taxpayer-supported subsidies to make sure the poor don't fall through the cracks.

The law of supply & demand still remains a useful rule. Its real-world application demonstrates that economics is a behavioral science, the study of the economic behavior of humans. While humans are capable of perfectly sensible behavior, not all human behavior is sensible -- as demonstrated by stock market bubbles.

* In any case, with the work of Jevons and Marshall, economics took on a more modern appearance, with their work defined as "neo-classical" economics, as opposed to the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo. One aspect of neo-classical economics was the emergence of the "rational economic man", who reasons about buying and selling, balancing price and benefit, making decisions according. There was no Marxist class struggle in such a "rational" economic system; there was instead a game in which everyone got to play, with some winning more than others.

This became a more appealing vision as industrialization spread wealth, with the emergence of a prosperous middle class. New inventions proliferated, one particular innovation being the "combine harvester", a machine that reaped and threshed grain. Horse-drawn reaping machines had been invented in the 1820s, with steam-powered combine harvesters arising in the 1880s. They were the beginning of a revolution: agriculture had long been the dominant occupation of societies, but now agricultural productivity began to skyrocket, leading to a gradual decline in the proportion of the population working on the farms.

The rush of invention was backed up by intellectual property protection, and the inevitable rise of patent feuds. A necessary technical standards bureaucracy arose -- for a prominent example, the International Telegraph Union (ITU), founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1865.

The ITU ensured that telegraphy systems were interoperable across national borders; it had no particular authority, countries were not obligated to follow its regulations, it was just that communications to other countries would be impossible if the regulations were ignored. Not incidentally, the ITU still exists today as the "International Telecommunications Union", providing oversight of electronic communications in general. It was followed in 1874 by the "Universal Postal Union (UPU)" to regulate international mails. It might seem strange that the ITU preceded the UPU, but postal coordination had been previously performed by treaty arrangements between countries. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 29 SEP 22] BETELGEUSE ERUPTS / MICRONOVAS

* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Supergiant Betelgeuse Had A Never-Before-Seen Massive Eruption" by Ashley Strickland, 12 August 2022), the star Betelgeuse is one of the closest and most visible red supergiant stars in our galactic neighborhood. As of late, it's behaving in an unexpected fashion. In late 2019 the star experienced a strange darkening, and continued to grow dim in 2020.

Analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories suggests the star experienced a titanic surface mass ejection, losing a substantial part of its visible surface. The dimming was due to the immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked light coming from the star's surface.

Our own Sun experiences coronal mass ejections (CME) every now and then, in which it blows off parts of its corona, or outer atmosphere. They can disrupt satellites and power grids. However, the surface mass ejection Betelgeuse experienced released more than 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME from our Sun.

Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life in cosmic terms; it has swollen to a diameter of 1.6 billion kilometers (a billion miles) as it burns through its nuclear fuel. Once it runs out of fuel, it will collapse and explode as a supernova that should be visible from the Earth, even in daytime.

With the current outburst, astronomers believe that a convective plume, stretching more than 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) across, originated from inside the star. The plume generating shocks and pulsations that triggered an eruption, blasting off a chunk of the star's outer shell or "photosphere". The blasted-off photosphere, which weighed several times as much as the Moon, was released into space. As the mass cooled, it formed a large dust cloud that blocked the star's light when viewed through telescopes on Earth.

Telescope data has shown that the star's outer layer has returned to normal as Betelgeuse slowly recovers, but its surface remains agitated while the photosphere rebuilds.

* As discussed in a related article from REUTERS.com ("Surprised Astronomers Find New Type Of Star Explosion: A Micronova: by Will Dunham, 20 April 2022), astronomers have now discovered a previously unknown type of stellar explosion, called a "micronova" -- in contrast to the more powerful nova and much more powerful supernova explosions.

Novas are due to a thermonuclear conflagation of material built up on the surface of a superdense white dwarf star, the material having been drained from a companion star, while supernovas are caused by the collapse of supergiant stars. Micronovas are similar to novas, with a conflagration of materials obtained from a companion star, but the explosions are limited to the poles of a white dwarf. Astronomer Simone Scaringi -- of Durham University in the UK and the research lead in the investigation -- says: "The discovery was an unexpected surprise. It goes to show just how dynamic the universe is. These events are fast and sporadic. Finding them requires looking at the right place at the right time."

Micronovas are observed from Earth as bursts of light lasting about 10 hours. They were documented on three white dwarfs: one 1,680 light years away from Earth, one 3,720 light years away, and one 4,900 light years away. They only occur in very specific binary star systems, featuring a white dwarf star with a strong magnetic field, along with a low-mass normal star. The white dwarf drains hydrogen from the companion star, which then builds up at the star's magnetic poles; once the pressure and temperature in the polar columns build up enough, fusion reactions follow, resulting in a micronova.

Of course, micronovas can repeat. Without the intense magnetic field, the hydrogen would build up all over the star until there was enough to start fusion reactions, resulting in a nova. Novas can last for weeks or months, burning through about a million times more mass than micronovas.

[WED 28 SEP 22] THE LIBERAL AGENDA (3)

* THE LIBERAL AGENDA (3): John Stuart Mill understood that capitalistic greed could undermine liberal, open society. He also believed that democracy could undermine it, in a different way. Mill thought it right that ordinary people were being emancipated -- but once they were, they could follow demagogues who appealed to their bigotries and short-sighted self-interests. The result would be a society dominated by the lowest common denominator -- where free thought might be suppressed, where the educated were denounced.

Paradoxically, individual freedom could end up being more suppressed under mass democracy than under the despotic sovereigns of the past. Mill famously referred to this as "tyranny of the majority". It wasn't just the ignorance of the working class that he feared; it was also the conformism of "respectability" among the middle class.

Mill believed that the knowledgeable were required to keep the system in useful balance. Progress required people with the time and inclination for serious study -- a sort of secular clergy, what he called the "clerisy" -- a word borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The clerisy had a utilitarian justification: as modern British philosopher Alan Ryan put it, its members would draw up "rules that would maximize human well-being if we all followed them."

One of Mill's suggestions was to give educated voters greater power: people who could not read or write, or who had received the 19th-century equivalent of welfare benefits, would not get a vote. Mill also thought certain citizens of Britain's colonies, including Indians, were incapable of self-government. University graduates might get six votes; unskilled workers one. The lower orders would be reminded that they required political and moral guidance, though they would be encouraged and helped to become more educated themselves.

This is an absolutely outrageous viewpoint from the modern perspective. As bad as mob rule is, voter suppression is worse -- a century of Jim Crow convinced Americans of that. However, by the standards of his era, Mill was enlightened, being in favor of the universal franchise and women's rights. Again, Mill was not too concerned about having contradictory views. He certainly wouldn't have approved of the Brexit referendum: ask the general populace to decide on a matter on which they have little knowledge? He would have loathed Donald Trump and his contempt for expertise, but he might have been surprised that America had taken so long to elect a demagogue.

Mill would have been depressed at the shrill tone of the 21st-century political debate on both sides of the Atlantic, writing in "On Liberty":

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END QUOTE

Mill would have been opposed to de-platforming -- but his world view did not quite grasp mass disinformation campaigns, enabled by a global internet and aided by foreign subversion, or understand that they were more a form of criminal fraud than intellectual discourse, a race to produce ever bigger and more blatant lies.

He might even argue that, before the chaotic year of 2016, liberal thought had fallen to a tyranny of conformity, liberal society having said little about those "left behind" or the losers from free trade. Many liberals had fallen into complacency, assuming that all the big arguments had been settled.

If there was any value in Donald Trump's reign of misrule, it was to drive liberals to revisit the case for everything from free trade to immigration. Brexit has led to a lively debate about the proper locus of power, and universities have become a battleground over the limits of free speech. There is a ferment in contemporary discourse; it will return to normalcy, of course, but it won't be the same normal as before. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 27 SEP 22] IMPACT EXTINCTION?

* IMPACT EXTINCTION? As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Giant Tsunami From Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact Revealed In Fossilized 'Megaripples'" by Akila Raghavan, 12 July 2021), an asteroid struck what is now the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, wreaking hemispheric destruction and marking the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

It is hotly debated whether the Yucatan impact actually caused the demise of the dinosaurs, but there is no debate that the impact happened, and that it was cataclysmic. It sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (almost a mile) high smashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses.

Now, researchers have found fossilized "megaripples" from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana. They spotted them with seismic imaging techniques, in which explosives are detonated or industrial hammers activated to send seismic waves into the Earth, and listen for reflections from the layers beneath. Companies have long used such an approach to hunt for oil and gas deposits, and have huge archives of data -- particularly in regions like the Gulf of Mexico.

Over a decade ago Gary Kinsland -- a geophysicist at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette -- obtained seismic imaging data for central Louisiana from Devon Energy. At the time of the great impact, sea levels were higher, and Kinsland suspected information from this region might yield clues to what happened in the shallow seas off the coastline.

When Kinsland and his team analyzed a layer about 1500 meters underground, associated with the time of the impact, they saw fossilized ripples. These "megaripples" were spaced up to a kilometer (3,300 feet) apart and were an average of 16 meters (52 feet) tall. Kinsland believes the ripples are the imprint of the tsunami waves as they approached the shore in waters about 60 meters (200 feet) deep, churning up the seafloor sediments. Tidal waves, incidentally, only get high when they travel into the shallows.

When Kinsland drew a line perpendicular to the ripples, they pointed straight at Chicxulub. Kinsland adds that the location was perfect for preserving the ripples, which would have otherwise eventually been buried in sediment: "The water was so deep that once the tsunami had quit, regular storm waves couldn't disturb what was down there."

The Yucatan impact is becoming better understood all the time. Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza -- a paleontologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, who was not involved with the study -- says:

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* In related science news, according to a report from SCIENCEDAILY.com ("Extreme Volcanism Did Not Cause The Massive Extinction Of Species In The Late Cretaceous", 20 September 2021), it is known that the dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous era, 66 million years ago, with the age of mammals following. It is known that a giant meteor impact had something to do with the change, but others have suggested runaway volcanism might have been another big factor.

A study now suggests that extreme volcanic episodes were not a factor in the massive extinction of species in the late Cretaceous. The study was performed by Sietske Batenburg -- from the Faculty of Earth Sciences of the University of Barcelona -- along with Vicente Gilabert, Ignacio Arenillas, and Jose Antonio Arz -- from the University Research Institute on Environmental Sciences of Aragon.

The researchers investigated the Zumaia cliffs in Spain's Basque Country, which have a high-quality section of strata that reveals the geological history of the Earth in the period of 50 to 115 million years ago (Ma). They focused on microfossils, particularly those of foraminifera or "forams", that were deposited between 66.4 and 65.4 Ma, the time interval that includes the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) transition. The microfossils reflected climate changes in that interval, the question being if the changes corresponded to the Deccan massive volcanic eruptions in what is now India, or the orbital variations of the Earth. The orbital variations are known as "Milankovitch cycles", which repeat every 405,000, 100,000, 41,000 and 21,000 years. Variations that result in cooler summers of course influence climate.

Carbon-13 isotopic analysis on the rocks in combination with the study of fossil forams indicates that more than 90% of the Cretaceous planktonic foraminiferal species from Zumaia became extinct 66 Ma ago, coinciding with a big disruption in the carbon cycle and an accumulation of impact glass spherules originating from the giant meteor impact. The study also revealed three strong climate warming periods, one hundreds of thousands of years before the impact, the other two hundreds of thousands of years after the impact. They all coincided with the normal course of Milankovitch cycles, with the event preceding the impact corresponding to the time of the Deccan Traps eruptions. They did not coincide with the abrupt loss of foram species.

[MON 26 SEP 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 39

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have been relentlessly pushing their offensive against Russian invaders in eastern Ukraine, with spectacular results, driving on Luhansk in the north. They're taking so many prisoners that it's not clear how they will be taken care of. In the meantime, off the headlines, at the southern end of the battle line the AFU is grinding up Russians trapped in the Kherson meat-grinder.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded by instituting a partial mobilization, drawing in 300,000 more soldiers. The measure was desperate and impractical; Russia cannot properly train or equip these soldiers, and in fact probably won't have the logistical capability to feed them. A law was passed to give anyone who surrendered ten years in prison. It is unlikely that these troops will be combat-effective in any way -- in fact, there are rumors of Russian troops selling their tanks to Ukrainian forces. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander of the AFU, commented: "We finished off the Russian professional army -- now it's time to finish the amateur one."

Coupled with this was a push by the Russian government to conduct a referendum in the occupied territories, to determine if they should be annexed by Russia. The referendums were internationally condemned as a malign farce, and there were even protest by Ukrainians in the occupied territories. Nobody is impressed. One Philips O'Brien -- a professor of strategic studies at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland -- commented on Twitter:

Phillips P. O'Brien (@PhillipsPOBrien): Was just talking with a NATO officer about the Russian Army and asked him how long it would take the Finnish Army to seize Saint Petersburg. He said: "Not long -- the only problem they?d face is that the Poles would get there first."

* Back in the USA, Attorney General Letitia James of New York slapped Donald Trump and his family with a civil lawsuit, accusing the Trumps of recklessly over-valuing or under-valuing their properties as suited their convenience. The suit claims the Trumps obtained hundreds of millions of dollars by such trickery. It is not clear how well the lawsuit will go in court, though civil cases are easier to win than criminal cases. It has still turned up the pressure on Donald Trump.

* CNN has been a media institution for decades, seen as having a liberal bias, but now it's taken a sharp turn to the Right. One Twitter poster named "@ReallyActivist" took a shot at explaining why, the text being heavily edited here:

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CNN has no future, which is discouraging. However, neither does Fox News, since their viewer base is disappearing. Lawsuits against Fox News won't do them any good, either.

[FRI 23 SEP 22] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (13)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (13): The American Civil War of 1861:1865 represented, among other things, the coming of age of industrial society. Mass production, railroads, and the telegraph revolutionized warfare. The slave oligarchy of the Southern Confederacy could not compete with the sheer might of the North -- with the Federal government not only funding a huge war machine, but continuing to push through a continental railroad to establish economic integration with the Western USA, helping the states establish "Agricultural & Mechanical" colleges to promote economic growth, and very notably to introduce paper currency.

Paper currency was not a new idea even in the USA, but it had never amounted to much before there. Economic pressures of funding the war against the South forced the Federal government to turn to paper, and it finally became established. At the outset, the paper money was in principle convertible to gold; it would take a long time for people to realize that money was no more than a token of exchange, and that convertibility to gold amounted to nothing in the bigger view of things than expensive money.

In the North, industry boomed in the postwar period, with a flood of inventions, and goods pouring out of factories. Unfortunately, the war did not fundamentally change the economy and social structure of the South, with black people reduced to "sharecroppers" who lived a semi-feudal existence for large landowners -- and segregation ensuring that black folk were kept in their place. When segregation of the races was challenged in court, the courts protected it on the basis of the right of businesses and public facilities to, in effect, discriminate if they felt like it.

Segregation was not widely challenged in the North, and in fact it existed in Northern society as well, if not as pervasively. It was a "Gilded Age" when great fortunes were made, with a fabulously wealthy class of "robber barons" rising. One of the most popular thinkers followed by the robber barons was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820:1903), a polymath who was one of the founders of modern psychology. One major aspect of his work was an interest in the evolutionary basis of society, which is a fairly common notion in modern times -- though his thinking on evolution was far from modern, in some ways predating the work of Charles Darwin.

However, Spencer did leave his mark on evolutionary science by coining the phrase "survival of the fittest". His writings on the subject were nuanced, but his style was windy and ponderous, and it was too easy to take away the message that society was run by the law of nature -- that society would be better off to promote the strong and discard the weak. This idea, to a degree an extension of Malthusian thinking, became known as "Social Darwinism", and it was popular among the robber barons. Spencer would be largely forgotten, but Social Darwinism would keep on popping up every now and then in various guises to the present day.

* Social Darwinism was too crude a notion to be anything more than a pretext for public irresponsibility. It had little impact on the emerging science of economics, one innovation being a rethinking of the theory of value. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx had believed in the labor theory of value, that a product's value was the result of the labor invested in its creation. It didn't take too much thought to realize that idea wasn't quite right. Why does a bottle of elite champagne cost so much more than a bottle of cheap wine of the same size, when the difference in the labor to create them is so much smaller?

It was the British economist William Jevons (1835:1882), one of the first economists to be formally educated as such, who came up with an answer to that question, in the form of what became known as "marginal utility" -- the simple idea that it is less labor that determines the value of a product than the perceived need of the buyers. If a buyer named, say, Bob really likes fine chocolates, he's willing to pay a premium for them -- but if there's only so many he enjoys eating, he's not willing to buy a lot of them in a batch. Even if he gets a better price per individual chocolate by purchasing in bulk, he doesn't want to pay more than he would to just buy the chocolates he needs, since the marginal utility of doing so. He would prefer to spend the extra money on something else that he actually wants.

When people go shopping, they are always balancing the price of things they want against how much they want it, and how much of it they want. People will pay a great deal for elite champagne because, in a certain circularity, they value it that highly. They won't be willing to pay as much for commonplace cheap wine. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 22 SEP 22] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Navy Special Ops Has Adapted RQ-21 Blackjack Drones To Deploy Smaller Quadcopters" by Joseph Tevithick, 20 December 2021), the Boeing-Insitu RQ-21 Blackjack drone is in service with the US Navy and Marines, the Australian Army, plus others. It is a small drone with a launch weight of 61 kilograms (135 pounds), with a high swept wing featuring winglets, a pusher prop driven by a piston engine, a twin-boom tail, and a sensor turret under the nose. It is launched by rail and recovered with a "skyhook" system; it doesn't have landing gear.

Although the sensor turret, which features day-night imagers and a laser target designator, is the default payload, but it can carry replacement payloads, and also can be fitted with different payload modules that plug into the fuselage. In addition, a small store can be carried under the front of each tailboom. Most interestingly, the Navy has released an image of a payload module that carries a quadcopter drone.

No specifics were announced, as to what the capabilities of the quadcopter drone actually are, or if it can be recovered in flight. Obviously, the quadcopter allows for discreet close inspection of targets, or even fly in through windows to snoop around. The Marines, incidentally, are phasing out their Blackjacks, in favor of the V-BAT vertical take-off drone -- possibly because it requires less support gear, not being dependent on a launcher.

* As discussed in article from JANES.com ("Dutch Military Orders Smart Shooter's Smash System To Counter UAVs" by Yaakov Lappin, 25 February 2022), drones have become common on the battlefield, leading to work to neutralize them. One of the difficulties is that drones are cheap, and so it doesn't make much sense to use a relatively expensive missile to destroy them.

After evaluating the Smash rifle sight from Smart Shooter of Israel, the Dutch military has decided to obtain it for the counter-drone role. The Smash smart sight has imagers and a laser rangefinder; the shooter points the rifle at the target, holds down the trigger, with the smart sight firing the rifle when the target is lined up. The sight has a degree of night capability, and can also obtain target information from an external sensor.

* One of the more recent weapons to be fielded to Ukraine is the "Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE)" from L3 Harris. It is based on the "Advanced Precision-Kill Weapons System (APKWS)" missile, which is a classic 70-millimeter rocket with a screw-on laser-seeking head, developed by BAE Systems. Maximum range is 5 kilometers (3 miles). In the anti-air mode, the APKWS is fitted with a proximity fuze and a fragmentation warhead; a new combined-effects warhead is being developed to allow an APKWS to flexibly engage different targets.

VAMPIRE is a palletized system that can be easily mounted on the bed of a pickup truck or other vehicle; it has its own battery power supply system, presumably wired into the truck's electrical system in some way. Along with a four-round APKWS launcher, it has an electro-optic / infrared sensor turret with a laser target designator, the turret being mounted on a telescoping mast. The turret presumably has automatic target detection and tracking, since VAMPIRE is being sent to the theatre as an anti-drone weapon. However, it can engage other types of targets, and the EO-IR turret can be used for scouting and surveillance. The VAMPIRE system could be configured with other turrets or munitions.

[WED 21 SEP 22] THE LIBERAL AGENDA (2)

* THE LIBERAL AGENDA (2): John Stuart Mill was not a dogmatist. He wanted people to be exposed to as wide a range of opinions as possible, and for no idea or practice to remain unchallenged. To protect freedom of expression, he formulated his "harm principle": "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others," he wrote in ON LIBERTY, his most famous book.

As Richard Reeves's biography makes clear, Mill thought the emerging industrial, democratic age could enable human flourishing in some ways, but hinder it in others. Take free trade, for which he was an enthusiast -- even though he had worked for a long time for the East India Company, one of the biggest and most persistent monopolies in history. He thought free trade increased productivity: "Whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place, tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world," he wrote in PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. He disliked the Corn Laws, which were tariffs that largely benefited holders of agricultural land.

Mill's enthusiasm for free trade ran deep, seeing it as more than the international exchange of goods; it broadened the mind, Mill writing: "It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar."

That applied to everyone: "There is no nation which does not need to borrow from others." He put that philosophy to work, spending considerable time in France and seeing himself as a something of a bridge between the revolutionary passion of French politics, and the buttoned-down gradualism of England.

The democratic revolution, Mill observed, would also increase the diversity of thought. He supported the Reform Act of 1832, which, as well as extending the franchise, did away with "rotten boroughs", anti-democratic constituencies with negligible electorates. He praised France's move in 1848 to institute universal male suffrage. Each voter's views, he believed, would be represented, and all would have reason to inform themselves. Participation in collective decision-making was for Mill part of the good life.

In the same way, he was an early proponent of votes for women. "I consider [sex] to be as entirely irrelevant to political rights as difference in height or in the colour of the hair," he wrote in "Considerations on Representative Government". After becoming a Member of Parliament in 1865, he presented a petition calling for female suffrage.

Along with the advances of society, Mill saw threats. Capitalism had flaws; democracy had a dangerous tendency to undermine itself. The capitalism of the era was brutal and remorseless: from 1800 to 1850, average annual real-wage growth in Britain was a miserable 0.5%. The average working week was 60 hours long, and in some cities, the life expectancy was below 30. Mill supported trade unions and legislation to improve working conditions. He saw a more fundamental threat in the drive to accumulate wealth, which led to an insistence on the status quo, the "tyranny of conformity".

Mill admired American democracy, but feared that American greed had undermined it, writing that Americans displayed "general indifference to those kinds of knowledge and mental culture which cannot be immediately converted into pounds, shillings and pence." Mill saw America as the country where there was less genuine freedom of thought than any other. How else could it live with such a huge inconsistency at its heart: how could it proclaim liberty, while maintaining slavery? [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 20 SEP 22] GERMANY MAKES HEAT PUMPS

* GERMANY MAKES HEAT PUMPS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("German Heat Pump Bonanza Test Industry's Resilience In Russian Gas Crunch" by Thomas Escritt, 18 August 2022), the Ukraine War has been transformational, a rearrangement of the world. One of the consequences has been to underline the risks of becoming economically dependent on authoritarian regimes -- a lesson nowhere more obvious than in Germany, stuck with a dependence on Russian gas supplies. Economy Minister Robert Habeck commented: "Germany built up a business model that relied on cheap Russian gas. This model has failed, and it's not coming back."

As a result, the main factor of heating manufacturer Stiebel Eltron (SE) in Holzminden is now working around the clock to turn out energy-efficient electric heat pumps. That's good news for the company; SE sold 50,000 heat pumps in 2021, a third of the 154,000 sold in Germany, and expects to sell 80,000 in 2022. However, SE could have sold 50,000 more -- with supply bottlenecks, labor shortages, and surging energy costs making it painfully difficult to meet the demand. Kai Schiefelbein, the company's chief operating officer, says: "I've worked here for 25 years, and I've never experienced such wildly fluctuating and high material prices."

SE is a family-owned company, founded in 1924, with about 4,000 employees and a billion euros in turnover. There are thousands of companies much like it, and they are the backbone of the German economy, accounting for half its output and employing 40 million Germans. Unfortunately, these "Mittelstand" medium-sized family-owned companies are now finding themselves short of everything that made up Germany's winning formula, including functioning global supply chains, skilled labor, and cheap energy.

Supply chains, already strained by the COVID-10 pandemic, have been further frayed by the war in Ukraine, while the cost of raw materials has soared -- including that of the copper from which coolant pipes are made, or the silver with which sections are welded together. Schiefelbein says: "We've bought processors [chips] that normally cost 42 cents for 45 euros."

With high sales, SE is still profiting. In the automotive sector, life is more difficult -- not merely because of the same problems faced by SE, but because of the shift towards electric vehicles, which is troublesome for suppliers focused on combustion engines.

Schiefelbein is confident that German industry will weather the storm, saying the time he spent running a Stiebel Eltron factory in China gave him a "half-Asian" can-do attitude. He says: "These are simply the conditions we face. And our job, my job especially, is to make sure people keep their jobs and that the company keeps growing."

In time, the company will add new production lines, allowing stretched staff to return to working days only. The company is energetically recruiting, with immigrants proving a stretch labor pool. As of late, SE has been bringing in Ukrainian refugees partly through personal networks, with staff who had chosen to host new arrivals recommending them to the company.

The number of Ukrainians working in Germany is still relatively low: of a million Ukrainians, 84,000 were employed in June 2022, according to the German labor agency. Earlier refugee waves, though, such as the 2015 influx from Syria, eventually led to strong employment growth, with some 400,000 refugees in work by 2019.

Like many of Germany's Mittelstand businesses, Stiebel Eltron appreciates recent government moves to make it easier for foreigners to come to Germany to work, but despairs at authorities' continuing insistence on checking whether foreign education certificates match up with Germany's nitpicky vocational qualifications.

* In the meantime, the gas wars continue, with the European Union announcing a price cap on Russian gas, and Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening to turn off the taps if the EU doesn't pay what Russia wants them to pay, and redirect production to China. A gas cutoff could almost double the cost of gas and cause yet another round of economic dislocation.

However, Putin is in a bind: selling oil and gas to Europe has been one of the main sources for Russian foreign currency earnings since Soviet geologists found oil and gas in the swamps of Siberia in the decades after World War II. Shutting off the gas taps means no money for Russia, and building up pipelines to China will be expensive and time-consuming. That will have to be done, since the EU is working to stop using Russian gas in five years -- but until Russia has alternate markets, Putin still needs to sell gas.

[MON 19 SEP 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 38

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The quiet, ongoing Department of Justice investigation of Donald Trump and MAGA has been making some waves lately, most notably with the Feds seizing boxes full of classified documents that Trump wasn't supposed to have from his Mar-a-Lago estate ... with the question hanging of what he was doing with them. In another, lesser revelation Mike Lindell -- "My Pillow Guy", the pillow magnate, a major Trump backer -- announced that the Feds had grabbed his smartphone from him at a Hardee's burger joint.

The Feds didn't say a word about it, it only went public because of Lindell. The stony silence of the authorities has a lot of people upset, with loud claims that the DOJ "isn't doing anything" and "nothing will happen to Trump." A Twitter poster named @BlackKnight10K counseled patience:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The guy's right, Trump pleading guilty would tie things up neatly. However, to get him to do that, the Feds have to offer him a deal, and the only thing that would be persuasive is home arrest. If Trump spent the rest of his life in a gilded cage with an ankle bracelet on, nobody would bother to rescue him, since he'd be worse off on the run. Besides, he'd need geriatric care in prison, and would be an expensive nuisance to take care of. Sure, he'd need to do a bit of time behind bars, just to get pictures of him in a prison suit, but then we can send him home and forget about him.

In any case, I was chatting on Twitter with a woman about interviews with Garland -- saying that when a reporter asks him a clueless question, one sees Garland hesitate for an instant, as if thinking: YOU IDIOT! -- and give a by-the-book answer. She replied: "It's like a parent trying to talk to an unreasonable teenager." Yep.

* I'm planning a road trip from Colorado to Ohio in early October. I'm a little excited, I haven't been on a serious road trip since 2016. Of course, I wanted to get vaccinated for flu and COVID-19 before I left, since the likelihood of picking up a contagious disease will skyrocket, even though I'll be using a mask.

I got the flu shot through Kaiser Permanente, my healthcare provider, and it was no bother -- just a sore arm for a few hours. Getting the COVID-19 vaccination was a bit trickier. I checked with the Larimer County health department, and was pleased to find they were offering the new "bivalent" booster shots that cover both the older and newer COVID-19 variants. I was told to get an appointment through the department web page -- but for a week, all I could see was: NO APPOINTMENTS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

I finally called up the health department again and asked: "Has something gone wrong?" The answer was: "No, we really are booked up." However, the person gave me the phone number for a Colorado state office that handles vaccinations, and I called them right up. I quickly got an appointment for a shot on Saturday morning at Front Range Community College, north up the road from Loveland in Fort Collins.

I wasn't sure exactly where I was supposed to go at FRCC, but it turned out it was a drive-through operation in the parking lot -- I couldn't miss it. The shot itself was a little more troublesome than the flu shot, and I got sleepy during the day and had to take a short nap, which might have been due to shorting myself on sleep during the week anyway. I did wake up in the middle of the night, feeling like one big ache; I took a pain-killer and went back to bed. After I got up Sunday morning, I did my normal exercises, ate, and was okay again, though I was a bit up-&-down during the day.

I'm probably feeling more bullet-proof against COVID-19 than I should, but the vaccination effect should still be strong in early October, and there's not more I can do about it anyway. In any case, the USA is by no means done with COVID-19, and too many people aren't getting shots. However, I was pleased to find that shots are pretty easy to get if they're wanted, and the demand is high.

* Just for fun, I decided to buy a cheap classic video games box from Amazon.com for $75 USD, advertised as offering 8,000 games. It was a handy-sized little computer with two cheap game controllers, plus HDMI video out. It was just plug it in and go, I was playing right away. The only problem was that some of the games demanded inputs that the game controller couldn't generate -- but after puzzling it over, I plugged in a USB keyboard and pressed buttons until I found something that worked.

It turned out that the box was based on Pandora, which is a Linux-based operating system to support game emulators, notably for the extinct arcade game systems like Bally and Midway. A breakdown of a Pandora box suggested that they're typically built with an ARM chip featuring peripheral drivers, plus 250 megabytes of RAM and an 8-gigabyte flash chip for firmware. Emulators are notoriously slow, but that hardware was far more powerful than that of the original game machines, and performance wasn't a problem.

It turned out the box really did have 8,000 games, though there were duplicates here and there -- Japanese versus US versions, different revisions of the same game, and so on. I was pleased that they had the arcade versions of the games, since the old home gamebox versions are so crude as to be unplayable. The games are bootleg and not all of them are likely to work well.

It's an interesting historical exercise, since I could go back in time to the games of the 1980s and see how they evolved. I told my niece Jordy that most of the games were older than she was. It's a revelation to see that I've been playing video games all along, if not fanatically. Now I'm starting to get more into it. I was thinking of going to a theme park on my Ohio trip, but I'm getting too old for them -- and why should I bother, if I can stock up on video games? It's like having a theme park in my living room.

[FRI 16 SEP 22] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (12)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (12): Karl Marx (1818:1883) was a German Jew who grew up poor and radicalized, often being hounded by the authorities. He moved from one country to another in the 1840s as a result, to finally settle in London in 1850. In 1847, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels (1820:1895) -- Marx's patron, a businessman who liked to play radical after work hours -- he published a pamphlet titled THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO outlining a radical socialist, "communist", platform, which led to the publication in 1867 of his masterwork, DAS KAPITAL.

Marx had no interest in utopian communities, having no faith in the powers of reason and enlightened benevolence. Such notions were, to him, naive at best, hypocritical at worst, in effect a way to bamboozle the working class -- as were religion and nationalism. Marx instead viewed society as class-ridden, completely dominated by a class struggle. Marx and Engels wrote in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism."

In 1847, Marx wrote in an essay:

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According to Marx, the capitalist ruling class, the "bourgeoisie", controlled the wealth, while the "proletariat", the working class, provided the labor -- which Marx, as with Adam Smith, saw as the source of value. Laborers would produce goods and be paid wages to sustain themselves; but of course, the capitalists had to sell the goods at a high enough price to bring in a profit, a "surplus", after subtracting wages, materials costs, and operating costs. The surplus created by labor was taken by capitalists, who owned the factories and machinery, with the capitalists exploiting the workers to increase the surplus. The growth of capitalism led inevitably to an ever-growing oppressed worker class.

However, since the proletariat actually created the wealth, that was where the power actually resided. Eventually, the capitalist system would destroy itself, the workers rising up in revolt to dispose of the old order and create a new one -- a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and a more egalitarian society. Marx saw this process as the inevitable endpoint of history.

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" went beyond socialist ideas. Under socialism, individuals could still own private property -- but the means of production would be owned and managed by a democratically elected government. Under communism, a strong central government would control all aspects of economic production, and provide citizens with their basic necessities such as food, housing, medical care, and education. This was necessarily opposed to all that capitalism stood for, and there could be no compromise with capitalism.

Marx's critique of capitalism was compelling, but his proposals for solutions weak and vague. Partly that was due to being steeped in German philosophy, which was notoriously opaque; but even given that, it was not at all clear what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was going to look like. It certainly looked like it was anti-democratic, with what amounted to a one-party state with weak notions of, in the limit even a contempt for, personal rights. Marx's thinking would prove influential in a way that the work of the utopian socialists did not, but his influence would prove troublesome. Possibly there were less drastic ways, processes of accommodation between the haves and have-nots, to civilize capitalism?

Nonetheless, Marx understood that capitalism was driven by rules that, taken by themselves, would lead to revolution. Today, capitalists all over the world have been working to halt the process of give-&-take, being under the illusion that a lopsided social order is to their personal benefit, even claiming it would be a benefit to the rest of society. Marx provided a hint to them that they are dangerously wrong. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 15 SEP 22] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for August included:

[01 AUG 22] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1V / COSMOS 2558 -- A Soyuz 2.1v booster was launched from Plesetsk at 2025 UTC (next day local time - 4) to put what appeared to be an inspection satellite, designated "Cosmos 2558", into Sun-synchronous orbit. Its orbit closely trailed that of the US NROL 87 / USA 326 satellite.

[04 AUG 22] CN TY / LONG MARCH 4B / TECIS & -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0308 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Inventory Satellite (TECIS)" satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. It carried four instruments. A multi-Beam LIDAR, a polarization camera, a hyper-spectral Monitor, and a spectral camera. It was designed to operate for eight years.

The HEAD 2G satellite and Minhang Youth Satellites were secondary payloads. HEAD 2G was a 40-kilogram (88-pound) satellite, designed by the HEAD Aerospace Group in Beijing. It was to be used for ship and flight monitoring in combination with their HEAD?s Skywalker constellation of 48 satellites. The Minhang Youth Satellite was a studentsat.

[04 AUG 22] NZ / ELECTRON / NROL 199 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand at 0500 UTC (local time - 13) to put a classified payload into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. The payload was designated "NROL 199". This mission was contracted through the NRO's "Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR)" program.

[04 AUG 22] USA CC / ATLAS 5 / SBIRS GEO FLIGHT 6 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1029 UTC (local time + 4) to put the US military's sixth "Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous (SBIRS GEO 5)" missile launch warning satellite into orbit. It was the last launch in the series.

[04 AUG 22] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2F / SECRET SPACEPLANE -- A Long March 2F booster was launched from Jiuquan at about 1600 GMT (local time - 8) to put a reusable spaceplane into orbit. No specifics were released. Apparently, the same vehicle was launched in September 2020.

[04 AUG 22] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / KPLO -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2308 UTC (local time + 4) to send the "Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO)" AKA "Danuri" to the Moon, this being the first Korean mission beyond Earth. The probe had a launch mass of 678 kilograms (1,495 pounds); it carried science instruments to image permanently shadowed craters to search for signs of water ice, measure the composition of lunar regolith, and capture high-resolution images to map future landing sites. The Falcon 9's first stage booster landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

[07 AUG 22] IN SR / SSLV / TEST FLIGHT -- An ISRO Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0348 UTC (local time - 5:30) on its initial orbital test flight. The booster carried two payloads:

• EOS 02: A demonstrator for an Earth remote sensing satellite series, with a launch mass of about 135 kilograms (300 pounds).
  
  
• AzaadiSAT: A CubeSat from an Indian educational organization named Space Kids India, hosting 75 small payloads from rural Indian students. The CubeSat hosted an amateur radio transponder, a radiation detector, and a "selfie" camera.

The SSLV features three solid-fuel stages and a liquid-fuel upper stage. The launch was a failure, the satellites being placed in the wrong orbit.

[09 AUG 22] CN JQ / CERES 1 / TAIJING 1-01, 1-02, & -- A Ceres 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0411 GMT (local time - 8) to put three Earth observation satellites into a sun-synchronous polar orbit. The two larger satellites, "Taijing 1-01" and "Taijing 1-02", had a launch mass of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) each; they were developed by the Beijing-based private sector company Weina Star, also known as Minospace, for commercial Earth imagery. A nanosat from ASESSpace was also on board.

This was the third launch of the Ceres 1 system, also known as Gushenxing 1. The previous launches were in November 2020 and December 2021. The Ceres 1 is a four-stage rocket, using three solid-fueled stages with a hydrazine-fueled fourth stage. Ceres 1 is can put to 230 kilograms (505 pounds) into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles). Ceres 1, named after the first asteroid to be discovered, is 19 meters (62.3 feet) tall and is 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) in diameter at its widest. The rocket weighs 30 tonnes (33 tonnes) and is in a similar capability class to the American Rocket Lab Electron or Chinese iSpace Hyperbola 1 launch vehicles. Payloads are carried in a composite fairing 2.6 meters in height and 1.28 meters in diameter (8.5 x 4.2 feet).

[09 JUL 22] RU BK / SOYUZ 2-1B / KHAYYAM & -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Baikonur at 0552 UTC (local time - 6) to put the "Khayyam" satellite into orbit for Iran, along with 16 CubeSats from various Russian institutions and universities.

Khayyam was an Earth remote sensing satellite, with panchromatic and near-infrared imagers, with a launch mass of 650 kilograms (1,435 pounds). It was built by Russian organizations with Iranian involvement. The CubeSats included CubeSX HSE-2, KODIZ, UTMN, CYCLOPS, Siren, KAI 1, Kuzbass 300, Skoltech B1 & B2, Polytech Universe 1 & 2, Vizard, Geoscan-Edelweiss, MIET-AIS, ISOI, and ReshUCub.

[10 AUG 22] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 4-26 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0214 UTC (next day local time + 4) to put 52 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. This launch brought the total of Starlink satellites launched to 3,009. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The booster first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.

[10 AUG 22] CN TY / LONG MARCH 6 / JILIN 1 x 10 + 6 -- A Chinese Chang Zheng (Long March) 6 booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0450 UTC (local time - 8) to put 16 "Jilin 1" satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit, including the "Jilin 1 Gaofen 03D #35:43" infrared imaging and "Jilin 1 Hongwai (Yunyao 1) #1:6" satellites.

[12 AUG 22] USA-C VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 3-3 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 2142 UTC (local time + 7) to put 46 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 brought the number of Starlink launches to above 2500. The first stage landed on the SpaceX drone barge in the Pacific.

[19 AUG 22] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2D / YAOGAN 35-4 x 3 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Xichang at 1736 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the secret "Yaogan 35 Group 2" payloads into orbit. It was a triplet of satellites and may have been a "flying triangle" naval signals intelligence payload.

[19 AUG 22] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 4-27 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1921 UTC (local time + 4) to put 53 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). The booster first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.

[23 AUG 22] CN XC / KUAIZHOU 1A / CHUNANGXIN 1 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Xichang at 0236 UTC (local time - 8) to put the undescribed "Chunangxin 1" payload into orbit. It may have been a double payload.

[24 AUG 22] CN TY / LONG MARCH 2D / BEIJING 3B -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Taiyuan Xichang at 0301 UTC (local time - 8) to put the secret "Beijing 3B" Earth remote sensing satellite into orbit.

[28 AUG 22] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 4-23 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0341 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put 53 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). The booster first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.

[31 AUG 22] USA-C VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 3-4 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0540 UTC (previous day local time + 7) to put 46 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 brought the number of Starlink launches to above 2500. The first stage landed on the SpaceX drone barge in the Pacific.

[WED 14 SEP 22] THE LIBERAL AGENDA (1)

* THE LIBERAL AGENDA (1): Liberalism appears to be on the retreat in the 21st century. A survey from ECONOMIST.com ("The Liberal Agenda", August 2018), points to its deep roots, suggesting that it won't go away that easily.

Start with John Stuart Mill, born in 1806. At age six, he had written a history of Rome, and by age seven, he was reading classics in Greek. He was a prodigy, who grew up with a deep faith in the power of reason. He became the leading proponent of the philosophy of liberalism, formulating ideas about economics and democracy that shaped the political debates of the 19th century. His reflections on individual rights and mob rule are still relevant today; maybe particularly today.

Mill grew up in an era of democratic revolution. America had achieved independence from Britain, and set up an elected government free of aristocracy; France had overthrown its monarchy. In 1832 Britain passed the first Reform Act, which extended the voting franchise to the middle classes. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. The old social order, in which birth determined social position, was fading away, and nobody was sure what would replace it.

Today, many see Mill as an advocate for the ruthless capitalism of his era. The American historian Henry Adams referred to Mill as "his Satanic free-trade majesty". Such few photos as survive of him suggest a cold, arrogant man. That was not the case.

True, in his youth he was a staunch utilitarian. His mentor was Jeremy Bentham, who had argued that the principle underlying all social activity ought to be "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". The aim of political economy, as economics was then known, was to maximize utility. Mill initially followed Bentham in seeing humans as mere calculating machines.

He matured. In his brilliant autobiography, published after his death in 1873, he said that he grew up "in the absence of love and in the presence of fear". The result was a breakdown in his early 20s. He later came to believe that there must be more to life than what Benthamites term the "felicific calculus", a dry accounting of pleasure and pain.

He turned to the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which taught him about beauty, honor and loyalty. His new aesthetic sense led him away from driven reformism and gently towards conservatism. If the societies of the past had produced such good art, he reasoned, they must have something to offer his age.

Mill did not reject utilitarianism as thoroughly as his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, who argued that only pigs would view the seeking of pleasure as the foundation of all ethics. Instead, Mill saw the bigger picture. What may at first seem a purely virtuous act that engenders no immediate pleasure -- being true to your word, say -- and so might hardly be seen as utilitarian, may eventually come to seem essential to well-being.

Mill ended up being a pragmatist, not an ideologue, not devoted to a fixed doctrine. Part of what makes him a great thinker is that he qualifies his own arguments. His views evolved over the course of his life, but for most of it he rejected absolutes -- accepting the world's mess and complexity, not devoted to the creation of a grand system of thought. John Gray, a philosopher, writes that Mill was "an eclectic and transitional thinker whose writings cannot be expected to yield a coherent doctrine."

One theme that does stand out in his work is that Mill, like all liberals, believed in the power of individual thought. His first major work, A SYSTEM OF LOGIC, argues that humanity's greatest weakness is its inclination to self-delusion, to uncritically accept absolute truths. He rejected doctrines and customs that stopped people thinking for themselves. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 13 SEP 22] RESISTANCE OPERATING CONCEPT

* RESISTANCE OPERATING CONCEPT: Reports from Ukraine indicate that guerilla activities in Russian-occupied territories are on the increase. As reported by an article from CNN.com ("How Ukraine Is Using Resistance Warfare Developed By The US To Fight Back Against Russia" by Oren Liebermann, 27 August 2022), the Ukrainian guerrilla movement traces back, in part, to operational concepts developed by US special operations forces (SOF).

The "Resistance Operating Concept (ROC)" was developed in 2013 following Russia's war in Georgia a few years earlier, but the concept only came of age after Russia seized Crimea in 2014. ROC provides a blueprint for smaller nations to fight back effectively against a more powerful invader, with resistance from both military forces and citizen guerrilla groups. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Schwartz, who was commander of Special Operations Command Europe during the doctrine's development, says:

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ROC is defined more in terms of general philosophy and not detailed plans, though specific tactical measures are defined. Exactly what plans a particular country implements is up to each country. At first, only Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland expressed much enthusiasm about ROC -- but after Russia's largely bloodless take-over and annexation of Crimea shocked Ukraine and the West in 2014, interest grew rapidly. To date, at least 15 countries have conducted some form of training in ROC. The Baltic States have been particularly enthusiastic; Estonia's defense plans integrate its standing military with its general population and its volunteer forces, with public approval becoming stronger after the invasion of Ukraine.

The conventional wisdom when the Ukraine War started was that Ukraine would be hard-pressed to stop the Russian invasion. In reality, the Russian invasion was badly planned and executed, with equipment in a poor state of repair and untrained troops. Ukrainian Army forces, backed up by weapons hurriedly supplied by NATO countries, hit back hard and stopped the drive.

The Russians abandoned their drives into the country and decided to overrun the weakly-held Donbas region in the east, then partially under their control. By use of overwhelming firepower, they were able to make slow gains -- until the US Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) was introduced, providing the Ukrainian Army (UA) with a long-range precision attack weapon. The Russian drive ground to a halt.

In the meantime, guerilla groups, largely coordinated by the AFU-SOF, began to conduct operations in Russian-occupied territory. It started out small. Early in the war, the Ukrainian government set up a website that explained different ways to resist. The described nonviolent actions, including boycotting public events, labor strikes, and even the use of humor and satire. The goal was to disrupt the ability of pro-Russian authorities to govern, while reminding the population of Ukraine's rightful sovereignty. The resistance doctrine went on to suggest violent actions as well, including making Molotov cocktails, starting fires, and putting chemicals in fuel tanks to sabotage enemy vehicles. As of late, the resistance has taken to assassinating collaborationist officials.

In early April 2022, General Richard Clarke, the commander of US Special Operations Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the US had helped train resistance companies in Ukraine embedded with special forces. When asked if he was seeing some of the success of that training, Clarke replied: "Yes, Senator, we are."

The doctrine also calls for a broad messaging campaign to control the narrative of the conflict, prevent an occupier's message from taking hold, and keeping the population united. Videos of Ukrainian strikes against Russian tanks, often to a soundtrack of pop music or heavy metal, have gone viral, as have clips of Ukrainian soldiers rescuing stray animals. The Ukrainians have proven highly adept at propaganda, while the Russians have done nothing but tell preposterous lies and sneer. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, a comedian and actor before he went into politics, has carefully crafted himself in frequent speeches and international appearances as the symbol of national resistance.

Obviously, Ukrainian plans for ROC involve more severe measures, as reports filter out of the assassinations of collaborator officials and occasional attacks on enemy hangouts. The war in the Russian rear continues to be mysterious, but it is clearly active. The story will not be told until after the fighting is over, and much of it will never be told.

[MON 12 SEP 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 37

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The Ukrainian offensive against the Russians isolated in the city of Kherson continues; this southern push was joined this week one in the north, against Russian lines facing Kharkiv. The northern offensive has pushed forward against disorganized resistance, with the Ukrainian Army capturing so many Russian prisoners that it's problematic to care for them. The cities of Kupiansk and Izyum are on the threshold of being taken.

There are wild rumors of UA advances much deeper into Russian-controlled territory, but they're hard to take seriously for the moment. The Ukrainians do have to advance as far and as fast as they can; millions of Ukrainians remain under Russian control, and there will be mass starvation during the winter if the Russians aren't evicted.

Videos of Ukrainian troops advancing -- sometimes on foot, sometimes on combat vehicles, often in ubiquitous Ukrainian pickup trucks -- show them being greeted by Ukrainian citizens, grannies hugging the soldiers and crying, one man even on his knees with his arms raised. It appears many Russian soldiers are stealing civilian clothes and fleeing.

Videos of strikes on Russian targets continue to be released. Videos of tanks blowing their turrets are common, but one recent video topped that. In the bottom corner of the video, a tank next to a farmhouse was blasted; a few seconds later, something fell from the sky and landed on the farmhouse roof. It was the tank commander, who was apparently standing in the top hatch when the tank was hit. As gruesome as it was, I had to laugh.

* As discussed in an essay from ATLANTICCOUNCIL.org ("Russia May Not Survive Putin's Disastrous Decision To Invade Ukraine" by Janusz Bugajski, 8 September 2022), discussed possibilities for what happens after Russia is evicted from Ukraine. Bugajski writes:

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Putin's calamitous war in Ukraine has put Russia under breaking strain:

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Nobody is expecting a stalemate now. What spells ruin for Russia is that the present government is not sustainable, but there is no alternative to it in the wings. There will be demands for autonomy by the many states of the Russian Federation:

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Of course, the disintegration of the Russian Federation will pose great challenges to NATO:

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The ground is shifting under Vladimir Putin's feet. Moscow municipal officials sent him a blunt message, released to the public:

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A similar message was sent out by municipal officials in Saint Petersburg. To no surprise, the police went after the officials. That was what the officials expected, of course; they were just trying to make a public plea for sanity, and see if they could get a response. Given the deteriorating state of Russian forces in Ukraine, this is not the end of it.

[FRI 09 SEP 22] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (11)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (11): A French aristocrat named Henri de Saint-Simon (1760:1825) took a broader view of a utopian order, envisioning not merely orderly communities, but an entire society based on utopian principles.

Saint-Simon was an ambitious man who had fought as a French soldier in the American Revolution, and also been locked up for a year by the French revolutionary government. He was released, to make a fortune buying up church lands, only to lose the fortune and be reduced to despair -- but he didn't abandon his ideals. Saint-Simon wanted to do away with aristocracies and militarism, with society run by scientists and industrialists -- "technocrats" in the modern term -- constructing an industrial society where all cooperated for the common good, free from poverty.

The idea seems naive in hindsight, but Saint-Simon did appreciate that industrialization meant a great multiplication of wealth. Wouldn't there be enough to go around for everyone? However, Saint-Simon was not a practical thinker; indeed, in his book THE NEW CHRISTIANITY, published in 1825, he modeled his ideas as a religion, based on Christianity, but with a social imperative, that religion "should guide the community toward the great aim of improving as quickly as possible the conditions of the poorest class."

Whatever the limitations of their thinking, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, and others working along much the same lines were proposing a new and radical notion, what would become known as "socialism" -- the idea that the resources of society should not enrich the capitalist few, but should be shared among all citizens.

* None of the utopians would live to see their ideals realized, but they did witness the industrial transformation of society. The steam engine had been invented late in the 18th century; from early in the 19th century, there were experiments with mounting a steam engine on wheels and running it down a set of rails, and by the 1820s, the "locomotive" was a going proposition. To that time, land transport had been limited to horse-drawn wagons and canal boats; now it was possible to rapidly haul passengers or large loads over long distances, with governments establishing, or helping establish, national rail networks.

Roughly in parallel, steam-powered ships emerged, making ocean travel much faster and more reliable than it was in the age of sail. Steam power also led to the development of vessels with iron hulls, leading to larger ships -- and much more economical transport of bulk goods over long distances. The locomotives and ships were generally powered by coal, which became the driving force of the Age of Steam. Coal was a filthy fuel, profusely generating pollutants and leading to polluted industrial areas, but there was no general concern about that at the time, while coal was plentiful and cheap.

From the 1840s, the telegraph was introduced, providing instant communications over long distances -- even across the oceans, as submarine cables were laid to connect the continents later in the century. The Age of Steam was also the Age of the Telegraph; rapid long-distance transport of goods was dependent on rapid long-range transactions, along with scheduling of transport. Telegraph lines were often set up alongside railroad tracks, and operated by railroad companies.

Precision manufacturing was emerging as well at the time, producing elaborate machines, with one effectively identical to the other, and with interchangeable parts. That was not easy to accomplish, but it was gradually becoming the norm. Manufacturing was expanding rapidly, with armies of laborers toiling away in factories. Britain remained a global center of industrialization in the era, though America was beginning to flex its muscles as well.

American industrial capitalism had a rival, however: slave plantations. Ironically, slavery had been given a huge boost by Yankee engineering ingenuity, when inventor Eli Whitney (1765:1825) devised the "cotton gin", a simple device to remove the seeds from cotton. That made cotton a much more economically practical crop, with great slave plantations arising to grow the crop. The two systems were in tension, with the industrial and mercantile North wanting high tariffs to protect industry, while the agrarian slave South wanted low tariffs to provide cheap goods. Still, the United States had been able to accommodate both systems, with slavery restricted to the South -- but in 1848, the USA fought a war with Mexico, to obtain huge land concessions in the western part of the continent. The uneasy truce between industrial capitalism and slavery began to break down in fighting over whether the new American states in the West would be slave or free.

Slavery was effectively a dead issue in Europe -- though European nations maintained colonial empires in Asia, with the empires gradually acquiring more possessions in Africa through the century. The colonial regimes were generally committed to capitalist exploitation of the inhabitants of foreign lands. Back at home, a restless and often exploited worker class was growing in size. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 08 SEP 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article by Matthew Fraser, New York City's chief technology officer, in NYDAILYNEWS.com ("What The New LinkNYC 5G Kiosks Will Mean For New Yorkers", 11 July 2022), NYC's government is seeking to provide high-speed internet access to all its citizens. In 2015, the city introduced the first "LinkNYC" kiosks to provide free wi-fi, phone calls, and other digital services. LinkNYC has proven a great success, and is now being upgraded to fast "5th Generation (5G)" with the introduction of the first "LinkNYC5C" kiosks, providing data rates an order of magnitude faster.

About 40% of New Yorkers don't have home and mobile internet access, particularly in underserved neighborhoods, known as "digital deserts". Eventually there will be 2,000 Link5Gs across the city, particularly in areas where broadband options are limited and foot traffic is heavy. The entire city will also benefit from the expansion of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables laid thanks to this program. The fiber links have excess capacity that the city will be able to lease out to service providers.

Alas, the introduction of LinkNYC5G has been marked by the emergence of protests against the 5G, by those who believe 5G is dangerous. Since it isn't, it's unlikely the protests will end up being anything but an annoyance.

* Wireless data body implants are nothing new, having been discussed here in 2006. They were originally used primarily as an ID scheme; an article from BBC.com ("The Microchip Implants That Let You Pay With Your Hand" by Katherine Latham, 16 April 2022) described how they are now being used to make payments.

Patrick Paumen, a 37-year-old Dutch security guard, gets a startled reaction when he pays for things in a shop or restaurant. All he does is hold his hand up to a near-field wireless card reader, and the payment goes through -- thanks to a microchip he had implanted in his hand in 2019. Paumen says: "The reactions I get from cashiers are priceless!"

He got his chip, which is about the size of a grain of rice, from a British-Polish firm, Walletmor, which claims to be the first to have set up a payment system based on implanted wireless chips. Chief executive Wojtek Paprota says that the "can be used wherever contactless payments are accepted." The chip is safe, being encased in a biologically-inert polymer, and has regulatory approval. Like other near-field wireless devices, it doesn't need batteries, being powered through its antenna by the reader device.

Paumen says he's not worried about being tracked. Near-field wireless only works in close proximity to a detector, and any transaction he makes with the chip is no more or less tracked than if he used a charge card: "RFID chips are used in pets to identify them when they're lost -- but it's not possible to locate them using an RFID chip implant."

There is a general concern about the potential for abuse of data rights as we become more internet-connected, but Steven Northam -- a professor at the University of Winchester and founder of the UK firm BioTeq, which has been making RFID chip implants since 2017 -- sees no real problem with the implants. The company's implants are intended for people with disabilities who can use the chips to automatically open doors. Northram says: "We have daily enquiries, and have carried out over 500 implants in the UK ... This technology has been used in animals for years. They are very small, inert objects. There are no risks."

* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("A Pay-As-You-Go Electric Truck Is Making Deliveries On Rwanda's Dirt Roads" by Tommy O'Callaghan, 20 July 2020), the African country of Rwanda is hilly, most of the roads are unpaved, and most of the people get around on bicycles and motorcycles. Farmers often use such vehicles to get their produce to market, but they obviously leave something to be desired to that end.

However, OX Delivers -- a British-Rwandan delivery startup -- has a better idea, in the form of its electric OX Trucks, designed for rough roads, and with a load capacity of two tonnes. The truck was designed by former Formula One race car engineer Gordon Murray in 2016, commissioned by a non-profit named the "Global Vehicle Trust", which wanted a vehicle to perform essential deliveries in developing countries.

The Global Vehicle Trust launched OX Delivers in 2020. Although it's headquartered in Warwickshire, England, the company says it is an African-led operation. OX Delivers is not trying to sell the vehicles, instead renting out delivery space on the trucks, mostly to smallholder farmers and small-scale traders. OX Delivers started out with two trucks in Western Rwanda in April 2021 and are now up to 12, transporting everything from fruit to livestock, lumber to school equipment.

The OX Truck features large tires and high ground clearance; it was designed to be sturdy and easy to maintain. Its assemblies can be shipped in flat packs, allowing six to fit into a shipping container that would only be able to carry two assembled trucks. OX says the truck can be assembled by three "skilled, but not necessarily expert" people in 12 hours, using an image-based, IKEA-like guide. It has half the operating cost of diesel machines. The trucks have a range of 170 kilometers (105 miles), and can recharge in up to six hours. The company has installed private charging depots to support the fleet.

OX Delivers says it charges the same as cargo bicycles -- around 50 cents to transport a 100-kilogram (220-pound) sack 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) -- but can travel further, and offers a discount for return trips. Customers book space on a truck through a basic "app" designed for 2G feature phones. Since the app cannot yet process payments, drivers negotiate prices and build relationships face to face with their customers.

[WED 07 SEP 22] DEFENDING TAIWAN (5)

* DEFENDING TAIWAN (5): Along with weapons to deal with a Chinese amphibious force, Taiwan needs large volumes of lower-cost precision-guided munitions to engage forces approaching or landing on its beaches. Hellfire missiles could be mounted on light four-wheel tactical vehicles, or small fast boats for the job. In addition, large numbers of Javelin missiles, or similar infantry-portable anti-tank guided munitions (ATGM) should be stockpiled in hardened sites near possible landing areas. Experience in Ukraine suggests thousands of missiles will be needed.

The war in Ukraine has already absorbed a significant portion of US Javelin and Stinger stockpiles, which implies restocking them. The Biden Administration has been unapologetically steadfast in backing America's military commitments, so we can assume they will be restocked. Production licenses to Taiwan would help as well.

Finally, Taiwan should also install North Korean-style tube artillery in tunnels bored into mountainsides, with pre-zeroed aim points for rapid firing on the key beaches near Taipei and Kaohsiung and just offshore. The most lethal combination would involve 155-millimeter guided shells, such as the combat-proven Excalibur, and tunnel-based mobile gun platforms such as the M109 Paladin -- already approved for sale to Taiwan -- or the rapid-firing BAE/Bofors Archer.

COUNTERMEASURES & HOMELAND DEFENSE: Countermeasures systems are a basic element of the defense of Taiwan -- with radio-frequency jammers disrupting Chinese radar, communications, and satellite navigation. Inflatable decoys of weapons and battle systems could be deployed and shuffled around to confuse the Chinese. Decoys and actual vehicles should employ camouflage; leaking photos of camouflaged decoys on social media would help confuse Chinese intelligence, while actual combat systems could be disguised as civilian articles. Decoys would not merely be useful for confusing the enemy, but to force enemy platforms to reveal their presence for targeting.

Large quantities of cheap, effective weapons, particularly unguided light anti-tank rockets, should be stockpiled, with reserve forces trained to use them to grind down an invasion force. Taiwan will also need infrastructure to maintain operations in an invasion -- such as a large fuel reserve in hardened and dispersed locations, as well as dispersed stockpiles of food to allow Taiwanese to hold out for months. Wells need to have reliable backup power to allow them to pump in the face of attacks on the water system. Starlink-style satellite communications systems will allow communications to be maintained.

The bottom line is that if China does decide to invade Taiwan, the invasion must be made as costly as possible for Beijing, with Taiwan holding out until the US and other allies can throw their full weight into the fight. Taiwan has now passed a greatly increased defense budget, while the Americans have shown not the slightest sign of flagging in their commitment to defend Taiwan -- indeed, the USA is conducting a military buildup in the East Pacific with new weapons that China is perfectly aware. The ultimate goal of Taiwan, and the USA in support of Taiwan, is not so much to defeat China, but to convince Chinese leadership that the risk of defeat is too high to take the gamble. The Chinese will be defeated in their own minds. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 06 SEP 22] HYPERSONIC STRIKE

* HYPERSONIC STRIKE: The Pentagon's drive towards an arsenal of hypersonic missiles has been discussed here in the past. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("USAF & DARPA Test Hypersonic Weapon Systems In Air & On The Ground" by David Szondy, 14 July 2022), flight tests of such weapons are now in progress.

The US Air Force (USAF) has carried out an air-launched flight test of its "AGM-183A" hypersonic missile, while the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" research office -- has fired a prototype of its "Operational Fires (OpFires)" missile for launching hypersonic weapons from the ground using standard military ground vehicles and support equipment.

The USAF's "Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon Booster Test Flight-3" of the AGM-138A on 12 July 2022 in the skies off the Southern California coast is the 12th flight in the program flight and the second to prove successful after a string of three failures. For the test, the missile was dropped from under the wing of a B-52 Stratofortress bomber, to then accelerate to speeds in excess of Mach 5. The successful flight paves the way towards all-up testing, to begin later in 2022. The AGM-183A is a solid-fuel rocket, with a separating hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) warhead.

The US Army and Marine Corps wants ground launch for their hypersonic munitions, and so DARPA's OpFires program is developing a two-stage rocket that can carry a hypersonic glide warhead. The missile is to be launched from a variant of the Army's five-axle "Palletized Load System" family of vehicles. In the flight demonstration, an OpFires missile was launched at White Sands, New Mexico, from a USMC logistics vehicle, with a normal US Army artillery fire control system in charge. The test was successful, though the flight article was not an "all-up" system.

* In closely related news, in July 2022 DARPA performed the second successful test flight of the "Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC)" hypersonic cruise missile being developed by Raytheon Technologies and Northrop Grumman. It follows an initial test in September 2021.

In the tests, the HAWC prototype is carried under the wing of a B-52 to altitude and then released, to be brought up to speed with a solid-rocket booster. After booster burn-out, the booster is discarded, with the missile's supersonic-combustion ramjet (scramjet) propulsion taking over, with the missile moving out at Mach 5. Apparently, HAWC will be small enough to carried by aircraft such as F-15s.

* Further articles state that the US Navy is working on their own hypersonic missile, named "Intermediate Range Conventional Prompt Strike". Lockheed Martin is working on it, but it hasn't been test-flown yet.

Even more intriguingly, on 16 August 2022, the US Air Force conducted a test launch of a Minuteman III missile, with what was referred to as a "test re-entry vehicle", no details being provided. It is tempting to think that it was an HGV; the Pentagon has made it clear there is no plan to create an HGV with a nuclear warhead, but hints have been dropped that the US military does have interest in a long-range conventionally-armed HGV. It is possible that the 16 August test was a demonstration for the USAF's new "Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent" -- but in absence of information, no way to validate that idea.

[MON 05 SEP 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 36

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: On Thursday, 1 September 2022, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech at Philadelphia's Independence Hall, in which he blasted Donald Trump's MAGA followers. The speech is excerpted below:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Some perceived missteps in the speech, one being that Biden was backlit in red, giving him an ominous appearance; the other being that he was backed by his Marine guards, which some military professionals thought was inappropriate. The red lighting was due to the fact that Independence Hall was spotlit in red, white, and blue, and Biden wasn't well framed against it. MAGA quickly distributed images of the red-lit Biden online, suggesting he was an aspiring tyrant. The supposed gibes backfired; Biden was instead framed as "Dark Brandon", the Marvel Comix superhero version of Biden, created in response to the obscure "Let's Go Brandon" -- meaning "Fuck Biden" -- sneer created by MAGA.

As far as the presence of the Marines went, that was fairly normal for presidents, and it also provided a reminder that Biden is the Commander in Chief of America's armed forces; does MAGA really want to take him on? In any case, MAGA screamed very loud, as if they were being unjustly attacked -- which was to be expected, and only enhanced Biden's approval ratings. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen how the speech will play out in events, most notably in the November mid-term elections. In any case, Congress comes back into session this week after summer recess, and there's reason to think much will happen there.

* The Ukraine War flames on, though there's a news blackout in progress as Ukrainian Army forces press their offensive against Russians trapped in Kherson. However, things are going on elsewhere in public view: somebody hacked into the systems of Moscow's biggest taxicab company, and commanded all the taxis to pick up a fare at the same location. The result was a massive traffic jam.

Wars do have a comical element. The Russians have been claiming they have destroyed a number of HIMARS rocket launchers -- but it turns out they instead destroyed plywood-based decoys. It seems the Ukrainians have a lively decoy industry in operation, but we won't know much more until the war is over.

In other news, it appears that the fringe were projecting 3 September 2022 as "COVID Zombie Apocalypse Day", in which people who had been vaccinated would become zombies. The day was in fact generally uneventful. Looks like we dodged the bullet this time.

[FRI 02 SEP 22] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (10)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (10): David Ricardo was a believer in capitalism -- of course, the system had made his fortunes. However, not everyone honestly benefited from the Industrial Revolution, with its "dark Satanic mills", as the poet William Blake (1757:1827) put. Many workers, including children, put in long hours under primitive conditions to barely make a living, with few protections in the law and little hope of a better life.

Some wanted a better system, one of them being Charles Fourier (1772:1837), who worked as a traveling salesman and a clerk, to work at writing eccentric tracts that failed to sell -- though he did attract wealthy benefactors. He despised the capitalist system, with impoverished workers living dull lives at the bottom, and rich owners at the top who were determined to maintain their privileges. Fourier envisioned an alternative, a "system of harmony" as he called it, involving a large number of small collective facilities, focused on different specific interests.

Fourier called these groups "phalanxes", after the mass foot-soldier formations of classical warfare, and labeled the communities they formed "phalansteres". Groups in the phalansteries would form around common interests, with the money made by a phalanstery allocated among its members. Fourier never started managed to start a mass movement, though a number of utopian communities along the lines of his phalansteres were established.

Despite the limits of his practical influence, Fourier proved a source of ideas for later utopian thinkers -- with his introduction of the notion of "feminism" proving particularly enduring: ?The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.? However, his writings were also tainted by antisemitism.

A Welshman named Robert Owen (1771:1858) came to conclusions like those of Fourier, but started out very differently. He'd risen from a lowly shop assistant to the status of a rich and nationally-famous industrialist, dealing with all classes of society in Britain. He outlined his ideas for improving on the system in a set of essays titled A NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY, published in 1816.

Owen weighed in on the argument that would eventually be known as "nature versus nurture", which could be reduced, at least in his case, to the question of whether the dismal condition of the poor, ignorant, and wretched was inevitable because it was their nature, or whether their misery was due to their environment. Owen, establishing a path towards modern thought, believed it was due to their environment, and further believed that a just society could be achieved with a better environment.

To put his ideas into practice, he set up a "model community" around one of his cotton mills at New Lanark in Scotland. It ended up being more of a showpiece than a practical system, but Owen did use it as a platform for introducing new ideas. He set up an "infant school", a daycare center in modern terms, grandly calling it the "Institute for the Formation of Character". He reduced working hours and encouraged his workers to lead clean, honest, and moderate lives.

Owen promoted diligent working habits with a wooden cube for each worker that had colored faces, corresponding to how well each working was doing his job: a white face for doing well, a yellow face for good, a blue face for poor, a black face for bad, with the supervisor judging how the cube should be turned. At first, most of the cubes were set to black or blue, but gradually they turned to yellow and white. Owen later set up an even more ambitious "model community" in America, at New Harmony in Indiana, which featured a system of farms, workshops, and schools. It attracted a lot of people, but many were eccentrics or deadbeats; the community fell to squabbling, to eventually fail. Utopian communities would, at least in themselves, go nowhere. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 01 SEP 22] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("UN To Roll Out Global Early-Warning Systems For Extreme Weather" by Gloria Dickie, 23 March 2022), the United Nations is planning to set up a global warning system to provide alerts for extreme weather events. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says: "Half of humanity is already in the danger zone [of extreme weather disasters, and yet] one-third of the world's people, mainly in least developed countries and small island developing states, are still not covered by early warning systems."

Africa is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, which also can impact food security. Parts of the continent are ravaged frequently by drought, cyclones or intense rainfall, but 60% of the population lives in areas that don't have early-warning weather systems. According to data from the UN World Health Organization (WHO), there are about five times the number of weather-related disasters than there were in the 1970s. The droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms have killed more than 2 million people and inflicted $3.64 trillion USD in losses globally since 1970.

Warning systems have helped cut death tolls by some 76% since the 1970s by giving time for preparation, saving lives and reducing damage. A 24-hour storm warning, for example, can help people reduce damage by about 30%, according to a 2019 report from the Global Commission on Adaptation. That report also suggested that spending $800 million USD on early-warning systems in developing countries alone would avoid up to $16 billion USD in annual losses. Although details are not yet available, the UN wants to have a warning system in place in five years. The project was previously mentioned at the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021.

* As discussed in an article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("NASA Asteroid Detector Looks Up To Scan Entire Sky Every 24 Hours" by Ben Turner, 7 February 2022), in 2017, the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) brought online a telescopic system to hunt for near-Earth asteroids (NEA) that could conceivably collide with Earth.

At the outset, the "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)" consisted of two telescopes in Hawaii that scanned the skies, but now it has added a telescope in Chile and another in South Africa, allowing it to scan the entire night sky on a daily basis. Combined, the four telescopes can take images covering 100 times the area of the full Moon.

NASA currently knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000 asteroids; since it came online in 2017, ATLAS has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth, the former exploding off the south coast of Puerto Rico and the latter landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. As is typical, they were small and exploded at high altitude, causing no serious damage.

* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Earth Has A Second Known Trojan Asteroid" by Liz Kruesi, 1 February 2022), it has long been known that the planet Jupiter shares its orbit with two clusters of "Trojan asteroids". They are trapped in the "Lagrange points" in the orbit trapped in a gravitationally stable location equidistant from Jupiter and the Sun, with some leading Jupiter in the "Lagrange 4 (L4)" position, and some trailing Jupiter in the "L5" position.

It had turned out that other planets in the Solar System, including Neptune and Mars, have Trojans as well -- and in 2010, the first Earth Trojan, designated "2010 TK7", was discovered in Earth's L4 position. Now a second Earth Trojan, "2020 XL5", have been found. This asteroid, at about a kilometer in diameter several times bigger than 2020 XL5, was discovered by astronomer Toni Santana-Ros and colleagues of the University of Barcelona in Spain.

It was originally spotted in late 2020, with follow-up telescopic examinations, the asteroid also being found in archival imagery going back to 2012. The gravitational trap at Earth's L4 position is not as strong as that at Jupiter's L4 position, and the Earth Trojans won't be there indefinitely. 2020 XL5 will hang around at L4 for at least 4,000 years, while 2010 TK7, for comparison, will stick around for some 10,000 years. On the basis of the discovery of 2020 XL5, Santana-Rose believes there may be more Earth Trojans: "It might be part of a family or population."